GTM Crossroads Podcast Ep4: Intent data, partnerships, inside-out GTM

In this episode of GTM Crossroads, we dive into the evolving role of intent data, the shift from traditional data-buying approaches to more inside-out segmentation, and how teams can create hyper-targeted outbound strategies that actually convert. Plus, we touch on the hidden complexities of segmentation, why hiring a junior SDR to figure it out is a mistake, and how bad targeting can erode trust faster than anything else.

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Disclaimer

Please note that the GTM Crossroads Podcast is co-hosted by Harris Kenny (Founder, OutboundSync), Brendan Tolleson (Co-Founder & CEO, RevPartners), and Zach Vidibor (Co-Founder & CEO, Octave). Each episode features discussions on go-to-market (GTM) strategy, revenue operations, and sales execution from industry leaders.

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the individual speakers at the time of recording and do not necessarily reflect the official stance of their respective organizations. Statements made during the conversation may be speculative, evolving, or based on personal experience rather than company policy.

This transcript below is provided for reference and accessibility but should not be interpreted as official guidance, policy, or endorsement by any company mentioned. 

Transcript

Brendan Tolleson (00:01.07)
All right, gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of Go to Market Crossroads. I think this is episode four. So we’ve made it four episodes. Like, look at us guys. This is like a thing now. So we can all be proud of what we are building together. And I think one of the fun, well, actually, before I kind of go in that, Zach, Harris, how y’all doing?

Zach Vidibor (00:22.088)
Good. I mean, we’ve probably made it into like the 99th percentile of podcast already. I’m sure like 1.1 episodes is the average. let’s do those two hours.

Brendan Tolleson (00:26.186)
I’m

Brendan Tolleson (00:31.214)
You

Elite Company. Harris, how about you man?

Zach Vidibor (00:36.66)
Yeah. But that’s all right. We’re doing good. Yeah.

Harris Kenny (00:39.135)
For sure. it’s all good. Hopefully we’re cracking into some people’s commutes or grocery store routines or whatever. And if nothing else, if it’s just between the three of us and the lamps, I’ve been really enjoying talking to you guys.

Brendan Tolleson (00:55.182)
Yeah, I don’t know if we’ve eclipsed like 10 views yet, but that’s okay, guys. I enjoy that. It gives me excuse to hang out with you all. that’s that. Well, you know, I like one of the things that we did in the last few episodes, which is just kind of what’s what’s been going on the last week that you want to highlight. could be something from the show feedback you received from your mother, or it could be something that you’re seeing in the market as you’re kind of building your company. So, Harris, I’ll start with you in terms of

Harris Kenny (01:02.111)
Yeah, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Brendan Tolleson (01:25.282)
What’s been going on or something you want to highlight?

Harris Kenny (01:27.955)
Yeah, absolutely. So one thing that we do that’s a little different versus like a lot of software companies is that we do have Slack channels. I know some do this, but a lot don’t. We do have Slack channels with our users and then particularly for our agencies because our agencies will have like, they’ll have like 10 or 20 clients that they’re using our product across. And I was thinking a lot about our conversation last week around intent, intent signals, intent data providers, things like that. And I started asking a couple of our agency partners about this.

like seeing kind of where they’re using it how it’s coming up in some of their campaigns. And I think I got to eat a little crow. mean, I was, I, I tried to be somewhat neutral, but at last week I was skeptical of intent data. And I think I was probably. I don’t even know which type of logical fallacy or what type of error this was, but I think I was like misattributing. think like historically when I’ve thought about intent data, I thought about like a handful of very specific providers that do a very specific thing. But I think that really what has changed over the last.

I don’t know, six months is that like this, think thinking about it more as like signals and signal tracking and that yes, sometimes there’s intent like individualized or personalized intent behind signals, but sometimes there’s like firmographic or some other industry level information. But you know, basically it’s like the like drum beat of things that are happening over time. And like, as that cadence changes, like, Hey, there’s a new sound, there’s a new something.

So I think like there’s more happening there than I think we gave credit to, than I gave credit to last week. And I think like social signals, job changes, like these things have been kind of like one-offs, but I think they’re becoming more structurally baked into how companies are doing all bound. And so I think like with that in mind, I think there’s probably a lot more here and frankly, like a lot of learning for me about like what are the current state of the art? Because like I said, like I said last week, like we’re small, we have a small go-to-market budget, we’re three person team.

most of the time I was spending my time focused on like uptime and like looking at logs. And so like our actual business, we are probably not the most innovative go-to-market team ourselves. So yeah, so that’s just kind of what I’ve been kind of like reflecting on and thinking like, okay, I’ve got some catching up to do here, which is a good thing. You know, we’re always learning, but yeah, those are my reflections.

Brendan Tolleson (03:45.612)
Well, got to go back. No, go ahead.

Zach Vidibor (03:45.798)
I maybe. Go for it. No, I was just gonna maybe build on that a little. had some of, think our mutual friends, Alex and Ali from Undershort. They were actually, they were out my way in San Francisco, so got to have a in-person powwow, pound the table, you know, get all animated over some beers, all in good fun. But like we were talking about this as well and they were really highlighting.

Harris Kenny (03:58.773)
yeah.

Zach Vidibor (04:14.1)
to your point Harris, about the signals and you can do a of different things and just the success they’ve had with LinkedIn retargeting, right? And really elegant way to kind of take in a stream of people that are coming to your front door and kind of like we were talking about last time, I’m just like, is it intent? I don’t know, you know?

Harris Kenny (04:21.395)
Mm-hmm.

Zach Vidibor (04:32.99)
who knows why they landed there. It’s hard to say you’re a hand raiser, but then there are these other things you can do with that signal and get that into different channels. I think they were just, no surprise, calling out the success they’ve had with that. And it makes intuitive sense. We all know that experience we have on.

you search for something on Google, then you pop open Instagram and you see the ad and you’re like, yeah, well, they did a good job there. I was thinking about that, you know? So it’s like, it does feel intuitive and yeah, there’s lots of opportunity there. So I was thinking about that, yeah, over the last few days as well.

Harris Kenny (05:00.117)
You

Brendan Tolleson (05:10.678)
Yeah, the end story guys are great. Another Atlanta Bay shop where I’m at. maybe Zach, you can kill two birds with one stone, get your butt on a flight and get over here, Here’s your welcome too as well. yeah, I think that.

Zach Vidibor (05:14.643)
Yeah.

Zach Vidibor (05:19.442)
I know, they’re excited.

Harris Kenny (05:23.889)
It’s been a while. The last time I was in Atlanta was a long, time ago, but it was a great trip.

Brendan Tolleson (05:29.452)
Well guys, that actually is a great opportunity for me to share some news in the last week. We are actually gonna be holding an event in Atlanta. So if you’re a revenue leader, I promised I didn’t set that up, but it actually worked out really well. So I’m just gonna use it. So we are gonna be hosting Southbound, which is our annual revenue event in Atlanta. It’ll be May, gosh, this is the first time I’ve announced it, so I’m gonna get the dates wrong. But it’s Wednesday and Thursday, which I believe is May 20th and 21st.

Zach Vidibor (05:37.961)
Hello?

Brendan Tolleson (05:57.222)
You may have the opportunity to see Zach and Harris. I haven’t talked to them about this, but I would love for them to be there. You’ll probably see the understory guys and a bunch of other cool people in the ecosystem. we’re excited. We just locked in the dates today and getting the vendors and the speakers all done. heads up, that’s coming in May. So we’re excited about that. I guess the only other learning that I call out from this past week, this is nice feel forward moment. I think Harris, you’re the one that said eating crow.

I thought this was kind of ironic because we talked about email deliverability a few weeks ago. And we have an SDR and we experienced the problem of email deliverability. his domain got crushed. And in fact, his email got shut down. So I thought that was a fun moment to call out to the team that even though we’re supposedly such a matter of experts, even we fail. So I just thought I’d share that as we’re in a safe place. This is therapy in some ways.

But guys, think as we kind of move on into the topics for today, or the topic rather, this is our fourth week as we talked about. And so kind of like building on the sequence, we talked about deliverability, we talked about the copy, we talked about intent. And I think it’d be kind of the segue even from what you, Zach and Harris were talking about, just gets in beyond intent. What are ways that you’ve seen be successful for us to look at the database in a way which drives that conversion from…

with these prospects. And so that’s kind of what I want us to focus on today. And it could just be exactly what you just said, like, hey, here’s some of the things I’m learning as a result of talking to people or things that you’re seeing even within your own environment that have driven success. So that’s what we’re going to park on for the rest of the time. But who would like to get started?

Zach Vidibor (07:42.136)
I got a thought maybe we can run, run with something, see where it takes us. But I guess I think, you know, when we’re talking about like data and all this and list building and segmenting your market. And I think like a big transition that’s happening and definitely enabled by AI is I think it kind of used to be. You would like define your market kind of like.

outside in, right? Like you would be buying data and like zoom info or LinkedIn sales net or whoever, like they define the schema, they define the world through filters and ranges and like all these things. And I think that just became the de facto way of companies will go like, all right, this is the data set. So I have to define my market via this available data. And I think things have changed a lot now where you’re able to go kind of more inside out of, okay,

that data is important, the firmographics, the technographics, those are all nodes in the universe, but also like, what the hell do we care about? And you know, like the classic example of like a Vanta or a Drata or like their go-to-market motion is like, hey, like what’s the most important thing? Like, I wanna go to your website and see, do you list a SOC 2 certification or not? Right, like data points like that, those become like more valuable than.

any like industry or employer range or anything else, right? And so I think there’s been, there’s like this ongoing revolution of like, how do you define these other pieces of data that makes sense to like your unique business, your products, your services, your motions, and like really make that a part of list building and segmentation and qualification and all these points. And I think there’s just like, we’re at the like early, early innings of like, how do we define our own day? And then

via AI tools, can get so much, can scrape and extract and find and summarize and like, you can get so much more from the universe now, then you were just kind of forced to just buy off the truck as is and a, you know, a flat file or a GUI, who cared, you know, it was all the same for everybody. Now you can kind of define your own.

Zach Vidibor (09:53.172)
universe. it’s just like that. That’s something I’ve been thinking a lot of kind of this like, yeah, like outside in versus inside out, how do you define yourself? And I think that like unlocks a lot of a lot of possibilities.

Zach Vidibor (10:08.212)
I don’t know if that resonates or sparks any ideas or is just too esoteric.

Brendan Tolleson (10:16.841)
I was thinking of here’s the floor. I can speak into it here if you’d like.

Harris Kenny (10:20.275)
I’m just processing. thinking. I’m still thinking about what we were talking about before we started recording too. You’re giving me a lot today, Zach.

Zach Vidibor (10:26.396)
All right.

Brendan Tolleson (10:27.763)
Well, yeah, it isn’t like whatever you call it inside out or outside in or inside out that I think there’s this element of like democratization of data. I guess I don’t know how else to say it. It’s like the data is no longer exclusive to a handful of providers. Like the data is at your fingertips. And so how do you actually weaponize that where

those that know how to do it well will win. we have this like the first episode, I think is like there you can have such a competitive advantage if you know how to set things up well. And so I think that that part to what you just described, Zach, makes a ton of sense. This isn’t exclusive to a few. Everyone has access to it now. And so what do do about that? And it gets pretty exciting about how you can set things up.

Harris Kenny (11:15.071)
Yeah, yeah, I agree. think that, you know, like so much of the problem before was, it’s like, okay, I’m a data provider and like, I need to put this data into a database. like, I need like tables and columns and I need to organize it. And it’s just like, that’s like a fundamentally like, it’s like a limiting thing, but it’s like, how else were they gonna do it? You know, there was no other way for them to do it. And I think with the inside out approach, I think the…

The bigger challenge is…

You know, I think like a lot of organizations aren’t ready to do that. I mean, they haven’t, they don’t really understand fully like who they sell to or like what it is that they’re trying to do. I mean, sometimes it’s like pretty shocking how big companies can get just because like they had the right idea at the right time. And it doesn’t mean it’s a bad company or it’s an immature company. I mean, I have a ton of respect for anybody that can come up with an idea and make a buck, you know, as long as it’s not.

you know, something bad. it’s like, but that in and of itself doesn’t necessarily make a company like good at this idea of like what we’re calling a go to market now, a GTM now. you know, it’s like, if you’re going inside out, like you have to like go within and then you really have to understand like who is it that you’re selling to, what are their priorities? And then you have to have a way of like maintaining that as it changes.

over time. So it’s like your company evolves over months and over years and your customer base changes and what they’re buying and your features, like all of those things change over time. And I think that the idea of like just buying this off the shelf stuff, it made it easy. I think that the like the maintenance aspect of this and what we’re talking about is much harder than people kind of give credit for. And I think it puts like way more pressure on the CRM than has historically been expected in terms of like data hygiene.

Harris Kenny (13:12.691)
and data governance, and we have a user who they have a very serious Salesforce admin, and so we have really good back and forth with her, and we’re asking like, okay, how do you want it to be, and what can we add to our product to solve this problem better? And what has stood out to me is how unusual she is relative to maybe some of the other admins that we’ve interacted with at other companies, where she’s asking these questions, and I’m like, my gosh, like how?

Like this isn’t even a problem with our product necessarily. It’s not something we’re doing right or wrong. She’s just asking like depth of questions. And I’m like, nobody’s asked me that in two years. And so, you know, it’s like, and this is like, and anyway, so yeah, I think like the inside out, like what that, that puts pressure, I think on teams that they’re not like fully equipped to like handle it. I don’t know if they have like the right personnel or the right process around like how they manage their systems to do that work.

Zach Vidibor (14:05.491)
No.

Harris Kenny (14:06.261)
in ways that I think are unexpected. It’s not just like go sign up for clay or something, you know? It requires like a discipline that I just like is not typical from what I’ve seen working with teams, you know? I don’t know if you guys agree with that or not.

Zach Vidibor (14:16.755)
Yeah.

Brendan Tolleson (14:19.505)
think actually what would be helpful, we’ve talked about inside, I know Zach, you mentioned Inside Out and, or excuse me, yeah, Zach and then Harris, you talked a little bit about it, but maybe let’s take a step back. What do you mean, Zach, by Inside Out for those that may not be as familiar with that concept, just to set the foundation.

Zach Vidibor (14:35.952)
Yeah, I guess, let’s, I guess maybe I can go back into my, my own personal history, you know, like my, my sales job 15 years ago. And it was like, data was, it was so much more a, you know, the, the CRM was about, Hey, does this account have a Dunn’s number? Because that will tell us like what bucket we put it in and how you operate and what, what you go march off into the universe and talk about, right? Like, they’re

they’re a tax service provider, done, SIC code, blah, blah, blah, go talk about that. And I think like, again, that’s a crude example, but I think it was like, oftentimes it’s like, we go buy data, we stuff it into CRM based on what’s available, we do our best job slicing up. And then again, I’ll speak to like my background. You would go like, all right, what’s the most sensible way to do this? Like we kind of go buy,

size of company and then we have reps in SMB, mid market and enterprise and it’s kind of size of company roughly maps to kind of size of prize of the deal and like go forth and prosper, you know? And I think like, again, crude example, but now I think companies are being much more thoughtful of like, hey, maybe, you know, higher education, very large organizations, lots of revenue, lots of employees, but like,

they don’t spend the same way, they buy different ways, they’re regulated. I think companies have gotten and need to get much more sophisticated about like, all right, the customers are selling to like, how do we deliver emotion that they’re gonna understand what we do, how we can help them specifically? And I think getting much more in the weeds of, hey, are you, where does your infrastructure sit? If you’re a technology that’s selling into the…

a company’s infrastructure, go, hey, are you multi-cloud? Do you need stuff on-prem? All of these types of things that are.

Zach Vidibor (16:43.784)
more granular ways of just kind of understanding your customer and likely what they care about and where they’re feeling pains and not just going like, you you’re oil and gas, you’re regulated, you care about compliance, know, blah, blah, blah. You know, like, I guess that’s what I mean. I don’t know if this is too squishy or helpful, but I think all of that data that exists out in the universe is no doubt valuable, but the like inside out is going first starting with like,

What do we do that’s like really unique? Why do our customers buy from us versus the next guy? And then what are the signals? What are the data points? What are the like, you know, what are the comorbidities with our, you know, our, you know, motion, right? Like what are the things we can go look for that are really specific and interesting and not the things that everybody’s looking, you know, I think like we talked about last time, they like.

Brendan Tolleson (17:20.613)
Okay.

Zach Vidibor (17:39.848)
funding, hiring, promotion, job change, you know, like all of those things are like, okay, those exist. Are they truly relevant to you? Is it always just like, go take the signal that you can buy from somebody and just like bolt your value prop onto it? Or is it more like, can we go craft a signal that’s actually really important to our business, then search for that and then boom, when we made that with our value prop, now we have a unique story.

Harris Kenny (18:08.181)
Yeah, I think the Vanta example is like a really interesting one because that’s like a different way of segmenting companies of like, do they or do they not have SOC 2, for example, on their site? And if they do, you might approach them differently. I think that like we had a customer, we had back when I ran the agency, we had a customer that provided a service that was like essentially like a surge service for contractors. And so, you know, we had spent quite a bit of time developing a campaign around.

like weather events where contractors would have like an increase in doing like restoration services and things like that. There was one that for another previous client where they would, like we targeted like the attendees at the user conference kind of thing, which was really effective. And like for some of these, you have to get really creative, but it’s like, like, yeah, like in this case, it’s like a really small market, you know? And so,

Brendan Tolleson (19:03.237)
you

Harris Kenny (19:05.301)
But yeah, I think that it’s like identifying a way to segment, know, if you think about like, basically if it’s, if you can apply a filter in Apollo or ZoomInfo, that’s like level one thinking kind of thing. And I feel like level two is a data point that stitches between columns somehow within a traditional lead database. I’m not saying use or don’t use ZoomInfo or Apollo, I’m just saying like,

Zach Vidibor (19:24.03)
Mm-hmm.

Harris Kenny (19:32.694)
If they can easily categorize it, then it’s like probably not sufficient for like where I think we’re talking about things are going, which is like more advanced segmentation. It’s like yes, level one and two. So the guests, okay, but you have to look at the website for this. But then you also have to look at their like org chart to see like, do they have this job title within their organization? And you know, whatever. it’s like that that’s kind of where you start getting I think the insight, you can get this kind of like, much better messaging, you can hit the relevance better than you could before, I think.

Brendan Tolleson (20:02.796)
Yeah, it’s interesting on our side because the comment you guys made about outside in versus inside out, you know, we’re, I think I’ve shared this before, we’re about $10 million business. And like, we’ve got a lot of data. And it’s funny because we, one of our, if you guys are familiar with OKRs, which we get, that’s a whole nother debate if OKRs is the right structure, but that’s like on a quarterly basis, hey, what are the priorities for each department? And we’ve also been going through a whole messaging. And it was funny because

Zach Vidibor (20:24.775)
Okay.

Brendan Tolleson (20:32.676)
I was our customer success team, which we call PX. Like I was like charged. They’re charged with like coming out with the personas that we serve. And at the same time, I’m like communicating the met the narrative we’re taking the market is this. This is the persona we serve. And then they’re like, well, but we don’t serve that persona. Like we may aspirationally serve that persona, but here’s like the actual data shows. And I’d be curious to get y’all. And the reason I bring that up is one, think it’s it’s timely and it hits in a way that I think is

Zach Vidibor (20:55.582)
over.

Brendan Tolleson (21:02.372)
very close to home. But I also wonder too, there is, how do you guys think about like what is like your current state versus aspirational? Like Zach, I know you guys are in a growth mode mindset and like where you are today may be different from where you want to go and who you serve, et cetera. Like how do you balance that in your mind of, yep, this is the persona, like let’s just use the data to inform how we target, but we also know.

Zach Vidibor (21:26.238)
Yeah.

Brendan Tolleson (21:29.348)
Hey, we want to go to bigger companies. want to go to bigger sales teams or whatever that may be for you. I’d be curious to think to hear how you balance that.

Zach Vidibor (21:39.048)
yeah, definitely living that as we speak. I think we’re, we try and be pretty thoughtful. would say I give us some credit in like, we’re trying to push people to do something new. So you have, you have to paint something aspirational. There has to be kind of some motivating vision. Hey, on the other side of this, you know, the chasm.

something better exists, but I don’t think you can go too far out. And I think we do speak to our customers a lot in the language of like, okay, let me tell you what’s on the truck today. Let me tell you a crawl, crawl, run. Here’s what we can take off the truck and do today. And here’s where we can get to with the current product and here’s what we’re building. I think I’ve always found,

But buyers are smart, they know they’re investing in a relationship and they wanna know where you’re headed, right? It takes a long time and it’s painful, they don’t wanna make a switch. So I think some of the vision and aspiration really is important, because people want that as well. The people that are gonna buy what we’re doing from all of us, they’re trying to transform, they’re trying to change, and so.

encouraging them that we’re gonna be on the journey together. Here’s the path we’re headed down. We’re not there yet, but we’re gonna link up arms and go together. I think that’s good. You gotta be a little careful. Don’t make promises you can’t keep, of course, but some blend of the here’s where we can get and here’s where we start. If you give me money today, let me be.

Harris Kenny (23:26.069)
Thank

Brendan Tolleson (23:26.23)
I’m

Zach Vidibor (23:27.028)
I think there is also, and maybe this is more just like sales theory, but super transparent, set the bar low, give yourself a chance to over exceed expectations, I think is always a better move in my opinion. yeah, we’re definitely blending both. How do we help you with outbound today? How do we help you?

have a smarter brain for your ICP and this living definition in the future, right? Like people aren’t buying that from me today, but they believe like, okay, as I start to adopt Octave, I get to start to have this living breathing definition of who I care about, why they buy from me, what their pains are. like, I think we’re getting people to buy into that, but then that’s not necessarily, you know, what we go do tomorrow after they sign up, you know?

Harris Kenny (24:18.581)
Mm-hmm.

Brendan Tolleson (24:18.692)
Yeah, I like that. There’s today and tomorrow kind of narrative in that. And Harris, may come to you with another question is.

So I mean, from what I understand from your good, like everyone has different, I say everyone, there are different types of go-to-market motions. And so I think for outbound sync as an example, my perception is outbound sync is more of a sell through versus a sell to, meaning you’re building partnerships that then drive in-user relationships. As we think about this topic of not just like the product roadmap, but also like the database, like does it…

Harris Kenny (24:37.418)
Mm-hmm.

Harris Kenny (24:49.407)
Mm-hmm.

Brendan Tolleson (24:56.79)
Does it change the sell to like when you’re doing a partnership motion versus a direct motion that you think is worth calling out for the audience or is it hey, a customer is a customer no matter how you’re going to market.

Harris Kenny (25:09.545)
Yeah, definitely. I I think that our our go-to-market strategy is informed by our by our cap table, you know, and I think like that’s true of lot of companies. Like when a company started and it has like ownership, like what is the structure of the company? And that’s going to like if you kind of work from the at some point, whether it’s when I die and this is a, you know, 65 year project for me or it’s in 30 years or 10 years or five years or whatever. At some point, I won’t be running this company anymore.

And so it’s like, are the expectations of the people who started it and who invested in it? And we did a pre seed round with tiny seed and we are bootstrapped. So like, we don’t have the cash to teach the market. And I think I really believe in what we’re working on, but I don’t know that it’s like a venture scale billion dollar plus opportunity, you know, like Sam Altman talks about like, oh, you know, if it couldn’t be a 10 billion dollar company, you’re wasting your time. If you’re trying to raise venture kind of thing. And like, we’re not like, I mean, we’re solving like a connection problem.

And so as a result of that, like my focus is like, why don’t like, we need to just find the people who agree that this problem matters and who have a sense of urgency. Like we don’t have the budget to like teach them about why it’s important. And that’s okay, right? Like, and so therefore what agencies do for us is that they’re out there showing how to get incredible results. And of the companies who decide to bring on an expert to get those results, some percentage of them are, and I believe more over time as we like,

as this becomes more mainstream, will also have data governance requirements around their CRM and tracking and compliance and security. And then as that happens, we will be there to help those agencies serve that increasingly sophisticated customer of theirs. Whereas like two years ago, the people who are using, like, I mean, I’ve been a smart lead customer for over two years. It’s a very, very, very early customer of Clay. The people who are using Clay and smart lead back two years ago were very different than they are today. It’s like a lot of founder led companies, a lot of tiny, you

It was just like experimenters and hackers and stuff. And so, you know, for us, our go-to-market is like, find the people who already kind of get it and just need to, and we just need to show them like, Hey, here’s how to do that thing that you’re, that you’ve already spent some time thinking about that you’ve already looked up on YouTube once or twice or Googled, or you built with make, or you’ve talked about it with chat GPT. And so that’s for us, that’s where agencies help. And that’s kind of how we, we tend to think about it. Cause you know, and so for us, like, you know, if you’re familiar with that, meme.

Harris Kenny (27:36.692)
of like the mid-wit that like sits in the middle, like the middle IQ. It’s like very complicated ideas. And then there’s like the low end and the high end of the IQ bell curve. And there’s like the simple person has the same idea as a really smart person. I got caught in that like mid-wit part of the curve. Like I was running this, I was building out these things that were complicated. And at the end of the day, like right now what I’m doing with the campaigns that I’m shipping today that will go out in March are like, hey, you use SmartLead, you use HubSpot, we make them talk. Let me know if that’s interesting to you at all. Like really simple.

Zach Vidibor (27:37.948)
Yeah. Yeah.

Harris Kenny (28:04.851)
That’s it. Like that’s what we do. If you like that, if you think that’s important, let’s talk. If not, no worries. Have a good life. Like happy trails. And like that’s, mean, that’s really all that for us. That’s all that matters right now. it doesn’t matter. Like if they have five STRs or 10 STRs or if they’re in, you know, London or Sydney or who, mean, who do you use these two tools and do want her to talk? Right? Like that’s the job. So for us, that’s it. And like 95 % of people might say no. And it’s like, great. Who cares? I just, I’m just trying to find that handful who, who are right now. So

That’s kind how my thinking on this has evolved over time. But I’m not trying to, you it’s different. It’s different in terms of expectations of the company and performance and what success looks like. You we need to pay our bills right now and we don’t have extra money for like running bigger campaigns. So yeah, I think that dictates a lot of the decisions that we make as a business, you know, and maybe that’ll change one day, but that’s where we’re at today.

Brendan Tolleson (28:55.236)
Well, I think it’s helpful to inform how you’re going to market in terms of, we have resource constraints and therefore we need to build a partnership model that actually serves as our sales force to allow us to have efficiency. And to your point, we’re not raising capital, so we don’t have capital to burn. it sounds like the same, hey guys, regardless of whether you’re doing partner-led motion or direct motion, the same, the data can be applied the same manner.

kind of your point, simplify the message to figure out from a focus and clarity perspective, what are those hooks that’s going to drive engagement? And so for you, like the Spark lead HubSpot example is a great one of all I need is 5 % to say yes and I’m on a good spot.

Harris Kenny (29:36.82)
Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think for us, like our focus is on educating our partners. So it’s like, how do we get them to understand our product and to get them to show their clients why this matters? And so that’s why we’ve been focusing a lot on revenue attribution. Like the understory, know, Alex Find Understory, talked about them earlier. Like he had a client where they found that they were driving like two to three X, depending on the month, the pipeline that they were getting credit for. And it’s because like they would come in, they would get a cold email and then they would forward it and they would end up coming in through a paid ad or through some other channel.

And so it’s like, that’s like a really cool, tight, simple story that we can give our agencies, our partners to go out and tell the market and they can tell their clients, Hey, like we might be doing more for you than you think. Do you want us to track that? Okay, well here’s how we need that data in HubSpot. So that like is a big focus for us. It’s like, how do we equip our partners and so that they can go out and explain to their clients why this, why this matters and get some where they want to go. And so it is really different, you know, like we don’t, I’m not sending out lots of marketing emails. I’m not taking 10, 15 demo calls a day.

It’s definitely a different lever to pull.

Brendan Tolleson (30:38.088)
Well, I think that gets into the value element and it goes back to what Zach was talking about around like with the partnership you have with your customers. There’s today and there’s tomorrow. And like we will continue to deliver in a way in which it achieves the outcome that you have as a business. Well, guys, we’re wrapped. I know many of were at time. Any concluding thoughts? Zach, I’ll let you start and Harris, I’ll let you finish.

Zach Vidibor (31:03.576)
man, I don’t know. Love the discussion today and great meme poll by the way, the mid-wit is like, I feel like I want that on my wall to live by that. I always think of the Apple Notes version of the guy that’s got the notes with the make with the air table and it’s just like, the ninja’s just like, I use Apple Notes. So anyways, I just get that out of my head. Great poll.

Harris Kenny (31:12.021)
you

Harris Kenny (31:27.541)
That’s right. That’s right. You just, yeah. I mean, I think of myself as it’s like Schrodinger’s meme. Like I’m constantly in all three parts of that bell curve, feel like, depending on what the topic is. No, I think segmentation is, super important and using it to try to get better results. And I think the only thing I’ll just say on this is like, people think they can hire an entry level person to figure this out.

Brendan Tolleson (31:28.508)
We’ll have that as the thumbnail for this episode.

Zach Vidibor (31:41.383)
Alright. Right.

Harris Kenny (31:57.442)
and like it’s pretty freaking hard. And I think that you’re going to have a bad time if you try to do that. I mean, you’ve got to have smart people in the room, whether that’s an agency or it’s software vendors or some combination of them and internal hires. Like this is like what makes companies work. It’s not, you know, the colors of your logo or whatever. And so I think that this is way harder than people realize.

It’s just really, yeah, it’s just tough. you know, they, people hire an SDR and then they fire them two months later because they didn’t book 10 meetings. And you’re like, you know, that, that, definitely bothers me. I think when people underestimate how hard this stuff is, because the segmentation is not, not, not easy. And then in hindsight, it’s always obvious is the thing you hear the story of Vantas so big and they found this. Yeah. But like they went through, they walked over, walked through glass to get to that insight. And then only in hindsight, you’re like, duh, you know,

Brendan Tolleson (32:47.358)
Yeah.

Zach Vidibor (32:52.946)
Yeah, and it’s not, you don’t get to it once either. It’s not like, it’s never done, you know, so I think people need to recognize that.

Brendan Tolleson (32:53.224)
Yeah, mean… go-

Harris Kenny (32:57.469)
Right.

Brendan Tolleson (33:03.112)
Well, I think we also there’s a cost associated with doing it wrong. It’s not just like you throwing people a problem and that there’s that element, but there’s the there’s the trust with the buyer that is like super important that we can’t forget. It’s like you can erode trust very, very fast. And once you are on the blacklist, it’s very hard to change that. And we talked about in the first episode is that rise of the strategic tech tech tition that you can’t just throw a body at it on the SDR side or on.

like an admin side, someone really needs to understand what you’re trying to achieve from a go-to-market perspective to operationalize that inside the CRM. so yeah, if you have a disconnected system and you’re just throwing bodies at it, you’re in a world of hurt, because it’s going to introduce a lot of friction into the buyer process, but also into the internal teams. And nobody wins in that scenario.

Zach Vidibor (33:54.942)
Yeah.

Brendan Tolleson (33:56.349)
Alright guys, well, appreciate your time. Look forward to next week and hopefully see you in Atlanta in May for Southbound.

Zach Vidibor (33:59.486)
Blow it.

Zach Vidibor (34:05.63)
pencil in your calendars, folks.

Brendan Tolleson (34:07.421)
See ya.

Zach Vidibor (34:09.822)
See ya, bye.

Harris Kenny (34:10.111)
Thanks guys.