BSMS 77 - Leveling up your go to market

What does it take to truly level up in 2025? It’s not just about growing your GTM team—it’s about elevating your own leadership, optimizing your impact, and mastering the tools that will define the next era of growth.

In this must-listen episode, Brian Graf sits down with Stijn Hendrikse and Antoine Vial to dive into their upcoming book, Level Up! Coaching Go-To-Market Leaders to Achieve Exponential Growth. 

They explore why coaching—both for your team and with AI—is the key to unlocking greater GTM efficiency, smarter decision-making, and lasting success.

🔥 What You'll Learn:

• Why coaching is a critical skill in working with today’s GTM teams
• The surprising parallels between coaching AI and coaching people
• How to leverage AI, automation, and remote teams to scale your marketing & sales impact
• Actionable frameworks that GTM leaders can use to drive growth
• How to level up your leadership, team, and technology for sustained success

📖 Get Early Access to the Book!
Sign up for the early bird program to receive exclusive content, coaching frameworks, and first access to Level Up! 
https://www.kalungi.com/level-up-early-bird-signup.

B2B SaaS Marketing Snacks is one of the most respected voices in the SaaS industry. It is hosted by two leading marketing and revenue growth experts for software:

• Stijn Hendrikse: Author of T2D3 CMO Masterclass & Book, Founder of Kalungi
• Brian Graf: CEO of Kalungi

B2B SaaS companies move through predictable stages of marketing focus, cost and size (as described in the popular T2D3 book). With people cost being a majority of the cost involved, every hire needs to be well worth the investment!

The best founders, CFOs and COOs in B2B SaaS work at getting the best balance of marketing leadership, strategy and execution to produce the customer and revenue growth they require. Staying flexible and nimble is a key asset in a hard-charging B2B world.

Resources shared in this episode:

• 2025 B2B SaaS Marketing Trends for Founders and Executives
• BSMS 67 - The impact of AI on marketing
• Unlocking the power of AI: Transform your content creation process
• T2D3 CMO Masterclass
• Submit and vote on our podcast topics

Brian Graf: Welcome to Episode 77 of B2B SaaS Marketing Snacks. We took a brief hiatus from posting, but we're back in action and better than ever as I interview Stijn Hendrikse, who you all know and love, and Antoine Vial, a fractional CMO who has led marketing for over 20 companies about their upcoming book, Level Up! Coaching Go To Market Leaders to Achieve Exponential Growth. 

In this discussion, we talk through why coaching and leadership are so pivotal in today's day and age, how, somewhat unexpectedly, coaching individuals and coaching AI are eerily similar, and how it's so critical to utilize the full power of AI as a go to market leader.

I love the discussion and am super excited for the launch, but listen for yourself and see if you gain some good insights. Enjoy! 

Welcome back, everyone. Thank you for joining me, as always, Stijn. And we have Antoine here as well from previous episodes. This is a special episode for me, and hopefully for you guys, because it follows closely the announcement of your new book.

It's called Level Up, Coaching GTM Leaders to Achieve Exponential Growth. I have you guys in a room for half an hour, I wanted to pick your brains about it. Stijn, we can start with you. I mean, it's coming hot off the tails of your previous book, T2D3. I know you're always thinking about what you want to be writing about, what you want to be posting about.

How did this topic stick with you? And what, what inspired you to write the book? 

Stijn Hendrikse: Yeah, and the reality is, Brian, the story starts with you and me together. We were working on another book that maybe one day sees the daylight. A book called Fractional, that's all about because Fractional executive work has taken a huge amount of momentum the last 10 years in the US where it used to be very popular in Europe, right?

Interim management is very common there. And we see it much more now here and there, usually combined with a fractional component. And we were working on that book. And of course, we still intend to do something with that. But we were finding that a lot of the topics were not necessarily about. being interim or fractional, all those things are also interesting.

They bring an interesting dimension to how you lead, especially in small software companies. But what struck me as we put that work on hold a little bit is that the remaining item that is extremely current right now is With the advent of AI and also the reduction of cost to get people to work globally right in remote teams in different settings has also really changed the role of a go to market leader in a very different way in a way that where you used to be someone who had to be partly doing things hands on and be both strategic and sometimes technical, be able to hire people that were really sort of complementing your skill set, doing a lot of the more Maybe technical work and the execution that used to be in the same office or in the same town.

And with AI now taking over a lot of the more, let's call it modern parts of professional work, right? The writing, some of the design work, some of the automation, some of the reporting. And the ability to access labor across the world with enormous amounts of talent with different cost footprints made me think what is really the most important part that's left to do for the go to market leader, right?

The CMO, the CRO, the Chief Sales Executive, the Chief Customer Success Director. And it really struck me. Whether you lead people or you lead people that are now powered by so many more tools, right? Not only AI, by the way, a lot of the automation, a lot of the other software capabilities that have grown in the MarTech space in the last 10 years.

What is the most essential capability of the marketing or the go to market leader? And it's really not only coaching the people on their team, hiring them, developing them, making them constantly level up, but also coaching them in ways that combine the individual, the people, the professional with the tools and with the capabilities that AI now brings.

And then what I found is that when I see myself use Claude or Chachi Petit for all kinds of things, that’s very strategic, right? Creating the draft of a plan, a go to market strategy based on some market research that you do together with the AI support, but all the way to writing and to do variations of subject lines and build campaigns around different lead magnet ideas and make it cheaper to build some of those things and test them.

Then all of that still involved a lot of that same coaching element. When I talk with an AI, the way I'm making it better, the way I like it to get trained to, to get the output to be more, the output I want, right, or to make it try things again, to get better. Not very different from what you do often with team members.

Of course, the way you do it is very different, right? You don't have things like situational leadership where you have to balance people getting more capable and more confident in their journey of learning something new. With an AI, you don't necessarily have to worry about the confidence part as much.

It's just the capability side. But there were a lot of parallels. So our situational leadership maybe does not translate one to one from coaching a human being to coaching an AI tool. A lot of other things, the way you instruct them, the way you create a prompt, the way you are clear about what you're expecting, the way you then give feedback, the way you try to make it better.

A lot of parallels. And then I was thinking of one of the most talented marketing leaders that I've worked with in the past and who I've seen grow from leaving basically university and, and getting into marketing, which was not Antoine, which you studied and, and learning so fast, right? Partly due to coaching, right, and to getting better because you were looking at things around you and the tools, but also becoming an amazing coach yourself.

That's when we together came up with, Hey, what could this book be? And we started to brainstorm and I'll ask Antoine to talk a little bit more about what the book actually does and what it talks about. But that's where it came from. That's coaching and coaching and go to market leader.

parallels with the go to market leader coaching their own team and the tools that they're using and the combination of those is really where now the go to market leader in the CMO can really make the biggest difference. And that's what the book is about. The book is called Level Up. It's about leveling up your team, leveling up your own output, your own capabilities, but also using the tools that are now in such vast amounts available to make the sum of those parts bigger. 

So that's the book Level Up. Antoine, thoughts? 

Antoine Vial: Yeah. Well, first, thanks for the kind words. That was nice. And of course, I think just on the, on the book itself and, and, and how it came about, there is also a Very significant amount of the book is built on, if not the entire book, is built on an analogy to the coaching at the sports level.

And that was also something that was extremely important for me because it's a big part of my life and something I did prior to marketing and prior to being coached by you and by the team at Kalungi and then coaching as well. And I thought bridging that gap between that thrive and that normalization of being coached in order to thrive and succeed in for athletes was something that was not necessarily seen in the business world where.

More than ever, right? When you talked about access to knowledge with AI really democratizing access to knowledge and, and your team members being able to do so much more with, with less that human element, being able to have that coach next to you, that person just by standing next to you, being able to motivate you, keep you accountable and use the valuable experience through frameworks, of course, coaching frameworks.

Can help you to really level up way faster This was actually one of the core value at Kanungi leveling up together and being able to translate that into a book Turn not necessarily complex frameworks, but frameworks that are very well known used And turn them into actionable illustrations, meeting agendas, and really trying to make everything as usable as possible to empower GTM leaders to go use them and trade on their team, use it for themselves and yeah, and really be able to achieve exponential growth. 

So that's, that's a secondary dimension, but something that was also very, very important for me that you also had the nudge that within the book at the very beginning and something that got me super excited. And so yeah, either line we read your draft over the weekend and then I think on the next Monday, I was like, yeah, I mean, let's let's do these things.

So that's, that's really how we came about the book as you said, called Level Up and super excited about it. A ton of work has been put into it, but yeah, that's the backstory for how we came about. 

Stijn Hendrikse: We should give credit to the early Kalungi days where the team and we as founders had a couple of core values for the company and the main one was leveling up together.

Which did really speak to, and this was mostly still about people leveling up together. But it was all about reaching your potential, right? And how do you constantly ask yourself, ask the people around you, How can, how can I, how can we make this better, right? And if we can, let's do that. Right. And, and it's also in my career, it's been so gratifying to have especially a younger marketing talent, see, see them reach their potential.

And it does nothing to do with age. It can be every part of your career, but it's just such a cool part of what I think you can do now. With all these new tools at our disposal to increase even the amount of how your superpowers can scale and have much more impact than you could ever have alone. And all of that, of course, we'll have a coaching element because when you work with others, when you work through others, when you work for others, when you lead others, finding the right language and the right tools to help others.

Getting better is really what coaching is about. In a way, the main element there is that with a coaching approach, you're not taking over the work, right? You're allowing someone else to reach their potential. You're allowing someone else to get better. So that's really an important part. And I, yeah, I love the fact that you're, you're a professional, you were a professional athlete on Antoine before we sucked you into the world of marketing.

And you bring that aspect to it. I love it. I love it. Sports. are such a great analogy to business when it comes to reaching your potential trying it one more time, trying to do it one level better, right? To increase your performance beyond the point that you yourself would have thought possible, right?

Partly because you get inspiration from others. Sometimes that's a coach in a more formal setting. Sometimes it's a coach who's your peer and that's really what the book is about. And then, yeah, Brian, love to get your questions. With T2D3, we got a lot of feedback from, so we sold. Almost 6, 000 copies. And we got a lot of feedback from a lot of the people who read it that what they mostly liked is how practical it was, how specifically it applied to them, the things they do every day and how it provided some templates and easy things to get started with.

And then also to keep. So in the Level Up book, you'll find the same thing. There's many, there are many books on coaching. Level Up is really focused on coaching a go to market leader. Or if you are the go to market leader to coaching the people in your team. It's partly of course built on our experience with software companies, but it doesn't, I think it does, does apply to other types of business as well, but it's mostly about you're going to market.

And so what you'll see in. In most of the book, there will be extremely practical examples. There will be guides, there will be coaching frameworks that will be explained in a way that's easy to use. We'll have practices, exercises, all those things that you can immediately put to work with your team.

So it gets out of theory very quickly and goes into, okay, what can you do in your first coaching conversation when you coach someone? 

Brian Graf: I think what's interesting too is, is Stijn, you and I have had a similar conversation around AI, and I would almost apply it here as well, where both of your professions as fractional marketing leaders and fractional CMOs, it almost makes really good coaching, not an option, right?

Because as a fractional CMO, you need to Everyone knows that you're fractional, but you still have to make the impact of, I would argue, of a full time employee, right? And the only way to do that is by extending yourself through other people, through other tools, right? And it seems like the, this is such a, an apt framework, I think, for fractionals and, and your Both of your experiences I think lend itself really well to this topic right because you cannot do it all yourself It's impossible right as as a fractional leader And so you do you need to do?

Build the team around you and to build tools around you to make you as effective as possible. So I think it really gives you guys a unique insight into this topic. So I'm excited to hear you guys' knowledge on it diving into it a little bit. Was there anything in particular that you guys have seen at the companies that you've worked with. Around the teams that you've worked with around the coaching systems that were in place that made you want to write this book. What do you think ? Does this solve any gaps there or is it just a summarization of all of the learnings that you've had and the systems that you've put in place.

Antoine Vial: I don't know if it's a misconception or simplification, but in our space often there is this movement trying to simplify complex situations with a one size fits all solution and I think that's, I totally understand what that's what this is coming from. It's appealing, it seems like it's the magic pill.

to solve all, all of your issues, but it's definitely fallacious, right? It's, it's, it's a fallacious rezoning that leads to poor outcomes and leaders, a few leaders and some leaders, unfortunately falling to that rezoning and being like, okay, we're going to do one thing, but there is not one fit one solution that will fit all your problem.

The opposite. There are a lot of great frameworks that are out there. but they are applicable at a certain time at a certain moment. Stijn mentioned earlier situational leadership. It's a great example of a framework that really illustrates the complexity of like who, when, at which time. When do you hold the hand?

Where do you let them go? When do you just like to provide additional guidance and I think that's one gap that the book is really filling. It allows the reader to have access at the theoretical level. It explains the framework, but very fast it explains and it gives tools to implement it in the context, of course, of SaaS.

And, and B2B SaaS, that that's the context in which we work and, and what we have the most experience and what we've seen the most success, but it gives like very clear step by step on, in this situation, you can use this one, this framework because, and you can apply it this way. And I think this is very unique about this book.

It makes this really very. Actionable and I think that's that, that was one of the premises. That's something that as Stijn mentioned in the T2D3 book, the longevity of the concept of T2D3 came through the T2D3 Academy and all of the, all of the materials that came along with the book. And here the idea was to include that right from the get go and make it as actionable as possible.

Of course, Stijn feel free to add on top of this. 

Stijn Hendrikse: When you think of what's the hardest part of leading a go to market organization and building a team and making the team effective, it is the, I call it the big M marketing, right? The positioning, the who's it for, what's it for. And so what often happens is that those things get shortcut a little bit and we jump into running some ads or building some content or sending out some emails, etc.

Doing real interviews with customers, if you've not done that before, doing real data analysis of the market, doing real strategic product research, product marketing research, is hard and it takes a lot of time. And now that you have some of these tools making that a lot easier, you can set the bar for yourself a lot higher to make that really, I call this the signal noise equation, right?

To turn that into a much stronger signal, the big M part of marketing. Do you get the positioning right? Do you know what niche to nail? Do you know what your ICP is? Do you understand your differentiation? And are you able to analyze the competitors and how you're stacking up and what that means for how you talk about your offering and what customers are?

So sort of expecting all that becomes so much easier with all these AI tools that you can now really take accountability for doing that really, really, really well. I like to think of this also in the context of doing an MBA, right? When you think of marketing leaders or go to market leaders doing an MBA, what do you really learn when you go to a one or two or three or four year depending a little bit on what type of program sort of masters in business administration, right?

With some form of marketing or go to market focus, you learn a lot of theory. And you learn a lot of practical application of this through cases, right, and through working with your peers, where if you go through a program like that, I think you've both been exposed to some of those experiences. So you could talk a little bit about your experience there.

What I find is that now, with some of these tools, you have all the theory in your back pocket, right, or on your app, I would say. You don't really need to go do an MBA to find out what's the best pricing elasticity framework. to use and, and how to actually put a survey together to use it and, and how to run it in what situations, right?

All those things that you would learn from a book in an MBA, you don't need to go to the MBA for the book anymore, right? You can, you can get it from your app much faster and applicable to your specific situation, et cetera. Now, the other part that you used to do in the MBA is to actually learn how to use these tools.

So that's, of course, the part that's still very important, but where you would benefit in an MBA to do this with a group of people, right? And to learn together and to have a professor giving you feedback. Now, a lot of them, that's why we also wrote this book, can be brought back to real coaching capabilities of the people around you who may have done this before, right?

And, or even the tools, the chat GPTs, et cetera, the world will give you some of that coaching when you ask for it, right? You can sort of show the new work, right? This is the survey I built for this prize. It was elasticity research. And this is the question I'm trying to answer. Do you feel it would answer that?

You get a lot of coaching from these AI tools. That's not that different from what you would get from an average professor in your MBA, not maybe from the greatest professors. But, and not saying there's no value in spending a couple of months or a year. two years together with a group of people working on some of these things in person.

But a lot of that can now be done with a combination of the tools, the information being so readily available. And then some of the coaching that we describe in the book to help you coach either yourself or coach others. So that's the other part, how do you now maybe not need that MBA as much anymore as you used to, to become an effective marketing, go to market leader.

Back to the AI being part of the role of every professional now, but in our case of the go to market leader, because the tools will do so many of these sort of more transactional parts of your job, you can really hold yourself accountable to a higher level of quality to make everything better, right to constantly test things.

There's no excuse not to have A/B test all the time because creating variations of things… of a piece of content, of an email, of a campaign, of a strategy is actually a lot cheaper these days. It's much cheaper to test it. So that's really where I think the other, you asked for the gap Brian, in addition to what Antoine was talking about, but I guess it also fills that gap of educational need that people have and learning how to do these things in the wild.

And, and the gap to, to really commit to doing things at a high quality level, to commit to doing the strategy, right, the big M part of marketing, right? So you don't have to, because you don't have to do a lot of the more technical work yourself, or it doesn't take so much time. 

Brian Graf: What's interesting too is that, and it's still crazy to me that this is the world that we live in, is that the The success that you're, you will have or not have as a, as a coach, as a marketing leader, right.

A go to market leader and within using, utilizing AI, it seems like it's really boiling down to like, can you ask the right questions to solve your problem? Can you give it the right data and can you have the right. Can you set basically the right bar for an output, right? Or, or have in mind what you need.

And what's interesting, and you made this point early on in the conversation, Stijn, is that it does really apply across both AI and coaching, right? And build, team building, right? Like the same thing. It's the same principles that will build a really high performing team, right? With the right guidance just applied slightly differently across both the tools that you use and the people that you have in your team.

So I think it's a really, really interesting joining of principles there. Let's talk a little bit more specifically, if you don't mind. About the book, talk me through one or two frameworks that you guys think are really useful in the book that listeners or readers will really benefit from, and maybe we can discuss one or two of those.

Stijn Hendrikse: Yeah, I can, I can take a stab at that. I'm telling you five more probably, but like in, in one of the earlier chapters in the book, we compare coaching people and coaching in ai, right? And where are those things very different and where are there a lot of similarities where you can either also use one to do the other better?

But if you think of coaching a professional and you. And you want to challenge them to level up the type of conversations you have when you're a coach, you ask a lot of questions, right? You, you challenge people like, Hey, what's really, what's really holding you back here, right? What's the real challenge here?

What options do you have, right? What would it take for you to go pursue some of those, et cetera. And that's not very different from how you actually, when you do your first prompting in AI, how you also. challenge the AI when it comes back to its first question and you don't like the answer, right?

And you basically say, Hey, this part doesn't really make sense, or this part is a little too vanilla or not detailed enough or too detailed, right? And you can push it a little bit by saying, what makes it hard for you to actually solve for this as an example? So it's about asking the right questions.

And of course, on the AI side, that is a form of. Prompt engineering, right? It's a different way of saying, Hey, we need to make sure we ask the right questions. And then what you have to do with people sometimes is call out BS, right? If there's a little bit of gamemanship going on or people are not challenging themselves.

They're maybe sometimes fooling themselves, right? With either the quality of their work or the things they're focused on. When they do, for example, their OKRs, right? To be really honest with themselves. How much can you really do? Is this really a stretch goal? Is this really an A plus level of quality?

performance versus a B minus, right? You do the same with the AI and there will be different things. You will call out, for example, hallucination, right? When it's really going off track in a certain direction that is really not meaningful, where it's forgetting what you asked it before. And some of these tools are getting better at memorizing what your preferences are, et cetera.

So again, not very different in a sense that you have to call it out on those things. You have to course correct, right? And the longer you wait with that, the worse the outcome will be. You have to encourage people to try harder, right? You have to do crossfit a lot. I still do a little bit of water polo.

Not too much, but I used to a lot. It's a team sport, water polo. So you cannot, if you're the one like not playing defense, not be able to swim back hard enough to get back on your half of the pool when you lose the ball. It's not going to be great, right? called out on that, you're going to be asked to try harder by your teammates.

You do the same in CrossFit, right? You're basically, whether it's an MRAP or you go, hey, let's get one more rep in, or it's more of a time bound performance, right? Can you do this a little bit faster? The same with the AI, right? How do you get them to constantly do better, right? And improve the answer you get, improve the thing that they wrote, right?

And challenge it. When we teach people new skills, right? We teach AI new things with the data we feed it, right? When I do Positioning and messaging with AI, and I've done this now for about a year. It is so interesting when you, I used to just feed it things like a persona and an ICP. And then I started to add things like the value prop.

And then I started to add the brand voice as the input, right? Make the signal stronger and stronger. Now I'm using the LinkedIn profiles of my audience. And now I found this other tool, which is basically using AI to tell you a little bit about the profile, the personality profile of the person you're communicating with.

And now, okay, if you have someone who's like red in the, on DISC, I think the D who wants you to be brave and to be gone, right? You, you send a different type of email than someone who's blue, right? Who wants to see data, right? And wants to see the facts or someone who's green, which is about, Hey, make sure, show me you care, right?

In the. First part of the email, instead of jumping into numbers right away, right? And, or the, the yellow profile on the desk, right? Which is all about let's collaborate, but let's brainstorm. Let's explore options. Let's not close too many doors. Right? So the type of email you would write is very different.

So when I think of training. a person or train the AI, whether it's teaching people in your team, new skills or new frameworks or et cetera, or teaching the AI with this data on how to make the email even more relevant. I think there's a lot of really good parallels. So. The last thing in the framework that I'm walking you through, how do you coach a professional versus how you coach an AI, that's in the early parts of the book if you're interested, the details.

The last one is how do you actually provide feedback, right? As humans, there's a whole art to how you provide feedback, right? There's the, what is called the hamburgers, the sandwich model or something like that. Say something good before you say something where people can improve, right? For the AI, of course, that's not really that necessary.

But what you do need is the right type of feedback that the AI can get better off. Right? And there's many forms. There's also reinforced human feedback, right? Where you have an, have an AI trained by. Giving it two or three outcomes and letting people almost vote on which one is better. There's different ways of creating feedback, but you also need to give it feedback.

And then finally, you constantly ask when you work with people, you ask things like, why is this important? Right? What's really relevant here? How are you doing this? That makes it special, right? It’s really the way you're contributing value, and that's where the AI really goes back to that. How do you distinguish the signals from the noise of whatever you get from the AI, right?

Whenever you guys have worked with AI tools, one of the challenges is it generates a lot of new content, right? There's a lot of new things getting back, and a lot of that will be duplicative as well, right? So how do you, how do you then make sure that you Distinguish the signals from the noise, which is honestly not very different from when you're coaching a human and you ask why.

It's very, so there's all these parallels and that's one of the frameworks that the book explores, Brian. How, when you coach people versus when you coach tools or AI to do work with you and for you, how you, how some of those things are parallel and some of the things are very different.

Antoine, what do you think? What's a helpful framework? 

Antoine Vial: Yeah, I'll, I'll add to that on the providing feedback, you mentioned a little bit, the, uh, the DISC framework, but really trying to understand personality, being able to really use these frameworks to know how to behave in certain situations.

You also one, one big framework that we discuss is the MBTI from Caldron, and it gives you about 16, if I'm not wrong, it's about 16 different personality types. This is important at the human level. Of course, there is a difference between how you would coach the, the, the AI or the tools and how you would coach people.

And this is super important because in the way you approach your coaching and the way you, you try to help your team level up to like go full circle and even use the title of the book, it's super important, right? It's super important because the human element is really central to that coaching element.

And with AI, with the thing that we talked about for the entirety of this chat, there is definitely access to knowledge at a scale that never existed before. So you, you use the analogy of the MBA and, and, and, you know getting access to knowledge now has democratized the way the internet democratized access to the information.

But there is still, in my opinion, that gives and that's what we, what we talk about in the book as well, that just like shows that AI gives scale and therefore we need to coach the teams and the team members to use AI to be more productive, do more with less, but to focus on value and delivering that value more than ever.

It's an irreversible shift that really is happening. If not, it has already happened. The measure of success by volume has completely disappeared. This has, it's not relevant. We can use a very simple example in our. In our industry, but as yours, how many calls have you made or how many emails have you sent?

This becomes completely irrelevant because the AI can do it at scale infinitely. Now it's how can you teach and help and coach and empower your team to do more? How many blogs do you write is not the question, right? How can you write a blog that would rank or how would you use the tool?

And, and these are really, we provide a few deep dives on how to provide the feedback, how. how to use the tools and how to really focus on that value element which has always been important, but more than ever. And, and these are, of course, explained throughout all of the chapters, but there is an entire chapter just on the frameworks with very usable elements.

And it's about, yeah, it's about 30 plus frameworks in there. So if you're interested of course. You'll have to get the book, but this is, I think, one really important element to discussion in the book. 

Stijn Hendrikse: We've, we've created a couple of new frameworks, like how this coaching and AI and how do those overlap and are they different?

There's a couple of frameworks we've developed ourselves around, for example, how do you create more time, right? It's called the development matrix that some of the readers may know. I've introduced it a little bit outside the book already. In the last couple of years, and there's a couple other new frameworks in there, but we also try to incorporate every like, for example, I think Antoine mentioned Myers Briggs or DISC or situational leadership.

We talked about all these existing frameworks and gave you an overview of like five or six of them in the book run just about personality types, right? And how that influences how you manage someone, how you communicate with people. There's a bunch of them around leadership, right?

There's a bunch of them around conflict management, around things like the drama triangle, things like. And then a whole bunch of frames that are more about go to market specific coaching, right? How do you actually coach someone who's in charge of marketing or sales in an organization?

And then simple things like how do you set goals, right? Or OKRs. So we try to touch on a lot of these very practical frameworks and give them the right context. So when to use which. And then fill them with a lot of the content that we know to be helpful for our type of audience, which is to go to market leader.

Brian Graf: Yeah, I think it's super interesting. I think, well, I know we're, we're probably at about time, but maybe I can ask you one more question. And, and this may fly in the face of the book a bit, but I want to at least try, right? Like this too, to your point, right? There's no, there's no advice that's one size fits all, but for listeners or leaders who are out there who are.

Who want to get better, who want to start improving, but just don't know where to start. What would your recommendation be? Like, where should they focus first? Aside from obviously reading the book. 

Stijn Hendrikse: When I coach a new person, I usually work with the go to market leader, CEO, founder of a software company. I have two lists of five things that I do.

One is at the strategic level and the other list is at the technical level. And, and the first one is It's very much about understanding where they are with leading their, their business, leading their company. And so the five things are: are you a real SaaS business? And are you focused on the right things that a SaaS business should focus on?

Which basically comes down to retaining your customers first should be your first priority. Then driving the revenue expansion and then finding new customers right in that sequence. SaaS companies, they end up sometimes in a little bit of a confused state of mind where they're just adding new customers and they're not necessarily paying attention to the customers that are walking out the door in the back.

So that's very strategic, right? Of course, there's tactical implementation consequences, but there's the first one out of the five things that I look for, that I coach the, the CEO for how they're thinking about, are they aware of that? Are they on top of that? Right? Then what's the ratio between the average contract value, the size of their customers, and the cost of acquiring those customers, the ACV CAT ratio?

And if that is in, is comp, Patent with the go-to market model that they're using, right? Whether you think of product led growth, marketing led growth, sales led growth, because there's really, there's almost, there's laws of physics that when your deal size is too small, you cannot really afford to do sales led growth.

Right? So, so getting, that's my second assessment and coaching them on asking those critical questions to themselves, to their team. Right. Is your go-to-market medal model. compatible with the type of clients you're servicing, with the type of solution you're selling to them. Then the third one is, do you really understand partly back to some of the earlier things we talked about, what are the big M marketing questions for your company, right?

What's it for, who's it for? Is your positioning helpful, right? Are you able to answer that question? Why do customers really need this and why is that really important to them? Of course, that is a question that CEOs. and founders need to be able to answer, but also to go to market leader. The fourth one is Are they comfortable?

Because usually the teams that I coach are smaller companies, maybe a couple of hundred people at most, right, under a hundred million in revenue. Are they able to focus? Are they allowing themselves to make the hard decisions to close a bunch of doors, to not go after the full market, right, but really nailing a niche, going after a part of the market where they can win, where they can be different and defend that differentiation.

So that's number four. And then number five, I go back to more of the teams. And again, this is still my strategic list, right? This is all very strategic for me. Like, do you have the right people in the right seats, right? Is the team executing with the right level of urgency? Do they have the right level of professionalism, right?

That sort of aligns with what you want your company brand to be and your company's reputation. Is there the amount of ownership and ownership of things like quality? And again, urgency. So I do this, this type of coaching in these five, five areas of a new marketing leader, go to market leader or CEO when I coach them.

And then I go to the more technical side. Are there OKRs in place or some other form of quarterly rhythm that tells me, does everybody know what their priorities are? Are they executing on those? Is it clear amongst people what they, what each other does, right? So they can work together very effectively.

There's no duplication of work. Things don't fall between the cracks, right? Is it clear who's responsible for churn, for example, on the go to market team? And then I try to translate that into more of a weekly. That's how I drive urgency, right? A weekly tracker of KPIs with a bowler or something like that to turn these quarterly OKRs into what is every week the most important thing to look for to make sure you get that level of translation to daily execution.

Then I like to go into And all these, of course, in a coaching session, right? I ask the CEO these questions. I ask the market leader these questions. I like to go into funnel data quality, right? Quality of attribution, quality of the, and when I ask, how many leads did you get in last week, last yesterday, last month?

Can they actually answer that question with a number instead of a sentence or a paragraph or a bunch of clicks in their CRM system? Then I go to, their forecasting ability is relatively good, right? Are they, if you ask the team what do you think you'll sell next week, next month, next quarter?

How good are they at actually predicting that with a certain level of accuracy again, without a bunch of clicks in the CRM system. And then the final one, the most favorite one for me in the last couple of months, but are they using enough AI tools in all the people on the team, because every profession I think needs to use these tools.

If you're not, it's like you're not using a laptop or a computer to do your job. And I try to get some questions on each of these five more technical questions. So the state of technical execution, right? So I ask first of these five. More strategic areas and then these five more technical areas to get a sense of where I also apply my next coaching energy, right?

Which of these 10 is going to have the most impact? Where do my coachees have the most need or most interest to take our coaching journey? But these are the 10 topics, Brian, five for tactical, five for strategic topics. 

Brian Graf: Awesome. Super comprehensive. Antoine, anything to add? 

Antoine Vial: I think this was super comprehensive and definitely you know, I was coached by Stijn.

So I use a lot of Stijn's frameworks. So I will not go more in depth, but here, of course, defining responsibilities, aligning go to market strategy and analysis on right people, right seat, all of these, something that is probably the first place that go to market leaders would want to look at, but like to wrap up this this conversation and try to.

talk about what the objective of this book is and if hopefully there is a long lasting impact on the readers from this book. I think there is at the moment, this, this real movement that maybe happened five years ago, maybe a little more in, in, in the e-commerce space with the B2B SaaS space, with a lot of founder led growth motions and like a lot of you know, almost like.

A shift towards creating community and I see a lot of ambiguity into how this community or the word community is defined. I think it's more, it's more community and audience. An audience is meant to be monetized, which is totally fine. The concept of SaaS, it's really important. If you're trying to build an audience, which is often what you're trying to do here to try to sell more to the right people, to the right ideal customer profile.

You have almost this like creation or people worship the tool or people worship the person that embodies this tool. And when that person disappears, the audience disappears as a leader. And as a go to market leader, I think what if there's one thing that is really the long lasting objective, this concept of servant leader and servant leadership, which is also discussed in the book is trying to.

Really start a movement, build a community, not an audience. You can use that community and monetize it, that's totally fine. But the initial intention is more to try to solve a real problem, solve something that will be long lasting. And more importantly, if you're not part of it as the leader, as the person that ignited that fire, once you remove yourself, the movement keeps on going.

And this is really what creating or building a community is. And I think that, that concept of servant leader and trying to do things trying to solve real problems is really hopefully the one you know, the bottle that I will throw in the sea. And hopefully someone will get the message after reading the book.

That's my take on it. 

Brian Graf: Let's wrap. this, but I guess, let me ask you one more question before we do. What's your guys launch plan for the book? Where are you hoping listeners or readers can find it? And when is it going to be available? 

Stijn Hendrikse: Antoine is our launch lead. He deserved all the credits for his.

So much work into this. So Antoine, I'm not going to speak on this one. 

Antoine Vial: Yeah. So everyone can sign up for an early bird program currently available. You'll receive a weekly newsletter with some of the frameworks that are discussed. One big initiative from this book is trying to build that community that we're just talking about and try to really support these growing leaders – arming them, enabling them to embrace AI and embrace all of the concepts that we discuss in the book.

And so we'll have this weekly newsletter. And we'll, we'll give a really usable tool through that and early access probably mid May on the book about mid May. So there is a ramp up period, but that's the launch plan as it stands right now. We hope to get a lot of feedback on these early agenda and frameworks that we discuss and, and, and make sure that they are as actionable as possible.

And then of course we'll release the book to everyone, but that's where we stand at the moment. 

Brian Graf: Is there a page people can go to or should we just wait bated breath for your LinkedIn post to announce and then they can find it there? 

Antoine Vial: We, we have a page we'll, we'll add the link in the description for this, yeah, in the show notes.

And yeah, absolutely. There's a link to sign up and everything will be hosted under the T2D3 website. It'll be a dedicated space, but the idea is to add a new space and make sure that all of the level of content fits under there. 

Brian Graf: Well, perfect. Thank you both so much for your time. Super excited to get my hands on it.

Antoine Vial: Thank you, Brian.

Brian Graf: Thank you to Adriano Valerio for producing this episode and the Kalungi team for helping us make this whole thing work.

And of course you for choosing to spend your time with us. As a reminder all the links we mentioned in this episode can be found in the show notes 

If you want to submit or vote on a question you'd like us to answer, you can do that at Kalungi.com/Podcast every time we record you take one of the top three topics and jam on it. 

Thanks again.

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