Matt Bramson, welcome to the Sacking Growth podcast. How are you doing? Cassidy, great to be here. Thank you for having me.
I'm looking forward to catching up. Yeah, same here. It's a full disclosure for the audience. I've known Matt and worked with him for the last three years.
He's taught me a lot about sales. He's a genuinely good dude and an amazing golfer. So just putting that out there. Then in fact, we're hitting the links and catching up next week.
So I'm looking forward to that. Likewise. Yeah, it's going to be fun. Yeah, a lot of fun.
So why do we start with just what have you been up to? We departed ways. We sold our company five months ago. What's been going on since?
Love to hear it. Yeah, about a month and a half ago, I joined another post-series A. Actually, we just raised our series B and announced that internally. But we're going to do a bit of press around that next week.
But joining another startup called Manta, they sit within this category that they created. We can certainly talk more about it, but called Data Lineage, which essentially allows organizations to understand how data flows through systems. So the first half of my career, I've only had three jobs. This is my third job, really, never right outside of bus and dishes or whatever.
But my first part of my career was really around data feeds and data solutions and metadata management. The second part of my career was really around front end or user applications, which a lot about because that's what we did together. But I really haven't sat in the middleware space or the infrastructure space. So for me, that's what really excited me about the company was learning a lot about how it actually gets from the front end all the way or gets from the backend all the way to the front end.
That's what we do. Massive opportunity. We're still growing. We're hiring a lot of people.
We're enhancing the product. But what you would expect from a company that has some semblance of product market fit. But how do we scale that? Well, congratulations on the series B.
And what I heard was anybody out there who wants a job called Manta. They're hiring. And last, I mean, I have to say as somebody who's been in marketing for a while, it blesses my heart to hear the words category being used by a salesperson. So that's all I love that.
Why don't we kind of lay a little foundation for a conversation in that? But what does the sales organization look like at Manta? Kind of what you're willing to share? Kind of just broadly kind of paint a picture of what this kind of looks like.
And we can go from there and jump into a few more questions. Sure. So our sales function is kind of executive specifically. It's split into two sort of halves.
One side of the house being what we call enterprise and one being strategic. So enterprise is less than 10,000 employees, strategic being greater than 10,000 employees. But the thinking there is we need different types of sales people to sell to different types of organizations, not just by industry or vertical, but more complex sales cycles requiring different types of experiences. So that's the makeup of the account executives.
We have a very robust inside sales team as well. I would say they spend the majority of their time trying to capture meetings with those enterprise to less than 10,000 employee accounts. And then a lot of the outbound to attract new logos is going to be done by the account executives on the strategic side. So there's a bit of resource sharing there with inside sales across strategic enterprise.
But that's the makeup of the sales function. But as you'd expect, on-prem or SaaS deployments, we've got a pretty robust sales engineering team as well to help with proof of concepts and value assessments and all the types of things that you expect software companies to do. Yeah, I appreciate that breakdown. Roughly, how many accounts would you put into a strategic account about 10,000?
And how many accounts would you put into a below 10,000? Like a rough ballpark. Great question. That was something I actually posed to my account executives when I started.
How do you go to market? How do you create a list of accounts you want to target? I would say that the exercise for me was more to get a sense of how to think as opposed to what the actual deliverable was. Now, obviously, if there was something completely out of bounds, we would address that.
But I think for a strategic account executives, it's going to be really hard to go to market with more than 30 accounts. You could stretch that a little bit, or you could kind of reel it back in a little bit. But what I didn't really want to see, and I actually saw a bit of this, but what I didn't really want to see was someone saying, okay, here's 500 companies in my territory that are greater than 10,000 employees. Let's go.
You might find success there, I suppose, but it's certainly not all that just by definition, one strategic, but two, I think it's very hard to measure your effectiveness there. So they're talking about 30 accounts, the top five of those, and they're primarily existing accounts. So they're trying to up and cross sell those. The other 25 are pretty blue ocean.
But they have put some thought into why they made it on the list. And that breakdown is usually why are we a good fit for them, and why would they be interested in having a conversation with us? I'm actually challenging our account executives to present some point of view around why we would even work with these organizations. So everyone's sort of approaches that exercise a little bit different.
Some people will look at financials for these companies, like is their SG&A expense ratio higher than an industry average? They sort of take a more mathematical approach to it. Others will say, well, what do we still pass? What are competitors?
Can I go target Home Depot because we sold something to Lowe's or Menars or something like that? So again, I'm more interested with how they think, because if they're going into that exercise, saying, I feel really good about this execution plan, they're going to do well. That's going to happen. If I come in and say, no, go sell to these only these types of companies and only do this, it becomes a much more difficult exercise for them.
They've been on the plan at that point. I appreciate the breakdown. And I'm going to ask a selfish question because it's something that we've been talking about and wrestling with in our sales team here at Refine Labs. And that is when you think about these 30 accounts, these strategic accounts, and you said typically to call five of those accounts are current customers.
How do you think about that in terms of like the book of business that the sales person's running? You want them ideally to have 30 accounts and maybe 10 or 15 are existing? Do you keep the number of net new accounts versus current customers separate within their book? Do you see that changing over time in terms of like this kind of full cycle nature of running these strategic accounts?
I'm just curious how you think about that, selfishly? Yeah, I think our capacity model, right, that how many accounts you can target and how did you choose those accounts is a little bit like touchy feely right now, right? We don't really have a great idea that five is the absolute perfect number. Now, keep in mind, like that account executive might actually have 15 accounts that he could sell to more products to, but he's chosen those five for a specific reason, right?
We score and rate our clients based on how many, you know, where unit based pricing models, so how many units are they actually utilizing? That is probably the purest measure for any consumption based model, but already using the unit that they actually purchased, right? It's not a seed license, it's consumption based. So if they're reaching that threshold and they're up for renewal soon and we're dealing with executives and they might be actually influencing our roadmap, like it's pretty easy to say that that that organization should be on the list.
Now on the flip side, you might have a customer that isn't all that thrilled with the solution, right? Or maybe they're going in a different direction. Maybe they want to do this entire thing manually or higher consulting. I mean, those are certainly things that we sell against.
So I think over time, I would actually see that the accounting executives here, as we sign more and more customers, that their 30 strategic accounts are probably all existing customers. And then you probably now create a different role where you're focused on growing and cross selling with the CSMs and getting the boots on the ground there, but also a role that's specifically designed around that new logos. That's not a radical concept, right? But as an organization, we're just not there yet.
I think I want to come back on this. There's a lot of questions I want to go down around, who I'm thinking about regarding kind of the sales structure and process and strategy. But let me kind of take a step back. One of the things that I was very interested in having you on this podcast to talk about is you're an enterprise sale seller who's always been in this column early stage startup.
So you mentioned you have three careers. This is kind of your niche, which I find fascinating, selling the large strategic accounts as a small entrepreneurial disruptive startup. So let's start with just like, I characterize that correctly. And then too, how did that come about for folks out there listening saying, I want to be like Matt, Matt, perhaps some.
There's probably more to aspire to that would be my first piece of advice. But I would correct you. And I haven't really had three different careers per se. I've had three different jobs.
I've worked at three different companies. Right. I kind of mentioned this earlier. The first part of my career, I was working for an organization called BACSET, Research Systems.
We were a front end platform for financial advisors and both managers and hedge funds. So we competed with Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters. And you can go on and on on the list. My role there was, I was essentially tasked with ripping the guts out of the system, the data and the analytics, and then supplying those off platform.
It was a pretty radical concept to the organization at the time, because you would expect a platform would want to keep you in the platform, as opposed to start to allow users to try to analyze the data outside of it. So there was a lot of like internal selling that we had to do that this was like a practice area that we should stand up. So that was sort of like my first, I guess, whiff of being an entrepreneur or trying to convince people. I wasn't selling externally.
I was selling internally. But like this was, we had a market here, right? Hedge funds want to buy this stuff and they don't want the platform. These are big deals, right?
Like, do we want to do we want to pursue these? And I have a bit of more of a technical background. So I was sort of told, yeah, you can do it if you can actually write the code to do what the customers want. So that was the early part of my career.
I then was asked to move overseas. I did the same thing, but started the same practice area in London and sold to customers kind of anywhere outside of North America. I don't know why they allowed me to do it. I still don't to this day.
But they did. So that was like, I guess my second whiff of a startup in a way that I had this support or safety net with the mothership based in Connecticut. But I didn't have those resources, right? And I didn't really have like the selling motion is different in a broad relative to the state.
So it really got me interested in just like starting things from scratch, right? And then my next sort of logical question that I was begging myself was, why don't I do this at a real startup? And why do I not do this at a company that has 10 or 20 or 30,000 employees, right? Because I kind of wanted to take the governor off a little bit and see if I could do this somewhere else.
And that's ultimately what brought me to narrative science when I joined, we had 15, 20 employees and was there for eight years started as a contributor and went on to manage teams. And then obviously the organization was acquired several months ago. So I think you've kind of got to decide at some point, like what do you want to be good at, right? And I think there's a certain type, and I'll be the first to admit this.
And I mentioned this to everybody that I work with here at Manta, but I think there's a certain type of person that can bring a company from where they're at, you know, five to 10 million, right? They've got a little bit of product market fit to 50 million to 60, but it's a very different type of person that's going to bring you from 60 to 600, right? Or 60 to 200. I don't think that's me, right?
It could be over time, maybe my mind changes or something like that. But yeah, I just decided that this is something that I want to get really, really good at and sharpen my skills here so that it becomes very easy to pick up and replicate at virtually any type of company that needs to sales later. This kind of introspection that you went through to kind of figure out this is the thing that you do well and want to do. I think it's admirable to say, listen, you're the person to take the company from five to 50, but maybe not from 50 to 500 or 600.
How did you get to that point in kind of realization on your end that this is what you'd like to do and this is what you're going to have to kind of intersect you with those two things? That's a great question. A lot of it was through my interviewing process after the acquisition. I talked with several companies that were at the 70,000, 80,000,000 range.
And I was the person to tell them, I don't know that I'm the right person to do this. And the founder or the leadership team would say exactly what you would expect them to say, which was, I haven't done this either, Matt, like come along for the ride, right? I think that's great, right? I think there's ways to sort of grow there and you can learn a lot of new things.
My mind said, it's always been like, how can I get better at the things that I already do? And that's what motivates me. It's not necessarily, listen, I love learning new things and expanding horizontally. But I get a lot of satisfaction out of just getting really, really good at something I'm already participating in.
How do I go from an A minus to an A plus, right? Or a B plus to an A minus to an A. There's nothing wrong with saying, okay, I'm an F over here and I want to get to a C. And it's not that it seems more daunting to me or anything like that.
It's just how my mind works. I appreciate that. So let's tack a little bit. I'm a person who also realized I love being around companies and better disrupting the status quo, whether that's being bringing a new technology to market or service or whatever.
And this has kind of been your journey now three times. What's interesting about this though, in each one of these, these journeys you've been on, it's been kind of disrupting the current state or the status quo, but in selling to really large enterprises. And so I think this is where every startup wants to get to. Some start there right away, maybe like Manta.
Others kind of go on a journey where they start with, you know, SMB and commercial market and work their way up. I'm curious, like, I don't give us the secrets. Like, what are the things you've learned in order to be able to do that? Because you don't really have brand recognition.
You're taking a disruptive, unproven technology or solution with a company that nobody's ever heard of. And you're trying to sell it to the largest organizations in the world who tend to be risk averse and want to buy from people that they know and trust and have relationships with. How do you get through that barrier? There's a lot of different ways to, you know, answer the question.
You know, I think it would be great to have all of those things. It would be great to have a brand that everyone has heard of, right, that helps you with hiring probably more than it does client acquisition, to be honest with you. Those things would be nice. All the things that you've heard, you've heard, you've heard, you've heard, you've heard, you've seen people ask you for, right, case studies and testimonials and all that stuff.
I think there's, yeah, I think that helps. I really do, right? But I think when I'm hiring people, right, or even when I'm talking about customers, I really do subscribe to this, which is I'm only here to figure out if and how we can help you. That is it.
That is my only objective here. And if we can't, I will save you 25 minutes of this 30 minute phone call, this introduction or qualification call, right? I'll tell you if there's there there. And that is really hard for a lot of people, right?
The easiest way to do it is, you know, if leaves are just like flying through the door and you're sort of filtering, deciding what you want to work on, you sort of enter that mentality by default, right? Like you have to pick and choose what you want to work on. And you're going to be a lot more forthcoming with the client that, listen, like, I don't have a lot of time. I'm here and just tell you if I can help you.
If I think I can and you think you can and you think you need to be helped, right? And you're open to change and then there's there's time to have that conversation tomorrow or the next week and bring in some more resources. So I actually think it starts probably more with a mindset shift, which is not trying to really pretend to be bigger than you really are, right? Just being honest and you can do it in the form of, hey, we're small, take a bet on us, right?
You can do that. There's probably some likes there. But if every conversation was approached through that, through that lens, I actually think that the buyers would probably pick up the phone more. I really do, right?
They've had so many bad sales conversations where organizations just pull up their slide deck, go through the motions down with the product and say, hey, you know, I try it? Sure, right? Okay. That works for a lot of products, right?
Like product lens sales that I think works for. And that's kind of what some people are used to. But a lot of people just, you know, if they're open to change, you know, they're going to tell you what's working and what isn't, right? Not immediately.
You might have to work a little bit to get there. But that is probably the biggest like change in mentality or culture shift that, you know, I find when you're starting over again, or you're inheriting a team that hasn't sold into the enterprise or you promoted someone from strategic or from enterprise to strategic, it's how you live in that sort of, you know, abundance mindset that your time is just as valuable as the customers, right? I mean, that's credibility more than anything. And if your time is just as valuable, you are as big as IBM at that point, like maybe not.
But so I think that's a little bit more like art than science. I'm not really talking like execution tactics, like how you write the perfect email, how you find your ICP, how you do all that stuff. We can go into those details. But when interviewing, if I don't get a sense that, you know, someone is either both intellectually curious, right, too, they can recognize patterns, but three don't live in a world where their time is super valuable and they're only trying to figure out how to help a customer.
They're probably not going to be a good fit for, you know, first startup. I'll mention just one of the things, for me, this is probably like an easier thing to deal with because we had, we had a ton of leads, right? Like a narrative science, right? We had a lot of leads that were coming into the door.
I mean, you got to be really selective around how you spent your time, right? And a lot of startups really don't sort of have that, you know, have that advantage. But I'm firmly convinced that people laugh at me all the time. It's kind of stupid.
But being an enterprise or large organization seller is the closest thing to being a doctor, right? Like, your job is to go in there, you know, diagnose and prescribe that is it. Like, that is it. And if if you don't have to treat a broken arm, recommend them to somebody that knows how to, right?
Like, that is it. That is the key. If you live in that sort of mindset, I really do find that people are the thing I learned from you that I still carry forward is this notion of an abundance detached mindset, this idea of going into a discussion with a prospect in really just having this view of like, if and how I can help you. I think that's it's been phenomenal.
I've seen this work with you and our sales team have seen this work with myself since I had this kind of epiphany that this is way it should work. So I appreciate that explanation. I'm going to actually give an example of how Matt walks the talk here. Early on in neuroscience, I was on my first sales call at Matt and it was a big client who was introduced to us through through my network.
Matt, I only know if you remember this. But I remember sitting here in this call and like Matt's asking questions, explaining what we do. And the person on the other end is literally like, okay, I need this. I'm ready to go.
What's it going to take to buy your technology? And Matt just continues pumping the brakes for like 30 minutes being like, I don't know if you really need it. Yeah, it can come across as kind of aggressive aggressive. So you got to be careful.
But yes, I do remember this. You did it in such a way. And I was starting to sweat. I'm like, what the hell's going on here?
But you were able to work through all the things that could have been gotchas later down the road by just being detached and asking the questions in a way of helping the other individual really understand, does this person need it? Are they willing to go through the pain to implement it? What's it really going to mean for their business? And because you had that mindset, you had the prospect really thinking through like, how are they going to sell this in and execute it?
And it was just mastery. It was brilliant. And I've seen you do that over and over. I got a minute the first time you did that.
I was like, what in the hell is going on here? And we got the sale. We did. I've been accused of being sounding passive aggressive on some of these.
That's not the intention, right? And I think smart buyers realize that. I think people that aren't really serious don't. And I'm okay with that.
So we can we can all save ourselves a little bit of time, I suppose. How do you coach your team to have that mentality? Now you have a decent sized team now. You know, there are signs for sales team with smaller.
Everybody's really experienced. It didn't really take a lot to get all of us on board with this abundance and detach mindset. And in your case, you already had it. But now you're dealing with, you know, maybe newer sales folks who came from different sales cultures.
How do you go about getting them to kind of follow your lead and have this philosophy? So first, I think it's inside everybody. I mean, it's not like a little coach or something, but everyone can do this. It's not it's not really super challenging.
I think there's two points I would make. One is I think it actually starts before that. I don't know that it starts directly with your account executive, your strategic or enterprise seller. I actually think it starts with the inside sales team.
If you have that resource, right? Like if they're approaching, you know, and their KPIs are getting meeting set, right? And conversions and things like that. They want to bring in high quality leads.
They don't want to just pump calendars full of organizations that want to chat for 15 minutes. Right. So I've actually probably spent more time with the leader of the inside sales team to make sure that, you know, that team is at least beginning to think about it, right? You got to chip away at this stuff.
It does not happen overnight. Right. So that's sort of like point number one. Point number two is I found that everyone kind of learns differently, right?
You certainly want the one size fits all models. You can scale, right? You want to take sales enablements, best practices and things like that. But there's a reason, like, I listen to a lot of audiobooks and I don't read books.
Like I just, I learn and I absorb information through language, spoken language as opposed to, you know, written, written language. So I think the first question you've got to ask your team is how do they like to learn? That's through what medium? Do you absorb information the quickest?
Where do you recall the information from the best? Right. And I've had some reps, you know, tell me that they like, obviously they want the feedback to be aggregated and consistent. They don't like these little onesie-tusies or, you know, okay, I listen to a call and, or, you know, I'm texting them as I'm sitting on a call.
So that's sort of the foundation, right? It's figuring out how they like to learn and then finding any opportunity to reinforce what they are actually already doing that you quite like. And you've seen work in the past. So reinforce that, right?
That's good. And then find those opportunities. And the great part is, you know, technology can enable a lot of this, right? You brought in gone.
I think it was you guys brought in gone at our previous company. There was a lot of reluctance. It's like, here comes Big Brother, right? Here comes, here comes the Peanut Gallery.
Everyone's going to make us feel awful. But man, it really raises your game very quickly. And not because you're afraid that someone's going to listen to it. It's because like, you can actually go back and listen to yourself.
Did I do the things that I am being told will improve my performance, right? So there's a lot of like sort of a virtue of a cycle of training yourself, right? If you've been given the right sort of direction. So as a new hire at a company, I don't know how I would have ever gotten up to speed.
This is not time sounding like no paid ads, right? I guess. But it's like, I don't actually don't. I'm not quite sure how I would have gotten up to speed with any sort of with any pace without a tool like on, right?
Especially when you're trying to learn the business to try to, you know, identify talented people and how you can make them really successful with three, provide the feedback to make everybody better, not just the middle performers, but the best ones, the best ones as well. Yeah, I mean, it's your baseball analogy. I know you said you were trying to talk like a coach is, is true. Like you can't, it's hard to coach people if you can't see them in action on the field day in and day out.
And so I think the, your point is like the technology can definitely enable that. I really like your idea of, I'm sure a lot of people don't do this. Something you'll be of it. And that is, instead of you forcing how you coach on your team, you're asking a team, what's the way that they like to learn?
I think that's a really great advice. That's not obvious for most managers and leaders out there to take that, you know, that approach with their team in terms of coaching. Let me ask, does a great answer in terms of like the team? How do you, or do you have to influence above you?
Like this could be an uncomfortable selling motion kind of philosophy for let's call it the CEO, who may just be like, tell them how great we are and I'm greater product is and lie to the math to get the sale. That's a joke partially. How do you sell in senior leadership? Like this is the actual way to do, you know, modern selling for like a like a better word.
Some founders are there. It's in everybody, right? Like some founders are kind of already there, whether they're product led founders or engineering led founders or, God bless you, if you found a sales founder, right? Probably creating sales and a woman software or something like that, right?
That seems to be sort of a trend. But to me, I think the easiest way to do this is you have to set milestones, right? And I'm not talking about like two or three or four of these things. Go to your leadership team or your founder and tell them, I've seen a trajectory, right?
Two years ago, you guys were doing $40,000 deals. I joined when you guys are averaging, you know, $200,000. We haven't done a million dollar deal. We haven't done it yet, right?
That is the milestone. By the end of this year, we're going to do a million dollar deal. I don't know a founder in the world that wouldn't like that as a milestone. Okay, so work backwards.
Okay, the same way you want the customer, right? You create these sort of, this is what needs to happen to get us there. So, you know, I think that the logical place to start from those sales leaders is start to interrogate, but go to market strategy. The pricing, right?
Is it the right way to price? Are there different more creative ways that we can get to a million dollar deal that might make you uncomfortable, but it's going to grow. It's going to grow the top line of the organization, right? It might make the customer success team a little bit on earth because they've got to go fulfill a certain amount of units, right?
Or whatever it is that you might have proposed. So, I think, yeah, there's the majority of selling that you do at smaller companies is probably cross-functionally. It's not just up. It's just as well lateral.
But I think there's a reason why, you know, a post-series A or maybe even a post-series B that hasn't really sort of sold into the enterprise, wants to go higher in enterprise sales leader because they hit that point where they don't know what they don't know, right? So, they've already sort of acknowledged, right, that they need help in certain areas. So, you can always come back to that. You brought me in to get you to this point.
I'm telling you that what we're doing will work, but it's going to take too long or it will work, but it's not going to get there as fast as you'd like, right? There are different things that we can execute on that are actually going to have a higher impact and they're not that hard to change, right? The only thing that I'm trying to change is your mind at that point and have them open to ideas. But yeah, I would be ambitious, right?
Like, and you're going to get someone's going to ask, everyone, you said you're going to close a million dollar deal, right? Yeah, I do, right? And so get ready for that, get a little bit of a low back, but like be ambitious with those milestones as it relates to a large dollar value or a certain logo. You maybe want to sell in a bank.
There's a brand that you admire, right? Nike, I don't know, or ideas, right? Like, if you set those milestones on an individual level, but also at a leadership level, and then just work backwards from there. Yeah, I like to say, especially as startup, everything that you do is about change.
Like, you're trying to change the world and trying to change your customer, and I like this example of like, you need to push change individually and within your team. So, the idea of like, hey, here's a vision, we're going to get a million dollar deal by the end of the year. Here's how we're going to get there. It's an bold and audacious goal, but it's changed.
You're trying to get the organization to move from $40,000 to $200,000 deals to million deals. I think that's great advice for any function and anybody in an organization that's looking to scale and change what their customers do. One other point I would make too is that, and this is like, five to five dysfunctions of a team, one-on-one kind of stuff here, but there has to be a lot of alignment, right? There has to be the one metric that everyone cares about, right?
If, and this is an exercise that I've gone through, right, is to ask sales what they care about. The one thing, they care about, what do you think they're going to say? Bookings, right? Like, of course, you guys marketing, they're not going to say that, right?
You ask customer success, they're not going to say that. So, this is where you actually need the founder or the CEO's help, right? To set that one thing. So, we go into product meetings and we're deciding to win this to that.
Hey, if it doesn't influence that one thing that we've all agreed that we care about, why are we talking about it? We can, but let's do it over beers, right? Let's not do it here. Why do you think that's so hard?
I mean, obviously, it feels like, hey, the company's trying to grow. You need revenue and do you need to, what revenue do you need? Things that are leading indicators of revenue? Why is it not that simple?
I actually think it is quite simple. I think it's harder to get people to agree to that thing maybe, because they're all going to come with slightly different points of view. But here's the way I would put it. How do you measure the value of the company, right?
Okay, start there. And if people are saying, well, you've got it, you've got shares outstanding and you have a price per share. Like, okay, fine. But let's think a little more critically about this, right?
In our business, we're a consumption based model, right? Not true utility, like your, you know, your buying gas or anything like that, but you buy a certain number of scripts, right? They that scan your systems and tell you where data is flowing in and out based on sort of procedures. Okay.
That's a pretty easy exercise. If people are running strips and that number is going up and to the right, that is your quantification of value. That's it. That's the only thing that I, I mean, yes, we're going to sort of dig into the weeds and set KPIs and talk about web traffic, all this stuff is super important, but it should all sort of waterfall based off of that, off of that one thing.
And I think once people, you know, talk through that and have their first couple meetings where that is the focus of it, how do we get people to run more scripts, right? The conversation tends to sort of just lean itself in the right direction. There's not a lot of like nudging that I really have to do at that point. That seems pretty clear to me.
So let's talk a little bit about the alignment. I mean, we're an organization that supports good market strategies for B2B SaaS companies. I'll be at large, at least through the marketing organization. So alignment, what do you need from your marketing organization?
In terms of, you know, you could take it as in script, you know, growing scripts and man's or you think about more general through your experience, like, start with like, what do the marketing teams kind of get right? And what do they get wrong in terms of the relationship with sales from your perspective, putting on spot? So I mentioned, I've only worked with three companies. The first company I worked at had really no marketing presence at all, right?
Relatively to our competitors, like Bloomberg. There's a reason why, you know, Bloomberg and you probably never heard of fact that it's like the fact that it's a billion dollars, right? And they're massive, but no one's ever heard of them. So I grew up, not grew up, but sure, I grew up with not really a lot of support and expectations that marketing was going to influence my ability to hit a number, right?
I left that organization and joined narrative science where we had a really strong marketing function, right? Really strong marketing function. And I was not a big believer, right? That we needed that function to, you know, to produce things for us, you know, assets, leads, anything like that.
But the biggest thing that I would lean into on early stage startups, if they haven't already started the work is the brand, right? And I say that not just because it builds credibility with the customers, you have to hire really good people, really good people. And the brand is going to attract them, right? It really, really will, especially if you remote, right?
Everyone is sort of dialing into these calls from all over the country. You don't have that sort of like culture that you might have if you were in office, right? And you were doing anything in person. So the more that you know, you can get your marketing team to focus on the value of the brand and how the website reflects those types of things, you've laid the right foundation to then do everything else from there.
So the budgets aren't limited, right? I get that, right? But to the extent that you can apply a lot of time and exercise, a lot of time and effort, excuse me, into building the brand. And you taught me this, Cassidy, this is not something that I came up with, right?
Like, we found really talented people that could help us inside or outside that could help us build our brand. And I'm not an expert in that, right? But I know what good looks like. It's humidity, right?
You can just kind of feel it. And I knew I never saw it. I've been amazing brand and how we were able to use that in the sales process. Maybe it wasn't one to one.
The brand helped us here, right? But it's one more kind of arrow in your enderquiter. Yeah, I mean, we see this. I appreciate that feedback.
I mean, we see this every day of their clients and that, you know, if you're a startup, you're here to change an industry, the world, your customer, nobody knows who you are. And when you say brand, I would even put a finer point on it. It is a point of view that is unique that kind of permeates your entire company. So it's not just a point of view that marketing put on the website.
It's a point of view that your leadership believes in why the company started. It's a point of view that the product team's building to. It's a point of view that your go to market team can get behind and it's not bullshit. It's the truth.
And I think that singular thing is the most powerful thing that I think a startup or any company can have. And if you have that in place, I think it's what you're saying, it's like everything else can fall in line. And if you don't, it's going to be hard to tell. Yeah, a hundred percent agree, right?
There's a reason why there's brands that you admire. Why is that? It's why to do that, right? I think that's really kind of what we're saying the same thing.
You may not have insight into this. But I'm curious why you believe CEOs or marketing teams don't focus on that more. And maybe you believe they do focus on it enough. But I'm biased.
When I look around, I'm like, it's not a, I don't see marketing being kind of incented and to do things that are sub-optimal to figuring out the thing that we just talked about. And I feel like that's driven a large part by senior leadership. Is the question, why do leadership teams and CEOs not see the value of marketing? Is that what you're asking?
Yeah, let me ask you this way. Why do you think CEOs and leadership teams don't either see the value of marketing or more in particular the value of the strong brand? To me, it's the hardest thing to measure. How do you measure a brand?
Like I said, it's humidity. You feel it, right? And I think that's hard. So it's hard to get alignment, right?
When everybody, I feel like I'm talking about my spouse right now, right? It's like, you can't argue with feelings, right? I get that all the time. You can argue with my feelings.
So I love her dearly. But there's something to that, right? Like, I think it's hard to measure and everyone's going to have a slightly different feeling, right, about the value of something. But I think what we could all agree on is what good looks like, right?
So to my earlier point, find a brand that you admire, write out the five reasons why you admire that brand. This is, you wouldn't do this at a board meeting, right? But I'll get into a room and bring those five things together. And I guarantee you, there's a lot of overlap there, which you've now all said, this is like inception, right?
You've now all just agree that brands are important, right? And there's similarities in the terms of the way that you think about them. So how do we now build plan around that? How do we aspire to be that brand, despite the brand being different?
But the underlying values of the brand or something that you can all agree on. So your question was, why is it difficult? I think that's the reason, right? It's a feeling how you measure feelings.
It's very difficult. Yeah, I can buy that answer. I'll get you another one, I think. I think it's difficult because people don't know how to do it, or they're not used to it.
Or maybe there's kind of a view out there that you can't measure it. But I maintain that you can measure this. And that it's the difference between your ability to grow your company at a lower and lower cost of customer acquisition. And so that may not be perfect either.
But if your job is getting easier as a sales leader to get deals done, and you as a good market function are spending less and less to acquire those customers, my sense is I can move in in the right direction when it comes to building the value of your brand equity. Thoughts on that? I'm a seal that. Yes, I like that.
We're talking instead of time. But let me ask just a question because we talk about this a lot. This is going to be our selfish question. Have you seen or how has your customer changed in terms of the buying or selling process?
So when new customers come to you today or the last few years, you see it different than like earlier in your career. Or is it customers want the same thing? They're educated the same way. It has changed quite a bit.
I think most clients and most of the conversations that we have, they're expecting a product-led sale, right? And it's probably influenced by the way that they evaluate their consumer products, apps on their phone, websites, whatever it might be, right? There is an expectation that they're going to get to see the product in 30 minutes. They're going to get to use it at the end of 30 minutes, right?
That doesn't work for our company, right? So we tell them that, right? We tell them that I would love to do those types of things, but this is not a product. I don't say this, but it's not a product-led sale.
It will be once we start standing things up and you can test things, but we've got to decide on what success criteria is and all of that. And again, large organizations, enterprises, greater than 10,000 employees, like they'll come around to that. If they're serious, they'll come around to that. If their pain point is large enough, they're going to come around to that.
If their current supplier isn't doing what they need, they're going to come around to that, right? So I think that's probably the biggest change and that's probably not radical, right? I'm sure you would probably say the same thing, but I would say that's by and large, the biggest thing. Yeah, we see that quite a bit too.
And the benefit of what you are running is at least you're into a consumption model. So yeah, there may be a hurdle to get them going, but my guess is they can start at a decent entry point and then as you pointed out, the more they consume, the more they pay, which I think is also another model that's becoming more and more prevalent, kind of tied with the product line. The rest desire. Tell me, where do you see sales going?
If you had a crystal ball, you're going to look out two to five years. How do you see sales change or go to market change within? Let's call it start up selling to large enterprises. I don't know that it's going to look radically different.
I think the biggest challenge over the next three or five years is to be finding the right talent. Good salespeople are not going to leave their current company. They're not. So the ones that do want to leave, you've got to be real critical about why they're leaving and don't interrogate them, but there's a reason why they're leaving and it has to be the right one.
I think that is going to be the biggest challenge. How do we find the right people fit culturally that know the industry? I could care less about the role of decks that they bring. That doesn't mean anything to me.
That's going to be the biggest challenge. How does the sales industry change to sort of account for that? That's a big unknown for me. I can tell you I don't really lose sleep over that really, because it is so far away five years, but I think that we're going to run into a lot of people that maybe don't want to choose a career in sales or they're perfectly content working at wherever they are.
They may be just a little bit more risk-verse. Do you think you see a world going forward where you're not actually hiring salespeople? You're hiring somebody in a different function and training them on sales. If I think about your journey, there's been this common denominator of the type of technology and that you're technically early on, which has probably led you to the point where you can talk as an expert on the industry you're in today.
Do you think, I'll give another example, our best seller right now was four months ago, a demand-gen manager and he wanted to get into the sales and put him into sales. Because we sell that capability to marketing leaders, he's crushing it. Our sales leaders are training him how to sell, but it's hard to replace the domain knowledge that he has and he brought to the sales function. Is that just kind of a corner case?
Do you see maybe in the future the makeup of the seller is different than what it has been historically in the past? That's a great question. I don't know that I would call that an edge case. I think that there's there's stories like that at every company, I'm sure.
I don't know that someone from engineering, that would be a serious edge case. Engineering jumping over sales. I think that there's absolutely opportunities to promote from within or repurpose people. We're going through this right now.
There's probably some people that we can upscale with the right amount of training can sell into strategic accounts. So BDR is very logical. If you segmented your account executives into different types of customers, that's very logical where it starts to get a little bit. For me, is anything outside of client facing roles, there's no reason that a customer success person can't sell.
In fact, they probably are already, if they're halfway decent. So that's a very good approach to that. If you go back to the question, which was five years from now, what do you worry about or how do things look different? I can see that playing out.
I can see a lot of repurposing of people to sell into both the enterprise and in our case, strategic accounts. Yeah, I like your criteria there. If somebody's already client facing, for whatever reason, it's probably good indicator that they can move into the sales process or sales function. Or at least have an opportunity to.
But in five years, we'll still have sales people, right? We're not getting rid of the function. I think so. I hope so.
Yeah, I hope so. Yeah. And it's just the last point on that. I think when you are looking for that, if that is the direction that you want to go, if these people are really good at recognizing patterns in their client facing role, they will exceed in sales.
It is connecting the dots that people aren't going to connect for you. If they're doing that in a customer success role, or they're doing that in a marketing role, they're going to be able to do in sales. That's half the battle. You brought this point up a couple of times on pattern recognition.
And before we end the call, I'd love you to share your perspective on how do you do that well? Is that just from repetition? Is that something consciously that you've worked on over time? Is that just an inherent or innate skill?
How do you become good at pattern recognition in a way that you're using it? Yeah, it's a good question. I think there's different ways to do it. I think you have to be an active listener.
You cannot ask questions for the sake of reloading. There are all the policies to say all the time. It starts with that. If you are not an active listener and you're asking questions with a very different agenda or you're reading, I don't think you're going to get there.
That's probably the foundation. When I say pattern recognition, I'm looking to find things that are repeatable. So in SAS sales, it's probably use cases. Have I heard the same thing today that I heard a week ago?
And should I expect to hear that again? That could be a new piece of regulation brought down by banks that our technology might help solve. It could be a lot of different things. When I say pattern recognition, I'm really talking about repeatability, but probably more specifically use cases that I can go and market and sell.
How do I make my job easier? How do I build a repeatable point of view that I can at least test at the onset, but attempt to build a true go-to-market motion around? Well, I know you're going to make the former narrative science marketing team happy because you're able to plug use cases. That's an inside joke.
There's more to that, obviously. It's all about the use case. There's some different paths you can go down from that. The one thing we do, we sell the delineaged solutions.
It's a pretty nascent term. Some people have heard of it, some happen. Go on Glassdoor or indeed and type in a delineaged analyst. Oh, dear God, 100 companies pop up.
Huh. They know about it. Why don't we target them? Is that going to work across the board?
Sure. You might find a couple of customers. The patterns that you recognize and emotions and the place that you put out in the field, they're going to have minimal impacts or they're going to have big impacts, but they all roll out to a number. I think it's probably beyond that point.
If you take a step further beyond, I recognize those patterns. How do I get smart about discarding the ones that are probably noise? How do I want to overemphasize the ones that have a high ROI? Yeah.
What I like about the example that you had at the end is this is obviously a skill that I've noticed the best sales teams have. What you just outlined as an example is really kind of the way marketing should think about marketing. That is what you're doing is trying to create and recognize the patterns in the market. From how you position the audiences you hit, the channels you use.
When you see a pattern that's working, that's where you double and triple down on it. That level of experimentation across brand positioning, audience channel. It's really the job of the marketers in order to find those patterns, recognize them, and then double or triple down on them. I'm sorry, I appreciate that.
I'll be calling this at a time. Anything that you wish I asked you that I didn't? Not specifically. You had it.
You brought me with a few questions. The one that I thought maybe Pete your interest a little bit was related to not necessarily incentives, but creating a right behavior and mindset. We went down that path a little bit, the first strategic. One thing that we're trying to do here at Mantis, when they sign a customer, strategic account customer, we allow them to buy stock in that company, open up a broker's account and go buy stock.
How does that change their mindset when they're selling to a company? How much more curious are they going to be when they're trying to up and cross out their very shareholder of that company? Maybe tying back to your earlier question, how does sales evolve? I think you're going to ship away.
You're going to find these other types of things that just influence behavior either on the customer side or your employee side. That's just going to create higher alignment throughout the selling process. That was a plug for my idea more than anything, Cassie. It's something that I'd love to see other companies do as well.
I love this idea. I'll let you have the hook. Walk us through how this works. I sell to a large enterprise, obviously, public company.
You're just allowing them, or are you giving them part of a commission to be able to invest in this company? How far have you taken it so far in terms of the mechanism for doing it? The first step is do they have a brokerage account? You've got to have that if you don't open one.
Most salespeople probably too, because they're interested in the markets and things like that. You can set your thresholds. The deals are above a certain amount. We give you a buy brand, hand-brand, extra, not as part of the commission, but extra.
That goes into your brokerage account and you buy that company. That's pretty damn clever. I've not heard that as an example. We'll see.
Come back to me in a year. We'll see if it's an influence of behavior. Now, as you as a sales leader, do you get to invest in all of the accounts or how does it impact you? I'm impacted because my sellers are more strategic.
That's it. They're doing bigger deals. Well, this has been great. Thanks for joining.
How do people reach out? You're going to hold you if they want to. Learn more about you. Yeah.
Linked in Matthew Branson at Manta. My email address is matt with 2ts.branson at getmanta.com. The website is getmanta.com. We'll make sure that's all in the show.
Thanks again, Matt. This is a lot of fun. See you soon. We're out.