Brian Kotlyar [00:00:00]:
A, if they don't make it, you don't get paid. B, you're now in a much more of a revenue facing role, which means you're much more subject to that perception. Miss the target, things happen, and usually marketers don't have that problem, or they might, but it's over a longer time period. You know, it plays out over 18 months, two years. If ahead of sales misses three quarters in a row, they don't get to be head of sales anymore. Exit.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:31]:
All right, Brian, thank you for coming on the podcast for people who don't know who you are. I got some great notes from my friend Chantel to prep for this, but you're an impressive guy with a great background. I'm excited to get to dive in with you today, but how do you explain who you are and what you.
Brian Kotlyar [00:00:47]:
Do in terms of what I do? So I lead growth and marketing for a company called Hightouch. We're a B two B SaaS technology startup. Basically what the product is, is we just help marketers get access and make data much more usable in a very modern, fast, streamlined way.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:06]:
Before that, I already like you because I like when people explain their company in simple, relatable terms, not what the boilerplate might say. So you're already on my good list.
Brian Kotlyar [00:01:17]:
Yeah, we'll save that for the press release. Great company. We're growing really fast. I actually came here really interestingly, by virtue of being a customer first, which I think is always a really interesting way to figure out a career opportunity, is when you uncover a really cool technology that solves problems for you. And so before this, I was leading a similar role, kind of leading growth and marketing for new relic, which at the time has since been acquired by private equity. At the time was a publicly traded company where we were basically engaged in a turnaround project. The company's growth had slowed down for a number of reasons, and I was brought in as well as a number of other leaders to help reaccelerate that growth. And we succeeded.
Brian Kotlyar [00:01:54]:
We basically grew growth by 300% over the course of about 18 months with a bunch of different initiatives and things like that. Before that, you and I were actually across different sides of the table competing one another. I was at Intercom while you were at drift, where we were both sort of involved in the conversational chat space.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:13]:
What was the name of the company?
Brian Kotlyar [00:02:15]:
Intercom.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:17]:
Not familiar. That's amazing.
Brian Kotlyar [00:02:21]:
I was going to say, I'm pretty sure Bobby's. I was going to say Bobby clearly didn't make an impression.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:29]:
No, I love.
Brian Kotlyar [00:02:32]:
So. And I came to there from Sprinklr, which is now publicly traded as well, where I joined that company by acquisition from a startup I was helping to grow. And I did sort of every marketing job under the sun there. My title throughout my time there was vp of demand gem, but gosh, just sort of did everything as we were hyper scaling that business.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:51]:
All right, you're a machine. I wish I had you for 3 hours today, but we don't because I was so much. I want to get into what drives you professionally and creatively. You've had a bunch of wins, you've run marketing at a bunch of different companies, run the demand gen function, which you could argue is the most important function on a team. And I'm saying that more coming from the brand side. What drives you to stay motivated and keep getting after it at these companies? What is it for you?
Brian Kotlyar [00:03:24]:
Personally, I think, well, personally I think about tech companies as like there can be life changing for people participating in them and for the world in their own way, obviously. For example, when I was at Sprinklr, we're dealing with social media, or when I was at Intercom, we were dealing with chat. But the difference between having Intercom for your support chat and not is life changing. It's a great product. It really helps. The difference between having sprinkler deal with all your social media stuff and not is crazy. I listen to a lot of our sales calls here at iTouch, and I hear in the voice of our customers some of the anguish they have from buying other solutions that didn't work and how it hurt their careers and made their life worse. And so I'm very motivated by products that help people.
Brian Kotlyar [00:04:10]:
And then on the other side, I know that. I know from helping grow a company to ultimately IPo, when you're part of that personally, you develop and you learn in ways that you just can't get in other career paths. And then financially and economically, the upside is unlike most other jobs. And so I don't think you should get in this business counting on an IPo, because Lord knows they're few and far between. But sometimes I explain this to family members. Imagine we're a lottery ticket where you control the odds, and that's unique to what we do. So that's another very motivating aspect. Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:04:44]:
And it certainly gives you more upside than a lot of other paths. And that's a very motivating view that you're helping people. Because I do think sometimes there's a lot of people that I talk to are more jaded now and they're like, oh, you're just selling software, just selling marketing software to marketing people. But when you come from this customer driven standpoint and you think about who the people are and how they're using your product, I think that's where you can really create a mission around the why for doing this marketing, right?
Brian Kotlyar [00:05:17]:
100%. And it's also, as a marketer in the discipline of marketing, it's also where a lot of your best ideas for marketing are going to come from. Because if you look at the job like, I'm trying to help somebody whose life would otherwise be worse, and then you realize, okay, well, what are those ways that it's worse and how will it be better and what's that feel like? What words do they use to describe it? How do they talk to their peer or their boss about it? A lot of the best marketing ideas, they sit in that space where you understand really how you help people. I think it's very motivating for the individual, for the company, once it understands what that is. But it also is like actually, it's actually the magic pixie dust that makes the program kind of work.
Dave Gerhardt [00:06:00]:
You said to me before we started that you enjoy mentoring early career marketers. And there's a good mix of people that listen to the podcast. I don't want to say that they're all early career, but I do think most of the people that are going to listen to this are aspire to be a VP marketing leader. What are some of the biggest themes that come up when you have discussions or mentoring early career marketers? Where do you see people get stuck? Where are the frustrations? What are the blockers? What are some of the 80 20 things that you've taken away?
Brian Kotlyar [00:06:33]:
Sure. I mean, a couple that come to mind. One is I hear a lot of folks, I hear this term and honestly, it makes me cringe a little. It's like I just want a seat at the table. And I'm like, first of all, as somebody who has a seat at this notional table, let me reassure you, it's not that great. But also.
Dave Gerhardt [00:06:57]:
You have kids. And so I often think of this, but somebody once said, you used to think your parents were crazy. Your parents drove be crazy. And then when you have kids, you kind of see the reasons why. Oh yeah, I get why my parents did all those things now and I'm doing the same things. And it's almost like getting into management and having a seat at the table. It's like, well, are you sure? There's kind of a nice lane you can carve out where you don't have to have that responsibility.
Brian Kotlyar [00:07:20]:
There's no shame at the other table at the bar, eating your meal or whatever.
Dave Gerhardt [00:07:24]:
Opposite is sitting by yourself at the bar watching something on tv, having your meal.
Brian Kotlyar [00:07:31]:
Yeah, it's a nice burger you're eating. Yeah, but what I often say to that, okay, let's assume for a minute that you actually do want it. With all the caveats aside, you actually do want that. My answer to the folks a lot of time is that nobody gives you anything in life, in business, whatever. The way you kind of carve that out for yourself is by sort of being the proactive marketer that you ought to be. You find the biggest business problem in the company, and you find a way to attach yourself to that biggest business problem and help solve it. And lo and behold, suddenly you're at the table. It's not that you're invited.
Brian Kotlyar [00:08:05]:
You need to create the invitation for yourself. Nobody really just gets there by virtue of how good looking they are or how smart they are or how poetic they are. So a lot of what I help these early career marketers think through is, what is that huge project? What is that big business problem? Is it helping sales qualify more deals? Is it our positioning? Is it activating a new distribution channel, whatever it may be, that is the biggest problem in the company. There's a way for you to help, and you help, and that's how you get that notional seat at the table. There's no magic to everything. So that's one. I can share a few others if it's helpful.
Dave Gerhardt [00:08:41]:
Yeah, please. Well, I was going to just build on that and say, you said you don't get invited to the table, but you almost do when you become Brian, the person that everyone in this, if you solve a problem. I've seen this with myself in earlier stage jobs, adrift in the early days as an like, I didn't set out to do this, but I was hungry. I worked on a bunch of interesting things. And all of a sudden, you become the person that the vp of sales wants you in that meeting. The VP of product wants you in that meeting. Brian, in your career has been that person that like, oh, let's get them involved. And so I see sometimes marketers are like, no, that's not my job.
Dave Gerhardt [00:09:21]:
I'm not going to get involved there. Where the best ones that I've known, the ones that have rose the quickest through their career and gained the most influence inside the company are like, sure, this isn't directly in my job, but this helps the company. I'm happy to come in that meeting. And the head of marketing is now deep in with customer success or engineering. It's finding your way into those opportunities by being a team member that wants to help the business win, not just being like, no, I only do marketing here.
Brian Kotlyar [00:09:46]:
Yeah, I agree. And I think there's two facets to that. It's a little bit well known, but I think people hear the words but don't necessarily internalize the lesson like this concept. First you have to be the CEO of whatever your job is truly own and just crush the thing that you actually are on the payroll to, blogging, emailing, whatever. Then the other thing is exactly what you were saying. Think like the CEO of the company and go find ways to help with all those biggest problems and act like a shareholder. Act like somebody whose job it is to help the whole company grow. The hard part is sometimes when you go and you freelance without your home base being covered and really nailed, people kind of look at you like, shouldn't you make this other thing that you actually are paid to do good? So you need to do both.
Brian Kotlyar [00:10:32]:
But my experience is that if you're that motivated, you will make your kind of core thing awesome and then use that credibility you've earned from that to be heard and to be participant in all these other awesome things that you could be doing for the business.
Dave Gerhardt [00:10:48]:
I don't know if you had. Did you have any more that I didn't let you get to on the mentoring piece? Because I want to take us in a different direction, but I think you had something else that you wanted to get to.
Brian Kotlyar [00:10:59]:
For what it's worth, I'll just say the one other thing. It's a little tactical, but I think it's just to say that there's no real magic. A lot of times when I get on calls with folks, they're like, what's this one thing that will solve my problem, X or Y? Like, what's the tech I can buy? What platform should I license? What consultant do I hire? Should I start posting more on LinkedIn? I'm sure you get the same thing and people ask those questions, and my answer, generally speaking, is, maybe I'm the wrong mentor for you because maybe I just suck and I don't know that answer, but I've never found it. I've been doing this now for a long time and doesn't exist. And so I just really encourage people that to just excise that whole shortcut mentality entirely from your life and just really deeply understand that you are not one Facebook ad away from solving your problem. And you're not one new tool acquisition away from solving your problem.
Dave Gerhardt [00:11:56]:
It's like a billboard. Sorry to be a billboard. You're one Facebook ad.
Brian Kotlyar [00:12:02]:
Mean. One of my stupid jokes my team gets tired of is like, the only company ever built on ads alone is Google. By selling like, the rest of us have to do other things to win. And so, I don't know, I just feel like we're always looking for shortcuts because we want to get ahead and we want to think that somebody knows something we don't. And there are obviously, there's like wisdom and craft that you acquire. But for all the blog posts and all the what have you, there's not actually, like this one simple trick. There is no one simple trick.
Dave Gerhardt [00:12:33]:
Yeah. So much of it is rooted in, I love LinkedIn, I love writing on LinkedIn. But so often the answer to most marketing questions are like, it really depends. Yeah, I have no idea. It depends on your goal. And I think a simple framework that I've gotten more disciplined and followed over time is like, you can't figure out what marketing should do until you figure out what the company wants to do and how the company wants to get there. There's many different paths. And until, you know, the company strategy and marketing has to be involved in helping to set that, it's going to be very tough to figure out what the marketing strategy should be.
Dave Gerhardt [00:13:08]:
And so it's like goals and then strategy and then tactics. It's very easy to just get in the tactics bucket without the right strategy and without the right goals. And almost everything that I've seen break down inside of the company, it's not because a tactic failed. It's because they set the wrong goal and had the wrong strategy. And that's where this all breaks down. Or the VP of sales. This has happened to me. The VP of sales is comped completely differently than I am, and we're going to compete no matter what.
Dave Gerhardt [00:13:37]:
And our teams are never going to be aligned because we're fundamentally misincentivized. It's always those things that I've seen over and over.
Brian Kotlyar [00:13:45]:
Yeah, I will say one way I fixed that is last few jobs. I've just insisted that my comp plan is the same as the sellers, which it's a little bit of a bold move for a marketer, I'll be honest. But I'll give you.
Dave Gerhardt [00:13:59]:
Yeah, talk about the mechanic. Let's talk about why you did that and what does that actually mean and what are the mechanics look like?
Brian Kotlyar [00:14:06]:
Sure. I mean the why is exactly a little bit what you were alluding to. It's like in b two b, even in plg b two B, because no company stays pure product led, they always start loading in sales assist and upmarket sellers without exception. So in b two B, you need to have really tight alignment with the human part of your selling process, even in PLG. And most companies aren't that heavily PLG. So it's really, most companies will stop. So you want to make sure that there is no daylight between you and the head of sales. Now there's ways to do that with relationship building and stuff like that.
Brian Kotlyar [00:14:41]:
But ultimately, to your point, when the incentives don't match that daylight creeps in, you start to grow apart. You have different goals and incentives and it's problematic. So that's the first really big benefit of that. The other benefit, kind of selfishly to the marketer, is you can actually negotiate a lot more money for yourself because if you're willing to put more comp at risk, you can in turn insist on a higher total comp package and more rewards, just like a seller does. And so you can individually earn a lot more money by willing to be willing to do that. Now, it's a gamble, I want to be clear about that. But that confidence manifests you differently to your other senior leaders and it puts you in a really different relationship with your head of sales that I think is very valuable and powerful for a typical marketer.
Dave Gerhardt [00:15:25]:
Yeah, this is great. People are going to love this. What led you to this? How did you have that conversation?
Brian Kotlyar [00:15:35]:
Well, greed is certainly in part, last part.
Dave Gerhardt [00:15:38]:
Also, side note, I've been there. You just find out things over the life of a company, right. And I know how much a VPS sales made in a role where my team was responsible for generating pipeline and I was much younger in my career. This person was much more tenured, whatever. But they must have made five, six, seven times the amount of money I did in the same year. And I'm like, wait a second, our motion is 90% inbound. Like we're driving all of this. This is totally out of whack.
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:13]:
And it's exactly what you said where the risk you can make way more because you're saying, hey, it's only going to happen if we hit these goals. And the company signed up to hit these goals, right?
Brian Kotlyar [00:16:24]:
Yeah, it's a lot easier for the CEO or the head of HR or whatever to agree to it because they'll be like, you just say to them very simply, if we did this as a company, would you agree in that scenario that I earned this increase in my comp? And they'll be like, yes. And you say back to them, and if we don't, I'm comfortable not getting it because at the time that you're doing negotiation, it's all notional. People are much more comfortable signing up for it. Both view on as a risk profile on them in terms of giving you the money. But then the time does come, the quarter does close or the year does close, and then check is due. And if you nailed it, you're going to wake a lot more money than you would have as a run of the mill marketer, know, stage one ops or something. So I feel like I didn't answer your question, though. I'm sorry, Dave.
Dave Gerhardt [00:17:13]:
This is great. I can't wait for the fallout from this podcast. Like, hundreds of marketers are going to go to the. It's the middle of February and you want me to change the. Yeah, I listen to this podcast and Sky Bryan, he's like, you know, change the comp plan.
Brian Kotlyar [00:17:31]:
Well, I will say, though, the other thing, though, you got to keep in mind is part of the reason that your old head of revenue made so much more money is that if they miss for three straight quarters, he's fired.
Dave Gerhardt [00:17:41]:
I just get to do webinars and do podcasts and keep my job.
Brian Kotlyar [00:17:45]:
Yeah, marketers aren't in that same position, so you have to also acknowledge that. So before all the listeners of this rush off to HR to say, I want a new comp plan, consider that, too. A, if they don't make it, you don't get paid. B, you're now in a much more of a revenue facing role, which means you're much more subject to that perception. Miss the target, things happen. And usually marketers don't have that problem at least, or they might, but it's over a longer time period. It plays out over 18 months, two years. If a head of sales misses three quarters in a row, they don't get to be head of sales anymore.
Brian Kotlyar [00:18:15]:
So you got to keep that in mind for sure.
Dave Gerhardt [00:18:18]:
And then how does that play out from a goals standpoint? So you set clear goals around revenue, but there's still going to want to be. My guess is there still needs to be some type of harder metrics that you can own. And basically what I'm asking is, how do you break that down into actionable goals and inputs. Do you own like leads or mqls or meetings or demos or something like that? What are the metrics that fall from that?
Brian Kotlyar [00:18:56]:
This is where there's some nuance that maybe there's a lot of room to disagree, but my personal preference, how I always done this is just give me the revenue number and you can have two flavors of it. You can have it like the actual all up, inclusive of churn and stuff, or you can say, marketing is a lot more tied to new revenue added, whether it's from new prospects or current customers expansion. So you could pick, but either way, my opinion should be money. Money is irrefutable. Money is what the company wants. Which is why when you go to them and you say, hey, I want to make more, but only in the scenario where we earn more money. That's why it's much more palatable to the organization. It's also, you can't fake it.
Brian Kotlyar [00:19:36]:
You can fake opportunity metrics, you can fake a lot of stuff. So the metric you're going to get paid on is revenue. But the thing that you as a marketer drive is not that like the product in a PLG motion or a self serve motion has to get credit card swipes or the reps have to close. So what you need to have kind of backing, this is like, and I imagine other guests have talked about this. If not, let me know and I'll sketch it for you quickly. But you need to have a concept of your supply chain of revenue. So what happens before a dollar goes into the bank? Well, they come a visit to the site, which turns into a demo, which turns into a meeting, which gets qualified, which gets blah blah blah, blah. And eventually you make money and you have to understand what parts of that are you wholly responsible for, like the visit to the site and which parts do you influence.
Brian Kotlyar [00:20:19]:
So, for example, maybe because product marketing often plays a big role in sales enablement, you influence the qualification process, you influence our ability to set traps for competitors so that the deals move. And so you kind of have that notion. And so you hyper optimize the stuff you own because you own it. It's your job opportunities, demos, whatever. And then because you're on revenue now where before you used to probably just be like pretty chill, well, I hit the demo goal, see you in hell now instead. Now instead you're like, well, wow, they're really getting screwed by that competitor. I better get them a battle card ASAP, because you need that thing to close to make your money. And so that's very motivating and helpful as a head of marketing to approach it in this very holistic way.
Dave Gerhardt [00:21:05]:
Well, it's so great because it forces you to go find, it forces you to remove all of the bullshit. And you're like, wait a second. Our job is to get customers. We have plenty of demos, but they're not closing. Then you shouldn't be winning. You're not winning in that scenario. Then you need to be focusing on how to get them to close. Also, when you're at a high growth company or any company, it's like marketing is such a game of whack a mole.
Dave Gerhardt [00:21:28]:
There's 1000 things you could do. You could do change this kind of isolates. Like, let's look at the gaps. What are the highest leverage opportunities? And yeah, let's go do some more sales enablement versus. It's very easy to be like, more and you might not need more. The demand might already be there. You have to figure out how to convert it better.
Brian Kotlyar [00:21:48]:
Yeah, exactly. And then to your point about the sales relationship thing earlier, is that the other benefit of this is nothing drives ahead of sales crazier or a CFO crazier than the marketer being like, I hit the demo goal, we're good. It just makes them nuts because it's like, well, that's not actually what we're trying to achieve. You all. We don't tell our board about our demo number. And so when the marketer goes much deeper, you just talk about seat at the table. You're just in a whole different relationship to everybody else. The way you lose a seat at the table is you bring a demo number to a board meeting.
Brian Kotlyar [00:22:22]:
That's the problem.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:23]:
Yeah, there was a younger version of me and we hadn't hired a vp of sales yet. And then we bring him in and I'm very defensive and hey, yeah, you guys spend time with Dave. He's running marketing.
Brian Kotlyar [00:22:34]:
Okay.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:34]:
So we get on the whiteboard, I draw out the funnel. I just met this guy 15 minutes ago. He's like, you don't have any. He's like, what you have is a bunch of contacts. You have a bunch of email addresses. I'm like, what are you talking about?
Brian Kotlyar [00:22:44]:
These are leads.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:45]:
He's like, I don't care about leads. He's like, no, show me the buyers. And I'm like, well, I don't know. And that was like the eye opening moment. But this is so good because this is a perfect way of, this is what you need. If you're listening to this. You need this. You need to be on the same page with sales, how you do it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:23:04]:
This is my biggest gripe. Oh, get a coffee with them, get to know them. Do some trust falls, go get lunch. No. What drives everyone is the compensation, is the revenue, and that all gets set from the goals. And so what's cool about this model, Brian, I love this, is that you're basically saying, hey, you run sales like I'm your. Like, I'm really good at marketing. You're really good at sales.
Dave Gerhardt [00:23:28]:
Let's combine our superpowers to help the company win, and then we all win. And that's what, I've been in companies before in the past where it's like, well, I'm not going to help out. I'm not going to build that battle card for them. I got 15 other things I got to do. But this really takes all that out of it and says, let's get a line on revenue.
Brian Kotlyar [00:23:45]:
I love this.
Dave Gerhardt [00:23:46]:
This is really good. How does this play? Are there downstream effects with your team? Your team, are they comped on revenue? How does this trickle down through the rest of the marketing team?
Brian Kotlyar [00:24:07]:
It gets a little trickier depending on the discipline and how senior people are.
Dave Gerhardt [00:24:12]:
Because you have a content person and you need to create good website content, but it's a little bit fuzzier to be like, well, we need to write articles, but it's not like someone's going to read an article and then instantly buy high touch. So how do you think through that?
Brian Kotlyar [00:24:27]:
Yeah, I think at a certain seniority, this should just be in play for everybody, pretty much. We're a small company, but to the degree that we have senior managers, managers, directors, stuff like that, I want at least a portion to be tied to the company's actual dollar and cents performance in addition to the value of their equity. As you get to maybe just a pure designer, like a production designer, it gets a lot harder, and it may not be fair. And also the culture, for example, I'll just use designers. I don't want to besmirch that discipline. Just as an example designer is a much more creative thing. People get into that job with different motivations, typically, than a seller did to make money. And so you have to be conscious of that as you set up these targets and these metrics.
Brian Kotlyar [00:25:13]:
So my general rule would be above a seniority threshold, and you have to kind of pick what that is for your organization. Yes, people should have a variable component tied to a really important business outcome. And then in certain disciplines, you may want to hold them back even from that with carve outs or whatever. But in others like demand Gen, where there really is clear metric ownership and there really is a really tight relationship between what you do and what happens then. I think you can be more aggressive with this and make it either a higher percentage or tie it to more of a specific metric in that supply chain model I kind of laid out for you and work from there.
Dave Gerhardt [00:25:52]:
Let's talk about demand Gen a little bit. What is the makeup? Maybe using your current job like you run marketing today, how do you articulate what demand gen does? And there's demand gen product marketing content. I'd be interested to hear just the makeup of your team today and how you have the team structured. And maybe we can use that as a way to talk about what's the role of demand gen in driving revenue.
Brian Kotlyar [00:26:16]:
Yeah, for sure. I apologize. I don't have a perfectly clean framework for this, but I'll share a few of the concepts I use. So I talk a lot with the team about this idea of like there's distribution and then there's stuff you distribute. And I think a lot of the distribution is where people think about channels like we buy ads to push a message out, we send emails to push a message out, and so on. And so that idea of distribution, I usually rest responsibility for that with what we these days call a growth marketing team or demand gen team. It's the people who are kind of operating the dials and the knobs and the levers of the website's conversion rate and of the ad's efficacy to drive traffic or clicks and so on. And that's usually sort of the more quantitative oriented, performance minded people that have found their way into the marketing job.
Brian Kotlyar [00:27:06]:
Some of the best ones I've ever worked with or hired are people who graduated from college with degrees in engineering and supply chain and stuff like knobs and dials type folks a lot of times. And then I think of these other disciplines that are a bit more about like what do you put into those pipes for distribution purposes? And that's a lot of times the product marketers who are thinking about positioning and messaging and assets, or some content marketers or comms people and so on. And I think a lot of the art of the head of marketing's job is to coordinate those two things so that you're not overrotating on just optimizations and fiddling with these little seeking little local improvements versus staircase kind of improvements. On the other hand, you can overrotate into product marketing and brand where you're saying lots of stuff but no one's seeing it because it's not being distributed effectively. And I think that's kind of the balance I'm always striving for.
Dave Gerhardt [00:28:00]:
Nice. I like that. That's a way to simplify a lot of the nonsense that we create inside of B two B SaaS orgs.
Brian Kotlyar [00:28:10]:
One thing that I've seen is with.
Dave Gerhardt [00:28:13]:
Demand, Jen, especially in this world where you're driving revenue, whether you're driving demos or revenue, it can kind of feel like all of the pressure and the stress of the job to hit the number is on demand gen. And there's also this kind of weird push and pull. Like demand Gen kind of runs the marketing team because of that. But then there's like, you got to work with product marketing, you got to work with creative. You know what I'm trying to get at? How do you account for that? It's like, well then why don't we just make demand Gen run the team? But there's this team, it can be very challenging. Then like, hey, yeah, we're behind on the number. I don't know. Creatives out to launch product marketing is on vacation, but the demand gen team is like super freaking stressed out because we're the ones trying to hit the number.
Dave Gerhardt [00:29:02]:
Is that bad design? Is it bad goal setting? Where does that come from? And have you found a way to fix that?
Brian Kotlyar [00:29:07]:
I think it's very common, and I've lived inside of that stress a lot in my career. And I would say that I think the cause of that is the fact that demand gen pretty uniquely has the knobs and dials to turn. They can actually see things. The thing that I'm always trying to counsel my own team, myself at times and others in that role where you have the data, you're looking at the relationship between an ad and hitting the target. The distribution system is basically our dumb pipes. My ability to buy an ad has actually no very little bearing on whether or not the ad works. What makes the ad work or not is the concept and the messaging and the creative of the ad. Like, I'm doing a bunch of stuff right now where we have our stock, kind of pretty generic b two b tech ad we run that we've been running for like six months, and then we're challenging it with much more creative treatments that I've been working on with the product marketing team and the outperforms by three x or we ran for ages, a very literal campaign called CDPs are dead.
Brian Kotlyar [00:30:07]:
Cdps are like a more legacy version of our software, and it really wasn't working. We listened to a bunch of the product marketing team, listened to a bunch of customer calls, and through those insights and that empathy, refrained it into friends don't let friends buy a CDP, which is the exact same idea, but a much nicer turn of phrase and much stronger copy. And the performance went up by 500%. Same ad program, same targeting, same budget.
Dave Gerhardt [00:30:35]:
Now creative. In that world, creative and product marketing are like, yeah, we did that. We created that thing. We feel like we're part of this machine now.
Brian Kotlyar [00:30:43]:
Exactly. And they're fired up to find the next one and they want to know the data for the next copy. Challenger, we're going to run against that one. And they're asking the question now, this is how it's literally playing out. The distribution team, the growth marketers are like, hey, we're starting to hit creative wear out here. Our target market is only so big. We've been showing them the friends don't let friends narrative for a while. We need something fresh.
Brian Kotlyar [00:31:03]:
And so first we started with visual interpretations of that, and that bought us some more time. But now we really just need something fresh. We just need a new thing. And the growth marketing team might be able to solution that on their own, but it's so much more likely to win if the brand team and the product marketing team is helping them, bringing those insights and bringing those ideas. You just can't win alone. So a lot of that stress does localize to the people that see the math every day, but they need to understand that despite the stress being localized to them, the solution is literally not possible just with them. And so you got to broaden it just to tie the two conversations we're having. That is one other perk of having this kind of revenue minded aspect above a certain level of seniority across all disciplines.
Brian Kotlyar [00:31:51]:
Because in some of the other disciplines that don't see all the math as much, that helps just keep them in that mindset consistently. So that's kind of a link between the two themes.
Dave Gerhardt [00:32:02]:
Yeah, it's really good. It's really good. The localized part is really good because it's like, yeah, you might be the knob turners. I forget exactly how you put it, but at the same time as you are, you also don't have the keys to all those things. You need to be able to inspire and influence creative influence product marketing and content, and you're responsible for delivering that meal, but you need to work with all these other kind of part time chefs or however you want to put it to help, to help get it done. This is really good. This is going to be a really helpful episode for people. I have a whole notion note that I take during this and I'm just already really excited about this episode.
Brian Kotlyar [00:32:46]:
I'm having fun. Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:32:47]:
Let's talk about, so you've given some practical stuff for working with sales, for thinking about demand. Gen, let's give some people some practical advice for reporting to the CEO. You've seen this, whether you've done this or seen this at a bunch of companies now, what's the right level to talk about marketing with the CEO? How do you prevent the CEO from getting in the weeds? One thing I talk about a lot is like working with a CEO who gets marketing. How do you test for that? Tell me about your relationships with ceos or just even the rest of the executive team when talking about marketing.
Brian Kotlyar [00:33:23]:
Sure. Yeah. I was about to use the sentence, I've been blessed to have really good relationships with my ceos, but that implies that it's an accident. And I actually don't think it is. I think there's a lot of things we can do proactively, and I think that's what you're getting at. So I think the first is that some ceos really get marketing, others don't. But I think they all kind of understand that it's really important. But a lot of it is dependent on like, okay, have they had a past relationship in sort of a more marketing oriented organization or like a lot of, especially founders that are more technical and maybe this is their first company or second company.
Brian Kotlyar [00:34:02]:
Are they coming at this as like an engineer? I need this thing. I don't really know it. I don't really understand it. You have to kind of grasp that yourself because it changes the way you talk about this with them. What terminology can you take for granted? What ideas can you take for granted? So that is something to sort of, you need to do an assessment of. What am I dealing with? So my founders right now at high touch, they're big believers in marketing because we've had some hits that have really accelerated our growth. So they see that, but they are all technical founders. And so there are times where we've got to just slow down and talk about the importance of storytelling, talk about the importance of messaging, talk about the channels, things like that.
Brian Kotlyar [00:34:39]:
So I'm conscious of that. So I'll kind of do like a first principles explanation of things that maybe for a different leader I might not have to. That's okay. It's no judgment. You just need to know, do I need to really explain the why of this, or can I just go right to the what is what you need to assess? The next thing is, I won't belabor it because we talked about it at length, but is like approaching this all as a revenue owner, not as like the owner of some weird sub KPI. We talked about that a lot. That does is very important. It changes the dynamic amongst you and your executives and your CEO.
Brian Kotlyar [00:35:10]:
There's a great book that many people, I imagine have read called the hard thing about hard things. And there's this one by Ben Horowitz of Anderson Horowitz. And there's this one anecdote in there where the company was literally about to go out of business and his mid level managers are coming to him talking about some sub issue, and he's like, he can't tell them the company's about to go out of business. They'll lose their minds. But you need to know as the person coming to the CEO that it's very possible that they know that the company's about to go under, they're about to run money, Silicon Valley bank, just whatever. And you're talking to them about your demo form not firing. You need to come to the room knowing that that's who you're talking to and where their mind is. So you're at the right altitude and you're calibrating what you're talking about correctly.
Dave Gerhardt [00:35:52]:
Yeah. Or there's some huge issue going on, some scandal in the business. I don't know, whatever. Something going on that you have no idea about having that context. You're so right. I've always said, like, I learned this the hard way, but you don't want to let them get in the weeds. Right? You might have 100 things that you're working on, but you don't need to tell them all the 100 things. It's like, let's talk about that one core thing.
Dave Gerhardt [00:36:15]:
And you got to trust that I got the rest of this stuff.
Brian Kotlyar [00:36:19]:
Yeah, and a huge asset for that. Founders especially, but all ceos, they just spew out ideas at this insane rate and you cannot keep up. If I actually counted every, I have three co founders, two co ceos, I can't do all this stuff. It's impossible. So you need systems for catching it and essentially backlogging it so they know you didn't forget. They also know that you're not doing it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:36:47]:
Do you have a system? Is that system just like a brain gut thing or do you have an actual system for that?
Brian Kotlyar [00:36:52]:
We have a system. So I'm very fortunate to have members of my team. I'm not a great project manager, if I'm honest, but I've been able to bring members of the team that are excellent. And so I worked with them to set up. Essentially we use notion and we have like a database in there where all the ideas go. And depending on the discipline there's a different database. So PMM has a different one than both marketing team and inside of there we just really explicitly prioritize and then we groom that backlog kind of like a software team might on a regular public interval. We're not afraid because the CEO is really passionate about something and we agree to jump and shuffle mid quarter, midweek even.
Brian Kotlyar [00:37:30]:
It's not that we're inflexible, we're super flexible. But everything does go into this environment where we prioritize and look at it. Because a lot of times the CEO, there's two things that they don't totally grasp. It takes time to do stuff. Three things actually. It takes time for things to work. And we're already working on their other good idea. And if they knew that their new good idea was going to kill our ability to do their old good idea, they might not want you to do the new good idea.
Brian Kotlyar [00:37:56]:
They don't know that because they think it's already done. Because they don't understand that things take time. So you need a way to manifest to them. Hey, a week ago we said we're going to do six city meetups this week. You're saying you want a podcast. I have two product marketers. These are both good ideas. Let me finish this one, please.
Brian Kotlyar [00:38:19]:
And there's a CEO, their name is on your paycheck. They're allowed to say, no, drop that one. But then you say back to them, let's be clear here. Dropping it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:38:30]:
This is why I love doing this podcast. And even just like building this exit five business right now because it's like the more you hear from other marketers, I know for a fact people are going to be listening to this and nodding their head and be like, wait, I'm not the only person who. This doesn't just happen. You've worked at all these companies now, Brian, and this has happened at every company. I'm laughing because I find myself doing this now to Dan, who I hired to help me run exit five. I send him a hundred ideas and he literally is like, okay, cool, these are good ideas, but we can't do these because you told me to do this other. And I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah, you're right. Never mind, just do that other thing.
Dave Gerhardt [00:39:03]:
However. And I've stressed out and burnt out team members before, and I can't help it. This is who I am. I have lots of ideas. I go fast. I do think that you have to have a culture where the CEO and others need to be able to be a firehose and share all the ideas, because they so often do have that visionary thing. And you're like, that is a good idea. You can't just shut the team down and be like, no, we're not taking it.
Brian Kotlyar [00:39:27]:
Right.
Dave Gerhardt [00:39:27]:
And so this process, the fact that you actually have a process for notion where this is a database and people can show what we're saying yes and no to, goes such a long way, because I feel like the only other alternative is to be like, no, don't worry. It's very easy to get defensive and be like, stop sharing ideas. You know, we have so much on our plate.
Brian Kotlyar [00:39:46]:
Totally. I call this, like, I don't know if this is a real term. I just call it this. I call it founder energy. Founder energy is unique and inexhaustible. And my experience from a number, number of companies, it's pretty much the difference between a company winning or losing, because these companies are supposed to fail, like, statistically, right? It's an active force of will to cause a company to shoulder its way into the market and to persist and exist. It's why so few win. So a CEO like yourself with exit five, or like my old CEO at Sprinklr, Raji, the last thing you want to do, the absolute last thing you want to do, is to stifle that in any way.
Brian Kotlyar [00:40:23]:
Do not stifle it, do not block it, do not stop it. But you have to harness it and you have to control it, because your poor junior content marketer, or whomever, given, it's like standing in front of a wall of water rushing at you. They can't survive it if you don't channel it and manage it. And so that's one of the first jobs, is like when I came to high trips, okay? I'm the barrier between the line marketers and the founders. And that barrier is not there to stop your ideas. The barrier is there to channel your ideas to the ones we're doing and the ones we're not. And we will work actively to constantly prioritize. We've developed a whole quarterly plan and changed it one week into the quarter.
Brian Kotlyar [00:41:03]:
I'm not ashamed of that. I'm not sad to do it, but we have the plan to begin with.
Dave Gerhardt [00:41:09]:
Love this. Great.
Brian Kotlyar [00:41:12]:
Let's wrap up and talk a little.
Dave Gerhardt [00:41:13]:
Bit about what's exciting to you right now. You're at a company that's growing fast. You raised a bunch of money over the summer at a time where a lot of companies are having trouble raising money. I go to LinkedIn just now and I see you have all these great featured companies, featured customers like the NBA, uses your products, soundcloud, ramp, lucid software, some really cool gamestop, some cool companies. What are you excited about from a marketing standpoint? What's exciting to you in 2024 that you all are doing for sure?
Brian Kotlyar [00:41:47]:
So I think one of my biggest obsessions is very much that messaging point. It's like we're trying to nail the next friends don't let friends buy a CDP. And we're doing a lot of experimentation and research to explore that. And I say that because again, it's not a hack like I was talking about earlier. I can't offer like a simple, easy idea. I just know from experience if you get that right, everything is easier. And the other thing I know is you don't need to get that many that right in the road. You can get three right.
Brian Kotlyar [00:42:16]:
And that's your four year tenure as the CMO of a company having been competing with you at drift. Right. You all had a couple of really good ideas around conversational marketing, around this kind of hyper growth framing, and you pushed that through a lot of channels. The channels weren't novel, but the message wasn't. And that one or two messages carried you for years. It's not like you weren't as ahead of marketing. You don't need that many good ideas. You just need them at the right times and to really stress them.
Brian Kotlyar [00:42:44]:
Friends don't have friends carried us for twelve months.
Dave Gerhardt [00:42:46]:
Yeah, I mean, it's great. It's why I've become obsessed with people like April Dunford as an example, where the positioning and messaging, it solves so many of the other problems. Right. It's so easy to get into the tactics when that's usually going to be the big thing that makes the rest of the stuff easier. It's good to hear you say that.
Brian Kotlyar [00:43:08]:
There's one other cool thing about that I'll say, and again, I love April's work, is they talked about distribution and messaging. Right. Great. Messages have self distribution because they're memorable and they're interesting and people talk about them. So it's interesting. One of the ways you make the demand gen scenes easier is with a message that causes people to stop scrolling and think about it and share it and react to it and then tell their coworker about it. You can actually have kind of crappy distribution if the message is good enough. Now, that's not the goal, obviously, but it's funny.
Brian Kotlyar [00:43:36]:
You can kind of get away with it if the message is interesting enough and good enough. So that's one of my super big focuses. Another thing that we are really actively working on right now is I just do a ton of sales enablement going back to the revenue point and looking across the whole supply chain. We're really trying to up level our game there and teach our reps how to storytell properly and deal with competitors and things like that. That's another huge initiative we're actively driving. And it's not usually the reason why a marketer gets into the gig, but a, it's necessary given my revenue mindedness, and b, it's actually really interesting in other ways. So that's something that we're doing a lot of work on, too. And then I guess probably the other thing I would just mention is just the concept of community.
Brian Kotlyar [00:44:23]:
It is true that a lot of the traditional distribution is harder now. Ads are very saturated, things like that, and so we're trying to figure that out. It's early days, but I really do think that that can be a moat for a business. I literally just got off a call working on it with the team. Like, how do we solve for this, knowing that it's like a long haul?
Dave Gerhardt [00:44:48]:
Just curious, because when you say community and just. I'm curious to hear how you're thinking about it. Does that mean like, you have a physical online place where people hang out, or do you see it like community? I've been following this guy Dan, who runs vp of community at Apollo IO. He's been doing an awesome job on his. I think they both work. I'm just curious to hear your perspective on it, where there's also community. Like, drift was an example. We didn't have a community, but we had community in the sense of like, social media was strong, podcast was strong, we did events, and we built community.
Dave Gerhardt [00:45:22]:
How are you thinking about it for your company now?
Brian Kotlyar [00:45:25]:
My preference is the drift way I think of it. Kind of like building a common identity. I would like to do that, but I acknowledge it's hard and it's a little bit lightning in a bottle ish. Obviously you were super successful with it at drift, but it's hard to replicate that the same playbook won't always so, but that's my preference. I would rather have a great identity that's loosely formed in many places if I had to choose than a slack community or something. And the reason is, it's easy to move the identity group into a slack community. It's hard to take a slack community and turn it into the other thing.
Dave Gerhardt [00:46:01]:
Totally. I'm glad that I asked you that, because that's kind of what I want to see more people get at is like, community does not mean, oh, we need to go set up circle or do a Facebook group or do a slack group. To your point, you can do that when you have this mass community is like this group of people that have a shared identity that to me are following your business even if they're not ready to buy from that business yet. You become a resource for them, an expert for them. Like me as a marketer, as a young marketer coming up in my career, that company for me was HubSpot. I didn't actually buy HubSpot until two years ago. For the first time I had worked there, I had been a fanboy reading their blog. I'm making myself sound smart in my job because they set some template about like, here's how to have a good one on one with your boss.
Dave Gerhardt [00:46:49]:
And I use that. My boss is like, wow, this is great. You're arming your ideal customers to be smarter, better at their jobs, be more successful. Then community happens in many forms. It could be LinkedIn followers, it could be podcast listeners, it could be email subscribers. It doesn't just mean like, go build a private walled community and put 100 people in there, because almost all those eventually die anyway. It gets very hard.
Brian Kotlyar [00:47:13]:
100%. Yeah. And I mean, just speaking about, again, the drift intercom thing, the hundreds of millions of dollars that intercom made by being like this incredible resource for product marketers and product managers. It's like if we were to go back and pay John Collins, the guy who ran that content team, more like performance based comp, on all those blog posts, he would own an island somewhere and it helped form an identity. But we never had a slack group or anything. But there was an identity of really interested people that the content was changing their lives and it caused the business to grow in a way that was super efficient and super fast. But again, it's not trivial to do that. John team was really well staffed.
Brian Kotlyar [00:47:56]:
We invested a lot of money in it. And I don't know that it's just like, turn the crank, that you can just pick up that same team and drop it in a new category and a new product and have it work again. I don't think that's how this works. There is a little bit of alchemy to it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:48:07]:
So much of the story and the positioning matters. I also think that people wildly underrate how talented somebody like John is. This is one of the biggest soapboxes or whatever that I like to stand on. It's like content brand positioning. There's a it factor there that's very hard. Some people just are good at it, and some people are just. I love April as an example. You can't just pick up her book, follow the framework and just boom.
Dave Gerhardt [00:48:34]:
You're magically amazing at positioning because I've actually never followed a.
Brian Kotlyar [00:48:39]:
A.
Dave Gerhardt [00:48:39]:
We didn't go through a positioning framework at Drift. It was like David and I, the CEO, we were texting every day, like, coming up with, oh, what about this? You see this thing?
Brian Kotlyar [00:48:48]:
Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:48:48]:
Change this. Like, there's an IT factor there that's also hard to train and quantify.
Brian Kotlyar [00:48:54]:
Yeah, I agree. One of the huge unlocks at Sprinklr was when we came up with our descriptor of the product, which is the most complete enterprise social media platform. They don't use it anymore, but me and the product market and the CEO were working that for months until we nailed it, and then growth took off immediately.
Dave Gerhardt [00:49:10]:
Lines like that are great, and it's like you can spend months trying to get to one, and then one day you're just, like, out on a walk and it just comes to you. Totally, Brian, thank you so much. This was an awesome episode. Go find Brian on LinkedIn. I'll link to all your stuff. This is a great episode. I wrote the title while we were doing. I throw this all through chat GBT later, but I wrote why marketing should get paid like sales, owning the revenue number, and the role of demand Gen with Brian Kotlier, VP of marketing growth at high touch.
Dave Gerhardt [00:49:39]:
I hope that's okay. It's a b plus title. I'll work on it a little bit, but great to meet you, Brian. Great to hang out, and I'm going to continue to follow you and root for you in your career.
Brian Kotlyar [00:49:48]:
Thanks so much.
Dave Gerhardt [00:49:49]:
All right, man. Thank you so much.
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