074. Founder-Led Demand Generation with Aron Schuhmann

Foreign.

Hello everyone, this is Emilio Garcia. Welcome to another episode of Demand Gen Studio. Today we have with us a great guest, Aaron Schumann from QC Groad. Really excited about having him today I think we're going to explore one very interesting topic related to how do you do some of those Demand Gen efforts that we talk frequently at the show, but from a founder led perspective and obviously from there we will explore more in more detail. But I think the biggest takeaway will be if you happen to be a founder of a company and you are dabbling to generating demand for your product or service on your own, how do you do things that at the beginning maybe do not necessarily scale, but build up momentum for your company? And I think you will get a ton of value from Aaron's point of view. So Aaron, welcome. How are you today?

Yeah, thanks for having me. Doing really well.

I would love, Aaron, if you tell us a little bit about yourself. Right. What build up your perspective kind of the why right. About this topic and then dive a little bit into what you have to share with us.

Yeah. So Karen Schuman. I lead marketing engagements at QC Growth. We help early stage founders get initial traction with their products in the market and help grow their team. So yeah, let me see, what. So just kind of go into a little bit of my background and kind of what formed my thinking.

Yes.

Yeah. I mean, how did I become a marketer and get into demand generation totally by accident?

And you, you keep confirming, you know, like as you might guess, this is a question that I ask all the time, Aaron, you know, like, how do you got into the main generation? Because it's a very peculiar professional role job title, if you want to call it that way, that's been building up as practitioners keep evolving it. And as you know, especially in LinkedIn, there's infinite conversations about what even what it is coming from all the problems of life. Right. From all kind of backgrounds and all that. So, you know, always interesting to hear. How is it that you ended up on this particular realm of marketing?

Yeah, that's well framed. You can now go to school and become trained in marketing in this discipline. For me, I graduated, I'm certainly dating myself, but I graduated in 2006, which is with a degree in history. So no applicable skills in the business world other than the ability to read and write at a certain level.

Engineering.

Well, there you go. Well, that, that certainly I, for me, I feel like that's a fairly transferable skill set. Yeah, I was just really lucky. I graduated in LA in 2006. And there was a lot of. There was like the beginning of digital advertising at scale. Right. I fell into the agency space and there was just at a time where like Google Ads just got started, Facebook ads just got started. And so like I was sort of growing up with the advertising platforms and at the time it was a great recession. I was just very, very lucky that there was a lot of budget that was going from traditional media to digital media. Because in house marketers are saying, like, well, I have way limited budget. There's this attributable channel that I can put my money towards that I can at least say, hey, if I, if I put a dollar in, like, I know what I got back out. So they were able to come to like a CPA or a cpl, which at the time was. Was like a new thing. And so I spent a lot of my early career just explaining digital advertising to marketers that have been doing it for a long time. Yeah. And just really enjoyed the, the constant evolution of the media landscape and what was working and the team play involved in making a really successful campaign that delivered tangible results. So, you know, whether it be messaging, creative, the tactics, the campaign management, the targeting, you know, all of that just gave a lot for my brain to chew on at the time. I was in my early 20s and I just wanted to hang out with my friends and live in LA and have a time. And this was an opportunity for me to do something I enjoyed during the day and just really fed my brain during the day, allowed me to sort of live in a city that I loved and over the course of a decade realized that I loved it and it was my career and I was going to stick with it.

Yeah, yeah. I relate so much to that. I have shared in our episodes. Similarly, that engineer background helped me Discover Google AdWords. Right. It was name AdWords, not ads. Back in the day, it was mostly tech, as you remember. And I was like, yeah, this thing actually tells you what's working, what's not. Which, you know, we might dive that into a little bit later. But definitely kind of like build up a generation of markers thinking that market, if you cannot prove that it works and then it's not happening. Which I think, you know, I make kind of like a flip over the years on that. But definitely at the beginning it was a lot about helping people understand what was it? Because it was, you know, like probably you remember those. This apprehension of I'm spending all this money, but I don't see who is seeing the ads, where's the ad Can I see it? How people like searching for their own keywords to kind of see how the ad looked like and all that apprehension about where I'm actually showing up when you say that I'm spending this amount of money and showing up in all these places and these millions of impressions, where are they? Because I don't see my ads. So very, very interesting. Love it.

Yeah, I was going to ask about that. Where you had your clients were asking like show me my ad on a website to make sure that I know that it's running. I, I forgot about that. That's a good blast from the past.

Definitely, definitely. And the other big one for me, I don't know if you remember, is that this eternal confusion of clients not being clear on I want to show up in the first place of Google to say an example. Right. And you know, well, is that paid or is that organic for some of our clients or and some of our, you know, internal customers, it wasn't really important for them. How were you showing up? Right. As long as you can prove that you were on the top and that every time that they in particular search they will find themselves or they will find their company.

Right.

So it's been a ride for sure.

Yeah, definitely. I think there's a. It's hard to separate your ego from your Google ranking. Yes. And that, that is a challenge.

Yeah. Which is repeating all over again with ChatGPT. But again, let us continue on that. And now I have this question. Is like, okay, you got into marketing broadly at the beginning or the becoming popular for digital marketing? We're going to talk more about how, you know, founders in particular, I'm assuming startups mostly.

Right.

Can use some of these techniques and tactics and strategies that you have learned. How do you got into this more narrower space of I'm assuming SaaS or B2B SaaS over time.

Yeah, well, yeah, so basically the experience I just described was in B2C. It was, it was all consumer brands, products and lead generation and kind of working with big branded budgets with multi channel strategies across all, you know, across a bunch of different platforms. It was really fun to be basically work with really big budgets. And that scale was really fun. B2C was really, was a really interesting place for me and I just imagined that that's where I would always be. Then I started dating my wife who lived in San Diego. I was living in la. It's just the worst long distance relationship you could imagine because like geographically it's actually not that far. But if you're Trying to go like drive from one to the other every weekend. It was pretty brutal. So I ended up moving to San Diego and it turns out it's just a very different job market with not the same kinds of, you know, opportunities for a B2C, you know, demand gen type person. So I ended up finding an agency that was looking for someone like me. They specialized in helping seed stage and early series A companies develop their early stage web presence to help them get initial traction. It was very much focused on web experience and helping their web experience and their product experience work together to help them get initial traction and sort of look the part and facilitate their initial go to market. So I was there for two years and really change gears and learned what it was like to work with founders who are at the very beginning of their business journey. And yeah, our lens, you know, was primarily, you know, web and their initial like product experiences. But we really started. The reason why they brought me on is because hey, this is the one thing we focus on. But we need to really understand how does this, how does what this agency was creating is called Digital Telepathy. Really cool agency and they got now bought by Surface. Now a lot of folks are still there doing great work. Yeah, they were just trying to figure out how does this web and product experience fit into the greater demand gen motion that our clients are creating. And so that was really fun and is able to bring my expertise to this new space and learned it really quickly and then just realized that there was a lot of things that were easily transferable and I just got really excited and started to get quite good at this early stage motion. And what are all the things that you need to do between what is the web experience and what is that early experience of them touching the product whether it be a service or whether it be a product like you know, what is that web experience? How does it increase relate to your demand gen strategy? How does it relate to your other go to market strategy like event and organic and just trying to see the whole picture for what does it mean for that early stage business? Because as a business grows you get a lot more narrow functions and specialities. In the beginning it's just like whatever you do to generate revenue, that's what we're doing. And you kind of have to have like an everything all at once test everything. Everything should be at least decently well designed and thought through in order to move the ball forward. And then the team that supports that, everybody just sort of plays in a bunch of different lanes as you grow of Course you get more specialized, but that early stage is just really fun and I basically have kind of just made that mostly my career and helping that sort of like 0 to 1 million to 5 million ARR motion kind of my specialty.

Nice. That's. That's super interesting in many levels, Aaron. Let me tell you why the first one is that transition from B2C to B2B. I particularly have done very little work on B2C. Right. To. To. To call it meaningful. Right. And dabble a little bit over time. When we were doing everything for digital marketing at the beginning, never managed, you know, like something very large in the B2C world to say I know it very well. But the little things that I know, especially for more established brands, is that the scale of what you have available, right. If you think about search, the inventory of potential searches or queries, the inventory of the demographics. Right. How do you define your audience and who can buy if you're going to advertise to create awareness about the brand are so different from, you know, when you go to B2B and especially when you scale down to, as you were describing or you know, any kind of startup where typically you start with a very narrow service or product, therefore just a handful of companies or a handful of users actually are your true market. And therefore this tool that allowed you to reach at scale have to be, you know, change quite significantly. You can transform, I'm sure from your experience, but I consider it such a different world. And that will be kind of like my first question, right. What was the thing that you feel was more striking for you as a change as you move, as you move from B2C to B2B and definitely the other one is I imagine that in your previous experience on the B2C you had a larger pool of talent to work with more specialized roles. And now if you start in an agency where on the other side the client is mostly the founder and maybe a handful of people and everybody's wearing multiple hats, your talent pool gets shrink and how do you cope with that? So I think those are the two questions I too long. But what was your. What is it that you learned from that transition?

I guess yeah, I would say my big learning experience. So when I went, I was at that agency in San Diego and our biggest client was a company called New Relic, which at the time was not a very big company. And I was able to be a part of it as it went from 50 people on the agency side and then it quickly became a public, huge public company and then they brought me in house and so I got to make that transition to being in house. And I really just went to school about sales, about enterprise sales. I feel like that was the thing that really was the light bulb for me. And just thinking about demand generation in the BB space is an extension of sales was like my, like the thing that I just anchored myself in. I just, I wanted to learn. Like, show me how the BDRS and the SDRs work. Like, what is their process? What does success look like for them? Like, how do they spend? What are their incentives? Because, you know, for me, when I got to meet them in person and see how they feel like that, all I wanted to do was help them be more successful. Know my little joke to myself was, you know, in the B2B space, marketing is just sales for people who don't want to get on the phone.

Yeah.

And what's been fun is that, like, there's been a very graying area between sales and marketing. And that's only been to my benefit, really, just being so excited about enabling sales. So, yeah, so that was the big aha moment, is just realizing that that is when you're in the B2C space, you're capitalizing on the brand and you're doing that at incredible scale. And so it's very data driven. Not to say that B2B market, obviously very data driven, but you're doing it this massive scale, statistically very significant. When you get in the B2B space, you know, it's very art and science. You know, you're talking about things that may not be statistically significant. And so then you. But the cool thing is, is that you can kind of zero in and go be like, okay, how is this lead progressing? You can sort of go from looking at stats and numbers and then jump down and be like, all right, I'm going to look at these three leads within my target account. Like, how are they behaving? What are they doing? What are they posting about on LinkedIn? And then you can then go talk to the AE that's responsible for that account and make a plan on how to get after them. And so that, that's been the really fun part is being very sales centric and being able to get incredibly granular about exactly who you're going after. That, that part was like the big aha moment for me.

Yeah. Now if you don't mind, I would love to dive into the topic itself. Right. But I will do it with this big question because you remember when we're talking about before the start starting to record this, I was really curious because let me tell you my personal problem. When founders of scaleups reach out and say can we do with you what you do, right? And this is the issue for us, for, for an agency like us, a perfect client, if not from the intent side, from the fit side is a company that is large enough that you know who you are, right? The brand is defined, the product is defined, there's market, this product fit. They already have a small but existing team of sales professionals that are either in closing or prospecting, ideally doing both. And they already have a website with some established content, right. That is being distributed on social media and all that. And they're looking at digital advertising as a way to expand, to broaden, to scale up. That initial effort is already working organically and through the and so established funnel. So is the problem I call it is how you can get in and make digital advertising a multiplier of whatever you're doing, right? You already have a, an investment on sales and a marketing marketing tag stack and then you get in and multiply that effort. Typically those clients even already have some digital advertising and they're just struggling to get it work. And that's even better, right? Because we could just go and do it. We don't have to justify why you should invest on advertising to begin with. So that's the ideal scenario. But more often than not we are with someone that is actually asking you this is well, I'm interested on your service but I don't have a sales team, I don't have anyone prospecting. I don't necessarily have any organic going on, right. Or content distribution or any non paid effort going on. What should I do first? And so my answer has vary along the years but I've not been exposed to enough to build up an answer that is I don't clad and I can say well this is the pattern that I'm sure applies most of the time. So I'm really intrigued with your experience because you have seen this many, many times. And so from that point probably that's the story that you're going to tell us is from that one person with a handful of team members where you have inklings of functions to these more mature startup or company where you already have at least some of those departments, some of those roles established. How do you go about it? What is like the recommended roadmap for that?

Yeah, that, that's very often the case. You know, you find that a founder gets a founder a very core group of People who start this business can get to a certain degree of business success and then they flatline as far as growth goes because they have a certain amount of inbound, but it's unreliable and you can't forecast growth on that. You know, maybe they've experimented with some ads or invested in other content and it's been hit and miss relative to the effort. But they are really good at working their own network and when they do get a lead, they can land it. And so that's giving them the confidence that there's something here that they need to figure out. And so the way that I think about it is kind of like for me, I feel like whenever I'm trying to figure out a campaign or how to scale something, I'm always just on the hunt for pain. Like what is the pain that you are solving for your customer and making sure that the founder is an expert at that and can present and. Because that's probably what's happening, right? Like they get somebody on the phone and through their conversation, whether it be very intentional or not, the prospect believes that this person really knows what they're talking about. They just happen to be like a 24 year old genius is just born to be so good at this thing. Or because of the accumulation of their experiences and the point of view that they have on the world that they can uniquely solve this problem for this customer. That is probably what's happening with founders. And you as a marketer is like, well then how do I. Like what is the magic that's happening here that the founder is communicating? And then what is the pain point that they're touching with the prospect? And then your job is to then try to go crystallize that and make it really tight. Because oftentimes founders don't necessarily know that this is what they're doing. It might not be really clean and concise. When you bring on your first sellers, those need that same crystallized message. Like they need to repeat that. So as a marketer, you can do a lot to package that together in a really tight pitch and identify the pain points that you're solving. I think from a founder's point of view, they also really need to have, yeah, they need to have a point of view on the world that's unique. And they should say like not marketing their product or their service, they're sort of marketing the problem. And they're saying, I'm seeing this problem that you have. I have this point of view on how we should solve it that's really unique and I can see the future and the future gets worse for you if you don't take action. And so that's sort of. That kind of. I often like to say that founders should have some sort of manifesto. You know, a blog is a forcing function for this. I have one client that wrote a book and that's certainly very helpful as a reference guide on sort of what is the point of view that we're evangelizing in the market about the problem. And then once you get your prospects to then sort of buy like that manifesto blog, write a manifesto blog, regardless of that blog is going to be very good about organic traffic or it's like an incredible marketing asset unto itself. It's a forcing function to have a point of view about the world that your marketing team can then try to scale in the market and try in different ways to see if they can connect that point of view with the pain, with the proper prospect to then drive a call to action. Because. Because as you know, marketing can take many different form factors. But that core point of view and message and problem statement that exists in every campaign activity.

Yeah, yeah, love it. So, and again, limited experience here because I believe most bootstrap, even debt fuel enterprises are forced by money to follow a path on. Imagine that you have that point of view very clearly defined by the founder. And now if I'm scaling conversation, I call it like it's very informal, especially for startups starting some certain ecosystems, right? Because it is by who are you founded by and kind of like the mentors you have that you get some word of mouth about the company itself and what you do, you're a founder, you are scaling all of that, right? You're doing the having that point of view and all that. But something that these companies have that is difficult for a company that is not getting invested is that money, you know, sales is the come. The money that is coming from the business itself constrain what can you hire and what efforts can you fund, right? And so I think startups are in a unique position because when you get funded then you have to make a proactive choice on investing that money to grow. And so it's a different problem because then you can say, well, do I take that investment and do I invest it on creating content and distributing it organically? Do I take it and hire my first SDR or I hire my first AE instead of an SDR or you know, I use it to do some advertising and some pay effort, some pr. So have you seen any like when you have the money for whatever meanings either sales even come from a product, but if you get a firm investment, have you seen a pattern there? Either the one that you believe works best or the one that is taken more often than not because of the pressures of growth. I don't know if makes sense.

Yeah. So this is challenging for me as somebody who loves paid advertising and really enjoys running campaigns and spend a lot of time on pushing pixels on websites to optimize conversion. But if you take a step back and say what is the fastest way to help a business grow revenue? I have tried almost everything under the sun and it turns out that outbound sales is the, is the number one way to help grow a business and also inform what other channels should be doing and what other channels could work. So this is again challenging as a born digital marketer in my bones to say the answer is sales. But the thing is that if I'm going to say like, hey, I'm just a founder and I'm doing really well, like what's the first thing I should do? I'd say you should develop an outbound motion because it's the hard, it's the hard thing to do because what's actually a lot of companies will say, hey, like maybe they got lucky and they were able to make non. Like they're able to do everything except for outbound. Like sometimes this happens with like product led growth type companies or people who just sort of like luck into a channel and that really works. And then they're like, okay, well now we need to go do outbound. Like it's really hard, it takes a long time. It's actually a very, it's like, it's process, it's data, it's tools. So my suggestion is do the hard thing first and it helps inform your other channels. So for example, let's say like when you're out there like just seeing what messages work, it's a really low cost way to figure out what's working both in what gets people to respond, who is responding and then when you get them on the phone, you can now get such incredible information from the transcripts. So like for, for all our clients, I create a custom GPT that basically is a product marketer in a box that takes all the transcripts and teases out like what are their pains, games, jobs to be done and that feeds up. And then from there I could say, okay, cool, like this is what, these are the pattern matches that we're seeing across, across our customers. I now know that if I can take, if I can match this person to this use case with this value proposition that that's a winner for us, that can then go feed some experiments in paid channels or in other types of content generation. So for me, you can then sort of run that in tandem with outbound in a way to make sure that when we do get those folks on the website and engaging, you can then have a human being make sure that you take action on that intent in a way that if you didn't have that outbound sales function kind of ready, ready there, you're just kind of hoping that they convert based on the strength of the website. I feel like there's a way that having that good foundation of outbound sales and being able to look at everything as an outbound opportunity when you are running traditional demand gen, those two things just really drive a lot of efficiency. And there's learning across the tip.

Yes, no, I totally agree. I didn't want it to preempt my point of view because I really wanted to come. You know, you have that experience. Mine is just an intuition. But yeah, I agree is I have seen so many times where.

A version.

Of what you're saying, right. Is sometimes we as founder, because I will now I put the hat of just a business owner, which I am as well is you. You say, well, maybe the solution is in marketing. If I just do marketing and then buyers come to me, only then I I will not have to struggle with the go and knocking doors, right? And asking for business. And so in that sense, yes, it's a way. There are different reasons why we might do that. But one of the reasons is because it feels easier to just market the company and waiting for the prospects, the right fit prospects to come to you. Right? But I agree with you in this, and this is the part that is really hard is that even if you are doing marketing from the beginning with a handful of clients already, you're still making a ton of assumptions about what is it that the broader market actually needs. And the only way to figure it out is to go and have conversations, right? That's the part of sales that is hard to see when you know that sales is not just obviously asking for business. It is, but it's also at the beginning for a founder, a way to learn, right? To learn everything. Not just will you buy my product, but it's what are the reasons why you will buy where as you say in the pain points, right? Is the pain big enough to justify a change?

Right.

And those things you can only learn if you have some conversations at the beginning. And that's the best way to do it. Right. Rather than sending these broad messages that have very weak interaction human to human, to learn something from it. You can spend days and days looking at the website visitors and looking at the hotjar sessions and clarity bit sessions, looking at behaviors and clicks, but you're not talking to anybody. Right. They don't feel a form. You have learned nothing except the fact that they came from a company IP and that they wander around your website.

Yeah. And that's very anxiety inducing if you're not getting the results that you want because there's a lot of unknown there. Yeah, totally agree with you. I feel like sales as market research, as user research and sort of a strategic input for what product or service you should be developing is really key. Like there was this one company I worked for, it was a big success. I mean I was there for two and a half years and we were acquired by Nvidia, which is like not a bad company to be acquired by. They didn't necessarily have use for a scrappy growth demand marketer like me. They don't realize they're chip sell themselves. So you know, I didn't get absorbed into the parent company, but it was a really big win in as far as this phenomenon that you're talking about. So the company is called Octo AI. It was an incredible technology, but it was sort of an incredible technology that we needed to figure out where it fit in the market. Like where was it maximally valuable. And so we just had an incredible go to market team and a really tight sales alignment to try to figure out like to make that iteration cycle as quickly as possible to find out like yes, we have this technology. Like who? Like you sort of have a key and you're in search of a lock to try to go like unlock the value in both directions. And so we had a, you know, it was everything from going to events, like events actually were really an interesting way, like conferences of having 200 conversations, you know, in the course of a few hours and being disciplined about then coming back and saying okay, what did you learn? You know, and then using that as an iteration cycle and then going out and doing outbound and then finding like okay, cool, like this is what's working, you know, this is the use case. And so the product ended up really finding its way to a really lucrative but very narrow enterprise market for very large companies that were running open source AI models at tremendous scale, but doing it in a private, you know, or on premises environment. So very narrow but very valuable market. And that is absolutely not where we started. But go to market was sort of the, you know, was like the weathervane that was kind of out there trying to see like where the wind was blowing and going and trying to see exactly where that that technology fit and ended up being really competitive in a market that Nvidia saw was really valuable and they acquired the company. So that's a kind of a good story to tell. Like you are not a passive participant in your product or services success in the market as a demand gen person. You are an active participant in the strategic input along with sales to go and tell leadership. This is what the market wants. Let's go give it to them.

Yeah, yeah. Now again, I'm going to narrow down now into okay, yeah, probably more often than not you need to dominate the sales function before investing heavily. It's not that you don't invest in marketing, you always are doing some investment in marketing because I think they're interchangeable to some extent. Right? Whatever sales activity you do has some impact on the perception of the brand, whatever for you do on the brand. Building has some impact on the short term for sales. But I have seen the work that you do with a large team that has the resources to set up the sales function proper is having your AES, having your BDR, having your SDRs, having the processes, right, building the flows, the stages of the deal, the stages of prospecting, qualification criteria, lead scoring, showing up in 10, right? Building up the dashboards for the managers, all that fun stuff that you can do on CRMs and making sure that you understand and map all the channels and making sure that someone gets assigned when it's coming from me. That's super fun stuff for a large team that is looking for some, you know, making it more like an institution, more like a formalized for a large team for sure, but a founder, right? I think that one of the challenges and hopefully you can give us some light there is sometimes you read and listen about all of these things and think that you gotta have all of those things for yourself. When the team is just one person or one person and a half or one person, a handful of contractors and you make this super complicated process and you add all this tech stack for something that is meant for teams of 5, 10 people rather than just one person that is trying to do things at scale but really doesn't have the bandwidth because on top of that is doing obviously product and he's doing marketing and he's doing human resources. And so let us Consider that yes, probably a founder on a company should start focus on sales. What are the things that maybe don't scale, that don't require super complicated processes and super complicated technology? What is the framework, the steps that a founder should take to start that journey? Aaron?

Yeah, I think the tools like the, like the tools that you buy to help you go to market will not help you go to, will not generate demand unto themselves. It's also important to remember that every tool that you bring on requires care and feeding. Yeah, marketers. We are going to get you so excited. Like if I'm marketing to sales and marketing people or founders about marketing technology, I've always thought about this as a career path because I've always felt like Martech would be fun because you get people so excited about the future of a pipeline. Like if you buy this big CRM, the only thing it's missing is just the chart going up and to the right. And they don't tell you that actually you're going to need to hire a consultant and they're going to need to build out your lead scoring. Like there's just a lot you don't know. So my thing would just be, is like be skeptical about buying tools and always think about what is the lightest touch that I would be able to do this with in anything that you're doing, whether it be lead scoring or tracking your pipeline and just sort of think like what, what is my goal of this? First I would say being really self critical about picking up new things. Because once you buy a CRM and you start setting it up like you're kind of on the hook to get it across the finish line. And those are the types of things that if you just focus on what your goal of that tool is, it will help you right size to what you're trying to go for. So I would say like first like just do it really simple, you know, like a trello board, like very simple kanban for your pipeline, just start there. And then like one of our clients kind of what we agreed was just like let's just push 10 deals through the pipeline through to close and then we're going to go back and bake in what we've learned. Because in the beginning when you're setting up your systems and your tools, your processes, you're making a lot of assumptions about what things will be like in the future. Like even if you're thinking like oh shoot, I need to pick close lost reasons, what would people say? And it's just like, you know, it's so much easier if you just say I have all this information and something that doesn't scale, I need to then go map it to something that does and it helps you in. Anything you're using is going to go a lot faster. So kind of go first principles, what do you, what is your objective? What's the smallest, like easiest, fastest way for you to get started with this? Knowing that you are going to need to make a choice in the future to get to something that is more scalable. So yeah, run 10 deals through your pipeline all the way through to close and then go back and decide like hey, like what is, what's our qualification process? Like what's our deck look like? You know, like what should our lead scoring be? Based on the fact that we now have these many thousands of leads that have then produced, you know, 10 fully closed deals, I'd say that go create success first and then build around it versus buy a bunch of tools expecting success will come.

Yeah, love it. Let me, let me put you in this way. The way that I sometimes refer to clients is, you know in more mature organizations and teams I like to see a triad of information, right? I want to see one or two KPIs for the department or the effort or whatever is being measured. 1, 1, 2 critical KPIs that's I call them. Someone is going to get rewarded or fire if these numbers don't get hit. And then you have the meat of when you justify systems and you justify tech stack which is all these metrics, right? All these leading indicators that kind of give you predicting abilities or at least forecasting abilities on the KPI. Because the KPI usually is lagging indicator. There's nothing that you can do about it once you either hit it or not. And so that's where systems I think do a fantastic job. But the ones that get are very hard for a founder to understand that are really the source of everything are the habits, right? The metrics that reflect the habits. So I think with larger teams is easier to say well I know that there are going to be calls, going to be emails, going to be you know like meetings to either talked about loss close reasons and close rates and time cycles. But if you don't have these numbers related to activity, right to habits, to every day picking up the phone or sending those emails or going to these events or having conversations, there's no way that you're gonna have either the metrics or the KPIs working on your favor. So I think when we are talking About a founder, that's the part that gets lost. That is like, yeah, maybe definitely have a goal because you need to have one. Right. And a big objective that you go after. Don't get super, super crazy about all the metrics that you need for leading indicators. Because just being you really, what really matters is how consistent you are on your habits. Right. On the things that lead to that outcome. And so I don't know if you agree with me or not is that. And again, this relates to me. The hardest part of when you are doing this on your own is that at the end of the day, you got to every day repeat the activity for a long time.

Yeah. Plug for a guy now. His name's Justin Gage. He works at a VC group called Amplify Partners. He has a. He has a really great blog about a point that he makes that founders, their biggest problem with marketing is not doing enough marketing and just holding themselves and, and their initial teams to just a base level of activity to say, okay, every month, how many blogs did we write? How many blogs do we want to write? And just holding yourself to just like these very crude KPIs that really are just about developing a muscle of marketing. Like of course, yeah, like you want to generate pipeline, but there's so many behaviors and like a development of a cultural go to market, go to market culture of just getting in that rhythm. And so I think, yeah, developing, just going from just knowing that generally speaking, it's not like doing marketing at all and getting in that habit and making that part of your daily, weekly thought process is the big unlock for a lot of founders. And they can get wrapped around the axle if they think just beyond in a month. What are the things that constitute marketing for us that we want to hold ourselves accountable to?

Yes. And finally, I think we can close with this one again. I will tell you what I think after your answer. But you know, just like in marketing, in sales you have so many potential ways, right. That you can go about and do outbound sales channels, places. What is your take on Shula founder? Try a bunch of them at the same time. Focus on one and see if it works. What is kind of like your go about on what do you try and how do you know if it's working or not? How long do you give it time before you drop it and try something else?

Yeah, I mean I would say the first thing to do is identify your ideal, ideal customer. Like get, get absurdly specific like, and then work outwards from there. Be like, I'm looking For you know, I'm looking for a logistics company in the Midwest that has like recently hired a director of operations and also just replatformed like just get so specific to. And then maybe you can't. Oh yeah. And then they've got revenue that looks like this and the company is that old. Like just get so, so specific and then see like work your way outwards. What are the tools that would even let you know those things? And then maybe you actually only find that there's like five or six that exact same thing. But if you maybe take one or two, you know, of those filtering criteria off now you've got 50 and it's like go tackle those 50, like start. Make sure you do things that don't scale, that are very time intensive but are, but you know, is, is the right fit for you. And then work your way outwards from there. Because once you know that, once you like validate that people who just come into a new job and they just go through a major replatforming, they are very open to outside help. And it turns out that the best way to connect with them is through one on one LinkedIn which is like actually very challenging to scale. But there are becoming tools that can allow you to better do that. Or like ooh, like this. I spent an hour and a half in sales Navigator to find these three leads. Be like, well there are now other tools and techniques that might be able to help you do that. So I would say start with that like freakishly specific ICP and then work your way outwards and you know, the answers will, will reveal themselves.

Yeah, no, love it. Again, I couldn't agree more. This I tell for personal experience. I have seen clients, while we help them on marketing do both things right. And you can tell for the ones that tried the very crude approach of oh, gotta be companies between this size and this size and they're in this industry and they're in the US or they're in this part of the, of the country and they just bring in this large database and start calling like crazy to all of these prospects. And it's just a matter of time that you discover that most of them are not in market. That's the reality of it, right? And then you say well it doesn't matter because we are going through all of them. Yeah, but you have dedicated way more time be more and more specific to the handful that actually had a higher probability of actually being in market at the moment. Because as you said, it's not just Firmographics is not Just the buyer Persona itself is there are some company behaviors, Right. That give you an inkling into. There's a higher probability that this person will be open to have a conversation with you because it's suffering that pain point that your product or service actually solve. And I've done that. And as you said, it doesn't scale because it requires time. And obviously that's where maybe if you can leverage tools that can give you some inkling or some approximation of. For our case, obviously, is like, are you investing in growth? One that I love to see is how do you think about your website? Right. If you think about your website as a brochure, then it will have certain look and feel. If you see it as a 247 marketer, 247 salesperson, then it will have a different look and feel. And we know that people or companies that think one way or the other behave very differently about what we do. And so those little differences matter. And obviously the big ones, someone changes a job, starts a new position, announces a new investment, I think those are more well known nowadays. But for every single person, every single company, they're going to be something very, very unique that is just related to your product or service, that if you can find tools that allow you to signal, that will make your work very efficient. Because as you were saying, if you. There's just one person, you can really tackle just a handful of those companies every day. And it makes no sense to say, I have a list of 5,000 potential buyers. Well, it's going to take you a long time to actually reach all of them meaningfully. Right. Not dramatically. Yes. You can send a massive email, but good luck with that.

Yeah, yeah. I think kind of bringing it full circle. The thing you said in the beginning is just really know who you are. Yeah. And then go after, like, take an approach that doesn't scale and then work out from there. I think if you are very clear about who you are and what you offer and very incredibly precise about exactly who is the right fit, then do that thing that doesn't scale and then work your way out from there. Because that's the thing about website design, is that everybody's like, I don't want to turn people off. You know, I. I don't want to. I want. I'm going to end up saying something that's very generic as a means to try to talk to as many people as possible. I think that's actually a really good discipline, is when you really do know who you are and you're very specific about who you're targeting and you, you think about the universe as well. At any given time, there's a few thousand people that are truly in market. Let's talk to them. Having that point of view really does make like, for example, website design, you know, much sharper articulation and an easier exercise. So, yeah, totally agree.

Fantastic. Aaron, any last recommendation that you may have? If there's one thing that a founder should know or try today that you might have for our audience before saying goodbye.

Yeah, have a manifesto, like, have a point. Because in a world where, like it is now. So let's say you're in the software business. It is now very easy to build software, you know, with. With a lot of different tools, it's getting easy. So in a world where software becomes commoditized, what are customers buying into? They're buying into you. The person behind the company, the vision behind the company. So make sure that you are clear about your point of view and why people should buy into you and that your job is to then enable your marketing team to then go take that point of view and that perspective and that view of the world and create a depth of content that reflects it. If you think about great, you know, the great companies of the world, if you think about their early days, they're very founder centric. I think Mark Benioff is probably the best example. This is just like, right as I was coming up, he was just out there saying like, so this is back in the day when software was something that you physically accepted that installed in your system. You know, he was out there basically saying like, this is not how it should be. The world that was called software at the time. And he, his whole point of view was like, no software. This is the problem that we're solving. Didn't say anything about a CRM. He was just out there basically saying that my point of view of the world is that software should be completely different and you deserve something better. And that was like the. And so not everybody has to be Mark Benioff. But think about that. Like, what is your point of view in the world? What's the bold contrarian aha statement that you have to say and then enable your marketing team to proliferate that message?

Yeah, love it. Yeah, because it was as much software as what was before. So it was, yeah, as you said, is the point of view was the one that was, you know, really, really stand out. Love it. Aaron, thank you so much. I really enjoy our conversation today. And yeah, let's hope that this is not the last time that we. That we speak at the Manja studio. Thank you for being with us.

It was great to be here. Thanks.

Thank you, man. Bye.

Bye.