GTM Crossroads Podcast Ep7: Omni-Channel Outbound and Product Data

In this episode of GTM Crossroads, the hosts discuss their personal experiences with spring activities, transitioning into a reflection on their business performance in Q1 and strategies for Q2. They explore the importance of hiring, the shift towards API integration and first-party data, and the growing need for omni-channel marketing strategies.

The conversation also delves into transforming email marketing from a transactional approach to a more relational one, emphasizing the significance of customer experience and relationship building in today’s business landscape.

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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 (00:01.073)
Gents, welcome back to another episode of Go To Market Crossroads. Zach, it looks like you’re enjoying the spring weather behind you. Not experiencing the pollen that I had to deal with in the lovely city of Atlanta, where we actually had a record count of pollen, which was terrible. But anyways, Harris, how are you doing? Let’s go to you, because you don’t experience any pollen, and it’s probably not too hot in Colorado.

Harris Kenny (00:26.718)
No, quite the opposite. We got a little bit of spring snow, so we got a little dusting, which is great. We’re gonna go up skiing this weekend for probably last one of the last run of the season. Our four and a half year old is learning how to ski and I switched to skiing myself after never really like falling in love with snowboarding and I loved skiing. So yeah, we love the snow and it’s always goofy. Spring is goofy out here, but no pollen. I think the snow dampened all the pollen from coming out.

Zach Vidibor (00:56.619)
Did you start as a skier and switch to snowboarding and now back? were you always a boarder?

Harris Kenny (01:01.804)
I started as a snowboarder as an adult, you know, in my early twenties. And I just never really, I like just being on my feet, you know, I’m not like a big gear sports guy, but there’s something about when your back is like downhill, it’s just something about it. just, my brain was, it just never got comfortable with it. but with skiing, was like, okay, I know where I’m going. I can always pizza, you know, I can always point my toes in and make a little pizza slice with the, you’re, if you’re not familiar with the, with the skis, I got the poles.

which is great, I can push myself if I’m stuck. Yeah, just, I’m really looking forward to kinda getting into it. I know. Well, no, if you get stuck on like a catwalk, you know, it’s very practical. And then with kids, they can grab the pole and you can pull them if they get stuck. You know, it’s just like, it’s really like practical and you can kinda like, you always see where you’re going. I don’t know. But I mean, I’m definitely not getting any younger. I feel that.

Brendan Tolleson (01:36.497)
You sound like a really old person right now. Just FYI.

Yeah.

Harris Kenny (01:59.312)
I feel that in the morning when I wake up.

Zach Vidibor (02:00.781)
you

Brendan Tolleson (02:01.533)
My buddies, they’ve done like this trip with other guys the last two years out to actually to Colorado and both years, day one, same injury, two guys like broke their legs. I think to your point about getting older, you know, use caution. What’s like, where are you on like levels? Are you like, I don’t even know levels of skiing because I don’t ski but is double black diamond a thing or what’s after?

Zach Vidibor (02:15.839)
Ugh.

Harris Kenny (02:20.665)
yeah.

Harris Kenny (02:28.697)
I mean it is, but not for me. It’s on the mountain, but not for me. No, no, I have pools in my life where I have, we’ll talk about our businesses today, but tremendous risk and then in every other area I like to be really, really small-see conservative. So I am not risky at all. I don’t do jumps, I don’t do anything. Physically, you could maybe describe me as a scaredy cat. Maybe it’s the best way to describe it.

Brendan Tolleson (02:30.671)
Okay.

Zach Vidibor (02:30.935)
Ha ha!

Brendan Tolleson (02:57.831)
That key, you know?

Zach Vidibor (02:57.934)
I started skiing, switched to snowboarding the last few years. Living in London for three years, there was not much snowboarding going on there. And then since I moved back three years ago, embarrassingly I haven’t been back up to Tahoe or anywhere.

Harris Kenny (03:09.252)
You

Zach Vidibor (03:19.096)
But yeah, I’ve definitely, used to be like, I I love board sports. I grew up on a skateboard, throwing myself downstairs in handrails and I have firmly entered, I love like mountain biking too. And I go like mountain biking with my buddies and like used to be much more of a daredevil. And I have firmly entered the, again, to your point Harris. In other places I’m risky. In the action sports, I’m in the no longer is there anything to prove zone.

Harris Kenny (03:48.367)
Yeah, that’s what chart mogul and Stripe screenshots are for. You see how crazy I am? Look at that slope.

Zach Vidibor (03:53.582)
Right, right, exactly. Yeah, that, yeah, I need to… A broken collarbone on the mountain bike would severely… That would really screw up the other part of the life that’s consuming me.

Brendan Tolleson (04:07.573)
All right, guys, well, speaking of I don’t know if risk is the right word, but let’s go into the business side that we just talked about. We’re all entrepreneurs. So yes, we have a tolerance for risk, but we are now in April, which means if you are on the calendar year quarters, that means you ended Q1 and you’re entering Q2. So I think this could be, you know, we’re all in different spaces and in different inflection points of businesses, but I think it’d be often time just to

take a step back, reflect on the takeaways for Q1, and then in light of what we saw, what are we prioritizing for Q2? So who wants to get us kicked off as it relates to some of the trends that you experienced in Q1?

Zach Vidibor (04:48.494)
We had a good Q1. We didn’t have a lovable zero to 40 million ARR in four months Q1, but we’re happy with the team we got and what we’re trying to do. We made some really good progress with our direct selling efforts, with our products, partnerships like these that are beginning to bear fruit and doing co-selling together.

We are definitely, Q2 obviously, have VC backers, so growth is always number one, I guess that is always priority number one, but I’d say we have definitely, we got nine people on the team now here. We are the real,

What will catapult us to the next level is we need to hire. And like really where the business feels the most tension right now and like transparently like where I feel the most tension is, know, Octave still feels like this, the Octave source code like.

Julian’s my co-founder. It’s like that software only runs in our head right now and like we need to start really Bleeding that out into a team that can start taking over some of this stuff because like if it’s all single threading through us No matter what we’re doing on the the sales side like the product the business the company won’t won’t scale and so that’s Frankly, you know besides keep on selling selling selling

I’ve started to turn a lot of my attention to hiring and recruiting and like what’s the team we’re going to build look like and we got to go. We’re going to truly emerge from the garage and go get an office and like, all those to like starting to, think enter that next level for our company. like that’s a, again, won’t ever end hopefully, or, know, at some point that’s, you know, pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. But yeah, that’s Q2 is we’re really having a…

Zach Vidibor (06:58.506)
spend much more of our time on hiring and recruiting than we have ever before.

Brendan Tolleson (07:03.737)
I’m going come back to you in a second. Harris, how about you on your side?

Harris Kenny (07:08.529)
Yeah, so I mean, for us, we’re fortunate growth is steady. I mean, we grow like 10 to 20 % every month and we have for like almost almost two years. I mean, so it’s just like steady, steady, steady. And so I think, you know, for us, and that was that was true in Q1 as well. Fortunately.

I think that, and that’s like net, so we’re retaining. So, you know, I think we’ve made a lot of investments on the customer success and retention shot, retention side. I think that for me, for growth, for us, what it looks like is.

I mean, partners are huge for us. We sell through agencies. It’s about 80 % of our business is selling through growth agencies and to a small extent, rev ops type, like more CRM focus agencies. But I mean, as we’ve talked about a little bit in the past, like I think that most of the, most of the ecosystem is just not really in a position to be able to handle this stuff. They’re just not making these changes. They’re not, they’re not, they’re on the wrong side of the GTM crossroads.

You know, so for us, like, it’s mostly nos. It’s nine nos and it’s one yes. Cause we are, you know, bootstrapped, so we’re bandwidth constrained and we just gotta say no to a lot of feature ideas and even some bigger things that I’m pretty excited about. And so we just gotta go to like the one thing where it’s like, okay, this is obviously what’s coming up from users. Let’s go build that new thing. And so for us, that’s continuing doing what we’re doing on the partner side, but it’s omni-channel. You know, we’re really consistently hearing from users that they wanna be able to

to get that omni-channel data inside of the CRM. so specifically for email right now, so that’s considering LinkedIn and then it’s phones. WhatsApp is also kind of interesting, and that is increasingly a thing, is interesting. yeah, so for us, for our own growth, if we keep, disciplined in terms of what we’re shipping, continue to sell through partners, and then for our direct deals,

Harris Kenny (09:11.599)
I’m working on our process, our sales process, you know, and just doing a better job of that. think that I’ve definitely noticed some deals are slowing down. There’s just like a lot of uncertainty. And so I’m just trying to do a better job of entertaining value. And I have like a two-stage process, which we’ve talked about a little bit previously, but I’m doing that and it’s working. I’m getting like the book of meeting from a meeting that is convert that’s resulting in deals closing and people not ghosting me as much as they were before.

So unfortunately I’m in a stage of the business where it’s just really kind of boring discipline stuff. I mean, hopefully we keep growing, but the stuff that I’m thinking about is just like, it’s just like sit down and eat your veggies kind of thing. It’s nothing like super exotic. I mean, I think we’re doing it. Something’s interesting in interesting ways, but it’s all just kind of, yeah, basic stuff. But we did get sock two type two, which is pretty sweet. that’s compliance and yeah, compliance and moving up market. I think that’s like complimentary with the, with the idea of sale of our sales process.

Brendan Tolleson (09:58.46)
and crap.

Harris Kenny (10:05.637)
because we’re selling to bigger companies too. So I think that’s gonna help.

Brendan Tolleson (10:10.247)
Great. Well, I can attest to your comment on focus. I remember our first conversation at inbound, I asked you for an integration and you said no. So he is very laser focused on the things that he is doing. So that’s impressive. Yeah, our quick exec summary for RP was, Q1 was great. And I’m very thankful for that. Like we had, for those that have followed our journey last year was,

Harris Kenny (10:19.652)
You

Zach Vidibor (10:23.234)
Yeah.

Zach Vidibor (10:28.11)
Thanks

Brendan Tolleson (10:39.613)
think probably how you described it Harris, with the whole eat your veggies, it was like get back to sustainability, get the company healthy, and FY25 was like let’s get back into a growth mode, kind of like measured aggression. And there’s like this Sam Altman quote that talks about like, regards to you about Sam Altman, the quote was basically around like growth covers a lot of problems, and so it’s just nice forward back in the growth mode. had like 120 % of our qualified deals, we at 99 % of our…

bookings target, and then we had 120 % of our attention target. So overall it was a good quarter for us. I’ll get into Q2 in a second. But Zach, one of the things I wanted to come back to you on, then Harris, have a question for you, but Zach, what did you see, like Q1 you talked about, it was a positive quarter for y’all. Were there any deal trends that you’re seeing in terms of industry, employee size, persona, like who you’re competing against, kind of like to pull that out, some of the themes that you saw.

Zach Vidibor (11:37.058)
Yeah.

I would say where we’re trying to lean in more, where I think the market’s pulling us and we want to go in this direction and we kind of think it’s more differentiated. So we kind of have the like very high conviction is being very API integration first. And then, you know, there’s a little in the weeds, but like we’re seeing a lot of like, we’re starting to talk to larger customers that have

interesting first party data. And that first party data could be CRM data, could be conversation intelligence, things coming from call transcripts. It’s also starting to be people that have PLG motion and they have actual product data.

And this is something I’d say we’re seeing early, a few deals are starting to appear and it’s something we always wanted to do and maybe now it’s time to really go this direction is a lot of these PLG companies, have this extreme long tail of oftentimes can be very high volume of people signing up, getting in the product. They’re from a business, they’re a B2B user and they’re just kind of put in your standard lifecycle.

marketing trip. Hey, thanks for signing up. Here’s our docs, here’s our guides. Two days later, hey, check out this video, blah blah blah. We’re starting to see companies that are looking at putting a little more of like a sales assist kind of like automated motion behind that, leveraging a like, hey.

Zach Vidibor (13:22.286)
You’re a DTC e-commerce company, right? They’re starting to want to be armed with a bit more of a sales perspective, like, hey, saw you signed up, using some of that product data to really tighten up the relevancy of, hey, we know you, saw what happened, and really infusing that into, hey, companies like yours are doing XYZ with us. And so that is like…

been very interested, we’ve always kind had this dream of like, all right, when you just live and die in like pure cold outbound, like that’s a scary firing line to be on every day. And if we as a business can start getting more into the like…

Hey, we’re helping you across all these different touch points and the warmer and even not just the warm, the people that have like signed up. So we’ve started to see that. And yeah, I feel excited about like we’ve built the API in ways that can already like, can ingest a lot of that like rich data. And I think that’s going to be a bet we make on the product side and see if we can go take down a few more of these customers and really build like, okay, like we’ve done this now half dozen, dozen times and like here now.

Brendan Tolleson (14:09.009)
Right.

Zach Vidibor (14:35.428)
let’s go tell the world about it.

Brendan Tolleson (14:38.237)
Yeah, that’s really interesting. In terms of the conversational intelligence, the product-led side, to your point about intent signals, that’s a lot higher intent than some of the other ones that we’ve discussed in the past. that’s pretty interesting and unique that you’re able to go that far. Speaking of cold calling, Harris, one of the that you had mentioned is this omni-channel kind of desire. So I guess, maybe let’s take a step back. What is driving that omni-channel push that you’re seeing?

And then how are you thinking about solving that? Because from what my, what’s the right word? Limited knowledge. You were more on the email side. So how are you thinking about, hey, in light of this expansion of the need, how am I solving for it? So what’s driving it and then two, how are you solving for it?

Harris Kenny (15:08.016)
Mm-hmm.

Harris Kenny (15:20.751)
Mm-hmm.

Harris Kenny (15:27.493)
Yeah, I mean, so what we’re hearing from what we’re seeing is that people just prefer to get their information in different ways, right? I mean, it’s just like not, I mean, this is all bound, you know, approach D from your team had a great post about her and Kendra too, both had great posts this week on LinkedIn from RP about this and kind of what’s happening on the all bound side. Maybe it’s just different ways to catch people at different times or they preferred or whatever is just how you get through the noise. And,

I think like in first generation of this with the sales loft and the outreach of the world, you know, had a single rep in a single seat and they would have like a sequence across multiple channels. And then that model has shifted. There are still a lot of teams being successful with that at lower volume where they have target accounts, but we’re seeing this unbundling of the go-to-market function where now you have like a GTM engineer type person to use Clay’s term, but.

probably other words you use to describe it, basically it’s kind of becoming a little bit more like marketing. And so what was easier in the beginning was that there were tools that were built for that and they were email-based tools first for a lot of reasons. Email itself, it’s an open standard. There’s a lot of tooling around it. Validation is easier. It’s relatively consistent and stable as a form of identification. If you look at the CRM, HubSpot uses email as a unique identifier so you can

query HubSpot through an email address. Like there’s lots of technical reasons why I think, you know, anyway, so, but now we’re seeing like, okay, people are kind of, they’re getting a lot out of that, but there’s diminishing returns. And so they’re saying, okay, what else can we do with other channels? So I think that’s why it’s just like the reason why sales often outreach of the world built it in the first place, like all those reasons are still true. And, and if you’re going to have a, like the term that I’ve been increasingly using, I’m kind of falling in love with it is programmatic outbound.

where I think that this type of, it’s becoming like marketing, it’s becoming like advertising and you know, people like Eric Novoselosky talk about email as being like, like almost like a private ad network. And so it’s like different types of private ads that you can run across this list of prospects. and so there’s just like tooling missing for programmatic outbound that exists for programmatic digital advertising. And so that, that I think is, I think why it’s been like a little bit slow to take on.

Harris Kenny (17:51.41)
along with other like platform risks. mean, phones, it’s just hard to find someone who’s willing to pick up the phone, make a phone call, you know, just from like a staffing perspective and then getting good numbers. But now there’s increasingly providers like Sure Connect that are scoring phone numbers for propensity to respond. And so now that rep efficiency is going way up because they’re making, you know, four calls and having a conversation.

There are also the power parallel, a power, parallel dialers like Orem and stuff where you can just kind of rock through a thousand numbers at once kind of thing. anyway, there’s just new tech that’s kind of catching up. feel like email was first for whatever reason, for whatever combination of reasons. so let me, let me just stop there. And I’m curious, like if you guys are hearing and seeing that or how much of that you’re agreeing with, mean, I mean, Zach, from a messaging perspective, this messaging problem, it totally, translates across channels, you know, it’s not just like a single channel problem.

Zach Vidibor (18:44.654)
Totally, totally. think the, yeah, I think the, it’s interesting that like I’ve heard that the notion of the private ad network, it’s like a new way of like thinking about it. I will like, anecdotally, I will say.

Harris Kenny (18:55.803)
Yeah.

Zach Vidibor (19:03.618)
like the customers that are most successful that I’m seeing with cold outbound, like it’s first a mindset shift of just like email was treated as like, it’s this transactional channel. It’s like, you know, it’s a performance marketing channel. You know, it’s like, I put emails in, I get 30 minute meetings on the calendar out. And it is like, that is extremely difficult to do now, but you have this like, wait, what if we view this as

yet another one of our touch points. This one, email, happens to have this like unique property of like, I can actually kind of figure out exactly who I want to deliver this, this ad or this impression of our company and our offering and what we do and like.

if I treat it that way, it’s like, all right, hey, I spent a lot of money on Google and Meta and all these other places to deliver ads, like, what if I rethink how I think about email? Like, it’s not free and I can’t just treat it like crap, like, I gotta be more thoughtful and intentional, and like, those companies, like, no surprise, I’d say, like.

they’re outperforming, know, cause it’s like, it’s the compounding you get across these touch points and the trying to be, you know, a bit more value first and like not just demanding time from people. Like that seems to be where there’s momentum picking up. And I see like the teams that are making it work are just like, yeah, it’s like first rethinking the like, what do we, what are our expectations here? How do we treat this? And then the toolings and the system and the processes follow.

Harris Kenny (20:33.329)
Yeah, totally. And funny enough, like paid ads are kind of coming back and now some of these app bond agencies are talking about adding paid ads. So, you know, it’s really interesting. One last thing. And then Brendan, I don’t know what you’re seeing because I mean, you’re running a $10 million agency, which you’ve said on this before. So I know that’s not a secret. You know, you’re running a major agency at scale. So I’m curious what you’re seeing, but the last thing I’ll just say is that Taylor Herron, he had an interesting post on LinkedIn this week about the campaigns that are running for RB2B.

Zach Vidibor (20:37.422)
Right.

Harris Kenny (21:00.897)
And something that’s interesting is that they’re sending those campaign follow-ups and then the offer in the email. So you get deliverability right first. And that’s where we’ve talked about before how technical that is. But then the offer is like, Hey, here’s a free for life plan that you can use. Like there’s no meeting requests. There’s no hard pitch. It’s just like a really straightforward, clean offer. And for our B2B, they, we’ve talked about it before, but so, you know, it’s like, it’s just like another touch point where you’re getting, where you’re getting in front of that person and you’re giving us something that they can take action on or just learn about you. So yeah, I definitely think there’s like a shift happening.

And so, yeah.

Brendan Tolleson (21:31.773)
I really like the concept of how to think about your email strategy. How does it, to where you guys are going with that, and I think it’s like the programmatic concept. How does, so therefore, how does it change the copy of the email? Like, are you saying it’s more kind of informational as opposed to transactional? how, what is the, I guess for our listeners that are hearing this, they’re saying, okay,

I can buy into that concept. Now what does that mean in terms of how I should approach the email inbox?

Harris Kenny (22:06.619)
Yeah, well, I mean, I can just say like some of the offers that we’re seeing are different than they were before. So if you think about like before, you had a sales rep that had access to Zoom info or a Don and Bradstreet and they were working, you know, some limited number of target accounts and they would write individual emails and they would create a task and then they would write a second email. And the goal was always for that rep to get meetings for themselves on their calendar as an SDR, if they’re following that old predictable revenue model and then hand that off to an AE.

But if Outbound is shifting to this more programmatic Outbound, it’s becoming a little bit more of like an extent, moving up funnel a little bit, becoming a little bit of an extension of marketing. Then we’re seeing offers that are like, for example, using Outbound to distribute content. Hey, you know, we just put together this calculator or this white paper or like, just like posted this on LinkedIn, thought you might find it interesting. So as a distribution channel for content in a way that’s really light touch. Or let’s see.

What else? I I think that you can use a certain channel when other channels aren’t available. So I think that if you have multiple channels available to reach someone, or if you can have signals-based things changing what you’re doing, I think that’s where the programmatic piece comes in. So the question’s like, what are you emailing? It depends. It depends on what your content strategy is. It depends on what signals you can track for them. It depends on what you know about them from an ICP perspective. And the more you know about them, the more likely it is that you can find something for them to grab onto.

That doesn’t necessarily have to be a meeting today. I mean our goal of course is growth. It’s revenue We want closed one deals like obviously But it’s not not as straight line as it used to be and so that I think is kind of overall What I’m seeing

Zach Vidibor (23:51.566)
Yeah, I think there’s like a few places like the rubber meets the road in like real tactical differences. Like, okay, what’s the CTA? Like, what’s the call to action? Is it, do you have time to chat for 30 minutes or is it something softer? it, can I send you this? Can I send you a video? Can I share companies just like yours we’ve worked with in your industry? You know, like things that are like easy, like I’d say that’s like a tactical piece, but then I’d say like, again, the like, not to make this too like,

abstract theory based but it just like if you’re

When you’re developing messaging, if the goal is like, how do I like…

create this Rubik’s Cube that somebody will agree to meet with me. That’s just kind of like a different equation than if you’re just like, hey, I want this person to understand we’re doing really cool stuff that solves a problem. I think they have. And I want to deliver that message. Hey, I have a perspective that I think I’m right about. I’m not totally sure, but might be able to help you. It’s gotta just, and this is where…

It’s a blend of human and AI. Like AI cannot figure this out on its own. know, this is like it takes…

Zach Vidibor (25:03.756)
the operator who’s been in the business knows the offer, knows the market and like, yeah, we can start using tools, you you can use tools like us or many others to help automate a lot of this, but it’s like, this is where the art still lies, you know, and you just gotta think of like, what are we trying to motivate people to do to understand about us, to feel about our brand? You know, like, I think those things are like becoming more important again, you know, I think there’s gonna be a renaissance of…

the importance of brand will surface again, not that it’s gone away, but maybe just for B2B more so than B2C, I think it’s gonna grow in importance and kind of like how strategic companies need to think about it.

Brendan Tolleson (25:47.549)
Yeah, I think the, it’s almost like rewiring the way we approach go to market and it’s going from a transaction to a relationship is kind of what I’m hearing. And one of the things that actually Rob Jones and I have been talking a lot about is like, how do you capture this? it’s, we’re talking about a lot, this actually is funny that you guys are bringing this up. This is a lot of what we’re gonna be talking about at Southbound, our conference in May in Atlanta.

but there’s this idea of like turn my funnel into a tunnel. And it’s, we’re working on this. Yeah, we’re working on how to like frame this, but the idea of like a tunnel is like continuity. And it really is all about this idea of like the customer experience and value and relationship and a tunnel can go very deep. And so there’s like no end to it. And so we’re trying to like, from a visualization perspective, what you guys are talking about of like, how do we approach the

Zach Vidibor (26:23.16)
Thank very much.

Yeah.

Brendan Tolleson (26:46.557)
using the idea of the programmatic outbound or, but it’s just like, how do we think about it in that way? Where it is very much value centric, recurring value, as opposed to, I want to just force you down something. It’s just a different mindset that we’re playing around with.

Harris Kenny (27:02.737)
And the lineup at Southbound is insane, by the way. I mean, I’ll let you talk about it, but some of the companies that are speaking there are nuts. I mean, this isn’t just like we talk a lot about B2B SaaS, but this is about way more than that, right? I mean, we’re talking about things that are affecting whole parts of the economy that are experiencing a ton of change right now with everything going on economically. Not just in the US, like around the world. mean, things are up in the air right now.

Brendan Tolleson (27:03.281)
So if you guys like the funnel, you’re gonna see the funnel.

Brendan Tolleson (27:25.959)
Well, that was it.

Zach Vidibor (27:30.83)
Thank

Harris Kenny (27:31.375)
big time, you know? I mean, not to turn this into a news show, but you know, Jesus.

Brendan Tolleson (27:33.08)
Yeah. Well, I think that was going back to this idea of like, everyone’s talking about AI and we just talk about transaction versus relationship. And it’s like, well, no, we really need to be mindful of the human element. And that was the whole idea. Like some things change, but other things remain the same. And at the end of the day, we are people selling to people. And so why not learn from some of the best brands that we’ve seen in that B2C space?

Hor Shultz, who ran the Ritz Carlton. And then you have Dan Cathy on the Chick-fil-A side, who may be the number one in customer satisfaction for I eight years in row now. So it’s like, hey, what if you guys, like just using those two as example, how have you guys thought through the experience you create for your customer to translate it from a transaction to a relationship that we can learn from? And then like Donald Miller, who is a bestselling author and the StoryBrand framework is all about the customer is the hero and you’re the guide.

And so yeah, we were very much like, let’s take these principles and then how do we apply that with some of these concepts that like a winning by design is talking about with a bow tie model. So yeah, we’re trying to marry that to your point, Harris. Like we don’t claim to know the best things. And so let’s use these like thought leaders to really help not only inspire, but then apply that into our good market. So that’s the intent behind who’s there and why we’re doing it that way.

Zach Vidibor (28:55.31)
awesome. That’s a killer lineup. It’s funny, I always find myself drawn to like the… there are a lot of lessons from B to C and just like they get to operate at like a crazy scale and like they’re, you know, they go deeper on like the the psychology aspect in ways that oftentimes like we go in B to B because it’s harder in B to B where it’s like you’re dealing with…

buying committees and it’s like, it’s not one buyer psychology, it’s like, what’s the buying psychology of this company’s culture? know, but it’s just like, there are a lot of lessons to be drawn from that. So that’s gonna be cool to hear and like, yeah, we’re in this like, yeah, not just the news of the day is like, you know, things are in flux, but like the, think people’s teams, how they’re growing, what they’re hiring for, how they’re thinking about their markets. Like we’re gonna, you know, it’s a interesting time, but lots of opportunity as well.

Brendan Tolleson (29:48.861)
Well, yeah, I think we already see the Amazon effect of like how people want to buy. So you mentioned PLG earlier. So there’s like even just the experience of how we want to purchase. But then there’s like the commitment. I mean, you’re seeing it. was talking to John Dick, who runs customer success now at HubSpot. know, John Dick was in marketing and now he’s in CS, which is kind of a weird, like it seems weird. Like, why would you go from marketing to CS? But I think it speaks into the B2C concept and it’s like.

Hey, no, we have to have recurring value, recurring impact. We have to earn the right to win their business on a, like every day. And like, how do we bring kind of your point about like programmatic outbound, there’s almost like this programmatic customer experience where marketing actually plays a role in that. So I think there’s a lot we can unpack on that topic. I know we are at the top of our time, but guys, I’d love to talk more because there’s a lot here as it relates to what we’re seeing and I it’s gonna be a fun.

Harris Kenny (30:29.657)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Brendan Tolleson (30:43.249)
kind of way to set this up of just kind of what’s going on in our businesses and what we’re experiencing since last week, just to have a pretty open dialogue and hopefully the, I liked it, hopefully the audience likes it too, but I think it’s a good way for us to continue to learn and challenge assumptions that we have as we build together.

Zach Vidibor (30:59.961)
The meeting invite on the calendar started as a GTM therapy. we can make it a little more, some therapy we can get on the couch.

Harris Kenny (31:04.735)
Yeah

Harris Kenny (31:09.649)
That’s right. Yeah, for all negative feedback, please direct that to Brendan Tollison on LinkedIn. Let us know. Send us what you think. Really don’t hold back. Just let it Brendan know. Positive feedback sent to Zach and I.

Zach Vidibor (31:14.559)
Ha ha ha!

Brendan Tolleson (31:19.581)
Alright, feedback’s a gift. Alright gents, well enjoy the conversation. I’ll see y’all next week.

Zach Vidibor (31:20.6)
You

Zach Vidibor (31:28.984)
Cheers.