บทถอดความฉบับเต็มของ Pattern Interrupt

you've come in, you've done your 90 days, you've basically worked out that an incrementalist approach is not going to make things happen. You've got that first win, so you bought yourself some space. ⁓ and then you've also worked out, you know, greater clarity on your ICP where they show up, where they hang out, all that sort of stuff. But you've still got that challenge where, as I understand it, much better funded competitors are also in those spaces. So the ⁓ I think you speak a lot about sort of pattern interrupts. And ⁓ you know, the ability to to go and when did you realize that you were gonna have to really start to work out how to stand out in those channels in order to cut through and and really make the most of what you had? speaker-0: Yeah, so the product was good because like the CEO comes from a very product specific ⁓ background. ⁓ he's you know, this is like his third company and ⁓ and then and then I so I knew the product was good. I mean, every company claims that is the case, but like ⁓ it was pretty clear that in two years these guys went from nine hundred K to two million. So I was like, Okay, there's I mean like you don't see that, it's it's a hard grind to, you know, ⁓ get there. So then I was like, okay. The next thing was when we looked at sort of the buyer data, right? Like what was persistently the problem was either we were not in the buyer consideration set. ⁓ so typically, like if you take an average example, somebody putting a thread on like a popular marketing leaders group on you know Slack or somewhere that, hey, which is the best time automation platform, like Sturlin would not be as prominent there or would not show up at all, right? So typically the we you know, the buyer would not have us in their consideration or we'd be Like the third vendor. And if you're the third vendor, you're basically fighting the first vendor's narrative, right? Like whatever they said. ⁓ so we needed to change that. ⁓ that basically ⁓ involved like what we needed to do was ⁓ BA, you know, first thing is B in that consideration set, and then B is like ⁓ phase two is to become the first vendor in that set, right? And ⁓ a lot of that growth was going to come from not competing in that five percent where all of these this competition was like being very aggressive in and ⁓ to go after that, you know, like that vast majority evergreen market, which was not even aware about like the this is more specific to our category because it's like it was a low awareness category about ⁓ three, four years ago and ⁓ there was a lot of education that was needed and there was a vast green field opportunity on the other side. ⁓ so that's what we ⁓ you know we tried to ⁓ focus on. ⁓ yeah and and that was the main goal. So how do we enter into ⁓ the buyer consideration set. And the first thing I also looked at there was it's kind of funny and a little ironic that ⁓ typically if you look at your ICPs, they maybe follow ⁓ like these 30-40 voices in their world and they sort of live in that in that bubble, a lot of them at least. ⁓ and if you can somehow penetrate yourself into that circle, right, and become one of the three options being recommended there. It actually has quite a lot of ⁓ wide impact and implications and then like you know, it it sort of starts compounding. So that became the first challenge. How do we enter into that 30, 40, whatever social cloud group? And there were a few things that we did there to get ⁓ get to that. ⁓ and then to your other question about pattern interrupts. So that's the question about how do we get there, right? So ⁓ typically if you have a brand that well, if you don't really have a brand. And if you reach out to any of these, you know, folks with a lot of social flower, ⁓ they'd be like, yeah, I haven't heard of you, you know. And they'll either like make it very difficult to actually work together, whether it's high pricing, like prohibitive pricing, ⁓ let's say that, or it'd be more like ⁓ it won't apply back to you or just won't ⁓ do this, right? So how do you get their attention? And so this was ⁓ sort of an idea that that I mean I don't think it Formulated here at Storyline, it was more in practice, but I'd been thinking about it for a f a while. ⁓ so ⁓ you know what, maybe I would say about 10 years ago, I used to work at a company called HubStaff. And ⁓ back then it was like you know, at that time there like much lesser B2B players in this space, and ⁓ everybody used to follow everybody. So you would know Basecamp, what they're doing, what Slack is doing, all of that. ⁓ and you know, I I would constantly look at Basecamp and see that. They would go against the grind on everything. If you look at their book, their perspectives, LinkedIn posts, you know, the blog, the way their website structure was, right? And ⁓ actually did a whole sort of ⁓ I would say a podcast like on my own podcast about ⁓ breaking down like why Basecamp was just doing things differently and why they were going against the general flow, right? ⁓ but then ⁓ yeah and then you know that idea sort of remained in my head and I did a bunch of things at ⁓ other different companies, but in order to, you know, explain that to your team, it's not as simple, right? ⁓ like ⁓ if tomorrow like my CEO comes to me and says, like, hey, ⁓ we need to, you know, get something viral, right? Like it's a very common question that marketers get from their CEOs. And then ⁓ it'd be like, at that time you don't know what to do. You know, like ⁓ same for me, right? And then I went to my head of brand and my head of demand gen and I asked him, like, ⁓ Hey, you know, what can we do? Something to go viral and and there's no there's no answer right there and there, right? ⁓ and so I stu I'd been hearing about this term called pattern interrupts, you know, like ⁓ by w YouTubers and video creators. And I thought that, you know, ⁓ that actually like filled that space really well and made it a more direction

oriented question. So instead of how do we go viral or how do we think differently, it was more about a question like, what's a pattern everybody's following and how do we interrupt it? So then it's like The job became look for patterns and then look for the right interruption. And that sort of became and and solidified into a more of a strategy. speaker-1: Makes perfect sense. And you know, the the Martec landscape as we all know is so crowded at the moment. I'm sure, you know, everyone's aware of Scott Brinker's diagram that goes from sort of a a thousand vendors not that long ago to I think last time I checked it was over fifteen thousand. It's like I I can't even, you know, make out any of the logos anymore. and so, you know, that kind of really creates the requirement to stand out, right? Because if you're if you're competing against, you know, arguably fifteen thousand different vendors, arguably not directly, but in the same like ⁓ super category. Like if you look and sound and and do like everyone else, y you know, it's very difficult to have any kind of standout and ⁓ and recognition, particularly when you're small, right? speaker-0: Yeah, and and actually it's not so Martech and Sales Tech have always been quite overcrowded. ⁓ but you know if you thought the other categories are not, like ⁓ I also looked at the G2 listings data, right? And this is just five years of data. From twenty nineteen to twenty twenty four, we've gone from ⁓ fifty thousand vendors to over a hundred and fifty thousand vendors, ⁓ which is crazy, right? Like three X the amount of vendors. So it's not like literally every small category is getting crowded now. Like ⁓ everybody's found ways to build apps and All of that, like it's never the bar's never been lower, right? ⁓ so I think the ⁓ the major thing to think about, and that's what I'm seeing with the other portfolios as well as like ⁓ you know, if you're doing things the same way as everybody else, you know, maybe it's sort of a contrarian take on this is that ⁓ you know, you're you're you're slowly going to die as a business. ⁓ it's like ⁓ and that we can see across campaigns everywhere, whether it's SEO or the way webinars are done or the way the podcasts are done or the way they ⁓ the traditional demand gen motion, like everything is being questioned, right? Like and everything reaches its ⁓ sort of maturity, right? So the only way to sort of stay ahead of everybody is to keep innovating, keep thinking differently, keep disrupting patterns, because then you can sort of get that early mover advantage. speaker-1: Yeah. And I think your advice on how to do that is brilliant, right? So when we spoke previously, you were saying ⁓ a lot of people sort of start with the question, how do we actually stand out? Whereas your advice is to start a little bit earlier, right? And is to say, what are the patterns that the category follows and then how do we do something different? How do we interrupt that pattern? Is that

is that right? Is that how you look at it? speaker-0: I mean, I think it depends on the company and the business. So it's it's it's compl like so for example, sometimes there might be an early stage company that's trying to enter into a new category, right? Or is trying to, you know, be heard in a category, right? There the question is more like, Okay, if we go into this category and do marketing like everybody else, we're gonna become invisible. So now it's, you know, time to think a little bit differently. There are some companies that are, let's say, more later stage, you know, maybe twenty, twenty-five million an era, right? That, you know, whatever they've done with growth, whatever got them there is great. But now they're kind of stalled at that place. You know, like three years, you know, like the revenue's been, you know, flat or declining or staying the same. And that's usually when you need to start questioning. Okay, like ⁓ like for example, ⁓ it's very common to see that, you know, like that be a company and they'll be there, and then you go deep into their portfolio and you'll realize that. Okay, there's been a podcast that the CEOs have been doing and it's been going on for three years and 155 episodes and you know it's been going just because it has to go on, right? And ⁓ nobody's ever questioned that okay, maybe it's following a pattern at this point in time, right? And so typically there the the question is more around if a campaign is not doing well, how do you turn around that campaign? And that's when you when you look at patterns and you sort of interrupt it, ⁓ you can, you know, make the campaign perform better, right? So There's different scenarios require different ⁓ needs. ⁓ but ⁓ the ⁓ primary thing is more like okay, how to get noticed, right? Like at that given scenario, at that whatever state of business you're in. speaker-1: Hmm. Yeah, makes a ton of sense. And ⁓ yeah, I guess you're right. You know, the the exact strategy and implementation is gonna look quite different depending on where you are in the journey. ⁓ and I I guess, you know, we're seeing so much ⁓ now with with people running marketing or attempting to run marketing through AI, ⁓ increased usage. And I think that's quite interesting. That can cut both ways in terms of patterns and pattern interrupts, right? Because you could argue that there's gonna be more patterns to go and interrupt and more stuff to go and work with on the edges. Or that actually it's gonna ⁓ make it harder because people are gonna have more ideas and be doing more stuff. Do you have a view? Is AI gonna make pattern interrupts more valuable or more or harder to execute? What do you think? speaker-0: I think it's gonna be definitely ⁓ more valuable just because ⁓ like I know we chatted about this ⁓ earlier as well, but I think the the the big thing I see is like ⁓ you know, if AI has given you access to do something, everybody's doing the same thing, right? So there's ⁓ anything unique that comes in, you know, with AI, like, you know, it ends up becoming a pattern in quite a few scenarios, right? Like ⁓ if if apps was your moat, right? Like now everybody is building an app, right? ⁓ you know building like these, you know, very like ⁓ literally everything now can become that. So I think it becomes all the more important the ability to spot patterns, right? Because there's always gonna be patterns that'll keep emerging, you know, pre AI era or post AI era. ⁓ there's this and and like ⁓ the goal is just always to like, okay, we are now in an era, you know, with ⁓ AI focused companies, with all sorts of, you know, cool sort of, you know ways to you know do things and all that, right? So what is the you know pattern that's ⁓ you know worth ⁓ interrupting right like there's many examples right now like for example like if you look at ⁓ you know ⁓ the way the products are being named right like everybody has like a personality attached to it a Mindy, Holly, Mindy, whatever, right? Like there's a pattern right in in AI, right? Or in the way the visual language, how AI products are being perceived, or like you know, the use of words like orchestration and all that. These are more basic levels. If you go a little bit more deeper, if you look at ⁓ you know, everybody's building like these crazy workflows and all that, right? ⁓ I mean like I think there's that's a whole long conversation, but yeah, the simple answer is yeah. speaker-1: Yeah. I I'd I'd agree, Madel, for what it's worth. I think that, you know, what I see in terms of content that's being produced and ⁓ you know, some of the other aspects that you mentioned is because A AI is basically about creating patterns and generating patterns and the the whole thing is probabilistic, right? So in my mind it sort of ⁓ heightens the middle of the bell curve and that means there's more space for guys like you at the edges to go and spot those patterns and say we're gonna do exactly the opposite. So I I think it's quite exciting for people who believe in this type of pattern interrupt thinking. speaker-0: I appreciate that. Yeah. speaker-1: Yeah, I think it's gonna be fun times. And and sort of on that subject, right, I I think that probably a lot of people listening to this will ⁓ will relate to the idea that it it it all sounds great, you know, and we'd love to be doing these pattern interrupts, we'd love to be standing out and and getting known for being distinct and interesting. ⁓ but so often, you know, it there's a there's a gap ⁓ between that intention and actually bringing it into the world. And I think everyone would agree, you know, with so much of what you're saying, but then perhaps struggle to actually make it happen in their org. ⁓ ha have you got experience or any thoughts on why that happens and how people can overcome it? speaker-0: ⁓ I think a lot of times also it's ⁓ sort of ⁓ some things are in your control, some things are outside of your control. A lot of times

the leadership might be very sort of focused on that and there's not ⁓ this is more from a marketing leader's perspective, right? Like ⁓ If let's say your CEO is not aligned on that, there's not too much you can do. You can make a business case. You can and there's there's few ways where you can make a business case where you can show examples and actually show that, you know, being the same is actually gonna kill us and being different is the new normal that we need to get used to, right? ⁓ and and then there's more things that can be done there, but that's the extent of it you can do. ⁓ I think a lot of it comes down to is the CEO also okay to do that? Or you can sort of build up a business case for it. ⁓ I think once that hurdle has been crossed, ⁓ it becomes a lot more easier to sort of build ⁓ you know, that whole sort of ⁓ pant, you know, like the whole ability to, you know, like look at patterns and interrupt it, because then it becomes a team by thing. Because like, like I completely agree, right? Like everybody's like, ⁓ you know, I like to think different, you know, I I want to make bold moves and this and that, right? ⁓ but if you're let's say if the entire portfolio has so much pressure on like Hey, you know, we need to, you know, get you know SEO to work, or you know, we need to sort of ⁓ you know, like ⁓ hit our pipeline targets and all that, right? It becomes something I must do, but it's kind of like maybe on on like a fourth or a fifth priority list, right? ⁓ but I think when you reframe the the question to like, okay, if you're you know, you've got all of these sort of campaigns that are running, right? Like which is great, and you know, you've got like these pipeline goals. But if you're not gonna like pause and actually Think that if any of these campaigns, like, you know, when we're optimizing campaigns, we look at, okay, maybe we can tweak a copy, maybe we can sort of ⁓ change one bit about this strategy, or maybe we can sort of look at it from a different angle and all that, right? ⁓ all of those are good. They will have maybe a 1%, 1.5% change, right? ⁓ but sometimes if you want like a, you know, like a very distinct pipeline impact, right? Maybe at that time it's just, you know, like time to think about like, okay, let's just stop and pause and look at this campaign and you know be like, okay, like are we getting into a pattern? And you know, is that the reason why this is probably not working, right? And I think when we do that and then you know ⁓ there's like a sort of interruption and and the numbers start looking good, then you know again like the leadership also buys into that philosophy and then you know so on and so forth. So ⁓ yeah I think it's it's it's like I get it. Like I I understand with marketing leaders it's not easy. But you just have to remember, like I think in today's age, if you stay the same, it's it's gonna slowly kill the business. speaker-1: Yeah, I I couldn't agree more. a couple of questions off

the back of that, right? So when you joined Storylane, ⁓ that kind of leadership sponsorship for this type of change and this type of thinking, was that something that ⁓ attracted you to the role or was it something that was sort of like a a happy thing that you discovered once you were through the door? I guess I'm asking, were you seeking out a place where you had permission to do that? Was that like an important criteria for you? speaker-0: No, I think it was more like ⁓ it's a very interesting question. I I wasn't seeking it out. I think it was more like for me the two big important things was a how is the sort of ⁓ company like you know growing and like what it was looking like, and the other thing was ⁓ like how much does the you know the the CEO trust in me? ⁓ like you know, because typically what happens is if the CEO is also running marketing right beside it. There's no harm in it. But ⁓ when things clash, like it it gets gets a little bit messy, right? So ⁓ that th those are like the two big criteria. So when I knew that my CE was like ⁓ it was always a conversation that, you know, whatever it takes three months, four months, five months, ⁓ you just need to earn my trust and I'll give you marketing completely. ⁓ that sort of convinced me. I'm like, okay, I'm gonna you know, like ⁓ going to try to earn that trust. ⁓ and that was the only reason. Yeah. speaker-1: That's great. It it's so ⁓ interesting how so much of of success in my view and and all of the stuff comes back to trust and teamwork and culture. But that's ⁓ that's maybe one for another day. What one other question, just while we're on that thread, I'm curious. When you stopped doing the incremental stuff, you you kind of made the point that in order to pick something up new, you have to drop something old, right? Is how I'd summarise some of what you were saying earlier. When you dropped the old, did you see a a dip before the ⁓ before the new stuff started to take off? How did you manage that? Or were you able actually to keep things going at a certain level and just add on top? I'm just curious. speaker-0: No, no, no. There were dips. I mean, like, ⁓ and so I think that that's another important one. So when we think about pattern interruptness, right? Like ⁓ also have to sort of like let everybody know and like be like fully aware that, you know, one out of ten thing sorry, like you know, I would say eight out of ten things are not gonna work, you know, in your favor. ⁓ and then like one or two that will actually work will, you know, compensate for the other eight, right? ⁓ that is For sure always the case, right? So there were so many instances where the interrupt actually didn't work out, right? ⁓ or like the bet didn't sort of go off if you know, fly the way it had to, right? But the way I sort of also thought about it is that it wasn't a dip, it was like what was going on went on, right? ⁓ but what did well did fantastically well, right? There was no place where it was

like, ⁓ you know, like ⁓ Where it sort of went negative. I think there was maybe one thing that probably ⁓ was maybe a bad strategic move like on like the big channels. ⁓ but largely it was just like things just didn't move. ⁓ but like for the ones that moved, like that's that was my experience. speaker-1: Super interesting. So it sounds like you kind of got ahead of that and you you started letting people know look, not every bet is going to be a 10X, like we're going to have some successes. ⁓ most of them are going to fail, but that's fine because we're going find the stuff that works. And I sorry, just one more on this thread. You you said that the stuff that you ⁓ stopped focusing on so much kind of carried on. Is that in spite of reduced investment? Because presumably you were putting more time and resources into the pattern interrupts and all of the things that were gonna really move the needle. Did you find that those things like carried on under their own momentum? Or did you have to continue investing in those those ⁓ at the same time while you were trying to push the new stuff? speaker-0: No, so like for example, like ⁓ let's look at webinars, right? Like so the way let's say we used to do webinars, right? ⁓ let's say we put a pattern interrupt spin to it. I think this this one time, just about three months into my role, we started this thing called interactive demo days, right? And and you know, we started doing like these new formats for our ⁓ customers and it was like ⁓ the first webinar got like a lot of registrations or you know, it was like maybe whatever. And then, like, if you look at it like over the last six, seven ⁓ sessions, the average was actually about the same as what was there before it, right? So it it was it was basically like it was a new format, like the old one was dropped, but there was a new format, but it was roughly getting the same amount of numbers, right? And there were obviously learnings from that, right? ⁓ and that led us to a second iteration at it and a third iteration to it, ⁓ to the point where now we have this webinar series called Final Demos Club, which was actually built off off these different pattern interrupt experiments with the webinar, which is now consistently getting like three, four times more the number of registrations that we would have gotten the traditional webinar today. ⁓ So it was it was about experimentation, right? ⁓ there was and I think like I can say that like for example, there might have been a webinar campaign where it the numbers might have been a little bit lesser than the traditional one. But it wasn't a significant difference. It wasn't something that's gonna like affect your pipeline as such, right? ⁓ there's like even like in terms of SEO, right? Like we were doing the whole blog SEO stuff that every company does, right? And we grew slowly from in three years from zero to like fifteen thousand a month in traffic, right? So I reduced the investment there and like you

know, focused on demo led SEO, and that sort of took us to a quarter million in traffic. But the blog was sort of like It I think i it just continued on with the reduced investment and that's when it became a little bit of a bad strategic move over the long term for you know for me. Like I felt like it was also the AI traffic and all, but then it sort of went down and down and down and then it affected a little bit about our AI citation. So then I started like ⁓ you know, fixing things, right? So there's gonna be like one or two of those bets, but then if you were to ask me if I go back in time, would I change things? I don't I absolutely wouldn't because like the level of success we had with demil at SEOs, like it's been our number one pattern interrupt we've ever done. Like it's ⁓ it it's compensated for a hundred pattern interrupts, if I could put it that way. Right. So that's kind of like the power of finding like this one thing that's like ⁓ you know like the one innovation that like you'll find way before everybody else. speaker-1: Yeah. And I I guess going back to what you were saying before, you only do that by being a bit brave, trying new stuff and finding those patterns and interrupting them, because that's the way that you're going to find the one in ten or the one in a hundred that pays for everything else, right? So super interesting. And ⁓ I guess moving on to talk about how p how people can think about this for themselves, right? You have a framework for doing this, I believe, called called pipe. ⁓ could you talk a bit about that, walk us through that and what each step looks like? speaker-0: Yeah, it's it's pretty simple actually. So it's it's pipe, ⁓ which is basically the first step is identifying the pattern, right? So typically when you would go in, you want to look at okay, what pattern am I stuck at, or what pattern am I following, or what pattern is the industry following. You need to find and name that pattern. Then you've got to find the right interruption. That's the second thing, the interrupt, right? Now, ⁓ you know, you can have all and like variety of interrupts, but the interrupts got to sort of make sense. For you as a business, right? Is it on-brand? Is it off-brand? Is it sort of ⁓ moving anything in the pipeline in the business? Where does it fit in your portfolio? ⁓ there's multiple questions that need to be asked, right? Like an example is that an interrupt is also somebody wearing a duck suit at the center of a dance floor at a conference, right? And nobody would know anything about your product, you know, with that sort of a move. ⁓ but an interrupt is also, you know, something like ⁓ kind of like the demiler deserving or Like our award show and all of that, right? Like so that's the difference between when you set the right card rails. Not every interrupt makes sense. You gotta make the right interrupt move. ⁓ then the third is thinking from a portfolio perspective with your pattern interrupts, right? So when you think about your you know portfolio of pattern interrupts, it's not like if you just go with the white top of the funnel pattern interrupts every single time. It's obviously, you know, you're gonna have like a you know a brand product association problem, right? I always come back to this example that, you know, somebody from Chili Piper told me that ⁓ Chili Piper's always known, you know, ⁓ like somebody went and asked, like, ⁓ hey, you know, what do you think about ⁓ you know, what does Chili Piper do? And they're ⁓ you're the brand that throws cool parties. And then she's like, No, no, we gotta change something about it, right? So ⁓ and that's where I think a good balanced portfolio of top of the funnel bets versus bottom of the funnel, or you know, you can you can call it width or depth, you can call it whatever you want. ⁓ but something that You know, gets you wide awareness and something that drives the brand product association, right? And the the the split of that depends on what stage and what ⁓ you know business you're at, right? Like for example, somebody like a sales force or like a you know huge category leader, maybe like a ⁓ you know anybody like seismic or you know whoever it is, all of these companies can afford to have a portfolio with a lot of width plays or a lot of top of the fun plays, right? Because for them, they've already got the brand and the product association, all that, right, right? Any visibility, you know, more visibility actually helps them. But for a company that's relatively, you know, earlier stage, right? Like sub 10 million, ⁓ in that case, you know, it's more about like ⁓ you're hedging your bets between ⁓ you know, like ⁓ maybe a 50% you know width and a 50% depth. So get the wide awareness, but also do the work to get that brand product association. So that's the third part. And then the fourth part is the execution system, which I think is really important. It's not part of the pattern interruption process. It's more about how you build, you know, like the you know, the the the system inside your organization, ⁓ you know, to, you know, to constantly keep questioning like the patterns that keep coming up. Right. So this is not something like I'm thinking so much about it because, you know, I I you know this has been my sort of past experience and the books I've read and the book I'm writing, right? But that might not be the case with my team or like, you know, ⁓ like other teams, right? So typically what I like to do with my time ⁓ you know, you know, my team is like this sort of quarterly lock in or whatever, that that's what I call it. Three days I lock them in and I don't really lock them in, it's like in a boardroom. ⁓ and then ⁓ and then three days we just sit down and ⁓ we if we look at the portfolio. So the learning here is like pausing all your work, you know, for three days in an entire quarter, which was not going to kill things at all. And then basically just processing, okay, like

what are the patterns are we following? You know, and typically for the campaigns where things are not doing well, or there's a new campaign with like a sort of goal like a goal, right? Like for example, we're doing a lot of expansions work right now, right? So and and there's like a big expansion scroll, right? So how do we get a big head start with like a smashing campaign, right? So those three days are are all about like looking at ⁓ you know, patterns and finding the interruptions. And there's like everybody in the room, right? So there's demand and product marketing, brand, ⁓ they've all got their own perspectives and we share and then we sort of come up with that, right? So That's more on a lot of like organization level, on even on a leadership level, right? Like how do you convey the value of pattern drops? We've already talked about that in the previous sessions, but it's it's a lot more about building the business case for it, where right now, you know, you if you're doing you know whatever ⁓ you know everybody else is doing, it's gonna slowly kill your business. And there's a whole business case you can build to it. That's the whole sort of system, ⁓ typically, and and what we've used ⁓ at Stoldino like the last two, two and a half years. speaker-1: So working across the pipe pipe framework, we've got the P, which is spotting the patterns, we've got the I, which is the interrupts, we've got the the second P, which is the portfolio approach, and then we've got the E for execution, right? And so to solve the first P, we're getting everyone in a room for three days a quarter and we're working through and we're looking, we're understanding what are the ⁓ what are the patterns that we're we're currently seeing or following or exist in our market. But how once you've got those, how do you work out which ones to prioritize, right? Because presumably you come up with with Dozens, if not hundreds, of ideas of patterns and things you could do. How do you work out where to place your bets? speaker-0: Yeah, there's no structured system honestly about that one. But it's more around ⁓ if it's the margin focused, it's very, you know, like, okay, hey, this campaign is looking great. Let's try it out as an experiment. There's a window, if it works, if there's you know, if the numbers hit, you know, we'll continue on. If not, we you'll kill it. ⁓ I'll give you one example. So we came up with a campaign to do sort of like ⁓ this idea of a town hall with our customers. ⁓ So again, like we were thinking about how do we, you know, ⁓ do sort of like a customer show and tell. Well, not really a customer show and tell, but how do we demo to you know all of our customers about our additional products without it seeming sort of like a demo. And then ⁓ there was this idea that was floated that, you know, why don't we do something like an AMA, you know, with the CEO and you know, let him sort of show all of the ways customers are using it, right? ⁓ and so it was

like, okay, it was it was it was an interesting idea. So the premise was we're gonna do it for three ⁓ sort of ⁓ sessions. So three months you're gonna do it. ⁓ the expectation is that we wanna get at least 300 registrations per webinar on average over the three months. If we get that, we're gonna continue on after three months. If not, we're gonna close it. I don't think ⁓ so if you typically look at the email communications from Storylane, especially from the marketing team. There's a lot of marketing campaigns that we launch, but the ones that have been recurring for like the last one year is probably like a handful of them because they launch, we try them. If something doesn't work, you know, we sort of scale it back down, right? ⁓ and then typically when we have all of these campaign ideas, right? ⁓ a lot of times ⁓ which campaign gets selected is you know, sometimes it's more like, you know, I will sort of take the decision on which one makes sense or not. With obviously input from everybody, but then I'll take the final call because I sort of run marketing and I'm responsible for like whatever numbers come out of it. ⁓ and the same for like, you know, the other departments ⁓ particularly, right? So if in the margin it's gonna be from that. That's how we do it. ⁓ there's no perfect way to know it's gonna be, you know, this one's gonna be great or not. Sometimes you just like maybe with experience you c also start to spot some patterns from like, look, I've tried something, I know this is not gonna work. And you could very well be wrong as well, but it it's that's that's how we do it. Yeah. speaker-1: Yeah, I I have a mentor that always reminds me, if you can't be wrong, you haven't made a decision. And I think that's ⁓ that's kind of quite relevant here, right? And it it brings us really nicely onto the third P and sorry, the second P, the third letter in pipe, which is the portfolio approach. And as you're talking here, it puts me in mind of sort of the di the difference between ⁓ European and and British investors and West Coast American investors, right? 'Cause British European tend to be like a quite safe portfolio where everything needs to do quite well and that's how we'll succeed. Whereas West Coast is more like, well look, we'll chuck our money in a a hundred different places and if w if one of them's Facebook, then we're gonna go to the moon. And it's it sounds like, you know, in a nutshell, ⁓ you're sort of advocating for people to take that more West Coast approach, ⁓ which is like don't expect everything to win, place bets, be different, be bold, and the one that comes off, you know, in the ten or in the hundred will pay for everything else. Is that is that a fair summary of like how you think about that portfolio piece? speaker-0: Yeah, that's ⁓ a hundred percent right. Yeah. Exactly how we think about it. Yeah. speaker-1: Yeah, it's good fun. It's good fun. and so you know, the the the a a lot of the pattern interrupts, I guess, ⁓ you know, that you've done are are amazing, right? So it's stuff like ⁓ coffee carts with branded latte art, which I love, mobile demo trucks outside a conference, so rather than having to be in the conference, you've just got a demo truck outside, so you're not paying h however much you know the the organizer wants. I love these things, these kind of gorilla things. How do you ensure that they become ⁓ sort of ⁓ not gimmicks? And they become, you know, sort of valuable pattern interrupts 'cause, you know, y's y the the gap between the two might not always seem super large. speaker-0: Yeah. So I will say with the cav the ⁓ the caveat that ⁓ we've not perfected it, but I think we're getting better at it. I think it's more like ⁓ that's where the interrupt guardrails make sense, the step two. So it's not it's ⁓ it's it's more about what th there's like few things that make sense. So one is I always ask my team that if you're gonna go, let's say run this coffee cart raid, ⁓ is there a way that people will be able to you know, know about our product or try our product or you know know what storyline is. Like we're not the company that's selling coffee here, you know, we're talking about so typically I would be the one that'll like, you know, okay, ⁓ maybe let's have it in the menu or let's have a QR code on the cart or add the QR code on the cups, you know, to an interactive demo or like sign up URL or whatever. Right. There are multiple, but that's one, right? Like, you know, like does it drive pipeline and at what journey like what awareness journey does it serve right is it more ⁓ sort of ⁓ is it more for like the awareness play is it more for the conversion play like you know a bunch of things ⁓ then the second thing is ⁓ you know does it is it on brand to us in the and on brand can mean a couple of things right like one is our and this is more from like our shared brand document that we have which we align on what is our mission you know what are we not what are we right like it's pretty standard But typically the here it's more like, okay, if there's gonna be a brand idea that's gonna come in, it's got to be focused on a mission, right? So our let's say our mission right now is we want to make buying software easier, right? And you know, provide tools to sort of ⁓ help with that, right? So any idea needs to connect to that mission, right? So that's one. If that's not there, gets removed, right? The second thing is ⁓ you know, is this sort of like are we the brand? ⁓ like how do we, you know, show up in front of our brand, right? And that answer has been different every year. Like so ⁓ you know, typically twenty three, twenty-four, we were more around let's be a little bit more gimmicky because we need to get a lot more awareness in front of our buyers. So we need to make a lot over you know, the top sort of things, not go and obviously there's like a layer that, you know, ⁓ we're not gonna sort of go be, you know, annoying or, you

know, be like that. But we were willing to be a little bit more ⁓ sort of ⁓ wild there, right? Today at like, you know, whatever revenue, ⁓ you know, we are basically ⁓ now it's more like, okay, we need to try these new creative things, but we also have like sort of ⁓ a reputation in the category and we need to have some sort of polish and finesse into what we do, right? So typically our campaigns have become a little bit more constrained, even the website and visual language and all that, right? So I think these are all like I mean, just simple answer is that the guardrails. Keep us on that ⁓ what is the right and dropped and what's not. speaker-1: Yeah. Yeah, and it's interesting how that evolves over time, right? So y at the start, you know, when you're a little bit smaller, you do just need to grab attention. But as you start to grow, you have to work out and you don't want to take it too far, right? Because otherwise you're just following the same patterns as everyone else. But you've got to put in some guardrails and sort of connecting that through, I guess, to to buying groups, right? So we know from all of the research that's coming out that ⁓ you know, a lot of the buying journey Is actually the buying group sitting together and trying to work out, you know, is this problem worth solving? How much should we spend doing it? And I guess going back to something you said earlier where, you know, category awareness awareness was relatively low when you start and you had the ability really to grow the category rather than just compete for what was already there. ⁓ how do you think about that in terms of these pattern interrupts? You know, first of all, creating awareness of the category, but but then helping the buying group to align around the problem. It's c it's quite a complex problem. Did you have a way of of thinking about how you were going to do that? speaker-0: Yeah, so I think the first thing is ⁓ I'm just yeah thinking through it, but ⁓ I think the first thing we had to do was in this particular case, if you need to reach a very wide group that is not aware about your category. you need to a drive a lot of general education and brand awareness. At this point, let's say the other ninety-five percent needs to know what a storyline is and actually get them to search on. Google about Storyline, right? Like here it's not about you know, like showing a differentiation or showing that storyline is a demo automation software or getting people to know that okay, what is a demo automation software? Get get the word out about storyline first, right? So ⁓ the goal is very, very wide visibility in front of that group. Okay, it's ⁓ because this is a very, very large group. Like ⁓ when you're talking about the other ninety-five percent, it's ⁓ like that's basically like the majority of the time, right, ⁓ that you have, right? So typically for that, ⁓ for the economics like unless you're like somebody who has like a hundred million in their plate and go in and and spend a lot to actually reach that with ads and all that, the only way to reach that group is to do like, you know, some, you know, like wild experiments, right? ⁓ so for us it was like to reach these evergreen companies. There are a few things that we knew, right? Like one was ⁓ a lot of that ninety five percent market doesn't live on LinkedIn. So how do we reach to that market that doesn't live on LinkedIn, right? And we're like, okay, then maybe searching on Google. And then we start looking at tutorials and you know that's how the whole demo led SEO campaign came, which was around like, okay, these people use all of these tools. Can we piggyback the search volume of these categories and their documentation keywords and somehow drive awareness about storyline through that? Even though the percentage conversion might be low, but the volume actually makes up for it, right? The other thing is to use Any existing demand that lives elsewhere and try to educate about your category from there. So typically, if interactive demo software isn't popular, CRO tools are very popular, website conversion optimization tools are very popular, ⁓ sales enablement tools are very popular, right? So can you somehow get yourself in those lists, right? And try to sort of, you know, get yourself there, right? But this is not really and then even like if you go a little bit more deeper into those, it's not just the list, it's also like Can you partner up with them? Can you do integrations? Can you do dinners together? Can you do a content collaboration together? Can you do a brand play together? Right. That's kind of like how so we also love to partner with brands that are actually not super active on LinkedIn because they usually have such an interesting group of customers that you would never have heard of. You know, like typically if you go to like a Gartner conference or a Forester conference, you'd be surprised to see like the majority of them actually are not even on LinkedIn. So ⁓ the kind of bubble that we live in forces us to not see that there's like this huge world out there and ⁓ and ⁓ we just have to find different ways to get a lot of wide visibility. Once you've got the wide visibility, see if if they know the word storyline, they're gonna search on Google, they're gonna hit your website. The moment they hit in you know your website, that's a privil well, I don't know if that's a privilege, but that's something in in the US, you can basically sort of ⁓ you know, put them into your retargeting, you know, do sort of any outburn campaigns and all of that, right? Because you've sort of ⁓ caught them in that that whole sort of cycle, right? ⁓ of course in in Europe there's like GDPR laws and there's ⁓ there's there's there's other ways we have to do that, but ⁓ that's typically how we think about it. speaker-1: Yeah, amazing. As you're talking there, Madav, I'm thinking about and I'm gonna get it wrong, but it's a stat that I read recently

about invisible buyers in the buying group and the impact of even having heard of your brand. So often there can be gatekeepers in the background who you don't know exist, you don't know a part of the buying group, but if they haven't even heard of your brand, they're something like fifty percent more likely to veto ⁓ the the purchase or the or the investment, right? So your clever way there of like getting in front of people who who aren't necessarily on LinkedIn. ⁓ but using partnerships and what have you to go and at least get your name in front of those people in the first instance is is super smart and sort of speaks to that whole thing around ⁓ awareness and aligning the buying group, which is which is awesome. speaker-0: Yeah, no, I think that's so true. Because even like today, if I look at like ⁓ so you know, we have like this ⁓ form field ⁓ but how did you hear about us in our demo form, right? It's so interesting. There's so many people that are like, ⁓ a colleague told me, a friend told me, you know, ⁓ yeah, somebody told me at a conference, at a meetup, this and that, right? Like that's the kind of impact that you can have. Like the the and like today especially, like that whole peer trust is like at at it's at its peak right now, right? Like you will even if you look at the last five tools you purchased, right? It's probably come from ⁓ either somebody told you in person, like one on one, or you heard butter on LinkedIn from somebody you trust. ⁓ there would at least like it's ⁓ you today we don't just go and like read a blog and actually find a tool and buy it, right? Like peer trust is quite common. And I think to actually get those peers, right? Like ⁓ if you can yeah just somehow get awareness with everybody. If you've got three people in your organization saying, ⁓ you know, Storyline's great. Like ⁓ you know, ⁓ it's makes it so much easier to get that ⁓ tool into the organization as well. So yeah, a hundred percent agree. I think that's a great start. speaker-1: Amazing. It it feels like you've really cracked that buying group bit, you know, the awareness and all the rest of it is great. turning to like a really practical one, I I want to give you a hypothetical, so sorry, it's a it's a tricky one, right? ⁓ imagine that you are a a head of marketing or a marketing leader. you're six months through the year and your pipe pipeline is not where it needs to be. You're behind on plan. ⁓ you've got let's make it even harder, you've got ⁓ three competitors, large well founded competitors who are all shipping a similar playbook. and imagine this poor marketing leader trying to work out what they're doing. Imagine they've just heard your thesis. They've just heard about pipe. They've they've maybe read your book. ⁓ what do they do tomorrow morning in their shoes? What would you do? speaker-0: Yeah, the first thing I would do is I would go take my portfolio and ⁓ basically write out everything what's happening, like but like in the sense like my entire portfolio, my campaigns, all of the ⁓ excuse me, all of the tension points and all the stresses in the work, put that into like a Claude and basically ask Claude what pattern am I stuck at? Like what's the pattern that I'm following with my work that's you know, making either these campaigns not work or, you know, like for whatever reason, right? Typically, like with all of these things, yeah, I will give you some fantastic answers, right? I'll give you a starting point that here's what I see. I think you're doing this, but all of that, right? It might not be right on every instance or most instances, but it'll give you a directional idea that this is probably the path that is sort of causing that, right? And then the next thing is to just go and like ⁓ Okay, like ⁓ have a conversation and be, you know, like with your leadership and be ⁓ like your CEO and be like, listen, I have a proposal and you know, we have these these these campaigns. I wanna try a new approach and I wanna take this one campaign, which I feel ⁓ you know, I think if you try with you know, like this new sort of creative angle to it, ⁓ you know, worst case scenario, it's gonna you know perform the same. Best case scenario, we have something like that, you know, something that ends up working and actually does pretty well, right? Try that out and then ⁓ I think just you know see the results for it ⁓ yourself. I think that's typically what I would like, you know, it's an interesting one, very in very timely question because ⁓ I was just thinking ⁓ like literally two days back around ⁓ so we've been also thinking about you know our own, let's say, user conference, right? And ⁓ this is an interesting one because now there's a new it's not something that's not performing, it's more like Okay, I want to start something new, but I don't want to fall into like a pattern, right? ⁓ now typically if you were to go start your own user conference, what would happen is, ⁓ we're gonna do the anti-conference or the unconference now. But the problem right now is that there's so many on-conferences already now. Even that's become a pattern. So you've got Highline and Exit Five Drive, and you've got Spring, and you've got like this arcadia leadership experience. There's like a bunch of them there, they would somebody's got a camping ground, somebody's got, you know, a a spa resort ⁓ somewhere, somebody's not having any talk sessions, just networking, right? So ⁓ I started looking into these and I'm like, how can we be the unconference, you know, out of the unconference, right? And then it was about okay, what is the pattern that the unconference are following? And the one thing that became clear to me was that ⁓ everybody used to host everybody at like this really fancy five star resort, right? ⁓ you know, and like it's always like a very polished sort of an experience, right? Like what if we were to change that, you know, and maybe interrupt that into more sort of like ⁓ you

know what do you call ⁓ sort of like a raw experience or whatever, you know, ⁓ you know, it's something that's a little bit less polished, right? Or it could be something like everybody has like these networking tables where everybody's talking, cross talking with each other and all. But what if the entire conference was like this mega workshop with like mini modes and all that? So it doesn't make I don't know if anything makes sense or not, but it's more like ⁓ if you were to start this, you would first look at all of the patterns that everybody's following and then try to see, okay, what is the like name that one pattern that you see. Whether it's a i in in the conferences, it's the it's the venue or the way the networking happens, or let's say even another sort of ⁓ pattern that I saw was that ⁓ everybody has the same set of guests that show up at every conference. You'd literally see the same group of people showing up, right? So How could you have like a very diverse, interesting group that is probably not as active on LinkedIn? These are all different interruptions, then you just got to go with your gut and ⁓ try to break that. speaker-1: Amazing. I I think you make a really interesting point there with the conferences because what you're saying is, you know, there's a culture or there's a pattern and then there's a counterculture or an anti pattern and then that becomes a pattern. And so you need to find, as you say, the anti anti pattern. And I think that you know, the point that you make around like the experience that's delivered and the way that the whole thing is done. I I think I think the way you look at that is like is wonderful, sort of from the outside and and really analysing it to understand where can we drive distinctness and notability and not fall into the trap. of sort of repeating someone else's anti pattern, I think is ⁓ is super interesting. It's patterns all the way down, right? speaker-0: So nice if you yeah, if you said that, yeah. speaker-1: That's awesome. So look, ⁓ wrapping up, it it's been amazing and ⁓ and you know, s so many ⁓ fascinating and ⁓ and deep thoughts around how all of this works. So thank you so much for sharing. But ⁓ to close, the the show is called Real Seekers After Truth, right? So in your view, Madav, what is one thing that every real seeker in marketing should stop doing and what's one thing that they should start? speaker-0: Okay. Ooh, that's a loaded question. okay, let's think about it. One thing or we should stop doing. So is it more like is it more tactical or is it more ⁓ principles level? speaker-1: whatever you'd like. It's whatever you like. You know, for for peop for people who want to sort of follow your philosophy, let's say, and people who are interested in, you know, because what you're talking about here is like the truth of the matter, which is something along the lines of, you know, incrementalism is isn't going to get you there. That's why you have the pipe framework, which

helps you break out of that. So, you know, that kind of could be an angle that you could take, right? Around, you know, what what what do you need to really stop doing or thinking or behaving like? And then, you know, what do you need to replace that with? speaker-0: Yeah, I think one thing I'll say is that You've got to stop blindly following other companies' playbooks. ⁓ because I think one thing I've seen is that ⁓ you know every business has its own unique luck, unique circumstances, ⁓ unique market conditions, you know, unique team, unique product. There's so many different factors, right? So if tomorrow if you see that, hey, you know, here's what Clay did, and you know, we should absolutely do that thing, right? It's not gonna work out the same way ⁓ you know, ⁓ that it worked for them, right? and ⁓ like ⁓ I there's almost like this herd mentality or almost like this religious following of brands that are doing well. They're like, ⁓ look what lovable is doing. But you know, like these are all very different scenarios. Like lovable is viral product. Like I I saw somebody's post on LinkedIn which was around like You know, lovable is successful because look at their employee advocates. Everybody has a hundred thousand followers. But like it's not because the employee advocates has ⁓ have a hundred thousand followers, it's because lovable is super successful and all of these people that work there got the followers, right? Like there's different ways to think about it. So then what you should follow here is ⁓ and and and this I learned was ⁓ you are in the business. So like I think of myself in the business of Serving storyline customers, marketing storylane, and basically doing everything to grow the storyline business, right? We're in the business of storyline, so we have our own storyline business problems and we have our own storyline growth opportunities, right? And when you start looking at it like that, right, that's when you can think a little bit differently. You can also sort of focus on the right things that actually move, right? ⁓ not what Clay did or what, you know, like ⁓ what lovable did and you know all of that, what you know, what will actually work for you. And it's always great to take ideas from all these brands. I'm not saying that it'll, you know, it like but like you know but you have to know that that context is very different and and your context is very different. And I think ⁓ when you start serving problems in your own business, you'll also start like questioning, you know, like tomorrow, you know, if you were to like look at your business and be like, okay, here are all of our business problems, right? Like I typically like to do like this This exercise called theory of constraints, where you basically look at all of the constraints of your business and then try to do the opposite. What's the opposite of that constraint, right? And that's when that sort of critical thinking is going to get you to the the real good growth gaps and opportunities, right? And I think that's I see a lot of businesses not doing that. And I think that's the the the big one to think about, especially with AI and everything that's going on. Yeah. speaker-1: Yeah. Amazing. Really great advice to them, Madhav. I'd love to pick up on that constraints and and that whole way of thinking another time. That's something certainly we think a lot about. But ⁓ but look, this has been amazing. Thank you so much for sharing all of that. ⁓ really enjoyed speaking. As I say, super interesting ideas. ⁓ brilliant. Thank you so much for for joining me. speaker-0: Thank you so much. I appreciate it. I really enjoyed this. speaker-1: Awesome. See you soon. Thank you.