Navigating the Intersection of Product and Go-to-Market Strategy with Robin Daniels | Part 1

What is happening? This is Ryan here with the Skate up show. So I got Robin Daniels on today, who is a CMO and a CPO and a go to market leader, right? So he's working for a company called Zente, which is awesome, was formerly the chief marketing officer over at WeWork, has done some amazing things, took multiple companies IPO and we get into how AI affects human transformation. Right. And like how to leverage that specifically. He's got some awesome ideas based on how he works with organizations and how his company Sensei does. But it's truly, truly an awesome episode. Time flew by. This is part one. I think you really enjoy this. He's got a wealth of experience and check it out. How do you grow like a VC backed company without taking on investors? Do you want to create a lifestyle business, a performance business or an empire? How do you scale to an exit without losing your freedom? Those are the questions and this show is the answer. Welcome everybody to the Scaleup show. This is your host, Ryan Staley. Very special guest. With me today I have Robin Daniels. Robin is the chief business and product officer at sensei. Previously a 3 time CMO, 20 years plus experience working with companies like for leadership roles, I should say at companies like Salesforce, Box, LinkedIn, Matterport was the CMO of WeWork. He's done two and a half, not, not, not two, not three IPOs acquisition and have led companies through hyper growth to become epic. Rob and welcome. Happy to have you on the show, man.

It's good to be here, Ryan. It's good to see you. Giving you some Robin arms from across the pond.

Yeah, dude, you're like, I think you're a little bit further than the pond. You're a couple stones throw. You're in Denmark right now, right? Is that where you're heading?

I am, I am, yeah, yeah, I am. I just, I just got back from the US a few days ago. You know, still jet lag, but yeah, I'm back in Denmark where I've been living for the last four years now.

Well, you got great energy, man. You don't seem jet lagged at all. I imagine like I kind of suck with sleep so that would crush me if I had to go back and forth all the time. Is that like a hard recovery for you at all?

I've been on such a journey for the last couple years to get my sleep back. It was so broken for the last, I think 10 years as my stress levels have gone up. Honestly with lots of travel and more senior roles and so on IPOs and then during COVID I moved to Denmark and I was still working for a company in California and I was working till 1, 2, 3 o' clock every night, you know, because the whole company was in California. That was rough. So I've been on a journey for the last three years to get my sleep back. It's better. I have a Oura ring to help me, you know, that's what I use.

Yeah, I use that as well. I've been rocking the Oura ring for like I think five and a half years or something like that. I was an early adopter. So what's your, what's your score at? And like, you know, love to hear that. We don't need to get too geeked out on it. But I'm just curious how you brought it up.

It usually hovers between, I would say 70 to 85 is usually like my average score. I would like it to go. But honestly, when I came back from the U.S. it was like 50, 55 because broken sleep and jet lag. You know, it takes. Coming this way is always the worst. Going to the US is not so bad. But coming, coming to Europe takes a good week to get back into the rhythm of things. But I love it. I've had it only for about six months now, the Oura ring. And it honestly changed my life. Just like you can really see how alcohol or stress or some of these known factors really affects your sleep quality and your readiness and your ability to actually perform. And I'm so focused on, I mean, my superpowers. Not that I'm great at a lot of things and a lot of things I'm not so good at, but I can bring high energy that transfers to other people so they get inspired to want to go do great work. Right. Because of the energy that we collectively have. And I'm always mindful of keeping that as high as I can because that's how you really create that momentum in a group of people.

That's awesome. And I want to get into what you do. Exactly. Because I think it's all we're going to bring full circle. One last thing on the Oura ring, the biggest discovery I had for that as that if I consume movie popcorn, which I don't do very often, it single handedly destroys my sleep and puts my resting heart rate through the roof. So food for thought, if you haven't noticed that that's something that could destroy your sleep. Yeah, I know.

It's very specific. Not just popcorn, but movie popcorn. Movie popcorn. They got all the Weird.

Yeah, they probably put asbestos in that for all I know. Man, I don't know. Anyways. All right, well let's do a real quick revenue rundown. So where are you guys at in the stage of the journey at Zensay and it's Z E N S A I in case anybody wants to look it up.

Yeah, we used to be LMS365. Now we're sensei. We are just north of 30 million in ARR. We're about 200 people. Just over 200 people. We started in Denmark a few years ago and now we're a global company. Over half of our revenue comes from the US and we have people all over over the world. 50 people in the US we've got maybe 100 and maybe just 120, 30 in Europe and then the rest kind of all over the world, Australia and so on. What we do basically. And the reason I was attracted to this company, a couple of reasons. One is I love the mission of what we're trying to do. I mean we basically want to change the way that companies think about getting the best out of their people. We call this success and that's why we are offering to the market what we call the human success platform, which is really just a combination of various products that is all about making sure that people have the right knowledge, skills and motivation to do the best work of their lives. Because that's been a conference in my life as well. And so that's what the company is all about. And I love that mission because I am 100% where I am today. Although the accolades you just kind of went through because so many people along the way have believed in me and invested in me and giving me the skills that I needed to be successful. I also love the stage of the company that we're at. Two companies I've taken Public, the Box and Matterport. I joined around the same size. A little bit smaller or a little bit larger, but around the same size. And I love that scale up journey. I love when there's great product market fit. We've got great customers, we got a great team in place. But I can see the potential if we just make some really smart strategic moves around our growth around the product vision. And so what I do at the company is I run product and I also run our go to market. So I'm really focused on how do we build great products that our customers love and that changes the way that they do things, but also bring that to market in an exciting way where we do something that's a little bit different and differentiated and hopefully becomes a category leading company, just like I've done with some of the other companies I've worked for, including Salesforce, WeWork, Box and so on.

So that's. Well, first of all, I love what you guys are doing over there. As I was doing the pre show research. Just love the concept of using AI to leverage or to propel human development. So I think that mission's pretty cool. And so at the same time, it's super interesting that you're in charge of go to market and product. I haven't seen that at all before, especially at a $30 million ARR company. So walk me through that a little bit. It makes a lot of sense and I get it, especially with some of the stuff I'm doing. And for my company, I'm way earlier in the journey than you guys. Like, how did that kind of come about? And then like, how do you. How do you focus on the most critical outcomes for product and go to market by managing both?

It's a quick question. It's a very deliberate kind of move on my part. I've been a CMO many times and a marketing leader many, many times. And I love marketing. I would say of all the disciplines of kind of go to market, it's probably the one I feel the most comfortable and I'm the best at. But it's also clear to me that in a modern company, it's very hard to separate sales, marketing, product partnerships, business dev, this dev, and so on because they're all so interlinked together. Right. You can't really have one operating in a silo very well. And so it's a very deliberate move. I thought about, okay, as I want to again also push myself and my skills and my growth to new levels. How can I take on more that's not just related to the core area that I've been working in the last many, many years, but something that's tangential because I even the other companies, when I was a cmo, I was of course heavily involved in product. I was heavily involved in sales and partnerships, but I didn't run all of those things as well. And so the idea was, well, when I was talking to CEO about joining, we're discussing various roles and one of the things that we were talking about was should it be a COO role or some other title? And I said, well, and maybe I'm wrong, but I think a COO is oftentimes very kind of internally focused. You know, they're focused on Finance and HR and legal and lots of different things. Of course there are different permutations of COOs. And I've always felt like that's definitely not my superpower. You can find way better people for those things. My superpower is go to market storytelling, meeting with customers, generating excitement around the story in the market, sharing a vision that basically people think is different and game changing and they understand. I always think in order to create a brand that people love and it stands the test of time, people of course have to know what it is, understand it and then ultimately fall in love with it. I think so often companies don't figure out the last one, how to make really people fall in love with the brand. And the reason why is because it requires a tight coordination. I think of all go to market aspects. If it falls down in one aspect, you know, then you have a subpar experience. It's very hard to love a brand. I'm very interested in creating long term loyalty and love through creating a brand that people, people think is epic. Okay.

And it's because I'm having, as you're talking, I'm having like flashbacks to the different things I've been doing over the last few weeks, which, you know, this is part one of a two part episode. So I think I'm going to save some of them for the second part when we get into the AI use cases. But like I think you're tapping into something that's tight because obviously there's a proliferation of SaaS products. The cost to create them continues to go down and copy them continues to go down. Right. So distribution is way more critical in that emotional connection to a brand. So what like in terms of orchestrating that and creating that connection to a brand, how do you kind of approach it? And across like all your experience, what do you see works the best just for, you know, the B2B space that we're in?

Yeah. I think in my experience the brands that have done well have courage, conviction and a point of view. And I think it's very rare to find that honestly in the B2B world. You find it a lot more in B2C. You know, here's an exercise I've done hundreds of times literally in my career is I ask people, tell me three brands you love and 100% of the time they come back with consumer brands because those brands oftentimes stand for something. Right. They're emotional. Nike, Patagonia, Tesla, Apple, you know, you name it, right. There's so many good brands out there. And so the Playbook I've always had honestly is, yes, of course we're B2B company. I've only worked at B2B companies in my whole career. But let's market ourselves like a B2C company because we want to stand for someone. We want to. We want to basically create an emotional reaction in people. And that requires courage. And because in a B2B, you know, environment, oftentimes you're trying to please very large set of people, stakeholders and groups of companies. And so oftentimes you get into these committee meetings of trying to figure out your messaging and go to market and it gets so watered down where the end result is so weak, there's no kind of power to it in any way. And I think, of course, I mean, it's not like I'm trying to piss off people or want to have a negative reaction. Ideally, you want to have a positive reaction to your story and your brand. But a negative reaction in some ways is also okay. It's better than no reaction. The worst is like you're like, whatever, it's okay. The okay is like the worst word when it comes to any kind of storytelling or go to market. And we are in this kind of golden age of storytelling. The best brands out there have really figured out how to tell compelling stories Even in the B2B world, like gainsight and Gong and so many cool, cool companies out there that I admire because they stand for something to have humor or they use edginess or data in fun ways or all kinds of things. But they use oftentimes the humanity and the emotional resonance to actually get people to respond well to that versus just beating people over the head with facts and figures and all kinds of things that it's important, of course, but they're important at the next level. So at the highest level, my point is, the highest level, you have to go to market, I think, like a B2C company, even if you're a B2B company. At the highest level, of course, everyone who works in B2B knows that the sales cycle and the sales complexity is way more intricate than in B2C because a lot of stakeholders and amount of time that goes by, so you have to map out that. But at the highest level, you want to get your champion, the people who are ultimately going to be using your product or responsible for really emotionally invested in who you are and what you do.

Okay, yeah, you're right on the B2C side. I think that's spot on. So who are your favorite 3B 2C brands? Who should go to Matt?

I would say I love Patagonia, and I'm a big fan of a company called Bird Dogs. I have pretty much all their shades of glasses. They have really fun, like, glasses, different colors. And I'm a big fan of Nike. Honestly, I think they do. They do really cool stuff as well. They stand for something that I can totally get behind, like, this idea of optimizing being the best you can be no matter what level you're at. I think that's really kind of what they usually stand for. And I love that. It's like, nobody's perfect. Nobody has it all figured out. But it's like every day you try. You try to be better than what you were yesterday. Mm. Yeah, That's. That's. What about you? Tell me three brands you love.

You know what's interesting, I think, because I was thinking about this as you were saying, like, I love Nike too. So, like, that's easy, I think. And this isn't really necessarily. Well, I guess it kind of is a B2C brand, but he does it across, like, a lot of different elements. Is Ryan Reynolds. Else, you know, he's got Aviator Jin. He's got Wrexham. He's got his movie aspect. So really, like, that's a unique play because he's hit all different angles of, like, how he kind of approaches it with, like, his sarcasm and his humor. So I appreciate him. And then another one, like, I haven't dug super deep into it, and it's, like, always been one of those things that I'm like, I gotta do. This is Deathwater?

Yes. Is it Death Water?

Is it Death Water?

Liquid Death. Liquid Death. Liquid death. Right. Yeah.

Because, like, anybody that could charge a multiple of, like, what, 10x on a can of water that, like, tastes no different, and it's just packaging, labeling, and the movement, like, that's pretty freaking impressive to me. So, like, there's obviously something insane that they do underneath the hood for that. Would you. Would you agree with that one?

Totally. It's so impressive what they've done. I mean, like, that much for water. Not cheap. And it's just Water Water. Another brand, actually, that comes to mind. I think I've done phenomenally well in the last couple years. Canva. Wow. What? They've come kind to, like, out of nowhere over the last couple years, and it's one of the few brands that I can think of that spans B2B and B2C. Of course, I think. I mean, individuals use it, but they bring it into the companies that they work for, and they use it all the time to create great graphics and slide decks and all that. It's like, very impressive brand, I think.

Yeah, I think those are good calls, man. I love that. So let's shift gears a little bit because I know we're getting close on time and I want to make sure we hit on how AI relates to human development. I know that you invest a lot of time in that, with the product and what you do. So what's your point of view on that? And how can we augment human development with AI?

Yeah, so we want to be firmly on the side of humans. That's why we call our platform the human success platform. And the movement we're trying to create is really around how do we empower people and humans to be the best they can be. And we think AI is going to be hugely instrumental in that, but instrumental in the way of really kind of helping you get to the point that you want to in your life and in your career. And AI is perfect for that because it's so good at connecting data points and data sets. And the pattern recognition that oftentimes managers have. The reason why oftentimes, let's say, a little bit older people become. You become better as a leader as you become a little older. Not always, but a lot of times because of the pattern recognition you have over time. And AI, of course, is a great substitute for pattern recognition because it's about seeing various things in people or in situations and being able to connect the dots and AI. So, for example, the more we know about you. So our platform is all about making sure you have the right goals, you know, KPIs or OKRs, and you're measuring yourself and your team against them every single month and quarter. It's about making sure that you're learning new things so you can uplevel your skills and learn new skills to become better and better and better. And finally, it's around this, what we call employee engagement, which is really around making sure that people are focusing on the right things. They're motivated and happy, not just in the work they're doing, but also with the team they're working with and their manager that they're working for and all those different things. If you think about our data points that we can use to see and nudge people in the right direction based on what their. Their path is about. If I can see that week after week somebody is working on some projects and they're really connecting well with these people, then I could maybe say, hey, Maybe one day you're suitable for becoming a cmo. Here, the skills you should be having here, the people you should connect with here are some of the courses you should be taking here, the goals you should set yourself and so on. If you want to take the path of a CMO, it might take you five or 10 years or whatever it is, but here's what we think or here's some good mentors you have. The more we know about you and what you care about, the more we can guide you. Meaning AI can guide you. And we use Microsoft AI in our products to do that. So every time somebody in our platform puts in an update on their goals, how they're tracking them, or skills that they're learning through the learning platform, or who they're engaging with and what kudos they're getting and high fives, we use all those data points to help create a picture about you so we can send you in the right direction ultimately, so you can become the best version of yourself, more successful, more productive, more happy. Because we know that the benefits of doing that means that the companies will win. Those companies who have figured that out, they see higher levels of profit and revenue than in their cohorts. And so it's so important that we do this for every employee, not just based on what a manager thinks, because that's kind of the old school AI right in my head. Now we can actually distribute that to every employee in a company using scalable methods.

That's good man. And I love the thoroughness of it. Right. And how you're kind of approaching it. It sounds like, and I think when I was doing my, my pre work, you guys only work with Office 365, right? It's like embedded in the product. Is that kind of how you're offering set up?

Yeah, absolutely. That's our superpower. So our superpower is basically many things, but one of them is that we are 100% built on Microsoft, including OpenAI's tech stack. And we only really sell to companies use Microsoft because our main delivery mechanism is through the Microsoft Suite. And that's a huge benefit because it means adoption is like super high. Implementation is easy. The CFOs and the IT team trust us because it's like we don't have to go like check, is this platform actually that, oh, it's just built on Microsoft. If you don't trust Microsoft, then you're not going to trust us and vice versa, if you trust Microsoft, you're going to trust us because it's exactly the same. It's not like there's really no difference. And so it's. That is our superpower. It means that basically if you look at some of the competitors that we see in the market, they'll take you a few months to kind of deploy a suite like this of products with us. You can do it in a few hours because it's just through Microsoft. So through teams, through Office365, through SharePoint.

Okay, I got you. So it enables you to do much faster time to value tighter integration? I think so, yeah. That was going to be one of my follow up questions. How did you decide to standardize? Like, obviously Microsoft has massive distribution. Right.

Every time they update their platform we get the benefits of the upgrades. But I would love to claim that it was my brilliant idea. It was people who came before me. I've been with Sensei about a year and in that time we went from being basically an LMS where we sold the learning platform, to now we have this human success platform because we've broadened out our product suite. So that's kind of been the main focus for me. But I did not make the call to focus on Microsoft. That was a call that was made a few years ago. And honestly at that point in time, I think it was in 2018, our CTO made that bet and it was seen as a little bit risky. And now probably one of the smartest moves ever because the Microsoft platform is just going gangbusters. I mean, it's the most trusted biggest platform. It's overtaking pretty much everything else, whether that's Google Docs or Slack or anything else. It's just doing well because they're making some smart moves. Satya Nadella is probably, arguably one of the best CEOs of our time, if you ask me.

Yeah, he's. He's killing it, man. He's killing it.

Yeah. All right.

Well, unfortunately, and I all that makes like a lot of sense and it's, it's so funny. The distribution is so critical. I think that's why we, like I said, we do a whole episode on this. But anyways, I don't want to get sidetracked. We're up on time and I want to be sensitive to your time. So where can people find you? Where can they find out more about Sensei and then we'll wrap things up.

Yeah, go find me on LinkedIn. I'm not hard to find. Robin Daniels. If you do a search for that name, I'm probably the first person that comes up. And if you want to find more about the Human Success platform, go to sensei.com set EN or C E n if you say it in the US c e n s a I.com Excellent man.

Well it was awesome having you on the show this time. Absolutely flew by. But I am excited I have you back for part two. So thanks for being on Robin. Thanks Ryan and we will see you on the next episode. Thank you for checking out the scale up show. My mission in life is to help founders and revenue leaders avoid all the pain and suffering in revenue growth so they can flip it and create a life of their own design. So if you enjoyed this show please like review share it on social and more important just share it with a friend. Share with someone that you think could learn and benefit from what you heard on Today. But the more we get the message out, the more people we could help, the bigger the impact we make and the bigger the community gets which helps everybody. So once again thank you for being a loyal listener. I appreciate you and look forward to seeing you on the next episode.