Marketing budget benchmarks, SaaStr 2022, thought leadership, where to start with demand gen programs, why everyone is talking about community & more

This episode is brought to you by Zttle. We're halfway through 2025 and one thing's clear. We've been feeling this firsthand for sure. Events continue to be one of the highest performing marketing channels. Niche meetups, conferences, curated dinners, networking, breakfasts. Everyone's all in. Everyone's leaning into in person events have become a core part of our playbook here at Exit 5. So far we've hosted two virtual sessions. We do them twice a month. We do one large virtual event, sometimes two a year. One in person meetup. And we're deep in the trenches right now planning drive our annual conference coming back to Vermont in September. We use Zuttle to help us run a smarter event strategy. They help us with driving, registrations, managing invites, automating, communications, reminders, analytics, tracking. They do it all. They have a salesforce integration that also makes it easy and simple to report on pipeline and revenue from events without having to pull an op. So you'd know exactly how your events performed. On top of that, the differentiator with ZTTL is how their team is insanely good at supporting us. They always go above and beyond for us and that's how we've been able to keep the momentum going with 12 events this year already and just a small little team here at exit 5. So if events are a part of your marketing strategy like they are ours, you should check out Zuttle to see how Companies like Zillow, CrowdStrike and Iterable are using the top event platform for business events in 2025. Head over to zuttle.com exit5 that's z-u- dash dash-l.com exit5 to learn more.

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I ask myself who I am pretty much daily.

Who doesn't, Sister, who is Chantal? Yeah, right.

So, yeah, I'm Chantal. I am the director of marketing at Demand. Well, I love biking and I love cooking. And what's the man?

Well, what's Demand well, for people? Actually, no, we don't have to say that because the Demand, well, is the sponsor of this podcast, so you'll hear it. So if you don't know, go back to the first minute of this episode. When you talk about biking, are you like, is this road bike or mountain bike or both?

So it's actually a gravel bike, which Egan is also into, coincidentally. So kind of a hybrid.

A gravel bike. What's that?

It's like the frame of a road bike, but it has clearance for larger tires and obviously other differences as well. But so, yeah, you can. You can do muddy roads, you can do gravel roads. You can also be on the road.

And Egan is here. And the way that we got connected was I asked Shanto, like, hey, I. Let's do a podcast. Let's have everybody hang out and talk. Who should we have on. She suggested you, so give us a quick intro too. Nice.

Now I got to live up to it. Yeah. Egan Montgomery. I'm the director of Go to Market at High Alpha. I know that Dave is going to ask me what High Alpha does. So we are a venture studio, and what that means is we're basically a startup studio and a venture capital fund smashed together in one company. So we're coming up with ideas, validating those ideas, finding entrepreneurs who want to spend, you know, their next 10 years working with us on that thing, and then we've got money that we can go go fund that idea.

And Demand well, is a studio company of High Alphas. So that's how I know Egan, and he's kind of the person that I go to whenever I. I am not really a demand gen marketer, but I've had to do a lot of that in my role at Demand well, and so I came in having no idea what I was doing, and Egan was the person that I would go to being like, how does channel work? Like, what is happening here?

What?

So does channel work?

I don't know.

I still don't know what is channel. Wait, can you give me an example of like a real. Of a real thing? Like, obviously, if it's secret, don't have to share it, but I'm sure there's something you can share. Like, what's something that you've hit Egan up for, like a type of question.

Totally. So I think the most recent, very impactful conversation that we had was when earlier this year, I was putting together my plan for the whole year, and I had sort of been assigned a certain amount of marketing budget. And I noticed that over time it was going to force me to scale up our roi, like, pretty aggressively, quarter over quarter. And so I get into the first quarter where I'm like, ooh, this is going to be a stretch, because what our ROI is, is not what will be required for us to hit our goals this quarter. And so I started seeing some negative impacts and I like, frantically flacked Egan and asked a bunch of questions around, like, benchmarking for what marketing budget should I have relative to the revenue that we're supposed to bring in this quarter? And how do I think about that? And how do I think about that at this stage? And how does it change over time? And Egan had a really great answer, which we now use because I was able to convince our finance person that that was the benchmark. So.

Well, which was it? What? Everyone that's listening is going to Want to know. So what is it?

It's program spent should be a quarter of the revenue that you're trying to drive and headcount should be a quarter of the revenue that you're trying to drive and then the rest can go to sales. So assuming that you have like a really fast payback period, Egan, what am I missing?

I think that's it. I mean, that's the beauty of it. It's really that simple, at least to start. I mean, you may realize that your business has different needs and you can customize that, but I think that gives you a really good starting place to understand like, man, do I have the money I need to even come close to accomplishing my goals or am I like way off because we're paying too much money to sales or we've got too much money going to headcount and not enough to promotions.

Got it. So if the new revenue goal was just make it easy, the new revenue goal was a million dollars. ARR. For next year you would say that. Okay, so to fuel the new 25%, we need at least 250k to spend on people. We need at least 250k to spend on programs and then the rest of that is going to go to sales.

Exactly.

So do you need to spend a mil? If you do that math all the way out, does that mean you need to spend a million to make a million?

Yes.

Yeah.

I mean in that equation that, that's what that says and you're optimizing for growth in that case for sure. And you know, basically a one to one payback on dollars. So for every dollar you spend, you make a dollar back. But if your efficiency targets are different, if the strategy of the company is we need to make $3 for every dollar that we spend, then then you've got to tweak that equation and be more efficient in one of those areas.

Yeah, well, and then also like if you're, if you're going to keep that, I don't know if that's right or not. Surprise to everybody. I'm not the metrics optimization guy. I've made my living in B2B marketing on the content and creative and communication side. So I've always had a partner in doing this stuff. This is not what gets me out of bed in the morning, but I've learned. And it's also like we talk a lot about like the path to marketing leadership. I think like I'm a perfect example of like you don't have to know all of the things like I've become a marketing leader by like knowing enough and knowing how to hire the right people and plug them in there, which is just a side conversation of its own. But I think it also brings into account if you convert a customer and the, the customer's gonna stay for two or three years and maybe one to one is, is okay. I found that most people listening to this podcast are like more in the kind of where we all come from, like earlier stage startups. And I think the challenge becomes, you know, you're making a plan with a lot of guesses and the more, the earlier that you can like be okay with that and have some benchmarks and like go own data because it's like somebody else's LTV is going to be completely made up. I remember like for me, the first year of Drift, for example, you know, there was no LTV because we had, we know we were in business for like for eight months. And so, you know, you have to, you have to be okay with kind of like, you know, licking your finger and like making some guesses. Right?

Totally. Or like calculating, presuming we have a three year lifetime value. What does that look like? Presumably, like, can I have my job?

Can I have my job for three years? Like, it's very hard to look out that far. Right?

Totally. I also think it, like it depends on if you get all of your payments upfront annual you can be a lot more flexible. Like I really don't know that much about this, but that's something that our finance person and probably many anyone who.

Depends on ARR, you know, finance and the two people love annuals the most, the finance team and the VCs. It's like actually. And customer success is low churn. It's the best way to do it. All right, I have a hundred things that we need to talk about today, so I don't. One we're going to talk about Sasser. Oh, this is where I was going to go from there. How important isn't it just so great to have a peer though? Like whether it's through this high alpha relationship or not. I mean the power of like being able to just have somebody else to be like, hey, what is your, you know, benchmark for this is. I feel like that's made a huge difference in my career and the people that don't have it like go and find that person because it's a lifesaver.

It's huge. And you know, honestly, like, I'm sometimes the guy that like, you know, Chantal, I have a Question about demand gen. I'm going to come to Egan, but I learn as much from people like Shantal as they learn from me. And selfishly, that's one of like, the coolest parts of my job. And then with High Alpha, there's a lot of portfolio companies, so that fortunately that network is sort of built in. But I mean, you're right, if you don't have that, you need to find it.

It's super helpful. Also, in the context of, am I crazy? Am I the only person who's going through this right now? Like, just validating the way that you're thinking through things, it's like, yeah.

And it's hard because, like, you get these questions like the CFO or the CEO or something. They like, you don't know that they don't actually know. Like, they're just like, find the benchmark for this. And you're like, are they asking that? Because, like, there is a benchmark. Are they just like saying that? And so I think you're exactly right. Sometimes you have to be able to come back and be like, oh, yeah, nobody knows what the hell this is. And so, like, I feel good about it. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna make a guess. And that's my favorite part of marketing now is like, yeah, there's definitely some benchmarks and kind of frameworks that you need, but I think the more you can learn, the more you can be confident. Like, I think the fun part is marketing is like this game of like portfolio management and you're gonna take a guess on, you know, based on data about, like, what should our approach be? What should our go to market model be? Which types of people do we need to hire? How are we going to get them? How are we going to compete? That's the like, stuff that really makes a difference. And there is no, there's no benchmark for that. You have to be able to, like, make some assumptions and, and go out and execute and learn really fast. Uh, okay. You both were at Saster last week?

Just me.

Just you. Do you want to talk about it?

Yes. I have two key takeaways that I was.

Hold on, wait. No, I'm not even. You can't go first. On a scale of 1 to 5 with show of fingers, what would you rate it? 5. Wow.

The energy was so real. It was like. So this is the first event I've been to, by the way, so I'm biased. Actually, you should know the place I'm coming from is that I haven't been to A single event since pre Covid.

Well. Right.

Yeah.

There's probably a lot of energy.

Yeah, the energy was amazing. It was so nice to be back in person and like back with SaaS people and just talking to other SaaS marketers and hearing what they're thinking about. So.

And were you there like just to go and soak things up? Did your company have a presence there, like trying to, you know, build up business? What was like the arrangement?

Yeah, we sponsored. And the reason that we sponsored is that the core audience that we have been focusing on for the last few years is B2B SaaS companies. So that's kind of like the perfect place for us to have a sponsorship because that's the exact audience that is there.

So what does that. What does that entail? What's in the sponsorship?

You know, you got the booth. That's basically it. You have the booth set up. Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah. And the sponsors totally brought the heat. It was really cool to see what other people were up to. There were like print your own T shirt activations and all kinds of creative things. This amazing like ice cream thing where there was like ice cream on a stick and you choose your dip and then you choose your topping. Super creative.

I saw edible selfies. Was that a thing?

Oh, yeah. There were cookies with like you could print a picture, your own picture onto the cookie. That's crazy.

Inedible selfie. I'm so glad I don't have to travel for work anymore. No, it's great. Okay. It's great to hear that because. Wait, shoot. Where I just pulled this up. I just. I was interested to hear your reaction because last night a CMO friend of mine sent me this. This post. This person wrote this post on. On LinkedIn. I have an unpopular opinion. I actually didn't enjoy Sasser. That's that much. And. And they listed out like all. All these reasons why.

Interesting.

Which to me is like, maybe not like how many people were there? Right? 20. 20,000?

Yeah.

Is there going to be one person who doesn't like it? Yeah, probably there's going to be many hundreds, thousands of people who didn't like it. But it's good to hear that take from you who. When I think it also just means different things to different people and. And reasons to go. How do you think about like the. Just because I know how you all think and you're smart about quantifying things. Like what is the goal of going there is like we need. We want 20 meetings post saster. Or is it something more, longer Term.

So we definitely set goals like that. And the main reason that we set those goals is basically to, like, give the people who are working the booth something to rally around, celebrate. And like, if on the first day we're not on pace, we can say, okay, we're not on pace. Like, we need to really get it together today, maybe get creative. Like, that's sort of the main reason for the goal. And also, obviously, at the beginning of every quarter, we do an exercise where we say, where are ops going to come from this quarter? And that's part of it is saying, we know we have these event sponsorships, so what do we hope to get from them? So it definitely does map back into our marketing goals. But I think because there are so many intangibles about sponsoring events, I don't want that to be the only goal. And I do think the core focus of the goal for the event is to help the team at the booth, like, get excited and get motivated. The intangibles from the event, which sort of impossible to track, are like, we talked to so many companies that we currently have AES running ABM for. We talk to open opportunities, we talk to customers. We, you know, that type of engagement, one on one with people is just so hard to put a dollar on, but so important. And then, you know, the brand awareness stuff at the top of the funnel, like, who knows how that will play out over the next few years.

Even did you feel like the people knew you more or less than you expected?

A lot of people said, oh, we've seen your ads on LinkedIn because we're targeting fast marketers on LinkedIn, but a lot of people didn't really know we were. And we definitely had people coming up to the booth because we had these two signs that say 100% organic. Because, you know, demand wall is SEO software, helps you drive organic traffic. Yeah. And that was our branding theme for the event.

Okay, let's pause and see. I like, I like stuff like that. That to me is like, catchy. It fits with your brand and it's not corny. Like.

Right.

It can work. You can, like, push the bar on, like, what you do with it. But I think that's great.

I know I'm not the questioner here, but.

No, no, I want you to chat. I want this all good. That's why you're here.

Okay. Talk about some of the stuff you did that was like, within that theme, because I thought you guys activated that in a really cool way.

Wow. Now I'm like, what is he Referencing.

Well, for those who weren't there, they had four big cows grazing, they got grass, they.

And they had them in front of them said milk. Exactly.

Well, like, I guess I'll answer my own question. Like the cotton of the T shirts that you handed out was like organic cotton or like you had healthy snacks at the table because like all the food at those things is crap. So like give them nice healthy food. Like those little touches are like what really make that so much better than just, you know, what you put on your conference, you know, advertisements and banners.

Yeah, exactly. And like we had reusable straws that we were giving away. And like we're going to continue to extend this metaphor into sort of like sustainability and try to make the swag that we give away really thoughtful. We also had like, we didn't use our traditional brand that's on our site. We kind of created a sub extension of the visual brand and we have all this topography on the site. And so for the event it was like hand drawn topography with cute little plants kind of interspersed and yeah, things like that.

Yeah, I love that. And to me though, like what you're talking about that stuff to me, and I'm not taking away from what you did, I'm just teaching this as a lesson. That stuff comes easy once you create the hook. Like what? To me, like, once you have like the 100% organic thing, like it all comes together. It all comes together and it's like that's where you need to spend more time on. Like I talk to startups and this comes up a lot. It's like to me that's like, what's the offer? And by offer I don't mean like, you know, 20% off X. It's like that becomes basically one line that everyone can think about and associate you with, right? Like, oh, organic, they own organic. And you're like, no, we don't do everything for everyone. We are exclusively focused on organic. And so I think that to me is possible. Not because the marketing team had this like creative last minute idea. It's like, oh no, that's kind of fundamental to like the DNA of the company. Like this is a very clear niche, a very clear icp. This is the thing that we're focusing on and then within that you can execute. I find that the worst marketing comes up when like the story is not as clear. You know. You know where I'm going with that.

Totally. I mean, I could rant about this for days. I think like my harshest opinion on this topic is that like, I think so often people kind of look to marketing to be like, make the brand, like, make it happen. Like, it's on you, you know, and it's like, no, this is like a full company commitment. You have to have a really good story, which starts with your founders in some cases. And marketing can kind of like pull that out of other people at the business. But it's not just marketing's job. And if you don't know who you're selling to or if that's unclear, or if you sell to like a huge. You do too many things for too many people, it's like really hard to bring that to life. Yeah, you like, brand and create companies constantly. I feel like you probably have some really good thoughts on this.

I got this tweet from Dharmesh that he said, don't be afraid. This is just now, don't be afraid to create opinionated software. That's kind of the point. It's what people are paying for. Most business applications are fancy Excel spreadsheets with opinions. Right. So like, and we're all marketers. Like, the jobs and the things that I'm attracted to are like, you know, we can't do all the magic. It's like we will work best when the company has strong opinions. So go ahead.

Well, one thing I always think about is Andy Raskin, the greatest sales deck ever guy, you know, he kind of famously, at least at one point, only worked with CEOs on like strategic narrative and storytelling. And I think that's like, nothing is more indicative of how important storytelling is, how much it has to be kind of a top level executive priority that's kind of driven, you know, through the company. If of course, marketing is like a huge component of that and an influencer and a creator. But like, it's gotta be at the CEO level for it to really, really mean something.

Yeah. In my experience as CEO, when it comes to marketing, if you simplify, what do they care about? They care about pipeline and they care about the story. And I use those two buckets because I think like, as a marketing leader or day to day marketing person, you know, maybe you report to the CEO, you got a one on one Shanto do you report to Mitch?

Mm.

Okay. So like you got a one on one with CEO. Everybody knows there's a hundred things on your list that you're working on, Right. He doesn't care about 80% of those. Not that he doesn't care, but like, he trusts you and the team to go and execute on today's episode is.

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Go check them out, those things. But at least in my experience in the CEO in that role, the two things that they do want to talk about and do want to dig on is like, how are we generating revenue and what is the story? And I think, like, if you take that lens going in, that's helped me kind of like manage up and shape, like, what should I be talking about with the CEO? And I think when the CEO gets marketing, those are, those are some of the first principles. Egan, as far as like the high alpha portfolio, how do you push that, like, to like, it's just such an essential ingredient of marketing strategy. And I struggle to articulate this sometimes because it's like people love advice about the very tactical stuff, like this channel. This channel. And I'm like, I wish I had a better way to say it, but like, none of this is that hard if you have like, the story is everything. I'm just curious to see like how you, how you see that play out across multiple companies.

Yeah, I mean, for us, like, especially in a sales led environment, I think product led is, is a little different. But when you're a sales led company, I think the first call deck is like such an important asset and we drive a lot of that storytelling and a lot of that discipline kind of through the first call deck. So we talk about it, you know, for what it is, which is the first thing that you show to a prospect. But it also is like the thing that really encompasses like your company's story. And I feel like a lot of the times, if we can get that right, especially the intro portion, you know, before you get to product screenshots and all that kind of stuff, you're in a really good spot. And then you can use that to inform, you know, some of the other like customer facing or prospect facing assets.

Mitch and I actually have very recently tried to develop a process to kind of like unlock what's in his head around our story on a regular basis. Like, for a long time he's had a goal of creating more thought leadership for the company and just like getting his thoughts down on paper more. Because CEOs, it's not like they have a lot on their plate and thought leadership is one of them, but it's probably not their highest priority most of the time. So we basically have a weekly recurring time where we just, we have either set up a conversation with him to basically like talk about a topic with the goal of creating a podcast someday with a marketer, or it's just him and he's just riffing on a topic that he cares about for 30 minutes or something. And then we basically use that as this is the seed for all of our thought leadership for the week or for the next two weeks. So kind of just like a recurring calendar invite where the point is just to capture Mitch's thoughts and then marketing can do whatever they want with them.

I love that. I hope people are this huge ROI on this, listening to this episode, which is free podcast, but because that, that's an amazing way of like, you don't know what the output is going to be. But you know that if we got 30 minutes and it's not like you're not asking him to like write anything or do it's, hey, it's on your calendar. We're going to talk to you, we're going to record it. Thank you, Mitch. Good to see you. See you later. The thing that you just talked about is exactly. We had this podcast at Drift in the early days called Seeking Wisdom. And this is exactly how that podcast came to be. When I was interviewing, I remember David was like, I really want to start a podcast. I'm like, cool, I know how to do that. And he's like, yeah, I know. Let, let's like help me launch a podcast. And I was just, nobody, like, nobody wanted to hear me on a podcast. He was a well known founder. I didn't want to be on the podcast. And I was like, all right, here's what we're going to do. And this was physically in the office and we had the microphone and it was a Zoom H4N, like recorder, XLR mics. He's in the room. Here's a topic. He had tweeted about some stuff and I was just kind of like giving him some prompts, like, hey, this tweet, like about why you don't hire MBAs in product. Like went nuts, like, go in a room and talk about that. And it didn't work. It didn't work that well because it was just like not natural, like for him to just go in a room and like, rant about a topic. And so that then more from like, okay, how about I'll interview you? And it was like, let's go in the room. I'll just, you know, let it go, like, free form, whatever. We can turn that, ghostwrite it into stuff. And from there that actually that was like V2. We got a bunch of content and eventually morphed into more of like a back and forth conversation. And we were like, huh, maybe this is what this is. It's like proven veteran CEO, you know, young and up and coming marketing person who kind of just is like the host of the show is like making sure like, you know, he was the talent. Right. My job was like, make sure the train ran on time. And so it's why I love podcasting as a strategy for all those reasons. But maybe, and maybe you don't even like set out with an intention to do it, but you start doing it to get these and you're like, wow, this could be a podcast. Or at the bare minimum, you now have 30 minutes of content that you can take. You could chop it up into video clips. But I love the idea of like force thought leadership because I also think a lot of that. You have to put it on the CEO and the founder. You're not going to be able to see the market and have the vision. You know, you're in there executing day to day. They have the 5, 10 year vision of the company. Hopefully. Marketing can't just like bad thought leadership is when marketing just takes like very generic. Like, I can always tell when it's like the marketing team wrote it because the CEO has nothing interesting to say because it goes directly to like case studies, testimonials, a customer quote where like the real CEO stuff is like, they were just in a meeting and like they had this thought and they're pissed off about it and they're going to turn into a rant. And you get that from there. That's when it gets really good.

Totally. I also love the example that you give because it just captures what I think is so important at the early stage, which is like, do not start with the perfect product end result in mind as the thing that you're shooting for. It's like the number of times that it's like, oh, we need, we need a social strategy. Okay, we need to target these seven themes and it needs to be 70%, like conversion oriented, 20% inspirational. Like, the more that you complicate it in the early days, it's just like it slows you down. You don't learn, you don't end up with a really good optimized outcome because you've like, you've made it way too complicated. Whereas what you describe, it's like you start just talking once a week, you start recording, you realize what's not working, you realize what's working, you do more of what's working, you stop doing what's not working. And in the end you have this amazing outcome that like, had you started with that in mind, I don't like, who knows if you would have gotten there, how long it would have taken. Like the crawl, walk, run thing. I'm such a fan.

I completely agree. And I think as the marketing leader, like, if you're an early stage SaaS company, I think it's your job to figure these things out. I think it's very, it's very easy to like have an idea. Yeah, we should do this ghostwriting thing with Mitch and you're like tagging someone on the team about it. I think like, especially in the early days, your job is to be like the explorer of those new channels while the rest of the team is focused on the day to day stuff. And one mistake that I made as a first time marketing leader is not really understanding that and not having a clear separation of my job. And so I was really good at the day to day executing thing. Like, we're going to saster. What is our move going to be like, great at that, not great at next year the revenue goal is going to grow 40%. What are we doing now this year to build that foundation? Egan's smiling because he's seen that. But like, that's the wisdom that I wish I knew then that I think would have made my life easier is like, okay, I know that I gotta be able to do both. Right.

It's a really hard balance to strike. I mean, you're right, you have to do both of those things. But the one way to make sure you don't get to the next stage is to not successfully get through the stage that you're in. And I see companies spending too much time thinking about the right now, how do I hit this quarter, how do I hit next quarter? And then they stumble later. But it can happen the other way too. Like you're focused too much on the future and you don't accomplish what's right in front of you.

It's really tough. I feel like my time at demand, well, I have been very short term oriented, potentially to our detriment. Like, and I think when, how would I categorize it? I'd categorize it as like there's. If you're thinking about short term, that's like demand generation tactics where you're just like capturing what's out there in the market today. And then the longer term thinking, from my perspective, a lot of that is more of that like demand creation kind of thing where you're like, okay, we need a. I don't know exactly where I'm going with this, but early on in My opinion, I think it is kind of smart to just like capture the demand that currently exists for your product and make sure that you are able to get a customer base that likes you and you can feel confident that you have product market fit and the really, really basic. Like you have a business that functions cool. And then at some point, yeah, there has to be this transition where you start thinking a lot longer term in the way that you're marketing and start thinking about like building your brand in a very serious way and, and building yourself as the category leader, which is more of that demand creation stuff. But Dave, I feel like you or I get the impression that you've always been very brand first, which is very different than the way that I've sort of run things at demand well so far.

Yeah, I think when I, I guess like brand is the word, but I think what it really means is like reputation or attention. Like I'm good at getting people to pay attention to something. And so it's like, I don't know if that's demand gen or product marketing or creative or whatever, but it's like, hey, we have this company, we sell this thing. I think one of the things that we don't talk about in the land of MQLs and SQLs and PQLs and product led growth is like, hey, at the end of the day people need to know you exist. Just go all the way back to simple like do people know we exist? And for most startups in the very early days, the answer is no, they don't. And so I've been good at figuring out like, okay, well how do we get them to know we exist and like build from there. And so that often starts with like, okay, well what ingredients do we have? Well the founder, you know, Mitch came from Lessonly and so he has knows a bunch of people in SaaS and like, you know, demand. Well like, you know, we kind of have some people know us. Okay, awesome. You know what, he knows SEO really well. We can tell a good story about like why we started this company around SEO. First thing we're going to do is make a target account list of who are 50 people that we think should be our customers. And I'm going to come up with a great pitch and offer to reach out to those people with and it's like that's not a sexy marketing strategy. It's literally six lines of copy in an email and a sales demo. But that's where this starts. And then you build from there and it's like okay, cool, I sent out 20 emails and I haven't gotten any response. Okay, great. Now we have, now we have learning number one. Okay, nobody's responded. So like, was the audience wrong? Was the pitch wrong? Is it because I asked for 30 minutes of people's time? They don't want it yet. Okay, maybe let's lead with content first. Okay, our hypothesis. We're gonna test a video and we want to give people like a one minute video. Explain it. Okay. And you keep iterating from there versus like cold email. I'm not saying like cold email. 50 people with like a message that you don't even know works yet. And it's very iterative and I just believe very much in like content and social media as a way to do those things and test those and start to scale. And it's why I'm not a good marketing leader at a big company.

Well, Chantal, I was thinking when you were talking, like when we think about building demand gen programs with a new company, one thing I always say is like, you start with the bottom of the funnel. And I'm not a huge like funnel guy. I know that's popular in demand gen, but you start with the bottom of the funnel and you work your way out. And it's kind of like I like to play golf and if I made like a new putter.

Oh, now we're talking. Okay, talk to me.

Yeah, if I made a new putter, I would go find like one or two golfers and I'd show it to them and I'd be like, hey, do you like this? What do you like about it? Do you not like it? The grip's too big. I don't like the way the blade is, it's too long, it's too short. Until those two really like my putter, it doesn't make sense for me to go put a billboard up about it or run a commercial on it. So starting small and really focusing on what do you want to learn, what hypothesis are you testing, what feedback do you need? And then kind of working your way out. So with an early stage SaaS company, a lot of times that one to one stuff is happening on social, it's happening through direct email, it's happening through one on one conversations and then you're moving to high intent paid search ads or you're starting to publish webinar content or even, I don't know, you can play it out. But I think that's like helpful framing for like, where do I start?

It's exactly where we started with With Drift, we were like, the company was a little bit different in the fact that they raised like they're basically Series A and today series A's are 15 million. But, but seven years ago it was very, very, very rare to have a Series A company with no product in the market raise $15 million. And that was strictly on the credibility of David and Elias, the company's founders who had just kind of, they sold their last company at HubSpot, had a bunch of success and really smart guys in the space and investors were like go, you know, go build something awesome and we got you. And so that put me in a unique position as a marketer because we got to do exactly that, which is I basically had nothing to go on yet. And then our product, we had one product manager, his name was Matt Bellotti and he would go and he was doing a ton of customer development. Like because they were trying to figure out what to build, we'd share those notes and be like, holy shit, this is actually like amazing content. And what we learned was we were trying to figure out how we're going to sell a product to product marketers. And through that process what we learned was that all these product marketing people, everyone that we talked to is like, hey, separate from what we're talking about right now, people have no idea what the heck product marketing does inside of a SaaS company. And that wasn't a product insight, but that to me was a marketing insight. I was like, huh, interesting. Okay, so you know what, maybe we could be that brand for them. And so all right, here's what we're do. We're going to start up an interview series and I'm going to go and cold. I learned cold emailed 15 product marketer just at good looking companies had no connections to these people. Like oh yeah, Twilio is legit company. So and so is I'm connected to her on LinkedIn. She's VP of Product Marketing. Boom. Reach out. Hey, it's Dave. I'm doing marketing at this new company called Drift. We're doing this content series where I want to interview a product marketer and talk about the day in the life of a product marketer and understand how they do things. You email 15 people with that, you're going to get three or four responses and that's enough to go from. So we start creating content. Then we create like what is product marketing? We're going to write, we made this killer like 60 slide slide deck and like the definitive explanation to like the role of product marketing within a SaaS org. And that I remember was like the very first piece of content that like jump started things, not in a sales way and instead of back to like a, you know, being a brand person way, not in a direct response way, but it was like, huh. At that point that article got shared and discussed more than anything else we had done. I saw it all over LinkedIn. We were getting the email response. We were like, there's something here, let's double down now. Let's build a newsletter. We had a slack group for product marketing people and that was like the seed of where that started. And so I think now you can get that in even if you're not early stage company but you have an existing audience. Like that's the power to me of like LinkedIn and social media and email. It's like there's all the stuff that we love to talk about quantifying and building in the funnel and modeling. But to me it's like those types of insights that you're going to take a bet on and then go and build something on back to us talking about brand. That's the stuff that I love and that gets me fired up. And I think then you have to figure out like how you scale those things. But I think that's a, I love that approach.

Did your, did that experience inform your ICP better for you? Like, because one thing that comes to mind for me is like, or one good lesson that we learned early on at Demand, well was like, as you're going around and asking people about your golf club, like try to ask similar people who you think you can sell to and make sure that you're not asking like one pro, one beginner, for example, like are you making the golf club for pros or for beginners? Because that could be a very different thing. So I'm curious, like Dave, as you were having those conversations with those product marketers that initially you were kind of like, oh good company, is the qualification, like did you kind of hone your focus a little bit?

Breathing human? Who would say yes?

Yeah, exactly.

Yes, we did. I think we had already kind of niched down all the way to get to that role. Like so that step we'd already, we had already kind of done that. So basically the way that we got to product marketing was because I think at first they started to sell to like all of my. I think the thought process was like, this is a chat widget that needs to go on someone's website in order to go on someone's website. Somebody inside the Company has to install it somehow. So who's going to do that? And we couldn't really get through sales. We couldn't get through demand gen. We were like, because demand. Well, actually we know a lot of product marketers and a lot of companies. Product marketing owns the website. Huh. Interesting. And so it actually was kind of like a Trojan horse for that, which is like product marketing owns the website. If we can get them to know like, and trust us through content, when we have this product ready, maybe they'll try it. And so we had the luxury of like having three to six months before we launched the product. And so by the time we had the product ready, we had a waiting list that was, I'd say three, I think it was like maybe between three and 5,000 people. And they didn't really know what we were building, but we got them to know like, and trust us through the content. And so it was amazing because the launch email was like, hey, so you've heard, you know, you know who we are now and you've probably been wondering like, what the heck are we building? Well, today I'm super excited because we're finally ready to show you. Boom. Here's the thing and I think I just, I love that approach so much where like, if you can build an audience first, I think it just gives you such an incredible, it just gives you such an incredible marketing advantage and it speaks to like back to brand again. I think that brand is reputation. And I think that the way you build a reputation today is through content. And so my bias is towards content and social media. And I think it starts with, it's like this approach of like, who is your ideal customer and how can you become a trusted source for them? And there's companies that are doing this in different ways, right? You can lead with like deep insights and expertise. Like have you seen what Amanda is doing with like SparkToro? I think their content is some of the best content out there right now. And they're basically winning by creating very like meaty, in depth tactical stuff. They're winning with better content and they're speaking to content marketers and social media marketers. Right. But you could also be funny and entertaining. It's a company called Catalyst. They do like customer success software and they've built a LinkedIn following like strictly by posting CS memes. Then that's another way to do it. Right. And I. So I think it's like that's the approach to marketing, that that's where my brain goes to like, I think the the person on the other end of the spectrum for me who I think is smart and pushing everybody and, and leading the way right now is Chris Walker from Refine Labs. And just like how he thinks about. He, he's like a scientist, like an actual scientist. That was his background. Or engineer. Or an engineer. So his, his approach is that my approach is much more like come up with some hot ideas.

It's so interesting because as you're talking about it, you're calling it content and. But I think it's so similar to the way I hear people talk about community. And community is such a hot topic. Like every marketing advisor that we have is like, build a community. And I'm like, amazing. Like how.

Yeah, well, I have so many, I have so many pro. I'm going to write that down because I want to talk about community for a second after.

Yeah.

But yeah, I think I use the word interchangeably too. And I think that when I say content, people automatically assume like that means like, oh, the blog. And I kind of see it as like content is the market, content is all. Is all like think about the brand. Like it could come in any form. It could be great written content, it could be newsletter, it could be LinkedIn, it could be YouTube, it could be TikTok, it could be any of those things. I think it's typically just non salesy content. And I think especially in B2B marketing where B2B marketing, you're. The difference between B2C marketing is that you're selling to the wallet of somebody who works at a company. And so I'm less likely to take a risk. I'm more likely to just like buy the thing that we've used before or buy the thing that's cheaper. And so I think the opportunity is like to you de risk someone's purchasing decision by like being like, you want to be the brand who's like, look, maybe you've never heard demand well before. But like I went to two webinars that they did. I listened to all their stuff. I've been reading their blog. Like they know SEO. I know that this is a new company. I know the product is new. But like they've made me smarter at SEO and so that's why I. And by the way, I've gotten a demo and it looks great and it works and it plugs into all the things that we choose and that stuff is important. Pass security audit. But to me it's like that's the thing that I'm, that I try to bottle which is like, that is content to me. It's like, how do you be that resource? And I believe that in B2C or even in B2B. Like in. Or B2C. In B2C. All my B2B's. My goodness. Like, the golf example is a perfect one. If I was starting a golf company, the way that I would want to do it was like, how can I make this brand be the number one or a leading resource for someone in this space? And there's. You can do that by being entertaining, you can do it by being educational, by. By being funny, by being serious. There's lots of ways you can do it. I like to think about that as the marketing. Like, how do we apply that to marketing? And so if you sell to hr, how do you become the. A resource that someone in that department goes to?

The thing that you said that resonates the most with me is like, when you said how, like, this brand made me smarter at SEO. It's like you kind of have to find the thing, in my opinion, that people can't really get anywhere else, or it helps them in some way that it would be really hard for them to chase down that information if it wasn't all kind of in one place for them or something. Egan. Sorry to interrupt.

And guess what? That's not. That's not easy. Like, that's hard to do. Like, this is. This is why this job is a skill. This is why as a founder, like, you want to work with a founder who has an opinion and is building an interesting product. It's not like, nobody can just take this as like, yeah, because if you have nothing to say, it's gonna be very hard. And so, like, if Mitch didn't have innovative thoughts about where SEO is going and what you're going to do, then it makes it very hard because holy shit, SEO is a commodity. Like, there's a million SEO agency. Or like, whether whether what you do is unique or not, the perception to the market is that SEO is a commodity. And so this is why it's so important. The founder story, the company story. That part is so important. Go ahead, Egan. I know you've been itching to say something.

Yeah, we've kind of flirted with this concept of ideal customer profile. And I grapple with this a lot. And in my, you know, my work, I deal with brand new companies sometimes. Zero revenue, zero product. But I talk to a lot of marketers who I think grapple with ICP as well. Like, when is the right time to really get focused like the viva, like, incredible story. Like one of the most valuable companies off $4 million capital raised. Literally one of their core values is clear and concise target markets. And I love that. But I've also read all kinds of stuff from, you know, famous VCs. Jason Limkin wrote an article that was basically like, you don't know your ICP until you're at 2 million ARR, like full stop. And honestly, I see both sides of that. And I've been asking myself this question lately, so I'm just curious, like, what do you guys think about that?

It's oftentimes a moving target and not a means to an end. But I think you can't get traction if you're trying to be everything to everyone. And so I think the best thing is to like, is to niche down and pick that one. Like, who can you best serve? So like go back to revenue goals. Like if your goal is to generate a million dollars in new ARR this year, who is the one ICP that you can serve that will help you get there? Because you need to focus. You don't have all the team, you don't have all the budget, you don't have, you know, when you're salesforce and you have however many thousands of marketing people, they can touch every vertical because they can have every, you know, they can have every little segment and have a whole funnel for each one of those things, but you can't. And so like in the case of Drift, for example, we focus on product marketing as basically like the kind of ICP that got us to first, let's call it Million ARR. And then from there you have a win and you're like, okay, cool. We've had a lot of success selling to this icp. We know what's working this icp. Now let's start to juggle another ball. And now you start to juggle more and you add and you add. And then later in the company's history, like they shifted to, they took those learnings and realized that they need to be more focused on enterprise. When I was at Privy, for example, the company kind of had a, didn't have a very clear focus. And then we, we came up with this ICP of like our best market. And they had 500,000 people using the product. Their hypothesis of like the best way to scale revenue is by focusing on this one pocket of entrepreneurs, which is entrepreneurs doing less than $1 million in sales. And that allowed us to carve out a unique position in the market because other companies that had similar tools and we were being evaluated against. We could basically reposition them by saying like, yeah, what they do is great. If you're a big company doing $10 million in revenue, we focus on this. And so I think it's definitely very iterative.

For me, it's always been helpful to see what commonalities exist among any existing customers when you kind of first enter. And from my perspective, starting off with. So I guess also there's a good dichotomy between the people that you're outbounding aggressively. Like you might want that to be a more honed target market because you're able to talk about the value that you deliver to your existing customers. And it's just easier to tell the story if it's the people that you know you can serve. But from an inbound perspective, like you can take a demo with anyone who knocks on your door for a while. And that's how we've been thinking about it at demand. Well, it's like, okay, we want to be open to seeing if there is traction in other spaces, but we're not going to waste our money trying to sell to the Fortune 100 right now because like our current market is SMB commercial segment.

So well you, and you have to look and adjust. And so like maybe a Bunch of Fortune 100 companies came in and they didn't add any frick because oftentimes that adds friction to a small company which is like, they have much higher security requirements. There's just a lot of like, ah, holy cow, this would be a million dollar contract for us. But you're like, is that worth it? Because it's not our sales process. They're going to need a dedicated customer success person, the expectation and sometimes it's worth a company like making that bet, like, hey, this is where we're going. So we want to do this. Sometimes it's not. And so this is like, I think the ICP goes all the way back to like a management level discussion about like, should we sell to this customer or not? And I've been in conversations in companies where it's like sales rep X is like going to close this deal with this company and we have to be like, we gotta say no. I've also been in the same company where it's like, you know what? This is not our icp. But like there's no red flags. It kind of checks all the boxes like, let's do this and see how it goes. And they're like, holy, that was actually an amazing customer for Us, let's see if we can go get more of them. And so, like, then as you start to, like, explore the revenue plan for next year, and you're like, huh, where's new revenue going to come from? You start to think about expanding. Could we go to this pocket or that? Okay, we could talk forever. I want to make sure we spend five minutes on Community.

Egan.

We'll start with you and go to Chantal after. Why do you think everybody's talking about Community right now?

I think this is not novel, but I think people want to connect with people, not brands. And I think that is what's driving everything around Community right now. We have companies in our portfolio. Okay, I'm thinking of companies. I'm not going to pick on them. But two real companies in our portfolio both have a LinkedIn strategy. One of them is running the strategy through their company branded page, and one of them is running it through the CEO's page. Guess which one is performing better? The CEO by, like, times a million. And you're literally seeing this community starting to form. They're really new. They're less than six months old, but every day there's more likes, there's more likes, there's more comments, there's more comments. It is like, it's so cool to watch, but I think it all comes back to just people want to hear from people, and that's really what Community is at the end of the day.

Yeah. Also that you can have both. That's okay. By the way. Like, I think they complement each other. You can create a personality for the. The company page, and oftentimes when people are looking for jobs, you know, the company page is huge for employment branding and just, like, looking that, you know, making sure it exists. I do see marketing teams default to the company page, though, because they feel like they can control that a little bit more than the CEO pages are. Like, we're going to build this through the company page, but yes, through CEO, Founder. I think it's great. Shanta, what do you say to that? What's your opinion?

So I am sort of annoyed that everyone is talking about Community all the time. I feel like it really depends on your customer and what other communities they have available to them. Like, one challenge that I'm having is, like, marketers have tons of communities actually, that they have access to, and they love, like, the Exit 5 community, like, pavilion. Like, there are so many places that marketers can go to learn from each other, and, you know, they're not associated with a vendor at all. But Then on the other hand, like, my last company was in the customer support space and we were serving this particular person on the customer support team who often didn't have peers doing the same job as them at their company. So they were really creating contact with us who had their same job. And it was like magic. Just connect them, have events for them. It was so amazing and so powerful. And I think the beauty of community is that it's really hard to replicate. It kind of creates a competitive moat in addition to all the other great things that you guys have both talked about today. So, yeah, that's my hot take.

Also, I also think community can mean different things. I don't think it means. I think people have taken the word community and assume that that means, like, oh, we need to build a website where people go and log into and chat with each other, or we need to build a Slack group, or we need to build a Facebook. I think it can mean that. I think it can also mean like building a strong page for the, for the founder. Like, for example, like, I have now, I think it's like 140,000 LinkedIn followers. I could have no Exit 5 community. And I would say that I have community because through my page I can reach thousands of people within this niche. I think that's like, to me, community is about, like, this shift of not having to rely on spending money through advertising or other paid programs to like, to communicate with your ideal customers. I do think that a lot of companies are going to try to make these communities like, hey, go to the HR pros Slack group. And it's really hard to compete there because you have to have strong opinions, you have to have something to say. It can't just become like a forum for your product. And I do see a lot of, like, B2B SaaS companies that, that are doing that where, like, I think about all the time, like, would I have had as much success building exit 5 into a B2B marketing community if this was inside of a SaaS company? Heck no. Because it's just me. There are no sales goals. There's no MQLs. We're not trying to justify, like, how much time we're spending and who's in there and is it the right ICP fit and all that stuff. And those things ruin the community on the way in when you're like, yep, we only want this role. We only want this of these companies. That just makes it really hard when you have those competing things inside of a company.

Maybe this is a pipe dream and Just not feasible. But isn't that the way that a marketer at a brand should be thinking about their community anyways? Like, shouldn't you just trust that if you build a place that people want to come, whatever form that is and connect with each other and solve problems with each other, then like good things are going to happen? I mean it does take a little, it takes more long term thinking, it takes trust from a CEO or a cfo. But like that feels like the right way to go about it whether you're with a brand or not with a brand.

Yeah, I think that's critical to success is that you are not trying to actively monetize the community. If you are a vendor that's creating a community because that it's like to your point Egan, if you build it, they will come and then also don't mess it up by getting super salesy. It has to say the field of dreams, not the field of like cold calling, et cetera.

Yeah, and I just like the framework of like, then I'm not the one to go to for like the perfect definition of anything community. Just my opinion is like whether it's a Slack group or Facebook group, a LinkedIn page, a YouTube channel, a podcast, whatever, I bucket that all under community. And what I'm trying to achieve by that is like building a direct relationship with our ideal customers in a non salesy way so they can know like and trust us. And so like then when we do have something to promote, it can be very powerful. So now when I do have something that I want to promote, that is a sales thing and I post it in the Exit 5 community or I send an email, it's like it's taken all the hard part. Like marketing is easy because you have the ICP fit and you have the audience who's eager to hear from you. And then you're like, and here's something you can buy and they buy it and that doesn't work like that. That's very simplified. Like that's not how B2B SaaS works. But you can simplify it down to that level. It's like go back to what we said earlier. Be the resource for them. That's where this goes. Okay, you all have real jobs to go back to. This was fantastic. Shantal, we will plug you in here. Egan will plug you the same thing and maybe, who knows, maybe we'll, we'll chat again in the near future. This is great. Thank you both for doing this. Thanks to you for wherever you are, for listening to the Exit 5 podcast. I hope you enjoy the rest of your day. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of the Exit 5 podcast. If you're in B2B marketing and you want to grow your career, you should also go and check out everything that we have over@exit5.com we've got articles, we've got videos, we've got templates, plus we have a community. A community of over 4000 B2B marketing pros. Whether you're deep in your career and want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want a place to go where you can see what people are talking about, get smarter about B2B marketing in your own time to grow your career and help grow your company. Go and check it out. It's exit5.com you can get on the email list there you can join the community. There's 4,000 marketers in the community. We have a job board. We're always adding new stuff. It's really become becoming the number one place you can go if you want to grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day. So check it out. Exit5.com and I also want to make sure I give a shout out to my friends at Hatch. That's Hatch fm. They produce this podcast. It sounds amazing because of the work that they do and they work with B2B companies just like yours. They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You you can get unlimited podcast editing and on demand strategy for a low monthly cost. All you gotta do is just upload your episode and they take care of the rest. Go and check them out. It's Hatch fm.

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