BLOG

Josh Schachter
welcome, everybody to [Un]churned on Josh Schachter, founder and CEO of UpdateAI and a host of uninsurance. Joining me today, I’m very excited to have chief growth and community officer at go to market at GTM. Partners, Mr. Judd Borakove. Judd, thank you so much for being on the program today.

Judd Borakove
Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Josh Schachter
So tell us I don’t want to butcher your intro here. We’ve had several conversations. And I don’t want to botch your background. Tell us a little bit about both yourself and what GTM partners is all about.

Judd Borakove
Sure. So I spent a lot of time all across go to market no explain go to market in a minute. But sales marketing, customer success started, some companies sold some failed at some learn a lot of lessons and most recently partnered up with a couple of very smart people probably smarter than me, Sandra Bhadra, who was the CMO over at Pardot for a number of years Salesforce and then started a company called Terminus. Brian Brown, who was the Chief Strategy Officer at silverpop for a number of years, and then Terminus. And basically we came together realizing that right now people really struggle with what go to market isn’t how to execute. There’s been lots of funnels and things like that over the years, but they don’t take into account some of the newer metrics that we’re really supposed to track, such as NRR, grr, things like that. And, you know, there’s been a massive emergence in the need for more and more focused on customer time to value and expansion motions within business. So we’re out there doing research, working with people hands on to kind of help solve these problems.

Josh Schachter
Well, I’m looking forward to this conversation, because our audience does consist of a lot of people in customer success, as you know, a lot of people in go to market within SAS organization. So it’s very, very appropriate for this discussion we’re going to have also, I think you’re winning by virtue of your you’re teaming up with with your claim that you know, people smarter than yourselves, that’s the first rule in a successful business is always find people smarter than yourself to join team. So well done on on that initial start. There’s lots of folks that give advice in marketing and sales and go to market. What’s your qualification? You know, for for the organization you’ve run

Judd Borakove
as far as like what we do? Or why anyone should listen to us? Yes. Why should we listen to you? One, we have access to data and research that nobody else does. So we have a partnership with GE to a number other data providers that allow us to see things that nobody else can get people say, Oh, we buy their data. It’s different. So we do that we do our own individualized research, we have been in and been successful at multiple businesses, we’ve seen it we’ve worked with VCs, we’ve done a lot of different things, and had a lot of success. So you know, I don’t choose who you know, you don’t have to listen to us for sure. But we are definitely trying to disrupt what people think about analysts and how they function analyst research these days, not as many people listen to or look at, unless you’re really big enterprise. And we think that that needs to change. So hopefully people will will see what we’re doing and catch on the events we’ve been doing. We do these roadshows have been wildly successful. And so we’re trying to just build upon that.

Josh Schachter
So when you say when you talk about the traditional analysts, you’re talking about the folks like the Forest Service, like gardeners, the monitors of the world

Judd Borakove
exactly where, you know, like, look, they definitely have a purpose people need them, we actually help people to better utilize our services in some instances. So nobody’s saying like, Oh, they’re the worst thing in the world. I just think that some of the things they do these days are a bit antiquated and don’t quite fit for the need of fast growing tech firms. And

Josh Schachter
so if I’m reading it correctly, you’re you’re providing analysis as well, like they are, but it’s maybe a little bit more focused on your individual client’s needs with maybe a little bit more hands on insight and actionability. Is that the right read on it,

Judd Borakove
it is definitely part of it. The insights also, we have different market trends and things that we can track that even they don’t for them, most of the time they’re talking to individuals or doing, you know, a 300 plus person analysis, which you know, 301 is considered statistically relevant. We’re trying to get 10s of 1000s of data points that can help people better understand the future, what’s coming, not what’s happened in the past.

Josh Schachter
I see, I see. Great. We’d like to start the show off with going Unturned, right and honest to our name, which is an homage to the SAS metric of churn and retention. So I want to do some rapid fire questioning here with you. First question, Who is your favorite job and I have three options for you here. So there’s Judd Apatow. who, you know, famous comic writer produce a lot of movies with Will Ferrell and others. There’s Ashley Judd. And then there’s Judd Hirsch. Do you know you know judge Judd Hirsch

Judd Borakove
very well, you miss judge rose to I’m gonna go with Judd Hirsch just seen his love avatar. Nothing wrong with him. Go consider Ashley, a judge just saying.

Josh Schachter
I was hoping you’d guess Judd Hirsch, you’d say Judd Hirsch. I figured not many would taxi is actually one of my favorite shows of all time.

Judd Borakove
I haven’t seen it in forever and still remember it to this day.

Josh Schachter
And in researching for this interview, I looked up gender, he’s 87 years old. I didn’t realize Time flies, can you imagine? No, no, I think we’re old to myself included.

Josh Schachter
Yeah, amen to that. So there’s different types of go to marketplace, right. This is something that I’m currently thinking through I’ve been thinking through for months and months and months with update AI is what is our play can you Can you juggle multiple types of plays at the same time for go to market? What are some of the most common plays that are out there in terms of different go to market strategies?

Judd Borakove
I mean, you have the standard like outbound inbound, you have community lead, you have ecosystem lead, which is primarily partnerships, we could also think of that as, like Salesforce builds a platform for other developers to create, right? There’s, there’s a lot of good market motions, and more are getting created all the time. I mean, nobody ever would have said community lead was something they ever focused on. And now it’s big, you got category lead, right category creation has been abuzz for, you know, the last five years or so. So different motions, and to your comments about can you run multiple at the same time, all the best companies do, but that does not mean that’s how you start. So if you think about technologies that maybe sell to developers, right, you want a top down and bottom up approach. So you’re gonna have two different things, you might have a plg approach to get users to use your product. And you may have an outbound maybe ABM focused approach to talk to the executives, and be able to find ways to get more people into the buying process. So let me run this by you

Josh Schachter
Where Where should I start? Where should I start, and I have, I have a hypothesis, and we have a starting point that we are starting at. But before I share that, because it is something that we’ve really been thinking about, and I’ve spoken to a lot of advisors about over the past several months. So our product, right we we are there inside of Zoom video conferences, we’ve built proprietary technology that detects action items and follow ups through AI, in your calls and your customer calls, and then spits it out to you on a silver platter, right right after your call, Hey, great call, here’s a recap. Here’s the action items that we overheard, you know, you can put them into Salesforce, you can put them into notion or your task tool or whatever it is, and go from there. That could very easily be a plg a product lead growth play, right where each individual just has their personal assistant for their meetings. That being said, I don’t necessarily know that I want to endeavor into a plg domain, because I would really like to become a quote unquote, variation of of a gong, right, where it’s direct sales, and you’re signing up contracts, and it’s larger, a CVS, and you’re not dealing with, you know, the grassroot level, churn and operational complexity and cost of cost of acquisition of individual users. Like we can talk more about minor where we can we can move on to different topic, but any thoughts and from your perspective, based on what I just shared?

Judd Borakove
Well, a lot of the motions are determined by your contract value, you know, a higher contract value could determine Hey, ABM makes sense, right? Outbound tends to have a pretty high cost, right? Because you need salespeople, you need marketing, help drive, not always, sometimes you can go just direct sales, inbound, you know, you’re gonna spend on PPC, you know, all the ads and things like that SEO plg. Kind of similar, I mean, you’ve got to get people to the product. But if you get it in their hands, then you’re focused on conversion, like basically, you’ve got to get not just activation, but then conversion to pay. Do you have to think about how you gate it to create that. So there’s, there’s a couple ways to go. But I will say that, just because you start with one does not mean that’s where you need to stay. So for example, let’s say you start with p&g, because it makes the most sense, because your headcount is low, right? I don’t know how many people you have on your team. But maybe that’s an easier thing to do. As you expand the product, your plg motion could get into hands that create multiple go to market motions. So you may not ever stop a plg motion, you use it to create more throughput, while you’re then going after larger deals, because you’ve expanded to more of a platform opportunity that you know, supports more of an enterprise sale.

Josh Schachter
You know, the one one thing we haven’t talked about is IV plg motion as a way to to increase the velocity of my product learnings that if I can bring more people into the platform early on, then I accelerate my learnings about my product and my my roadmap and my product gets better and better and better. At a certain point, you hit the threshold where then you feel really good about going after larger enterprises, right? Because you got a certain level of product maturity. Yeah,

Judd Borakove
that’s absolutely true. There’s a lot of positives to each type of go to market, you just have to understand what makes sense, because each not every product could even be turned into a plg product. But yeah, right now we hear it everybody’s like, you know, marketing and selling cars, like, hey, create a plg motion and like, I got an enterprise product, what am I going to, like add to ingest data? Like that’s not possible. So you know, people get kind of happy feet will say, you know, with with the new motions and like how do we do it to not every product, and that’s okay, getting really hyper focused on your ICP might be more important than creating another go to market motion.

Josh Schachter
You hear a lot you hear about plg all the time from venture capitalists. You go to these conferences and it’s all appeal GPL GPL G, the multipliers are far and above anything else that you see out there. It makes sense to be successful in plg. You have to be providing really good value true value. Are you at the atomic level to each individual end user, and it makes sense for a VC to go in there and say, I want you to prove that out. Because I know if you prove the atomic value out to the atomic vuser, then then you’re going to be able to grow this thing. And it almost feels to me like it’s a way for them to vet companies earlier, upfront, let them either really prosper or fail fast. I don’t know if that’s anything that’s ever kind of crossed your mind.

Judd Borakove
You know, one of the things that I’ll say with plg is you get a lot of user data, conversion data, things that you can look at, even outside of having to go into the company to better understand things. So I think that one of the reasons they like it is the data that is created through the motion itself, it’s easier just to rely on and believe data that comes from product usage than say things or input from a sales rep. Or data that you’re seeing that is bad data from marketing campaigns or whatever conversion metrics. Yeah, I think there’s some some some definite things there that that definitely make VCs excited about it. Also the cost, honestly, even with the cost to get it to a certain point that might be a little higher up front, it tails off. If I’m in an enterprise motion, sales reps are not cheap, right? The overhead associated with onboarding them, ramping them, you know, all of their costs associated from technology and so on. It can be pretty expensive, it eats into your margins. So you see bigger multipliers, probably because of that,

Josh Schachter
yeah, when that when it’s done right at scale. You guys have a framework called the eight pillars of the go to market operating system. Let’s let’s talk a little bit through that that framework and kind of go through each of the pillars, if you don’t

Judd Borakove
mind. Yeah, it is, it is a pretty cool way to think about things. Pretty obvious. But you know, we kind of look at this as if anyone is familiar with siriusdecisions, or Topo, they created different models, the demand waterfall was created. And it made a lot of sense. That’s why people bought into it. This is something that makes a lot of sense. We think this is the evolution of that. So some of the areas that have been added are those customer time to value and expansion. We’ve also included rev ops, and we talk a lot about leadership and management as a pillar. And that’s the people and things like that. But if I take you through it, your first piece, and it does not have to be done in order, there’s the thing that people don’t always get, you can jump in at any point because no matter what motion you’re running, these are always there just in different varying levels. So first, we call it total relevant market. So a lot of people talk about total addressable market, we talk about a relevant market those potential buyers who are in market and can buy your product or offering. So when people go our tam is every b2b company between this and this? I mean, like, really? Are they really? Probably not. So we like to get a little bit closer to the truth and say, we need to look at the relevant market. So who do I sell to?

Josh Schachter
Is that different at all? I’m like, I’m dated in my acronyms. It’s been a few years different than Psalm and Sam at all, or is that just a different twist on the same thing?

Judd Borakove
A little bit different? A little bit different? But you know, and look, we coined some terminology here, too, that isn’t the standard because some of this stuff just doesn’t exist. We talked about next is our market investment map. And this isn’t like a standard term. But the way we look at it is there’s got to be a way to understand where do we make investments where we make bets, what go to market motion, should we invest in? What God should we invest in? What product should we expand to a lot, we find that a lot of times companies will acquire a company because they think they have a tangential or a an expansion opportunity with their offering. And then they go in to realize that it’s not even the same buyer, economic or otherwise. And suddenly, now you’re thrown to different motions selling to things that don’t cross over. So there’s no way to expand upon you need to look at these things in advance. Like what should we invest in? That leads you to your standard branded demand and branded demand? People think, oh, it’s branded demand? Well, yes. But there’s a lot to it. If I think that I’m going to go ABM I have to look at the cost associated, can we afford to go after the you know, go go in this motion? And how are we going to do that? And sometimes just for

Josh Schachter
folks that are that maybe don’t, you know, background in GDM, what ABM what does it stand for? What is Account

Judd Borakove
Based Marketing. So been around probably about 80 plus years or so, my co founder Sangram founded one of the companies that was a leader in at Terminus, and you’re gonna find most companies run ABM in some form if they have a certain, you know, annual contract value ACV. So, there’s different ways to run it so but that it can be outbound. It can be any motion, if it doesn’t make sense for your organization, if it’s not cost effective for acquisition and your CAC is too high or things like you may have to go back to your investment mapping and make new decisions. So this isn’t like one of those it always goes forward. There’s a lot of areas you have to go back and research that leads into our pipeline velocity and this is that sales process sales motion that you know you’re trying to Get them through the pipe and get them to sale, then once I’ve sold you, we need to make sure we get you the value you expect as quickly as we can. If I’ve got a one year contract, and you don’t see value till nine months, guess what you’re not really. So those things are really important and not often thought about, then we’ve got customer expansion. Obviously, it’s a lower cost associated with selling somebody who was already a customer. But not only that, it’s a lot easier to help them actually show them more value, help them get more out of what they’ve purchased from you. And you know what, you become a trusted advisor, because you actually care about the outcomes, and its

Josh Schachter
customer retention, where advocacy, customer advocacy, customer marketing comes in?

Judd Borakove
Yep, absolutely. Absolutely. You know, so customer success. Also, you know that that customer expansion can also be account management and things along those lines, it can also that can come time to value. A lot of people don’t believe that customer success itself and Georgia carrier quota. Now, I don’t think you need to incentivize them that way. And don’t think you have to say you must, but if you’re doing your job, well, you’re going to help them see other products that can bring them value, it’ll happen naturally, account managers could sell it your your AES consult, whatever, however your structure that can work. But really, if you do it, right, they trust you, they work with you, they want you to be a part of what they’re doing. So they can be successful with it, you know, you nobody makes a purchase thinking, Oh, I hope this doesn’t work out, you know, they want to see success. And unfortunately, I think that the vast majority of people go in without an actual plan of how to make that piece of software, whatever you’ve purchased, work and bring the value you want. So hopefully these customer success can get in there and help do it. So I’m really huge on customer success and the expansion of it, the growth of it, the leadership of it right now,

Josh Schachter
and just go back to the point you made about the you know, should they should they own revenue, right and be incentivized revenue? It’s a really good question, I see both sides of that story, I see where you want them to be to be incentivized, and they should have the same opportunities as sales teams and, and of course, those incentives, will will help them to, to push things forward. But at the same time, you want the purity of that relationship that’s being built with the customer for, for reasons that are not commercial and not monetizable. I spoke to a CS leader earlier today, actually, who was saying that their team has split, right where they each CSM is tethered to a an account executive. And they together have a quota goal, which I thought was an interesting approach to

Judd Borakove
and there’s a lot, there’s a lot of people trying to solve that problem right now. Because a lot of people think that if our goal with your activity is to produce more revenue, how do we incentivize you to do so. And this was a hard one, because the role inherently is not supposed to be a revenue generating role, but a success, you know, time to Value, Customer Relationship type of role. So it’s, it’s really interesting. And this is like, this is when to me business is really fun, when these new things come out, and we get to try to test new things and see how they work and see the evolution of them. So it’s gonna be a fun time for CES for sure. And so once you get through the expansion piece, like, how do I figure out what’s really going on with my work? You know, we’ve always heard the adage of the old stuff, like sales and marketing don’t get along, ces doesn’t have a seat at the table, you know, so on and so forth. Well, the data tells whatever story we want it to. So if I have sales ops, markup, CS ops, and everybody comes to the table with their data, guess what, we’re gonna have three different stories. So one of the biggest components that we are telling people is your robots, it’s having a decentralized group that is responsible for insights so that when they come to the table, there is no bias, that bias is what kills companies all day long, right? If sales owns robots, guess what story is going to tell? And it should, because that’s what it needs to do. So when you unhook it from any of those business operational units, you get a better outcome. And so we’re where we’ve seen this is really successful is attaching to like a CEO, a CFO, even a CEO, where they have a seat at the table. They’re, they’re there to literally provide the insights necessary for people to plan and strategize.

Josh Schachter
Interesting. So they’re Switzerland, they’re the arbiter. And do you ever see them reporting to the CRO

Judd Borakove
we do. But once again, it’s that’s, you know, really reporting to sales, most of the time, there are CROs you have both, which might be a little bit easier. But most zeros and this has been my experience, others may have other most zeros come from sales, I definitely know some that have come from marketing or other functions, but the vast majority of time they’re coming for sale. So they have that mindset. So that’s why you know, D centralizing makes it a much better function and necessity. And then really, the final is what we call leadership and management that can be visualization that can be meeting cadences, that can be anything related to your people, because like I said, without the people, none of this works, that can even be down to your project management to make sure that all these things move in a cohesive way. And we actually have a framework that we call cat which is clarity alignment team. It’s creating the clarity around the problems and how we’re going to fix them the alignment on what’s going to happen and who’s involved and dissemination of all that information so that every team member understand the action there are taking and how that action actually translates to the Bazer bigger business objective. When you do that the company just functions better because everybody understands they’re part of a bigger team. And their, their part fails. If it doesn’t work, if they don’t do their job, everybody else suffers. So that’s our framework,

Josh Schachter
eight pillars. We’ll go through them very quickly, I want to I want to play back to you what I heard. So well let me go through them now and then we’ll and then I want to follow up with for you. So we got total relevant market, identify the best performing segment for you relevant to your product, market investment map, identify the highest value areas for you to be investing in, by product type by by the different go to market motions. What am I missing out one by by POS, right? Right, etc. Brandon demand your strategy around how you’re talking to your customer. And obviously harvesting demand and generating demand pipeline velocity, make sure making sure that you’re feeding your sales at the right pace to hit your goals. Customer time to value that’s onboarding that’s training your customers. That’s that’s, that’s continuous value delivery. That’s customer success, customer expansion. As a segue from that, that is, you know, you’ve made that customer successful. Now, let’s plan and expand let’s increase the size of that account. Revenue operations. is an independent arbiter that is an arbiter maybe, maybe maybe there’s a connotation there that there’s some kind of war going on. But that’s an independent reviewer of the metrics. And what are all the analytics from pre sales, sales, post sales, that are that and how do we make make make sense of those, and then leadership and management, making sure that the leadership it really has the right motivations and and setting the team up successfully? Okay, so those are the eight pillars of your GTM framework, cool, like, what do I do with that I’m sure I can hire you, as a consultant and your team to do a wonderful job of helping me to institute that. But let’s say now for a second that I want to give a shout out, give something a shot on my own first, what am I doing with this information?

Judd Borakove
I mean, first, you’ve got to organize around it, right? So thinking through this, as do all of these pieces exist in our current go to market? And how do they exist? You know, you can say I know what my ICP is, we’ll go in a little deeper there, and making sure that you truly understand it to a level that you can sell to it. And that it is the right buyer changes the entire game. We have people who are like, Oh, we’ve got an ICP and you get in and you go, not really. And you’re wondering why you are selling to everybody and why you have high churn. So one of the things that people don’t seem to realize is everything. It’s not a sales problem, or a marketing problem or sales problem, it is a go to market problem. If sales isn’t working, right, if you’re not closing up fields, if your pipelines are full, people go into a sales problem. Well, we need to take a step back and go back into the entire process to see what’s breaking, because a lot of times it’s not sales profit sales problem, right? They could be targeting the wrong ICP and therefore they can’t get pipe going. They can’t close deals. Well, did we define the right ICP? Are we attracting the right ICP is marketing, marketing to the right ICP, and so on. So, really use it as a way to dissect your problem. start back at the front, make sure all the pieces are right, that they’re aligned properly, and then come back through. That is how I would use it if you’re not engaged with us to really assess what’s going on in your organization and figure out how to fix it.

Josh Schachter
Chad Barkoff my second favorite job after I got number two, and that was Ashley Judd.

Judd Borakove
Probably you might Yeah.

Josh Schachter
Thank you so much. I learned a lot on this episode and really appreciate your time.

Judd Borakove
Amen. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.