Product led growth changes the way companies market and sell their product. We often hear how sellers need to adjust, but in this episode, we dig in with Tara Pawlak, Head of Marketing at GetAccept to learn how marketing needs to shift as well.
In this episode of the Product Led Revenue podcast, our host Breezy Beaumont welcomes Tara to hear how GetAccept has built and structured their team, the primary channels they focus on, and the goals and KPIs you should be tracking on the path to success.
Guest-at-a-Glance
💡 Name: Tara Pawlak
💡 What they do: Head of Marketing
💡 Company: GetAccept
💡 Where to find them: LinkedIn
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Transcript
BREEZY
3:31 Before we dive into some of the specifics, if you could just sort of give an overview of sort of the various teams that you have and sort of what your go to market strategy looks like today, just from the high level, and then we can maybe dive into some specifics from there.
TARA
3:45 Yeah, sure. So from a go to market strategy forget, except we have three motions historically we wore a sales lead. Our four co-founders have a lot of experience and background in sales. If you look into what our product and what we do, we support revenue team. So it makes a lot of sense there. But we also then added marketing lead. And then finally and more recently within, I would say the last two years, right? When I started product lead. And so for teams to help support for this conversation, a lot of the product lead growth motion is of course, our product team development, that whole, you know, engineering that whole section of get accept as well as our marketing team and sales team and CS. So that's primarily who is involved from the go to market strategy. But we also, of course, have our fund rev, ops and sales ops to lean on for analyst help for sure, so which we figure it out. We needed that sooner than later.
BREEZY
4:54 Always better to learn that early on.
TARA
4:56 Yes, yes, for sure.
BREEZY
4:58 So you didn't previously work in product lead. So let's talk a little bit about sort of maybe started there with that swap and sort of what it's been like in this current role. And then you're welcome to sort of take the conversation wherever you'd like from there.
Moving Forward ends
TARA
5:12 Yeah, for sure. So my background is all B to B tech, mostly demand gen strategy and operations. So supporting sales teams pretty much my whole career and like mid to enterprise, so good except we sit more in the SMB to mid space for like an SCP perspective. So when I first started to get, except, I was like what is up with this? Like free trial? Like everyone needs to talk to sales. Like I came in with this notion of we need to remove that from the websites. We need to send everybody the sales. And it was like, no, no. And I was like, I just was not buying.
BREEZY
5:56 For probably.
TARA
5:57 The first, I would say three months which is very interesting because in month five, we really changed from free trial to free account. So instead of really like cutting people that were interested off from our product and letting them know it was ending, we decided to do the opposite and extend it. And one of the reasons that I was so really set on demo is a call to action versus a free account or free trial is what we actually look at our numbers. The air are, can be attributed well towards like more than half to sales, which is historically many companies, right? So I just didn't have the mindset of I would say the end user I was always coming in with like the buyer, who is the power, who is a budget, who is the money. So, but my perspective definitely has changed for sure. So I don't know if anyone else has any familiar stories like that or that's like where they started. I'd love to hear that as well. If anyone wants to add over time, how their perceptions of change for PL, ti, verse like sales lead.
TIM
7:16 Good question there. Hi, Tara. What, of course. Yeah, you're like, you know, and I similarly earlier my career, you know, came from a sales background and then Sofie LG and then it's kind of, you know, work my brain a little bit so much so that I started the company to help. But yeah, what would you say or something like the biggest impediments or objections you got? You know, obviously it was in place before we joined, but yeah, from like the sales side, like what were they say? What were some of the feedback points you were hearing from them?
TARA
7:48 From sales specifically?
TIM
7:50 Yeah, about the free motion.
TARA
7:52 Yeah. So I think without it being communicated in the right way that this is supposed to help your whole go to market strategy. The sales team can feel like you ripped interested buyers or end users away from them verse, really helping eight. And at the end of the day, it's about customers, right? It's about prospects and their experience, and some of them aren't ready to talk to sales yet, or maybe they don't want to at all, but are we all on the same path of getting that revenue in the door for helping the customer wherever they want to spend our time.
BREEZY
8:33 Or…
TARA
8:34 By, so luckily we had some pretty vocal product leaders in our company to really try to educate how this all needs to play together of the buying journey. And especially because we so sales tax software. So… you know, you're looking at people that want to be hands on our hands on. And so we kind of have a change of mindset and perspective of that where the sales team was like you're taking way interested buyers from us and these are ours but it's like they're actually the companies and how do we best help the customer from first and foremost? That was like the main objection.
OPHIR
9:21 I've actually at a two part question. The first one is like what percentage of your sales would you say are sales lead versus product lead? Obviously, there's gonna be some overlap but kind of high level. I know like a lot of people will do 90 percent of everything we need to do, you know, by themselves versus a demo and secondly on that. And I can relate to that. One of the challenges that we've been facing recently is in terms of attribution slash credit. How do you deal with? Well? You know, you just did, whether that's a physical event or if it's you want to sign up for the G to sponsor or whatever it is. How do you deal with? Good? Because for us, it's one of the things we're dealing with right now is getting proper attribution for a lot of the product lead stuff or kind of in general like, you know, want to sell goes through because you don't always know dark social etcetera. Just wondering your thoughts on that.
TARA
10:24 Yeah, great questions. So for us, we are still primarily when you look dig into our analytics, I would say sales lead meaning sales are assisting. So you would probably put that at about a 75 to 25 depending on the market that we're in 80 20 in some markets. But I agree with you and attribution is a whole other especially for our marketing in conversation that we could go on for days. So what we try to do is follow the journey and see all the touch. Hi, it's so instead of doing like last touchpoint or first touch point, trying to do a multi touchpoint or linear to follow back that, hey, they actually created an account for months ago. Then we saw that they went to G to, and then they did a demo request. And obviously that's why I mentioned in the beginning having analyst or anyone on board that can help really build out that customer journey is like super important because we have found that we need multiple touch points. We're not Bernard converting customers who are just coming in. Honestly. One way, they typically have all this interaction with marketing and eventually they'll go to sales. But somewhere in the middle, sometimes there are accounts that were created or that they're so I don't think it's a perfect science. To be honest. I think it depends on your business model and what the company really wants to measure. We try to measure the touchpoint that push them over the edge that made them take an action that we would say this is a qualified opportunity to closest to buying is kind of how we lay out the attribution internally… just hard to get to but important to have a line.
OPHIR
12:23 Wait, what CRM are you using for attribution?
TARA
12:27 So, right now, we have a couple of different things in place. We've actually built some internal kinds of data which yeah, I know. But hey, you know, you're a startup. So we gotta be kinda scrappy in that mindset. So we actually have Hubspot in there, and then we pull things out to like Tableau and do it kinda wanna analyst way, versa software doing it for us.
OPHIR
12:56 Thanks.
TARA
12:57 Yeah.
SANJA MARKOVIC
13:01 I saw this in chat, but Breezy, I saw you went to meet our needs. So ask, I begin verbally.
JAMES
13:06 I always.
BREEZY
13:07 Like when people talk.
SANJA MARKOVIC
13:08 Yeah, no worries. I mean kind of related to like attribution and the objection from sales. Like right now we're in a situation where even if you come in through the free trial and like you're ready to pay us, like sales wants to talk to you at least once for commission purposes. And obviously, like you were saying like that's, not always going to be the case. Customers come in a variety of ways. But like when you're coming in purely a three PL G like how did you overcome that objection of like, no, like we shouldn't be getting in the way of people just wanting to give us money.
TARA
13:36 Yeah, I would say that's probably one of the biggest challenges to face when you have a very strong sales sled motion, which we do. And I think because we're selling, we have a ease selling to VP of sales of like sales selling to sales, that is very difficult for us and some of them are just traditional, they wanna talk to somebody. So how do we solve for that? I think it's more of the notion. And well, I guess let me start up back up a little bit when we do have like a po, V motion, our sales team is notified and they see all of that. They see when certain segments and users create their accounts, they can dig into the analytics. And depending on what we would kind of call within our SCP, and the level of user is like they'll dig into the company data. I like, okay, they have this many end users potentially this and that we will reach out to offer support. But I will tell you a lot of those times those, you know, emails and phone calls go on answered like they don't get back to sales. So in our way of calculating it, they don't get credit for just reaching out to someone who's not obviously responsive. And we will see some of those customers convert on their own. So that's how we track and just say like this is pure appeal. Gee, there's no recorded instance of, so it's like it's not that we're saying like don't go and speak to these customers that might want your, you know, your assistant to your support, you know, feel free to go do that within the segments that we think are worth it.
BREEZY
15:23 I guess if you will.
TARA
15:25 Hear on a stay on this call and then that's how we track it back. So, I think that to our sales team, they're like, okay, these aren't like don't go touch, leave these alone. Let them do the po V motion. If they want your support and your guidance, then by all means, so that helped us a lot versus just saying like hands off.
SANJA MARKOVIC
15:49 Thank you.
TARA
15:50 Yeah. You have another question here, right? Or it's just a comment. Sales shouldn't be spending their time within users… five users, sign up at night.
BREEZY
16:04 I don't we, why don't we get you to chime in here? You got some back and forth going?
JAMES
16:08 Yeah, no, sure. I think this is a really interesting topic. We're very much. We've shifted into a PL gee motion. We're an open source company that had a kind of an on-prem database and we now have a full, you know, cloud version where people can sign up for free, swipe the credit card, et cetera. And we found we don't have a lot of success. You know, if we engage salespeople with the end users, the end users don't necessarily want to, you know, be bothered until they reach a certain level of adoption. Maybe they just kind of learning et cetera. So we try and do a couple of things. We'll try and surface a P CA. So rather than saying, hey, there's one developer here or one developer that signed up, we'll say that, right? This particular account is now five developers that have signed up. So that's now P CA. We've now got, you know, intelligence saying they've done a bunch of things that met a particular peaky well, score. And then overall that becomes a P CA. The other thing that we've found that's very valuable is our customer advocates can think of them as SDR, you know, that will reach out to the end users, make sure they're aware of onboarding and training videos, the rest of it. But we try and show that they go above and beyond the users and reach out to multiple people in an account and which week gotcha they use atrium, which we find is a really great tool. So we can set goals to say that if you get 10 leads, you need to have HeadsUp 30 people across those 10 leads. And that means you've gone above the developers, you've gone to the project managers, the product owners, the directors, and so on. And so forth. And then we have the eight ease come on top to really try and find the TMS, the technical decision makers to kind of do that 360 across the different roles. And we found that that's working much better than just hitting a end user. The moment they sign up, they get a little bit scattered about that.
TARA
17:51 Yeah… yeah. That's a great approach. Almost reminds me of like an ABM approach, but it's like within the actual interest and engaging than the product.
TIM
18:05 I ask James one quick follow up. How are you setting the P CA threshold or is it just based on kind of users entering the workspace or do you have any product qualification aspect to that?
JAMES
18:14 Yeah. We have a lot of things. We've got a firmographic techno graphic. There's a whole bunch of things that go into that as well as usage company size. I CP as well. We cover a certain type of icp more than we do others. So we may call that in into become an MQL score, PQ health score and an overall lead score, but it's an evolution. It's not, and by no means perfect. Right now, it's constantly going through change.
TARA
18:49 Yeah. I have a question to the customer advocates. Are they commission base? They there's so many tests?
JAMES
18:55 That, yeah, exactly. They are, they're paid majority really. I'm getting a meetings we have with, you know, the right profile of people, not necessarily the end users but, you know, getting a meeting with the, you know, the decision maker manager, et cetera.
TARA
19:14 Yeah, that makes sense. Now, I'm thinking about that.
SANJA MARKOVIC
19:19 Have a question. So, yeah, I joined this… trend this call because I was trying to figure out from, for enterprise, you know, capturing enterprise business. It was best to my CEO just is hell bent that it won't work. And just intuitively I just feel like, well, humans that are just human beings anyway. So, you know, whether they're in a startup environment or enterprise, you know, because we get ads and I sees all the time who reach, yeah, it's like, hey, you know, I was, we're at this company network here. Can I get a single license or XYZ? And I'm just like day man, I think it would be nice to have something like that. So, I'm trying to figure out how to, you know, does it work in the enterprise space? You know, this PLC thing. I'm super brand new. So I had to Google search pto is, I guess there's a lot of marketers here and that was a lot of acronyms and stuff. But yeah, I mean, I don't know if there's something that would work in the enterprise environment, if anyone has any insight into that.
TARA
20:21 So, I guess from my standpoint I can share that with get accept. We have a lot better like come in through like a demo or sales or marketing, whatever you would call the attribution. And then when we get to a certain stage, they ask and say, can you send us up an account and we want to try it out for a while? And, you know, at an enterprise level, there's things that are more complicated with product we have like integrations and like all these things.
Moving Forward
TARA
20:51 But we look at it like, absolutely, yes, why wouldn't we allow this really big opportunity for us to try our product? There can be some pushback and negative depending on if there's like development involved and stuff like that. And we will push back at that point because you're basically giving away things about getting anything in return if we're doing custom work, but we started to do that. I've actually like an offering before they even ask that saying like, hey, why don't we get your team setup for, you know, 30 days depending on the account. So we kind of offer that within our sales strategy has its own.
SANJA MARKOVIC
21:32 And does it depend on the type of solution being offered, right? Like if it's something that's more of an extension or, you know, point type of solution, you know, folks who just gonna use what they need to just get the job done, you know, for a quick second… or, you know, is there where folks are, you know, you get all these different business units in this sort of just throughout, you know, you just see that there's a lot of folks that are using it. And then there's sort of like, you know, sparse adoption of this, you know, product or service or whatever. And then you go, I don't know basically I'm wanting to leave here or in the series of calls with the way to bring this to my CEO and like look, we really should have this a part of what we do because, you know, we've got competitors in the space that have this type of framework. And, you know, I think just even from… an awareness from an awareness standpoint, I think that would be helpful, you know, for that as well. But I don't know if I even asked the question but hopefully someone can make sense of that and unpack.
BREEZY
22:33 I mean, I think even just that competitive intelligence is a good… that should light a little bit of a fire. Yeah, yeah.
Moving Forward ends
JOCELYN
22:43 Just gonna say that. I mean if you want to refrain this thinking on it, it's you can think about it is just a much more qualified lead. So we're moving friction from any buying process is a good thing. So if you have a way to remove friction from the front end, your process and bring further along and it just happens to be a different audience than you usually spend time on. It's just a matter of probably piloting with a set of resources against that specific motion. And you're just introducing a new channel. It's essentially you're talking about introducing a new channel of how people can learn and explore your product and we do it all depends on how hard it is to understand it. But it's you could look at it just as a new channel.
OPHIR
23:29 That's a great.
SANJA MARKOVIC
23:29 Way to position it that's awesome.
OPHIR
23:31 Yeah. I just wanna add real quick and that could adjustments, that is the short answer. It depends. Yes, PL, gee is suitable for enterprises. Teal, gee is suitable for everybody, but without knowing the specifics of… complicated it would be for somebody or how possible that would be for an individual user to go in and start getting value from your product. That's the only question if an individual user can technically, I'll give you an example of some of the products I've worked with. You need to have the it team give access to certain back end systems which the individual user just wouldn't have access to, where you need to get sign in from somebody who they can't so if an individual user can technically get value from your product, and by all means it can be appeal. Gee. But besides that, it really depends on the specific. So just so many other things. And I highly suggest you talk to, you know, there's lots of people out there besides this column, sure can understand your specifics and help you out. Just do a search for like the field, gee consulting to get zillion.
BREEZY
24:36 Cool. Awesome. Thanks thanks everybody for jumping in there. So it's helpful. One of the topics that has been coming up in the slack connect. I've also heard from many of you and others on LinkedIn as well is around some of the KPI'S especially from a marketing perspective, what are some of the important metrics that folks should be looking at? So, so what are you all doing over there at get accept?
TARA
25:03 Yeah, great question. So we like I mentioned the beginning, we had a free trial. We went to premium and there was a lot of lessons there. So we had to put a lot more resources on the product side for supporting more like onboarding and engagement. And I would actually say our number one is activation right now, there's a lot of people that sign up. And then, you know, we can see within a certain amount of time, they just kind of like fall off. And now they're not actually using our product to the extent that we would believe calling them an active user. So the main KPI'S right now that we're tracking marketing with kind of product marketing, it really sits under product marketing at get accept. Working with the product team is usage and engagement. And then I'll actually add another one is aware, yes, which sounds kind of funny but from a marketing and we also have just sent out a survey to our current customers just interesting. The ones that came in the appeal, gee, the ones like sales motion of their level of awareness of all like the value in the features that we believe get accept brings to their day to day.
Moving Forward
TARA
26:16 And so we're doing like a benchmark right now because I think that's the most difficult part from a marketing. And you're like no human asked explained to them the value of this product and how it can fit into their business. And it's like did they discover it on their own? Yes or no? Are they aware of all these other features and functionalities? So the awareness as a new one that we're benchmarking. And then we're gonna use that going forward quarter over quarter to ensure that we're doing the right marketing messages onboarding In-app support tutorials and things like that.
BREEZY
26:53 Are, are you all using TQ L, is product qualified, leads? Product qualified accounts are all of the sort of internal commonly use turns. Is that something you're building out today? What's that look like?
TARA
27:04 Yeah. So right now we have.
BREEZY
27:06 To else?
TARA
27:07 And those, it's interesting, I think… someone asked me before and it's like you can have both, which is a fun conversation.
BREEZY
27:18 Hello. But for us?
TARA
27:20 It comes down to looking at the opportunities as they kinda move through the funnel if you will. So we have yet to get into an official kind have like P CA or opportunity or things like that. They're still kind of at that level right now. So.
BREEZY
27:42 Yeah. Okay. Cool. Thanks for. Let me jump in everybody for a couple of questions. Okay. Alright. We have three minutes left usually were slamming up against the 30 minute mark here, but I think we have space for another question. Maybe too, if anyone has any, I see one from eagle or… words, right? I'll ask this one. How was your sales funnel look like? What's up? So that's a pretty broad one. But maybe let's talk about sorta of like what, how you all think about the funnel or how you think about the different steps of converting someone throughout?
TARA
28:23 Yeah. So we, we're actually we just added another step and our opportunity… phase of the sales process more because of in my opinion the macro economic environment that's going on. And so we have a kind of like the typical like demo proposal negotiation like close, but we kind of added in the step that's… internal debating a little bit because we've actually had a lot of customers who have said, yes, you're the vendor we're going for you, and then they actually get pushed out a lot like, okay, we can sign next month. We can find the following month. So us internally, we really want to track that when we got the verbal yes. And then when we actually got the signature. So I probably didn't answer your question, but I just thought that was.
BREEZY
29:23 Thing. Yeah.
TARA
29:24 Yeah. So today's world, the reason for that, the reason I brought up is because of like the sales velocity in the sales cycle for us. We are seeing that it's changing. And so we're really trying to dig in right now to really understand what that is? The reasons are vast. But if we can better forecasts, then obviously, we're in better shape for next year, so.
BREEZY
29:48 And one last quick question then we'll drop here. But what, how are you all measuring that awareness today? Or is that through surveys or how are you doing that? Yeah.
TARA
29:59 Yeah, we're at the beginning of it because we launched a lot of new features and we actually saw in our opinion and lower engagement level and some of the new features that we have in the product. So we're really trying to increase that but we don't have a baseline. So that's why we developed this awareness that's like step one, our customers aware of all these different features. And in order to measure it, we need that. So we are doing, we did like an email survey, we do an In-app survey. And then we also have our customer success team also like talking through it with our customers and kind of getting it anecdotally and then we're adding and all up. So it's actually I would say a very startup way of doing it is not too formal but you have to get started somewhere. Well, probably formalize it a little bit more in the quarters that comes since our first go at it.
BREEZY
30:51 Awesome. Alright. Well, thank you. Thank you for joining all the questions, good conversation and thanks for leading the conversation for us.
Moving Forward ends
BREEZY
31:01 So we'll see all soon if anyone wants to joined the slack connected in the same place that you sign up for. These jobs are just finding on LinkedIn and I'll get you in there, but otherwise sale later.
TARA
31:13 Thanks for having me.