WEBVTT
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Hello everyone.
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Welcome to another episode of OpsCast, brought to you by the Mo Pros, powered by marketingops.com.
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I'm your host, Michael Hartmann.
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Joined today by just one of my hosts, Mike Rizzo.
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Hey everybody.
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Glad to be here.
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Sorry, Naomi's not with us.
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We know you appreciate her insights.
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You know, we'll have to get her out, out here again.
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She'll
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I'm sure she'll say yes.
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All right, so today we are joined by Dave Rigotti to talk about marketing ops in product led growth or PLG organizations.
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As I'm sure if you're a listener of ours, you're in the community, you've heard this term.
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Um, and if you're like me, you.
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Kind of think, you know what it is, probably don't.
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But Dave is the CEO and a founding team member of inflection.io, a startup developing software for marketing teams at product led companies.
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So previously Dave was a director of marketing at Adobe, responsible for account based marketing, supporting Marketo and Magento.
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Dave made his way to Adobe via two acquisitions for Steve was the VP of marketing visible when after Visible was acquired by Marketo.
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Um, Marketo was then of course, Purchased by Adobe in 2018.
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So prior to visible, Dave spent nearly five years at Microsoft in introducing Bing and being ads to the world.
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So quite a background here.
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Dave, thanks for joining us today.
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Yeah.
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Thanks so much for having me and uh, thanks everyone for listening in.
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Awesome.
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So, Dave, you know, since we first talked, I've done a little bit of research, uh, in all the spare time I have, but, um, intrigued about your career journey to this point.
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You know, it's a little bit of, we, I think we only gave.
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Really a thumbnail sketch there.
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Why don't we start with this?
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Why don't you share a little bit about your career journey, uh, with our listeners, and then maybe a little bit about how that ultimately led to the, the founding of inflection.io.
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Sure, yeah.
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Happy to share a bit about my career.
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Um, as you mentioned, I started the first part of my career working at Microsoft on Bing and Bing ads, and was very like blessed to and privileged to be able to work there straight out of school.
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And it was an awesome place to.
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Honestly learned how to do marketing.
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You know, I studied marketing in school, um, but I didn't really know how to do it.
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And so what a great like, environment and, um, company to go learn how to do marketing.
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So I absolutely loved it.
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It was a great time.
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Um, got to play in both, um, kind of B2B and social or b2b.
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And, um, consumer marketing and, and just learn a lot that, Hey, I actually really love B2B marketing.
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And that sort of, um, took me to visible.
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I I also study entrepreneurship in school.
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I love startups.
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I wanted to get to a startup and so I joined Visible when it was, I think I was the sixth employee.
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I was the first marketing hire.
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It had just started, just gotten.
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The products had just launched.
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It's not even the product that people kind of really know today.
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Um, this was in 2013 and um, that was an awesome ride for, for five years.
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We grew the team, the marketing team to I think about 10 people.
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The whole company was about 120 and was, um, I, I think doing marketing for marketers is, it's really hard, um, but really rewarding and really fun and.
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especially marketing ops, who is probably who you were primary audience was, right.
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Yeah, yeah, we had, um, it was mostly marketing ops or demand gen, um, kind of depending on the, on the company.
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And it was, it was awesome.
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It was, it was really cool to, um, just go create content all day about something you're passionate about and.
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Gosh, it's, it's probably like being a developer at a, at like a dev tools company.
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Like it's, it's like the whole car hell of, of the work, at least to me.
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Um, so that was an awesome ride.
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And then, you know, we had a fantastic exit to Marketo and then a very quick, um, kind of turnaround from there into, um, Adobe.
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So I spent most of my time when I was working at Marketo, actually under Adobe.
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Um, you know, was, was an awesome place to be, especially during, during Covid and Adobe took great care of, of so many folks to the acquisition.
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But, um, two, just, just shy of two years ago, you know, we knew I wanted to get back to startups.
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Absolutely love startups.
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You know, I had some great insights about, um, just the kind of changing dynamics and go to market from kind of like content driven go to market models to.
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More product led, driven, go to market models and, and just kind of have this insight that there really isn't a lot to kind of go help people do that really well.
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And so, um, I teamed back up with a few of the kind of other folks from, from Visible era and, and now we're off doing inflection.
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Very interesting.
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Uh, what I, One follow up question from that, so you mentioned.
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I'm at Microsoft.
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I think specifically you talked about was a great place to learn and all that, but curious, were there any specific, like did you have key people that were like you think of or maybe you still work with, you know, are still kind of people you go to as mentors or whatever people you trust that were key to that kind of evolution for you?
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Yeah, yeah.
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It, it took me like, um, probably eight years or nine years into my career to.
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To realize how important those relationships are.
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Um, it's crazy.
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My, like my first boss at um, At Microsoft when I was right outta school is somebody I still talk to because she's very involved in kind of running marketing at various startups and she's been our, our, I think our customer before at visible and, you know, she just keeps coming in and out of my life.
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And there's plenty of others that are, that are like that too.
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You know, a boss for six months, your first job outta school, it's like wow.
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That they can still have such an impact on, on your, your kind of professional life and, um, Yeah, it took me, it took me a long time to realize that.
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Um, and, uh, yeah.
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So I, I try to remember that for others that are just starting their careers too.
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Yeah, it's a good call out.
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I think just in general, paying, paying, like paying heed to the, uh, idea that the relationships that you build at any stage in your career can be beneficial long term.
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Right.
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So, um, don't burn a bridge, folks.
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It's wild.
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I agree completely.
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Like, I, I still have really good relationships with folks that I, you know, I was even laid off from a role one time, and I still want to be friends with those folks.
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Right.
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It's
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Yeah, you don't have to be friends, but.
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Well,
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be surprised.
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Do situations change?
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You know, five years later people come back into your life.
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Like, I dunno, when you're starting out the, this, this world of like marketing ops and, and just like B2B marketing in general feels so big, but it's like in reality, so much smaller
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Oh,
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than you maybe realize.
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Yeah.
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Yeah,
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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It's, it's great.
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I mean, like, look at the journey to, to you and I being connected, right, Dave?
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Like, like the, I I think if I could do the short story for those that don't know the way that Dave and I know each other, it's when he was running the community for marketing operations professionals back in the day, uh, with marketingops.com, as as the tool, right?
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That's how I came across this, like Dave and I met back then,
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Yeah, it's like a half decade journey of just coming in and out of each other's lives.
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I love it.
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That's
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fun.
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I reached out to Dave and I was like, What happened to the domain?
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He's like, Oh yeah, so and so we were just leasing it, so, and I was like, Oh boy.
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Okay, here we go.
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Yeah.
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Oh, and fun fact, the Twitter handle that we have for marketing ops, uh, Dave was like, Oh yeah, I still have that here.
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you
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yeah.
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Luckily I like didn't change my email address cause that was like a five year later, you know, password reset.
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But glad you got it.
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Yeah, glad you got it.
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was, it was good.
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So full circle,
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Yeah, I, I think it's, it's just always interesting to me cuz we've had a number of people on where some, where we specifically talked about sort their journey.
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In or out, into and out of, uh, marketing ops and other roles.
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And it's been, I, I keep finding a lot of commonality in the fact that there's a lot of people who have, like, there are key people who, you know, saw something in them or, you know, supported them.
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And, and, and I think it's a really important piece.
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I mean, it's part of why I think, you know, marketing apps I com the community.
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Is a good place for that.
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And I think there's the, That's why I think it's gonna be huge.
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Like I always talk, say like if I, if this had been around 15, 20 years ago, it would've been, I think, I'm not even sure that I would be in the same place.
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Right.
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It would be a very different experience and from a career standpoint.
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totally true.
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Yeah.
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I went to like a state, a state university that, you know, Microsoft doesn't recruit out of.
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And I don't know why they hired me over a lot of the other candidates that I, you know, I saw their resumes or who they were, and that's it.
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You know, you have like five people in a row who take bats on you, and that's how you grow the career, and it comes down to that.
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I see.
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Yeah.
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Awesome.
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All right, well let's get into product led growth.
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And, uh, for me, I think, I think I have my own sort of idea of what that means.
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I think it's probably accurate, but why don't we start with, when we, when you say product led growth, plg, like what does that mean to you?
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And let's like at least get that sort of a baseline for us.
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Yeah, I, I love the question because I also run a podcast through the product led.marketing community, and that is the first question I ask everyone, which is just like, what does it mean to you?
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Because everyone's definition is different.
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Nobody's on the same page, and I will ask a hundred people and I will get a hundred different responses.
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So I, I like that.
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You're, you're pretty mean in the hot seat on that question.
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The way I think about it is, um, it, it's really just letting people use a product without having you to go through a sales team.
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And so in, in kind of practical terms, that just means being able to sign up for a product online, um, and, and get started yourself.
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There's a lot of different models for product led growth from freemium to usage based, like, um, AWS to like seat pricing, like Sprout social, um, to even open source models like you can go, you know, download something from, from GitHub and get started without having to talk to a sales person.
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Great.
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That's product led growth.
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So I, I tend to take a little bit broader perspective.
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Then some people that might say it's just, it's just freemium.
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Cuz I think those are, that's just a, a pricing or packaging kind of difference on product led growth.
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But it, it's all consistent that you're able to use the product without having to, you know, go through a sales process.
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So, um, So I just want, So I think I wanna replay it, so just make sure I'm unsafe.
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So it's, yeah, it's a service offering or product offering that you, you can sign up for without going through a salesperson.
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And it may be free initially or it may not be right, So you could have a low, low cost kind of entry point.
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And is it, uh, so I think I, that, that makes sense.
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Is it, is it apply?
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To B2B and B2C or sort of hybrid models, like, uh, the reason I'm asking, I'm thinking about like streaming services that I might add onto what I use at home, for example, a lot of'em have, yeah, a week trial or something like that.
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Yeah, totally.
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The, yeah, there's of course B, B2C and BDB kind of, um, offerings, like a yeah.
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A Netflix, you know, you'd say is, is, is product led and kind of a lot of consumer products are product led.
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Um, I think for purposes of marketing ops and thinking about it, we can think, think kind of more of the, the B2B side and, um, that tends not to be quite as straightforward and, um, is a, is a good conversation that we can, we can get into.
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Yeah, I, I was talking to somebody.
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Actually earlier today somebody on my team about like that B2B is like if, if you are going from B to C, cuz he had heard something about, uh, somebody predicting that they're gonna be more like B2 C marketer leaders moving to b2b, which I think is an interesting idea.
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But I've always thought that B2 C is relatively.
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Um, well, the other way, B2B is a much more complicated environment.
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Yeah.
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For lots of reasons.
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Right.
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Um, but, and it's harder to move.
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I, I, my, my assertion is that it's hard to move from B2C to B2B than it is to go B2B to
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I've always said the same thing, and uh, it just feels like there's, you know, I've done some B2C marketing at an agency, and I will tell you from my experience, I'm like, wow.
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This, There's a lot of flexibility here.
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like there's sort of a lot of different stuff you can try and then in, in B2B you're sort of like, Yeah, like I'm limited There's only so many places to go.
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Not only limited, but you have to like prove it out like very fast.
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Like, okay, is it working?
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It's like, it just went out like yesterday, you know, Um, it's, yeah, especially true to smaller company.
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It's like, it's, it's pretty hard to, you know, kind of shift careers.
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Maybe, maybe easier, bigger companies.
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I don't know.
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Yeah, it just, it's sort of an aside.
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Um, Okay.
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So I think we've got a pretty good working definition.
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So, and, and I've like, probably all, a lot of our listeners, like I've heard the term thrown around a lot on LinkedIn or other, you know, through emails, whatever, What, um, I guess kind of a couple of related questions, like why is it becoming big in terms of it, I hate to use the word hype, but I'll use the hype like why is the hype there?
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But, but more importantly, maybe what are some of the base sort of me, meta, meta trends, I had to throw that in there.
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That are happening in, in the space.
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Yeah, it's, it's a good question and I, you know, I shouldn't.
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Um, transition to this by saying, you know, when you talk product led, you, you, you, you talk first about, you know, hey, you can just sign up without talking to a salesperson.
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You can just use the product.
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Like, you don't need an onboarding manager, maybe.
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Um, and that's, that's, that's basically all true, but that's not the only motion for product led growth.
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And every product led company has a fantastic sales team.
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The marketing team is using product data to create some great outbound campaigns and ABM campaigns.
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And there's this like whole kind of sales on motion at, at product led companies that that's very robust and very, very strong, um, that we can get into.
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But, uh, So being product led does not mean being only product led.
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Um, there's, there's obviously a, a sales led component to it.
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Um, and then, you know, why is it, why is it hot right now?
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Um, if you look at all of the, the biggest, most valuable, fastest growing.
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Kind of bdb startups out there.
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They're, they're all product led.
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Um, go look at, you know, AWS is the great example.
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I could surround startup, but great example.
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Twilio, Atlassian mural Figma, um, ly, you know, goes on and on.
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Um, and if you can really crack it, it's a, um, it's, it's a total accelerant to just building a.
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Great company.
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Um, a really, a really big company.
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Stripe.
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Yeah, Stripes won.
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I mean, there's some original players out there too.
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Um, back before we were even referring to it, right, like, um, was a Dropbox.
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Right.
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Like the Sean, Sean Ellis was there at the time and he sort of crafted the like, hey, give and get right.
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And, and there was a whole bunch of PLG stuff there where they suddenly were like sharing, uh, you know, files through this thing.
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And we were like, What is this And,
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Isn't that
00:16:13.809 --> 00:16:16.659
then it turned into, I think they struggled a little bit.
00:16:16.689 --> 00:16:22.569
It took'em a while longer to move from that like self serve payment model to the, to the enterprise.
00:16:22.600 --> 00:16:22.839
Right?
00:16:22.839 --> 00:16:25.179
There wasn't an emotion for that at first, but now companies.
00:16:26.079 --> 00:16:29.589
like recognizing, hey, we're building these sort of simultaneously,
00:16:30.100 --> 00:16:31.600
It's a super hard transition.
00:16:31.839 --> 00:16:38.769
I see a lot of startups get to like three to 4 million ARR just on.
00:16:39.324 --> 00:16:42.044
Kind of inbound product led motion.
00:16:42.625 --> 00:16:46.824
Um, maybe, I think I've seen one get to 10 million ar just, just on that.
00:16:46.884 --> 00:16:56.454
So it's a great way to, you know, get to your series A, series B, you know, you're getting the flywheel MO going, and then you have to go out on sales.
00:16:56.459 --> 00:16:58.944
You have to start selling bigger companies.
00:16:59.245 --> 00:17:07.105
And now sure, they'll still sign up for your product, but you have to turn it into a, a bigger deal and some companies can figure that out and, and some can't.
00:17:07.255 --> 00:17:07.765
Um,
00:17:08.515 --> 00:17:09.055
Yeah.
00:17:09.144 --> 00:17:09.625
Yeah.
00:17:09.985 --> 00:17:18.115
I was just talking to, uh, to some folks about this idea of, you know, capturing in that PLG motion, capturing the upside potential for an account.
00:17:18.535 --> 00:17:18.924
Right.
00:17:19.015 --> 00:17:21.144
Um, cuz it's like being built into
00:17:21.250 --> 00:17:24.339
The Tam account, you gotta look at the tam of, of your signups.
00:17:24.339 --> 00:17:26.440
Like somebody just signs up for a Gmail.
00:17:26.440 --> 00:17:31.629
Like you're probably gonna wanna treat differently than if you've got 30 years users at Microsoft Hammer away.
00:17:31.629 --> 00:17:39.819
And your product, like, you need to layer on the, the, the kind of personas, the roles, um, and the usage.
00:17:39.819 --> 00:17:42.309
And then the tam as part of the firmographics.
00:17:43.184 --> 00:17:49.724
You know, you didn't care that much about when you were, If you do traditional B2B sas, you're kind of like, okay, yeah, they're in our icp.
00:17:49.724 --> 00:17:52.184
They're between, you know, 50 and 200 employees.
00:17:52.184 --> 00:17:52.875
Like, great.
00:17:53.414 --> 00:17:57.555
That can be very different when you're looking at product led tam, just in that
00:17:57.565 --> 00:17:57.865
Yeah.
00:17:58.734 --> 00:17:59.365
Yep, totally.
00:17:59.529 --> 00:18:02.220
it's just curious like, so I think one of.
00:18:02.740 --> 00:18:19.089
One of the advantages or one of the things I think that something like private, like growth can address is, uh, I know as a buyer of marketing technology in the past, I've always been, yeah, usually you can get, uh, you can get a trial or a proof of concept that's good for a relatively short period of time before you're asked to make a commitment.
00:18:19.119 --> 00:18:25.180
And it, and in sometimes you get sort of more of the capabilities than you actually can afford, so to speak.
00:18:25.839 --> 00:18:30.099
And I've always struggled with that, like looking for options for if I was gonna give.
00:18:30.369 --> 00:18:37.690
Tech companies wanted piece bit advice, like make an available, a paid longer term, one that, you know, does a couple things right?
00:18:37.720 --> 00:18:41.889
It gets you invested in actually going through the effort of evaluating it.
00:18:42.069 --> 00:18:46.029
Well, and it on the, the, the, the tech company side, right?
00:18:46.029 --> 00:18:56.889
They get a little bit of revenue even if they don't ultimately sign for the something I just, this maybe product like growth helps kind of bridge that gap for someone like me who would like to see that.
00:18:57.565 --> 00:18:57.984
Right.
00:18:57.984 --> 00:18:58.734
How, Yeah.
00:18:58.734 --> 00:19:01.315
It's like, how many times have we been burned buying software?
00:19:01.375 --> 00:19:15.075
Like every, everyone, like it's a, it's a rite of passage and being in marketing ops is, you've, you've bought software for vendor area and it didn't live up to the expectations that the salesperson, um, had for, or that you had for, for.
00:19:15.670 --> 00:19:28.700
For it shaped, you know, just directly by the, the salesperson, or you get pushed off to success after buying and it's like, you know, good luck and you have to restart this whole conversation about what you're trying to do.
00:19:28.700 --> 00:19:29.019
And.
00:19:29.710 --> 00:19:37.210
Um, it's hard like now think about a product led company where you can just go in and you can play around with it for a couple of hours.
00:19:37.210 --> 00:19:41.889
Try your scenarios and know very quickly, Hey, is this kind of what I was thinking?
00:19:41.889 --> 00:19:44.349
And it, it doesn't work for all companies.
00:19:44.349 --> 00:19:46.869
Like not every company should be product led.
00:19:47.535 --> 00:19:50.565
Um, but if you can, it's, it's pretty awesome.
00:19:51.164 --> 00:19:54.164
And it's like the most valuable content download ever.
00:19:54.164 --> 00:20:02.384
Basically like the, you know, it's like I spend so much time in my career thinking about intent data sources, and third party intent.
00:20:02.414 --> 00:20:05.654
How do you triangulate to, like, who's in the market?
00:20:05.654 --> 00:20:06.734
It's like they're right there.
00:20:06.914 --> 00:20:08.355
Like they're using your product.
00:20:08.355 --> 00:20:08.805
They signed up.
00:20:08.805 --> 00:20:10.754
You could see exactly what they're doing in your product.
00:20:10.754 --> 00:20:11.085
Like
00:20:11.424 --> 00:20:12.774
it's the ultimate first party
00:20:12.849 --> 00:20:14.769
It's the ultimate first party cookie.
00:20:14.799 --> 00:20:15.579
Like Totally.
00:20:16.059 --> 00:20:16.299
Yeah.
00:20:16.299 --> 00:20:20.109
It's a total gold mine for like doing great marketing.
00:20:20.379 --> 00:20:22.809
Like you know so much about someone and you can really help them.
00:20:24.654 --> 00:20:25.144
Yeah.
00:20:25.254 --> 00:20:25.644
Wow.
00:20:25.764 --> 00:20:27.204
So this, okay, so this is really interesting.
00:20:27.234 --> 00:20:30.970
Uh, okay, so let's, for our audience, Yeah.
00:20:30.970 --> 00:20:33.339
Being primarily marketing ops folks.
00:20:33.819 --> 00:20:42.220
Let's talk a little bit about, um, or maybe talk us through, like, how do you think, uh, like how do you think that this kind, you've kind of touched on a little bit, right?
00:20:42.224 --> 00:20:44.200
That there's more than one motion typically.
00:20:44.379 --> 00:20:53.259
Um, how does like, but maybe get, go a little deeper on what the, like what the differences are in product led go to market mos versus.
00:20:53.994 --> 00:20:59.424
I'll call it traditional if there is one, unless I guess we can keep it to b2b just to, to keep it a little bit contained.
00:21:00.805 --> 00:21:09.595
Yeah, maybe, maybe I'll answer this, putting it in context of systems and that might be, um, like a good anchor for this conversation.
00:21:09.595 --> 00:21:09.894
Yeah,
00:21:10.014 --> 00:21:12.894
I think, um, for.
00:21:13.450 --> 00:21:17.529
You know, quote unquote traditional B2B marketing.
00:21:17.529 --> 00:21:19.359
You know, you have forums.
00:21:19.759 --> 00:21:33.759
Somebody comes in, you have ads, those forums, they're downloading eBooks, you're running webinars, It's all getting in your marketing animation, you're scoring them, you're pushing it into a crm, and then sales qualifies and converts that into pipeline for the most part.
00:21:33.759 --> 00:21:37.299
That's your, you know, your, your mode of, of.
00:21:37.960 --> 00:21:41.319
Transit, if you will, for, you know, how somebody goes to the sales cycle.
00:21:41.680 --> 00:21:45.519
And for the most part, marketing's job's done after pipeline create.
00:21:45.639 --> 00:21:45.910
Sure.
00:21:45.914 --> 00:21:52.059
There's like field marketing, there's some stuff you might do for customer marketing, but it's more like customer love marketing.
00:21:52.059 --> 00:21:57.789
It's, it's not like, um, it, it's comes the lightest weight kind of customer you could do.
00:21:58.629 --> 00:22:00.730
Um, so you have two main systems, right?
00:22:00.730 --> 00:22:02.319
Like marketing automation and crm.
00:22:02.859 --> 00:22:07.180
Now get into a product lab where, That motion still exists.
00:22:07.389 --> 00:22:18.430
Um, you still have that motion for the most part because there's lots of buyers out there that, yeah, in some cases can't use your product like it does not let them install Slack on their machine.
00:22:18.430 --> 00:22:23.379
And so if you wanna go sell a big company Slack, you need to go, um, have
00:22:23.545 --> 00:22:23.839
that.
00:22:23.839 --> 00:22:24.710
That hits that hit.
00:22:24.714 --> 00:22:26.269
That hits so home at home right now.
00:22:28.375 --> 00:22:30.894
And so, you know, you still have that motion, okay?
00:22:30.924 --> 00:22:37.585
And now you have like this whole other set of infra for people who can just sign up for the product and use it.
00:22:37.615 --> 00:22:47.394
And now you gotta figure out somebody who's signed up for their product and how do you convert them over into, you know, revenue or pipeline, you know, from just using your product.
00:22:47.694 --> 00:22:50.575
So now you gotta think from a, a mobs perspective.
00:22:50.849 --> 00:22:51.750
About, Okay, great.
00:22:51.750 --> 00:22:57.569
Like, you know, I need to figure out how to like tap into our product activity data from Segment or Amplitude.
00:22:57.899 --> 00:22:58.139
Okay.
00:22:58.139 --> 00:23:01.950
The data team has set up that data into the data house, like Snowflake.
00:23:02.220 --> 00:23:05.670
So we gotta get that data, we gotta figure out how to go get, do something with that data.
00:23:06.180 --> 00:23:16.200
And then we have to figure out, you know, what are the, what are all the, the journeys and communications we need to send to someone to convert them from a free plan to a paid plan or a.
00:23:16.805 --> 00:23:24.394
Middle tier plan to an enterprise plan and like inviting people to, you know, just a webinar is not, not, not gonna do it.
00:23:24.845 --> 00:23:31.984
And so you need to get really contextualized about who they are, what are they doing in their product, You know, are they hitting the limits, their free plan?
00:23:31.984 --> 00:23:32.224
Great.
00:23:32.224 --> 00:23:35.434
Tell them that so that they can upgrade and make it easy for them to upgrade.
00:23:35.434 --> 00:23:39.264
And so you started to get into this whole like, set of things beyond.
00:23:39.805 --> 00:23:44.845
Marketing automation and, and CRM with product data, data warehouses.
00:23:45.474 --> 00:23:56.184
And then like teams, like data teams, um, engineering teams has gotta go tag the product with your product events you need to be successful, um, and, you know, goes on and on.
00:23:56.190 --> 00:24:06.625
So, um, I've talked with a lot of marketing ops leaders at, at PLG companies and a lot are super burned, super, like, super burned out.
00:24:07.914 --> 00:24:13.224
um, it, it's been a heck of a couple of years for some folks as part of just hyper growth.
00:24:13.224 --> 00:24:28.134
And then on top of that, having to learn so much new stuff and set up new systems, especially when it comes to, to product activity data, which isn't new for, for product teams, but is pretty new for, for marketing teams.
00:24:29.609 --> 00:24:39.240
So is it, I think, it sounds like if I, if I'm hearing this right too, there's also a new channel that that marketers and marketing apps have to deal with for communication, which is the app itself, right?
00:24:39.269 --> 00:24:41.339
So some of this might happen in the app.
00:24:41.815 --> 00:24:48.295
So you have to coordinate not only data capture in your marketing operations system, you have to be able to push some back to it.
00:24:48.519 --> 00:24:49.149
Yeah.
00:24:49.779 --> 00:24:50.139
Yeah.
00:24:50.139 --> 00:24:54.220
I didn't even, didn't even mention in-app, but there's like a whole in-app channel too.
00:24:54.759 --> 00:24:55.899
Um, totally true.
00:24:56.170 --> 00:24:58.180
But it, it's like, it's a whole separate funnel.
00:24:58.180 --> 00:24:58.569
I think.
00:24:59.049 --> 00:25:09.519
Um, Megan, he were from, she's now winning by design, you know, she's, she's, you know, spent some time at Sirius and then at kgo, and she's now winning by design, creating some fantastic.
00:25:10.089 --> 00:25:22.059
Content around plg and she has this, it's called the, I think it's like the bow tie framework or the bow tie method, which on the, the left hand side of a bow tie is your traditional, you know, marketing funnel.
00:25:22.210 --> 00:25:23.980
It starts out wide, it gets really small.
00:25:24.250 --> 00:25:25.599
That's when it gets small.
00:25:25.599 --> 00:25:33.250
That's the kind of moment of a sign up, and then on the right hand side of a bow tie where it starts small and then it becomes like a big triangle.
00:25:33.519 --> 00:25:35.170
So sort of like an opposite funnel.
00:25:36.250 --> 00:25:37.869
That's your like PLG motion.
00:25:38.680 --> 00:25:42.220
It only makes sense to, to like do this if you can expand accounts.
00:25:42.700 --> 00:25:46.599
And if you can't expand accounts, then like, why are you, why are, why are you plt?
00:25:46.990 --> 00:25:48.309
You should, you should stop that.
00:25:48.309 --> 00:25:59.049
And so you have all this set of marketing, um, that is this the, the right hand side of, of the bow tie, Um, and it's all about instead of.
00:26:00.115 --> 00:26:01.494
Just the initial purchase.
00:26:01.795 --> 00:26:14.994
You know, in a traditional B2B, SAS kind of marketing world, it's about expansions and how do we make this a worthwhile customer for us to, you know, be spending so much on cogs just to have them in the, in the product.
00:26:17.319 --> 00:26:25.869
I'm curious, given all that is there are, do you I would, I'm gonna make it a little bit of assumption cuz I haven't worked in like.
00:26:26.724 --> 00:26:28.704
Software companies directly before.
00:26:28.704 --> 00:26:37.164
So in a tradit called traditional software company, I'm assuming like marketing basically takes, here's product or product marketing is saying, Hey, here's the features we've got.
00:26:37.164 --> 00:26:44.055
Go figure out how to promote that, and then sales sell it, where it sounds like there needs to be a much more of a, a tighter connection between.
00:26:44.845 --> 00:26:54.714
Marketing, it may be sales to marketing and product in terms of providing input on feature sets and capabilities for the, for the, for the software.
00:26:54.720 --> 00:26:55.795
Is that my,
00:26:56.184 --> 00:26:58.674
It's even more, it's even more extreme than that.
00:26:58.734 --> 00:27:07.494
Like in a, in a traditional sense, like, yes, you need to get your features and benefits from product marketing and the product team, but like it's, you're running a webinar.
00:27:07.585 --> 00:27:11.605
Like you, you don't need product to actually execute the webinar.
00:27:11.964 --> 00:27:16.375
Like you can just set it up, you can run it, you can just send an email, you're good to go.
00:27:16.375 --> 00:27:22.944
Like you need input on the copy and the content, but like you don't need input really to like go execute it.
00:27:23.964 --> 00:27:30.954
Um, or you don't have a dependency on the execution, you a hundred percent have a dependency on the execution for product led.
00:27:31.315 --> 00:27:41.785
Like if you can't access the product data, like the, um, the log of what people are doing in your product, like how are you supposed to send them an email when they've hit their limit on their free plan?
00:27:42.595 --> 00:27:48.355
Um, if, you know, and that has a dependency on, it's like there's a product team involved in that.
00:27:48.359 --> 00:27:49.795
There's a data team involved in that.
00:27:49.795 --> 00:27:53.575
There's like probably engineering teams that need to go add those events if they don't exist.
00:27:53.994 --> 00:27:58.105
You know, you need to figure out like, how do I get, how do I logistically get the data?
00:27:58.404 --> 00:28:00.434
How do we connect it in Is do we go through the warehouse?
00:28:00.434 --> 00:28:02.484
Do we get it through the crm?
00:28:02.545 --> 00:28:04.224
Is there some other way to do it?
00:28:04.644 --> 00:28:08.125
And then, you know, set up all of these communications for that.
00:28:08.559 --> 00:28:09.579
That's just to send an email.
00:28:09.789 --> 00:28:11.769
Like, that's not even like crazy.
00:28:11.769 --> 00:28:13.869
That's just like, you know, sending an email.
00:28:13.869 --> 00:28:22.269
So this is, I, I, you know, I, I talk with a lot of folks and they're like, you know, we have a new, we have a, we have to make an announcement, we have to do a feature release, We have to get our announcement out.
00:28:22.660 --> 00:28:27.430
You know, it's like product to engineering, data teams are all involved to send that email.
00:28:27.579 --> 00:28:31.389
And that just doesn't, like, doesn't, that doesn't make sense to me, like,
00:28:32.349 --> 00:28:33.460
Yeah, yeah.
00:28:33.460 --> 00:28:39.430
Where I, I, I've been faced with this challenge, uh, I've been, unlike, unlike Mr.
00:28:39.430 --> 00:28:44.649
Hartman, I've been solely in early stage sort of SAS companies for the most part.
00:28:44.769 --> 00:28:50.019
Spent a little bit of time in agency and a little bit at a, at a ad tech industry.
00:28:50.559 --> 00:29:01.494
But even then the, the latest one was around product usage and we were trying to build an engineer sort of growth tactics, um, and, and, I mean, it's really complicated, right?
00:29:01.494 --> 00:29:21.085
Like the tools and, and I'm perfectly okay with like, it makes a lot of sense for you, Dave and inflection to be doing what you're doing because what we've been faced with in marketing operations is like, how in the hell do I like stitch this thing together?
00:29:21.414 --> 00:29:23.724
And how do I talk to my engineers, right?
00:29:23.724 --> 00:29:28.494
Like I worked with the growth team, quote unquote at Maven Link back in the.
00:29:29.529 --> 00:29:31.359
Who were your, your growth engineers?
00:29:31.359 --> 00:29:35.710
And we said, Here's all the data points that, you know, they advised us a little bit.
00:29:36.069 --> 00:29:40.089
It was really just me, so there's no, there was a team of one, no surprise there.
00:29:40.599 --> 00:29:44.950
Uh, and she says, you know, here's the data we have access to right in the product.
00:29:45.519 --> 00:29:48.369
Um, what else, Where do you need me to send this?
00:29:48.369 --> 00:29:54.549
And I said, Okay, I need you to sync that to HubSpot and I need the, the run to happen, you know, every x number of minutes.
00:29:54.970 --> 00:29:57.940
Uh, I need the start stop dates or your trial.
00:29:58.269 --> 00:30:05.740
Uh, and then I will try to manage like alongside you, I'll engineer the sort of workflow to deliver the trial onboarding sequence.
00:30:06.129 --> 00:30:08.410
But then that's still not intelligent, right?
00:30:08.410 --> 00:30:09.579
Like that's just basic.
00:30:09.779 --> 00:30:14.220
Basic level of data integration, then it's like, well, are they actually using it?
00:30:14.549 --> 00:30:15.690
What do you do from there?
00:30:15.779 --> 00:30:21.299
These systems aren't built for, for sending those types of things, and so
00:30:21.355 --> 00:30:22.365
Well, it's so
00:30:22.410 --> 00:30:33.930
is working on is like fundamental to changing the game for folks that are trying to enable the function of deliver based on sort of the current value state of that customer
00:30:34.180 --> 00:30:42.670
And, and quickly too, I, I talked like, you know, being delayed by a couple days because you have to wait, you know, overnight for data to get in.
00:30:43.569 --> 00:30:49.660
You know, data warehouse or to get that data in or talk with a lot of companies they do, they pass email lists around.
00:30:49.660 --> 00:30:57.549
So there's a data team that'll run at SQL Query on the data warehouse, and then once a week pass a new list over into, into, uh, Market Mation.
00:30:57.555 --> 00:30:58.470
If, if you're waiting like.
00:30:59.274 --> 00:31:01.674
A week to send your welcome email to somebody.
00:31:02.214 --> 00:31:14.504
You know, it's like maybe they've already even turned or they've already set up their product and you're telling them to go do all these steps for something that is already kind of long past and it's, it's like a, that's a negative experience.
00:31:15.279 --> 00:31:17.859
like this just physically hurts right now to listen to that.
00:31:17.859 --> 00:31:18.369
Like just.
00:31:18.805 --> 00:31:25.815
and just like, you know, for those listening to this episode, right, We're just talking about the front end of the final here, folks.
00:31:26.065 --> 00:31:26.605
Yeah.
00:31:26.950 --> 00:31:39.700
Uh, once we became more mature, I ended up boomerang Boomeranging back to the Mavenlink side of things, and I worked under client success and their development of that team and program was, was tremendous.
00:31:39.700 --> 00:31:40.059
Right.
00:31:40.509 --> 00:31:44.410
Um, but your, your growth in Mr.
00:31:44.529 --> 00:31:50.259
Andr should come from growing accounts and those signals, right?
00:31:50.259 --> 00:31:50.349
The
00:31:50.454 --> 00:31:50.934
it has to.
00:31:51.639 --> 00:31:55.569
And so, uh, those signals need to come from product usage.
00:31:55.599 --> 00:32:16.389
And then low and behold, you're suddenly moving from plg like top of funnel, you know, conversion to sale, to you've got client success who needs to be alerted of the fact that their, their key account that they're in charge of is trying to do something in the product that they're running up against a barrier, or boy, they're using the heck outta that feature.
00:32:16.389 --> 00:32:19.240
And we really should try to like make this.
00:32:19.759 --> 00:32:22.039
Transition to this upgrade or, Or what have you.
00:32:22.430 --> 00:32:23.779
And like so land and
00:32:23.815 --> 00:32:25.944
Yeah, I know all
00:32:25.970 --> 00:32:27.440
they're asking for something totally different.
00:32:27.440 --> 00:32:28.519
And then how do they send emails?
00:32:28.519 --> 00:32:30.490
They're not in charge of Marketo or HubSpot
00:32:30.744 --> 00:32:31.105
right.
00:32:31.105 --> 00:32:32.305
Yeah, that's, that's right.
00:32:32.545 --> 00:32:42.865
All of this is like, you know, obviously a great opportunity for us from a software side and, and why we started inflection, but it's also a great opportunity from a career side.
00:32:43.315 --> 00:32:54.835
Um, you know, I think part of my reason for, um, kind of doing pretty well in my career was when I started at Microsoft, my first, you know, this like two.
00:32:56.410 --> 00:32:56.920
Nine.
00:32:57.490 --> 00:33:11.500
Um, my first job was like running like social media accounts, like every, you know, 2009, like every, you're just, you give your college grad, your, your social media head, say, Have fun and you get this, like, all this kind of authority that you like really should not have.
00:33:11.799 --> 00:33:14.319
I feel like back then that was the qualification though.
00:33:14.319 --> 00:33:14.589
Like
00:33:14.769 --> 00:33:15.339
right.
00:33:15.670 --> 00:33:16.210
yeah, we're
00:33:16.359 --> 00:33:17.049
Oh, you grew up,
00:33:17.049 --> 00:33:17.740
We did great.
00:33:17.889 --> 00:33:18.099
Yeah.
00:33:18.129 --> 00:33:19.079
know how to spell Twitter.
00:33:19.089 --> 00:33:21.789
media, so you know what a hashtag
00:33:21.940 --> 00:33:25.569
Yeah, you're not adding a period to every, like, every social post at the end.
00:33:25.629 --> 00:33:36.039
And like, that was the test, you know, But like, you know, it ended up like growing and being a big thing and like that was a great kind of wagon to hitch to, you know, for a while.
00:33:36.099 --> 00:33:38.559
Um, or a, a cart to hitch to.
00:33:38.889 --> 00:33:41.379
So, um, I kind of think PLG is the same.
00:33:41.500 --> 00:33:43.779
Um, it's a booming business.
00:33:43.869 --> 00:33:50.879
Um, this, like this product led space and, um, there's a, there, this is a, I think, a, a.
00:33:51.744 --> 00:33:57.865
A big shift in the foundation for marketing and especially in, in kind of marketing office with all the foundation.
00:33:57.865 --> 00:34:09.565
So anyways, if anyone's listening in your, in your new, your career or you're trying to figure out, you know, different things to kind of go learn about and really stand out, I think learning about product data is, uh, awesome.
00:34:10.255 --> 00:34:17.184
And there's some great content out there from amplitude and segments and heap and rudder stack and fresh pain.
00:34:18.025 --> 00:34:25.465
There's, there's so many vendors, um, Amplitude and Segment have some of the, the kind of past content out there to go, go learn from.
00:34:25.465 --> 00:34:39.775
And, you know, if you go in an interview and you're talking about, you know, track calls and identified calls and product events and kind of how a marketing team should be thinking about them, or better yet go to market team should be thinking about them and kind of how to take advantage of.
00:34:40.990 --> 00:34:46.660
Quote unquote gold mine of first party data and translate that into, you know, business growth.
00:34:47.590 --> 00:34:57.970
You're hired, like you're hired because that, a lot of people don't know that, all that stuff and it's, you can go take some courses online and you know, go crush it.
00:34:59.335 --> 00:35:05.605
Yeah, I think, I think there's probably a number of our listeners who, who might be sitting there listening to this, like, I am here going like this.
00:35:05.605 --> 00:35:15.865
Some of the things you're describing that we can do, like, that you have to go through with a, I'll call it traditional, you know, marketing ops platform with, you know, a CRM on the other side of it or whatever is it?
00:35:16.675 --> 00:35:16.885
Yeah.
00:35:16.885 --> 00:35:17.275
There just.
00:35:17.835 --> 00:35:28.855
Like they haven't kept up and they now, especially now that they've all sort of become really big part of big companies, I don't know that they can move as quickly to enable the kinds of things that, you know, you're able to do.
00:35:29.455 --> 00:35:33.175
But I, Yeah, I think, I mean immediately was, as you were describing some of that stuff, it remind me of.
00:35:33.894 --> 00:35:39.745
Yeah, having done a high volume custom integration to Marketo from some operational systems at one, one stop.
00:35:39.745 --> 00:35:44.095
And it was, it was, it was a six month project, right?
00:35:44.335 --> 00:35:47.394
And then it was ongoing because we had to clean up stuff we didn't expect.
00:35:47.400 --> 00:35:47.635
Right.
00:35:48.325 --> 00:36:13.990
Um, and then way back in my career, Um, talking about it wasn't quite the same as like product data, but it was, I worked for a telecom company and part of what we, I had, cause I was building the, the customer database for it and both for, for acquisition and retention, is that we had all this access to all this data about how people were using the network and um, yeah, we had a team of guys, they would probably be called data scientists.
00:36:13.990 --> 00:36:14.800
Now, back then they.
00:36:15.460 --> 00:36:31.990
Statisticians, but they were doing, you know, churn models and things like that to try to identify who was likely to churn on the acquisition side, like likelihood to, to be acquired and like that is the kind of stuff that it sounds like I'm, that's like what my mind's going to those kinds of things.
00:36:31.995 --> 00:36:36.190
And what you're describing just in a much faster pace.
00:36:37.135 --> 00:36:38.695
Yeah, Yeah.
00:36:38.995 --> 00:36:47.635
Now, now, now layer on hypergo startups and marketing owning the post purchase journey.
00:36:48.205 --> 00:36:57.745
Um, and yeah, it gets, it gets hairy fast and with, you know, no more team members, like these teams are like the same size.
00:36:57.820 --> 00:36:58.380
right.
00:36:58.525 --> 00:36:58.945
all the same.
00:36:59.335 --> 00:37:02.995
So I do have a question around teams, uh, and responsibilities.
00:37:03.000 --> 00:37:08.845
Just, I mean, I don't know that there's necessarily right answer, but just, just like curiosity sort of.
00:37:09.275 --> 00:37:18.394
From your perspective, Dave, um, you know, we talked a little bit earlier about the PLG funnel and you know, sort of activation and sell through, right?
00:37:18.394 --> 00:37:20.465
You sign up for free, you see usage.
00:37:20.525 --> 00:37:23.285
You want to nurture that person to try to buy.
00:37:23.705 --> 00:37:29.285
Um, you know, if you had a title to put on that, it is as a marketing ops rev op person.
00:37:29.590 --> 00:37:34.150
Your responsibility is to usher data into the right places and allow it to be activated, right.
00:37:34.210 --> 00:37:36.130
Um, and understand what the requests are.
00:37:36.130 --> 00:37:38.680
So, so your responsibilities to make those that magic happen.
00:37:39.310 --> 00:37:45.790
Um, but when you think about who is responsible for sort of owning that, That cta, right?
00:37:45.790 --> 00:37:48.850
The buy now button, or the upgrade now or what have you.
00:37:49.120 --> 00:37:51.160
Is that a growth marketer quote unquote?
00:37:51.160 --> 00:37:53.440
Is that a product marketer, quote unquote?
00:37:53.440 --> 00:38:04.105
Like what would you think that sort of, if you had to bucket it into a couple titles that you think are generally applicable, you know, I'm, I'm also trying to get you to say it is not marketing
00:38:04.255 --> 00:38:04.435
Yeah,
00:38:04.495 --> 00:38:05.155
and agree with that
00:38:06.445 --> 00:38:06.985
right?
00:38:07.165 --> 00:38:07.945
but, who is it?
00:38:08.005 --> 00:38:08.275
Right?
00:38:08.275 --> 00:38:08.875
Who is it?
00:38:08.875 --> 00:38:16.465
So that the marketing house people listening go, Look, I can help try to activate this data, move it to somewhere, but someone's gotta go and the rest of the way.
00:38:16.465 --> 00:38:16.795
Right.
00:38:18.400 --> 00:38:19.300
I don't know.
00:38:19.960 --> 00:38:23.620
Um, I'll tell you what I've seen, but I don't know, um,
00:38:23.725 --> 00:38:24.535
Mike, why?
00:38:24.535 --> 00:38:25.765
Why did we get Dave on this
00:38:25.900 --> 00:38:26.290
Yeah.
00:38:26.350 --> 00:38:26.560
Yeah.
00:38:26.560 --> 00:38:26.980
Right.
00:38:26.980 --> 00:38:27.470
Yeah.
00:38:28.810 --> 00:38:29.470
I think this is
00:38:29.575 --> 00:38:30.245
Nobody knows
00:38:30.460 --> 00:38:31.030
right.
00:38:31.030 --> 00:38:46.570
I think this is, this is the, um, Well, depending on who you are, this can be the, the, the fun part of, of product led, and it's a little bit of of pain too, is like nobody really knows a lot of these answers.
00:38:47.050 --> 00:38:52.990
There's no, like, you know, serious decisions demand waterfall for like, how everything should work.
00:38:53.170 --> 00:38:57.100
Um, so like, companies don't know.
00:38:57.160 --> 00:39:02.470
I like, I've talked to a lot of product line companies and everyone is.
00:39:03.255 --> 00:39:03.865
Mm-hmm.
00:39:03.910 --> 00:39:09.190
a different setup and, um, nobody's very confident that it's the right setup.
00:39:09.610 --> 00:39:12.160
Like when I talk with folks, they're like, Oh, but you've talked with everyone else.
00:39:12.160 --> 00:39:13.030
Like, what are they doing?
00:39:13.390 --> 00:39:23.710
So this is what we're trying to do with our product led market community, is to help educate and we'll make some great content and frameworks to help people understand kind of what we're, what we're seeing.
00:39:23.710 --> 00:39:25.420
But I don't know.
00:39:25.450 --> 00:39:31.570
And like, so to answer that question about kind of who's owning a lot of the stuff, there's like the.
00:39:32.635 --> 00:39:38.425
I'll say there's like the foundation owner and then there's the kind of ex execution kind of owner.
00:39:39.115 --> 00:39:46.090
Um, Marketing apps owns a lot of the foundation or activation of that foundation.
00:39:46.090 --> 00:39:55.690
So, you know, in product and engineering, like have to own the product activity data and the kind of data warehouses if, if they have one.
00:39:56.530 --> 00:40:02.565
Um, Because using it for product like growth purposes is just, is just one, one reason.
00:40:02.625 --> 00:40:04.035
Like it's just one use case.
00:40:04.125 --> 00:40:07.485
Um, there's lots of other, other reasons that they kind of should own it.
00:40:07.575 --> 00:40:10.995
Um, and not marketing, but um, so they kind of own it.
00:40:11.505 --> 00:40:17.055
You know, marketing should influence how a product should be tagged and what events should be tracked.
00:40:17.055 --> 00:40:19.005
But, um, they're not the owners of it.
00:40:19.365 --> 00:40:25.635
But more often than not, marketing Ops is the owner for, Okay, you have this data, like how do you go.
00:40:26.275 --> 00:40:31.375
activate it, at least for, definitely from a kind of email communication perspective.
00:40:32.035 --> 00:40:41.545
Now who's in there actually creating the emails, designing the journeys, and kind of figuring out, you know, what kinds of campaigns should be run.
00:40:41.545 --> 00:40:43.465
And I call'em like growth loops.
00:40:43.525 --> 00:40:47.305
You know that it's gonna get people to use the product more, upgrade them.
00:40:48.805 --> 00:40:49.975
It's very consistent.
00:40:50.335 --> 00:40:59.860
So sometimes it's a life cycle marketer, sometimes it's, um, You know, like a life cycle being like a full funnel demand marketer, basically.
00:41:00.610 --> 00:41:04.690
Sometimes it's a pm like a product person.
00:41:05.440 --> 00:41:08.950
Um, sometimes in product there are marketers.
00:41:09.550 --> 00:41:11.620
There'll be like growth marketers under.
00:41:12.535 --> 00:41:15.625
So, yeah, any other company, they would be in marketing.
00:41:15.925 --> 00:41:18.385
They have a marketing background, but they happen to sit in a product.
00:41:18.985 --> 00:41:24.985
Um, sometimes I've seen it's actually like success, like they own post purchase.
00:41:24.985 --> 00:41:27.445
They consider a sign up to be that point.
00:41:27.535 --> 00:41:32.635
And so CS is in there kind of owning, owning that, and kind of designing.
00:41:34.045 --> 00:41:38.035
So it's the, I say don't know because, um, I've seen it all.
00:41:38.995 --> 00:41:39.625
seen it all.
00:41:39.625 --> 00:41:42.265
And this is a, this is a challenge we have with our product marketing.
00:41:42.685 --> 00:41:46.135
You know, you go to our site, it says, talks about market animation.
00:41:46.135 --> 00:41:55.405
It's like, kind of like, but also like, kind of not like we have companies that are using, like it's in CS team using our product or its product.
00:41:55.495 --> 00:41:59.635
Like does a, was a, a VP of product and a PM using our software.
00:42:00.025 --> 00:42:01.615
Like, would they call it marketing animation?
00:42:02.215 --> 00:42:02.725
No way.
00:42:03.175 --> 00:42:05.465
So we have to figure that out.
00:42:07.330 --> 00:42:08.470
the category We are in
00:42:10.125 --> 00:42:10.615
Yeah,
00:42:10.715 --> 00:42:23.075
I think what you're saying is like if you're in marketing or or marketing hops and probably like growth, you know, there's probably a lot of or, or a lack of clarity about roles, responsibilities across this kind of stuff and how to use it.
00:42:23.795 --> 00:42:24.635
Just think of what I'm hearing.
00:42:25.165 --> 00:42:29.515
I, I'd say there's clarity in the companies, but lack of consistency across companies.
00:42:29.545 --> 00:42:30.205
Fair enough.
00:42:30.655 --> 00:42:31.075
Yeah.
00:42:31.255 --> 00:42:38.545
And I think this is like, this isn't a marketing, a product led growth is not a like marketing initiative.
00:42:38.545 --> 00:42:40.945
It's not even a like go to market initiative.
00:42:40.945 --> 00:42:42.685
It like has to be a company initiative.
00:42:43.105 --> 00:42:44.695
It's like impossible.
00:42:45.115 --> 00:42:50.995
I've never seen a marketer or even a marketing leader be like, We need to add this motion and here's what it is.
00:42:51.595 --> 00:42:53.785
Um, without like the support.
00:42:54.670 --> 00:42:55.090
The
00:42:55.120 --> 00:42:55.690
kinds of stuff.
00:42:55.690 --> 00:43:01.300
Cause like if you're not product led, you wanna get there, like you're gonna have to, you know, change up a lot of stuff.
00:43:01.300 --> 00:43:05.650
Like people need to be able to self-service the product otherwise, like, what are you doing Card?
00:43:06.205 --> 00:43:10.015
It's really, I I like to see when, Yeah, I, I agree.
00:43:10.015 --> 00:43:10.255
Right?
00:43:10.255 --> 00:43:21.085
The top down the entire org needs to be sort of involved, and I really like it when you start getting the, the product designers trying to think in terms of that PLG motion.
00:43:21.085 --> 00:43:24.325
Like where, where do we put the intentional growth loop, right?
00:43:24.565 --> 00:43:33.144
The intentional little hook to, to put the notification that, or the barrier to entry, like they're engineering the little stops along the way.
00:43:33.460 --> 00:43:41.680
With intentionality that there's still enough value in the product, but up to a point we're going, Oh, there's a little bit more you have to do in order to get going.
00:43:41.685 --> 00:43:43.390
It's those progressive form fills that we
00:43:43.405 --> 00:43:44.365
Exactly.
00:43:44.665 --> 00:43:45.925
Yeah, it's exactly right.
00:43:45.955 --> 00:43:57.115
There's like, I was talking with a, a company, uh, yesterday and they, um, didn't have any, like, essentially we would think of it as like progressive profiling or progressive form fills.
00:43:58.360 --> 00:43:59.140
In their product.
00:43:59.140 --> 00:44:02.140
So people sign up and they, they just get an email address.
00:44:02.140 --> 00:44:03.700
They're like, We don't know anything about these people.
00:44:03.700 --> 00:44:09.850
We don't know who, like their level, their title, um, their type, their industry.
00:44:09.850 --> 00:44:13.180
We don't know what kind of use case they're coming in to kind of solve for.
00:44:13.180 --> 00:44:15.640
And they're like, Oops, we made that mistake.
00:44:15.644 --> 00:44:18.340
We need to go back and work with product.
00:44:18.550 --> 00:44:25.490
So when people sign up, we put them through, you know, we put three forms in front of them, getting that information so we can actually go.
00:44:26.350 --> 00:44:28.030
Yeah, like complete your profile,
00:44:28.195 --> 00:44:28.945
Exactly.
00:44:29.305 --> 00:44:29.665
Exactly.
00:44:29.680 --> 00:44:37.510
profile version inside your product and, and, you know, and the product might go well then they're not using it cuz they, they fall out and it's like, well we can't market
00:44:38.125 --> 00:44:38.605
Right.
00:44:38.665 --> 00:44:38.845
Yeah.
00:44:38.845 --> 00:44:40.015
It's the right, it's right product.
00:44:40.015 --> 00:44:46.075
Might not think to go ask people their title, but you know, marketers like obviously do and need that.
00:44:46.555 --> 00:44:49.975
This is, uh, one of the things that I talked about very early in my career.
00:44:49.980 --> 00:45:02.275
I was like, if you can get product folks to start thinking about the needs of the marketer to do the selling piece earlier on as they engineer the product, um, there's a, there's a lot of potential win for the
00:45:02.470 --> 00:45:02.769
Yeah,
00:45:03.130 --> 00:45:03.519
Yeah.
00:45:03.685 --> 00:45:06.205
Um, but it has to start like the sooner the better.
00:45:06.295 --> 00:45:06.685
Right?
00:45:06.730 --> 00:45:15.519
I would, I would, I would argue, just like I, I, years ago I got a book, it's like a, who Moved My Cheese type book about marketing and sale sales and how, how to be a marketing superstar.
00:45:15.519 --> 00:45:18.580
There's a, there was a one chapter that was like two basic pages.
00:45:19.030 --> 00:45:21.460
It had basically said, Yeah, this is customer money.
00:45:21.460 --> 00:45:22.960
It, it has changed kind of how I thought.
00:45:23.530 --> 00:45:27.400
The term customer a lot, but basically said everybody's paychecks should have on it, right?
00:45:27.400 --> 00:45:39.730
This is customer money to kind of try to drill into people's head, like whatever they're doing is in service of getting new customers who are actually gonna enable them to have the jobs that they have and right, so the company to grow.
00:45:40.420 --> 00:45:42.850
So I think that's just another version of that.
00:45:43.390 --> 00:45:43.750
Mm-hmm.
00:45:43.990 --> 00:45:44.140
Mm-hmm.
00:45:44.740 --> 00:45:51.475
so, um, So we talked about like, this is a different kind of motion on top of existing stuff.
00:45:51.565 --> 00:45:54.775
It, so for our audience who are in marketing apps mostly, right.
00:45:54.775 --> 00:46:03.745
So what, what are the things that, what are some of the things that, um, that you would kind of advise them to start learning about more?
00:46:03.750 --> 00:46:05.965
You, I think you mentioned a couple of things early on, but maybe.
00:46:06.385 --> 00:46:26.785
Kind of recap those that they can, you know, so if they wanna be interested, if they're interested in something like this and what the differences are, and then maybe the flip is like, are there anything lessons from plg, you know, uh, companies and organizations that, uh, we could apply in other non PLG companies.
00:46:28.300 --> 00:46:28.630
Cool.
00:46:28.630 --> 00:46:29.380
Yeah, I love it.
00:46:29.470 --> 00:46:35.590
Um, for, for learning, um, I think there's, there's a couple things.
00:46:35.650 --> 00:46:42.610
Definitely go in and learn about product activity data, very like, Be a student.
00:46:43.060 --> 00:46:43.390
Learn it.
00:46:43.420 --> 00:46:44.470
Learn it intensely.
00:46:44.560 --> 00:46:51.760
You can do that and don't mean go spend a hundred hours on it, but, but really like, sit down and, and like try to understand it.
00:46:51.760 --> 00:46:55.570
Don't, don't go through a training to say you got a certification.
00:46:55.810 --> 00:47:02.290
Go through a training by segment or amplitude to be like a a, a learner about it.
00:47:02.650 --> 00:47:05.170
So AC go in and kind of actually learn.
00:47:06.290 --> 00:47:10.840
A couple weeks ago, I put out a product led growth vendor landscape.
00:47:11.200 --> 00:47:16.240
There's some technologies that are very specific to product led companies.
00:47:16.840 --> 00:47:23.920
Um, If somebody's looking to go learn more, you can download, um, or go view the landscape.
00:47:23.920 --> 00:47:31.870
You can see some of the categories that are specific to kind of data and being product led that maybe you haven't kind of come across debt.
00:47:32.140 --> 00:47:34.060
So you can kind of go learn about the categories.
00:47:34.090 --> 00:47:37.990
Then, of course, if you want, like go learn about the vendors, but at least learn about the categories.
00:47:37.990 --> 00:47:49.420
So when somebody asks you about, you know, ETL or V ETL or product sales, Whatever, um, you know, you know what they're talking about.
00:47:50.080 --> 00:48:01.690
Um, and then for, you know, what, what can you learn if you're not a product led company from those that are, um, kind of being product led?
00:48:02.650 --> 00:48:10.930
I think, um, I, I think, I don't think customer marketing's the right term, but the, this.
00:48:13.630 --> 00:48:22.510
I felt like we were, in my career, I've, you know, run marketing teams, you were doing customer marketing, we're doing great job, supporting our customers.
00:48:23.140 --> 00:48:39.130
And then I look back, you know, it's like, yes, we had, you know, 10% of our, of our marketing team in customer marketing and, but we had, you know, 95% of our budget for due logo acquisition and.
00:48:39.610 --> 00:48:56.050
You know, the customer marketing team was doing great work, but like it was more turning our customers into superstars and, and not, and that's different than like helping them with the product.
00:48:57.070 --> 00:49:06.640
Um, I think product that the best product led companies are are just so good at getting people.
00:49:07.300 --> 00:49:13.000
Really into the product, like using the product, adding more users into the product.
00:49:13.000 --> 00:49:28.870
Like I don't, I don't think we ever once did any, had any effort at visible to, to have companies go add more like, like more, um, people into visible, you know, like maybe there was just a company would have just one, one login.
00:49:29.050 --> 00:49:30.220
We didn't even charge seat.
00:49:30.220 --> 00:49:33.880
Like it wouldn't cost them anything to go get more people into the product.
00:49:33.885 --> 00:49:36.280
Like we never did that and it just wasn't a.
00:49:36.970 --> 00:49:41.800
A big party for expansion, and that's, that's all the game for product like growth.
00:49:41.800 --> 00:49:58.810
It's all about taking this like crazy med scientist stuff that we do every day on funnel conversions from a content download to this mql, to this like go, like, you know, to have that brain, but like now for your customers and it, it unlocks some pretty cool stuff.
00:49:59.425 --> 00:49:59.995
That's awesome.
00:50:00.144 --> 00:50:05.455
Yeah, it's like I, I think we're gonna have to wrap it up here now, just out of time, and I feel.
00:50:06.085 --> 00:50:09.175
Coming into this now I realize like, I didn't know what I didn't know.
00:50:09.295 --> 00:50:09.505
Right.
00:50:09.505 --> 00:50:14.635
I feel like I could, we could continue on for another hour, but, uh, unfortunately we're not able to.
00:50:15.205 --> 00:50:30.610
So, uh, you mentioned the, uh, the landscape document, but let, let me, um, so that plus if people wanna like, Keep up with what you're doing or learn more about you or inflection, like what's the best place for them to do that and where can they get that, uh, that doc.
00:50:31.210 --> 00:50:35.200
Yeah, you can, you can learn more about inflection, just inflection.io.
00:50:35.860 --> 00:50:47.920
Um, and then we have this, this community that we, that we run for, it's mostly marketers, um, uh, including marketing ops or rev ops at product led companies called product led.marketing.
00:50:48.550 --> 00:50:51.730
Um, and it's, uh, you know, a public free community.
00:50:51.730 --> 00:50:53.710
It's not a, it's an industry group.
00:50:53.710 --> 00:50:54.580
It's not a vendor group.
00:50:54.580 --> 00:50:55.210
And so there's a lot.
00:50:55.715 --> 00:51:00.035
Great conversations there can always post to if you have a question or wanna learn.
00:51:00.040 --> 00:51:01.925
And we publish a lot of content there.
00:51:01.925 --> 00:51:05.675
So again, that's product led marketing and inflection io.
00:51:06.760 --> 00:51:07.450
Fantastic.
00:51:08.394 --> 00:51:13.615
uh, Dave's summer camp session is available@marketingops.com.
00:51:13.615 --> 00:51:19.495
So if you want to do, um, we, it was a, a little bit of a different spin on what we talked about today.
00:51:19.555 --> 00:51:21.505
Um, some more information there.
00:51:21.970 --> 00:51:29.920
Uh, and so if you want to go a little deeper into PLG and watch his presentation as a pro member, you can have access to that.
00:51:29.920 --> 00:51:30.580
It's included.
00:51:31.150 --> 00:51:35.740
Um, and, and you can go, you know, sink your teeth in even further there.
00:51:35.800 --> 00:51:40.390
But yeah, full faith in Dave and his ability to run a community that's really valuable.
00:51:40.420 --> 00:51:47.769
Um, credence to, you know, the stuff that he did earlier, uh, with marketing op.com and all that stuff.
00:51:47.769 --> 00:51:49.510
And so, yeah, please go check it out.
00:51:49.510 --> 00:51:50.290
It's really, really good.
00:51:50.410 --> 00:51:51.040
We appreciate you.
00:51:51.500 --> 00:51:51.990
Yeah.
00:51:52.160 --> 00:51:52.360
it.
00:51:52.360 --> 00:51:53.519
Thanks for having me.
00:51:53.830 --> 00:51:55.660
Dave, this is like super helpful.
00:51:55.660 --> 00:51:56.500
I know I learned a lot.
00:51:56.500 --> 00:52:07.945
I think our listeners who were in my same shoes not as familiar, will have learned a lot as well, so, Um, with that though, uh, thank you to all of our listeners.
00:52:08.065 --> 00:52:14.455
Uh, we always appreciate this continued support, feedback, and, um, ideas for topics and, and guests.
00:52:15.144 --> 00:52:18.715
Um, hard, hard to believe that this is now episode 71.
00:52:18.805 --> 00:52:23.005
Uh, we're almost two years into it, so thank you all for that, Mike.
00:52:23.005 --> 00:52:23.545
Thank you.
00:52:23.545 --> 00:52:24.925
And we, we miss Naomi.
00:52:25.075 --> 00:52:28.735
But, uh, with that, we'll talk to you next time everybody.
00:52:28.825 --> 00:52:29.215
Bye.
00:52:29.530 --> 00:52:30.190
Thanks everyone.
00:52:30.330 --> 00:52:30.810
Byebye.
00:00:27.880 --> 00:00:28.630
Hello everyone.
00:00:28.630 --> 00:00:32.960
Welcome to another episode of OpsCast, brought to you by the Mo Pros, powered by marketingops.com.
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I'm your host, Michael Hartmann.
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Joined today by just one of my hosts, Mike Rizzo.
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Hey everybody.
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Glad to be here.
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Sorry, Naomi's not with us.
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We know you appreciate her insights.
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You know, we'll have to get her out, out here again.
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She'll
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I'm sure she'll say yes.
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All right, so today we are joined by Dave Rigotti to talk about marketing ops in product led growth or PLG organizations.
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As I'm sure if you're a listener of ours, you're in the community, you've heard this term.
00:01:01.630 --> 00:01:03.429
Um, and if you're like me, you.
00:01:03.500 --> 00:01:05.390
Kind of think, you know what it is, probably don't.
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But Dave is the CEO and a founding team member of inflection.io, a startup developing software for marketing teams at product led companies.
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So previously Dave was a director of marketing at Adobe, responsible for account based marketing, supporting Marketo and Magento.
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Dave made his way to Adobe via two acquisitions for Steve was the VP of marketing visible when after Visible was acquired by Marketo.
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Um, Marketo was then of course, Purchased by Adobe in 2018.
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So prior to visible, Dave spent nearly five years at Microsoft in introducing Bing and being ads to the world.
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So quite a background here.
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Dave, thanks for joining us today.
00:01:40.254 --> 00:01:40.614
Yeah.
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Thanks so much for having me and uh, thanks everyone for listening in.
00:01:44.969 --> 00:01:45.329
Awesome.
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So, Dave, you know, since we first talked, I've done a little bit of research, uh, in all the spare time I have, but, um, intrigued about your career journey to this point.
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You know, it's a little bit of, we, I think we only gave.
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Really a thumbnail sketch there.
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Why don't we start with this?
00:01:59.260 --> 00:02:09.040
Why don't you share a little bit about your career journey, uh, with our listeners, and then maybe a little bit about how that ultimately led to the, the founding of inflection.io.
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Sure, yeah.
00:02:11.004 --> 00:02:12.685
Happy to share a bit about my career.
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Um, as you mentioned, I started the first part of my career working at Microsoft on Bing and Bing ads, and was very like blessed to and privileged to be able to work there straight out of school.
00:02:25.284 --> 00:02:26.844
And it was an awesome place to.
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Honestly learned how to do marketing.
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You know, I studied marketing in school, um, but I didn't really know how to do it.
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And so what a great like, environment and, um, company to go learn how to do marketing.
00:02:39.550 --> 00:02:40.360
So I absolutely loved it.
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It was a great time.
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Um, got to play in both, um, kind of B2B and social or b2b.
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And, um, consumer marketing and, and just learn a lot that, Hey, I actually really love B2B marketing.
00:02:54.025 --> 00:02:56.784
And that sort of, um, took me to visible.
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I I also study entrepreneurship in school.
00:02:59.335 --> 00:03:00.384
I love startups.
00:03:00.414 --> 00:03:06.925
I wanted to get to a startup and so I joined Visible when it was, I think I was the sixth employee.
00:03:07.224 --> 00:03:08.574
I was the first marketing hire.
00:03:08.694 --> 00:03:11.275
It had just started, just gotten.
00:03:11.965 --> 00:03:13.224
The products had just launched.
00:03:13.224 --> 00:03:16.375
It's not even the product that people kind of really know today.
00:03:16.525 --> 00:03:21.805
Um, this was in 2013 and um, that was an awesome ride for, for five years.
00:03:21.865 --> 00:03:25.944
We grew the team, the marketing team to I think about 10 people.
00:03:26.245 --> 00:03:37.254
The whole company was about 120 and was, um, I, I think doing marketing for marketers is, it's really hard, um, but really rewarding and really fun and.
00:03:37.324 --> 00:03:41.375
especially marketing ops, who is probably who you were primary audience was, right.
00:03:41.620 --> 00:03:47.319
Yeah, yeah, we had, um, it was mostly marketing ops or demand gen, um, kind of depending on the, on the company.
00:03:47.319 --> 00:03:49.180
And it was, it was awesome.
00:03:49.180 --> 00:03:55.930
It was, it was really cool to, um, just go create content all day about something you're passionate about and.
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Gosh, it's, it's probably like being a developer at a, at like a dev tools company.
00:04:00.580 --> 00:04:04.569
Like it's, it's like the whole car hell of, of the work, at least to me.
00:04:04.810 --> 00:04:07.180
Um, so that was an awesome ride.
00:04:07.210 --> 00:04:16.449
And then, you know, we had a fantastic exit to Marketo and then a very quick, um, kind of turnaround from there into, um, Adobe.
00:04:16.449 --> 00:04:20.230
So I spent most of my time when I was working at Marketo, actually under Adobe.
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Um, you know, was, was an awesome place to be, especially during, during Covid and Adobe took great care of, of so many folks to the acquisition.
00:04:29.139 --> 00:04:36.039
But, um, two, just, just shy of two years ago, you know, we knew I wanted to get back to startups.
00:04:36.340 --> 00:04:37.600
Absolutely love startups.
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You know, I had some great insights about, um, just the kind of changing dynamics and go to market from kind of like content driven go to market models to.
00:04:48.610 --> 00:04:57.039
More product led, driven, go to market models and, and just kind of have this insight that there really isn't a lot to kind of go help people do that really well.
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And so, um, I teamed back up with a few of the kind of other folks from, from Visible era and, and now we're off doing inflection.
00:05:08.389 --> 00:05:09.279
Very interesting.
00:05:09.610 --> 00:05:13.149
Uh, what I, One follow up question from that, so you mentioned.
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I'm at Microsoft.
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I think specifically you talked about was a great place to learn and all that, but curious, were there any specific, like did you have key people that were like you think of or maybe you still work with, you know, are still kind of people you go to as mentors or whatever people you trust that were key to that kind of evolution for you?
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Yeah, yeah.
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It, it took me like, um, probably eight years or nine years into my career to.
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To realize how important those relationships are.
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Um, it's crazy.
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My, like my first boss at um, At Microsoft when I was right outta school is somebody I still talk to because she's very involved in kind of running marketing at various startups and she's been our, our, I think our customer before at visible and, you know, she just keeps coming in and out of my life.
00:06:06.554 --> 00:06:09.759
And there's plenty of others that are, that are like that too.
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You know, a boss for six months, your first job outta school, it's like wow.
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That they can still have such an impact on, on your, your kind of professional life and, um, Yeah, it took me, it took me a long time to realize that.
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Um, and, uh, yeah.
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So I, I try to remember that for others that are just starting their careers too.
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Yeah, it's a good call out.
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I think just in general, paying, paying, like paying heed to the, uh, idea that the relationships that you build at any stage in your career can be beneficial long term.
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Right.
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So, um, don't burn a bridge, folks.
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It's wild.
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I agree completely.
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Like, I, I still have really good relationships with folks that I, you know, I was even laid off from a role one time, and I still want to be friends with those folks.
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Right.
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It's
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Yeah, you don't have to be friends, but.
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Well,
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be surprised.
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Do situations change?
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You know, five years later people come back into your life.
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Like, I dunno, when you're starting out the, this, this world of like marketing ops and, and just like B2B marketing in general feels so big, but it's like in reality, so much smaller
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Oh,
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than you maybe realize.
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Yeah.
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Yeah,
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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It's, it's great.
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I mean, like, look at the journey to, to you and I being connected, right, Dave?
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Like, like the, I I think if I could do the short story for those that don't know the way that Dave and I know each other, it's when he was running the community for marketing operations professionals back in the day, uh, with marketingops.com, as as the tool, right?
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That's how I came across this, like Dave and I met back then,
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Yeah, it's like a half decade journey of just coming in and out of each other's lives.
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I love it.
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That's
00:07:54.445 --> 00:07:54.804
fun.
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I reached out to Dave and I was like, What happened to the domain?
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He's like, Oh yeah, so and so we were just leasing it, so, and I was like, Oh boy.
00:08:02.365 --> 00:08:03.414
Okay, here we go.
00:08:03.450 --> 00:08:03.940
Yeah.
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Oh, and fun fact, the Twitter handle that we have for marketing ops, uh, Dave was like, Oh yeah, I still have that here.
00:08:12.534 --> 00:08:12.625
you
00:08:12.669 --> 00:08:12.879
yeah.
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Luckily I like didn't change my email address cause that was like a five year later, you know, password reset.
00:08:18.320 --> 00:08:19.419
But glad you got it.
00:08:19.419 --> 00:08:20.539
Yeah, glad you got it.
00:08:21.774 --> 00:08:22.615
was, it was good.
00:08:22.764 --> 00:08:23.845
So full circle,
00:08:23.919 --> 00:08:30.769
Yeah, I, I think it's, it's just always interesting to me cuz we've had a number of people on where some, where we specifically talked about sort their journey.
00:08:31.870 --> 00:08:35.440
In or out, into and out of, uh, marketing ops and other roles.
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And it's been, I, I keep finding a lot of commonality in the fact that there's a lot of people who have, like, there are key people who, you know, saw something in them or, you know, supported them.
00:08:47.235 --> 00:08:49.750
And, and, and I think it's a really important piece.
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I mean, it's part of why I think, you know, marketing apps I com the community.
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Is a good place for that.
00:08:54.370 --> 00:08:57.279
And I think there's the, That's why I think it's gonna be huge.
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Like I always talk, say like if I, if this had been around 15, 20 years ago, it would've been, I think, I'm not even sure that I would be in the same place.
00:09:04.245 --> 00:09:04.389
Right.
00:09:04.389 --> 00:09:07.659
It would be a very different experience and from a career standpoint.
00:09:08.379 --> 00:09:09.009
totally true.
00:09:09.100 --> 00:09:09.250
Yeah.
00:09:09.250 --> 00:09:13.779
I went to like a state, a state university that, you know, Microsoft doesn't recruit out of.
00:09:13.779 --> 00:09:21.309
And I don't know why they hired me over a lot of the other candidates that I, you know, I saw their resumes or who they were, and that's it.
00:09:21.309 --> 00:09:28.269
You know, you have like five people in a row who take bats on you, and that's how you grow the career, and it comes down to that.
00:09:28.269 --> 00:09:28.629
I see.
00:09:29.089 --> 00:09:29.419
Yeah.
00:09:29.689 --> 00:09:30.110
Awesome.
00:09:30.559 --> 00:09:33.289
All right, well let's get into product led growth.
00:09:33.319 --> 00:09:38.059
And, uh, for me, I think, I think I have my own sort of idea of what that means.
00:09:38.059 --> 00:09:44.480
I think it's probably accurate, but why don't we start with, when we, when you say product led growth, plg, like what does that mean to you?
00:09:45.470 --> 00:09:48.889
And let's like at least get that sort of a baseline for us.
00:09:49.539 --> 00:10:00.069
Yeah, I, I love the question because I also run a podcast through the product led.marketing community, and that is the first question I ask everyone, which is just like, what does it mean to you?
00:10:00.069 --> 00:10:02.350
Because everyone's definition is different.
00:10:02.620 --> 00:10:07.870
Nobody's on the same page, and I will ask a hundred people and I will get a hundred different responses.
00:10:07.870 --> 00:10:09.069
So I, I like that.
00:10:09.069 --> 00:10:10.959
You're, you're pretty mean in the hot seat on that question.
00:10:11.809 --> 00:10:19.789
The way I think about it is, um, it, it's really just letting people use a product without having you to go through a sales team.
00:10:20.120 --> 00:10:27.769
And so in, in kind of practical terms, that just means being able to sign up for a product online, um, and, and get started yourself.
00:10:28.704 --> 00:10:48.475
There's a lot of different models for product led growth from freemium to usage based, like, um, AWS to like seat pricing, like Sprout social, um, to even open source models like you can go, you know, download something from, from GitHub and get started without having to talk to a sales person.
00:10:48.475 --> 00:10:48.804
Great.
00:10:48.834 --> 00:10:49.735
That's product led growth.
00:10:50.184 --> 00:10:52.434
So I, I tend to take a little bit broader perspective.
00:10:53.289 --> 00:10:55.720
Then some people that might say it's just, it's just freemium.
00:10:55.720 --> 00:11:01.569
Cuz I think those are, that's just a, a pricing or packaging kind of difference on product led growth.
00:11:01.929 --> 00:11:09.379
But it, it's all consistent that you're able to use the product without having to, you know, go through a sales process.
00:11:10.519 --> 00:11:14.985
So, um, So I just want, So I think I wanna replay it, so just make sure I'm unsafe.
00:11:15.074 --> 00:11:21.735
So it's, yeah, it's a service offering or product offering that you, you can sign up for without going through a salesperson.
00:11:21.735 --> 00:11:27.644
And it may be free initially or it may not be right, So you could have a low, low cost kind of entry point.
00:11:28.154 --> 00:11:30.164
And is it, uh, so I think I, that, that makes sense.
00:11:30.164 --> 00:11:31.394
Is it, is it apply?
00:11:32.154 --> 00:11:45.564
To B2B and B2C or sort of hybrid models, like, uh, the reason I'm asking, I'm thinking about like streaming services that I might add onto what I use at home, for example, a lot of'em have, yeah, a week trial or something like that.
00:11:46.329 --> 00:11:46.990
Yeah, totally.
00:11:46.990 --> 00:11:52.539
The, yeah, there's of course B, B2C and BDB kind of, um, offerings, like a yeah.
00:11:52.689 --> 00:12:00.069
A Netflix, you know, you'd say is, is, is product led and kind of a lot of consumer products are product led.
00:12:00.610 --> 00:12:16.404
Um, I think for purposes of marketing ops and thinking about it, we can think, think kind of more of the, the B2B side and, um, that tends not to be quite as straightforward and, um, is a, is a good conversation that we can, we can get into.
00:12:16.750 --> 00:12:19.000
Yeah, I, I was talking to somebody.
00:12:19.399 --> 00:12:35.629
Actually earlier today somebody on my team about like that B2B is like if, if you are going from B to C, cuz he had heard something about, uh, somebody predicting that they're gonna be more like B2 C marketer leaders moving to b2b, which I think is an interesting idea.
00:12:35.629 --> 00:12:38.629
But I've always thought that B2 C is relatively.
00:12:39.759 --> 00:12:43.990
Um, well, the other way, B2B is a much more complicated environment.
00:12:44.139 --> 00:12:44.409
Yeah.
00:12:44.439 --> 00:12:45.339
For lots of reasons.
00:12:45.339 --> 00:12:45.669
Right.
00:12:45.759 --> 00:12:48.399
Um, but, and it's harder to move.
00:12:48.429 --> 00:12:53.129
I, I, my, my assertion is that it's hard to move from B2C to B2B than it is to go B2B to
00:12:53.259 --> 00:13:03.169
I've always said the same thing, and uh, it just feels like there's, you know, I've done some B2C marketing at an agency, and I will tell you from my experience, I'm like, wow.
00:13:03.970 --> 00:13:05.919
This, There's a lot of flexibility here.
00:13:06.409 --> 00:13:15.639
like there's sort of a lot of different stuff you can try and then in, in B2B you're sort of like, Yeah, like I'm limited There's only so many places to go.
00:13:16.029 --> 00:13:19.480
Not only limited, but you have to like prove it out like very fast.
00:13:19.480 --> 00:13:20.379
Like, okay, is it working?
00:13:20.379 --> 00:13:26.230
It's like, it just went out like yesterday, you know, Um, it's, yeah, especially true to smaller company.
00:13:26.230 --> 00:13:31.149
It's like, it's, it's pretty hard to, you know, kind of shift careers.
00:13:31.149 --> 00:13:32.620
Maybe, maybe easier, bigger companies.
00:13:32.625 --> 00:13:32.860
I don't know.
00:13:33.235 --> 00:13:35.184
Yeah, it just, it's sort of an aside.
00:13:35.274 --> 00:13:35.845
Um, Okay.
00:13:35.845 --> 00:13:38.814
So I think we've got a pretty good working definition.
00:13:39.714 --> 00:13:59.620
So, and, and I've like, probably all, a lot of our listeners, like I've heard the term thrown around a lot on LinkedIn or other, you know, through emails, whatever, What, um, I guess kind of a couple of related questions, like why is it becoming big in terms of it, I hate to use the word hype, but I'll use the hype like why is the hype there?
00:13:59.620 --> 00:14:06.309
But, but more importantly, maybe what are some of the base sort of me, meta, meta trends, I had to throw that in there.
00:14:06.850 --> 00:14:08.889
That are happening in, in the space.
00:14:10.434 --> 00:14:12.654
Yeah, it's, it's a good question and I, you know, I shouldn't.
00:14:13.899 --> 00:14:24.100
Um, transition to this by saying, you know, when you talk product led, you, you, you, you talk first about, you know, hey, you can just sign up without talking to a salesperson.
00:14:24.105 --> 00:14:25.419
You can just use the product.
00:14:25.449 --> 00:14:27.429
Like, you don't need an onboarding manager, maybe.
00:14:28.029 --> 00:14:34.539
Um, and that's, that's, that's basically all true, but that's not the only motion for product led growth.
00:14:34.539 --> 00:14:38.589
And every product led company has a fantastic sales team.
00:14:38.829 --> 00:14:44.649
The marketing team is using product data to create some great outbound campaigns and ABM campaigns.
00:14:44.919 --> 00:14:54.939
And there's this like whole kind of sales on motion at, at product led companies that that's very robust and very, very strong, um, that we can get into.
00:14:54.939 --> 00:14:59.754
But, uh, So being product led does not mean being only product led.
00:14:59.904 --> 00:15:02.875
Um, there's, there's obviously a, a sales led component to it.
00:15:03.504 --> 00:15:06.595
Um, and then, you know, why is it, why is it hot right now?
00:15:06.745 --> 00:15:13.345
Um, if you look at all of the, the biggest, most valuable, fastest growing.
00:15:14.394 --> 00:15:16.524
Kind of bdb startups out there.
00:15:16.584 --> 00:15:18.475
They're, they're all product led.
00:15:18.865 --> 00:15:23.454
Um, go look at, you know, AWS is the great example.
00:15:23.454 --> 00:15:25.855
I could surround startup, but great example.
00:15:25.975 --> 00:15:32.964
Twilio, Atlassian mural Figma, um, ly, you know, goes on and on.
00:15:33.444 --> 00:15:40.884
Um, and if you can really crack it, it's a, um, it's, it's a total accelerant to just building a.
00:15:41.919 --> 00:15:42.939
Great company.
00:15:43.509 --> 00:15:45.519
Um, a really, a really big company.
00:15:46.059 --> 00:15:46.600
Stripe.
00:15:47.419 --> 00:15:48.610
Yeah, Stripes won.
00:15:48.610 --> 00:15:51.370
I mean, there's some original players out there too.
00:15:51.429 --> 00:15:55.629
Um, back before we were even referring to it, right, like, um, was a Dropbox.
00:15:56.409 --> 00:15:56.679
Right.
00:15:56.679 --> 00:16:03.220
Like the Sean, Sean Ellis was there at the time and he sort of crafted the like, hey, give and get right.
00:16:03.220 --> 00:16:11.169
And, and there was a whole bunch of PLG stuff there where they suddenly were like sharing, uh, you know, files through this thing.
00:16:11.169 --> 00:16:12.639
And we were like, What is this And,
00:16:13.110 --> 00:16:13.670
Isn't that
00:16:13.809 --> 00:16:16.659
then it turned into, I think they struggled a little bit.
00:16:16.689 --> 00:16:22.569
It took'em a while longer to move from that like self serve payment model to the, to the enterprise.
00:16:22.600 --> 00:16:22.839
Right?
00:16:22.839 --> 00:16:25.179
There wasn't an emotion for that at first, but now companies.
00:16:26.079 --> 00:16:29.589
like recognizing, hey, we're building these sort of simultaneously,
00:16:30.100 --> 00:16:31.600
It's a super hard transition.
00:16:31.839 --> 00:16:38.769
I see a lot of startups get to like three to 4 million ARR just on.
00:16:39.324 --> 00:16:42.044
Kind of inbound product led motion.
00:16:42.625 --> 00:16:46.824
Um, maybe, I think I've seen one get to 10 million ar just, just on that.
00:16:46.884 --> 00:16:56.454
So it's a great way to, you know, get to your series A, series B, you know, you're getting the flywheel MO going, and then you have to go out on sales.
00:16:56.459 --> 00:16:58.944
You have to start selling bigger companies.
00:16:59.245 --> 00:17:07.105
And now sure, they'll still sign up for your product, but you have to turn it into a, a bigger deal and some companies can figure that out and, and some can't.
00:17:07.255 --> 00:17:07.765
Um,
00:17:08.515 --> 00:17:09.055
Yeah.
00:17:09.144 --> 00:17:09.625
Yeah.
00:17:09.985 --> 00:17:18.115
I was just talking to, uh, to some folks about this idea of, you know, capturing in that PLG motion, capturing the upside potential for an account.
00:17:18.535 --> 00:17:18.924
Right.
00:17:19.015 --> 00:17:21.144
Um, cuz it's like being built into
00:17:21.250 --> 00:17:24.339
The Tam account, you gotta look at the tam of, of your signups.
00:17:24.339 --> 00:17:26.440
Like somebody just signs up for a Gmail.
00:17:26.440 --> 00:17:31.629
Like you're probably gonna wanna treat differently than if you've got 30 years users at Microsoft Hammer away.
00:17:31.629 --> 00:17:39.819
And your product, like, you need to layer on the, the, the kind of personas, the roles, um, and the usage.
00:17:39.819 --> 00:17:42.309
And then the tam as part of the firmographics.
00:17:43.184 --> 00:17:49.724
You know, you didn't care that much about when you were, If you do traditional B2B sas, you're kind of like, okay, yeah, they're in our icp.
00:17:49.724 --> 00:17:52.184
They're between, you know, 50 and 200 employees.
00:17:52.184 --> 00:17:52.875
Like, great.
00:17:53.414 --> 00:17:57.555
That can be very different when you're looking at product led tam, just in that
00:17:57.565 --> 00:17:57.865
Yeah.
00:17:58.734 --> 00:17:59.365
Yep, totally.
00:17:59.529 --> 00:18:02.220
it's just curious like, so I think one of.
00:18:02.740 --> 00:18:19.089
One of the advantages or one of the things I think that something like private, like growth can address is, uh, I know as a buyer of marketing technology in the past, I've always been, yeah, usually you can get, uh, you can get a trial or a proof of concept that's good for a relatively short period of time before you're asked to make a commitment.
00:18:19.119 --> 00:18:25.180
And it, and in sometimes you get sort of more of the capabilities than you actually can afford, so to speak.
00:18:25.839 --> 00:18:30.099
And I've always struggled with that, like looking for options for if I was gonna give.
00:18:30.369 --> 00:18:37.690
Tech companies wanted piece bit advice, like make an available, a paid longer term, one that, you know, does a couple things right?
00:18:37.720 --> 00:18:41.889
It gets you invested in actually going through the effort of evaluating it.
00:18:42.069 --> 00:18:46.029
Well, and it on the, the, the, the tech company side, right?
00:18:46.029 --> 00:18:56.889
They get a little bit of revenue even if they don't ultimately sign for the something I just, this maybe product like growth helps kind of bridge that gap for someone like me who would like to see that.
00:18:57.565 --> 00:18:57.984
Right.
00:18:57.984 --> 00:18:58.734
How, Yeah.
00:18:58.734 --> 00:19:01.315
It's like, how many times have we been burned buying software?
00:19:01.375 --> 00:19:15.075
Like every, everyone, like it's a, it's a rite of passage and being in marketing ops is, you've, you've bought software for vendor area and it didn't live up to the expectations that the salesperson, um, had for, or that you had for, for.
00:19:15.670 --> 00:19:28.700
For it shaped, you know, just directly by the, the salesperson, or you get pushed off to success after buying and it's like, you know, good luck and you have to restart this whole conversation about what you're trying to do.
00:19:28.700 --> 00:19:29.019
And.
00:19:29.710 --> 00:19:37.210
Um, it's hard like now think about a product led company where you can just go in and you can play around with it for a couple of hours.
00:19:37.210 --> 00:19:41.889
Try your scenarios and know very quickly, Hey, is this kind of what I was thinking?
00:19:41.889 --> 00:19:44.349
And it, it doesn't work for all companies.
00:19:44.349 --> 00:19:46.869
Like not every company should be product led.
00:19:47.535 --> 00:19:50.565
Um, but if you can, it's, it's pretty awesome.
00:19:51.164 --> 00:19:54.164
And it's like the most valuable content download ever.
00:19:54.164 --> 00:20:02.384
Basically like the, you know, it's like I spend so much time in my career thinking about intent data sources, and third party intent.
00:20:02.414 --> 00:20:05.654
How do you triangulate to, like, who's in the market?
00:20:05.654 --> 00:20:06.734
It's like they're right there.
00:20:06.914 --> 00:20:08.355
Like they're using your product.
00:20:08.355 --> 00:20:08.805
They signed up.
00:20:08.805 --> 00:20:10.754
You could see exactly what they're doing in your product.
00:20:10.754 --> 00:20:11.085
Like
00:20:11.424 --> 00:20:12.774
it's the ultimate first party
00:20:12.849 --> 00:20:14.769
It's the ultimate first party cookie.
00:20:14.799 --> 00:20:15.579
Like Totally.
00:20:16.059 --> 00:20:16.299
Yeah.
00:20:16.299 --> 00:20:20.109
It's a total gold mine for like doing great marketing.
00:20:20.379 --> 00:20:22.809
Like you know so much about someone and you can really help them.
00:20:24.654 --> 00:20:25.144
Yeah.
00:20:25.254 --> 00:20:25.644
Wow.
00:20:25.764 --> 00:20:27.204
So this, okay, so this is really interesting.
00:20:27.234 --> 00:20:30.970
Uh, okay, so let's, for our audience, Yeah.
00:20:30.970 --> 00:20:33.339
Being primarily marketing ops folks.
00:20:33.819 --> 00:20:42.220
Let's talk a little bit about, um, or maybe talk us through, like, how do you think, uh, like how do you think that this kind, you've kind of touched on a little bit, right?
00:20:42.224 --> 00:20:44.200
That there's more than one motion typically.
00:20:44.379 --> 00:20:53.259
Um, how does like, but maybe get, go a little deeper on what the, like what the differences are in product led go to market mos versus.
00:20:53.994 --> 00:20:59.424
I'll call it traditional if there is one, unless I guess we can keep it to b2b just to, to keep it a little bit contained.
00:21:00.805 --> 00:21:09.595
Yeah, maybe, maybe I'll answer this, putting it in context of systems and that might be, um, like a good anchor for this conversation.
00:21:09.595 --> 00:21:09.894
Yeah,
00:21:10.014 --> 00:21:12.894
I think, um, for.
00:21:13.450 --> 00:21:17.529
You know, quote unquote traditional B2B marketing.
00:21:17.529 --> 00:21:19.359
You know, you have forums.
00:21:19.759 --> 00:21:33.759
Somebody comes in, you have ads, those forums, they're downloading eBooks, you're running webinars, It's all getting in your marketing animation, you're scoring them, you're pushing it into a crm, and then sales qualifies and converts that into pipeline for the most part.
00:21:33.759 --> 00:21:37.299
That's your, you know, your, your mode of, of.
00:21:37.960 --> 00:21:41.319
Transit, if you will, for, you know, how somebody goes to the sales cycle.
00:21:41.680 --> 00:21:45.519
And for the most part, marketing's job's done after pipeline create.
00:21:45.639 --> 00:21:45.910
Sure.
00:21:45.914 --> 00:21:52.059
There's like field marketing, there's some stuff you might do for customer marketing, but it's more like customer love marketing.
00:21:52.059 --> 00:21:57.789
It's, it's not like, um, it, it's comes the lightest weight kind of customer you could do.
00:21:58.629 --> 00:22:00.730
Um, so you have two main systems, right?
00:22:00.730 --> 00:22:02.319
Like marketing automation and crm.
00:22:02.859 --> 00:22:07.180
Now get into a product lab where, That motion still exists.
00:22:07.389 --> 00:22:18.430
Um, you still have that motion for the most part because there's lots of buyers out there that, yeah, in some cases can't use your product like it does not let them install Slack on their machine.
00:22:18.430 --> 00:22:23.379
And so if you wanna go sell a big company Slack, you need to go, um, have
00:22:23.545 --> 00:22:23.839
that.
00:22:23.839 --> 00:22:24.710
That hits that hit.
00:22:24.714 --> 00:22:26.269
That hits so home at home right now.
00:22:28.375 --> 00:22:30.894
And so, you know, you still have that motion, okay?
00:22:30.924 --> 00:22:37.585
And now you have like this whole other set of infra for people who can just sign up for the product and use it.
00:22:37.615 --> 00:22:47.394
And now you gotta figure out somebody who's signed up for their product and how do you convert them over into, you know, revenue or pipeline, you know, from just using your product.
00:22:47.694 --> 00:22:50.575
So now you gotta think from a, a mobs perspective.
00:22:50.849 --> 00:22:51.750
About, Okay, great.
00:22:51.750 --> 00:22:57.569
Like, you know, I need to figure out how to like tap into our product activity data from Segment or Amplitude.
00:22:57.899 --> 00:22:58.139
Okay.
00:22:58.139 --> 00:23:01.950
The data team has set up that data into the data house, like Snowflake.
00:23:02.220 --> 00:23:05.670
So we gotta get that data, we gotta figure out how to go get, do something with that data.
00:23:06.180 --> 00:23:16.200
And then we have to figure out, you know, what are the, what are all the, the journeys and communications we need to send to someone to convert them from a free plan to a paid plan or a.
00:23:16.805 --> 00:23:24.394
Middle tier plan to an enterprise plan and like inviting people to, you know, just a webinar is not, not, not gonna do it.
00:23:24.845 --> 00:23:31.984
And so you need to get really contextualized about who they are, what are they doing in their product, You know, are they hitting the limits, their free plan?
00:23:31.984 --> 00:23:32.224
Great.
00:23:32.224 --> 00:23:35.434
Tell them that so that they can upgrade and make it easy for them to upgrade.
00:23:35.434 --> 00:23:39.264
And so you started to get into this whole like, set of things beyond.
00:23:39.805 --> 00:23:44.845
Marketing automation and, and CRM with product data, data warehouses.
00:23:45.474 --> 00:23:56.184
And then like teams, like data teams, um, engineering teams has gotta go tag the product with your product events you need to be successful, um, and, you know, goes on and on.
00:23:56.190 --> 00:24:06.625
So, um, I've talked with a lot of marketing ops leaders at, at PLG companies and a lot are super burned, super, like, super burned out.
00:24:07.914 --> 00:24:13.224
um, it, it's been a heck of a couple of years for some folks as part of just hyper growth.
00:24:13.224 --> 00:24:28.134
And then on top of that, having to learn so much new stuff and set up new systems, especially when it comes to, to product activity data, which isn't new for, for product teams, but is pretty new for, for marketing teams.
00:24:29.609 --> 00:24:39.240
So is it, I think, it sounds like if I, if I'm hearing this right too, there's also a new channel that that marketers and marketing apps have to deal with for communication, which is the app itself, right?
00:24:39.269 --> 00:24:41.339
So some of this might happen in the app.
00:24:41.815 --> 00:24:48.295
So you have to coordinate not only data capture in your marketing operations system, you have to be able to push some back to it.
00:24:48.519 --> 00:24:49.149
Yeah.
00:24:49.779 --> 00:24:50.139
Yeah.
00:24:50.139 --> 00:24:54.220
I didn't even, didn't even mention in-app, but there's like a whole in-app channel too.
00:24:54.759 --> 00:24:55.899
Um, totally true.
00:24:56.170 --> 00:24:58.180
But it, it's like, it's a whole separate funnel.
00:24:58.180 --> 00:24:58.569
I think.
00:24:59.049 --> 00:25:09.519
Um, Megan, he were from, she's now winning by design, you know, she's, she's, you know, spent some time at Sirius and then at kgo, and she's now winning by design, creating some fantastic.
00:25:10.089 --> 00:25:22.059
Content around plg and she has this, it's called the, I think it's like the bow tie framework or the bow tie method, which on the, the left hand side of a bow tie is your traditional, you know, marketing funnel.
00:25:22.210 --> 00:25:23.980
It starts out wide, it gets really small.
00:25:24.250 --> 00:25:25.599
That's when it gets small.
00:25:25.599 --> 00:25:33.250
That's the kind of moment of a sign up, and then on the right hand side of a bow tie where it starts small and then it becomes like a big triangle.
00:25:33.519 --> 00:25:35.170
So sort of like an opposite funnel.
00:25:36.250 --> 00:25:37.869
That's your like PLG motion.
00:25:38.680 --> 00:25:42.220
It only makes sense to, to like do this if you can expand accounts.
00:25:42.700 --> 00:25:46.599
And if you can't expand accounts, then like, why are you, why are, why are you plt?
00:25:46.990 --> 00:25:48.309
You should, you should stop that.
00:25:48.309 --> 00:25:59.049
And so you have all this set of marketing, um, that is this the, the right hand side of, of the bow tie, Um, and it's all about instead of.
00:26:00.115 --> 00:26:01.494
Just the initial purchase.
00:26:01.795 --> 00:26:14.994
You know, in a traditional B2B, SAS kind of marketing world, it's about expansions and how do we make this a worthwhile customer for us to, you know, be spending so much on cogs just to have them in the, in the product.
00:26:17.319 --> 00:26:25.869
I'm curious, given all that is there are, do you I would, I'm gonna make it a little bit of assumption cuz I haven't worked in like.
00:26:26.724 --> 00:26:28.704
Software companies directly before.
00:26:28.704 --> 00:26:37.164
So in a tradit called traditional software company, I'm assuming like marketing basically takes, here's product or product marketing is saying, Hey, here's the features we've got.
00:26:37.164 --> 00:26:44.055
Go figure out how to promote that, and then sales sell it, where it sounds like there needs to be a much more of a, a tighter connection between.
00:26:44.845 --> 00:26:54.714
Marketing, it may be sales to marketing and product in terms of providing input on feature sets and capabilities for the, for the, for the software.
00:26:54.720 --> 00:26:55.795
Is that my,
00:26:56.184 --> 00:26:58.674
It's even more, it's even more extreme than that.
00:26:58.734 --> 00:27:07.494
Like in a, in a traditional sense, like, yes, you need to get your features and benefits from product marketing and the product team, but like it's, you're running a webinar.
00:27:07.585 --> 00:27:11.605
Like you, you don't need product to actually execute the webinar.
00:27:11.964 --> 00:27:16.375
Like you can just set it up, you can run it, you can just send an email, you're good to go.
00:27:16.375 --> 00:27:22.944
Like you need input on the copy and the content, but like you don't need input really to like go execute it.
00:27:23.964 --> 00:27:30.954
Um, or you don't have a dependency on the execution, you a hundred percent have a dependency on the execution for product led.
00:27:31.315 --> 00:27:41.785
Like if you can't access the product data, like the, um, the log of what people are doing in your product, like how are you supposed to send them an email when they've hit their limit on their free plan?
00:27:42.595 --> 00:27:48.355
Um, if, you know, and that has a dependency on, it's like there's a product team involved in that.
00:27:48.359 --> 00:27:49.795
There's a data team involved in that.
00:27:49.795 --> 00:27:53.575
There's like probably engineering teams that need to go add those events if they don't exist.
00:27:53.994 --> 00:27:58.105
You know, you need to figure out like, how do I get, how do I logistically get the data?
00:27:58.404 --> 00:28:00.434
How do we connect it in Is do we go through the warehouse?
00:28:00.434 --> 00:28:02.484
Do we get it through the crm?
00:28:02.545 --> 00:28:04.224
Is there some other way to do it?
00:28:04.644 --> 00:28:08.125
And then, you know, set up all of these communications for that.
00:28:08.559 --> 00:28:09.579
That's just to send an email.
00:28:09.789 --> 00:28:11.769
Like, that's not even like crazy.
00:28:11.769 --> 00:28:13.869
That's just like, you know, sending an email.
00:28:13.869 --> 00:28:22.269
So this is, I, I, you know, I, I talk with a lot of folks and they're like, you know, we have a new, we have a, we have to make an announcement, we have to do a feature release, We have to get our announcement out.
00:28:22.660 --> 00:28:27.430
You know, it's like product to engineering, data teams are all involved to send that email.
00:28:27.579 --> 00:28:31.389
And that just doesn't, like, doesn't, that doesn't make sense to me, like,
00:28:32.349 --> 00:28:33.460
Yeah, yeah.
00:28:33.460 --> 00:28:39.430
Where I, I, I've been faced with this challenge, uh, I've been, unlike, unlike Mr.
00:28:39.430 --> 00:28:44.649
Hartman, I've been solely in early stage sort of SAS companies for the most part.
00:28:44.769 --> 00:28:50.019
Spent a little bit of time in agency and a little bit at a, at a ad tech industry.
00:28:50.559 --> 00:29:01.494
But even then the, the latest one was around product usage and we were trying to build an engineer sort of growth tactics, um, and, and, I mean, it's really complicated, right?
00:29:01.494 --> 00:29:21.085
Like the tools and, and I'm perfectly okay with like, it makes a lot of sense for you, Dave and inflection to be doing what you're doing because what we've been faced with in marketing operations is like, how in the hell do I like stitch this thing together?
00:29:21.414 --> 00:29:23.724
And how do I talk to my engineers, right?
00:29:23.724 --> 00:29:28.494
Like I worked with the growth team, quote unquote at Maven Link back in the.
00:29:29.529 --> 00:29:31.359
Who were your, your growth engineers?
00:29:31.359 --> 00:29:35.710
And we said, Here's all the data points that, you know, they advised us a little bit.
00:29:36.069 --> 00:29:40.089
It was really just me, so there's no, there was a team of one, no surprise there.
00:29:40.599 --> 00:29:44.950
Uh, and she says, you know, here's the data we have access to right in the product.
00:29:45.519 --> 00:29:48.369
Um, what else, Where do you need me to send this?
00:29:48.369 --> 00:29:54.549
And I said, Okay, I need you to sync that to HubSpot and I need the, the run to happen, you know, every x number of minutes.
00:29:54.970 --> 00:29:57.940
Uh, I need the start stop dates or your trial.
00:29:58.269 --> 00:30:05.740
Uh, and then I will try to manage like alongside you, I'll engineer the sort of workflow to deliver the trial onboarding sequence.
00:30:06.129 --> 00:30:08.410
But then that's still not intelligent, right?
00:30:08.410 --> 00:30:09.579
Like that's just basic.
00:30:09.779 --> 00:30:14.220
Basic level of data integration, then it's like, well, are they actually using it?
00:30:14.549 --> 00:30:15.690
What do you do from there?
00:30:15.779 --> 00:30:21.299
These systems aren't built for, for sending those types of things, and so
00:30:21.355 --> 00:30:22.365
Well, it's so
00:30:22.410 --> 00:30:33.930
is working on is like fundamental to changing the game for folks that are trying to enable the function of deliver based on sort of the current value state of that customer
00:30:34.180 --> 00:30:42.670
And, and quickly too, I, I talked like, you know, being delayed by a couple days because you have to wait, you know, overnight for data to get in.
00:30:43.569 --> 00:30:49.660
You know, data warehouse or to get that data in or talk with a lot of companies they do, they pass email lists around.
00:30:49.660 --> 00:30:57.549
So there's a data team that'll run at SQL Query on the data warehouse, and then once a week pass a new list over into, into, uh, Market Mation.
00:30:57.555 --> 00:30:58.470
If, if you're waiting like.
00:30:59.274 --> 00:31:01.674
A week to send your welcome email to somebody.
00:31:02.214 --> 00:31:14.504
You know, it's like maybe they've already even turned or they've already set up their product and you're telling them to go do all these steps for something that is already kind of long past and it's, it's like a, that's a negative experience.
00:31:15.279 --> 00:31:17.859
like this just physically hurts right now to listen to that.
00:31:17.859 --> 00:31:18.369
Like just.
00:31:18.805 --> 00:31:25.815
and just like, you know, for those listening to this episode, right, We're just talking about the front end of the final here, folks.
00:31:26.065 --> 00:31:26.605
Yeah.
00:31:26.950 --> 00:31:39.700
Uh, once we became more mature, I ended up boomerang Boomeranging back to the Mavenlink side of things, and I worked under client success and their development of that team and program was, was tremendous.
00:31:39.700 --> 00:31:40.059
Right.
00:31:40.509 --> 00:31:44.410
Um, but your, your growth in Mr.
00:31:44.529 --> 00:31:50.259
Andr should come from growing accounts and those signals, right?
00:31:50.259 --> 00:31:50.349
The
00:31:50.454 --> 00:31:50.934
it has to.
00:31:51.639 --> 00:31:55.569
And so, uh, those signals need to come from product usage.
00:31:55.599 --> 00:32:16.389
And then low and behold, you're suddenly moving from plg like top of funnel, you know, conversion to sale, to you've got client success who needs to be alerted of the fact that their, their key account that they're in charge of is trying to do something in the product that they're running up against a barrier, or boy, they're using the heck outta that feature.
00:32:16.389 --> 00:32:19.240
And we really should try to like make this.
00:32:19.759 --> 00:32:22.039
Transition to this upgrade or, Or what have you.
00:32:22.430 --> 00:32:23.779
And like so land and
00:32:23.815 --> 00:32:25.944
Yeah, I know all
00:32:25.970 --> 00:32:27.440
they're asking for something totally different.
00:32:27.440 --> 00:32:28.519
And then how do they send emails?
00:32:28.519 --> 00:32:30.490
They're not in charge of Marketo or HubSpot
00:32:30.744 --> 00:32:31.105
right.
00:32:31.105 --> 00:32:32.305
Yeah, that's, that's right.
00:32:32.545 --> 00:32:42.865
All of this is like, you know, obviously a great opportunity for us from a software side and, and why we started inflection, but it's also a great opportunity from a career side.
00:32:43.315 --> 00:32:54.835
Um, you know, I think part of my reason for, um, kind of doing pretty well in my career was when I started at Microsoft, my first, you know, this like two.
00:32:56.410 --> 00:32:56.920
Nine.
00:32:57.490 --> 00:33:11.500
Um, my first job was like running like social media accounts, like every, you know, 2009, like every, you're just, you give your college grad, your, your social media head, say, Have fun and you get this, like, all this kind of authority that you like really should not have.
00:33:11.799 --> 00:33:14.319
I feel like back then that was the qualification though.
00:33:14.319 --> 00:33:14.589
Like
00:33:14.769 --> 00:33:15.339
right.
00:33:15.670 --> 00:33:16.210
yeah, we're
00:33:16.359 --> 00:33:17.049
Oh, you grew up,
00:33:17.049 --> 00:33:17.740
We did great.
00:33:17.889 --> 00:33:18.099
Yeah.
00:33:18.129 --> 00:33:19.079
know how to spell Twitter.
00:33:19.089 --> 00:33:21.789
media, so you know what a hashtag
00:33:21.940 --> 00:33:25.569
Yeah, you're not adding a period to every, like, every social post at the end.
00:33:25.629 --> 00:33:36.039
And like, that was the test, you know, But like, you know, it ended up like growing and being a big thing and like that was a great kind of wagon to hitch to, you know, for a while.
00:33:36.099 --> 00:33:38.559
Um, or a, a cart to hitch to.
00:33:38.889 --> 00:33:41.379
So, um, I kind of think PLG is the same.
00:33:41.500 --> 00:33:43.779
Um, it's a booming business.
00:33:43.869 --> 00:33:50.879
Um, this, like this product led space and, um, there's a, there, this is a, I think, a, a.
00:33:51.744 --> 00:33:57.865
A big shift in the foundation for marketing and especially in, in kind of marketing office with all the foundation.
00:33:57.865 --> 00:34:09.565
So anyways, if anyone's listening in your, in your new, your career or you're trying to figure out, you know, different things to kind of go learn about and really stand out, I think learning about product data is, uh, awesome.
00:34:10.255 --> 00:34:17.184
And there's some great content out there from amplitude and segments and heap and rudder stack and fresh pain.
00:34:18.025 --> 00:34:25.465
There's, there's so many vendors, um, Amplitude and Segment have some of the, the kind of past content out there to go, go learn from.
00:34:25.465 --> 00:34:39.775
And, you know, if you go in an interview and you're talking about, you know, track calls and identified calls and product events and kind of how a marketing team should be thinking about them, or better yet go to market team should be thinking about them and kind of how to take advantage of.
00:34:40.990 --> 00:34:46.660
Quote unquote gold mine of first party data and translate that into, you know, business growth.
00:34:47.590 --> 00:34:57.970
You're hired, like you're hired because that, a lot of people don't know that, all that stuff and it's, you can go take some courses online and you know, go crush it.
00:34:59.335 --> 00:35:05.605
Yeah, I think, I think there's probably a number of our listeners who, who might be sitting there listening to this, like, I am here going like this.
00:35:05.605 --> 00:35:15.865
Some of the things you're describing that we can do, like, that you have to go through with a, I'll call it traditional, you know, marketing ops platform with, you know, a CRM on the other side of it or whatever is it?
00:35:16.675 --> 00:35:16.885
Yeah.
00:35:16.885 --> 00:35:17.275
There just.
00:35:17.835 --> 00:35:28.855
Like they haven't kept up and they now, especially now that they've all sort of become really big part of big companies, I don't know that they can move as quickly to enable the kinds of things that, you know, you're able to do.
00:35:29.455 --> 00:35:33.175
But I, Yeah, I think, I mean immediately was, as you were describing some of that stuff, it remind me of.
00:35:33.894 --> 00:35:39.745
Yeah, having done a high volume custom integration to Marketo from some operational systems at one, one stop.
00:35:39.745 --> 00:35:44.095
And it was, it was, it was a six month project, right?
00:35:44.335 --> 00:35:47.394
And then it was ongoing because we had to clean up stuff we didn't expect.
00:35:47.400 --> 00:35:47.635
Right.
00:35:48.325 --> 00:36:13.990
Um, and then way back in my career, Um, talking about it wasn't quite the same as like product data, but it was, I worked for a telecom company and part of what we, I had, cause I was building the, the customer database for it and both for, for acquisition and retention, is that we had all this access to all this data about how people were using the network and um, yeah, we had a team of guys, they would probably be called data scientists.
00:36:13.990 --> 00:36:14.800
Now, back then they.
00:36:15.460 --> 00:36:31.990
Statisticians, but they were doing, you know, churn models and things like that to try to identify who was likely to churn on the acquisition side, like likelihood to, to be acquired and like that is the kind of stuff that it sounds like I'm, that's like what my mind's going to those kinds of things.
00:36:31.995 --> 00:36:36.190
And what you're describing just in a much faster pace.
00:36:37.135 --> 00:36:38.695
Yeah, Yeah.
00:36:38.995 --> 00:36:47.635
Now, now, now layer on hypergo startups and marketing owning the post purchase journey.
00:36:48.205 --> 00:36:57.745
Um, and yeah, it gets, it gets hairy fast and with, you know, no more team members, like these teams are like the same size.
00:36:57.820 --> 00:36:58.380
right.
00:36:58.525 --> 00:36:58.945
all the same.
00:36:59.335 --> 00:37:02.995
So I do have a question around teams, uh, and responsibilities.
00:37:03.000 --> 00:37:08.845
Just, I mean, I don't know that there's necessarily right answer, but just, just like curiosity sort of.
00:37:09.275 --> 00:37:18.394
From your perspective, Dave, um, you know, we talked a little bit earlier about the PLG funnel and you know, sort of activation and sell through, right?
00:37:18.394 --> 00:37:20.465
You sign up for free, you see usage.
00:37:20.525 --> 00:37:23.285
You want to nurture that person to try to buy.
00:37:23.705 --> 00:37:29.285
Um, you know, if you had a title to put on that, it is as a marketing ops rev op person.
00:37:29.590 --> 00:37:34.150
Your responsibility is to usher data into the right places and allow it to be activated, right.
00:37:34.210 --> 00:37:36.130
Um, and understand what the requests are.
00:37:36.130 --> 00:37:38.680
So, so your responsibilities to make those that magic happen.
00:37:39.310 --> 00:37:45.790
Um, but when you think about who is responsible for sort of owning that, That cta, right?
00:37:45.790 --> 00:37:48.850
The buy now button, or the upgrade now or what have you.
00:37:49.120 --> 00:37:51.160
Is that a growth marketer quote unquote?
00:37:51.160 --> 00:37:53.440
Is that a product marketer, quote unquote?
00:37:53.440 --> 00:38:04.105
Like what would you think that sort of, if you had to bucket it into a couple titles that you think are generally applicable, you know, I'm, I'm also trying to get you to say it is not marketing
00:38:04.255 --> 00:38:04.435
Yeah,
00:38:04.495 --> 00:38:05.155
and agree with that
00:38:06.445 --> 00:38:06.985
right?
00:38:07.165 --> 00:38:07.945
but, who is it?
00:38:08.005 --> 00:38:08.275
Right?
00:38:08.275 --> 00:38:08.875
Who is it?
00:38:08.875 --> 00:38:16.465
So that the marketing house people listening go, Look, I can help try to activate this data, move it to somewhere, but someone's gotta go and the rest of the way.
00:38:16.465 --> 00:38:16.795
Right.
00:38:18.400 --> 00:38:19.300
I don't know.
00:38:19.960 --> 00:38:23.620
Um, I'll tell you what I've seen, but I don't know, um,
00:38:23.725 --> 00:38:24.535
Mike, why?
00:38:24.535 --> 00:38:25.765
Why did we get Dave on this
00:38:25.900 --> 00:38:26.290
Yeah.
00:38:26.350 --> 00:38:26.560
Yeah.
00:38:26.560 --> 00:38:26.980
Right.
00:38:26.980 --> 00:38:27.470
Yeah.
00:38:28.810 --> 00:38:29.470
I think this is
00:38:29.575 --> 00:38:30.245
Nobody knows
00:38:30.460 --> 00:38:31.030
right.
00:38:31.030 --> 00:38:46.570
I think this is, this is the, um, Well, depending on who you are, this can be the, the, the fun part of, of product led, and it's a little bit of of pain too, is like nobody really knows a lot of these answers.
00:38:47.050 --> 00:38:52.990
There's no, like, you know, serious decisions demand waterfall for like, how everything should work.
00:38:53.170 --> 00:38:57.100
Um, so like, companies don't know.
00:38:57.160 --> 00:39:02.470
I like, I've talked to a lot of product line companies and everyone is.
00:39:03.255 --> 00:39:03.865
Mm-hmm.
00:39:03.910 --> 00:39:09.190
a different setup and, um, nobody's very confident that it's the right setup.
00:39:09.610 --> 00:39:12.160
Like when I talk with folks, they're like, Oh, but you've talked with everyone else.
00:39:12.160 --> 00:39:13.030
Like, what are they doing?
00:39:13.390 --> 00:39:23.710
So this is what we're trying to do with our product led market community, is to help educate and we'll make some great content and frameworks to help people understand kind of what we're, what we're seeing.
00:39:23.710 --> 00:39:25.420
But I don't know.
00:39:25.450 --> 00:39:31.570
And like, so to answer that question about kind of who's owning a lot of the stuff, there's like the.
00:39:32.635 --> 00:39:38.425
I'll say there's like the foundation owner and then there's the kind of ex execution kind of owner.
00:39:39.115 --> 00:39:46.090
Um, Marketing apps owns a lot of the foundation or activation of that foundation.
00:39:46.090 --> 00:39:55.690
So, you know, in product and engineering, like have to own the product activity data and the kind of data warehouses if, if they have one.
00:39:56.530 --> 00:40:02.565
Um, Because using it for product like growth purposes is just, is just one, one reason.
00:40:02.625 --> 00:40:04.035
Like it's just one use case.
00:40:04.125 --> 00:40:07.485
Um, there's lots of other, other reasons that they kind of should own it.
00:40:07.575 --> 00:40:10.995
Um, and not marketing, but um, so they kind of own it.
00:40:11.505 --> 00:40:17.055
You know, marketing should influence how a product should be tagged and what events should be tracked.
00:40:17.055 --> 00:40:19.005
But, um, they're not the owners of it.
00:40:19.365 --> 00:40:25.635
But more often than not, marketing Ops is the owner for, Okay, you have this data, like how do you go.
00:40:26.275 --> 00:40:31.375
activate it, at least for, definitely from a kind of email communication perspective.
00:40:32.035 --> 00:40:41.545
Now who's in there actually creating the emails, designing the journeys, and kind of figuring out, you know, what kinds of campaigns should be run.
00:40:41.545 --> 00:40:43.465
And I call'em like growth loops.
00:40:43.525 --> 00:40:47.305
You know that it's gonna get people to use the product more, upgrade them.
00:40:48.805 --> 00:40:49.975
It's very consistent.
00:40:50.335 --> 00:40:59.860
So sometimes it's a life cycle marketer, sometimes it's, um, You know, like a life cycle being like a full funnel demand marketer, basically.
00:41:00.610 --> 00:41:04.690
Sometimes it's a pm like a product person.
00:41:05.440 --> 00:41:08.950
Um, sometimes in product there are marketers.
00:41:09.550 --> 00:41:11.620
There'll be like growth marketers under.
00:41:12.535 --> 00:41:15.625
So, yeah, any other company, they would be in marketing.
00:41:15.925 --> 00:41:18.385
They have a marketing background, but they happen to sit in a product.
00:41:18.985 --> 00:41:24.985
Um, sometimes I've seen it's actually like success, like they own post purchase.
00:41:24.985 --> 00:41:27.445
They consider a sign up to be that point.
00:41:27.535 --> 00:41:32.635
And so CS is in there kind of owning, owning that, and kind of designing.
00:41:34.045 --> 00:41:38.035
So it's the, I say don't know because, um, I've seen it all.
00:41:38.995 --> 00:41:39.625
seen it all.
00:41:39.625 --> 00:41:42.265
And this is a, this is a challenge we have with our product marketing.
00:41:42.685 --> 00:41:46.135
You know, you go to our site, it says, talks about market animation.
00:41:46.135 --> 00:41:55.405
It's like, kind of like, but also like, kind of not like we have companies that are using, like it's in CS team using our product or its product.
00:41:55.495 --> 00:41:59.635
Like does a, was a, a VP of product and a PM using our software.
00:42:00.025 --> 00:42:01.615
Like, would they call it marketing animation?
00:42:02.215 --> 00:42:02.725
No way.
00:42:03.175 --> 00:42:05.465
So we have to figure that out.
00:42:07.330 --> 00:42:08.470
the category We are in
00:42:10.125 --> 00:42:10.615
Yeah,
00:42:10.715 --> 00:42:23.075
I think what you're saying is like if you're in marketing or or marketing hops and probably like growth, you know, there's probably a lot of or, or a lack of clarity about roles, responsibilities across this kind of stuff and how to use it.
00:42:23.795 --> 00:42:24.635
Just think of what I'm hearing.
00:42:25.165 --> 00:42:29.515
I, I'd say there's clarity in the companies, but lack of consistency across companies.
00:42:29.545 --> 00:42:30.205
Fair enough.
00:42:30.655 --> 00:42:31.075
Yeah.
00:42:31.255 --> 00:42:38.545
And I think this is like, this isn't a marketing, a product led growth is not a like marketing initiative.
00:42:38.545 --> 00:42:40.945
It's not even a like go to market initiative.
00:42:40.945 --> 00:42:42.685
It like has to be a company initiative.
00:42:43.105 --> 00:42:44.695
It's like impossible.
00:42:45.115 --> 00:42:50.995
I've never seen a marketer or even a marketing leader be like, We need to add this motion and here's what it is.
00:42:51.595 --> 00:42:53.785
Um, without like the support.
00:42:54.670 --> 00:42:55.090
The
00:42:55.120 --> 00:42:55.690
kinds of stuff.
00:42:55.690 --> 00:43:01.300
Cause like if you're not product led, you wanna get there, like you're gonna have to, you know, change up a lot of stuff.
00:43:01.300 --> 00:43:05.650
Like people need to be able to self-service the product otherwise, like, what are you doing Card?
00:43:06.205 --> 00:43:10.015
It's really, I I like to see when, Yeah, I, I agree.
00:43:10.015 --> 00:43:10.255
Right?
00:43:10.255 --> 00:43:21.085
The top down the entire org needs to be sort of involved, and I really like it when you start getting the, the product designers trying to think in terms of that PLG motion.
00:43:21.085 --> 00:43:24.325
Like where, where do we put the intentional growth loop, right?
00:43:24.565 --> 00:43:33.144
The intentional little hook to, to put the notification that, or the barrier to entry, like they're engineering the little stops along the way.
00:43:33.460 --> 00:43:41.680
With intentionality that there's still enough value in the product, but up to a point we're going, Oh, there's a little bit more you have to do in order to get going.
00:43:41.685 --> 00:43:43.390
It's those progressive form fills that we
00:43:43.405 --> 00:43:44.365
Exactly.
00:43:44.665 --> 00:43:45.925
Yeah, it's exactly right.
00:43:45.955 --> 00:43:57.115
There's like, I was talking with a, a company, uh, yesterday and they, um, didn't have any, like, essentially we would think of it as like progressive profiling or progressive form fills.
00:43:58.360 --> 00:43:59.140
In their product.
00:43:59.140 --> 00:44:02.140
So people sign up and they, they just get an email address.
00:44:02.140 --> 00:44:03.700
They're like, We don't know anything about these people.
00:44:03.700 --> 00:44:09.850
We don't know who, like their level, their title, um, their type, their industry.
00:44:09.850 --> 00:44:13.180
We don't know what kind of use case they're coming in to kind of solve for.
00:44:13.180 --> 00:44:15.640
And they're like, Oops, we made that mistake.
00:44:15.644 --> 00:44:18.340
We need to go back and work with product.
00:44:18.550 --> 00:44:25.490
So when people sign up, we put them through, you know, we put three forms in front of them, getting that information so we can actually go.
00:44:26.350 --> 00:44:28.030
Yeah, like complete your profile,
00:44:28.195 --> 00:44:28.945
Exactly.
00:44:29.305 --> 00:44:29.665
Exactly.
00:44:29.680 --> 00:44:37.510
profile version inside your product and, and, you know, and the product might go well then they're not using it cuz they, they fall out and it's like, well we can't market
00:44:38.125 --> 00:44:38.605
Right.
00:44:38.665 --> 00:44:38.845
Yeah.
00:44:38.845 --> 00:44:40.015
It's the right, it's right product.
00:44:40.015 --> 00:44:46.075
Might not think to go ask people their title, but you know, marketers like obviously do and need that.
00:44:46.555 --> 00:44:49.975
This is, uh, one of the things that I talked about very early in my career.
00:44:49.980 --> 00:45:02.275
I was like, if you can get product folks to start thinking about the needs of the marketer to do the selling piece earlier on as they engineer the product, um, there's a, there's a lot of potential win for the
00:45:02.470 --> 00:45:02.769
Yeah,
00:45:03.130 --> 00:45:03.519
Yeah.
00:45:03.685 --> 00:45:06.205
Um, but it has to start like the sooner the better.
00:45:06.295 --> 00:45:06.685
Right?
00:45:06.730 --> 00:45:15.519
I would, I would, I would argue, just like I, I, years ago I got a book, it's like a, who Moved My Cheese type book about marketing and sale sales and how, how to be a marketing superstar.
00:45:15.519 --> 00:45:18.580
There's a, there was a one chapter that was like two basic pages.
00:45:19.030 --> 00:45:21.460
It had basically said, Yeah, this is customer money.
00:45:21.460 --> 00:45:22.960
It, it has changed kind of how I thought.
00:45:23.530 --> 00:45:27.400
The term customer a lot, but basically said everybody's paychecks should have on it, right?
00:45:27.400 --> 00:45:39.730
This is customer money to kind of try to drill into people's head, like whatever they're doing is in service of getting new customers who are actually gonna enable them to have the jobs that they have and right, so the company to grow.
00:45:40.420 --> 00:45:42.850
So I think that's just another version of that.
00:45:43.390 --> 00:45:43.750
Mm-hmm.
00:45:43.990 --> 00:45:44.140
Mm-hmm.
00:45:44.740 --> 00:45:51.475
so, um, So we talked about like, this is a different kind of motion on top of existing stuff.
00:45:51.565 --> 00:45:54.775
It, so for our audience who are in marketing apps mostly, right.
00:45:54.775 --> 00:46:03.745
So what, what are the things that, what are some of the things that, um, that you would kind of advise them to start learning about more?
00:46:03.750 --> 00:46:05.965
You, I think you mentioned a couple of things early on, but maybe.
00:46:06.385 --> 00:46:26.785
Kind of recap those that they can, you know, so if they wanna be interested, if they're interested in something like this and what the differences are, and then maybe the flip is like, are there anything lessons from plg, you know, uh, companies and organizations that, uh, we could apply in other non PLG companies.
00:46:28.300 --> 00:46:28.630
Cool.
00:46:28.630 --> 00:46:29.380
Yeah, I love it.
00:46:29.470 --> 00:46:35.590
Um, for, for learning, um, I think there's, there's a couple things.
00:46:35.650 --> 00:46:42.610
Definitely go in and learn about product activity data, very like, Be a student.
00:46:43.060 --> 00:46:43.390
Learn it.
00:46:43.420 --> 00:46:44.470
Learn it intensely.
00:46:44.560 --> 00:46:51.760
You can do that and don't mean go spend a hundred hours on it, but, but really like, sit down and, and like try to understand it.
00:46:51.760 --> 00:46:55.570
Don't, don't go through a training to say you got a certification.
00:46:55.810 --> 00:47:02.290
Go through a training by segment or amplitude to be like a a, a learner about it.
00:47:02.650 --> 00:47:05.170
So AC go in and kind of actually learn.
00:47:06.290 --> 00:47:10.840
A couple weeks ago, I put out a product led growth vendor landscape.
00:47:11.200 --> 00:47:16.240
There's some technologies that are very specific to product led companies.
00:47:16.840 --> 00:47:23.920
Um, If somebody's looking to go learn more, you can download, um, or go view the landscape.
00:47:23.920 --> 00:47:31.870
You can see some of the categories that are specific to kind of data and being product led that maybe you haven't kind of come across debt.
00:47:32.140 --> 00:47:34.060
So you can kind of go learn about the categories.
00:47:34.090 --> 00:47:37.990
Then, of course, if you want, like go learn about the vendors, but at least learn about the categories.
00:47:37.990 --> 00:47:49.420
So when somebody asks you about, you know, ETL or V ETL or product sales, Whatever, um, you know, you know what they're talking about.
00:47:50.080 --> 00:48:01.690
Um, and then for, you know, what, what can you learn if you're not a product led company from those that are, um, kind of being product led?
00:48:02.650 --> 00:48:10.930
I think, um, I, I think, I don't think customer marketing's the right term, but the, this.
00:48:13.630 --> 00:48:22.510
I felt like we were, in my career, I've, you know, run marketing teams, you were doing customer marketing, we're doing great job, supporting our customers.
00:48:23.140 --> 00:48:39.130
And then I look back, you know, it's like, yes, we had, you know, 10% of our, of our marketing team in customer marketing and, but we had, you know, 95% of our budget for due logo acquisition and.
00:48:39.610 --> 00:48:56.050
You know, the customer marketing team was doing great work, but like it was more turning our customers into superstars and, and not, and that's different than like helping them with the product.
00:48:57.070 --> 00:49:06.640
Um, I think product that the best product led companies are are just so good at getting people.
00:49:07.300 --> 00:49:13.000
Really into the product, like using the product, adding more users into the product.
00:49:13.000 --> 00:49:28.870
Like I don't, I don't think we ever once did any, had any effort at visible to, to have companies go add more like, like more, um, people into visible, you know, like maybe there was just a company would have just one, one login.
00:49:29.050 --> 00:49:30.220
We didn't even charge seat.
00:49:30.220 --> 00:49:33.880
Like it wouldn't cost them anything to go get more people into the product.
00:49:33.885 --> 00:49:36.280
Like we never did that and it just wasn't a.
00:49:36.970 --> 00:49:41.800
A big party for expansion, and that's, that's all the game for product like growth.
00:49:41.800 --> 00:49:58.810
It's all about taking this like crazy med scientist stuff that we do every day on funnel conversions from a content download to this mql, to this like go, like, you know, to have that brain, but like now for your customers and it, it unlocks some pretty cool stuff.
00:49:59.425 --> 00:49:59.995
That's awesome.
00:50:00.144 --> 00:50:05.455
Yeah, it's like I, I think we're gonna have to wrap it up here now, just out of time, and I feel.
00:50:06.085 --> 00:50:09.175
Coming into this now I realize like, I didn't know what I didn't know.
00:50:09.295 --> 00:50:09.505
Right.
00:50:09.505 --> 00:50:14.635
I feel like I could, we could continue on for another hour, but, uh, unfortunately we're not able to.
00:50:15.205 --> 00:50:30.610
So, uh, you mentioned the, uh, the landscape document, but let, let me, um, so that plus if people wanna like, Keep up with what you're doing or learn more about you or inflection, like what's the best place for them to do that and where can they get that, uh, that doc.
00:50:31.210 --> 00:50:35.200
Yeah, you can, you can learn more about inflection, just inflection.io.
00:50:35.860 --> 00:50:47.920
Um, and then we have this, this community that we, that we run for, it's mostly marketers, um, uh, including marketing ops or rev ops at product led companies called product led.marketing.
00:50:48.550 --> 00:50:51.730
Um, and it's, uh, you know, a public free community.
00:50:51.730 --> 00:50:53.710
It's not a, it's an industry group.
00:50:53.710 --> 00:50:54.580
It's not a vendor group.
00:50:54.580 --> 00:50:55.210
And so there's a lot.
00:50:55.715 --> 00:51:00.035
Great conversations there can always post to if you have a question or wanna learn.
00:51:00.040 --> 00:51:01.925
And we publish a lot of content there.
00:51:01.925 --> 00:51:05.675
So again, that's product led marketing and inflection io.
00:51:06.760 --> 00:51:07.450
Fantastic.
00:51:08.394 --> 00:51:13.615
uh, Dave's summer camp session is available@marketingops.com.
00:51:13.615 --> 00:51:19.495
So if you want to do, um, we, it was a, a little bit of a different spin on what we talked about today.
00:51:19.555 --> 00:51:21.505
Um, some more information there.
00:51:21.970 --> 00:51:29.920
Uh, and so if you want to go a little deeper into PLG and watch his presentation as a pro member, you can have access to that.
00:51:29.920 --> 00:51:30.580
It's included.
00:51:31.150 --> 00:51:35.740
Um, and, and you can go, you know, sink your teeth in even further there.
00:51:35.800 --> 00:51:40.390
But yeah, full faith in Dave and his ability to run a community that's really valuable.
00:51:40.420 --> 00:51:47.769
Um, credence to, you know, the stuff that he did earlier, uh, with marketing op.com and all that stuff.
00:51:47.769 --> 00:51:49.510
And so, yeah, please go check it out.
00:51:49.510 --> 00:51:50.290
It's really, really good.
00:51:50.410 --> 00:51:51.040
We appreciate you.
00:51:51.500 --> 00:51:51.990
Yeah.
00:51:52.160 --> 00:51:52.360
it.
00:51:52.360 --> 00:51:53.519
Thanks for having me.
00:51:53.830 --> 00:51:55.660
Dave, this is like super helpful.
00:51:55.660 --> 00:51:56.500
I know I learned a lot.
00:51:56.500 --> 00:52:07.945
I think our listeners who were in my same shoes not as familiar, will have learned a lot as well, so, Um, with that though, uh, thank you to all of our listeners.
00:52:08.065 --> 00:52:14.455
Uh, we always appreciate this continued support, feedback, and, um, ideas for topics and, and guests.
00:52:15.144 --> 00:52:18.715
Um, hard, hard to believe that this is now episode 71.
00:52:18.805 --> 00:52:23.005
Uh, we're almost two years into it, so thank you all for that, Mike.
00:52:23.005 --> 00:52:23.545
Thank you.
00:52:23.545 --> 00:52:24.925
And we, we miss Naomi.
00:52:25.075 --> 00:52:28.735
But, uh, with that, we'll talk to you next time everybody.
00:52:28.825 --> 00:52:29.215
Bye.
00:52:29.530 --> 00:52:30.190
Thanks everyone.
00:52:30.330 --> 00:52:30.810
Byebye.
