In this interview, Flexport CRO Ben Braverman explains that Flexport’s go‑to‑market was 90% outbound, but the effectiveness of that outbound effort was tightly linked to brand‑building activities. He argues that marketing and SDR functions are artificially separated; strong press coverage, events, and founder‑driven storytelling boost the brand, which in turn makes SDRs’ jobs easier, raises quota capacity, and shortens sales cycles. Braverman cites concrete examples such as front‑page coverage in the Wall Street Journal and paid Forbes articles that, despite feeling “stupid,” improved outbound performance. He contrasts Flexport’s experience with Lattice, where marketing touchpoints (community Slack, ebooks, podcasts, billboards) fed into SDR outreach, accounting for roughly 80% of outbound deals. Both discuss the difficulty of precise attribution in enterprise sales, noting that chasing perfect metrics is futile and that leadership must assume marketing value when events and webinars deliver real education. The conversation also highlights the role of leaders like Jack Altman and CFO Josh Brown in understanding the gray area of marketing‑sales ROI.
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What did the top of funnel look like for Flexport? Like, how did you actually set these meetings? Was it just outbound to people? Like, where did you— yeah, I don't know, how did all that work?
We were 90% outbound. However, what I will say is your outbound strategy, like when people talk about like marketing versus like SDR, it's such an artificial separation. The more press we got, the better our brand seemed to be in the market, the easier our SDRs' lives were, the higher their quotas could be, the faster the deals would progress through the cycle. Like these things are highly correlated and I hate to admit it because like spending on brand sucks. Like it's one of those things that like when you think about how much money it costs to effectively build a brand, like in reality, like yeah, there's some things that go viral or whatever, but like to build a brand over the course of the life cycle of a company, it's a lot of in-person events. It's a ton of founder time. It's like it has to be a core part of your strategy that you care about and nurture. And like some of it you do just by having customers love you. But a lot of it is like being in market and spending the time and telling your story and teaching, teaching, teaching at every opportunity. You know, just being that source of value that people find, not just for things that are like buying things from your company, but across the whole industry. It takes a huge amount of money and effort to do well. But the truth is, like, when I look at, we look at the times where our FDRs were just cranking and way overachieving, it was always at the same time as we were investing in the brand. And like, even some of the dumb brand spend worked, like just being on the front page of the Wall Street Journal works. And like, you know, we had a bunch of like stupid paid Forbes articles that I hated, but frankly, our outbound worked better when those articles were running. It's frustrating to believe, it's frustrating to admit to, but it's true.
Yeah, no, we found the same thing at Lattice. And, you know, I was on the other side running all the marketing, but as I put up billboards around San Francisco or rebuilt the community and did more high-profile events, it just makes everything better. Like, the funny analogy I give is obviously like war. It's like marketing is the air cover. It's like the bombers and the sales reps are the ones who are on the ground actually making this shit happen. But you need sort of both things to be successful in, you know, in your, in your motion.
So yeah, we're SDR and marketing at Lattice, one org, or were you, were you all separate?
Yeah, it was separate orgs because I always thought of it as like, I am not the best at sales. So me being able to teach an SDR the right way to become an AE, right? It was really a proving ground for an SDR to become an AE. I could help them write a better email. I could help them follow up with marketing campaigns. But a lot of the motion that we found that worked was some marketing touchpoint, whether it was them joining our Slack community, joining the ebook, watching the podcast, whatever it is, we would get their email and then follow up, you know, from an SDR motion. So it wasn't as much like cold, cold outbound. It was like outbound off of a marketing touchpoint. And that worked. I think it was like 80% of our outbound deals started with a marketing touchpoint, something like that.
That's awesome. Yeah, I, we, we were never that good at measuring it, honestly. Like, and I got so bogged down in trying to do perfect attribution. And so what I ultimately concluded was let's just assume it works. Like, let's assume the smart stuff that marketing is doing works as long as like the events are good. As long as the webinars are teaching people valuable things, like let's assume it's working and let's not spend a ton of time and money trying to measure everything perfectly. It's like you can just, you can spend forever trying to measure it all and like just define every dollar of attribution perfectly. And in these enterprise sales, it's just, you're never going to do it in a way that's accurate.
Totally. And everyone wants it to work like consumer where it's like you see an Instagram ad and you buy the shoes and it's just like, that's not how this works. And I think it, it takes, you know, like leadership, like Jack was amazing at understanding this. And then Josh Brown, who was the CFO at Lattice, like they You know, he was the first finance person I met who didn't just look at the numbers in the spreadsheet, like actually knew what the numbers meant and knew how it was hard. It wasn't just like this $100 should turn into $1,000. Like there's, there's a lot of gray. It's not just a black and white thing to get all this working.
Jack, for, you know, for the, for the people listening, is Jack Altman, who's like one of the world's great humans. So not surprising he did this well, but it's like, it's super hard for, especially for first-time founders to do well because to your point, everybody wants that like What is our cost per click? What is our cost per install? Which like, dude, it's not mobile gaming. You know, we're not going to have that level of precision, sadly. But yeah, I'm not surprised that Jack did as well.
Yeah. And it just takes so long. But yeah, it's attribution. We could spend an hour talking about it.
