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Creating and Capturing Demand in Complex Industries with Aileen Casmano

• Mark Bliss • Season 1 • Episode 10

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In this conversation, Aileen Casmano and Mark Bliss discuss what it's like to run growth marketing in an early-stage startup. They cover the importance of admitting when you don't know something, and the value of storytelling in marketing. They also discuss the implementation of product-led growth (PLG) and the challenges and considerations involved. Additionally, they explore creative event strategies for startups with limited budgets, and the importance of focusing on revenue and pipeline generated by marketing rather than MQLs. Plus, they emphasize the significance of strong writing skills and the ability to present and be on camera as a marketing leader.

Takeaways

  • Focus on core objectives and avoid trying to do everything at once.
  • Communicate clearly with executives and founders about the time and resources required for marketing initiatives.
  • Set boundaries to maintain a healthy work-life balance and prevent burnout.
    Invest in brand identity, functional websites, and SEO for organic traffic.
    Utilize contractors to supplement a lean marketing team.
  • Encourage CEO involvement in marketing and social selling.
  • Create dynamic content like videos and podcasts to engage and educate prospects. Admitting when you don't know something is important for growth and learning.
  • Storytelling is a powerful tool in marketing, and sharing the process and journey is more impactful than just sharing the end result.
  • Implementing product-led growth (PLG) requires careful consideration of factors such as product-market fit, self-service capabilities, and sales enablement.
  • Creative event strategies, such as micro events and partnering with channel sales, can be effective for startups with limited budgets.
  • Focusing on revenue and pipeline generated by marketing is more valuable than solely focusing on MQLs.
  • Strong writing skills and the ability to present and be on camera are essential for marketing leaders.
  • Digital ads can be effective for startups with lean budgets, and testing and targeting the right audience is key.

Sound Bites

"Nobody respects the amount of time that it takes to be able to evaluate a campaign or a channel."
"Educate your executives and your founders on actually what goes into making that happen."
"It needs to be a full story arc."
"I wish I said I don't know more."






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Continue the conversation by connecting with Mark on Linkedin!

Hi, and welcome to Go To Market After Hours, a safe space for marketers, for AEs, CSMs, and really everyone else in that B2B SaaS growth hamster wheel. So grab a comfy blanket, go get your go -to beverage of choice and your emotional support animal, and join me for another exciting go -to -market conversation. All right, so I am stoked today. I love talking about growth marketing, especially in complex industries like cybersecurity. And I am joined by a absolute rock star growth marketing leader from cyber and a lot of experience in early stage startup. So if that's your jam, if you have a complicated and complex product that you're trying to market right now, like in cybersecurity at a earlier stage company where there's not a lot of money to be had, this is definitely going to be a great episode for you. So I am joined by Aileen And I will pass it over to her to tell a little bit more about herself other than just growth marketer for complex early stage startups. Aileen, welcome to the Thank you. I'm Aileen, as Mark said, I have been in startup marketing across demand gen and growth marketing for over 10 years and just absolutely love the world of startups and cybersecurity. And some fun facts about me, I love Taylor Swift. I've been a Swiftie since before being a Swiftie was cool. And I have a golden doodle that I'm also obsessed with. So if you ever get to meet me, I will probably bring up Taylor Swift and my golden doodle. Is the golden doodle named after a Taylor Swift Unfortunately, no, but my sourdough starter is. As long as it's not bad blood because No, it's not. It's Betty. Okay, I dig that. Yeah, my I also have a golden doodle and her name is Luna love doodle because we're Harry Potter fans I love that. Golden Doodle, parents unite. Indeed. Well, yeah, we're all all golden doodle parents are apparently exceptional growth marketers. That's what I'm gonna go with Yeah, there's a lot of us. So to kick off, you've been doing this a long time. The first thing that I want to ask is what does everybody get wrong about growth marketing and demand gen? Like what is the number one falsehood coming out of the executive suite when it comes to Yeah, it's hard to pick just one. From my experience, what I'll say is, is trying to do everything and thinking that you'll be successful. So it's just really common for a founder and executive to throw a bunch of ideas at you and say, we need to be doing X, Y, and Z. And most growth marketers have tried a lot. And it's important to understand if that actually applies to your business and your strategy, your business strategy and goals. So educating executives on what's important to try and maybe try at a later stage. And also making sure that there's always like a core objective. Are we just doing this because we saw a competitor do it? or are we doing this because it supports the business strategy? No. We saw a competitor and now we have to do it. I. I also think making sure that you have enough time to actually gauge whether or not it was effective that that to me in in demand and like, yeah, you're getting a million things thrown at you. And part of the reason you're getting a million three things thrown at you is. Nobody respects the amount of time that it takes to be able to actually evaluate a campaign or a channel, anything that you're doing Absolutely. And also I think one area that I've struggled to do or failed to do is I take on a lot and sometimes it seems like magic happens. And it's important to educate your executives and your founders on actually what goes into making that happen. But if you're always kind of making things happen behind the scenes and not... explaining all the different steps and details and time that goes into a project or an initiative, they're going to think, well, you can do this then if you did that. So just making sure that like you have. clear plan and your executives know the resources and time it's going to take. And even if you're set up to do it, like with resources, like if they want to do an ebook and you don't need your messaging isn't even fleshed out yet, and you don't have a content writer, it's probably important to put the cart before the horse. You know, I am sensing that at one point in your career, you were just like absolutely decimated and burnt out based on what you're saying. And that brought you that brought you to this lesson. So how did you dig out of that and get to the point where now you're able to articulate everything that goes in, you know, how the sausage is made and you're able to set appropriate boundaries? around how much time it's going to take and what resources you really need to do. Yeah, I think definitely burnout. Getting to a point where I couldn't, you it's like you're stacking cups, Glass cups. And if you just add one more, the tower's going to fall over and everything's gonna break. So I think it got to that. It got to a former manager of mine, Jenny Duong. really forcing me to add together as a team, looking at what we were doing and carving it down to, what's actually bringing in results, what's actually supporting our sales and business goals, and what do we have the resources to actually like execute with and make this successful? And so that definitely shifted my mindset. It helped me be a better leader, be a better strategist. And That's just something I've of built into my framework now when I work with early stage startups and founders. that you talked about the stacking cups. There's a there's an old British show called Coupling, which is like their like raunchier version of Friends. And they have an entire segment called the Giggle Loop, where in an in a situation like you're you can't laugh like, you know, if you're at a funeral or something. They showed the representation of that as stacking cups. And eventually you've stacked one too many and now you laugh out loud. you know, an inappropriate situation. So I had I had that visual in my head. And for those listening who have never seen that before, I know there's a YouTube clip. It's actually really hilarious. Highly recommend it. We're going to have to drop it in the comments when we post the episode. yeah. Well, I don't know, because rights issues might be in might be a problem there. If I post an unauthorized YouTube video of it, but coupling it really, really hilarious show. And I think the Giga Loop is like episode three or something in season one. So definitely check that out. But I also heard it. My old boss and mentor, Tim Barr, always used to say that it's it's juggling. And at any point in time, you have all these balls in the air. And the trick is knowing which ones like family and your health are glass. And so if they hit the floor, they shatter. And then you got to spend a ton of time picking them back up and gluing them together. Whereas how many of those balls are like bouncy balls or basketballs or something, and they're they're going to come back up to you if you let them hit the floor You know, leadership is really defined by knowing which balls will shatter and which which ones will bounce back. And we often always get that wrong. But it's a learning experience all the Yeah, and just touching on that, the whole burnout and mental health, during the time that Jenny and I were working together and we were making sure we focused on priorities and carving out what's mapping back to business goals was when I really started to integrate a focus on my mental health and making sure that I didn't get burnt out again. And so I'll just share that like setting work hours for myself really helped. I was letting my work kind of bleed into my morning and just one more email answer. I'll check one more slack. so really getting strict in that, you know, I'm not going to take a meeting before nine and I'm not going to take a meeting after five 30 and like being on the same page with my manager about that. And like that really helped me separate life from work. And that way I was able to like pursue my hobbies in the morning or at night. And I knew I could build them into my schedule instead of letting work be my priority and ignoring. everything outside of that. And then a lot of people from the Cyber Marketing Society know that I'm very into meditation and yoga. I actually became a certified meditation teacher last year because meditation has helped me so much with my, you know, quieting a busy mind and thoughts, especially coming down from a work day. And I really incorporated mindfulness into my just lifestyle, really. Well, and cybersecurity is such a, you know, it is a complex solution. And so add that to early stage startup with a complex solution. And it, I mean, you need meditation to be able to get through Yeah. And also in early stage, because it's such a small team usually, and you're so tight knit, you really feel a sense of responsibility for the company's success. And that's a lot to hold. And obviously you're responsible for your role and your KPIs and the program you're running, I was putting a lot of pressure on myself that like the success of the company like depended on my programs and I've really had to take a step back and learn how to separate from that. think it's really helpful to and shout out to the cybersecurity marketing society. That's where you and I both met. And I think that they're having a community like that across even competitors within the market and just knowing that we're all in this together in a way like we're all dealing with the same issues and having a place to go to meet people who are dealing with the same issues. I think that that that helps, you know, If nothing else, it'll give you some coping mechanisms, but you may not need it if you know that you're not Exactly. Even when the CrowdStrike thing happened a few weeks ago, it was so comforting to see everyone helping each other in the society and sending well wishes to those that were dealing with the craziness with their customers and their company. And it was competitive companies and you know, it's just, it's so true. This community is, it's just, it's rare to find this. So I'm really thankful that we have it and that's how we connected. Now you talk about, you know, being at early stage companies, but you know, you've, you've also been like hired number one and building the entire growth and demand gens to strategy from scratch from day one of building it. So how is that? Like, how do you approach something like that in a healthy way? Not in like, I'm going to do everything in burnout way, but knowing what you know now, How do you approach that in a healthy Yeah, so knowing what I know now, which I wish I knew about five years ago, I think it's really important to work with founders that care about, invest, want to invest in marketing and care about marketing, but like want to put the time in to work with you on the ICP, work with you on building out. marketing and sales processes because a lot of times early on is founder -led sales. And so the onus is on them as well to deliver what you need to be a successful marketer. I always, you now that I'm a consultant, when I talk to founders, I say like, this is going to be a very collaborative. Partnership, I'm gonna need your time. I'm gonna need your input. Like you know your customers, you know your market best. So, you know, the onus is on you for XYZ so that we can form a great plan together. I think a lot of founders think they, you know, there's a marketing hire and they're just gonna magically get them a bunch of leads. So that's something that I wish I was more like, was just better at doing is really like partnering better with founders earlier on. The second would be definitely, I think having a basic CRM or marketing automation tool like HubSpot. So that once you start to kick the funnel off, you can get those early indicators through analytics and you can showcase, this channel, we just put, you know, $2 ,000 into it, whatever, we're seeing these results, let's turn it back and let's try a different channel or let's try a different type of ad or lead gen ad or whatever it may be. I think it's important to just have a basic CRM set up so that you can just start looking at analytics early on. A lot of founders say, just want to start outbounding. I just want to start building top of funnel. We'll, we'll set up our ops, you know, down the road. I've done that before and it was a nightmare. was, it was like impossible to, to, to track the success that I was bringing in and the failure as well. And right. Exactly. making decisions off of gut feeling and you're not willing to take the time to invest in the data I suppose that's that's one of those like I don't know if it's a red flag But maybe it's a yellow flag as as you're trying to identify is You know, is this gonna be a good fit? Am I going to have a good partner like you were mentioning like having a partner in in the CEO chair You're going to have to lean on them. So, you know, part of it's probably understanding how much they're willing to participate and how much are they willing to let you redirect resources where your experience is deemed it Exactly. Exactly. Hit the nail on the head. And then, to my last point, I think I know that brand and website are really important early on. Your website is your storefront, your digital storefront. Just, you know, making don't overcomplicate your website. Have a clear call to action. Make sure that your homepage actually tells people what you do instead of just bragging about how amazing you are. no, we, think we have to, I think we have to know. I love the acronym soup. And then you read the homepage, you still don't know what they do. And there's like one CTA, but it's like at the top and the nav like nothing in line or anything all the way throughout. Yeah. And it's just like saying how amazing you are and how amazing your product is and nothing that the, the persona or ICP is actually looking to learn. They have no idea who you are. Well, and part of it is because you then have too many cooks in the kitchen, right? Like, you know, you have so many voices from, from product and probably, you even like your professional services side that are influencing the verbiage on the website. And so, and you might be just trying to talk to everybody instead of your Right, exactly. And that's what a lot of startup founders want to do is, well, you know, we need to say we do all of this because, you know, we don't want to turn away a certain business or, you know, we do from startup to enterprise, large enterprise. It's like, no, you don't. Not as a startup. No. Well, and there's also a difference between page one on the cover and page seven. Yeah. So I always remind people of, like magazines or newspapers and that what we put on the cover is the most interesting thing. And it's the thing that's going to be most likely to capture the attention of our, our, you buyers. What we put on page seven or eight. That's where you can start to experiment with all of these additional acronyms or additional services, things that we don't quite do or sell as much. But we can put those on the website and then maybe make a promise to them, hey, if the traffic and the time on this page starts going up and hits a certain threshold, we'll move it onto the homepage. Yep, exactly. Yep. And I just think brand identity. I think your logo and your colors are so important. There's so many brands that I love seeing like the case studies on LinkedIn where like a brand that you didn't know about, I think it was Ollipop. Their branding was like old and not exciting and didn't really resonate with their ICP and they rebranded and they like are up like 19 million or 19 billion or something crazy in sales. So it's still important to like craft. a great brand image and brand identity early on that can build trust with your audience when they're looking through your assets and your website and materials. And lastly, the last thing I'll mention is especially if you're doing founder led, making sure that you're helping your founders build their brands on LinkedIn and have a voice and put a lot, know, put into thought leadership and building their brand and helping them craft their story. Because once you do that, those founder led sales motions, whether it be through sales navigator or through email prospects are going to go to their LinkedIn and see what they're talking about and see if they're an expert in what they say they're an expert in. Well, also the algorithms penalize the company page, but prioritize your CEO's page. So, you know, if you've got a CEO that is unwilling to post and participate, you're already fighting the battle with one arm time behind your Exactly. I've seen CEOs not only not want to post and participate, but not even support the company page and what the company was posting and like reshare it. I mean, talk about making it impossible to collaborate with. Well, how do you, how do you come back from that? you, you know, how do you get them involved? Like what are the data points that you show them? Like, how do you get them to be a part of marketing? mean, there might be begrudgingly posting on LinkedIn, but how do you get them to be willing to do it Yeah, I've shown, I usually try to start with like come with an educational perspective. education on how an organic post by an individual on LinkedIn will get way more impressions, especially if you tag people and they reshare it, right? Just the reach and engagement that you get. posting as an individual rather than a company and how company pages are like their traffic is suppressed. There's just so much education out there about social selling and I've seen it work. I've done it in past roles. I've seen it work and that's definitely, I'll. pick different thought leaders on LinkedIn and how they've built their brand by social selling. Dave Gerhart is an example, Chris Walker, they're marketers, they've both spun off their own businesses, literally all through thought leadership and social selling on LinkedIn. So there's a lot of proven success stories out there that I bring back to my executives and educate them. And then I know we touched on, well, competitors doing it, we should, but if a founder of a competitive company is building their network and they're following. it's important to obviously do that as well because they're connecting with more prospects organically than you would be if you're not. And also it's also a low cost. mean, there's obviously time and resources put into it, but it's not an actual cost from budget. Yes, and and too you mentioned that crowd strike and that entire shit show Like that was the most negative press you could ever have the entire world now knows who they are and the replies And the remediation I think that that came from the ceo's personal accounts Yep. Yeah, I think I think on Twitter X and LinkedIn, I think that's where they put their this is what we did. This is how it's remediating, not a press release, not from the corporate page, not from an email blast. They did all those things after it came from from the CEO, I think. and that's a humanized approach to like PR, a PR disaster. Humans want to connect with humans. They want to know who's behind the company that they're investing in, you know, giving money to. Yeah, it matters so much in the, in the sales cycle too. I mean, if, if your CEO joins the call, even for five minutes to say, Hey, I saw that we had a demo with ABC company on the schedule. I don't have a lot of time, but I wanted to pop in and say hello. And, know, I'll make sure to connect with everybody on LinkedIn. Feel free to message me if you have any direct questions that I can help with. They will never message. Unless they really need to. But now your CEO and all of their content is in there Exactly. And all it takes is a little bit of, you know, five minutes. This is great. And you can do it after the fact, too. You don't have to have them join the call. But I have found that it works really well if they join the call. They, you know, people feel important that your CEO took a little bit of time out of their day to join in. And I wouldn't do it on every deal, but like you could totally manage all of your tier one accounts. Yeah, once they get to a certain stage, right, I think it definitely makes sense to have the CEO spend spend more time with them. Now, we talked about building growth strategies. What are what are like your foundational elements that you have found work the best now? Not like the buzzwords and everything, you know, say, well, PLG or ABM, like those are not just buzzwords, but like the actual core foundational strategies that you've seen pretty much have to be in there when you're building something from day Sure. So we talked about this before we started recording, but PLG is one of those things that every founder in startup SaaS wants to adopt. And it's something, you know, in my experience that is very hard to do unless your product is at a point and your sales motion is at a point where you can adopt that. So. I've used PLLG as a sales enablement tool, not as a, revenue generating, we're not even gonna have BDRs, right? People are just gonna sign up with a credit card and upgrade. That's very hard to execute and you need a lot set up internally and in your product to make that happen. I think core foundations that I bring into every program. Functional website definitely like is the website does it have good navigation or do you have a journey that you're bringing your prospect on? You don't need anything crazy Your homepage I think is most you know, I know everyone every good marketer knows your homepage is your best most important page Building SEO Investing in SEO early on I've done a couple times now, I've waited too long to start just investing in some basic SEO and kind of kick myself for not doing it sooner. Because when you have a small budget, SEO, it takes time, but that's bringing in organic traffic. So if you're looking, if you're a marketer on a tight budget, SEO is really helpful. I'm also a really big fan of contractors when you're a lean team or even a single marketing hire. Having like an arsenal of contractors that you can tap into that are like quick, they do good work, they're easy to collaborate with, that'll get you by. that could get you by for like a good year if you don't have budget for full -time hires. And there's so many great contractors in the cyber marketing society and even on LinkedIn that I've connected with and on Upwork that have really been like my saving grace when I was a one person marketing team in the first time hire. Like I said, just getting a foundational CRM marketing automation set up. so that you're able to track early signals, marketing and sales signals, report that back to your founders of what's working and what's not, make a case for things that you want to do or that you want to stop doing. And then for digital, you know, you really, you can start out with, I'm not a fan of dumping a ton of money into Google ads right away. We started at LinkedIn, just for cybersecurity marketing. Our audience is mainly on LinkedIn. They're not really on Metta. And I've dabbled with Reddit and Twitter, but I've just found the most success on LinkedIn. Using document ads, conversational ads, there's some low cost options on there that you can start leveraging to see what your ICP resonates with. You don't have to go right to a lead gen form that's gonna cost you like $300 cost per lead to start. So those are some basics of my framework that I you know, usually start out with basic email drip campaigns so that the leads you're bringing in the funnel can be nurtured. I content is really important. Again, content can be overwhelming. Just start with the basics. Start with a monthly newsletter. It builds your founder's brand and it builds your company's brand. You don't have to go out and write an ebook every month. There's different smaller bite -sized pieces of content that you can do and reuse and repurpose. I love that you talked about SEO and content as kind of both part of your core foundational elements. But I always question it because I think there are people that are doing SEO in a modern way. They've got their post -pandemic 2024 vibes going on. And then you have a lot of people still partying like it's 1999. And so like, do you differentiate? Like what, is something you wouldn't do? Cause that's now too old school and it wouldn't work. And what's something that's like a modern SEO technique that really, really makes a big Yeah, even just so. I'm just a fan of using tools like Ahrefs, And taking your core product and your core solution, seeing what has room to rank for organically instead of going after those really hard keywords to rank for, what's some low -hanging fruit that you could earn and own when it comes to organic? Starting to incorporate your brand keywords as well so that if your competitors are setting up ad campaigns using your branded keywords, at least you're showing up organically and they're not taking over that as well. So those are just some like early, very early foundational things that I like to incorporate. I recently watched a webinar with Michael King of iPullRank and Rand Fisken, who's the former founder and CEO of Moz. And they were talking about how Google's algorithm now, it puts a pretty big emphasis on the amount of time that the person spends on the page when they convert. Because if they convert and then come right back and click on something else, that tells them that that keyword is not a fit because that persona didn't actually stay on the page. But if they stay on the page and then exit out of the search, now it's telling them that should be ranked higher. And so I thought that was an interesting tactic. I don't think a lot of people are spending as much time focusing on keeping somebody on that page. because that requires more video. It requires a lot more of like educational informative graphics. I don't know. It's interesting. I think a lot of people still tie into like backlinks a lot more than tactics like trying to increase your time on page. Right, yeah, because backlink you can get, right? You'll get them to your site, but where do they go from there? Well, and also the personas because, you know, we are, we now know that Google knows everything about us, everything. So if a certain persona that's not a fit for your product is doing really well, it's just going to drive more of that persona to your site. Yep. So I think a lot of people. kind of missed that, right? Where, especially if they're working with no team, no budget, and they're just trying to get things done, any traffic is good traffic. But if you compound that over another couple of years, by the time that you do your next funding round and you're able to actually scale, you've now educated Google in an ICP that isn't yours. Yep. And you're off to a bad start. Yeah, think dynamic, yeah, dynamic content like videos, even podcasts, even if you can get your executives and product leaders on podcasts and then use, know, embed those episodes on like landing pages or in your content library. If someone clicks to listen or watch, that's going to keep them on the page, obviously longer than if you just have a bunch of text in a blog post. yeah, and doing, you pulling out from your webinars. Take like a minute clip and throw that on the page. You're not doing much extra work, but if somebody wants to watch it, it'll really help you keep them on that page. big fan of snippets and like pulling snippets from webinars, podcasts, lives, all of that. Well, but you have to have people willing to do those two and no offense to our friends in pre -sales, but your pre -sales engineer, not the best person to do those. They can be on them. They can be a part of it, but you need somebody with a title that the buying committee is going to Yep, absolutely. you know, that is probably the, that, that, that's the, the, guess, secret that we don't want to say out loud is that title matters. You know, it's a very terrible thing in some ways to say, because it should be about the information and anybody of any stature could do the info, you know, can share information. But when you're trying to find a snippet and empower each of these pages on your site with some additional video content, they're looking to learn from and build their relationship members of your executive team, know, kind like we were saying before, you know, getting to know the CEO, you know, that if they're learning from them, that they are now building a relationship, even if they never Absolutely, especially if a CEO or a founder is their peer. Like if the CEO was a former CISO or a former security engineer, if we're talking cybersecurity, right, it's a peer, they have the same pain points and challenges. They're gonna wanna hear from them way more than a solutions engineer. That's a good point, I think even going further, I don't think they had to have been a former CSO or SecOps person, anything at all that is a shared struggle posting things about, mean, even just down to how difficult it is to to hire and retain talent right now. Like that is something every CEO is dealing with. And something the cyber community has been dealing with in spades for decades. There's never enough cybersecurity pros available in the market at any time. So if you talk about things like that on like a general level on their, you know, LinkedIn pages and then take out little snippets and things that you can integrate into your site, you're going to be able to paint a picture your company actually knows and understands what your buyers are going through on a day to day basis. But it doesn't have to be one to one. Like they don't have to have been hiring, you know, cybersecurity folks for the sock. Yeah, they could just simply be like, it's difficult to hire right now. You know, a candidate for a key role came in and did And this is what impressed me about them and post that on LinkedIn. I don't know. People want to watch the sausage being Yeah, and everyone's figuring it out. And to know that someone else, to hear from someone else that's figuring it out, just kind makes the situation, like humbles it a bit, makes it not as like bad or serious as you thought it would. like there's everyone else is struggling with what you're struggling with usually when it comes to business and all that. Well, and I think sales reps don't understand the power that they have in that environment either. You know, so any if we have any AEs that are listening and have gotten to this point in the podcast, you know, first off, kudos to you because you're listening to a very marketing centered episode. But the sales team can always has this opportunity where they can show the sausage being made. They can talk about the demo that they just had. And this question came up. And let me tell you why it's an important question. And here's how I struggled Because if you do that and you post that on LinkedIn, the people that you've connected with at that company are going to see it. And the five companies exactly like them are going to see it and resonate with it. Because if they ask the question, there's other people who want to know the answer to that. And it gives you more time and space to be able to answer it. I think it's a huge missing link. You know, we're talking about like modern, modern selling and even account based marketing in general. Like if you can start telling stories about the demo and the pitch and the struggles that your prospects are going through. That's in a way 10 times better than a case study. Yeah, absolutely. It's such a core part of social selling because it's also showing people how you think and giving more background into who you are as a professional as well. I've tried implementing with sales leaders because I've worked really closely with BDRs in many of my past roles and... we've tried implementing like a question of the day or challenge of the day, like sales Slack, Slack channel, like what's, what's one thing, like what's one objection you couldn't handle today or one thing you're struggling with or a question you got asked that you didn't know how to answer. And I think everyone's just afraid to admit that they don't know something. Because it took a while for people to adopt it and like it was an open channel. And so what we did was like we made it sales and marketing and product only so that like people didn't feel like they were asking a silly question or sharing something that they should have known. So yeah, like just everyone's figuring it out is what it comes down to. in an era with, you know, layoffs everywhere and so much uncertainty. I do understand why somebody would be a little nervous of just sharing, don't know. But I think the magic happens in the I don't know, you know, even just from a storytelling standpoint, I don't know. But I learned this and here's what you know came out of it is a Whereas just sharing the end result, that's that's not it's not a story. That's the last 10 minutes of a movie. That's cool. But nobody's going to pay two hundred dollars to go to a movie theater just to just see the last 10 minutes. I need to see why Deadpool and Wolverine are teaming up. Like I have to I have to have that awareness, you know? And yeah, if I'm to spend two hundred dollars to take take my family to the movies. It needs to be a full story arc. I feel like that's same thing in, in software sales, where if I'm going to spend $250 ,000 on your software, I need to understand the full story. And people just miss that. You know, founders want to make it seem like they had everything figured out from the get-go, but the absolute best about us pages have a timeline where they failed or learn some I I know everyone recites like Apple's story, but they're just such a like poster example for failing and. breed, you know, rebuilding in a different way to appeal to their market and just trying different things until something sticks. So totally agree. Just to bring it full circle, like back to some core things as like a first time marketer, first time hire at a company. I wish I said I don't know more. run virtual round of applause from everybody listening to that. That is so important, Yeah, I wish I just was admitted. I don't know or I need some time to think this through and figure out a plan or figure out, you have a brainstorming session. It's such a like relief when you can just you're comfortable saying it or saying like, don't know yet, but I'll you know, I'm going to figure it out. There were so many times where I was like put on the spot, asked, what are we gonna do about this? How are we gonna bring more leads in the funnel? What's our strategy for RSA? And I scrounged up an answer. And then once I got off the call, like, know, frantically put ideas together. And I think it's way more credible when you admit that, hey, I don't know yet because I'm still figuring it out. Well, you can only be in doing mode or strategy mode. You cannot be in both at the same time. And the second that you give an answer, now you're in doing mode. And so if you had just taken a minute and be like, I am still finalizing that. Let me, let me get back to you in a couple of days. And even just simply having a call to dig in and understand what their objectives are. What are they bringing to the table? Who's coming to RSA? So now who do I have? At my disposal to work with I don't know you're always shooting yourself in the in the foot when you're trying to Immediately answer and I do that too, by the way, like that is that is a lesson. I am always going to be learning I think I think any of us in marketing leadership like we just we want to have the answer and We do have one in our head. Like we always have this like yeah, I could say this But we're taking away our opportunity to dig into strategy by just exactly. Couldn't have like framed it in a better way. I've like, you know, kicked myself in the foot afterwards for just being like, I should have waited and like put together a more thoughtful response or like taking the time to actually build my plan and walk, walk my manager, the executive through it. Well, and generative AI makes this so much easier today, right? Like you can have a 10 minute meeting with any of the key stakeholders, ask them what's important, have them dig in, throw those transcripts in and say, Hey, what are the three most important things that we need to Yep. And it gives you a nice starting place and a way to reframe it. Or also if it's something really highly technical, which kind of led us on this journey, like if it's really highly technical and I don't know, I don't know what you're saying. Being able to have that recorded and tell the person, you know, like, Hey, you know, you're my subject matter expert. I need you to explain it to me. Like I'm in 11th grade. And then they're going to explain it to you like you're getting a Right, like you're their peer. Yeah, but you can still take that and then give the same prompt into chat. GPT, you know, simplify this. Pretend you're you're talking to a group of high schoolers about it and you know, take the transcript. yeah. Chat GPT, feel like for marketers especially has been pretty game changing as far as just augmenting marketing copy, right? Like, I'm having writer's block. I need help. getting an outline for this, know, blog that I'm writing or social post or LinkedIn post, whatever it may be. Even I just started consulting for DemandGen on the side and... I was trying to just outline what I wanted to, like a client intake session. So I had an idea of what I wanted to ask my clients when I first started working with them about their business. But I wanted to do it in like order of priority and like. split up brand values and mission and ICP from KPIs and metrics and what their quarterly goals are. I did a brain dump into ChatGPT and it put this beautiful client intake outline together for me. And I was like, that's awesome. It's my ideas, but you just made them better. Mm It's a it's great for the strategic marketers. So people who have really, really made it a point to come up with creative ideas and change the game. They see the forest through the trees. It's not as great for your more like I see like task oriented marketers, because a lot of those tasks are now able to be done. by AI and so, you know, it's this weird dichotomy like we're shifting through it. On a recent episode, you know, having a conversation about this and it's really, it was really tied into what is it going to look like marketers who understand how to use AI and marketers who don't. It's going to be a true haves and have nots and particularly early stage SaaS for complex products, you need marketers who understand how to leverage AI. Because there's not enough resources to get the strategy right. If you're not using AI to help simplify Absolutely. Just take a scroll through LinkedIn and you can see it's obvious who knows how to use AI the right way. Yeah, just for everybody listening, the wrong way is using it to craft a LinkedIn post. And you're like, Hey, I want a LinkedIn post on writing blogs. And then you just get this garbage, clearly fake thing. you change nothing. You don't like post edit anything and you keep a lot of emojis in there. I'll tell you where where it's been the most helpful for me is I will do like a I'll have a call and then after the call, I'll do like a 10 minute. Here's what I'm thinking about with strategy and I'll I'll record that in my my recorder app. Take that transcript, upload it, and then I will ask, you know, what what are the key points in that conversation? And it's literally just me talking. But it helps me to reframe what is most important out of my like 10 minutes of bouncing around in my creative Exactly. What I did, you know, once I had my outline with like my ideas of what I wanted to like talk through with the founders, I dumped the call recordings into chat GPT and said, use this outline and fill in, you know, the areas like the most important snippets from the conversation and the areas and like, voila. So big fan of that as well. Well, we stumbled upon leveraging AI to supplement a, you know, early stage marketing team that doesn't have a lot of money. But I'd love to go rapid fire with you on a few different foundational areas of marketing and how you handle those as you're scaling out an early stage org that doesn't have money. might be like if you were the first hire, you don't have that big of a team regardless, How do people do those things? I'll start with PLG because you mentioned starting in stages in a PLG motion. How do you handle that with no money most founders are gonna come to you if you're in a SaaS org and say, let's try product-led growth. And if you don't know anything about product -led growth or have never tried it before, there are a lot of factors and resources required to make product -led growth a success. If you don't have a team of stakeholders internally to not only support that and be a resource, but make product -led growth successful, you're gonna waste a ton of time and a ton of money. And different factors that... play into being ready for product -led growth is like, you proven your product market fit? So you can slap a free button up on your website, right? Anyone can do that and say, sign up for a free tier, but like, have you proven that you have product market fit that's gonna use this free tier? And is it proven that there's a progression? Do you have enough in free to make it sticky? But do you also have other tiers that they're eventually gonna graduate from free? go to paid basics. And that's all about the growth potential and making product growth successful. And the other big part of it is just the customer success enablement portion. Is your product self -service enough? Is it intuitive enough? Is your UI in a place where your user can pop around and give themself and do a self-service journey? And a lot of products that do product -led growth don't have that. And it just ends up that there's just drop -off and no one uses it. And then being ready from a sales or perspective, a lot of SaaS companies just say, we don't want BDRs, right? We're going to do product -led growth. we'll have like, only when we work with enterprises will we bring in a sales team. very big risk to take. I like to see product -led growth, especially for enterprise SaaS solutions, as a sales enablement tool. So it's getting leads in the top of the funnel. There's obviously some sort of signal of interest there, but we're not relying on the free trial to convert. to a sale. So you bring in your solutions, you know, your pre -sales engineer, you bring in an AE or BDR, however you structure it, depending on your company. And you use that as a tool to help sell because you're proving value, but you're not expecting your product to sell. to proctor and gamble through a free trial. So that's my stance on PLG. think there's ways that enterprise motions can leverage it, but do not expect it to be your sales team. So I am incredibly thankful that we revisited that because that was like, I don't know, you're just like dropping knowledge bombs all across. But but also I'm glad that you did not take the lightning round aspect seriously. No, no, that was that was perfect. I don't actually have a time limit on these episodes, so that's that was awesome. I do want to make sure, though, that we cover events. Yeah, we've referenced a couple of times throughout, but we haven't really dug in. When you're at an early stage company like that, you're not spending a quarter million dollars on a giant booth space at RSA or Black Hat. Like you're having to get really, really creative and you're having to leverage those events to integrate with all of your other campaigns that you're running. And so I want to ask you, having run a lot of events in cyber and being a part of those teams that don't have a lot of cash to spend. So this is definitely something I'm passionate about. I love taking an event concept and making it like, seeing it come to fruition and like taking it from concept to execution. For the cyber world, the biggest trade shows are RSA and Black Hat. And they're notoriously just to walk through the door, you have to drop like 50K unless you qualify for early stage startup. And so to augment that at some earlier stage companies I've been at is doing what I like to call micro events. So whether it be in tandem with a trade show, like you're not exhibiting, but you're doing an event during that week because you know that your buyers will be there or putting on. your own sort of concept owned event. And then if you have like a channel sales motion, in addition to your sales team, getting channel partners to buy sponsorships for your events to help augment the costs. And so not only are they helping to pay for costs, but they're also inviting their customers and bringing leads to the event on your behalf. And I've seen that work really well for startups. You can turn it into a like show style so do like a proof of concept in a city see if it works and then look at your other core territories, territory cities and it's it's really like a repeatable event that you can do and you can like I even developed like like roadshow kits like we know we need a banner we know we need you know self sheets you know collateral whatever it may napkins that are branded little details like that but like it just makes it like you just ship the little roadshow kit off to the salesperson that's putting it on and with partnerships it can be really low cost. I love that. I think so many times we fall into this trap where we're just going with here are the shows in our space. This is the sponsorship I can afford and I just do that. Most of the time it's because somebody in the company, you know, in leadership somewhere, usually sales, sometimes has done that show before and saw it successful. And then you end up spending the money there. What you're advocating for, I think is a much better integrated look at marketing because you're saying, how do I craft the event around my audience instead of hoping that the event that I'm signing up for has my audience. Exactly. Exactly. And we've, we've, you know, I've definitely seen the micro events work. I've also found that people are more inclined to like buyers are just more inclined to open up and really like relationship build when it's a smaller event. I've seen dinners work really well in relationship building, especially at the executive level. And that's definitely been for enterprise, like a tactic that I've used before, partnering with sales teams in their regions, doing dinners, bring the executives in for those like core dinners, especially if it's like companies that are in the pipeline. But making an experience, like picking a really nice place, know, delicious meal. white glove service. It may seem like a simple tactic, but I feel like everyone focuses on the huge trade shows and not enough on micro and more intimate events. Well, and things don't cost as much as you think that they do. I mean, that that is just the reality of the situation. You know, sometimes, you know, companies will have like a celebrity at their booth. I've done that before. They're not as expensive as you think that they are. You know, they might be paying somewhere between 10 ,000 and 30 ,000 for the appearance fee, depending on the level of celebrity that the celebrity has. Yep. but it's not that much money, especially if you're doing an event where those celebrities already Right, you don't have pay for travel. Exactly. So, you know, I think things like that, and even down to like any type of a golf outing, arcade rentals like there. There are so many things that are much more affordable than you think that they are, where you can add a really nice experience in that it doesn't break the bank and the nicer restaurants. If that's going to be a problem in your per plate cost, have less people. Yep. Absolutely. have, like don't judge an event because you had 300 people at the event. Judge the event because you had three people, but they're all in your ICP. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, and you can get creative without, like you said, without breaking the bank. When I was at Owl Cyber, we developed an event series called, so our demographic was government, highly technical environments, engineers, and from going to events and getting to know our audience, we found that our audience loved craft beer. Like they were just like craft beer enthusiasts. They were like and so we developed an event concept called SyBeer Tech Talks and we started doing them at different smaller events that we were going to and eventually so we would partner with local breweries, we would bring their beer in so it was also supporting small businesses in the area. It was a very relaxed environment. We called it like a backyard brewery, like networking events. So we had cornhole, ring toss, Adirondack, chairs and eventually we actually got asked by events to be their premier networking event. So they wanted to bring Syver into their trade show. This was at Distribute Tech, was a few years ago, I think it was 2018 or 2019, event. And same thing though, we recruited partners and the whole cost wasn't on us, but we got to like have OWL be the, you know, the name recognition for the event. and our ICP loved it. So it's also about getting creative and like learning your ICP's like interests and hobbies and building that in somehow. You know, it's funny, one of the absolute best trade shows that I've done, was at an MSSP that I was working at running marketing at called Newspire. And I had a phenomenal sales rep, Maria Graham. Shout out Maria. Our booth didn't arrive. Well, so here's the thing, though, when your booth doesn't show up, you now have to actually think outside of the box. And so, you know, it was very, very quick. You know, we printed up whatever materials we needed to new pop up banner thing at Staples. But picking up it was like backyard games and, you know, a cooler filled with beers and things. And it it it brought. a really cool and approachable vibe. And all of the show follow up was we were the booth without a booth. And it was it was memorable enough. And it's just it's interesting that when something goes wrong is typically where you get to be creative. And I love what you're saying in that you're saying, like, be creative before like you have limited money. Like come up with something unique and then as it scales, just make it bigger and bigger and bigger. But you know, come up with something unique to start with that can attach to your brand and make you memorable. Absolutely. So I want to ask one more question and then we'll close out. But you mentioned dashboards and KPIs earlier on and having to build that out first, getting to that data to be able to make better decisions. What's on your, I have a small team and a small budget executive dashboard. What are those so at a high level, always like to, I'm a big advocate for revenue and pipeline generated by marketing. And I think early on founders usually want to focus on MQLs. And I always say, I can get you hundreds of MQLs if that's what you really want. But. Is that like, are they going to be quality? Probably not, right? We can sponsor this event and get an event list. So opportunities created, number of opportunities created, amount of pipeline generated, and then number of those deals in like production trial or proof of concept. depending on your sales stage. So it's just showing value, right? Like these deals are legitimate, they're quality, they're progressing. And then close one revenue, you know, as you go on, obviously, those are the ones that I always advocate for marketing to be measured on. Because I've just, I've been there, I've brought in thousands of MQLs, I've brought in like a bunch of leads that just, it was quantity over quality. I'm enjoying this because I despise MQLs as a KPI. I don't even like them as a leading indicator because your definition of an MQL can change. And so I've joined companies where I've changed the definition of an MQL. And so if we're comparing against these two other previous regimes in the last five years, that each had their own definition of an MQL. The data is so flawed, it's not usable. Like you can't compare and contrast, and it's not even a good leading indicator. You wanna lean to your intense signals for leading indicators. Like I'd probably put that on the dashboard, but I would never, like MQLs, unless you have a CEO that's demanding it, which most of us have, it's a terrible, absolutely terrible metric. So I love that you said Absolutely love that you said that. And then I think revenue as the starting point makes a lot of sense, but I would probably throw out that you need to have multi -touch attribution because if it's a first touch model and you're focused on revenue, you're going to end up spending way too much of your time fighting with sales as to where it started. yeah. Yep. I think it's it's crazy. Absolutely crazy because if you start with revenue and it's not multi touch its first touch, you end up spending hours of your life battling over where did this deal come in? Did it start at the event or was it the outreach before the event? And it's the most asinine battle. that you've ever had because it's revenue for the company. Right. Like we're all in we're all in the same fucking team here. So why are we having this battle? But but that happens so often where if you don't have a multi touch, if you've got people again, party and like it's 1999 and you want to do a first touch, just know that you're going to be spending half of your work days battling over attribution. And it's not helpful to anybody. It's not going to help the sales team get more deals. And it's not going to help the marketing team spend their money better, because if you don't give that event attribution, you're not going to do it next year when you probably should have. If it influenced the sale at Yep. I also will add marketing influenced pipeline and marketing influence revenue to kind of showcase in addition to what we've brought in, you know, as marketing as the first touch of the source. Here's what people, you know, from engaging in our webinars, attending events, coming to our website, like this is what we've influenced. So that's how I like to advocate for marketing to be measured. And then as we build our. you know, keyword rankings. I like to report on that on usually like a quarterly basis. Unsubscribe rate, click through rate, open rate. Those are things that, you know, you obviously are building towards a North Star when you're an early stage startup. So to show the progress there is, you know, it's just, it paints the picture of, okay, there's a lot going on in marketing. And even though, you know, we're not bringing in thousand MQLs a month. we're still, things are on the up across X areas. The first person who can tell me what bringing in a thousand mqls a month actually means to the business They can ask me about mqls, but until that point in time, we're not going to talk about mqls I don't even want to talk about lead count I was at a company that we had a meeting with every executive team member across the company To go through which leads filled out a form that I've been at companies like that. Why it doesn't doesn't make any sense at all. You're taking time away from people who have real work to do and you're not actually learning anything because you're looking at it at two micro of a level. Like we need to we need to zoom out and we need to look at leads the last 60, 90 days. You know, here's what happened in this quarter. This is the percentage of leads that were in our ICP. And of that percentage, This is what move forward into our funnel like what you're talking about. MQL like, cool. We had a lead that came in and they were an MQL. Great. Were they an MQL because of behavioral tactics they took or did they not take any behavioral tactics like viewing a bunch of pages on our website? But they're a see so at X company. And all they did was download a white paper. Both of those leads are flawed. So why are we even talking about them and why do we take the time to attribute them as an MQL? Drives me nuts. Yeah, it's just it's such a sore subject with so many marketers. Well, you know, it's funny we're both experienced enough to remember when we started shifting away from MQLs. And I remember that time where people were fighting and clinging so hard on to the MQL. And it was it was it was the marketers who were clinging on to the MQLs. You know, it was it was our brethren who were like, but if we don't have How are we going to measure ourselves? Now we're trusting sales to close these deals to have a counter revenue. And it's like, no, you're trusting yourself to market across the sales cycle. Yep, it was that whole MQL is dead era. Yes, yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was like, I know eight years ago somewhere in there like seven years ago. Yeah. It was, it was a fun transition. That was about the time that ABM was starting up and it's like ABM and then the MQL is dead and all that transition. And the people that were hung on so tightly to the MQLs are probably the same people today that are listening to this episode and like, yeah, fuck MQLs. Like, I don't want to see them again. I'm not saying don't score your leads, but score them with intent data and then use that to impact the prioritization of your outreach and your follow up. Do not use it to define what programs and campaigns are affected. are working. So this was fun. Anytime, anytime I get to drop an F bomb talking about MQL is a good day. But to close out, I always ask the the guest to to share the advice that you would give, you know, rookie marketer you. And so, you know, you said like a decade doing this, you know, what would what advice would you give? you know, 10 years ago, you know, 2014 alien. tell every person I manage that's, you know, more junior in their career, I tell them this, invest in polishing your writing. Because no one tells you in business school, that writing is like such a core foundation of being a successful marketer, no matter what discipline you're in, whether it's writing like a chat GPT prompt, or writing a social post or writing a white paper. And It's definitely something that I've been investing time in with courses and workshops. And I just don't think that there's enough emphasis on how important writing is when you're early on in your career for marketing. I would also take it a step further and say being comfortable presenting and being on camera is a suddenly now very important aspect of being a marketing leader that I wish me 10 years ago spent more time getting comfortable in that regard. Even just presenting to a Yep. Like the first time you do that, you're like terrified. I was sweating. I think I sweat my entire water cow and my body out. Yeah, you hop on the scale and you're like, yeah, that was powerful. But in every other way, no. Yeah, yeah, it helped you to drown your sorrows later that night with an entire like dozen donuts. But yeah. Yeah, it's so stressful. it's because like that's, know, they can they can they can teach you in school the basics of marketing and They do it from like one generation behind and we all know that. But. And all the professors are, you know, retired marketers. So. You know, and even the ones that are current practitioners, it's still marketing moves so fast that if you're not engaging, you're not, you know, listening to podcasts, following thought leaders, learning as you go, you're going to be left behind. But I think it's so interesting because we're taught to write a blog. we're not taught to write and market internally to sell our ideas in the organization. And I think that that was an important piece of advice you would give your younger self. And so to any younger marketers, know, more junior on this call, start that. Yeah, right. It's it's too critical to pass And in hindsight, every marketer wished that they were a more comfortable putting together their own slide decks and emails to their CEOs and a more comfortable being on camera, you know, being on a zoom call with, you know, 20 other leaders or your board of directors call or any of that. So get used to I co -sign all of that. Nice. Well, this was this was a blast. I think we covered a lot of great, great topics. I will I will give you the final word. And I'd love for you to say like, what is something we didn't cover that is so important for a growth marketing leader at an early stage startup with no money? Yeah, I think I would say digital ads. And there's so much you can do on a lean budget. So don't completely write digital ads off. You can get creative. There's different options that are more low cost than others. So start out with a smaller budget and do some testing, see where your audience resonates, and then double down on that once you get a larger budget.