The GTM Slop Problem: Marc Sabatini on the Six Dimensions of GTM. Partner Buying, and Winning the US Market
- Apr 20
- 47 min read
Most B2B companies don’t fail because the product is bad. They fail because the system around it is broken.
In this episode of Signal & Noise, we sit down with Marc Sabatini, Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer at HighSignals, to break down what Brett has been calling the GTM Slop Problem—and why so many launches stall before the market even has a chance to decide.
Marc has spent 30+ years operating at the intersection of product, sales, marketing, and customer success—the exact place where strategy either turns into revenue… or quietly falls apart.
This is not a theory episode. This is how go-to-market actually works—or doesn’t—in the real world.
1. Why GTM breaks before the market even decides The biggest failure point isn’t competition. It’s internal:
Misaligned teams
Fuzzy narrative
No shared system
No clear ICP
As Marc puts it: “It’s not just slop from inexperience. It’s slop from lack of coordination.”
2. The Six Dimensions of GTM (and where they fall apart)
We walk through the six dimensions every company thinks they have dialed in:
Narrative (not messaging—commercial logic)
ICP & targeting (focus vs. “sell to everyone”)
Competitive readiness
Offer & proof
Field enablement
Activation & measurement
The takeaway: Most companies don’t have weak pieces. They have weak connections between the pieces.
3. Problem Market Fit vs. Product Market Fit vs. Platform Market Fit
One of the most important frameworks in the episode:
Problem Market Fit → You can sell, but it’s messy
Product Market Fit → You can scale
Platform Market Fit → You can compound
Most companies get stuck in the first phase—generating revenue without ever building a system that scales.
4. Why “great products win” is a myth
The uncomfortable truth:
The best product rarely wins. The best go-to-market does.
Even strong products fail when:
Narrative is unclear
Proof is weak
Sales is improvising
Customer success is disconnected
Or simply: Too much activity. Not enough coherence.
5. Partner-Based Buying is changing everything
Buyers aren’t buying alone anymore.
Agencies, SIs, cloud partners, and ecosystems are now:
Influencing decisions
Validating vendors
Acting as gatekeepers
Which means: You’re not just selling to the end buyer. You’re selling to the entire buying system.
And that changes your proof stack completely.
6. Why most companies fail entering the US market
Marc breaks down a common pattern:
Too broad ICP
Weak local proof
Misread buyer expectations
Activity without traction
The result: Burned time, burned budget, and burned field trust.
7. The real job of GTM: building a system, not running campaigns
This is the core idea of the episode:
GTM is not marketing. GTM is not sales. GTM is not a launch plan.
It’s a connected commercial system.
And when that system breaks:
Messaging gets blamed
Sales gets blamed
Product gets blamed
But the real issue is lack of alignment and orchestration.
There’s more product being built right now than ever before. AI has lowered the barrier to creation.
But it hasn’t solved:
Positioning
Differentiation
Commercial execution
If anything, it’s made the problem worse.
More products. More noise. More GTM slop.
Founders trying to turn product into revenue
CROs, CMOs, and GTM leaders fixing broken systems
Anyone launching B2B SaaS or AI products
Operators tired of “more activity” being the answer
If there’s one idea to walk away with, it’s this:
A launch is not ready just because the product is ready. It’s ready when the system around it is coherent.
Most companies never get there.
Read the full transcript bellow: 00:01.37
Brett House
Hey everybody, welcome back to Signal & Noise. This is our first episode back recording on Zencastr versus Riverside. Not that people care, but if the sound sounds different.
00:12.06
Brett House
You know why, you know who to blame.
00:12.22
Rio
You know who to blame.
00:14.84
Brett House
I'm Brett House. This is my co-host Rio Longacre. Today, ah we are thrilled to have Mark Sabatini, who a lot in the ad tech and martech industry probably already know.
00:25.05
Brett House
He is ah the newly announced co-founder and chief commercial officer of High Signals, my company. I promise not to shill and sell ah my vendor, ah the vendor that I'm helping to run.
00:38.61
Brett House
um
00:38.90
Rio
But you're going to anyway, right?
00:40.06
Brett House
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
00:41.05
Marc Sabatini
Yep.
00:41.03
Rio
Yeah.
00:41.42
Brett House
We're B2B SaaS. AI companies turn GTM strategy into clearer commercial execution. That's really what what Mark and I have been focusing on.
00:51.53
Brett House
We met at the AdTech God Party via Rio. Rio said, you, Mark, need to speak to Brett. And next thing you know, we had a long conversation. And a few months later, hung out at CES together.
01:03.42
Brett House
ah We decided to to work together to launch this this organization. So it's it's been quite a ride. So just as a quick backdrop, Mark has spent three decades in ad tech, martech data, enterprise growth roles, right? Companies like you're the chief strategy officer of Aquifer, right?
01:22.10
Marc Sabatini
Absolutely.
01:22.23
Brett House
And a co-founder um and Data Axel as well. I think the title was about the same, right?
01:28.25
Marc Sabatini
Absolutely.
01:28.28
Brett House
And you've held ah some leadership roles at Epsilon and Analytics IQ. So you certainly know the industry. You've been a chief revenue officer. You've run an organization or helped run an organization called the CRO Collective.
01:40.47
Brett House
which has you educating CROs globally. Madrid, London, I've heard of a lot of exotic and wonderful places that you've been to recently. So welcome to the show, Mark. Thrilled to have you. And let the audience know a little bit about yourself in your own words.
01:54.71
Marc Sabatini
Sure. Wonderful. Well, thank you, Brett and Rio. And it's good to be here. It's good to be on the ah on the show with you guys. You know, Brett, as you said, I've been in the the business for 30 years now. So I've seen a lot of change over time when it comes to product capabilities.
02:12.41
Marc Sabatini
And just I think through that natural evolution, I always believe that every day I need to be learning something new. it you know, years ago, it was always product. Like, how do I understand the product more?
02:23.67
Marc Sabatini
The changes in the ecosystem, um you know, how ad tech started to come ah to the forefront and all the changes that have rapidly been happening ah year over year.
02:34.76
Marc Sabatini
But, you know, as time went on, it really started to dovetail more into, um you know, the go-to-market side of things. Because, you know, at the end of the day, we're not out there you know trying to pitch our product, we're actually trying to solve problems. right And I think if if everybody takes away one thing from this conversation today, um look for companies that have the problems that your outcomes solve for and focus the capabilities you have and the outcomes you deliver to solve the problems they have.
03:05.37
Marc Sabatini
And you won't be selling anything. you know You'll just be delivering outcomes that solve problems. and um I think the the number one challenge I get from salespeople um you know trying to get their products in somewhere is, you know i'm I'm trying to sell this and I can't get them to want to buy this.
03:23.51
Marc Sabatini
And as opposed to really focusing more on the challenges that somebody has and the relationship that you can build with them. um and that's really what it comes down to but my experience at aquifer ah you know as a co-founder there and uh in really in the first year essentially being out there almost on my own trying to get the uh the revenue for the business to accelerate and start um yeah i would i was facing one go-to-market challenge after another because they were all falling on my shoulders. Right. When you think of go to market, you're thinking about ah not only sales, but marketing, customer success.
04:00.47
Marc Sabatini
Today, we might talk about revenue operations, but at the end of the day, it's how do I collect all of this information about my activities so that the data itself about my actions and my activity can start to rise to the top and figure out what works and what doesn't work. And, you know, in in many of the books you'll read about go to market, it talks about a broken a broken system between sales, marketing and customer success. And in the startup, that's all you, right? So it's it's really broken because you're just one person trying to deal with
04:35.48
Marc Sabatini
each one of those core areas. In a larger company, there are deep and wide silos that organizations face where, you know, marketing and sales are just, they're set up on completely different paths where, um you know, bonuses and and goals and metrics are not only timed at different times of the year, but at sometimes they're counterintuitive, right?
04:59.10
Brett House
Yeah, it can be incentive misalignment, process misalignment, right?
05:02.04
Marc Sabatini
Absolutely. and And then when you start to think about customer success, you know any person watching this this episode who's responsible to run or grow a business, at the end of the day, the best place to focus is your existing customers.
05:17.78
Marc Sabatini
right You want to take those existing customers. Number one, you want to make sure that they don't leave. So you're delivering with excellence and you're managing that relationship. But you also want to make sure that there's more that you can provide to them to solve more problems. And what people don't realize is that, yes, while I need yeah quality, educated and competent people on customer success to know how to deal with my customers, it really goes back to the beginning when you're profiling your ideal customer profile to say, i'm focused on bringing customers in that actually have the ability to grow and that they don't just need the one product.
05:56.73
Marc Sabatini
that my salesperson decided to talk to them about. So it really is a full cycle.
06:00.51
Rio
Well, so Mark, su I love this the way this is going already, right? So it's, I mean, I agree with you 100%. It is a not an easy thing to do.
06:12.83
Rio
regardless company size. I've seen it at big companies where the silo thing you discussed, the handles to your marketing, sales, service, success, like totally broken or non-existent, especially when you add in a partner channel and small companies too. So I think this will be a fun discussion. And for those who haven't seen it, like Brett put out a couple posts recently on what he's calling the go-to-market slop series. So if you haven't seen that, check it out. It's on signaltonoise.ai. It really talks about one of the problems we're going to be delving into now some of the I think some of the outcomes that aren't aren't so great from some go to market motions we see where ah that result in launches fail, like failure to launch, let's call it right.
06:50.14
Rio
ah Brett gave some good examples of companies that have succeeded and explained why. He gave some examples of yeah what he sees as the go to market slop.
06:57.15
Marc Sabatini
Yes.
06:57.26
Rio
And Mark, we thought you'd be great at this because you've been doing this a long time. You're one of the, like I think, the better known people in the world of of ad tech and martech. And i mean we were going to each other few years to ago, right? I think down in Miami, if possible, right?
07:08.34
Rio
and And, you know, thought this would be a great discussion to talk about what happens, like from your point of view, as somebody who's been in the trenches doing this, you' you've been an operator, right? at At different types of companies. What happens when there's a fuzzy narrative? What happens when there's like no, like poorly defined ICP, when there's,
07:25.38
Rio
when When things have been validated, when you when you have to improvise, what do you do, right? When you don't know these things. So I guess getting your perspective on this, we thought just to be a lot of fun and looking at what ah how does that relate to the dimensions of go to market?
07:36.57
Rio
So um yeah with that, let's maybe dive into some questions.
07:37.18
Marc Sabatini
Sure.
07:40.23
Rio
We have some good ones that will ask you about different things in in your background. I think Brett, you had the first question, right?
07:45.40
Brett House
Yeah, where do you think – no, and it and thank you for referencing the – before I ask the question, before you thank you for asking the referencing the go-to-market slop series. And I did write that for really the the purpose that I've seen – the things that I've seen in a lot of tech, B2B SaaS, tech AI organizations throughout my career.
08:04.33
Brett House
30 years is sort of a lack of commercial coherence or at least consistent commercial coherence from the release or development of a product, even MVP and beta, all the way through the actual commercial motions. And I find it's almost like, and i've said this a bunch of times on the, on the, podcast And I've seen this, you know, in real life, and I'm sure you've seen this, Marcus, as well, is it's like it's like Chinese whispers, right? Like you say something into, ah you know, one person whispers something into somebody else's ear. And by the time it goes around the table, it's a completely different story. And so I found that that often is where the incoherence commercially happens. And and the product people know the product deeply, but it's not being you know consistently delivered through these, you know sometimes gatekeepers. Sometimes product marketing acts as a gatekeeper that then goes to sales or solutions engineering that then goes to customer success. And it seems like there's breakage.
08:57.66
Brett House
And by the time you get to customer success, delivering accounts or delivering growth to accounts or or solutions to accounts, um oftentimes they're you know three or four steps removed from from the actual capabilities or potentially what the sales people were selling in market right so then there's a disconnect and the client's going wait a minute like this is what i was promised and that's the classic over promising under delivering uh or otherwise but But um back to the question framework, I just wanted to to to mention that about the GTM Slop Series and why why I'm sort of writing this.
09:04.62
Marc Sabatini
Mm-hmm.
09:30.50
Brett House
Because, you know Mark and I, you and I both totally agree that this is a major issue. um Where do you think the system, you know, I sort of gave ah a kind of a long winded sort of view of that.
09:35.35
Marc Sabatini
Yeah.
09:41.31
Brett House
But where do you really think go to market breaks first? Where do you think is the first portion of that that sort of falls down?
09:50.20
Marc Sabatini
Well, i it like everything, it starts with leadership, but, you know, touching on your go to market slop, you can have slop when nobody knows anything about go to market and people are just pushing effort towards what they think is the right thing to do.
10:07.03
Marc Sabatini
But you can also have slop on the other end where everybody feels like they're educated and they're trying to do state of the art or leading edge go to market tactics, but there's no organization, there's no system, there's no coordination.
10:22.24
Marc Sabatini
It's like ah a football team going out on the field without a playbook, right? And well the quarterback just yelling a number out and everybody just kind of runs in in a whole bunch of different directions.
10:26.59
Brett House
Yep.
10:32.26
Marc Sabatini
You know, you're you're not going to do that.
10:33.02
Brett House
That's a good analogy. A sports analogy is always coming.
10:34.07
Rio
I just described the New York Jets.
10:36.88
Marc Sabatini
Yeah.
10:37.88
Brett House
You're running a bunch of plays. They're not all coordinated.
10:40.22
Rio
They look like plays.
10:41.69
Brett House
They look like plays.
10:43.35
Marc Sabatini
That's right. So, you know, it's it really comes down to focus and, you know, a lot of what you're talking about with product and most of the people that may be watching from from ad tech and and more tech are coming from organizations that have product. Yes, there are a lot of service organizations out there and and consultancies. But you know if the if the chief product officer in the product organization is developing something that they believe is going to be needed in market six months from now or a year from now, um not only has that timeline you know gotten tighter, but you need the voice of the customer to to help inform that. And voice of the customer comes from customer success, but also from sales.
11:27.83
Marc Sabatini
So as sales is out there testing the water on a new feature, listening to the challenges that you know buyers may be having with competitive offerings or the lack of ah of an offering in market, having that that clarity from all of these ah these voice of the customer engagements provides product, provides a good product team with the right path to follow to get to a point where they'll have something that that people need.
11:48.15
Brett House
Thank you.
11:55.80
Marc Sabatini
And, you know, the the work that I do with the CRO collective in training chief revenue officers, getting chief revenue officers together to talk about the challenges they have, but also fixing the system.
12:07.96
Marc Sabatini
it really focuses on how the chief revenue officer can be a strong partner to the chief product officer. And it is for that very reason. And it's not so much the roadmap to something new, but it's also sunsetting what's old, right? So this this really starts to become a process where there's a lot of handoffs throughout the process. And what sits in the middle is marketing,
12:33.37
Marc Sabatini
that is coming up with the messaging about those products and more importantly about the challenges that these outcomes solve for.
12:41.59
Brett House
Well, the hold on.
12:41.75
Marc Sabatini
so
12:42.15
Brett House
So the question, let me, let me just say, so the answer to the question for what breaks versus the voice of customer, is that what I'm hearing?
12:43.89
Marc Sabatini
Yep.
12:47.78
Marc Sabatini
It's the system.
12:47.90
Brett House
That there's, it's the system, right?
12:48.91
Marc Sabatini
It's the system.
12:50.15
Brett House
And and if the product, if if product are developing things that aren't aligned with actual customer need, because they're
12:50.16
Marc Sabatini
It's the lack of leadership in the system.
12:57.74
Marc Sabatini
Yep.
12:58.84
Brett House
removed there i've i've talked to startup CEOs that have rolled customer success and account leadership teams into their product organization, which seems a weird way to retrofit, to solve kind of a core problem that the product team didn't know enough about what was going on on the client side of things, right?
13:16.36
Brett House
And in other cases, your your commercial team suck in product resources into every other meeting with clients because of a lack of subject matter expertise or just to get them to help close deals.
13:28.24
Brett House
And that's also a problem.
13:29.50
Marc Sabatini
So the other piece there is training, learning and development, right? Because the reason why salespeople and customer success people pull product in is because they don't feel confident enough about what they need to talk about.
13:39.14
Brett House
Yep. yep
13:41.21
Marc Sabatini
And if if you take your engagement with ah a prospect that you're trying to make into a lead, into a qualified opportunity, there's only so deep that you need to go on each one of those conversations.
13:53.62
Marc Sabatini
So if we educate the customer success and salesperson on how deep they need to go from hello to the prospect saying, yes, I'd like to learn more, which is your indicator that they you know to set up the next call.
14:06.30
Marc Sabatini
um now that they're ready to go that much deeper, but there's research that they have to do as part of this go-to-market process to truly understand how my my offering fits in and solves that problem.
14:20.92
Marc Sabatini
So it's about education, because if I can educate my my forward-facing team of sales, marketing, and customer success, then I don't need to bring product in. Product should not be in the conversation, in my opinion, actively selling until it's a qualified opportunity or or ready to close, right?
14:38.34
Marc Sabatini
There's some
14:38.50
Rio
Or speaking of education, um I mean, a lot of people, in fact, I've run into many technical founders who are great at product and and and build great products, a lot of great products out there, right?
14:49.47
Rio
But I think there's a misconception that just having a good product alone will win you business, that that's enough.
14:55.25
Marc Sabatini
That was good. Yeah.
14:56.47
Rio
And and i my hypothesis, I'm curious to hear what your take on it is that the best product won't win without a great go-to-market. In fact, maybe like let's make maybe great products table stakes, but it's not always the best product that wins.
15:10.42
Rio
It's it's it's a good product. It's good enough with the best go-to-market. That's really what it takes. And that's why this is so important. Thoughts on that?
15:17.02
Brett House
Yeah. And go to market is not just marketing. Let's make that super clear. Right. You know, it's not just a campaign.
15:20.95
Marc Sabatini
ah scott
15:22.06
Brett House
So you talk about the three P's. I think that's a relevant here.
15:25.88
Marc Sabatini
Yeah, so the the first stage of the three Ps, and I'll give some credit to s Sangram Padre, his book Move and Go-To-Market Partners, which um I'm trained in and I'm a certified partner in there in their ah go-to-market operating system. The first of the three Ps is problem market fit.
15:47.96
Marc Sabatini
And, you know, it's it sounds...
15:49.46
Brett House
that's That's a new one, and that's that's very interesting.
15:51.48
Marc Sabatini
15:52.15
Brett House
Yeah.
16:02.34
Marc Sabatini
it's It's something that's required for you to truly be able to scale your organization. um But problem market fit is you've got a solution that happens to solve a lot of problems, right? it it's it's good enough or it's generic enough or it's full featured enough where your team can be going out to an ICP that, in my opinion, may be too wide and you're generating revenue.
16:28.57
Marc Sabatini
But all of a sudden you turn around and you realize that when you start to put your your clients in categories, you've got a lot of categories, right? People are using the product to solve this problem or that problem or another problem. And ultimately to get to product market fit, which is the second P you want to be able to align all of your go-to-market resource resources to focus on the market that needs that product to solve that problem.
16:55.32
Marc Sabatini
That's where you can scale. It's very hard to scale when you're in problem market fit. And then to the point that I brought up earlier about, well, yeah you typically you start with the problem to prove that your product works right.
17:02.14
Brett House
So start with the problem is to your point, which is which is the, yeah, that's your that's your sort of outside in.
17:08.56
Marc Sabatini
The Rios point,
17:10.38
Brett House
You're sort of not selling you know features and capabilities, which is the product. You're selling the why and the how you actually deliver value to a client.
17:18.20
Marc Sabatini
Yeah, I believe that it's possible to immediately go in and have ah only clients that ah validate your product market fit. But more often than not, the people the the really good founders that you were talking about before, Rio, who've got a great product and they come to market, I think you'll find that there's a lot of customers they bring in that are not going to go along with them for the long haul because they were there to fit a need of driving revenue, to test the product out, to try things.
17:49.59
Marc Sabatini
um you know We can go back to the book Crossing the Chasm of you know the the early adopters and so on and so forth.
17:53.38
Brett House
It's great book.
17:53.82
Rio
Go one
17:54.71
Brett House
Yeah.
17:55.67
Marc Sabatini
But um Ultimately, you want to be able to scale your business. And there are companies that are that are new that need to focus on how do I get to product market fit to scale. But there are mature companies that may have lost their demand because they have a lot of competitors or the market has just changed and their product hasn't kept up with it, where they need a transformation.
18:17.91
Marc Sabatini
And that transformation is going to be hyper focus on the ideal customer profile, which I know we're going to talk about today. um But really, how do I get back to that product market fit?
18:29.85
Marc Sabatini
Because that's where the demand is going to come from. Because now all of the components of go to market are focused on on one profile of ah of a problem and one profile a customer.
18:41.98
Marc Sabatini
And that's where your scale is going to come from. You can compete significantly better.
18:45.27
Brett House
well the Well, the third P, you mentioned the third P, right? The platform market fit.
18:48.22
Marc Sabatini
and And the third B goes back to what we were talking about in the beginning, which is I want to pick prospects to help that have the need for many of the capabilities I have. Or I know that that as I help them in the early stage, they're going to grow and have a significantly more demand for a significant, more demand for the product that I have. And that's where platform market fit comes into play, because now if I sold you know, something for them to, for a dollar, you know, let's just use some simple numbers.
19:22.23
Marc Sabatini
The, the platform market fit as I'm nurturing this relationship and delivering with excellence. Now there's more features functionality that they can buy. Cause I know that they'll need them. or potentially the demand for what they need from the single piece of what I'm doing won't be a dollar anymore. It'll $10 or $100. But that's where the growth starts to come in. And we're not focused too much on ARR, but we can focus on NRR. And there's a lot of math out there that people can look up about the value of an additional dollar and in an existing customer versus a net new dollar and what it costs you to get that dollar versus, ah you know, growing into it. So scaling into the problem the platform market fit is really something that is a part of the planning.
20:10.01
Marc Sabatini
Like if you know your product is going to evolve into several other features, that's a that's a product led growth approach. And we can talk about that in another time as well.
20:20.15
Brett House
Yeah. Well, in Rio, Rio, I don't know if you're familiar with, you know because this this these three P's is just a retrofitting of a speech that Simon Sinek, I think, gave us a TED talk like 30 years ago, 20 years ago, which was the golden circle.
20:21.14
Rio
Thank you.
20:34.23
Brett House
and i And it's funny because you've told me this before, Mark. But what I realized is that the problem market fit is the why. the the The product market fit is the how right of this circle.
20:45.76
Marc Sabatini
Mm-hmm.
20:47.23
Brett House
right And then the platform market fit is the what. like How does the actual platform deliver against the how you're doing this? And why should I care? why is it delivering value to my business?
20:57.75
Rio
Well, ah Brett, this interesting point you make about like it taking older concepts, not older, but taking really good concepts from the past and and replying them to how you how you actually bring products and services to market. And I actually think you brought up ICP market. I actually think there's a very similar analogy we can make with that where – ah The concept of CX you know goes back a couple of decades.
21:18.48
Rio
right i mean i mean Steve Jobs has kind of given credit for founding it right with the whole concept of CX being in order to build better products, services and solutions.
21:22.84
Marc Sabatini
Okay.
21:25.76
Rio
You look at the customer, you start with the gu the customer once and you work backwards. right And it's that that method that thinking that led to the the the iPod, the iPhone and all these great products that consumers love.
21:35.34
Brett House
Yep. yep
21:36.36
Rio
right So I think what I really like about the concept of ICP and how you're wrapping into this, Mark, I love what you love your thoughts on this is I see ICP is the concept of taking CX about looking at your customer and like creating the way that you go to market, the way you tell your narrative, the way you build and structure your organization and those handoffs by really putting a customer in the center and like working backwards to the customer. that make sense? I love your thoughts on that.
22:01.28
Marc Sabatini
Yeah, it's, you know, ultimately the the individuals that we have, the experts in customer success, people who are trained and are constantly learning, they're active listeners, right? So we may have sold a certain product and we're delivering that product and you have your your weekly calls or however often your cadence is with your customer in that conversation, there's other challenges that the customer's dealing with. And if you've picked the right prospect to solve their problem, and you're now in this stage where they're, where they're your customer, you'll start to hear a lot of the same challenges that they're having. And it gives the opportunity for that customer or the customer success person to raise their hand and say, you know, I can help you with that too. But it was all part of the plan from day one.
22:46.23
Marc Sabatini
because you knew you were going to get there. and And the whole reverse process, as you're saying, is that if I understand that's the destination I'm going to, well, then how do I profile that business from hello so that I'm only talking to prospects that I can help that will become the types of customers that I can grow?
23:06.42
Marc Sabatini
Because it's very easy to sell a problem that I'm going solve back to problem market fit to somebody that will never grow.
23:11.13
Brett House
Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah, no, exactly. And that, and that yeah, that I keep thinking about that that visual. I started to to hammer on Simon Sinek, but it's most product organizations that I've been part part of, and Rio, you made the point that super technical founders, they think in that if you're a product builder and a product leader, and there's a lot of them with cloud code and the ability to vibe code today, putting products to market with really no commercial experience.
23:20.74
Marc Sabatini
Yeah.
23:37.31
Brett House
And they tend to think in that in that what category. right what it does, what its features are, what its capabilities are. remember when I first joined Newstar, the deck that I was given to understand the company was 75 slides long and a lot of workflows, a lot of interworking parts and pieces of this of this market texture.
23:55.33
Rio
That was too much.
23:57.67
Brett House
Right. and And so then you you wonder why commercial teams often struggle to sort of define the thesis, the problem statement behind what they're delivering.
24:08.47
Marc Sabatini
Yes.
24:09.15
Brett House
Because they're so stuck in what's been handed off from product, right, ah to them is just a kind of a the what, answering the what, the platform story, versus the why.
24:15.98
Marc Sabatini
Yeah. That's
24:19.80
Brett House
Like, why should anyone give a shit? Why should anybody care? What value are you delivering? And then how do you actually do that? do you have proof case studies?
24:27.95
Marc Sabatini
right.
24:28.08
Brett House
How do you actually deliver to companies like me or people like me in my function?
24:31.77
Marc Sabatini
Yeah, I think if you if you if you stack the value prop this way and then you go with the the i the ICP ah out and you broaden the ICP, the value gets too generic as you go out.
24:44.74
Brett House
Yep. yep
24:46.14
Marc Sabatini
Right. So so if I'm talking to people who I know have the problems that my outcome solve for, the value is believable. Right. The more that i I bring it out, it's harder for me to explain why you need this. Right. And and one of the things that anybody who's who's a been a part of my teams, my sales teams, it's I talk about, you know, if I find myself, you know, trying to help somebody with a problem they didn't know they had.
25:15.28
Marc Sabatini
That's a long sales cycle, right? And what if a cycle?
25:16.76
Brett House
Yeah, you had to convince them that this really is a problem.
25:17.91
Marc Sabatini
They have the problem. Like all the evidence is there, but I first have to convince them or I have to educate them on why they why that's a problem for their business. but And before I ever get to the point of how I solve it, right?
25:30.84
Marc Sabatini
So if I can focus, so it's not just employee size, sales volume, you know all the firmographics. it It also, the second part of the ICP is all the education, and all the research you're getting.
25:42.74
Marc Sabatini
So do you have some type of a tool or a process that's going to help you do a deep dive into what that business is dealing with right now? Because the other ah factor is whether I need to drive 100,000 in net new logos or net new revenue or $100 million dollars in net new revenue, the the perspective of the market is going to be significantly bigger.
26:05.46
Marc Sabatini
But at the end of the day, how many deals do I actually need to close? And then what
26:10.81
Rio
How is AI changing this, Mark? mean, because I'm looking here, here you describe a lot of things you're doing.
26:13.05
Marc Sabatini
ah Yeah. Yeah.
26:15.77
Rio
a lot of them are heavy research based, right? Talking to customers, which, yeah, mean, you there's there super important, but is AI speeding this up? Is replacing some of the people using synthetic research instead of like actual qualitative customer research? Like what's actually happening in the field?
26:31.03
Marc Sabatini
Yeah, no, it's both. And I think anybody who's on LinkedIn is seeing all these different you know posts out there about ah tools that people are setting up to speed up a process, make it faster.
26:41.96
Marc Sabatini
But ultimately, this cycle this cycle fits really well into what these tools are doing because it's about going out
26:44.25
Brett House
your virtual BDRs, right? Your agentic BDRs.
26:55.10
Marc Sabatini
taking a path, experiencing that path, collecting the data from the experience you have, learning from it and modifying the path. And that cycle of doing that over and over again, as well as using you know the open web and all the other ah ah available information that's out there that these tools can bring to the table, the the research is significant that you can bring to the table and generate your own signals and avoid the noise.
27:25.11
Marc Sabatini
Notice how I did that. um And, and truly get in front of the right, the right players at the right time. But it's, it comes down to the people still at the end of the day.
27:31.54
Brett House
Yeah. and And the adaptability in it Yeah, yeah. And I think the adaptability and the adjustment periods have been compressed. I mean, you know, we call it, and Pascal has mentioned this at CES, Luke Pascal, Rio and I were talking to him in a suite at CES.
27:46.34
Brett House
And he he was talking about GTM compression, meaning the decision cycles, the product life cycles are shrinking, right? so you've got a lot of what I call like products being that that are MVPs that are entering the market, right?
27:59.05
Brett House
Which creates a lot of noise. um And then the go-to-market cycles, like you have to figure out your your three P's or your golden circle, your product platform and and fit you know rapidly.
28:11.01
Brett House
Because if you don't, somebody else is going to, and they're going to do it because they're leveraging the sort of decisioning and predictive capabilities
28:14.98
Marc Sabatini
Yeah.
28:20.22
Brett House
of AI, which just compounds and speeds up when appropriately applied, your decisioning, right? Because you can you could do competitive analysis at 100x the speed you're ever able to do competitive analysis.
28:32.41
Brett House
You could do persona analysis at 100x the speed. And to me, all of that's going to help you get quicker to something that delivers value, obviously human orchestrated, but that a message that delivers value to or perceived value to your end customer.
28:49.14
Marc Sabatini
it's It's all a great point. We're all going to leverage it how we can. But many companies right now are dealing with a situation where what you just described is moving at such a fast pace.
29:02.42
Marc Sabatini
So it's like trying to merge onto an interstate highway. And, you know, some companies, they're sitting in a fast car, right? Other companies, great product, great people, but they're trying to merge into that on a bicycle, right?
29:11.13
Brett House
Yep.
29:17.62
Marc Sabatini
And and it goes back to the first topic we talked about, which is the the the system in the organization, because if you're in those silos and and sales and marketing and CS don't work well together and product doesn't know how to work with them, you'll never be able to accelerate this way.
29:33.30
Marc Sabatini
You have to work as a team and understand that as a team, you're all contributing to that that repository of information that all these great tools sitting on top can start to deliver. Otherwise, you'll have great information, but the team won't be able to accelerate fast enough.
29:51.03
Rio
Mark, let's say you get hired at a yeah a so small startup-y company, right? yeah I don't know. like Let's say the revenue is under a million, right? But accelerating quickly. Good product.
30:03.99
Rio
um You get hired as the go-to-market. I'm curious to hear this. say I know you've done this a couple of times, right? You've gone from zero to zero. You know, in the case of Aquifer as well, there's data actually, you worked both those companies very early on and grew them significantly. So let's say you brought in just how to go to market. What's the first thing you do and what's the first hire you make?
30:23.58
Marc Sabatini
Well, it's going to vary by company, but the first thing I do is do an assessment of go to market. And, you know, there's there's plenty of documentation out there. I i leverage the go to market partners documentation about the 15 most common go to market problems that that you have.
30:39.67
Marc Sabatini
And if you come in and start talking with people who have been there and have been part of the growth, you can say, look, let's look at this list and understand what are the top three challenges that you believe the company is dealing with. And if you do that over five or ten people, you start to see some common threads, whether it's a heroic sales efforts or what causes it, sales marketing and customer success or not, ah you know working well together. It could be a product problem, so on and so forth. But that's what helps you to identify where to begin.
31:09.53
Marc Sabatini
The other piece is going back to leadership and saying, you know what's the number that we have to hit? like What's the next stage in growth in the near term? But more importantly, if if you're talking to the CEO of the company, you know what's the long-term vision?
31:24.70
Marc Sabatini
You know, we're going to sell the company in two years, three years. Are we looking for more investment? Each one of those milestones two or three years out require you to work backwards and decide what you have to work on today, because many of those steps take years to to to get into motion. So So those are some of the the things that come out of it. The next thing is to pressure test the existing customers.
31:46.22
Marc Sabatini
What's the churn rate? What's the ability to ah to drive incremental growth from an existing customer? Some of the easy questions to the customer success team are, you know, who was the economic buyer when you sold when the company sold this deal in, right? Now, do they actually understand what an economic buyer is? Do they know who it was, whether it's a deal that happened in the last 12 months or it was a five year five years ago? And why is that important? Because we want to focus on customer time to value. And the question that you want to go back to is,
32:17.21
Marc Sabatini
Why did they pick you? What was the value prop that they said, this is why I want to pick you? And one of the most important steps you can do in customer success is focusing on customer time to value because all day, every day, you want to prove to people why they picked you.
32:32.78
Brett House
Yeah.
32:32.98
Marc Sabatini
Right. And if I can continue on that cycle, I'm continuing to drive value with the people who picked us. And if there's something new, a new project, I better do the same thing. Why? And then I want everybody to know why. But it comes back to ROI.
32:47.45
Marc Sabatini
And we can we all know products that save us money or save us time. And those sound like very important value propositions. But ultimately, in your ICP, you want to focus on on targets, customers, buyers, where your offering can bring a transformational ah ROI to their business.
33:07.64
Marc Sabatini
If they pick you and they work with you, it's actually going to transform how their business works. And that's significantly more valuable valuable than i just saved you some time and money.
33:19.03
Marc Sabatini
and And those are the types of things I would look at. And based on that analysis, I would know whether I need to hire a better person in CS, a marketer who can tell that story better, because i'll I'll identify that it's actually a messaging problem, or potentially somebody who understands how to get their arms around this and and get the next two deals in so we have more revenue to to continue to hire on the go-to-market team.
33:43.75
Brett House
Well, you've made a bunch of good points there. and Let's unpack that a little bit. is that is I'll challenge you on the messaging front. I think most CEOs of companies that are a million dollars or less will um say messaging messaging in general is bullshit.
33:57.85
Brett House
And the reason why I say that is it it comes across as too too much fluff. as two not close enough to the actual client narrative. like what What do they really need?
34:07.41
Marc Sabatini
Yeah.
34:08.46
Brett House
How are you solving some of their hard problems and how are you delivering delivering value? And I think that that's actually that narrative, which is, I think, ah just a ah deeper... way of looking at messaging.
34:19.54
Brett House
Messaging to me comes across as, oh, this is the brand messaging. This is how it's appearing on the homepage or appearing in a press release. But it seems so disconnected from from the actual hard client problems, which oftentimes is the complaint with your branding agencies, your PR agencies, and your marketing teams in a lot of cases, the marketing generalists.
34:41.98
Marc Sabatini
Mm-hmm.
34:42.00
Brett House
that don't have the product expertise to sort of know the deep you know ah ah characteristics of the product and how it delivers value. And they don't have the commercial expertise to actually deliver that message clearly in a way that resonates with the buyer, whoever the buyer is.
34:58.43
Brett House
right So so how do you how do you fix that problem when you've got So sellers out there trying to build pipeline, you know customer success that's trying to support and grow customers, product that's building product, the product life cycles. And then there's this in-between zone, which everybody calls marketing, and they throw shit at marketing. And they say, build us some messaging.
35:20.79
Brett House
um And nobody's ever happy. And, ah you know, marketing teams are laid off. they They hire external agencies. They go through these iterative cycles.
35:29.08
Rio
New CMO. right
35:30.10
Brett House
Yeah. Again and again, they they bring in this PMM agency and this PR agency and this, and they never seem happy. What is breaking in that process?
35:40.25
Marc Sabatini
So I think you've you've outlined it very well in how you you got us to this point of asking the question. and if If you if you pull back the audio here and and and listen to what you said, everything is focused on marketing as a silo, whether it's people outside the silo saying the silo is not doing what it's supposed to do or people inside the silo potentially not asking enough information from the rest of the people on the team and just doing what they're supposed to do.
36:08.81
Marc Sabatini
So when we talk about messaging,
36:09.21
Brett House
yep yep point
36:11.06
Marc Sabatini
Part of the problem and what I would do if I went into that that company that you outlined, Rio, is I would I would ask everybody in leadership. And I think this is a a project that a strong leader should do across the entire leadership team, which is ask everybody to write on a piece of paper.
36:27.16
Marc Sabatini
Why are we here? Like, what do we do? Who do we solve the problems for? What are the problems that we solve? And, and ah you know, why do we exist?
36:37.78
Marc Sabatini
Like those those type of very simple questions. And if it, if it doesn't come back with similar answers, you already have the foundation of your problem, right?
36:46.55
Brett House
Yeah. Or if it comes back like overly complex or there's a, there's a dozens of use cases, which oftentimes startup companies have problems with because they're trying to figure out where they fit best and they can solve a lot of problems.
36:49.82
Marc Sabatini
Or, or it's very complex.
36:54.14
Marc Sabatini
Yup.
36:57.62
Marc Sabatini
Yes.
36:58.90
Brett House
Yeah.
36:59.51
Marc Sabatini
So, so for 30 years, my father's been asking me, he's, he's 93. He's been asking me, what do you do? Like, it never fails. Like, tell me again.
37:07.62
Brett House
Surveillance marketing.
37:08.82
Marc Sabatini
I know we've been through this before, but tell me again, what do you do?
37:09.27
Brett House
a
37:12.06
Marc Sabatini
And for somebody outside of ad tech and market, martech, sometimes it's really hard to convey that message without sounding like, you know, you know, you're doing junk mail or or or spam or things like that. And it's like, no, no, no, it's the opposite of that. But it's it really is. how do i How do I tell the message so that it's crystal clear? But I don't want to tell it so that my 93-year-old father understands it. I want to tell the message crystal clear so that the person who has the problem immediately stops in their tracks and says, yes, I need that.
37:45.94
Brett House
That is the hardest thing to nail, even for people like us that have been experienced in the industry. It is so hard to, it's almost like you have to go through this continuous sort of editing and in tweaking and tuning and then feedback loops to get it right.
37:58.42
Marc Sabatini
ask But ask yourself a question. I'm talking to the CEO of the business, the chief product officer, the chief customer officer, the chief sales officer. Why are we here?
38:09.94
Marc Sabatini
Like, what do we do?
38:11.38
Brett House
Yeah.
38:11.51
Marc Sabatini
Who are the people? What's the problem that somebody has that we solve really well? Let's articulate that as a team. And then you bring that down into the messaging that the entire team says in a uniform way across sales, marketing, CS, RevOps. Everybody says it. You go into the product team who may never have been in front of a customer. You say, what's what's our messaging?
38:33.91
Marc Sabatini
right? They should talk about what the messaging is. Because if we're all saying the same message at the same time, we now can start to say, is it our messaging, our product positioning? But if I have 20 people saying something slightly different or significantly different, I'll never know whether it's my message or my product or the people who I have that I'm trying to talk to.
38:54.90
Brett House
Yeah.
38:55.03
Marc Sabatini
So it's it's very important that this is a team effort that we're all working together off the same ah messaging and ultimately the same playbook.
39:03.73
Rio
Mark, it's funny you bring that up. i mean i I'll tell you give you an anecdote. So I was, this a few years ago. ah This is a regional bank called me in. and They had built this product that was supposed to be, but they leasted initially didn't tell me what the product was for, but they eventually showed me the product. They brought me in ostensibly to saying this product is crap. It hasn't gained traction because it's a bad product. We want you to look at it, audit it. Let us know how we can improve the appearance, you know, fix the UX. Are there features it's missing? It's got to have more features, right? I took a look at Actually, wasn't that bad, right? But then I looked at how they were going to market.
39:36.35
Rio
The product was this incredible concierge. let's say you called to this regional bank and they they could tell based on your your customer profile, did you have a mortgage with them?
39:46.49
Rio
Did you have auto loans with them? Did you have bank accounts, checking accounts, business? They knew all that, right? And it would kind of like give you like a concierge, like, and this is before AI was really had really taken off.
39:52.23
Marc Sabatini
Mm-hmm.
39:58.88
Rio
So think it would give you this front end where we're like, got act as a concierge to steer you to the right place. It actually was pretty cool. I thought it worked pretty well. But then their goal was to get people to this wealth management thing.
40:09.91
Rio
They're like, i I was struggling. after i Finally, I asked the head of product, like why did you put this in? like People like your customers, they're going to have a Schwab account or ah or whatever, like or an E-Trade. That's where they're goingnna do all of their like day trading and their investing. I don't see them doing with you this this with you guys. And then we went through this whole exercise. And the conclusion we had at the end of the project, Mark, brett was...
40:35.70
Rio
The product is fine, but like your go-to-market is completely wrong. Your messaging is wrong. Your ICP is not even close. And that was the problem.
40:43.41
Marc Sabatini
Mm-hmm.
40:43.67
Brett House
Yeah.
40:44.27
Rio
I love i love your comments on that.
40:44.77
Brett House
Well, and and i want yeah I wonder if there was a – was there a disconnect between how the product what the product envisure what the product leader envisioned when building it and then what you were actually seeing within the platform, which didn't – like with there was a disconnect in terms of the concierge service versus –
41:01.35
Rio
I could never find out why it happened. Brad was more like they, and I think they're probably a different product people and maybe had a product and a CMO with different ideas. And like, so I think it was just like competing interests, lack of alignment, a lot of things you see in big corporate America, but it was more like that, like this, that lack of a,
41:15.96
Brett House
Yeah.
41:19.81
Rio
With the right go to market, I was convinced that product would do pretty well. And that was a recommendation I gave i gave them. but And that they didn't really need to invest in redoing this thing, which would take another year.
41:25.92
Marc Sabatini
Thank you.
41:29.48
Rio
they could They could go to market and probably get good traction doing this and maybe later on find ways to steer people towards different different features in it. right So i don't know if you have any similar stories, Mark, or any thoughts on that story.
41:40.60
Rio
But I just thought for me, that just hit home how important go to market is.
41:45.60
Marc Sabatini
Well, for an established bank like that, especially a regional bank that would have a lot of ah local people coming in and out of the bank, they have a relationship with the customer. Many times, just ask your customers, is this something that would help?
41:59.38
Marc Sabatini
um You know, it sounds to me like as they were building the product, you know, somebody was looking at what other companies do, maybe some of the larger ones and wealth management was in there and, you know, a couple of other buzzwords and they decided to put that all together, not thinking about who they were actually targeting.
42:16.66
Marc Sabatini
And if if part of the feedback from the existing customers were we love working with our local bank and is there any way you can help us with our wealth management instead of us going to some, you know, huge conglomerate to do it, then that's the product.
42:32.15
Brett House
then Yeah, then there's a market need.
42:32.18
Marc Sabatini
we but But many times what you'll find is that if you dig into it, somebody will say, well, that's what the CEO said we had to do.
42:33.51
Brett House
Yeah, totally.
42:41.78
Brett House
Yeah, that's where we're going to make the money.
42:42.97
Marc Sabatini
Yeah.
42:43.06
Brett House
This whole concierge service is nice, but it's not going to make us any money. The only way we know how to make money is potentially this wealth management thing. Right?
42:50.42
Marc Sabatini
and And that's really where this this this loop comes back and forth.
42:51.63
Brett House
Right.
42:53.82
Marc Sabatini
And it may be that driver. You're absolutely right, Brett. Look, all these other things we already do, like people just walk in, they use the ATM, they use that. Why would we need this? Oh, well, it'll only work if we do that. Well, nobody in product then said, well, let's go out and actually identify, is there a market that we could be in front of that need all of this and would want to buy it from us?
43:15.03
Marc Sabatini
Right. So ah all day, every day, you you need to identify um the buyer's current comfort level with going with you.
43:15.51
Brett House
Yeah.
43:24.15
Marc Sabatini
Right.
43:24.41
Brett House
yeah
43:24.86
Marc Sabatini
And is it is it that it's new?
43:25.05
Brett House
and
43:27.48
Marc Sabatini
Is it ah like, what's my ability to a believe that you can deliver on this? ah B, that I want to move what I can do and see that there's enough of those people to warrant going to market with that product.
43:41.50
Brett House
Yeah, and it all goes back to where it all breaks first is that voice of customer, not to to take that word out of the clouds of it the actual needs of customers. And at a regional bank, you would think Rio would need, would want their bank, would want a level of trust with their regional bank, right?
43:56.80
Marc Sabatini
Yep.
43:57.19
Brett House
Like, hey, it's in my market area. I want to know that they know me. They know things about me that I don't, you know, that that are trusted within this relationship. But it seems like the wealth management was like a ah leap too far.
44:08.73
Rio
Yeah, I think you're right.
44:09.47
Brett House
Yeah.
44:11.14
Rio
Brett, I think you nailed it. I think what probably have happened, they apparently done some research, but I think what happened is the research didn't get interpreted right where it maybe got interpreted different ways by different people. And I think some senior person came in and said, we're going to become like, we're going to start selling people more like wealth management or like, I don't know, like we like it was it didn't make any...
44:28.58
Marc Sabatini
Yeah.
44:30.81
Rio
i I didn't think that was their sweet spot and it certainly wasn't. And yeah i thought, i mean, there were all these other great services they were offering that you could have upsold and cross sold people very easily with this. Right. So I actually thought that was a great opportunity to get this thing really sticking to build a better customer experience.
44:44.18
Rio
This could have been like really the front, the digital front door for people as they work with the bank instead of like all these other different websites and apps and stuff they had.
44:47.73
Brett House
Yeah.
44:52.27
Rio
So I actually thought it was a missed opportunity. And that's kind of the recommendation i they gave them for that. But I think, I think you're right. I think it's either not enough research, Mark, or, misconstruing the research, maybe not getting the right, that right learnings from the research.
45:06.68
Marc Sabatini
Tim.
45:06.71
Brett House
Yeah, and and especially early on, a bit it just reminds me, it the idea of your you nail who your buyer or buyer types are in their specific use cases and getting to a, so to a like ah especially with early stage companies, getting simple fast, I find is the hardest thing. So oftentimes there's there's a lot of noise um and usually the dollars you know drive that behavior. You start to see certain use cases change.
45:32.19
Brett House
generating interest amongst your clients, certain specific buyers saying, I've got that problem. Can you help me solve solve that problem? And then you have the sort of domino effect. Let's sell more of that. Let's lean in there. but But that could just be the activity of a specific salesperson, a specific PM, as opposed to something that's consistent across the commercial organization. Once you get to that point of clarity, though, I think it's it's about really zeroing in and ensuring that you're hyper-focused. And I think the best early stage companies are hyper-focused in that way.
46:03.48
Marc Sabatini
Another another aspect of of problem market fit versus product market fit, problem market fit. It goes back to the hero, so heroic sales efforts that all of our sales are coming from just a couple of salespeople.
46:15.34
Brett House
Yep.
46:16.06
Marc Sabatini
And because of it to get to product market fit, my entire sales team should be able to sell this. Right. It's not just it's not just the one one person. And, you know, to to the point you were just talking about, ah Rio, when it comes down to it, it's um You know, how do I identify that there's actually a need in the marketplace for what I'm doing?
46:36.46
Marc Sabatini
And that was, in my opinion, that was that regional banks opportunity to try to get to platform market fit, but they didn't do enough analysis on their customer base.
46:45.46
Brett House
yeah yep yeah
46:46.01
Marc Sabatini
But if we switch over to B2B and because I know this audience, if there's a lot of people in ad tech and more tech, it's it's heavily B2B oriented in in driving revenue for the companies. And it all comes down to proof, facts and evidence.
46:59.86
Marc Sabatini
Right. There are many great storytellers in our industry that can go out and pitch something, tell a story, get an audience to feel like this is great. But at the end of the day, you need facts and evidence that go back to, you know, why should I buy this? Why does this why do I believe that this solves my problem? Because the hurdle that you're getting over um isn't just um I don't see enough ah ROI in this, or, you know, I have a contract with somebody else. I don't need it for six months.
47:28.79
Marc Sabatini
It's fear. More often than not, your buyers have a level of fear about what you're talking about. Not just will this work and is my job on the line, but well, this could actually take my job.
47:40.79
Marc Sabatini
Or if I bring this in and save this and improve that and do this, I've got 25 people that might not be working here anymore.
47:47.86
Brett House
Well, especially the AI economy, but but it could also help promote them if it's doing good to help.
47:53.11
Marc Sabatini
that's the twist. That's the, what the, what the, what the, the company who's trying to deliver on this new offering, that's what they need to do.
47:54.14
Brett House
Yeah.
48:01.03
Marc Sabatini
They need to show how this helps to grow the business. And that's not just that proof is not just one use case or, or one buyer example, or one view of how it operates inside of a, of a company.
48:13.19
Marc Sabatini
It's, it's, it's a lot of that. It's, You have to get to a point where your proof points um get you past that reason to believe. and And that's when buyers, because if you're doing your job right, you're in front of the person who actually owns the problem that you address.
48:30.71
Marc Sabatini
And for all of us who have owned a lot of problems in our career, if somebody was standing in front of me who could who could show me facts and evidence that they can solve the problem that I'm dealing with, I'm going to spend a lot of time with that person.
48:40.95
Brett House
Yeah, yeah that's that's that that's the transition from like, I think we're kind of moving in that path of the the why. you got them You got the first meeting. They believe that you've got something that delivers to so something that's valuable to them. That's going to make them better, make get them promoted, help their help them drive you know team or company KPIs. The how is now now yeah now you're in front of me.
49:01.08
Brett House
Now you got to prove it to your point, right? That's where the the the how do you actually do this and show me examples with clients like me? right industry category like me function i'm a cmo i'm a cfo whatever it might be like me and that and getting to that point how what's your recommendation for companies um that are early stage that don't necessarily have all this is the collective almost a classic crossing the chasm case study right how do you get enough of that foothold within a certain category a certain buyer category a certain vertical or industry
49:25.17
Marc Sabatini
yeah.
49:34.78
Brett House
um to have the proof, right? Because yeah you know you're just getting started. how you what What's your recommendation to smaller companies about?
49:40.63
Marc Sabatini
You have to create the evidence, whether it's through POCs that you're going to do or people you know. i mean, it's rare to find a yeah you know a set of founders who don't have a handful of people that they could just go and and start doing this.
49:53.46
Marc Sabatini
Or you find those early adopters that will just buy anything because it sounds interesting. But you have to manufacture that.
50:00.15
Brett House
That's a rare one.
50:01.40
Marc Sabatini
you have to manufacture that that proof and evidence. And a lot of times today with cloud computing and the speed that you can do things, you could take you know very large data sets and recreate something that a client scenario and and have your facts and evidence and then go to them.
50:16.28
Marc Sabatini
um You know, you can pick logical, ah ah you know, ah proof points and and bring them up. But at at the end of the day, what you're up against is that today's buyers are are spending all of their time doing their own research on social, on you know, whatever they can find, ah you know, through whatever ah model they're using to do research on the problems to solve their, their challenge that they have, and they're 80% of the way through deciding who they're going to talk to before they talk to anybody.
50:49.46
Marc Sabatini
Yep.
50:49.66
Brett House
Yeah, I've got some stats to back that up. 84%, these are McKinsey and Sixth Sense, a combination. 84% choose a vendor before speaking with sales. 70% do their vendor research before sales is at all involved in the process, right? So they've already shortlisted a selected a selection of of vendors. They've done a ton of research into vendor solving problem ABCs. And then once once they actually select a vendor, or I'm sorry, here's another fact. 78% of companies that successfully build the product
51:20.57
Brett House
um and achieve some level of product market fit failed to scale, which I think kind of, that's a McKinsey quote that mckinsey never that I mentioned in my first GTM slop article, which I think is really interesting because that's saying you've built a successful product, you've got product market fit, but you may not have exact problem market fit, right?
51:41.88
Marc Sabatini
Mm-hmm.
51:41.98
Brett House
To your point, right? Your platform, you know, like, why do you think that is? Why do you think companies fail to scale once?
51:48.50
Marc Sabatini
once they get the product market fit, um, that that's more of a go to market issue about the orchestration of the team.
51:50.04
Brett House
Yeah.
51:55.90
Brett House
Yeah.
51:56.28
Marc Sabatini
Um, there's, there's, uh, some solutions out there. I, I, uh, do advisory work for a company called full cast, and there's a ah revenue, uh, intelligence solution that can actually go in and look at, um, all the activities that your go to market team has to say, how many times am I touching a given prospect in a certain period of time?
52:17.88
Marc Sabatini
when I win the deals and how many times do I touch them or how many people am I multi-threaded with when I don't win them? Or how quickly am I bringing procurement into this into the organization or how quickly am I bringing legal in to start talking about the contract?
52:34.49
Marc Sabatini
And it's it's really trying to map out how did I get those customers that helped me to establish that I have product market fit? and then replicating that right across the organization.
52:47.58
Marc Sabatini
Because the difference on the sales side of things, the difference between the 10% to 15% of my salespeople that are bringing 90% of the net new revenue in and the balance is process.
52:59.54
Marc Sabatini
It's really understanding that that they've been educated on the process to do this and what works for our solution and for our business. icp because it's different across the board that's the education that you have to have and when i talked earlier about ah picking what you're going to do going out and doing it and collecting the evidence and analyzing the evidence that's what you need to do and i would i would venture to say that that that those organizations failed to have a strong and and deep revenue operations team
53:23.38
Brett House
Yeah.
53:33.05
Marc Sabatini
to collect the information from sales, marketing and customer success and the interaction of people to the brand and in and in the sales process to say what's working.
53:41.20
Rio
Okay.
53:41.98
Brett House
Yeah, and that's the feed and that's the feedback loop.
53:42.39
Rio
So Mark, we're almost almost out we are almost out of time here.
53:43.95
Brett House
Yeah.
53:45.52
Rio
how about we so we go to the quick hits, Mark, it like we're, you know i don't know if one word answer is a reasonable, but let's say several word answers, one sentence max. Question one, which go to market screw up do you see most often when you're doing your job?
54:01.82
Marc Sabatini
uh, uh, ICP, they're trying to sell something to everybody.
54:07.29
Brett House
Yeah, I'm going to add a quick hit is how do you solve the um the education gap? Right? Because you you you just clearly in your last answer talked about the the gap between, you know, what products delivering and in the commercial readiness.
54:13.47
Marc Sabatini
Yeah.
54:18.23
Marc Sabatini
Yeah. Look, for everybody that's listening, it's our responsibility to be self learners. It's not our company or our organization's responsibility to teach everybody everything. So we need a team that's ready to learn, learn on their own, information is readily available. Now, the company does need to do learning and development.
54:36.63
Marc Sabatini
um But the the the test is find an objective competency assessment tool for each one of the roles in your organization and measure competency, not from a perspective I'm going to let people go, but from a perspective of where do I need to teach more?
54:53.11
Marc Sabatini
Right. Then you're going to learn who in your organization wants to learn and who doesn't want to learn. And you guys can all figure out which category you want to do what with. But the next perspective is who can learn and who's having trouble learning, because I'll spend much more time with the person who's having trouble learning, who wants to learn than person who doesn't want to learn.
55:12.62
Rio
Well, these are definitely not quick hit answers, Mark. Unfortunately, it's giving you a time.
55:17.24
Brett House
yeah
55:17.64
Rio
Don't worry about it. That's good answer. All right. So I guess we've got time for one more and then we'd love to hear how guests can get ahold of you, Mark. So last question, what's one sign undeniable that a go-to-market or a market entry plan is not ready or or is going fail?
55:32.79
Marc Sabatini
ah that You can't scale. You can't string together one quarter after another. That's one sign.
55:38.68
Brett House
PB, David Ensign PB, David Ensign For sure.
55:39.07
Marc Sabatini
The other piece is you're either firing people or losing people because I doubt that everybody's bad at hiring. At the end of the day, when the system's broken, it doesn't work for the humans in the organization.
55:52.16
Rio
that's a really That's a really good call. I think we've all seen in our careers at some point, right?
55:56.12
Brett House
for sure
55:57.59
Rio
Cool. So let's say, Mark, how can people get ahold you? Let's say someone wants to talk about your, yeah how do you run and go to market? Some of the CRO advisory you're doing, they want to get ahold of you and Brett and and in high signals. I mean, what's the best way to get in touch with you?
56:10.42
Marc Sabatini
Yeah, the easiest way is through LinkedIn. They can find me out there. um But, you know, certainly the the work that Brett and I are doing with High Signals, you're going to start hearing a lot more about us.
56:21.94
Marc Sabatini
But at the end of the day, just jump on LinkedIn, find me, and I'm happy to have a conversation.
56:27.17
Brett House
Yep, debdebdebhighsignals.com. But for all those that have made it through this episode, check out signalandnoise.ai. We're constantly publishing articles. Rio's just got one coming out. He's got one or two coming out a week. I'm writing a bunch. We've got a bunch of executive contributors that are producing a ton of great new content. So check out signalandnoise.ai as well as YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you listen and watch your favorite content. And we will see you next time.
56:58.68
Rio
Yeah, surprisingly, the amount of people actually make it through these when they look at that when when I look at the numbers, Brett. So it's it's pretty cool to see. So thanks again, everyone. Mark, it was always a pleasure as usual.
57:07.13
Marc Sabatini
Thank you for having me.
57:08.18
Rio
And thanks for coming. And thank you.
57:10.62
Marc Sabatini
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you both.
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