Justin Anovick, Former CPO/CMO at Syndigo, gives us a masterclass in 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,
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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
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months later,
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reported on the progress. But I would say that, you know, looking at the, who
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does the
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MARTEC landscape, but like there's limited, there's so much noise and there's
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limited ability to
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get through that there has to be some targeting for more mature businesses,
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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
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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,
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the product research and product operations team needs to be the one
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responsible. Oh, that's white
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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
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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
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think that there might
16:24
be a little less risk there because that's, you know, a longer tail. You're not
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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
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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
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possible. But marketing
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usually starts with the most amount of activities, I would say. Do you find
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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
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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
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differentiate. And then,
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you know, when I was in pre sales for my first half of my career, I was always
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for it because I
17:49
always felt like, hey, I knew what was happening. And let's go through that.
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And then, you know,
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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
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doing with our budget. If we can't answer that fundamental question, it's all
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guesses. It's all
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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
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my brain to do it, which is to do the ICP. Then once you know that, to me, then
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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
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messaging and that
18:31
positioning towards that, that ICP. But I've been a part of it so many times
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where it's the opposite.
18:37
And in the end, it feels like it was a good exercise, but it would never last
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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.
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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,
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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.