Gurupandian Chandrasekaran, revenue leader at JustCall, argues that perception drives discovery and distribution more than product alone. He says listening to customer calls for tone, context, and unspoken cues beats surveys. Running rapid experiments on messaging and channels, then analyzing calls for objections and pain points, can cut retention costs by roughly 25%.
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Hi folks, very happy to be presenting some of the insights in getting your go-to-market strategy right. My name is Guru and I lead BPA revenue and growth at JustCall. So I'm going to talk a little bit about our one chapter of how to get your GTM right. So I want to start off with the first point is this is a very common phrase used in all B2B SaaS companies. It's very tough to build products, but the truth of the matter is distribution actually wins product, right? Because distribution matters more than product, right? So that's something to take, but we want to go one step above that in your go-to-market motion and build something. So we have a theory which says perception is greater than discovery, which is greater than distribution and product. What it means is it's tough to build product, Distribution wins product all the time. And then discovery. Without discovery, distribution gets very difficult. And to get discovery by customers, you need to get perception. So perception, what exactly is perception, right? And that's kind of like leads to our first chapter. Now, this is applicable for even first-time founders here, just with one person working on a garage, head of sales, head of support. It doesn't matter who you are in the go-to-market motion. It matters to everybody. As you start and as you keep building your product and go-to-market motions, the internal perception is actually the very strongest. You have a very clear idea on like, this is what I think we are selling, this is what we stand for, this is what we market. But there's a quote, customers rarely buy what we sell, right? So you have to align internal perception with external perception. And that's a very, very important phrase. You have to get the outside-in perspective in to understand, okay, what do people think about a product? What do customers think? And that is what is at the heart of our first chapter, which we are calling it Listening. We have a go-to-market deep dive series. We're going to be talking about multiple points here. But as of today, just focus on the first chapter, which is Listening. Now, to get your go-to-market right, There are only 2 things that I think matters, right? Learning and speed. Because you have to keep trying different things. What worked for you like yesterday, that's not gonna work today. You're gonna keep trying, you're gonna keep learning, you're gonna do it faster. Now you can't go all in, so you're having a bunch of experiments, right? You're testing your go-to-market strategy, you're testing like, you know, even it's an inbound motion, outbound motion, an email copy, even in one email, right? A LinkedIn message. Everything you've got to be testing. So you want to test your go-to-market strategy with real clients, right? No more assumptions. We live in a space where you have to test it real time. And how do you take what's working and scale it? And that is at the core of any successful go-to-market motion. Now, why should you make listening part of your go-to-market motion? There is a certain cost of all these tools to get the listening inbuilt into your go-to-market motion. But I'm here to tell you, Making listening an active part of your go-to-market motion reduces your customer retention cost by like 25%. Why is listening so important? And people might think like, I think we've already spoken to our customers, right? What are we missing here? What you're missing is you have to hear it from the horse's mouth, right? Every time you want to hear it at scale, you want to look at what are the red flags about and what are the issues The customers are talking to you with your CX team or even sales team for that matter. And then you have to challenge your go-to-market assumptions, whether it is messaging, branding, positioning, what are you articulating as value of your product? And then using this, you've got to start building better CX models because customer experience goes from a point where they don't know we exist to becoming an evangelist. So in this entire journey, You got to keep listening to your customers. And most important thing in this thing is you need to listen to what customers are asking you. You want to have a latent understanding of their needs, the preferences, and the patterns which evolve. And that is precisely the reason why listening should be part. And for all the GTM team members, don't think it's a marketing job or a product marketing job. It's for every person in that go-to-market motion. Now, the next question which our customers tell us is like, where should I listen to my customers? Where should I go? There are so many channels you're already leveraging, right? You have business calls, emails, social media posts, comments, texts. These are all there. But I feel when you're starting out and when you're testing out something, right, even 5, 10 calls or 100 calls makes a lot of difference. And that's why what you talk to a customer in real time matters a lot more. And now I'm not here to demean any other channel, but this has a lot of weight because when you hear somebody say, that carries a lot of heft because it doesn't capture— like an email doesn't capture a context of what somebody is trying to tell over a phone call. You can hear the voice, you can hear the pauses, you can hear what people are not telling you. That's why it's an important source. Now, why do conventional surveys and scores fail? Because these don't capture context. These kind of like, you know, goad the customer into selecting some option which doesn't actually reveal what they're actually asking you. So, and that is why we kind of believe listening should happen in phone calls, in when the customer's tone, voice, all matters. Now, this is a space where like, you know, you must have heard, or this is maybe new to you, talking about conversational intelligence. But why, what all can you mine from a good sales call? There are so many things, right? You can start off by asking like, what is the brand recall for a customer? You can test like if a customer knows your brand, is there an aha moment when they hear about your brand? They know, oh, I've heard about you, I've seen it there. Always ask for the channel, the source, because marketing is a dark funnel, right? So you want to know where which part of your marketing funnel is making an impact for this customer to come to you and which is creating a recall. Now, that's an important part, but not as important as the next 2 things, which is you have to always test your messaging. You have to ask, is this messaging exactly conveying the value that you want? And also you have to ask the customer to describe the pain point in their language. And it might not tally because the customer never buys what we sell, right? They have their own way. They will describe their pain problem in a very different language than your message. So you've got to align them. And there are other common things like, okay, what are the objections that you have? What are the key moments or deal drivers that is kind of taking the deal forward? What is the pain point that you've come to talk to me regarding? So all this is some of the big insights that you can glean into in every call. And that's kind of the bigger territory called conversational intelligence. We'll dive deeper into it. And this is the point where I want to talk to you a little bit about why you need a tech stack for it, right? You can just have one person talk to 10 customers and tell you, hey, this is what I think my customers told me. You have to do this at scale with remote working, with different people coming in and going, right? You have to have a platform which can record calls, decode them automatically without some person having to go through, go through them manually. You need to have the engine bake up all kinds of insights, alerts, give you sentiments. So we'll kind of delve into it and how you can make listening a key part of your customer experience, be it sales, marketing, support, success, account management, any team. Because it needs to be a collective brain. Now, top of the mind, right? What will listening real help me and what will the tech stack do it? First is calls, which I've already talked about, uh, which can be real-time transcripts, uh, during a call, post-call. So you want to choose a platform which gives you both because post-call is great for learning but not for improving the current call. So you have to have the privilege of having both. Everything is recorded. And now AI scoring is something which you can have sophisticated AI or minimal. You have to decide what you want. You want a tool at the bare minimum to give you pattern recognition, to tell you, okay, are they sticking to a particular script? Are these phrases being occurred? You have to find patterns which influence a sale, influence a good customer support call, influence a success call. Basically improve the CX engine. And there should be a lot of elements and drivers regarding moment analysis, sentiment, regarding the tone of the customer, regarding words like pricing, regarding words like discount, right, uttering a competitor's name. All this needs to be prioritized both during and post-call. Now you have to have at the bare minimum all these things to do to have listening as a strong strength within the go-to-market motion of your company.
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