People-First GTM and how Marketing Ops can Enable it with Mark Kilens

Speaker 1: 0:23

Hello and welcome back to another episode of OpsCast by MarketingOpscom, powered by the MoPros. Hey everybody, I'm Mike Rizzo. I'm actually going to be solo hosting this episode, which is a unique twist. It doesn't happen very often, but I'm excited because today we are continuing our series on emerging go-to-market approaches, and joining me is Mark Killens. Did I get that last name right? Got it right? All right, awesome.

Speaker 1: 0:54

He is the CEO and founder of TAC, and so just a quick tidbit about what's going on at TAC. It is a media and go-to-market firm helping startups and scale-ups match how they go to market to how people actually buy. They're modernizing how businesses go to market to create, capture and convert demand into revenue. Tac helps B2B organizations transform how they grow using its proprietary, people-first, go-to-market model and approach. We will unpack that in this episode. That is exactly what this is for. Their mission at TAC is to make every experience and interaction with a business more human, so companies like ComSor, swoogo, zoominfo, Casted and UserGems are partnering with TAC today to unite their go-to-market teams to grow more efficiently and effectively Two words that are near and dear to this community's heart efficiency and effectiveness. Efficiency and effectiveness. So prior to TAC, mark held leadership roles at several organizations, including CMO at Airmeet, vp of Content and Community at Drift and VP of Marketing slash, the founder of the HubSpot Academy. So, mark, thank you for joining us today. Really appreciate it.

Speaker 2: 2:01

Yeah, no, thank you for having me, mike, excited to be on this podcast. I've listened to a few episodes, love the show, so thank you so much.

Speaker 1: 2:12

Of course. Yeah Well, I'm glad to hear that we were able to capture your attention on a few episodes because, you know, not always we don't always reach people that are, you know, in the you know, upper echelons of experience in the world, I think you know. So it's it's helpful to hear that we've got some influencers like yourself listening.

Speaker 2: 2:32

Oh, you can always be learning. I, you know, never settle, always be learning two of my personal life principles. So, you know, when I see something I want to learn about, learn from someone, I'm going to, I'm going to try to study it and listen.

Speaker 1: 2:40

Awesome, Awesome. Well, again, you know, I think there's just a ton of alignment between what you're working on at TAC and what this community's sort of foundations are all about we talk about. You know, the number one traits of some of the strongest marketing operations professionals are to always be learning and curiosity, for sure, and then, you know, just talking about building things that are efficient and effective. But before we dive into the rest of this conversation, let's try to baseline some folks. Would you mind sharing? You know people first is pretty new right, and you're all sort of pushing that into the market. Would you help sort of share with our audience? What does that really mean when you say people first go to market?

Speaker 2: 3:26

Yeah. So we started looking at how you could say marketing and sales from a buyer's perspective was changing or has been changing about like two years ago. So when I was wrapping up my time at Drift and moving to Airmeet, it was that strange time when the pandemic was happening, but we were starting to come out of it. I was like, hmm, there just feels like a lot of change happening with how I buy things myself, but then my friends, family, and then I started to say to myself, hmm, I think B2B is changing a little bit. This pandemic has had a lot of different types of effects on things.

Speaker 2: 4:08

One of the biggest things I noticed as I studied this and this has been happening now since mid-2000s is how the internet has shifted from a search-dominant model to a social-dominant model. And you know, when I was at HubSpot, I was there for almost nine years. I mean, you know search was the playspot. I was there for almost nine years. I mean you know search was the play. Inbound marketing people find you online, mostly through search. Of course, social became a thing. Um, fun fact, I was one of the first 20 colleges to ever use facebook. I was in that small orb. I have never used facebook since 2007 because I could. I could actually see the train wreck coming um. So that's just. I do use Instagram I will say that, disclose that, but very minimally and WhatsApp. So yeah, I use Facebook, but whatever I digress the point is you use tools in the meta ecosystem.

Speaker 2: 5:02

Exactly Tools in, I guess meta now is the name. I don't even. Yeah, Good point, Mike, Same here. I don't Facebook.

Speaker 1: 5:08

Yeah, good point, mike. Yeah, same here. I don't Facebook, I have very little relationship with Instagram, but I have a WhatsApp account and that's largely because I've got people internationally that I work with.

Speaker 2: 5:18

You know, you kind of it's like Google, apple, Meta, microsoft, you almost you have to use one of them Anyway, somewhere. Anyway, anyway, the shift from search to social was interesting. The other thing I saw happening was the ways in which people consume things. It's been changing, but now at this point, I think it's almost like across the chasm where video is predominant. Video is how people and it's more generational to some degree, but video is predominant Like. Video is how people and it's more generational to some degree, but like video is big.

Speaker 2: 5:52

So when you think about social and video has been those two things I mean what's what's? What's behind that? That that's that's becoming much more people. First, right, like you know, this podcast might become a video podcast one day, but, like you know, audio, right, you're hearing from people. Video is about learning, connecting through that, storytelling. That is probably the most powerful thing when it comes to video and how you can communicate so many great things through the video medium versus just audio, versus just text, et cetera. And then the social side of things, these networks, and when I mean social, it's not just like the social networks, it's all of these larger networks, some of the ones we mentioned, but this proliferation of smaller community networks that I would classify as social networks that have taken hold thanks to technology that has created this dispersion of how people connect, meet, learn, interact. I'll pause there.

Speaker 1: 6:54

Yeah, no, it makes a ton of sense. I think I would agree with you. Communities fall into the category of social network, right, and I think this idea of how we learn and consume content is heavily dependent on finding the people that ideally have sort of been there, right, and you want to learn from them. And if you figure out what pools they're swimming in, and if you figure out what pools they're swimming in and I think over time in your career I certainly went through this.

Speaker 1: 7:33

I don't know if I speak for other listeners, but I went through a period of time where I was a little bashful.

Speaker 1: 7:48

I didn't necessarily want to reach out to a bunch of folks that have been there because I don't know if that would make me look incompetent or you know what that would do, right. But eventually I got past that and I said that person knows what they're doing. I wonder if they'd be willing to share you know some of their information with me. And I think that's what happens in these little microcosms of the social sort of communities that we're building, right. So we're niching down into these environments and we're leaning on the people that are in those groups to say, hey look, I don't want free consulting. I'm not looking for you to be a free consultant to me, but I am looking for a little bit of a hand up or just some pointers on where to look next, right? So I think in general that makes sense, right? People want to consume content, so is this people first motion really about creating video content, or is it just about creating content that resonates with the person on the other side of the screen?

Speaker 2: 8:44

I guess other side of the screen, I guess yeah, no, no. So the video and social stuff, like those two. There's a few other. I would call them macro, undeniable trends. Those are just things that are creating the conditions for why B2B go-to-market needs to change, understood. There's the macro conditions. I think of macro conditions, market drivers and then business problems. So we're still at the very high, you know, top of the pyramid of how we, how to think about this.

Speaker 2: 9:13

Um, from like a b2b market driver standpoint, let's talk about like something like market conditions ton, more competition right in every category. Um, you know, money was really easy to get then. Money wasn't really easy to get then money wasn't really easy to get. That's interesting. And some other, just like trends of B2B, go to market. That's that's been problematic because of these market drivers.

Speaker 2: 9:42

Now, like B2B companies for the most part, go to market on their own. They create the marketing, they create a way to get in front of the right audience, turn that audience into a qualified buyer all the way through. The companies themselves create all this content. A lot of them have been trained and some of this is partially due to what we said at HubSpot to some degree. But let's focus on leads and quantity of leads, and let's just do all these things because you could spend money, you could almost just keep spending money and there wasn't as much competition, commoditization wasn't as intense or happening as fast. But because of these macro changes, these market drivers and the status quo man, things have to change now because these things don't work as well or at all anymore, or they're just not going to give you good, efficient and effective growth.

Speaker 1: 11:51

Yeah, that resonates with me. I'm hearing and I think you know we, we, when we were preparing to talk about this subject with you I'm hearing hints of, uh, some some areas I want to dive into as it relates to sort of, uh, your go-to-market team and network nowadays right around partnerships, um, and this and this kind of thing. But I'm curious, uh, to hear your take on, okay, so you know, I can't just pour money out into the ecosystem anymore, um, do you, do you think some of this inability to generate the call it demand or just the leads, right, it's, it's like demands the wrong term in my opinion but to generate the leads in the market is a symptom of distrust. Has the market reached a point in B2B and I'm kind of coming at it from the angle of B2B SaaS Is it that I don't really believe what you're telling me?

Speaker 1: 12:50

Now I want you to prove it to me and this people first motion is maybe trying to help adjust to that. Almost like the brand is like I get it If you've got good customers and they're speaking positively about you. We saw G2 climb the ranks and now that's maybe a little saturated, but I don't know. That's maybe a little saturated, but I don't know, are we getting the sense that brands are struggling to build the trust that they actually can put the money where their mouth is, or what have you, or the features where their mouth is?

Speaker 2: 13:26

I mean, I think they're probably struggling to build that trust. I also think they're trusted less. People are who you trust. So, yes, people first go to market is about, in some ways, getting to that trust faster and then also using it as a long-term advantage and sustaining it, but ideally, growing it. So, yes, trust is super important. There's three kind of pillars to how we think about what needs to happen for people first go to market to be successful. And really it's about, like you said in the beginning, matching your go to market to how people buy.

Speaker 2: 14:02

And how people buy today is they use search a lot less. They use social channels a lot more. They read a lot less content. They listen and watch a lot more things. They also, you know, really are focused on understanding and learning, uh, on their own, because they're so empowered.

Speaker 2: 14:26

The empowered thing has been happening since the dawn of the internet, um, but like the empowerment now is is off the charts, um, so there's more noise, right, and we flooded the market with brand spam. So, like, well, all these brands are saying slightly same or similar things. How do I cut through all that noise and garbage? I go to people I trust, I go to people I respect and maybe don't even know, but, like you know, they've built a brand and now I follow them, because that's how I also behave as a B2B buyer in my personal life, because I follow people you know on all these different places and networks. So storytelling, relationships and partnerships are the three core things that ultimately make up your successful go to market the story. We can unpack each one, mike, if you want, or we don't have to unpack any of them, but those three things storytelling, relationships and partnerships are what B2B companies, in our opinion, need to lean into today for a number of different reasons.

Speaker 1: 15:29

Yeah, yeah, yeah, and I do want to unpack that a little bit. It's interesting. There's been some, some commentary on LinkedIn just in the last handful of weeks, maybe even days. Uh, that around this storytelling sort of uh narrative, Right, Um, and, and trying to paint the picture of I commented on it. I want to say, um, sure of I commented on it. I want to say, um, what are the bigger influencers? I, you know, investors, uh, and, and they, they did this post around how buyers today just sort of want the service done for you, Right, Um, uh, and, and.

Speaker 1: 16:09

So if I buy a SAS product, you know, I think the the positioning in the post was something around this idea of like it'd be better if the provider could literally just provide the service of migrating the data and all these other kinds of things.

Speaker 1: 16:23

And to bring it back to storytelling, my comment on this was well, isn't it funny how these brands, like these founders, often identify a problem and they go to solve that problem with a piece of technology and they've felt it at their core, right, but somehow that gets lost in translation when they're trying to bring consumers and purchasers into their customer base, Somehow that narrative of that pain that they felt as an individual user or business owner or whatever it was, seems to get lost all of a sudden in this, like bloat, and I think you know like, oh, we're just talking about features and pricing and all these other things. I think storytelling is an art that is definitely like getting lost in the fray and I don't know how I don't yet know how to pull that down into. Okay, you're now you're scaling your team. You've got 150 employees right. How do you get them to tell your story? And so you know, I'd love for you to unpack that first pillar and tell us a little bit about, like, what you mean by storytelling and people first, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 17:29

So what you just said, what people would want to buy, at the end of the day, the most is the outcome, not the service. Yeah, they don't care how they get to that outcome. Maybe it's services, software, other things you said. But like if you, if you could just buy the outcome, everyone and anyone, for the most part, would buy that. Yeah, so, and and that's where the best storytellers are starting to really hone in um, and a lot of the times the outcome is a feeling. In the context of business usually can't be a feeling. So I'll give you an example of one of the customers we work with where their outcome was a hardware and software based company. The outcome that they deliver for their customers and it's an AI first company very, very smart accident reduction. So they're a trucking company. It's a company that sells hardware and software for trucks, all types of trucks. They I can't guarantee it, because that'd be hard, but they can say look, it's almost a guarantee, we will reduce your accidents if you buy this.

Speaker 2: 18:44

That's pretty powerful right, that's the story we're telling, right, that's the camp so we use. We can go down this rabbit hole now if you want, but as part of your go-to-market. We believe in integrated revenue campaigns. I actually don't AB, know ABM fine, I'll use it if I have to say that term but, like, I believe more in an integrated revenue approach that is, using the foundation of brand level, solution level, product level, storytelling, messaging and positioning to build those relationships with the people in your funnel, within your customer base, and activate partnerships. That's the core of the whole. People first go to market idea.

Speaker 1: 19:25

I love it and so you know, interestingly, you know I think everybody understands. So you talk about storytelling, relationships and partnerships as these three key pillars. I think, generally speaking, I understand you know relationships right and so you know if there's anything you want to touch on, feel free to sort of like dive in on that. On the partnership side, there's so much happening here. I mean even as recently as like today and yesterday in our community, the Mopros community, someone was asking about how do I get referrals and track that and build this partnership play in a way that's meaningful, and so you know trying to, you've got these marketing technologists right. They're constantly looking at ways to integrate, go to market strategies with underlying data and technology Right To measure the outcome.

Speaker 1: 20:23

But partnerships feels like this really ripe category and I know Asher Matthew who runs partnership leaders in that community. Right, there's, there's this shift happening. It might even feel like really ripe for some sort of technological innovation. I know there's some tech out there, but it feels like it's still underserved, like. Tell us a little bit about what is partnerships in your eyes. Are they like resellers, vars, that kind of thing, or sort of what is? How does people first in partnerships fit?

Speaker 2: 20:53

So, yeah, I mean I use the term partner-led growth. It's the thing that surrounds the other kind of growth strategies in the model we created, because partnerships, from our perspective, is not like just about sales or marketing, it's about customer success. It's about the things product partnerships, by the way, which is a general go to market partnership, then, but it's also you made the comment around like well, how do you help your sales team tell stories? It's about how well you partner with your internal teams as well. So partner-led growth is all of that and that's a different take, and people are like well, that's confusing, like well, it goes back to the term I used just a moment ago, which is integrated. You can't create a really amazing go-to-market. It doesn't matter how much of a scale you're talking about. It could be at HubSpot scale, or it could just be at a scale that look, we're a $10 million company and we're just continuing to get more profitable, yet grow as well. The real unicorns, in my opinion, by the way, are the companies that are profitable, that are growing 50%. I don't even know those exist, but if you're profitable, growing 50% year over year, holy shit, like I want to invest in that company. So that's the real unicorn definition. But I digress.

Speaker 2: 22:15

And getting back to this idea of partner led growth, it's about leverage. That's all it is. It's just leverage. So a good example of a technology that's helping with partner-led growth that is actually a tech customer disclosure is ComStore. I'm sure you've seen ComStore online. They're about to announce a few more big things. They were a company that did a lot with community-led growth and they were building a platform for community managers, like HubSpot is for marketers and salespeople, pivoted off that and said no, we're going to introduce this thing called GoToNetwork, which is very similar to People First, and what they're doing is they're taking the power of your relationships across all of those sources through 35 now, plus different factors and then what you can do is say, hey, I'm going to connect my network to all the other networks in my company and layer in our ICP and account map strategy on top of that. Now getting to the right person has become maybe not so so so, so easy, but you just now got lines of sight into stuff that no CRM on the planet can do today.

Speaker 1: 23:52

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm very close with Mac. I think we met when he was still surfing on some couches when he had these crazy ideas and this big vision, and I really love what CommSource has been pursuing around community led and now this new, this new motion that they're pushing out, which makes a ton of sense right for the technology that they're building, and so, yeah, super, super exciting, all right. So you know, we've talked a lot about capturing sort of like, basically using these approaches to sort of capture. You know, demand, right, like what, what's going on? So we're talking about social media. There's advocates, there's influencers, there's all this stuff. Is this a part of the people first? Should companies be thinking about engaging their network from an influencer perspective? Are they hiring differently because of these strategies that you're suggesting they implement? What is maybe some actionable steps that a marketing team or organization might consider as they think about a people first motion?

Speaker 2: 25:04

Yeah, no, most important thing is to understand the macro conditions, the market drivers and the problems affecting your ideal customer. And I mean ultimately, the problems are going to be one or more of the things you solve. Like, if you don't have a good grasp on that, you really should start there, because that's getting you into the head and mindset and that proximity you need to understand your buyers and then you need to tie that to say well, you know, based off of that stuff, we've created this premise and this belief that there is an approach that we can help you take to overcome this problem. Because, look like, if you just take the vendor feature out, it can work, it can make you some money.

Speaker 2: 26:00

I don't think you're going to be able to create a really large company by just being a vendor and a feature slash tool. You're going to need to become a partner, maybe a strategic partner. You're going to need to become a solution, maybe a suite. You're going to, you know, maybe you know ultimate case, very few get there but a platform. But like, you need to do more than that. So the the idea of like that story piece is super important. From there, we think of like three channels in maybe the untraditional sense Like people think channels, like when I say channels, mike, what do you think of?

Speaker 1: 26:36

Unfortunately, I think of like five different definitions because I had so many different companies. I work with a company right now, uh, as a consultant, and there it was like lead sources and go to market motions and all kinds of things were all the channel, like the word channel was used.

Speaker 2: 26:52

So well, yeah, channel is a very company. First thing was, oh, I'm gonna, we're gonna use this channel and blast our message and get to the consumer, the customer, through this channel. And our channels are simple One is very unknown and new. The two other ones are less unknown. If you want to create demand, we say, great, use a community-led growth approach. So I'll pause there and that's going to be like getting you to basically that qualified buyer, qualified account op stage. It really will. It gets you to that stage. Basically, from there, we think you should use a member-led growth approach.

Speaker 2: 27:38

No one really knows what that is, but I've been using it since early days of HubSpot. But we can unpack that if you want. That's going to help you get someone to become a customer. What that really is really quickly is just they form a relationship with your brand and company in a much deeper way. Right, the, the b2c companies a lot of them do this extremely well.

Speaker 2: 28:04

That you become a member of some part of that company in some way. I have countless examples, but makes sense, that's, that's, that's one thing, right? Um, for example, like you can become a member of an airline before you even take a flight through their loyalty program. Right, there's a lot of different examples. Um, sometimes that happens after, but like, become a member and then then the customer led one which is which isn't, as, like you know, confusing, it's confusing but it's like, known, at least it's.

Speaker 2: 28:35

How do you then take the demand that you've created through community approach? You've captured this demand and you really understand the signal of the demand through membership, and really it's about first-party data collection. And then it's like, how do you convert a customer into a true product advocate, not just a brand advocate, but a product advocate? So those are the three channels we help companies activate. Sure, there's email, social, all that other crap. Right, you know stuff, but like, think strategy, think people first, because each of those are people first way to think about your, your channel activation, not like you're like email stuff, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally no that.

Speaker 1: 29:23

that, that, uh, all three of those make sense to me.

Speaker 1: 29:25

And you know, when I hear you talk about community led, obviously we have a community Um, we have brands that support this community and they believe in um.

Speaker 1: 29:36

You know the value of creating educational resources that help elevate these potential customers that could potentially be a buyer of their product or service one day. But they partner with us to make sure that we're creating the right materials in the market that enable them, and so there's a community-led motion there. But then when I think about us as a business platform and a private network for our ecosystem, when you said member led, I found that really interesting, because we have members of our community that spend zero dollars with us, right, but they advocate tremendously, right, they find a whole bunch of value and they continue to champion the fact that the things that we're doing to support them are valuable enough for them to just tell their friends about it, right, whether that's creating content or resources that help enable them in their work. I think this is applicable to pretty much any business, right, you can enable your members of your organization or your community to be supported and then, if they become customers. They sort of go all the way around, right? Yes, that all really resonates.

Speaker 2: 30:52

Let me unpack that a little bit more for you. So you actually are using, so you have an owned community. I know that right People sign up for the M-Ops community. Is it free or paid, or is it both?

Speaker 2: 31:05

It's both yeah yeah, cool, it's just like Club PF with us. We have a free version and a paid version. Love that. Yeah, so that's member-led. Yeah, you have a community-led strategy and this podcast is part of that, where you're using rented channels. So I classify it as you have an owned community. You've created an ownership model with your community where there are free and paying members. Love that. Hubspot Academy was that, drift Insider was that, sales Hacker with Outreach was that. But then you have community-led, which is about rented network activation, rented social community activation and what you're doing with this one right now.

Speaker 2: 31:49

This podcast is using a content led strategy. This podcast is content. You're deploying it across your community led approach, probably using it in some ways in your member led approach, which I love. And you're using partner led growth because you've partnered with me and many, many other people to come onto this and use that relationship, use that, you know, not super strategic partnership, but there's a partnership here to fuel those other three approaches I just mentioned. So that's how I would think about it, you know.

Speaker 1: 32:14

Yeah, a hundred percent, and I think, I think that's spot on, right, and, and you know, uh, the people. First bit is you know, I want to. You know, before we even hit record today, right, we, we just quickly touched on the fact that we haven't had a chance to interact, uh, outside of just sort of the quick exchange on LinkedIn here and there, and so here we are, we're getting to know each other. Uh, you know, now I know more about your business and all this other stuff, and, right, so you, you create these. I can't say that, like I put on a strategic hat one day and said we're going to start a podcast, and here's my wizardry. That, I think, is going to the magic that's going to happen when we do a podcast.

Speaker 1: 32:54

Um, but to you know, if you started to sort of wrap it in some of the definitions that you just did, I think that that makes a ton of sense, right, so I think you know I touched for a moment. You certainly have talked about it. I said, hey, I feel like this is pretty applicable across pretty much any industry, but do you feel that there's certain audiences based on what you've seen in the market? You know certain verticals? Is SaaS sort of the place where this is taking hold? You mentioned a hardware software, so already that's sort of a mix. But where do you see this people led approach sort of growing most rapidly right now, I guess, is my question.

Speaker 2: 33:37

Yeah, I mean. So we just unpacked four to the seven different motions in the overall approach. We talked about the community side, the membership side, and there's a customer side, and then there's content, events and product-led. So content-led, event-led, product-led, which are the offers that really help you accelerate the trust building that you deploy in your community strategy and your member strategy, in your customer strategy, with partnerships playing into all those right. So those are the seven things. The reason I frame that is, like with most things, B2C has been doing this across the board. I have examples. Do you want me to do an example in my local community to get you want me to do an example in my local community? Do you want me to do an example outside of sas, but it's b2b? Where do you want me to go? I can name a type of business.

Speaker 1: 34:31

I have an example seriously, whatever comes to mind first, I mean b2c is it makes sense to me. Uh, we could start there, that's totally fine how about a?

Speaker 2: 34:38

how about like a? A very interesting b2c company? So they sell physical product. They sell fish, seafood, fishmonger. That's the example. Um, it's about a block and a half away from my house. Um, the company is small business called fish in newburyport. Fred owns it. Love the guy. He is huge into partner-led growth. How does he do partner-led growth? He partners with local businesses to help them activate product experiences and micro events. It's, it's gold, right. So he's using literally free products that he brings into the store to like get people to taste them, so that that so product-led growth from a, from that standpoint, is. You know, you go to a place and they have like a free sample yeah product-led growth.

Speaker 2: 35:25

That's that, that is product-led growth. And because it works, because you're like, oh, that tastes good, I'm gonna buy that. Um it's like, hey, I gotta try that sass product out, I'm gonna buy that. Um brings him into the store. He does these micro events. He creates awesome zero click content on instagram. One of my favorite things he does is Fridays with Fred. What's going on in the store, like you got the weekend coming up. Just great example, mike right, and you probably can name a few businesses just like his right that do that. Right, oh, totally, totally People first, there's plenty.

Speaker 1: 35:59

Yeah, people first all the way. Yeah, I think you know, when you shared that story, my, my wife, uh, makes delicious cookies and we've been encouraging her to uh, potentially bring these to market at some point. And, and, uh, uh, my, my concept was well, how do we enable the local community to benefit from the launch of this brand? Right? And so I thought, oh, we'll do this whole. Um, we're going to I propose that we called it the secret stash. Uh, we're going to call them stash cookies because it's the only cookie that your spouse actually tries to hide from you. Love that.

Speaker 1: 36:36

So we actually have a married couple that we're really good friends with and the husband puts them as high as he possibly can on the shelf because he wants to keep them for himself. And then I thought, great, let's go put like a treasure chest in every local shop in our area and send out these keys, and then we'll drive business to all the local stores and they're going to love that. Right, that's partner led that inside, every key will open it, right, but inside is a sample whatever, right? So I think that that's you know, I feel like maybe that's just a symbol or another version or an example of like what we all sort of crave is like this connection and these experiences and again, just like going back to these relationships that we're building with the people and the brands around us to enable go-to-market right.

Speaker 2: 37:26

I love that. Your wife should definitely do that. Love that example, love that idea. Yeah, I mean, it's people, just, I think, have fallen into this trap of the status quo of like B2B go-to-market. They've fallen into this, into the mirage of data and tech. I, I my hope with ai is actually ai gets us so much closer back to the customer, to the buyer, to the person, and that's what I'm excited about ai for, like I'm not excited about ai writing content.

Speaker 2: 37:59

I'll be for the most part like I'm excited about ai automating these go to market tasks. I mean you probably know this better than almost anyone because marketing ops, you're talking to these people all the time, your communities about it. But like how does AI help the marketing ops people be a better business partner but also be closer to the customer? Like learn more about the customer, learn more about the things that the people actually care about and help the business with those things.

Speaker 1: 38:24

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, and I think it's a perfect segue and I know we want to get some of these sort of final thoughts in place before we wrap this episode.

Speaker 1: 38:31

So you know, when we were talking about this motion, as we think about marketing operations professionals, they definitely want to be more involved as quickly as possible around the strategic go-to-market discussion, because often they're handed a to-do list of things that are sometimes not actually possible because the underlying data is not there. Whatever it is, the tool might not have been purchased yet or set up that way, right? So when you think about marketing and revenue, ops pros and we've got organizations that are trying to work on this kind of go to market, this, people first, right. What are the things that this audience needs to be thinking about or advocate for in order to actually enable this motion, whether it's technology or being involved like what should they be trying to? You know, bring to the table, maybe to earn that like seat, or just not even a seat at the table, just be in the room contributing in a way that says, hey, everybody, stop, stop, stop with all of this crazy go-to-market stuff you're talking about. Let's get back to the customer journey. What could they be thinking?

Speaker 2: 39:45

about yeah, yeah, no for sure. So to me, it starts with helping the business understand its customers more. So how can you give us insights around what we have assumed our ICP is today? What can we learn more and more about that ICP? And then, where could we take the definition of our ICP and change that because of either market conditions, competitive conditions, product changes we're making, like, get us closer and deeper insights into our customers. And then from there, how do we think about segmenting our customers and our buyers using the right signals and I know this is also one of these things on linkedin, mike, that has been a hot topic signals like whatever, but like look, I remember when I was talking at hubspot back in 2011 12 like lead scoring.

Speaker 2: 40:45

I'm like, oh my god, lead scoring, it's amazing. Like I, I do think there's a fundamental difference between um lead score, lead scoring and um buyer intent. Uh, lead scoring is a company first kind of view and approach. Buyer intent modeling is more a people first approach. So if you could help your company create a buyer intent model, that's almost like I've used this term. I don't think it's. It doesn't seem to have caught on. But like the buyer qualified lead, like the buyer qualifies themselves and, like you, just follow along in that qualification process. Like that would be pretty nice. Because ultimately, at the end of the day, what, what, what Nick, my co-founder, and I are trying to do, and what we're trying to do in our community and everything, is get rid of generic go-to-market. The enemy I have to say this just once the enemy is generic go-to-market. So marketing ops people, if you can help your company be less generic in how it goes to market, that is a competitive advantage, that's a differentiator, I think, mike.

Speaker 1: 41:54

Yeah, yeah, I totally agree with that. I think this particular audience marketing ops professionals, rev ops professionals the lens that they have into the business, assuming first folks for those of you listening that you understand the pain that the business is trying to solve for certain consumers at a baseline get that understanding, get the training internally, whatever it is that you need to be able to understand, like, what is it that we sell? Do we sell widgets, do we sell service Like and why do we sell them? And then go in and start analyzing the underlying data points to be able to enable that. I think your lens, and typically in this role, is very unique and you can bring a lot of those conversations to light with your team and be a strategic enabler in that regard. So you know, I I totally, it totally resonates with me. I think that there's a ton of opportunity for this particular profession right To to have a more impactful, you know, or just have more of an impact on the strategic go-to market around these things for sure.

Speaker 2: 43:02

A hundred, percent, a hundred percent.

Speaker 1: 43:09

Yeah, anything else you know. I want to wrap it up and let you go get back to your busy schedule. Anything else that you know, I didn't ask you about that. You were like hey, I really want to make sure I share this with the audience. You know.

Speaker 2: 43:18

No, we had a really great conversation. We cover a lot of ground, I think. I mean, there's a lot to go deeper into. I will say, though, we're going to have a course come out in the May timeframe around. People first go to market. It's eight different classes about everything we talked about. It's going to be something that we offer up, so that's something that's coming.

Speaker 2: 43:38

But I say, the other thing that marketing ops people can help with is provide, or help not provide, but partner with the other teams. Once you have that foundational understanding of the customer and everything like we talked about because you're spot on on that is provide insights and partner with people on guiding principles. The best go-to markets create guiding principles. So when we partner with a company, um and I did this at my other teams when I have a team of people we always create a set of principles. I think your go-to-market needs a set of principles, which is then the thing that guides the strategy. A lot of people say, oh, we're going to learn and diagnose and then we're going to execute the strategy, but wait, what is the foundation principles of that strategy? Don't forget about the guiding principles.

Speaker 1: 44:22

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good, call out. Well, mark, thank you, I really appreciate it. As always, mr Michael Hartman always says I feel like we could go on forever and we probably could, so I appreciate you taking the time. If anybody wants to sort of stay in touch with you, give them the sort of shameless plugs on where you're at, how to follow you and how to get you know, maybe learn more about TAC.

Speaker 2: 44:47

Yeah, I appreciate it. Yeah, Three things. You know LinkedIn. You know myself, nick, super active on that. And then clubpeoplefirstcom, that's the community like yours. And then our primary website is tacgtmcom.

Speaker 1: 45:01

Awesome, awesome. Well, I appreciate it, mark. Uh, for all of you listeners that are tuning into this episode, I hope you enjoyed it. Go back and check out some of the other uh, go to market deep dives we were doing with some other folks. Um, there will be, I think, a couple more scheduled still. Uh, and please rate and review on whatever podcast uh you're streaming from. We really appreciate it and, as always, if you want to be a guest on the show, don't hesitate to reach out to myself or anyone in the community. And, yeah, go check out that course. When it comes out, Mark will tell us all about it, I'm sure. Awesome, all right. Well, thanks everybody, have a great day and we'll catch you on the next one.