Hey everybody, welcome to Stacking Growth. My name is Megan Bowen. I'm the CEO of Refine Labs. Today I'm joined by special guest Max Morier, the VP of Growth Marketing at Trellix.
Welcome to the show, Max. Feel free and please introduce yourself to the listeners. Thanks so much, Megan. I'm Max.
I'm VP of Growth Marketing at Trellix. Like I said, that encompasses several different teams. We kind of have this good chunk of the marketing funnel rolling up into this growth organization, marketing automation, marketing analytics, along with demand generation field marketing, partner marketing, and BDR teams. So we've got kind of the gamut of top middle of funnel marketing, rolling up into growth marketing.
Just a little bit about my background, you know, in marketing for a little over a decade, worked at small startups, worked as a consultant at large companies, worked at kind of companies that have been around for quite some time looking at retention and growth optimization in kind of this new landscape. So I've got quite the breadth of experience across different types of organizations and roles both as a full-time employee and consultant. And I'm very excited to be with you on the show today, Megan. Yeah, thanks so much for coming.
We have a really important theme for our conversation today. We're going to talk a lot about alignment. And within the context of B to B and marketing, probably the most common sort of topic that you'll see, especially in the LinkedIn echo chamber on this is, oh, marketing must be aligned with sales. Marketing and sales alignment is so important to hit the goals.
And I know that you have a new and a fresh perspective about alignment and what B to B marketers should be thinking about today. So I'm really excited to dig into this. And I also, as I was kind of reflecting on this topic, was really uncovering some perspectives that I had as well relative to marketing alignment with other teams in the organization beyond sales. So I think this will be a cool conversation and something a little bit different than what we see a lot of the B to B marketing influencers talk about.
So I'm saying the stage for you, Max, why don't you break down your perspective on as a marketing team, as a marketing leader, which other function within the organization do you think is actually most critical for them to align with? So I think marketing and sales alignment is critical. It's important. And hopefully this isn't too much of a hot take.
But I came up in marketing hearing that alignment with sales was the most important thing for our teams and our leaders. If we were aligned to sales, nothing could go wrong. That was the be all end all. And obviously we had goals.
We were trying to generate or impact pipeline, but alignment with sales above all else. What I think we've seen over the last few years, especially is a shift in that we need to align to sales, we need to understand what their individual objectives are, their leadership objectives are. But often we don't necessarily see sales and finance aligned on how to get to a goal. We see sales know that they have a goal.
They then want support from the organizations around them, including marketing to work toward that goal. But what finance teams really want to understand is how we're going to do that goal. They look at all the different elements of the organization and try to understand which subset of the business is adding value and how versus sales teams, which also often just wants to get to the goal, for any means possible. And I think as a marketing team, what we need to do now is make sure that we're not just aligning to sales and their end goal objectives, but aligning to our finance teams, understanding how they measure success for a marketing organization, which may or may not align directly to what sales is requesting us as a team.
I mean, overall, I agree with you. I'm curious to know what was the set of circumstances that you experienced that made you arrive to this conclusion? I don't know for certain, but I suspect that through your own experience, you kind of came to this realization and I would love to have you kind of expand on whether it's your current position or a different one. What happened to make you realize that this was important?
Sure. I've been privileged to have visibility now for several years and several roles into decision making at the executive level. And I think that a lot of marketers look at the sales alignment as their safety blanket. If we do this, we'll be okay.
Sales will vouch for us. We will continue to see the investment that we want. We'll be able to run the programs that we like. We'll be able to be creative.
But getting to experience planning, planning discussions at a high level and understand the revenue and growth objectives for businesses has made it clear to me that there is this difference between an end sales objective and the how of it, how we get there. And where I see the rubber hit the road is really around tactical investment for marketing. We see sellers want certain tactics invested in from us as a team. I don't want to throw any particular functions under the bus, but depending on your sales organization and what kinds of programs they feel have an impact on their pipeline or on their funnel, they will want to see that same investment year over year over year.
It could be digital marketing. It could be live events. But they like to see the same thing that they think based on their guts or their total win rates, see reinvested year over year. When you start to connect, though, whether or not that has an actual mathematical impact on generation of pipeline or an impact on closing a business, what I've found through several different roles, several different organizations of varying sizes is that those investment requests do not or cannot, in some cases, be linked directly to value.
There's this assumed anecdotal value add that you hear, but that's not what finance is about. And for marketers who have been exposed to some of the planning conversations at an organization who gives us the budget, it's not sales. Unless you roll up to a CRO, which I have before, that can be great. But sales does not give you your budget.
Finance gives you your budget. Your board, those folks give you your budget. So make sure you understand those objectives just as much as you understand that sales love that we invested in this last year, we should do it again. That matters.
But you need to make sure that you can justify that investment, not just the sales, but to the other teams and understand what they use as the yardstick for marketing success measurement. Yeah. And I think you'd probably agree with this. I think in an ideal scenario, you would have alignment across all functions within an organization or in this particular conversation.
Are sales marketing and finance are all tightly aligned? Do you find that this is, you've described a couple of times where basically the misalignment that you're witnessing is a sales team believes that a particular marketing program is most impactful for them, but an objective financial analysis might show otherwise. Is that the primary misalignment that you see? Are there other scenarios that play out that you're observing and witnessing?
So I think that best practice for folks who've been exposed to different types of marketing attribution strategies, best practice is to understand what your business has before you propose any changes to it. But a lot of people find that whatever strategies used for measurement is not reflective of the actual value that they feel their marketing programs are adding. And often sales instinct is right. They feel like certain kinds of investment adds value, but it's in a way that can't be made mathematical.
And unfortunately, finance teams need it to be made mathematical. And so I think a lot of marketers will shy away from that challenge. Like, how do I translate this type of investment into spreadsheet form for a finance team instead of just assuming that sales is going to support me through this discussion? And I saw a LinkedIn post from someone in the industry that I regard highly about marketing shouldn't be the CFO.
Like we, if it's not our job, we are not a finance team. And I wholeheartedly agree with that. There's a lot of other things that finance teams do, but it is our job to be aware of the value that we get back to the business, not everyone else's value and return on investment plan, but our own return on investment. It's important for us to understand that.
And so whether it's events or digital marketing, kind of two ends of the spectrum, you can connect that to whatever your success metric is. If your PLG company and your goal is, you know, signups, easy, easy, like you can connect that digital experience through. If it's, you know, pipeline and traditional B2B motion with a belong sales organization, you can do that. But it does take a lot of front end education alignment first of yourself to make sure you understand what the internal process's definitions and models are, and then start to provide recommendations and explain why you think these things need to change.
But I urge marketers to throw off the sales supports me, say, if you like it and go talk to your finance folks, make sure that you have the business's best interest in mind, not just making decisions based off the gut and stick to your sellers. Yeah, and you know, something I talk about a lot personally, on LinkedIn too, is how marketing should think about effectively. And I think what you think you're kind of getting at the same point is, as a marketing leader, you need to be able to make a financial business case that backs up your strategy and your program recommendations, right? And you need to use as much data as you have available, which you've highlighted the challenge of attribution and the challenge of measuring the effectiveness of certain programs can be imperfect or difficult to actually do.
We have a very specific methodology that we call split the funnel. It basically, you know, the primary approach to the split the funnel analysis is that you basically try to dissect all of your close one opportunities and bucket them into different pipeline sources and evaluate the total investment relative to the total return of each pipeline source. And that effectively gives you some good insights. It could show that certain programs are over, you know, you're over investing in certain programs that aren't yielding the return that you want, or the opposite, right?
That you're actually getting a significant return. And maybe you should be investing more in a different program to get an even, you know, an even greater ROI. That has been the basis with which, you know, we work with our customers to help let's paint the picture of the reality that exists today, use the conclusions and the insights, and then develop a roadmap for how we can make changes to kind of optimize the ROI on that. So that's been our typical approach.
It works, I would say the biggest challenge that we have is a lack of data quality or like a lack of information that limits how robust that analysis can be. And then, you know, we try to figure out where we can fix those data gaps, those infrastructure gaps so that we can at least collect more robust or more accurate data going forward. But I'd love you to break down your approach. Like, how do you think about it?
Like, if we get really specific, you as a marketing leader, what are you doing to align with your finance team, you know, today? Yeah, I'll give an example. You know, I'm lucky to be at Trellix. We have a great sales organization, a great financing.
We've gone through a lot of change in the last couple of years. It's a relatively new brand. There've been a million challenges that we've been able to overcome. One of the first things that I knew I had to do when I joined with all the change going on was I didn't want to come in knowing that there were all these priorities on everyone's plate and kicked down the door and say, we need to implement a new attribution methodology.
When I see marketers do that, often what happens is they implement their own attribution methodology that has nothing to do with how the business or the board or your investors measure the success of your marketing team. The first thing I always do whether it's here elsewhere is first get a handle on current state models definitions and goals. Like, what is it today? Because if I can't articulate that, I can't explain why what I'm about to propose is better or more reflective of value and true return on investment.
And then what I do is I start to model and I think marketers and I'm not talking care special week, but the marketers shy away from that because they think I'm not math. I don't do math. I didn't go to school for math. Maybe I didn't go to school at all.
Math is scary. You know, once you start to map out what your funnel looks like, even if your current definitions of success are messy, there's usually only, you know, 10 steps in your funnel really that are most critical. And that includes, you know, volumetrics and conversions, really. And then you start to map out within this current definition, you know, what did success look like or what did failure look like historically get a sense of trends, map out what you could do within that same model with additional investment going forward.
Then you start to say, well, okay, you, the C level team are asking us to make investments in certain things. But when I try to plug that into my model, it's not actually going to spit out any value. So then you can start to point to examples in your investment recommendations from folks who have more authority than you, who are saying you need to do this one way or another to use that as the impetus for changing your definition and saying, okay, well, maybe we need to get more inclusive about how we measure marketing's contribution here. Are we siloing out marketing, you know, contribution from our channel or partner contribution?
Why aren't we letting these teams collaborate instead of compete with each other? You know, that's, that could really be a strong foundation for changes, comparing and contrasting the investments that your highest level of the company seems to require you to make with the actual definitions for success that your finance or even your sales team have put in place for you. So I think best practice is always don't kick on the door and just start, you know, firing. Make sure that you come in, you understand the foundation on which you should either continue to build or try and rebuild and change so that you come in intelligently to the conversation, have as much math based information as possible.
Like it's only as good as the data to some extent. Yes. But again, you know, that doesn't excuse marketers from trying. I see that a lot where marketers are like, well, the data is messy.
So like, we're just going to keep guessing. Like, no, you got to use that messy data as a way to push for change and show why it's wrong. So that's my take on kind of how I approach this. I don't want to vouch for any particular attribution model or another.
I think it totally depends on the goals that a company is trying to reach and B to B to C could be totally different. But that's going to be a first I take when I come in first understand the goals that understand the measurement methodology and then move on to change proposals. Yeah. I've taken a specific approach as a leader in a couple of organizations that was pretty effective.
And so, you know, I think we've probably had many marketing leaders or sales leaders listening to this where you might start, you know, you join an organization and then you kind of come to realize when you're taking a look at the financial model that it was, you know, it, and I'm not saying every company does this, but this is a common practice, especially in years past. I feel like people are trying to get better about this. But I'm sure you've experienced this at least once in your career where the annual plan is based on we want to make X million dollars by December. So let's just back into what would be required in order to hit that end goal over the course of this year.
And then, okay, let's then figure out how many sales people we need, you know, how much money we need to pump into the marketing machine to give us a return. And that's like a, like a typical way that a lot of plans can be made. You know, when I had that experience coming into an organization and realized that that was how the goals were set, the approach that I took was actually saying, okay, can I get someone from finance, someone from sales, someone from marketing, and someone from customer success, all in a room together. And even beyond just marketing and finance alignment, can we actually look at the entire go to market engine?
And can we all have like an honest dialogue of what this is really going to look like, right? And I find that, I think depending on the scenario, taking your approach or like the approach I described previously, of like putting it together in analysis and a business case and like presenting it is kind of very effective. This approach that I'm describing is a little bit different. It's almost like starting with an attempt to align and getting on the same page with how we're all going to work together to build a bottoms up model based on reality.
And the way that I've framed it up to the this kind of like working group that I formed is, Hey, let's just do this exercise. This is a top down model that the company wants us to achieve. Let's build a bottoms up model based on what we believe is realistic. And let's go through that exercise together so that everyone can also understand from the leader that's closest to each function, what really makes sense or how they think about forecasting and projecting and growth.
Let's see where we land when we complete that bottoms up model and then let's compare it to the top down model. How far away are they? They're often way off. And then I do another thought exercise.
So I say, okay, based on how far away, what would it take? What would have to be true if we were going to go for it? Would we need more headcount, more budget, more time? Like, what are the levers that we have?
What would have to be true to get to that mark? And then out of all of those things, you know, what is actually realistic and what are some bets we can place to, because the likely scenario is in this example that we're saying, like, you're probably not going to hit the unrealistic top down model, but there's also probably a way to overperform the bottoms up model, right? And really strong performance is probably somewhere in the middle of those two models. So I found that that approach can be really helpful because at number one, I think it educates and creates a lot of empathy for all of the different leaders of all those functions to go through that process with their peers and like really understand the reasons why people are projecting or forecasting in certain ways, the real challenges that they face, why they believe they can't hit a certain particular goal or target.
And then having the exercise where you're like, okay, this is probably more realistic, but let's not hold ourselves back. And then going through that exercise of like a co collaborative effort to say, because what I found in my experience is the things that really move the needle are things that marketing sales and the customer success team are all working on together. And this brings finance out of the spreadsheet, just as much as we need to get the other functions into spreadsheets, I find that it's also important for finance to get out of theirs and to get into the customer world. Right.
And so anyway, that's been effective with this. I thought I would share that. Yeah, I'd say too, like the, you know, while the first thing that I'll always do is try to understand current state and try to model into that and use that as my base language claim, the need for change, supporting metrics are critical. Like if you have, there's usually a metric that is legal, which is some, some level of bookings, like that's what we're trying to get to.
And then you can argue about whether that's marketing's job or whether marketing's job is for the funnel or a million different places along the funnel. But those million different places along the funnel are all supporting cast members that marketers should also make sure they understand and map out, you know, if if they would take these example of like new business pipeline. Okay, so we're focused on growth of new logos got it new business pipeline is our most critical metric. But what about renewals?
What about upsell cross sell? Does that count as a business pipeline? What does the definition of new business pipeline include? Is it just new logos?
Is it this other stuff? Obviously, we don't run when rules to suffer. We want that to be at as high as it could possibly be and marketing can educate the customer base just as well as it can educate, you know, potential new customers, making sure as a marketer that you map out these things that, you know, exactly what you said, a finance team who's used to just spreadsheets may not be remembering that marketing has an impact on. And if the way that they measure success is exclusive to just one, you know, section of your businesses success funnel and they're not accounting for all of these other things like retention rates or deployment rates, you know, those kinds of things are absolutely things marketing can have an impact on if it's a priority.
And that's in those planning discussions where you can highlight that as a like look our primary goal and how we've tracked to it is this. But look at all this stuff that we talked as a team. Again, it takes a lot of effort. You have to go through, you have to understand, can this be measured?
Are other teams measuring it? Is it, you know, purely correlative or can we represent a direct connection between marketing's work and something about the customer success team or the renewal sales team is working on separate from like a new logo model? But again, I think about the underpinning there. And just based on my own experience, what I see is marketers get wrapped up in our day to day execution.
We are, you know, trying to deliver a program or a tactic. And it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of communication, it takes a lot of, you know, budding heads to potentially track down what all of the supporting metrics are and how they're defined and have all these discussions about whether that's correct or not. But what I find in my own experience is, you know, I come from this background of automation, technology, I've grown into, you know, testing based digital growth marketing and all these sub functions. It has been so helpful for me to be able to lean on my teams or lean on my own experience to track all these down, understand as many of them as I can.
So that when someone comes to me and says, you're not adding a value, I can point at all those other supporting cast metrics and say, yeah, I might not be doing exactly what I need to here. But are you remembering that we have to spend and split all of our time supporting all these other things? And that if we stopped doing that in support of this, that that would be felt. It might not be our most critical metric, but you would see a drop off, I can show you, you know, looking at tracking over time.
So I think it's really helpful to go through the legwork as a marketer, maybe getting out of your comfort zone of execution and pure marketing tactical, you know, optimization, like not getting stuck in, I'm trying to optimize for event attendance. Like, that's not the end goal. The end goal is what is that impact further down, making sure that you pull yourself back from your day to day execution optimization, look at business optimization. I think that's the whole point of growth marketing.
And my role is to test test test and show your results. And, you know, for me, it's been incredibly helpful to get into the weeds and not shy away from, you know, working with finance teams and working with spreadsheets. But just like you said, it's a two-way street. We want to pull them out of it just as much as we can get it to it.
Yeah. And you know, I've been a CEO, a CEO, one of the things as well, but I think like a finance team has a lot of influence over is incentives. So I think incentives are hugely impactful for goal setting and for alignment across teams. And so I think, you know, we're kind of indexing on like what the marketers should be thinking about, what the marketers should be doing to build this alignment.
But when you think about the company leadership and the finance team, what I find is when there is real misalignment across an organization, oftentimes it can be mapped back to a conflicting incentive structure. And so I think that's another key element where even if, you know, if you're the B2B marketer, you're fighting the good fight, you're making your spreadsheet, you're trying to align with finance. But if you have these headwinds and these competing forces that you're dealing with, it can be really challenging. And so I'd be curious, what's your take on just incentives overall and how that plays into this entire topic that we're talking about?
Well, first and foremost, a marketer working by themselves trying to align is going to be next to impossible. It needs to be a marketing mission as a team. You know, I've seen a lot of great marketing folks, someone, you know, someone who I inherited as a team member, several roles back to be so much about analytics and modeling it, they were so frustrated with the inability to create change and definitions and process. And it wasn't because they were wrong.
They were, they were absolutely right about most of what they were frustrated with. But the tiers of leadership above us, that wasn't the priority. And so it does need to be a top-down priority that marketing pushes on this methodology. And, you know, again, I'm lucky.
My CMO, Ashbury is a operational CMO. He has a lot of creative people on this team. He has a lot of creative concepts at the core. We want to make sure that we know what value we add to the organization.
And so he pushes the entire team, myself and my teams included, to work toward that alignment and that methodology together, make sure that we have more than just a, you know, a surface level understanding of definitions and metrics, because we want to be able to defend ourselves in our work and show how that supports the business. But it has to be something that each level of management is in on with the rest of the marketing team. We all need to be working in support of that. And I think it's then contingent on management to defend our teams if the company is not ready to make changes.
Either that means we invest in things that are only going to show ROI and we need to defend our teams when that means pulling away from other programs that add value that can't be represented in a funnel or push even harder and make a huge think about that model in a way that escalates as high as it can go to actually drive change. So I do think there's a huge leadership opponent to this. It can't just be a you know, a marketer in spreadsheets and a silo trying to create change. It has to be a full team push.
Absolutely. I think another thing that I see similar to incentive that's more systemic to the business that could also be getting in the way of alignment overall is like the core fundamentals of the actual business strategy. And a lot of these things typically fall within like a product marketing function, right? So think about things like pricing, positioning, you know, who your ideal customer is, whether your product is good enough or is a need to have or nice to have.
I would say, you know, for me personally, some of the when I've had the biggest impacts in my career at particular companies has always been when I was able to look at the business as a whole, not just my function and say, what is like, what is standing in the way of us growing, right? And being able to look at every function, every team, the core fundamentals of the business and try to actually identify the real root cause problem that could be happening and bringing that to the table and working cross functionally to try to solve that. Those are those problems are hard. They're not easy to solve.
They're also hard to identify. But I think that's another element. I've been in the position where I've been so tunnel visioned on my function and just like continuing to optimize my function, but then wasn't seeing the requisite business outcomes that I thought I would get. And then realizing that there's a bigger problem.
So all the things I was doing were like bandaids on like a huge gaping wound that wasn't actually fixing the problem, right? And so I think that's really important as well, especially with, especially over the last five years and the COVID boom and like the injection of VC money and 2021, the proliferation of new startups. And now we're seeing another wave, like, you know, million AI startups are coming up every day. It goes back to like, are you actually solving a problem that matters?
Is your solution something that people really need? Are you appropriately pricing? You know, do you have a strong offer? Can you deliver on your promises?
And so I think asking those big strategic questions, I think, is equally as important as everything else that we've been talking about until this point agreed. I would say, though, that being able to pose those questions and be taken seriously, it definitely has to be built on credibility through other means. Like, you know, again, there's a huge difference for marketers starting in a new company and marketers, marketers who've shown that they're able to optimize within their own function and then start to look outside it. You know, we, if I come into a planning discussion and say, like, we can do all the optimization in the world as a marketing team, but really our deployment rates on the product are the biggest reason we're not heading out.
If I come in and just say that without having shown that, even if I've identified the correct solution, that's going to be a difficult pill to swallow for a customer success team or a new organization. I find it really helpful to make sure that I have a couple quarters of at least of self-optimization under my belt. So again, there's a lot of nuance in there for marketers to actually drive meaningful change. This might be a hot take.
Marketing is not going to make a break whether a company has the skills. Like, we are amplifiers of successful products, successful sales motions. We help feed something, but we, it's not going to be unless there's a colossal screw up and some sort of programmer campaign, which we've seen. But in most cases, marketing is not going to, marketing cannot take a company by itself from failure to success or vice versa.
We move the needle. We help there. And so I think it's good. We have to know, we have to optimize, but it's good for the rest of the org to be reminded that we amplify the good things.
We can amplify bad things if they're not working well. If we promote solutions that don't work, it's going to come back a bit somewhere in the funnel. If we are feeding into a sales motion that has fundamental issues and how it manages or closes pipeline, what's the point of creating all that pipeline to begin with? So I think it's, we can make a massive impact, but rarely are we going to be the reason for success or failure.
So we want to build our credibility and show, hey, we've taken ourselves from, if we're talking dollar in dollar out from one to one ROI to a dollar in five dollars out, then we can go to the table and say, look, we've shown we can optimize our own organization. Let's start to look at some of these other areas that are then causing a breakdown success of the business, but definitely like that baseline of self assessment optimization first. Yeah, totally agree. I think that's a great point.
My, I've been thinking a lot about this, especially lately, because I'm really starting to think ahead and I believe that actually creating a really exceptional customer experience, we're not only are you delivering on your outcomes, but you're finding opportunities to create such memorable experiences, you can use the praise, surprise and delight that that actually might be one of the more powerful marketing strategies that exist, especially as we start to think with AI coming up and the impact of like, I don't know what, I think things like paid search and SEO and paid ads are going to over five to 10 year horizon are going to start to have some diminishing impacts because of some of these new technologies that are coming up and how it's going to change, how people discover information online. And I'm actually kind of a customer success person as heart. That was kind of where I spent the bold of my career in my twenties and early thirties. And it's almost kind of like going back to the basics of if you get that right, like, I mean, and effectively, I think that becomes like word of mouth marketing, but I think that's going to come back around as like the most impactful marketing tactic that exists.
And then you kind of ask yourself like, is that the job of the marketing team or is that the job of the product team or the customer success team? So I know my perspective is yes, it's important for marketing to be aligned with sales, yes, it's important for marketing to be aligned with finance. But if I am a marketer and a B2B company, I think I'm really thinking about how am I able to understand and influence and amplify the product and the customer experience. I think, I think I hope and I think that those are going to continue to have more of a focus, you know, in the future.
I think it's conceptually, I agree in practice. I, this is where this this frustration comes from for me is, well, in theory, yes, so many organizations can't seem to reflect that as value driven by a marketing team or supported by a marketing team. And so, aspirational goal, I think is to get to that point. But when marketers, when we go through downturns and we get so frustrated by budget changes or headcount changes, if we're just working on the basis of an aspirational goal, then we're confused why stuff like that happens like we saw in the last couple of years in the tech industry.
And if we're, if we have that aspirational goal in mind, we're hoping and we're trying to help get there or explain why the current state doesn't reflect that correctly. But still very aware and understand the actual current state, which is, in most cases, based on a, you know, top down model about outcome in revenue or booking, then we're not surprised. And I think that it's, again, it's, I totally agree on aspirationally surprising to light is what we all want to do as marketers. But if we, if that's the way that we work, we're going to be shocked and disappointed when changes occur in the business.
And I am the kind of marketer who would rather not be surprised like that. And I hear that sentiment from a lot of marketers. They want to know why did this happen? Why did we end up in this place?
And it's like, well, there were signals, there were signs, if we weren't aware enough of how measurement actually occurred versus how we aspirationally want to represent our value edge of business, then we're going to be surprised by that stuff. So I think there's, you want to push for the aspirational, just like anything in any job anywhere. But you definitely don't want to just do that. You have, I would just recommend that all marketers get some level of understanding of true financial objectives and how it ties to marketing, don't understand the whole company strategy direction, financial landscape.
But what does marketing's role in the current state so that you're not surprised? Or maybe you can read tea leaves about changes in strategy and direction and investment for your team and get ahead of that stuff. And I think a lot of that just comes with being comfortable, just bringing it full circle, pulling that safety blanket of, hey, well, I'm lying to sales, everything's fine. Putting that to the side, knowing that you had a great relationship with your sellers is key, but focusing some more time or equivalent time on understanding who holds the purse strings, which is finance investors, boards, etc.
Yeah. And I think, fair points. I think the way I would counter is the people that hold the purse strings in your organization are actually your customers. And when you think about, I agree, it's not either or, right?
So I don't think it's like, oh, we only index on this and don't do anything else. Like, obviously, you need to be looking at the whole picture and you need to have a portfolio of strategies that you're executing against something very tactical to bring the aspirational down into reality. I'll give an example, had a really small marketing budget at a company. And we had a great product that our customers really genuinely loved to use.
And so we developed a series of small, intimate customer gatherings at a really high frequency. And we would invite our customer and we would ask that they bring a non-customer with them to the event, a fellow colleague in their industry. And we really literally just held these events in our office. It wasn't that expensive.
We get some food, we get some drinks, we were kind of scrappy, so it wasn't even a significant like cost or investment in this particular program. But what we found was when we were regularly getting our customers together, creating opportunities for them to bring potential customers into our space in our world, creating really fun, light, easy experiences that they could enjoy get value out of that that was a huge contributor to net new pipeline creation. And so there are very real tactics that can be implemented fairly low cost to start to move towards that broader aspirational reality that I painted. Well, thank you so much, Max.
This was an awesome conversation. We covered a lot of ground. I really like the different directions that our conversation took, really appreciate your perspective and sharing from your experience. And I love that we kind of had some different ways to look at things.
So I always love when we can kind of have some differing perspectives in a back and forth. That was a ton of fun. So thanks again, and we'll have to do this again sometime.