Transcription

• Speaker #0

  We are a podcast for product marketers and B2B SaaS who feel misunderstood of what they do.

• Speaker #1

  From someone who truly gets what you do and basically help you feel less like a misfit to be unignorable in your role. Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of We're Not Marketers. Today we have an amazing guest that We've been rescheduling countless times with him and we're very excited. Finally, we were able to find time. But before we introduce that guest, let's tackle who's talking to you, right? You might be wondering right now, you're listening, who the hell is this guy talking to me? First of all, it's Gab Nujo. I'm there with you and I'll pass it out to one of my co-hosts, Eric.

• Speaker #2

  Yeah, I was even wondering who the hell was talking right there.

• Speaker #1

  I know, dude. I'm surprising myself too.

• Speaker #2

  Yo, Eric Holland. I'm the Franken marketer of the group. and we'll let the third trio finish it up. Zach, give them an intro. Hey this is Zach Roberts on the mic, the sales water lad, and Gab back to you my friend.

• Speaker #1

  Thank you, thank you. So before you start Gab,

• Speaker #2

  this is the first time we've had a guest on that I've met in person before meeting on an atmosphere. Very cool.

• Speaker #1

  Listen if you're hearing more of that camaraderie aspect please meet us in person first. It will make better content and better episodes. But yes, so very excited today to introduce to you Drew Giovannoli. Drew is the founder of BuriedWins. It's a win-loss and competitive analysis agency, and their goal is to help you discover why you're losing winnable deals. So his expertise is in win-loss and B2B research for competitive SaaS, going after mid-market deals. But before being that, Drew is a veteran in the product marketing space. He was a VP marketing at Rev, he was a product marketing director, he was a PMM and product marketing director at multiple startups and companies. And we're super excited of having him with us today because if you don't do win-loss, your credibility as a product marketer is at stake. And this is what we're going to be talking about today. Drew, welcome to the show.

• Speaker #3

  Awesome. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here amongst the dead and ready for the podcast.

• Speaker #0

  I love what Gab said that product marketing credibility is at stake without win-loss, because I feel like product marketing credibility is always at stake regardless of what you do.

• Speaker #1

  It's always at stake, but yeah, go ahead, Drew.

• Speaker #3

  I think that it is, we don't have much that we bring to the table. Like in general, we're not building products. We're not going out and setting campaigns. We're not selling shit. And yeah, I think that if product marketers don't understand the buyer, however you want to do it and understand the market, then you don't have much to stand on but to be a like a sales deck monkey and responding to just requests from everybody in the org. So yeah, I think it's the foundation of what good product marketing is.

• Speaker #1

  You're already cooking and we haven't even asked their first question. So dude, let's go. It's going to be a fire episode.

• Speaker #0

  Well, the man's a chef Come on,

• Speaker #1

  let him cook. Yeah, I know. He's cooking in and out of the kitchen. Drew, our marketers. Speaking of marketers.

• Speaker #2

  Oh man.

• Speaker #1

  Sorry.

• Speaker #2

  Man, you know I had the funniest line Gab and you're just so antsy I can feel it.

• Speaker #1

  He's excited. I need to ask if Joe.

• Speaker #2

  We always ask one question to every single guest that comes on and the man with the flavor saver is about to ask it. Go ahead Gab.

• Speaker #1

  Ooh, the flavor saver. I love it. Drew. Are product marketers actually marketers? Why or why not?

• Speaker #3

  If I wasn't prepared with this question, I'm a bad guest. I'm thinking about this. And your alter egos, I might have... I'm going to be a little bit on their side, but I actually think in disagreement with you guys, I'm going to be more in agreement than most. So number one, yes, I do think product marketers are marketers, but I also think The product people are marketers. I think sales are marketers. I think the executive team is marketers and they don't realize it. And the more that a company appreciates that kind of everybody at the company represents the company and their product to market, the better the company does. I think it's odd. Like we're all kind of LinkedIn junkies here. And so no one would argue the fact that like you should have your executives online, promoting their personal brand and then helps your business. Right? So if you can accept that fact, can you accept that the more that product folks talking about themselves and their vision of the product helps market the business? Can you accept the fact that maybe like the way you build your and whatever kind of viral loops you build into it, the more shareable you make the product, the more engaging you make it helps with marketing the product. I think we can have this conversation about should product marketing sit in marketing or should it sit in products? But like, I think if we're going to have this conversation, it's a super fun one. I think that not only do I think of product marketing, but I think of like most of the company should at least feel like they've got some responsibility to marketing.

• Speaker #2

  That's totally dodging the angle and taking it in a cool way. One, I think the general sentiment of marketing is very much not pleasant, no matter what stage really. And if you look at those other departments and you were to just ask them, do a win-loss interview on them, right? On how do you feel about the marketing team and just marketing in general? I don't think you'd have an overwhelming majority of positive feedback. answers. And so that's a great point of everyone start thinking of themselves as contributing to the marketing engine.

• Speaker #3

  I think that when people consider investing in a marketing team for the first time, usually it's this idea that we, and let's just talk about kind of enterprise sales motion first, and then we can go in other areas, but it's usually, hey, we need to generate pipeline. Like we need to do reach people at scale, right? so that our sales reps can then close them in a one-to-one basis. And like product feels, I think some of that impression is like product feels, oh, if the product's good enough, we don't even need marketing. And then sales feels, I'm doing the work to close the deals. Why do you need them? I think it all comes down to like, how are you defining like marketing, right? And there's a lot of discussion of what's the value of brand today, especially in the age of AI. What's the value of running these campaigns, people turning off paid acquisition. But really just like marketing is how you represent yourself to an audience and how you reach that audience so you can go win business. And attribution is probably one of the biggest problems, like why people don't give any respect to a marketing group as it's evolving. Eric, this is like, cool, can you prove it? Like, we're going to throw a bunch of money at a problem. And... You're not directly closing the deal and you're not directly building the product. And so you're in this messy middle, but the companies that do well understand how to reach that customer and make them understand their value prop.

• Speaker #0

  So Drew, tell us this then, like you've been in all levels of marketing. You've been in leadership, you've been in IAC, you've got your own agency right now. Let's go back to when you were in-house. And can you tell us about a time when you were on a an executive call, you were on a all hands or team meeting. You're like, damn, I don't feel like a marketer. Like what prompted that reaction?

• Speaker #3

  Yeah, definitely. And I think it happens a lot because of what we believe marketing is right. So you have to feel like cool. Am I feeling like marketing? Cool. Am I doing marketing activities? And I think coming out of school and maybe reading and being inspired by books or podcasts, you think it's a lot of inspiring positioning. Maybe like you go in the Mad Men lens, or you can think about investing a ton of money in creative campaigns that drive eyeballs and attention. That's another view of what it is. I've found so much of marketing, and let's note, I've been in B2B my whole career, so I don't have a B2C lens. But in the B2B lens, so much of what do marketing is not market. So there is the research part, which like I didn't, it's like my whole job now, but I didn't think of as marketing beforehand. But before you write brilliant campaigns and before you launch positioning that you hope works, like you think it helps to know who the buyer is and what the competitors are doing and where the market's going, their needs and pain points. I don't think Eric is spinning up Mojo off of just like generic, okay, hey, I've got a client in the healthcare space, like spin up positioning. I'm like, no, you have to know what they're paying. So yeah, research is an area where I didn't feel like I was like doing marketing work. Another big one, I've talked about this a lot in the past. I think a great product marketer is like over 50% the job is influence. And to influence... people, I think you have to have extreme like empathy. So to know if I'm going to support sales to be successful, I've got to spend a lot of time with sales and I've got to understand their pain and how they're pitching and what they're doing. That's not necessarily marketing work. If I have to go launch a product, I got to spend a bunch of time with product, understand what they're building and why that's different from the competitor and how that's going to affect the customer. Is that writing sexy positioning and launching campaigns? No, but it's the foundation for doing those things well. And so yeah, early in my career, I felt like the majority of what I was doing was not marketing until I realized that it's all the components of good marketing.

• Speaker #0

  Oh,

• Speaker #2

  go. Yeah. So we've guys, what are we going to be on here? Like episode 65, 75, something like that.

• Speaker #1

  I don't know.

• Speaker #2

  I've been waiting for this conversation to get broken open naturally. So this is very much, I don't like to say it out publicly, but fuck it. This is where I feel like the other marketing teams don't do what you just acknowledged is that there is a core component of particularly research, but it's about like the understanding the business, understanding the market, understanding the customer, understanding the competitor. And then you just added that layer of understanding the product all to it that I believe it's just been it's just given to product marketing. Right? And there is no curiosity, there's no appetite coming from those other marketing functions. And now you've just landed into like really my whole route of where I feel why we're not marketers is because what you just really said is like, you didn't view that as marketing, even though now you may think it is. I don't think the vast majority of B2B looks at that part as marketing. And so they give it over to us and they're like, go do it because we're not going to go spend enough time with our customer and learning their pains. We're not going to spend enough time with product to learn how things actually work. We're not going to spend enough time with sales, etc. So that was a lot of shit to throw on you, but how are you feeling about all that?

• Speaker #3

  Yeah. I think the analogy would be like, do we think that negotiating a contract is part of sales? So no. Do we think that doing buyer research before you hop on a sales call is part of sales? Like you're not selling. So do the pieces that you need to do your job well outside of the act of selling the deal or marketing the product or building the product, are they part of the job? Or are they some ancillary thing? Now like a lot of product orgs, they have research group. And I also think... So yeah, I still believe that it gets pushed to us, yeah, but as a critical engine for marketing. I think a problem with research big time is that it's looked at as academic And it's because it's treated academically. Like maybe you do some of it, maybe you pay for some of it and then it sits in a Google Drive and you're like, why are we doing this? Why don't we invest all this money in some like ICP campaign that sales doesn't give a shit about, like products doesn't give a shit about, they're not changing anything, like we're back to just creating one pagers that no one's gonna look at. Like, that sucks. I think if, why care about research and why is that even marketing? It comes down to... Okay, you're going to sit down and you're going to build a sales deck. Or you're going to write web page copy. You're going to build a solutions page or a product page. What is it based on? You had a conversation with the product team and you think you know the market. It's just so useless and you have no credibility to back that up. So you listen to gong calls. That's a great start. Let's focus on a sales deck for a second. To me, a great sales deck is one that's adopted. First of all, right? And so it doesn't matter how good a job you do. You have to put the end output above, above the input. And so that it doesn't matter if you're the most brilliant market in the world, that has to happen. So first you engage sales, you figure out what slides are they already using? Are they using three, four and eight of the current deck? Why do they care about those? Why are they ignoring everything else? Well, cool. What objections are they facing? You can hear from them directly. You can look into Gong. You can see what questions they get a lot. And then you can start to research those things. So then your 20 slide deck includes three, four and seven, and then maybe four more that answer the biggest questions, the biggest objections. And it's a type of research that sales wants to use as they feel like you're helping them solve their problem. And the same thing goes for kind of web copy. It's just cool. What part of the site do we think is converting now? What's resonating people with not? Let's strip it back. Let's do some research and then let's test. I think another problem, maybe rambling on a little bit, we can chop this up, but You put in the work as a product marketer, maybe you do some research and then you have an output. And then people treat it like this, like holy launch day, like you created some finished sculpture. And the reality is that's a beautiful beginning. It's what really is a new baseline that you're going to judge everything else against. And hopefully two weeks in and a month in, you're saying, cool, what's better or what's worse? The worst thing that can happen is you have a sales team that just gives you a thumbs up and says nothing about it. That probably means no one's using your shit, right? What you want them to say is, hey, slide eight and nine suck. I don't use this. Can we have something else? Now, we're not going to grant sales like full rights to be like, oh, we need four more case study examples and we just need more testimonials. Your job as product marketers is to look across all the salespeople and look across all the sales calls and bring more like aggregate context into place, but it's just about thinking about the end use, not research for academic sake, not just some like checkbox item. It's about having again back to credibility as product marketer, like partner with the team, bring something new to the table and then create a new baseline to improve the way you're going to market.

• Speaker #0

  One challenge I've seen with research in the past is that like in sales calls, like I'll give you an example is that let's say you have a prospect that is in cybersecurity and they are gung-ho CrowdStrike. There is nothing you can say about CrowdStrike. So I'm curious, like from your perspective, like from organizations you've worked with in your house, like how do you help sales use research in a way that builds credibility instead of like the what we have gotten accustomed to in product marketing is the gotcha Intel.

• Speaker #3

  Yeah, I think somewhat surprisingly to me now having done like 30 months of exclusive, like product marketing work and research is that a lot of the time it's not just discovering things about the buyer's preferences. It's discovering that hey, that customer that's going to go with CrowdStrike with an end complete focus and choice. they just might not be your customer. The learning is that research is just as much about defining who your ICP is a little bit better. So much of the time, I'll get a question like, "Hey, are we priced too expensively?" And the answer will come back like, "Cool." 40% of the time, the answer is no and 60% of the answer is yes. You could either go and change your pricing, you can either go and change the perception of your pricing Or we can figure out that 40% who thought the price was right and like absolutely appropriately valued. And you should stop wasting sales time going after that other 60%. Your win rates are going to go up, you're going to find your ICP, you're going to be able to better market to them because they're gonna have slightly different needs and pain points. So I don't know, for your specific example, my first reaction is just cool. Maybe that's not the right vibe.

• Speaker #0

  But I'm like, but like Drew, I'm a marketer, man. Like my job is to get leads. - Feed the pipeline - Feed the, okay I'm gonna stop. Okay tell me more, tell me where I'm wrong.

• Speaker #3

  - Your job's not to get leads, your job is to get well qualified leads. So it's not just to fill the funnel with people who might buy, it's to fill the funnel with the highest qualified pipeline that your sales are gonna go close and is gonna stick with you the longest amount of time and not churn. Yeah, like incentives may be flawed in an organization where they're just trying to pump up pipeline and have to hit some forecasts because their VC put it in front of them. But if you have an organization leaders who can think long term enough, it's about getting the people who are actually your customers. That's what's best for the business, not just getting any lead.

• Speaker #1

  And the fact is, if you target better leads, better ICP that fits it, you will get higher account per opportunities. Your sales will increase. stop wasting time on those bad fit. And essentially you will just be a better instrument to make sure that higher quality leads get into a pipeline and more revenue gets out of it too. So at the end, it's not just about more work for sales. It's the work that sales will be doing is just more efficient too.

• Speaker #3

  And the more focused you get in marketing, just it's just marketing becomes so much easier with the more you focus. It's just like vanilla boring ass. messaging and positioning comes from trying to target too many people at once. You just lose your ability to say anything interesting when you don't know a specific person. The more you know them, the more specific it gets, the more you can like truly speak to their pain, their goals, their industry. Everything gets better the more you focus.

• Speaker #0

  And that's a good point for some clients like we've seen in the past is that you will have that energetic startup founder that I believe you drew, but I have this company vision and in my head it includes payroll, it includes someone who works in construction. I need to get those people right now and that is my vision So how do you talk to like a startup founder that it cares more about the company vision being realized today? Versus what you're saying we need to focus on one ICP and build from there.

• Speaker #3

  Yeah, everyone's driven by incentives, right? And so that that founder is saying that because they just got out of 30 investor calls or board meetings where they're getting pushed on their billion-dollar vision and so the answer is not to say hey, I You can't have what you just promised the board or you can't even have that vision. The answer is, hey, cool. Let me help you achieve that by phasing this into sections where we have an incredible amount of success in phase one with this industry. And as that matures, we're going to dive in six months later, a year later to that next phase. Let's just phase it out so I can help you tell the story back to the people you have to report to. So it's back to that empathy comment. It's like, why are they saying that? These are smart people. They're not... they got the spot that they're at and building the company that they're at not being crazy, not like this ambition is not hurting them but they've got other influences and you just have to help them achieve that vision while still being realistic about what you can achieve. And so I like very specifically and tactically I'd say cool let's phase it out we can win you a lot more deals and a lot more dollars if instead of splitting the pie three ways now We put all that focus and energy and like marketing investment into one of those industries right now. And then we're going to do the next one and the next one. If you have a preference, let's talk about why and what and set that up. But I think it's just about reframing it to match their goals.

• Speaker #2

  You mentioned academic earlier. I think it's a great adjective to put towards that type of research. So an example might be... A new report comes out that says you got to do this thing with your SEO or for your AI to start picking things up, or some perspective about a tactic in marketing that's going to change how people convert. How do you feel like that type of research is received versus the type of research that you would be doing, which is actually talking to the buyers who actually might be buying into your business as opposed to these individual marketing tactics?

• Speaker #3

  I consider them completely separate budgets, right? One is what tactics do we use in marketing to work to achieve our goal? When I ran a team, when I first got the team at Rev, it was 33 folks. And I think the way we looked at it was that there was a portion of the budget that was like experimental. And so that experimental budget allowed us to do things like if you want to go hard on GEO, AAO for the quarter, we can do that. Or if we want to be in B2B influencer land and test that out, we do that. And we acknowledge that the known things are going to carry the weight of hitting our goal, but hopefully the experimental is going to unlock growth maybe in this quarter, but we're going to find the one by adjusting constantly that's going to get us the next phase of growth, whether it's the following quarter or in the next year. I think when it comes to questions about Buyer research, where we spend our time, it's about how do we keep a pulse on knowing what the audience we're trying to sell to cares about. It's strange that it is a problem at all. I think about this a lot. When a company starts, usually the founders either have been in that industry or they've sold to that industry before. They're like intimately close to the buyer and then they sell to that buyer for a while. But what happens is you scale, you hire a sales team and you've got execs and VPs. And all of a sudden, you're just removed from the buyer and you lose that pulse. So I think that's part of the problem. And another part of the problem is that people don't buy based on reality. And so what I mean by that is it's not just like a feature comparison. And if it's equal, we go with a better price. It's all based on buyer perception. Right? how do they perceive you to be versus the competitor? And so much of the research is not even, you hear back that there's an issue with an integration that you don't have or that you're not innovative enough. The pricing structure is wrong. And then the question is always, is this something we actually need to go fix or is there something we need to fix the perception of? I'll give you like a very quick example from one of our clients is that they were the leading player in the space and they started to lose deals to newer startups who are coming to the market and saying, hey, we are dead focused on the beauty industry or the like health and fitness industry. And so we're going to be able to serve you better, way better than that big behemoth. They don't care. They're agnostic. They're trying to scale whatever. our customer success team dedicated to this. So they started to lose deals. And my client didn't really understand why. Once they figured out that was the reason that they were pitching, these little startups were pitching themselves like industry experts, we realized like, hey, my client, they have five, six, seven X the amount of clients in that specific vertical and each of those verticals that these startups had. And so all they needed to do is shift the narratives to say, hey, when you start to talk to someone, in the health and fitness space, let's introduce a deck specific to that industry. Let's make sure we've got case studies and referral clients specific to that industry. Let's talk about all our experiences and scale in that industry. And likely you're going to go talk to one of these competitors. Let's give them questions to ask. Cool. They say they're an expert. Here's what we've done. Ask them about how long in market they've been serving that industry. Let's test that knowledge. And so that's a perception shift It's not always like a real problem you have to solve. It's a, how do you solve the perception of why you're losing deals?

• Speaker #0

  So once you provided that recommendation, what happened next is, or is it too early to say or?

• Speaker #3

  No, they stopped having that problem. They started winning a lot more deals against those new players and an industry focused go-to-market approach is like a big part of the way they're going to market now.

• Speaker #2

  That's awesome.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah.

• Speaker #2

  And actually, fun fact that you mentioned that I was on a reference call today. Another company wanted me to hop in and see if I could help them close down a deal. And the sales rep had a totally different idea of what the objections were. And they told me straight up, hey, I was wondering if they would be innovative enough. They seem like they're becoming a bigger company. And I'm like, whoa, that's so interesting. Deal's not even done yet. But that's the type of information I feel like is being missed out. Personally, I feel like people are spending more of their budget on those experimental things or tossing a bunch of money in ads, doing A-B tests, that type of thing. Explain to me why I'm feeling people are more willing to throw money at that problem as opposed to throw money at you or other buyer insights type of problems where they're getting firsthand information about their go-to market.

• Speaker #3

  Yeah, I think it's an easier ROI story to tell. Cool. I'm going to put money here and I think... think that if I can turn this dollar into three, like it's a lot more attributable. There's just like closer connection to it. The problem is if you throw a whole bunch of money at like the wrong person or the wrong pain point, it's just not going to convert. And so yeah, I, listen, I don't think that I don't really don't think that everybody should use buried winds or an agency like buried winds, but like everybody should be talking to their buyers. and everybody should be doing research on the competitors. And I think it comes to, we can talk about it, I think it comes down to just the volume of deals you have and the resources you have. But there's no reason not to do the work as a product marketing team, 'cause like we said at the beginning, what else? What other credibility do you have?

• Speaker #0

  - So like about that piece around research, a few months ago or I don't know how long ago, deep research AI capability was released.

• Speaker #3

  - Yeah.

• Speaker #0

  - It's a very exciting time For founders to now say, "Well, why do we need a competitive Intel team?" I can just type in the prompt and I get 20 pages of Intel across 67 different competitors. Like, "Hey Drew, like I got deep research. Why should we hire you? How do you respond to that?"

• Speaker #2

  Yeah, sure.

• Speaker #3

  I think that if I was one of the tools in the competitive landscape world that pretty much presented alerts about competitors changing their landing pages or hiring new people or putting out a press release. Yeah, I think deep research actually does a pretty good job of keeping you updated on what's changing in the public web.

• Speaker #0

  right? And a lot of, there were a lot of tools, like well-known tools, like Crayon, for example, that like does that. And I think that I would, I don't, I'm not into that tool like today. I don't know how they're innovating, but like, I would be a little bit worried about that. I think deep research is really good at finding publicly available data. Unfortunately, your buyers are not spending 30 minutes typing out their feelings about you and your evaluation process and how they compared you to competitors. putting it on the web. And so there's just like, and so, yeah, you need to go talk to buyers because that data isn't available on the web. And an LLM has a brilliant aggregation of what's publicly available. And so, yeah, that's the difference. Like we are finding and product marketers through interviews and surveys can find out what buyers in the past month thought about them versus their competitor and why they chose to make the decision they did. And when they learn that, they can use it to affect the future sales cycles to convert more deals in their favor. That's just information that's not available through ChaiGBT because the data source is not there.

• Speaker #1

  Let's say I'm the executive team. We were all at Drive a few weeks ago and they're like, Drew, I was talking to my buyers. We were out there at the bar. We're having drinks. They're telling me about their business. Like, how's your approach? Like, what am I missing in me having a casual drink with our buyers at the bar versus your approach, what you're highlighting of those emotional sentiments?

• Speaker #0

  I guess if they're spending every weekend at the bar with their buyers, that would do the trick, too.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah,

• Speaker #0

  if I could shift my career to just instead of being on these interviews for a lot of the day to go into, yeah, like, open air bar with a band playing and dogs around. That sounds great. I don't think it's a reality. Maybe cool if they were at Drive and they spoke to five buyers. That should inform a lot of information. Are they spending 30 minutes asking them questions? Great. What motivated you to move off your old platform or tool to evaluate something new? Great. Okay. Thanks for sharing that. Now, what was your criteria for making that decision? What reputation did we have? those are not the conversations they're having at the bar. And if they were, like, great, but they're not at the bar that much. And if they are at the bar or at a Coldplay concert, they're probably like, yeah, they're just not there enough to get the information they need.

• Speaker #2

  I love it. It reminded me of my grandfather used to be a salesman. And what he was doing he was bringing a bottle of cognac to people that he was visiting. So he was always like drinking with them, chatting with them, making sales, and then going back on the car, which would not happen today at all. It's way too dangerous to don't drink and drive folks. Eric, I don't know if you had a follow-up question, but I would like to maybe cover the part that we talk about in terms of like product marketing and helping sales. So if you have, if you don't have a follow-up question, I would just like to dig in a little bit.

• Speaker #3

  Go for it, Gabbaroni.

• Speaker #2

  Perfect. you wrote recently you will take orders from sales until you earn credibility as a product marketer and it spoke a lot to me it reminded me of when i was trying to help sales and i was working in a sales deck in a dark corner and then hoping that they use it without success how can product marketers listening right now how can they juggle between being the sales and a counterpart that can help them with partner french yeah let's just take a

• Speaker #0

  let's like look at it from their lens. I think we should take the theme of empathy in this episode. They are looking at you building a deck. They're in sales calls all day long, all week long. And you who are in zero calls are building the tool that they're going to use to go do their job. And what leg do you have to stand on except for them to tell you what they need and why they need The only reason... they should, is if you say, that's great feedback. I also talked to eight other reps and I interviewed these buyers. I paired that with the competitive research I did. Like here's, I suspect that we can close more deals if we focus on this because it's differentiator and the buyer said they cared about it. And it actually works on like these two other examples for your industry. Like all of a sudden they're like, oh, cool. I do want help closing deals. I just thought I had more information than you. And it's not about being a better seller. Like product marketers, you're really just like a solicitor of customer truths and your connective weave between product. and sales and marketing right and so if you like put yourself in a sales enablement setting if you're standing up there trying to present this deck that you created in a vacuum with no sales experience like there's no reason for them to use it there's just no trust there but if you start with here's what i learned here's why i believe it can help you guys and like i talked to seven of you before i built this and i think that like we kept the best slides, we got rid of the worst. It's just a different tone, right? All of a sudden, they're going to respect you. I'll put it one other key point, which is not directly part of this question, but does speak to why product marketing ends up being so reactive and not proactive in a lot of times. I think so few product marketers take the time at the beginning of a quarter or a year and say, socializing their plan with leadership and saying, hey, Here's what I think. can help our company grow. Like within my world, here's like five initiatives or here's eight initiatives. What's your opinion? Like, what do you think they are? And you work through them, you socialize them, and then you've got a list of these, maybe the top five things you're going to focus on with your team that year. Once you have that and something comes up, then you actually have the place to say, cool, you're asking for this new like sales asset. If I do that, I can't do one of the five things we agreed were important, right? And we can make that call, but let's make that call together. And at this point, you know where I'm focusing and why. Most people don't socialize anything. They know the product marketing, like maybe they do some pricing, maybe they write some copy, maybe they build some sales decks, but they don't know what you're working on. And they just, they ask you for help. Again, you've got nothing to stand on. You've got no... reason you can say no because you haven't told them what you are focusing on and why. And so I think that's another piece of being responsive, I think, to sales needs is one, you haven't told them what you're focusing on that's going to help them in advance. And then two, you give them no reason to believe that the information you have is better than their week full of sales calls.

• Speaker #2

  I love it. the way you are approaching it in terms of tone and context, I spoke to those people, this is what I think we should do. I think it is a key thing. Something I heard, especially when starting a role and again, it might be, not everyone might agree with this, but do you think PMMs at the beginning should jump or shadow sales people and be with them to get at least closer to their reality or the problem that you were solving?

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, I mean, I remember pre-Gong days where that was like the only way to do it. So you'd come into your new role and you would just shadow sales. I don't think it's as required from a like to see them actually act because you can just watch the recording. You can do it on your own time. You can do more of it. But building a relationship with sales is pretty key to your success. If they don't use the things you create, what you've created is worthless no matter how good it is. And so maybe you don't have to shadow their calls, but should you be in the weekly team meetings? Should you be trying to serve them with information when you find it and building that rapport? Should you be meeting with them to find out what's working, not working? Yeah. If nothing else, for the sake that when you need their help or you want to make a change, they have some trust in you. And they know that you care and you know you're putting in the time.

• Speaker #2

  Sorry, go ahead. I was about to say that it's also a key requirement if you want to run any type of positioning or repositioning initiative. If it doesn't start with sales, you're going to be having a hell of a bad time.

• Speaker #3

  I think it's a good reminder of you never want to be caught with your pants down with one of these types of questions. A, how many other sales reps did you run this by? B, how many customers or prospects did you run this by? And I think that's just the really good takeaway that I'm picking up is, yeah, as great as it could be, bringing everyone in and making it seem like it's part of their idea to begin with seems like the best recipe for success.

• Speaker #0

  We start every win-loss program by interviewing all of the internal stakeholders. And it is half so that we know questions that will... give us answers they're going to care about, right? So it's not academic, it's going to hit their goals. And half because we want them to know that we're solving their problems, not adding work to their plate. Because with win-loss, you could come and say, hey, the demos aren't working, or the sales team isn't doing X, Y, or Z. And if that's the first time they're hearing from you, they're not going to use it. They're not going to care, and they're going to be upset. If you've talked to them first and said, you know, what, how can I help you hit your number? And then you come back with data that helps solve their problem. They're going to use it. And it could be the same exact stuff.

• Speaker #1

  And are these organizations that you typically work with, do they already have a win-loss program or are they literally started from scratch and they're like, Hey, get help us build it from the ground up.

• Speaker #0

  It's a pretty mixed bag. I mean, they definitely have a product marketing person or team already. They usually have 10 plus reps. right? These are like for the work, the product that I'm doing it like buried wins. Really, I think like under 30 opportunities closed a month, just like you're going to get maybe a 10% conversion rate. It could be 20%, but just depends on your industry. If you're trying to sell to lawyers or HVAC technicians or marketers. So under 30, let's say it's three interviews, product marketing, just send emails, offer incentives, follow up on those emails, get a few calls booked host them yourself no need to but everybody should be doing something no excuse hashtag accountability hashtag accountability and then dm eric let him know that you did it this week yeah

• Speaker #1

  and then your ass encounter so let's pivot real quick to the fractional world because like you said before your work in-house form like latest roles like bp of marketing at rev We've got listeners all the time that they get to hear guests like yourself. They're working in-house. They're drowning under the work. They have incredible expertise. And they're like, dang, I just heard Drew. He is killing it. He's got his own fractional work. But just 51 months ago, he was just like me. Like to listeners that are hearing you right now, can you give us a bit more insight of what was that process of? of going in-house leader to agency boss today. So let's start from there. Cool.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, it starts with a call from your CEO who says you've got two weeks left until you're fired. And then what do you want me to do?

• Speaker #1

  I mean,

• Speaker #0

  I took over a big team and then there were a couple rounds of layoffs and that landed me there. Now, granted, I've started before then multiple other businesses, usually like VC backed or... tech focused that weren't services based and this is the first one that's like really worked but what yeah what drove me to this specific business was i was part of a big layoff i knew i wanted to start a company right away and when i was looking for what i wanted to do next i was looking at things i had just no business being in like fun stuff like oh wind turbines and like How do I apply AI to renewable energy? Like both of which, this is two and a half years ago, I had no idea about, no knowledge. And in that process, I reached out to an old boss and I said, hey, what fractional work do you have for me that I can do so I can figure out what I'm going to do next? And one of them said, I have a windmoss consultant that we're using now. I think you would do as good, if not a much better job doing it. Would you like to take on that work? And I said, yes, with no expectation that would be the business I like develop today. And what's weird, so strange that I didn't see it. This is like such an obvious statement. If someone is willing to give you money to do a thing. and you have some expertise around the thing and you happen to know the buyer, that's a pretty good direction to run in. Oh, my first two customers were my last two bosses. And then from there, I just started reaching out to every sales manager and every marketing leader that I'd ever worked with and told them that I was thinking of going in this direction. For six months, I got nothing except for those two. And then the annual planning cycle happened. And out of those meetings, a few people said, hey, we don't know the buyers the way we wish we did. And we don't understand the competitor that's coming to the market. Because I had those conversations. We had a past reputation. They called me and I won some more business. Let's be super clear, Zach. Like it is we're doing pretty well as a business. I have a team now about there's about five of us, three full time. couple fract or part-time, but it is, yeah, I wouldn't say we're like absolutely crushing it. Like shit's super hard and stressful. And I don't think it is always the right call. I think that like almost anybody can do it, but it's a total. shift from being a product marketer. Being a founder is like being a product marketer, but first you need to be a salesperson. To survive, you need to go win business. And then you can do the product marketing stuff well. And yeah, you have to do product marketing for your own business to know who you should go sell to, with what pain points, what are you going to serve? But ultimately, if you can't sell a deal, you're going to have to go get another in-house job. And I don't know, I told you this started or was inspired by a layoff. And I... always knew that I was going to go in this direction because I've repeatedly done it. And this one happens to work when you talk about why, but I think it comes down to your goals and your tolerance for risk. Do you have a partner that can help you financially? Do you have some savings? Do you like, do you need to, do you want to do it? Why? I think it can be a great, there's a lot of different versions of it too. You can use fractional to tide you over to the next gig, you can do it full time. but it's fractional. You're charging hourly. You can move in the direction. If you really want to do it long-term, move to project-based, which allows you when you charge per project to hire other help. That helps you improve the margins and increase the scale. But yeah, it is great for flexibility and there's huge potential upside. And it's also way more stressful and incredibly hard. And at times you want to quit and then there are great days too. Yeah, it's not, I don't think anyone should look at me and you guys can speak for yourselves, but be like, cool, I made the leap and it's fucking rocks. Come join us.

• Speaker #2

  Let's go, dude. I think Zach said it on a couple of episodes or just together, but it's basically choose your heart, right? And I think for listeners, like with your journey, it's essentially, don't be afraid to try something and to get the validation that people are willing to pay you for it, which is what you did, right? Hey, I feel like you would be much better. one last consultant or doing one last analysis at that person let's try it out and then the other end goal is also you're trying it out but you have to understand that the context will be incredibly different it's not a nine to five it's a 24 7 and it's your business there's a lot that relies on it and of course one of the key element is sales if you cannot sell your own offer if you cannot sell your service uh there's no one coming to save you to help you do it so you're just putting a lot of stress as you said and

• Speaker #3

  there's a lot to be riding on that you have to understand the different reality of the new role and that lead basically i'm gonna hire a sales rep because gab just said no one's coming to save me i'll show you gab yeah

• Speaker #2

  hire a perfect sales rep and just pay them by commission and then see what happened lots of people interested in that job i'll pay him in fake mustaches but drew this was

• Speaker #3

  Awesome stuff. And I always love talking about research-based conversations. I don't think we're having enough of them on the pod and I definitely don't think we're having enough of them as a product marketing group. So I personally really love this and it got me thinking about a lot of new things. Guys, do you have any more big questions for Drew before we let him go be a full-time solo dad?

• Speaker #2

  I just have one. I just have one to end. If I'm a PMM, I'm listening right now and either I got laid off or I feel like I might get laid off. What's one tip you would give them if they're thinking about taking a leap?

• Speaker #0

  If they're thinking about taking a leap, as in, hey, I think I want to become a fractional product marketer, what should I do?

• Speaker #2

  Taking a leap into entrepreneurship. Yeah. either a fractional consultant agency?

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, two things. One, I think you got to figure out your goal, right? Do you want to be a fractional product marketer who sells your time? And like, you want to do that for a few years, you're trying to build a business because there's like different things you do for each. Either one, I think that the most common mistakes I see are, one, they become a generalized product marketing consultant. And I think there's just the market's flooded with product marketing consultants. It doesn't mean you're not going to win business, but you're not going to be thought of when people need work. And the number one thing I need you to find success is to niche down into something that you become known for. You can talk about, you can be referred to. When somebody knows they've got a problem with X, they come to you. So decide your goal, find your niche, and then finally go try to sell it. Nothing matters unless you can sell the thing. It's not real. until someone pays you for that work and Repeatably and I think maybe the easiest way to do that is to go talk to all your colleagues see where they're spending money today and try to replace one of the things, whether it be a person. Yeah, I think it's not simply, oh, there are product marketing teams and people are looking for fractional help. I think a lot less of that exists than people think, but there are a lot of people trying to solve problems in the business. If you can be someone who creates a solution to those problems, then I think you can build a business.

• Speaker #2

  Awesome, man. Such a great tip. When can people find more about you? If they listen to your organization, they want to learn more about you. where did they go? What did they check?

• Speaker #0

  Yeah. LinkedIn at Drew Giovinoli or buriedwinds.com.

• Speaker #2

  Amazing, man. Cool. So that's about it for another episode of We're Not Marketers. Thank you, folks.

• Speaker #3

  Next time. See ya.

• Speaker #2

  Thank you for listening to We're Not Marketers. If you like what you heard, review our podcast. and share this episode with other PMMs.

• Speaker #0

  Going out and setting campaigns, we're not selling shit. And so, yeah, I think that if product marketers don't understand the buyer, however you want to do it, and understand the market, then you don't have much to stand on but to be like a sales deck monkey and responding to just requests from everybody in the org. So yeah, I think it's the foundation of what good product marketing is.

• Speaker #2

  You're already cooking and we haven't even asked the first question. So dude, let's go. It's going to be a fight.

• Speaker #3

  One question to every single guest that comes on. And the man with the flavor saver is about to ask it. Go ahead, Gab.

• Speaker #2

  Ooh, the flavor saver. I love it. Drew. Are product marketers actually marketers? Why or why not?

• Speaker #0

  If I wasn't prepared with this question, like, you know, I'm a bad guest. I'm thinking about this. And. your alter egos. I might have, I'm going to be a little bit on their side, but I actually think in disagreement with you guys, I'm going to be more in agreement than most. So number one, yes, I do think product marketers are marketers, but I also think the product people are marketers. I think sales are marketers. I think the executive team is marketers and they don't realize it. And the more that a company appreciates that kind of everybody at the company. represents the company and the product to market, the better the company does. I think it's odd. We're all LinkedIn junkies here. And so no one would argue the fact that you should have your executives online promoting their personal brand and that helps your business. So if you can accept that fact, can you accept that the more that product folks talking about themselves and their vision of the product helps market the business? Can you accept the fact that maybe like the way you build your product and whatever kind of viral loops you build into it, the output, and that people treat it like this, like holy launch day, like you created some like finished sculpture. And the reality is like, you're just, that's like a beautiful beginning. It's like, what's really is a new baseline that you're going to judge everything else against. And hopefully two weeks in and a month in, you're saying, cool, like what's better or what's worse. The worst thing that could happen is you have a sales team that just like gives you a thumbs up and says nothing about it. That probably means no one's using your shit, right? What you want them to say is like, hey, slide eight and nine suck. I don't use this. Can we have something else? Now, we're not going to grant sales like full rights to be like, oh, we need like four more case study examples and we need like, we just need more testimonials. Your job as product marketer is to like look across all the salespeople and look across all the sales calls. to bring more like aggregate context into place, but it's just about thinking about the end use.

• Speaker #3

  With your pants down with like one of these types of questions, A, how many other sales reps did you run this by? B, how many customers or prospects did you run this by? Right? And I think that's just the really good takeaway that I'm picking up is, yeah, as great as it could be. bringing everyone in and making it seem like it's part of their idea to begin with seems like the best recipe for success.

• Speaker #0

  Totally. I mean, we start every win-loss program by interviewing all of the internal stakeholders. And it is half so that we know questions that will give us answers they're going to care about, right? So it's not academic, it's going to hit their goals. And half because we want them to know that we're solving their problems, not adding work to their plate. Because like with win-loss, you could come and say, hey, the demos aren't working or like the sales team isn't doing X, Y, or Z. And if that's the first time they're hearing from you, they're not going to use it. They're not going to care. They're going to be layoff. And I always knew. that I was going to go in this direction because I've repeatedly done it. And this one happens to work when you talk about why, but I think it comes down to your goals and your tolerance for risk. Do you have a partner that can help you financially? Do you have some savings? Do you need to do it? Do you want to do it? Why? I think it can be a great, there's a lot of different versions of it too. You can use fractional to tide you over to the next gig. you can do it full time. but it's fractional. You're charging hourly. You can move in the direction. If you really want to do it long-term, move to project-based, which allows you when you charge per project to hire other help. That helps you improve the margins and increase the scale. But yeah, it is great for flexibility and there's huge potential upside. And it's also way more stressful and incredibly hard. And at times you want to...