Krithika Shankarraman: evaluation

Transcript context

…So let's follow that thread because everyone's like, "Goddamn, I need a play. Just tell me how to do this." Okay, so there's no playbooks that you... If your advice is, "Don't just copy what other companies do that have done well," what should people be doing? How do they approach figuring out how to market their product and help it grow faster? Yeah. So I was an engineer before I became a marketer, and so I have brought a little bit of an engineer's framework to the marketing side of the house. And so something that I've tried to do is put together a four-step process that has served me pretty well. The first step here is diagnosing. So, diagnosing the actual problem. Again, this usually means taking a zoom back when a founder comes and asks, "Hey, we really need to hire a demand gen leader. Who do you know in your network that we should be thinking about?" And I'm like, "Let's talk about your funnel. Do you have a lot of people coming in at the top of the funnel? And when they do come in at the top of the funnel and you start talking to them and having a sales conversation, how likely is it that you close them? How likely is it that you win that deal?" That usually tells you very astutely, do you have product market fit? Once you're already in the room and people are converting, you have found that problem statement that is critical to them that is hurting them the most, and your solution is resonating as a solve to that problem. And so that means yes, probably throwing in more at the top of the funnel is a very good move to make at that time. But on the other hand, if you say, "Yeah. I mean, we get a lot of interest, but once they're in the room, they have a bunch of questions. They're asking about, how do you compare to X competitor and Y competitor? And why does it cost so much?" and et cetera, et cetera. That probably means that there's more to be done in the product market fit zone rather than throwing in more at the top of the funnel because you have a leaky funnel at the bottom. And so hiring a demand generator may be the worst thing that you can do versus thinking about more of a product marketer who's thinking about the competitive differentiation, the positioning, the sales enablement that gets more people through at the bottom. So that's that diagnostic step at the top. Second to me is analyzing your competitors' approaches. So to me, this is not about being super laser focused on your competition because that leads to these local maxima rather than thinking about face shift changes and breakthroughs that you can make as a company. But when you analyze your competitors' approaches, evaluating what others do in the space can kind of give you a useful baseline and identify opportunities and gaps and niches that your company can take in instead. And then, this is the critical step. The next one is you have to intentionally take a different path than what everyone else is doing. And so driving a strategy that sort of sets the company apart is really critically important. I think it's so core to the discipline of marketing, ensuring that differentiation in the market. And you don't have to go into a cave to come up with these ideas and strategies. critically important. I think it's so core to the discipline of marketing, ensuring that differentiation in the market. And you don't have to go into a cave to come up with these ideas and strategies. You can usually go and look at domains that are far outside of your own rather than your direct competitors and come up with some great ideas that you can cross apply and bring in and steal into your own domain or vertical instead. And then the final piece is just experiment, test, validate all of that, and then scale what works and kind of discard what doesn't. So you really have to have a lot of that ability to throw away work when you might have spent a ton of calories on this wonderful piece of content. But if it's not working, don't double down on it. That bias of the sunk cause fallacy really comes into play, especially when you've poured your heart and soul into creating artifacts for marketing. So experiment, test, validate. Give people that psychological safety to fail, especially your teams and organizations. And then, yeah, once you find what works, really double down on it.…

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