Optimizing Go-To-Market Strategies with Bill Macaitis

Overview:

Kerry Guard welcomes Bill Macaitis, a seasoned marketing leader with experience at some of the fastest-growing SaaS companies, to explore the evolution of go-to-market strategies. They break down the misconceptions surrounding GTM, the importance of integrating sales, marketing, and product teams, and how AI is reshaping the landscape. Bill emphasizes the role of customer-centric metrics, such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) and time-to-value, in driving long-term success. The conversation also touches on the impact of PLG, the power of freemium models, and how companies can use content marketing to engage and educate their audience effectively. Tune in to gain valuable insights from a GTM expert and learn how to optimize your growth strategy.

Transcript:

Kerry Guard 0:02

Kerry, hello. I'm Kerry Guard. Welcome back to Tea Time with Tech Marketing Leaders. I know I know you're expecting a woman sitting beside me, the lovely Gina. She we had to, we had to reschedule that one, and we are going to have that conversation. Oh, it's going to be so good, and we're going to have it in October. So stay tuned. But we should not be disappointed, because this is going to be an amazing show as well. I'm very much looking forward to hanging out with Bill Macaitis, where we are going to unpack GTM. We're going to have a real take here on what it is, how it's evolved, and our favorite motions as it relates to you all who have been on my show and who we've been speaking to. So just as a friendly reminder, it's about you from you are probably part of a complex brand, an audience, a company who's got to sell a really hard thing. Can't do it in a one-liner. This isn't B to C. This isn't just do it. This is, this is a thing where you got to really build trust with your audience and convince them that you really understand their problem and you can take care of them, and they're going to have to do a lot of wiring and configuring to get this thing to work, and that takes time. And you're going to do to an audience, a complex audience, who kind of sort of hates us as marketing and sales, and they deal with us because they have to, and we have a lot of trust to sort of build that bridge and convince them that we are not selling snake oil and it's okay, and we want to make sure that we are there to support them, and that takes time as well. So with that in mind, when Bill and I get to our topic today, we're going to do it with that lens, because we want it to be for you, where you can take away and run with some of these concepts that Bill has been working on for a long time for SaaS brands. A little bit about Bill. A little bit about Bill. He is a board advisor for service. He let's try it again. He offers Board Advisory Services where he shares and accumulates a go to market knowledge leading marketing for the three of the fastest growing SaaS companies in history, Slack, send desk and Salesforce. Little meme dropping there. Gotta love it. Gotta love it. He's achieved five exits over his career as well. So guys, we're we got an expert in the room here, and I'm here for it. I'm gonna have a ton of questions, and I hope you do too. Beauty of being live. I look forward to all of your questions, Bill and I, we are going to unpack those. So please don't, don't hold back. He's clearly lived, lived this for some of the biggest B to B brands. So let's take advantage of it. He has enjoyed helping other AI and SaaS companies build capital-efficient marketing strategies that drive growth at efficient costs. He dives into product-led growth, PLG, premium models, high-velocity content marketing, SEO, and brand building. He's also dabbled with ABM and many other strategies. He'll show you what has worked to power some of the fastest-growing B-to-B SaaS companies in the world, and more over how to focus on capital-efficient growth for today's environment. And that is a wonderful, wonderful line, thank you for doing my job. Bill. I'm just reading your little thing here. Yeah, it is a mouthful, but it's like, how to focus on capital efficient growth, how to focus I'm going to come back to that because I think that's like, ah, we

Bill Macaitis 3:19

Yeah.

Kerry Guard 3:20

So much waste. Yeah. Well, you know, I'm gonna stop there, Bill, because that is we did some say, we did some serious name-dropping. We've definitely laid out your career, and I'm just really excited to have you on the show. So thank you and welcome.

Bill Macaitis 3:33

Oh yeah. Thank you so much for having me. Was excited to chat today.

Kerry Guard 3:37

It's gonna be good before we get into it, though. I mean, I like I said, I did some knee-dropping, I talked about what you do, but more importantly is your journey and how you got there. So share with us. Tell us all the things. How did you find marketing? Or maybe marketing found you.

Bill Macaitis 3:51

I think marketing and business found me. I was the nerd in sixth grade that was reading Wall Street Journal and Economist in the back of the class, and I've just always loved it. I've always loved entrepreneurship. I did a first startup right out of college, and I wasn't just smart back then. I didn't even know there were VCs, so we had to, like, grow it on our own. It was out of the Midwest, it was in the gaming space. But, you know, we grew it, we were profitable. We sold it, and I spent about 15 years on the BTC side. So that was kind of unique for me, is I've never been a pure B to B marketer. I've spent about half my current B to C. So I've worked for really large media companies like ij, entertainment and News Corp, Rotten Tomatoes, men, just building up these really large audiences. And then about, you know, 15 years later, I shifted into B to B, and there was this guy, Mark, and he was building up this, you know, kind of new technology of SaaS and the cloud, and I went over to Salesforce, and, you know, just spent time on that side of the house with, you know, Salesforce and Zendesk and slack, and did a couple of IPOs. And then I was just like, you know, what do I do? And I just, I've always loved talking to marketers and helping founders out. And so I shifted more into. To the advisor side of the house, and now I just help other, you know, startups, help them grow, help them scale, help them with marketing, help them with go to market. I know we're gonna talk a little bit about that, and that was a lot of fun. And then I was like, having all these had great conversations with everyone, but I'm like, I kept getting the same questions, and I was like, Well, you know, I want to start doing some videos of my own, like, I built up a little studio. And I was like, so I started a new channel, a new YouTube channel. It's called SAS CMO Pro, and you can go there, and you can just hear long videos of me talking about all these different topics, and that's been ton of fun, too.

Kerry Guard 5:34

And his, his little marketing character is a sloth, and that's a sloth thing ever

Bill Macaitis 5:40

I love sloths. We can talk for 20 minutes on sloths and really bore everyone. But I love the sloth.

Kerry Guard 5:47

My son's a big fan. He has the sleep story that he listens to every night called CNN, sleepy sloth. And it's all about slowing down helps the rainforest. Yes,

Bill Macaitis 5:56

yes, they're they talk about capital efficiency. The sloth is so efficient with their movements, right? I mean, they just conserve energy in the right way. They're camouflaged.

Kerry Guard 6:07

Tons of cool things about sloths,which makes perfect sense for how you're helping out organizations. It sounds like to maybe slow down.

Bill Macaitis 6:18

I think I would think, yeah, be a little calculated with it, right? You know, I think it's really interesting because, like, I work with all these AI founders, and they're amazing people, and the products are coming out with are just like, breath thinking the technology, but it's a lot of times they will use a really dated, I'll say it go to market playbook and, and and that's where I just think, like, those of us in marketing or sales, success, support, whoever we are, like, there are always new ways to do these. And so, like, that's, I lean a little bit more towards the modern approach, right? And I'm sure we're going to dive into that, but it's a really fun, fun topic.

Kerry Guard 6:56

Yeah, we are. We're going to pull it all apart. It's going to be glorious before we get there, though, what you know now that you're in a completely different seat, more from an advisory standpoint, which I'm doing a bit of, and I find just so much fun. Yeah, I'm glad you do too. Your studio is glorious. If you want to know what Bill studio looks like, I'm definitely taking notes. You should go check out his video. He breaks it all down for you. It's

Bill Macaitis 7:19

he was a quick shot. There's the live of those that are cedar. There are a couple different angles, but yeah, that's a studio,

Kerry Guard 7:26

man. Well,

Bill Macaitis 7:28

I was like, I need a project. Here. You have a great studio.

Kerry Guard 7:34

That's always one of my favorite questions is, what new hobbies you picked up over the pandemic, and now you Yeah. So in this new seat of what you're doing, from an advisory standpoint, what challenge Are you currently facing? What's sort of hard for you in this new role, as you talk about, you know, go to market and some of these different motions for for brands?

Bill Macaitis 7:57

Yeah, I think, you know, we're at this incredible nexus point, right, where there's so many new AI technologies coming out, and I just think that's, you know, really fun. It's really challenging, right? Because I think we're all thinking about how we redo every single step of our work process, right? And I know even myself as shifting into content creation, I really had to think about like, how do I leverage these AI tools, from transcription to video editing to, you know, posting it on different social networks. And that's been both fun and a challenge for me, just learning all that, right? Like, I historically hadn't done a huge amount on the social side, so that's been fun. But I think just, you know, for a lot of founders out there, they are thinking about just, how do they grow? It's a crowded marketplace, right? I mean, that's a hard thing. There's like, even if you are starting right now and you've got this amazing AI product or SaaS product, there's 10 other competitors that kind of do similar things, right? And so I really think the differentiation, how they go to market, how they expand, how they grow, the capital efficiency, all these different tactics, like, that's the biggest challenge for a lot of these startups right now, and you know, it's what's going to make or break them.

Kerry Guard 9:06

Don't get left behind. We're going to circle back on that because I'm so curious around how AI is playing a role in these modern go-to-motion opportunities. Let's talk about go to market for a second, and just define this for folks because I think we talked about this before we hopped on, but there seems to be a lot of different definitions of how people are thinking about it. I get on my high horse for a second. Maybe do for those ridiculous hot takes that I loathe, but gonna say it. I feel like marketing sort of grabbed on to this acronym go to market like a life raft, and they're not. They've sort of owned it, and I'm not sure that they're using it right. So I'm just gonna put that out there. What's your you know, in your experience, you've been around the block, you've helped a couple companies go public that are, you know, just these little whatever Salesforce. Or whatever, in your experience, though, how do you define go to market?

Bill Macaitis 10:07

Yeah, for me, go to market is the overarching principle of how you take your product and get it out and expose it to everyone. And I think that that entails a lot of different teams, though. That entails marketing, but also entails sales success, support. It's historically referred to a lot of the customer-facing teams. And I think marketing sometimes does want to maybe Co-Op that and just say, like, we just do go to market. I remember when it came to the B to B side, and I remember there was a campaigns person I was working with, and they were like, oh yeah. Like, I own go to market. And I was like, Oh, well, we're like, really, like, what do you? What are you? What are you doing, or you're coming up with the overarching strategy and everything? And it was like, No, but I think it's like, it's almost everything. And I think for me, go to market, a lot of it refers to all the different channels and strategies you're gonna use. And that's what I found with like, between sales, success, support and marketing, there's 1000 different ways you could technically go to market, right? And you had mentioned some of them earlier, right? Even on the marketing ones, whether you're doing, you know, inbound marketing, you're doing SEO content, PR, you're doing outbound marketing, I classify that as a lot of like, paid advertising, you know, outbound campaigns, you're doing outbound sales. You're doing a lot of cold calling, SDRs, maybe you're doing inbound sales, where you're getting them from different ways, but they're all doing they're all doing high-velocity motions. Plg, there's 1000 different ways to do it, and I think that's where, like, I always just try to challenge, you know, founders and just like, hey, there's a lot of different ways to do it, but are you doing in a way that's efficient? Are you doing in a way that's maybe customer-centric so people don't always hate us, right? So that they actually like, Yeah, I had a good experience with marketing, or, actually, I had a good experience with sales. Like, I think there's a lot of nuances there. So anyways, I'll let you, kind of, you know, riff off that one.

Kerry Guard 11:49

Yeah, no, I think that's important to because I think that's one of the things that gets lost and go to market, is this notion that it really takes, it takes the whole company to bring it to market. I would, I would throw product in there in a big way too, around more of these PLG motions that tend to come up. I don't think PLG is for everyone. I think companies are trying it when they're not quite in the right space to be doing it, but it is. I product plays a huge role in that one for sure. So I do think it takes the entire company. I think you had a really good point, though, Bill and I mentioned it too, around marketing, sort of owning it. Should marketing own the GTM motion? And who within marketing should be driving that? If that's the case or not, if it's not marketing, then who should it be?

Bill Macaitis 12:43

Yeah, I mean, to me go to market, that's a more holistic, almost philosophical belief, right? I think that's come from like, the founder, the CEO, on which go-to-market approach they want to take, right? You know, do you want to be a very sales-centric or a sales like growth type company? Do you want to be a more product-like growth or plg, type company you know, are you targeting enterprises? Are you targeting SMBs? Do you want to take a customer-centric approach? Like that was big for us at Slack, right? Like we measured, we had a lot of customer-centric type metrics, like net promoter score and CSAT. We even do crazy things, at least when I was there, like when, like, I ran sales, success, support and marketing at Slack, and we would do things like, hey, when someone had an interaction with an account executive, we would survey that person and be like, Hey, how was your interaction? You know, how helpful were they? How knowledgeable were they? How responsive were they? Right? Not just, did they push you to buy it, right? It was like, we wanted to measure all these experiences. So I do think you know, to your question, like, those are like, kind of core philosophical beliefs on how you want to grow and the capital efficiency of that. And I don't think that's just marketing like you said, the product plays a huge role in it as well. So I really think that kind of has to come from the top. I don't think like marketing can just quite own it, or even like a team within marketing can quote, unquote, own go to market. But obviously, I do think these teams have to work together, and when they are working together on a unified go-to-market approach, that's going to be much more successful than every team having a completely different approach and being very siloed.

Kerry Guard 14:16

I so agree. I so agree. I think it's interesting, though to talk about this. I do think it needs to come from the top because I think it's going to work better when everybody's on board with the approach. It sounds like, though in order for to pull this off the right way, the CEO has to be pretty knowledgeable about the different types of motions is that yeah, it will air

Bill Macaitis 14:44

Yeah. And what I probably say is, at least in my experience, working with a lot of like SaaS and AI startups, you'll generally have two scenarios. You'll have one where the founder knows sales, marketing support knows all these kind of like go to market type, um. Have teams and strategies and others are just a very technical founder, right? They came from a technical background, and they kind of built a product, but they don't have a lot of experience there. So a lot of times you will have one person, you know, maybe that leads those teams. So like it slack again, like I was like a CMO slash zero, but I ran marketing, sales, success, support. A lot of times, you'll see a COO, or a CRO or, you know, a CCO chief customer officer that they kind of run these, all these different teams here. I think it really helps if you have one person that kind of understands those business principles and how these teams work together for an overarching go-to-market motion. But I think probably to your question, though, what happens a lot is, it's a technical founder. They haven't really defined it, and it's kind of defaulted out to the teams. And it's kind of like marketing's doing its own thing and sales is doing its own thing, and success is doing its own things. They get very siloed. And even within marketing, you have five different teams that are all doing their own thing, that don't work together, don't have shared metrics. And I think that's where you get these very kind of like broken, fragmented go to market approaches.

Kerry Guard 16:02

I agree. Think there are a lot of companies out there really struggling with trying to figure out how to pull everybody together. I mean, I host a VIP group every month, and we always come back, inevitably come back to sales and marketing alignment, like even though we try and steer clear of it, because we keep talking about it and we don't have a solution for it, or we keep talking about the same solutions, we keep coming back to it. And I think getting to the root issue, you just nailed it. And the problem is, is that there isn't somebody at the very tippy top, whether it's a CEO or COO, driving the overarching vision, pulling all the teams together and being like, this is how it's gonna roll. We all got to get in the same boat, and let's go. And it's got to be agnostic. I believe it's got to be agnostic of marketing and sales. It's got to be somebody who's seeing the bigger picture and pulling it, pulling it all through, so that the finger-pointing, yeah,

Bill Macaitis 16:56

it's so easy for these teams to get confrontational and antagonistic. I think I had a really unique background because I was a Zendesk, so I got to know support and success well. I was a sales force. I got to know sales well. And I'd always had a marketing background, and so I kind of felt the backgrounds and the pain points of each these teams. But for a lot of companies, the CRO tends to be just the default salesperson that also now was running these other teams, and you get into a very heavy SLG or sales, like growth motions. So yeah, I think it's really important, like, whoever the person is, they have to be agnostic. They have to think about how these teams can work together, not against each other. And I'm sure you've talked about this with your, you know, your fellow marketing leaders. But I love, like shared metrics, you know, aligning sales, and marketing success together. I like more customer-centric metrics, more long term metrics and and even like, I think a lot of times even the fears that these teams have don't necessarily have to be like plg. I just did a video on set cmo pro about talking about how like plg is actually like an enterprise sales secret weapon. Like it's actually, I think it's a really good thing, right? Like, you have a plg motion when we were at Slack, God, we sold the really large enterprises, but by the time they went to the account executive, they already had a usage at that company. They were all using slack. We already knew, like, who are the power users in there? Who are our friends? Who are evangelists? You know, it was a much easier deal just to expand it than to start from zero and try to go wall to wall and made these you know, the account executives lives were much easier. But I think a lot of times there's just a lot of fear that comes with it, with like, oh, it's gonna take my quota or steal my deals, or, you know, there's just a lot of misinformation out there, and I think that's because these teams have historically not worked really closely together.

Kerry Guard 18:36

I think that's fair. I think that's fair. So when we're breaking down the we're starting to see sort of steps come come to fruition here, which is great in terms of, you know, defining what your go to market strategy is going to be from the very, very top, having somebody agnostic, pull the teams together and rally around it, putting the customer centric metrics in place. Let's talk about those for a second. What would you define those metrics to be I, feel like everybody just sort of is starting to use revenue as a crutch, but there's got to be those leading indicators that get to the revenue. And each team sort of needs their own metrics to some regard in terms of what they can control. And I feel like if we just yell revenue at the marketing teams and sales teams we're going to lose. That could be the end goal for everybody. But like, to your point, there's got to be other metrics involved. So for you, what are those?

Bill Macaitis 19:31

Yeah, for me, I think revenue is just an output, like you said, it's not an input, right? Like the inputs that drive revenue in the customer-centric metrics I like are net promoter score, and use daily active users. So how people are coming and using your website, your product or software every day? I like things like product-qualified leads. So not just is it a marketing-qualified lead, but are they in the product? Are they actually using it? Have they passed the threshold? I love things like time to value. How quickly do people experience value? I like CSAT stuff. So like I talked about what the sales experience, we did that a lot, whether it was within sales support or success, after someone had an interaction. Was it a good interaction? Was it a delightful interaction? Right? I do think at the end of the day, a brand is the sum of all these different touch points, right? And when you can try to give a delightful experience, a delightful sales experience, a delightful website experience, a delightful content experience, a delightful onboarding experience. You know, those things tend to culminate in a positive way, and even on the branding side, right, like a lot of BB companies, I don't know why, like I came from B to C, where it was very common to measure your brand awareness, your A to recall your name, recall your sentiment. But a lot of BB companies don't measure that, and I do think that's a really important one, right to how do people feel about you, right? All these things. I think when your go to market looks at those metrics, you change dramatically the type of actions you do, and you look at a little bit more long term in a more customer-centric way.

Kerry Guard 21:04

I haven't heard these metrics in like, a really long time. I when I worked at Microsoft, when I worked for Microsoft, we were at MEC, and Microsoft was one of our clients. I remember social sentiment being like a really big deal, and I forget which tool they used at the time, but it would come back to us as ad-like, from an ads team. They would come back and say, from a social sentiment standpoint, like, here's what's happening, and here's how we need to change our messaging. So new ads are coming your way, and that was really standard for them, but I haven't heard that in such a long time. I don't know if it's because I work with smaller brands that then sort of grow into that needing those tools and they can't afford them right away, or if they've just gotten really expensive. I don't know what the case is, but man, sentiment, I feel like, is so underappreciated. And what's interesting to me, as you're talking about it, Bill is and we're talking about the changes you make. It sounds like you're going to correct me, it's going to be great, but it sounds like the changes you make become more human, instead of just like the change of a button color or trying to just get your click through rate up or your CPCs down, it's like, well, how is our messaging resonating, and How do we adapt to really make them feel something. And so is that when you're talking about the changes in the decisions you make, or is it, it feels more qualitative versus quantitative, which feels really gray and fuzzy? And now I think everybody's probably freaking out a little bit, so reel us back in.

Bill Macaitis 22:38

The good thing is, like with all these customer-centric metrics. You can measure this stuff. You can measure it. It's just, you just take a different approach. You're like, all right, for instance, if we care about daily active users, and we want to get people actually using the software more, okay, we're marketers, right? Well, should I work on the website, or maybe I should actually spend time in the product? Maybe I should be working with my product folks to think about what that onboarding sequence looks like, maybe, as opposed to defaulting all the text on the onboarding to the back-end developer that wrote it, maybe we have one of the marketers write it. You know, we did a lot of slack, like all the prompts, the dialog, the onboarding, the release notes were written by marketers that just we had developed unique editor, tone and voice. It was fun. It was whimsical. You know, maybe marketing needs to spend more time making the product. Have a little life, right? Have a unique visual identity. Like, I say this all the time in B to B sass. Like, you'll go to their websites and they're like, whoa. Like, beautiful, great. Tons of colors tons of emotion. And then, like, all right, I'll sign up, I'll go into the product. And it's like, white background, tiny, black text, 1000 things going on. You know, very sterile, lifeless. So, you know, when you have a metric like da use, marketers think of things differently. They're like, well, maybe I need to actually get in the product. When you have a metric like net promoter score, now you're like, oh, how do I give people good experience? Maybe I shouldn't gain everything, right? Well, my metric before was just leads. Well, of course, you're going to gate everything, right? You're going to give people bad experiences. I always hate that. Like, I would go to a website and like, Oh, what do you do? And it's like, no, I have to fill out a 17 field form, and then I have to talk to a salesperson. And I'm like, I just want to find out, like, what you do, right? But if all we have is leads as a metric. Of course, we're going to be driven to that. So now, if you have never noticed from it, well, how do we have a more delightful experience? All right? Well, maybe I record a demo that they can just watch there, or maybe they can schedule a time, or maybe we can just drop them right into the product, right? It just forces you to think about things differently. Or I even have another one. This is going to really, like, push the boundaries here, but like, how fun is your product? And I would argue again, you can measure that you could do a CSAT survey one week after they've used it. You know, hey, how fun was using our product? Thumbs up, thumbs down, right? All right, 17% gave us a thumbs up. Okay. Product marketing team, our goal is to get that from 17% to 30% how could we make it more fun? Like, for instance, Slack, our number one integration was. Is not Salesforce, was not HubSpot, was not a back end data analytics tool. It was Giphy. People like to have animated GIFs.

Kerry Guard 25:08

Yes. You know, I got in so much trouble moving away from slack because they know Looker had their giphys. So much trouble. Giffy, right?

Bill Macaitis 25:14

Yes. And people are having more fun, and now they're using the tool more, and because they're using the tool more. You know, it's growing faster. They're talking about it more. The brand sentiment improves. Your word of mouth improves. All these out input, revenue metric, funnel metrics start to improve. But again, that was an input to it, right? So I just think, you know, a customer-centric playbook isn't for everyone. It's a very different philosophy and how you go about it, how these teams work together, but I do think you can quantify it. There's definitely lots of good metrics out there. You know, some of our plg type metrics, some of them are experienced type metrics. But, you know, it's a different way of thinking. Again, you're not just looking at everything, of like, how do we just squeeze as much out of a short term, you know, funnel and get more leads and more leads, even if those leads aren't good. You know, there's a lot of bad things we can do in marketing, and I think that's why you get some of these. People hate marketing and sales.

Kerry Guard 26:10

I am so grateful to be talking about something different other than leads and revenue. This is so this is a breath of fresh air. Bill, I am so grateful. And in terms of those, it's all it's all sentiment and qualitative too, which I think is so interesting, and again, something we haven't talked about in a long time. So I'm excited for people to start wrapping their heads around that it's going back to basics a little bit. And I think that got so lost. And it tends to be one of those things that were like, well, that's a B to C thing, like, B to C wants to have fun and like, we're not allowed, and that's so untrue. I love Slack for that reason. I love gusto for that reason. Gusta has this little pig that pops up. That's hilarious. Is that great because you're getting paid today, right? Yeah, a little easter egg. Well, piggy bank get paid today, right? Like, yes, thank you for, you know, infusing and making, making my job a little a little extra fun. So I love that. I think we can even do that from a from one of some of this more serious products. Not to say that getting paid isn't serious, very serious. From Augusto's standpoint, it's why I use them, because they're one of the for as fun as they are. They're also, from a customer centric standpoint, like the fact that I can call and get a per call and get a person is just, yeah, so huge. But I do think when we're talking about products that are more in the cybersecurity space or in the healthcare space, you can still like, we're all still human, and we still love entertainment. We still like to have

Bill Macaitis 27:38

fun. Yeah, you know, another one is just, and I've worked with cybersecurity firms, and another big one I've always advocated for is just how simple or easy to use is your product, right? I think a lot of companies go down this path, especially as they sell in the enterprise; they just want to add feature after feature after feature after feature, and it becomes harder and harder and harder to use the more features you add. And so it's a different playbook. Again, that's another customer-centric one. It's just like, Hey, is your is your software easy to use? And you know, I remember I was working for a really large enterprise. I was, you know, doing advisory work, and I had to submit my invoice. And I would think, I don't know, how long do you think it should take Carrie to submit an invoice to a large company? Like, five minutes, few minutes, three minutes. It took me two hours, like they were using some back end, like procurement system from the 1990s and it had all, like three-point fonts, and I had to go through 17 steps. And I was so frustrated. I was pulling out what little hair I have left, and it was like, Oh my god. It was such a horrible experience. But I kind of know, like the product team was probably just like, Oh, here's a roadmap. We just have to keep adding feature after feature after feature. And you can underestimate, like most, first of all, most users only use like 10% of your features, right? And when you have a really hard-use product, well, then you have to cover it up with a lot of success and support. And that's expensive, right? And so we always talk about these capital-efficient ways to grow just a simple, beautiful, fun product. Like, it's, it's such an easy strategy, and it works so well. I didn't work time and time again for different SaaS companies. And again, I think, like, marketing has a part in that, like, we're good at, you know, making things simple and, you know, clarifying our message, or we're good at zero conversion rate optimization. But part of that too is just like, how do we get people through the next step? How do we reduce friction? Right? Adoption friction, pricing friction, I think, like, marketing can help there. So, yeah, I think there's just a lot of different playbooks, and that always kind of goes back to my, you know, a more modern go to market playbook, I think, is, is B to B market, or sometimes we have to challenge the traditional, 30 year old funnel metrics that marketing. You're just in charge of leads or top of funnel, and that's your only job. I think marketing has a much more holistic impact they can make in the entire customer journey. And it is a journey, right? It's not just one thing. You have to realize these are people and nurture and educate and delight them through the entire. Your funnel.

Kerry Guard 30:02

Gosh, it sounds more fun, too. It is more fun. I gotta say, I it's real slog, you know, as an agency, right? So we do digital ads and SEO for for companies, and the the lead metrics that we're held to are just exhausting because we could hit them, that's fine, but when, but then you're asking us how much revenue you made, right? And it's like, I It's so tough. It's just really, really tough to think about the quality, the quantity over the quality. And I just love some of these different metrics to be thinking about from a quality standpoint. So I'm excited to start wrapping our own arms around those for clients. That's That's amazing. Let's talk about some of the different go to market motions we mentioned. That's said motions twice, essentially different go to market opportunities. Yeah. So you have plg, which we've talked a lot about, and I want to come back to that in a second. But let's just list off a couple of your favorites when it comes to the B to B space complex brands and these lovely audiences that really struggle with us.

Bill Macaitis 31:11

Yeah, so I'm a big believer in content. I think, I think you need to go where your audience is right, and in B to see that's, you know, that's kind of fundamentally understood as you go where the eyeballs are right, and the eyeballs are always using different things, and there's, like, this lagging time for B to B companies to go where their buyers and prospects actually are. And I think the big thing now that you see is like, do you just have way more people on social, you have way more people on mobile, and you have way more people on video, right? So, and our personal lives, we probably all spend a lot of time, you know, on our phone, you know, scrolling through and increasingly, watching, you know, these shorts, these videos, and I think, like, that's where there's a huge opportunity for a lot of B to B companies to go, because a their competitors aren't there, right? They're all still writing white papers, or they're just doing, you know, more expensive type outbound, but you've got a great chance to build a relationship and again, I like the content side of it. So I'm not even just like, hey, just, you know, you can run ads on social video, but I like, like, create content, create helpful content that's going to educate them, that's going to nurture them. I mean, I think we, we all totally know this in the B to B space, these are long deal cycles, right when, when we would sell. You know, Slack, Salesforce, Zendesk, the enterprise. This was not like they saw us in one day and bought us. This was a long time across multiple stakeholders. You're trying to convince the procurement person, the IT person, the InfoSec person, the finance person, the C suite and the line of business, right? So you have eight different stakeholders, all with various different levels of knowledge of your particular you-know solution. And so like, I always view, these are long journeys and content, and I've always tried to invest in content, but good content, not slang, we brochure, we're content which is just hey, buy us today for these 10 reasons, but just like, hey, write content about the pain of that role, right, and how you know, slowly, educate them about what your space even does. You know buyers guides and list your competitors and why you're good why you're not, and show other customers and how they're using you. And view it as a long journey. And I think like when you can take that content and deliver it via social, you are going to be in a little more modern playbook. And of course, there are lots of AI tools that make that process a lot easier now that you can manage that. But that's a good one for me, because I've always loved SEO. I grew up doing SEO, and I grew up doing a lot of content for B to C companies. And I think B to B, there's a huge opportunity to do that.

Kerry Guard 33:42

100% agree. I mean, from an SEO perspective, we don't even do we run technical audits and we chuck it over the fence and say, your technical team, your web depth team, needs to figure these out, right? You need to speed up your website. You need to, you know, you got some duplicate content here. But, like, we can't fix any of that for you. We're just telling you what your problems are. Go fix it. Great. What we really want to focus on is the content, where the content holds. Where are your opportunities? What? Where's the empty space that you can go fill to really tell those stories around why you what pain you solve, and why you solve it better than anybody, depending on who your ICP is, right? And so I 100% agree that content is definitely the way I will say the pushback we get and how you might be really helpful here is the resource intensity that content creates now AI is definitely here to stay. It is wonderful. I am having a blast with doll dolly right now. Yeah, all of my clients' content for their newsletter and stuff, I am just making these wonderful visuals for all of their blog posts, and it is so much fun. So I do think that there are some AI hacks that help with the content lift, but video in particular, as we know with our beautiful studios, that. We poured, you know, tons into we know what that lift is for these folks, and so help them. Help us. Help them in terms of getting started, where to start, because you can't eat the elephant, don't eat the elephant. And what are some of those other tips and tricks to help scale it without the resource, knowing that they probably don't have a full content team at their fingertips.

Bill Macaitis 35:27

Yeah, the nice thing is, I think in the last couple years, there's been so many good solutions out there that make content creation easy, that make content distribution more seamless. So for a lot of B to B companies, what you'll usually have, is you'll have some assets. Maybe you'll have one long form interview, right, with your your CEO. And the good news is, hey, there's tons of tools out there that will take that long form video and chop it up into 13 sections. You know, when we finish this, they'll, we'll probably like, go through and take the best sections and post it out on social. And, you know, there's great AI tools that will do that for you. You know, I use tools where we'll go through it'll automatically AI will grab all the entire transcripts, right? So then you can summarize it. You can do different things with it. There's tools that will allow you to post to multiple different services. So they'll post to x and YouTube and LinkedIn all simultaneously. So I would say that the heavy lifting that historically had been from either creating content, re leveraging that content, or distributing that content is significantly coming down. And I just think like, you know, again, you got to go where the eyeballs are. You know, you look at any industry stat on where people are spending their time, it's on their phone. It's increasingly on video, whether that's Instagram, Tiktok, LinkedIn, YouTube, you know, they're all shifting to video. So I would just say, you know, try to get a little ahead of that. If you can, you know, make those investments, you know, with agencies or in house, whatever it is, right?

Kerry Guard 37:02

You're going to be in a better place the way that we've been able to get it done internally, and for I do it for a couple of our clients, is systems and processes, right? So it's really, it's really helpful to get into a flow to be able to execute it on a consistent basis. So whatever that is. So if you're going to take one piece of content, like I did a great interview with an executive coach who's one of my clients, and now it's going to take that and delve it up into different sections, I'm going to have different pieces on the website, depending on what he's talking about. Going to surface it all over social media, for sure, and it's an hour long that's probably going to be, you know, 15 pieces of content, easy, easy. So I think the system and process is really key to figuring out, like, Okay, we got the video. Now, what do we do? And putting that once, you build it once, and then just you get to rinse and repeat, yeah? Do other interviews. It'll be great, yeah? So I do think that's helpful.

Bill Macaitis 38:04

Yeah, I was gonna say, like, Gold Cast, the company I've worked with, and they do a lot of event video, but they're really repositioning to just be able to re-leverage this video everywhere, right? And I find that a lot of times, especially B to B companies, a lot of times you'll have a field marketing team or an events team, and there's just a goldmine of great quality content there that you can, you know, re leverage and for social and content in other places. So I certainly think, like, you know, there are great tools and opportunities to leverage that they use a lot of AI, they're a great tool, but there's a lot of good ones out

Kerry Guard 38:35

there. Yeah, tons of tools, tons of tools. Find your tech stack, stick to it, iterate on it if you need to, but get up more importantly and not more importantly, but and a system and process in terms of the going back to the video, you know, one of the most important things you said, You've been talking customer-centric, which I totally love and agree with, when it comes to creating content, the last thing we want to do is create more noise, especially if we're talking to very specific audiences that aren't that big, right? So in terms of being thoughtful around the quality aspect, how do you go about figuring out what to even say? I find that that's such a roadblock for people to just get started.

Bill Macaitis 39:13

Yeah, I so we did this a lot at Zendesk, and I would always tell our content team, hey, just go talk to our ICPs and ask them, ask them out their day, and ask them what their pain points are, right? And let's just talk about, you know, those pain points, right? It's, it's great content. It's going to help them out. So for instance, like one of our most popular pieces of content we created at Zendesk was the top 10 interview questions for hiring customer support agents, right? Because if you're in, you know, support leadership, you historically have really big teams. There's a lot of turnover. You're constantly hiring, and they have to do a lot of interviewing, right? And they want to find out, hey, which is where some good interview questions was Zendesk, like an ATS, or did we hire people? No, we didn't. That wasn't our thing at all. But, you know, we created content. That helped out a very big pain point that they went through. And then, you know, that content also had links to other pieces of content. And then we slowly started to talk about just customer support and where we see it moving. And then there was a little bit, oh, by the way, and here's, this is what we do at Zendesk. Here's what we offer. Here's our some cool customers are using us. You know, I think a lot of times we markers, we want to rush to that very bottom funnel content, like, we're awesome by us today, these six reasons, right? And it's like, well, you know, like, let's, let's, let's slow the door. Slow down a little bit here.

Kerry Guard 40:29

Gotta get your foot in the door. Yeah. So, yeah. And I think that that's a really great example of pressing on a pain where you don't have customer success people that you're trying to, you know, sell into these companies, but the customer success people use your product. And so there's wonderful partnership in that content of solving a pain for your customer, and also talking about the people who are going to be using this in a way that, like we, understand what you need to be doing, what problems you're going to have and, oh, by the way, here's all the things that send us that we can support from an SEO perspective. I mean, link building, internal link building, all day, every day. So

Bill Macaitis 41:11

yeah, I love it for sure. Yeah, you got across link. Got

Kerry Guard 41:14

across link. I think we only have one more time for another go-to-market opportunity. One of the things that my friend I there was a podcast yesterday from a few friends of mine who were talking about different go-to-market strategies. And one of the things that they were talking about is that you can't just have one. So if you're talking about content as as a key opportunity, what would you partner with that one to really make it you know, get to the next level. Let's say content LED is your primary but then what are some secondaries that need to support it?

Bill Macaitis 41:45

I'm so. I'm a huge believer in plg, right? So that SAS cmo pro channel I made. I literally have done 27 videos just on product-led growth. That's how much I love it. And I don't think product-led growth is just the product team doing it. I think product like growth is just this idea that people spend more time in the product, in the software, right? So you have to infuse your marketing instead of the product, your sales into the product, your support into the product, right? And I even think the pricing packaging that goes along with a plg motion can have a big influence. So, like, I'm a huge believer in freemium emotions. I know it's kind of a polarizing topic, but one of the reasons I love free emotions is you get you hire basically millions of free marketers, right? You know, you're they're out there talking about your product and recommending your product. And when you combine a freemium motion with a content play, now you have a lot of educated free marketers that are out there, you know, again, spreading the word and, you know, switching jobs and taking Tech with them and moving into new opportunities. So I love that content. And I would even argue another thing you could tie with that is leverage that content for your existing customers too, right? Like, again, a lot of times as marketers, I think we are, sometimes we are forced to just say, Oh, you're just top of funnel, or just leads and above. Well, that content is great for existing customers too. They again, they're hiring, they're Zendesk. They're hiring customer support agents. Do that's helpful for them, right? You know, content about your space, content about what's possible within your product. In fact, usually in SaaS and AI, half your revenue comes from add an upgrade, expansion. So you know, you want to be continuing to market to your existing customers, because that's a huge growth opportunity. Again, again, don't just say this is customer success. They have a part in that, in continuing to upgrade and add on. But marketing, we're really good at campaigns. We're good at content. We're good at automating a lot of this as well. So I think there's, again, like you said, there's 1000s of go to market motions you can be using. Using using one is just a little dangerous. I don't think you should be doing 1000 because you spread way too thin. But I do like the plg type motions. I like the content the inbound and again, really think about how you can use AI in each of those to help accelerate and deliver more value in terms of PLG

Kerry Guard 43:58

I just want to make sure we wrap this up with a bow for folks, because I'm under the I'm the one say. I'm under the impression I think you could do this at any point, but I feel like it's easier to do plg when you're just getting started, because you got to it's really comes into there's such a product lift there a developer lift. And so if you try and bring plg in later, it feels like it's going to be a little harder, not impossible. But I also want to be thoughtful around I think there's a misconception. You said, there's lots of misconceptions. One of the misconceptions I tend to see is that people think plg is just a trial.

Bill Macaitis 44:36

Yeah, yeah. So I've it's so funny. I'm just such a plg geek, like, I've done videos on almost every topic you mentioned there. So I did video on the seven landmines of doing a plg initiative. I've done a video on what is plg, on how there's really, like 27 different elements as a part of plg. It's not just a free trial. I literally worked with a client that was like, Yeah, we're doing a plg motion. Like, oh. Great. Like, are you doing, like, in product education, high velocity buying? Are you doing, reducing friction, time to value and, oh, we're just adding a free trial. I'm like, well, that's like, one slice of it. It's a it's important slice. And I'd even argue should go up to freemium, not cryptoware or not free trial. But there's a lot of elements to it. And to your point, too, it is absolutely more difficult. I helped a lot of companies implement a plg motion, and it's much more difficult when they're a series CD, established company, and especially if they're sales like growth company, and they're transitioning to plg or adding in addition to it very hard, very hard, culturally, there's a lot of roadblocks, a lot of inertia. So I do think you know when you embark on a plg motion really try to educate yourself on you know what it is, all the different teams that need to be involved for it the right metrics to set for it, for it to be successful, it's not for the faint of heart, but when you implement it, wow, if you do it right, it can be incredible for your long term growth and the capital efficiency of that growth, it's a huge capital, efficient driver.

Kerry Guard 46:02

I just want to double down on freemium because it gets a bad rap. I was using a freemium model for a company called I'm going to I don't mean to throw them under the bus, because I still think they're a wonderful company, but so get accept is this really cool sales product. They're actually in Europe, very cool founder, and I went to use it one day, and I was literally locked out because I had immediately upgrade. So they didn't tell me that I was going to need to upgrade. And I don't need every I don't need the kitchen sink that they sell. I just needed what the freemium model, which was, which was basically three documents I could get signed at a time, and I never hit three at a time. I maybe I had one or two. I never hit three, but I talked about them relentless to everybody. So talking about, like, free marketing, I was definitely one of their free marketers. I loved their project. I loved talking about them, and then I I can't access it anymore. And so I'm so bummed, and I think I just think that's a really wonderful piece that people lose sight of if that, if somebody's in there and they're not in it every day, and they're not paying for it, that then they shouldn't. Maybe we just need to start charging for it.

Bill Macaitis 47:14

And it's like,yeah, I so I know get accept. I've actually talked to them in the past, and I've been a big I'm a big fan of their solution. It's a great solution. So, and it's, it's, you know, it was founded by salespeople, right? And in a good way, right? But it's very difficult, I think, sometimes, for sales to really embrace a PLG type motion, right? So I would just argue, like, I think in general, freemium is very misunderstood by sales folks again, like, I just did a video on that, like, how like, sales should view, like, PLG is their best friend, right? It can be really, really good for them, but there's a lot of scary stuff on it. And I think even if you have a free emotion, sometimes they'll just go to Cryptoware, right? Like, it's such a feature-limited version. I think the ideal for anyone who wants to go down this journey, from a pricing packaging standpoint, is have a free plan, have a very robust free plan, but put in thresholds, right? So, like, what we did slack is we said, like, hey, like, you can use Slack for free for all the different types of features, right? And when you hit 10,000 messages, then only at that point you can still keep using it. But we're just going to say, hey, you know, we can only keep the most current 10,000 messages. The older ones are going to start getting deleted, and that usually didn't hit until, like, six months in, right? And even then, you could still keep using it. So like I said, I think there's a lot of different variations here, and the really smart B to B companies can can get the positive benefits all this crazy word of mouth growth and the improvements in your brand and your sentiment, and even use it as a conversion funnel, but it is a long term one. It takes a little bit of time to get there.

Kerry Guard 48:49

It does, and I love what you're saying in terms of taking the time to nurture those folks and that it could take six months, but I think the payoff is is awesome. I am so grateful for this conversation, Bill. I could talk to you all day long, but clearly you you're like, one step ahead. You know all my questions, because you've already answered them on your channel. So you have, if you want to know more about Bill and what Bill's got going on in terms of all of these different motions, especially, especially, plg, head on over there, we'll drop the link in the comments as well as Bill's profile, so you can find him to find out more about the metrics we should be using for long term and sentiment to to coupling, you know, content and plg and being able to build our brands for the long haul. I'm here for it. I'm here for it, Bill, before we go, yeah, we go, you're more than a marketer. You're more than a video content creator. I want to know we're I know that q4 doesn't technically start until October 1, but let's all get real. It's starting next week. The race is done. It's here, end of year. What are you most looking forward to in closing out?

Bill Macaitis 50:02

2024,well, I gotta say, My other passion, beyond AI and SaaS marketing, is gardening. So for me, I'm harvesting the last of the fall crops that are coming out. You know, we do a lot of tomatoes and summer squash, and we just had some great pears that we were harvesting and nectarines. So I'm in the Bay Area, so, like, we have a very late summer. It's kind of weird, like, we still can get stuff all the way up through, like, late October. But yeah, q4 is fun. I was just thinking about that. It's like Halloween, you know, I have a daughter, and that's always fun. You know, getting out all the decorations, and you get to see a lot more family coming out. So, yeah, I mean, there's definitely the business element of q4 The interesting thing is, a lot of like SaaS companies, they're actually their q4 starts on November 1. So they they do November 1, December and January, because they didn't. They were such seasonal buying, and they didn't want the quarter to end right on the holidays. So it'll kind of shift a little bit depending on the space you're in there.

Kerry Guard 50:55

Yeah, yeah. We have some clients where we actually renew in February. For that reason, it's so smart. I I live in the UK now, and Halloween is not as big here, and I gotta say, it's like such a bummer, but I throw my kids a little a little Halloween east. It's not Easter obviously, but like an Easter egg hunt, but with candy. And I like the whole house, yeah. So it's super fun, and I try to make it up to them, because we are is one of like, Thanksgiving and Halloween. I got, you know, it's, it's hard to not be in the US during those holidays, but I try and bring a little piece of home with me wherever I go. So I'm here for a bill. Yes to q4 yes to these things. Let's go. Let's go. Good deal. Awesome.

Bill Macaitis 51:38

Well, thanks again for having me on this is a ton of fun. Kerry, thank

Kerry Guard 51:41

you so much for joining me, and thank you to our listeners. If you liked this episode, please like, subscribe and share. This episode was brought to you by MKG Marketing, the digital marketing agency that helps complex brands get found via SEO and digital ads. It's hosted by Kerry Guard, CEO and co-founder of MKG marketing, Music Mix and mastering done by Snappy. And if you'd like to be a guest, hit me up. I'd love to have you on. Thank you all so much.

Bill Macaitis 52:02

Thanks. Applause.