[S1E3] Talking about (most common) early-stage startup mistakes with Lucy Heskins. Because nobody should have to cry in marketing alone

Podcast

Mar 13

Written By Ekaterina Howard

You’re Doing Growth Wrong
Season 1, episode 3

Overcome startup growing pains and avoid common mistakes founders make in search of PMF

Find out more about Lucy here: https://www.ohblimey.com/

Transcript

<<INTRO>>

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard

One of the things that I have sort of mixed feelings about is this tendency in the startup world to gloss over the hardships especially for the earlier stage startups.

Today's guest works with early stage startups and marketing teams on overcoming those hardships. Because nobody should have to cry in marketing alone.

In this episode:

top three mistakes that early stage founders make while looking for product market fit
why you and your founding members really need to run their own research
and what's the difference between a healthy and extremely unhealthy obsession with your competitors

<<INTERVIEW>>

Lucy Heskins

Hi, I'm Lucy and I'm the director of Oh blimey, I work with startups, helping them to navigate the messy process of building and marketing their products and services.

I tend to focus on working with first time founders to go to market, build repeatable marketing, and helping them to develop the confidence that they are pursuing the right activities.

I work in the UK and the US across a number of verticals, predominantly across B2B SaaS services and marketplaces.

Previous to Oh blimey, I worked in-house for a startup. And I joined as employee number one. And over the course of two and a half years, we pivoted, we made all the mistakes that you possibly could make. But we finally became profitable. And last year, the actual startup was acquired.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard

Tell me a bit more. So obviously, mistakes will happen. How do you catch them? How do you fix them? How do you learn in your experience?

Lucy Heskins

Oh, okay. So, mistakes. So I think going in as an employee, or employee number one, there were a few mistakes I made. And the first one was not understanding the stage the startup actually was at. So I subscribe to Steve Blank’s definition of growing a startup. And when I joined Careercake, which was the in-house role that I had, I assumed, based on the kind of interview that I had with the founder, that we had ”product market fit,” or whatever that means.

And so I joined the company as head of marketing, I came in with all these grand ideas of being able to market to this segment, to be able to increase the average order. And what happened was, I spent about two and a half months asking myself, do I even know how to do this job. And the reason being is the results weren't there. I came in expecting the campaigns to be successful, because I had a track record of marketing to this sector. And what actually happened was a lot of things just fell flat.

And it wasn't until we really kind of dug into what the problem was, was actually we are at this customer discovery phase, which is the first phase that Steve Blank talks about.

So yes, we've got a broad idea of who our ICP is. And yes, we did have a couple of paying customers. But when you try and translate that when you try and build in repeatable growth, if you don't know what's working and why, it's a bit of a false start. So I think the mistake that I made from that, which really set me on my course for making so many more mistakes, was not understanding the true stage the startup was at, and then understanding which strategy to then overlay it.

So in hindsight, I should have gone in, helped with audience discovery, with validation, understanding which model would actually help us to commercialize it, but instead, I was there firing off my campaigns and getting excited when a marketing qualified lead came in, but not really understanding that we didn't have the infrastructure or the strategy to actually commercialize that so that's definitely the first or one of one of many mistakes I made.

Another mistake that we've, we've made and I see I've I see founders make this as well is outsourcing customer validation to consultants or agencies.

Now, I appreciate the irony in this, being a consultant that works within the validation space. But more often than not when I see a founder outsource it, perhaps because they shy away from this process, you very rarely get to the nuts and bolts of the problem that you're trying to solve, you don't have that opportunity to understand the nuance in language, to understand the voice of customer, to understand the struggles that somebody is going through.

And I think when you receive this information from a consultant, it makes it harder to apply, it makes it harder to kind of empathize with your ideal customer.

So I've worked in that business that outsourced it. And I think that the campaigns or the results that we ended up achieving weren't as effective or authentic, as if I had been involved myself.

And I think now when I work with my clients, and when I was working in house, I'd make sure that I always got involved in it. And I'd also make sure that the founding team gets involved as well, because that layer of authenticity needs to flow throughout the founding team.

<<TRANSITION>>

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard

You may be slightly surprised to hear that, after all, isn't the whole point of being a b2b SaaS consultant to get more business and research, which many in-house folks don't want to do, because that's typically are a lot of work, or just don't have time to do in the first place. Seems like a no brainer to outsource. But I actually agree with Lucy.

<<INTERVIEW>>

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard

What makes it worthwhile to keep this in-house knowing that it's time effort, and the ick factor of now I need to go and talk to people? Oh, my God, not that again.

Lucy Heskins

Okay, so how can I answer this? So I think the reason why I would say that you need to keep this in-house, is because at any point you can hire or fire consultants. And every time you do that, you lose a piece of the puzzle, you lose a piece of that story that you're trying to create there. And it wasn't until we at that particular business, we realized for months on end that things weren't really working. And so we decided to do the validation process. Efficiently, or effectively, I should say, over a three-month period, we looked at our ICP, and we spoke to the HR sector. So that's who we were selling to. And then it wasn't till we kind of dug in and we realized that we're not talking to the HR sector, we're talking to learning and development. And we're also talking to heads of people.

Now, as you kind of dig in, and you find your your niche, you realize that you've got these sub-sectors, and the way their head of people subscribes, researchers, buys, is very different to the head of HR, for example, within the industry that we are going after, and the struggling moments, that moment where somebody wakes up and realizes that they need to make a switch, and they need to do something, was very different between HR and people. So the stories we were telling were very, very different.

And what we found was, yes, our story and our proposition made sense to all these segments. But if we were pitching to the head of people, they just got it. They just got it and they got it very differently. And for us, we found that when we were going after this segment, they were a lot more open to buying subscription products, they were more open to telling the stories of their young professionals, that what our product was around, so it kind of resonated. And once we kind of felt at home there and we're able to start signing up paid-for pilots and then bigger clients. What was great is that you're in a position where you can start building up a repository of customer language.

And for me that moment when I saw the founder onstage presenting a keynote, and using some of those sentences that we had extracted from these interviews, and then looking at the audience and seeing people nodding their heads, going, Yes, that's me. Yes, that's my problem. That was kind of the connection.

All of a sudden, it didn't feel like I'd been given this business jargon to reel off and almost like a sales, you know, when you're taught to do the 60-second sales pitch, and you know that you don't believe in it, you know, it's kind of like buzzword lingo, when you've got all these random stupid words, and no humans even talk that way. But for me, it was seeing that connection where this thread of a message that had come from the customer, right through to the founding team, it's now being presented in keynotes. And you can see people in the audience resonating going, Oh, my God, that's me, that person can hear me — that made the business case to not outsource that process. Outsource it to speed up, to automate certain parts, or perhaps get advice around strategy or questioning techniques. Absolutely. But that is something that the core founding team needs to own, in my opinion.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard

So let's say I'm at an early stage and this is the “Am I talking to the right audience at all?!” question – or is it that I just can't write marketing campaigns and need to get somebody else to do it for me? So how do I figure out which one it is?

Lucy Heskins

So I think that most people waste their money by going to an agency or committing to writing copy or messages by just relying on hunches.

I’m marketing to this customer segment and they really care about this based on my secondary research and looking at my competitors website. And the problem with that is that it is akin to relying on buyer personas.

So buyer personas are great for targeting. But crucially, you need a message in the first place to understand what you're going to be saying.

So in this kind of perspective, before you even tear apart your ability to write copy, if you think that actually execution might be the problem here, just look back to your ideal client profile and understand whether they actually have a problem that you need to solve, or they need to solve, whether you're even able to commercialize it, because one of the biggest mistakes that we made, at one point at a startup was we had some of the most vocal loud supporters, anything we did, they would celebrate, they would share on social media. And we were like, brilliant, we're on a high.

Could we monetize that segment? Not at all, they loved us, but they weren't in a position to be able to ever pay for our service. So like I said, before you even take apart the campaign's that you are writing or committing to, make sure that you are solving a problem that is painful enough that somebody is willing to throw cash at, if that's the kind of market that you're working out.

But also consider what ultimately would motivate someone to buy. So there's a framework that I'm sure, I'm sure you're aware of Jobs To Be Done. And it was created by Clayton Christensen, and then further developed by Bob Moesta from the ReWired Group. And it's this theory that says that people don't buy products randomly, we hire and fire them based on the progress that we want to make in life. And my interpretation of this is, it's not what your product does, it's what your product helps you to become. So if you kind of can take that logic, knowing what you've learned already about part of your ICP that is willing to pay to solve the problem. Then consider what outcomes or what desired outcomes somebody would want from using your product

Look at your messaging through that lens and that might give you an indication of why your campaigns might be falling short.

<<TRANSITION>>

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard

You may be thinking, excellent. Got it! On it!. It's not about what our product does. It's about what our product helps our users to become. Now we're going to fix all of our campaigns, we can skip those frameworks. After all, it's similar to “lead with benefits.” OK, “lead with benefits” is valid, contextually, and also in cases when you actually know what those benefits are. I see this type of advice backfire splendidly in cases, one, when you don't have a clear audience in mind, so you go with extremely generic Slack-like headlines, which makes sense for Slack because everybody knows what it is anyway, but don't necessarily make sense for a new startup. And two, when you have several segments you would like to attract, and you're forced to look for that common denominator, that, again, turns out to be in most cases way too generic.

<<INTERVIEW>>

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard

So basically, I just need to lead with “I will 10x next year’s growth,” right? As a start up across any vertical because that's what ultimately people care about, right?

Lucy Heskins

Oh, God. So right, the best way that I approach this is: we don't all buy the same way, right? We don't all want the same desired outcome.

And a business might have 10 different potential customers, right, who all want to 10x their growth, whatever that means. But there's only going to be one or two of those customer groups that are genuinely profitable to that business, right.

And if you are going out there with a message about 10x-ing growth or reducing churn or whatever it is, you are saying exactly the same as what everybody else is saying as well.

It's very hard to differentiate in that kind of market.

And I think that's why something like Jobs To Be Done is useful because it takes into account the kind of buying timeline that someone follows, it takes into account the forces of pay that might push someone towards subscribing, or that might hold someone back. And by using that, it allows you to think about the words, the proposition, the pictures of the people consuming the product. And it packages it up very, very differently.

And there are examples of businesses such as Huddle, Basecamp, Intercom, Otterbox, they're all these examples where these software businesses could promise 10x growth, but actually when they speak to the desired outcome, from that end user from an emotional functional and social perspective, it's the stories that are… or the representations of the stories that are proven to get the better results. So um, I also think that if you promise 10x, or 5x growth, you're just being very, very lazy.

<<TRANSITION>>

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard

Fair enough, at the same time, I think it's understandable, our brains are lazy. They don't want to spend the extra energy on any unnecessary thinking. And don't want to do the things that are not, you know, actually contributing to success.

But if you are a founder addicted to quick fixes and easy three step frameworks, and realize that they do not deliver the success that you expect, here is a different approach that is, hopefully, going to help you market better and see the growth you've been expecting.

<<INTERVIEW>>

Lucy Heskins

Okay, so I think I'm gonna share this in the context that I know that if I talk to somebody or I talk to a founder about customer research, the importance of talking to your customers, probably one of the most boring, dry, obvious things that I could impart, right? If, if I was to call it or describe it under the guise of growth, or sales, all of a sudden, that founders’ eyes light up.

And I think it's because it's that promise of shorter term and results.

So I think that's the context that we're working in.

But when I think about the kind of myths that derail founders, and I think having experienced these myself as well, the first one that comes in is this misunderstanding, or this idea, that go to market is all around the launch.

So people just think, Okay, well, when I talk about go to market, it's about me promoting this new product, or this new service, how can I work with marketing? How can I rally them around? How can I do a big, big push.

But go to market is actually the strategic body of work, it is the relationship between product, market, channel, branding, and customers. So the framework that I really like using is the one from DemandCurve.

But the idea is that actually, you've got these five components that have to work together to even make sure that the launch is going to be effective.

And it all starts with the market, right.

So who you are marketing to will determine your sales approach, the customer acquisition model, whether you should be freemium, whether you should offer a free trial, the channels you use, the branding, I mean, think about the competitive landscape. These all have a relationship with one another.

And as soon as you start looking at the market, and you decide which customer segment you're going to be looking at, it then unlocks a series of other paths, and then helps you work towards the going to market motion. So I think that's definitely the first myth.

Because hopefully, everything I've just said has showed you that it is not just about launching a couple of campaigns and sending out email blasts and whatnot. Actually, it's how different functions within the business have relationship with one another.

So that's the first one.

The second one is focused around people. And it's this concept of just get someone in, cheap. And that could be outsourcing something to Upwork or Fiverr. Or it could be bringing in an intern.

And I don't mean any disservice to interns because we have all been there.

But I can't get over the number of founders that give key messaging or strategic decisions that give that responsibility to a marketing assistant that just came in. And the reason being is that strategy should be owned by the founder because it is their business.

But also more often than not the marketing assistants that I have worked with – who are brilliant – but a lot of their learning in their teaching is based on what they picked up at university or what they picked up on a course. And more often than not, that case study is an established business, not a startup.

So you're not starting from scratch, it’s not got-to-market in its essence. I think also, when you bring in somebody who has less experience, they don't necessarily have the confidence to push back. Again, I certainly didn't when I was a marketing assistant.

But more often than not, I will see some founders get frustrated that organic activity on LinkedIn isn't resulting in sales. Or, I don't know, they're not landing enough sales. So they're having to discount. And it's because the marketing assistant or the marketer at this point hasn't developed the business nuance that I think you do need when you are kind of occupying more senior level marketing roles, to push back and say, actually, if we were to use the channel that is organic social media, that's not the point in it, that's not the metric.

I think that that can cause a lot of headaches. So that's the kind of second point, if you are going to bring in someone less experienced, don't give them strategy, or don't let them own strategy, that is your responsibility, and allow them that kind of safe space to kind of to push back as well.

The third myth is just because somebody has worked in your industry before, doesn't necessarily [mean] they're able to sell you now. So a good example would be… many moons ago, I was the marketing manager of a recruitment agency. And we would sell our job board advertising and job board tech to HR managers. As soon as I moved to a startup, we are selling a learning and development platform to HR managers.

I was hired because I knew how to market to HR. But the problem with that, right, is that I'm marketing a completely different product.

Yes, OK, I've got a couple of shortcuts because I know the nuance of the industry, but I am selling a completely different product.

And also, the way that people derive value from products and services changes over time as well. So my knowledge of that sector is immediately out of date.

And I think that if you have someone that is able to instantly kind of promise you, oh, we've got X amount of experience selling to this industry, or I know startups, I've worked with startups, I would just maybe question it a little bit more.

Lift the bonnet, ask exactly in what guise they've been able to kind of learn this. And if in doubt, if that person that you bring on does not want to talk to customers, does not want to get on the phone, does not want to conduct any level of audience discovery, that would be a red flag for me. So those are kind of the three, three myths that kind of derail the success of startups, especially kind of in those early stages.

<<TRANSITION>>

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard

Okay, let's recap. One, there is more to go to market than you might have thought. And it's definitely more than just launching. Two, strategic decisions should not be outsourced to marketing assistants, or folks from Upwork. And three, industry expertise does not always translate into being able to sell your product. Just because the context changes, the audience changes. And while being aware of the industry is a plus, it does not guarantee success.

But let's go back to the second one, because that's something that has not come up for me. Okay, makes sense, we should not be outsourcing strategy to non-founders.

But what does strategy even mean for an early stage startup? And what are the strategic decisions that you need to be making?

<<INTERVIEW>>

Lucy Heskins

So again, in the context of how I work, I'm a strategy consultant, right? I work with founders to help them ultimately validate and ultimately grow their startups. They should not be outsourcing which segment they want to go after.

I can present work and I can work with their teams and I can coach their teams to say this is the process, these are the segments I believe that we should be going after, but it can't be my decision, who they should be going after next because their businesses their business.

I'm just one part that is helping, trying to help them make progress.

So that's definitely one example. I think also in terms of marketing strategy and growth strategy as well. I think having agencies or consultants that are responsible for things like leads, it just seems… I mean, yes, you can pay for leads, but it just seems a little bit confusing.

Because ultimately, if you're early stage, the point is retention. The point should be around growth. And it just seems like it's the easiest thing to kind of hang your hat on.

It's almost like you're outsourcing responsibility that you ultimately should own at the end of it.

Because I think that you could work with an external consultant to help validate an ICP, right. And it might be, let's say the engagement is 12 weeks. But we've already discussed [that] how people derive value changes over time. And there are external factors going on all the time, where that can ultimately affect whether someone makes a buying decision.

So it could be time of year, budget, it could be they are downsizing, they’re upsizing, maybe they've got a new CRM that doesn't talk to your kind of particular product, there's all these different things.

And I think that if you run audience discovery, or run these interviews as part of this validation process, and think after 12 weeks that your work is done – biggest mistake you can make.

So you've got two options here, you can either find more people, or new people that the problem resonates with, which might then change the market or customer group that you're kind of going after, or you just find more of the same people.

And it's interesting, because we spoke about this earlier. Yes, your TAM might be X. But actually the resources that you have on that day, whether you've got 30 or 50 members of staff, I don't know, you're only ever going to be able to talk to a certain percentage of that market.

So the takeaways here would be talking or running this level of customer discovery has to be a continual thing. Purely because of how people derive value and how that changes, but also, depending on the size of your market, how many people you’re truly getting in front of as well? Is your job ever done?

I would say no, it's, I mean, I don't want to talk about the lean startup and all those kinds of things. But there is, there's value in the whole idea of it being a loop, right? It's cyclical, it’s iteration, you learn so much more by talking to people and being able to refine your sales message.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard

Can I just, like, copy what everybody else is doing already and not talk to customers?

Lucy Heskins

Oh, yeah, that's what I do all the time.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard

How’s that working out?

Lucy Heskins

Do you know what, years ago, I worked for a manager who was obsessed, obsessed with our competitors. And we had to do a check on the competitors every single morning at 9am. Without fail Monday to Friday, because they were obsessed.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard

To know what exactly?

Lucy Heskins

To see which new clients that they had got, whether they made any changes to their channel strategy, to see if they'd lowered their prices.

And at one point, you realize, oh, okay, so we're working in a pretty saturated market. And then you get to a point where you're obsessing so much, doesn't it say more about your proposition? There's a bigger question, bigger question there.

I'm a massive fan of competitor research, I do realize that it can get a bit unhealthy. But for me, the part where I was like, damn, this is really, really useful is the day that I stopped thinking competitors were just direct competitors. So direct, obviously, is a lifelike product marketing to the same segment. But as soon as I realized, actually, if you look at the progress, or the desired outcomes someone's looking to get from a product, you realize that there are three competitors, or three competitor types, so direct, indirect, and replacement.

So if this is kind of like new, the best example I like to share is, let's say you want to have a meeting with a client. And you are Zoom. So a direct competitor would be Teams. An indirect could be WhatsApp, because I'm still able to have a video interview. And a replacement is a business class flight, I could just jump on a plane, and I could go and see them face to face.

And as soon as I kind of realized that this was the case, any startup that I worked with, we then took apart, okay, when people are trying to solve this problem, what are they currently doing?

And that allowed us to see the level of direct, indirect and replacement solutions that were going on. And what was interesting about that, is that, yes, we could have competed against these different ones. But actually, they all have a sales cycle attributed to them. So we wanted to go after the competitor where we knew we had more chances of winning against and it was a shorter sales cycle.

And once you realize that, you can be aware that there are a number of competitors, but it gives you focus, right? And then as soon as you realize that actually, you're competing against this indirect competitor, for example, yes, have a look at the channels they're using, yes, look at the proposition.

But it gives you a bit more focus, it makes your research competitive intelligence, rather than this borderline obsession.

And I think that you can strike a healthy balance. But I don't know about you, but I've worked in a startup that has only had six weeks, left, run right? In six weeks’ time, if we don't make another sale, we're not gonna we're not gonna be in business, I'm not gonna be able to pay my mortgage.

And that's definitely the moment where you realize: stop obsessing with what they're doing, then just focus on what you're looking to achieve.

The only other time that competitors can come up is, particularly if you work in B2B, and you've got a sales pipeline, and you're looking at your last opportunities, if there is one competitor or one type of competitor that keeps on coming up, yes, drill down into that.

But maybe on a quarterly basis, not every morning at 9am like that, that first job I’ve ever had.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard

So for that less unhealthy quarterly review, what are the things to look for? What's noise? What's actually relevant as far as analyzing what competitors are up to is concerned?

Lucy Heskins

So from my perspective, when I work with clients, if we lose an opportunity, I'll ask them to find out who it was. And if there is the potential to ask them what the deal breaker was, what was it that swung it for competitor A, to get it rather than us.

And more often than not, that could be a short-term opportunity to update messaging.

It could be particular features. So that might be something that actually goes to the product team.

It could be a brand association. So perhaps you weren't present at an event or you weren't occupying a space that we thought that you should be to be kind of trustworthy. So then it opens up almost like a positioning thing.

So make sure that when you look at lost opportunities against certain competitors, categorize them, because then it will kind of give you a direction, and the level of focus to then kind of attack or interrogate that next stage.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard

What are your tips on how to go about this?

Lucy Heskins

So… Gah, okay. If you can, literally, ask them why they went with X versus Y. 90% of people will tell you it’s price, ignore that, it's a load of rubbish, it's usually never a reason.

So it could be that they couldn't get a sign off from their manager, it could be that the competitor has offered them a saving if they sign up for a multi year.

It could be, it is too much of a pain in the ass to change from one software system to another because you know that you've got to go and talk to somebody in engineering, somebody in product, and it's going to interrupt a number of workflows.

I think I would ask it as an open question, first of all, and then very quickly, you'll start to be able to categorize it. And then over the course of a quarter, very quickly, you can see oh, actually it is a product thing.

Maybe we do need to deliver X or maybe we do need to think about changing our trial length, I don't know.

But open it, literally open it up at the beginning to then collect the data to see what comes back. And then that should let you know which direction to kind of focus on next. I mean, hopefully you won't get too many lost opportunities.

But put these kinds of mechanisms in place to make sure that you're collecting that data.

<<TRANSITION>>

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard

So close losts are clearly a great idea for obvious reasons. Having mechanisms to gather feedback and stay on top of the changes in your competitive environment and in the way your customers shop for solutions also starts to seem to be a no-brainer, right? But what else can you do to be more proactive, react faster, and avoid that sinking feeling at the end of the quarter?

<<INTERVIEW>>

Lucy Heskins

As kind of standard, I put in a process where, again, depends on the model and the kind of product that we're working on, that within three to six months, we will run customer interviews with our best-fit customers as well. And the idea is that we're trying to refine this answer to Jobs To Be Done. So why did someone hire us? And there are a number of different frameworks out there, so Katelyn Bourgoin, she has a template, you've got Bob Moesta, and there's a number of frameworks out there.

But ultimately, I would always recommend putting in our standard and again, this is kind of supporting that whole message of building repeatable marketing and building repeatable processes to say, what was the struggling moment that was going through your mind that made you realize that you had to change your offering. What are the deal breakers, whose push like whose decision is it to push forward? Are you the champion here? Or are you someone that can actually sign off on the budget? What else are you looking at? And why? What picked it over the post? Why did we win this contract? And ultimately, now, you've been a customer with us for about three to six months, what can you do now that you couldn't do before?

And again, it kind of goes back to those outcomes and the outcomes that you want to put on your website to make sure that you're not promoting features you're promoting who can support people to be, like, brilliant in their careers, or whatever the proposition as well.

But yeah, I think, do you know, I think I just take it as obvious. Because, again, it's one of those really annoying bits of advice from a marketing consultant “Talk to your customers.” Yeah, obviously, founders aren't denying that they shouldn't talk to customers, they know that they've got to talk to customers, but they don't know, necessarily what they're asking.

And they sure as hell don't know how to apply it.

And that's not a criticism, because founders have, I mean, their sales, their marketing, the product, they've got to learn how to talk to engineers like that. They might be talking to investors, I don't know. So it's one of those. I think, as marketers, we do a disservice sometimes to startups, because we state the obvious, but we don't tell our customers what the next stage should be, if that makes sense.

Like even today, I was talking to someone. And we were talking about running audience discoveries, because this company in question established its go to market and they want to go into a new sector. And I was like, we need to have a couple of couple members of your team running these interview scripts.

And she was like, “Yeah, I'll put my salespeople on.” And it was literally like… That's really bad. But that was me, screeching the brakes. I was like, do not let your salespeople touch those scripts do not – and admittedly, that's a bias from my perspective. But I was like, knowing the sales people that I know, if they go in, and they are running one of these kinds of these calls to extract all this information that supports growth.

If they get one whiff of a potential sale, it's more than likely that they will lock that down and turn it into a sales opportunity rather than run its course, and collect the intel that we need.

That is so important for marketing, product growth and all these other departments. I don't know if that's unfair. But based on my experience of working with salespeople, I'd say it's fairly accurate.

<<TRANSITION>>

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard

OK, if the idea of salespeople in charge of your research initiatives makes you uncomfortable, fear not! We're going to dig into many other possible ways in which you can derail your research and see it fall apart and crash and burn spectacularly… for a number of reasons.

<<INTERVIEW>>

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard

What I see is like founders running those calls, and they also tend to be very quick to switch to the sales mode.

Another thing that I see is like they explain everything first, and then they kind of like one, one to put me in the right frame of mind so that they get biased results back because I already know what's going on. so…

Lucy Heskins

Yeah, and it's like, you know, it's skewing the results in the favor for an answer that you want. So you may as well not even just have the call in the first place, do you know what I mean?

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard

Yes, and then I sometimes run into marketing teams running those calls. And they tend to also… I think it's just like a beginner's mistake, overexplaining what it is you're trying to do. And also asking super leading questions because you just hope to hear something nice and return already because marketing is so hard.

Lucy Heskins

And you know, there's nothing worse than going up to your boss and going, “I've just ran 20 calls. They really don't like our product. They think it's rubbish because of X, Y and Z.”

[For] a founder, or a certain type of founder, I should say, it's easier to deliver good news, right? As humans, we want to help and we want to be positive. And I don't envy the marketer that has to go in and say, actually, 90% of customers really dislike this, especially if it's around a feature or part of the proposition that the founder was really, really kind of passionate about getting across.

So yeah, I do – and I'm not coming from the perspective that marketers know what they're doing. And when I've been the marketer where my target was to generate 150 leads a month, but that was not tied to conversion into sales.

So I had this very inflated – and again, it's you learn don't you learn – so yeah, I think we're always learning.

I'm gonna turn that into a positive we're always learning – growth mindset, she says with gritted teeth.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard

This is awesome!

Lucy Heskins

Growth mindset!

<<TRANSITION>>

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard

Tracking MQLs, but not tracking conversions – wait, what? If you are slightly confused about why you would do that, and how this translated into business growth, you're about to find out. And perhaps more importantly, some ideas on how to make sure that sales and marketing worked together, happily ever after.

<<INTERVIEW>>

Lucy Heskins

So this was a particular business that I was working in… in a word, a business where the sales team are the champions, and they'd get bottles of whisky for hitting their targets. And it was very much the kind of like, they were put on this pedestal.

And marketing, I know it's cliche, but marketing, we're very much seen as the coloring in department, the kind of pretty pictures type thing. Sales hated it whenever marketing wanted to talk to customers, absolutely hated it. I had one salesperson tell me that they, because of me, I can eat. They pay my mortgage, that was definitely a fun one.

And what was interesting is we, this particular business, we were working in a really kind of saturated market. And we could see that market share was falling ever so slightly. So all of a sudden, you look back into the organization, and see something needs to change.

And for us, it was realizing that we could generate as many leads as possible. But if there's no lead scoring, if it's not actually tied to any type of buying signals, what, genuinely, what's the point? And I think that the process that we went from marketing and turning it into growth, and focusing more on expansion opportunities and increase in cumulative spend, that was the change for us, because all of a sudden, marketing is showing its value. It's showing that it's a profit center, not a cost center. And that was great.

But the adjustment from a sales perspective was quite difficult for some of the team because I think we went from having kind of the sales heroes that bring in all these big deals to actually it's not just this function if sales and marketing work together.

Actually, it's kind of better for everyone, but I'm just stating the absolute obvious here, let's be honest. But this was back in the day where the sign of success was working with as many companies as possible, not increasing the average order with a few best-fit customers that you knew would keep on coming back. And again, like, in hindsight now I'm thinking, no wonder I was stressed, anxious, had burnout, all of these different things that I know that many marketers experience. And I think because I went through that now I know what a few of the red flags are.

But yeah, that's metrics. But that's metrics for an established business.

Metrics for startups, it's, it's interesting, because when I work with particularly early stage startups, the focus, yes, is always on sales. But we actually have to kind of bring it back.

And Matt Lerner talks about something called message market fit before product market fit and making sure you're using the right terminology, voice customer to get those conversions in.

But certainly the way that I kind of break up metrics is, particularly if you're working within B2B, B2B SaaS model, is paid-for pilots for just showing people showing commitment. So that could be beta customers willing to jump on calls, give you their time, help shape products, help shape sales messaging.

Or those people that say, do you know, I will give you some money, I'm not going to give it to you for 12 months, but if you as a founder can work towards metrics that support paid-for contracts coming through even for a couple of months, then that's, that's a kind of a good a good thing to build momentum on. And that's definitely the kind of approach I take now.

If you are pre-revenue, just get that commitment in, you're not gonna be able to get a five-year contract. Or you might be I don't know, what are the current kind of smaller increments? How can you support that?

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard

I hope that this episode has changed your mind about what it actually takes to go to market and also dispels some of those common early stage startup myths about what matters and what doesn't, and who should be in charge of all your startup strategy.

If you want to find out more about Lucy, go to ohblimey.com. Don't forget to check out the comics.

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So at this point, hopefully you are at least somewhat okay with the idea that to accelerate your growth, you may have to quote unquote, talk to your customers. And it turns out in some cases, it is not enough to commit to this course of action and to have an interview guide full of not leading, not biased, perfectly acceptable questions.

As it turns out, sometimes a missing ingredient is empathy. For some people who are not into people (tech founders everywhere, I see you), this can be the missing piece of the puzzle.

In the next episode, I'm going to talk to a person who has learned how to be a more empathetic listener, and is now teaching startup founders how to apply those skills to get accurate, rich, qualitative data from their customer interviews.

Learn more about Lucy