Hubspot’s AI Search Grader & ICP Tips (with Manoj Ramnani)
We're talking Nike’s strategy flop, Hubspot’s AI Search Grader, & ICP tips with SalesIntel's Manoj Ramnani.
Out of like the 10 recommendations that it gave, I would say probably 50% were
actionable,
50% were high level.
So at the end of the day, if you don't know who you're trying to sell to and
why and why
they would want to buy your product, all of this other stuff really doesn't
matter too
much.
Businesses are people.
Businesses team.
Nice, they say, you know, business is building business as a team sport.
Little talk backed up with real action.
This is GTM News Desk.
I'm Nick Bennett and I'm Mark Killens.
Let's see what's trending.
Welcome to another episode of GTM News Desk.
My name is Mark Killens, joined by Nick Bennett today.
Nick, what's going on my friends?
Just live in the life.
It's a beautiful day outside.
Can't complain.
Very good.
We have three very exciting and interesting segments for you today on the news
desk.
We have our two segments and stories of the day to start with and then we'll
get into
a great conversation with Menoj, the CEO of sales Intel.
It's a not misconversation around your ideal customer profile and what CEOs
really think
about going to market strategy and creating and identifying the right customers
to sell
your product to.
To kick it off with the headline story, Nick, Nike has really effed up.
Bit time.
You're being Nike guy.
I actually am.
I have a lot of Nike shoes, although I've been buying less and less and I'm
more into
like all birds right now just because of how comfortable they are.
But like my baseball cleats, they're Nike.
Like everything that I have from a sports perspective is Nike.
Interesting.
I never buy new shoes though.
I buy one pair of new shoes a year.
That's a fun fact about me.
I could give two shits less about a shoe, but I know some people obsessed with
shoes.
So Nike though, they make a lot of stuff.
They don't make just shoes.
Of course that's how they got into all this and there's a great book and there
's a great
movie about Nike.
Check those two things out if you haven't yet.
Nike though a few years ago when they brought a new CMO in and a few new
presidents to their
business, Nick made a massive decision.
And said, look, art strategy in the past was all about creating an amazing
brand, distributing
out our products through many different partners, you know, I think partner led
growth.
Like many different partners, retail stores, getting Nike in the places where
Nike customers
and future customers, consumers are.
Then they said though a few years ago, hey, you know what?
This whole thing that SaaS businesses are doing.
This idea of like targeting people with digital ads and doing a lot more
digital, native
things to increase their sales and focus a bit more on their existing customers
versus
acquiring new customers.
Let's just do that.
Guess what?
Complete failure.
So the lesson number one, Nick is don't listen to SaaS marketers.
Fantastic movie about Nike though.
I didn't even know that was out.
I watched a couple months ago, really good movie to learn about their whole
thing, but yeah,
yeah, this is a big failure.
Well, yeah, I mean, that movie was about like when they got started, right?
That was the Jordan era, right?
Great movie, right?
It was like, what was it called?
Like, error?
I think it was like, yeah, I forget the name of it, but yeah, it was like, yeah
, it was
all about the early days.
So the former CMO, Mikey, this guy who I was talking about, right?
Like, because he's no longer the CMO, he got fired.
He's like, hey, let's focus on existing customers, but the flaw in that is you
won't grow, right?
Like, there's only so much growth that can come from existing customers.
So number one, like if you're only focusing on existing customers, that's going
to be an
issue.
And the other thing is you're not going to create any net new penetration or
market share
if you focus too much on your existing customers.
So when you think about ideal customer profile, you have to think of it in the
lens of,
look, we have customers today, how many fit within this ICP and how is the ICP
changed?
And how do we require more customers like them?
And in Nike's case, they over indexed on this idea of digital marketing, e-com,
basically.
Like, hey, let's do it with me, think of ourselves.
Let's create this e-com channel and they invested a lot in this idea of Nike
membership,
which I think is a good move.
They just over indexed.
So if you go to Nike and you find their membership experience, I'm sure a lot
of folks listening
and have checked it out.
Hey, that's good, but they destroyed the brand equity.
Like, what made Nike so amazing was the storytelling, was how they showed their
brand of the marketplace
through the eyes of athletes that then made other people aspire to be better.
Right?
You think about it like a community, you think about a brand, the altruistic
nature of it
and the idea of, hey, I am, I'm not that person, but I aspire to be number one
in my sport.
I aspire to be the winner.
I aspire to be the best at whatever I'm doing.
That's Nike, right?
And without that storytelling, without that inspiration, that motivation that
comes through
TV commercials that comes through different activations they do at events and
other things,
you're going to lose a lot of mind share and what they've done instead and they
're changing
it now, but they created a lot of low quality shitty content on the internet to
try to drive
people back to buy on their e-con site, which I mean, in hindsight, it's like,
yeah, why would
you change what's been working for so long that makes Nike Nike?
But in hindsight, like, hey, this is the hot new thing, like go do this thing.
So I think that's the big lesson in story number one is like, you know, be true
to yourself
and be very careful about chasing something that might be working for another
type of
company or other group of companies and you forget what makes you you.
I've thought about this a little bit.
I don't know.
I get Nike such an established brand that I feel like they still have the brand
equity where
it's like, regardless.
I mean, yeah, it's you think of like, all right, cool.
What are one of the coolest brands as far as sneakers out there?
Like Nike, like, it's, you know, I even had a question.
Like a lot of people would never like see this and maybe it's for the younger
generations,
but I feel like even younger generations like my daughter, she's six and like
she for
Christmas, she was just like, I want a pair of Nike shoes and I was like, do
you even know
when Nike shoes are?
She's like, no, but all the kids have them at school.
And I was just like, so like wearing a pair of Nike shoes does that make you
any better
as like an athlete or whatever?
She's just like, no, but like everyone just like has them.
Like, it's just you know what it is.
Like, it just, this story made me think about that.
Even knowing they're what they're trying to do and the mistake that they made,
like, I
think they can still come back from it because it's just, it's an iconic brand
that just
everyone will always know.
Yeah, agree.
I think what they did really wrong though is they pulled Nike out of these
stores.
So like, yeah, your daughter wants a Nike pair of shoes and you go to the store
, you can't
find Nike's anymore.
Like, that's what they did.
Like, it's go e-com.
It's like, oh, I can't touch the shoe.
I have to like buy it through an all I think that's a massive mistake and they
see
their numbers.
I'm trying to find the exact number of how much money they lost, like billions
of dollars.
They're a stock price or a huge haircut.
But yeah, I mean, it was really bad.
They blew up their entire supply chain basically, right?
Like, they had all of these partnerships through their distribution channels
and they just
said, hey, no, we're going to pivot to like, like e-com, like direct to
consumer and yes,
you could do some of that, but I really think that the over pivot of not having
the serendipitous
moment of someone coming into a store saying, yeah, I know Nike to your point
and I'm going
to buy that thing there now.
Really hurt him.
Yeah.
For sure.
Before we dive into this conversation with Mino's and honestly, I'm excited for
that.
I want to talk, I came across this on LinkedIn and I mean, I know you spent
lots of years at Hub
Spot, but they had something that that I feel like has been coming.
It's more apparent in our space right now.
They came out with this hub, it's called the Hub Spot AI search greater.
And for those that aren't familiar, it helps brand see how visible they are in
AI powered
search engines.
It actually gives actionable recommendations how you can improve booster brand
awareness.
I've tried this for tech just to kind of see like what it came back with.
But it also reminds me similar of like, you know, the website greater that they
had.
I feel like they're always doing all these like cool things.
Now, I think there's some interesting things, some great things about this tool
From a marketing perspective and you know, tying it back to to ICP, like it's
super accessible
for marketers.
Even if you don't have a technical background, it offers you custom
recommendations to help
kind of figure out where your AI usage in search makes sense.
But it's important to remember that it's just one piece of the puzzle.
So as marketers, you know, lots of times unfortunately, you know, bandwidth and
just layoffs and all
that.
It's one person taking on like five rules.
And some of them might not have a background in this and understanding, Hey,
here's how my
ICP fits in.
Here's how my brand fits into everything else.
But like they're just trying to make it work.
I think that the insights, somewhat can become surface level.
There's a risk.
And I know we've talked about this before of leaning too heavily on AI,
possibly at the
expense of other critical elements, which is really like your content quality
or the overall
user experience.
And it really brings me to my key point.
So when I think of like, you know, AI tools and specifically this AI tool, like
an AI
tool should be a tool in our toolkit, but not the entire solution.
And so well, it can optimize our SEO strategies.
You know, bringing it back to people first.
Nothing can replace that human creativity and the deep understanding of our
audience,
actually talking to people, seeing how your brand resonates in the market.
And so I think ultimately our goal is to serve the end user, whatever the end
user is to
you.
So when you're using tools like this and again, nothing against HubSpot, like I
'm sure,
I'm sure I'm sure about thousands, hundreds of thousands of people are using
this tool.
And you know, obviously, I'm sure it's going to be incredibly successful, just
like every
other tool that they have.
But you have to remember to balance those insights that you get with the human
judgment
and keep your focus on the people first when it comes to your marketing and
understanding
that this plays into a small part of your tool set, but it's not the entire
thing.
And take it with a grain of salt as well.
I mean, I don't think AI is perfect by any means and you know, ask me that in
five years,
I might have a different answer.
But I don't think people could just take these recommendations and just run
with them
because I mean, what what?
I mean, what's the difference of you asking an AI to figure out how your brand
is in
search and you go into ask other people, like you got to you got to still do
the leg work
to be able to pull everything together.
Humans aren't perfect, right?
Like so nothing's perfect.
Right.
So there's always going to be critical errors and it's like, how do you balance
that to make
it work?
That's the hardest thing, one of the hardest things, right?
So let me ask you this, like AI search greater, like how good are the
recommended, like
how good and actionable are recommendations in that thing?
I haven't used it.
Yeah.
So when I put tack in there, we got, I think it was like, I
got 65.
But how good are the recommendations?
Like, like, like, let's like, let's really like rip it, rip into it.
Like, is it like, hey, these are 10 out of 10 recommendations, actionable,
understanding
specific, or is like, eh, not so much.
I feel like some of them actionable where it's like, hey, you need to focus on
like long-tail
keywords and like they, they gave recommendations based on like what those
keywords are based
on like what tack kind of like comes with.
And I'm sure, I mean, I don't know if this changes company to company or what
the recommendations
they give.
I'm sure they have something that spits that out.
But I feel like some of them were like surface level where I might not know the
technical
background of it, but like, I know enough that like, oh, like, I could have
just said something
like this, but like, this doesn't get me to talking about it deeper, going to a
deeper
level.
And maybe that's where their upsell opportunity is where it's like, they'll
talk to the
ill kind of like their website grader, like they'll figure out, they'll have
you talk
to someone to figure out how to maximize your website.
Maybe it's just something where they're going to figure out how that all plays
in.
But some of them were actionable.
I would say out of like the 10 recommendations that it gave, I would say
probably 50% were
actionable, 50% were high level.
Okay.
So what do you think?
What would you give a grade of it?
F-D-C-B-A.
What's the grade?
Again, not knowing a ton from like an SEO or like a grade.
Stop qualifying.
No, no, no, no, no, just just what's the grade?
What's the grade?
I would probably say like a B-C plus right now.
Okay, that's not you bad.
That's not you bad.
This thing just came out.
So I mean, I'm sure just like anything, they're going to make changes, tweaks
to it and they're
going to take hopefully user feedback and improve it.
But in present state, B-C plus, I think the recommendations can be a lot better
But I think there is going to be a lot of people that use it.
You're the ideal customer for this though, right?
Because you don't know a lot about SEO.
So that tells you almost everything you need to know, right?
So if it's not too helpful for you, I mean, it's not going to be helpful for
someone who
knows SEO then probably.
Right.
People that know SEO is probably not going to be a great tool for you.
Now I just, what I thought was interesting is like I filled out my information,
put in,
you know, filled out all my contact details to get, you know, to the, the, the
greater.
But like no one contacted me.
I don't know.
Maybe that's just part of it.
Maybe they're just collecting data at this point.
But, you know, I thought someone would be able to like follow up on my score
like, hey,
here's are the things that you could do to do even better, especially because
our website
is built on HubSpot.
So like if this all plays in together and becomes one big ecosystem, like, I
don't know.
I just think that you could do so much more.
But again, I don't know, I don't know what their plan is or how early this is
or like where
they see this going in six months.
But present day B-C plus.
It's pretty average.
Pretty average, maybe slightly above average.
Okay.
Interesting.
Yeah, AI search rate.
I mean, they've done a ton of it with graders.
We built a website grade, like you said, email grader.
They have graders all built into the product.
We have social media grader at one point when Twitter had open APIs, Twitter
grader.
Yeah, I mean, they're on a trend.
They're hopping on a trend, right?
They're trying to be first to market with this thing that, and it's interesting
how they
call them AI powered search engines.
I would, I don't know if I would call chat GBT in AI powered search engine.
I mean, maybe that's the new category.
I haven't really referred about that, you know, like in that context.
It's good that they built up thing to help people understand or try to
understand something
that's very nascent and new and it's going to change a lot.
It's going to, I mean, yeah, it's going to change a dramatic amount.
So we'll see.
We shall see.
And we'll see what Monosha is now about this ICP ideal customer profile
development because
at the end of the day, if you don't know who you're trying to sell to and why
and why they
would want to buy your product and how they should go about buying your product
, all
of this other stuff really doesn't matter too, too much.
So my tip for you today is spend more time talking to your customers less time
doing other
things.
If you're not talking to your customers, you know, at least three times a week,
if you're
an executive, I think you're missing, missing a massive opportunity to improve
your business.
I'm a noj will talk more about that.
So let's get to the conversation Nick.
Excited.
See you all on flip side.
All right, everyone on to the featured guest today.
Mino from sales intel.
Minoj, what's going on my friend?
A lot.
A lot.
Somewhere is almost coming to end.
Everybody's getting ready for the prime season.
Like in the B to B world, as you know, you know, our prime season has kind of
two phases.
September 5th, you know, after the Labor Day, all the way to the mid-night, you
know, past
midnight December 31st, right?
I remember for last couple of years, we're still signing deals at two in the
morning because
it's not yet midnight in California.
So that's the first wave and the second is that January through March.
And many people ask me why?
I say, well, you know, the reason September December is our prime season is
because we
all spend way too much time on the beaches, right?
So the chances are we're not going to hit the World Cup three and we got to
make up for the
Q4 and some of us prepare early on, right?
For the next year.
So that's why, you know, that's a season that's our buying time.
Yeah, I mean, it is.
And some people have shifted it to the one month away from the calendar, right?
And you know, it takes a little pressure off, but nonetheless, we are going
into the closing
stretch, Nick and Minoj, closing stretch.
So Minoj, you've been the CEO of sales until for how long now?
No, six years, almost.
Wow, congrats.
That's a pretty good run and you've built a really successful business.
And the topic we want to really hone in on with you today is something that
every business
has to always be thinking about and measuring and understanding because it's a
fluid situation.
And that is your ideal customer profile, aka who, who did you build this
product for and
why and how the hell are you going to sell it to them?
Yep, yep.
You know, I met many companies don't get it right as basic as it sells.
You know, ideal customer profile.
They don't dial it in and companies that invest enough time in defining their
ICP being data
driven.
They see the magic.
They see the rewards that come on the other side in terms of all the key key PR
s of SaaS
that we measure, right?
So how do you make sure you don't get it wrong?
Yeah.
Well, it shows, it shows right in your funnel, right?
You don't have enough pipeline.
Your deals are not converting as fast and your ACV is not going in the right
direction.
And painfully, it also shows up in your renewal.
You know, the journey is so high, right?
You're able to sell to the customer, but they were just not the perfect fit for
your solution
or your services.
And as a result of that, customer is going to join in.
And in SaaS business, in the time that we are living in, you know, your NRR is
not more
often important KPIs than your growth at the top, right?
So is it only looking at the metrics?
I think it's going to show up in the KPIs and the customer satisfaction is
going to show
up in your moral of your go-to-market team.
It's going to show up, you know, for the entire business.
Even being a product person, developing product for someone and your sales
people, your go-to-market
team is having a hell of a time to bring, you know, a customer on or the
customers that
they bring in, you know, they lose.
So you're going to see everywhere, you know, whether it's the hard KPIs that we
all measure
in the SaaS world, as well as in your, you know, day-to-day company moral.
Nick, before we get to your question, I want to do an audible, put my nose in
the spot
a bit, who then is the responsible individual to make sure the ICP is right and
stays right?
Yeah, yeah, you know, it's a go-to-market team effort.
Ultimately, I think the CEO owns it and CEO owns the go-to-market strategy.
She works very closely with, you know, the company's top lieutenance, which is
your, you
know, CMO.
If you have one, your, your CRO, like your head of customer success and account
management
and product, right?
You come together under the leadership of the CEO to define who your ICP is.
In the earlier days, you know, the, the, the depends upon the size of the
company and the
maturity curve of where the company is, you know, if you start up not two
founders into
developers, then it's the founders instinct to say, you know what, I had this
problem or
I worked at the previous company, we saw this problem.
Let's go after this, right?
And then as the company grows and becomes more mature, you have some data
points, right?
And we recommend to our customers and prospects that, you know, once you have
enough data points,
then we data-driven because your data is telling you something, right?
Which cohort of your data has, you know, you do, do you have a better win rate
or a,
when you win, you're retaining it.
So they didn't tell you a lot about who you should go after.
Hmm.
I like that a lot.
You know, it's interesting.
I was doing customer marketing for a while and I was at a company and I feel
like going
back to the ICP, I feel like it was partly wrong.
And I think it's partly because we pivoted what the ICP was.
And one of the things that I noticed was that time to value as far as a
customer and
I mean, I guess it plays into NRR as well.
But like time to value, if you think about it, you know, in a SaaS business,
say you're
signing a 12 month contract and you're not seeing time to value for up to 90
days, that's
really only giving you, you know, a short period to see if the products were
worth your
value.
And so one of the things that I worked on that ultimately helped retool our ICP
was getting
that time to value to sub 30 days for the right people.
And once we kind of flushed out all, I mean, ultimately there's going to be ch
urn from
bad accounts and just wrong ICP fit.
But I noticed it made a huge difference once we were all aligned on the ICP sub
Yeah, yeah, could be more with you.
Time to value, it insert and SaaS organization, you know, it'd be great if
every organization
could have 30 days, like, you know, we have sub 30 days because our product is
very, very
simple.
Like, to likely the customer has never used our product, it's very, very low.
So they're familiar with the space, the problem that we solve, but there are
some products where
the implementation is 90 days, right?
We are currently implementing a finance and accounting software and it's been
past 90
days and we are not up and running yet.
Right?
So they're the time to value, you know, it's probably going to be four, five,
six months
in certain cases.
Hmm.
Great point.
Let's talk about CEOs though.
You know, yourself, I know a lot of CEOs.
What is the biggest mistake being made by CEOs in 2024?
Oh boy, you know what?
We as CEOs, we make a lot of mistakes.
The key is to not make the same mistake again.
And the second is to not make the mistake that you know somebody else has made
it.
Learn from someone else's mistake.
And I see even now, obvious mistakes that you see that are visible are spray
and prey.
You know, all right, there's just, you know, grow up to the second, the growth
all cost.
They're still hiring all those BDRs, even though they're not not productive
just because
they've raised 80 million dollars just before, you know, the market crashed and
they have
money in the bank.
The third is not cutting costs fast enough, right?
I have been in a victim of that mistake myself.
Like I'm never I always think I wish I'd.
Terminated that contract fast enough or I wish I'd shut down that AWS services.
I wish, you know, I had same cost because when you're running businesses that
are coming up,
regardless of whether you're venture backed or not, money is oxygen, right?
It's like a video game in your own coin.
You die, you start all over again.
So I see still some of the some of the CEOs not getting ghost.
I want to I want to I want to work spicy instrument.
No, it's just kind of like, it was a good.
I don't know.
You know, they got better as you said them.
Okay.
I give you that.
And I'm not taking it though.
I think there's bigger mistakes people are making.
I mean, look, like I technically like Nick and I have a very small business.
Two people plus we have a team of people that work with us.
And I'm technically the one to make a lot of the poor decisions with a lot of
input from
Nick and whatnot.
But I want to hear from you first and I'll give my answer.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So so on the road market, let's just talk specifically about nowhere where we
help our
customers.
Yeah, I talked to a hundred go to market leaders in the last, you know, since
January,
or third of four, in the first seven months.
And as part of it, I gave them 100 pennies as part of this, you know, 20 minute
webinar.
As I hear the hundred pennies, your goal is to build the most optimal pipeline
for your
business, right?
That converts into revenue and the revenue that you can keep, you know, that
continues to
stay with you and impacts your positive and other.
And it was surprising how many go to market leaders, not specifically CEOs, but
how many
go to market leaders had still sales that motion.
Whereas when you segment the data as to who are still focusing on sales that
versus, you
know, different go to market strategies and I'll come to the top three that
came out when
you take the CEO as a title out and then look at the rest of the go to market
professionals,
the top three go to market strategies that these these professions for spending
their
100 pennies on, partnership, communities and events.
You think the mistake is they're not taking the regular market approach that
are under
say, it's not they're not getting them spend it spent fast enough.
They're not taking the approach yourself.
Some of them are very, very smart.
They, you know, especially the second time CEOs, you know, they've learned from
the mistakes.
They have seen their company go under.
They have seen investors filing them.
So you know, bad things have happened to them.
And then the second time around they are very quick to respond to the economic
changes.
They're very quick to respond to the market signals.
You know, when it comes to, you know, go to market strategy and pivoting it
fair.
I'll give you my answer.
Then we'll go to the next question getting back to ICP.
The biggest mistake and that you can just roast me on this if you want is CEOs
do not spend
enough time and money investments in improving the company culture in making
their team
better, happier and more productive.
That's the biggest mistake and that is affecting everything when it comes to a
company.
Yep.
You know, look, I, this is my fourth one, you know, I kind of big it for
granted.
And I learned, I learned, you know, my first company, culture walled into the
second company
after two to three years.
This company when we started the very first thing was, you know, focus on the
culture and
define your company culture that everybody can remember.
So keep it very simple and harp on that, right?
When we build our turning 24, you know, every day we build our, you know, focus
areas at
the very top, at the very top of the slide is culture and brand, right?
Without a strong culture, you cannot build a good company, a successful company
and without
a good brand, you can build a business, right?
So that's the number one focus area.
And then you operational in the strategic initiatives that will take a couple
of years to steer
the ship.
But, yeah, that, that to me is foundational.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Obviously, well, I was going to say, yeah, I agree.
And I mean, to be honest with you, going back to culture, like, I'll turn down
jobs that
at higher pay, but I could tell the culture wasn't there.
And I mean, you know, you can get red flags and you can get senses.
Does the CEO actually get marketing?
Like, how is this all going to play together?
And in my experience, I've worked for Mark before at our last company together.
And like, yeah, I mean, I agree.
I think culture plays a huge part of it.
But I mean, I've also worked for companies where the culture has been terrible.
And it's like every single day, you're wondering why you're still there.
I feel like culture then kind of cascades or waterfalls down into lots of other
issues
because the culture is instead at the top.
You know, some of your work, Mark, I know you worked at HubSpot.
And if you look at when HubSpot started, it wasn't that they innovated the
marketing automation.
Right.
And it wasn't that HubSpot had the best product possible.
But where they won was and cool us to the mesh, he kind of took the ownership,
which is
unusual for a CTO to take the ownership.
He was a founder, co founder, CTO.
He took the ownership of the culture and just kept investing, kept nesting in
this to the
point where today it's like a Bible.
You know, lots of companies like me included, I'm a fan of their mesh, you know
, companies
just just use that as a framework to build their culture framework.
Well, this this goes into then, I think culture goes to brand and brand goes to
ICP.
Like it's all kind of together, right?
When you think about it.
So I think of CEOs as the CMO, by the way, people say, what the, no, I think I
'm not going to say that the CMO company is the CEO.
That's my opinion.
And I like your answer with the CEO owning the ICP.
So from a CEO's perspective, what's some big misconceptions in your mind as you
create
an ICP or as you update your ICP?
Like what, you know, what, what are you thinking when it comes to that ICP
development?
The biggest misconceptions for most CEOs, I say, you know, early stage to an
admitted
company is I know who our ICP is.
Right?
It's more of a gut feel than actually being data driven and have the have the
proof.
And when you're a smaller company, you know, your people are not going to just
just go along
with you.
They're not going to push back.
You know, unless you have a really strong leadership team and really strong go
to marketing
that pushes you back and say, yes, Mr. CEO, I understand that your gut feeling
would
be the need to.
I love that.
No, I love that.
So like, let's unpack the next one and Nick, like people first, you know, Nick
and I talk
a lot about this.
So Tied Manoj for this next one, because I actually am going to be very
interested to
see how you take this next question.
We were at least where you take it.
Yeah.
So when you think about, you know, people first and putting people at the
center of every
interaction and experience, how does that look from an ICP perspective?
Like when you think about your ICP, when you think about what really matters,
are you putting
people at the core of it or how does that come across in your mind?
Yeah.
So you know, at the end of the day, you know, I'm sure you heard, you know,
people buy
from people, businesses, you know, LLC, anybody can go, you know, register in
LLC, online,
salary, bucks, 75 bucks, it doesn't mean anything.
People make the company and, you know, businesses, all people, businesses team.
I say, you know, businesses, building businesses, the team sport and in the
transactions, you
know, which we all are in the business, people buy from people.
So everything that you do, you keep the person in mind, right?
When you define the ICP, many times, even the mature go to market leaders, they
make a mistake
and they, they intertwine the companies that you're targeting in my mind that
there's
a very clear distinction between the companies that you're targeting, I call it
the ICP.
And then the buying center within that company that you are targeting to buy
your solution.
And now, as we know, the buying center is not just, you know, one person, it's
a committee
of people, depending upon the study that you look at, you know, this 7.4, no
person on an
average involved to 11.2, right?
The Godness is 7.4, CEPB prior to them merging, they came up with the whole
study of 11.2 decision
makers involved in a B-2B software, software versus.
So I kind of like to separate these two things.
I think your first and foremost definition of ICP is 1A based on the
characteristics based
on the data, such as pharmacographic data, technographic data, when you're
locations,
your size of the business and so on so forth, who are the companies that will
buy your software
or service and get the value out of, right?
And why those elements are important?
A size of a company may be a perfect, let's say you're selling to companies
that are for
50 to 200, but when you further deep down say, how big is there, let's say you
're selling
to finance department or you're selling to sales department, how big is the
sales department?
Aha, one was certain, if it's a B-E-driven organization, guess what?
They may have zero salesperson and your tool is for sales organization.
Well, it is not a fit here.
So the more data points you have about the company, pharmacographic, the better
, you know,
ID in this particular example, the department size.
And then second thing is the technology stack because companies buy product
that are easily
implemented and they kind of work well with their existing text stack.
Have the integration is already available.
That's why the technographic component is super important to have.
Once you nail that, then depending upon your product and the target market size
or
tam, then you put the intent layer.
Depending on who you talk to, some people are, you know, they're a big fan of
intent,
others are like intent doesn't work.
I think when you separate the expectation as to what intent is,
directly giving you some indication that these are the companies that you
should talk to.
Right? Because at any given point of time, 5% of your target market is in
market,
is looking for a solution.
So refining your segment, that ICB segment by putting an intent layer is good.
So that to me is like, you know, 1-B.
And then one C is your people.
Okay, who within these companies are you targeting?
Who is the buying center?
Is it a CRO, CMO, ReVobs? In our case, it's a ReVobs.
It's BDR leader, it's sales leader, it's marketing leader.
Right?
Depending upon the composition of both market team,
we have a separate endpoint, entry point, into the organization.
So that's how the long-winded answer to say, you know, separate the companies,
let's you figure out everything else is people.
You know, who are the people that you're targeting?
About that.
Yeah, I mean, to me, it's like,
talk to people, like you can have all this data, but like if you're not talking
to people to
validate your ICP assumptions, like every week, like especially early on, like
when you're
really early pre-product market fit, or if your product market fit is changing,
like you need
to have conversations and conversations to people.
One of my favorite examples of a company doing this right now, to build a
really innovative
product is data AI.
They have assembled a army of people that are building the product with them,
Nick and I are two of those people.
And they are having conversations daily with these people in Slack and in Zoom
to both build an audience that when they are ready to prime the public go to
market,
it's going to be like a massive success.
And they're using that to really understand what their ICP should look like
when they do
start spending real dollars to acquire customers.
So I just, I got a, we're going to have Mike Peachy on a future GTM news desk.
He's going to unpack his whole playbook, but I think that to me is one of like
the best ways to do it.
And then once you get to scale everything you said but no,
it makes a ton of sense.
I think there's just different approaches based off of stage accompany.
Stage accompany, absolutely.
When you're trying to figure out your product market fit, then your
communication with
your ICP defines who your ICP is.
And the more the frequent, I always tell people when they find the ICP, should
you do it or not?
How should you do it? How often should you do it?
You know, should you do it or not?
Well, you will pay the price if you don't.
And just go with the, with your CEO's gut feeling.
How should you do it?
Make it data driven, get data from someone that gives you intelligence about
just,
you know what, I'm getting this.
And then bounce your clothes one and clothes box.
You know, many times people say, "Here, these are your winning."
Let's just go find look alike and then that's how our ICP is.
Well, that is one part of it.
How about the clothes lost?
You want to bring the customers that look good but then the channel on the
other side.
So that and then how frequently, I think the frequency of defining your ICP
depends upon
the maturity curve.
So in this example, data.ai, you know, they are daily because they're trying to
figure out their ICP.
For a company that is, you know, qualified to 20 million dollars in ARR, I
think
to IC year because it takes a few months for you to, once you're defined, the
ICP, for you to see
the fruits of your labor, right?
Regardless of the go-to market, channel that you adopt, sales, sales,
marketing, partnership, events, you know, the community driven, it's going to
take you six months
to figure out, okay, you know what, I dial that in, let me see if I'm getting
the results on
other side of not in terms of my pipeline, the daily velocity, the ACV
increment and sales cycle
getting in a shorter. And if you get those, that's great. If you don't, then
you need to tweak it, you know.
Before we go any deeper, let's pause here. The rest of the conversation, you
folks can find it
on the tech network. Manoj is going to share some secrets, some frameworks to
doing this in a
even more specific way. Thank you, Manoj, for the conversation today. So my
pleasure.
Thanks for joining us on this episode of GTM NewsDest, presented by the tech
network.
To hear our full conversation with our guests today, head to the link in the
show notes to
subscribe to the tech network. Until next time, I'm Mark Killens, and I'm Nick
Bennett.
Keep it people fairest everybody.