Operational Excellence, Executive Hiring Series: VP of Marketing - INTERVIEW

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Sara Lindquist:

I'm Sara Lindquist from Fuse. We're an early-stage venture firm based right here in the Pacific Northwest. And just like the founders in our portfolio, we are just getting started. We believe that founders deserve more: more urgency, more community, more expertise, more reliability - more of everything. And we aim to deliver.

Today we're continuing with our Operational Excellence series focused on the hiring journey. I'm once again joined by FUSE operating partner Satbir Khanuja to talk about hiring an early stage marketing leader. With learnings gathered throughout his time as an early marketing leader at Amazon as well as his own time as a startup founder and operator, he's going to have a lot of great insights to share.

Let's get started!

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Sara:

Satbir, thank you so much for joining me here again today to continue to share some additional fantastic wisdom on the hiring journey.

Satbir:

I'm excited to be here Sara.

Sara:

So today, we're on to the VP of Marketing, which I know is a role that is near and dear to your heart as you have great insights and experience given your own tremendous career in marketing. So this obviously includes your DataSphere days but also your tenure as the head of global marketing at Amazon. So I definitely want you to share some learnings and stories from those experiences - but to kick things off, can you give us a quick overview of the marketing discipline as a whole and how it's changed over the last few decades? I think that'd be a really helpful place to start.

Satbir:

Yeah, absolutely. I'll start with what has not changed and then I'll layer in what has really changed. As I look several decades back, what has not changed is that marketers have to still understand a customer's pain point and they have to juxtapose their product benefits in context of solving those pain points. And I remember once when I was watching this AMC series called Mad Men, it was about creative people who are trying to articulate a product's benefits on a magazine, on a single page. And one of the favorite ads I remember from that series is about this Samsonite luggage. And I think they did a really good job articulating the benefits. If I recall correctly, the verbiage was, "If you travel like your luggage bag, would you look like a Samsonite?"

Sara:

Yeah, that's right.

Satbir:

I think the whole idea was like this bag can take beating versus basically the previous bags who probably were not doing that as well under adversity when they were moving around basically through luggage traffic. And I just felt they had the right image of human beings looking like crumpled bags and it was a really nice juxtaposition. So I felt they did a fantastic job describing the product benefit in context of what the pain point was, which was the luggage bag used to crack open while they were basically on their journey and this product really solves the problem point.

So if I extrapolate - what these marketers in this scenario did not have and now the current methods have is - they did not know whether that ad was effective or not. There was no way of knowing. You just put the ad on a magazine and/or put a jingle on a radio commercial and then you are done. The only thing you can do is probably do some focus groups and get some limited data to see whether it was effective or not, but there was no close feedback loop solution to really see whether that ad was effective or not. Now fast forward to today's paradigm, we have internet, we have mobile and there's lots of measurements. So the way you can use those creative ad articulations can be put in so many different channels that it allows you to target the right kind of customers in many different ways.

And also in internet and mobile, one of the key things is your ability to measure and learn and iterate and provide a feedback loop. One of the things, talking about my days at Amazon - and fortunately for me I was a beneficiary of these modern platforms - was, as we were advertising in different channels, we could track a click all the way from Google or one of our affiliate channels or within Amazon and actually see whether the click converted into a sale, and if that sale converted how much contribution profit it created. And that gave us all the indication to the software in terms of, "Should we continue to persist that ad - or make changes and keep getting better?" That's something that is very, very unique to what's available today and it creates amazing sets of opportunities for today's marketer.

Sara:

Yeah, that's great. That's super helpful context. Got to love the Mad Men example as well, it's really helpful to frame it. Next question, so now that we better understand the new marketing landscape and all of the attribution tools that are available, how should a CEO or a founder think about the role's output? In other words, what are the key responsibilities for this leader?

Satbir:

Yeah, that's a great question because I think, to me, another thing that has fundamentally changed is: traditionally marketers will focus on activities, and in today's world, marketers need to really think about the output. And one of the things that I have seen the great marketers do is really obsess about driving growth. They are true partner in crime with their CEO and other functional sales leaders to really help drive customer and revenue growth. And towards that objective function, there is a constraint though - you don't have unlimited dollars, you have a finite amount of budget to drive a certain output. And that's the objective function that the true marketers are trying to solve.

To do that, they primarily have to do three things. One is again really try to help the company on product positioning, really understand what the customer pain point is, articulating the product benefits so that customers really understand why that pain point needs to be solved through this product. They also understand who the ideal customer is because these products evolve over a period of time and they will need to continue to refine who the ideal customer is. Especially if it's a novel new product, you want to go after people who are ready to give a new product a chance where it may not have an established brand. And so just really identifying who the ideal customer is as an important part of the marketing organization.

And then once you've defined who the ideal customer is, what's the best channel to connect with them, to source them and then the channel matters because the point is you don't have unlimited budgets, right? So you need to find the channel that gives you a cost of customer acquisition that is economically feasible for you to have a viable business. So creating demand becomes very interesting, and in some cases, the fulfillment can be done online. Like in my role at Amazon, people would just come in. We're trying to influence them on the internet, on mobile and people are coming in and they're buying without any sales team involvement - versus when you're selling enterprise software, you may be able to create an interest and that interest needs to be then addressed with a conversation with a salesperson who tells them in more details the product benefits and how the two parties can work together. So that's the part of sales enablement especially in the enterprise sales, right?

Sara:

Right.

Satbir:

So that's the second part which is creating demand and then fulfilling it. And the last piece is, over time, you want to build an amazing brand where people understand "what does the company stand for?", and if they have any issues or any pinpoint in that space or a sector, they gravitate towards doing business with you, right? So for example, Amazon created a brand in the early days about books. So anyone who wanted to buy any books, Amazon had become synonymous with the best online book store where you can find everything at the cheapest possible price and then very, very convenient for you to find that obscure calculus book.

Sara:

Right, right.

Satbir:

And then similarly, another asset that I was part of at Amazon was IMDb. There, we worked very, very hard to become synonymous with movies. Anyone who wants to know anything about movies, now they just go to IMDb, gets hundreds of millions of unique visitors because we built that brand over a decade where the brand is synonymous with a sector. And it brings people in where you don't have to convince a person every time they use your product with some kind of paid ad motion. You want to build a brand where people just connect with you organically. So that's the last piece. So first is product marketing, second is you create demand and then the last piece is just building a holistic brand where the brand is synonymous with a certain benefit or a pain point it solves where in which customers come to you directly.

Sara:

Satbir, I just have to ask you because, as you're talking, I've been curious. What was really influential for you personally in your journey about how to learn how to do all these marketing disciplines well? Were there any key "aha moments" for you or stories to share there? I'm just curious.

Satbir:

Yeah, I think, to me, I had two opportunities within Amazon and the first opportunity was at IMDb. And lucky for me, nothing was established because the IMDb journey started in '99 and that was very early stage of internet. And the idea, there was no concept of scalable marketing. There was no concept of search engine marketing. Google was just getting born back in '98. So I had a clean slate to really reimagine how to apply the basics of marketing. And then when I started looking at marketing from first principle, it boiled down to: "what are the customer pain points, how's your product addressing it? Who's your ideal customer? How do you connect with them? How do you do it more efficiently?"

And then fortunately for me, Amazon being a close feedback loop system and IMDb being a digital product, it allowed me to really apply a lot of fresh thinking along with my team to invent some of the concepts that have become standard in the market right now. But again, I think it was Amazon's analytical approach applied to fundamentals of marketing and then really trying to take advantage of a new technology and platform that was giving an extent of measurability - and then creating a feedback loop that previously was not applied to marketing because attribution was one of the big issues before internet was born, but people just did not know how effective their ads were. And that process was very manual in nature and you had to work with very limited data and make big decisions. And I was just very lucky to be at the right place at the right time and the right company surrounded by really, really talented individuals who were collectively interested in taking advantage of this new technology and the platform and really re-imagining marketing to what it has become today.

Sara:

Yeah, well, that's fantastic and it's really cool obviously to have the grounding of the data but also to be bold in experimentation too with your customers and figuring out what really sticks. I always love hearing stories from your experience, so thank you for sharing that.

Satbir:

Absolutely.

Sara:

Now that we understand the framing for the responsibilities, what does it really take for someone to execute well in this role, or in other words, what are the key attributes that a founder or CEO should be looking for when they're hiring for this position?

Satbir:

Absolutely. I think there are four key attributes. The first one we've already talked about, right brain means left brain. You need to be creative, but you also need to be analytical in today's world. The creativity comes in - again, in really dissecting and really understanding the customer need and then figuring out how to articulate your product benefits so that they know that their lives will be better if they use your product. That has not changed. The analytical piece has changed because previously you just did not have that information available to you, but in today, you do and there's so many different venues you can go and then try to reach out to your customers.

So you need to be very deliberate in terms of identifying the most efficient channel for connecting with your customers and also - depending on the stage of the company - "Are you an early stage company with no brand? Are you established company with a more brand?"

Sara:

Right.

Satbir:

These things are dynamic and the market keeps changing, new platform keeps emerging. So you need to have this huge combination of creativity as well as an analytical mind. The second piece which has not changed is really understanding customer needs. So you are a chief customer evangelizer. You're trying to put yourself in their shoes, you're trying to learn what their unmet need is and really trying to create a product with your team and provide market feedback to the product team, to the CEO just so that the right product gets developed. So that way, when it's presented to the customer, it's so obvious to them that they have to make the change. So it's very important that you, as the Head of Marketing, are really representing the customers.

The third piece is even when you bring the customers in, especially in an enterprise sales software or enterprise software, you are not able to sell them directly through self-service. There's another step involved which is the sales motion, either it's an outbound sales motion or they're talking to a lead that you have developed and you need to really work with the sales people, so that they can have a conversation and make the connection of the product benefits with the customer pain points. And you need to help train them on the talk track. You need to develop the right content marketing, so you're bringing in the right kind of customers for the product that you're trying to sell.

So this whole sales enablement piece, especially in enterprise software is a very important part of marketing, because again, the point is it's not about just building awareness, but it's not just about bringing in leads and leaving, as we talked about the job of VP of Marketing or Head of Marketing is all about driving growth. So they need to keep working all the way until all that awareness and interest drives into a real customer relationship. It's very important that -- this part in some organizations is not done and then you have tremendous amount of conflict between marketing and sales because their criteria of success is very different. And having both sales as well as marketing co-own, the growth numbers just really aligns them.

And the last piece I will say is, once you reach a certain amount of traction, you need to start building a brand so that your product is synonymous with a certain pain point and customers come to you - as opposed to you chasing all the customers. And that's an important switch for companies who become very big and significant. A good chunk of their customers over time, they find them as opposed to you trying to recruit every customer because that's not going to become a large, scalable business otherwise.

Sara:

Right. That's great, Satbir. And what would you say are the key challenges that someone hiring this role would face? Because it's obviously very (all of these leadership positions are), but it's very multifaceted, the right brain/left brain skills, being able to be a good influencer, collaborator, but also be really data driven. So what are the key challenges with this role or even hiring for this role?

Satbir:

Yeah, I think one of the things that people have to look at, the CEOs have to look at, is this role has a lot of unique attributes. It's very difficult to find in one individual. And I think, to me, the best way to evaluate these candidates is, A), do they understand which part of the marketing stack they are personally good at and then are able to build a team around them that complements their skillsets, so together they have all the four skillsets that we have talked about. That's one of the key things that I think the CEOs as they're looking to fill this role need to look at in the candidates. It's a team effort - and I'm happy to share some examples of some great marketers who are really amazing, but still they will not be able to do all four things, but they have superpowers in a few of these things and then they surround themselves with other individuals who bring in complementary skillsets and together they create magic.

Sara:

Yeah, well, that would be great. That was actually the next question I was going to ask you is, who are examples of great marketing leaders where you think they've really done a great job - who they are and what made them great?

Satbir:

To me, I feel like the very first one that everyone understands is Steve Jobs. You look at what Apple has become, primarily because of the launch of the iPhone and the legendary launch that he did with the iPhone. I still remember, it's permanently etched in my mind. If you're a marketer, you want to see this video. It's a 14-minute announcement of the iPhone launch and Steve comes in the-

Sara:

Yeah, I think that's probably taught in classes now, marketing classes. It's totally the gold standard.

Satbir:

Absolutely, absolutely. I will rush through this one because people are familiar with it, but there's some important lessons I want to talk about. And then I'll give you an example within enterprise software because a lot of our companies come from that and the tactics are really different than how marketers need to perform in building a brand name in an enterprise market software versus a disruptive business-to-consumer product like an iPhone. So Steve comes in and then he talks about prior to the iPhone, the only thing we had in the marketplace was an iPod from Apple - and then you have feature phones, some functional phones. The smartphones were Blackberries back then which was primarily to make business people's job easier to send emails and then be productive while on the go.

And Steve comes in and he talks about the launch of three different products, a touchscreen iPod and people are excited that they don't have to change around with the wheels (which was a way to navigate) and you can just press the button, he talks about an iPhone, an internet phone and the last piece is just being able to browse the internet. And then basically he starts bringing the three together and actually just say, "It's all in one product, the iPhone." And it was very masterful because it was not just how the product was positioned - that it solves three different pain points with one device - which no one had solved.

Sara:

Right.

Satbir:

But the other thing that he does, which is exceptional, is his insistence on what the product should be from the ease of use standpoint by incorporating touchscreen software so that any average human being, even a young kid, knows how to operate it just by interacting with it, by pressing the buttons on these screens. That was masterful because the team at Apple was struggling to make that functional. That was the first time a touchscreen was being deployed in such massive scale to bring in so much interactivity. But he kept insisting and iPhone was delayed because he just needed to get it right, so that it could have a mass appeal.

And on top of that, he layers in the concept of the App Store where iPhone becomes a platform and so many applications can be built on top of it for consumers to access. So the net of it is there's so many masterful things in terms of his storytelling as well as his insistence - but his relating to the customer and really putting himself in their shoes in terms of making the product so easy to use, it has created trillions of dollars of value for Apple. And maybe in the entire history of our consumer products, it may be the most successful or most impactful consumer product launch we have seen.

And then again, he demonstrated a few other things, right? Really understanding the customer pain points, making sure the product was developed in such a fashion. The benefit was very easily articulated in context of the pain points. And what he did was he created a global brand for the iPhone with just that initial framing. So quite, quite masterful. If I take that example and contrast it with another product, which is an enterprise product, I will choose Marc Benioff's salesforce.com. I'm a huge fan of what Marc Benioff has done in building a brand for Salesforce from nothing. Let's go back and look at the context of what the industry landscape looked like when Marc came up with CRM.

There were large successful players like Siebel System. Siebel used to work at Oracle and then he came up with this idea about a CRM and it was an enterprise application, used to take many quarters for people to do the integration and get value out, but it was an important problem to solve because it was a source of truth for everything related to sales. And Siebel is a very successful company. Marc comes along and he feels like this problem can be solved in a way that people won't have to spend quarters to get value out on such an important thing like sales. He conceptualized with his team and his co-founders a simple product which can be delivered over the internet and charged as an early version of Software as a Service - way before SaaS was popular.

Except Marc's challenge was that he was coming in a category where there were a lot of very established players. So the problem that he needed to solve was to become relevant in terms of his potential customer set. The thing that he did an amazing job in is his creativity in what I call gorilla marketing and the approach he took - which is quite remarkable - is instead of staying away from the competition, this guy just goes charging head into the competition and tries to position his company as a disruptor against old companies positioning - and positioned them as legacy. Two of the examples that I remember that are quite remarkable, and as a marketer are quite an inspiration, was Siebel was having an event in Nice, France. It's a small city.

Marc goes in and actually just hires all the cabs for those two days at the airport. And essentially in all those cabs, he starts putting in ads for Salesforce. It's a 45 minute drive from the airport to the Siebel event and anyone who's coming to attend the Siebel event, they're all interested in CRM software, they're forced to listen to the Salesforce pitch for 45 minutes.

Sara:

Oh, that's epic. I didn't know that story.

Satbir:

It's just remarkable, right? You look at it and actually just say, "He knew precisely who to target and he goes in and he comes up with this creative approach to connect with those people and he's got a captive audience." It's a genius! Another example is he comes up with a visual where he paints all the old enterprise sales systems, the CRM system as old style biplanes and then Salesforce is this fighter jet, which is shooting at the biplanes and again positioning his company that it's a disruptor, it's got a modern way for people to get value out. He prices it very aggressively at like 10-20% off of these other tools. And then the other piece is people can basically buy in small increments as opposed to doing an enterprise application.

So you look at examples like these, Marc really understands who his ICP is, chooses a creative strategy - in this instance that the only way he becomes relevant and gets a lot of brand coverage - is because of his creativity. It's not just the end customers who were finding Salesforce in a very creative fashion, but he also got a tremendous amount of coverage by regular media, just the way he was taking it to the competition. Another concept he did, which is way out there is the "No Software" campaign he created. Even though the product is a software, but he wanted to make a point that this software is different than an enterprise software where you're doing licensing and long-stage installation.

This is just consumed as a service on top of the internet - and he comes up with a "No Software" marketing campaign, which gets tons of resistance from his team, but he still proceeds because the visual is so strong.

Sara:

Oh yeah, it's still used everywhere.

Satbir:

That's right. Again, he's juxta positioning his value proposition "why it's so disruptive, why it is so different". So again, if you look at the three or four things we talked about in terms of a successful marketer, both Steve and Marc Benioff are great examples. And in this case, they had a team, but they themselves led the marketing piece because it is so important for them at an early stage as they were trying to figure out and introduce a new product. Different products and different context, but amazing execution of some of the principles we have talked about.

Sara:

Yeah, those are great, classic examples. Those are fantastic. So thanks for sharing that, Satbir. Okay, so now that we have great insight on what to look for and what matters for finding the right person and some great examples to model after, how would you advise CEOs on when the right time is to bring in a leader? How should they think about timing?

Satbir:

The best way to think about it is the stage of the company and the second piece is: what does the CEO and his product person or a technology person, what kind of capabilities do they have? If they don't have marketing capabilities, they will need to bring in someone from marketing during pre-product-market-fit. Because what you're really trying to understand is a crisp articulation of the customer pain points, right? What are must haves versus what are nice to have? And that's very important to establish when the company's getting conceptualized. You may be directionally correct in terms of the problem that you're trying to solve, but what's the opening act that will really resonate with the customer? And do you bring a VP of Marketing level or do you bring a person who's a director level who can be part of the product person's team or a CTO's team?

That's something I think they will need to contextualize depending on the problem, depending on the resources that they have. But they can easily get away with a Director of Product Marketing or Director of Marketing who can help them with that specific point - which is understanding the customer pain points, really helping articulate what features and benefits should be incorporated in the product so they can ensure a high certainty on a product- market-fit in that stage. The next stage is, once you've established the product-market-fit, you want to prove it out with a number of customers. And there again, if you don't have a person in the pre-product-market-fit stage, you want to bring in a little bit more seasoned person at this stage because you're beginning to think about who the ideal customer is for this product and then how you will acquire that customer.

And you need to start thinking in terms of different channels, how will you experiment? Which channels are effective? You need to start doing some measurements in terms of cost of customers. Can this channel be more effective than the other? Can it take you to 5-10 million in revenue? Ideally speaking, if you can do that with one channel, that's ideal, one to two channels because the more channels you add, it gets more and more complicated. And since you're starting from scratch, it's very easy to find one or two channels that can take you to the 5-10 million mark. At the 10 million mark, if you have to keep growing at 100%, 200%, you definitely need to start thinking more holistically about a number of things, because it's now becoming a highly scalable company, right?

So it's not just what you can do with a small team, but you're trying to build a function on product marketing. You're trying to build a function on demand generation, trying to build a function on sales enablement and you're trying to build a function around "how do you build a brand so that you can get organic traffic coming to you?" - and that becomes the basis of your job. And then you clearly need a VP of Marketing, if not a Chief Marketing Officer. And then the final stages, if the company becomes super successful and you're inching towards 50-200 million in revenues, you're beginning to think about going public.

The scope of what the CMOs job expands because besides taking what you've done to take the company from 10-100 million, you are really trying to build a high-level narrative of the company that resonates with the customers and the investors and future employees. You're trying to become a machine in terms of investor relations. All the channel stuff needs to be tremendously scaled. You're showing up at large events to create a brand amongst enterprise customers if that's the focus. So take all what you need to go from 10-100M and you just basically amplify that role quite tremendously because then the next journey that you're embarked on is taking the company from 100, 200 million bucks to a billion in revenues and the scope of impact truly becomes global in nature.

You may want to take your company into other countries. Then you really need to understand the context of those countries and you may need to hire a team in those countries. The channels may be very different in those countries. So it just basically takes the job to the next level. And in some instances your leader may be able to transition from one stage to another, but the role dramatically changes. And what you want to do - especially as you're getting into the pre-IPO, IPO stage - you do want to bring in people who have had tremendous amount of experience and demonstrated success - and they're clearly learning some on the job because all these jobs are not static, but you do want to have people who have done this thing before to a certain extent.

Sara:

Yeah, that absolutely makes sense. Can you talk to even the added responsibilities at that level in terms of - obviously you have to be able to build a team, build a global team and have context of your customers in all those places - but it's also brand marketing, it's channel marketing, obviously product marketing, wherever that sits, but then it's PR, analyst relations. What else are important things to be aware of at that stage?

Satbir:

Yeah, I think you've covered it - but during my days at Amazon, we were so focused on scalable demand generation where we could attribute creating demand and fulfillment through self-service. We were not spending any monies on TV, but Amazon is at a stage right now where they want to connect with every possible consumer in the United States and the world. That's what they're trying to go after, which is anyone who's on the internet, which is about 4 billion people, they want all 4 billion people to do business with them. So you just work backwards. The scope of the problem has fundamentally changed because when I was doing these things, there were probably hundreds of millions of people in the marketplace which grew to closer to a billion by the time I left Amazon - and now the scope of the problem is fundamentally different. Amazon is now in every possible country, especially the developed and the developing countries with significant populations.

And the way you think about it is - you need to have country-specific strategy. How you engage with people in India is very, very different than how you engage in Europe ...

Sara:

Right, right.

Satbir:

...because competition is different, channels are different. So what you are doing at that stage is you are truly building a team and you're trying to work with the team to develop the strategy and then you are using every possible means in your end - including some of the least efficient channels which help you with the brand. So you look at how aggressively Amazon is advertising for Kindle products. They're advertising for AWS because AWS has become mainstream. So the range of tools you need to use and willingness to spend more effort in creating a brand increases - because you are really going to the long tail of people who are currently not part of your ecosystem or who are not part of your relationships, you're trying to just take all approaches, so that way your entire customer set is aware of you. It takes a very holistic and a global brand approach.

And what you are doing at that specific stage is building a team to help you accomplish that goal, versus when you're in the pre-product-market-fit stage, you yourself are creating a lot of ideas. It's less emphasis on the team building earlier on - and in the later stages, it's all about building an amazing team and a culture that keeps coming up with new things and new approaches to stand out in the market.

Sara:

Yes. Yeah, I think that's a really good point because I remember during my time at Smartsheet, the marketing org was deciding that these peer review sites were a really huge new channel that they needed to go after. So it takes being creative enough to say, "Hey, we actually need to build a whole team to go for this channel." So anyway-

Satbir:

Yeah, that's great example. Like for enterprise software, there are a lot of peer review sites, right? G2 and others. And you need to be very deliberate. As you're working with your customers, you're trying to convince the customers that, "If you're happy, take some time and put your thoughts on the peer review site." On their own, they may not do it because they're busy with their day-to-day life and it requires a very different motion, right? And you need to be very deliberate about how are you going to get that activity done because it has such an important impact. When people are buying enterprise software, they like to read lot of reviews and very detailed deliberate reviews.

So to me, I think each one of these things, as you said, requires the thought work of: "what will convince a potential prospect to get in relationship with you?". Besides you impressing the product benefits on them, they want to know "are there others like them that have taken the plunge into the product and are they deriving benefits?". And that's a new thing. And as soon as that new thing is there, people need to be aware in marketing groups to take advantage of it and then actually make it happen.

Sara:

Yeah, yeah. That's great. Satbir, that was awesome. Thank you. So again, continued framing here is so helpful. My final question for you is actually around the vetting process. So when it becomes the right time to hire for this role - at whatever stage the company's in - what advice do you have for screening in the interview?

Satbir:

VPs of Marketing are amazing storytellers if they're really good. So it's very easy to look at someone's resume and LinkedIn and see how they're articulating how they created impact for the companies they work for. If they don't do a good job at it, you need to have some concern right off the bat. Because if they're an amazing storyteller, they should easily make a case as to why they'll be relevant for this high-growth company that you're building. I look at, "How are they telling their story?" Because if they can't even sell themselves, how will they sell our product?.

Sara:

Good point.

Satbir:

Then you go to the next thing and the next thing, right? So let's say they are doing a great job and now you're beginning to talk to them. You want to really understand, "How do they approach things? Are they able to articulate the customer pain points? How did they get to the truth of the customer pain points?" If they are a person who has been in the weeds in the early stages of the company, they will easily be able to tell you about all of these false starts they had - because you don't get to the true North Star of a pain point and the customer benefit in one try. It's a highly iterative process. So you want to really see the iteration they went through, how did they create insight from one failure to another to get to the main points? So ask them to describe that journey about how did they find and refine the pain point, how did they refine the benefits and the product feature? That's one part.

The second part is clearly how did they define the ideal customer profile, what creative approaches did they take to stand out in the marketplace to connect with them. So the four things we have talked about, which is product-marketing fit, scale about demand generation, helping the sales team, if it's an enterprise software product - how did they help them basically improve their conversion or improve the ACV, reduce the churn - and then finally, how did they build a brand? It will be very easy if they've been part of a journey like a Smartsheet or a DocuSign.

These companies have become very, very synonymous to a pain point that they solve and they're doing very, very well because all these things come together, the product and the marketing. And the marketing team is responsible for unifying everything into very simple messaging to the market so that people really understand, "What does this company do and when should we need their services?" So to me, the key thing is, again, you start with, "Are they crisply articulating what they have done for the previous company? Are they able to tell their story of impact crisply?" And then you just go step by step in the four or five things that we've talked about in terms of the key attributes that they need to have.

And then as I said, most of these people will not have all the attributes. So the question is, "Do they have a crisp understanding as to what they're good at and where they need to complement their skillset with other team members?"

Sara:

That's a very good point. It's about building the team and that's great, Satbir. Well, thank you so much. This, once again, to no surprise has been a gold mine of information and so really appreciate you taking the time to be here and paying it forward, Satbir.

Satbir:

Yeah, it's been fun, Sara. I think the fun part is some of these insights stay with you, and when you have an engaging conversation like the one we just had, it just helps to crystallize some of those insights that others can benefit from. So it is just been fun talking to you.

Sara:

Totally and hopefully a fun walk down memory lane as well. It was certainly fun to hear about your journey. Well, thank you, Satbir. Appreciate you.

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Sara:

Thanks for joining us. And be sure to check out our next conversation on the hiring journey. Coming up is a discussion about how to find and hire a great engineering or technology leader. Thanks again and see you next time!