Welcome back everybody to second growth. This is Cass Dam here today with Carl. Carl, how you doing? Oh yeah, Cassidy.
We're here. We're doing it. I'm doing good. Let's do this.
I'm excited to see you and I today. No guest. We've had a run of great guests on the show, which the audience is loved and now they're stuck with just you and I this week. It's, you know, I'm okay with it.
I think it's time. We've had, there's some stuff we need to get off our chest, I feel like, but shout out to our guests. If you're listening to this podcast like the first time we've had Dan Sanchez on and he was talking about building an audience. I was a couple weeks ago.
Devin Reed had some awesome nuggets just around social, what he did at Gone, what he's doing at Clary. And we got a lot of cool stuff out of it. Like Devin is on a lot of podcasts, right? He's a popular dude, but I felt like we got a lot of really cool nuggets out of him.
So that that haven't really maybe been heard before. And so definitely check out those podcasts. Those are great or check out just Cassidy's LinkedIn. Cassidy, you do a better job than me of sort of summarizing those conversations.
So well, it's not hard to do a better job considering you don't do anything. Look, I'm getting to it. I just need an executive assistant and maybe like a full-time staff and then we post more regularly, right? So that's it.
But all seriousness, so the Dan, Devin back to back, we didn't really plan it that way, but it turned out great when you think about a masterclass and content and audience building, I can't think of two better people than those two. And I learned a lot just listening to both those podcasts. So it sounds cliche to say it, but I learned something on every podcast and from every guest that we talked to you. But those were like, I was thinking about those podcasts in the shower and in bed that night after they were done.
There was just a lot of meat to kind of pick off the bone of those conversations. So anyways, long story short, anyone listening, go check them out. Cassidy, today, the riff. What are we doing?
I was going to ask you, what's on your mind? I know you have some burning topics that are just been used. You just need to share. You just need to check out your chest.
So I guess the meta topic is just this idea that marketing, I think is especially notorious of this. We love acronyms and we love like inventing concepts. And I say we as if like I'm a marketer. I guess I'm just the most confused sales person in the world where I just perpetually sit between sales and marketing with my content with my actual job.
But marketing notoriously like acronyms and concepts and a lot of these concepts that you hear and I have two in particular that are like new and like agencies are built up around these concepts and companies are built around like they were kind of framed as these like even business models. And they're actually just repackages of sometimes good things and sometimes crappy things that probably shouldn't be repackaged. So the first one, if you want to dive into it, is PLG. So here's my hot take, all right, on PLG.
And now I see this anecdotally in like our customer base and you can see this in the market, but my the bone that I have to pick with PLG is that I think it's actually post COVID 2023 version of Gated eBook downloads and lead gen. It's it's new lead gen, right? Lead gen back in 2010 was Gated ebooks and maybe blog subscribers and stuff like that, right? Where the goal was get more newsletter signups or get more email addresses from this Gated eBook.
And that's like the north star of how we like measure our marketing, right? Number of leads, MQLs, Refine Labs for a long time, is really like attacked kind of that villain. Well, I feel like most of the market can is like starting to come around actually and agree with that. But there's a dangerous thing that's happened, Cassidy, which is like feels like they've replaced it with PLG.
Now it's signups and huge volume of dollars being pushed to just get people to sign up for a product. And what you and I see what we see in our customer base is like these signups or leads, even if you want to call them that convert about as well as an eBook download, they don't become customers. And you hear this, I hear this from salespeople, a ton, where they're like, the leads are weak. And they're not talking about eBook downloads anymore.
They're talking about people who signed up to use the product, a bunch of signups. They never use the product, they poke into the product for a few seconds or minutes and they ghost it, they never come back, they never invite other users, they never do any of the things that you think the signup would do. And they certainly don't convert to revenue. Guess what converts to revenue, Cassidy?
Good old fashioned requested demo. Talk to sales is still the ultimate signal of buying intent. But we're being tricked potentially is my hypothesis of the signup. Okay, so I'll be quiet.
Is that the hot take or am I just, is this is I mean, am I just way off base here? What's your, what's your take? So let me see if I got this right. What you're basically saying is despite VCs and investors running around and getting CEOs all hyped up that the future of enterprise software is PLG.
And that's what's going to unlock the growth of your company and making millions and billions of dollars is in reality, just a repackaged version of old school, the gen, the book, but in the modern way. I said it in two minutes and you said it in 20 seconds way more concisely. That's exactly what I'm saying. But what you'll hear is like, Oh yeah, but what about like, Miro, what about like these huge brands, right?
Like Asana, Slack, and what people that's a mistake, right? It's like saying, Gated eBooks works. Look at HubSpot. It's like, yeah, the HubSpot crushed it, right?
No doubt that that's a playbook that worked for them. But who else did it work for other than HubSpot at their scale, right? Okay, a couple of the unicorn companies. And so I think the same mistake is made to say, wait, I look at Slack, look at Miro PLG that works.
It's like, it worked for four unicorns at a very specific point in time. And guess what? They have big, fat enterprise sales teams too, closing big deals like you don't know their unit. Everyone assumes that they know Miro's or Slack's unit economics.
Like, Oh, they must be just killing it because of their free signups. And it's like, you don't know that you don't see that fun on math. You don't know that the sales team isn't actually caring. Most of the weight of their new business revenue.
So again, I'm not trying to throw that whole strategy away, but there's just a lot of bad assumptions that get made to validate it. Yeah, I mean, in many cases, what you're saying is great products were likely when regardless of the go-to-market strategy. Yeah, but most companies don't have great products. And so the go-to-market strategy matters quite a bit.
And I think what we see with PLG is everybody falls in love with their product in terms of leadership at a company. And so they think, Hey, listen, I just get the product in the hands of the user. They'll see how brilliant I am and how magical it is and sales will easily follow. Yep.
And in the reality is most companies are products, not that great or not that differentiated or it's not a must have or a new to have. It's a nice to have. And who sells nice to have products? Well, salespeople.
Yeah, I mean, it's a necessity. You have a nice to have you need a salesperson. So I think I think you nailed something. It's assuming that Miro is successful because of their strategy, which is PLG led.
And that's the false assumption, isn't it? The product is outstanding. The millions of dollars that they have spent in the product. You know what I'm saying?
That product is beautiful. The experience that they give you inside of it, right? Like how they onboard you and like give you how they nurture you into different areas of the product. It's like, you don't just wake up yesterday, Cassidy and be like, we want to do PLG.
It literally requires not just a new go-to-market motion and a set of assumptions that comes with that, but it requires your product to get built a certain way. Like it requires development hours. And so like you can't see some of these legacy companies that are like, we want to go and stand up a PLG motion. I'm like, you'd have to rebuild your product.
So is the money spent doing that better? Is there going to be better ROI on that investment than standing up in a price? I mean, either way, it's a bet. I guess like if you go back in time and ask Miro, right, Miro chose or slack chose to go product led first.
And they built the product and they spent money to make the product ready for that. It makes you wonder, would they have had the same success if they would have invested those dollars in a more traditional go-to-market motion? I don't know that they actually would have been less successful. I think there's two ways, but I think where you start matters, if that makes sense.
So I don't know if there's a thread here that you want to pull on. What I like to think about in this scenario is I think PLG or self-serve model works well when you're entering the low end of the market, where you need to prove value with little friction. And what I mean by that is, most new companies or disruptors need to enter on the low end of the market. So they may start with a few users, likely in smaller accounts, and they kind of worked their way up to the enterprise.
And from a cost-effective perspective on a go-to-market strategy, this makes a lot of sense. But the question then becomes like, you can't ride that up the curb. You can't ride that into the commercial or mid-market and into the enterprise market. As you want to get into the bigger deal size, it's extremely, you're actually successful in a PLG motion, which you're questioning if you're even art successful.
You're going to need to move into layering on more complex marketing sales teams, maybe even in count basis, you get bigger and bigger in order to be able to drive what was previously a bottoms up model into really a top-down model, if you want to get into the bigger strategic accounts and move your lifetime value from account much higher than what you're going to do in a PLG motion. So I do like it as far as reducing friction to enter a market. I think you're pointing out something that often gets overlooked. And I think most companies feel like they can enter this space with a minimum viable product, because that's what they've been told to build in SaaS World Tech Land.
That, oh, we'll just get a product out there, and then we'll just iterate on the feedback and we'll make it better. And I think that actually is really a harmful thought process when the only thing you have in your go-to market is the product. And so I'd argue some of the examples that you've gave in Miro and Slack, et cetera, were fabulous products from the start. Yeah, Monday got to be future rich.
But you know what? They're an enjoyable experience, and you got to value immediately. And let's face it, most tech out there is not that. Yeah, you bring up a whole bunch of, I think, guardrails to like, is your product the type of product that can be like, is like time to value is critical, right?
Like a cybersecurity product is not going to have that constraint, right? Like it has to be implemented properly. Like there's stuff that goes into this. So I think like forcing your business into a model of PLG simply because it's like a hot new thing, it's just like a recipe for disaster.
And then again, I hate like making assumptions based on the success of other businesses. Like, I don't care who you are, Cassidy, like you can only guess so well, you can't just look at Monday.com from the outside and be like, oh, they don't have sales near the first five years. You don't have access to their financials. You don't know if that works.
Here's another pot take is PLG a go-to-market motion that's only possible and was only made possible with like the huge influx of VC money that we saw. Like, can you only really be successful with that model when you have a ton of cash to light on fire and burn on product development and you're runway is, you know, five years, half a decade. That's not the world anymore. So can you even actually replicate a mural or a Monday because they had very different financial circumstances than you did?
Not only did they have good timing in the market, right? Or like all these companies were trying to go digital at the time that they were coming up, but they also had treasure chests of cash that they could light on fire. So it's almost like that economic, that favorable economic climate actually birthed or created the environment for a really unique go-to-market model that it's actually maybe not possible under different economic circumstances. Like a unicorn model that can only be hatched out of a specific egg, if that makes sense.
Do you think there's any, I mean, can the bootstrapped founder really do? Again, PLG? Well, I don't know. I don't know.
I have questions there, you know, so. Well, I think it was born a little bit out of what you see in the consumer space where it's massive customer acquisition up front to build an audience or critical mass that you can monetize later based on that critical mass of that audience. And you see this like the cold start problem in B2C is real. And like that is a methodology that I think has been kind of tested in that space.
And you try to apply it to an enterprise space. What your hope is, is I can drive a massive amount of signups. And at some point I'll be able to convert those signups into high paying customers. And what we see time and time again is you can drive signups, but the conversion to revenue, very difficult.
And this is where we have to step in and help customers do that. But it's not easy. Because it's not a only I go to market issue, it's a whole company issue in terms of how you're getting customers to take something that was easy to obtain for free and get money from them that company that's always hard to do. No matter how sales call or you're trying my product, getting people to part ways with money, always going to be difficult.
There's no real quick hack to be able to do that for my opinion. Well, any assumption is that like, can we get away with doing that, that monetization without a sales person? And it's just like that goes against I don't care who you are, like just buying behavior, right? Human psychology, like we need help from other people.
Like I could walk into a car lot and not have a car because it broke down. Like I literally need to drive to work on Monday and I can still get cold feet when the sales guy or gal is asking me to go ahead and start financing paperwork or asking me to write a check for my Dodge Ram 1500. I mean, just as humans, like to your point, we're just so resistant to partying with money and we're so risk-averse, et cetera. And so to think that your product in this, do that alone, again, are the unicorn moments where that's possible, 100%.
But at scale, consistently, I don't, I want to see the data. I mean, I'm like, prove me wrong. If somebody's listening to this and it's like, we've got this awesome PLG motion and you're hitting all your revenue targets and you don't have salespeople and you're getting high conversion from sign up to customer. I mean, we'd love to bring down the podcast and see it.
But we've worked with some pretty awesome PLG companies, Cassidy. And again, it's not that it's not effective, but it's that the conversion rates are about the same as lead gen. And that's just a reality of it. That's a reality that we've seen again, we haven't seen 2000 CRM instances, but man, what we've seen 10, 15 PLG companies potentially, and it's just like, there's never a compelling revenue being driven from sign ups.
So, Yeah, let's walk through that comparison just one more time. So people understand what we're saying. The lead gen model in a classic sense for marketing is let's capture a bunch of leads, I.e. email addresses, Gated eBooks events, et cetera.
Let's either nurture them in score them in some way, which you could think of as a proxy for usage, meaning, oh, these Carl's more interested in our company because he read two web pages, or give them directly to the SDR right away. And you get a handle more of the sales team. The sales team's job is to then figure out how to educate these buyers and convert them from people who looked at your content into people who want to buy your product. And that happens at a very low conversion rate.
Consistently. It happens, we're not saying there's going to be no sales, there will be sales, but the conversions will lead to revenue very low. And in the PLG model to kind of compare that and contrast it is, instead of an e-book or webinar, people are going to subscribe to try your product, maybe even give you 10 bucks a month or something for one user to give it a shot. And you'll drive a large number of these people either using the product for free or paying some nominal amount of money one user at a time.
Then you're going to give it to some team, it could be a sales team, it could be a growth team, that's a cool name. They say, okay, how do we take all these people who've signed up and either haven't used the product or used the product for free or paying maybe 10 bucks a month and get them and their company to pay a lot more. And the tactics that you go about doing are really the same tactics that the team would use in terms of your traditional lead gen model. And what you're saying is the economics and conversion will look roughly the same.
It's a number of quote signups, people trying to use your product and very few people who actually convert to what I call revenue paying customers that have a positive return on investment. And what are you left with? So you're exactly right, that's a good summation. And what are you left with?
Well, the only way to scale this and make more money is more volume at the top of the funnel. It's the only lever that I can pull for the most part, right? If I'm converting my signups or my ebook downloads that let's say 2% to revenue, any kind of revenue. I'm not even saying like you set the bar higher for revenue, I'm talking about just paying you a dollar.
If the conversion right there is 2, 3, 5%, how do I make more money? Well, I need to double my signups. I need to and the amount of money and that's invested in that we see this on the lead gen side all the time is enormous. It's not scalable.
If you want to double your ebook downloads, like you have to spend tens of thousands of dollars in advertising and it's the same thing for signups, right? PLG is really in my opinion, just like marketing lead sales. Like a product doesn't drive signups, it's marketing that is pumping signups instead of a gated ebook. So it's really it's marketing lead.
Anyways, I could go on forever about this, but it's just not scalable. It just requires treasure, chests of cash, when you could just dial down the volume and figure out who are the best companies that we could actually benefit from. And let's send a human being to go and build a relationship. And we still have a really nice product that's easy to use, easy to adopt, easy to buy other users.
We shouldn't neglect that. And we should still have marketing going. But I think like trying to be like PLG versus sales led, it's just the wrong, this is the wrong dynamic. Marketing for years, Cassie has been trying to align with sales.
And now we built a model where it's like product and sales, like so what's going to happen is now we need product and sales alignment. Like you can already see into the future in the next 10 years, there's going to be like, we need product and sales alignment versus marketing and sales alignment. It's like, it's like history is repeating itself here. That's what I see.
I love that. Let me put you on the spot. Oh gosh. So in a classic lead gen to demand gen model, we have, we've talked quite a bit about how to make that transformation and really what you want.
Is you want people raising their hand to buy from you, talk to sales, you demo, come in by, they have intent, they have need, they have affinity for your, your, your brand. We want to work with you. Yeah. And we see that.
Obviously the volume of those leads are lower, but the conversion rate and sales velocity higher. What do you do in a PLG world? That's kind of analogous to that. How do you break the PLG lead gen to demand gen?
Okay. The honest answer is, I don't know, but I'm going to take a stab. So let's assume that we believe that like you still need a human being and we want to talk to high quality, high intent people. We know that signaling to talk to sales is a much stronger signal of intent than signaling to sign up for your products.
Like if you don't believe that assumption, then this isn't the podcast for you, right? If you see something else in your CRM, that's a story that we see in the data. So that if that, if you believe that assumption is true, we can go to the next phase here, then we know what, then we want, and then the second assumption, so first assumption is if we believe that it's a signal of higher intent to say, talk to sales versus sign up, we believe that that's true, then naturally the second assumption is we want to drive more, talk to sales people, right? More people that want to talk to sales.
And so I think if we don't want to abandon a product as a part of these sales process, like I'm okay with that. I don't think it looks like a free trial necessarily, but do we give access after there's been buying intent, right? How do we weave in the products? More than a demo, right?
Because demos, they largely suck, right? It sucks to sit in on a demo. I've sat in another demo as a buyer. I've obviously sat through thousands of demos as a sales person delivering a demo, right?
Like that's not a, that's a sucking experience, right? Screenshare, half your audience is asleep. You have to take all these courses on like how to run exciting demos. It just sucks, right?
It's not a great experience. And so how do we take a good product and make it a native part of the sales process without what with people who have intent to buy? How does it help, how does a product enable them to make a good decision and to change in their business versus, yeah, we'll just let people window shop for free and spike our AWS bill, and we'll have all these products to chase them down and we have PLG usage metrics platform, now plugged in and it's sending email nurtures. What if we started, instead of the sign up, we just started with the talk to sales as a signal of intent and then crafted a sales process around this cool hybrid sales slash product experience sales process?
I don't know, I'm making things up at this point, but I'm like as a sales person, you know, I think it requires innovation to think differently about how the product is experienced in the sales process. I think we're still in like the legacy, I'll share my screen and show you a couple slides and then click through a couple areas of the product and tell you how you'll be able to use it. You know, is there something more compelling? That's also not like a POC, right?
Where it's like, I leave you into the product that we have, we have to deliver value in six weeks, blah, blah, blah. So I'm rambling, I don't want to ramble, but it's not a perfect answer, but I'm like, how do we actually change the sales process to be more virus-centric and involve the product in a compelling way, as opposed to just leaving the entire process up to the product? That's just not how buyers buy, regardless of what they say, which is a separate topic. That's a ball, that's aggressive, Carl.
What do you think? I would you think making the transition from lead-dentive to man-gen, but PLG to something. What would that transformation? Yeah, it's great to think about this.
What I certainly wouldn't do, the first kind of status quo assumption I'd want to crush, is the idea that somebody is going to go through this path of trying my product for free, paying a little bit of money, and then magically it's going to turn into something that explodes into an organization because my product is wonderful. Okay, I challenge you there though. We're bullied. Vendors and tech companies are bullied into a sense by buyers, right?
We have all these research. Buyers want a sales person-free process. So like, I think a lot of vendors are like, there's just an overwhelming pressure from buyers that they want to sell a free experience. But then when they do experience a really awesome product, they don't actually buy anything.
Like, how do you reconcile that? Yeah, I'm going to tell you. So like, the first thing is I would stop with the belief that this path is practical. What I would then do with my PLG product is I would treat it like creating as an avenue to create demand.
So I'm going to ratchet it way down. I'm going to get it away for free, or in some trial or some condensed version. I'm really trying to do this because I'm thinking of it as education. I'm thinking of it as a way for you to just try and dabble.
Almost like getting a demo. Almost like going to my site and watching a few videos. I'm going to give you the product and let you use it in a very confined space. I think what happens is companies make the free version too good.
I would take that and I would strip it way down. They get enough taste, so I don't have to do the demo. I don't have to create all these product videos. If you want to see what the products like and try for yourself, like, great, here, go do that.
But then what I would try to do from there is continue educating to the point where I'm forcing them to say I'm ready to talk to sales because I want to buy something. Once I got that motion down, I would then come back and see where I can make it more self-serve in the future. Once I got that path of try the product out, talk to sales, get people into the product, get the experience really good, then I start backing it off. Can somebody try the product?
Actually buy seats. Can I prove that model works without the sales person? But I've done that because I've proven the model with sales and I've learned something and I've been that baked that into the product and mature the product to be able to do that. People try to do that from the beginning and they don't have any credibility.
They don't have product market fit at each step of the process. And so I would use sales at each step of that process. So I can know I can test and prove in product market fit going from try my product and not pay me money to try my product and pay money try my product, pay money and then get everybody, my team involved and it's 10 licenses and so forth and so on. I would definitely make that a more regimented process and just hoping it's going to work.
And sales will be at every step and where I don't need to sell, see my back I'm off slowly. And then what I would do to sales team is focus on higher and higher and bigger and bigger accounts where that sales touch is going to be needed for a long period of time. And it feels like PLG companies for the most part, they eventually learn their way and migrate their way to that because I mean what you just described is how I would look at like Miro today, right? They've got like the PLG like down market play and then they have a good enterprise sales team.
And it's just like what does it look like if you just start there instead of fumbling your way there? I think it sounds like if I understand like what you're positioning. So yeah, good stuff man. I haven't solved it but what I do know is the truth is that it's not like some silver bullet to amazing scale and virality and you're probably not the next slack.
I'm sorry. I'm going to be honest with you. So and to aspire to be like those companies, I think it's cool but you also don't like know the truth. A lot of people I think would be surprised to see some of the financials, especially these early stage companies are like, man, Monday, how come exploding?
Yeah, they're not publicly or they're talking about a private company. It's like, you don't know what their financials look like, man, like they could be burning cash. They may not even be a business there. So assumptions.
Let's talk about it. By the way, my hunch, if you're a look at that, it's going to go back to your plate on well capitalized companies. The cost of acquisition is going to be through the roof to get people into a low friction free trial single user sign up with the hopes of turning that into enterprise license agreements. And so the companies who are successful will have one, a good product, which is rare, into a lot of money to drive a high initial cost of acquisition to build that market.
And so you'll be able to sustain that and those two things have to happen. You have a high cost of acquisition and a shitty product and you're just going to end up in a bad situation. You have high cost acquisition and a good product. You might hit the scale where you get a good return on investment.
It's going to take a while. And when you're signing up for users or people paying your seven bucks a month. Yeah, I think you nailed it. Another one is like, how do we do the math of customer acquisition?
I think a lot of times it's like marketing and sales is like the customer acquisition cost. And it's like with PLD, you have to change that model, right? Because like product is absolutely a part of this acquisition cost. So if you just remove sales and you're just like, Oh, look, marketing does stuff and they drive signups.
Look how cheap this cat is. And it's just like, that's not the whole truth. The product you're saying that the product is the sales person. And that product costs millions of dollars to build and the years to get Miro to where it is today.
So like, does that we don't factor that into the into the math here? Like it's just it's not apples to apples. It's dishonest math, right? And so I think you're absolutely right.
Like the cat is maybe going to be higher, maybe going to be, I don't think, I don't know, I don't think it's a compelling go to market motion, honestly, not for startups. So I don't know if I I'm not as pessimistic on it. I think what the lesson is for marketers listening to this, this is no free lunchman. Do your homework, understand economics through the full life cycle.
Don't just believe that you're going to magically drive a bunch of signups that will convert into high paying customers because you know, the CEO and your investors told you that's what's going to happen. You know, be critical and look at this. Do you have the product that can can make that happen? Chances are you will.
And so what's all the work you're going to need to do to get ahead of this? So you don't make the same mistake that we keep saying over and over. Yep. Yeah.
All right, Carl, you want to pick on what was your next topic? Oh, man. Maybe I'm scared now. ABM.
Yeah. So okay, here's my here's my hot take with ABM. I've seen this hot take before. It's just like there's just like there's that ABM is like a really like it's a buzzwordy thing right now.
We even have started to incorporate a little bit of it on our websites. So look, we're part of the buzz as well. But ABM to me, every time I talk about an ABM strategy with like a buyer or customer or whatever, someone here in the Refine Labs ecosystem, running the context of my week to week sales calls, it's like that it's going to be like this silver bullet. And I mean, look, this is me.
I'm a salesperson, Cassidy. I'm a knuckle-dragger. Okay. So maybe you can clarify and educate me.
But whenever I think of ABM and like a marketer that comes to me is like, we want to launch ABM. What I think to myself, and I can't help but think this, is so let me get this straight. You want to do good marketing to a list of people that you think are a good fit for your business. That's all I think.
And so I'm like, so really, you just want to do better marketing. And I'm like, why, you know, so if you do ABM, let's let's keep following me here. If you do ABM as separate from like your general marketing, I'm like, why do you have two things? Why wouldn't you want your general marketing to be as high quality as your ABM?
Oh, we want to do all this unique messaging and positioning to like this list. It's like, well, why wouldn't if that messaging works for that list of your perfect customers really well, why isn't this messaging just in all of your marketing? So like, when I start to ask myself all these questions, I just get to the point of like, what is ABM besides just like a marketing that you should be doing? And I just baffle myself and then lose those deals, obviously.
So because I'm the worst sales person in the world. So can you help me as a marketer, as a career marketer, understand? Because that's my beef. Point of this riff, my beef with ABM is I can't figure out why it's like, why it's this separate thing, you know, I can't.
And then there's all this tech. Let's not even talk about the tech. And I'm like, this tech, right? Great pieces of tech surface intent data in a list.
I'm like, I surface intent data to they click, talk to sales button on the website. You know, like you want to buy that? That's a CTA man, I make it in HubSpot 30 cents, you know, and I got an intent platform. I'm just like, I just, you know, I make sense of it for me.
Well, on one hand, I would say the worst thing about ABM is it could very well just be another term for lead gennet scale. And I can talk about the one I mean by that here in a second. On the best case, it's like, just good marketing and selling. And so what I always find funny is the marketers going, Hey, Carl, you and sales, I got this great idea.
Let's target accounts. And the sales person's like, oh, I thought what I thought we were doing was targeting accounts. It's sales people been doing ABM for like 100 years. That's all we have is we have to find accounts to target.
And then we call them and marketing seems to be coming around finally. And what I find interesting is like, think about in a company when you talk about customers. It's a sales talks about accounts, big accounts, small accounts, customer success talks about accounts. The CEO is on an earnings call is talking about customers as any counts.
We got Pepsi, Vadji, blah, blah, blah, blah. Thank you America. Thank you America. Everybody in the company talks about accounts and marketers talk about leads.
So when I think about like the disconnect between marketing and the rest of the organization, what I like about ABM is now they're talking like everybody else. Hey, we're going after accounts. And yes, there are people in accounts that we want to target. But the first thing we want to do is target accounts.
Can we think are ideal buyers of our product? This is like marketing 101. It's called segmenting your market and targeting those people for those accounts in the market. You segment marketing 101.
So in some instances, I would say ABM setting a site attack and how we may have bastardized the word is actually how you do marketing in B2B. That's the good side of this. The bad side is it's just a bunch of technology called ABM that helps marketers do lead genocial. So that's the spectrum.
I think yeah, I mean, you nailed it. And I think on the when it gets really extreme too, right, is you get like tech and you get like one to one marketing, right? Let me know what you think of this like landing pages that are built just for like GE or Pepsi or these large accounts. And again, I question that strategy because I'm like, one, that effort on that is enormous.
But two, if that message works for GE or for Bank of America, and you've really done a lot of work on like that messaging and the talk tracks and positioning the customer stories, like that should work for every other big bank that you're targeting too. So when you get to like this granularity of ABM as well, I get confused because I'm like, man, if you're doing good marketing, so if it's going to nail it for the one account, it should nail it for all the accounts in that vertical or segment or vertical and segment, right? So there's just like granularity too that confuses me of like, man, when you're going, I feel like a lot of it is just like tech vendors, they sell you the stuff, you know, like you need a landing page that personalizes and says the name like when Cassidy from Bank of America comes to the website, I wanted to say Cassidy, we can help you do this and I'm just like, who said that that's like effective, you know, and like that's worth that work, you know, to your point, it's just, is this just better marketing and has the rest of the company been on this page forever and marketing is just now catching up, but now getting lost again in saying, oh, we need this tech, we need this, we need this special playbook, dude, you need a list and a good hypothesis why that is the right list, you should be able to explain why this is the right list and then we develop what we're going to say to these people and then we find where they are and then we put those messages in front of them in a rich, compelling way consistently over time and eventually they will come click get a demo. That just sounds like marketing to me.
So how do we like, is it our place to go and say like, you know, should be doing ABM, should be doing this, I guess, do we just let it go? We'll do an ABM strategy for you and all we're doing is a good marketing strategy. I guess like, is this something, is this a bone to pick with the market you think or do you just kind of let it go? Yeah, so one hand, ABM should mean doing high quality marketing to a set of customers.
And I think what we should be doing is helping educate at least our customers in the market of how to run this and what is the right way to do marketing. I think what gets conflated here is we hear a lot of folks reaching out saying, I bought some technology, therefore I'm running ABM. And this is a problem that is confusing the market. You don't need the technology to run an ABM strategy.
At some point, you may get to a volume where the technology helps you optimize and become more efficient in the activities you're running. And by all means, buy technology to drive efficiency, but you don't need to buy technology to do ABM. Yeah, it's a technology leading the strategy instead of the strategy leading the technology. And I mean, let's be honest, a lot of ABM platforms, it's like they're sales platforms.
They're giving sales people signals, right? And now we could argue about the quality of those signals, right? I don't I've never used honestly like an ABM platform and I work for a company that had like a sixth sense or something like that. At a hub spot, we didn't have any of that.
And so, you know, why it's just it's sales tech, right? Like even just the concept of intent. Okay, that might help us prioritize some activity, but we should be messaging good messaging to our market already. So the people who have buying intent, the one to two percent are getting messaging anyways, right?
But so are the other 98%. So again, strategy leading tech and not tech, you know, driving strategy, I think is kind of a critical, you know, comment for a lot of marketing teams. I'll add that like segmenting your market, defining your position for that segment and creating messaging, the support you're positioning for that segment is not ABM. And it's just good marketing.
That's literally how marketers market. If you go to the B2C world, they're well versed in this, proctor and gamble, Coca-Cola, et cetera, et cetera. Like that process is beaten into marketing leader's heads. And yes, B2B marketers should be doing that and it tends to be the segments that happen by count.
And you should we should they should be doing that and we'll help them do that as we do. The idea of buying technology to further that along or buying data for intense signals should be evaluated in that strategy. And you should make that decision based on kind of where you are in your journey and what your needs are, but they're two independent things, in my opinion. There's the strategy and the process for executing that strategy.
And then there's a technology you could or could not buy to enable it. And I think what's happened in this market, if we've conflated these two things together as you said earlier. Now the Cassidy, well, we've picked a fight with two things today. So we'll see how much hate mail we get.
I don't know if you ever get hate mail. But I do. Well, you know, there's a part of the audience that doesn't like the sales guy coming on and talking to marketers about. Well, I think that's the marketing audience, which is the whole audience.
So no one actually knows your sales bros come and listen to our podcast. There's a couple sales bros. This is this is a sales fam that comes by every once in a while. But yeah, man, this has been awesome.
We picked the fight with PLG and ABM and we should talk more about this. And if anyone's made it this far, congrats to you. But also like if you have, I mean, we should like change my mind, right? You want to come out of the podcast and you have a strong opinion.
Otherwise, whether it's ABM and how it's automatically different from like good marketing or PLG and how it's crushing it at your company for X, Y, Z reasons, and you can kind of bring in a public setting here on a podcast that gets more data like change my mind. So. And I'll add, you know, our audience, they believe in this journey of transformation from Lee Janet to man, Jen. And then what happens is the marketing community or your CEO or your boards are Australian things like PLG and ABM and that can be confusing because you're trying to go on this journey of creating demand where people want to buy from you.
And then how does PLG and ABM play into that? And really, the point of the whole discussion is to think critically about those technologies and those terms in regard to your overall go-to-market and marketing strategy. It isn't just another way of saying we're doing a lead gen. I would say on the worst case, yes, based on this conversation.
And regardless of you doing broad based marketing, doing PLG, doing ABM, the journey we're all on is to go from lead gen to demand gen and don't let those acronyms, those terms fool you into thinking something different. What's kind of my takeaway? Mmm, nailed it. All right, all, let us know what you think.
Carl, let's get chatting with you. Go close to deals. Go close to deals, Carl. All right, everybody, we're out.
Thanks for listening.