Metrics that Measure Up

Anthony Kennada, is the founder and CEO of AudiencePlus and formerly the Chief Marketing Officer at Hopin and Gainsight...quite the pedigree!

Anthony joined our host, Ray Rike to discuss the evolving nature of community and content led-growth, which is a strategy and topic trending across every B2B SaaS CMO. Anthony takes the topic a step further and highlights why "Owned Media" is a critical component in every B2B SaaS CMOs Go-to-Market strategy.

Anthony's experience in using content and community at Gainsight serves as the foundation for Anthony's vision for AudiencePlus and its customers. Over the past few years, community development has traditionally been focused on the customer, but over the last few years expanding the reach of the content and the inclusion of all stakeholders interested in the topics the brand is creating and evangelizing has become a key part of the Marketing strategy to create a "halo" effect around the brand.

Anthony was involved in building the Gainsight "Pulse" community from the ground up. During the early days, Gainsight took the role of building the stage for the leading thinkers in Customer Success, but not being at the center of the stage which developed an authenticity of helping to build a profession, not just a company.

Second, Gainsight did not focus much on its product - but rather on the information on how to build, manage and scale a Customer Success team. Over time, as the market evolved and matured - then the opportunity to gradually introduce more about the Gainsight Customer Success Platform as the community grew.

Lastly, when Gainsight first started hosting events - they did not measure the ROI by the revenue generated from the annual Pulse event - but by the pipeline and ultimate revenue generated as a by product of the event.

Over the past few years - the event landscape has changed and building community is facing new headwinds. First, there is so much noise in the market that it is much harder to break through the noise. The second challenge is the distribution of content, as budgets have decreased and the cost of "paid media" continues to increase. The third challenge is that the rules of social media continue to evolve and change...as an example the recent decision by Twitter to not allow links to content on Substack.

AudiencePlus is positioned as the first "owned-media platform for marketers". Anthony defines owned media as using a more rich editorial format of content beyond blog posts to break through the noise. One example is taking a podcast and breaking it into multiple clips, both audio and video to create more audience engagement. The "owned" media component is creating rich, educational, and engaging content that motivates the audience to view a company's content and community as a destination for people who are like-minded and they feel like they belong to something bigger - a community of their peers.

If you are a CEO, CRO, or CMO exploring how to leverage content, media, and community to engage your target audience, and establish a thought leadership role for the community of buyers you seek to serve, this conversation with Anthony Kennada, Founder and CEO of AudiencePlus is a must listen!

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On this episode, we are joined by Udi Ledergor, the Chief Marketing Officer at GONG responsible for first creating the Conversational Intelligence category and then again in creating the Revenue Intelligence category resulting in one of the fastest growing B2B SaaS companies in history.

In this episode, Udi highlights the evolving strategy and measurements for the Marketing organization at Gong along the growth journey to greater than $100M ARR and a $6B+ in company value!

Creating a category builds the overall Target Addressable Market (TAM) - creating a brand increases the percentage of the TAM the category leader captures. Gong's journey and Udi's role in building their success is a valuable lesson chalked full of great ideas, insights and experiences!

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Ecosystem-Led Growth is an evolution of Partner-Led Growth and is the vision of Bob Moore, Founder and CEO of Crossbeam and the author of Ecosystem-Led Growth.

Bob started his tech career as an investor at Insight Partners, and then founded RJ Metrics which was acquired by Magento in 2016, now part of Adobe, and then Bob co-founded Stitch Data which was ultimately acquired by Talend and is now part of Click.

Crossbeam was founded to unlock the modern platform's architecture and data layer enabling companies to collaborate by making it much easier to share data across multiple partner companies. The catalyst to Bob founding Crossbeam was a $2.6B mistake! That mistake was one Bob made at RJ Metrics where they found and then fell out of product-market fit as evidenced by lower growth. When they analyzed the factor leading to the reduced growth, they identified the emergence of the API economy and how buyers wanted to be able to buy point solutions that were easy to integrate with other point solutions - which was the inspiration to build a product that fully leverages the modern data stack and open API ecosystem.

What is Ecosystem-Led Growth? It is the ability to leverage a network of partners who can easily share insights with partners who sell complimentary products to the same target buyers. Simple questions like do we have customers or prospects in common, or do you have an active sales cycle going on that we could partner on to build a joint solution for the customer?

What is the difference between building an "app ecosystem" such as the Salesforce App Exchange and a "partner ecosystem"? It starts with a foundation built upon an open system architecture that enables the sharing of data to collaborate on common target customers, and those companies in the ecosystem are willing to share specific data with partners to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Why are most B2B SaaS companies still using a traditional direct sales model versus focusing more on partner ecosystems as a primary lead source? The answer starts with the negative reputation of how partnership models were implemented, managed, and operated historically. Partnerships were viewed as encroaching on sales rep opportunities and having a partner damage the reputation of their partners by not adequately communicating the value, feature, and function of their partner's solution.

Modern Ecosystem-Led growth does not rely upon an army of partnership reps, it leverages the data that already exists in each partnership infrastructure, such as their CRM system. Now, based upon corporate policy, rules, and intercompany workflows, an existing partner can share the relevant data with their partner(s) which will enable that sales rep to have access to data that will make approaching a new potential customer armed with relevant data regarding the tech stack and preferences of a potential customer.

If you are looking for new ways to increase revenue growth efficiency, decrease customer acquisition costs, and identify "best fit" potential customers by participating in an ecosystem with partners who share those goals and understand the concept of "give to get" this episode is chalked full of ideas, insights and applicable steps to leverage the emerging growth strategy of Ecosystem-Led Growth!

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How many times have you visited a B2B website and cringed at being asked to provide your contact information, including your email just to download a white paper or watch a video?
Why is this a reality in 2023 on most B2B SaaS websites? Because "leads" are still a primary measurement of Marketing success and marketers have not yet invested in the processes and instrumentation to focus on both the "pre-opportunity process" and then the ultimate outcomes of pipeline and revenue.
One of the first topics we discussed was the "buying journey" which in the 6sense land is focused on the "pre-buying" or pre-opportunity journey which is often the area that is understood the least. A majority of the pre-opportunity journey is anonymous, most B2B companies will have multiple resources touching the early phase of the journey and there is real friction and resistance for buyers to reveal their identity early in the process.
However, by understanding the pre-opportunity journey, a company is better positioned to engage with potential buyers in a more personalized and impactful way.
Latane' defines the pre-opportunity buying journey into 5 phases including:
- Target
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision
- Purchase (meaning they are ready to enter the active opportunity phase)
Once a company moves into the "decision" of which company a buyer wants to engage in a sales process is the best time for B2B marketers to proactively reach out to a potential future customer.
The concept of "IICP" takes the Ideal Customer Profile to another level by introducing the "in-market" Ideal Customer Profile. By understanding that an account is actively researching and evaluating a specific market category that your company plays in. Taking this concept to something that "Sales" cares about includes being able to provide the Sales organization with real-time leads that are actively "in-market" and thus have a much higher conversion rate to qualified opportunities.
Next, we double-clicked into why a minority of B2B companies are not actively using "intent data" to determine when an "ICP" account is actively in-market. Latane highlights that a major obstacle is that a well-defined "workflow" is not often in place to ensure that the Sales Development team comes in each morning with a complete, prioritized list available for them to start the day off productively...versus spending their time researching and building a prioritized list for outreach.
If you are responsible for engaging a target market and buyer to generate high-quality leads, and/or are interested in how to take advantage of intent data, account-based programs, and the dark web to increase pipeline quality - Latane is a great listen and her book NO FORMS, NO SPAM, NO COLD CALLS is a great read!

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Holding key financial leadership roles at Qualcomm and Palantir Technologies by itself positions Bijan Moallemi, Founder and CEO of Mosaic Tech as a uniquely qualified finance leader.
Factor in his innovative use of technology and automation to enable more efficient hyper-growth and his desire to make this level of automation available to anyone trying to implement a strategic finance function in the B2B Cloud industry, Bijan is a market visionary.
His story starts with the challenges he found upon joining Palantir as a 100 person, yet $2B Enterprise Valuation company. Even at that lofty valuation, even the most basic financial questions were difficult to answer with the existing infrastructure, and would often take days, by which time decisions that could have been informed with the data were already made.
His first task was to implement the right infrastructure to move from reactive to proactive financial planning, management and ultimately become a forward looking, strategic finance organization.
At Palantir, Financial Operations including all FP&A, business operations, budgeting, forecasting and included all of the systems that drove all revenue including financial and CRM systems. By owning the end to end system architecture, it allowed the team to have a scalable, and nimble financial operations function.
Most finance organizations face the challenge of requiring source data from multiple systems across the organization. By having the primary underlying systems responsibility, coupled with the ability to define the standard data ontology across the customer lifecycle and organization.
When pushed on how Bijan defines a "strategic finance function", he started by highlighting the key components of a strategic finance function "Get the Right Data to the Right People on a timely and digestible basis". The role of the CFO has become more technical, and the toolkit required for a modern CFO have not kept up. A primary cause is that access to the data and insights are not typically available at the speed or context required.
52% of B2B SaaS/Cloud metrics required for a strategic finance function are currently being captured and calculated manually in excel and Google Sheets. Unfortunately, many metrics are still siloed within each function, such as Sales, Marketing and Customer Success. Until his data is integrated, normalized and available in real-time, decisions will continue to be made on backward looking, historical information versus the relevant data from yesterday or even today.
Think about this, how can you plan for next month or next quarter with data that is only available 10-30 days AFTER the new accounting period has started???
One of the key attributes for the modern finance leader is the ability to "tell the story" that the data is telling. Bijan refers this to the "synthesis" of the data deserves a much greater share of mindshare and time.
If you are responsible for generating or the recipient of SaaS/Cloud metrics to help make metrics informed decisions, Bijan and his unique insights how to deploy and leverage standardized, integrated and forward looking insights to make better metrics informed decisions while building a modern, strategic finance function are a great listen!

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