In this episode, Yoni Solomon, the CMO at Uptime.com and former Director of Product Marketing at G2, joins us to share his insights and experience on how to get your product marketing right. He talks about: --> How is product marketing different from content marketing, demand-gen, or other marketing functions? --> What's the right stage for an org to hire a product marketer? --> The five stages of product launch and GTM --> What is the role of product marketing in product positioning? --> What's a 'message house', and how does it help you uphold product positioning? --> What are the core KPIs that a product marketer is accountable for? --> Whom should a product marketer report to, and a lot more...

In this episode, Christopher Engman, the co-founder and managing partner of MegaDeals Advisory, joins us to discuss "How to win mega deals?" He has been personally involved in making hundreds of B2B deals happen, which cumulatively exceed several billion. In this episode, Chris dives deep on: --> Why mega deals are a lot like winning a political contest? --> What qualifies as a mega-deal -- is it deal value or a range? What are some common characteristics of megadeals? --> Challenges sellers face when selling to enterprises --> How to hire a mega dealer? What should you look for? --> 5 cornerstones of mega deals, and a lot more...

In this episode, Randy Frisch—the co-founder, CMO & President of Uberflip, joins us to discuss 'how to create a personalized content experience to drive demand and improve customer engagement.' He was named one of the Top 50 Fearless Marketers globally by Marketo. Through this episode, Randy throws light on: --> Why he's mad about the way content marketing is generally done in B2B SaaS? --> What are some common mistakes that SaaS content marketers do? --> What is meaningful content personalization? And how to achieve it at scale in the context of creating relevant content experience? --> Should you control the content experience? Does it truly make sense to take people to a content hub? --> Content experience framework -- what are the components and how can you apply it today, and a lot more...

In this episode, Chris Kneeland, the CEO of Cult Collective, one of North America's premier engagement marketing firms, joins us to discuss 'How to stop chasing customers and build cults?" Chris co-founded Cult in 2010 and has consulted for Harley Davidson, Canadian Tyre, Zappos, Best Buy, United Way and dozens of other brands. In this episode, he talks about: --> What exactly is a cult? How can a startup realistically build it? --> Why should you stop chasing customers and build a cult in the first place? --> Why word of mouth doesn't always start from customers? And more importantly, why have 'brand advocacy' ahead of 'brand awareness?' --> What's the right stage of the business to start a cult? --> How do you measure progress while building a cult? ---> Why is Chris against the idea of consumption metrics and a lot more...

In this episode, Kris Rudeegraap, the co-founder and CEO of Sendoso, shares his insights on two super interesting connected topics – team selling and customer retention. He talks about: --> What is a go-to-market (GTM) fit, and why does Sendoso prioritize GTM fit over product-market fit? --> What is team selling? How it works, and what's the infrastructure needed for it? --> Can startups and SMBs practice team selling? --> 3 major changes that Sendoso made over the years to improve customer retention (their net dollar retention is 120%) --> Sendoso's customer success team structure, and specifically the role of CX Ops in customer success --> What's the right time to expand the customer success team into specific roles and a lot more...

In this episode, Karthik Sridharan, the co-founder and CEO of Flexiple – an online curated freelancing platform that empowers and connects companies and freelancers, joins us to discuss how the role of marketing evolves from the first year of a startup to how it looks at $10 mil ARR. Karthik talks about: --> How long it took for Flexiple to get to its first million from a marketing perspective --> How their marketing approach changed and evolved between 1 million ARR to $3 million --> The kind of goals and metrics they had for marketing in the early stages of Flexiple, and their current KPIs for product marketing, performance marketing, content team, etc. --> What to look for when hiring a VP of Marketing at an early stage company --> Learnings when it comes to leading remote teams and the common mistakes to overcome --> Why scale is relative, and when should one start thinking about scalability --> The difference in approach between a bootstrapping tech startup vs the one raising venture capital, and a lot more...

In this episode, Vukasin Vukosavljevic, popularly known as 'Vuk,' joins us to discuss how to build a strong product marketing team that hits it out of the park. Vuk is the head of growth at Lemlist and is a rockstar that every SaaS company would want to have on their team. He talks about: --> Why is product marketing often very misunderstood? --> What does the Lemlist product marketing playbook look like, what their goals and KPIs are --> His GTM checklist --> The process to seek customer feedback and the prioritization parameters for incorporating them --> Common mistakes when product marketers leverage email as a channel and a lot more...

In this episode, David Spinks, the co-founder of CMX, VP of Community at Bevy, and is the host of the Masters of Community podcast, joins us to discuss how to build a community and mistakes to avoid along your community journey. David talks about: --> What led him into community building, and how he had the best speakers for his first community event, even before booking the venue --> Signs/data to look at before taking the plunge to start a community --> Common mistakes most companies make when launching a community --> Roadblocks faced by David in the early stages of building CMX and how he overcame it --> The Spaces Framework for building a community --> What are the right metrics to measure the success and impact of a community, and a lot more...

In this episode, Manish Nepal, the founder of Marketing Impact, and I discuss whether it makes sense to build a B2B community. We discussed how we at The ABM Conversations podcast built one and failed badly. Here are the timestamps of the key points discussed: 3:18 Does building a community make sense for all? Everyone talks about its benefits; you hear virtue statements like “build a community before you build your product?” but the reality is far from it. The question is – can it even be a universal formula for everyone. And why you shouldn’t be comparing B2C communities and B2B communities. 8:04 A Few things that led us to assume that The ABM Conversations Podcast needs a community around it – and how it wasn’t to be. We talk about how it was either bad execution or flawed interpretation of data signals. We spoke in detail about how we went about our execution. 12:00 Does community building need a different skillset? What makes B2B communities like Peak Community and RevGenius work well? Summary of what we think are the top-most issues with building communities in today’s date. 18:25 Are you better off focusing on your core than building a community? Or do you have a clear purpose for how your community will help people? Do you have something to offer as leverage for people? And finally, do you have what it takes?

In this episode, Claire Suellentrop, the co-founder of Forget the Funnel, joins us to discuss how to implement customer-led growth for your organization step-by-step. Here are some key timestamps you might want to jump into: 2:30 Claire talks about what customer-led growth means and how it’s not yet another buzzword. She details how it’s different from the PLG or sales-led or marketing-led growth motion and how customer-led is directly related to Jobs-To-Be-Done. 7:11 As companies go from startup to scale-up, how customer intimacy weakens and some of the symptoms to identify that. Claire goes into the details of how to identify the success gaps in the buyer journey. 9:23 Sparktoro case study: The specifics of the survey to understand SparkToro’s customers, how they ensured they’re not getting averaged-out answers, for example — identifying true sources of new customer sources (because in this case, a lot of people known Rand Fishkin and most initial customers might be founder-led) 24:20 The top 3-5 key takeaways you need to aim for, from your customer interviews 27:40 How to leverage all the collected answers to build your growth levers. Claire talks about how you can put together these answers on a spreadsheet and derive insights to help you construct growth pillars and a lot more...