5 actionable strategies for building the fastest marketing team with Mutiny CEO Jaleh Rezaei

before we get kicked off today. Alright, I am admitting some more attendees, but I'll go through this. It is an interactive 30-minute session, so don't be quite surprised as you join, your video pops up. That is intentional. You are muted, however, you do have the opportunity to mute yourself, and we encourage that interactivity. There are two ways that you can ask questions. One is the raise hand little icon at the bottom of the Zoom screen, and also in the chat functionality as well. So you can— Hello, Thomas. —and you are able to drop in your questions as well. All right, these sessions are being recorded and they are streaming live at the moment. So we have a lot to get into a session that is 30 minutes long. So without further ado, I am going to hand it over to Jaleh to take us through today.

Awesome. Thanks, Sammy. Nice to meet all of you. And it would be great if you have background noise just to put it on mute. So that we get clear audio for this. So as Tammy mentioned, I'm Jaleh. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Mutiny. We help B2B companies personalize their online experience for their customers and prospects. And prior to Mutiny, I led marketing at Gusto from around— I see my son on the call. —from around kind of like 10 employees to about 500 employees when I left to start Mutiny. And one of the things I'm really excited about today's session is that I think there's a lot of content out there on marketing tactics, you know, the different channels and the strategies that work, but there's very little information on cultures of marketing teams and the characteristics and the internal practices that leads to a team that's consistently winning and discovering winning tactics. And today's session is obviously on kind of the behind the scenes and one of the cultural characteristics that I believe to be really important, which is speed. So we're gonna talk a little bit about that and also go into kind of a 5-part strategy for how you can, rather than having a campaign-based strategy to marketing, have more of a high-speed iterative approach to launching new programs. So I want to start with a question, and feel free to use the chat functionality for this, which is how do you define excellence in marketing? Just whatever comes to your head, like however, whatever you think means good marketing is like Meeting revenue and company-wide growth goals. That's great from Ria. I'm pronouncing that correctly. Yeah, I mean, data-driven decisions to drive strategy, producing stuff people actually care about, which reminds me a bit of the YC slogan of, you know, build something, build something people like. Top customer mind. So that customer centricity. Being able to find the right users that want to pay for your product. Yeah, these are all really, really great. Customer centricity, results, all of these things are incredibly important within a marketing team. But the thing that I have personally found to be the single most important driver of great results. So kind of like one lever below these impact goals is really speed. And I think it's one of those things within marketing that's a little bit controversial, 'cause as soon as you say speed is really important, everyone assumes that what you're advocating for is people running around like chickens with their heads cut off, doing things, not understanding, not worrying or focusing on results. And I have a very different perspective on speed, so I kind of want to talk about what, you know, why it's important, what it means. So let's talk a little bit about why speed is the most important underlying lever that ultimately yields a lot of the byproduct, the results that you guys mentioned within the chat. Growth is incredibly competitive, and I think we often underestimate this. We underestimate this as CEOs. We also underestimate it as marketing teams. We spend collectively over $1 trillion on winning over the eyeballs of the right customers. And it's not— you're not just in competition with your direct competitors. You're in competition for the attention of a particular buyer that may buy many, many, many different products. So it's really competitive. And what that means, in my experience building the marketing team at Gusto and today at Mutiny, we work with some of the best marketing teams like Brax and Amplitude and Segment and Carta, what I've seen is that there are no silver bullets. So it's, it's not possible to kind of say, I have a bunch of money, let's pick a channel, and then bam, you know, that channel generates 20% of your revenue. And so the only way to really get to marketing programs that end up yielding a lot of results is to one, gain extreme mastery in a very few number of channels that happen to work really well for your business and to continue to iterate incrementally in those channels so that you out-execute the competition who are also trying to leverage those same channels to reach those same customers. And in tandem with that, it requires you to— because you don't necessarily know which one's going to be your stars and which ones are going to be the dogs— you have to iterate and try lots of different things. So simultaneous to gaining mastery, you have to be trying other things and rapidly divesting from the channels that are not going to work for you. And so the— really the way to get to these big scaled growth programs is to kind of take your team's ideas that are ideally rooted in a deep understanding of your customer and your market, and to iterate really, really quickly. And that will ultimately yield all the things that you want, which is quality and results and a team that's leading the market where your competition is constantly in reaction mode to all of the new things that you're releasing out there, whether they're the things that work or don't work. So let's talk about what slows us down. There are, I think, 3 things that tend to slow us down without us even realizing it. So one is inability to cut our losses, whether that's for our own internal psychology or politics of not wanting to kind of give up on something that we put our name next to. That tends to be a big one. So a lot of times marketing teams will spend a ton of time working on, you know, 10 programs with the same level of attention when 7 of those programs needs to be shut down because it's not working and it's not going to yield results. And so this inability to cut losses seems to be like really present in my experience within marketing teams. Second is accepting limitations. That don't actually exist. So for example, why are we so slow at making AdWords work for us? Well, we have to wait for 1 month for engineering to produce a new landing page. Or there's kind of these internal points of collaboration that we develop as the companies grow. And we assume that those things need to exist, when in reality, if what you were working on was the most important thing for the company, you could actually remove pretty much all of those limitations, as long as you were willing to look at them as not permanent. And then the third piece is a high-quality bar for things that don't yet matter. So in the process of getting to quality and scaled growth programs, there's going to be a lot of mistakes. And this one's very self-inflicted for marketing teams, I think, because marketers themselves are perfectionists. They believe in the brand values and things that they've built. And we tend to not tolerate any mistakes. And unfortunately, with speed comes mistakes. There are smaller mistakes, but it's very much required in order for you to move quickly. And so one illustration that I like to use with my team is, imagine like this is your brand. So this is the Mutiny logo. And you put so much thought into it. It has its brand values and all of these things that it stands for, the things that it does and doesn't do. And then let's say your team is moving really quickly and all of a sudden there's a mistake that doesn't fit the rest of your brand. And from the perspective of the marketing team, this is kind of the resolution with which you see the mistake. Like it's all you can see. My gosh, that email, that went out didn't have a subject line, or there's a typo on the landing page where we're testing a new messaging. But the reality is that this is actually the view that the market has, because there are so many interactions that other people have with your brand, from your CX experience, your product experience, your various online presence. And so, you know, one mistake doesn't really ruin your brand. And I think it's really important as marketers to realize that so that we can, you know, kind of open up our team to be able to move more quickly and tolerate a little bit of mistake margin that's gonna come with speed. So now what I wanna talk about is how do you launch marketing programs with speed in mind? And how do we move away from what has very sort of historically been the approach of marketing teams, which is these big campaigns that we design and spend a lot of time on, and then we launch 3 to 6 months later? So here's, you know, kind of a 5-part playbook for how to approach that same process but with speed in mind. So typically, the first step that I like to do is a one 90-minute session. This is very early on. So as soon as you want to start working on the program, you get the core stakeholders for the program in a meeting to break down this much larger problem. And the format that I found to help is first coming up with one really big inspiring problem statement and metric. So, you know, what is this big thing that you're trying to achieve through this program that you're building? Obviously, you have big aspirations for it, otherwise you wouldn't be investing time in it if you could never scale it. So articulating that really clearly for people. And then instead of then moving into what most marketing teams do, which is to highlight, okay, how are we gonna achieve that? What I recommend is the black hat technique. Where you, you put on like what we call the black hat, and the goal is to uncover all of the things that can actually go wrong in the program. And this is a process by which you end up breaking down this one large problem statement into a set of core hypotheses, usually 5 to 10 hypotheses and metrics, that help define that program. So the way the black hat technique works is you come up with your big goal. So let's say in this case, we're launching a new partner channel program. And we want to acquire 5,000 partners that can sell Mutiny as a managed service, let's say, just to kind of give you an illustrative example. And that's our big statement, and it's really inspiring, and it's awesome because today we don't have any partners, and so in one year to have 5,000 is really motivating. For the team. So then what we do with the black hat technique is we say, okay, imagine, fast forward 1 year from now, we have completely failed at this goal. What went wrong? And then the whole team starts brainstorming what could have gone wrong. And you'll get ideas like the market isn't big enough, or we couldn't figure out pricing and packaging that worked for partners, or we couldn't teach teach them how to run personalization software, right? So you start to tap into the problem-solving skills of your team, but now for— in order to find, you know, what are all of the things that could go wrong. And then if you just turn those negative statements into positive statements, that's essentially the core set of hypotheses that you're working with in your program. So for example, we might say our first hypothesis is that there are at least 50,000 agencies with customers in our ideal customer profile. So that's one of the core hypotheses that we have, because realistically we can maybe acquire 10% of those partners. That means that we have this very concrete assumption about what the market size is going to be for partners that sell to the same customer profile that we sell to. Another hypothesis might be We can create a rev-share model that attracts these agency partners, right? And, you know, usually you'll come up with 5 to 10 hypotheses. I recommend the hypothesis and a metric that makes it really clear. Once you've gone through this process, you now have gone from, you know, one big program idea and a clear goal that your team is trying to get to. I usually recommend within 1 to 2 years, to a set of levers that helps your team almost have X-ray vision into what are all of the things that need to be true in order for us to actually achieve our goal. And with this understanding, when you approach the rest of the program building, what I found is that your teams get a lot better at quickly identifying, oh, okay, here's the crux of the problem. That we are seeing in this particular situation versus, you know, almost like flying blind and not really understanding the root cause and therefore not being able to problem solve at a deep enough level when you run into issues down the road, which inevitably you will, right? You're solving problems every week. So this is the first step, and it's something you can achieve usually in one 90-minute meeting. Someone summarizes it, sends it out, and now everyone has this like incredibly strategic view into what the program is. Then the next step that I recommend is, this is typically then where the team would go and build for, you know, 2 to 3 months, like depending on the size of the program, they would go and start building landing pages and researching the market and doing all of these things. And so what I recommend is to actually ship it, ship as down funnel as you can. Within 1 or 2 weeks at the latest. And the reason this works is because— I don't know if you've ever tried moving a box. Initially it's really hard, but as soon as the box starts moving, it becomes easier. And it's not an illusion, like you actually— static friction is higher than kinetic friction, so as soon as you go into motion, everything sort of moves a little bit more easily, right? And so the goal is getting your team from static friction into kinetic friction as soon as possible. And this happens, you know, it's not just something that happens in physics. It's also true for the way humans work. It's hard to do something new, right? A brand new program requires so many new things that we have never done before, all these new muscles that we haven't built. And so what it does is it creates this tendency in people to want to get it right. And go into the basement, do a lot of research, plan a bunch of things, and make sure that, you know, we do it correctly. When in reality, you don't learn anything in the basement. You only learn when you launch things and you're actually talking to customers and are out there trying to achieve the goal that— or the smallest sort of like version of the goal that actually matters to you. That's when you start to validate your different hypotheses. That's when you start to learn whether this program can actually be as big as you had hoped. And so the way that I do this with my teams is setting kind of what we call motion goals. So essentially, as soon as we have that 90-minute meeting, then what's our goal for the next 1 to 2 weeks? We try to set a goal that gets the team into motion. And so an example of a bad goal, which might not feel bad, is research partner programs and build our partner deck, right? Like we're launching a partner program, so we need to know what the partner program is. So we need to go research what other people are doing, what are the best practices, and build a deck. Building a deck does not add value to your company, right? So even though it feels like a good goal, it's actually not a motion goal because you are in the basement. You haven't really learned anything about your own partner program and what your market needs from you. So an example of a good goal is to sell the program to one partner this week. That's a lot scarier, isn't it? Right? Like you're just like, you know, you haven't thought through all of the details, but that's exactly the point is you don't want to create all of these precious assets that later haunt you and slow you down and become baggage. You want to move really quickly into the, into learning, right? And it doesn't really matter if you successfully sell the program to one partner or not. It's about going through the actions that you would go through if that was your goal, right? So now if you imagine at the end of this one-week period, you now have, you know, what are all the things you've had to do? You've had to go and find partners that you could reach out to. You've crafted some sort of an email. That has your partner program hook. Maybe the first one didn't work and you had to try a few different ones. You've had to kind of quickly put your thoughts together for why this program is valuable. You've had to get in front of partners. So you validated, you know, you've not only kind of crystallized like what might be the initial value proposition for the partner, but you've also just by virtue of trying to get the partners on the phone with you or on a Zoom with you, You've also validated whether they're actually interested in this program. So by the end of this 1 to 2 week period, you have validated a number of those hypotheses that you had, at least directionally. Like if you were trying to reach out to partners and it was extremely hard to find 10, we probably don't have 50,000 of them in the market, right? Or if you had to talk to 30 of them and only one of them had people in your ideal customer profile, You validated that, you know, you might have some faulty assumptions about this program and whether you can actually scale it as big as you want, et cetera. So that's the motion goal. So whatever is kind of like the crispest goal that your team has to accomplish within 1 to 2 weeks maximum. Then at this point, the team is already in motion, right? They've gone from, static to kinetic friction. They've built out a lot of the different pieces that they need for the program. And what I found is at that point, you don't need as much of a push for the team because now they're doing it and they're, you know, they don't have that psychological barrier and they're already kind of in motion. And so at this point, what I like to do is about like 2 weeks into the program is to set a dashboard that the program owner can create. And as the manager or the leader, you can help them with this. And usually what I recommend is there's kind of two aspects of this that is important. One, you have weekly targets. So even though your goal is to get to 5,000 partners in one year, and sometimes we assume, oh, because that's our, you know, that's a one-year goal, let's break it down into quarterly goals because that's our OKR cycle. It's not— it's too far out for encouraging speed. You really need weekly goals if you want a team to move quickly. And so the goals have to be weekly, which means that you take your quarterly goal or your annual goal and you back into your funnel, right, of let's just make some assumptions. If we reach out to X partners, we'll book this many meetings, and this many of them will turn into a signed partner. So you can kind of come up with some rough assumptions around what your funnel could be, and you, and you create a dashboard around a metric that you can actually move every week. And I usually recommend the lowest point in your funnel that you can track every week. So usually you want like the number to be at least like 1 per week, and maybe even more than that as the program scales. And you want the team to have a target. And this, the target is the same every week, right? So you incrementally add to the target every week and to share the results of what's the target, where are we, what is the actual number that we're at, and to publish those. So whether you share it in your weekly go-to-market meeting or they send out an email to the team with here's where we are, here's what we learned. Are putting the responsibility in the hand of the program owner. They are now accountable. Their progress and expectations on a week-by-week basis is very clear, and you don't have to micromanage. This is kind of enough for the program owners to, to be iterating on their own because they're, they're, they're learning that, oh, if they're behind on a goal, they have to try many, many things differently in order to hit that goal again the following week. And so your job as the manager then moves to more like, let me help you diagnose, let me help you ideate, as opposed to let me figure out what's going on in this program. And, you know, or even worse, coming in at the end of the quarter, realizing that we're off by 50% from the goal that we had set for ourselves. So you have this like really close cadence without necessarily micromanaging or suffocating the team, which I think is really important. Then the fourth step that I recommend is, is a learning meeting, which essentially, this is more just to capture learnings from your team. And the format is, you know, your hypothesis, the test that you designed, and what you learn from it. And it can be a broad group outside of marketing, whenever different teams and program owners are ready. They'll come and like share, hey, here's one thing that we did within our program and this is what we learned. And that's a really great way to like teach your team and your company that mistakes are a part of a fast engine and that these mistakes aren't just, you know, mistakes. You're learning from those mistakes and they are incredibly valuable for your company. And then finally, I would say the fifth step is using technology effectively throughout this process. So I usually start with very little technology just so that the basics that we need to be able to execute and see and track those weekly goals. And then from there, we get a lot more rigorous about technology of what is it that we're trying to— what are the most important workflows that we need to be fast at, and then constantly reevaluating the tech stack to make sure that speed is met with the technology. And almost, I would say, any program that's reaching, you know, after 3 months and moving into scaling mode, it needs technology in this day and age to be able to move quickly. And then I'll close with, you know, the one question that I always ask myself if I want to kind of recalibrate is, are we moving as fast as possible towards the most important thing? This is a really good both like CMO and CEO and program owner question to ask yourself. To make sure that, you know, because the first step is defining what's the most important thing, and then you can think about if you're not moving as fast as possible, what can you be doing differently so that you can realign your team? And I'll pause there. Sorry, this is normally a much longer session. It's an hour-long session, but that I packed into 30 minutes. Any questions?

Hi, this is Douglas. Just a quick question, Jenny. Do you feel that often we might expect to move faster and kind of sideways through the strategy? Because sometimes I see that there's a little bit of a struggle from the marketing teams to understand a strategy that might begin with something product, something in engineering, and it doesn't come across as easily to when people are thinking about the strategy of how to convey that to the, to the customers, right? Do you feel that if you were to, to let's say prioritize something on this, this beginning before getting to the friction of motion, right? How would you make sure that the strategy is well aligned and prepared so when we start running, you have everything that you need in order to success?

Yeah, I think that about the only thing that doesn't change from the beginning of the program to, you know, at any point in the future is the goal and the hypotheses. Everything else changes. And so even if you, if you have a sense of, you know, we want— here's how we're going to go about it— the strategy is actually just a series of tactics that, that we have elevated into a story so it sounds like a strategy, right? But the reality is you don't actually know what the right tactics are. And so what I have What I've learned just through my own experience is I used to spend a lot more time on the strategy up front. Now I spend a lot less time on the strategy and a lot more time on the goals. That doesn't mean that strategy isn't important and you don't need to think about it. It just means that it's not set in stone and you have to be open to it evolving. And so usually you can go back, um, you know, in like a really great program, like when people come and speak about it, They'll, a year later, they'll present such an immaculate strategy, but really that strategy was discovered through trial and error, unless they just got lucky and it happened to be right. But what I found is often you're not that lucky and you have to do a lot of iteration along the way. Does that answer your question?

Makes a lot of sense. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It's about committing to reaching the goal, not exactly how you're gonna do that. So you're still gonna have the flexibility to innovate with insights that are receiving from market, I guess.

Yeah, and you will discover, like, you know, I think it's good to have some sense of how are we going to execute this, right? Just be flexible with it changing all the time, basically. Thank you so much. Any other questions? And it looks like we might be out of time. So feel free to reach out to me on, you know, LinkedIn if you want to connect. I'm also publishing something on this topic with a lot more example in long form. So if you ping me on LinkedIn, I can send that to you once it comes out in the next couple of weeks.

Fantastic. Thank you so much, Charlay, for such an insightful session. So here's to moving faster to the most important thing.

Thank you, everyone. Great. Have a good one. Bye.