GTM After Hours

Aligning Sales and Marketing for Better Outcomes with Gary Schwartz

• Mark Bliss • Season 1 • Episode 23

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In this conversation, Gary Schwartz joins host Mark Bliss to discuss the critical importance of alignment between sales and marketing teams, emphasizing the need to break down silos and focus on shared goals. They highlight the evolution of buyer behavior and the inadequacy of traditional metrics like MQLs in today's market. Schwartz advocates for a more integrated approach where SDRs are positioned within marketing, fostering collaboration and efficiency. He also stresses the significance of brand marketing and the need for companies to adapt to new realities in buyer engagement. The discussion concludes with practical advice for aspiring marketers, focusing on customer obsession and continuous learning.

Takeaways

  • Misalignment between sales and marketing often stems from differing goals.
  • Leads should be viewed as a means to an end, not the end itself.
  • The traditional MQL is becoming less relevant in modern marketing.
  • Understanding buyer behavior is crucial for effective marketing strategies.
  • SDRs should ideally sit within the marketing team for better alignment.
  • Focus on creating qualified opportunities rather than just leads.
  • Brand marketing is essential for long-term success and visibility.
  • Attribution in marketing is evolving and needs to adapt to new realities.
  • Building a strong team requires strategic hiring in key areas.
  • Customer obsession is the key to success in marketing.

Sound Bites

  • "Leads are a path to an outcome. They are not an outcome."
  • "The MQL is not what we thought it was."
  • "Buying committees consist of IT leadership, procurement, and more."
  • "I'd rather have my SDR spending a ton of time researching."
  • "I've seen the most success when SDRs sit in marketing."
  • "I never ever talked about leads."
  • "The 100 calls a day thing used to be a badge of honor."
  • "Focus on increasing the number of organic handraisers."
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All right, everyone. Welcome to GTM after hours. I am joined today by marketing pro Gary Schwartz, who preaches and also practices what he preaches around go to marketing alignment, getting the sales and marketing teams together. Not not the kumbaya bullshit that you hear from from other folks. This is going to be some real talk around how that alignment actually takes place from somebody who's been on both sides of it. So Gary, I'd love to have you give kind of that 30,000 foot shirt overview for our listeners who may not know your background or what you do. Well, first Mark, thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate you know, you're inviting me onto the podcast and Hopefully can contribute for your viewers So I've been a sales and marketing leader for the past 20 25 years in b2b sass companies most recently focusing on cybersecurity fintech and edtech and Yeah, it's I've seen from both sides the toxicity of the silos that get created too often between sales and marketing organizations. And my mission is to remove those silos one by one. Love it. Well, let's start. Let's go one by one. What is the what is the biggest issue that you see when you go into an org and they've got a silo? What's the biggest cause of that? It's a misalignment and the misalignment starts when you hear the CEO asks leaders, what's going on? We're not hitting our numbers. And the sales leader says, well, marketing is not giving us enough leads. And the marketing leader goes, well, we hit our target. Sales can't close the leads. We give them. And as a marketeer, any marketing leader that says that should be shown the door right away. Cause how can you be happy, right? That you hit your target if the company's not meeting its goals. And that symptom starts to me with a fundamental misalignment on how you're targeting your organization. Leads are a path to an outcome. They are not an outcome. And so if marketing is measured on leads, sales is always measured on the revenue target right away. That says we're not focused on the same things that are going to lead us to where we need to get to. And in my experience, if you focus marketing and in fact, the places I've built structures that work. We focused marketing on creating opportunities on building pipeline that was sufficient to cover what sales needed. And we also didn't stop. It wasn't like this, okay, we're throwing pipeline over the wall at you because that's also indicates that marketing is just a service organization to sales, but really focusing the organization so that marketing is in lockstep with sales to help. move those deals forward and close that business, close it faster, close it at a higher conversion rate. That alignment all the way through is what really drives success into those organizations. I love it. And it's funny, you you mentioned leads. Marketers are really great at focusing on those leading indicators, whether it's leads or MQLs or, you know, what is it? Heroes, high intent revenue opportunities. They're really great at that. But I find on the sales side, there's often a struggle as it relates to leading indicators, because unless you have a really strong rev ops function, the comparison of conversion rate across the cycle is not really done. I think people tend to turn a blind eye on that. so as much as marketers are over investing on leading indicators of leads and MQLs, you could also say that the sales team is so, so blinded and only focused on revenue that maybe they're missing the conversion paths through the cycle. Well, even so leads is not the outcome, right? So marketing focusing on leads, even as a leading indicator, I mean, I've come to the conclusion that the MQL is not what we thought it was. And that's partly because the way buyers buy has changed so much. 15 years ago, when the MQL pretty much first came up, Whenever Marketo, was started 15 to 20 years ago, I as a buyer, right, of marketing technology, I was a buying committee of one. If I had the budget and I determined here's what I wanna buy, I I brought Marketo into an organization probably in 2009 and I didn't have to go through any hoops at all. I just said, okay, I got the money, I like Marketo, we're gonna buy it, here we go. Today, that's impossible. because buying committees consists of IT leadership, of a cybersecurity vetting team, procurement, the CMO, several people in the marketing organization, and this is just to buy a piece of marketing software. And so how can I, as one individual who might be filling in a form, be considered marketing qualified when there's so many other people in the equation, and I might be a junior researcher who's just looking up stuff and trying to learn about things, and the company may not even be in market. So the idea that leads are meaningful is starting to dissipate right now as far as individuals are concerned. And so what's replacing that is the idea that an account is in market, a company is in market. and you need to look at what type of material are they engaging with to see where they are in their intent journey. Am I just researching the space? So now let's shift to me as not a buyer, but a vendor in the cybersecurity space. And I may have a glossary of terms that I've created for SEO purposes to bring people to my website to learn about the space that I operate in. And then I may have a whole set of content. that talks about the benefits of my product and the features of the product. Then I may have a whole set of content about my customers and how are they solving problems. And those pieces of content map to different stages in the buyer journey. So consider that I may know that a particular account, and it may be on my target list, has multiple people and even if they haven't identified themselves, because they don't fill in forms, they don't want to be contacted by my SDRs because they downloaded a 50 page report. Now, Who Among Us hasn't been contacted by the SDR five minutes after we've downloaded that 50 page report to find out what you think of that report, can we get a meeting? That way of doing business is outmoded. But if I understand where there's smoke, there's fire. and I've got 10 or 15 different people at a company looking at, let's say they're all looking at the glossary. Well, they're at an earlier stage in the process. They're trying to understand the space. If they're looking at product features or if I've put in cleverly, here's how we compare to our competition document. Now they're trying to understand who the players are in the market. And if they're reading all my customer case study, my ROI focused content, now they're getting ready. to enter into a conversation, we can do outreach to those people, offering them value, offering them content that's specific to the stage and the journey they are. That creates a better buying experience and it belies the whole idea that leads or MQLs are meaningful. Cause to your point, and I know it's a long winded answer to your question, but it's not a leading indicator. All it tells you is that somebody's reading your stuff. And here's the other thing, your decision makers, right? Everybody wants to talk to the C-suite. There is no way anybody in the C-suite is going to fill out a form to download content because they know the first thing they're going to do is be reached out to. And so the way forward is to understand where companies are in their buying cycle because research shows that 70 % of their journey is taking place before they even contact the vendor. And there's other research that shows that 84 % of the time, the first vendor they contact has already been predetermined to be the winner. And so from a marketing and a sales point of view, our job is to build the awareness, build our SEO, be in peer review sites, be where our buyers are looking before they ever contact us. so that we become top of mind and we are that first vendor who 84 % of the time is gonna be the winning vendor. And the challenge for sales and marketing organizations is to understand what's the right way to be doing outreach. I'd rather have my SDR spending a ton of time researching those companies that are very much in market so they get the right personalized message to them than to say, you guys gotta do 100 calls a day. Go get them, tiger, because that's not the way to do it anymore. Well, you're going to go scorched earth and then just burn all the accounts that they're going after. And that actually brings up a good question. Where should the SDR sit? I'm very biased in this because I think it's a key part of building that alignment between sales and marketing and reducing the sales view that we're not getting enough leads. I've seen the most success when SDR sit in marketing. And further, I don't pay SDRs to set meetings because if I pay them to set meetings, they're going to set a lot of meetings that they'll go anywhere. Where I've seen it done most successfully, where I've built this from scratch. is where I compensate the SDRs on qualified opportunities, but the catch is only the reps get to accept them as qualified opportunities. So when the SDR say to me, I can't control what the reps do, my response is bullshit. Ask them, talk to them, start to work with your reps, find out what they're looking for in a qualified opportunity. and you're gonna have a much, much higher incidence of them accepting those. And again, where I've seen this done well, the conversion rate was upwards of 90 % because my SDRs met with their reps, they were paired up, they met with their reps at least twice a week, they discussed strategies, they discussed how to talk to people, discussed, you know, the reps discussed what they've heard from contacts in the same organizations. And so the SDR sitting in marketing being paid on accepted opportunities, it creates a forcing function of alignment. And I'll tell you what, in those companies, I never ever talked about leads. What we talked about is how are we creating those ops together? How are we building pipelines together? And it was the most aligned marketing and sales, most aligned go to market teams that I've ever had the pleasure to be a part of. I talked to my counterpart in sales daily. We texted each other all the time. And that was unusual because in other places, you know, we'd be lucky to meet once a month, a couple of times a quarter. But when you build that alignment and you create that forcing function for teams to work together, it gets everybody into line. And then what ends up happening is your culture comes from top down. When the teams see that the leaders are talking to each other all the time, they start building those connections amongst themselves. and you start to build really aligned teams. Well, and the SDR component is often the single most critical point of friction when they sit in sales, because that's where the blame game kicks in. If the marketing leader owns everything up until it's a sales accepted leader, you know, SAO, you know, it's an opportunity in your funnel, then you have ownership, you have responsibility. You know, if if the opportunity count is down, if you're not able to generate real opportunities that are turning into revenue, all of that ownership sits in marketing. But if you have the SDR sitting in sales, well, now you got finger pointing because was the lead not good or was the follow up Right. And when they're sitting in marketing, we can discuss whether it's inbound, whether it's outbound, who are the SDRs talking to? you know, if, an SDR is sitting around waiting for leads to come in, I got a problem with that when they're on my team, because they should be thinking about our ICP. They should be thinking about who are the targets. And we should be as an overall marketing team, we should providing we should be providing the intelligence that says, here's the companies that are in market, research them, and then do your outreach to them. Because again, I don't care if they're not doing like a hundred calls a day. What I care about is what are they doing that's going to create that velocity of opportunities that we work on with sales. And then once sales has the opportunity, the product marketing team, the customer advocacy team, the content team are working with them to help move those opportunities faster and increase the deal velocity. So it's still, it's never like we're just throwing stuff over the wall saying, good luck, we gave you opportunities. Doesn't work that way. It's we continue to collaborate all the way through to getting that business done. I think the 100 calls a day thing used to be a badge of honor like when we were doing this 10 years ago. But now that's a giant red flag. I mean, if I have an SDR that's making 100 calls in the day, their efficiency is garbage. There is major problems there. And, you know, I love I love it when I walk into an organization where they have compensation that spits or bonuses based on that quantity of calls and outreach. or like minimum thresholds. Blowing that up is the easiest and quickest way to change that culture. my God, I've never done SPFs on activity. I measure that activity, right? And, you know, I got it to a point where I could tell you in the middle of a month whether or not they were going to hit their targets the following month, right? And, but, so we measured it, but they were, they were targeted on getting those meetings set, getting those meetings held, and then getting those accepted by the sales team. The activity was, just, it was a leading indicator. but it wasn't the only one. But it was really more about are they connecting with people? Are they getting the right meetings together? And the activities were just, if I saw a guy who wasn't hitting the meetings target, because I knew my conversion rates for the meetings to the opportunities, then I'd look at their activities. But if I had people who were setting the right meetings and they were converting, I didn't care. so much about how did they get there because I knew they were getting there and they were doing the right things. I actually bonus off of efficiency and that conversion ratio. And so, you know, if I'm going to give a bonus, if it's going to be a spiff, I want the fewest amount of activities with the fewest amount of accounts to be able to generate their pipeline. Totally, and I would create accelerators if my guys overachieved, they got a higher rate for those meetings and for those opportunities that they had accepted, which meant that they weren't sandbagging. I didn't incentivize them to say, I'm not going to those meetings this month because I need them for next month. You got paid more if you overachieved in a given month. So their incentives were all about pulling things in, not pushing them back. So why do you think people do it the old way? Do you think they just never learned the evolution and how buying has changed? Or do you think it's more intrinsic to like, you know, maybe it's a VC who's pushing an older model and grading leaders off of that older model. I think it's probably a combination of the two. think it is very much driven by investors. I last summer was consulting with a client and I spoke about the issue, you know, how buying behavior has changed, how the MQL is not a, it's not a reliable indicator anymore. And went through a whole discussion around that and around the plan. And the very first thing the investor asked me after I finished, you know, presenting it was, so how many MQLs are going to deliver to sales? And I just wanted to ask, have you even been listening? so there's, you know, they, and they think it's been successful, but everybody's seeing the pressure, everybody's seeing how much more difficult it is to hit the numbers and to hit the targets. And I think we are at an inflection point because all the marketers I talk to, I feel like I'm in an echo chamber. They all recognize that, you know, focusing on leads doesn't work. The old way of doing MQL doesn't work. The intent understanding where people are in the buyer journey is the way forward. And I think what's going to happen is that the companies that are the early adopters of this newer way of, it's not a newer way. It's just adapting to the way buyer behavior has changed. But those who are the early adopters of that are going to perform. disproportionately well. And the investors in those companies are gonna benefit disproportionately compared to those who don't adopt it. And what they're going, what you're gonna find is word is gonna travel and everyone's gonna hop on the train, but there's gonna be a period of time where people are gonna outperform their competition because they're adapting to the new reality of buyer behavior. Now what they're gonna do, they're actually gonna give a better buyer experience, which is also gonna reinforce this, right? Because they're not gonna piss off people who aren't ready to buy just because they downloaded some content. So they're gonna create a better buyer experience. They're gonna create a better seller experience for their sellers, which is gonna result in better results and a better investor experience. But it's gonna take a little bit of time for the early adopters to the leaders to... to share that, but once word gets around that this is the way to do things, people will start to adopt it more in droves and they'll go away. But I think it's driven by investors, by executives who've been successful and they've done things the way they've always done them, but they're finding that doesn't work. yeah, it's the the shifting playbook. But people don't want to shift. We saw this many times in our career. I mean, you talked about implementing market early, you know, the entire inbound marketing push. And then you saw platforms like the sales loft and outreach that completely changed outbound. And then that led to the ABM push and boom, you know, with the terminus. And now you're seeing that with AI and companies are like the way that people are buying now. People aren't understanding that things like SEO are all but dead. You don't know it yet, but rest in peace to the search engine because you can have a full on conversation with chat, GPT, Gemini, whatever, to get the answers to your questions. You don't ever have to read a blog. that was written by a company targeting a search term. But you need that content to get into the AI, right? So you still gotta write the blogs. And I think you're right to an extent. think people, the idea that people want to go to a website is a bit outdated, right? People want answers to their questions. And if AI becomes a better way to deliver the answers to the questions, I mean, it can refer you to the websites and so on, but I think you're right. but you still have to get your content into the AI's vision, which means you still gotta write those blogs and you still gotta, you still have to answer the questions that people are asking and then become that resource that AI features when it answers your questions for you. So I'm not sure I totally agree that SEO is dead, I think, or maybe it's just content is not dead. You still have to write relevant content that answers people's questions. And it's the long game. was talking to someone earlier today about, you know, how when you're moving from founder led sales to a repeatable scalable sales motion, you're at that inflection point in that business where you got to play the short game because you got to do pipeline generation for this year, but you got to play the long game because you've got to build up that awareness so that when you're building and you've got that repeatable scalable process in place. people already coming to your site, you're in that, it's not the dark web, but it's there, it's the dark funnel, right? It's the dark funnel where people are learning about you, they're finding you. Maybe it's on your website, maybe it's on peer review sites, maybe it's in different places, maybe it's in AI. And you've got to build that because you're playing the long game so that when you're no longer able to just rely on your founder, you're building a machine that the machine already exists when you're ready to kind of turn one off and turn the other on. It's not quite turning off outbound and turning on inbound, but it's not far away from that because you're still going to do some outbound. But the majority of it is inbound because that's what the research is showing is that the buyers will contact you when they're ready, but you better be where they're looking in order for them to be ready for you. Well, all along the way, everything that we've talked about so far throughout our careers and that journey has been considered a luxury. When you bought Marketo, that was considered a luxury at the time. it, know, the question is, do you really need to spend that? Like it was the same thing with the terminus with sales loft. And, as things change, you know, we're implementing luxuries because we're seeing a head of the curve and where things are going. And it takes several years for people to catch up and realize, yeah, that's actually a necessity. And I think that the next one or the I guess the newest luxury is spending on brand marketing, doing the old school, the old school branding plays like if I'm doing doing a trade show specifically just because I know everybody's there. It's not necessarily a transactional element, but I need my brand to be a part of this conversation. And it can't be in a little 10 by 10 booth in the corner, because we're going to get the same amount of revenue, maybe in the short term, but not in the long term, right? Yeah. And it's funny. I've had a lot of conversations with people about brand marketing versus demand gen and the whole demand gen and performance marketing thing exists simply because it's, and even the marketo and the MQLs is the same thing. They exist simply because they're easier to measure. Right. I can say, I spent this much money on this tool and here's how many MQLs got spat out. Right. Here's how, you know, I did this much. syndicated content, I did this many webinars, and here's how many MQLs got spat out, right? So we focused on it because we could measure it. you can say to the CFO, well, here's why I'm spending all this money, because here's the value I'm getting. And it's been hard to do that with brand marketing. But that whole shift that I was talking about from the outbound to the inbound to that dark funnel is dependent on brand marketing. the people who were going to win or the people who were going to be able to demonstrate that the investment we made in the brand marketing, whether it's SEO, whether it's the trade shows, whether it's peer review sites, whatever it is, when we can demonstrate that these were the things that got us in the forefront of people's minds so that they raised their hands and came to us because where the battle's going to be fought and attribution's going to be challenging. is I call them organic handraisers, right? People that came to my website, whether they did all their research and they went to ChatGPT and they learned about my company and they typed my branded search term into Google and clicked on the first non-sponsored link to come to my website and then they filled in a contact me or get a demo or whatever. The form is that asks my sales team to get in touch with them. That's where the battle's gonna be won. so, attribution is a weird thing because the common wisdom is it takes some ungodly number of touches before somebody's ready to reach out to you. But all those touches matter. All those touches matter. And so I think the game, and what I advise clients, is focus on increasing the number of organic handraisers. They're more likely to turn into opportunities. And doing that is gonna be how you measure in effect the return of investment on the brand. Because without it, an absent really that outbound brute force strategy that used to work so well, you're not gonna be in those opportunities when they're ready to buy. And it's not just common wisdom. Again, research shows that somewhere between 80 and 90 % of your total addressable market is actually in market for a product at any point in time. And what you need to be is in the top of their mind when they identify, holy cow, I got a solution. yeah, this company is the one. I've read about them, I've heard about them. They can solve my problem. And that's all about the brand awareness. So it's, I think that's where the battle's gonna be waged this year and the coming years. The challenge. going to be attribution because the first touch, last touch, multi-touch, all of those are based on the stuff that we kind of know how to measure, which is all the paid things that we've done. But that's not what's all going to win. I got a I got a soapbox somewhere with first touch attribution on it. I that I bother. It bothers me how much people want to party like it's 1999 and do first touch attribution and have that rule the roost. It doesn't make any sense to me at all because you've got an entire buying committee like you referenced before. Just because one person filled out that form doesn't mean that the five people we've met through other various means throughout the last two years don't matter at all just because they didn't form. It doesn't mean that the first form fill is the first touch. It just means it's the first time they identified themselves. And there's some other research that I've seen that says for every, and this is pretty consistent, whether it's an SMB or an enterprise buying, for every two or three people that identified themselves, there's probably a factor of 10 of people. that have engaged with your content anonymously and you have no idea. And that's why it's so important to understand who's visiting your site, which companies are, whether or not you know the individuals, because those buying committees are bigger than they've ever been. Well, and they they might have actually met you in person at an event, but you're not scanning the folks who are just walking by your booth or or walking up and grabbing some swag or asking a couple of questions, but they're not in a buying mode or maybe they don't have the the title that you've identified as worth your time. And so those people I had a example, a perfect example of this, where it was an inbound lead, quote unquote. Filled out the form. was demo form, much like what you're talking about. But I had an open field that was where did you hear about us? And they listed multiple conferences. We had no scan leads from any of those conferences from that account. And so then we get on the call and we find out that they've just been very aware of us the whole time. sat through, by sat through, I mean, they were across the hall. watching the pitch so as not to be scanned because nobody wants that SDR follow-up email, but everybody wants knowledge. And that's just a perfect example of how it's changed. Nobody wants the SDR outreach. It's a shame. B2B, SaaS, marketing and sales organizations, we've done ourselves a disservice over the last 15 years, but it's reached that point where they will opt in when they're ready, not when we're ready, and certainly not when we pretend that we know that an MQL means anything. And that it indicates that they're ready. So let's talk really tactical here about team building, you know, for the marketing execs that are listening to this call or the sales execs who want to have a say in this process. Teams are getting leaner right now. What are the three positions? And I'll give you mine and we'll collaborate on this, but kind of like Fanny's football draft style. If you got three positions that you're going to hire for that are going to not just increase revenue, but also build a better relationship across sales and marketing? What are they? You get the first draft pick. Okay, my first draft pick is my marketing operations leader, someone who understands the tech stack, who understands how to do reporting, who understands what matters, and who's going to make sense of everything that we do. That first hire is my Mops leader. Nice. Not only does that give you better data, but it's going to allow all of the shiny features that nobody's using in the tech stack you're spending a half a million dollars on to actually be utilized by sales. Well, and they'll probably root out about 40 % of the tech stack you bought because over time you've created a tech stack that just is duplicative and is unnecessary. So that sharp marketing leader, first thing I ask her to do is make it more efficient and take cost out of our tech stack. Love it. I'm going to throw a curve ball and I'm going to pick a contractor, not an internal full time employee. But I want I want PR investment because in this new world order, not only not only do I need my brand to show up and be more visible, but I need the sales team to get super excited. And so having having that, you know, Wall Street Journal article that reference us that they can share to every one of their prospects. Huge. Yeah, I think that's right. It's that credible third party endorsement, but it's gotta be the right publications, your tier one publications, and it's gotta be features where we're the only vendor in the space. That's my top tier in the rubrics that I've created to measure PR. So I'm with you on that and I agree, that's outsourced. what you don't just want share a voice, you don't just trust share a voice as your metric to grade PR. I know, you know what, power of voice is actually the metric that I've used. And if you'll let me share vendors and I have no skin in the game on this, but I worked with a company called on inclusive that was able to take share a voice, but attribute both sentiment and the impact of the publication, which aligns to the way that I've always kind of brute forced on, you know, measurement of impact of PR. So. Power Voice is something that to me that really gets you kind of, know, who's winning. So if you've got a big external event that happens and how good is your agency at getting you in, Power Voice is a good, I found is a good metric for that. awesome. I can hear people doing a voice note on their phones right now to research that later. Absolutely. Okay, so I'm gonna go on my next, do I get the next pick? All right, it's gonna be an internal hire and after the MOPs, I think it's my most important hire and it's the product marketing person. And here's the reason for that. A lot of companies, especially early stage companies fail for not identifying three key things that they need to do to really succeed in the market and they're all, they all sit. under that product marketing hire. And the thing that all three of them rely on is customer obsession. So customer obsession is one of the things that I kind of scroll over my forehead or a tattoo on my arm because without customer obsession, you're not going to create a product that matters to your market you're trying to reach. And I'll start with that product market fit. I've seen too many early stage companies where you get a founder really knows their stuff. They've got some buddies who are potential buyers. They create a product that's suitable for the big whales, but they don't create or don't research whether there's product market fit that's broader than those big whales. And what they end up being is a consulting company that meets the needs of those big, big accounts because they can't afford to lose them. but those features don't necessarily translate to the broader market. Product market fit is all about talking to potential customers, talking to existing company customers and ensuring that what you're building is sufficient to get you to where you want to get to as a business in terms of your growth. Product marketing team leads that along with the product organization. The second component of that And it's intertwined, so it's not like you necessarily do this in order, but it's your ICP, your ideal customer profile. I've spoken to a company that told me their ICP is the Fortune 1000. And maybe that's correct, and maybe it's a real horizontal play, but in order to scale the business, you want to build an ICP. that is based on those customers and it could be by industry, it could be by geography, could well be by size. So could well be that Fortune 1000, but where you had not only success in selling to them, but longevity in the accounts. And now those are the people that are gonna be your best ambassadors. They're gonna tell your success stories for you. You can build collateral and material. let's say it's around an industry and let's say it's financial services, which is a regulated industry. You can build a cohort of assets that tell customer stories that tell why in a regulated industry you're specifically suitable. And I've just picked one financial services, but then you focus your inbound, you focus your outbound, your sales organization. Cause as you said, we're getting lean. So it's a smallish organization and we crush it. We dominate in that initial ICP. And then we have a cookie cutter that we can replicate for success as we scale this up and grow the business. So product marketing leads that. And then the third component of that is your persona research, understanding the buying committee, getting the messaging right. And the only way to do that is to work with the sales organization. because they're the ones who are talking to all those people. So marketing's gotta work with sales to understand them. Is this the message that resonates? What are the objections? How do we get over that? And so those three things, product market fit, your ideal customer profile, your personas and your messaging, and my product marketing first hire owns that, works with product, works with sales. I did product marketing like 20 years ago and I loved it because I felt like I was the glue for the whole company and it was so much fun because you got to work with everybody to be successful in that role. So that's my next pick. It makes everybody better, right? Like you're making the product better because there's now a two way communication for what's expected in the market with somebody who can hold their own and that meeting with the product team. And then you're making sales better because you've got real sales enablement with assets and you know, a pitch that actually works. It's not just a bunch of buzzwords that, you know, some demand gen marketer found online and they're, this works really well. It's like, yeah, in an ad, but maybe not in a one hour conversation. No, I think the list is good. just delivering it. You're not just dropping it on sales. You've worked with sales to create it. And what that does is it gets buy-in from the sales organization. All of a sudden, they go, hey, this marketing organization, I trust them. And what they will do as a result is they will share their learnings. Because the old way, sales will learn what works and won't work, but they'll just share it with their peers in sales. They don't share it with marketing. But if you've got that relationship built, where they're working together. Sales knows it's in their interest to share that, those key learnings with the marketing team. And again, that's my product marketing guy or gal. They're the ones that make that happen. Love it. So we've got an internal MOPs hire or some form of MOPs, rev ops, whatever the hell you want to call it. And then you've got your outsource PR and then you have your product marketing hire. And that is the three hires from our draft that will make everybody's life easier. Do you want to throw out any honorable mentions? I I think maybe like community or social media would be helpful. I think it's definitely underrepresented out there nowadays when people are. hiring somebody out of college and having them just use chat GPT to write social posts. But anything you want to throw out is an honorable. Yeah. Yeah, I I think there's gotta be a demand gen component, right? Somebody's, whether it's a contractor, somebody's got to own that machine because they are going to be coordinating whatever digital spend you're gonna do and digital spend is part of that building brand awareness, especially if it's CPC. because even if people don't click, they're going to see my message, right? Paid social. So there's someone who's got to coordinate all of that in whatever, whether you're a HubSpot, you know, Fanatic or a Marketo and Salesforce, you know, whatever, whatever tools you like, they got to, you know, make, bring all of that together. But yeah, and I agree with you. Social media is a big component of that, but I think a lot of companies, when they do social media, they do it off of the company profile. And I don't know, in any company that I've been, if you add up all of the staff, full-time and contract staff, and you add up all of their followers, it's gonna be probably an order of magnitude bigger than the company's following. So if you're do social media right, everybody's gotta build their personal brands around it and bring that up to the company. And that's, think, how to really grow that in a very much bigger way than most companies do it. And the pros that know how to actually build that with the sales team with the executive team, they are not cheap. So, you know, get the right hire. This was awesome conversation. Awesome conversation. I loved every minute of it. I end these the same way every time where I want you to think back to OG Gary, you know, pre implementing marketo back in the day. What advice would you give to your younger self coming into their marketing career, you know, with fresh eyes and all the hope in the world? Well, I'll tell you the best advice I ever got from a mentor, which is what I share with people. And he said to me, if you're not sure what to do, ask yourself what's best for your customer. And he says 95 % of the time that's going to be the right answer. And I think that's being customer obsessed is the quickest way to building success. in your business because I don't know nothing if I don't know where my customers' needs, where my customers' goals, what keeps them up at night. That, me, is the best thing. And then so I kind of had that advice back in the day. But I think the other advice I would give is always be learning, always ask questions. You don't know what you don't know. and it takes a village and be curious. Curiosity is gonna be your best asset in your career.