5 Steps to Build Your First GTM Playbook with Stage 2 Capital

Welcome back to this week's Workshop Wednesday. Hopefully welcome back. Do we have any first-timers this morning for Workshop Wednesday? I assume we're all regulars at this point, but drop in the chat and let us know if this is your first time. We'd love to know where you're tuning in from, of course. We're super excited for this week to have Mandy Cole and for our topic that she's going to walk us through. So every Wednesday, we're here. We got the week to share detailed, interactive, and hands-on workshops and conversations. So we bring the SAS expert, you guys bring questions. You'll have the opportunity to interact today with Mandy directly to ask any questions, um, as she's going through a presentation. And then of course at the end she's going to take time to answer some questions for us. So this week, Mandy Cole, she's a partner at Stage 2 Capital. She works with Mark Robert, one of our OG SaaS fan favorites, um, at Stage 2 Capital. So today she's going to walk us through her 5 steps to build your first GTM playbook, and then of course open it up to your questions. And this was a super popular networking session that we had at Annual. We got a ton of attendees and a ton of questions, so we wanted to bring it back here to open it up to the community. So maybe you have questions on the 5, maybe you have other insights that you want to share. We definitely want to hear them. So looking forward to diving in. Of course, before we do that, just a couple housekeeping rules. As I mentioned, interaction is our key and our goal here. So get your questions ready. We want to give you the access to Mandy and learn from her, but also give you the opportunity to get all of your questions answered. If you drop your questions in the chat throughout her slides, I'll ask if you want to come off mute so you can ask yourself. If not, I'm happy to ask Mandy for you on your behalf. Mandy, welcome, and thanks again for joining us this morning.

Thanks so much for having me, Caitlin. Super excited.

Good, love it. Well, as our regulars know, we do have a few warm-up questions thrown at you to get to know you a little bit better. So let's just in with some of those. First, to kick us off, what is one of your favorite investments that you or the firm have made in the past year?

In the past year? Well, it's always hard to say favorite because I feel like all of them are like, you know, my children, um, unique in their own way. Um, my partner and I did make an investment, um, earlier this year, this summer, um, that, um, and when I say partner, we work in teams at Sage Street. We're sort of unique that way in that there's one partner that has an investment background, the other that has a go-to-market operator background, which is myself. And then we work together as a team with our, with Portco. So that's something unique about us. We invested in a company called MedScout, which is a go-to-market— think of it like Apollo for the medtech industry. And so super excited. They're on track to do 5x growth this year. We love the founding team. We love what they are solving. When I was consulting before I joined Stage 2, I worked with a few companies that were selling into medtech and pharma, and there hasn't been a lot developed in that space to really, especially as COVID has also changed how those reps sell, to help the, the sales folks in that space really understand who they're targeting, how to target them, and, and, you know, be more productive. And so we're really excited about working with that. Team.

That's great, um, and good to hear kind of more how you guys work in teams as well. Um, just looking at the chat's blown up. We've got obviously some Bay Area, Saratoga, Menlo Park, Virginia, Brazil, um, Seattle. So thanks everyone, keep dropping in the chat where you're from. Let's get on to our next question for Mandy. Um, what has most surprised you about venture capital this year?

I think for us specifically, what's been a refreshing surprise is to see valuations go back to normal and to see the emphasis back on really retention. And because we've always taken the lens that the first thing we look at is usage data and retention and expansion data, because that tells us if there's product market fit. It's ironic that we are a go-to-market-focused venture capital firm, but we don't believe in growth at all costs. We do believe in efficient growth. And in 2021, that wasn't as popular. And now we're excited because that's really, you know, the best companies are made by focusing on that. And certainly something we'll talk about today in building your playbook. So that's been, I think, a good change for the better for everyone, customers or companies and investors.

Yeah, definitely. Getting back to that, that's great. What are you most excited about for the next 12 months as we look forward?

I'm excited to see how we continue to take that efficiency scale and then leverage technology, especially, you know, obviously the buzzword this year has been AI. In particular, I am the partner in our firm that has been looking at go-to-market AI tools and technology. And there's just some really interesting things that are happening out there. And I think the landscape for go-to-market in terms of the roles in go-to-market and, and com— in combination with how the buyer is buying is really going to change in the next 12 months. And I'm excited to see how we can, how that— what that looks like.

Great. And then last question for you. Who is one of your favorite co-investors, if you have one?

This is— I know, also a hard one because we do have a lot of great co-investors. I think there's one company we're co-invested in and Bling Capital is also a co-investor. They just— and NextView— and we just work really together, well together on the board supporting this company. So it's been fun working with them this year on that.

Awesome. All right, without further ado, I'm going to let you jump into your slides. As she is going through the content, please drop your questions in along the way. We'll have plenty of time at the end for questions. Mandy, take it away.

Awesome. I'm excited to jump into building your go-to-market playbook. This is something that we've been revisiting with portfolio companies as we're doing 2024 planning. And it's a great time to do that because this does really feed into your ability to hit your plan. And so let's jump right in. To give a little context on what we're going to start today, I want to talk about what used to happen. And even when I first started selling, which was years ago, you know, the way that I learned to sell was very much like, hey, here's the product. My onboarding was basically like, we're gonna walk you through a demo of the product and then you're gonna go out and sell this product. And that's just been traditionally, in fact, you know, even, even now sometimes a lot where we focus so much on we have to teach the sales rep the product and then they can go learn how to sell the product. But the reality is that the way we sell now is should be focused on the buyer. And if we're designing a process that's going to work well, it needs to be starting with the buyer. And this, I think, is even more important today than it's ever been because there's just more information out there for the buyer to be able to get prior to, to having a conversation. In the last couple years, we've seen that outbound— and for any of you that are doing outbound— in the days of cold outbound, let's get a list and let's just and fire off a ton of emails. It's not really effective anymore because we are not— we get so many emails that it's easy to not look at those. But what we can do is leverage more content, more intent data. So buyers want to do some of their own investigating first. They want to talk to other folks. They want to look at materials. And then they wanna determine when they wanna engage with the seller. And where I'm seeing success and where we typically see success is when a company has a sales process that first starts with how the buyer is thinking about and how they would purchase your product, and then mapping the, the sales journey to that. So that's what we're gonna walk through today, and we'll start with that buyer process. oh, actually first we'll start with your customer and then your buyer process. So step 1 is who are you selling to? What's your ideal customer profile? This isn't a new word. I'm sure we've all heard of this. And so I'm not gonna go through exactly what the ideal customer profile is. What I do wanna talk about are a couple of things that we've seen that are really important that a lot of times is where people can make mistakes. And/or just trip themselves up. So the first is, by determining your ideal customer profile, it's really about focus. Once you get past the founder stage, once you have your first 10 to 20 customers, you have enough to realize, okay, seems that we have a fit here, or we're starting to get pull here, and this is where we're going to focus because this is where it seems like we have a product fit. And so with that, you want to determine both what are your, what are the key criteria? And I've listed some of them here that you want to focus on. Equally important is what you're not gonna focus on. So what I found is that the more that we leave things open, the more that other customers bleed in. And then what ends up happening a lot of times is that you have to make some, some changes on the product potentially. It just, it ends up being a longer sales cycle and you're definitely not focusing on a customer that is right for your product. So we like to now use a green, yellow, red scenario with our teams where we say like, look, green is go after these customers. These are our ideal customer. We're going to sell them. Yellow is, hey, we're not going to outbound to them, but if they happen to come through maybe an inbound channel or a referral, we'll take a look and see if they meet the criteria. And red is right now we cannot focus on this. It doesn't match our product. We're not gonna sell them. So I, the red part is what we don't typically see happening. And then that's where, you know, there's a lot of use or edge cases that tend to come in. And the more clear you can make this for yourself and for your company and for your, if you do have a sales team for your team, the easier it is to just focus on the green. So start there. And then the second is now defining the buyer within that customer's journey. A couple of things on buyer that you potentially have several buyers depending on or, or roles within the buyer's journey. So you can see here that we've— this is a template we can share afterwards, but that we have defined who the buyer is, but also what their role is in the journey. If you're SMB, sometimes maybe you only have one person you talk to, maybe it's the owner. But if you're selling mid-market or enterprise, a lot of times there's a champion. There might be a technical buyer, there's a decision maker. So there could be several folks that you're talking to and you want to make sure that you're defining each of their journeys because they're— what they're looking for could be different, right? The user of your product could have a different value prop than the decision maker has. And that's something that you want to clearly define. When I was at Zenefits, we had a user that was in HR manager, but the decision maker typically was the CFO, and they had two very different reasons for buying the product. And then they also had two very different ways, you know, two different challenges or goals and what they were looking at. And so we wanted to make sure that when we were reaching out to them, that both the content we were using and the, the, the questions and the conversation that the salesperson was having was relevant to that person. So that's why we're defining the buyer's journey. And it starts with, you know, awareness. What are they— what's the challenges? Why would they even need your product right now? What else would they be considering besides your product? So that you make sure that you're arming your team and you're thinking about how to have those conversations. And then how are they going to make that decision? What's the criteria? What's important to them? What's a must-have? What's a nice-to-have? And then what's the timing around making that decision? And then equally as important as when they pass that off to success, or when you pass it off to success, is how are they defining that? And can you meet their definition of success? So let's do a quick example together. And I used OpenTable because I feel like that's something everyone's familiar with. We've probably all made a reservation on OpenTable. And so if you, if I were sitting in OpenTable and thinking about, you know, how are we going to go out and sell to our ICP, I know that typically their buyer is a GM, so the general manager or an operations manager of the restaurant. And that buyer is typically a decision maker. Sometimes they may be a user, but frankly, they're probably not the one taking reservations, or they may be the one managing the schedule, which OpenTable also does. But that's— I wanna think about it in terms of how would they be thinking about it. But really, you know, their thought is we need to make money. We're a restaurant, so we're trying to get customers, fill seats, right? We wanna have butts in seats and we need to reach new customers. If we're getting more customers coming back, great. And then lastly, a lot of times they're looking at how do we optimize capacity in our restaurant and make sure that I'm optimizing also my scheduling around that. I don't need to have as many waitstaff on a Tuesday night potentially as I do on a Friday. So by understanding what my capacity is going to be, I can also optimize around that. So then they're thinking about, so what would I— what could help me with this? There are several other folks out there that I could be looking at. What am I using now? They're probably going to talk to other restaurant GMs. What are you using? What have you looked at? So you wanna get into your buyer's head and think about not only what are other things they would consider, but how are they gonna find out about 'em? Are they going online to research this? Are they going to events? Events have really come back big this year. Are they talking to other, other people in that space so that you can think about where your content is going to be and how you're going to approach them? And you know, not only with your message, but, but where, what channel you're gonna use. And then obviously the decision, what's key criteria for them? In this case, you know, most OpenTable, most restaurants want to make sure that it integrates with their point of sale system that they're using so they don't have to manage two different things. They want to make sure that they do have access to new customers and it's not just— and then, you know, something that's become big for them the past few years is the usage-based pricing. I don't want to pay a flat fee because in January nobody's coming to my restaurant. I wanna pay when somebody actually books a reservation cause I know I'm making money. And then the timing around that. And then again, aligning on the success of, you know, you wanna make sure that when you are implementing a customer, that how they're going to measure the success of your product is actually what you're delivering, or else you're gonna have a retention problem. And that's going to really hurt your ability to continue to grow your business. Business. So step 1— but so that was step 2, buyer's journey. Whoops, my, um, so now we've got our buyer's journey in place. How do we teach our team to sell to the buyer's journey? Um, and that's where we align what we call playbooks around each section of the buyer's journey. Um, so for awareness, I want my team to understand how to reach out. And, you know, what's the right way, right? Especially for outbound, we potentially have a pro— we have a prospecting guide. That's not only how they're reaching out, and what tools they're using in our technology, but also what are they saying? How do they get the interest of the buyer? What are they using that— and this is for when I do this with companies, we do this not only like, what is the salesperson saying, but we also, you know, what is marketing delivering around this, because in a lot of cases, times you're using a case study, or you're using an example, or you're using some kind of content that marketing has created, and you want to make sure that that's clearly in that prospecting guide. Or if marketing is doing some outbound, and they're doing some, you know, putting content out there, and it's coming back in, you want to understand when the team is going to engage in that, you know, a lot of folks are using intent data now. And so I even have— we even have a portfolio company that is testing that they only outbound once somebody has come in and looked at their website. So they're using intent data to run their outbound as well. So that's how we would align each of these. Discovery is clearly once they're considering it, we want to understand more about that company. We want to help them make the right decision. And then we want to make sure that our customers success Success team can continue to manage that company to success. So let me give you an example of one of these. I'm not going to go through all of them. We do have a template online that we can send out. We have this entire playbook template that you can go in and, and modify for your company. But here's an example of the discovery guide. It's the objective for each of these. And then there are— we do have example questions. I like to give my teams examples. I want them to make it their own because I feel like then it's more authentic than having a script. But the real importance is for, for the team to understand and again, get in the buyer's head of how do I do that? You know, why? What is their current situation? What are their challenges? Which is usually fairly easy for people to ask. What gets harder is the next couple of steps. You know, what else are you looking at? What have you used in the past? Did you like it? Why or why not? What else, you know, what are you considering? And then the big one, how are you going to measure success against that? And how are you measured? Because a lot of times the person you're talking to, you know, they've got something tied to the success of this as well. And then what happens if you don't solve this? What's the impact to the business then? And you want to make sure that you're understanding that so that you can solve that for them, as well as criteria and timing. And then recap next steps and confirm with them what you're going to do next. So example of a discovery guide. Now what we want to do is align all this with our CRM. Because this is where forecasting, the importance of managing your pipeline and forecasting come into play. So in a lot of cases, you know, we don't— the way that we manage somebody through in our CRM is very much focused on what our sales rep has been doing, and not necessarily where the buyer has been, which is why we don't, in a lot of cases, have funnel stages, although it potentially I say we potentially should, um, called they're in awareness, they're in consideration. You know, we talk about they're a prospect and now they're marketing qualified lead, they're sales qualified lead, now they're an opportunity. And a lot of that's because it comes from the CRM that we're using. And that's fine as long as you know where it maps back in the buyer's journey. But we have seen some companies go as far as actually renaming their funnel stages to the buyer journey. So completely up to you how you want to do that. To me, the most important thing is that we actually have, um, criteria on each stage that is based on what the buyer does, not what the seller does. So we— the seller needs to know what they're doing, but I want to forecast based on how is my buyer taking action, because then it really removes a lot of the fool's gold from the forecast. And I'll give you an example. I can't even count the number of times I would go on a call with a rep or listen to a call, and the call would end. Let's say it's a demo, and they would say, well, I can send you a proposal. And then the person on the other end, the buyer that we're talking to, says, great, yep, send that proposal over, and then we'll get back to you. And we get off the call, and I say, how do you think that went? Oh my God, that went great. Like they're totally going to buy. And I'm thinking that went horrible. All they wanted to do was get you off the call with the send the proposal. So I would've said, hey, we're still in presentation and we're not moving forward to consideration because, you know, I'm not sure that they really agree with what, you know, they seem to be looking at other things, answering email, not really engaged. Where the sales rep would've said, oh, totally moving to consideration. I'm sending them a proposal. They're excited. And this is where we got to— I just was never willing to forecast up to my CEO based on my very excited and enthusiastic reps, which I was very glad that they were. But, you know, they're more positive than I am on things. I wanted to be and more try to be as, as I guess as close to we could as accurate. And so what I found is that if we just use what the buyer was doing, it tended to be pretty accurate. If the buyer wasn't gonna show up for a proposal call or give us a verbal yes, then we wouldn't, we weren't putting them in consideration. And it really also helped my reps understand that the goal wasn't just to be able to move people forward. The goal was actually to engage, have a conversation, understand who is gonna move forward so we could spend time with those people and give them the, the, the ability to say no, it's okay. If they're not going to move forward and we're not a fit, then let's move then move them out so that we're focusing on the folks that are. So I really recommend that you, if you're not using buyer actions as your criteria, that you make it about the buyer. Again, you can still tell the rep like, hey, here's what you should be doing. And there's certainly now tools that are coming out that are helping with this in turn, in actually in your CRM. So that's really helpful. And we used to build it in, I'll show you an example. So that it— I used to have it built into my CRM so that it looked more like this. I guess I don't have my example in here, but I used to have it built in so that at every stage there would be checkboxes and they would have to complete it with the date. And then my pipeline report would show me what was completed on each of these. So if somebody did move consideration and a client hadn't attended a proposal call, then in the pipeline review meeting, I'd make them take it out. But there are now even tools that, you know, are helping us with AI automate some of this. So I think this is going to become easier and easier for us to manage, which is great. I would have loved to have those tools when I was in-house. Last but not least, this is not a set it and forget it activity, because this is going to continue to change. So you've got to make think about this as an ongoing. When people update, the reason a lot of times playbooks don't work is because we think of them as something like, oh, I've got to write this stuff down. And now I'm just going to sit it somewhere in my Google Drive and no one's ever going to use it. And then new reps come in and then your reps are saying, oh, don't, don't look at that because it's wrong. We don't even use that anymore. And it just helps. It's hard for you to understand what's working and what's not working. If you're not keeping your playbook up to date. So I'd recommend that that's something that you do at least on a quarterly basis is go through it and make sure like, is this actually what we're doing in the field? And if it's not, like, let's update it. Because then we can see the impact to our pipeline. And the way you can measure that is by, you know, we're fortunate now, like, you can still the old-fashioned way of sitting on calls. But we've got a lot of data from the CRM, we certainly a lot of folks have a way if you're using a Gong or a Chorus, or even if you're just using Zoom, you can still review calls and getting customer feedback. So there's lots of ways to measure that. And then, you know, really optimizing. So don't just set it out there. So to recap the key takeaways, and then let's dive into questions and open it up. Because I know all of you are probably in the midst of planning. There's lots of thoughts you have going on about how to optimize your go-to-market next year. And we want to— I would love to dive into that. So just key takeaways. I would define your playbook and your process by your buyer, not by your product, or not by what your sales rep is doing. If you're using that framework, it'll make it easy to see for your team and give them permission where they are aligned. So when you go back to that buyer journey, it makes it really easy for the team to see, gosh, If I have a conversation with them and they don't tell me that this is one of their top challenges, that they're really focused on something else, then I'm not a priority and that's okay. So we want to make sure that we're leveraging that framework not only to create the content and the process, but to also give our reps the ability to say no. We want to use guides so we can standardize how somebody moves through and we can also focus on understanding the customer, not just going in and demoing. We don't want to be giving the same demo over and over again to a customer. It really should be customized, and that's why we want to use playbooks to do that. And then let's continue to optimize, look at how it's working, incorporate best practices so you can share that, um, and customize your CRM stages with exit criteria that is driven by the buyer's actions. So with that, Caitlin, do we want to open it up?

Yeah, definitely. Let's do it. Thank you so much. If you want to share your screen, as a reminder, the recording will be live right after this on our YouTube. Also, these slides will be available on SlideShare. So you, if you didn't get a screenshot, you can make sure she's got some great examples up there that we can reference later or in any questions. So we do want to make this as interactive as possible. I do have some questions that we've gotten through the chat that I'll jump in on and then I'll call on anyone else. Um, some people have mentioned they can, um, ask their questions live themselves. Um, so first, just a question of like, how does this strategy change as you scale as a company?

Great question. Um, I think to me, the methodology doesn't change, but maybe the way I would orchestrate it changed. So when I'm working with earlier stage companies and we only have a handful of reps. Like, actually, I love to do the buyer's journey with the entire— with marketing, with RevOps, with product, with the founders in the room, because I feel like we should all be saying the same thing and we should all be attuned to— everybody is focused on solving the same problem in the entire company. So we should all be in lockstep about that. As you continue to grow, I mean, when I think about when I was at LivingSocial and I had a team of 750 salespeople, it was harder to get product and other folks in the room. So my senior team, we would make sure we were aligned. But instead what we did was we leveraged our best performing reps and made sure that any of the— that as we came out with and updated the buyer's journey and therefore our process, that it was aligned with actually what they were doing and that the content that we were producing, we always were in lockstep with marketing. Was also aligned.

This is kind of a follow-up question to that, I think. And of course, it depends on the stage, but who owns this process? So you mentioned sales, you mentioned working with marketing, obviously, products really important. Can you just kind of talk about, you know, from your past experience, successful stories of how all of these kinds of teams or orgs work together? Yes.

And I think who owns it has evolved too. I mean, I've In the past, I've owned it, I've co-owned it with marketing, or I've owned the sales process part and marketing has potentially owned— if marketing didn't report to me, they've owned the buyer journey part. So I see it in different ways. The great thing about RevOps now is that in a lot of companies, RevOps will own it, at least own the operationalizing of it. And so I think it's just important to define in your company. I don't know that there is a right way to do it. I think the more critical thing is that somebody actually owns each piece. So I'm seeing in a lot of my earlier stage companies that marketing is owning, defining the buyer journey, and then sales is owning the sales process and criteria, um, and managing to that buyer journey. And then they're each owning their respective actions against that. Um, and then they're agreeing upon that together. And then they're sharing the pipeline generated as a shared goal so that it doesn't become finger-pointing around, well, I'm only responsible for leads. How many of us have heard this, right? Well, those leads aren't good. And that's why we can't get ops. So if you're both, if they're both responsible for this, how many operate ops we generate, and we think marketing is going to get this many and outbound or however the channels you can still align that, but owning that shared goal usually then makes teams work better together.

Great. Question from Christy. Do you want to come off mute and ask?

Sure.

Yeah.

So hi, I'm Christy Roaring from Wet Dog Weather. We are a small B2B SaaS company that does weather and visualization tools. And our path has been sort of more legacy direction sales, but we're also founder-led sales. Our first two customers were a great fit with the product that we have, but we've been struggling to find new customers. And so we went ahead and focused on getting profitable by contracting out 50% of our engineering. But, um, do you have any recommendations on how you identify that buyer's journey and how you move to buyer-focused sales?

Yeah. So just to make sure, Christy, I understand. So you've got a couple of customers and you're now trying to find more customers. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. Um, and does the product seem to be working for the couple of customers that you have right now? Yeah.

I mean, So one of our customers is a B2C company that is used by hundreds of thousands of people daily. So I mean, we definitely have a scalable software, and we're working well with integration on the other customer. So it seems like what we have is fitting really well with those customers that we've found so far. But, you know, how do we find more customers that are willing to pay for our service?

Great. So a couple things on where you are. I wouldn't worry as much. I mean, I say this and I know that you all need revenue to, to operate, but you're still in a getting the product market fit stage. And so I think about it exactly. Design Partners, your first 7 to 10. I mean, I wouldn't worry about optimizing revenue on them and I'd think more about like let's get enough on to show that this product works and, and, and that, um, you know, and they're seeing success from it. So I would, you know, go first start with that ICP with your first 2 customers, like fill out, okay, what are the similarities, where should we go after, um, and, you know, so get kind of a profile and then figure out how to get in front of some of those others. A lot of times at your stage, people are using their network if you— I don't know if you have any investors now or friends and family, but reach out and say, hey, we'd love to talk to other companies, or even approach people on LinkedIn. And a lot of times the way that you can do that as the founder is say, I would just love your feedback on this. I'd love to show you what we're doing. This is the problem we're trying to solve. Um, you know, we'd love to show you and get your feedback. It's, it's a much more approachable way than I want to see if, you know, this is something that you want to buy. And if you know, in a lot of cases it ends up being that they are interested, and if not, then they may know other people. And so I just ask, well, does this resonate with you, or have you talked to anyone else recently that you feel like could really use this? And the other thing you could look at is if there's an event that has a lot of these people at it, you know, I'm not saying go, don't, don't get a booth, don't sponsor, don't do anything. Go and just—

we actually have a booth coming up at the next meteorological conference in January.

So, okay, perfect.

That is how we've been getting out there.

And then keep track. The last thing I'd say, Christy, is keep track of all the conversations you're having. I don't know if you're using like HubSpot or even if you're just using Excel, because if you do—

we're using Pipedrive. Yeah.

Okay. 25 conversations and nobody's interested, then there's something else there too. So you'd want to ask them why.

Great, thank you so much.

You're welcome.

Sean, I see your hand raised. We've got 2 more questions just ahead of you in the chat. And David, yours keeps getting upvoted. So let's jump on that. Great process. How do you envision it would need to be extended for companies and enterprise sales, i.e., complex sales, multiple buyer roles, 6, 7-figure deals?

Yes, great question. So obviously, I showed a a, a V1 of this. When we're working with enterprise companies, it is more complex because what we do is we first have— and I do have some content around this, I don't think, not sure if it's on our site or not, but I can send it to Caitlin if it's helpful. We have a buyer matrix that we build out with folks that has all of the different roles in it. And then each role, you know, what what their criteria is, you know, what they care about, what they need, what they want, what they care about when they come into play in the role and what they play. And then what we do is we map that to, you know, we build a buyer's journey for each of them and then map that to the process and then align that to content. Or, you know, so at each stage, we're thinking about who actually, who get involved, where they get involved in the process. Because not everybody is involved at the initial stage, right? Like a lot of times you're not reaching out to the technical buyer. Potentially you're trying to just make sure that your use case is resonating and that you've got somebody internally that's going to champion you. So sometimes depending, that might be the champion, sometimes it might actually be the decision maker. You may be trying to talk to both of them at the same time. And so you want to just make sure that you've aligned on what, who you're reaching out to at each stage. I also think it's important to make sure that you align on who has to be involved before you move forward. And so an example of that, I'll bring the technical buyer back up. I've seen several times in cases where when there is a technical integration and the technical buyer is not brought in by a certain time, and then you think that you're in procurement, and then they rear their head, you think it's just a, oh, we're they're just going to like check this off and then they blow up the whole deal. So you make sure that you understand when that person has to be brought in and get their buy-off as part of that. So it's basically a more complex version of what we did, but using the same methodology. Awesome.

Thank you.

Can I ask a follow-up question?

Yeah, sure, go ahead. I think I found it in the chat, but Mandy, maybe you can Confirming.

Okay, perfect. Right.

Yeah, Mandy, thanks. That's really helpful. So, and with those multiple, you know, buyer roles, right, you really end up with multiple buyer journeys, right? Do you then also encourage your portcos to try to map all of that into the CRM? And because that's where I've, you know, run into troubles, right, is trying to get that complexity. You know, the economic buyer might be moving along one path in one stage versus somebody else and wondering A, do you map it into the CRM? How do you handle the complexity? And if you're allowed to say, is there a particular CRM tool that you believe handles that better than other ones?

Yeah. So I actually, I will say that I used to think Salesforce only because I think I use Salesforce all the time and I was just more of a super user. I have seen it now done well in HubSpot. I think it depends on what's the best tool for your organization and how much— what else you're integrating with into that CRM. What I would say is it depends on who's doing it, right? With a lot of— I mean, I would honestly, the majority of my portcos are using a RevOps outsourced team that we really like that I know does it well and will do it right and doesn't overcomplicate. Before I joined Stage 2, I did— for 5 years I was a consultant. I had my own team and we would go in and stand up go-to-market, the play, the strategy, the playbook, and the team. And I had an ops person that would configure. And half the time we were unwinding things that people had hired, you know, somebody that really didn't know what they were doing and they came out and built all this custom stuff out. And now like you couldn't really run reports, you couldn't connect other things. And so that's where I just get a little wary. When people say, well, I'm just gonna hire a RevOps person, it's like there are several flavors of RevOps people, and they may not know the best technology. So I would recommend potentially, I think it's worth getting and spending the same amount of money, honestly, that you would spend on hiring a RevOps person to get somebody like Iceberg, who's who we use, to come in and do it the right way for you initially.

Great. Thank you.

You're welcome.

All right. Question from Mark. What process do you use to determine which marketing activities to focus on? SEO, SEM, content, events, etc.?

Yeah. So great. Honestly, it's this process. We're doing this right now with the Portco where we've got a decent amount of inbound coming in. And the reality— and the question started to be, Well, what other channels should we look at? And I said, let's just get back to the buyer journey. Let's look at actually what the buyers, what are they trying to solve? And have we gone and talked to a few of these and asked them where they're getting their content? So a lot of times I go back to putting ourselves in, here's the person we're trying to reach and here's what they're doing right now. And therefore that's gonna tell us a lot about, you know, where we can find them. And start to engage in that conversation. We have some companies that are reaching out. We have a company that sells to— they are a platform that helps services businesses like plumbers and home services businesses. And they're finding that Facebook's working really well for them because these folks aren't on LinkedIn and they aren't really answering email because they're out in the field all day, but they do look at their Facebook account. So that's actually a way that they're engaging with them. So I think it's really going back to the buyer journey and then having a hypothesis on that and testing it.

Awesome. You kind of mentioned this, working with a portfolio company, but this is a follow-up question from Mark. How does Stage 2 engage with your portcos?

We are fairly hands-on, so we, um, we're fortunate. Not only, as I mentioned, do we have, you know, a go-to-market operator working, but half of our fund comes from 300 go-to-market executives. So we're very fortunate to have investors that have a lot of experience and do get involved, obviously have invested interest to get involved with our portfolio companies. But we do an initial assessment and recommendations, and then we leverage all the tools that you're seeing, that we're talking about now with our companies. We did just launch this week, actually. So it's good timing. And I'll put it in the— one of the things we were asked a lot about is, can we— can I get that template from you guys? Or can I get something. So we did just launch our own resource center this week. So it shares a lot of the tools that we use with our own portcos. So I'll put it in the chat if you guys are looking— everything from how to build a bottoms-up model to make sure that you've got, you know, aligned your— because all of you right now are probably doing planning, but traditionally we do a finance plan and it's based on this is how many people we have and this is what we think our conversion rate is. But what we like to do is bottoms up on, okay, realistically on what's been happening with your conversion rate, how much pipeline do you need to sell to do to reach that? And what are the leading indicators you should be looking at in terms of how many ops you need a month per rep, um, or in general and the cost of providing those. So there's a lot of resources like that in there.

Awesome. Thank you for dropping that. Into the chat. So be sure to check that out. Sean, thanks for raising your hand. Fire away.

Hi, Mandy. Thanks so much for the, just the detailed and thoughtful ideas you're presenting here. I think you're getting great engagement from all of us because there's just so much to digest and think about there. I came in halfway through, so my question maybe is redundant. I can go back and watch the YouTube video, but I noticed in the stages that you had that there was the mutual eval plan really caught my attention. I don't know if you already covered that topic. If not, I can watch it. If not, could you describe a little bit about how that goes? That really caught my eye.

Sure. One of the things that I think is— and it goes back to teaching our teams to really make sure that we are aligned with the buyer all the way through the journey. And so after that first discovery call, I really like to send what we call a mutual eval plan. You can still do it the old-fashioned way and send an email. There are tools now that actually engage the buyer and do it back and forth. You know, you may not be at the stage where you need that yet, but it's basically like recapping the call. And what's interesting is if you are using Fireflies or some of these AI tools, they will recap and then have next steps. But essentially it's a, hey, thanks so much. For, for spending some time with me today. Really enjoyed getting to know you and learn more about, you know, X, Y, and Z about your product. I really think, you know, just to make sure that we are on the same page, let me just recap. And then I like to recap, like, here's what you're seeing as the challenges. Here's what you've tried to do so far. Here's what's important to you in this product. And here's what we agreed on is how we'll measure success. And then lastly, here's the next steps. And, you know, then I'm gonna follow up on the next steps. What I find is interesting is like, it's helpful for the person you talk to, because a lot of times you don't have the decision maker on that first call to use that to share. I'm usually asking the decision maker to join the demo. I like to actually have any buyer, that's just me personally, on that so that we can have a conversation together. I like to be in the room as much as I can for these conversations. So if I can get as many people that are going to have a say in the decision on the conversation, then I'd rather, you know, address things up front. But it makes it easier for them to send that along and share. And then people are more prepared. Or a lot of times I find people write back and be like, oh yeah, and I forgot this one other thing. We also need to do this or we need to do that. So it just lets you also see their level of engagement too. And then that's helpful as you move them through the journey.

I really like the idea of observing what caught their attention and kind of restating it back to them. Seems like just a really powerful method. Thanks for answering my question.

Of course.

Also a good reminder list for you to action on for next steps. All right. Next question from Karan, I think. Sorry if I'm getting that wrong, but what's the best way to discover ICP? What tools help you with that currently?

Really, I think it's, um, it's so— I think initially it's your own, it's why you're building your product, right? Because you've got a hypothesis that this is a challenge for this particular person in this kind of company, and we're going to solve that challenge. And so then you want to, then you want to validate if that's the case or not. And so a lot of that is going out the way we were talking about with Christy, reaching out to companies. I usually start with, you know, reaching out through your network, but trying to find some folks and validating. I know several founders, sometimes when we're talking to people, they say like, I did 50 conversations with these people, this type of role, to validate that this was true before I built the product, and then I could go back to them. So, um, so I think that's initially, if you're trying to validate once you have customers, and this, you know, becomes the next step, right? Because it is very common that when you're first selling, you're also like, I'm not sure. Oh, maybe this could be a use case. Let me try and sell. And you may have then a few different types of buyers or a few different types of companies because there's different use cases. If you're trying to validate where you wanna focus, which I highly recommend that you do, then I look at usage product data to do that and retention data. So how are they using the product? Because the product data is really gonna tell you If it's a product that somebody should be using on a weekly basis and you're seeing that it's much stronger in this one use case than the other ones, then I would start focusing there because you want to be selling customers that you're going to retain and that are going to grow with your product. And right now, for those of you that need to raise money again, you know, showing net revenue retention is, is equally as important as showing growth. Yep.

Mandy, and I have a follow-on question if I may on that.

Yes, go ahead.

So when you're saying if you already have customers, you use it, you look at product usage data, but what about like analyzing all your CRM data and along with like churn data and then you look at like, hey, who's visiting your website, who's bouncing off, who's not bouncing off, like basically looking at multiple signals and trying to—

Yeah, for sure. I mean, obviously you can look at the velocity, right, that you're selling them. What's the, the MQL to SQL ratio? If you have MQLs, what's that to close? So if you're seeing that you're closing a segment, your conversion rates are much better in a certain segment than others. And that, and then the churn is the product usage. So the reason I say product usage, and we use that as a leading indicator, is because a lot of times you have to wait 12 months for churn. But if they're not using the product, then most likely they're going to churn. So we like to look at product usage as a leading indicator to retention. But certainly if you've got enough to know churn data, then I would include that as well.

And like, how do you— in the ICP, right? Like once you have like, okay, these are the customers who are working, what are the variables you consider? Like, hey, you dissect them by revenue, geography, industry, number of employees. Like what are the other variables you can look at to say, I, based on these variables, I will go and create my target account list.

Yeah. So there's, there's, and if you go into, I put it higher up in the slide, it's a link to our website where it has my blog on this, but there is a link in that blog to a go-to-market playbook template or the template for all these slides. And I do have a sub-slide to that slide, Karan, which has more. So I think some things people decide are, are there technology considerations, right? In some cases they have to be using a certain product or integrated in a certain product, or they can't be using a certain product because you don't integrate with that. And then we have also, you know, we've added the qualification criteria as well. So for some of you might be using Medic, you might be using MedPic, but there are criteria sometimes around the qualification. That people want to use as part of determining if it's an ICP. Now, I think about that as you don't— I think about it in two stages. You know, there's information you can find without talking to the customer, which is usually what you just mentioned, Kran, plus, I mean, you can get some technical data as well. And then there's the information you have to talk to the customer about to qualify them, which is usually the medic or med pick.

Thank you.

So I think we have time for one more question. Devin, I don't know if I'm going to get this right. So feel free to come off and help clarify if needed. But thanks for sharing, Mandy. A lot of what you spoke about sounds like buyer-focused product-led growth marketing. As a part of your measure and iterate process, have you run into the need for or preach a hybrid product-led sales approach? I.e., PLG and account-based marketing.

Yep, absolutely. And I will tell you, Devin, I used this approach before when I had teams that were mostly outbound. I mean, long before PLG came around. So it works both ways. I think when you're— when you have— it's all about defining and putting guardrails in place. So if you are using this with a PLG motion where people can come in and either try your product for free or there's, if it's a free trial or a certain version, and then you're using your team and looking at signals for, and you're doing account-based marketing against that and then delivering it to your team when they're ready, then it's just about defining that with the group. You know, who are, when is a customer ready to actually have a salesperson talk to them? And then how are you going to deliver it to that Awesome.

Thank you. Well, that wraps— I think we're out of time. So thanks everyone for another great Workshop Wednesday. Mandy, thank you so much for joining us. As a reminder, recording will be available on our YouTube as well as slides on SlideShare. So be sure to check those out. And also make sure to grab the link to her— the Resources Hub on Stage 2's website before we jump off. She dropped that in the chat. Mandy, thanks so much again.

Thank you. Thanks, everyone.

All right, we will be back everyone next week. A lot to be thankful for. We have our very own Jason M. Lemkin, who's going to be joining us for Workshop Wednesday. So he's going to walk us through top 10 mistakes that he sees in the VP of Sales hiring process. So always get a ton of questions about recruitment. Don't miss that one. We'll see everyone next Wednesday.