Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Long Story Short:

• Tactical strategies for how to put your product at the center of everything
• The biggest misconceptions about product led growth
• How the roles of marketing and sales have shifted in product-led companies
• The key differences between PQLs and MQLs
• Making it easy for prospects to navigate their way through the sales process in a way that works for them 
• How product led growth leads to a better product by putting the customer first and giving you a better understanding of your product
• The importance of being where your customers are—social platforms and communities— to answer questions

 

Resources:

GetCorrelated.com

The Product Led Revenue Podcast

 

Connect with Breezy:

LinkedIn

 

Connect with the Host:

Jeff Sirkin on LinkedIn

 

Connect with Sirkin Research:

Website

Twitter

Instagram

LinkedIn

Transcript:

Jeff Sirkin:
Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Long Story Short, the podcast about storytelling and connection. I’m your host, Jeff Sirkin. On this show, we talk to people making a difference as marketers, entrepreneurs, and social impact advocates. We dig into actionable strategies and tactics to help you connect with your audience and keep your finger on the pulse of your market.

Jeff Sirkin:
My guest this week is Breezy Beaumont. She’s the of head of growth and marketing at Correlated and has tons of hands on experience at multiple hyper-growth software companies. She’s always bringing in new ideas for data-driven strategies and product-led initiatives with the motto, work smarter, not harder.

Jeff Sirkin:
This episode is all about product-led growth and Breezy is the expert on all things PLG. We discuss what product-led growth means, and get into tactical strategies for how to put your product at the center of everything. We cover some of the biggest misconceptions in how companies can begin shifting their thinking into being product-led. So without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Breezy Beaumont.

Jeff Sirkin:
Hi Breezy. Thanks for coming on Long Story Short.

Breezy Beaumont:
Thanks, Jeff. I’m excited about this.

Jeff Sirkin:
So today’s episode is all about a hot topic in the B2B world and that’s product-led growth. So in order to get us started, can you give us perspective on how you define product-led growth?

Breezy Beaumont:
Yes, definitely. So product-led growth, everyone’s talking about it and how many of those actually know what the heck it is is a whole other question. But product-led growth is a go to market function that puts your product at the center of everything that you do. And so what that means is that when you go to someone’s website, if they’re a product-led growth company, you can easily get started with the product right then and there, whether that’s free trial, freemium, whatever it may be. It doesn’t matter. It’s just the idea that you can get started with the product immediately.

Jeff Sirkin:
I love that. And again, I think it’s something that, similar to the conversations that have been going on for decades now around gating versus ungating, and how much of it, that’s always been the most valuable piece of getting somebody into the product. So I love the idea that everything centers around that. But from what I’ve heard and from our conversations, I mean, it sounds like being product-led does sound like a slight shift in focus from the traditional sort of go to market framework. And so how do you see the roles of marketing and sales shifting or being different in product-led companies?

Breezy Beaumont:
Yeah, definitely. There’s a slight shift in each of the roles, especially on the go to market team in a product-led company. So from marketing to sales, to customer success, there are some changes. It’s not anything night and day. And I think in any of those roles, if you are excelling and really strong in that role today, I don’t have any concerns that you will still be successful in the future, which is going to be very much product-led, or if you swap over to a product-led growth company. But that being said, there are some changes about them.

Breezy Beaumont:
So for marketers, your product is on your website just like the way that a content download or a demo request button or whatever it else may be is out there. And so a couple additional responsibilities is that you’re trying to get people signed up to use the product. And so that means that your marketing and branding is going to be a lot about the value that people can get from it. But also it requires you to have a little bit of a deeper knowledge about how your product actually works and how people can benefit from it, and what are some of those problems out there in the market that people are talking about and how does your product fit into what people are already struggling with and what’s keeping them up in the middle of the night.

Breezy Beaumont:
And so a lot of the marketing is focused on brand marketing, content, community, social, really building and being very much in a public place is really important in a product-led growth company. And then also you are going to likely be working with the product team to build the virality piece or the network effects piece into a PLG product.

Breezy Beaumont:
So for instance I create a Zoom link and I share it with you. Now you jump into Zoom as well and create an account. Okay. And so that’s how you can naturally see the product shift from one person to the next, and get that virality piece. Same with if you use an invoicing software, when you send an invoice, the logo of that invoice company being at the bottom and saying create your free account again, creates the network effects. So that’s some of the shifts on the marketing side.

Breezy Beaumont:
On the sales side, is more of like a cultural shift. And then the tools that you use to do your day-to-day shift. So it’s about being somewhat more, what would you think of as customer success. So as a salesperson, you might be talking to people who are already using your product. And many times you are talking to people who are already using it, they’ve tried different features and this and that. So your conversation is more based on what they’ve been doing inside of your product and how can you add value there. Or if they haven’t used your product yet during the sales process, they may create a free account and start using it, or they may say, “Hey, I’d like to create an account.” And so you might be assisting in that.

Breezy Beaumont:
So it’s a little bit of a blurry line between what sales and customer success looks like, because you’re mixing the two skills together. But again, like I said, for marketers or for sales people, the really good ones were already doing all these things except for maybe building in the product virality piece, but everything else I stated, I think people were already doing if you’re strong in your role. And so it shouldn’t be a hard shift for you.

Jeff Sirkin:
And that makes a ton of sense. And one of the things I know has been out there is, oh, in PLG and product-led growth, the sales team isn’t really necessary or doesn’t even really need to exist. And so I’m glad to hear your perspective. So along with that, which sounds like it was fairly, obviously a misconception, what are some of the other maybe misconceptions or misnomers out there around product-led growth.

Breezy Beaumont:
I think I just need to address the one that you stated, which is the biggest misconception, is that the product’s just going to sell itself. And so if you think the product’s just going to sell itself, you think, okay, then we don’t need a sales team. That cannot be further from the truth. And the data suggests the same. 96% of product-led growth companies have sales teams. And I’d see those numbers also reflect on the marketing side and also reflect many times on the customer success side or some similar support type role. And so that’s one of the biggest misconceptions is that you are removing teams who currently exist in companies. They still exist, but you do get the benefit of some of the metrics like your customer acquisition costs being much lower, your net dollar attention being much higher, and you get the benefit of these different things.

Breezy Beaumont:
So the reason I bring up those metrics is that you may have a leaner team, but you’re very much… Or not even necessarily a leaner team, but selling more of your products, you have more pipeline, but you’re definitely not removing those folks from the process. You still need marketing. People are not going to know about you or how they can benefit from using if you don’t have a marketing team. And you need sales to help people understand, okay, even if they’re using your product today, when is a good time for them to have a conversation to move to the next tier of the product or the next usage feature of your product. And so it’s important to have the sales team to help guide your users and guide your current customers as well.

Jeff Sirkin:
I love that. And the reason I brought up gating earlier is it feels to me like this is the natural evolution where I think as marketers, we’ve talked about that to gate or not to gate for years. And the idea now is moving, the pendulum is shifting a little more towards not gating any ideas. You need to create valuable and valuable content for your buyers. And so this is the next logical extension is as opposed to just, “Hey, let’s continue to create valuable content. Let’s actually show them, let’s get it in their hands.” So to me, this feels like a very natural evolution, and I think it makes sense, but it’s interesting just to hear some of those misconceptions that are out there.

Breezy Beaumont:
Yeah. I think on the gated content front, or just gating anything, gated product, gated content, et cetera. I think the thing that needs to be true is whatever people are giving up to get your content needs to be equal, or even better would be to give more than what you’re requiring from someone to sign up to use it.

Breezy Beaumont:
So if your content piece is something that is of high value to them, I think it’s fine to gate a couple things here and there. But I think in general, I’m definitely in the ungate things, let people learn, give them all the knowledge that they’d like bucket. I think one of the other things that people think about with product-led growth is this concern around the idea that well, now people will be able to see our product or now people will be able to understand our pricing or whatever all these things are that people were always able to do this. They’re able to do it today even if you’re not a product-led growth company.

Breezy Beaumont:
If you go into Reddit or G2 or wherever you’re looking, people are already sharing your pricing willingly. They’re already sharing demos and screenshots and screen shares of your product. You might as well be the owner of that and be the one touring and showing them the value that they could be getting from your product.

Jeff Sirkin:
That’s such a good perspective because I know personally I’ve been in this boat plenty of times where you go to a company’s page and you say, oh, see pricing. And you go to the pricing and it gives you the different business models and oh, click here for… So everything is sort of walled off. And for me, just as a potential user, that’s always been a frustrating experience.

Jeff Sirkin:
But I think that’s great perspective, it’s already out there, right? And I think that’s so much of why the gating strategy has evolved the way it has is fundamentally, there’s just so much out there now. And so you’d rather be the owner of that, but even coming back to what you said at the beginning, and I love the idea, because I think so often we take our own internal perspective of we need contact information, because we can put them into these nurture campaigns and XYZ, but we don’t see it from the other perspective where there’s value being exchanged.

Jeff Sirkin:
And so this is the B2B cash register, is putting frankly asking them for their contact information. So there has to be at least equivalent value that you’re giving back to them. And if that’s not something you would be interested in getting put into nurture streams, as we all know we’re about to be when we sign up, when we give our information on those forms, then we shouldn’t be gating some of those things ourselves.

Breezy Beaumont:
Yeah, exactly. I mean the whole concept of what should really just be every company but I think especially in product-led growth, is making it easy for the prospect to navigate their way through the sales process and navigate the way that they would like to work and in the way that’s going to be most effective for them. And so if that means on your pricing page that… And this is something we do at Correlated. So we have a free tier and we are public facing about that.

Breezy Beaumont:
But for our other pricing tiers, the pricing information isn’t directly out there. And the reason being is that the complexity of it doesn’t make sense for the end-user. It would be better for them to have a conversation with someone to understand where they’re going to fit into pricing. Otherwise it might be confusing or it might be something where they could misunderstand or misinterpret it. And so that’s a case. Okay, great. So then we will give the free tier and people can just get started and use that. And we’ll have a conversation about pricing if we move that direction.

Breezy Beaumont:
And same with any interaction should just be, what’s going to be best for the customer. What’s going to be the path of least resistance and let’s do everything that we can to make it possible. So if people want to sign up and get started using our product, but there’s some complexity in using it, let’s allow them to get started and use the product, but let’s make sure that they understand that we’re here to help, that they can schedule time with us directly on our calendars at any time that they’d like, and just removing all of the bumps in the road along the way as best that we can.

Jeff Sirkin:
But fundamentally in what you’re saying, which I couldn’t agree more with, is really putting the control in the hands of the buyers, as opposed to it being this monolithic thing that you’re in our sales cycle as opposed to it’s your buyer’s journey.

Breezy Beaumont:
Yes. People like the ability to choose, that’s a human instinct. We want to be able to pick. Do we want to demo, do we want to use the product? We want to have the choice to give up our contact information or not give up our contact. These are things that we all want this ability to choose. And as buyers, we’ve always wanted these, and we’ve always felt certain ways about moving through a sales process, but yet for some reason, on the other side of it, we created these gates and things that make it really difficult for a prospect to move around. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s like, think of how you would want it, observe how your prospects are interacting with you and remove all the friction along the way. It’s a no-brainer.

Jeff Sirkin:
It makes sense to me. And speaking of which, one of the reasons we put those gates up is because historically B2B has focused on generating marketing qualified leads and it’s something like that a demo or a trial would certainly qualify in most companies. But shifting to being product-led, the key metric becomes product qualified leads, PQLs. And so can you talk about what are PQLs and what the difference is between the PQL and an MQL?

Breezy Beaumont:
Yeah, definitely. So it’s not as scary and confusing as I think a lot of people feel like the difference between an MQL and a PQL is. At its core, an MQL combines information about the leader contact, right? So maybe their title or this or that and information about the company. So maybe the industry or how many employees it has or where the company’s located. And so it’s combining that information with things that people are doing with your marketing content. And so are they downloading things? Are they attending events? Are they visiting your website a certain amount of times?

Breezy Beaumont:
And in a PQL it’s all the same on the first things we talked about, there’s attributes about the person, there’s attributes about the company, but instead of things that people are doing on your website, it’s about what they’re doing in your product. Are they logging in a certain amount of times? Are they clicking on a feature? Are they inviting more users to collaborate with them? Did they create X, Y, and Z or trigger ABC inside of your product? And so it’s just the different actions that someone’s taking inside of your product. And that’s what makes up the PQL.

Breezy Beaumont:
The only other major difference is that for MQLs, you really just have one. You have one MQL opportunity, and in some cases, more developed companies might have like a re-MQL or a recycled MQL, but in most cases we just have one, one MQL and done. For PQLs, that’s not the case. And there are actually multiple PQL opportunities. Maybe when someone first signs up and logs in a certain amount of times, or takes an action, that’s one PQL opportunity. The next is they invite others to collaborate with them or hit a certain pricing or usage tier, that’s the next PQL opportunity and so on and so forth. So it’s throughout the customer lifecycle rather than just being one trigger to say, okay, sales, go talk to them. It’s about anytime there might be a new revenue opportunity, that’s when you hit that PQL mark.

Jeff Sirkin:
And the reason I think this to me is really the game changer is really the insights that come from the product usage. From my perspective, working with a number of B2B marketing SaaS companies, what you end up doing is, and I’ve heard this a number of times is that, once a customer signs a contract, that’s the end of what they hear from the company until the renewal’s up, maybe a year, three years later.

Jeff Sirkin:
And so much of that is… And frankly what you end up finding is that they may have sold some sort of giant account, really this big logo that they really wanted to get, but they have it a very, very small footprint with them. And so to me, I’ve always thought of this, that they’re missing the opportunity to help them identify how to potentially grow into that, that they’re so acutely focused on new logo. And they’re missing the opportunities that are right in front of them in terms of, to your point, have they actually logged in? Have they actually invited other people into the platform? Did they stop using it nine months ago? All of these things would be completely relevant as to how it would help retention, as to how it would help potentially land and expand strategies and enterprise. What are some of the other insights that you see that are really core to product-led growth company?

Breezy Beaumont:
Land and expand is like a phrase that we’ve always talked about, but I don’t think most companies were really executing on it. It was like a pipe dream of, okay, we land this gigantic enterprise account or really just any account, and then we’re going to expand to either another team or expand to more people on that team using it. And so there are some roles who helped to pull this off, like lifecycle marketers and obviously customer success teams and things like that. But it wasn’t ever a huge focus.

Breezy Beaumont:
I think two things that are driving this to be a bigger focus is first of all, the financial metrics of a company, things like net dollar, retention and other metrics that are now relying a lot more on expansion to help drive those numbers. And then also, in product-ed growth companies, that there’s so much less of a focus on land and more of a focus on expand. So it basically really flipped things upside down, that the land is okay, great, fine and dandy, someone’s using it, but really we’re looking to get the person to the next tier of paying or the next tier of usage.

Breezy Beaumont:
So it’s the opposite in that the land is everything in a traditional company, whereas now it flips to the expand. And so one of the ways that you can help to drive that and make sure that that’s the case is by changing your sales teams compensation. And that’s something that we see a lot in product-led growth companies. So the variable comp for your sales team is going to be comprised primarily of expansion revenue, and a lower percent will be landing an account. Whereas in a traditional company of their variable comp, as much as 100%, would’ve been on landing a company. In other words, just getting the contract signed and then you get paid off of that. Great. Maybe you get paid continually every year, but still it’s really just about getting them to sign, stay as a customer, not thinking about how can they get more out of our platform.

Jeff Sirkin:
I love that. I’m an economist by training. And so the idea of people will do what you incentivize them to do. And we’ve worked with a number of clients similarly around… And actually some of the things we’ve heard with our clients is that they aren’t getting enough value because they’re not selling these big enough accounts, because what happens is these reps are being compensated for what they can close this quarter. And so, as a result, they’re not going to be spending their time on things that are not going to close for two, three, four quarters. So as a result, they never land some of those bigger fish that they’re always shooting for, or if they do it’s as we just said, it’s in these really small opportunities.

Jeff Sirkin:
But I love that perspective, the idea of that there’s more value there. And again, we’ve seen companies that that’s really their biggest avenue to growth. And I think the idea from my perspective is always been, well, we want to be the next unicorn and in order to achieve that hockey stick growth, and in order to get 10X this year, that has to come from new logo. And so I think that’s the goal everybody sets internally. And that’s what causes everybody to say only that, and then to your point, that’s the finish line, as far as marketing and sales is concerned, is that land, once that contract signed, great, we’re done. Send it over to customer success. Hopefully we’ll get these renewals, we’ll keep cranking those out. And then meanwhile, we’re onto the next fish. So I love the shift in perspective.

Breezy Beaumont:
I think it’s interesting that product-led growth is almost a forcing function for so many things that we have talked about and thought were important for so long and knew that they were true. So the saying that like, oh, it’s easier to get a dollar out of a current customer than it is about from net new. But sales and marketing being aligned on what’s important, and who’s important to talk to is so important. And that we love land and expand. Oh, it would be awesome to land a huge company, because then we can expand all the different parts of it.

Breezy Beaumont:
These are things that are not new. We’ve been talking about them forever, but I don’t know how much of it people were really bringing to fruition and making real. And I think product-led growth companies have this forcing function that makes all of those true. Sales and marketing have to be aligned. Everyone’s aligned because everyone knows exactly how the product works, who can benefit from it, so on and so forth.

Breezy Beaumont:
Land and expand you can be the forcing function by putting in those compensation structures. But also it’s just a forcing function anyway, because people are signing up to use your product and likely on a free trial or free tier or very low usage. They’re most likely just even going to expand almost on their own. But then if you can get the sales assistant there to help them expand even faster, then great. And the concept of it’s easier to get a dollar out of an existing customer, it’s like, yeah, it is. So why haven’t we been focusing on this.

Jeff Sirkin:
Of course.

Breezy Beaumont:
And also it doesn’t just mean that you’re getting more revenue out of your customers, it’s that they’re also getting more value out of your product by getting more revenue. It’s not just, oh, we got them to sign an even bigger contract. It’s like, they’re actually using more of your product. Especially if you’re a usage-based pricing company. They’re getting value on the other side, you’re getting more revenue. It’s like a truly, a win-win scenario.

Jeff Sirkin:
I love the idea of the forcing function because you’re right, you’re forcing yourself as a company to continue providing value period. It’s not just, let’s give them the case studies and all the ROI they can theoretically achieve and then just hope they sign on the dotted. And then hopefully they’ll sort of forget all about it and keep paying us every year. But as opposed to no, we’re going to keep forcing ourselves to keep providing value incrementally. We will then reap the returns of that, but you may need to continue putting the customer first.

Breezy Beaumont:
Yeah. And it drives you to create a better product, which that’s obviously product-led growth, it’s right in the name. But there’s been a lot of scenarios of companies and we’ve all come across them where you’re promised a lot of things during the sales process, you eventually sign on that line and it’s just not what you were sold. And sometimes to a degree that’s shocking that it’s really something completely different than what your conversations were during the sales process.

Breezy Beaumont:
And so that feeling is never great. Especially if you’re the one who put your neck on the line to buy a product that didn’t work out. And so, first of all, you get to avoid that whole scenario altogether. But also, it allows you to really test out, okay, is this a solid product from my initial learnings? And now that we’re using it based on how you use it, product-led growth companies are constantly shifting their product to make it easier for you to use, and better for you to use and see which features that you’re using. And so they’re so deep in all these different numbers that you’re getting a better experience as a buyer or as a customer, but then also their product is getting stronger, which means that the market, they’re probably most likely going to get even more market share because they have an even more solid product. So again, they keep continuing to bounce back and forth from each other.

Jeff Sirkin:
That’s so powerful. So are you ready for a couple of rapid fire questions?

Breezy Beaumont:
Yes, let’s do it.

Jeff Sirkin:
Okay. So the first one, what would you say is the most overrated marketing activity or tactic?

Breezy Beaumont:
I would say attribution is very much overrated. I know it’s not directly an activity, but it’s a result of your activities. And if you look at the way that really successful companies have grown, product-led or not, if you look at some of these really successful companies out there, they have built in public, they have created communities around what they’re doing. They’re doing social marketing, they’re doing a lot of brand marketing and awareness and all these other things. And the attribution on those activities, for lack of a better word, sucks. There’s not good attribution on the activities that we know drive really high results. Even if you think of referrals, there’s basically no attribution on someone referring you, but we know that referrals close at the highest percentage than anything else. And so I think attribution is something that’s tough. The best way to get attribution is actually capturing demand, but to be able to capture demand, you have to have created the brand awareness. And so, yeah.

Jeff Sirkin:
I couldn’t agree more as an for my entire career. This is something that would’ve made me recoil two, three, four years ago, even. But again, just the fact that A, there’s so much that we can’t see no matter what. And even if we could, to your point, the idea that it’s just never going to be good enough to really capture where some of this came from. And again, the more we keep seeing that the percentage of the buyer’s journey that’s completed before they’re ever going to get in touch with you, is getting higher and higher and higher. So the point where you’re losing, you’re missing out on seeing what the things are that actually drove that. But I love the perspective too, where there’s two different things of building demand versus capturing demand. And attribution really just shows you how you are successfully able to capture demand, but that’s not what’s really building your future.

Breezy Beaumont:
Exactly. And I’ve had many, many, many companies come to me from a consulting or advisory point of view to see what do you think is going on here? And even just looking at the numbers, you can see what’s going on there. They’re like, “Yeah, we’re doing a really great job at lead gen through our LinkedIn ads.” I’m like, “That’s amazing. And you should continue to do that. But you’re telling me the top of the funnel is you’re having a hard time with top of the funnel, and you’re not doing brand marketing.” So it’s a very clear piece there.

Jeff Sirkin:
Just a quick, funny anecdote, a company I worked with for a while, did some analysis and found that their most valuable lead source unsurprisingly was people who click on the contact us. I want to talk to a sales rep.

Breezy Beaumont:
Yes. Yeah.

Jeff Sirkin:
So then in theory, if you go based on their attribution… Exactly. But then the idea should be, well, then we should replace every single call to action. It should just be, raise your hand and talk to sales and it’s like…

Breezy Beaumont:
Oh my goodness.

Jeff Sirkin:
… well, you need to think about that. Is that the first thing somebody’s going to do? And the answer of course is no. So that’s the last piece when somebody is now sold and ready to start that conversation. Absolutely. But that’s not what’s getting them to the point. It’s not because the color or whatever of the call to action didn’t immediately make them ready to have a sales conversation.

Breezy Beaumont:
Yep. 100%.

Jeff Sirkin:
So let’s flip to the other side, the positive side of things. What’s the most underrated marketing activity?

Breezy Beaumont:
Probably community and social marketing. So getting out there on LinkedIn, Twitter. Actually, I guess I shouldn’t even name platforms. Getting out there wherever the heck your prospects and customers live. So depend on if their type of role, they might be on Twitter and LinkedIn and et cetera. Or they might be in Reddit and other forum or Quora. And so being where your customers are and building there, whether that’s in some sort of a social platform or in a community format, like a discord or slack community, being there, answering questions, not pushing your product, you’re there to answer questions, maybe tangentially related to your product. But that’s very underrated because it does a couple of things. First of all, you answering one person in a public forum like that, isn’t you answering one person. It’s you answering and thousands of people are seeing your answer to that question.

Breezy Beaumont:
And then also you’re positioning yourself as a thought leader. So yes, you work for a company and you can help to add value if they use your product in X, Y, Z way, but also, you know what the heck you’re talking about and you’re there to help them and whether or not they’re a good fit for your product today or in a year from now, you’re still going to be a good resource for them, and that way you’re there when they are ready to make that decision, your top of mind. So that’s super underrated, always has been, always will be, and is only continuing to be more important going into the future.

Jeff Sirkin:
I’m so glad that you combined those two, community and social, because I think so often people think of community building as this, again, monolithic thing that we need to create this and host this community. And the idea is, but I love your perspective, is be where they are, because I think so often really what you described about some of these social platforms is those social platforms are communities, so it doesn’t have to be this well established, big kind of thing that, oh, we have a platform and people come. Sure, if you can get there great, but frankly it’s be where they are. And a lot of times they have these communities and this is how the word of mouth is spreading digitally.

Breezy Beaumont:
Yeah. I mean, absolutely. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. I think if there’s a niche market that you can help to fill, and it makes sense to build a community around that, then build it. But I wouldn’t build a community as a forcing function to try to get people to join it. I think it’s when you see an opportunity and there’s a gap and people are hungry for that information, then build it and let it be the place where they can interact and you can help to facilitate and have really solid conversations.

Jeff Sirkin:
But again, I think the theme that keeps coming back is let them decide, right? Be where they are and should there be enough value that they need more of you, great. Then create it, but don’t see it as this monolithic thing that this is the only way to create it and get value out of it. It’s really only a matter of whether or not they want it.

Breezy Beaumont:
Yep, exactly.

Jeff Sirkin:
And so then last one here. What’s the most valuable skill or set of skills that a marketer can possess?

Breezy Beaumont:
Just to always be learning, I think. Being flexible as a marketer. I mean, this really applies to any role, but I do think it’s especially important as a marketer to just be able to pivot if you don’t know something, learn it. If you do know something, master it. And so just being able to roll with the punches and move and pivot quickly. So if you want to test out a new channel, do exactly that, go online, figure out how you’re supposed to go on that channel and the way that you should interact with folks, learn what you can. And then quickly shift that into testing it out, see how it works. What are the results, what are the initial learning that give you a hunch about what might happen if you focus on it even more so.

Breezy Beaumont:
And so just always being able to learn. I remember really early in my career, the company that I was working for, we wanted to create a new website. This was a small startup, as you’ll probably guess by the end of this story. And we needed a new website and we didn’t have someone on the team to do it currently. So we thought, should we hire, what should we do here? I went home, literally built a website from scratch, just like a personal website, figured out how to do it, came back to work like a week or two later, and built the website for the company. That’s how you’re going to learn how to do something. You don’t always have to go that in depth. I think you don’t want to fail at your current role to try to fill a different role, but just being able to learn and roll with the punches, and always be curious and just literally Google every single thing that you can is crucial. And it’s going to make you an amazing marketer.

Jeff Sirkin:
I love that. And I think to your point too, the barriers to entry in a lot of these things have never been lower. So there’s so much that you can do and learn and do in real time. And that’s how the world has continued to evolve. And frankly, if you look at a lot of the things we talked about in terms of some of the core things that marketers should be doing, there are things that didn’t even exist more than a couple years ago. So don’t see it as something that oh no, because you haven’t done this for 20 years. No one’s done it for 20 years. It hasn’t existed for 20 years. So remember that in a lot of these, especially these newer channels and skillsets that are growing in product-led growth, this is all again, relatively new. So again, even just being able to learn some stuff on Google, to be able to build some sort of core knowledge around it and then to be able to do it in real time. Again, I think that the sky’s the limit, so I couldn’t agree more.

Breezy Beaumont:
Just got to stay nimble, stay flexible, keep learning. And in any role, that’s the key to success.

Jeff Sirkin:
Yep. And what resources, books, blogs, podcasts would you want to recommend to our audience?

Breezy Beaumont:
If you’re interested in specifically on product-led growth content, myself and my team, we put out a lot of content on LinkedIn or you can go to getcorrelated.com. So we have the Product-led Revenue podcast, blogs, et cetera. So if that’s your focus, awesome.

Breezy Beaumont:
I would also say join communities. So there’s a lot of really amazing slack communities out there. All of them are what you put in is what you’re going to get out. So they do require time and effort, but they’re definitely worth it. So I found a lot of really great help and intros and things like that from different communities. So whatever the niches that you want to be learning about, there’s probably a slack community for it. So definitely leverage those.

Breezy Beaumont:
As you can probably from my recommendations, I’m more of a digital and audio learner, personally. There are obviously a bunch of amazing books and things out there. I prefer digesting content usually in either a quick bulleted format with some good imagery, or listening to a podcast, or talking directly with other folks. So that’s my way of going about it. But yeah, and if people want to connect with me, I’m on LinkedIn, incredibly active on there. So if there’s anything that I can help with, whether it’s in the product-led growth realm, marketing, et cetera, I’m always happy to connect with folks there.

Jeff Sirkin:
That’s awesome. And we’ll put all those links in the show notes. Breezy, thank you so much for taking the time with us today. This has been great.

Breezy Beaumont:
Thank you.

Jeff Sirkin:
I really enjoyed my conversation with Breezy. We’ve seen a massive shift as buyers are now firmly in control of their journeys. It’s time to reduce friction in the buyer’s journey and put your product at the center of your go to market strategy. If you want to learn more about the resources mentioned in this episode, you can find them in our show notes. In addition, we’re publishing full text transcripts of our episodes on our website, at sirkinresearch.com/podcast. Thank you for listening. And I hope you’ll join us for a new story next week on Long Story Short.