There are three or four core foundations, core questions that every business has to answer in order to know how to grow and figuring out the answers to those questions for your business. is essentially you figuring out your go-to-market strategy. So those four foundations are one, who do you serve? Who do you market and sell to, right? Who's your audience, right? Is the very first question. Two is what do you sell them?
What's your offering? What's your product or service? What's the pricing and packaging that goes along with it that makes it compelling? Well, thank you so much, Garrett, for coming on the show today. I'm really excited to talk about our go-to-market strategy and just all that you're working on these days. Thanks for coming on the show. You bet. Thanks for having me, Tony. It's great to be here.
Absolutely. Well, for our listeners, Garrett and I go, I was gonna say way back, but not like super, super far back, but enough back where we've been, we've been able to work on a couple clients together. And I just, from my own experience, have really enjoyed the work I've seen him do from...
just from afar, from a fractional CFO to a fractional CMO. It's been really wonderful to see. I know technically you don't ascribe to the fractional CMO title. You're a strategy, a consultant, but I can kind of put you a little bit in that. in that box. Yeah, that's fine. You know, maybe, maybe even just start with that. This is something that came up in our initial conversation was you had said that, you know, you try to.
try to shy away from the fractional CMO title. And you gave a reason for that. Why? Why is that? Why do you not try to do fractional CMO? Yeah. So let me give a little bit of context. So I started maybe about two years ago on my kind of consulting journey and I started as a fractional CMO. You know, my previous life, I was a full-time CMO at early stage software companies mostly. When I started, someone told me...
no one wants to hire a fractional CMO. They want a full-time CMO, but they just have a fractional budget. And I thought that that was kind of funny and it resonated. But in all reality, some of my first clients that I had, they needed more than I could provide.
in one day a week right they were sending anything and everything related to marketing to me and the other piece of that is one of the things that i've realized more and more especially for earlier stage b2b companies software or services it all comes down to do you have really tight
go-to-market foundations. I'm sure we'll talk more about what those are today, but that's what I really enjoy doing is helping companies focus on strengthening their go-to-market foundations because that is what drives success for so much more of marketing and sales.
i've just gradually focused more and more on those things so i end up doing more project work these days or ongoing engagements but you know i i'm less of a fractional cmo and more of a go-to-market strategy consultant yeah and with that the thing that you had told me too is is just the When you go to talk with these agencies in particular, or early stage SaaS companies, but because of the nature of this podcast, we're talking a lot with agency owners, you had just shared like...
Also, people don't want like a nebulous, open-ended, forever contract with an expert like you are. They ideally would want to have some kind of defined scope of work with a particular timeline in mind.
it's, it's a little easier to, to kind of work, work with them. And I think that that was something that really endeared you to me. Cause I think that can be, that can be the hard thing, even, you know, being the finance guy that I am, I'd be like, I really want to work with this person long-term, but also like.
I know what the budget is and we only have X amount of dollars to spend. And so I thought that was a very compelling way of approaching it. You're talking about go-to-market strategy. Would you mind just sharing, like unpack that a little bit? I know what that means because I've worked with you. I've seen your work before. But for other people who might be a little bit less familiar with go-to-market strategy and how you guys approach it, unpack that for us a little bit more.
Yeah, it's such a loaded term. It's something that we've all heard, but I don't feel like there's a really good definition that's consistently known across the board for it. So for me, it really comes down to there are three or four core foundations. questions that every business has to answer in order to know how to grow. And figuring out the answers to those questions for your business is essentially you figuring out your go-to-market strategy. So those four foundations are...
One, who do you serve? Who do you market and sell to? Who's your audience? Is the very first question. Two is what do you sell them? What's your offering? What's your product or service? What's the pricing and packaging that goes along with it that makes it compelling? Three is what is your messaging? What do you say? to clearly communicate your value to that same audience.
And four is what are the channels that you focus on to reach more people like your best fit customers, more prospects like them. And then there's kind of a nebulous fifth, which is really just about how do you execute? It's the operations, right?
But when I talk about the go-to-market foundations, it's really those four core foundations and figuring out the answers to those questions, making the choices, because there's trade-offs with all of those things. Who do you focus on? What do you say? What do you offer them? When you make those choices.
That's, that's really what strategy is to me. It's making choices, right? So it's the choices that you're making for each of those foundations to go to market. Yeah. And the thing I think is so interesting is like.
I know how valuable that go-to-market strategy is because I see agencies that don't have a go-to-market strategy. And it's evident in the fact that they couldn't even articulate who their ICP is. They wouldn't be able to kind of frame that. And so their content kind of falls on deaf ears. There's a lot of like a lack of resonance with what they're trying to do out in the market.
I see the value here. Something I think is really interesting from a conversation we had previously is you talk about how you've got a little bit of a philosophy of sales before marketing, which I think is kind of counterintuitive. You know, you're a marketing guy. that you would be purporting how marketing needs to be the first thing. But you talk about sales before marketing. Would you mind elaborating on why?
agencies should prioritize direct sales and fulfilling for customer needs before launching comprehensive marketing campaigns. Yeah, you bet. So before I get into it, let me just preface it by sharing this. I believe that every B2B company goes through three growth stages, three different stages of growth. Phase one is all about learning. You're selling
anything that you can to anyone who will give you money in the early days, right? Just to put food on your table. And that's okay. That's, that's, that's all about learning and finding quote unquote product market fit. You're trying to figure out which markets, which audiences, and which offering services you should sell. And eventually... After you have sold enough, you start to gain confidence in the right audience and the right offering. And so phase two then is about focus.
Phase one's about learning. Phase two is about focus. That's when you take more of a beachhead strategy. You focus on your one best fit audience, your one best fit offering. And you go all in on building customer acquisition systems to generate more customers and win that niche, right? It's all about niching down. Phase three is after you've done that, you either add a new audience to sell. that same service too.
or you add a new service to sell to the same audience, but you do it one at a time. Systematically you build out the new customer acquisition system for that one before you add a third and a fourth and a fifth. Right. And that's, that's. the path to growth. And I think that what I've seen so often is companies get caught up in phase one, they jump to phase three, they skip phase two, right? And it just makes so many problems for how...
they approach this process. So again, with that context, going back to your question, you asked me why sales before marketing sales is the fastest way to learn. What works by having conversations one-on-one by pitching your services to certain audiences, you're learning the messaging that works going back to those foundations. You're learning the right audience that resonates.
You're learning the right offerings. You're learning the right messaging and you're learning how to find them. Right. And because sales is a one-to-one. and more of a high effort low cost channel just doing sales motions right that's where you start and then you scale with a one to many channel because marketing is one to many
It usually costs more. And so you want to make sure that you're investing that money into channels that'll have a better return, but you need confidence in those foundations before you really do that. So anyways, we could go deeper into that, but hopefully that made sense. Yeah, that does. And so when you're thinking those phase one, phase two, phase three, are you thinking like go to market strategy typically comes in phase two, or it can come at any, any.
All of it is go-to-market strategy. There's go-to-market strategy across all three phases, but your go-to-market strategy changes. You think about those four foundations, right? You don't know what, who your audience is in phase one. You're just trying to figure it out. And your messaging is pretty focused.
And then broad it's chaotic, right? And then your channels are all over the place, but it's very different when you move into phase two versus phase three. And so I think that's also where companies get. caught up is they don't realize which phase they're in. And so therefore
Their go-to-market strategy is very different and they don't know exactly what to do because they don't want phase they're in. That makes sense. I see. I see. But I do like what you're saying though, is like sales is one of the best ways to learn. I mean, I've, I experienced that in my own, my own time as I'm building up.
equip is having those one-on-one conversations with people. Like you said, it's low cost, but high effort. There's a lot that goes into it. It's a very, it's personalized experience. You're not, you know, spamming people or anything like that. Like you're having an individual conversation. But it's in those nuanced conversations that you start to pull out and you can test certain theories of like what is actually resonating as a pain for people. I guess.
For those that are, they're hearing this, agencies that are hearing this, and they've maybe done marketing first before they've done sales, I guess, what suggestions would you have for them being in that spot? They're posting on LinkedIn, they're making YouTube videos.
They're doing all this stuff, but they haven't really done the sales stuff yet. What would your suggestion be? So I would say there's nothing wrong with that. I think that the risk is just higher that you're going to waste your budget. And I think it comes down to how comfortable are you with.
that risk that you're taking on, right? How much budget do you have to dedicate to this? Because what it really comes down to, to do good marketing, often marketing is more expensive than sales, just from a one-to-one perspective, high effort, low cost versus. you know, higher costs on the marketing sites, you know, to do good marketing, you have to really understand those foundations. You have to have a good understanding of who your audience is, what you're selling.
what you say, which channels to focus on. And if you don't, if you're going to change your mind in three months, then, you know, you just wasted a whole lot of money. Right. And so it's better to have pretty good idea of your foundations before you invest deeply in.
more expensive marketing channels so if you're going to create content great yeah do it if you're going to run ads great yeah do it just know that if you change your mind a few weeks down the road right then it's going to throw that all off and it may have been for not So, yeah, well, I just like the thought that's coming through my mind as you're sharing that is I think about the example of like, if I knew that if I thought my ICP was, you know, manufacturing companies in, in the Southwest and.
I think that their pain point is, you know, some, who knows what their pain point is, is some XYZ pain point. If I take the approach that you're talking about, where it's like, we're investing all this money in this initiative on a marketing campaign, that's, you know, maybe advertising to these people. But we haven't, you know, maybe had a lot of time to kind of vet that out through sales. We might be really, really far in and end up.
Like you said, like we might be really, really far in with our budget, uh, only to find out that actually isn't really the pain point that's resonant with that audience. Or maybe that's not even the audience we want to get after versus when you're just going and you're doing kind of one-on-one sales, like you can pivot in a moment.
I, you know, even just today, I'm like having a conversation with somebody and I'm like, here's this, uh, this offer that we have for your particular pain. And I can test whether or not that's even a viable marketing or a viable marketable service in the sales. conversation. Yeah, exactly. I'd say another way to think about it is you don't ever know that something is going to work until someone gives you money and then they reach success with your service.
or with your product, right? The whole goal of good marketing and sales should be to replicate your best fit customers. The ones who have paid you, who are happy and satisfied, that want to come back and pay you more, that want to refer others to you.
we should just be looking for finding more exactly like that and so you don't know if you haven't actually sold to this audience you don't know that it's the right audience the right offering the right messaging but as soon as you start selling and you can start repeating and replicating those best fit customers, then you know exactly what to market.
Yeah, that's so good. So let's say somebody is doing this right. They're doing sales first to really kind of vet some of this stuff out. At what point do you feel like it starts to make sense to now shift from that sales focus tactic to a more broader marketing initiative?
Yeah, it's a great question. I don't think that there's a perfect answer for, you know, that's applicable for every company. I think it depends on the company, the strengths of the founders, since they're the one who are, who are going to be leading marketing and sales initially. Right.
Usually, again, kind of going back to what we were talking before, you start with... high effort, low cost channels, which are often more outbound sales referrals until you've sold enough that you're confident in those go-to-market foundations, your audience, your offering, your messaging, your channels.
Then you start replicating those best fit customers, right? And so often I work with clients who are kind of coming out of phase one and going into phase two where they're starting to focus. And what we do is we... actually do some workshops where we identify who are their best fit customers, who is the ICP based on real data. And then we go talk to them and we ask them how they typically buy, you know, offerings like. this client is selling
Right. And then we go market those to those channels where they search online. So if they're really active, their audience is really active on LinkedIn. We know we should be on LinkedIn, whether it's creating organic content, whether it's doing some paid ads. Right. If they are constantly searching on Google or going to some other sources, we know we got to be there. If they're going to some events, we know we have to be there. Right. And so it starts, it's actually.
It's fairly simple when you start with those foundations, because you just go talk to those narrow audiences of people and you learn how they buy those products and you show up in those channels. So, yeah.
i think that's it makes it makes a ton of sense there's something kind of like paradoxical a little bit here right because like i and i'm totally on board with what you're saying, where you're saying, you know, sales before marketing, but then also one of the other things you stressed a lot is making sure that you have solid foundations before you get into the execution work that comes with marketing.
So I know what we've talked about in the past, when it comes to go-to-market foundations, you've talked about the three pillars. What are those three pillars for your go-to-market foundation? Yeah. So we've talked about them already today and I'd say I've kind of expanded them to four. Right. And so it's those four, those four foundations, which I think are so key. And, and I think that again, so that's your audience. It's your offering. It's your messaging.
And it's your channels, right? And understanding each of those things. The one thing I will say is I actually believe that marketing is broader than just demand generation, generating leads for your company. There are different disciplines within.
marketing. One of them is more traditional product marketing or solution marketing, which is doing a lot of this foundational work. So it's not that you don't need this work done before. It's just that you need that the product marketing type work the foundational work done before you invest deeply in demand generation marketing and generating more leads so most people think of marketing as
Running ads, doing SEO, doing these things. Right. But in order to do that really well, I think there's this whole other discipline of marketing, which is exactly what we're talking about too. And so you would clarify that more like a product marketing where you're, I guess, how would you parse that out? Product marketing versus maybe you were saying more traditional marketing. What's the difference there?
Yeah. So in within B2B marketing, there's usually people talk about three disciplines within B2B marketing. There's demand generation. So you're the people who are executing channels, SEO, paid ads, events, whatever it is to generate leads and new business. There's product marketing and product marketing really helps you with a lot of your foundations. They do a lot with understanding your customer, building your ICP messaging and positioning.
more of this strategy stuff and then the third bucket is brand marketing and it could be related to design or brand or building your brand. Right. And so there's different types of disciplines. Sometimes people group the more creative marketers in that brand market, you know, marketing bucket could be video could be lots of things. Right. And so when it comes down to it, like you, there really are three disciplines within market.
You need them all and they're all important. I think the key though, that I have seen is most people think about marketing as. demand generation. And so that's why I say definitely sales before marketing, right? You still need some of those foundations in place before you start executing. You still should start with sales, but. product marketing disciplines help you understand your foundations before you
amplify them, if that makes sense. Interesting. Yeah. So it's almost like the product marketing might be a better fit for more of that foundational, laying the groundwork and establishing those foundations of your marketing strategy. Because then from there, you can build more. on things like your, what did you say, brand marketing and your demand gen marketing?
Am I understanding that correctly? Yeah. And I think that the problem that smaller companies face, you know, smaller agencies, especially is when they're to the point where they need marketing, they should. Hire a product marketer, but they need demand generation. And I think that's the catch 22. The hard part about those early stages is what, what do you do?
Again, that's the gap that I'm trying to fill in the market is working with those companies that need that. But I can come in and help them do a lot of those product marketing foundations. before they go hire that SEO agency or that paid ad agency or hire someone in house to do that for them, because they think that that's what allows them to get better results. Yeah.
That makes so much more sense. Yeah, I've talked with my clients about this a lot, which is you need to have a really solid go-to-market strategy because we talk all about how you need to properly invest in your sales and marketing. Because a lot of agencies, just quite frankly, aren't under investing in their sales and marketing. And I think one of the biggest hesitations they have in making that spend or spending appropriately is they don't really know what to spend it on.
And part of that is just a general hesitance to go after the things like paid ads because they think marketing equals paid ads and it doesn't. It can, but it doesn't. And I'm almost always just directing them towards, I think you need a really solid go-to-market strategy.
And so even what you're saying about product marketing as being kind of a central or like a good foundational practice or discipline, like you're saying, that's super helpful. So you're saying product marketing or if somebody is a product marketer, that's a good. Good indication that this is kind of a good foundational marketing element. Usually, yep. Though, again, it's interesting because a lot of early stage companies don't hire product marketers first, even though they should.
Right. Product marketers often come a little bit later stages in the company to help you as you're launching your next products. Right. Some of it comes down to budget and like where you're at and your growth stage. but they're they are key and the discipline is key those foundations are key to doing really good marketing i think that's why we see so many companies that are in those earlier stages that go and hire that paid ad agency or that seo agency and then four months down the road
They're just underwhelmed with the results and they think, oh, that channel doesn't work for me and we got to try something different. And then they're just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what fits. It's because they didn't have that strategy in place that they needed. Yeah. Well, and I think, you know, the point you were making earlier, too, is like.
Part of the reason why they go after something more like demand gen marketing is because what they're feeling is the pressure of, I need to make sales. Like I need to be profitable because I don't, I'm not getting a ton of investment from outside. You know, you might be a sales company. uh and maybe you got some angel investment so maybe you have a little bit more uh leeway or a little bit more runway here but certainly if you're an agency you don't you don't have outside capital like
It's whatever money you're putting into your business. And so you feel the pressure of, I need to be able to make money. I need to be able to go in and, you know, get new revenue in. And so there's a general pull towards, I want to do demand gen marketing to make the money in the short term. And that's just why I love.
of your solution or your approach to say sales first marketing second, because if you're doing outbound sales, it is not the most effective or not the most efficient. It's really effective. It's not the most efficient. but it will address your short-term cashflow needs to then give you some space to do the work you need to do, which is product marketing. I think that that's brilliant. Yeah, exactly. The one thing I will say too, just to kind of add to that, Tony is.
i've worked with companies that have both raised money and the bootstrapped like agencies right secretly maybe not so secretly now The bootstrapped ones are my favorite to work with by far. And part of the reason why is I've seen so often when companies raise money, the pressure level to get revenue.
exponentially in through the door right now just goes through the roof. Right. And often that means they skip over those foundations. A lot of times bootstrap companies are a little bit more level-headed. They definitely feel the pressure of like, they need to grow and they need to get revenue in the door to keep the lights on, but they're okay. pausing for a minute to really understand the foundations so that they're investing in the future to be more efficient.
overall later on and i i don't know i just i just have learned more and more that you know at least from my experience it's not that if you raise money that you know, you're going to create a horribly inefficient company, but the likelihood is definitely higher. And I think the healthier companies that we're seeing today in the market often are the bootstrapped ones because they're willing to lock in their foundations.
And in order to, you know, be more efficient later on. Yeah, I totally wholeheartedly agree. That's why I love my bootstrappers. Let's go. Yep. So I want to dial in here for a minute. We're talking, you know, establishing the go-to-market strategy foundation. One of the things I love about your approach is, I mean...
This is probably just like basic for all the product marketers out there. They're just like, this is what we all do. But like for a novice like myself or like for other, you know, software dev agencies that might be listening to this. you actually do interviews, right? You're not just like, Oh, I wonder if this could potentially be like, you're talking with the people that actually have the problem and you distill it down. I'd love to just get into your brain for a minute as you're.
going through that exercise of conducting those interviews. Like, could you parse that out for us? What, what are those interviews to look like? What kind of questions are you asking? What's the best way that. a software dev agency owner some other agency owner can be doing those types of interviews yeah it's such a great question and man how much time you have we could go deep here too but but so to to start
One of the frameworks that I really like that helps with this is the theory of jobs to be done. If you've heard of the theory of jobs to be done, it was made popular by a Harvard professor, Clayton Christensen, years ago. There's some books written on it. Anyways, if you just Google job. You'll learn a lot about kind of this theory. The whole idea behind jobs to be done is that companies don't buy products and services. They hire your product or service to do a job for them.
And so if you can figure out what job are they hiring your product or service to do, and how do they go about hiring that your product or service, right? Then it's a lot easier to then. replicate that for new prospects out there. So a lot of what I ended up doing is jobs to be done types interviews that look back at, I ask.
clients, right? Well, I asked clients of my clients, if you will, right? Their customers about their journey from when they first had the thought of, I need some new solution. What was going on in their world? all the way until they signed up with this dev agency and got really good results and were really confident in their decision. And all we want to do is understand the timeline of what happened between that.
Right. What was the thing that triggered that search? What did they do next? Who else was involved? Who did they talk to? What alternatives did they consider? You know, what channels did they look through to look for a new solution?
Right. Did they look on Google? Did they ask, you know, a business partner? Did they ask some trusted advisor? What did they do? Right. What were they looking for along the way? Like what were the deal breakers? What were the things pushing them towards getting something new and what were the things pulling them back?
habits, anxieties often hold us back from making a purchase. So understanding those things, when did they know it was the right purchase decision? And when did they find success? If you can unpack those things and really understand those things across multiple customers.
And that's just a gold mine for all of those foundations, right? You know, exactly what to say in your messaging, you know, exactly which channels to target, you know, exactly how to price and package your offerings. And so, yeah, it really comes down to, I don't think you can do really good. messaging and positioning go to market strategy without first identifying who your best fit customers are and then going and talking to them.
so you actually you conduct those interviews with those best fit customers who are already paying your clients money or have paid money to them for the services that they've rendered Exactly. Cause again, the whole idea is you want to replicate your best fit customers. That's what it's all about. Once you have, so another way to think about this, I know we've talked about this multiple ways, but.
My favorite definition for, let me throw another term out there that everyone's heard, right? Product market fit. My favorite definition for product market fit is selling the same thing to the same buyer in the same way. with the same results. So if you can sell the same thing, same offering, same pricing and packaging to the same buyer, generally the same person, same titles or industries or sizes in the same way, using the same messaging and channels.
and help them get the same results, the same satisfaction, retention outcomes, then you have product market fit, right? And so it's all about replicating your best customer case study. It's all about replicating those best fit customers. Do I think it's worth talking to people who are not your customers or who said no? Yeah, I do. But most important, I think. in this process is talking to the people who actually bought. So you know how to resonate with people just like them out there.
So I want to do a quick devil's advocate on that definition, specifically thinking about in professional services and more specifically now software development agencies, a lot of the work that is being done is custom in nature. So what would you say to somebody who says, okay.
garrett that's cool that you're saying sell the same thing the same buyer same results but like every single engagement is going to be unique and different so how how is it even possible are you saying i will never hit product market fit No, I'm saying it definitely can be. There can't definitely can be consistency there. It goes back to the idea of jobs to be done that we talked about earlier. If you're targeting the same people with the same job to be done, then all of a sudden.
your offering becomes fairly consistent. I sell a service. Right. It's not a dev service, but I have a small agency that sells a service and I've been able to productize my offering because I'm focusing on companies that have a very similar job to be done. Right. That allows me to build a lot of efficiencies. It allows me to get a lot better. And so I think that that's one of the biggest mistakes that service providers, professional service, especially dev agencies.
do is they think that everything has to be custom custom is an important part of what they do but they should be constantly pushing to productize their services by targeting people with the same jobs to be done, right? And that allows them to really improve their messaging and positioning, the channels that they focus on, and the efficiencies of their marketing.
Yeah. And I mean, time and again, you see that the growth rates that agencies, when agencies have dialed into a specific vertical that they're reaching and the service specialization that they have, I mean. you're always going to get stronger revenue growth from that approach than you will with an industry agnostic generalist. So I think that makes a ton of sense.
I want to go back to some of those research questions you're talking about here. And specifically, I'm just like, I want to paint the picture in my own mind. Obviously, you don't want to base all of your decisions off of one conversation. That would be way too anecdotal. But how many conversations do you feel like you need to have in order to get a sense that this is a pretty well-founded, well-researched foundation for a business?
So I'm going to answer it in a couple different ways. So the first is before we start doing research, we first want to look at the existing customer or client base. And we want to segment it. Segmenting is just a process of grouping people into smaller groups to make it more efficient, more your marketing and sales, more efficient. Right. And so segmentation really is finding people with similar characteristics. And so once we do that.
Then we can see how many unique segments do we serve? And then we have to pick the few that we're going to focus on and identify our best fit customers from those segments. Because if you end up talking with people from lots of different segments.
that have different jobs to be done, that are different size companies, different industries, you're going to get a lot of different answers. And so you're going to have to interview a lot more people. But if you interview a lot of people from the same segment.
Right. It only takes a couple to start to identify the differences in trends there. So first is segmentation and identifying which segments to be focused on. Then you find the best fit customers within those segments and you can kind of dual path it. create your, your list of best fit customers and then look at who's paid you in the last 12 months and kind of identify the overlap there. So that's kind of like part one.
Part two is there's actually been some studies done that if you talk to people who are in similar segments, most of the new things you learn. Like you stop learning new things after about nine interviews. And so usually between five and nine interviews is what I target, right? And anything beyond that.
You know, you might get one or two little insights here and there, but you're not necessarily learning anything new. So it doesn't take a ton. Like it takes a handful between five, I would say at least five up to nine or 10 interviews. And if they're from the same segment, you're going to learn a ton from those interviews to really help guide your go-to-market strategy. And you would say that you ideally would see five to nine interviews within a given segment.
Yep. Or very similar segments that have very similar needs. Yeah. Okay. What, what happens, you know, I'm thinking maybe two or three years in, I don't have a ton of clients, maybe because the majority of the work that we do is it's larger in nature. So we have fewer clients. What do we do in a situation where it's like, I don't even know if I can point to five to nine ideal fit clients. Maybe I only have three. What's your approach for an agency that's in that spot?
Yeah, it's a great question. And I've worked with some agencies like that. So you kind of have two approaches. You either continue selling. You're still in phase one. Like we talked about all at the beginning, you continue selling until you get more.
clients that you can interview, right? And then you go from there, or you're okay with making a decision on where to focus with some more level of ambiguity. So you interview who you can, you interview those three or four, you just know that there's some level. of ambiguity there because you don't have as much data as if you had nine people to interview. And so you're okay with that. You just acknowledge and you're okay with that, knowing that.
Hey, this is still based on real data and we still feel really good about this direction. Right. And so we're planning to move forward. If you're not to a place where you're comfortable focusing on a certain segment because you don't have enough data. then you can always go back and continue selling, right? Keep selling, keep learning until you're to a point where you're comfortable focusing.
Yeah. Would you ever do like paid research? So like, let's say they're not clients. And so you just invite them on for an interview and you, you pay the money for the interview. Would you ever do something like that? Yeah. In fact, I just actually did that with a, with an agency that I'm working with. They had a low volume of clients, but we identified the attributes of some of their best fit clients. I was able to go to a platform and find people just like that, who had also hired.
another different dev agency in the past. And I was able to interview a few of those people. And, you know, I was able to learn some really good insights, right. About what they cared about in that process. It wasn't their clients, but it was really.
close to the type of clients that they want to get. So that's another way to go to, right. That can help you, you know, expand your research. Even if you don't have all of those paid clients, the best is always going to be talking to paid clients who have paid you money. Right. Next best is something like that.
So you mentioned there's like a website or there's like a platform that you can go and you can interact with these people. Would you be able to share like what that platform is? Yeah, there's lots of them actually. Well, the one that I used for this is called userinterviews.com. focused on UX research, a lot of people in the UX space, but you essentially say, these are the criteria, the people I want to talk to. You can, you can have some, some.
screener questions. And so I had some screener questions. Have you in the last 12 months hired a. software development agency to help with any internal tools or projects. Right. And, you know, asked a couple of questions like that. And so I only accepted people who fit the criteria, who had hired someone in the last 12 months.
you know, then move forward with it. So it's, it's pretty simple. There's others. There's one called respondent where you can find people to take surveys or do interviews. So there's a lot of them out there, but yeah, they're really good tools to find people who are in your target market. Right. who have the same attributes as your customers. But I will say one of the things that I believe is, I know I've said this again and again.
You got to start with your customers if possible though. It's easier to book those, but it's so much more valuable to start with your customers. And then you can layer that on. afterwards. Yeah. Well, cause you get the nuance of them specifically working with you and, and yeah, there's something, especially if you on your end can prove like this is a profitable type of client. You also want to replicate the profitable type of client.
Because you might even have somebody who's similar, demographically similar, similar segmentation, similar job to be done. But there might be like something slightly nuanced about this one that's your client that's actually actually is profitable. You don't know if you're.
this interview with this other person you paid for you don't actually know if that would have been a profitable deal for you because maybe their unique circumstances are just different enough i think that's a really that's a very important point to make what is If you were to go the route of you're doing a paid interview on some of those platforms, what even does something like that cost? I imagine there's a cost associated.
There is. So I'll tell you, you know, the ones that I did, you know, in this example, we paid about $200 per interview. And so you have to offer some sort of incentive to the person. Depending on their level of seniority and whatnot, the platform makes recommendations for how much you should offer them. So they recommended in the range of about $100 for a 30-minute call. And then I paid the platform about $100 for the fee of finding them.
So like there's ones that can go all the way up to $1,500 per interview. If you want some agency to have white glove service and go find some specific CEO for you to talk to. Right. But yeah, I mean. generally fairly affordable for a handful of interviews. I mean, a few hundred dollars to get some really good data is, can be super helpful.
Yeah, that's, that is really good. Well, we've talked about what right looks like. I'd love to hear your perspective when we're talking, when we're talking about client interviews, doing some of that market research, what are some of the things to avoid or what would be examples of like, Ooh. We kind of botched that. Specifically in interviews? Yeah. And market research. Yeah. I would say-
The biggest thing, so the reason why we focus on asking those jobs to be done questions is you want to ask questions that are not hypothetical. You want to ask about real past experiences. And their experience purchasing either your product or a similar product to yours. Right. I think the reason why is we all make stuff up all the time. You're going to get more accurate data. If you're asking about.
in an exact experience and that actually happened and having them walk them, you know, walk you through that process. So that's the biggest I would say is focus your questions, not on. Do you like this? Do you think this is good? Would this be good? Would you like it if we said something like this? Do you look at these channels? Again, have them focus on, tell me about this past experience. What did you do? What were you thinking at that moment?
real life past experiences is the key. Yeah. And the jobs to be done question, it's framing it in such a way where we're not just thinking, like you said, you're not just thinking about it hypothetical. You're actually like, no, this is what we've actually done.
in the past. And it reminds me of, you're probably referencing the mom test book. Is that? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Somebody told me about that. And I remember reading through it and I was like, oh my gosh, I've asked so many of the wrong questions. Yeah. That's a great book. for, you know, learning the right questions to ask and the ones to avoid, right? You're not asking about your product. You're asking about them and their challenges and stuff that they've really done.
Yeah, which I imagine can be challenging when you are the solution provider, when you're the one who's like both trying to sell and doing the work, it can be sometimes harder, like remove yourself, which I imagine is also.
part of why it's so helpful to have somebody like you who acts as somewhat of an intermediary because you're detached from it you don't even have all of the context that the agency owner does so you can come in in a lot more objective manner and really kind of just be like the journey essentially on the ground. I imagine that's part of the reason why you offer this as a part of your services. Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I've had, I've been interviewing people before who have said,
Stuff that I know that they wouldn't have said to the founders, right? Just because they're just more comfortable. They're more open. They're more honest. They know I don't have any personal stake in, you know, they're not going to hurt my feelings if they say something and that's what you really want. You want the truth. You want the honest.
And so I actually think it's better to hire someone who has done interviews like this before. Who's that neutral third party who can come in because it just gets you better, better data. Oh, absolutely. So let's, let's now kind of try to put a bow on this. We've talked about, you know, the, the go-to-market strategy. And one of the things that's, that's pretty important in a very important data point is that you're actually having conversations with your best fit clients. So you've had these.
interviews. Now rounding it out, the integration of what you find from those interviews into your grow to market strategy, I imagine you have a thesis or like a hypothesis coming into those interviews. I think it's going to look like this, but then you have the interviews and you might need to kind of make some tweaks.
Talk to me through the process when you're working with your clients. What does that look like to then take your interviews and try to integrate that and negotiate that into your go-to-market strategy? Yeah, I'm so glad you brought this up because I think one of the key things that... I really believe is that it's not enough to get the right answer when it comes to the different components of your go-to-market strategy. So for example, your messaging and positioning.
It's not enough to just have the right answer. You also have to have everyone on your team aligned behind what that answer is and bought into what that answer is. And so, you know, you could hire. you know, an agency or a freelancer to come in and say, this is what your positioning should be. Right. But it doesn't mean that it's actually going to be used and that people are actually aligned behind that.
My I've, I've realized that early on, I realized that, you know, even back when I was working in house as a CMO. And I think that that's one of the key things that has shaped. part of how I approach go-to-market strategy. I do workshops with all of the companies that I work with, and I do the research with customers beforehand. I also do interviews or surveys with members of the team. the go-to-market team, and then we compare the answers and we talk through.
What is the right answer for how we should position, how we should message the different parts of that? What is the right answer for who we should target, right? What should we say in our sales pitch and on our website? And the process of doing that allows everyone to kind of get there.
thoughts and their ideas out and use that customer research as a foundation, but shape it to something that everyone's really agreed to and bought into. It takes a little bit longer to do that than if you were to just hire someone to come in and give you the right answer.
But man, I found it to be so much more effective, which is why I tend to go that route. That's how you really make it, you know, actualize the research. That's how you make it actually executed your go-to-market strategy, if that makes sense. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, talking about alignment. So what I'm hearing you say is, is less about taking the interview questions and finding the right answer. And it's more about presenting the data and then.
driving a type of conversation that brings a unity and alignment amongst the leadership team so that we're all bought into this one course of action. Exactly. And sometimes, again, you have to give preference to...
what the customers actually said. The reason why, you know, that's helpful is a lot of times founders or a member of the team will come in with a strong idea of what they think the right answer should be but if that doesn't line up with what all the customers said you then have something to go back to and say hey joe hey sally whatever like look, this is exactly what your customers have said. So I know that
You know, that may be what you think, but it's an opportunity to get everyone to express, but also get aligned on, on this is what we're going to choose to say about how we position and message what we do. Right. Yeah.
I love that. I mean, have you had situations like that where because a founder or an agency owner has just such a strong vision, yeah, there's been a little bit of an incongruence between what you're seeing in the interviews and what they're... preferences and like, and if so, like, how do you navigate?
that type of conversation. Yeah, it's a, it's a great question. And yes, I have had, had those, right. It's always a balance, right? It's always a balance and it's something that I'm, I'm continuing to practice and work on. I typically.
like to tell the clients that I work with upfront that I'm going to push you out of your comfort zone when we're in these conversations, in these workshops, and I'm going to make you focus more than you want to. And it's going to feel a little uncomfortable and I'm going to challenge you directly at times. And so they know. that coming in. I think that's one of the reasons why
the clients who work with me like to work with me, right. Is because I will do that. But if, if that's not what someone wants, right. Then I'm usually not a good option to work with, but I have worked with, you know, founders in the past and ultimately it's up to them to make this decision. I'm a guide.
and help them and I can share my thoughts and my feelings with them on which direction they should go, but ultimately it's their company and their choice. And so if they feel strongly and choose, we're going to go in this direction, then that's great. They're going to go in that direction and I'm going to support.
them and help them to be successful going in that direction. Sometimes they end up being right. You know what I mean? Sometimes they're not right. And they realize that a couple of months later and they have to come back and they have to redo this type of work. So it just depends on what it is, but ultimately it's their choice.
Hmm. Yeah. Well, I think that's, I think that's really good. I see, I, as you're talking about this, I see so many parallels, even with my own work and infractional CFO. I have like thinking about like examples of. Here's the data. And even though they don't necessarily go with what my recommendation is at the end of the day, it's, I always want to prioritize.
Are they in alignment and are they united as a leadership team? And have I made my voice heard? Am I been clear and explicit? And if those two things are checked, at the end of the day, my job is to support them the best way I can. And sometimes that looks like. All right.
I will take, I will take your, your cue and your lead here and, and hope, hope and pray that it actually, it pans out the way that they want to. So we've, we've kind of concluded that, that thought process, right? We're talking to go to market foundations and thinking through the. interview process and now integrating that into the strategy. One of the other things we've talked about in the past is that
where in the funnel, we're now going to prioritize some tactics. And, you know, for what you even said, a lot of times agencies and companies will, they'll jump straight into some of that top of funnel marketing. But from our conversations, you would end up recommending that they should start at the bottom of the funnel and then work their way upward. Would you mind unpacking that for us a little bit more? Yeah, you bet. So again, when you think about your classic funnel.
You have your top of funnel activities, which are typically marketing activities. You're running ads, creating content, doing whatever you can to drive traffic to your website that then hopefully converts, right? They become leads and then you work them through a sales process and they hopefully close and then become.
successful, happy customers. Right. And so again, it starts with that kind of idea that your goal is to replicate your best fit customers. So you have to start with understanding what made them really great customers to begin with. right and are they happy enough to
Leave you a positive testimonial or a case study? Are they happy enough to leave you a review or refer other people to you? So often you want to start there, even past close with your successful customers and start doing some activities there. Then you move up to what are we doing to get the.
The leads that we already have to close at a higher rate. And S and sometimes you could move through those stages pretty quickly. Sometimes you have a pretty buttoned up process and it's pretty good. So then you move on to the next phase. At the end of the day, what you don't want to do, which too many companies do, is you try to pour water in a leaky bucket.
Right. And it all runs out before it gets to the bottom. So what you're doing as you start at the bottom and move your way up is you're plugging those holes in your leaky bucket so that when you eventually get to the top of the funnel activities, which is where you're going to spend years. You know, you're never going to get past that phase. It's always going to continue. You know that you're filling your bucket with stuff. That's not just going to leak out.
And I think that that's the other flip side of it. Oftentimes you can move through those bottom of funnel optimizations a lot quicker than if you start at the top of the funnel, you're never going to get past that stage of top of the funnel. You're never going to feel like it's.
sufficient to then move on to the lower funnel activities, if that makes sense. So again, what I typically recommend is start at the bottom, plug those holes, move backwards up the funnel until you get to those top of the funnel activities. Yeah. It produces quicker wins and quicker results when you're doing bottom of funnel first. Now I can imagine some examples of what that would look like, but can you just like paint a picture for me? Like let's take, take the industry terminology out of it.
and let's just talk practicals. We're talking bottom of funnel. What does that look like for the typical, let's say, software development agency or some type of agency? What are those bottom of funnel things we're talking about that we're working our way up? Do you have a good sales pitch? Is it consistent? Is it aligned with your positioning?
Do you have a CRM where you're tracking different stages of your funnel? Even if it's a spreadsheet, do you have data to know how long it's taking someone to move from your first call with them to close? Right. Do you know what's helping them to move that along? Right. Do you know what that percentage is that like the, often that's where you start if you don't have anything and then you can start adding in, you know, what other things would help us improve that close rate.
Then you move up one layer higher of all the people that are coming to you inbound through your website or from referrals. How are you tracking those? How are you following up with them? How quickly are you doing that? What's that messaging look like when you do follow up? Can you reduce some of the friction in their journey? Can you get on that call sooner? Can you provide them with the right messaging?
you know, materials that they would need to answer their questions along the way. It's some of the basic stuff. It seems pretty intuitive, right? But if you can't track it, you can't measure it. And there's a lot of friction still in that. from when someone first talks to you to when they close, reducing that friction will just help you typically increase your conversion rates.
yeah and and like we like we said before it's going to be the fastest way for you to see a return on that work too versus like you said pouring in just more more quantity at the top But if you don't have any of the data, if you don't know the friction points in your sales process, like you're going to end up, all of that's just going to end up, you know.
probably leaking out, you might get a couple things that come through. But that's, that's really helpful. I know we're coming up to the end of time here. But one other concept I want to kind of unpack with you, because I thought it was so helpful for me to hear is you talk about these different
channel categories in terms of spears nets and seeds so you know for for agencies targeting high value clients that's going to be the high value clients are going to be more of like you're going to be using spears maybe I'm going to pause there. I'm going to like, can you unpack the spheres, the nets and the seeds? Cause maybe this is the first time, you know, our listeners have ever heard that.
That concept. Yeah. Yeah. It's a really good concept. I didn't come up with it. It was someone else who came with it up with it years ago, kind of in the marketing world. So you may have heard of it, but essentially what it says is, you know, it, it uses the analogy of hunting for.
sales, right. Which is often the case. And so there are different types of animals that you can hunt and you need different weapons to hunt them, not to be too, too morbid here. Right. But if you're hunting an elephant and you have. Seeds or nets, it's not going to be very effective. Right. Whereas at the very bottom, if you're hunting a fly, right.
A spear is not going to be very effective for that. And so it's just aligning the right tools with the right size of client that you're going after. And so typically, you know, if someone's paying you a hundred thousand dollars a year. On average, you're going to need a lot more targeted approach. You're going to need the Spears approach, right? There are certain channels and go-to-market motions that are more.
targeted to individuals and companies, right? They're more high touch process. You're getting into higher touch sales process. You're going to prioritize outbound sales. Sometimes people talk about account based marketing, right? Where you're. picking the exact accounts that, you know, are going to be good fits and you're going directly to them with tailored, personalized messaging, sometimes a gifting strategy, sometimes inviting them to individual.
you know, dinners or events like that's an ABM type motion. Yeah. That's a motion that. is only going to work because it's going to be a lot more expensive, a lot more high touch. If someone's paying you a significant amount of money versus if they're only paying you $10 a year, right? You can't do anything like that. You have to rely on, you know, more virality.
type referrals or whatever else. Right. And then the middle stage is really nets, which is really casting a wide net, which is putting out content. often and pulling in people who resonate with that, right. And then converting some of those people. So that's kind of the middle realm. You know, most companies, especially services, dev services should be focused on spears and some net.
activities, right? That's where they should spend their time because they're bringing in these larger clients. They can afford to spend a little bit more per client to attract them. And it's a little bit more high touch. Yeah. And I think that's the most compelling part is when you think about this, you know, because I think a lot of times outbound sales, quite frankly, you know, whether it be.
Maybe it's cold email. Maybe it's, you know, cold calling. Heaven forbid we hop on the phone. Anyway, but a lot of these, those higher touch motions, those outbound motions can be frowned, very much frowned upon because we don't want to be imposing. But I think there's a way to do it that is effective. And to your point.
you can do it in large part because quite frankly, you should be able to afford it. I mean, if you've got hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of revenue coming from this one particular client, like you can afford to be a little bit more bespoke on your approach to.
to reaching out to them. And I think that was like the aha moment when you and I were talking about that. And something that I've even talked with my clients about is let's not overlook the bespoke, the high touch outbound that we can be doing with people.
Yeah. Yeah. When you, when you really open your mind, cause again, I agree. Like it's hard to do some of that outbound stuff. It's a grind sometimes, but there's also really creative ways that you can go about doing that stuff, right? That it doesn't have to feel like spammy. Right. That's not what we're talking about here. What we're talking about is, you know, creating a dinner.
Where you invite people who are in the same ecosystem to come and to connect with each other. And you're just building a relationship. I went to an event recently. I live in Utah and someone hosted an event in Park City.
where it was like overnight and they invited us to come and they invited prospects. They invited some customers. I was a partner of theirs, but I mean, that was an amazing experience where you get to stay at this beautiful hotel in park city overnight and listen to some great speakers.
Why do they do that? Well, it's because they want your business and it's a great way to build relationships and they can afford to do it because all of their clients are paying them a significant amount of money, right? You wouldn't see a company that is selling a... $10 a year app do, you know, marketing like that because they couldn't afford it. So that's right. Yeah, that is, that is really good. Well, man, have we covered a lot of bases here? It's been fun.
This has been really, really good. And the thing is, is we've only scratched the surface. So I know that there's more that we could be, we'd be talking about in, um, hopefully we we've. uncovered and unpacked a little bit. I'm thinking about all the people I'm going to share this episode with now, my clients or my prospects, just to help them better understand go-to-market strategy and why this is such a critical...
peace in order to grow agencies, really. I'm imagining people are going to be like, Okay, now I'm curious. I want to learn more. What's the best way to get in contact with you and or just like follow content that you're putting out there?
Yeah. Well, I, again, it's been an awesome conversation and you're right. We have just scratched the surface. So if anyone has questions, like feel free to reach out. I'm happy to go deep on any of this stuff. Anytime I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, so you can always connect with me there or check out the stuff that I'm posting.
I try to just share, you know, some of the stuff that I'm learning, working with clients along the way. I have a newsletter, so you can subscribe to that. If you want to go deeper, it's called go to market foundations. It's on sub stack.
And then you're also welcome to check on my website. So my website's PreludeMarketing.com and you can see some of the stuff we offer and you're welcome to reach out there. So yeah, I'd love to continue the conversation with anyone who's interested. Again, I know we talked about a ton of stuff today and hopefully it was coherent sometime. my ideas get kind of jumbled. I get kind of excited as we're talking about this stuff, but hopefully it's helpful for some of you out there.
Yeah, well, you've certainly hit the nail with this unique and important offering. And I really just hope people take you up on the offer to connect and to talk a little bit more. Like I said, I've... personally seen the benefit that my clients have had because of the work that you've done. So I couldn't recommend you enough, but Garrett, I really appreciate you taking the time to hop on the show today. Thanks so much, Tony. Appreciate it. Have a great day.
And thank you to our listeners. If you found value in our episode today, please leave us a review and tell your friends about us. If you're interested in being a guest on our show as a digital agency owner or maybe somebody with insights that can help digital agencies grow, head over to our website to learn more. at equip.com forward slash podcast guest. That's ACCQIP.com forward slash podcast guest.