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Practical Go-to-Market guidance specifically for B2B software and service companies between $5MM-$50MM in revenue.
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#19: Marketing Master Playbook with Bill Macaitis
Good day PROs!
Join us in getting to know the transformative insights of Bill Macaitis, the marketing mastermind behind Slack, Zendesk, and Salesforce, as he shares the playbook for modern B2B marketing and growth strategies.
Core topics:
- Mastering Go-to-Market Strategies for Revenue Leaders - 0:05
- Product-Led Growth Strategy and Pricing - 11:42
- Implementing Product-Led Growth Strategies - 15:32
- Driving Behavior With Company-Wide Metrics - 25:36
- Building a Strong Brand Identity - 28:38
- Measuring Marketing Impact and Opacity - 36:56
- Journey of Marketing Success - 44:04
- Collaboration for Revenue Leader Growth - 52:56
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, works now. Okay, welcome to GTM Pro. We are super excited to have our friend Bill Masaitis here today. Bill is well known as the CMOs. That's a thing CMO of multiple companies Slack, zendesk, spent some time at SVP at Salesforce, but we're going to get to the more interesting part of his background here in a moment. But we're super excited to have Bill here today to help us walk through a variety of topics as we think about the state and the future state of go-to-market, particularly in the lower middle market. So, bill, welcome.
Bill Macaitis:Thank you so much for having me on here, honored to be here and excited to go through this.
Gary:All right, it's excellent. So are we so well, really, for the benefit of the audience, those who may not know you, would you mind providing just a brief background? I know a lot has been said about what you learned and brought to Slack, then to Zendesk and then prior to that Salesforce, but maybe just a quick hop, starting earlier in your career, and kind of just get a timeline, because we'll come back to that here in a minute.
Bill Macaitis:Yeah, sure. So basically 30 years doing pure play online, right. About half the career was in B2B, like what you said Slack, salesforce, zendesk but really before, that which really shaped me was 15 years on the B2C side. So I did a first online startup right out of college. It was in the gaming space. I didn't know there were things called vcs that would give you money, so we had to operate it in a profitable manner and you know, I just finished school and I thought that's what you're supposed to do. So it was an early three-tier sas subscription model. We had, you know, viral loops, seo, content inbound, um, and we did all those because we had to right. It was like we just didn't have a big marketing budget or big capital budget. So I think that always stuck with me, right. And when I went on past that, we sold that company.
Bill Macaitis:I went to work for several big media companies so IG Entertainment, rotten Tomatoes, ask Men and then we got acquired by News Corp and I ran centralized online marketing for a lot of their properties everything from, like, fox Sports to Wall Street Journal to American Idol and it was just really fun, right. And the type of growth tactics you use I always found were a little bit more progressive, maybe on the B2C side. When I came over to B2B even though we're in B2B software and SaaS I was kind of a little shocked because I'm like, wow, these seem really data tactics. It was like let's send out a press release, let's do top down selling and buy steak dinners right, let's hold a massive event and maybe those all have their place. But I just know there's other, more capital efficient ways to grow, and so that's something that's always been kind of instilled in me at an early age.
Gary:Yeah. So I'm curious did the gaming thing start when you were actually in college or what? What was all this in the loop, like I'm gonna do this. What was that cat it was in?
Bill Macaitis:college, I mean like any, at my time I was playing online games. I was playing command and conquer and doom and all these and, uh, you know, there were a couple other co-founders and we basically built this uh online ranking site. So it did laddersders and tournaments for all these types of online games. And a funny pivot there was that we were initially were selling to all the other college kids who had no money, and so we were making a little bit of money, but not that much. And then we finally realized that there were this much older demographic that was playing classic card games, you know, hearts, spades, pinnacle, bridge, and they had a lot of disposable income and so we kind of pivoted to that. And, man, they were happy to pay for that gold membership, that platinum membership, you know, get their name with a little gold symbol and all these extra stats. It was kind of crazy, but you know it totally worked.
Gary:Yeah, you know what's what's really interesting? I mean, you mentioned all of the buzzwords of, you know, product led growth, but those didn't exist, like the whole concept of the actual library and best practices and all those things. So you were literally making it up as you went along and you mentioned that some of that learning as you went then to the B2B side. So and I think that's a lot honestly of what we feel of where we are now from a go-to-market perspective, is that if you look back I've posted a graphic about this recently If you look back to call it 2010, 2009, that's an entire generation of people who have grown up in this post-SAS zero interest rate up and to the right, literally just do something and growth would happen.
Gary:I'm oversimplifying it and I feel like in true efficient market performance, we have extracted all of the value that comes out of those tactics in many ways the low hanging value, right, the arbitrage value, and so now just throwing up ads on Google and, you know, doing some social ads and things like that, like the only players that seem to win in that are the marketplaces, the very channels that do it, and it's gotten really hard, which almost causes us to come back to the core principles of marketing again, and so you know you've, you've seen a lot over this 30-year period. What have you seen that's changed as companies again in the lower middle market are thinking about how they should be, thinking more broadly about go-to-market, and what do you think is just what's old is new again.
Bill Macaitis:It's a great question. So, lower mid-market I love that segment. I think they have an incredible opportunity. A lot of reason why, too, is because they're still relatively young. They can embrace a more modern go-to-market.
Bill Macaitis:And I probably said, the biggest thing I've learned working across all these different companies and advising a lot of companies is that go-to-market should be always evolving, always improving, always innovating. It's like your product, right? So if you are a engineering-led founder or product-led founder, you're not going to have your product be static. You're going to be constantly improving it. New languages, new technical architecture that comes out Well. Go-to-market is the same thing.
Bill Macaitis:There's been incredible advancements in the last 20 years, 10 years, five years, last year, right, whether you're talking, you know IBM, intent-based marketing. Whether you're talking, product-led growth, freemium models, time-delayed threshold upgrade drivers. You know building brands within product and product messaging, seo, content nurturing there's so many new tactics to helping grow your company. And I think just walking in with an eyes wide open and going like, hey, maybe there is a better way to do this, maybe there is a more capital efficient way to do this, I think in a lot of ways, like what you talked about, we don't have that zero interest rate environment anymore and, in a weird way, that's kind of good, because it's forcing us all to think about well, how are we acquiring this growth? How expensive was it, how repeatable was it, how scalable was it? Especially if you're in the SMB or mid market, you know types, type, segments, it's. It's a great revolution that's happening and I think it's forcing a lot of people to explore new models, explore product growth, explore some of these more advanced marketing channels, and I think that's a great thing.
Gary:Yeah, I agree. So you brought up something too, and I know that from our previous conversations that this is something near and dear to you as well, as before we even get to tax tactics is this idea of obsessing over the customer and customer centricity. So talk a little bit about that and I think, even going back to it, it seems like the B2C experience really, because that's truly buyer psychology if you think about it. Experience really, because that's truly buyer psychology if you think about it right, and I'm sure that came with you then in the B2B and probably was part of your superpowers as you were through there but as you think about the importance of where these companies start, because prioritization is a big thing, what are some key thoughts around how you would go about doing that and the importance of it.
Bill Macaitis:Yeah, I'm a huge believer in a customer-centric playbook. I think when you're in the B2C side, you don't have as many layers in between you and the end customer, right, like a lot of times you're having a much more direct type of contact. And what I had just noticed is like when I went to the B2B side, you know, I was a CMO, I was buying a lot of software and it wasn't a pleasant experience. You know, go to a website, oh, okay, this kind of looks interesting and like what do they do? Okay, I want to watch this video and it's like no, no, no, you got to fill out a 30 page form, you know. And then you're immediately called and I'm like wait, wait, I'm just researching. Like I'm not even ready to like buy it for you yeah, no soup for you, right, um?
Bill Macaitis:and then you know I finally would buy the software and I had like 10 sales people helping me buy it and then the minute I bought it, like they all ran away and I got assigned like one one thousandth of a customer success person who also was just trying to get me to buy more of the software. Right, you know, if I did need help in the product, the, the support link was totally buried. It was like I'm just getting a form reply. It would take three weeks to get a response from um. You know, the, the mobile website was horrible. I couldn't even use it. Um, it was just like, really, these bad experiences.
Bill Macaitis:And I and I'm a big believer, coming from the B2C side again that the brand isn't your logo, your slogan.
Bill Macaitis:The brand is the sum of all these different experiences that you have with the company, and a lot of times in b2b, those first experiences are with your marketing team, your sales team, your support team, your success team, even before you get into the product.
Bill Macaitis:So I'm just a big believer like, hey, you know, if you're thinking about the, the holy grail of capital, efficient growth, that's word of mouth. That's when someone just loves you, has a great experience with you and is recommending you, and what I found was a lot of B2B companies were polluting that experience, like actively like people hated it. And you see this right, like when you look at customer centric metrics like net promoter score, average B2B software score for a long time was like a minus 19. That's like, that's horrible. You're like in the negative range. You have more people actively saying stay away from this company that are actually saying good things about it, right. So I think, like to me, like the customer centric experience has really shaped how I go to market. It changes the metrics I look at right, like things like net promoter score or product qualified leads or daily active users. You know we use a lot of different metrics in some of these, like Slack and and Zendesk, and you did historically with just traditional funnel metrics.
Gary:Yeah, so speaking of Slack and Zendesk, I mean in that case huge, huge user bases, right. And then obviously, slack is famous, for I don't know if they invented it, but they certainly seem to have perfected the product-led approach. Now, lots talked about the sales influence on top of that, but do you think it was that dynamic that almost forced them into that degree of understanding the end user, like you would, a consumer? I mean, how would you? What were some of the key ingredients you saw there that led to that appreciation and how to build that internally?
Bill Macaitis:Yeah, I think one of the big thing was the leadership team at Slack all had a consumer background. So, literally, stuart, you know for those that don't know, slack used to be a game. It was called Glitch right and it didn't work out.
Gary:But you know, thank goodness it didn't work out.
Bill Macaitis:We wouldn't have it back today. There you go. You had a lot of people that had gaming backgrounds, right, and thought about things like you know, the editorial tone and voice, the experience, what it was like to sign up, what it was like to get value. You know, our core values at Slack were things like, you know, empathy and customer centricity and craftsmanship. Again, we had very customer centric metrics and that all drove us down a different path. Right, we did a lot of things that were different there.
Bill Macaitis:Like we innovated on, I would argue, pricing and packaging is one of the biggest levers. So for SMBs or mid markets out there, like your, pricing and packaging is one of the biggest influences on your growth and also your monetization of that growth, right, so we innovated a lot on, just historically in B2B, first of all, you usually didn't even have any type of free plan. When B2B organizations started to have innovate a little bit, it was just a free trial, but it was either, you know, crip-a-ware or only you know it was very user-gated or time-gated, right. And you know, here comes Long Slack. And our strategy was hey, we're going to offer a very full featured free plan. But the basic idea was like, when you moved up the levels. As opposed to differentiating on features, we differentiate on enterprise requirements. So when you move to the higher plans, you got things like a dedicated customer success manager. You got 99.99% uptime, you got provisioning and deprovisioning, consolidated billing, legal compliance, exports all these things that, like, enterprises need.
Bill Macaitis:But it was a very different playbook and so I think a lot of those things the product growth, my role at Slack I evolved to more. I took on the sales success, support and marketing, so we had all those customer facing teams under one leader and that helped to rethink. What are the metrics they get? How do we become more customer centric and how do we pull all these functions and put them into the product and, the end of the day, that's what I really think PLG is. It's just this idea that people are spending more of their time in the product. So you have to figure out how you allow people to buy it within the product, how to support them within the product. You know how to educate them within the product, and it's just a little bit of a different playbook.
Gary:Yeah, there's so much to impact just right there as we think about it. So let's talk about pricing and packaging for a moment, because it's a really complex topic that we run into all the time, and what we see often is that there's go-to-market and then there's product, and then somewhere in a back room, in a boiler room, is developed pricing and packaging, and the way we see it is go-to-market and product. Go-to-market strategy and product strategy are literally the yin and yang, and so, as you describe the pricing and packaging that you developed at Slack, it was business model design, right. The product was developed with go-to-market in mind. Go-to-market was developed with product in mind, and so they were run together and it's so.
Gary:So that's the beauty of, I think, having some of that consumer mindset from the outset. Right is that they were really thinking about this adopt versus buy, yep, and for companies that have already have us, they've already ridden the sales-led motion and now they're starting to think about how do we make our product more accessible and how do we will offer a free version of it. What are, within the companies that you've advised buys that are already in that stage, how should they be thinking about the really challenging thing of of adding a PLG motion and then the impacts that has in pricing and packaging, but just prioritization and how to do that, cause that's much more difficult than starting there, absolutely so.
Bill Macaitis:Look, I'll say one thing, hey, for the audience here that's listening to this if you are SMB bid market, you have a huge advantage over traditional enterprises here. The hardest thing about PLG is just implementing it, and what I mean by that is that there is a ton of historical inertia that comes from whatever pricing and packaging SLG motion you built when you started. It's really hard to move from that. You literally are the tanker, oil tanker, going through the sea trying to change course, right. So the earlier you are as a company, um, the easier it is to change that Right, um, but you do have to walk in eyes wide open.
Bill Macaitis:One of the reasons a POG motion is very difficult to pull off is because it is a cross-functional initiative. You need people from marketing, from sales, from product, from finance all working together. One of the reasons pricing never gets touched is because, like, first off it's kind of nebulous, like who owns it Right? Is that finance that owns it? As a salesman, as a product that owns it right? You have to get big consensus for all of them. It's just a super hard gray area. A lot of times companies don't put hey, one person's in charge of it, right, and PLG is all about infusing these different elements into the product. So, for instance, like at Slack, a big part of a PLG motion for us was making it a simpler, more fun to use product Right. Like a lot of times, like I found, like B2B software companies, they just want to add features. You know, oh, we need this feature, we need this feature. Sales said, we need this feature, we need this feature. And every time you add features it ironically makes your product much harder to use.
Andy:Right.
Bill Macaitis:It just gets more complex, Right, yeah, Um, and so, like a lot of times for POG, for us marketing, we would work directly with product people and go hey, let's go through, let's re-go through the signup process, Right, Um, how can we make it simpler? How can we reduce friction? Also, how can we make it more fun, Right? So we created a really fun unique editor tone and voice and we inserted that into the product, into the signup flow Anytime people have interactions with Slack. Our release notes were fun A lot of times, just the education around it. We had a fun, witty, unique tone and voice For a lot of companies because those teams are so separated, you just have backend developers writing your dialogue. I don't do any good backend developers that write really fun, entertaining dialogue. It's usually like cancel order four, three, seven, two, five.
Gary:It tends to be direct.
Bill Macaitis:yes, really fun, entertaining dialogue, right, it's usually like cancel order 43725. It has to be direct. Yes, yeah, right. So you know, I think PLG initiatives are hard. You have to walk in eyes wide open that, hey, there's a lot of cultural inertia that's going to go against it. They're incredibly capital efficient, but you have to make sure you resource it appropriately, make sure you have a cross-functional initiative going.
Bill Macaitis:You have to have the right metrics. I mentioned earlier. You know metrics like product qualified leads, net promoter score, daily active users all those things are really important. And then you have to think about how the pricing and packaging is going to support that right. Do you have some type of tier that allows people to, in a low friction way, start using it? Do you have a seed and grow motion? Right, like Slack, sendus, salesforce all those companies we grew by getting little tiny pilots and installments and all these different companies and they would start to grow naturally. Right, some software companies don't even allow that. Right, you have to go through sales. You have to do a top-down motion. So I would definitely encourage PLG. I'm a huge, huge fan of it. At the same time, you have to walk in. This is a pretty big initiative and you have to have people that have been there and understand how to resource it appropriately.
Gary:Yeah, you mentioned one thing, bill, in your description of product-led that we agree with as well, which is, when you say product-led growth, we immediately think of the free product that leads to the upsell, the users, and then the enterprise version, everything you just described. That was beautifully done by Slack. But the other thing you mentioned is the barrier to communication we often have with our customers and how we think about using the product to make that communication Like they're in it, more often than reading our emails from marketing or certainly talking to our salespeople, or certainly talking to our salespeople. And then, related to that then is how then do we use that as an opportunity, based on the packaging that we provide, to give them natural paths to upgrade?
Gary:I think a lot of times we see number one, we're going to communicate everything through some marketing channel, typically email. And number two, our packages are built on, we built these features. Now we need to monetize them. Let's put them together in packages a, b and c without regard for, well, what is what if I only need one of the thing in package a and I don't need the other thing? What and what? What is the business problem that I can actually solve with package a or b or c, um, so I thought that was something that that, uh, that to consider it baby steps towards product-led right. It's thinking now, okay, you've got this installed base, you're a sales-led motion. It is Herculean to move to product-led. We get that, but how can we be thinking about bringing in product-led elements into that? Have you seen that? Any glimmers of success from that?
Bill Macaitis:transition. Yeah, so, you're right. So POG encompasses a lot of different things. I have a checklist that's literally 27 different items, right? So there's a lot of things in there, but one of them that you had mentioned, which is, you know, don't let perfect be the enemy of good, and, you know, let's start breaking these down to little pieces that we could actually implement, right, so is in product messaging, right?
Bill Macaitis:So, for me, this is the idea that, like you said, people spend their time on the product. They're not going to your blog, they're not reading your emails, they're not going to junk mail. We may like to think as marketers, it is, but it's not. But they're in your product, right? So how do you, as a marketing team, educate, inform your users of what's going on? And so, at Slack, zendesk both of of those at Salesforce we had, I call them in product messaging modules right? So, you know, this could be as simple as hey when you log in, as opposed to just having you know email password and a giant blank page. Put a med rec there. You know, medium rectangle, right? That's like an ad unit, and use that to, you know, let people know. Hey, there's new features coming out. By the way, did you know we offered this plan? Hey, we have a special going on here. Hey, here's what this cool customer did. That's using us Tons of great content.
Bill Macaitis:Marketing teams create lots of content. A lot of times they only use that for net new prospects, which I think is like a flaw of marketing. They're metric the wrong way. They shouldn't just be put on leads, they should be put on overall ARR, because a lot of times 50% of your revenue SaaS company is like add on, upgrade, expansion, right, and if you're only having customer success or A's, do that. That's all one-to-one knife fights. Well, marketing, we're good at scaling stuff, right, so put that in the login page. Or maybe you know, spend a little time and create an in-product. You know education module somewhere in the product, right, that you can let people know again the cool features that maybe they're not aware of. The new plans that just launched cross-pollinate if you're a multi-product family, so that's for me a really good example.
Bill Macaitis:Product-led growth is infusing your marketing, your sales, your success, your support into the product. Another example, maybe on the customer success side, is you think about it, we sign these amazing customers. I think it was a huge customer you just signed, you got. You're like I hope they're successful. I want them to be successful.
Bill Macaitis:Well, a lot of times we're very reactive. We wait for they go on the product, they have a problem, and then they reach out to us. Well, hey, we've had you know in product chat for a while now. Right, right, like why couldn't we just put that? But, as opposed to putting on your pricing page on the website, put in the product and maybe that customer success person is there. So the first time the person from this huge account comes in, you're like hey, I'm Sarah Just checking in, like, how's it going? Are you finding everything right? Like, oh yeah, that's a little hard to use. Let me walk you through how you get your first account created or how you do whatever X, y, z. That's a good example of pulling your success into the product. So there's lots of these, I think, these little moments where you have opportunities, right.
Bill Macaitis:Another thing I'll say, like a small little thing you can do, is just try to make your product simpler. Now, that may seem like you're boiling the ocean. There's tons of things, but maybe just go through and go hey, what are our top two use features, you know? Hey, let's go back and let's polish them. How can we make them more easy to use, more intuitive? You know, I remember when Slack launched emoji reactions which, by the way, people love emojis. I know it's B2B software, but put them in there, they'll use your product way more.
Bill Macaitis:And the first version we made it was horrible. It would literally. It was like you had to mouse perfectly over to this rectangle up at the top of the screen. If you didn't do it, it would disappear. When you did come on it, the emojis were random. They put it like really weird on the message. And you know we could have just launched and said, okay, move on to the next feature. But we said, hey, let's keep polishing it, make it more intuitive, make it more simpler, reduce friction right, and I find that's a big thing, like people recommend you because you're simple, easy to use, fun, right, and that's very different than how most B2B companies think about how they build their product, right. So, anyways, there's lots of things. Yeah, I'd say with PLG, don't let you know perfect be the enemy of good. You can break these things into little components and start getting real returns right now.
Gary:Yeah, that's some. We're jotting notes feverishly. Some great, some great golden. I think that's some. We're jotting notes feverishly because there's some great golden words.
Andy:I think that's a huge thing that you guys have been touching on, which is PLG, does not have to be an upheaval and especially in the lower middle market, you aren't going to be able to shift from sales led to that, because that's kind of the big ship that's hard to steer for even a smaller company is they've they've started sales led. Oftentimes that's founder led sales motion, and so just to do this other thing sounds like a lot and it is a lot if you, if you try and do it all, but what you're just saying is there are bite-sized things you can do in that absolutely absolutely yeah, you have to be ready for them Easy actions there.
Bill Macaitis:I'm sorry, go ahead, go ahead.
Tiana:No, you have to be ready for them. As you said, you have to have the metrics, the resources and the prioritization and make your whole, like your whole DTM engine, understand what they're going for, Because if not, it's like Andy and Gary said in our previous podcast the goal will be product growth and not exactly just placing your customer.
Bill Macaitis:Yeah, and to your point. Look, if you're a CEO, a founder, listening to this, if you want to get into POG and you have no idea what to do, I'll give you one easy tip and everything will start working towards it Change your metrics, say hey, as a company, we are now metriced on three things. We're metriced on net promoter score. We're metric on daily active users, that's how many people come to your software every day. And we're metric on product qualified leads, that's people that have gone into the product and have enough usage that they pass a threshold, that they go to sales. You could do nothing else and just go hey, teams, this is how you're metric. We're going to get a big bonus if we hit our goals here, and the teams will figure it out because they're going to radically change their behavior. Right, when marketing now goes oh, I have to get more people using the product every day. How do I get more people using the product? Well, I should probably spend time in it. I went through that sign-up flow last week. It's horrible, right. Oh, yeah, it fun to be in our product. Product's like oh, maybe we'll add some emoji. Our number one integration at Slack, giphy, it wasn't HubSpot or Salesforce or Marketo. It was Giphy right, so product was making it more fun.
Bill Macaitis:Finance is like oh well, how do we reduce friction? Maybe we can try a free plan right? Legal's like oh, we don't want to have this massive terms of service. Let's rewrite it to make it simpler so people enjoy it more. We get a better net promoter score. Like the metrics. I'm a big believer. Metrics drive behavior and in a typical SLG company you have very different metrics. Right, and it's just going to incentivize the marketing is only going to care about creating leads. Sales is going to care about closing business products only going to care about adding new features. So you know, something is just. You know, re-explore those metrics you're using and re-explore like hey, how can we make these company-wide metrics? And let the teams they will naturally figure all that stuff out.
Gary:Yeah, and as you said that, bill, it reminded me of two things, because I was going to go back to you were talking about the various things that you can do to think differently about how we accomplish something, but starting first with understanding the buyer, the customer, and what they're trying to achieve and the experience that they prefer to have, and then determining what your tactics should be. So often we get in we're like, well, we look left, we look right and we're like, well, they're doing that, so let's do that, that's best practice now, so we'll go do that thing, you can do the motion, but if you're not delivering the experience and the value and the information that your customer needs, it doesn't matter what tactic you do Right. And so related to that was was also the, as we we forget so often that the business is an operating system. It's a complex system and when we tweak one variable we impact another, and so we have these discrete variables that are like marketing success. You pointed it out Marketing success is heavily biased towards new logo acquisition, despite the fact that they literally cover the entire end-to-end revenue threshold, or buyer experience.
Gary:Obviously, sales is sales, and then CS tends to be more post and it's like look, if we are really thoughtful and we make changes at the beginning of the experience, every metric downstream will change, and so we've got to be thinking more holistically.
Gary:Okay, absolutely. We could go on for two hours, but I know you don't have two hours, so I'm going to try to keep this brief. So the other thing you mentioned that is a hot topic is brand, and so I will say, as a board member, one of the things that we kind of cringe when we hear a new marketing leader come in is to say well, we really need to quote, refresh our brand, and as we think about all the stuff that needs to happen and and you know that might actually be true and done, done well, that's, that's absolutely what needs to happen, but it's such an amorphous term about what that means. So, for a company that can't buy ads in the wall street journal and, you know, doesn't have TV and huge budgets to spend, how should they be thinking about brand, like, what's the core kernel of that, and how would a marketer communicate that to the board?
Bill Macaitis:as an example, yeah, a great, great question. So, look, the good news is, uh, smb, mid-market founders, you don't need to spend a ton of money, um, to have a great brand. So the couple of action items I would recommend there is first off, start measuring brand right, like a lot of people cringe when they hear marketing say that because marketing has wasted a ton of money and haven't shown any impact. Right, let's be honest. So you know, coming from the B2C side, we always track brand metrics. Right, that's very normal. Right, you would track things like aided recall, unaided recall, sentiment, share a voice, share a conversation.
Bill Macaitis:There is a plethora of good brand metrics out there. You know there's been tons of good technology advances where it doesn't cost that much to track those anymore. And start tracking them right, then you can at least know like when I joined Slack, that's one of the first things I did is I started tracking brand metrics. I tracked, like our, our, uh, aided recall. Aided recall is like you literally ask you know someone into your target demographic. Like, hey, when you think of team communication software, which of the following companies are you familiar with? Right, like slack, ms, teams, hip chat, like whatever it was at that time period unaided is you don't even give the give the names. You're just like, hey, when you think of team communication software, what is it right? But you'll get a number right, like when I started. We were like at three percent. You know, it was really low.
Gary:Everybody in silicon valley knew us, but the minute you went to east and so, for context, let's go back when you started at slack yeah, 50 people. What was?
Bill Macaitis:yeah, uh, very very small first marketer came in as cmo and built out all those teams from scratch.
Gary:So when we say that's, I think I wanted to point that out because when people hear, oh, Slack, of course you've got, you know, all of these brand metrics and all these things, but you started measuring brand effectively at the same stage that our audience is at.
Bill Macaitis:We had, I think, maybe one other market. I hired one marketer at that time. I usually hire an ops person as my first hire marketer at that time. I usually hire an ops person as my first hire and I'd worked with this person before and we knew how to track it and we just started running a survey. We use SurveyMonkey to get the aided unaided information Cost, maybe, like I don't know, like 300 for each survey. It wasn't that much.
Bill Macaitis:We do it on a monthly cadence and it allowed us to see, right, like, hey, our awareness is growing like this. Oh, when we ran this campaign it went up, right, and you can also see the awareness of all your competitors too, which is kind of cool. Right, like, um, cause, you know, I've done sales too and that's really frustrating. When you walk into a room, or CEO founder, they go in and this company has no idea who you are. You know, and you have to start from ground zero, right, and you know, that's why we see like these huge long deal cycles, you know, six months, a year, two years, because you're starting from scratch. So, anyways, I'd say again, just start measuring it. It's like the POG stuff, like, start just measuring those metrics and that will, you know, incentivize and encourage people to start thinking about it. The other thing, too, that I found is like, look, I have run Super Bowl ads. I've run multi-million $30 million ad campaigns, but I've also run a ton of campaigns that didn't have any program dollars attached to it.
Bill Macaitis:So, again, the biggest thing I would recommend is like, hey, create a unique visual identity. So look a little different than your other 10 competitors. So if you go in the analytics space, everyone looks the exact same. They're all white background, black text, way too much text on the pages. Right, create a unique visual identity. Right, like I'm working with, uh, yellowai, love them great ai company. When I first started working with them, they have yellow anywhere. I'm like, you're called yellowai, seems. Yes, they embrace that. Right, like zendesk, we embrace green. That was our thing. Right, uh, you know we had a buddha's is, you know, kind of like you know, the personification of what zendesk was, because it, you know, reduced the chaos and simplification. Um, but create a visual identity, create a tone and voice. Right, like, have someone from marketing that can write really good copy or fun copy. But then here's the thing as opposed to spending 20 million dollars, putting into a marketing campaign. Put it into the product, like, rewrite the dialogue of that signup flow. You know, make your product have some color background to it, like Slack had a, you know a tartan pattern that we put directly into the product. That's your brand.
Bill Macaitis:Your brand is like how people feel about it. You know, create some fun moments in the product, right. So for those that have, you know, ever used Carta, they do equity management when you get stock options. You know, when you get a stock grant, they do a little confetti like, oh, like you got it. And for a lot of people that's their first stock grant, like, oh, this is a big moment in their life, Like, I just accepted it. That's a great fun moment. They could have easily done. You have accepted grant seven, four, three, two, five, next, you know, but they, they made it a fun moment, right. So when you infuse these fun moments, have a little bit more life, maybe have a mascot.
Bill Macaitis:Um, people like the brand, the perception towards that company changes. All those emotions transfer onto your brand. The fun, the smile that they have, right, the interactions transfer onto your brand and you create these brand loyalists and evangelists that go out there and talk about you and really spread the word. That doesn't require $20 million. You probably have the resources right now. But again, because the metrics, because you probably told your marketing team I just generate leads. They're never even touching the product. That's the last thing from their mind, right? And that product is a different org and they sit over there or they're different. You know they just they don't work together at all. So, anyway, that's a. That's a simple, actionable way, like I've seen, is take all the fun stuff you see in the website and put it into the product. That will make a huge difference.
Gary:Yeah, that's great, great advice, and I love the just tactical, pragmatic nature of it and it. You know one of the things that we talk about as well in terms of brand, and Andy's talks about this, and you know, if you think about Google search, you look at the performance of branded pay-per-click right brand search people like that. That looks really good. I want to do more of that. Like, well, you don't go just conjure up brand as I'm stealing your thunder here, andy, but the idea behind that is, of course, that it, especially in a space where you're early on, you're a smaller company, you have to be super, super tight on whom you serve and then part of your brand is serving them.
Gary:Like you think about all the thought leadership stuff you're supposed to do because they're supposed to get leads, but why not actually make it something, with everything you just described, that becomes part of your identity, with everything you just described, that becomes part of your identity? Like you have the tone of voice and you have the color, but now it's also value added for that particular product and segment and like that's brand right? Yeah, absolutely, guess what it starts to establish. You know, get on the day one list before they get to the buying cycle. Absolutely, I love that, okay. So another thing that you mentioned here was well, let's see, we talked about having the customer focus before tactics, so that was really helpful. And I had one other thing and I got so excited about the brand thing I got distracted. So I've been hogging all the questions.
Andy:So, andy, if you want to jump in here, well, yeah, I mean on that establishing brand, I mean I think the the companion piece to that is the measurement. So we've been talking a lot about how you can't really measure attributions dead. You don't have all those levers like we even used to with UTM parameters and so on. And as you get smaller, with marketing dollars, even if you did have all that visibility, that would be really minimal. What have you seen? For you know, even in cases with bigger companies doing smaller campaigns, how are they measuring those impacts, either on a campaign basis or, you know, to the brand, or you know we've talked about media mix modeling and so on that there's ways you can kind of do it from a temporal basis or even a regional basis, obviously with out of home as a great example of that. But how have you seen people deal with especially the opacity of measurement?
Bill Macaitis:Yeah, it's a big problem and it's one of the reasons why sometimes board members get nervous when marketing people say they need five million, 10 million, whatever budget, right, because a lot of times they're not able to back that up. And that's difficult too, because a lot of times you know marketers, a lot of times you have more creative folks, right, and you need that, but it's hard for creative folks to know. You know multi-touch attribution modeling and mixed modeling and it's just, it's difficult, right. So probably the most effective thing that I've seen, which is also one of the cheapest ways to do it and you had touched on it a little bit, andy there was using control groups and either geo or segment targeting. So what I mean by that is most marketers, they get excited. We wanna run this campaign. We're gonna run it everywhere. Everyone sees this, right. The whole US sees it. Whatever is, start with. Start with a small region, right? So slack. When we started leveraging up our um, our, our ad campaign efforts, we started with like three cities and then we had very similar sister cities that did not get the campaign, and then we measured okay, well, how much should this improve our band metrics, our aided recall or uned recall how much did this improve our band metrics, our aided recall, our uned recall, how much did it increase new leads pipeline, closed deal sentiment towards the brand against the control group? Right, okay, because you know there's always external events that happen too, right, like recessions happen, interest rates move and this and that. But if you have control groups, you can account for those factors. Or let's say, hey, you're mid-market, you, you, you're big slg motion, no problem, right? Maybe, uh, marketing is doing a big abm campaign for you, right? So whether that's saturating ads, you know whether that's content, whether that's personalized home page, where that's sending personalized gifts, that's awesome. Maybe you have a top 50 abm list. Don't send it to all 50, send it to 25, 25, get it 25. Don't, right. And then you just measure, same thing, okay, for the ones that got it, what was our average deal size? You know what was the deal velocity? How long did these deals take to close? You know anecdotal information from the salespeople when you know they had those meetings.
Bill Macaitis:Oh, yeah, I've already seen you guys, or I know you like, everywhere I turn, see, I see some content or your ads, but you have a control group. Um, I know, that's always been a big thing for me, like. I think like, data is the antidote to politics, and when you don't have that, it devolves into these like oh, it was amazing, and look at shiny object, we did so good. Um, so when you have that, you know you've got some pretty good data right. Um, it's no, there's no attribution, that's 100% perfect. But does it give you confidence?
Bill Macaitis:Yes, and when we did that Slack, like, our board saw that and they said, okay, we're seeing like, so we started a couple of cities. Okay, let's do it more. Okay, now we did a big region and we had a control group that didn't get it. It did good. Then we said, hey, let's do it for all of us, right, okay, we did all us. But guess what Rest of the world was our control group there? Right, and it allowed to just slowly build confidence and understand that, hey, you can do this and you don't have to spend a huge amount on tech to do that, you just have to have discipline and have control groups.
Bill Macaitis:I remember even when I was a sales force, you know, there was a lot of pressure hey, we have to come with a new messaging and the whole team's working on it and they're ready to go live with it. I'm like whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, do not put this live to everyone. The minute you put this live to everyone, we're never going to know, you know, if there was some external factor that caused you know the increase or the decrease to happen at the same time. I'm like, just just put it to 50% of the audience, right, and so you know. I think you can use control groups for everything, but it's a very simple and effective way to understand marketing effectiveness and return on spend.
Gary:Not surprisingly, that is exactly the question that I was headed toward. So, andy, you read my mind. We thought we'd hear bill, which is, I think, especially in the lower middle market. Again we're so, after years and years and years of everything being attribution, attribution measure, the last click, the first click, you know the w, whatever that. And now we're in an environment where the opacity of that information right, I mean the platforms are stripping it out, the devices are stripping it out, and so you, now you're flying more blind than ever and we have again a whole generation of marketers who literally don't know what to do, because they've never had to think more holistically about. Let's think about it, let's take a portfolio approach to this, and we have these sets of things and we're going to isolate this. It's like you know, back in the day we spent a lot of time in marketing studying statistics. Well, because in a business, world.
Gary:It's about statistical modeling to try to figure out what's working and what's not. And I really believe that we're back at that point because so much of the buyer journey is opaque to us. It's happening on our competitors' websites, it's happening in communities, it's happening on platforms we can't see or measure, it's happening through word of mouth, the ultimate capital efficient growth engine, and it's really hard to measure that, and so that's why we advocate. I think an enormous amount of time and energy can be spent by companies of this size focused on attribution, when, if you take a big step back and look at how much you're spending and on the channels and what you're spending, like you can only be on so many many channels, why are you crushing yourself trying to get down to the last knit on attribution when you've missed the forest?
Bill Macaitis:absolutely, I love the approach that you just laid out there. Yeah, and just add to that, you know, gary, and in my experience, especially in b2b, whether you're smb, urban market, these are our long deal cycles right, the higher you go up to, the longer the deal cycles get, you know, three months, six months, a year or two years. I think the most fundamental thing that I came to conclusion is you have to view these as journeys. You know these are not isolated one events that cost someone to become a lead or cost someone to buy it right. I did a ton of research as a salesperson. We saw is like people would have 10, 20, 30 interactions before they even became a lead and then, from lead, another 10, 20, 30 interactions to close business.
Bill Macaitis:The idea is ludicrous that you would give all the credits to the very first thing or the very last thing they did. How are you nurturing them, educating them and looking at it from a holistic journey standpoint if you have that myopic mindset and I think a lot of times these out of the box first or last touch attribution that comes with a lot of marketing automation software just pits these marketing teams against each other. They get tagging words and just trying to get the last thing they did, which makes no sense. What about all the nurturing that has to happen along the way, right Like those channels get no credit. So yeah, I'm a big believer. You have to view these as journeys.
Gary:Yeah, how did you? With that in mind, we agree a hundred percent. One of the challenges you have is that every journey is different, and so it's very hard to throw into a dashboard and measure. How did? What are some ways that you've seen more recently where people have used the, the informed, or the you know, the assessment of a journey, to inform what they're doing. How are they, you know, doing that? Are they like tearing down a specific deal and looking back at the journey and almost doing like a retrospective, or how are they doing that?
Bill Macaitis:I think you know one. Just talking to your customers, you know getting direct conversations, learn from them. Like I, I always liked the net promoter score survey Cause it also asked the why question. You know, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague? That's the main question.
Bill Macaitis:And then, why is the second one and you learn a lot right about, like how people find out about you, what they're learning. And probably the biggest thing I've seen, where a lot of companies are taking steps toward is moving beyond pure bottom funnel content to having mid funnel and top of funnel content right, like having an entire journey worth right. Like if all your content is just we're awesome. Here's 10 reasons to buy us. You know I call it brochure wear, like slimy brochure wear. It's just like every little page is like we're amazing, right, but you're skipping that step where, like you mentioned at the beginning of this conversation, you know people are researching products well before they even have that first contact with you, right? So how do you engage in those conversations? How do you create content that is helpful and useful and valuable?
Bill Macaitis:I remember our most popular piece of content as Zendesk had nothing to do with what Zendesk sold. It was, you know, the top 10 interview questions for hiring customer support agents. You know tons of directors, customer support, do that every day. They you know big teams a lot of turnover. That was super helpful for them. Day. They you know big teams, a lot of turnover. That was super helpful for them.
Bill Macaitis:But you know we were, we were ticketing system. We didn't, you know, we didn't, we weren't a recruiting system or anything like that. But it was very helpful and it helped introduce them to the brand, help educate them, you know, with other content that lets them know hey, this is, this is the space we're in, here's how it's different. And then you slowly get into hey, here's us and this is company. Here's what some of our customers are doing, here's what our product is. Then you finally get into like okay, are you ready to start with us? Here's our pricing. But too often I find in these journeys we just skip straight to like here's our pricing, start with us, buy us now, right.
Andy:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Bill Macaitis:And you were like whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You know, that's probably going to have low conversion odds on that one.
Gary:I don't even know your name.
Andy:I have a different version of that, as a joke in fact, about pizza and dating. If you will Not safe for work? Yes, Not for public consumption, that very that very. There you go.
Gary:I know we're running a little tight on time here, but I want to go back to one thing that you touched on in your experience at Slack directly and that is what we're hearing quite a bit more about. You know finding a way to have that work more specifically, so at Slack it sounds like you really were able to develop that over time to have marketing, sales, customer success all part of one ecosystem. More recently, perhaps, with companies that you advise for companies, especially those that have kind of grown up in the more traditional marketing, there's marketing sales to sales what are some early steps that they can begin to take to think about how we think more broadly about unification? And I think I know one of them it's going to be metrics.
Bill Macaitis:You know me well, gary. Yeah, let's start there. I think to be metrics. But you know me well, gary. Uh, yeah, let's start there. I think, uh, the the right metrics. Um, you know, I would say, explore customer centric metrics, right, there's a whole suite of them out there. Choose a couple. Second, I would say, start sharing some of these metrics. So it's very easy for these teams to get super siloed. Everyone has a totally different metric which is a competing metric. You know, product is doing something totally different than marketing, which is totally different than sales. Try to.
Bill Macaitis:You know, one of the reasons I thought like worked really well at Slack is we had a lot of shared metrics, all the teams shared in them, and we didn't view each other as adversaries, but more like, hey, how can we help each other out? And every team has unique skill sets, right. And when you're limited to doing only projects that your functional team can do, like they're limited in scope, when you do projects that multiple teams can work on together, like pricing and packaging, right, like whoa, now that's a huge lever, right, huge growth lever for you there. And then you know, I think, maybe re-explore what some of these even top level leadership roles look like so a lot of times, you know, like a lot of times what I see is like you'll see SMB mid-market there'll be like an engineering background, a product founder they don't really want to do go to market, so they'll hire a CRO and because it's CRO it's a higher title. A lot of times we'll bring in more of an SLG person that's only run sales and you know those integrations are hard. Sometimes Maybe it'll be sales and customer success, but again very SOG in nature.
Bill Macaitis:I think sometimes, like, where I see companies kind of innovating, there is maybe changing that. Maybe it's more of a chief customer officer role Right, and these four teams report into it. Maybe they have more of a marketing back, maybe they're more of a consumer background Right, like I think those are just really interesting perspectives that you, that you bring to the table. So, yeah, I think you know, sum up, the metrics you choose are really important. If they're shared or siloed, that makes a big difference. And even the background and what you call this role is really important If you want to go down that customer centric path, right, if you want to have more of an organization that really puts themselves in the customer's shoes.
Bill Macaitis:All those little things make a big difference.
Gary:Yeah, it's great advice. I think we've seen some fantastic CROs. But just as often, if not more often, it tends to be, especially when companies say we need to go up market, then they go out and they look for an enterprise salesperson who has that experience and because it's a smaller company, they want the title and so they get the title and it's it's an enterprise salesperson in a cro title and that just yanks the entire organization in that direction, because that's what they know right versus. I love the analogy of let's think differently about it. Maybe it's not necessarily a sales mentality, but it's. You know how do's think differently about it? Maybe it's not necessarily a sales mentality, but it's. You know. How do we think differently about the skill sets required to be a true overseer of the GTM engine and the customer journey? That's fantastic.
Gary:Okay, well, bill, we talked a lot about where you've been and your insights. That provided that, but we didn't talk at all about what you're doing today and what you want to do. So spend a few minutes about what's going on with Bill today and what you're leaning into, and what you're interested in.
Bill Macaitis:Yeah, sure, I love all things go-to-market marketing. I was literally the nerd in fifth grade that was reading Forbes, wall Street Journal and Businessweek Fifth grade wow, I just always geeked out on this stuff. I think it's super fun and fascinating and I had a ton of great operating roles, really fortunate with, you know, a number of exits. And so it was like what do I do next? And I'm waiting to retire and I'm terrible at golf. Or it was like, hey, do I become a VC? But I feel like there's a million of those and that's not my thing. And so I just wanted to help other operators out, right, you know, because I felt like a lot of times in my journey we didn't have those advisors that could help out. So that's what I do now. I do full time, I do board advisor engagements, so I work with, you know, fast growing AI startups or B2B SaaS startups and just help them.
Bill Macaitis:Think about you know a lot of the marketing, a lot of the POG, all the stuff we talked about, right, and just someone that can help guide them and assist them through their process. So I think there's a huge need for this. Like I love what you guys are doing. There's so many companies out there that you know go to market just isn't their thing, right, and that's fine, right. Like, look, if you plot me in a CEO somewhere and I'm leading a massive development org, I'm not going to know it. I'm not going to know best practice. I'm not going to know it. I'm not going to know best practice. I'm not going to know what's most recent Right. So for a lot of founders and CEOs, go to market is kind of a newer thing, and finding people that have been through it um can help them along, give them the shortcuts right, so they don't burn themselves. And, trust me, I have tons of scar tissue and that's probably one of the most valuable piece of advice I give is don't do that.
Bill Macaitis:Stay away from that. Oh my God, that was a massive, massive disaster. You'll save so much time and money right, um. So that's what I do and I really enjoy and love it.
Gary:That's awesome so how, if uh people are interested, how will they find you? Just?
Bill Macaitis:reach out on linkedin. Uh. So, bill mesitis, linkedin. Just send me a note there. Uh, happy to connect okay, awesome bill.
Gary:We are so thankful for your time today. Thank you again. We're gonna hold you to this. You got to put a list together, this awesome studio, that studio that put together, because there's some serious studio envy going on. So appreciate that.
Bill Macaitis:Oh, thank you, I will definitely do that. That is on my list of things to do, and thanks everybody for joining and listening. I had a fun time here.
Gary:You bet. All right, bill, thank you so much. So stick around for a second, but for now listening on GTM Pro again. Bye, beep, cut.
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