Strategy & Planning

BSMS 57 - Making changes as a new marketing leader


 
 
Congratulations, you’re the new CMO for a B2B SaaS company! What do you do first?

Learn the ins and outs of “making moves” as a new marketing leader: how fast to move and how to tackle all the big and urgent issues you'll face early on. It’s vital to avoid pitfalls and maximize your impact in the short term while building for the medium and long term too.

Getting hired as marketing leader at a software company – whether fractional or full-time – means you are probably inheriting a strategy already in play… for better or for worse. It can be tempting to make big changes quickly, to capitalize on your momentum when you're new, but it can be dangerous if you don't take precautions and follow the right implementation steps.

As a brand new leader in the company, you will learn how to:
• Identify which strategy is the right strategy
• How to set initial OKRs
• Make changes that will be effective both in speed and execution 
• How to identify underperforming areas and focus on strengths
• How to delineate marketing problems from people problems, so the right issues get corrected 
• The most important marketing metrics to identify first
 
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:
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:
ABOUT B2B SAAS MARKETING SNACKS
Since 2020, The B2B SaaS Marketing Snacks Podcast has offered software company founders, investors and leadership a fresh source of insights into building a complete and efficient engine for growth.

Meet our Marketing Snacks Podcast Hosts: 
  • Stijn Hendrikse: Author of T2D3 Masterclass & Book, Founder of Kalungi
    As a serial entrepreneur and marketing leader, Stijn has contributed to the success of 20+ startups as a C-level executive, including Chief Revenue Officer of Acumatica, CEO of MightyCall, a SaaS contact center solution, and leading the initial global Go-to-Market for Atera, a B2B SaaS Unicorn. Before focusing on startups, Stijn led global SMB Marketing and B2B Product Marketing for Microsoft’s Office platform.

  • Brian Graf: CEO of Kalungi
    As CEO of Kalungi, Brian provides high-level strategy, tactical execution, and business leadership expertise to drive long-term growth for B2B SaaS. Brian has successfully led clients in all aspects of marketing growth, from positioning and messaging to event support, product announcements, and channel-spend optimizations, generating qualified leads and brand awareness for clients while prioritizing ROI. Before Kalungi, Brian worked in television advertising, specializing in business intelligence and campaign optimization, and earned his MBA at the University of Washington's Foster School of Business with a focus in finance and marketing.
Visit Kalungi.com to learn more about growing your B2B SaaS company.
 
 
 

Episode Transcript:

Brian Graf: Hi there, and welcome to episode 57 of B2B SaaS Marketing Snacks. I'm Brian Graf, I'm the CEO of Kalungi, and today I'm here with Kalungi’s co founder, Stijn Hendrikse, who's a serial SaaS marketing executive and ex Microsoft product marketing leader. I'll keep this intro relatively brief because my opening question introduces the topic, but today, Stijn and I discuss the ins and outs of of making changes as a new marketing leader, how fast to move, and how to tackle some of the big and urgent issues you'll face early on while avoiding pitfalls and maximizing impact.

Let's get into it.

Thanks again for being with me, Stijn. We got a good topic today. This one is Hopefully near and dear to a lot of marketing leaders' hearts, but also just fractional executives as a whole. And that is, you know, as you're coming into a new company, whether again, whether you're a fractional or you just got hired, there's often a strategy in play that may or may not be the most effective one to use.

And so how can you, as a brand new person in the company, identify whether that strategy is the right strategy, and then make a change that will be effective both in its speed and its execution. Often, it can be tempting to make a big change quickly, right, because you have that momentum when you're new, but it can also be dangerous if you don't take the right precautions before doing it, and follow the right implementation steps.

So, you know, there's no one better to ask than you, Stijn, all the experience that you have, but I thought it'd be a great topic for us to dive into today. So, I guess just to start off, talk us through, I don't know, some scenarios that you've been in where You know, you had to step in where things may have, may not have been going the way that they, they should have in a company and kind of what the, what the process was that you took to identify and triage and take the next step.

Stijn Hendrickse: Thank you, Brian. Yeah, it's very tempting when you come in and you're, especially when you're being introduced as this expert who knows everything to one of them. Satisfy that, that wish, right? Let me just say a couple of really smart things and, and immediately throw solutions at a problem that I don't, may not even understand yet.

Right. And so making sure that you let curiosity do the talking is very critical. I think early in, which means then most of your words, your sentences, your paragraphs should end in a question mark. So that's, I think you and I can talk about today. What are those questions? Right. And if you only get. Four or five questions before you have to kinda make up your assessment, do the triage, if you will.

Now, what do you think those questions should be? Mm-Hmm, , I also have fallen into the trap of wanting to provide a marketing solution or a solution that is closer to where I think my expertise lies or my experience or why I am being brought in. And then maybe not always feeling comfortable to say, well, you, maybe you don't have a marketing problem.

You have a very different problem. The challenge, of course, when you're a consultant, when you're an external, like a hired gun, is that 99 percent of the time when someone externally gets brought in, there's also a people problem, right? Maybe there's people who don't get along, or there are maybe some midshires, or there's some internal struggles with decision making.

Although maybe people get along on the surface, they don't really have the same opinion on the business strategy. This could even be the case when you have multiple founders, you know? So getting down to What's the real root cause before you start offering solutions? I think it's critical. So yeah, do you want to talk about a couple of the questions you would typically ask Ryan?

I have a couple I could share. 

Brian Graf: Yeah, yeah, let's dive into it. Take us through one or two of the questions that you typically ask when you first get in to understand the lay of the land. 

Stijn Hendrickse: I love to ask, it sounds very technical, but there's a lot behind this. What are your marketing OKRs, Objectives and Key Results?

Many companies don't use OKRs, right? So that's already, but that's an answer, right? And, and it tells you a little bit about how mature the business planning is, how they kind of, and the different roles and different teams use tools like OKRs to communicate. Roles of responsibilities, how much clarity there is around those who does what, basically.

So that's my first question. And, and the answer there will maybe take me in certain different directions. I would love to see if there's a marketing plan. I mean, the worst thing you can do is assume they don't have a marketing plan or there is no budget or, and that would be a really big mistake if there is actually a lot of.

Oh, here it is. Someone in the team has actually spent time on that. Right. Is there actually a person who's spending time on marketing, has a marketing plan, has maybe a budget that maybe have, have actually spent money on things? You: Because concluding that the brand looks good or not, you'll, you'll bring that message with a different tone if you know whether they spent any time on that or not, right?

So, I'd like to ask some of those before. Do you have OKRs? If you do, of course, I'd like to know what they are and what kind of typical metrics are that people are already looking at. And then is there a plan? And is that plan relatively up to date? Do you have a budget? And then if there's a budget, if there's a marketing budget, and this could include just discretionary dollars or also maybe the team and the people in the team, then I love to know kind of how they've allocated those resources, right?

Where are certain dollars going? Where's the time of certain people going? And do you kind of have a reason why you're doing it like that? That's where I would start. I wouldn't start with, which is maybe a little But some people would find a little more obvious like, oh, what's your ICP? And, and what's your positioning?

And, and of course you want answers to those questions as well. But then you're, you're running, you're falling in the trap that you're probably already making assumptions that the ICP isn't good or the positioning isn't great. And you're going to provide your opinion about those, etc. But I like to first maybe get Some of these other questions out of the way, so you get a sense of, hey, how many people, how many times, which time is actually being put into this function today?

Brian Graf: Yeah, I think, especially if you start to jump into ICP positioning and messaging, you're almost jumping into the operations a little too early, right? And you're just, you're, You're more onboarding yourself, I think, and, and tweaking the strategy than judging if the strategy is the right one. I really like this sequence of questions there in understanding what the goals are, what the plan is and what the budget is.

And I think that depending on the company that you go into or that you're brand new at, it can be very telling. If there is a discrepancy in the goals that the company is setting, the plan that they've created, and then how they're spending their money, for instance, if the leadership team really wants an organic growth strategy, right, and really want, want that long term growth, but they're spending 90 percent of their budget on paid events, right, then that is a very telling it's a very telling stat, right, and that can, I've seen that a lot.

A similar thing happened in marketing departments in the past. And it can be a, it can be a big friction point and, and cause them not to be able to produce the results that they would want to. So that's a fantastic way to jump in. 

Stijn Hendrickse: Yeah. And then, yeah, to your point, right? Show me where you spent your money, where you spent your time.

That's also part of the budget and that's really what your priorities are, right? 

Brian Graf: Exactly. Yeah. I think at the end of the day, where the money is spent is where the rubber meets the road, right? And that's where, where. The company is really investing in regardless of what the plan is. Yeah, I think that's, I think that's fantastic.

So, you know, the marketing plan and you know, the budget, how do you equate that to results or start to link that into are we going in the right direction? Are we making enough traction? 

Stijn Hendrickse: Yeah, when you know kind of the state of the team and where they spend their time etc Now it's important to kind of match that to the opportunity and the size of the market and how you're Capturing that opportunity.

So I like to get a little bit more acquainted with the environment that we're playing in. Right. So asking questions on who are your competitors and like, where are you winning? When are you losing? Why are you winning? Why are you losing? Tell me quickly, is this category mature or not? Right. Which of course will lead to a very different expectation that I would have from the type of marketing that is needed, right?

If you're in a very young category, you need a lot of top of funnel work, a lot of education of the market, very different from a. That demand generation, very different from a mature market, where it's more about demand capture. I mean, you'll quickly go into how your inbound performing versus the competition, right?

Because in an inbound demand capture environment, it's more about outrunning the other guys or gals. And we're in a more early stage market that's not really defined yet. It's much more about demand generation, which is often a more question of, do you have a podcast? Is your founder becoming how you are basically trying to dominate the market early on through your thought leader?

It's very different. So I like to understand a little bit what that environment looks like, the category that they're in. And asking who's your competition and what does that competition look like as a good proxy for that. And then I also would love to kind of, after that quickly go into, so if you have certain investments that you're doing in certain channels, right, what's the, what's the win rate by channel, right?

How do you, how do you look at your different lead sources? You ideally want to work your way back through the funnel, right? I love to start with, Hey, who are the last 10 customers that you want? And then. Where did those wins convert from? What type of opportunities, right? How fast did those go through the funnel?

What leads did those come from, right? And of course, while you do it, you try to kind of fill out your own version of a small spreadsheet. You're not asking them yet to give you a huge dashboard or any, you can do that as well. Especially if they already offered it, that's absolutely useful information.

That is nothing wrong with, in a more of a conversational style, sort of say, Hey, where did your last 10 customers come from? And kind of work your way back through the funnel to get all the way through, of course, what channels are performing for you and why. But doing that more of a, in sort of a conversation, working your way back, tells you also a lot about how marketing and sales are working together.

That's kind of the quality of the convert. There's three functions that lead to revenue growth, right? It's the speed of the funnel, the size of the funnel, and the quality of the funnel, or the conversion rate. So, it's those three things that you quickly, kind of get a sense of when you ask those questions.

Brian Graf: Yeah, I think that's a great idea. I mean, especially the early conversations, just to anecdotally get a lay of the land through the sales and the leadership team is such a shortcut compared to a lot of the trials that. Marketers or or sales people even will face it when getting in the door and just trying to understand the mess of data that can be there.

I, when I was writing notes for this, I was taking a much more technical route, which I think is still good, but I think you can get 60 percent of the way there with your conversation. Right. You do need to, you need to be able to understand where leads are coming from generally, right. Before you start making big decisions in how you adjust the leads.

The mix of, of your marketing, right? And what channels you focus on and everything like that. 

Stijn Hendrickse: Well, I'm thinking about our conversation today for the listeners. I said, what do you do, what can you do in a one hour conversation? Right. Let's say we're not having three days to do a full audit of every part of the marketing function.

You have to have these types of conversations. And it also gives you a sense of your, if you're really talking with the marketing leader or someone who's leaving to go to market. How much they know their numbers, right? You can't grow what you don't know. So, and then you have to do it more in these types of conversation styles, but you can get a lot of, like, for example, when you've asked a question about the competition and you ask the question about where did your last 10 wins come from?

Brian Graf: Yeah. It's 

Stijn Hendrickse: also pretty easy to follow that up with like, why do you win and why do you lose? Right. And now you, You're getting pretty quickly to is your content good, you know, do you have the right value prop? Is there a good set of differentiators that you're using in the way you win, right? Or are you just winning by chance and And it's, it's wonderful how much of that you can get out of the single conversation without maybe getting someone to do two days of spreadsheet work that gets you maybe a number that's 3-4 percent more accurate, but not necessarily much more insightful. 

Brian Graf: I think of one of the things that has helped me, I guess, early, early, early on in engagements as well. And it might be fairly obvious, but just to make sure that it's covered is how effective marketing has been in achieving the company's goals, right?

Like how big is the gap between what marketing has been able to produce to date to what the company actually needs. And I think to me that, that it gives me a, I guess the appropriate sense of urgency and some of the changes that need to be made. If it's just optimizations, optimizing something that's mostly there or whether it's something a pure directional change that needs to happen pretty quickly.

It's very useful to know. 

Stijn Hendrickse: There's also, especially when you want to keep the conversation to a real company, you can ask a couple of things in an essay. Like an email before the meeting, right? Hey, what's your ACV? What's your CAC? You know, computer, just, just see if we, again, make it a point that there's no homework to be done.

Other than if you know the number, tell me, but you don't have to go do a bunch of engineering to come up with it. 

Brian Graf: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. What about looking at the different channel types that a company's using and understanding their effectiveness? And if, you know, if they're worth keeping or doubling.

Keeping and doubling down on, or maybe reducing investment in, how do you go about that? 

Stijn Hendrickse: Yeah, what's I think really important when you start to go down more technical, tactical assessment of what's working, what's not, like is, is this channel performing better than the other channel? It is so easy to make a marketing tactic fail by not, you know, doing it long enough or not doing the foundation well, right?

You're not going to get Google ads to perform if you don't have a good value proposition, you don't have a good A B testing tool, you're not spending time nurturing any of those clicks if they're not ready to buy, right? But they were interested, right? So, get a good sense before you judge the channel and its face, right?

Let's say the face judgment would be what if you spend on a channel and how many, well, how many customers came out, right? Let's say it's a bad number. If it's a bad number for account based marketing, for example, or for PPC, but you also find out that they maybe gave account based marketing only like two months of time to, to perform, then you know that that's not really important.

interesting data point. Account based marketing, assuming that you're going after prospects who are not necessarily even problem aware, that are very early in their journey, who may not have considered looking at solutions like yours at all until they got an email from you or, or some form of a trigger that made them think about this.

And now they said, well, maybe that's worth considering. And then maybe they're one, two months into the journey. of starting to, to wait almost for the problem to be big enough for them to become real prospects. And now you're pulling the plug on your ABM campaign because you want to perform just as fast as you would with an inbound channel where of course people are much more much closer to the bottom of the funnel where they're interested, where they're, where We're looking for a solution.

So I would like to know before I say, Hey, this channel is performing better than the other, how much time was spent on each and what parts of the execution I feel were done well, versus maybe just, you know, if you, if you run a bunch of Google ads. But you let everything on the auto automatic bidding. And you, you, you had a Fiverr person create some display ads that you didn't really think much about.

And the messaging was not grounded in really what's your value prop and what, what is, what are the things that only we do and who are the personas that we're going after. Then of course, yeah, the channel is going to perform poorly, but. For very good reasons.

Brian Graf: Yeah. How do you look at, you know, you've gotten the goals, you've gotten the, the are we meeting revenue targets, right. And you have an idea of where things are starting to come from. You have the budget, right now. Let's start, let's dig a little bit deeper. Right. And look at. The mix that marketing is using, the types of channels that they're using.

How do you, how do you understand if, if the go to market approach, I guess, is working from a more tactical level? 

Stijn Hendrickse: Yeah, that's a good question. I think this is where you will really bring your expertise to bear, right? If you look at a pay per click or some of these types of inbound channels, even organic.

There's going to be a limited inventory, right? Inventory meaning how many clicks are there to buy, right? And so the absolute numbers and whether, you know, the trend is going in the right direction, they don't tell you much unless you have some of those references, right? How big is this market? How many competitors are bidding on the same things, right?

How effectively are you winning those bets at a competitive price or at a price that actually supports your ROI goals? So that's for inbound channels, I think, critical to figure out here. How big are these channels? What's the side with the pie and then are we getting our kind of the slice that we think is the right slice for us.

And then when you're thinking of more demand generation, a podcast or maybe a really innovative series of webinars that you're running, where you're trying to maybe have a completely new Conversation with the market, et cetera. I would look at different things. I would look at more of kind of, is things, are things looking, are they going up, right?

Are we getting more followers? Are we getting more listeners? Are we getting more engagement? Is there something here, right? So it's just a very different way of looking at it. But what do you think, Brian? You wrote some things down before we started this conversation. 

Brian Graf: I was the person who asked the question, but it's a tricky question.

I think what you really need to take a step back and look at before, before really diving into the channels is What are the channels jobs, right? What are each one of the channels jobs, but also what is marketing's job, right? Like according to the different stages of each company, according to the size, the maturity, the growth rate, marketing has a very different job.

As you were saying, you know, if it's a, if we're in a pre launch situation or an immature market, right? Marketing's job is about demand generation and grabbing attention and holding the conversation versus in a more mature market. We're about demand capture, right? And niching down and carving out. And those are very different strategies and will look very different when you, when it comes to channels that are being used, I think also once you kind of understand that it's really important to understand what each channel's job is as well, right?

A podcast won't necessarily be. You can't really expect that to be directly attributable to a ton of sales, but it will fuel the results that you get from organic, from content, from everything, right? And if you were to look at it from purely an quote unquote ROI perspective, right? It would be easy to look at something like that or, or even ABM for instance, and cut it because it's not producing MQLs, right?

But, if you were to look closely and know the intricacies of the marketing system, you would know that it's the backbone of, of your marketing strategy, right? So it's really important to understand the job of each channel and the interdependencies that each one has. I guess I'll, I'll round it out.

I think, you know, with each channel, understanding the job, you then can understand kind of mini funnels for each channel to understand performance, right? Whether it's volume or efficiency, you know, price per click price per MQL. Things like that, that can really under, those are the metrics that I would start to look at in terms of actual performance per channel.

But it is really important to kind of get that lay of the land before you start making those decisions. And then, again, depending on the role of marketing, it is really important to have an eye on marketing's ROI as a whole, right? Because if you are in a pure investment mode, then great. You can, you can kind of spend it, to gain market share.

But after a while, marketing has to start being positive, right? Cause it's a, it's a revenue generating function. And so you as the marketing leader really have to keep an eye on that. As you're, as you're building out and making these changes to, to make sure that you're moving that needle in the right direction, or at least have a solid plan to move it in the right direction.

Stijn Hendrickse: Yeah, when you don't win because something doesn't convert in a certain channel, then you should learn something from it, right? So I almost also want to, when I assess how our channel is doing, I look first, of course, at what's the output, how's the funnel growing. And the second is, what did we learn from it?

And if we didn't do either of those, then it definitely failed. That's a problem, yeah. 

Brian Graf: I think it's also, you know, going back to the, what is the job of marketing in each channel, right? I think it's important to align yourself with, I was talking about ROI, but align yourself with your, you know, your CEO or, you know, For your executives in terms of what the actual goal is, right?

Some executives will really want MQL. Some will really want a pipeline. Some will say that they want MQLs, but what they mean is pipeline, right? And so understanding, understanding what the, what the number is, right? We always try to get a numerical target that we're going for, but. And how, how marketing is contributing to that is really critical while you're, while you're starting to, to understand landscapes like this.

Stijn Hendrickse: Maybe shifting gears a little bit. You also want to talk about marketing tech stack and team structure and roles, because those are things you would love to learn about quickly, of course. Like what on the team, what type of tools are you using? What type of tools maybe have you committed to? Did you buy Zoom info and have Prepared it for a year, things like that.

Brian Graf: Yeah. Well, yeah. And going back to the budget, right. Is that kind of where the, where, like we said, the, the rubber meets the road for the strategy. Right. And so if you've locked yourself into a, if you come in as a marketing leader and the, the marketing budget has already been spent on 15 events, right.

You, yeah, you can You can have all the ideas in the world, but you kind of have to commit to that strategy and at least make the most of it while making some incremental changes, so that's a really important thing, right to, to have an idea of, but also, right, like what roles were hired for versus what roles And I was, when I was prepping for this, I was thinking like, you'd want to build the strategy based on this audit that you do have all these channels and, and what you think the right go to market strategy is given the maturity and the ACV and everything.

And then you want to take, take a look at the positions within the marketing team and. And build those out, right? And so you have to do that mental exercise and then compare it to what's on the budget today. We may have to make some tough choices to make sure that the right people are in the right seats to fulfill that.

But to your point, right? The tech stack is absolutely another place that is worth it. Looking at some of these contracts are year long, right? And you can get locked into software that you may or may not need. And it's very easy with, especially with subscriptions for software to kind of fall under the radar and, and pile up your expenses in a way that isn't really that fruitful for your strategy.

Another area, I guess, as well, just to round out the budget is the discretionary spend on the other hand is a very liquid piece of your budget. And it's pretty. to reallocate that according to what you're seeing when you're doing this audit. So that's a really nice area where you can either, you can either bring it down to, to hire a new person, right.

And bring some external-like capability onto your team. Or you can, honestly, as you, As you make changes to the team reinvest that in pay to give yourself a little boost if you need. 

Stijn Hendrickse: One other on the tech stack and so related to both. My favorite question always when I kind of want to get to know a team quickly and what they focus on and where they spend their time is, Hey, how many leads came in yesterday?

And then I hope, which never happens before, but I hope I get an answer that's actually a numerical value. Instead of a long explanation or someone pulling up a laptop and starting to share a screen to show me a HubSpot dashboard. No, because ideally people know what someone does now. If the numbers are really the most important KPI that they're looking to influence, they should know, right?

Just like a nurse in the ER who hands over her shift to the next person knows how many people were brought in in the last 

Brian Graf: And this is the importance of, going back to one of your first comments, the importance of OKRs, right? You really, to be successful, you want a team that Has a clear line of sight on what goal they're pushing for and is proactively driving towards that goal Not you as the leader trying to drag the team, you know in a direction and they're just happy to check boxes every day You need you need a team especially in marketing where it is performance based.

You need a team that's really driving things for you 

Stijn Hendrickse: And then a follow up on how many leads did you get last night and how are you nurturing them? The leads that either came in or the things that didn't convert, right? Do you have any nurturing in place? Because that's another so, such low hanging fruit often if it's not the case or it's not done very well.

And you're looking as a CMO, you're looking to have impact in what I call the big M marketing topics, like ISP and the positioning done correctly, etc. But you also need some quick wins. And nurture could be one of them, right? Or fixing a couple of things on the content side, like the website, asking, Hey, who's the website really for?

Is it really for? 

Brian Graf: Yep. 

Stijn Hendrickse: the internal audience, who cares about, you know, the colors on the page, or is it really for a certain type of audience, like people who are looking to get product information, or people who are looking to see if you have customers that look like them. Right. And is the website catering to that.

Those could yield some very, very quick wins. Yeah. Last one, and I think we've spent a lot of time on this topic already, but Do you have any testimonials? Who are your customers and your quotes that are saying, hey, you're the best thing that ever happened to us? And if you don't, why? Right? And how easy is that to fix?

Brian Graf: Yeah, I think, well, just one last thing before we switch. I think a follow up question to to your how many leads did we get this week is how have those how many of those have turned into opportunities how many of those turned into customers because plenty of marketers will like to hang their hat on the mql number and it's very important right but if they don't convert into you know an opportunity or revenue then it doesn't really doesn't really matter right and i think forcing the team to To really focus on those down funnel metrics, even just as indicators of success or quality, right.

It's really important.

One last topic that I thought would be interesting, right. Is, is once you've. We've been talking a lot about kind of getting a lay of the land and understanding the performance of a marketing team, marketing channel. But once you have an understanding of that, how do you make sure you can implement changes in a, in a way that's, you know, fast enough to, to take advantage of the momentum that you have as a new leader, right?

But also slow enough to where you don't break anything in the process. We've had experience where a company has hired us in to help them with a new go to market strategy, right? And we've wanted to really dive in and make that strategy happen, but the danger of doing that too fast is that you lose momentum on the thing that's making you money today, right?

How do you look at implementing changes like these in a way that obviously Moves quickly and doesn't, doesn't make the company get stuck, but also, you know, doesn't fall into any common pitfalls. 

Stijn Hendrickse: That's a great point. Yeah, I think we tried to in just the previous topic to give some thoughts on how you In like an hour conversation get to the core of a lot of insights and I think you should But then I also believe that as an executive coming in, you have to be very careful that you don't jump to conclusions.

So you have to kind of, there's this term. I think I've heard that. I don't know if I used it correctly, but the executive kind of no fly zone. When you get hired, you have to like to do a month of listening before you make all kinds of changes. And the reality is if you're coming in as an external, You know, fractional CMO, external executive, you don't really get that amount of time to be passive, right?

You're, you're kind of being asked the weekend, like, Hey, so what do you think? Now or never. Yeah. And then two, three weeks later, people ask, what are you changing? And four weeks later, month in, they want to see the results, right? So you, you kind of have a little bit of a different timeline. That's why I think it's important to find some of those quick wins and then don't, don't be shy on putting the trigger on those, especially.

And you see things that are just completely no, a friend of ours called it belt and suspender, you know, fixes, right? Things that you know have to happen. So don't take any prisoners there. Just move on and move ahead, I mean, and go implement those. But then especially when you think of changing the go to market focus and the ICP, and those are things that I want to make sure you have really enough data before you make some big, big changes there.

Those are very costly, the changes and are very hard to undo. But yeah, yeah. Even when a client pushes back we talk to our customers all time and we have plenty.

Especially the ones that I like, using your product that don't wanna help out by doing another interview. And it's very seldom that they don't appreciate the attention. Right, especially when someone comes in with a fresh perspective, where they'd love to give their thoughts, either good or bad.

Right. I never think you should wait with doing those, or ask for doing 

Brian Graf: those. There's no real downside to doing those, right? At the very least, you get a nice testimonial, a nice asset you can use, and at the, at the most, you get some amazing customer insights that you may or may not have heard in your conversations to date.

Yeah, I think from my perspective too, I'm kind of a data nerd. So I always like to dive into the CRM as deep as possible and really understand where the leads are coming from. I like to build the funnel out and look at where the breaks are. And I like to go that, that route, especially before I, Make a big shift or a big decision, but I also think to even with the right, even with the Leadership team and the company have decided to take on a new go to market approach right and maybe enter a new market I do think that as we start to it's good to not just flip it zero to 100 all in one go I think it's good to Give yourself a little bit of room, runway to test to, to make sure that you can prove some initial traction, right, and get some, some good conversations going and hopefully some initial customers to really prove to yourself and to the team that, that this will be successful before you really take the jump and take your foot off the gas of your current motion, right?

Because doing that too fast can, can even while you're, You're building traction in the new market, right? You may not, that traction may not be enough to cover the loss of the old market. Right? So it's an art form of a transition, but it's something to keep in mind and no matter how excited the leadership team can be, it's about this new, this new market, it's really good to, To not rush it too much.

Thank you to Adriana 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, and if you want to submit or vote on a question you'd like us to answer, you can do that at Kalungi. 

Every time we record, we take one of the top three topics and jam on it. Thanks again.

 
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