Product Led Growth (PLG) and Marketing Ops with Dave Rigotti

Hi, I'm Michael Hartman.

I'm Naomi Liu.

And I'm Mike Rizzo.

And this is OpsCast, a podcast for marketing ops pros and RevOps pros, created by the MoPros, the number one community for marketing operations professionals.

Tune into each episode as we chat with real professionals to help elevate you and your marketing operations career.

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by the MoPros powered by marketingops.com. I'm your host, Michael Hartman, joined today by just one of my co-hosts, Mike Rizzo.

Hey everybody, glad to be here. Sorry Naomi's not with us. We know you appreciate her insights.

You know, we'll have to get her out here again. She'll be here soon. Yeah. All right, so today we are joined by Dave Rigotti to talk about marketing ops in product-led growth or PLG organizations. I'm sure if you're a listener of ours, you're in the community, you've heard this term. And if you're like me, you kind of think you know what it is, probably don't. But Dave is the CEO and a founding team member of Inflection.io, a startup developing software for marketing teams at product-led companies. So previously Dave was a director of marketing at Adobe, responsible for account-based marketing, supporting Marketo and Magento. Dave made his way to Adobe via 2 acquisitions. First, he was the VP of marketing at Bizible. After Bizible was acquired by Marketo, Marketo was then of course purchased by Adobe in 2018. So prior to Visible, Dave spent nearly 5 years at Microsoft introducing Bing and Bing Ads to the world. So quite a background here. Dave, thanks for joining us today.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me and thanks everyone for listening in.

Awesome. So Dave, you know, since we first talked, I've done a little bit of research in all the spare time I have, but intrigued about your career journey to this point. You know, it's a little bit of, we, I think we only gave a, Really a thumbnail sketch there. Why don't we start with this? Why don't you share a little bit about your career journey with our listeners, and then maybe a little bit about how that ultimately led to the founding of inflection.io?

Sure. Yeah, happy to share a bit about my career. As you mentioned, I started the first part of my career working at Microsoft on Bing and Bing Ads, and was very blessed to and privileged to be able to work there straight out of school. And it was an awesome place to honestly learn how to do marketing. You know, I studied marketing in school, but I didn't really know how to do it. And so what a great environment and company to go learn how to do marketing. So I absolutely loved it. It was a great time. Got to play in both kind of B2B and social or B2B and consumer marketing. And just learned a lot that, hey, I actually really love B2B marketing. And that sort of took me to Bizible. I also studied entrepreneurship in school. I love startups. I wanted to get to a startup. And so I joined Bizible when it was, I think I was the 6th employee. I was the first marketing hire. It had just started, just gotten, the product had just launched. It's not even the product that people kind of really know today. This was in 2013. That was an awesome ride for 5 years. We grew the team, the marketing team to, I think about 10 people. The whole company was about 120 and was, I think doing marketing for marketers is, it's really hard, but really rewarding and really fun.

And especially marketing ops, who's probably who your primary audience was, right?

Yeah, yeah, we had, it was mostly marketing ops or demand gen, kind of depending on the company and It was awesome. It was really cool to just go create content all day about something you're passionate about. And gosh, it's probably like being a developer at a dev tools company. It's like the holy grail of the work, at least to me. So that was an awesome ride. And then we had a fantastic exit to Marketo and then a very quick turnaround from there into Adobe. So I spent most of my time when I was working at Marketo actually under Adobe, which was an awesome place to be, especially during COVID And Adobe took great care of so many folks through the acquisition. But just shy of 2 years ago, I wanted to get back to startups. Absolutely love startups. I had some great insights about just the kind of changing dynamics in go-to-market from kind of like content-driven go-to-market models to more product-led driven go-to-market models and just kind of had this insight that there really isn't a lot to kind of go help people do that really well. And so I teamed back up with a few of the kind of other folks from Visible era and now we're off doing Inflection.

Very interesting. One follow-up question from that. So, you mentioned your time at Microsoft. I think specifically you talked about it was a great place to learn and all that, but curious, were there any specific, like, did you have key people that were like, you think of, or maybe you still work with, you know, or still kind of people you go to as mentors or whatever, and people you trust that were key to that kind of evolution for you?

Yeah, yeah. It took me like, um, probably 8 years or 9 years into my career to, to realize how important those relationships are. Um, it's crazy, my, like, my first boss at, um, at Microsoft when I was right out of school is somebody I still talk to because she's very involved in kind of running marketing at various startups. And she's been our, I think our customer before at Bizible. And, you know, she just keeps coming in and out of my life. And there's plenty of others that are like that too. You know, a boss for 6 months, your first job out of school, it's like wild that they can still have such an impact on your kind of professional life. And yeah, it took me a long time to realize that. And, uh, yeah, so I try to remember that for others that are just starting their careers too.

Yeah, it's a good call out. I think just in general, paying, paying, like paying heed to the idea that the relationships that you build at any stage in your career can be beneficial long-term. Right. So, um, don't burn a bridge, folks. I can't, I agree completely. I still have really good relationships with folks that I You know, like I was even laid off from a role one time and I still wanna be friends with those folks, right?

Yeah.

It's like, it's not their fault.

You don't have to be friends, but like, well, you'd be surprised to see situations change, you know, 5 years later, people come back into your life. Like, I don't know, when you're starting out the, this, this world of like marketing ops and, and just like B2B marketing in general feels so big. But it's like in reality, so much smaller than you maybe realize.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a ton of, it's great.

I mean, like, look at the journey to, to you and I being connected, right, Dave? Like, like the, I think if I could do the short story for those that don't know the way that Dave and I know each other, it's when he was running the Community for Marketing Operations Professionals back in the day, uh, with marketingops.com as, as the tool, right? That's how I came across this. Like Dave and I met back then.

Yeah, it's like a half-decade journey of just coming in and out of each other's lives.

I love it.

It's fun.

And then I reached out to Dave and I was like, what happened to the domain? He's like, oh yeah, so-and-so, we were just leasing it. So, and I was like, oh boy, okay, here we go. Oh, and fun fact, the Twitter handle that we have for Marketing Ops, uh, Dave was like, oh yeah, I still have that here.

Yeah, luckily I like didn't change my email address because that was like a 5 years later, you know, password reset.

Glad you got it.

Yeah, it's crazy.

It was, it was good.

So full circle.

Yeah, I think it's, it's just always interesting to me because we've had a number of people on where some where we specifically talked about sort of their journey in or out of, into and out of marketing ops and other roles. And it's been, I keep finding a lot of commonality in the fact that there's a lot of people who have, like, there are key people who, you know, saw something in them or, you know, supported them and And I think it's a really important piece. I mean, it's part of why I think, you know, marketinghacks.com, the community is a good place for that. And I think there's the, that's why I think it's gonna be huge. Like I always talk and say like, if I, if this had been around 15, 20 years ago, it would've been, I think, I'm not even sure that I would be in the same place, right? It would be a very different experience and from a career standpoint.

That's totally true. Yeah, I went to like a state, a state university that, you know, Microsoft doesn't recruit out of and I don't know why they hired me over a lot of the other candidates that I, you know, I saw their resumes or who they were and that's it. You know, you have like 5 people in a row who take bets on you and that's how you grow the career and it comes down to that, honestly.

Yeah. Awesome. All right, well, let's get into product-led growth. And for me, I think I have my own sort of idea of what that means. I think it's probably accurate, but why don't we start with when you say product-led growth, PLG, like what does that mean to you? And let's like at least get that sort of a baseline for us.

Yeah, I love the question because I also run a podcast through the productled.marketing community, and that is the first question I ask everyone, which is just like, what does it mean to you? Because everyone's definition is different. Nobody's on the same page. And I will ask 100 people and I will get 100 different responses. So I like that you're, you're putting me in the hot seat on that question. The way I think about it is it's really just letting people use a product without having to go through a sales team. And so in kind of practical terms, that just means being able to sign up for a product online and get started yourself. There's a lot of different models for product-led growth from freemium to usage-based like AWS to like seat pricing like Sprout Social. To even open source models. Like you can go download something from GitHub and get started without having to talk to a salesperson. Great, that's product-led growth. So I tend to take a little bit broader perspective than some people that might say it's just freemium, because I think those are, that's just a pricing or packaging kind of difference on product-led growth. But it's all consistent that you're able to use the product without having to You know, go through a sales process.

So, um, so I just want, so I think I want to replay it. So just to make sure I'm not mistaken. So it's, you know, it's a service offering or product offering that you, you can sign up for without going through a salesperson and it may be free initially or it may not be, right? So you could have a low, low cost kind of entry point. And is it, uh, so I think that, that makes sense. Is it, is it applied both to B2B and B2C or? Sort of hybrid models? Like, the reason I'm asking, I'm thinking about like streaming services that I might add on to what I use at home, for example. A lot of them have, yeah, a week trial or something like that.

Yeah, totally. Yeah, there's of course B2C and B2B kind of offerings. Like, yeah, Netflix, you know, you'd say is product-led and kind of a lot of consumer products are product-led. I think for purposes of marketing ops and thinking about it, we can think kind of more of the B2B side and that tends not to be quite as straightforward and it's a good conversation that we can get into.

Yeah, I was talking to somebody actually earlier today, somebody on my team about like that B2B is like, if you are going from B2C, 'cause he had heard something about somebody predicting that there were gonna be more like B2C marketer leaders moving to B2B, which I think is an interesting idea. But I've always thought that B2C is relatively, well, let me put it the other way. B2B is a much more complicated environment.

Yeah.

For lots of reasons, right? But, and it's harder to move. I, my assertion is that it's harder to move from B2C to B2B than it is to go B2B.

I've always said the same thing. And, uh, it just feels like there's, you know, I've done some B2C marketing at an agency and I will tell you from my experience, I'm like, wow, this, there's a lot of flexibility here. There's sort of a lot of different stuff you could try. And then in B2B, you're sort of like, yeah, like I'm limited. There's only so many places to go.

Not only limited, but you have to like prove it out. Like very fast. Like, okay, is it working? It's like, oh, it just went out like yesterday, you know? Um, it's, yeah, especially true at a smaller company. It's like, it's, it's pretty hard to, you know, kind of shift careers. Maybe, maybe easier at bigger companies. I don't know.

Yeah, it's sort of an aside. Um, okay, so I think we've got a pretty good working definition.

Yeah.

So, and I've, like probably a lot of our listeners, like I've heard the term thrown around a lot on LinkedIn or other, you know, through emails, whatever. What, I guess kind of a couple of related questions, like why is it becoming big in terms of it? I hate to use the word hype, but I'll use the hype. Like why is the hype there? But more importantly, maybe what are some of the big sort of mega meta trends? I had to throw that in there that are happening in the space.

Yeah, it's a good question. And I, you know, I shouldn't, Transition to this by saying, you know, when you talk product-led, you talk first about, you know, hey, you can just sign up without talking to a salesperson. You can just use the product, like you don't need an onboarding manager maybe. And that's basically all true, but that's not the only motion for product-led growth. And every product-led company has a fantastic sales team. The marketing team is using product data to create some great outbound campaigns and ABM campaigns. And there's this whole sales-led motion at product-led companies that's very robust and very strong that we can get into. But so being product-led does not mean being only product-led. There's obviously a sales-led component to it. And then why is it hot right now? If you look at all of the biggest, most valuable, fastest growing kind of B2B startups out there, they're all product-led. Go look at AWS is the great example, I guess it's not a startup, but great example. Twilio, Atlassian, Mural, Figma, Calendly, it goes on and on. And if you can really crack it, it's a total accelerant to just building a really great company, a really big company. Stripe.

Yep. Stripe's one. I mean, there's some original players out there too, back before we were even referring to it, right? Like, what was it? Dropbox?

Yeah.

Right?

Like Sean Ellis was there at the time and he sort of crafted the like, hey, give and get, right? And And there was a whole bunch of PLG stuff there where they suddenly were like sharing, uh, you know, files through this thing. And we were like, what is this? And then it turned into, I think they struggled a little bit. It took them a while longer to move from that like self-serve payment model to the, to the enterprise, right? There wasn't a motion for that at first, but now companies are like, like recognizing, hey, we're building these sort of simultaneously.

Right. It's a super hard transition. I see a lot of startups get to like $3 to $4 million ARR just on kind of inbound product-led motion. Maybe I think I've seen one get to $10 million ARR just on that. So it's a great way to get to your Series A, Series B, you're getting the flywheel moat going and then you have to go add-on sales. You have to start selling bigger companies. And now, sure, they'll still sign up for your product, but you have to turn it into a bigger deal. And some companies can figure that out and some can't. Yeah.

It's hard. Yeah. I was just talking to some folks about this idea of capturing in that PLG motion, capturing the upside potential for an account, right? 'Cause it's like being built into this—

Yeah, the TAM account. You gotta look at the TAM of your signups. Like, Somebody just signs up for a Gmail, like you're probably gonna wanna treat differently than if you've got 30 users at Microsoft hammering away on your product. Like you need to layer on the kind of personas, the roles.

Mm-hmm.

And the usage and then the TAM as part of the firmographics, which, you know, you didn't care that much about when you were, if you do traditional B2B SaaS, you're kind of like, okay, yeah, they're in our ICP, they're between, you know, 50 and 200 employees, like great. That can be very different when you're looking at product-led TAM, just in that range.

Yeah, totally.

Just curious, like, so I think one of the advantages, one of the things I think that something like product-led growth can address is, I know as a buyer of marketing technology in the past, I've always been, yeah, usually you can get a trial or a proof of concept that's good for a relatively short period of time before you're asked to make a commitment. And it usually, and then sometimes you get sort of more of the capabilities than you actually can afford, so to speak. And I've always struggled with that, like looking for options for, if I was gonna give those tech companies one piece of advice, like make it available, a paid longer-term one that, you know, it does a couple of things, right? It gets you invested in actually going through the effort of evaluating it well. And it, on the tech company side, right? They get a little bit of revenue even if they don't ultimately sign for the something.

Yeah.

I just, this maybe product-led growth helps to kind of bridge that gap for someone like me who would like to see that.

Right. Yeah, it's like, how many times have we been burned buying software? Like everyone, like it's a rite of passage in being in marketing ops is you've bought software for a vendor and it didn't live up to the expectations that the salesperson had for, or that you had for for it shaped just directly by the salesperson, or you get pushed off to success after buying and it's like, good luck. And you have to restart this whole conversation about what you're trying to do. And it's hard. Now think about a product-led company where you can just go in and you can play around with it for a couple of hours, try your scenarios and know very quickly, hey, is this kind of what I was thinking? It doesn't work for all companies. Like, not every company should be product-led. But if you can, it's pretty awesome. And it's like the most valuable content download ever, basically.

Right.

You know, it's like, I spent so much time in my career thinking about intent data sources and third-party intent. How do you triangulate to like, who's in the market? It's like, they're right there. Like, they're using your product, they signed up, you can see exactly what they're doing in your product.

Like, It's the ultimate first-party cookie.

It's the ultimate first-party cookie, like totally. Yeah, it's a total goldmine for like doing great marketing. Like, you know so much about someone and you can really help them.

Yeah, wow. So this, okay, so this is really interesting. Okay, so let's, for our audience, yeah, being primarily marketing ops folks, let's talk a little bit about, or maybe talk us through Like, how do you think of like, how do you think that this kind of, you've kind of touched on a little bit, right? That there's more than one motion typically. How does like, but maybe go a little deeper on what the, like what the differences are in product-led go-to-market MOPS versus, I'll call it traditional if there is one. And let's, I guess we can keep it to B2B just to keep it a little bit contained.

Yeah, maybe, maybe I'll answer this putting it in context of systems. And that might be like a good anchor for this conversation.

Yeah, that'll probably work.

I think for, you know, quote unquote traditional B2B marketing, you know, you have forms, somebody comes in, you have ads to those forms, they're downloading ebooks, you're running webinars, it's all getting in your marketing automation, you're scoring them, you're pushing it into a CRM, and then sales qualifies and converts that into pipeline. For the most part, that's your mode of transit, if you will, for how somebody goes through the sales cycle. And for the most part, marketing's job's done after pipeline create. Sure, there's like field marketing, there's some stuff you might do for customer marketing, but it's more like customer love marketing. It's not like, it's kind of the lightest weight kind of customer marketing you can do. So you have 2 main systems, right? Like marketing automation and CRM. Now get into product-led where that motion still exists. You still have that motion for the most part because there's lots of buyers out there that in some cases can't use your product. Like IT does not let them install Slack on their machine. And so if you want to go sell a big company Slack, you need to go— Don't have it—

That hits so at home right now.

And so you still have that motion, okay? And now you have this whole other set of infra for people who can just sign up for the product and use it. And now you got to figure out somebody who's signed up for the product and how do you convert them over into revenue or pipeline from just using your product? So now you got to think from a MOPS perspective about, okay, great. I need to figure out how to tap into our product activity data from Segment or Amplitude. Okay, the data team has set up that data into the data warehouse like Snowflake. So we got to get that data. We got to figure out how to go do something with that data. And then we have to figure out what are all the journeys and communications we need to send to someone to convert them from a free plan to a paid plan or a middle-tier plan to an enterprise plan. And inviting people to just a webinar is not gonna do it. And so you need to get really contextualized about who they are, what are they doing in their product? Are they hitting the limits of their free plan? Great, tell them that so that they can upgrade and make it easy for them to upgrade. And so you start to get into this whole set of things beyond marketing automation and CRM with product data, data warehouses. And then like teams, like data teams, engineering teams just got to go tag the product with your product events you need to be successful. You know, it goes on and on. So I've talked with a lot of marketing ops leaders at PLG companies and a lot are super burned, super like super burned out. It's been a heck of a couple of years for some folks as part of just hypergrowth, and then on top of that, having to learn so much new stuff and set up new systems, especially when it comes to productivity data, which isn't new for product teams, but is pretty new for marketing teams.

So is it, I think it sounds like if I'm hearing this right too, there's also a new channel that marketers and marketing ops have to deal with for communication, which is the app itself, right? So some of this might happen In the app. So you have to coordinate not only data capture in your marketing operations system, you have to be able to push some back to it.

Yeah. Yeah. I didn't even mention in-app. There's like a whole in-app channel too. Totally true. But it's like, it's a whole separate funnel. I think Megan Huber from, she's now at Winning by Design. She's spent some time at Sirius and then at Engagio and she's now at Winning by Design creating some fantastic content around PLG and she has this, it's called the, I think it's like the bowtie framework or the bowtie method, which on the left-hand side of a bowtie is your traditional marketing funnel. It starts out wide, it gets really small. That's when it gets small, that's the kind of moment of a signup. And then on the right-hand side of a bowtie where it starts small and then it becomes like a big triangle. So sort of like an opposite funnel. That's your PLG motion where it only makes sense to do this if you can expand accounts. And if you can't expand accounts, then why are you PLG? You should stop that. And so you have all of this set of marketing that is the right-hand side of the bowtie. And it's all about instead of just the initial purchase, In a traditional B2B SaaS kind of marketing world, it's about expansions and how do we make this a worthwhile customer for us to be spending so much on COGS just to have them in the product.

So I'm curious, given all that, is there— I'm going to make it a little bit of an assumption because I haven't worked in SaaS software companies directly before. In a traditional software company, I'm assuming like marketing basically takes, here's product, or product marketing is saying, hey, here's the features we've got, go figure out how to promote that and then still sell it. Where it sounds like there needs to be a much more of a tighter connection between marketing, and maybe sales too, marketing and product in terms of providing input on feature sets and capabilities for the software. Is that—

Yeah.

Am I just sounding wrong?

It's even more extreme than that. Like, in a traditional sense, like, yes, you need to get your features and benefits from product marketing and the product team, but like, you're running a webinar. Like, you don't need product to actually execute the webinar. Like, you can just set it up, you can run it, you can just send an email, you're good to go. Like, you need input on the copy and the content, but like, you don't need input really to like go execute it, or you don't have a dependency on the execution. You 100% have a dependency on the execution for product-led. Like if you can't access the product data, like the log of what people are doing in your product, like how are you supposed to send them an email when they've hit their limit on their free plan? And that has a dependency on, it's like there's a product team involved in that, there's a data team involved in that, there's like probably engineering teams that need to go add those events if they don't exist. You need to figure out how do I logistically get the data? How do we connect it in? Do we go through the warehouse? Do we get it through the CRM? Is there some other way to do it? And then set up all of these communications for that. That's just to send an email.

Yeah.

It's not even crazy. That's just sending an email. So this is, I talk with a lot of folks and they're like, we have to make an announcement. We have to do a feature release. We have to get our announcement out. You know, it's like product engineering, data teams are all involved to send that email. And that just doesn't, like, doesn't, it doesn't make sense to me. Like, yeah.

Yeah. Where I, I've, I've been faced with this challenge, uh, I've been unlike, unlike Mr. Hartman, I've been solely in early stage sort of SaaS companies for the most part. Spent a little bit of time in agency, agency, and a little bit at a, at a ad tech industry. But even then, the latest one was around product usage and we were trying to build and engineer sort of growth tactics. And it's, I mean, it's really complicated, right? Like the tools and I'm perfectly okay with like, it makes a lot of sense for you, Dave, and Inflection to be doing what you're doing because Yeah. what we've been faced with in marketing operations is like, how in the hell do I Like stitch this thing together and how do I talk to my engineers? Right? Like I worked with the growth team, quote unquote, at Mavenlink back in the day, who were your, were your growth engineers. And we said, here's all the data points that, you know, they advised us a little bit. It was really just me. So there's no, it was a team of one, no surprise there. Uh, she says, you know, here's the data we have access to, right, in the product. Um, what else? Where do you need me to send this? And I said, okay, I need you to sync that to HubSpot and I need the, the run to happen at, you know, every X number of minutes. Uh, I need the start stop dates of your trial. Uh, and then I will try to manage like alongside you, I'll engineer the sort of workflow to deliver the trial onboarding sequence. But then that's still not intelligent, right? Like that's just basic, basic level of data integration. Then it's like, well, are they actually using it?

Yeah.

What do you do from there? These systems aren't built for, for sending those types of things. And so what Shade is working on is like fundamental to changing the game for folks that are trying to enable the function of deliver based on sort of the current value state of that customer journey.

And, and quickly too. I talked like, you know, being delayed by a couple days because you have to wait overnight for data to get in a data warehouse or to get that data in, or talking with a lot of companies, they do, they pass email lists around. So there's a data team that'll run a SQL query on the data warehouse, and then once a week pass a new list over into Market Automation. If you're waiting like a week to send your welcome email to somebody, it's like maybe they've already even churned or they've already set up their product and you're telling them to go do all these steps for something that is already kind of long past. And it's, it's like, that's a negative experience.

I think this just physically hurts right now to listen to that.

And just like, you know, for those listening to this episode, right, we're just talking about the front end of the funnel here, folks. Like, uh, once we became more mature, I ended up boomeranging back to the Mavenlink side of things. And I worked under client success and their development of that team and program was, was tremendous, right? But your, your growth in MRR and ARR should come from growing accounts.

Yeah.

And those signals, right? The expansion, right? And so those signals need to come from product usage. And then lo and behold, you're suddenly moving from PLG, like top of funnel, you know, conversion to sale to You've got client success who needs to be alerted of the fact that their, their key account that they're in charge of is trying to do something in the product that they're running up against a barrier or boy, they're using the heck out of that feature and we really should try to like make this, you know, transition to this upgrade or what have you. And like, so land and expand, right? And all of those are asking for something totally different. And then how do they send emails? They're not in charge of Marketo or HubSpot, right?

Yeah, that's, That's right. All of this is like, you know, obviously a great opportunity for us from a software side and why we started Inflection, but it's also a great opportunity from a career side.

Yeah.

You know, I think part of my reason for kind of doing pretty well in my career was when I started at Microsoft, my first, you know, this is like 2009. Um, my first job was like running like social media accounts, like, you know, 2009, like every, you're just, you give your college grad your, your social media and say, have fun. And you get this, like all this kind of authority that you like really should not have.

I feel like back then that was the qualification though.

Right?

Yeah. You know how to spell Twitter.

Yeah.

You know what a hashtag is.

Yeah.

You're not adding a period to every, like every social post at the end. And like, that was the test, you know, but like, you know, it ended up growing and being a big thing. And that was a great kind of wagon to hitch to for a while, or a cart to hitch to. So I kind of think PLG is the same. It's a booming business, this product-led space. And this is, I think, a big shift in the foundation for marketing and especially in kind of marketing ops with all that foundation. So anyways, if anyone's listening and you're new in your career or you're trying to figure out different things to kind of go learn about and really stand out. I think learning about product data is awesome. And there's some great content out there from Amplitude and Segment and Heap and RudderStack and Fresh Paint. And there's so many vendors. Amplitude and Segment have some of the kind of best content out there to go learn from. And if you go in an interview and you're talking about track calls and identify calls and product events and kind of how a marketing team should be thinking about them, or better yet, a go-to-market team should be thinking about them and kind of how to take advantage of this quote unquote goldmine of first-party data and translate that into business growth, you're hired. Like you're hired because that—

Right.

A lot of people don't know that, all that stuff. And it's, You can go take some courses online and, you know, go crush it.

Yeah, I think, I think there's probably a number of our listeners who might be sitting there listening to this like I am here going like, some of the things you're describing that you can do, like that you have to go through with a, I'll call it traditional, you know, marketing ops platform with, you know, a CRM on the other side of it or whatever is it. Yeah, there just hasn't, like they haven't kept up and they can't now, especially now that they've all sort of become really big part of big companies. I don't know that they can move as quickly to enable the kinds of things that, you know, you're able to do.

Yeah.

But I, you know, I think, I mean, immediately it was, as you were describing some of that stuff, it reminded me of, you know, having done a high-volume custom integration to Marketo from some operational systems at one stop. And it was, it was, it was a 6-month project, right? And then it was ongoing because we had to clean up stuff we didn't expect, right? And then way back in my career, Talking about, it wasn't quite the same as like product data, but it was, I worked for a telecom company and part of what we, I had, because I was building the customer database for it, both for acquisition and retention, is that we had all this access to all this data about how people were using the network. And yeah, we had a team of guys, they would probably be called data scientists now. Back then they were just statisticians.

Yeah.

But they were doing, you know, churn models and things like that to try to identify who was likely to churn on the acquisition side, like likelihood to, to be acquired. And that is the kind of stuff that it sounds like, I mean, that's like what my mind's going to, those kinds of things and what you're describing just in a much faster pace.

Yeah. Yeah. Now, now later on, Hypergrowth Startups and marketing, owning the post-purchase journey. Um, and yeah, it gets, it gets hairy fast and with, you know, no more team members, like these teams are like the same size.

Right.

They're all the same. So I do have a question around teams, uh, and responsibilities. Just, I mean, I don't know that there's necessarily a right answer, but just, just like curiosity sort of from your perspective, Dave. Um, you know, we talked a little bit earlier about the PLG funnel and you know, sort of activation and sell-through, right? You sign up for free, you see usage, you want to nurture that person to try to buy. You know, if you had a title to put on that, it is as a marketing ops, RevOps person, your responsibility is to usher data into the right places and allow it to be activated. Right. And understand what the requests are. So, so your responsibility is to make those, that magic happen. But when you think about who is responsible for sort of owning that That CTA, right? The buy now button or the upgrade now or what have you. Is that a growth marketer, quote unquote? Is that a product marketer, quote unquote? Like, what would you think that sort of, if you had to bucket it into a couple of titles that you think are generally applicable, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm also trying to get you to say it is not marketing ops.

Right.

But who is it?

Right?

Who is it? So that the marketing ops people listening go, look, I can help try to activate this data, move it to somewhere, but someone's gotta go out the rest of the way, right?

Yeah. I don't know. I'll tell you what I've seen, but I don't know the right answer or anything.

Wait, why did we get Dave on this call?

Yeah, right.

It's okay, nobody knows anything.

Right. I think this is the— well, depending on who you are, this can be the The fun part of product-led, and it's a little bit of pain too, is like nobody really knows a lot of these answers. There's no like, you know, serious decisions demand waterfall for like how everything should work. So like companies don't know. I like, I've talked to a lot of product-led companies and everyone is different. Everyone has a different setup and nobody's very confident that it's the right setup. Like when I talk with folks, they're like, oh, but you've talked with everyone else, like what are they doing? So this is what we're trying to do with our productled.marketing community is to help educate and we'll make some great content and frameworks to help people understand kind of what we're seeing. But I don't know. And like, so to answer that question about kind of who's owning a lot of this stuff. There's like the, I'll say there's like the foundation owner and then there's the kind of execution kind of owner. Marketing ops owns a lot of the foundation or activation of that foundation. So, you know, product and engineering like have to own the product activity data and the kind of data warehouses if they have one. Because using it for product-led growth purposes is just one reason, like it's just one use case. There's lots of other reasons that they kind of should own it and not marketing. So they kind of own it. Marketing should influence how a product should be tagged and what events should be tracked, but they're not the owners of it. But more often than not, marketing ops is the owner for Okay, you have this data, like how do you go activate it? At least from, definitely from a kind of email communication perspective. Now, who's in there actually creating the emails and designing the journeys and kind of figuring out, you know, what kinds of campaigns should be run? And I call 'em like growth loops, you know, that it's gonna get people to use the product more, upgrade them. Even It's very inconsistent. So sometimes it's a lifecycle marketer. Sometimes it's like a lifecycle being like a full funnel demand marketer, basically. Sometimes it's a PM, like a product person. Sometimes in product there are marketers. There'll be like growth marketers under— So in any other company they would be in marketing. They have a marketing background, but they happen to sit in product. Sometimes I've seen it's actually like success, like they own post-purchase, they consider a signup to be that point, and so CS is in there kind of owning that and kind of designing that. So it's the— I say don't know because I've seen it all.

Yeah, interesting.

I've seen it all, and this is a challenge we have with our product marketing. You know, you go to our site and it says, talks about marketing automation. It's like, kind of, like, but also like kind of not. Like we have companies that are using, like it's a CS team using our product or it's product. Like does a, was a VP of product and a PM using our software? Like would they call it marketing automation? Like no way.

So we have to figure that out.

That's really interesting.

What is the category we are in? Yeah.

So I think what you're saying is like, if you're in marketing or, or market ops and product-led growth, you know, there's probably a lot of, or a lack of clarity about roles, responsibilities across this kind of stuff and how to use it. It's like what I'm hearing.

I, I'd say there's clarity in the companies, but lack of consistency across companies.

Fair enough.

Good. Yeah. And I think this is like, this isn't a marketing, product-led growth is not a like marketing initiative. It's not even a like go-to-market initiative. It like has to be a company initiative. It's like impossible. I've never seen a marketer or even a marketing leader be like, we need to add this motion and here's what it is, without like the support of all kinds of stuff. Because like, if you're not product-led and you want to get there, like you're gonna have to change up a lot of stuff. Like people need to be able to self-service the product. Otherwise, like what are you doing?

Right.

It's really, I, I like to see when, yeah, I agree, right? The top down, the entire org needs to be sort of involved. And I really like it when you start getting the, the product designers trying to think in terms of that PLG motion. Like where, where do we put the intentional growth loop, right? The intentional little hook to, to put the notification that's, or the barrier to entry. Like they're engineering the little stops along the way with intentionality that there's still enough value in the product, but up to a point we're going, oh, there's a little bit more you have to do in order to get going. It's those progressive form fills that we think of.

Exactly. Yeah, it's exactly right. There's like, I was talking with a, a company, uh, yest— yesterday and they, um, didn't have any, like essentially, uh, yeah, we would think of it as like progressive profiling or progressive form fills. In their product. So people sign up and they just get an email address and they're like, we don't know anything about these people. We don't know who, like their level, their title, their type, their industry. We don't know what kind of use case they're coming in to kind of solve for. And they're like, oops, we made that mistake. We need to go back and work with product. So when people sign up, we put them through, you know, we put 3 forms in front of them. Getting that information so we can actually go like—

Yeah, complete your profile, right?

Exactly.

Create a profile version inside your product and, and, you know, and the product might go, well, then they're not using it because they fall out. It's like, well, we can't market to them. Right.

Yeah, that's right. Product might not think to go ask people their title, but, you know, marketers like obviously do and need that.

This is one of the things that I talked about very early in my career. I was like, if you can get product folks to start thinking about the needs of the marketer, to do the selling piece earlier on as they engineer the product, there's a, there's a lot of potential win for the organization. Yeah. But it has to start like the sooner the better, right?

Well, I would, I would argue, I would argue just like I, years ago I got a book, it's like a Who Moved My Cheese type book about marketing and sales and how to be a marketing superstar. There's a, there was a one chapter that was like 2 facing pages and it basically said, you know, this is customer money. It has changed kind of how I thought about the term customer a lot, but basically said everybody's paycheck should have on it, right, this is customer money, to kind of try to drill into people's head, like whatever they're doing is in service of getting new customers who are actually gonna enable them to have the jobs they have, right? So the company to grow. So I think that's just another version of that.

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

All right, so we talked about, right, this is a different kind of motion on top of existing stuff. So for our audience who are in marketing ops mostly, right? So what are the things that, what are some of the things that you would kind of advise them to start learning about more? I think you mentioned a couple of things early on, but maybe kind of recap those that they can, you know, sort of if they want to be interested, if they're interested in something like this and what the differences are. And then maybe the flip is like, are there any lessons from PLG companies and organizations that we could apply in other non-PLG companies?

Cool. Yeah, I love it. For learning, I think there's a couple of things. Definitely go in and learn about productivity data very— be a student, learn it intensely. You can do that. And I don't mean go spend 100 hours on it, but really like sit down and like try to understand it. Don't go through a training to say you got a certification. Go through a training by Segment or Amplitude to be like a learner about it. So go in and kind of actually learn it. A couple weeks ago, I put out a product-led growth vendor landscape. There's some technologies that are very specific to product-led companies. If somebody's looking to go learn more, you can download or go view the landscape. You can see some of the categories that are specific to kind of data and being product-led that maybe you haven't kind of come across yet. So you can kind of go learn about the categories. And then of course, if you want to like go learn about the vendors, but at least learn about the categories. So when somebody asks you about ETL or reverse ETL or product-led sales or whatever, you know what they're talking about. And then for what can you learn if you're not a product-led company from those that are kind of being product-led? I think I think I don't think customer marketing is the right term, but the this like I felt like we were in my career. I've you know run marketing teams. We're doing customer marketing. We're doing great jobs supporting our customers. And then I look back. You know it's like yes, we had you know ten percent of our of our marketing team in customer marketing. But we had 95% of our budget for new logo acquisition.

Yeah.

And the customer marketing team was doing great work, but it was more turning our customers into superstars. And that's different than helping them with the product.

It is.

I think product-led, the best product-led companies are just so good at getting people really into the product, like using the product, adding more users into the product. Like, I don't think we ever once did any, had any effort at Bizzable to have companies go add more, like, more people into Bizzable, you know, like, Maybe there was just a company would have just one login. We didn't even charge per seat. Like it wouldn't cost them anything to go get more people into the product. Like we never did that. And it just wasn't a big priority for expansion. And man, that's all the game for product-led growth.

Sure.

It's all about taking this like crazy mad scientist stuff that we do every day on funnel conversions from a content download to this MQL to this, like, Go like, you know, have that brain, but like now for your customers and it unlocks some pretty cool stuff.

That's awesome. Yeah, it's like, I think we're going to have to wrap it up here now, but just run out of time. And I feel like coming into this now, I realize like I didn't know what I didn't know. Right. I feel like I could, we can continue on for another hour, but unfortunately we're not able to. So you mentioned the landscape document. But let me, so that plus if people wanna like keep up with what you're doing or learn more about you or Inflection, like what's the best place for them to do that and where can they get that doc?

Yeah, you can learn more about Inflection, just inflection.io. And then we have this community that we run for, it's mostly marketers, including marketing ops or rev ops at product-led companies called productled.marketing. And it's a public free community. It's not a— it's an industry group, it's not a vendor group. And so there's a lot of great conversations there. You can always post if you have a question or want to learn and we publish a lot of content there. So again, that's productled.marketing and inflection.io.

Fantastic.

Also, Dave's summer camp session is available at marketingops.com. So if you want to do—

There we go.

We, it was a, a little bit of a different spin on what we talked about today.

It was.

Some more information there. And so if you want to go a little deeper into PLG and watch his presentation as a pro member, you can have access to that. It's included. And, and you can go, you know, sink your teeth in even further there. But yeah, full faith in Dave and his ability to run a community that's really valuable. credence to, you know, the stuff that he did earlier with marketingops.com and all that stuff. And so, yeah, please go check it out. It's really, really good. We appreciate you, Dave.

Yeah. Love it. Thanks for having me.

Hey, Dave, this is like super helpful. I know I learned a lot. I think our listeners who were in my same shoes, not as familiar, will have learned a lot as well. So with that though, thank you to all of our listeners. We always appreciate this continued support, feedback, and ideas for topics and guests. Hard to believe that this is now episode 71. We're almost 2 years into it. So thank you all for that. Mike, thank you. And we miss Naomi. But with that, we'll talk to you next time, everybody. Bye.

Thanks, everyone. Bye-bye.