“Success is a Team Sales and Marketing Sport” with Orum’s VP of Sales and VP of Marketing

to the stage Colin Spector, VP of Sales at Oram, and Tingting Luo, VP of Marketing at Oram. Woo!

Woo!

So Tingting, I was looking at the marketing dashboard this week, and wow, we had a record number of MQLs coming in, record number of opportunities, which is awesome.

Thank you.

I was looking a little closer at them, and the opportunity value looked a little bit lower than the segment we've been targeting. What do you think about that?

Colin, you know, my team has always cared a lot about the quality of the leads and opportunities. So have we examined the execution process lately on your team?

I think that's a fair question. Like, how are we handling those opportunities marketing is generating? I'll have to look and ensure we're converting them, we're responding at a fast clip here. And folks, that's the push and pull, right, with marketing. You've probably heard that conversation many times. Marketing generating the MQLs, is sales qualifying them and taking the ball the right way to the end zone. So I'm Colin Spector, VP of sales at Oram, and I've been the head of sales for 4 years at Oram. Oram started originally as an outbound sales motion, until we brought on Tingting, our VP of Marketing, 2 years ago. And I'm joined here with Tingting.

Yes, my name is Tingting Luo. I've been building the marketing team from scratch at Oram for the last 2 years, and it's been so crucial for us to build a really crucial revenue engine here at Oram.

That's right. And so we're excited to share with you today 4 lessons and tactical reflections that we've learned over the past 2 years going from 100% outbound revenue engine to an integrated go-to-market machine the past 2 years of combining sales and marketing collaboration. So, number one, every touchpoint counts in your sales and marketing funnel. When you think about your brand and the, and the way you interact with your market and your customers, investment in brand is a CAC deflator. It lowers the customer acquisition costs when you invest in your brand. And so if you've heard about Oram over the past 12 months, which many of you likely have, it's because of those investments in our brand. And we're not just talking about pouring marketing dollars and cents into demand generation. It's about investing in brand enablement with your frontline salespeople. It's about training them on the voice of your brand, the values that your company is aligned to, and it's ensuring that you have a consistent message from the cold call script to the posts on social media to the post-sale customer handoff, and that that message is consistent. Because when you reduce that uncertainty for your customers, it reduces buyer friction, right? It makes sense when your brand represents you consistently and holistically. And so we, we look to our individual contributors, our salespeople, to be a part of that brand experience, that investment. We've intentionally enabled our people and empowered them to be a representative, representative of our brand. So they post— our people, our salespeople post on social media. You likely have seen many of our folks out there sharing advice and best practices. And so investing in brand, not just from the marketing and content engine, but the individuals, was a key lesson for us over the past 2 years here. Number 2, continuous improvement with your sales and marketing counterparts, having that kaizen mantra, right? Kaizen's that Japanese Toyota continuous improvement mantra. And the way we think about this at Oram, we have a saying, shavings make a pile. We look for that 1 to 5% incremental improvement in our sales and marketing funnel. And those add up. Those add up over time. And a quick example of that, how many of you require phone fields on your demo requests and pricing request forms? How many of you? Okay. For those that don't require it today, give it a shot. Give it a try. And, you know, originally we thought, hey, if we require phone fields, we might get a drop-off in people requesting a demo or doing a pricing form. But in fact, what, what it was causing was the salesperson had to go and enrich the number and go chase the number down, and people weren't always providing their phone number. But the phone is the number one converting channel, not just at Oram, but a recent study we conducted across 1,000 companies said the phone was the number one converting channel for their marketing leads, right? People that are high-intent hand raisers saying, I want to learn more about you. They will provide their number. They're not gonna hold back on it. And so it gives your sales team an opportunity to call them right away, speed to lead, and have that conversation and bring them into an opportunity here. So again, shavings make a pile here.

Thanks so much, Colin. So the third lesson here is to really immerse into your persona. Over the last 12 months, a lot of things have been changing in the SaaS world. So some of the questions that we continue to ask ourselves are, how is your buying environment changing? How are your buying committees changing? How are your buying personas changing? And how do your messages need to adapt to make that happen? We're really lucky at Oram that, you know, we have a wealth of sales expertise at the company. And actually over half of our sales team have been either in a decision-making role or influence role in a previous— for a product like Oram in the past. So this culture of collaboration and two-way communication between my team and Colin's team ensures that that information is actually happening at their fingertips, and it's easy for that, that information to pass across for each of these persona learnings. More formally, what this looks like for for my product marketing team is 4 specific steps. Number 1, they're doing prospect and customer interviews every month because things are changing every day in our, in our, in our world. Number 2, we're listening in for how the first conversations, how that first, how that first conversation between sales reps and prospects are landing. So at we use our call library to review and track. There are many other tools out there that allow you to do that. So that's a key source of insight for my product marketing team. Number 3, they're doing deep persona research in new people that have entered the buying committee. So, you know, in one of our recent deals, we saw that there were 17 specific contacts that were engaged over a 15-month period in order to close a deal. So, uh, there's a lot more that we need to learn about different personas. Especially ops and finance in the last few months that have entered the arena. And then lastly, and this is a really important one, is the enablement. An insight hasn't landed until it's been fully received by your marketing and your sales development, your sales and CS team. So we've spent actually a lot of effort thinking about that end delivery and making sure that things are landing, especially in a remote organization. All right. Our last lesson here is around driving clarity. Each one of you probably have a set of expectations for your team. You probably also have a set of expectations for your counterpart's team, right? Like in sales or in marketing. And how do you know that those are actually aligned? To tackle this, we turn to a really simple exercise. It's a written exercise that we did at our last leadership offsite. And every leader wrote down, what are your expectations of every other team at the company? And then that leader was given the collated set of responses from the rest of the leadership team. So what are, what are my Ting Ting's expectations of product and sales and engineering and every other team at the company? We find that, you know, we're a diverse team that's from various experiences, stages of companies, and a lot of times there are implicit assumptions and expectations that, you know, give us blind spots or make it really tough to align on specific priorities. And by making these implicit things really direct and explicit, it gives us room to really focus on building strong relationships and working with each other. So One specific tool that we've leaned on to do this is a decision matrix called RAPID. So working together, working well together isn't always about doing everything together or having consensus. It's just about being clear about who owns what, like pricing and packaging or market segmentation and prioritization. We find that having this level of clarity helps accelerate. And, you know, many, many early-stage companies tend to shy away from processes like this because it may feel a little corporate or over-engineered. But for us, this level of clarity helps us ensure that we're rowing in the same direction as a company. All right. So these are our 4 takeaways. And if you look at them, you know, as a company whose vision is to make sales more human, They're really focused around constant communication and live conversations, and that should be no surprise. So that's very much embedded in the DNA of the company, how we work our— work with our customers, and that's very much implicit in the way that Colin and I build our partnership as sales and marketing counterparts as well. Thank you so much for the time today. We're gonna stick around just over there for a few more minutes to chat, but Um, come by our booth over in Hangar West. We're at booth 231. Thank you for your time today.

Thank you, everyone.

Account Executive, North America at Make, and Darren Patterson, VP Product at Make.

Good afternoon, saster. It is my great privilege to introduce you to my colleague Rachel, who is an Account Executive at Make, where she works with organizations both small and large to enable them to achieve unprecedented, unprecedented business agility through the power of automation. Rachel actually works and focuses on startups and scale-ups, and so she knows, like most people don't, how to enable an organization to grow past those growing challenges and grow as a company. Beyond all that amazing experience, Rachel's actually an accomplished comedian. So if you're thinking, should I join this back there, please come bring it in. You might be in for a few surprises.

[SPEAKING CHINESE] Well, thank you very much, Darren. But really, the pleasure is all mine to get to introduce Darren here. He is the VP of Product at Make. And that means that not only is he helping our customers stay at the cutting edge of technology in the landscape as it's ever-changing, but he's also an accomplished leader. And I say that because it's true, and I would like a raise. So thank you. So that being said, prior to coming to Make, Darin actually led an automation, integration, and enterprise product team at a company called— a work management company called— I want to get this right— Workfront. And you may not have heard of them because Darin's fantastic work actually led to a successful acquisition by Adobe. Again, you may not have heard of them, but they're a slightly larger company. So that being said, Darin, it's quite an impressive resume, and I think you should kick us off.

Well, now I'm officially blushing, and my face matches my shirt. But it's fantastic to get a sense to you with— to spend some time with you to really reflect on the technology space and where we've come in the world of product and automation. And since the dawn of computing, we've seen a chain of breakthroughs that have fundamentally shifted human productivity and our ability to release our potential. Everything from personal computing to cellular technology and the most recent smartphones and apps In things as fundamental as how we grow food to feed ourselves, this technology has a profound impact over the last several decades. And in fact, if you look at the same exact plot of land in 1948 compared to today, the USDA estimates that it produces 175% more food than it did in 1948. I've been around a long time, but not quite back to 1948, but I'm super excited to see to see how these impacts of technology support our world.

I have been around since 1948. I've got a great skincare routine. But that being said, this, this technology, it's authentically life-changing and business-changing. And it used to be kind of available in this real world to help deliver these real-world products. And it was largely exclusive to kind of these professionals and these experts. But in just a few short decades, this technology has kind of transformed from something that, that has shaped and informed the world that we live in to actually being the world that we live in. Whether it's the QR code at your local pub so you can see the drink specials, or, you know, your wearable technology or smart shopping experiences, there isn't really a today that doesn't involve technology. And actually the time to 1 million users, my goodness, this is growing ever so rapidly. It took Netflix 3.5 years to reach the 1 million user benchmark. Now fast forward, it took ChatGPT in 2022, 5 days. Uh, for those quickly doing math, I did it for you. That is 255 times faster. To reach that $1 million, that 1 million user benchmark. And then one year later, from 2022 to 2023, Threads went ahead and reached that benchmark 120 times faster than ChatGPT. It isn't just that this digital landscape is growing and changing, it's, it's doing so exponentially.

That's ridiculous, Rachel. With the world of digital products, Expanding, and as all of us become more and more comfortable in our digital environments, product leaders and business leaders like myself are now in a perpetual race. With the barriers to movement from one product to another, they're often incredibly low. And the user expectations and the market expectations for your ability to deliver value continuously are at an all-time high. All at the same time, the barriers for another me-too product to come into your space and take away your customers are at an all-time low. And of course, all this is happening at the exact same time that you have limited time and resources to be able to spend on prototyping, designing, and perfecting the right technology solution to deliver to your customers.

So, so what does that mean for you, the, the thought leaders that are here at SaaStr? Well, what it means is that we all need to be able to move as as possible. This is at an all-time high, but with these exact same, if not more constrained resources. We need to figure out a way to be far more effective with far less. So, oh, I speak to a lot of companies kind of about how to resolve this, this seemingly impossible contradiction that, that while it is seemingly impossible, it nonetheless must have a resolution. And, uh, there we're kind of on a cusp of a new breakthrough. And this breakthrough is utilizing two main technologies, but most importantly, the combination and marriage of the two. And those two technologies are generative AI and automation. So the ability to combine these is really the shift in landscape that is likely to be moving most quickly. And this is gonna be the technology that is going to most rapidly transition from being this, this elite tool for the professionals only to actually being a consumer-available product.

So given all this change in this fast-paced environment, let's take a look at how you can meaningfully apply some technologies and approaches to your product and your business to ensure that you can react to anything. And first among our list of recommendations for how you can adapt to make sure your product is future-proof is to ensure you use plug-and-play components within your tech stack. That is to say, opposed to implementing technologies in a static, hard-to-change way. Now, if you were to ask an engineer or an architect about this concept, they'd probably explain to you something called a loosely coupled architecture, where you have different services that talk to each other and have contracts with each other. But in incredibly practical terms that all of us can grasp, The concept is quite simple in that you should seek to implement best-of-breed solutions anytime you encounter a particular problem to solve within your product offering. In the most fundamental types of components, this could be something like how do you solve what database to use or what front-end technology to use. In more advanced examples, it might be analyzing how people are actually using your product. So understanding that product usage data is critical to your success, Rather than coding that solution deeply into your product, leverage existing best-of-breed solutions to ensure that you can adapt them in the future and continuously maintain that agility. The key here is to never reinvent the wheel, but instead ensure that when you upgrade your car, you can have those fancy new cool wheels go along with it.

I'll be able to upgrade my car with that raise that I'm getting at the end of this, Darren. But that being said, number 2, Be smart with your AI and automation. Kind of being on the business side of things, there's a, there's a couple of questions that I tend to field pretty frequently. There are things like, what is the, the most intelligent and effective place to implement technology and automation in my processes? Or, or what are kind of the use cases that you're seeing similar businesses go through that are going to most move the needle in their organization? And The answer, albeit slightly imprecise, is actually the same across all organizations and verticals. You want to let your people, your most valuable and most limited and absolutely most precious asset, focus on what is actually happening outside in the outside world. You want to maximize their time and their ability to be responsive to the changes that are going on in the market so they can proactively be making those change at the speed of human creativity. Running the inside of your business is not what's going to truly revolutionize anything for you. It's— that's just kind of the stuff that's, that's not really making a mark on the industry. So you really want those key resources to be focused outward and let AI and technology handle the stuff under the hood. Now in this kind of perpetual race to be the product leader. It's actually been known that 77% of companies out there are using or exploring AI. So this, this optimization of human capital, this is rapidly becoming the industry norm. And if you and your company are not proactively using or exploring AI, you're being left behind and you just don't know it yet.

Our third recommendation is to ensure that you're empowering users throughout and, and team members throughout your entire company, not just those that have a developer job title, to leverage automation to solve meaningful problems inside of your product and your customer experience. You know that incredible power that comes from innovating and creating a new solution? That's actually no longer just accessible to people that have engineering in their job title. In fact, it's increasingly accessible to people who might have a job role in product management or marketing or growth management or customer operations. At Make, anytime we encounter a business problem or an opportunity to solve something for our customers in our product, we carefully evaluate whether it makes sense to leverage developers or empower teammates throughout our organization to solve that problem. Whether it's how do we provision a new customer after we've signed a contract, or how do we create an incredibly personalized user experience directly inside the product? Now Rachel's gonna talk a little bit more about some of those actual technologies, but let's think about the impact that that has on our organization. I'm told this is a national stat. I recognize we're in the Bay Area, so I suspect it's maybe off by a factor of 3 to 4. But what's important here is to recognize the relationship between these two things and the real and meaningful impact that this can have on your organization. Organization's bottom line. Now, money's cool. I like money. I'd like some more of it. But it's not the only thing that exists in life. And what you'll find is amazing is the culture that it creates in your organization by empowering teams to take authority and autonomy to solve problems rather than relying upon the ivory tower of engineering to solve all their product problems.

So I did actually see a couple of furrowed brows when Dan kind of— Darren kind of mentioned this, this actual democratization of power, because the thought, the thought, the worry that comes up from that is that when you're actually allowing kind of the everyman, or everywoman as it were, to go ahead and have this, doesn't that just result in chaos and misconstrued and misfollowed through processes as opposed to like this general empowerment? And very simply, the answer is And the reason why the answer is no is because we need to proactively look at seamwork. So that may be a new term for some people. Historically, organizations talk about teamwork, you know, how do we, you know, rah-rah, how do we make sure that our entire organization is one team? How do we make sure that we're crossing this finish line together? But where actually things are gonna matter is the seamwork. It's not about that teamwork and bringing everyone together. It's about how do we make sure that all of these teams can optimize individually and still work seamlessly hand in hand. What tends to be found is that teamwork allows for local optimization, whereas teamwork allows for global optimization. And so when we are able to do something like proactively and preemptively focus on teamwork, this is really allowing our teams to focus on a much wider area through authentic breakthrough productivity. And it's really actually embracing that global optimization that we're all aiming for.

Now, it would be a shame if all of you left here and thought, great, I no longer need developers. In fact, it's quite the opposite. You still need to hire great product managers, great designers, and great engineers to help deliver differentiated value. But the key here is to make sure that you're focusing and innovating where you can differentiate. Focus on the one thing that makes your product or your value proposition distinct and nail that. Continue to apply engineering resources to continue to innovate over and over and over that— on that. Everything else associated with your product, push that ownership and accountability into other teams that can help solve those problems for your customers. Is it really the most important thing for your engineering team to be working on a customer onboarding survey? Yes, that's important, but are there other teams that can be empowered to accomplish those things while you focus on the most strategic things? What I love about this principle is it focuses you as a leadership team to deeply understand what differentiates you, understand your distinct value, and push and innovate on that particular piece.

Darren, Darren's exactly right on that. Kind of once you've isolated out these elements that don't really need to fall under engineering's umbrellas, that's when you really want to be focusing on low and no-code solutions. I know this is a buzzword. I know you guys have probably heard this forever, but the impact of low and no-code is so much more than what this nomad saturation has kind of caught us numb to. If you go to the next slide, 87% of people have the ability to read, write, and count. And in the workforce, quite honestly, that number the number staggers a lot closer to 100%, but only 0.3% are able to code. And so at the end of the day, if you are enabling your employees to be working with low and no-code solutions, that means you are enabling approximately 300 times more of your personal workforce to be able to make these huge transformative decisions. To, to do those breakthrough things that put your organization on the map and really leave a footprint. 300 times more of your workforce.

Thank you so much for allowing us to share a few insights in how we maintain adaptability and responsiveness to an ever-changing environment. This helps us at our company, Make, enable us to foster the right product, the right processes, the right culture, customer experience, and just as importantly, the right culture.

If you guys can't tell, we totally geek out over this. So please, we'll be over there to kind of answer some questions if you guys want to talk. But I know it's also lunchtime, so please, please visit us at the Make booth. We're in that adjacent building. We're over in 213. We would love to talk about this with you guys. It's just, it's so interesting and fascinating, and we'd love to help empower your organizations like ours.

Thanks, Rach. Jason M. Lemkin.

You rocked it.