Embark on a time-traveling odyssey back to the not-so-distant past, where the digital bloom reshaped the SaaS industry's go-to-market playbook. Our latest episode is a treasure trove of stories and insights that will shift your perspective on the evolution of marketing and sales strategies. From the digital marketing surge to the essential role of Sales Development Representatives (SDRs), we navigate the trials and triumphs that have forged the cutting-edge tactics of today. Join us as we dissect the "law of shitty click-throughs" and confront the trials facing revenue leaders in the bustling lower middle market—a segment where innovation is key to cutting through the cacophony of advertising noise.
Here's a nugget of wisdom for those crafting go-to-market strategies: specificity isn't just a detail; it's the cornerstone of customer trust. In this episode, we peel back the layers of the 'moment of value' and examine the delicate dance between promises made and expectations met. We also tackle the buyer's skepticism in a sea of choices and explore how AI marvels like ChatGPT are changing the game for discerning buyers. As we weave through the narrative, the emphasis falls upon the power of a unified message—reminding organizations, regardless of size, that precise and targeted approaches can significantly bolster their marketing muscle.
Finally, we turn the spotlight on the holistic changes sweeping across marketing and sales departments, where the 'moment of value' reigns supreme in customer engagement. Our conversation is a call to arms for alignment across teams, ensuring that the brand's heartbeat is consistent from the first customer interaction to the last. With an eye toward efficiency and revenue that sticks, we liken a well-oiled marketing strategy to the rhythmic operations of a factory floor. Don't miss this enlightening episode, where we tackle the intricacies of go-to-market planning and offer up a vision for thriving in an ever-shifting business landscape.
Embark on a time-traveling odyssey back to the not-so-distant past, where the digital bloom reshaped the SaaS industry's go-to-market playbook. Our latest episode is a treasure trove of stories and insights that will shift your perspective on the evolution of marketing and sales strategies. From the digital marketing surge to the essential role of Sales Development Representatives (SDRs), we navigate the trials and triumphs that have forged the cutting-edge tactics of today. Join us as we dissect the "law of shitty click-throughs" and confront the trials facing revenue leaders in the bustling lower middle market—a segment where innovation is key to cutting through the cacophony of advertising noise.
Here's a nugget of wisdom for those crafting go-to-market strategies: specificity isn't just a detail; it's the cornerstone of customer trust. In this episode, we peel back the layers of the 'moment of value' and examine the delicate dance between promises made and expectations met. We also tackle the buyer's skepticism in a sea of choices and explore how AI marvels like ChatGPT are changing the game for discerning buyers. As we weave through the narrative, the emphasis falls upon the power of a unified message—reminding organizations, regardless of size, that precise and targeted approaches can significantly bolster their marketing muscle.
Finally, we turn the spotlight on the holistic changes sweeping across marketing and sales departments, where the 'moment of value' reigns supreme in customer engagement. Our conversation is a call to arms for alignment across teams, ensuring that the brand's heartbeat is consistent from the first customer interaction to the last. With an eye toward efficiency and revenue that sticks, we liken a well-oiled marketing strategy to the rhythmic operations of a factory floor. Don't miss this enlightening episode, where we tackle the intricacies of go-to-market planning and offer up a vision for thriving in an ever-shifting business landscape.
Gary:
Welcome to the GTM Pro Podcast, your essential audio resource for mastering go-to-market discussions in the boardroom. Here we share insights for revenue leaders at B2B Software and Services companies, especially those with less than 50 million in revenue. Why? Because the challenges faced by companies of this size are unique. They are too big to be small and too small to be big. This dynamic pushes revenue leaders into executive leadership without a lot of help or support. We are here to provide that support. Your journey to boardroom excellence starts now.
Gary:
Have you ever seen the video? It's Christmas. Come on, man Meli Kaleeki Makka. What's the first thing you think about when you think about that? A Christmas story, christmas, vacation, man, christmas vacation.
Andy:
Sorry, wrong yeah.
Gary:
Heavy chase staring out the window, that's right, that's right, that's really cool.
Gary:
Yes, I have a buddy in college. The first time I hear this song, I actually go back to college days, because it could be May and we'd be hanging out at his apartment and it was time to throw everybody out of the apartment, and so this is when the lights would come on and this is the song that he would play. So that's what I remember of Meli Kaleeki Makka Time to go to the bars. Okay, here we are. So last version of 2023. We've been talking a lot about 24. It'll be here before we know it.
Gary:
I'm actually just now, just a handful of days, and we have been talking somewhat about this confluence of topics or thoughts that all seem to be emanating out of the same thing, and for us, it's this idea of what we've been talking about for a long time, which is go to market as a system and systems thinking in 2024. And the prompt for this, I think, started with a several posts. One of them was this Harvard Business Review article recently on the unified commercial engine, which we'll put in the link notes. We'll get to that in a second. Dave Kellogg provides a good overview of that, or kind of some counterpoints to that. And then, recently as well winning by design. Jaco posted a thing about what appears to be losing go to market fit. A lot of organizations are just struggling all around the board. I think everybody feels that, and so, as we have been talking about that, one of the things is to how did we get here, basically, and I think we have to actually go quite a ways back. So, as we again, we are focused and most often speaking to revenue leaders at organizations that are in the lower middle market, so, $5 to $50 million in revenue, they're typically not running the double, double, triple, triple playbook. It's much more about capital efficient growth, and those leaders are at least in our experience, are most often in their mid 30s. They're seasoned, functional leaders, probably early in their executive career and growing in that perspective, and so, if you back up and think about that, that means then that they graduated college in 2010 timeframe, 22 years old, right, mid 30s, 13 years later. And so if we go back to that time period and think through everything that they have seen, it really is, it says a lot about where we are today and why we are sitting here today.
Gary:
So let's go back to 2010,. Right, first of all, we're at the beginning of a very long growth cycle. Right, we had just come out of the. We're basically coming out of the great recession of 0809. For most, for a lot of folks, they were in college and so you're somewhat immune to that. And then you're entering a period where there's great growth. It's really the explosion of SaaS. Right, it's the beginning of it started kind of 0708 with Amazon Web Services, but 2010, all of a sudden, is the explosion of software as a service companies and therefore the funding of all those companies, and it is just an absolute. And this is kind of go back to the Martek landscape. I don't know when that started, but I'm going to say early 2010s. You know 1112, something like that, and you get 500 to 1,000 to 1,500, and that just that alone is is, I think, a great proxy for what we just see overall in the growth of SaaS.
Gary:
And capital was really cheap, right, because we just came out of that great recession and we were at 0% interest rates for a long time. And we have the beginning of inbound, we have the beginning of digital buying, we have social networks, we have mobile, we have unbelievable amounts of capital getting deployed and all of these things, all of these motions are working and so it becomes more about running the motion right. We need to be doing digital marketing, we need to be doing email marketing, we need to be doing inbound we need to start and then we layered in outbound and then we got so much inbound we had to put SDRs in to filter through all of that stuff, and the tide was rising. And it was rising so fast that, honestly, you didn't actually have to be that good at it. You just had to make sure that you were doing it, and the capital that came in just created more and more and more of it. And then you hit 2020, we have a blip from probably March to July, and then a torrent of capital hits the market and, all of a sudden, organizations that were once reliant on events and more in-person, more analog things, had no choice but to go digital.
Gary:
We went all in on outbound SDRs. At the same time, the data and technology to service that was getting funded as well. So now we sit here today and you think about all of the stuff that we have relied on for the last 13 years. Almost all of it has run through the law of shitty click-throughs where it worked and we threw more and more money at it. We did more and more and more of it, and we have to remember that the buyer is on the receiving end of all of that and at some point you just get fatigue and it stops working. How many times do you get an email message in your inbox? You can sniff it out without even opening it, delete and then, andy I think the other interesting aspect of that is when you have all of this capital coming in to push growth, which at one point in time it was an astronomical amount of money that would literally come into a company to be spent exclusively on paid digital, especially in B2B. And what did the platforms do with that?
Andy:
Well, they figured out how to extract it.
Gary:
It was. You know. They own the marketplace, and so they're going to take it all the way to the efficient frontier 100%.
Andy:
Yeah Well, we talked about that some time ago where, when I first started using paid search, for example, you could find profit pools and you could exploit them for a while, and it took a bit Google specifically for them to kind of figure that out. Kind of, you know, let the market run its course and kind of coalesce around it. Okay and this is me assuming the algorithm does this, which I truly believe it does it eventually finds that efficient frontier, but now it's like instantaneous to your point, gary, and Google knows, through all kinds of means, where that efficient frontier is, where people are willing to pay for a lead, for a particular classification of software and so on, and it gets there very quickly, very quickly and you have to believe that LinkedIn and Facebook and all the others, because it's a bidding system, right, and in order to make the algorithm smarter and work in our favor, we feed it more and more data and basically turning over our economic model to them and telling them what our efficient frontier is.
Gary:
So if we're willing to pay $175 for a lead, because that's where it's worked out in terms of closed one business and ACV and all those kinds of things, guess where they're going to go.
Andy:
So you're going to get $174.99, right, or actually $177.
Gary:
I'm like we know your threshold is $175, but we're pretty sure we can go a little bit higher than that.
Andy:
We'll lead in your gross margin just a little bit and you'll take it right Because, oh because, we're providing brand coverage for you and so on, and there's a lot of things that go into that. Here's the other piece of all of this, right. The other piece that goes with the Martek landscape, for example, having grown and people consuming that, people being hit by a lot of value propositions along the way and we talked about this being an aspect of poisoning the well, which is people are much more savvy to the whole buying process but specifically, how hard is this for me to implement? How hard is this for my tech team to implement? How long is that going to take? Do you onboard me, or you know, and so on, and so people are asking these really hard questions and you know it came to like I'm not getting what was promised to me and now people aren't really conveying that to me up front.
Andy:
The other piece on just this whole high volume thing is you know I was a direct response marketer, right, it's like what I was doing at Capital One in AOL, with direct mail turned into B2B, like you're just going to mail the crap out. It turns out it was email as opposed to direct mail in a lot of cases. But I'm going to just go nuts. And you know why. That was really cheap, right, it was like free. Once I had the leads it was free. It's not, but we can get into that. But so what are you going to do? You're going to go hey, why are you on that? And just, you know, more is better. I mean, I get a little response, but a little is, you know, npv positive if I'm paying very little on the margin to do this stuff.
Gary:
So you have all these things converging to that, yeah, and I think, and the downside to that in that boom market, is that we did not work on the more, the harder but more enduring things that enable us to get through all of that. Noise, right, it's like the magic diet pill that works, and so we don't work out, we don't eat well, we don't have good lifestyle habits, and then the pill stops working or becomes more expensive, or both right. We reach a point where it just stopped working, and now not only can we not rely on that anymore, but we have ignored all of the fundamental things, that on which the skills that we need to have in order to be successful in a market like this.
Andy:
I can honestly admit, I'll admit this, I'll admit this at one point in my career I actually outsourced creation of value propositions to an agency. Like think about that and think about that in that context, right, because then what I'm doing is I'm taking this input here which isn't even really me. I didn't think hard about it, right. I didn't put in the effort to come up with, okay, here's my product, and I didn't obsess about why my buyer should care. I kind of outsourced that, you know, phone it in, right, and then do a little volume around that Shake the tree, see who falls out. I don't really care. If you're smaller, big, you know you're a customer, that's great and we'll sell you and it'll be great. And we forget about. We forget about that moment of value, which I know we're going to talk about as well. We forget about customer success. It's just whatever comes in is good.
Gary:
And you know actually you mentioned this earlier too, andy speaking of moment of value is the other. The reality is. Where we sit today is this confluence of things that we did over the course of the last 10 to 13 years, and the reality is, and what we are encouraging people to think about is that it is not coming back. We went through a one-way door. Once you destroy a channel or channels or tactics or whatever, they're gone, and it's because it's a trust thing, like trust is built step by step over time and it's destroyed instantly.
Andy:
Very quickly.
Gary:
So the other side of this is that, because of this explosion of SaaS companies, we had a lot of claims of what things could do, and then we've all been burned by eh, it didn't really do that right, or you know? Yes, you pointed out integration. It's a one-click integration, yeah, but it doesn't really solve the problem for me, and enough people have been through this enough times in their cycle that there is inherent skepticism in everything, like I don't trust you Absolutely. And so pile on the fact that there was another graphic.
Andy:
I need to grab that's on the product side, if you will, right, but on the go-to-market side, same thing, right, like I've been promised enough. There's that, but there's also, well, I'm here to help you. If I'm a salesperson, I'm trying to create a relationship with prospects let's say it's an overused term ABM right, like I'm trying to create relationships here. The motion, the moment you say you want to demo, let's get on a call together. Let's go through a product demo. Where's that trust go? Right?
Gary:
So the other parallel thought to that again, it's no one issue, it's the compounding of all of them. The other side and I'll find this graphic and we'll stick it in the show notes recently posted on LinkedIn that somebody just went to G2 Crowd and pulled out the number of organizations that were listed in a particular category and something like Pickham CRM the usual cast of characters, hundreds of options, hundreds of them. And so now you're the buyer and you have hundreds of options that you need to try to wade through, which you're not going to do. You don't trust anybody. They all tout certain things, but there's a layer of detail there that you're like, yeah, but do you really? And so now that's the purpose a lot of times of that demo conversation if I'm an informed buyer, is to actually get under the hood to see what are you really able to do. I just I want to see that. What can you really do relative to my use case?
Gary:
So the point of all this is if you, especially if you're a marketing leader at a lower middle market company 2024, you are faced with a buyer who is crushed in enormous amounts of choice.
Gary:
They have limited budget. They don't trust any of the usual channels like even SEO, has become polluted. Do a search for any high value term, any of those things, and we all know you pull that up and, honestly, the first page is pretty much useless because they're all pages that rank really well because they they have hijacked the mind, share around the seven best tips you need to think about for X, and they're all the same thing from somebody trying to sell you something software companies. It's not really the answer, right, and so no wonder people are turned into chat, gpt and Bard and others for answers Like I want to bypass a bunch of blue links that are just trying to, that are really just click bait, not actually getting me to, you know, to my answer and the nuance in that answer and it's getting much savvier to the savvy piece about products, about integrations and so on.
Andy:
They're also very savvy about being really specific to your point about what they're searching for. I need something that does this, that works with this, that you know integrates. In this way they get really specific and again, the, the, the tools are, you know, are helpful on that front because it you're able to have a prompt that's super complex, whereas pure search it's still a bit of a crapshoot but it's getting really specific.
Gary:
Yeah, so, as a that's the point in all of that is that there is, there are, if you were now at the hand, because the other reality, too, is that many of the buyers that we have today are in the same boat. Right, they've grown up in that same period, and so we, as, as revenue leaders. Now, how do you deal with that? How do you deal with that environment? And I think that that's one of probably the most important things is that success lies in the details. It is in stitch, being very, very specific about the value that you provide and for whom, and that starts to turn into product strategy as well, but from a go to market perspective, very, very specific, and that we refer to this as the you know, continually, continually pulling the flywheel in the right direction.
Gary:
If, if you're, every interaction that a buyer has with some piece of content or some, you know, whatever it may be a piece of content, sales interaction, a webinar, whatever If, at any point in time, you're inconsistent with that because you have different teams working on different things, you just took the flywheel that's starting to turn and cranked it backwards, and then, therefore, the amount of energy it requires to get it back flowing in the right direction is exponentially more, and so you never get this compounding effect. And I think that is the whole point of organizations, especially lean organizations. We're talking about teams of three for marketers and maybe you have seven sellers and you know there's not an abundance of rep ops. You don't have all this. You don't have all this abundance you can't afford to miss, and so it is. We have to start thinking more about the system. How do we bring all of these pieces together and what are we doing, not to get this buyer through our process, but enabling the buyer to buy?
Andy:
Yeah, it's really. I mean, I keep coming back to the term decisiveness and part of this system systems thinking hit home when I just read a blog post by Jeffrey Moore you know he's the, he's one of the Godfathers of, you know, modern SAS marketing, arguably right crossing the chasm. And so everyone in the company is customer success. So we talk about go to market being selling a moment of value, and that is when the customer has achieved success to some extent or something, their use case, something very specific, right. And so if the whole company is customer success, then it's obvious you can extrapolate that to go to market and selling a moment of value and doing that very specifically and very deliberately.
Andy:
You brought up a use case. It needs to be that specific and we need to think about things to our point, about campaigns and about quick hits and this tactic, this campaign, really worked well as opposed to the company initiative. If the company is customer success and go to market is also a company initiative, you need to think about it more holistically than just this one thing I'm doing over here, that I'm not thinking about everything else going on over here and, to your point, that can cause disjointedness and disjointedness in the eyes of the customer is going to break down everything we talked about trust. Is this the right thing for me? Should I be talking to them? If they see anything inconsistent, it's over.
Gary:
Yeah, you bring up two really good points. The idea of moment of value. We say all the time that when a customer comes into your process, they actually probably begrudgingly click the request to demo link and come into your process. What they really want is to cut through all of that and get a glimpse of what someone who looks like them is on the other side and what they see. Help me see that what they really want to do is bypass all that. Go talk to somebody who's very similar to their business dynamics.
Gary:
How did you use the tool? What did you experience? Did you get the value out of it that you hoped? What paths did you take to get there? How did you get the team on board? That's what they want to know. That's because that's the risk that they're taking and, if we could, our whole job is to give them that and give it to them in a way that is very specific to their particular use case and given to them in the medium that they prefer, which isn't necessarily always through a salesperson. The other thing you mentioned relative to that, you bring up the campaign. Go back to call it three. Let's take January 24 as the line of demarket. 23 is the year of transition. 24 is the line of demarket Prior to 23,. Campaigns could be clever and work. It was a clever way to hijack the LinkedIn feed or a clever way to do a Facebook campaign or direct mail something that interrupted the feed, hacking right.
Andy:
We don't hear a lot about hacking.
Gary:
We don't hear hacking as much anymore, thank goodness. But yeah, it was all about being creative and how to, which will always be the case. We always need to pattern. Interruption is gonna be a good thing, but if that's the only thing that got you the success, that doesn't last very long and I would argue it lasts less. It's shorter than it's ever been Versus.
Gary:
It worked because we discovered a way to answer the questions the buyer had or get them to think about it in a new way, or it's more about the substance of what we delivered versus how we delivered it, and I think that the challenge in that is that organizations of that's of, again, lower middle market companies we have a lot of people brought in to execute, but execution, the success of execution is in what we're saying, why we're saying it, how we're saying it, and there's so much focus on the running of the campaign and the email, the things we should be doing.
Gary:
Like I looked left, I looked right. These are what the successful organizations are doing. We're looking at the mechanics of what they're doing Versus truly tearing down and spending the elbow grease necessary to get a common view of the buyer, their environment, all the things that they're dealing with and making that. Then it becomes a mission of great. Now we know what they need to know, and now we need to think about how do we make this consumable in as many ways as possible and put it in front of our buyers capital efficiently.
Andy:
It's that easy, so easy, right. The problem with that, now, right, is that takes longer. It just is gonna take longer, right? It's a whole company thing. I was thinking of it this way and this probably has flaws. But marketing needs to sell the vision of that of the moment of value, right, marketing sells the vision, sales sells that path and then customer success, which is the rest of the company, does the rest. They get people physically to that moment of value. But that's going to take longer, right. It's like marketing and sales Please like, have the same message. That's the starting point, because this is, you know, it should all be the same thing, especially to the same type of customer. You may have a couple of different segments that you alter this to, right, but when you're approaching that segment, you need to all be saying the same thing.
Gary:
Yeah Well, I think the biggest mindset shift is and we've said this marketing is eating sales. I would say it's also eating customer success and it doesn't mean that sales goes away and customer success goes away. It's really a mindset shift which is and it goes to what you see a lot of in Boredex is marketing influence pipeline, somewhat, in jest said, all pipeline is marketing influenced, Like it is the only discipline in the organization that literally touches every single aspect of, from the very, very tip of awareness all the way through the advocacy side of it. Right, they're involved in everything. And so, taking a more holistic approach about what is that set of information, what's the buyer journey, where are they in the various stages, what's the set of information they need, and then what is the best way to deliver it? It might be a sales conversation, it might be a customer success webinar or something educational, it might be an advertisement. I mean that's. The problem is that we have unnecessarily, I would argue, especially companies of this size is we still have these silos. We talk about sales and marketing alignment but we still have these silos where sales is doing its thing and marketing is doing this thing and then meanwhile the buyer is literally screaming in your ear at that first point, when they come in to tell you everything that you need to do to tell them to win, and we don't listen and we don't align and we don't, and I think that's gonna be the biggest difference in 24.
Gary:
The ones that have success are think about it as the you know again systems thinking. Think about it as the factory floor. A well run factory doesn't send a workstation off to maximize what it's doing, only to pile up sub-assemblies at the next workstation. It's looking at how do we get throughput through the factory? In our case, throughput through the factory is revenue that sticks and that comes when customers get value. And so if we have a bottleneck in one workstation, we'll go fix that bottleneck, but only to the point that it creates another bottleneck someplace else.
Gary:
Don't keep going. You're literally wasting your time Maximizing for leads, as an example, when your conversion rates start to slip or your ACVs start to slip, or it is literally bouncing around the revenue organization and fixing what is stuck, which most often is a function of we're not speaking to the buyers correctly. We're not giving them what they need. Maybe it's a pricing and packaging issue, like let's understand where we're getting stuck relative to what the buyer needs and solve that and focus our resources. So it really is a more holistic view, which is hard work. It really is. It's a complete mindset shift.
Andy:
Yeah, the peep post about selling as a brand as opposed to features really resonates there as well, I think, which is in that sea of noise a few features that are slightly better than especially an 800 pound gorilla that you're competing against as a lower middle market company isn't going to matter, and so it's even more reason to narrow your focus down to those that you absolutely know, and that's another thing you need to get to.
Andy:
You need to know you serve them very well. That's where not only prospects scream in your ear, but customers obviously do as well, and really really listening to that and knowing what you do well for them and narrowing your focus down to that, Because that's the place where you can whether this is the right analogy or not, but being the Coca-Cola of your industry might be a very small sliver of an industry, but if you present yourself as the solution to that sliver and the only solution that really works for that use case, and you say it enough and you say it in the right places, it becomes reality. That's marketing, right, Like perception is reality at some point. But if you deliver value along with that, then it works.
Gary:
Yeah, yeah, I think the uncomfortably small definition of whom you serve right, it gets. That's where it gets challenging is, over time, we've built up a portfolio of customers and they're, they're, they're all important, they're all these segments are important, they all, they all deliver revenue and it's terrifying to think of not listening to them, serving them or what have you. But especially organizations of this size, if you don't pick a horse to ride, especially in an environment where your messaging to the world has to be so precise to cut through the clutter, you aren't big enough to do that. Well, with more than one or two segments, one or two jobs, and that's the most challenging thing for a lot of organizations. They've got, oh, we've got a concentration of business and financial services and we've got some in healthcare, or perhaps I'm a solution only in financial services, and they're certain sizes, they're.
Gary:
In any case, the chances that you have exhausted your TAM in the segment that you serve the best are very, very small, and especially, again, at this size, which is your goal. We so often mix up the narrative that we try to tell investors who want to see a bigger TAM with what we need to go out and tell the market that, because the website is the storefront. We think of it as well when investors come to our website and they see that we're X but we're telling them Y. That's not going to work. So we have to be broader, we have to be bigger. We have, and that's where we start to fall apart.
Andy:
Well, just you brought up one other thing too that's worth touching on is a segment or ICP or persona which I don't love the term, but that's not firm of graphics necessarily. And then it can relate to it, to your point. Like some of those industries, they behave differently. Especially it pertains to, as it pertains to, buying your product right. But oftentimes we see, right when we do these, when we do this de averaging of customer prices, that it's not about the firm of graphics, that's not about what industry you're in. It's about some behavior, some trigger events, something occurring underlying that, and that's really what. That's really what your PAM is comprised of. That's really what your segment, your target audience, should be comprised of.
Andy:
So there may be concentrations in industry, but there's some underlying characteristic the way they do their job to be done. That incorporates your product. There's consistency around that across industries and that's the overriding thing that you may not be able to target on that right away or at all through some data scraping process, data acquisition process. You may have to speak to that. That's the other side of the equation. You can fish in the right pond or you can fish with the right lure to catch the type of fish you're trying to catch. Sometimes you need to try to do both.
Gary:
Yeah, yeah, well it's. You know there's no. And I think the point of all this is there is no easy button and that is so challenging because we were still shaking off 13 years of frankly easy buttons, which, for those that live through it, it probably feels a little sorry. We know it wasn't easy, we lived through it too, but it actually, with the benefit of hindsight, it really was, because it was very much about execution and tactics. And, yes, there was.
Gary:
There was a lot of great work being done in terms of how we think about messaging and the whom and what have you, but that for many, many companies didn't have to be as dialed in as it does now and the integration of activities throughout the funnel that we, so we can take advantage of this consecutive, consistent crank of the flywheel. I think that's the biggest challenge. So, you know, marketing leaders especially, but definitely sales leaders, this really is a lock arms moment. And and putting your getting ready, getting really, really close to the buyer, first of all, making sure that you're all in alignment on who the buyer is, ie, who is your ideal customer profile? Very, very specifically, not customers between 100 and 10,000 employees in financial services. That is not specific.
Gary:
You know there are a lot of different types of financial services credit unions, there's investment management companies, there's lender you know payday lenders. There's all kinds of stuff in there. So really being specific about whom you serve is paramount and making sure everybody understands that and that you actually have some evidence for that Not who you want to serve, but whom you actually serve, demonstrated product, market fit. And then really getting under the hood on the eyes of your buyer, the buyer group, the dynamics, understanding those things and then starting to think through okay, how can we help them answer the questions to enable them to buy, if we believe that our solution absolutely is the right solution for those people? For these reasons, now it becomes a function of creating a narrative and making that consumable in the format that they want to consume and making sure that's consistent.
Andy:
And that requires you know, in some cases trial and error. But to your point about you said this earlier they will tell you. They're going to tell you what they need. If they're a prospect, they're going to tell you how they're using your product to solve a problem and a job to be done. If they're your customer, that should be part of your process. But, for the love of God, create those feedback loops internally, because they're giving you those answers.
Gary:
Indeed, all right. Well, I think we're at time, so let's wrap up. I think it's been a tumultuous year for many people. I think there's been some, I feel, some, optimism for 24. I think that you know the if you think about late 22 going into 23, there was a lot of unknowns, a lot of uncertainty.
Gary:
While some of that still exists out there, I feel like everybody's kind of settled into this is the. You know the way it's going to be and now we just need to figure out how to work through that. So I think there's definitely some optimism, but also have to remember that you know there's there are bigger things in life to worry about than than go to market, and we're all very thankful for a great year, thank, thankful for health, for the opportunity to get together and spend time doing this and look forward to 24. I'm really excited about 24. I think for for GTM Pro, for for yield group, for, you know, really just leaning into this. So thank you guys Tiana, john, andy it's been a good year and I'm looking forward to an even better one next year.
Andy:
Thank you.
Gary:
All right.
Gary:
And also thank you for welcoming me into the group. I'm very happy to be here and I'm very excited for 24 too.
Gary:
We are very happy to have you here, tiana. None of this would be happening if you were not here, so we are pumped All right With that. Have a great holiday, happy New Year and bye.
Gary:
And that's us. Share this journey. Subscribe, engage and elevate your go to market skills Until next time. Go be a pro.