You are listening to the sassiest podcast in the world. Born in the Nordics, democratizing B2B sass knowledge everywhere. Hi, I'm Daniel. And I'm Thomas and we are experienced sass professionals that are curious about how other successful sass companies go to market, scale, build winning teams and great products. Join us on our journey as we speak to sass leaders trying to get hold of their secret sauce. And today's guest is Madhav Bandari, the CMO at Storyline. Looking at your portfolio, you just got to build a lot of identifying patterns and then finding creative disruptions from it. And they come from all places and all walks of life. Let's talk about something every sass CFO and revenue leader is chasing right now. Smarter growth. Scaling and recurring revenue business isn't just about winning new customers. It's about staying in control of subscriptions, billing, and compliance without the chaos. That's where union comes in. Union delivers AI power subscription management and billing, giving sass and subscription businesses a single source of truth for contracts, invoicing, revenue recognition, and analytics. One native tool that kills the spreadsheets, automates the busy work, and serves up real-time metrics turning complexity into clarity and helping you scale with confidence. Check out unium.com/sassist to see how leading sass finance teams power smarter growth with union. Hello and welcome back to the sassist podcast. I'm hot in your cold. How are you Daniel? I think that's a fair description right now. We probably have negative two or three right now and it's been windy and this morning when I walked from my house into my little office that I have in the garden here, I walked by two planters that have fallen over because it was very windy. So we definitely still have proper winters over here, but winters are also nice. You probably are very hot in Thailand and sweaty and it's like sticky. There's downsides to that as well. Yeah, but you can always go inside to their condition. I think we have 30 degrees now. And we are always pulling through at sassist. I think you have like three people with fever at home and wife broke her ankle and I have had all my three daughters to the hospital and also this night I had to go with my wife the whole night. But we're still kicking and we just made a really interesting podcast episode that we hope that you will enjoy. Besides that, now we are starting off our CEO and executive networks. We have a fantastic CEO kick off next week in Stockholm where we gather 60B to be sassist, CEO, scale-ups. Really looking forward to that. And we also have a CHRO dinner. Also the very same week. And after that, the regular online session starts where we have more than 600 people active in the network. So now it's starting for real, Daniel. It is starting for real. And I think we should just get right into it. It's a great episode, great guest here. We're going to talk about pattern interruption essentially. And I mean not to offend anyone here. But a lot of us, we sound the same, we look the same. It just feels the same. And if we can't stand out, it is the race to average. And if it's the race to average, then the only thing that we can differentiate on is price. And nobody wants that. So we're going to talk to a fantastic CMO here that has truly mastered how to interrupt patterns and how to stand out. And how to be the number one priority when somebody makes a short list in their category. So we should all listen to this and let's see what we can learn. Let's go. Today we are super excited to have no other than Madhav Bandari, the CMO at Storyline. Here's the guest in the Sessiest Podcast. Welcome Madhav, how are you today? We're doing amazing. And Thomas, great job. You just got my pronunciation exactly that. I'm happy to hear that because I sometimes make fun of him because he always says the name of the guest. And some names are maybe not more as common for us. And he's really turning into a pro here. I don't know Thomas. Is it you and ChatGT? You're like, he has a cheat code here. He does something to get the names right. It's the same thing that you do when you're meeting people. And you always find some sport connection. So I'm doing this linguistics exercise instead. Yeah. So speaking about sports, are you a cricket fan? Well, I am. But I think one of my top sort of players kind of retired. Who was your top player? Oh, very awkwardly. Who's like this. I don't know if you follow cricket. A little bit. Enough to get in trouble. But then when people talk a lot about it, then I don't know. I don't know. Then it has all the channels. So he probably, you know, sees this one. What's it worth? Well, what amazes me with cricket is that a game can last like days. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. What? Like literally days. Like you play a full day and it's like nobody wants. So we continue tomorrow. I did. Yeah. Yeah. It's Chris. Anyway, like we're not going to talk too much about cricket. So I might have to tell us like, who are you? Like for us, you are famous. You're linked in celebrity. You're a fantastic CMO. You've been listed everywhere as a CMO to watch. And I personally have a crush on your gene jacket. Like the storyline branded jacket. But like if we set all those sides or all those things aside, who are you? If there's somebody listening to this and like they have no idea who you are. How would you introduce yourself? You're incredibly sweet to say all of those things and hype me up. But yeah, I think it's maybe 10% of that. I would say who am I is a very tough question. But yeah, I mean, what I do right now is I run marketing at a company called Story Lane. But I've also been in marketing, especially in B2B tech for 15 years now. I've done it at a bunch of companies. And I sort of specialise in that for at least it's like say like five million to 20 million sort of there. I mean, 20 million in the limit is because I haven't really crossed beyond that. It's like soon. Soon enough. Yeah. So it's kind of like, but like I think it's that phase where it's like, okay, the company's starting to pick up a little bit and then you know, like you start to like build out the motion for it. So that's what I've worked on for more than a decade. And yeah, and then I, I'm actually a computer science engineer, you know, like as a background and then just happened to enter into marketing because I was very interested to understand how. Like I want to build my own startup, but I didn't know how. So the next best thing was to join a startup and understand how the business operates. Right. And then so I started. I joined a very early state startup did sales, marketing, CS. You know, even product management, to be honest, and then. And then just trying to connect the dots, you know, what works? What does it take from zero to one, one to 10, 10 to 20, you know, like all of that. And that's why I just, you know, like got deeply involved into it. So even today, if you ask me like, I'm definitely not the most creative person or anything. Like I think the reason I'm in marketing is to just like solve like business problems. That's how I sort of deal with it. Like if there's a problem that we're dealing with, oh, you know, we're stuck it up. Sorting revenue. You're going to get out of it, right? Like that's how I would operate it. Not like, okay, oh, we have the child. We need to make that work. Like that's not how I operate. And we're in the world. All you're right now. Right now I'm in Delhi, India, which is kind of like where I'm based out of. But I oscillate between San Francisco and Delhi because the storyline sort of founders and the exact team is all in the Bay Area. So I spend like, you know, I guess like almost I would say. Once every quarter there for a couple of weeks and I'm back here. That's what's happening with me right now. Okay. You're on the road quite a bit. So tell us a little bit about storytelling. Like what do you guys do? Yes, it's a demo automation software. It was like a new tech that came in 2020, which is basically like there was a lot of people that were kind of frustrated with like getting on sales calls with people. And then just like being able to see the product was like three weeks away, right? And then like this tech what it provides is that you can basically create like a front end replica of your product. And you know, put it up on the website so people can see the product, you know, at their own pace. Click around in the buttons and all of that. And then, you know, when the actual talk to sales is when they can sort of reach out. So that's kind of like the space for him. And it's particularly for sales marketing and now they at least see us teams as well. All right. Yeah, and so we've been out for four years. All right. So I used to work as a sales engineer within presets. So would that put me out of a job? No, it's not that. I think it's more like I'm glad that you asked because what happens is that usually a sales engineer is supporting like an insane amount of A. So like the SE2A ratio is is crazily wild, right? Every A1's like, hey, I want my sales engineer in the demo. So what we're saying is that listen, you don't have to get on every demo. You know, like focus on like the high leverage deals and the rest you just create demo templates that A's can like that's vetted by you. But the A's can use it in their calls. Okay, so five A's can like we have like a company where there's 50 SE supporting thousand A's. Yeah, okay. And not making right now. So that's kind of like. Yeah. And then you risk minimize some some of these creative A E like demos that they are doing on the fly, right? I feel an insult coming here. Like, you know, I build the my career in the back of Thomas demos. No, but you know, you know, the, the, the sort of the interaction or the, yeah, with me and then we have, we have that background worked a lot together. With the A is says any connection. So that's super interesting. And what can you say about the companies that sort of buys your solution? Is there certain verticals, sizes of companies or who do you attract? Yeah, so we go after mid market and enterprise, think of the company that's I would say like at, you know, not in terms of revenue, but it'd be like a company that's generally either in let's say HR tech manufacturing. Generally, any tech company that either wants to try out a free trial option, but you know, doesn't want to sort of it doesn't makes it, you know, sense for that. Or they have like a sort of issue with like the sales engineers being like deeply under, like the team being on very under resource with the CZ and the they just don't maybe have the budget for that. Or it's just generally like CMO is looking to understand, hey, how do I improve conversions with like a new content format like it's usually these companies. So would you say that this is a category that is well known? Now, what does people don't realize that this exists? I think it is getting there. So I would say in terms of B to B tech particularly there is quite a few people that are aware about what the interactive demo tech is, especially in the US, Europe and the UK generally are slightly behind on that. But in terms of how many of actually implemented this actually not that many. Okay. Yeah. Cool. Would be cool to see it in acting sometime. Maybe try out it on Daniel and see what happens, but to put some figures behind your business just to understand sort of where we are. What can you say about your ARR number of customers and employees and so on. Yeah. So we basically crossed 10 million ARR I think in September of last year. And right now we are probably between 10 to 15. I would say at this point and sort of navigating the journey to maybe well hopefully crossed 20 million by the end of this year. We're on track, but we'll see about that one. And then we're angels trapped in the sense like no additional funding, no plans to raise any money on that one as well. Are you profitable? Yeah. We're profitable. Okay. Nice. Yeah. So that's the dream, right? Like you've got to sort of and we're also like fully remote and like I think the team size and total is 50 people at this point. Okay. Yeah. And do you serve any particular markets or do you focus your marketing activities or any particular markets? We just focus on selling to you know pre sales and marketing and sales, right? Like so the whole GTM stack basically. And then mostly to B2B tech companies anyone who has a software product that they're selling rate is kind of the market that we're going up. But is it predominantly US or Europe or Asia or? Yeah. I think so we we're like in terms of our existing customer base. I would say like it's almost 70% US and the world. But Europe is sort of like a very fast growing segment in the sense it's insanely surprising that how I think one of our A's basically focuses only on Europe. And I think last year she was across the million in you know, cards from it. Okay. So we're like we've been spending a lot of time like growing in Europe and UK is another really big market for us. Oh, interesting. Sounds like you are on a very interesting trajectory and going to hit that 20 million soon. I mean really cool and and what we wanted to discuss with you a little bit is it's a crowded space not your space but any software category there's like so many options. A lot of us we sound the same will look the same and sometimes it feels like it's the race to average. Because if we all look the same if we all sound the same well what's the difference and then like the nightmare scenarios that we all have to just compete on pricing who is the cheapest and most affordable solution. But I know like the reality is much more nuanced here it's it's not how the reality actually look and you guys have really managed to stand out here and I know you're writing a book on how to avoid the sameness trap by something called pattern interruption in marketing like what does that mean. Yeah. That's a great one. So I think so my realization generally is so you're 100% right I think every software category is now getting covered like ours is specially brutal. I think anybody in martyck or sales tech is like the worst affected in terms of like just that's insanely crowded right but also like I mean there's also like this very common report that you know like literally every speaker on a conference mentioned which is the martyck landscape report right. In 2011 they were like 11000 well 1100 vendors and I think 24 there was like 15,000 vendors like you can't really see any logos and I think with vibe coding and you know cursor and all of these different tools that are making features and products really fast to sort of ship right. Like we could be at 50,000 products and martyck but it's not just martyck it's also like you know I looked at the software listings across G2 right. So 2019 I think in total there were like 50,000 listings and in 2024 there's 150,000 right. So it reacts across categories right. So it's not like this literally is maybe a handful of categories where there's very little competition but even those are going to get crowded so the question now is that if products are easy to copy. Like sure there's a craft into like making the product very sort of scalable for enterprise and all like get that but I think the GTM motion is more important today than ever before in the sense like you can build the most amazing product but if it you know doesn't sort of stand out you just you'll never get customer right. So that's the big problem. There was also like the business problem that I sort of was sort of handed maybe like two and a half years ago when I joined. Which is just like we had a great product you're growing fairly quickly but we were also not visible in you know like what you should happen is that that be deals that will happen where. That would be like two or three competitors and we weren't even being that consideration said so even if you had a great product we wouldn't like be able to win that deal or let's say we would enter that deal as not the first vendor but like the third or the fourth vendor right so what happens is the first vendor decides the narrative. The first narrative to like the second third fourth vendor right so you're at a disadvantage right so we wanted to flip that so how do we. Show up in the deal conversations but also how do we become the first vendor that these people see so that we can have sort of unfair advantage right and and I think that was definitely not going to happen if we just went with you know the standard route right and and I can tell you this for a fact that no amount of money. In sort of help you get more visibility in the sense like visibility is not equal to you know more money money spend yeah like because we have competitors that have raised like 80 million okay which is insane and you get the brand facility you know is like maybe one tenth of what we are at so that's that's probably like. The misconception that I want to share with everybody is just that you know 40 million does not equal to you sort of having like this many brands such as whatever right and that's kind of what we were like sort of we want to solve for and then one of the things I sort of start thinking about is there a certain company is that did really well in terms of standing out despite being bootstrapped despite being sort of profitable despite not having like big financial muscle or anything right one company that comes to mind is based. Yeah and I always want to think like how are they standing out right and like the simple idea that came in our mind is that you know they basically go against the direction when everybody's following like just a simple thing right like okay if everybody has the same website we're going to go you know in another direction right we had we had one of the founders in in the podcast and he's definitely what's the right word to say here contrary and he doesn't he doesn't shy away from going the opposite direction. Yeah was it David yeah I think it was the city right yeah yes so I think yeah like that's I mean if you see their podcast their books everything is just like my contrary and takes right and so I think that that was sort of like the idea that okay when my CEO came to me asking like hey how do we stand out how do we be different that's a very direction less question like you know you ask something like you know today I go to my team and be like hey we need to come up with like crazy idea that can we can go by. With like on this part nobody can come with ideas and also it's it's a very directional as question where do you even start looking right so I think that was a problem I was also dealing with so I came up with something like how about we look at patterns in the industry in our ICPs and our competitors and we try to disrupt those patterns because that's a lot more direction focused way that okay. If everybody is hosting webinars right let's put an end to it and let's you know maybe sort of do a different take to it and that's when we you know I had like an event called demo dandies which is styled on the office theme right so it was about constantly finding patterns and interrupting them all right. So do you have other examples of when you have disrupted what what yeah the the else of the competitors are doing yeah something that worked really well or maybe you tried something out because I guess you know every pattern interruption experiment doesn't work so could you share some of those experiences. 100% I think it's a portfolio right and the portfolio one is basically driving 80% and the rest are experiments. But you need to go through those experiments to find that one winning one I'll share the biggest one that we've had which is. So in SEO as well right like the traditional SEO path that everybody takes is they would create a blog article and then they put it out right and that's what we were doing for three years. It was like the standard blog that used to put out but it's too slow like I think in three years you went from zero to 15,000 traffic a month and AI you know when they cost the content creation gone down to zero is just very hard to stand out. So we basically start thinking okay what what can we do so we came up with an idea that what if we were to go after our ICPs like I was really inspired by the SEO strategy that Zapier has I don't know if you know about it but they basically targeted integration keywords like. Calendar sales force integration and then they created a page for it and they created 100,000 pages and that was the seed of where Zapier sort of at least in the initial growth that took them past 100 million era right. So I was thinking about like okay what is the opportunity that people haven't seen and how can we find it and the experiment was that there were our ICPs that were searching for these tutorials for the tools they use. So we are targeting sales and marketing folks we you know an example is sales force right like how do I merge a custom field in sales force you know how do I connect my sales force to part of all of those different queries and I knew that we can do a much better job by just adding a demo in there. So like the page used to be that I think the experiment was does Google lead text to rank and then what we did was we added just a demo showing how to merge a custom field in sales force no text at all. And I think we published that with I think like 100 pages and it was like immediately we saw like I think I think about 60% of the pages were ranking the first page one or five pages start ranking number one outracking sales for a sub spot 8 so all of these big tools right. So I was like okay this is an interesting opportunity so we scale up to 7000 pages and now it's like so do you understand correctly that you use your products to show demo of how you did something yeah yeah instead of just having text. Oh yeah yeah yeah okay you can actually just go into the website there's like a tutorial section of the photo and actually see it but I like it's basically the story lane demo that we had put in there on the website. And yeah I think now we're at 7000 pages and it's about quarter million and traffic and that not have been possible with blogs and it's not just traffic like there's actual day so like our PLG revenue particularly so we've got a PLG motion a sales led motion. PLG sign ups group at 3x yeah and I would say like sign ups doesn't paid subscriptions and what is interesting was we actually saw a few enterprise deals come in because the company is that we're looking at like these sales for tutorials were fair. Big companies right so it was it was a very very profitable thing I would say like one of the leading ones why we went from like the 2 to 10 million journey so fast yeah. And that is again this comes back to the whole pattern and corruption right like everybody's following the same SEO playbook what can you do to disrupt that pattern. And somewhere you find like these sort of interesting plays but it sounds like it's a lot of work for you guys setting up demos for that many different sort of tutorial. Set ups but of course you're you're the pros at that but but anyway it sounds like a lot of work it actually wasn't I think it's like if you because I have a background like my I grew up from SEO like that was sort of like the channel that that's like the deepest channel that I know about right. It's more about like systems and processor it wasn't us doing it you're actually working with many contractors and virtual assistants to actually create those pages and we set up the entire page structure and everything all automated so really the only effort the contractors had to do is go actually create the demo. The rest of the page was all done and created so you're actually producing pages that I would say like one every hour what was so think it more like 200 to 300 pages a week being published that's amazing that's a lot. So I'm I'm curious here because like everybody wants to stand out just like you said you know if you don't like you're not going to be preselected or not on the short list if you make the short list you might be option number three. Which is a losing game here so everybody wants to stand out and everybody wants to find these elements where they can break the pattern. Like I'm interested to find out like how do you actually identify and decide on which patterns are worth breaking versus which are not because I'm going to give you an example like sitting where we sit now we feel that there's a strong pattern. That every SAS company and their executive teams they've decided we're going to be thought leaders so you see all of them taking to to LinkedIn and becoming thought leaders and so on. Maybe that's a pattern that's worth jumping on everybody should do it or not like. But sometimes maybe there's certain patterns that how do I know that this is not the right thing to actually bet on that we need to go in the other direction how do you decide that is their framework for that. Yeah so I have a framework like insights for when we call it pipe which is basically pattern interrupt portfolio engine so the way we've done it is. So like the first step is pattern identification but you're 100% right not every pattern is worth going after like an example is that. You could literally wear a duck suit and stand in the center of dream force and get a shit ton of attention but it's not going to drive your pipe right. And it doesn't make sense but the eye is so the way it is like so the P is basically identifying the patterns. The eye is basically finding the instruction guardrains so what are the guardrails particularly it would be bunch of things right. Does it fit into the bio joint right like where does it fit into the bio joint like is it educating about your product is it on brand isn't off brand like this multiple things that you can look at it and that's how we basically like the way I work with my head of brand or product marketing is basically like we sit down and it's like okay you know here are the campaigns like you know we could potentially do now which one's actually makes sense right and I would say like almost two out of 10 ideas or maybe one or 10 idea actually makes it through so that's why the guardrails have processified it like they won't even come to me until they know that okay this is the answer that you know for like these interruptions but to your question about. How do you like find I think you have initial question was like how do you find these pattern interruptions that actually change that you know outcome that we're talking about right yes so I think there it's more like you kind of know what your portfolio is. Your marketing portfolio like what channels are going to drive results for you right so like in our case like I know for example that if there's an events playbook there's an influencer playbook there's an ads playbook there's an SEO playbook like I know these things are going to be. I know these things are going to work for us it's more about within these what can I do to disrupt the pattern right so in our case let's say for example if we wanted to become you know like the first of three become the first vendor that's discovered right we had to come in front of our prospects before anybody else does so that basically means going after the companies that are not in the market but actually the other 95% that is you know just sort of there right so we there the place like okay let's focus on brands how do we make the brand work right it's about okay finding these unique event opportunities finding these unique sort of audience segments in particular regions and doing a campaign there right so like I'll give you an example. Like again maybe I examples help but it's like the way that started out was what we realized was that a lot of like the US marketing conferences that used to happen especially like the knee you know the the niche ones where they were like a lot of like good ICPs are coming in. We saw that one of our competitors was talked about quite a lot there while we weren't right and why was that the reason the reason was just like the influences knew a lot more about the other brand and we they weren't even aware about us right so how do we get into that inner circle was the first business problem to solve like how do we enter that right so the first thing I did was I just started doing podcasts with all of these influencers like it was I started a series called GTM on the go and it was like a five minute five questions series and I just did that and I'm like I'm going to try to take like a piece of content and just get them to share it with their audience right so and also build a relationship right so I did about 12 15 episodes and that basically was like okay this is an in okay these are the people that I want to target and they now know about storyline right and then it was like okay the next thing is how do we do a campaign with them how do we get in the network is step by step and the metric that we are sort of optimizing for was like how many brand searches are we going so brand searches if I could quantify it's basically how many people searching for story and that are coming in in Google search console so if you go in there and you look for brand search very easy can actually see how many people are coming in there so that was the metric that we were optimizing for and I can give you some context there again because you want numbers right we had 1500 people searching for story in every month about seven quarters back today we are at about 12,000 people consistently every month searching for nice that's a nice bump yes and when you have that sort of traffic right then you have a very unfair advantage right like the people searching specifically for you channel agnostic and that's why it was like the focus was there so you mentioned that your product you know you work a lot with inbound marketing people can discover the products online they can see your solution you mentioned the tutorial so what is your main go to market is it product led or sales led or what does that look like for you guys it's mostly sales okay yeah so even if you get the leads inbound then I mean it's a sales process to actually learn the deal correct because even if we the PLG sign ups the motion there is that are going to PLG sign up is good but we want to see how we can expand that account so when you come to that phase when you actually have the sales representative interacting with the customers to learn the deal do you see that there is ways that you can stand out in that face as well I mean they might be talking to your competitors and they are also sort of in the same face so any thoughts about that and I'll give you a background story here might have like what Thomas and I when we used to have real jobs last time we worked together we we represented a very successful and these days also at that time a big product information management system and I was running a revenue there on sales and I could sit in sometimes with my reps and listen to their session even the best reps and in my mind of like great like he or she they got the story down but deep inside I knew like if we remove our logo from the deck here and some of our branding colors and so on this could be any one of our competitors saying exactly the same thing we just sound like everybody else and then we went through a big exercise with a very expensive American consultants to rebrand and reposition to try to stand out but we had this issue of like once we get in there as like gosh we did all this hard work but we sound like everybody else in the sessions like it's difficult to understand where we're different the only advantage we had is like we came in first which was you know the little bit of our saving grace and a big customer important community of them that I also think many different yeah so what I would say there is this it's a very very I guess like this many answers to it like what happens there where marketing has full control I would say in that entire conversation so there's a product job also that needs to happen in the sense like are we innovating in the sense like do we have products that none of our competitors have yeah you know the other thing is like are we leading the category not just in terms like whatever G2 motions or anything but more like do we have like are we leading for like okay we built this and then we have proof that the competitors followed right so that's a whole product like motion and that's what another script that you know sales could potentially follow right but what we do to enable sales is like a couple of things one is obviously there's a lot of product marketing work that happens and creating giving them whatever enablement assets they need but within those the interruptions I'll tell you is like a studies for example right like everybody knows that the case studies are always biased there's always good things about the product right it's like oh yeah you know we went we had our RWE 1500 percent increase because of this product and it's all good right but I think buyers want lot more real ones and they also want something that's a little bit more on context relevant because what case studies do is they talk about the outcome yeah right that because of this product we got this outcome but most people don't know what's the stage of the company what's the behind the scenes that happened you know like a company growing 3x you know for example 10 people company versus you know 1000 people company it's very different right so that context matters so we actually changed our case studies to be more like the behind the scenes process like tell me about when you purchase store in lane to you sort of getting the outcome and we basically explain that is a story and we packaged it like a recipe so like the series is called demo kitchen and then we basically packaged it as a recipe and that became an asset that you know all of these salespeople could follow right the other thing for example that we did is if you look at our website we've just like if you look this from like two years ago a you need to look like a sort of I would say company that's bigger than you actually are because that was another issue that we had like you're looking smaller than we actually were right so whether that's in terms of you know visual brand polish but also like surfacing the right sort of accounts and the language right so right now if you look at our website it's very I would say mid market enter pricey language the logo showing up the way the colors are you know chosen it's not super bright but it's like kind of there right so again we're like kind of positioning towards that right yeah also is like when we have like another thing for example is that the feedback we got from sales was that the first college is 30 minutes right and if we spend the first 30 minutes demoing the platform to them right then we don't have time to discuss about the next steps and you know things like that right and you want to move the deal forward so you know what can you do about it so another thing that we did was we started sort of another sort of there was like a email sort of campaign that happened before the call which is like we're going to send you all of the you know demo links and resources and everything right playbooks and how you can use it so they actually come in and be like okay we're self-educated to some extent now let's talk about the real things right so it's just small small things there that we're helping in like closing there but like my main job is like how do we just get quality accounts these people and then they just have to close those deals yeah I think that like makes a lot of sense and I want to come back to I think what you alluded to earlier and you also mentioned it that this pattern interruption it needs to be some kind of a portfolio and you need to build a muscle where it's a repeatable exercise and not just you know a one-off or let's do a brainstorm session and then we do it like you know if I'm listening to this if I'm a CMO like what does that mean that need to be a portfolio and how do I build this repeatable muscle what's your recommendation here yeah so I think the reason why I keep saying you need a portfolio is because there's a lot of companies or let's maybe equate it to even just like the music business like why is the example Mike Posner a one-hit wonder with like that I took a pill and it beats up it's like it needs a fifth or a cold play right you know like which have like just you know they could create a greatest hits album right it's because it's like it was sort of part of the system right and that's more a lot of B2B companies also do is like they look for that one big moral idea and then they'll just basically ride on that wave forever right like we'll talk about we did this and that's the only thing that they did we needed to make it sort of built into the system right like not just like in the way like the like actually build like sort of things I'll tell you a couple of things we do one is every quarter we're a remote team my entire marketing team is fully remote but every quarter I bring them in sort of like a boardroom and then we call that those days the lock in which is basically like three days will have everybody in the room no agenda it's literally looking at everybody's work and all of us sort of trying to identify patterns and then ask collectively figuring out how to disrupt it so like by the end of every quarter we have this lock in and then through that the new campaign ideas will come so there's never a single quarter in the entire year where we're not testing our pattern interrupt ideas that's you know like for example right now one thing that like this multiple interrupts are going on but like one is for example the CMO dinners that usually happen and there's just so many that are happening as long as we come up pattern at this point and so we've been trying to figure out how we disrupt the format right like how you know they they happen you know how the conversations happen the format of it like like one example is that you know why I do it in a restaurant setting but you know why not book like a VIP box at like a clippers game or something and then you know like try to initiate conversations from there so it's it's basically like making that a habit like you know interruption but also looking at the pattern interrupts in sort of like a portfolio style so you know you could call it top of the middle top of the final middle of the final bottom of the funnel you could call it width or depth you can call it whatever you want but you need to understand what are the interrupts that are more for wider awareness and what are the interrupts that are more for like depths you know actually going in like driving that awareness for customer right so we've got campaigns that like for example you might have a campaign this was one that we did in September where we basically created these flyers which is like Rome wasn't built in a day but you know your demos can be and then it had like this whole sort of thing and then we had like somebody dress up as dualist Caesar and go and like you know distributed at inbound and all of that right that's more width as a portfolio of right but then the depth ones are for example the demo ds event I give you an example about or for example we have this series called finer demos club webinar which is taken from a reference of the office which is like finer things club or something like that so it's basically based on that customers want to learn from customers how about we create like a series which is off the record so there's no recording available it's just you one time you show up and we'll have them show like full transfer and metrics but you won't get any recording you can't say anything right so we've been doing those sessions and trying to figure out how more customers here about more usage these are all what I would say fit into the depth portfolio right and that's why we and I would say this split between the width and depth depends a lot on what the companies goals and you know things are like you know like for example early on I think the bigger bit was like how do we write wide awareness because we wanted to end that segment right now for example our brand awareness is like number one in the entire demo automation category so now it's more about okay how do we keep a driving more expansion from existing customers a lot of depth campaigns going on and also be if let's say other companies that you know are also coming up with products that are competing with ours how do we continue either refining the messaging or the way we present education about our products in like these depth campaigns so that's how I sort of think about the portfolio for it so Marab I also wanted to ask you a little bit about how to get started with this process so again let's come back to there's a bunch of CMOs listening to this marketing leaders probably also CEOs and sales leaders like okay we also want to stand out we also want to interrupt patterns like like where do I start how does an exercise like this start and I also wanted to to ask you a little bit from your perspective and also what's your recommendation is there a person should there be a person that leads the pattern interruption initiative or like where does this responsibility actually live because sometimes we need we see initiatives that if there's not a clear owner it doesn't get done as nice if they say like okay we share responsibility all of us it doesn't get done as well as if you say we all have a carry into this but it's Anna that drives it so who is Anna in your case it's a leadership so in our case it's it's me and my CEO in the sense like the CEO is pushing for pattern interruptions and sort of there was enough pattern instruction is like how to be innovate how to be do things differently in the product side in my case it's more around the margin and you know like the whole GTM motion like so it's got to be driven through the leadership you know downwards and then like I would say like as you sort of build it like you know as a as a muscle in the team you know it becomes like every day language right like it's like oh we don't do things this way you know we always do it differently even if you go to any sort of base camp employee right it's now probably built into their muscle like that's what I would say so that's one like definitely really leadership driven but the yeah so how do you get started the pattern interruption day I think it's more so first is I think you just need to become really good at identifying the patterns right like every company today has a bunch of patterns that are following that can potentially be broken so it's more like I would say auditing what you're currently doing and basically sort of looking at like okay you know if it's doing well fine that's great if it's not doing well like you know what can you do differently a border like there's a few examples that I can share like like one is just take the simple examples most companies have the exact same sort of these four or five things right they'll be running a monthly webinar series yeah they'll have an email newsletter they'll have sort of like case studies you know you know like the way they're usually done they'll have a product comparison page that'll be like you know we're the perennial champions and the other is like the full loser you know green red crossing of that right these are all things that are right there right now it's more about okay everybody follows this what and I think this is something to think about right like most of these companies that they're running these right I can bet you on it that the webinars don't have a lot of people coming in so it'll be like 20 30 40 people unless they're doing something very different right or the newsletters hardly being read or it's just being forcefully pushed out and they just have a high unsubscribe rate or a bad right so you look at those things then you try to do okay what can I do differently like a it's like the same tactic in a different way or it is like do I just drop this tactic all together right like some like another example what I see is that this company is that start let's say podcast or some sort of episodic series right and they just continue on it for years because hey you know we have this reputation I need to push out on new podcast episode every week but why you can always have seasons of things so that's how like for example when we did podcast it's more like let's do a 12 episode series that way once there's an end date to it it doesn't become cyclic we put out best effort into each episode and then by the end of 12 we end it right and then if let's say if there's people that are asking for it you know we can always bring it back but it doesn't have to be cyclic in nature right so it's identifying like we're running podcasts like why like why we're running it like you know is it even actually getting any views or like is it getting enough views if not just end it like okay this is the end of season one end of story you know you get to season two right it's identifying these certain things another and I'll tell you where are places where you can find these pattern interruption ideas so one that I found very interesting I was actually chatting with somebody a few months ago they've actually built an agency around it surprisingly is that they look at how other companies and different categories are actually tackling the same problem so an example is that how are the brand visuals used in a B2C company so for example if you're B2B our best way is like okay look at like I don't know maybe a very funky sort of you know like you've got those Tony's chocolates and in Amsterdam right so look at that if you look at the sort of shops if you have been on those right like they're like these really disruptive visual design right so and then can you take something from that into your own B2B category right then it's sort of like a disruption idea right but that's more on the visual language there's also things that like for example what's working really well in another category might not actually I'm not even being tried in your category so for example like this this is what happened with influencer program right that B2C has a very very mature influencer program B2B doesn't right but what if you did that same thing in B2B and then you'll suddenly have like a lot of good results going on because essentially they work so that's how you can find ideas that's one way the other way is like look at your own thing so I'll give you another example right now we have a third product that's coming in it's an AI native product right now if you look at the entire AI suite of products they all use some sort of a personality name there's a Mindy there's a I don't know just every random person that there right but the issue is that everybody is doing that at some point we're going to have personalities but they're not self-explanatory right like okay you have a Mindy but what the hell is Mindy or you have an underlord but what is underlord you know that's descriptor thing right so why not disrupt that and maybe make a sort of more sort of non personality sort of a name and then you know like make it a little bit more self-explanatory right so that's why we like we have a product called Lily we actually now rebranded to RepEx because we wanted to sort of show that it has rep capabilities and all that right so it's just looking at your portfolio just got to build a lot of identifying patterns and then finding creative disruptions from it and they come from all places and all walks of life interesting I think both me and then we are thinking about how can we disrupt what we are doing and looking at that so probably we will get some good ideas from this we have to just lock ourselves up for a few days somewhere let's see when we find the time for that but great this has been great but how thank you for sharing I mean if we're looking now you have a great growth you have a lot of things going on but what is the future for your company you mentioned a new product is is that the main things or is there something else that you know that will happen the next 12 to 18 months so this I think there's lots of things but I'll tell you an interesting one is that we're seeing a huge growth in expense yeah so like that was one of our fastest growing verticals as well so like how do we because we have a lot of big accounts you know think of Ali Baba Amazon Microsoft all of these right these are like huge upsell accounts so how do you upsell right you be this you know upsell through different teams or you know sell multiple products or different geographical regions and that you know like that's kind of or like sell AI usage credits you know based on products is multiple ways to expand but that is one of our fastest growing things so what we're looking at is how do we drive more relationship building without existing customers and do a very heavy bit of a customer marketing playbook that's kind of like a big focus area from marketing at this point and of course your book so when is when will it be out there so the draft is already sub it's in production so it's probably a month a month and a half from now the cover design is currently being created so yeah it's probably fair bend is what we're going to go for just need to figure out how to make distribution happen like I don't even know how to get something on Amazon bookstore so all of those things no and I think you should also bring some books to the fastest conference in May where you also will be on stage right so that would be a great opportunity to get a whole of the book but also to talk to Maha and we are really looking forward to have you if you get to have one more person on your team what kind of person would you like to add to your roster I'm going to I was thinking about this yesterday it's a very timely question yeah an AI content creator all right I want to be to be able to use these these script and all of these there's like a bunch of these air tools and like people are creating these really creative fancy films will like these air tools I want somebody you can do that and and and bring some sort of interesting ideas to life to stand out for us and how can you get the context with you off man like I mean if you have an amazing sort of any sort of B2B portfolio which is built through AI just share it with you LinkedIn very active there fantastic it's been a pleasure thank you so much for taking the time and we look forward to to seeing you again here in in a few months already like you know time flies here when you'll visit us in in Malmö super excited about that yeah super excited well I hope you guys have a good one thank you so much for inviting Thomas I wish you all the best with your family and I think it becomes better yes thank you thank you take care now thank you see ya all right Thomas I know you're passionate about marketing we all are but I know it's it's it's close to your heart and I want to give you credit for for all the good things that we do here like on the marketing side if you think we have something fun stuff if you like the name sassy oh gosh I here's a personal rant like we have a lot of people let's say sassy is this such a cool name and I hate to admit it it was Thomas idea and I also hate to admit it that maybe I was a little bit iffy in the beginning you had to convince me a little bit but a lot of the cool stuff the pinkness the name some of the fun stuff like Thomas here the brain here so listening to a fellow marketer here what did you learn today I learned that you know you can't just stack step back and do what you are always done I think that you always have to be you know top of your toes and looking at what happens in the market and yeah see what you can do differently and I mean they are doing this on a quarterly basis they are setting a strategy they are executing on it not everything flies but also suddenly some things takes off and then you double down on that I think it was really inspiring to hear what they did sort of replacing the regular blog post with these demo centered posts and not just that they did a few of them that they actually set up a structure so they can do masses of this hundreds a week and I think that was quite inspiring and I don't know exactly what that would you know yeah how you could replicate that in our world but I think that was a really smart move of them that also showcased their product it not not just you know driving traffic to your website but also showcasing your product for all potential prospects yeah yeah yeah yeah I mean what had me thinking here and I think we've all been inspired slash maybe we've all at some point fallen into that trap like if if you come to log into LinkedIn or if you come to Assassius event even like we put people up there to tell you like hey here's how we did XYZ to take us from A to B so it's about like listening to somebody that had success people opening up LinkedIn and you get inspired by somebody that did one to three and they achieve these results and then if we all do it again it becomes this sameness exercise and I know that there's a lot of leaders and marketers out there like the CEO comes and says look at these guys did this we should do something similar so listening to my have here again made me think like if you're going to be different if you're going to have the guts and the or going to build the muscle to really be disruptive it needs to be a management process and project like you need to have that openness from the top that okay we're going to do some things that are very very different because also what you alluded to here Thomas in the beginning of the episode there's going to be some pattern interruptions that just don't work out and then there needs to be acceptance for that in the organization that we are going to be different and on the chase of being different here there's going to be some things that fail and that's okay for sure but to support this overarching goal we're going to have to have this management buy-in and it can't be like he said also like you know it's not just a brainstorm session a one-off it's something that you built into DNA so I think that's that's important that it's it's it's happens repetitive the entire organization is aligned on it that we're going to build things differently here and I thought that was refreshing again to be reminded of yeah and I think having heard Madhav here I encourage you to be attentive of what you see only in another place to see what they do and think about how do they come to do this and and also take the opportunity to come to Sassius Dean May in Malmö meet Madhav and you know try to get hold of his book and everything but I mean keep a lookout and maybe you can sort of reverse engineer how they think I mean if anything I think what speaks for their story is like they're 50 people bootstrapped and they're going to break 20 million euros in AR this year I mean it's efficient what they're doing works yeah so like being different and standing out has always worked and will always work you just need to find out what that means to you in your world how you get there for sure and with that thank you for listening to this episode we are looking to looking forward to meet a lot of you during the year at the conferences at the meetups at the network group sessions and yeah if you want to reach us you can reach out on LinkedIn you can email to
[email protected] or
[email protected] with the TH and well see you around take care
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