Turning Marketers & Sellers Into Full-Stack GTM Athletes with Jaleh Rezaei, Co-Founder & CEO at Mutiny

We saw this massive opportunity to use AI to its fullest capability to then augment everyone in go-to-market and make them go from a specialist working on one narrow thing in the assembly line to becoming a full-stack go-to-market athlete that could do everything from taking a customer from cold all the way to closed one to expansion. You should never just start by writing about your product. You should start with 30 call transcripts from customers in that vertical and extract what are the words that they are using to describe the problem and then connect that to your solution. This has gotten a lot easier. You can now systematize this really quickly and you can personalize this really easily. The experience people have with your customer support, the experience they have with your sales reps, like that buying experience is your brand, and that's the lens through which they're going to evaluate whether they trust you or not as a company. And so if you have the opportunity to knock that out of the park and be way faster and more personalized, you're going to win a lot more deals. There's no excuse to have a generic experience.

Welcome to The GTM Engineer, where we share the hidden stories, cheat codes, and mental models behind the rise of GTM engineering and AI in sales and marketing. I'm your host, Noah Adelstein. Today I had Jaleh Rezaei onto the pod. Jaleh has a mechanical engineering background that she took to VMware, where she worked for 4 years in product marketing before joining Gusto to run all of marketing and BD while they went from 12 to 500 employees. In 2018, she co-founded Mutiny to help go-to-market teams move faster and grow more quickly. Our conversation hinged on what amazing marketing looks like and what Jaleh calls a go-to-market athlete. Jaleh's view, which I also subscribe to, is that as AI accelerates system building and asset creation, it means marketers can spend more time on what they are best at: creativity and deeply understanding users. We talk about what amazing go-to-market looks like, how marketing is evolving, what the evolution means for marketing and sales collaboration, how Mutiny is building a product that addresses these changes, how Jaleh thinks about account-based marketing, and much more. If you wanna find more content from the GTM Engineer, you can follow us on Spotify or subscribe on Substack. There's also a link in the show notes to apply to the GTM Engineer Lab, a community of GTM and aspiring GTM engineers. With that, here's Jaleh. Hope you learn something useful. Jaleh, thanks for joining onto the GTM Engineer.

Thanks for having me. I feel like we've been talking about doing this for a while and we finally made it.

I know, I'm really excited for the conversation. Do you want to just start out and give a little bit of an intro on your background and what you're doing now at Mutiny?

So I'm a little bit unique on the go-to-market side in that I started as a mechanical engineer and then fell in love honestly with the problem solving in business. I think in physics there's a right and a wrong answer and in business you're limited by your own creativity and there's there's so many ways to get from A to B, and I just love that. And so I started my career in, at VMware. I joined right before the company went public and they were still doubling revenue every year. It was a really exciting time. And I was in the product marketing and product management org. So got to work with really, really amazing enterprise sellers, closing really large deals and got to see the fundamentals of B2B and how do you get a customer all the way from the beginning to across the finish line on these really large contracts. And then I went to Gusto, which was the exact opposite. So $450 ACV instead of, you know, millions of dollars. And there we had to use technology to do all of it. And so that was a very interesting experience in trying to figure out how do we deliver a great experience to our customers at scale. So lots of lessons from that time. And then ultimately, part of what really frustrated me in the role was that we had all of these amazing ideas and I owned this really hard number, right? I owned the marketing team, business development at points, and parts of the sales team and the support team as well, but I didn't have the resources to hit my goals. And so we ended up building a dedicated growth engineering team. And even with all of that, I still felt super constrained with all of the dependencies. And so ultimately my co-founder, he's also from Gusto, we left and decided to start Mutiny to really help go-to-market teams be able to move a lot faster and grow more quickly by killing all of these dependencies.

Okay, great. And so how long was the VMware stint and the Gusto stint?

So I was at VMware for about 4 years and then similar for Gusto.

Okay. And Gusto, you joined, it was like 10 employees, right?

Yeah, it was like 12 people. We were in this tiny little loft in San Francisco. Nobody could work upstairs because it would just get so hot. You know, it was just your classic quirky startup.

Yeah. And then when you left, how big was Gusto then?

About 500 people.

Okay. Wow. Nice. And then Mutiny was what year did you start?

2018.

So you've been basically working on this problem with Mutiny for the last 7, 8 years.

Yes, exactly. So we started pre-LLMs. We started with website personalization. So at the time it was like, how do we enable a lot of growth in a no-code way so that we can eliminate the engineering and the design dependencies? And We, that's how, you know, we got our start. And then over time we started expanding to ABM. And then about a year ago, we decided to just double down on this Agentic AI platform. And we basically built the whole stack from the ground up.

Okay. Remember kind of earlier Mutiny days, it was like amazing personalized landing pages and a lot of account-based marketing. That was kind of the shtick. And then you guys have. Change and really broaden how you're thinking about things? And in really like just the last couple days now have made like a couple big changes and announcements on the direction of the company. Do you want to talk about that and how you got there?

Yeah, totally. So, you know, the vision of the company has very much stayed the same, right? Helping every company grow as fast as they can by being able to move as fast as they can. And obviously it's undeniable what you can do with AI in terms of automation, eliminating dependencies, right? We have these agents that can write, they can code, they can design, they can do analysis, they can do everything for you. And so we just saw this massive opportunity to use AI to its fullest capability to then augment everyone in go-to-market and make them go from a specialist working on one narrow thing in the assembly line to becoming a full stack go-to-market athlete that could do everything from taking a customer from cold all the way to closed one to expansion.

And so if we think about before LLMs and especially the kind of development of the capabilities in the last like year or two versus now and what's possible before, you probably need people who are, you know, going way deeper on every single part of marketing. Somebody who's designing the landing pages, someone who's building it on the backend. Somebody who's thinking about all the copy that goes on a flyer, somebody who's researching the accounts, et cetera. And, and it's like now LLMs can get maybe 80, 90% plus of the way there by themselves. And so how does that change what you think the role is of the marketer? And then maybe also like the skill sets that will lead to like the most effective GTM folks.

Yeah. So if I connect this back to my own experience, right, I think What is required from great go-to-market people is, do you understand your customer? Do you understand their pain points? Do you know how to connect your product to those pain points and build trust with them? And so I think it's more important than ever for marketers to learn how to sell and how to create that connection with the customer and to learn the skills to be able to now think a lot more broadly about their role. I I think in the past, you know, 5, 10 years, attribution has been almost like the death of marketing, right? It's like, oh, well, I got to prove that this metric can be moved. And it's actually minimized people even more. And I think this is the time to take a step back and say, how do I get customers? How do I help my company grow? And start from that bigger picture and then Give yourself the tools to be able to build a really great experience for those customers to get to know who you are, to connect their pain points to what your company does, and be able to evaluate your product, choose it between competitors that they're probably looking at, and just make it really easy for them to work with you.

So over the last many years, I think what you're saying is, has happened, which I agree with, is that The measurement of all of the marketing has become way more important. What that has done is it has kind of more narrowly scoped what a lot of people work on, and it's also probably changed the profile of person who's working in a lot of these marketing orgs because it's like you need a little bit more analytical rigor and the ability to connect the dots, even if they're somewhat like fuzzy in the first place. And it's taken away the things that actually always will matter with marketing, which is like understanding the customer, understanding their pain, telling the stories. Do you have any examples, maybe like when you were at VMware or, or Gusto of something that you did or, or someone you were working with did that highlights the importance of those things within marketing?

Yeah, totally. So, I mean, the other thing that I'll say about that, Noah, is there was also a need for specialization, right? So for example, if you wanna do LinkedIn ads, there's all these things that you need to know about it and there's all this manual work around it. And so you need someone dedicated who then accrues more knowledge about how that platform works and then For Meta, it's different. And for TikTok, you know, and so you basically needed all of these specialists to be able to optimize a go-to-market engine. And what I think is going to happen over the course of the next year or so is that a lot of those execution will now be handed off to an agent who can go do that for you. And so it's much more important that you take a step back and say, Where are my customers and how do I win them over? And what kinds of experiences are going to be really good for them to discover and understand? So I'll give you a super simple example from my early days at Gusto. It was very obvious that we had a lot of startups that wanted to buy our product, right? And we had a discount for incubators that anybody could use. So we had that offer, we had a page, you know, and so they could look at that. And then what we did was said, okay, well, when you are a startup, you really want to make sure that you're making the right decision. And you don't really have much time to think about it. So how can we make it super easy for you to know that you're making the exact correct decision, and that you can move on. So instead of the broad generic website experience, we basically built these, these micro pages for them that would say, hey, you're from Y Combinator, Here's the exclusive offer we have with Y Combinator. These are other YC companies that are using us. Here's what they say about it. So as soon as you would land on that page, you're like, I'm not making a stupid decision. This is the right product. I'm just going to buy it. And it increased our conversion rate by 2x because it's just so much easier to make that purchase. And I think these examples are all over the place, right? You look at the buying experience. I give this talk at YC on how to simplify marketing and the whole complexity of the buyer's journey, all that stuff, we rename it to how do you make it easy for them to buy, right? And to basically make that decision. And so I think you can go back to first principles and use AI to augment any skills that you don't have. And you can start experimenting and testing a lot more quickly. You don't need to prove in, you know, 5 conference room meetings, hey, I really think this is a good idea. We should really try it in order to get the resources you need. If you have an idea, just go use AI to figure out how to launch it by the end of the day, and then you'll have data, and you can use that data to then make a much bigger bet.

And so just backing up to that Gusto example, where did the insight come from that these businesses want to just make a decision quickly and not think very much about it?

Honestly, I think so much of it is talking to customers, right? Like, for example, right now, we just launched our agent, and it's a waitlist, so we're inviting people off the waitlist every day, and we have all of these funnels, right? Because presumably it's too many signups for us to be able to look at it all individually, but actually we are looking at it all individually. So we have our Amplitude dashboards and we can look at all of that data, but the reality is the best insights come from watching the user sessions. And then what's better than the user session is to then talk to the user and say, what were you trying to do? You know, how did you end up here? And I think actually this is a rippling value too, is go and see, right? Get out from behind your desk and go talk to customers. I'm a huge fan of going and talking to customers. And I experienced that very early on in my career. So, when I started at VMware, I inherited a free product that they had launched. And you can imagine how little attention a free product is going to get at a company like that. However, the free product was the architecture that we were going to flip the main product to. So, it had this big strategic importance for us. And my responsibility was to figure out how do I get small businesses and startups using this thing? I was looking at the data and, you know, all this stuff and we just, the data was really bad. We didn't have any information. So I literally just sat in my office and I just started calling them down the list. I would look them up and I would call them and be like, hey, you're using this. Who are you? What are you trying to do with this? And there'd be an instructor who's like, I'm teaching a class actually. And I'm using this to test different operating systems, you know, for my class. And then there's startups who are like, oh, I want to use this, but I don't know how to use it. You know, I got a really big insight out of that, which was that our whole education center at VMware was— it was a profit center. So if you wanted to use the product, you had to come and join this class for 7 days. And they thought, okay, well, we can reduce the cost for small businesses. But in talking to them, what I realized was that they had one person in it, and it wasn't the money, they couldn't leave for a week to take the class. And so that was a huge blocker for all of those startups. And so out of those, you know, 40, 50 calls that I made, then I built a proposal for how we need to revamp the way we're approaching education, and we need to, you know, build a totally different model that's free and self-serve. And then we started, you know, creating all of that. And that was a huge success for us. But had I just gone and talked to people inside the building or looked at the data, I would have never gotten there. So I'm old school in that way. I think you should just talk to as many users as you possibly can.

Yeah, I love that. So backing up, I sort of made the point that with attribution and measuring everything, it sort of attracted a different type of person and created different incentives within marketing. But the other point you made is that it's also been very channel dependent. And so as new channels have been created, Meta, LinkedIn, cold email, those effectively just require a level of analytical and technical expertise on the channel in order to go effectively run that channel. And then that's attracted a different kind of person who's really good at that. They go super deep on that. They're driving a bunch of value, not necessarily because the marketing is amazing, but really because the technical expertise on the channel. And so over time, as the channel is commoditized more and as agents are able to actually handle the technical parts that you need the specialization in, then the way to stand out is with really amazing marketing. How to go do really amazing marketing, deeply understand the customers, going and talking to them is always underrated. It's something people don't do nearly enough, and then drawing insights from that and going and creating storytelling and marketing around that. You know, the VMware example or the Gusto example are like very good ones within that.

Totally. And, and I would extend the same thing to sales, right? Marketing has a lot of dependencies. Sales has one massive dependency, which is marketing, right? And their livelihood depends on being able to close these deals. And there's this inherent conflict between sales and marketing in the sense that marketing is a smaller team and they have to operate at scale. Sales is a much larger team. Their headcount is allocated so that they can handle a certain number of accounts on a one-to-one basis. And so I think that introduces a lot of conflict between the two teams because sales wants help with those deals. Marketing can't do that. They just don't have enough headcount for that. And so what ends up happening is sales is constantly in need of one-pagers, ROI decks, more case studies, you know, all sorts of things that marketing just can't deliver. And so the really amazing opportunity now for a seller is you can be this true CEO of your territory, right? And you don't need to rely on someone in marketing. You can just go and create whatever deal material you need to get that deal across the finish line. And actually, the agent that we just released does that, right? So the first iteration of the agent for us right now is focused on making customer-facing materials that are on brand. So a marketer can use it. To get rid of their design dependencies and, you know, other internal dependencies and just create whatever they want and launch it. But a seller can also use it to basically say, oh, I need a case study or I need this unique thing that my customer asked for. They'll be able to create that in a couple of minutes.

Yeah. And so if we follow that thread further, I think a lot of what you're getting at is a lot better of an end-to-end prospect experience that a business is able to go deliver. For people because of the ability to go personalize more on the assets and create them at a larger scale. But do you want to just talk a little bit more about how you think about that and why you think like most businesses are not providing that level of customization today?

Yeah, I was just on a call with a customer, right, who on the call asked me for, hey, I would love to understand what are the top metrics that we can move with Mutiny. It sounds like time savings is a big one, but we're also potentially seeing opportunities with increasing win rate and conversion rate and things like that. It would be really great if you could tell us what those are and also give us examples of how other customers like us have done that. Can you imagine the number of things you have to pull together to create that if you're a salesperson, right? You have to go and extract, okay, what are the pain points of this customer that they care about? Like, what did they tell us are the big opportunities? Then you have to go look through all of your case studies and try to match what makes sense. And then you have to wrap all of that up and do that. And by the way, that was one of hundreds of calls that you have to do that week. It's not like that's your full-time job, right? So something like that, you could just come into the agent and basically be like, okay, based on this call transcript, it already plugs into all the case studies, it already plugs into the brand. You could literally just say, generate that asset for me based on what the customer asked for. And so it takes a process that would have been days of work and asking people for favors and probably ending up with something pretty crappy for the customer to now minutes and something that's going to blow the customer away because they're like, holy crap, I've never No one's ever done something like this for me. So there is, at some point in the future, the bar on customer experience is going to get raised pretty significantly and it becomes the new standard, which will be a good thing for the industry. But I think there is this one year, you know, whatever time period where you can be one of the only reps that's doing it, right? So you're in a deal. We were just trying to buy an AI CRM and It was such an eye-opening experience. The product that we went in to buy, we ended up not buying it because the rep was so bad. We're a pretty shrewd buyer, right? So we go in with like, this is our criteria, this is what we're trying to do, tell me how you do that, tell me how it compares to competitors. And so we're probably pretty annoying for a rep because we're asking for things that are customized and they may not have that handy. And this particular rep for the product that we wanted to buy, he would get back to us, everything started with my sincere apologies for the delay, and then he would give us something that wasn't very good. And then in contrast, the rep that we did end up buying from was super fast, was getting us everything that we needed. And honestly, what it did was at some point our internal meetings about it went from, okay, we think this is a really good product, we should use it, to we don't trust the company. What if all these features don't work the way that they say? They seem like a mess. So at some point, The experience we were having with the rep devolved into what we thought of the company and the brand. And I think that is so real. And a lot of companies don't realize that it's the experience people have with your customer support, the experience they have with your sales reps, like that buying experience is your brand. And that's the lens through which they're going to evaluate whether they trust you or not as a company. And so if you have the opportunity to knock that out of the park and be way faster and more personalized, you're gonna win a lot more deals.

Yeah. I mean, these guys basically just like completely eroded your trust with poor response times and, and at some point you equate that with the product. And I think especially today as people are just tired of these sort of like historical old sales processes that are painful and you're talking to somebody who doesn't understand your needs that well, et cetera, you gravitate more towards the businesses that are gonna reply quickly and like deeply get. Totally. And so what are the things that really matter here in terms of this, like Custom prospect experience. I think you have speed, you have relevance of being able to really tie the things that matter to them back to how your product can solve it. What are some of the other things that if you were to create a list, like really matter to, to drive better outcomes?

So I think there's two things that matter above everything else. So essentially what you wanna do is help the customer connect their pain to your product. And I would say most go-to-market teams fail at that step because they talk about their product, but they don't actually connect it to the customer's pain. And until that connection is made, there is no evaluation, right? No one's interested in looking at you, spending more time with you. You just exist in the ether and they exist in the ether with all their pain points. So you have to make that connection. If you get really good at making that connection faster, you're going to get a lot more opportunities, right? And throughout the deal, you're effectively strengthening that connection for them. And then the second thing that I think really matters is trust. You have to build trust with the customer and you build trust. I was looking at this, gosh, I can't remember who published this, but it was responsiveness. Was the number one contributor to trust. And so if you can be faster and you can be personalized, I mean, those are going to be the two ways in which you're going to be able to really, really stand out to your customers.

Yeah, so okay, so the second one feels very straightforward on trust, which is reply really quickly, make it look like you actually spent the time and are writing something that's specific to them and not some very generic message and then just be reliable on, you know, do the things you say you're gonna do. Like, I think the trust piece generally makes sense. On the pain connectivity, I guess historically really good salespeople do this, right? Or really good marketers create customization in such a way that like the prospect comes in through some funnel and it's like, wow, this really resonates with me. What do you think is the, the sort of new ceiling of this now that you have LLMs and all these things? Is it like just way more sophisticated, almost like matrices of customers that look like this should see these sorts of pain points and use cases? Or how do you think that is evolving?

Yeah, in the sales process, I think it's obvious, right? Like if a salesperson is not doing that, they're really not good at their job. On the marketing side, it's harder because you have to now do this at scale. I think the first thing that really matters is you have to understand how the customer talks about the problems. Even at Gusto, right? Like the way we would do that is we would have to talk to lots and lots and lots of customers. And of course, if I have a 25-person marketing team, not all of them can do that because they're managing channels and they're doing all these other things. And so then you have your product marketing person who's going and interviewing 30 people. And understands not everything that sales does, but at least understands 30 conversations. And then they try to take that and translate it into website messaging that connects to the pain points of the customer. But then if you think about how many other people touch that, then there's brand design. They're going to come in and put in their lens on it. And then there's your ads. By the time you get to the end experience, it's been filtered through so many people who don't understand the pain. That you end up with something super generic that it just doesn't resonate. It doesn't hit the nail on the head for you, right? So this is the old world that we're coming from. It was really hard to do that in that world. The thing that's gotten really easy with AI is you should never just start by writing about your product. You should start with 30 call transcripts from customers in that vertical and extract what are the words that they are using to describe the problem and then connect that to your solution. And so I think this has gotten a lot easier. You can now systematize this really quickly and you can personalize this really easily. I remember at Gusto when we were trying to greenlight our personalization initiative, we went and talked to a bunch of customers. To try to understand why is our conversion rate so bad within our ad channel? Historically, if you came inbound, it converted really well. But then as we started to spend more money, our conversion rates, I mean, at some point they were like 2% in certain channels like Facebook.

This is 2% of people who click the ad and get to the landing page actually bought.

If they got to the landing page, only 2% would become a lead, which you can't scale that, right? So it doesn't really work. Your ACACs through the roof. And so, you know, we went and talked to a bunch of them and it became really clear that you talk to a restaurant, they're like, you don't know how to handle time tracking. You know, all of my employees are hourly. You talk to an accountant and our messaging is all about the fastest way to pay people. And they're like, oh my God, I'm a risk minimizing persona. That's scary as hell. Right. You seem like a startup that I can't trust. And, and so we went and had those conversations, right? Get out of the building, go talk to customers. But even, you know, with that level of conviction, especially for me connecting that to my VMware experience, I'm like, of course, this is what's happening, right? Like, we need to personalize. The process of prioritizing that amongst everything else that we were building that required design and engineering and web work, you know, it took us months to get something out and tested. And then of course, from there, you see the results, and then you can move a lot more quickly. But That's the sort of stuff that's so much faster now. And so there is no reason, there's no excuse to have a generic experience. You have to be a lot more personalized. And, you know, we're trying to make it so that you can get to one-to-one with, with anybody. But I would say if you're not there, at a minimum, you should start with verticals and then quickly move into more and more personalization from there.

Yeah, I mean, I, I guess it's like, it is completely obvious as you scale a business and go wider that the people you're selling to are gonna look more and more different, are gonna have different sets of pain points and needs. And if you serve them some generic message, it's just not gonna hit in the same way all the way through the funnel from like the paid ad to the landing page, to the sales experience, even until, okay, they purchase and now they're a customer and what are the comms that we're sending them?

Exactly. Take every interaction and you're losing 20, 30, 50, 60% sometimes depending on how big your audience is at every single one of those interactions. Multiply those together, it's the difference between a channel that works and a channel that doesn't.

Yeah, 100%. And so where my head goes on this is like, sounds great in theory. How do you actually put this into practice from more of a technology perspective and also from a resourcing perspective? And then B, You know, what's the role of the seller in all of this versus the marketer? And then how do you sort of decide where to go deep? You know, there's 50 industries or 20 industries depending on how you wanna cut it. You go spend like hours and hours interviewing every single one of those people to gather the relevant context. Is that the right answer, et cetera? So maybe we start on even just like, what is Mutiny doing today to make this easier?

So we spend a number of time with some of the best go-to-market teams. Like Uber, Figma, thinking through this problem of personalization at scale. And I would say my conclusion was free agents, it was just too difficult to move beyond the level of verticals.

And so, and by verticals, you mean industries?

Exactly. Industries, personas, So the most scale that a typical marketing team could get to was, okay, I have my really big generic stuff and then I'm going to slice that up into 5, 6, 10 verticals, tailor the experience to that. And it would get them a lot of results. And that was probably where they could get to. If you were much bigger and had more resources, then you would then launch a one-to-one initiative. And the way that that would work is you probably were looking after somewhere around, you know, 12 to 100 accounts, probably a lot less than 100 that you could then do one-to-one for. There was the occasional example of a company like Snowflake where they had 30 people in ABM who could handle upwards of 600 accounts because they basically just hired ABM a little bit more similarly to the model of sales so that they could, they could really partner up and execute. But that's not realistic for most companies, right? Like, you can't really do that. Yeah. So that was in the pre-agent world.

And just really quick on that. So in that instance, to go get the 5 or 6 or 10 splits, you're effectively deploying marketers towards understanding the specific nuances and use cases of what's going on.

Yeah.

To then pull out differentiated messaging and experiences. And even when they do that, it's not insanely fast because they have to both go actually figure out what the underlying differences are and then figure out how to go plug that into the entire funnel and at a larger company that's working with potentially a dozen different people.

Yeah, exactly. But presumably it's manageable for most teams because you're launching 10 campaigns, you're iterating those some number of times, you could get it done. But when you go to the one-to-one level, that's when everything breaks down. And then of course lots of optimization is also not really that possible in that world. And so I think the, the solve for this is to have an agent execute this for you. And in our world, the way I see it is you actually should empower the salesperson to do what was historically considered ABM for themselves. And so my vision for this is that the marketer puts in the guardrails, makes sure that things are on brand, and they can, they can have their templates and turn on ads. You know, they can kind of set some of the ground rules, but then the salesperson is using it every day to get their deals done. They know the most about the deal. They have a lot riding on it, and they should be the one that can direct the agent to do what they need it to do for them. And so right now with Mutiny, they can create customer-facing assets. So let's say you own a bunch of accounts and these are expansion accounts. So you already have a relationship with them. You're trying to grow them. You can actually create a lot of those historically considered ABM materials as a salesperson. You can just do that yourself and get in front of those customers, increase your conversion rate for getting that first meeting booked. But then also throughout the cycle, create a business case, you know, whatever it is that you need, custom proposal, etc. You can also generate all of that stuff for yourself. So it's as if you have a dedicated ABM and product manager working for you that is creating things for you instantaneously, right? Where I want to take this is full activation of campaigns as well on top of it. So you'd be able to say, well, you know, you're getting into a large account, like maybe Microsoft. That's an account that should get a one-to-one ad. And so you'll be able to activate that for them. The enabling investment that we're making to get there is we're basically plugging into different data sources so that the agent can proactively guide the seller on what they should do next. So what that looks like specifically is you get a Slack message. It's like, hey, you just got off a call. Here's what they asked for. I've created it for you. You can go ahead and send this to the customer. Or, hey, this deal is now late stage. Let's turn on nurture ads for the whole buying committee for this deal. And there's a human in the loop who can give feedback if they want, but the agent's doing all of the heavy lifting, the proactive pinging and all that stuff, doing it for them. For the marketer, it's like, hey, this campaign isn't doing very well. Here's the new version of that campaign. Yeah, we are, you know, in terms of how we've broken up this pretty ambitious vision of, you know, making everyone go-to-market athlete with all these capabilities is we started with a big bet on creative, because that was the really hard part. And quite frankly, up until 9 weeks ago, it wasn't really working. And then all of a sudden, it all just clicked. And now it's generating really amazing assets. We took a big bet that AI was going to get there and we were there early and it worked. And so, so now we can create all of these things that the customer sees. The next layer of it is the full automation and the proactive execution of it.

Yeah. Okay. This makes sense to me. So what you're saying is that now you can actually automate almost all of the asset creation and you just need somebody to dictate what needs to get created and then actually sort of like orchestrate it. And so that's the landing pages, the one-pagers, the ROI case studies, the comparables of existing customers and what they're doing. And so because the sellers are every day interacting with the customers, they should actually know what they need to go give the customer, the prospect. And historically they'd have to like pay marketing, hey, can I get this one-pager? And marketing would go maybe do that if they had the time, but can't do that for very many people. And now the seller can effectively do that. The one thing that still seems fuzzy to me is you still need the marketer to actually create the sort of foundational product differentiation in the first place.

Yeah. So the way that we have built this is so that a sales team can get started by themselves and they will be able to create things that are far better than what they're creating today. So our agent extracts the brand, it almost like emulates a brand designer and creates guidelines for itself on how to comply to the brand so that it's not just use these colors, but there's standards of you don't do this with that, or here's the context of when you can make certain design decisions, etc. So it understands all of that and probably understands that better than most people on the marketing team, to be honest, outside the brand design team. And then it will also automatically extract images, customers they have, case studies, resources, all of that stuff. And Self Tags does all of that automatically within a PLG signup. So within a short period of time, it is doing all of that for them. And then they can create assets a lot of times in one shot that are pretty high quality.

Yeah.

That has all of their stuff that they need. Like, we were getting text messages, screenshots, emails from like investors, from founders, from different people that have been using it that are like, holy shit, I can't believe it one-shotted this for me. And so, so it can just do that. And honestly, most marketing teams look at that and they're like, this is way better than what the rep would have done on their own, which is take screenshots of a PDF and put it in the deck. I mean, it's crazy if you look at what sales reps try to do to get around this, because I think in a lot of cases they're not waiting for marketing. There is no marketing to help them with this, right? Unless you're closing Boeing, no one's helping you. You know, marketing shouldn't be helping you, quite honestly. They have all sorts of like bigger fish to fry. They have to build brandness. They have to create the market. They have to do all this scale stuff. They can't really do that. And we have a ton of salespeople and sales teams that are using Mutiny all by themselves. However, the— what's been really interesting is the marketing teams, they very much want to empower the sales team as well. So when we have a marketing team on Mutiny, all of them are in the process right now of— now that Mutiny is available self-serve to the sellers, they are all interested in, okay, let's get this into the sales team. And if you have both marketing and sales, in the agent, it just gets better because if you're a larger company, you want to run ads, that probably has to go through marketing. And so they're going to have to set up the rails for that. They can just do a lot more magical stuff and set up a lot more things for the sales team and, you know, so that they can operate even more efficiently.

I think where this takes me, I'm curious if you agree with this, is like as the personalization and the quality of the asset creation gets easier programmatically, right? And I haven't played around enough with the Mutiny product, but you're basically saying like we're there on that, then what it means is the marketers can actually spend more time deriving unique insights and making sure that like that's feeding into the underlying system so that the substance of the copy that goes out in the one-pager to the vertical persona mix, yada yada, is actually right on the head of the thing that they care about. And historically the marketer could do some of that, but because they had to spend all this other time on asset creation and on on all the things that, that you sort of felt like at Gusto you were blocked on because you had to do all these other parts to actually like deliver the marketing. You couldn't actually go as broad and as deep on what's the unique insight in this specific use case. Whereas now the GTM athlete, like the unique value that they're adding, cuz I personally don't think the LLMs are there yet, but maybe you disagree, is like deriving the unique insights and making sure that they're amazing. Like you pull call transcripts and case studies and it gets maybe like 70% of the way there, but I don't think the LLMs are quite at the like, oh, the insight here is that these guys want to move really quickly, you know, and not have to worry about, you know, HR or whatever.

Totally. So I agree with everything that you said. I think that AI is getting a lot better at that piece, but where we're at today is the agents raise the floor so that the marketing team can raise the ceiling with more creativity, right? To your point, historically they were bogged down just trying to keep the lights on and do the basic plumbing and execution. There was no room for creativity. And right now, what a time to be alive. Like, you can be so creative because you don't have to do that minutia anymore. You can get that done so much more quickly and you can take a step back and say, how can we take this to the next level? What is something really creative that we can do? And I think that's so amazing. Like in a way it reminds me of when marketing started, right? Like the Don Draper days of marketing where you could just have the big ideas. And in that case, you would put it on a billboard, but in the digital world, you have some idea and then you spend 99.9% of the time executing it. And so you just get to do a lot of ideation and cool things, but now we're masking that execution away. So now you get to be so much more creative. And so I'm excited to see new personas enter the marketing field. Really creative people.

Yeah.

Just come in and do cool stuff. Honestly, when we did our launch, I just posted about this. 40% of the signups are founders and CEOs. And we built an agent for sales and marketing people.

Yeah.

Because I think they have a lot of ideas for what they, you know, what they think they could be doing. And so I think it just opens it up to a lot more creativity. And I'm excited to see how GTM evolves.

Yeah, I want to recap a bunch of things. You obviously have like Mutiny is solving this specific opportunity or problem from everything I've seen would highly recommend checking out the product. But if we just take a step back and think about it independent of Mutiny, it's like the capacity for personalization is way higher. Building trust is important, if not more important than it's ever been. And this sort of like ability to go really deep on creativity and on segmentation and on the things that, you know, we might call like real marketing, uh, like there's just more capacity. And so this sort of like the teams that are gonna win, and there's probably a lot of delta over the next, like, couple of years until everybody catches up are the ones that are going to automate a lot of the asset creation, that are going to empower the salespeople to go actually figure out exactly what sets of assets to give to what prospects, how to personalize the kind of last mile so that marketing doesn't have to do that. The end prospect experience is faster, more personalized, more custom, really stands out and cuts through the noise. And then the sort of marketing teams will be spending more time on like very creative, campaign generation, talking to customers, pulling out unique insights and getting way more segmented in what they're doing. And that, that future is going to help all of marketing and then probably like even more as you sort of move upmarket.

Totally. And I think the message is learn how to automate the things you don't want to be doing so that you can spend all your time doing the really cool creative stuff that you do want to be doing.

Yeah, 100%. One, Other question on this is like account-based marketing, which people kind of historically have defined as like, you gotta go super deep on the account and really custom experience and yada yada. And a lot of this feels like account-based marketing at scale. If you go dedicate X% more resourcing to like the top 100 or the top 500 or top 1,000 accounts, like, do you think the ceiling is even higher in terms of what you can accomplish today?

I think you can do account-based marketing and more for every single prospect. The first step of this is agents that can create a pretty good experience with a human in the loop. And I think fairly quickly it'll get to no human in the loop. And so they can start generating that. You can go all the way to SMB. So I am super bullish that you can generate amazing experiences and do what we call ABM for everybody.

And do you think, though, that like bigger companies will get still better experiences, or do you think it's just like all the bars are going to be like equally high for everybody?

Oh, I think you can give much better experiences to the larger companies because you can spend a lot more money on them.

Yeah, that's true.

So like think of something like a custom event. You're not going to do that for a small business. You can still have agents help you create that custom event a lot more easily, take out a lot of the grunt work from it, finding the customers, inviting them, etc. You're not going to do that for a tiny customer, but you will do it for a larger one. You can send them really custom, amazing gifts that connects to the problems that they're trying to solve or something unique that you observed about them. I mean, there's really no limit to the creativity that you can put into the larger accounts. It's a good clarification. I don't think everyone's just going to get the same exact experience. I think the enterprises will get much better and more creative things, but you can raise the floor for everybody.

Yeah, it's almost like how most people would define ABM today for the best accounts. You can actually make universal for everybody, but there still will be a delta between that and what you're serving the most important accounts. And then the ceiling just gets higher on that. Go send them amazing direct mail, go do a bunch of research, show up at their office with donuts, you know, whatever the sets of things are you can just raise the bar even further.

I think good clarification too. I am, as you know, maniacal about the customer experience, right? So everything in growth, I don't believe in hacks. Everything starts with what is best for the end buyer, because if you can deliver that, you will have a sustainable growth engine that actually lasts. And so I think the way that we're approaching Mutiny is I don't want to create things with Mutiny that are spammy. So if you look at the first Cambrian explosion of AI, right, with all the AI-generated emails, I don't think that was good for the buyer and I don't think it was good for the industry because it basically burned email to the ground. Executives do not open email anymore, right? Like if you talk to any sales rep, they will tell you it is impossible to get to them. And I think the way that we're approaching Mutiny We're trying to be a lot more thoughtful about what is a great experience for the customer. And then how do we, how do we deliver that? And I think as the company that's designing the things that you can do within Mutiny, it's important to think about what do we want to create? What type of world are we leaving behind? What's a great experience that actually has longevity when everybody else is doing it? And that's where I think it goes to raise the floor so that everyone's happier and it makes it easier to understand products and purchase them. But you're— you are still going above and beyond for all of your enterprise accounts in really creative ways.

Yeah, completely. So this begs one question for me that I want to ask before we get into kind of the wrap-up questions, which is what would you recommend somebody do who wants to get better at marketing at this sort of understand the users and come with creative ideas and connect pain, you know, sorts of things that might be a little bit earlier on in their career.

I think you should sell. And I don't mean listen to sales calls. I mean sell because you will learn some things about the customer by listening. But when you're selling, you're in the hot seat. You feel the pressure of what it feels like in that moment. When you're trying to connect the dots and answer the customer's questions. And the level of ideation and creativity that it unlocks for you is very different than if you're just listening to the calls, because then you're like, oh, in this moment, the thing that I need to create for the sales team to be able to succeed in that moment, it's a lot more empathetic to the situation. I think a lot of times marketers will create things that just doesn't land with sales because they don't get the implementation of it right, because they don't fully understand being in the seat of a salesperson and trying to close that deal. If you give them an ROI calculator, right, they're going to have to use that on the call with the customer. So do they have the right information to put in there? Does it accommodate the customization that they need to make for the customer? I think the more you're in that seat and you're in charge of creating the ROI, then you will make an ROI calculator that actually really works for the field. So if you're starting out and you're a new college grad, one, you should come to our go-to-market hackathon on Wednesday, March 4th in New York City. But two, you should try to sell and you don't need anyone to hire you to be a salesperson and prospect on LinkedIn. You can get into the flow and start to understand what it feels like to buy and to sell, and obviously learn to use the crap out of AI because you have to compensate for the lack of experience with being much better at using the technology. And I actually think there's an opportunity to be even better than a lot of folks that have more experience with these things because you can come at it from first principles without the baggage of the past that may no longer be relevant. Quite frankly.

Yeah, I love that. Awesome. We're coming up on time, so I want to ask you two quick questions that, that I like to ask everybody that comes on. The first one is, what is your favorite underrated software tool?

Let's see. So I love Down Dog app for yoga. It's— doesn't it make you just tell it what you are trying to do and it'll auto-generate an instructor with all of the things that you need to get your practice? So that's probably my favorite consumer tool besides the, all the ones that everybody else talks about.

Nice. Nice. Yeah, for any yoga fans, uh, that's a great one. And then what about your favorite growth hack or creative campaign that you've heard of or run yourself?

I love things that are different. I think we've talked about this before, right? Like everything starts with different, not better. And if it's not different, quite frankly, you shouldn't do it because it's probably not going to work. The ROI is not going to work out because marketing and growth is so competitive right now. And so something that I saw a couple years ago, we did an award program and we asked marketers to submit all of their creative ideas. And the one that I loved and voted for was a children's book for data scientists. So their persona was data scientists, and it's really hard to explain what a data scientist is. They wrote this kid's book. It was beautifully done. And I think it generated 30 or something percent of their pipeline.

That's awesome. I love that. Cool. Well, any final thoughts on, on anything we talked about before we wrap up?

The last thing I'll say is I think this is an amazing time to differentiate yourself versus the competition. This is a very competitive market. It's never been easier to start a company and everyone has AI this and AI that. And so everyone that's selling is competing against lots of other alternatives. And I think where you can also differentiate as a go-to-market person is on the buying experience. And so you have a lot of power. There's a lot of tools. Really try to think about that as a competitive advantage for your company and how to implement that at scale.

Yeah, I completely agree with that. Well, Jaleh, thanks so much for coming on. This has been fun.

Amazing. Awesome. We did it.

We did it. That's it for the pod. Thanks for making it until the end. If you haven't already, don't forget to hit follow on Spotify and subscribe on Substack with the link in the show notes. Also, special shout out to Tiff Schonder from Sapphire Adventures for the encouragement to get some new intro and outro music. Until next time.