How to Stop Marketing in the Dark

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Video Transcript:  

NICK: All right. Welcome everybody today. We have a very exciting guest Fahad FAHAD VP of marketing at Daylight. Daylight is a low code platform that empowers teams to build simple and easy-to-use digital experiences without needing to write a single line of code Fahad. Welcome to growth marketing chat. It's a real pleasure having you. 

FAHAD: Likewise. Thanks Nick. 

NICK: Thank you so much for joining us today. And we wanna start off by kind of asking about your journey through marketing. What got you to this, to this point? And I know you've worked at a bunch of startups and scale ups, but if you can just kind of paint the journey for us. 

FAHAD: Yeah, absolutely. It's been a hell of a ride it's been close to about 13 years since I've been the marketer's shoes. You mentioned, a lot of rules, mainly, within tech and task companies ranging from startups to enterprise orgs, to SMBs, that were in the midst of a transition, whether they're adopting a new go to market strategy or it's a new product, um, r fast and furious ride, a lot of battle scars, a lot of, gray hair in the process. The start of this funny enough, goes back to the 2008 market crash. That’s when I was just wrapping up my undergrad and I was, I was very much into investment management, um, and I just was fascinated with the idea of  building portfolios from a growth perspective and then tying that to various elements in the market. 

And in that process of going in and, and speaking to different individuals, understanding their pain points and then orchestrating a solution that meets their needs. There's a, it's a combination of both sales and marketing. It relies more on the sales side, but definitely has a bit of a marketing element to it. And that was kind of the first kind of, I would say an informal kind of exposure to what marketing is. And then throughout that, that I got really, I got some opportunities coming my way into the B2C land, working within the manufacturing side with an organization that specialized in garment manufacturing. So that was my first real taste in marketing. And, and I was hooked from that I went back to school just to kind of Polish up my general academic understanding of marketing mm-hmm <affirmative>. And then dove back in o the marketing side by working for a company that managed loyalty programs for some of the biggest companies in North America, including Exxon. That was my official start of my marketing career. And then it just kinda went from there. 

NICK: So you were, were you a finance major? 

FAHAD: No, I wasn't. I was a business management major. Okay. My dad is an entrepreneur, so I did a minor in entrepreneurship, but a lot of the, a lot of the consulting projects during my undergrad included a lot of finance work. This was, you know, portfolio analysis, business planning, and building those, those kind financial models. And through that, that's where I was very much interested in joining an investment management firm. 

NICK: Interesting, because I, myself also had a finance background and around the same time as I was entering the job market when everything was crashing, it was an interesting time too, to be in that space. How do you feel that background as prepared you or helped you in your marketing career or maybe hindered you? 

FAHAD: I think so a couple of things, I think that on the, from a skill perspective, having that, that call of the, the financial understanding of, of various layers and in a company's performance, whether it's the balance sheets or whether it's you know, some of the other advanced elements, it kind, that's one of the, the things that a lot of marketers struggle with when it comes to just the pure number side. For me, that the biggest help that came from coming from that background was that was second hand to me. And then it was more, more of how do you articulate that into a meaningful way, because not everything is dollar and cent in the marketing lab. That really helped me kind when it comes to my approach to marketing is, and, and one of the biggest things that I focus on is building that strong analytics foundation without overdoing it . 

Yeah. Cause you don't wanna measure every single thing. And the next thing, you know, you're in the, in the weeds with attribution and different attribution models, and, you know, you're basically pulling your hair out, trying to justify ROI where the only number that matters is revenue at the end of it. So that, that, that definitely was a very, very strong component of from, from my perspective, the other thing which is more on the, just a general human to human interaction was empathy. As you mentioned, that was a very crazy time, um m a, from just general business landscape. And my day to day was around speaking with clients and engaging with customers that you would pick up the phone or someone you would talk to would be just crying on the other line. And, and that that's when you spread that out over a course of six months to and longer, it starts to kinda have a very different impact on individual oh yeah. 

On a personal level. So that empathy component is very, very, it's a tough one because it either it comes to you or you have to develop it over the course of time. And then using that and, and kind of just kind of fostering that from a leadership perspective, making sure that it's ingrained in everything we do, whether it's building the teams and which type of team members you want to build on ring on board and then giving them a little bit of a sandbox and then give having that foundational press. So I think those elements just kind of came from being, and being in a very, in that timeframe of when the world was in, in some shape or form coming down and having to navigate some of those conversations and some of those interactions. 

NICK: Yeah. I mean, everything that's happened since seems like a step in the right direction. Right. Because I mean, that, that time period was just, it was rough for the economy as a whole. 

FAHAD: Oh yeah. I have a lot of stories from those times, especially being on the front lines and seeing how companies managed some of that stuff, including Vanguard. That was an interesting time for sure. 

NICK: Yeah. Hopefully we're not going through something similar right now. Let's hope that it's just a temporary bump 

FAHAD: Yeah. I can't imagine, especially coming off of two plus years of COVID and social isolation and limited interactions. So yeah, I really hope we don't end up in any type of, those circles. 

NICK: I know you're also very passionate about go to market strategy and that's kind of one of the things that you're, you're, you're kind of a thought leader on, a you talk about go to market strategy, your approach to it? And, and my understanding is it's almost, you, you view it as a prerequisite for successful marketing. So what are the ingredients of a successful, GT 

FAHAD: A hundred percent? I think, you know, a lot of marketers, especially you, when it comes to software in, in the B2B context, a lot of, one of the biggest challenges that marketers have is executing on things that, that kind of have a, of an end to end approach. Either marketing is doing things and other sub-functions like whether it's sales or customer success or product, they're all kind of doing things. And marketing's waiting for stuff in a bit of a linear context coming their way where everything marketing does. It's kind of the concept I, I like to say is like the tip of the spear scenario, where we're at the tip of the spear as marketers, but the rest of the sphere is the organization. So everything has to go with marketing, but marketing cannot do things end to end. 

So it's, it's almost a gathering of the four or five pillars, depending upon the organization, sales, marketing, customer success product. Having these groups collaboratively come together, identify what are the go to market opportunities that we can capitalize on, whether it is what we, what, what the companies currently like the initial product, whether it's tied to a future release, whether it's a combination and then identifying, you know, the maturity levels associated with, how do we take this message or take this thing and, and launch it in the market. And that includes all, everything that includes, you know, successful sales enablement, that includes understanding of channels that we're gonna see a predictable pipeline creation. That includes what type of sales activities need to be there. And what the, what does that mix looks like? So it's the identification. And then at the general alignment between those core groups, it starts out process because you, you have buy in at that level. 

And then you take that, everybody's working towards that common thread of like all of these things are gonna be consumed and, and, or be worked upon ads that go to market is being built. And then when you launch it, the same thing happens. It's not just, okay. Stuff has now out there, sales people are on the field. Marketing is running campaigns, products waiting for feedback because releases happen, or they're just waiting for feedback because, you know, the certain combination of the go to market push includes certain feature functions. But if the same discipline needs to be applied once the switches turned on, which is, Hey, how are we doing? What is the market response? What type of conversations are we having? And then tying it back to what were the anticipated goals. Like if there, if this was from a revenue perspective, it had a target to it, and it had a run time, and let's say a quarter, how close are we? How far are we it's? So it's, it's a more of, of a collaborative endeavor across the key functions of an organization, which in a nutshell includes the entire organization and then a, an organization push versus a marketing push cuz go to market or a sales push in that, in that matter, cuz go to market, usually ends up in these two buckets, like either from a sales perspective, they will do something or marketing would do something whereas it needs to be tied together. It needs to be threaded together. 

Yeah. Yeah. And we, we often hear about, you know, marketing, helping sales, sales, help helping marketing, but we don't talk maybe enough about the roles that customer success and product have in marketing and, and vice versa. You know, where, like you said, we're at the tip of the spear, we're getting that initial market response. How is that translating into product development and iteration? So what about, you know, in your experience who leads go to market? Who leads the strategy is, is marketing equipped to do that? 

I like to think of more of as like a nights of the round table type scenario. Like no one leads it it's bring all those subject matter experts or owners, together now there's a foundational element that needs to be there, which is a structure. Otherwise it, you know, it's just unorganized thoughts and feedback loops and nothing moves. So it starts with the leaders of, of those units, whether it's sales, marketing, product CS, and you're right. The CS is, is, is a very critical component, especially in the post purchase side. So if you go to market focus includes going back to base. So it's customer marketing centric, that's predominantly going to be led by customer success. Product needs to be on from, from a, from a general kind of participation perspective product is, is the most important piece of a mall because right, whether it's using what's, you know, one of my appears used to say, sell what's on the truck. 

So whether it's selling something that's already there at a, at a feature function level or at a platform level, or it is tied to what's coming the, when product understands the packaging of how it's going to be sold at the, to an end customer or how it's gonna be brought to market, that feedback is so critical for them to understand potential tweaks that they would make at a product level or at the, at a development level to further make those refinements. Because now you have more clarity. It's not that product is just building something and then it just ships it out. But they're building something, knowing what that is going to be used for. And then that additional understanding further informs them to what changes or tweaks they could make. And then once it out, once it's out there, then it's an active feedback loop that comes in because then they can see the adoption of, of something happening at a very early stage at a starting at a conversation with a prospect. 

And then what, what are the takeaways from it? So that the nights of the round table concept, it's so critical for them, because then that feedback loop that comes really informs everyone in regards to where the calibration needs to happen from a marketing perspective, you, as a marketer, you would know what's working, what's not working at a sales level. You would need to you'll get feedback around, around certain things that are not resonating. So then either it's, it's fine tuning that or bringing that back at a team level and having, you know, really strategic conversations around how do we course correct. And if it's, again, if it has a customer-centric approach to it, then you get feedback loop from a CS perspective. Umut at the core, going back to your questions, like how do you start it? You have to have a simple framework, a simple, kind of like a structure to it. 

Otherwise it, it's gonna be a bit of a wild west of everybody coming with the ideas and define what you, from an organizational perspective, what is the objective of, of that go to market group? F the go to market group is designed around revenue generation, which typically tends to be the main focus, when let's, and that's tree shirt size that in the sense of like, what are our go to market that we can focus on and then pick one, whether it's something that is net new or tied to a release, or what you already have, and then just kind of build it and then basically have a simple tracker. It just like, okay, we're these are our, this is the realm of possibilities in terms of what we can do work as a group to figure out, which has the highest potential from a business impact perspective, pluck that out, start building towards that, build the marketing mix sales mix, get that alignment with, with the rest of the group, establish timelines, put some targets there, press the go button, see how that goes while that's in flight. 

Now you have opportunity to revisit like, okay, what else can we do? And then you're just, it's a, it's a very end to end process where the entire org is engaged. So the Nu then there's less of a mystery around what marketing is doing and what sales is doing because you're working together and everybody knows what they're doing. And that's not that only thing the org would do, but that would be the big chunk of, of what the business groups would focus on. 

NICK: Yeah, yeah, no, I, I agree with everything you're saying starts with the people and getting the right people in the room together, but can you also talk a little bit about the tool stack and aligning the tool stack and integrating the tool stack? Because if marketing is using one, one platform and sales is using something else and CS is using a third software, and none of them are integrated into the product. I mean, we have misalignment, right. So can you talk a little bit about that? 

FAHAD: Yeah. And, and this is, I think this gets further complicated with the state of the MarTech right now there's a tool for everything. And a lot of marketers fall in the trap of buying a tool to solve a problem versus knowing what the problem is. And, and having tried to solve it via traditional means, which I mean, by like, just from a process optimization perspective, and, and then identifying the need for a tool, be like, we need something for this and then going to find the best tool. A lot of it is happening the other way around, including right. I'm guilty of that at some point like, oh, I wish we had something that would just do it. The hard truth is that a tool will very rarely, if not ever get you the results you need, because if you don't understand the processes and you don't know the process to achieve the outcome, a tool is not gonna do that unless it's specifically tailored to you then it, then it will potentially do that. 

So at the core of it think from, from any SaaS, company set up perspective, you have common suspects, a CRM, there's, a customer or buyer journey staff in, in, at a system level that's built. And then everybody kind of shares different kinds of responsibilities in terms of meaning the data, maintaining the data inputs and hygiene, and then what's happening to it. Um, I th at the core that's, you would need only just alignment and on the customer journey. And then the operationalization of that at the baseline tech stack, which is a CRM marketing automation, um, an thing CS would be using. Anything that's brought on, on, on top would potentially go through a similar type of, filter exercise, which is if it's a marketing centric tool, then you probably don't need it. But if it's something that touches all functions or more than that, then there's definitely, there needs to be kind of that check on, is it duplicating efforts? 

Are we gonna enter data in multiple spots? If, if we're gonna shut, if it's gonna replace an existing functionality, how easy it is, how seamless it is. And what's the buy-in level. If we're gonna at a leadership level, it might sound all great. And like, this is the best thing ever. But if the users which are individual contributors and sub functional owners, if they don't believe in it, the tool is just gonna fall apart. So I think it, it, it's, it's the same kind of orchestration that I like a go to market. Of course, we're gonna have, like our, each function's gonna have its preferred tools, but anything that touches multiple stakeholders that requires that, that threading of who, who gets impacted, what are the current system it's gonna replace? What are the user habits it's gonna, that we need in place to make sure we maximize, h usage out of it. Um, then some sort of a success criteria. It has to have like a successful tech implementation needs to have something that it would do, whether it's process, whether it's efficiency gains from a pro process optimization perspective it just adds functionality that wasn't there, something along those lines so that you can at the end of the day, be like, yeah, that was a successful tool that we brought on board. Um, kind of cross that checkbox. 

NICK: Yeah, no, a hundred percent. It's, you know, the tool is not gonna solve your problems on its own. You have to define the problem before finding a tool, it will empower you to solve it. Um, we talked about kind of the company-wide GTM alignment. Now, if we can zoom into, marketing a little bit more, what do you think are the fundamentals of successful SaaS marketing? 

FAHAD: That's a good question. And I think there, there, there are a lot of layers to that. The first step is knowing what type of SAS organization is and the, or maturity, if it's, let's say a small company between that five to 10 million mark, where that the company that's between that 10 to 20 then the focus should be on good, not perfect because that perfect. Hasn't been defined and even, and, and it might, it's more of an abstract concept at that point. So if a lot of effort and energy is spent on doing things, just the, exactly the way this should be, you're gonna waste potential resources and the most important being time and not knowing what actually works. So right. That's the first thing I would say is, is in a lot of context, even beyond that, if, if, if, as an organization matures and you cross that 50 million ark and you're between that, that 50 to a hundred good is a good starting point because then you can optimize and, and more importantly, you know, what works, if you, the perfect side if you have data to validate that that level of execution is gonna get us the result a hundred percent double down on that. 

But if the data's not there, start with good. The other element I would say is knowing the audience if, if anything, that's the only thing I think someone a marketer needs to do is just know the audience who are you targeting? Hat are the characteristics of that? And that can start with just talking to customers, talk to the customers. You have get an understanding of what their pain points are. If you don't have any customers, if it's a pre-product type scenario, talk to the prospects that are, that closely resemble the persona of the customer you're trying to sell to, but that exercise a hundred percent needs to happen. A lot of marketers operate in the dark. They assume that that's the person they're selling to and then, or they don't have any idea. And they're just kind of following the general marketing mix of like, I'm gonna run ads and I'm gonna go to this event and I'm gonna put this billboard up. But if you know who you're selling too, you can reverse engineer the marketing mix that will have the most impact, or at least have a calculated understanding of the marketing mix that is gonna impact. Agin, it's gonna help you establish that point of contact and then it's the process of measuring calibrating and executing. Um, that, that would be, I would say the, probably the most important thing, um f the fundamentals, 

NICK: I'm sorry, I have to agree a hundred, 110% here. And not only is it the most important, but I feel like it's so often overlooked somehow. Yeah. Or like it's underestimated. Like, I, I don't, it's, it's a, it's very strange, it's very strange. The distance from how important it is to how often it's underutilized or people just don't pay enough attention to this. 

FAHAD: Yeah. And, and you're, you make a good point, cuz I have seen including I've been guilty of it in my, in certain scenarios of not doing that and then kind of falling back, like let me actually spend more time and understanding who am I targeting, but versus assuming that's the person I'm targeting. I think a lot of this is that there's a general pressure on marketing to just go and do things and just do it. Yeah, yeah. Just do it. Let's an ad run the ad or, you know, everybody's doing ABM. Why don't you do ABM, which is a whole other topic on the side, but it's, it's more important of like the way another analogy I'd like to kinda use is like the suspect board, right. If you're going after that one person or a set of folks in an enterprise context, for example, that's a very complex navigation that has to be done to understand, okay, what type of things that I can do will get me closer to that person versus just running a traditional marketing tack of ads and events and whatnot. 

Right. And you might end up at the same conclusion of like, I need to do events and I need to run ads, but you'll have more as a marketer, you'll have more insights on the class of events and the class of ads you wanna run and maybe where you wanna run them. And this one, I don't know why, but there's a general shyness to it. I think marketers just don't have that. I need to talk to the customer priority piece. Some of the best in class marketers that I know, the first thing they do with joining an org is like, I wanna talk to your customers or my customers. I wanna really know who they are, why they bought us, what are the things? And that just gives you all the raw data points that you need to take that back and be like, okay, this is how I'm gonna reengineer or reengineer my marketing mix. And this is how, what I'm gonna do from a general marketing perspective. 

NICK: It informs everything. It informs everything. And a lot of times, I mean, I have my own, you know, favorite channels and favorite tactics, but people get too caught up in the, in the channels. T's the messaging, the fit, the relevancy is so much more important than the channel to which you're going to distribute your information, your content, 

FAHAD: Well channels, just like a distribution network. Right. Right. And if you don't know, and that's, you're, you're right. And that's, that's why this discipline has negative stigma tied to it. That it's a cost center. Marketers spend a lot of money. And, and part of that is that when Mar as a marketer or as a marketing team, if you don't know who you're going after, and you don't understand just, you don't need to know exactly a hundred percent of every single pain point that they have, but if you don't even have a general sense of what that is, you're basically, it's almost like that hoping that somehow something you, you do connects, and that's where marketers fall into the trap of like, you know, lead gen, which, which is just, you know, pay for X amount of things. And you're like, whoa, it's a person in that organization. 

But that organization has 10,000 people. How is that one person going to get me to the person I need to talk to? And it's a tough one. It is, it is a tough one in the, in the noisy MarTech realm that we are in which every tool promises X Y increase and a matter of revenue impact or efficiency gains here. That is why marketers kind of just default to be like, okay, if I get this tool this will get me to the point a, to B. Whereas the, that might be the reality, but the prerequisite in order to achieve that, you still need to know who you're going after. And the more, you know, who you're going after then you might be able to use a tool to its fullest potential. 

NICK: I think that the SaaS marketers promoting these tools have actually done their homework about us and what we want to hear, and which is, which is why they're effective with this kind of messaging. And that's why it's oh, 

FAHAD: Big time. The best-freed marketers out there, if the common thread that ties them all is they understand their customers. They know who their customers are. And the common, sometimes I get feedback from peers like, well, we don't have customer. We don't have that many customers or our original customers were founder. So based on founder engagement, so they won't, they don't follow that, that the full kind of buying life cycle, for example, that's okay. The guess, what if you're still selling to a bank, just go find another bank and talk to them. People are open to having conversations to just generally do a thought share. Yeah. If that's not happening, there are actually services out there that would connect you for a fee too.  

Yeah. Focus groups think tanks, you know, there there are so many opportunities out there, but with, with power, social media and for genuine reasons, I've seen, like people actually will be open to having a conversation because they know that you're not, it's not like you're pitching something, but if done right, the world is out there and people are willing to share some insights, but that it has to start there. If you don't know who you're selling to, if you don't understand who they are, if you don't understand their day to day in some capacity, it's a shooting in the dark exercise. You're just hoping something lands, and yes, it will land, but, and that's where the trap really kicks in because when you spend a hundred thousand or 200,000 or a million dollars and you generate two, three things that are tangible, then the trap is like, okay, if I do this again, then I'm gonna repeat it. And that is where the trap lies. Like there is repeatability because that was just by chance, or that was a fluke. If you have tangible insights, like I did this and I, because of this, and now I can repeat it and see if I can get a repeatable outcome. 

NICK: Yeah. And, and I think another aspect to this trap that you're describing is that you start seeing people as data points, you start seeing people as pixels and data points and, and, and the, the biggest thing, the biggest turnoff for a prospect is if you make them feel like a data point and not a real person with real pain points and real needs, and that's, you're gonna lose them in, in a millisecond. So it's, it's you know, it's important to continue to see people. I think as people as who they are, as real people who have real needs real lives, real difficulties, real pain points and aspirations, and bake that into everything you do, from the messaging to the targeting, to, you know, to everything else. 

FAHAD: Well, people at the end of the day, people buy from people, right? Like you. Yeah. And, and if at a, at the core of it, they understand like everybody, you know, one's kind of in this dark of, oh, so, you know, now you've shifted gears and we're gonna talk shot. Like, but that initial foundational press, if that's there and that initial report is there and they, they, there is that realness to it. Then those conversation, or on conversations organically flow, because you're not selling them some something you're helping them solve a problem. The moment that happens that switch happens, that's when things move forward. But whether it's marketing, whether it's sales, whether it's even CS in a post, post purchase side if it's approached as like, Hey, you know, I'm from a sales perspective or the sales Z, that the label that I gets, like, it's, you're just pushing things on me without actually knowing that that's what I want. 

That's when credibility takes a bit of a hit. So every time people, all we're all buyers we, we always like, you know, I don't think there's a day that goes by that where we don't make a buying decision, whether we buy or don't buy, we're actively doing that in our, in our, in our minds where we' at Amazon or scrolling through our phones. But we only buy either if we have a very strong need and that product just satisfies that need, then that's, that's a, that's a perfect scenario of like, just people coming in and they're like, we need this and you don't have to do half of the work, but when it comes to the enterprise side or, or B2B software side, that's usually not because a very noisy market. So then you have to kind of establish that baseline trust. You need to know who they are in some capacity. You're not saying like you gotta, you know, build a crazy long, you know, relationship to, to move a conversation. But if, if you go with the intent of just learning what their pain points are, and then actually sharing whether or not you can solve for it, that has a very high probability moving forward versus just pitching something and hoping it lands. 

NICK: Yeah, no, that's great. I mean, I feel, I feel like we can, we can talk about this stuff all day, but we do have to wrap up last thing I want to ask you or our audience, do you have any kind of actionable tip or, or growth hack or something that people can implement,  the next week or month into their campaign? Something, something actionable. 

FAHAD: That's a good one because marketing orgs are so different and everybody has, everybody has a different setup and different tools and different campaign definitions of campaigns, for example, varies across the board. Um would, I, I think one tool going back to the go-to market side, if there are marketers out there that are not operating with that, but in any sense, and it's more of a siloed execution where sales, marketing, CS product, you all kind of just have separate lanes and you're just doing things I would highly recommend coming together. And then talking in that context of like, how can we just build something together that has a completeness to it? Like, it will still contain the same deliverables, not, not gonna change, but you're gonna build together or, and you're gonna work together. And then whatever framework you end up using, cuz it needs to be as again, it needs to be a simple tracker. 

This is the realm of possibilities here. Our highest impact thing that we can do, or this is the highest impact thing that we can push in the market. Okay, great. Now let's go figure out what, what are the things that are gonna at a marketing level, going to work the best at a sales level, going to work the best that level of orchestration can do wonders for an organization. So regardless of what's set up marketers and, and, and sales folks and the revenue centric teams have just thinking along those lines and even testing it out, I'm confident from a, from a general marketing perspective and just folks that do this, that you would see a very different outcome, a very progressive outcome. 

NICK: Awesome. Awesome. That's a nice, that's a nice way to end, the conversation, you know, have a cross functional conversation. Or if, if you can't bring everybody to the table, at least call a customer, you know, you learn something, you're gonna learn something. 

FAHAD: Yeah. I think those two things in the context of go to market and sorry, in the context I'm gonna market. And then just, just generally like things you can do in the absence of any tools or, you know, any, not knowing what the strategy or makeup of your org are executable and talk to the customer. If I even have to prioritize it, I would say, that's the number one thing. If you haven't spoken to your customers, do that, please call your customers, talk to them. If you don't have any customers or you don't have access to them, leverage, you know a, a significantly big list of things that you could do, whether it's, you know, third parties or your individual network, you will have someone that you can get you in front of someone and just have a conversation. Just, just try to learn what their pain points are. The insights are gonna be so more the, so, so, so powerful from either marketing go to market sales that no other tactic could potentially ever get you those insights. 

NICK: Absolutely, absolutely. Couldn't agree more well. This was very valuable. I'm sure this is gonna be very valuable for our audience. I really appreciate your time. And, thank you for joining us today. 

FAHAD: Likewise, have a great Friday and an awesome weekend.