Modules
Session 6: Growth at All Costs is Dead w/ Sangram Vajre
Transcript
There's energy in the room. I don't have to create all the energy in the room. So, Billy, thank you so much. I think the if you are actually going to do an event, you need a host like that.
So it's pretty much so give it up for Billy and his group.
There. Thank you so much. Alright. So I'm gonna talk about market shift.
How many of you are frustrated and sick of the market?
Anybody? Yeah? But he's kind of thinking like, hey, when is this gonna turn around? When is this gonna be get better? Are we all done talking about efficient growth?
Right? Everybody's like, well, you know, growth at all cost is gone and efficient growth, but what does that mean?
So I've been told, like, I mean, this is a very interactive crowd. I saw that people walking around and doing high five. I've never seen that before.
So so tell me, like, I want interaction over here. So if you make eye contact, I'm gonna talk to you and you're gonna talk to me. So we're gonna do that part. So what is what is go to market mean to you? What Does somebody define go to market for me? Alright?
Well, to me, starting internally, making sure you've orchestrated your cross functional revenue engine internally to provide client value from the outside in.
Wow. Give it up. Like, well, that's a that's a big that's a big there were a lot of words in there.
There were.
There were. I mean yeah. Like, it's it's pretty good. I mean, that sounds brilliant. That's one way to, like, really, really sounds brilliant. Alright. Yes, ma'am.
I don't know that I can top that one.
Yeah. Oh, you can. Use less words and you'll be good.
Using this word.
Go to market is really how we get go to market is really how we get what we wanna sell into the hands of the people we wanna sell it to.
Oh, look at the symbol straight up. Look at that. That's good. That's good. Alright. I'll carry.
Alright. This side over here, Lehman Doug Lehman.
In layman's terms, taking your products and services, having a unique strategy for your buyers to excel.
Alright. Unique strategy, buy. Alright. There's a lot of lot of really interesting thoughts over here.
The biggest challenge that I have seen, having written books on go to market is, there's not a single company, there's not a single CEO, not a single team can give me a concise definition of go to market that they all can agree on.
Can we agree on that?
Yeah.
And that is the number one challenge most companies are. And then, I'm I'm married for twenty years, and I know if me, me and my wife, we don't agree on something, the kids will be all going crazy and they will they will find a way to make things happen and that's what happens in companies. If if the executive team is not aligned on it, then you're gonna everybody's gonna be running in different direction and you're like, what happened? What happened?
And talk about the buzz words, right? The buzz words are like, do we have clarity? Do we have alignment? Do we have trust? Well, none of that is gonna happen if you don't know what it is that we're going for. So my hope is today, everybody will walk away with recognizing what it is.
So I'm gonna give you a definition in one word.
Is that helpful? Will that be helpful? Yeah. Okay.
So this is when I was having a conversation with Brian Halligan, who was the the CEO of HubSpot before Yamaguchi. So this is when I was a conversation with Brian Halligan, who was the the CEO of HubSpot before Yamini.
And, Brian, we go way back. We've been, we've done, events together. Inbound is one of my favorite events. It's been like seven years. I get to go and and speak at that event, and when Brian and I were chatting about it, I asked him like, Brian, define go to market for me.
He thought long and hard about it and he said, all right. It's in one word. And he said, the go to market is just like a product.
What does that mean? Product, like product, like actual product? He's like, no, no, no. Just like a product, when you have to go iteratively change it, and there are bug fixes and you have to adjust it and change it and you have to make decisions every single day, you have to make adjustments.
There's not a single day where you're not making go to market decisions. So you have to think about go to market like a product. Like that's starting to make sense. Well, I'm like, give me examples of go to market.
And I thought, like, I knew what go to market. I've run marketing at Pardot, I've been at Salesforce, I've built a company called Terminus, in Atlanta, understood go to market, but I was wrong.
He, he asked, give me some examples of it.
And he said, well, here's a few examples.
And you guys tell me what what you think about this. Is this a go to market decision or not? Just say yes or no. Alright?
Right? So if you need to invest in marketing or sales, is that a go to market decision? Yes. Okay.
If you want to open up and invest in, let's say, Atlanta or you want to open a new office in Chicago, is that a go to market decision? Alright? If you want to go ahead and acquire a company or you wanna build a new product, is that a go to market decision? Alright?
Think about if you wanna launch a new product or you want an existing product, you wanna enhance that project. Is that a go to market decision?
Yes.
Well guess what? If all those are go to market decisions, who owns go to market?
Well, if everyone owns something Nobody.
They got an orchestrator.
Nobody owns anything.
So that's the second question for you all. I haven't even started with the presentation. I don't know if it will ever get to the presentation. This is so much fun.
So let's go through this. Who owns go to market?
CEO.
CEO. Like if you're gonna make all the I don't even need the mic for that one. That's great. It's the CEO. Now, how many companies, you're you're all with different companies, how many of your company you think that the CEO knows that they own go to market?
One.
There's a lot of room for improvement folks.
That's for sure. Like, that's a big challenge.
If the organizational head, whoever that is, if they don't know and can define go to market, and if there are all these go to market decisions that are happening, but they don't know if they own it, we got problem.
We got a big problem. And that's one of the biggest fundamental shift, the market shift that's happening, is to understand what go to market really is, who owns it, how do you solve for it. So What I want to spend time doing today is just go through very quickly some history lessons to to get our foundations right around what is go to market and what, why we are here. And then I want to walk through some brutal truth.
Right? You ready for some brutal truth? You ready for like, alright, let's just talk real, like what's going on. Alright?
And then we're gonna go into the future of it. We're gonna talk about, well, how do we fix it? Because if I only told you what's wrong and didn't tell you, well, how he thinks you're going to not not like me very much. So so that's that's the goal today.
And then I'm going to share something really fun and really personal towards the end. So let's get started. The first thing, I want to talk to you about why we are here. What, what got us here.
So number one, how many tech, how many of you are having more than ten different technologies in your organization running your go to market? Raise your hand. Alright. More than fifteen?
Some? Twenty?
Alright. We did a recent research and we found that that the average go to market tech stack includes twenty three different tech. Twenty three. And there are obviously eleven thousand plus different tech and just smart tech and you add sales tech, but an average company has twenty three different technologies. Now, how many of you have all of them, whatever number of tech, just talking to each other?
Anybody?
Some of you. I mean, like RevPartners, like you guys are like, that's kind of what you guys help companies do. I mean, that's the that is the part that we need to have. Most companies we see that all these tech doesn't talk to each other. Well, that means everybody has their own cheese, and whenever somebody moves their cheese, they get really angry.
So that big challenge that happens in organization is lot of tech, but not integrated. And Hubspot just launched a new research two days ago, that I saw where it says that the number one thing companies are looking for, or the buyers are looking for is integrated tech that works together. Because we want to know who moved my cheese. Ultimately, that's ultimately what we wanna see. Number two, when we have all these different things, what we have created is, are small kingdoms.
Marketing is a kingdom, sales is a kingdom, rev ops as it came, became a kingdom. You talk about customer success became a kingdom. All of these become their own functional areas. Well, guess what? They have their own p and l, and now everybody just focused on how do I solve my problem. Not our problem, my problem. Any of you facing that in your organization?
Yeah? Well, this is this is therapy. We're gonna go through some therapy stuff together. And then the last part of this is that as a result of that, everybody has their own budget. So everybody's thinking, well, I need more budget. Now the worst question ever created in the history of go to market is this, if I give you a dollar, where will you put it?
Well, if I ask a marketing person, what is that person going to say?
Marketing. Marketing.
Yeah. I'll put more in demand. I'll put more in SEO, maybe in pay per click. What if I gave it to a salesperson? What would they say?
Sales? Right? I want to hire more SDR people. I want to hire more AE people. I want to do all those things. And that's the challenge is the question itself sounds really naive and really good.
But if you ask it to a functional owner of it who has their own line item, they're trying to solve the problem all by themselves. And if there's anything that I can impart today is that go to market is a team sport.
You cannot solve it by yourself. Now if you are, how many of you are in marketing?
Alright. How many of you are in sales?
Let's see if this changes at the end of the day. And when I ask that question, it, you know, everybody raises their hand.
Can marketing would would would sales people like to change compensation of marketing?
Of how they get paid? Sure. Come on now. Yeah. Yeah?
Alright. Marketing leaders, would you like to change the compensation of the sales people how they make money?
Yeah?
It happens to everybody, but guess guess what? Neither of you can do that, so chill out.
You can't do that. You can't, and don't get excited about it.
You cannot do that. That is why the CEO owes go to market. The point is, we all all would like to do that. We all can want to tell how the other person should do their job. Like, how many of the salesperson thinks that the marketing needs to do a better job with their website?
And the copy, and the booth, and the colors, and the logo, like, everybody got an opinion. I've never told a plumber to say, how do you plumbing, you know, go to the plumbing thing? But everybody tells marketing how they should do marketing. Yeah?
That's what happens. We all think you're the expert in something else, which we are not.
But then how do we solve the problems if we have to work together? So all of this has led us to solve problems isolated in our own world and and and the cost is too huge. That's what we're seeing. That's why go to market is so hard.
Now, there has been evolution in the go to market world. When when I was running at Pardot, we're just talking about inbound. It was very much focused about just marketing. It was really interesting, and then it moved into you you fast forward maybe ten more years than so marketing inbound and outbound.
How many of you have heard about or have done some ABM work? Right? Like that's been the next next evolution of it, and I happen to, to get to get a chance to write a couple of books and build a company around that, so I I know that world really well. And now when I look at the world, and I'm learning, I'm learning and I'm and that's the one thing I want everybody to recognize that nobody has it yet.
Nobody got this whole go to market idea fully figured out. We all have to learn very fast as things are changing. And what I'm learning is that there are more than one go to market motion. It's not just inbound, and it's not just outbound.
As a matter of fact, we identified there are six different type of go to market motions.
We are research and advisory advisory format go to market partners. So we this is what we do. There are over sixty thousand people who read our research called GTM Monday every single Monday.
So we bring out what's going on, we do surveys to find out, and we found out there are six different go to market motions.
Now think about the complexity right now.
You have The world has changed. We go from, growth at all costs to what we call efficient growth. The second part change is now, it's not just marketing and sales, but now you have all these different functions that have come up and popped up that you have to figure out how to work together. You have all these different technologies now that you have to figure out how they integrate. And on top of that, if that wasn't hard enough, now you've been asked like, well, there is more than one way to grow.
And last I checked, most of us in this room didn't have more budget to spend, did you?
How many of you actually got more budget to spend in twenty twenty four than last year? Nobody. Nobody?
Nope. But you have to solve. You you well, you must be doing something. But can you please come here and tell us what to do?
There you go. Alright. A percentage growth for for years. Thank you, though. Right? I mean, that's big.
That's not our research shows that ninety five percent of companies haven't seen a single cent grow in their marketing and sales budget, their go to market budget. So how are you gonna solve for this?
How are you gonna So right now, if you're feeling exhausted, frustrated, I need more coffee, I get it. I get it. But you're not alone. You're not alone.
This is a standard thing that's happening in the marketplace. What we are here to figure out is like, how do we solve for it? These are the constraint. These are the cards we have dealt with.
What do we do? Where do we go? And there's a lot of data. I'll go through a couple more brutal truths, so hang on to it before we get into like where do we go and how do we solve for it.
The first thing is, if you are a company, how many of you are ten million or more in revenue company?
Alright. This is an interesting thing. How many of you are in fifty million or more in revenue company? Alright. A few of you guys. Alright.
As we are building Terminus and as I was at Salesforce, here's something that I learned that I thought this was crazy. Even even at Pardot, when you hit a certain milestone in your in your revenue like at Terminus, and and David, you and I were chatting the other day about it. You think like, when we hit like a million in revenue, we thought, okay, this is great. We got this.
Guess what? Everything started breaking again. Then we hit at five million revenue. At that time, we really got this thing.
Now we we we don't there's nothing stopping us. Anybody felt like like when you hit a certain milestone? The very next day you go in the office and everybody's like, it's breaking. The person doesn't know anything.
We have these new customers. Now we need to hire a CS department and we need to hire a like what? I thought Friday I just went home and felt great. And then we're back and it's not working.
You hit a ten million dollar mind, so everything breaks again. Oh, we need to go enterprise now. We need to have bigger deals. Our product needs to do x y z things that it doesn't do, and we need integrations.
And everything is breaking again. And this happens at a normal course like ten million, twenty five million, fifty. Anybody, anybody experience that? So you're going through an evolution and change in go to market at every single stage of your business.
And that's what we call the valley of death.
Every organization goes through that. You are in some sort of valley of death. You like it or not, you want it or not. The question is, are you willing and humble enough to acknowledge that?
The valley of death would be like, hey, I got a great product but I can't market. And no marketer is going to say that's a problem, but I hate that that that does happen.
You can market, but you can sell. You have a great product. How many of you you feel like, yeah, we we have a problem with sales right now? Or you have a great sales, but you can't deliver. The product is not getting it to the market the way your marketing and sales, the buzz that have been created. Several of you are in that right now. How about you have delivered, but you can't renew?
How many of you are in that? Yeah. When you're in that mode, your your customers are saying, oh, we love you, but that's like, that's that's a nail in the coffin. Right?
Because they're like, oh, we love you. We love your customer success team, but I cannot justify the ROI of this thing. Right? You're in that, that valley of death.
Or you can renew, but you can expand.
Now how many of you actually focus on something called as NRR?
One, two, three, four, five, six. How many of you know what NRR is?
Okay. Not all of you. You need to go and read up on NRR.
Companies that are not focused on NRR are actually are the ones that are having the biggest pain. The reason we are here is because companies only focused on the top line growth, and they forgot that we need to make sure that our existing customers stay and not just stay, but buy more from us.
As an example, like since HubSpot in the room, I'll use HubSpot as an example. If they only had one product and if that's all they're selling, they're only going to get to a certain point.
If you want to expand and if your NRR is over one hundred percent you literally could double your revenue every five years without even adding a net new customer.
Let me say that again. It's a little bit of nerdy math kind of thing. If your NRR is over one hundred and twenty percent you can grow, you can double your revenue every five years without adding a single new customer.
So it's a different mindset shift that you have to think about. What, where, what is going, what is happening? So you can literally focus on your existing customer if you have a great product, and have them grow with you, and build new products to have them buy. You actually can grow faster, more profitable than it. That's the, that's one of the answers to the question, how do we have efficient growth?
Efficient growth doesn't mean don't spend. You can't grow without that. The efficient growth is you need to know where to spend.
And that's a big shift. So you're in some sort of valley of some given point. And if you know that, you can actually bring your organization together and figure out. And then, most of us are having smaller teams and budget cuts that we all talked about. So you're all have we're all having these issues. Let me tell you a tale of two companies. This is using g two data.
The top company, we as we advise companies, we're looking at their g two data and we're using that as a proxy. They actually cut every single spend whatsoever, on during, Q1 of twenty twenty three.
And this is using g two data, the proxy. So as they cut that, that, every single spend, whatever they were spending on SEO and pay per click and events and just being in the marketplace, they immediately saw and we were looking at the data right about this time, they immediately saw a drop in number of inbound that they were getting.
That's a big shift.
And so now, this company has been asked to create more pipeline and more revenue, While the inbound they were getting are coming down like it's never been before. So they are now, they were struggling all the way up to q one of this year. They're like, woah, we didn't realize the effects of not being in the market.
So some of it is like, we just need to be in the market where our customers are. And if you're not there, you're going to have significant quarter over quarter, value of debts coming to you because you were just not there. While the other company we saw right around the same time, about twenty twenty one happens to be working at because we look at that data all all the time for different companies. They just said, you know what? We're going to go all in with it. And they just skyrocketed their their growth because now they were coming across every single thing everywhere, wherever their customers wanted to buy because in g two you could compare this product versus that and they were they were right there.
So the point of all of this is that if you're not there, if you're invisible, you're going to have a harder quarter coming towards you and a harder year for you. And in when you think about go to market and you want to fix it, you want to be where your customers are. You don't want to be invisible altogether. So you have to figure out where can you invest, and so this is something that you can literally show.
There's a research on GTM Monday complete on just this part of it to show internally like we have to be where our customers are. There is no other way to go around it. And I know you probably won't see it, but we also created fifteen go to market problems that go, that you can just download and say, well what problems are we solving for? And all of our research, over five thousand people have taken this research, and we have never found a sixteenth go to market problem.
So I challenge each and every one of you as you take screenshots, print out, later on it's on GDM RevPartners website as well. You can literally print this out, and take it to your company.
And say, and and your executive team is saying, hey, let's let's let's figure out what are the top go to market problems. And then identify where to focus on. This is somewhat of the first things we do when we work with with our clients because most times the executive team will say, I think, I think, I think we have this problem. And you may have that problem, but it may be because of another reason.
Reason. And so we came up with this fifteen go to market problems, and our research shows the top two of all that we see all the time is number one, marketing sales and customer success out of sync. So your go to market team is out of sync. How many of you are facing that problem?
Yep. And number two is that your customers love you, but they can't quantify the ROI. So they won't renew or expand with you. How many of you are seeing that?
Those are the top two go to market problems. Quarter over quarter, every single time we run this survey, we find those as the top two ones that come up.
It comes down to figuring out, do we know go to market as a team?
So here is what we have, and I have wearing the t shirt on this thing. You don't you don't have a marketing problem, so we're gonna say this together. Alright?
Learning this from Billy. You don't have a?
Marketing problem. You don't have a? Sales problem. You don't have a?
CS problem.
You don't have a? Product problem.
So what problem do you have?
Market. You have a go to market problem. Alright? Like this is so fundamental. I know it sounds kind of funny, but here's the thing. Have you ever walked in a team meeting and said, we're gonna talk about leads. You see the marketing person start twitching.
Right? Like because they're like, wait a minute. They're talking to me.
Yeah. Like why are we talking about this? Right? Now you become defensive. Or all of a sudden we talk about like, well let's talk about pipeline and the sales person just starts drinking more coffee.
Right? You see this happening like physical visible clues happening in the organization.
But guess what? If you went in next time and you said, hey, let's talk about our go to market.
Nobody's twitching. Nobody's drinking coffee. Everybody's coming in and saying, we got a business problem to solve.
You happen to be in marketing and that's a great thing and we need your input. You happen to be in sales, you need a great thing. But by calling it a functional team meeting, it actually makes everybody think about that they are, they, they're gonna get fired or they're defensive or they want to figure out how, how they can solve solve for themselves. You can't.
It's a team sport. So just words have the power of life and death. You use the right words, people are now, okay. Yeah, Yeah.
I can get behind solving a go to market problem for our business. It sounds a much better thing to get around. So if you can do one thing, do this.
Next week, don't have a marketing and sales alignment meeting.
Because you saw, like, there's one of the fifteen go to market problems. It's like, hey, Sangram said fifteen go to market. I got an alignment meeting. Nobody shows up to that unless you have donuts or whatever.
Have a go to market meeting.
Bring people together and say, we're This is not a marketing sales meeting. This is a go to market. This is a business meeting. How are we gonna grow the business? And some of the best ideas can come from anywhere.
Somebody who's not in that function can give you a great idea and then somebody goes and executes on it and that may be a marketing or sales or somebody. But most time, we have seen time and time again, the best ideas don't come from the functional because you're too close to the problem trying to solve for. Okay?
Alright. So where are we going?
Can somebody tell me the definition of insanity?
Alright. How many of you are insane?
We walk in organizations all the time where this is literally what's happening. They're going through insanity.
We're gonna send another email, see me if they haven't read my last email and track it and oh oh he opened it.
He opened it. Did you see he opened it?
But I don't know why he's not responding to me.
We all do this stuff.
It's insane.
Like really it's bad. Like this is crazy. Like so all the technology is being used to figure out what's wrong with you.
And and and we are always trying to search for like, what they're not doing.
Instead, maybe, maybe we just need to look at it completely differently.
Maybe it's time for some of us to drop our baggage, whatever that baggage is off that whole old playbooks that we all may have run. Maybe we have had the best things. Maybe some of you went to the president's club because you did so well doing whatever. Maybe some of you were the best marketer of the year, maybe you were the best at it.
But it's time to realize that that's insanity.
That's not gonna work.
And that means you have to figure out what is the next playbook that's working.
Because market has truly shifted and they're expecting you to work with them. Not not sending another email or call that you have been doing for last ten years, but actually another way. Not sending an AI AI bot crazily tracking them because everybody wants to do some AI stuff, but actually being human again and recognizing the first principles of what it means to close a deal. Amen?
Amen. Alright. Alright. So with that, I submit to you that there are gonna be two kinds of people walking out of this room today.
One type of people are going to be the one who understand how the go to market, how to do go to market for the business. Which means, I'm a great marketer, I'm going to do great marketing. I'm a great sales person, I'm gonna do great sales person. I'm a great CS or a graphic designer or events person, I wanna do the best at it. Those are the people who understand how to do go to market for the business.
But I want to encourage you to be on the right side of this. Because this is the right side of the history.
You get to be part of this, which is, do you understand the business of go to market?
Which means, you're gonna not walk in with any prejudice around how to do what to do. You're gonna walk in in a go to market meeting and saying, what problem do we have?
And figure out from from first principles how to solve for it. It might mean you do an event, but it may be nothing you do with net new leads. It may be all to do with turning your existing customers into fans and expanding on that because NRR is the goal.
Completely different reason why you're doing an event.
So you can go through all of this, but you have to make that decision on what side of the history you wanna be on. Do you wanna be the best marketer, best events person? Or do you wanna be the best person who understand the business of go to market? And that's a pivotal question that you can only answer for yourself.
Alright? So I'm gonna go through very quickly the new way and the shift that's happening in each one of these areas. It's very quick. You can spend more time on the website. You will see a lot of these things. The future of go to market, very quickly one one to one on this thing is going this way. TAM, how many of you know what TAM is?
Total digital market.
Old playbook.
Wanna go after, it's great when you're raising money. When I raise money for terminals, oh, three point five billion dollar market. Right? Everybody talks about that. Well, guess what? We're still trying to sell the thousand customers.
Right? We we we it doesn't happen. So we need to go to a t r m, which is total relevant market. Which vertical, which industry, which specific ICP that can you sell this quarter, this year.
And if you do that, you're actually gonna be a profitable business this year. Right now, that's a big shift. So you stop going after everybody, you start going after the very specific one. Maybe you're the best at financial services in North America for a specific type of, vertical in it.
Think about multiple products. As I said, the new research shows that if you're in product, don't create a product where people have to log in and try new things. Create the most integrated product where it's seamless.
Change your product roadmap to align with that one. Because that's what your buyers want. Not you, but your buyers want. Alright?
Inbound, outbound. We already said there are six different go to market motions. Maybe you have been great at inbound, maybe you have been outbound. What about partner led, community led?
All of those go to market motions are actually the one that's driving net new deals in the marketplace. So figure out where your customers, how they want to engage, and what that go to market motion will be. Sales heroics. How many of you have heroic sales in your organization?
And God bless them. Like, you need them, especially now. But that is not how you're gonna create an organization that can create the net new outcome that you want to have as an organization for go to market. So what you want is a go to market play. An example of that is, if you are thinking I'm going to have a booth and a sales person and that's it.
That's an old playbook. That's how we all most of the time did it. Now you think about a booth and you have a marketing person, a sales person, a product person there and you're having all the meetings you need to have right there. It's not about just creating net new leads, it's about turning into revenue, it's about expanding the existing customers, it's about building relation, it's about doing product demos, it's about being visible in the marketplace.
So you're measuring success differently. It's a play. Not one and done, but a play that you're going after. ROI.
Our research shows that it takes thirty days for your customers to think and figure out if they're gonna renew or not.
Not six months, not one year when it used to be. Thirty days.
That's awfully less time.
In thirty days, you have to figure out how do I make them really excited about the product, do the onboarding so well that they're also seeing ROI from it. Thirty days. That's not a lot of time. So if you're going after nine months and saying, hey, how you doing Billy?
Billy's gone to North Carolina or like, you know, where were you going? Different locations. So you can't wait that long, for it. Retention focused. If you are focused on retention, like here's the question.
How many of you ever said that I want to retain my marriage?
That's a tough nobody says that.
Here we are, we are saying, I want to retain a customer.
We already are talking about them like like it's it's old news.
So the words we use have the power of life and death. We have to think about that. It's not about retention.
It's not about retention. It about a we want to grow with your company, with your customers. Right? So think about the growth play, not customer success, but customer growth that you want to have. So think about the words that you use that will put life into those conversation that will allow you to move move forward on that.
This one is this one is this one is tough one. Most of us because we have salary, we have scorecards for marketing, scorecards for sales, scorecards for product.
I submit to you, and again, there are free dashboards on go to market RevPartners. Create a go to market dashboard that everybody on your team and executive team across the board looks at it. And when they look at it, they understand what? The business of go to market. Not how many leads you got, nobody cares. Not how many email opens you got, nobody cares.
Not how many ads you ran, really nobody cares. I mean it's sad. Would you have to look at it and say, well, what business impact did it have? What do I need to change? And you gotta have business metrics that everybody understands so that they can make changes for it. You don't want another landing page.
What you want is a is an initiative where the customers will buy into that, that they wanna grow with you. And finally, this is what I'm seeing more now than ever before, is that because people are not hiring a whole bunch of people in the existing team, but they're very open. Organizations are very open to create fractional roles. And says, I'm gonna hire a fractional person to do HubSpot integration.
I'm gonna have a fractional person to run ABM campaign. I'm gonna have a So leverage that. Like you be the strategy in it and bring somebody who can do what it is for certain periods of time and just execute on it. I think this is the best year for people who are thinking about fractional as their roles, because most organizations are ready for it.
So we believe this is, this is, all of this, this is a new mindset. We call it the go to market operating system. So I'm just just gonna very quickly not go through every single one of them, but if you wanna take a screenshot or if you wanna have it for yourself, this is the go to market operating system. As you can see, it's not marketing, sales, CS, product.
It is go to market. It is all It's a business framework. We train, PE firms and their portfolio companies through it, through this. We teach a whole bunch of companies walking through it, and and really at an executive, because go to market is change management.
It is ultimately a change management. It is about helping companies make go to market meaning business decisions it's in it because ultimately, if you understand the business of go to market, you can then figure out how I can solve those problems for my company.
So with that I want to share something with you. Like all I shared with you, and it for some of you it's like man, old playbooks are gone. New playbooks.
Whatever I'm doing is insane.
Maybe all I made you feel is like really bad.
Well, maybe some of you are like, you know what? I I need, I need to just change the way I'm thinking about this stuff. Not just the market shift, but I need a mind shift on it. So I wanna share something personal over here. This is, this is my daughter, play her video in a second.
And I've written a few books and she once Googled me and said, Papa, she's nine years old. She's like, Papa, if I Google you, I see some of the stuff.
But if I, when I Google myself, I don't see anything. I'm like, why are you Googling yourself? That's the first question I have for you. But she was just curious and wants to figure out. I'm like, okay, well, you know, well, if you do something, if you write something, if you put something out there, chances are like people will it's a record. The world is recording everything. And it's, she's like, well, I wanna be an author like you.
Okay.
Progress, we'll give you time for that. You're nine. Like, you know, we'll take time. Time.
No problem. And she's like, no. No. No. I wanna write a book right now. I'm like, okay.
Well and she's like, what do what do I need to do? And I'm like, well, if you dream about it, if you think through it, you can figure it out. And I was really just not not trying to create our hopes too high. I'm like, just just, you know, you're not.
Like, you know, chill out. Like, go play. Like, you know, she's like, no. I wanna I wanna write.
I wanna do this thing. And she's very determined. I'm like, okay. I literally said, okay.
What do she said, what I would do I need to do? I said, alright. Well, I just literally gave her a piece of paper and say, create a headline, create your chapter outline, and you know, give me a book of your your write up. And once you do that, just give it to me and then I'll find a way to publish it.
And we ended the conversation there. This was like last summer.
October of last year, she comes to me and hands me a manuscript.
She has been working on this for three and a half months. And she said, papa, would you publish my book?
I was like, I tell you, like, that was like, I was in tears. I can't I can't imagine. Like, alright, I'll I'll I'll try to publish this book. And she wrote the whole outline, the whole chapters, and it's it's a really sweet book about it's like it's real heroes.
It's not Spiderman is not just the real hero, the people around them, around him is also heroes who do day to day. So she wrote a little book on it. So you wanna see her reaction because she didn't know book is gonna look like, and I didn't tell her when it's gonna come, the published book and design and everything. You wanna see her reaction?
Yeah. Alright. Well, let's check it out.
Open this up.
Turn the page over.
Has your book do you see your name here on the book?
That's my fatherly voice. What do you say?
There you there you have it guys. There you have it. Yeah.
So point of me sharing this with you is simply this. It is hard. It's extremely hard. Whatever we all are out to go do, whatever you need to do is extremely hard. Don't, I don't take it lightly. I don't think your jobs are light and I think the next three, six months or a year is gonna be easier.
But I know one thing for sure. If my daughter at the age of nine can have a dream and can say, I wanna do this thing and put herself to work and get it done.
I think I can. She gives me, I wanna be her when I grow up.
So I believe each one of you needs to make a promise to yourself. Like who are you gonna be? Are you gonna be the person who says, I'm just good at this. I'm just gonna do that because somebody said so or I want to understand the business of go to market and change my business, my career and understand that better.
Thank you so much.