Ian Faison & Justin Anovick 44 min

Unlocking Greater Marketing Potential: Operationalizing Your ICP


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[MUSIC]

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Welcome to Pipeline Visionaries.

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I'm Ian Faze on CEO of Cast Me in Studios.

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And today I am joined by a very special guest, Justin.

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How are you?

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>> I am doing great.

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Thanks for having me, Onion.

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>> Excited to chat today.

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It's going to be a little bit of a different type of an episode

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because you're not sitting in the sea right now.

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You've just left the proverbial seat

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and there's some new exciting things on the horizon.

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So we're getting Justin in between the two worlds of marketing

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and whatever's next, which is always a fun time to think about

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all the stuff that you've done previously in your marketing roles.

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>> Yeah, usually it's just in time.

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I guess it's just in between, but there's no real phrase for that.

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So we'll just move on.

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>> Indeed.

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So you were recently dual-headed as a chief product and marketing officer.

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You spent a lot of time in product specifically with stints in and out of

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product marketing and marketing and all that stuff.

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So we wanted to dive in today about product marketing as it fits in,

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marketing broadly, and specifically about one point about the ICP,

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which we'll get into here a bunch.

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So why did you want to talk about ICPs?

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>> Yeah, so before I got into the seat as a CMO,

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I had spent time running product marketing in addition to product,

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some organizations had product in marketing or in product,

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but I spent the last 10 years running product organizations.

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And until I actually got into the CMO seat,

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it was a struggle to understand the inability to focus,

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the inability to actually take ideal customer profile and

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do something with it beyond just marketing.

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And until I was able to see kind of the entire life cycle of what was needed,

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it was a head scratcher for me.

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And then the moment that I really got in CMO where you're starting to

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operationalize it, there was an aha moment, and

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it's really just that lack of alignment in most people in the organization feel

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it's a pure marketing exercise.

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So yeah, I think that that is one of the biggest struggles that I see a lot

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of organizations who I speak with, if you have the data to be able to put

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together

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your ICP, what do you actually do with it next?

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And it's more than just a target addressable market, there's more to it than

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that.

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>> I think understanding your ICP is one of the most important things that

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marketers

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often don't fully have a good concept or understanding of.

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Like if you were to sit down and take 10 marketers and

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two of them are by far and away the best, like top performers,

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I guarantee you that they know their ICP is the absolute best.

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They know their market the best, they know the triggers that make people buy

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the best.

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And they know all those things.

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I would bet my whole podcast on that.

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And yet we kind of don't.

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And I'm curious like, why do you think that is,

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like why do you think that so many people struggle to understand the ICP and

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then we'll get into operationalizing it here in a second?

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>> Yeah, so from myself personally, what I've seen,

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I've gone through the exercise of helping to define the ICP three times in the

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last

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four years for really two different businesses.

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And it's the inability to actually access and secure the data you need in order

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to

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make those decisions.

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And then two is actually the ability to narrow down and

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make the decision and stick to it.

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And certainly the data that you,

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if you had the luxury of having historical data and customers,

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then that's great.

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If you don't, there's something different.

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But if you have that, just being able to go and understand the sick codes,

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the market, the size, the company, what your revenue is.

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And in a lot of organizations, it's in disparate locations.

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And each of the times it took maybe three, four months working to finance,

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very deliberately to access that data.

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So I think that a lot of organizations I see,

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they just haven't put the time, effort, money, manpower behind it in order to

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actually define and understand the ICP.

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And so certainly each of those three times,

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one of the hardest things to operationalize it was to explain to the

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organization

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starting with marketing what actually ICP meant,

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what targeted adjustable market meant, but what service obtainable market meant

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and what we needed to do.

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And it was eye opening to realize how to your point,

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most even marketers didn't really, they understood the concept,

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but they hadn't actually operationalize it or used it before.

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Okay, so Zuma now, why do marketers need to do this in the first place?

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Why do companies need to do this in the first place?

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Everybody has a limited budget and you have to need to figure out what to do

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with that budget.

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And you can be a generalized organization where you can go after anybody.

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Basically, you wait for it, you're reactive, they contact you,

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and then you use your budget to contact them.

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Or for most businesses, you need to be proactive.

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So where do you spend your capital?

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Folks understand ABM, account-based marketing,

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but really without the ability for the ICP part and then the other pieces

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that we'll get into, you're spending a considerable amount of budget.

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Your click-through rates need to be higher, you need to spend less per lead

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essentially or higher quality leads.

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You need to convert more, you definitely see a lot of organizations,

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just the ones that I've been at, lower win rates because you're basically

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contacting everybody, even though they might not sit into your ICP.

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So it's really, how do you effectively spend the budget that you have access to

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In a much more concerted way.

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And I guess we should define, what do you define as an ICP?

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Yeah, so I always look at the four terms, ICP,

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so your ideal customer profile.

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So that could be the accounts, the size, region, market, size of business,

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revenue, or employees.

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A variety of factors that basically say, this is how you define your ideal

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customer profile.

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So if you're a FinTech, you're obviously going to focus on FinTech.

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If you're higher ed, you're going to focus on higher ed.

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Well, that's a little bit more complicated for non-vertically oriented B2B's.

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And so it's saying we have a greater chance of success in these two areas or

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seven areas.

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So that ICP is the first part to identify where you've had success historically

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Where you get into the TAM target addressable market is the totality of those

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businesses.

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How many are there in the universe, in those markets, and so on and so forth,

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service addressable market is you say you want to be in a certain region or

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certain market,

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service obtainable market is really who has budget now, who's buying, who is in

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a replacement

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cycle. And so those four terms, if you will, define what you're looking for.

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And so starting out this process, what's the first step?

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One, getting alignment at the ELT, the executive team, and to the board.

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It was funny, when I first really went into it on my own, I was at a board

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meeting.

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I knew that we needed to go through a process. Who's our customer?

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Where do we have success? That's what the board kept asking.

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I went through a process where I was literally going through and manually

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notating our entire customer list of like 8,000 customers, what category, what

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market,

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all of that. And the board's like, hey, we can give you some help. I'm like, oh

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, that's great,

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you know, because otherwise I need more Saturdays and Sundays in order to do

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this.

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And so it was really to answer, hey, we have this budget and our win rates

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matter, retention matters,

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all of that matters. We need to say who we are. And that's really the first

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true intro that I had

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was that occurred beyond marketing. Who do our partners? Who do we need to

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partner with to implement?

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What does product need to actually build? Which is somewhat logical, but it's

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usually the other

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way around where product is dictating based on n number of customers that we

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have versus the

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opportunity in the market. And so it was really, you know, for myself

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personally getting deeply

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ingrained in it was about five years ago when I was running a product team

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where the chairman

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of insight partners just kept asking me, who's our customer? Who's our customer

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? Who's our customer?

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And had to go through the research project to really look at it in a way that

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removed anecdotes

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and emotions and all that using the data that we have. Next step was, you know,

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there's the view of

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the past, but then how do you have a portal into the future? You can't

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necessarily decide your

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ICP or the SAM, let's say based off of entirely what you did in the past, right

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? There are factors

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that made you successful, maybe in a certain market, a certain size, certain

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area. Let's say

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your mid market, selling mainly mid market, but you know you now have the

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ability to go into enterprise

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or vice versa. And so there also needs to be that portal into the future. So

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the first one really is

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to agree as an ELT and even a board to say, these are the markets, this is the

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size, this is the ideal

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customer profile that we're going to go after. Here's the pros and cons of it.

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And most importantly,

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here's what we can expect. If we, you know, generated 100 leads instead of, you

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know, winning, you know,

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22% of them, we can expect to win 34%. Here's how we can spend less for, you

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know, achieve more

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with the same amount of budget. And so it's really ELT board level agreement to

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say, this is what

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we're doing. The next step is educating the entire business as to what it means

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for them. What does

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it mean for marketing, SDRs, sales, product, partners, customer service, all of

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the different

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groups and what it means for them? Because ultimately at some point in the 18

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to 24 month project of

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implementing something, somebody, everybody's going to be impacted. They might

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not be impacted at the

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moment, but really at some point they're going to be impacted. So it's really

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agreement. And then,

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you know, starting to communicate and educate folks on basically barely what it

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is and what it could

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mean for them. So then it's like, okay, cool. And then most of the time, if it

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's, if it, you know,

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failures occur when communication or educating different teams is like, you don

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't come back to

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them to say, okay, this is what you need to do. So it's really a roadmap of the

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different elements

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that have to occur. What do you actually have to do to align accounts? Do we

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need to actually buy

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new software in order to help address the Psalm and to address the

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organizations that you want to go

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after? You know, a lot of it does start in marketing. But if SDRs or VDRs and

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sales aren't aligned in

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the first pass, we could get a great opportunity, pass it, you know, to SDRs,

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and they have no idea

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what's going on because they weren't educated or sales gets it, and they don't

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treat it with even

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more respect. And so like that first pass of marketing, you know, really

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focusing, creating assets,

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developing the approach, and then aligning with SDRs and sales is really a key

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thing. Because the

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worst thing is that you could get great reaction and, you know, folks down the

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line didn't get

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educated or weren't involved. And so they don't really, you know, they let it

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pass because they

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didn't see anything interesting about it, let's say. Yeah. And I want to get

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back to the board

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here for a second. So years ago, I didn't exercise like this, not as

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sophisticated as you just,

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and I won't say I won't. But part of my rudimentary calculations were such that

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it took so much longer

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to close a certain demographic. In this case, it was, it was like a higher ed

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type

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organization that had like ridiculously long sales cycles and then ridiculously

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low

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ACVs. And my proposition to the leadership team was like, we shouldn't we

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should just not go after

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this. We should just like completely bail on this because our sales reps spend,

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you know,

12:47

whatever 20 calls to try to close this, you got to close it. It's like with the

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state or whoever,

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which is super complex. And, and like, there's not really like a lane and

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expand thing here,

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et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. My question here is like, in your experience,

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and talking with your peers and stuff like that about talking to boards, is

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this something that

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they want to be doing or interested in doing? Do they care about this stuff? Do

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they fight over

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who these things are? Like, how should marketing leaders position this

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information to the board

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to get, you know, buy in based off of this? Or should it be more collaborative

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and say like,

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hey, I'm chucking this all to you as well to say like, what should we do? Or

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should we should the

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marketer be more prescriptive? I would say that depending on what stage the

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investment is from

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the board or, you know, the investors, maybe they're done a high level analysis

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on their own. If it

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was a recent investment, or, you know, have done some work on their own, I

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think where the struggle

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gets is or where struggle occurs is that operationalization of it. And so like

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my second day in my last

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role, it was a board meeting. And the very first question of the chairman's

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mouth was, when are we

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going to see the ICP? And that's what kind of started me on the process to say,

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oh, cool, like,

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there's an opportunity here to do something. So, you know, came back in full of

14:16

months later,

14:17

reported on the progress. But I would say that, you know, looking at the, who

14:23

does the

14:23

MARTEC landscape, but like there's limited, there's so much noise and there's

14:28

limited ability to

14:29

get through that there has to be some targeting for more mature businesses,

14:35

right, for sure,

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when you have that opportunity to use the data from the past. So I would say

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that either the

14:41

board expects it, either, or they'd be unbelievably welcome to hear that there

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is a project going on.

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And not to say that I've used the board as the reason that we're doing it

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because it should be

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beyond that. Like there's usually what I've seen in talking to other, you know,

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CPOs, CMOs,

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is that there's usually an expectation and understanding. It's how deep do you

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go into it and what is

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the allocation of the budget that then becomes the conversation versus starting

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there and identifying

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what it is. Is this something that the CMO should own? Should the CPO own it?

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Should it be joint?

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Should it be owned by the CEO? You know, it's so funny. I've kind of gone back

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and forth and then

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I mentioned you've gone back and forth. That's why. Right, exactly. Yeah. I

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just keep chasing

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who's supposed to own the ICP and I'm like, let's do both. And so I was just

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reading product operations

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by Melissa Perry and Denise Tillis earlier and came across the page where they

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're saying, you know,

15:39

the product research and product operations team needs to be the one

15:43

responsible. Oh, that's white

15:45

out. But it needs to be the one responsible for helping to address this. And I

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'm like,

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I don't really know who should do it. There should be a research team, finance

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needs to be involved.

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It usually impacts the CMO, you know, the marketing team way more on the front

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end for businesses that

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I've been a part of because the product is a longer tail. But I would say that

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it's really

16:07

whoever has the passion and the ability to get it across the line. I think if

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the CMO doesn't own

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it, there is a struggle of it not getting adopted. And then it's pointless. If

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the CPO owns it and

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doesn't get it adopted, our CMO owns it, maybe the CPO doesn't adopt it. I

16:24

think that there might

16:24

be a little less risk there because that's, you know, a longer tail. You're not

16:28

necessarily going

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in and building a bunch of new product capabilities up front. You're working

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with customers. So there's

16:35

a little bit longer time. So I think it's like the, you know, wherever that

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emotional attachment

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needs to occur, I feel it's stronger on this, on the marketing side, you know,

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than it is initially

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on the product side. But again, like I do feel that the entire organization

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needs to get behind it.

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And every ELT member needs to, you know, promote it and push it as much as

16:58

possible. But marketing

17:00

usually starts with the most amount of activities, I would say. Do you find

17:05

that there's a lot of

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times where people will do a positioning exercise? And before they've done an I

17:14

CP or they have an

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outdated ICP or something like that, because I find that sometimes when you,

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you talk to folks who

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have done a recent positioning exercise, but they, what they part of what they

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find is that they

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don't necessarily have the most accurate ICP either. I have been a part of

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multiple

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iterations where that happens where hey, let's do a positioning exercise. What

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's the unique

17:39

selling propositions? What's the, you know, our new messaging? We need to

17:44

differentiate. And then,

17:45

you know, when I was in pre sales for my first half of my career, I was always

17:48

for it because I

17:49

always felt like, hey, I knew what was happening. And let's go through that.

17:53

And then, you know,

17:54

recently, I just basically say, I don't know what I'm supposed to build. I don

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't know what I'm supposed

17:58

to market. I don't know how we're supposed to answer some of these questions as

18:02

to what we're

18:02

doing with our budget. If we can't answer that fundamental question, it's all

18:06

guesses. It's all

18:07

anecdotes. It's all emotion at that point. So if we want to be data driven,

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there's only one way in

18:13

my brain to do it, which is to do the ICP. Then once you know that, to me, then

18:18

the positioning

18:18

exercise becomes infinitely easier, because you're, you know, who are your

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constituents,

18:24

your personas, the ideal customer, and who isn't. And so that's Peter for your

18:31

messaging and that

18:31

positioning towards that, that ICP. But I've been a part of it so many times

18:36

where it's the opposite.

18:37

And in the end, it feels like it was a good exercise, but it would never last

18:43

as long as it

18:44

needed to last. And we redid it every nine 12 months, I felt, when we didn't

18:49

have the clear ICP.

18:50

Well, and I think that part of it is that you, you kind of should be revisiting

18:55

it every night

18:55

at 12 months, it just shouldn't foundationally change like massive amount,

19:01

which is part of the

19:02

problem that I think it should be, it should be revisited for sure, but like a

19:08

completely

19:09

good to your point, a completely new foundation. And all of those exercises

19:13

were based off of the

19:14

last five, 10 big deals that we want. So that's where the emotional anecdotes

19:19

come in in some ways,

19:21

is it's purely based off of just whatever happened last week or last month or

19:24

last quarter.

19:26

And that's removing the rationale is the win rates, retention rates, all of

19:32

those other things,

19:33

if you're just purely basing it off of the interest we got in the market and

19:37

the new deals.

19:38

I kind of touched on this earlier with my little anecdote. A question that

19:41

often can come up is like,

19:43

well, what about blank that with 21% of our businesses, these people, and are

19:49

you saying we

19:51

should just ignore them, we should have no marketing for them, and we have no

19:54

whatever, like what about

19:55

when you come across something like that, where you have that fringe use case,

20:00

like our product is

20:01

for marketing and product people that are at this size company, as far as the,

20:06

and then for some

20:06

reason, we got a bunch of lawyers that also buy it, you know, like something

20:10

like that, where you're

20:11

like, oh, and then there's this out of left field sort of customer.

20:17

Yeah, so the way that I operated that, you know, purely from a marketing

20:21

perspective of where you

20:22

allocate your budget is ultimately, you want to get into 80% you spend on ICP,

20:27

but it takes a little

20:28

bit of time to evolve there. So there is like, you know, as long as there's an

20:32

idea communicated as to

20:34

what the process looks like, it basically comes down to, you know, there's a

20:39

proceed at your own

20:40

risk, and you're not going to get the same air cover that you would if it's ICP

20:44

, until we have the

20:46

opportunity to replace all of those lawyer opportunities with the ones that fit

20:51

into our ICP,

20:52

proceed at your own risk, might do one off things to help support if there's

20:56

multiple deals.

20:57

It's really, you know, elite scoring should be different. The view of the

21:01

forecasting and

21:02

pipeline should be different, but at the same time, we also need to make our

21:06

quarterly numbers,

21:08

so there has to be some effort. But as long as on the upfront to answer that

21:12

question exactly,

21:13

what if it occurs outside of the ICP, what are you guys doing? And it's, hey,

21:18

we're not going to

21:18

provide the same air cover, or we'll never get to be able to focus on the true

21:23

ICP. I think that I

21:24

have a little bit of credibility just because of my pre-sales background and

21:28

like, I know I

21:28

can't replace those opportunities yet, right? Like early in the process, like,

21:34

we have a bunch of

21:34

those lawyer opportunities that we're working, are you saying I should, you

21:38

know, you know,

21:39

do away with those and say, no, just be prepared that we're going to win 21%

21:43

like he said versus 32

21:45

or whatever the numbers end up being. And we need to just understand the impact

21:50

to the business

21:51

by chasing those, but I can't replace those just yet because the full machine

21:55

isn't working. And I

21:56

think that it's a little different being a salesperson and you only have one

22:00

opportunity,

22:01

you're working maybe, and that's that lawyer opportunity that doesn't fit into

22:04

the ICP and

22:05

then you get frustrated and angry, but at least being communicated to resolve

22:10

some of the issues

22:11

that you know, know you're not going to be, you know, pounding on a door. You

22:15

got an answer, you

22:16

might not like the answer, but at least you can understand what's happening.

22:20

Yeah, and to your

22:23

point earlier that if those lawyer opportunities only close at a 21%, but their

22:29

average deal size is,

22:31

you know, three times more, then there's problem that that would have been that

22:35

would have been

22:35

taken into account when you did the ICP original. Exactly. So it's like, hey,

22:42

we've already done

22:43

all the math on this stuff. And if that person's like, well, but this deal

22:46

could be three times

22:47

bigger, it's like, yeah, by all means, go close it is a way to say like, of

22:50

course, go close the deal,

22:52

but just know that this is not a well that is going to be easily, you know,

22:58

coming back to or

22:59

like you said, you don't have the air cover, you don't have marketing support,

23:01

you don't have,

23:02

you know, all the case studies and all the other things that the rest of our

23:05

company is building,

23:06

because we can only do 100 case studies a year and none of those are going to

23:10

be the lawyer or

23:12

exactly. And exceptions to every rule for sure. I mean, suddenly, if you see

23:17

there's four and pipe and,

23:18

you know, but the TAM or SOM is so small. Yeah, but to your point, like, all of

23:24

that should have

23:24

been answered, you can only go a certain extent, right? Like, hey, you're the

23:28

six, seven that we're

23:29

going to focus on, we're not going to focus all those at once. There were some

23:32

that were borderline,

23:34

we're just choosing that, hey, look, those just don't have a big TAM or, you

23:38

know, or they're not

23:39

in market at the moment. So we're going to leave those to the side. We'll

23:43

revisit again every year,

23:44

but like, from a reps perspective, they have an opportunity now, they don't

23:48

care, they want to

23:49

close it. That's all they have that they're working. How do we provide support

23:52

as an organization? And I

23:53

think the worst thing a leader could do is be like, sorry, sucks for you, dude.

23:58

Right? Like,

23:59

it's like, hey, we'll help support as best we can. We could do this, this, and

24:03

this, but like,

24:04

it's just not the same level of effort that we're going to get with something

24:08

that's in a different

24:08

market that does fall into our ICP. So you mentioned the different, you know,

24:17

deal sizes and percent

24:19

to close and all those things of having like sort of different dashboards,

24:23

different pipelines,

24:24

different things like that. I feel like for most CROs that they're not looking

24:32

at things in sort

24:32

of like those different ways, but I feel like a lot of CROs are just going to

24:37

kind of shove it

24:38

all into one pipeline and not do that stuff. What do you think about like how

24:42

much within the

24:45

different personas within that ICP and all that, like how different, how

24:49

different should those

24:50

pipelines be looking and how much should we be like putting credence into that?

24:55

I mean, I think massively in order to drive to forecast and to hit numbers,

25:00

like you have to

25:01

have all the data points. And just because it's a confidence level of the rep

25:07

or you hit, you know,

25:08

five of the six medic elements that it's, you know, it's categorized as 80%

25:14

chance of closing,

25:15

that's not taking everything into account. So I've advocated, pushed, developed

25:20

the lead scoring

25:21

to help make sure that it's adjusted as a part of the forecasting and without

25:28

it. So something

25:29

with an ICP should get, you know, if it's squarely into the ICP, you should get

25:34

score of 100, let's say,

25:35

right, if it's outside of ICP, it should start off with next score of 50 or

25:39

whatever the numbers are,

25:41

but then there's nuances to it, right? So you could say financial services

25:46

industry check,

25:47

you could say revenue size of organization check, but you could say digital

25:53

maturity

25:54

X, meaning they don't fit our digital maturity. Well, that should be adjusted

25:58

in the scoring,

25:59

and that should be left up to the analysis and investigation of the SDRs and

26:04

the reps to determine

26:06

if they are an actual fit. But all of that should be adjusted into the forecast

26:10

. I mean,

26:11

I've been a part of many organizations where you, you know, hit or miss and,

26:16

you know, you don't

26:17

entirely know why you're not entirely looking at the full picture of what is in

26:22

pipeline. And,

26:24

you know, it should be, it has to be in order for it to function appropriately

26:28

in my opinion.

26:29

Back to operationalizing the ICP. What do you see people doing right? What do

26:35

you see people doing

26:37

wrong? I've had the luxury of being able to talk to the different portfolio

26:41

companies of the

26:42

different investors to really get an understanding. And the number one thing

26:47

was measuring success

26:49

too early or measuring success too late. And what I mean by that is that like

26:53

you have to commit to,

26:55

you know, 20 steps to be able to operationalize, you know, before you can get

27:01

to the point of

27:02

measuring success. And then what are the first steps of measuring success? Is

27:06

it click-through

27:07

rates? Is it, you know, leads converted, you know, the SQ, the MQLs to SQLs, is

27:14

it deals closed? And

27:15

so having that agreement up front. And so when I went through it this last time

27:19

, you know, put

27:20

together a whole flow diagram and basically said, these are the points that we

27:24

're measuring

27:24

success. Let's talk about that because we're going to have to commit a lot of

27:30

effort and resources

27:31

before we get to that point of actually knowing if this is working or not. And

27:35

I think that the

27:36

expectation is, of course, if you're thinking of agile development, well, you

27:41

can check along the

27:42

way to see your progress. Well, that is the case here. But that first true

27:47

measurement

27:49

is a little bit further than most execs or sometimes boards want to know. So it

27:53

's hard to go in,

27:54

you know, a month after operationalizing it in marketing and getting all the

27:59

assets,

28:00

the programs, the campaigns, everything set up appropriately and all the

28:05

different applications

28:06

and say we have success yet. It's kind of like, hey, this is the progress that

28:10

we've made. We'll

28:11

use that as success. But that's the number one thing is the arguments

28:15

discussions around when

28:16

you measure success. And it's usually a little later than what most folks

28:21

inherently feel they want.

28:23

Where does attribution fit into that? So initially, that's one of the points of

28:32

measurement of,

28:33

you know, what are the different campaigns, assets, different programs, whether

28:38

it's,

28:38

you know, sales events, whether it's webinars, whether it's trade shows,

28:43

how are we looking at that? And we just never had the applications to be able

28:47

to support

28:48

multi-level attribution. So it became a little bit more complicated to look at

28:52

it. But we said,

28:54

we were going to measure, we were going to start looking at every step that

28:57

that asset or program

28:59

or campaign or event was touching and basically doing an experiment, an A/B

29:05

test. We did something

29:07

generalized. We did something for ICP and we can closely relate those. But the

29:12

attribution has

29:13

always been a difficult thing. And I've read so many things and talked to so

29:16

many people that say,

29:17

do it, don't do it, that, you know, my head goes, you know, spins a little bit.

29:22

But really,

29:23

we agree that we said, hey, every everything that we're creating, we want to

29:26

try to figure out how

29:27

to measure. I mean, the best example is we launched a campaign, what was the

29:30

click-through rate,

29:31

right? Like that's attribution, but it hasn't converted into an MQL or even SQL

29:36

at that point.

29:37

And then we know that there's going to be multiple other steps along the way.

29:40

And some of that is just noise at a certain point.

29:44

Yeah, for sure. I mean, if you put, you know, two ads with people on bikinis

29:49

and swim trunks

29:50

on there, like you're probably going to have a higher click rate, you know what

29:53

I mean? So it's

29:53

like obviously- Right, like if they were us, right? That's how you're saying?

29:56

That's what I'm saying. You and I are in bikinis and trunks.

30:00

But no, I- Hopefully nobody was into this over lunch or dinner.

30:05

Yeah, no, right. Or has Google readily available?

30:08

But I think that part of the problem is that you get into this entire ICP

30:18

initiative, then you do your positioning exercise and you're like, all right,

30:23

this is our key

30:24

differentiator. Our competitors have this, this and this, and we have this and

30:28

they don't, and we're

30:28

going to position around this. And you go to mark with that and you do all that

30:31

stuff. And then

30:32

your attribution is horrible. Like, so you're like, yeah, we did all this work.

30:37

And you're like,

30:37

does it work? And you're like, I don't know. And like, I, you know, we see this

30:41

a lot with, uh,

30:42

when we're making a video series or a podcast series with someone because we'll

30:47

sit down and

30:47

be like, all right, who's your ice peep? Who are we going after? They're like,

30:50

all right,

30:51

it's this, this, this, this, and this. You're like, okay, well, who's the, who

30:54

's the most

30:54

important one that we like, we can only make a show for one person who should

30:58

be first. Yeah.

30:59

And they're like, I don't know. You're like, okay, not a great start, but like,

31:04

we'll, we'll

31:04

pick one and then we pick one, we do, you know, all this other stuff. And they

31:07

're like, all right,

31:08

well, as we got to tie this whole thing back to pipeline, how do you do

31:11

attribution? They're like,

31:13

we do first touch. Really. I will never going to win with this initiative. You

31:17

're doing first

31:17

touch, you know, or whatever. I'm just saying that. But like, you're like, okay

31:21

, well, we did

31:21

all this work to get to the point where at the most important point of like,

31:26

what turns

31:27

people saying, hey, you know, I never heard of this company before to, oh, I

31:32

know who you are

31:33

to, hey, if I'm going to buy this solution, they should be on the slide to, hey

31:37

, they're,

31:38

they're on the slide and they're, they're the preferred option. Like, if you're

31:42

not measuring,

31:43

what are the things that are driving those, those, like light bulb moments,

31:47

then why do you do all

31:49

the other stuff in the first place other than just like pounding people's heads

31:52

in with the

31:53

sales materials? Yeah, I mean, like, when we would put the ROI together of a

31:58

program that says we're,

32:00

you know, go after ICP, don't go after ICP. I mean, there's a litany of those,

32:05

I mean, from

32:05

click through rates to general activities to, you know, certainly NQLs to SQLs

32:12

to win rates to

32:13

close deals to ASP and ultimately at the end of the day, the equation is

32:17

absolutely, you know,

32:19

win more, a higher percentage of opportunities at a higher ASP. But as we know,

32:25

I mean, a lot of

32:25

businesses, I mean, a lot of that, that I've been a part of the nine to 12 to

32:28

15 month sales

32:29

cycles, right? So you need some of those interim measurements. And I think that

32:33

the, you know,

32:35

that's where the data becomes a little bit of a struggle is that we don't have

32:38

this historical

32:39

level of data of the things that we want to look at, right? Like, you have

32:42

everything from

32:42

website activity to search results to click through rates, all of those

32:46

different things. And so,

32:48

you know, there does have to be some, you know, hippo or gut decisions that say

32:53

, hey, you know,

32:55

this is an important thing. But this is where the port codes of these other,

32:58

you know, investors,

33:00

you know, the investors of the business that I've been a part of, you know,

33:04

learning from them,

33:05

certainly learning from the group, and then understanding the appetite of the

33:09

investors

33:10

to, you know, and where they've had success and where the pitfalls. I mean,

33:13

those are where the

33:14

best board meetings and conversations with the board and direction really occur

33:18

is that that's

33:19

where those guesses in a way have to occur or opinions, because you're missing

33:24

some of those

33:25

inherent mid level data points before it actually gets interesting.

33:29

Are you having conversations like, you know, like, we have to be focused on the

33:37

direct, like,

33:37

director level engineers at this size company. And the other person's like, it

33:42

should be CIOs.

33:44

And you're like, no, it needs to be director level. And like, things like that.

33:47

And they're like,

33:48

but CIOs sign the dotted line. But directors are the ones who are going to, you

33:52

know,

33:53

primarily do all the work, you know, stuff like that. I mean, are you getting

33:55

that granular in the

33:57

ICP conversations? Or is that stuff that is a little bit further down?

34:01

I want to love the different voices that you're doing. And it's like, my kids,

34:06

like, use it

34:07

my voice like, but yeah, so like the persona, which I didn't mention plays a

34:12

critical role. And so

34:13

we ended up separating into buyer budget user personas. And so if we're

34:20

actually able to be

34:21

between some of those, right? So at the end of the day, you know, the budget

34:24

holder, of course,

34:25

you need to accommodate them at certain point, but they're usually not the ones

34:29

who were,

34:30

you know, looking at the campaigns, but we need something a little further down

34:34

in the sales cycle.

34:35

But the buyer and the user are, you know, to your point, like, that's where

34:39

those, you know,

34:40

puppet shows usually occur. And, you know, how do you address both of those? Or

34:45

that's where you

34:45

start doing the A/B testing and earlier in the cycle, which one res, which one

34:49

are you resonating

34:50

more? We can start gauging who's actually, you know, looking at these things by

34:55

targeting them,

34:55

we ended up acquiring six cents and use that to really help us identify and use

35:00

the persona

35:01

differences in the campaigns. And it makes a huge difference. And each market

35:05

ended up being different

35:06

is the problem. So it can't just be a blanket, hey, it's CIO for everything. It

35:12

's CIO in this

35:13

market, but it's a CDO in this market. But it's actually a director and an

35:17

enterprise because

35:18

this is usually not a line item based on the size that's actually, they don't

35:22

even care any higher

35:24

up. So it like differentiates based off of that ICP sometimes. Actually,

35:28

yeah, we, yeah, we, I mean, we've seen that with our, with our shows where you

35:33

have like our show

35:34

rise of rev ops that we do, you have rev ops leaders that are like literally

35:40

the head of revenue

35:42

operations, single person I see. And you have someone who's head of revenue

35:46

operations, 25%

35:48

team, right? And it's like totally different, you know, thing. And I mean,

35:51

obviously, we all know

35:52

that stuff. But but then once you see it in the information, and you're like,

35:56

Oh, actually,

35:57

you know, who is buying it and all that in titles, I think we get very caught

36:02

up in titles,

36:03

especially C level titles, where it's like, you know, the CIO. I mean, and

36:08

there's just huge

36:09

fluctuations like the CIO of we did this show named driving a lot of shows. But

36:14

but we did this,

36:15

but it's interesting because I think it's all this persona stuff. We do the

36:18

show cruising altitude,

36:20

partner with first step, shout out to the good people first step. And the first

36:24

two seasons,

36:25

we did only companies that were, I think 30,000 or more employees, like that,

36:30

that those are the

36:30

only people that the types of companies we were talking about. Because as we

36:33

did all this discovery,

36:34

was basically like, if you're in a company of 30,000 or more people, you kind

36:39

of don't even

36:40

see yourself as like, like you would never take notes from a 2000 person

36:44

company. You're like,

36:45

yeah, I mean, I'd eat a 2000 person company for lunch and not even install a

36:50

room for dessert.

36:51

And so, and then you'd have like, oh, like the CIO of a 250,000 person company.

36:56

And they're like,

36:56

they don't even see themselves in any way like a 20,000 person company. So they

37:01

're only looking

37:02

for like behemoth type companies. And those are just those little differences

37:06

that make all the

37:08

difference when you're creating a marketing initiative. We're like, well, we

37:11

sell to CMOs. And you're

37:12

like, well, that's CMO thinks about your problem with four minutes of their

37:17

entire year,

37:18

whereas the CMO of the 400 person company thinks about it like four hours a

37:22

week, you know,

37:23

yeah, absolutely. That persona makes a massive difference based off of that,

37:27

you know, size,

37:28

of business, revenue, all that stuff. We also started really focusing on the

37:32

digital maturity.

37:34

So, and we like, there's no formula, no easy way to really do a digital

37:38

maturity. But we basically

37:40

said, are they buying products that are equivalent to ours, cost wise, are they

37:46

using free ones,

37:47

or are they somewhere in the middle? And you're able to research that with

37:49

built with or zoom in

37:51

out of, or, you know, any of those tools. And so we basically said, okay, that

37:54

's kind of the tie

37:55

breaker. We know that we're, you know, a higher digitally mature required

38:00

solution,

38:01

let's say, and so kind of weed out some of those other ones to your point. They

38:07

're not even like

38:08

higher mature customers, or at like step three out of five, whereas low mature,

38:12

at like step zero,

38:13

they don't even know how to get off the ground. And so the conversation is

38:16

completely different

38:17

instead of why you need this thing, or why you should care, and identifying

38:22

reasons that,

38:23

you know, maybe precede even to the point of acquiring software. And so that

38:27

digital maturity

38:28

becomes that extra layer after that persona. So yeah, any other things that are

38:34

pitfalls,

38:37

or things people are doing right or wrong, or things that y'all did right or

38:39

wrong?

38:39

I mean, I think of the scars that I have are really about, you know, the

38:45

organizational alignment.

38:47

I've seen it where everybody seems to agree, but then doesn't operate with it.

38:52

And then you

38:53

basically wasted all of the time and effort. And it's really, you know, it is

38:57

about cross-organization.

38:58

It isn't just about marketing. It may start there. But if the whole, let's say

39:04

ELT

39:06

is aware, they need to be aligned, right? But I would ask almost weekly, are we

39:11

still aligned?

39:11

Are we still doing this? Do you still buy into it personally? And I think that

39:16

I got to a point,

39:17

and I get to a point of I got to get that emotional attachment. Like, what does

39:22

this mean for them,

39:24

right? Because a lot of people are like dealing with their regular jobs. Why

39:27

does the CTO really

39:29

care about this, let's say? Why does, you know, somebody in customer service

39:33

really care about this,

39:34

and it's really trying to connect the dots with them and to create that

39:37

emotional attachment.

39:38

Because one pillar falls, it really can't be adopted fully. And then the next

39:45

is really,

39:46

you know, forging your way beyond the inadequacy of the data. Like, you just

39:50

have to figure out

39:51

how to get to a point where you can make a decision. And I've seen a lot of

39:56

projects and

39:57

everybody probably has in general. You get to a point and you just can't,

40:00

nobody just

40:01

makes a decision and you move on to the next thing. But I feel so strongly that

40:04

every business needs

40:05

to have some type of ICP and identifying the sum because it helps with the

40:10

entire organization

40:11

mentality. You need to get to a point of a decision. And who makes that

40:14

decision? If the

40:15

CTO and the board are not an agreement, really, CTO is in an agreement, it's a

40:20

struggle.

40:21

Yeah, I think I just acutely see this problem where we work with teams where

40:26

so often they don't know their ICP. If you're like, what's your ICP? And like a

40:33

marketer that's

40:33

sitting somewhere in the marketing organization, wherever they are, as just

40:37

like, I mean, it's

40:40

this and this. And like, okay, what are the personas within that? It's like,

40:44

well, it's this and this.

40:45

Like, and it's not just like, here is the book, you know, here is, it is cod

40:49

ified. This is what we're

40:50

doing. This is what we're going after. Because to your point, like all of your

40:54

marketing spend,

40:54

all of your organizational effort, things like your podcast and your webinars

40:59

and your events

41:01

and all those things start layering onto that. It's like, hey, should we go to

41:05

Saster this year?

41:06

Well, does our ICP include SaaS founders? No, then we shouldn't. Or yes, then

41:10

we should, you know,

41:11

it's just like those sort of things that I think allow you to focus your effort

41:15

and energy and

41:16

layer in depth. You know, Chandar, the amazing team of Koopa, who just stepped

41:21

down and is an

41:22

advisor to cast me in a long time guest on the show, is notaries for saying

41:28

paint the sky Koopa

41:29

blue. And like, you can't paint the sky. So like every single place that they

41:34

look, you want your

41:35

key personas to look, they see you, right? And like, you can't do that if you

41:40

're spread super

41:42

in. And it seems like so many marketers sitting down there in content world or

41:46

demand or wherever.

41:48

And they're like, I just have 50 different personas that I'm trying to sell to.

41:53

And I do like,

41:54

two things a year for each of them. And like, I don't know where to put my

41:59

money. And it's just

42:00

kind of too hard. Absolutely. And then yeah, imagine downstream the product

42:05

being built, you know,

42:06

where you know, I've spent a lot of my career like, how do you really know the

42:09

investment? Because

42:10

that's like, that's a huge investment that you're going to then build features

42:14

for that specific

42:15

thing or the partners all the way downstream. Like it's, yeah, I can't, if the

42:21

data, if there's some

42:23

history, I can't imagine a more important strategic exercise for any company to

42:30

go through than to

42:30

really get ICP and forget about the TAM, but really to the service addressable

42:35

market or

42:36

obtain obtainable, if you can get to that data, like really, truly defining

42:40

what's successful. And

42:41

then just being so diligent about measuring against that to your point, like, I

42:46

assume that of the

42:46

seven that we selected, we're going to be wrong on two of them. And then how do

42:51

you then go and

42:52

revisit and what does success look like? And it takes a little bit of time. But

42:56

like, you know,

42:56

you're going to be wrong and like how on some of them, and how do you go and

43:00

you measure and you

43:01

adjust, but it needs to use that same base framework of data. I think that the

43:05

naysayers usually say,

43:06

well, that's historical, that's not painting the future. I definitely believe

43:10

that you're going to

43:10

have success based off of what you did previously. But you do also have to take

43:14

a chance at saying,

43:15

hey, we don't have a huge amount of opportunities historically in these two

43:18

markets. But these

43:20

have massive Psalms or Sam's less invest in those. What is your best advice for

43:27

first time CMO who's

43:28

trying to figure out their ICP? Seeing if you have the support of the board of

43:37

the ELT in explaining

43:39

the value of it. I think that the initial alignment is critical. Second is just

43:45

continual communication, just understanding that a lot of people in the

43:49

organization

43:50

have never gone through this. They don't know the value and you have to be okay

43:54

, communicating

43:55

and sharing and educating on what it means for them. Justin, so great chatting

44:00

today. Any final

44:01

thoughts? Anything to plug? No, I appreciate the time though. Yeah, it's been

44:08

wonderful. I mean,

44:09

I feel like we did a pretty good job of laying it all out. But boy, is there a

44:15

lot more to unpack?

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So, we'll have to have you back. Awesome having you on the show and take care.