August 21, 2025 • 53 mins
In this episode, Shiv Narayanan sits down with members of the How To SaaS client services team to talk about the most common marketing challenges inside PE-backed portfolio companies—and how to solve them.
Chief Client Officer Farhad Chikhliwala, VP of Marketing Taylor Moore and Director of Marketing Tatiana Morand discuss why poor tracking and misaligned spend can drain ROI, how to prioritize the right order of operations for go-to-market, the role of the CMO as a “custodian of investment” and how to align team structure with the investment thesis. Tune in to hear about overlooked growth levers like upsell and cross-sell, how to find 20–40% efficiency in existing spend and how to balance AI adoption with the marketing fundamentals that still drive enterprise value.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Welcome to the Private Equity Value Creation Podcast where we
interview leading investors, operators, bankers, and advisors
to help you answer one question.How do we increase the
enterprise value of our companies?
My name is Shiva Narayanan, and each episode I will dive deep
with a guest to help you become a better value creator and
(00:22):
capital allocator. So with that said, let's jump
right in and let's get started with today's episode.
Hey everybody, welcome to today's episode.
It's a different type of interview today.
I've actually asked Farhad, Taylor and Tatiana from our
client services team to be guests on the podcast.
And the reason I asked them on is they're the ones that are
(00:43):
regularly working with all of our private Equity Partners and
hundreds of clients across all the different B companies that
we work with. And the reason I wanted to do
this episode is that you often hear from me when I'm talking
about the challenges companies face, the problems that they're
actually countering and how we help solve them or how companies
in general should approach problems like that.
(01:03):
But we've never really had our client services team come in and
talk about their wisdom and expertise when they're really on
the front lines and engaging with these clients and seeing
their data first hand and talking to their teams and
transforming the organizations or even reporting up to the
private equity investors or their boards to actually make a
lot of those changes. And there's a lot of wisdom that
(01:24):
they have or have access to thatsometimes even I can't bring to
these calls sometimes because I'm not in the client services
side of our company. So I wanted to have them on and
go into a deep dive into the types of engagements that we do,
the insights that come back fromthere.
And how you as a listener, when you're thinking about your
specific company or an investment that you've made or a
(01:45):
portfolio company where you think that marketing can be a
huge lever, how to really think about that to scale that that
business faster? And there's just a ton of wisdom
on the call. Tatiana is a content and SEO
expert and she's helped hundredsof our client companies scale up
their organic traffic and she's done a lot of breakthrough work
on the API side more recently ascompanies are more concerned
(02:08):
about that and seeing declines in their organic search volumes.
Tatia, excuse me, Taylor is a product marketing and sales
enablement and comms expert and she's done a ton of work with
our clients on helping them position themselves better,
build messaging and, and messaging frameworks to be out
there and build a more thought leadership authority in a
particular marketplace. And Farhad is our resident CMO
(02:29):
and he's the one that is workingwith the boards and the CEOs and
the investors to really craft the marketing strategy, figure
out the budgets, figure out the team structures with the clients
that we're working with. So all three of them have done
this hundreds of times over. And there's just a ton of wisdom
that they bring to this episode.So I'm looking forward to you
hearing from them and hearing what they have to share.
(02:49):
And also thinking about how you can apply to your business and
also seeing more of the inside work of how dosas and seeing if
maybe it could it could be a fitfor the companies that you're
actually working on. So with that said, I'll leave
you to it and enjoy the episode.Alright, Farhad Taylor, Tatiana,
(03:10):
welcome to the show. How's it going?
Hey, Chief. Thanks for having us.
Great. Good.
Excited to have all three of youon.
Obviously, we worked together for many years, but for the
audience far ahead, why don't westart with you?
Let's give an intro of your roleand then we'll move on to Taylor
and then Tatiana. Yeah, absolutely.
Thanks, Thanks for having us. So I'm Farhad, I'm I lead the
client services team here at howto SAS.
(03:30):
And so as you guys might know, at HTS are really our jobs are,
you know, to help companies, founders, investors understand
and unlock the potential of marketing.
So really my role and you know, alongside Taylor and Tatiana
here is to make sure that we're providing value to our clients
and looking at, you know, doing audits of all the all the
marketing work, looking at looking at budgets, looking at
(03:51):
how, how much investments going into different areas and then
trying to find opportunities to scale and to find efficiencies.
So that's really our bread and butter daily.
And um, yeah, privilege to have that work over the last few
years here. So.
Awesome, Taylor. Yeah, Hi, I'm Taylor Moore.
I'm VP of Marketing here at Hasas.
On the client side, I I'm reallyhelping on the product
(04:14):
marketing, messaging, positioning side of things and
content and SEO as well. I've been in the SAS world for
over a decade now and on both the sales and marketing side of
the businesses. So I get to bring that unique
perspective to my clients as well.
Awesome and Tatiana last but notleast.
Yeah. Hey, I'm Tatiana.
So I'm the Director of Marketinghere.
(04:35):
Hassas. I've spent just under a decade
in B2 Visas Marketing, mostly focusing on content marketing
and SEO. And my role at HASSAS involves
working with our clients and ourteam of experts to uncover the
opportunities in their market and build data-driven marketing
strategies to just turn marketing into a growth engine
for them. Yeah.
And thanks for that guys. And the reason obviously we have
(04:57):
or having you guys on is the market often hears me speak and
talking about the problems we are helping companies solve.
But with the client services team, you guys are so close to
all of our investors and partners and and clients, you're
actually helping them solve day-to-day problems and you have
a very different view into theirrealities and what challenges
that they're facing. So let's start with with talking
(05:19):
about that forehead. When you're coming across these
companies and and you begin a client engagement, what are some
of the most common problems thatyou you see clients that are
really struggling with? Yeah, that's a good question.
I'm glad we're having this conversation.
Just given, you know, the current climate when we look at
the macro economic environment and and efficiency in general, I
think I think everyone here willagree that the number one thing
(05:42):
we see with clients is just thisissue of people tracking the
investment that they're making and kind of what the actual ROI
of that is. And it's just it's getting
harder and harder with other compliance issues and Internet
rules and things like that and cookies and things like that.
So it's getting complicated, butI think still seeing you know, a
large part of the market like not under investing in this area
(06:05):
and just not having some of the basic setup, right.
So for example, it's just a lot of companies that we work with
there are spending a lot of money and a lot of different
places that they cannot attribute directly to any
tangible outcome, whether that'snumber of leads or pipeline or
opportunities or or even actual revenue.
So it's sort of shocking the kind of kind of conversations we
(06:28):
have with clients. Again, this is we're seeing
this, you know, from anywhere inthe smaller range, you know, in
the 10 to $20 million sort of range, but also in really,
really large enterprise kind of companies as well, right?
And I think this is one of the biggest issues that we're
seeing. When you talk about the data
side and the tracking side, can you connect the dots for the
audience on like what? Why is that such a huge problem?
(06:50):
Like what are the marketing decisions or insights that
you're looking to get to with with that data so that the
companies can be better, better set up to actually scale their
marketing efforts? Yeah.
So I think if if you look at thenumber of areas of investment
that a modern marketing team needs to do, it's, it's huge,
(07:12):
right? We're talking 10 to 20 different
areas, specializations, everything from product
marketing to advertising to SEO to the website to messaging
events. There's just so many broad
categories of investment and what we're trying to get to is
how do people make decisions? How do CMOS, boards, investors
try to make decisions on where to invest, right?
(07:32):
That's the big problem. Over time, budgets get bloated,
investments keep continuing in different areas.
And we're not taking a pause to understand how all of that
attribution is, is actually happening and are we actually
investing the right place. So what we want to try to get to
is understand literally by everysingle channel that we're
investing in down to the campaign, down to the event,
down to the specifics, how much we're investing in any given
(07:55):
time period and what we actuallygot out of it, right?
And whether that's tangible things like leads and, and, and,
and pipeline and revenue or other sort of leading indicators
such as sort of eyeballs and impressions and other things,
right? So that's what we're trying to
get to is, OK, we've invested all this money, but So what and
what that will allow us to do once we sort of do that audit is
(08:15):
then to understand, OK, where dowe actually need to allocate the
actual budget, right? Are we actually allocating in
the right space? Because nine times out of 10
when we're brought in, there aremassive imbalances in where that
investment needs to go. Sometimes companies are over
indexing in certain areas that are just not driving any, any
leads or revenue pretty, pretty,pretty tangibly.
And in some places, you know, there are places there are
(08:37):
investments that need to be scaled up because those things
are working. And so it's just a, it's just
an, an exercise in understandinghow to find the right balance of
investment in a marketing team. And Tatiana maybe shifting to
you, when you look at this same conversation happening with CEOs
and boards, how does that lack of visibility, how, what are
(08:58):
what are the challenges that that's presenting to those,
those individuals as well? Yeah.
I mean, I think as you said, thefirst challenge really is just
that they don't have visibility into what marketing is doing,
what's working for the company, why marketing is making the
decisions that they're making, which then often creates a lack
of trust between the CEO and theCMO and the board and the
(09:20):
marketing team because it got, they just really don't know why
they're making those decisions that they're making.
So I think that, you know, when once we've done that audit and
have identified, OK, here are the channels that are working
for you that are doing what they're supposed to.
The next step is really to put together dashboards, make sure
that we have better visibility on that spend so that we're able
(09:41):
to trace up how it's aligned to broader business goals.
And start building that trust between what the marketing team
is doing and the CEO. Because the marketing team can
directly point to the impact that they're having on those
broader business goals. Aren't some of these things, and
this is a common question that Iget asked too, but I'm curious
what you guys think and Taylor, maybe you could take a shot at
(10:01):
this is, aren't some of these things kind of harder to track
when we're talking about productmarketing or content marketing
and some of the more softer marketing activities?
So how do, how do we address that for the boards and, and and
the CEO's that are looking for that visibility?
Yeah, it's a good question. I think.
I mean #1 I'd say prioritizing the things that are easier to
(10:23):
track and making sure that that is at least your baseline.
So just to to kind of put a finer point on what Farhad was
talking about earlier is, you know, a lot of times we'll see
our clients really just kind of focusing on chat tracking within
channel or reporting within channels.
So seeing that, you know, paid media and how it's working
within the Google Ads platform, but they're not seeing that all
(10:44):
the way through opportunity and close one and understanding
maybe there are certain channelsthat are converting better than
others into pipeline. So I'd say like first and
foremost, making sure that thosechannels that are trackable are
in a good place. I'd say also too, there's gonna
be like this forever debate within marketing of brand and
tracking brands. And there's of course things
(11:06):
that you can do around like big brand studies of recognition and
awareness in the market that arevery expensive.
There's some some brand work that's just the cost of doing
business, right. And I know CEO's don't often
like to hear that or CMO's are constantly trying to tie that to
a specific ROI. But there are some brand
(11:28):
initiatives are just this is this is what we need to do to
play in this space and building in some of that buffer of having
certain certain things that are not going to be able to be
directly tied to ROI. But if the majority of your
marketing spend that you have onpaid media is directly
trackable, I think that buildingin that 2030% buffer is an OK
(11:50):
thing to do depending on the space that you're playing in,
right? If you're in a very competitive
space where you have like multiple competitors are going
head to head with brands is going to need to be a focus and
you're going to need to invest in some of those larger thought
leadership brand plays that can't always be directly tied to
ROI and that's. OK.
And and I think, yeah, and I think there's other like these
(12:11):
are such foundational things, right, like building up your
brand, getting your messaging and positioning your product
marketing all in a good space, right.
That is like the foundation thateverything else is built on.
So for me investing in that willprovide dividends across all
programs, across all conversion rates will attract more people
and convert them faster and in abetter rate.
(12:34):
So for me it's like that's how you track it.
I think there are core metrics that over time and maybe it's
not a week to week metric, but it's a quarter to quarter metric
when we're looking at overall conversion rates and overall
sort of interest in in in your brand and that's some of those
things can be so. So there are ways to look at it.
It's definitely ways to track brand overtime, right?
Cheryl Boyce mentions like that's all trackable.
(12:57):
The tying it to ROI is forever going to be a difficult piece.
And yeah, Tiffany's point, like getting that as the foundational
layer for how we build a go to market is really important.
We're working with a client right now who's really unsure of
their messaging and they want itbattle tested and and to make
sure like, is this truly how we should be going to market?
(13:18):
And it's going to impact, you know, what we say on paid media,
what we say in content, the typeof content that we build.
So making sure that that is in agood spot by vetting, you know,
messaging and positioning with, you know, doing customer
analysis and understanding like insights there, win loss
analysis, understanding when when things were won and lost
(13:39):
based on the services and positioning there.
And then doing like a competitormessaging and positioning
exercise as well. So that's that's really the
foundation. Yeah, so, so let's talk about
that a little bit more. Taylor, how much are you seeing
the success of a clients marketing strategy or
implementation depend on the product marketing work or they
(14:00):
just don't have enough maturity or they haven't set up the right
assets to set up the rest of themarketing work that actually
needs to drive pipeline and revenue?
Yeah, I'd say, I mean it's goingto be a balance between spending
and over investing so many resources to get that messaging
100% perfect versus taking all the insights that, you know,
(14:23):
like I've just mentioned competitor customer, your
internal customer facing teams taking that and just write
battle testing it, put it in sales tax, put it in, put it on
the website. Like let's get some of that
messaging tested and iterate from there.
But I would say it is an extremely foundational part
that's going to inform all of the other parts of your go to
(14:45):
market. We've seen many cases where
clients have missed the mark andthey're kind of changing
positioning on the fly in order to update their go to market in
a more productive way. So I'd say it's it's very, very
important, but I think sometimeswe'll see clients over invest
the time to try to get it like that 100% versus taking
(15:08):
something that's 8090% of the way there and getting like
infields feedback. Just add to that is also like
there is and we talk a lot aboutthis, your content talks a lot
about this kind of an order of operations and marketing in
which we really want to get someof that foundational stuff down
and and also that idea of hot, warm, cold, you know which which
your content talks a lot about. But for those listeners who
(15:29):
might not be as familiar with it, it's this idea that we want
to create content or assets thatare serving the people who are
already in market first. So appealing to those people,
you know, they're already convinced that they need a
solution. They just need to be convinced
that your solution is the right one.
So creating that kind of content, you know, before moving
on to those colder types of content, which are like, OK, you
(15:50):
know, like what is XYZ or like just trying to convince people
that they need a solution at all.
And so really like making sure that we have that foundational
layer in place and working from,you know, hot, warm, cold is
super important just to see that, you know, because if we
don't have that hot contact in place, then why are we skipping
right away to trying to appeal to a completely cold audience,
(16:13):
you know, when, when they're notgoing to be as ready to buy.
So I think that that idea also ties into the idea of making
sure we have our messaging and positioning nailed down for
those people who are already in market and who are already
interested. Right.
Frank, can you talk about this piece and and expand on when
Tatiana just shared his? As much as you know, getting the
data in order is important as much as getting product
(16:33):
marketing is important. A lot of the companies that we
encounter just don't have the fundamentals in place.
And you can always over index insome of these areas where you go
in an extensive product marketing exercise or take on an
infrastructure project to make sure revenue office is
completely in order and meanwhile you're missing revenue
targets and projections. So just talk about that order of
operations a little bit. More, yeah.
(16:53):
In terms of order of operations,I think this is where, as you
said, a lot of people struggle and don't get it right.
So I think for me when I think about our operations, there is
the fundamental and foundationalpiece, right, which is what
Taylor sort of alluded to, whichis, OK, let's understand who
we're going after, what their pain points are, who we are and
how we're going to solve them, right?
This very simple, this can be a two page document that just
(17:16):
outlines that the next step for me is always to get, we need to
get that to market, right? So the obvious place is your
website. It'll be surprising how many
people's websites don't actuallyreflect that internal kind of
communication and internal work that's been done.
Like you go to website, it wouldn't even tell you what the
product does sometimes or what category they play in, right?
Simple things like that. So making sure that that, so
(17:37):
that's sort of your storefront, right, to get your web and web
assets and your customer facing assets up to date, right?
So there's that core sort of content work that needs to be
done from there. I mean, you know, it's your
standard marketing funnel. The idea is now how do we drive
traffic and relevant people to those assets, right?
So it's sort of the fundamentals, getting the word
out in terms of your content. And then how do we actually
(18:00):
drive traffic in people, right? And, and, and, and that can be
through outbound motions or getting people in front of the
right ICP that way. That can be sort of generating
advertising campaigns or SEO or other ways to sort of bring
people inbound. And that'll just depend on sort
of on your company's unit economics and, and, and, and,
and, and business model. But you know, that's how I think
about it. Sort of three big pillars of
(18:21):
getting the foundations right, getting that up to date, and
then start driving, driving people.
Tatiana, how often are you seeing when we're coming into
companies where because they're not doing things in the wrong
right order or just have the wrong priorities and there's
like a almost like a reset that needs to happen to refocus them
to say, OK, your product marketing is good enough or your
(18:42):
data infrastructure is good enough here.
The other things we need to focus on, like do you find that
the teams are working on the wrong things and that's
affecting their ability to get more resources?
Yeah, definitely. I, I think that that's actually
something we encounter quite frequently where it might like.
Part of I think part of the reason for that is because teams
(19:03):
will focus on the activities in which they're experts.
But if we haven't set up the right team, we might not be able
to capture the opportunities that exist in that market
because we don't have the peoplewho are are able to give the
depth to those activities that they need.
So for example, we recently conducted a due diligence
(19:24):
engagement where we're looking at a company's marketing
opportunity before acquisition and we found that there was a
big opportunity for them in SEO,in Google ads.
They, you know, aren't really appearing for searches and in
either way that are really fundamental to the software that
they they're selling. But a big part of that reason
was because there was no one on the team who was capable of
(19:46):
owning those activities. So part of part of our
recommendation there was that the team really did need to hire
specialists who could own and scale those areas of growth.
Because just having the resources on your team who are
capable of owning the areas of your marketing that are really
important for the company is, isalso something that is super
important and, and where we often will see a gap.
(20:08):
I just wanted to add to Tatiana's point, I think it's
such a good point on we'll oftensee our clients kind of their go
to market falls into what their the current level of expertise
on the team is, right. So we were working with a client
who had kind of grown their marketing team under the
leadership of this like brand generalist, like very strong on
(20:29):
the brand side, big on social, big on podcast, big on content,
but didn't have that like demandGen. mindset wasn't overly
metrics focus wasn't overly likeeverything was very like touchy
feely as opposed to driving pipeline.
So they had built an amazing brand, but they weren't really
(20:51):
generating predictable pipeline through predictable channels.
So what they ended up doing well, as we were working with
them is hiring someone to leave that demand you inside.
So the marketing leader kind of took over just the side of the
marketing team that was more brand content focused, hired us
upward demand Gen. manager, management director actually to
be more metrics minded, pipelineminded.
(21:15):
And that worked really well for them.
So yeah, it's, it's, you can seethese marketing teams kind of
growing up just restricted by the current talent that they
have. So what we really try to do when
we work with clients is what's the ideal go to market and then
how do we stop that up accordingly.
Yeah. Taylor, talk about the
resourcing side, because sometimes a lot of the strategy
(21:35):
work that you're saying and the people side is, is not aligned
and even they don't have enough head count or they have too much
head count or the wrong people in the wrong seats or the right
people in the wrong seats. Like how much of the success of
this is dependent on the people side?
Yeah. So when we're working with our
clients, that's often like team,our team recommendations is
often one of the last things that we assess because we want
(21:57):
to look at it objectively of, you know, if no one was at your
team, what is the ideal go to market, right?
Is it heavy content? Is it heavy partnerships?
And then the last recommendationwe make is around team and
budget. What are the actual resources
that are required to get this work done?
And sometimes that works really nicely with the existing team
that they have. And sometimes that's actually a
(22:18):
complete overhaul and either theexisting team needs to be
reallocated or we need to do a little bit more of a fresh start
of hiring people that are, you know, expert partnership
marketing or customer marketing because that's now going to be
50% of your strategy. So that is a thing that we
always try to kind of do and focus on last with that
objective lens of here's your ideal go to market, not your
(22:41):
mark go to market based on your existing talent.
So yeah. Yeah.
And I guess you're you're the one that's kind of working with
these clients and interfacing with the executives and the
private equity investors often and they often look at the team
as one of the biggest lovers, like private equity investors
just know that leadership changes everything.
(23:01):
So talk about that side of the awareness at the CEO level about
the team and resourcing and having the right CMO in place
and how we're addressing that and some of the issues and
problems that you see there. Yeah, absolutely.
And I think just to answer your previous question, like for me
like team is the biggest lever, right?
Like all of these activities arepeople based.
(23:22):
These are all sort of intellectual activities that
need the right thinking of the right people.
So yes, I think typically when we're brought in, it's like
someone at the organization has some kind of inkling that
something's not quite right here, right?
Like there, people are missing targets.
You know, we're not getting leadvolume, we're not converting
leads. There's something going on.
And that often can be traced back to decisions made by
(23:45):
marketing leadership, right? So I think, I think
unfortunately, what we see more often than we would like to see
is marketing leaders really focusing on the wrong things.
I think some of the mistakes that are happening are, as I
said, as I mentioned before, youknow, allocating resources to
some of the the wrong things, not taking a zoom out view and
like looking at the general landscape and understanding
(24:07):
where investment needs to be made.
I think another issue is sort ofcommunication and, and again
tracking and metrics. You know, marketers are not
often communicating their work and their efficacy up the chain.
So that the CEO's and boards need to understand how the
investments being made and, and what changes are being made and,
and how they're going to be adjusting.
(24:28):
I think CMOS too often and marketing teams in general are
not thinking as sort of businessowners and business leaders to
understand, hey, we are custodians of large amounts of
money and large amounts of investment that that these, that
these teams are making. And there's almost like an onus
and a responsibility to sort of invest that wisely and, and to
be able to prove ROI and, and, and, and, and do that.
(24:50):
So I think there's a number of issues like that which create
problems and tensions and marketing teams where there's
just sort of a blank check approach and people are not
tracking how, how things are going.
So I think you know, investors understand that really well,
especially coming into a new business that they've just
acquired or or revisiting a a company in their portfolio
(25:10):
that's struggling. It's the first place to look
right, especially if there's a significant marketing
investment. And that's what they're going to
find most often than not that these some of are some of the
issues that they're gonna companies.
Tatiana, do you have like an example from a client where the
team was almost like the throttle or the ceiling on the
company's ability to capture opportunities that were clearly
(25:31):
available to the to the company to scale revenue and pipeline?
Yeah. I think that one of the
companies that we worked with recently, example that comes to
mind is just that they were really focusing heavily on a a
strategy for SEO that just like wasn't really working.
(25:52):
But the internal team was reallybullish on this strategy and was
really pushing for it to really be the driver of what they were
doing for SEO. So I think because we were able
to come in and provide that unbiased perspective and really
point to other data points wherewe were like, look like this is
(26:12):
what we're seeing at other organizations.
This is what we're seeing based on external market research.
We really do need to shift strategy here.
And because this was just a major driver of leads for them,
that was something that was super important.
So helping them, you know, see that the way that the current
team was running this program was, was not aligned with how
(26:35):
the market and, and how SEO is changing and how it's changing
with AI and all of that. Yeah, helping them see that was
was a really important part of our engagement with them.
Yeah. And and forehead, like I guess
we run into this, this problem with a lot of clients where they
don't even have necessarily the right marketing leader to help
lead the organization. Sometimes there's a mismatch
(26:57):
where you have maybe a product marketing heavy leader, but the
company needs a demand Gen. leader or maybe they're more
inbound driven, but they need more ABM and that ends up being
a throttle on the business as well.
So talk about that mismatch and how do you go about navigating
that as a CEO or as an investor to get the right leader for your
business? Yeah.
I think that that's a very common, very common issue where
(27:21):
you have sort of legacy marketers that have sort of made
their way up or or hired in thatas you said, sort of have a
focus in one area and have weaknesses in others.
So obviously that has issues in terms of, you know, you really
need to be a almost or at one point a CMO needs to have been a
practitioner in a lot of different areas to really
understand deeply the areas in marketing.
(27:43):
And I think that's where we're lucky.
We have our team here that that have that and we can bring that
together. But often CMOS don't have that,
right? And especially CMOS that have a
long tenure and have experience,it's almost like the experience
is good, but they've also sort of grown up and, and, and, and
brought up in, you know, 20 years ago when marketing was
very different, right? And things have change if
they're not keeping up with the changes that that's part of the
(28:05):
problem. So I think the way I would
advise and how I advise investors and CEO is to look at
it is I think the CMO's job is sort of like that kind of how I
described like a custodian of investment.
Like I think a really important position that the CEO needs to
play is that that role of like understanding super, super
metrics minded, super finance minded, super investment minded
(28:28):
to understand how how things play and obviously having a
fundamental of all areas of marketing.
And I think I think if you have that lynchpin as as sort of the
centre of of the marketing team,that that goes a long way.
And then it's important to surround that CMO with really,
really strong subject matter experts and leaders in different
areas, right. So I think if you have that sort
of custodian related sort of finance minded CMO and around
(28:53):
them, build a really strong teamwhere they can rely on someone
to do the investment in the paidmedia side to make sure the
product marketing is up to date,to make sure the website and
having the marketing operations is is is is there.
So I think you know, it's it's really building a team around a
really smart business minded person and getting subject
matter experts mark deep marketing experts around them.
So that's how we like to advise our clients to build the team.
(29:16):
What that allows is for scale, it allows for, for
accountability in all those areas and really allows subject
matter experts to lead their ownareas and and and and, and, and,
and find and find some growth. So that's that's that's usually
our advice. That's great.
I want to shift gears a little bit to the value creation side.
And Taylor, why don't we start with you when we're coming in,
(29:36):
it's let's assume the team is ina good place, there is a good
CMO, there's decent resourcing or or supporting roles around
them. Talk about the strategy piece a
bit. Where are some of the biggest
opportunities for these clients when they think about driving
enterprise value or pipeline andrevenue and how should they
think about deploying their limited resources?
And then I'd like to actually goaround the table, Tiana, we'll
(29:58):
get your taken and far ahead as well.
Yeah. So I'd I'd say one of the
interesting or not often thoughtof opportunities is really
around like expansion or tappinginto your existing customer
base, right. Like there's always a very big
focus on focus in on new logo, but what can be done with kind
(30:18):
of like your friendlies or your existing customer base, right.
So one thing that will often do is help our clients map out that
white space and understands likeis there opportunity to grow
either within their existing base or get referred into new
logo through your existing base.So that often is a part of our
engagements where we're helping them map that and then creating
strategies for that. So for example, like one of our
(30:41):
clients had like Deloitte Spain,I believe as one of their one of
their existing customers. So mapping it a strategy of how
do you get introduced into Deloitte Canada by your Deloitte
Spain customer and, and what is that entire campaign look like
in terms of leveraging that Deloitte Spain contact and case
study and business case in orderto expand within your existing
(31:04):
customer base instead of just always focused on new logo.
So I'd say that's a really interesting way to generate more
more value and more pipeline without always trying to expand
into new logo. Tatiana, what do you think about
that? Like how often are you seeing
the cross sell and upsell opportunity be almost as
(31:25):
important, if not more importantthan landing that new logos?
Yeah. I think that's something that
we're seeing quite often on platform companies or companies
where they're selling multiple modules, especially because
we're often seeing that the close rates for those deals are
higher than net new sales. Exactly as Taylor said, like if
people already know you and trust you and have had a good
(31:45):
experience with you, then it just makes sense to find
additional opportunities there. I think especially as more and
more companies are focusing really tightly on account based
marketing, you know, big buzzword there really getting
their targeting down on the outbound side.
I think they really do need to focus on doing that same kind of
work within their customer base as well.
(32:06):
And I think that ties into the bigger point of there's often
opportunities to diversify theirmarketing mix that companies are
doing in general, especially if you know the earlier example
that that Taylor mentioned wherea company had grown really well
through that brand building and,and through less traditional
channels. You know, examples like that,
where we're seeing that historically their growth has
(32:26):
come really strongly from one place.
I'm just seeing like what other channels they can begin to
diversify into and and make surethat they're really making the
most of where their buyers are today across a broader range of
areas. Yeah.
And Farhad, on your side, like when we're coming into these
companies and you're looking at all these different value
(32:48):
creation levers, like our companies like almost
overlooking what's in the investment thesis or at least
marketers, they're like too focused on landing new clients
and not understanding what the investors really care about or,
or what's in that investment thesis.
Yeah, for sure. I think marketers often have,
you know, just a, a very narrow lens in terms of what they're
(33:09):
trying to achieve. I think it's not in, it's not
happening enough where markers are zooming out and are saying,
OK, what are all the opportunities across the whole
business? Because in the end, yeah, as you
said, right, what is the investment thesis, right?
We're trying to hit revenue goals.
We're trying to hit efficiency metrics, we're trying to hit
edit our numbers. And you know, I know you've
written a lot about this, like where can marketing fit in,
(33:31):
whether that's expansion, whether that's retention,
whether that's, you know, new logo.
There's so many areas where marketing and content can play a
role. And, and, and so, you know, our
job is often to sort of uncover some of that, to look at the
landscaping in general. And of course, you know, it's,
it's like natural for cross and CMOS to sort of jump into like
(33:52):
we just want more leads, more leads, more leads.
And of course that's always going to be a play a big part.
But we urge our clients to sort of look at their internal data,
look at find other opportunitiesthat's already sitting there
that are warmer, have better conversion rates, that have
better, better. And you know, often those upsell
and cross sell opportunities arereally handled by sales and it's
(34:12):
like sales lead motions and because you know, they own their
relationships and, and maybe sometimes come to customer
success managers, etcetera. But we are really big proponents
of getting those teams to talk to marketing and marketing to
start leading campaigns as they're the ones who are really
understand the prospect and, and, and, and how to, you know,
how to how to communicate that properly.
So yeah, our our goal is to get those teams to talk and start
(34:35):
moving forward. Is Taylor, is there like a
transparency issue where maybe the marketers are almost unaware
of the investment thesis or whatboards care about and CEO's care
about? And often when we're coming in,
like we get exposed to that because that's the person that
we're really working with or theperson that's hiring us.
And so we hear about the whole thing.
We see the management presentations, we have access to
(34:57):
data rooms and the SIM and all of that where maybe the
marketers don't see the EBITDA projections or don't see what's
the underlying investment thesis.
So do you think there's like an information gap?
There, Yeah, there's probably aninformation gap.
I mean, we've seen it done wallet a few of our clients, but
I would say more times than not,there's an information gap and
it has to do with like marketing's thought on how
(35:20):
responsible they are for revenue, right?
I think that that's that's a breakdown of a lot of clients of
ours think that they're responsible first and foremost
for leads as opposed to end revenue generated for the
company. And if that's the culture
within, it's like, maybe it maybe that's why they're not
getting seeing behind the curtain of what this investment
(35:42):
thesis is or you know, what the board is expecting.
It's because there's no culture of expectation that marketing
should be responsible for. This, I think that there is like
an element of transparency that needs to come from the top so
that everyone on the team does know what's going on and does
have the ability to feel responsible because they feel
like there is that transparency.And I think that goes for not
(36:05):
only again, from top down, but also like within teams.
I think another challenge that we're often faced with, with
which Farhad alluded to is that there's not a lot of
transparency between marketing and sales or a lot of alignment.
Again, sometimes in these ABM plays, the sales team is really
bullish on One Direction and then the marketing team is doing
something completely different. And then the sales team comes
(36:27):
back and is like, well, why aren't you helping us drive
leads in this vertical? And marketing is like, well,
we're working on this campaign and then and that can just lead
to some clashes and, and some lack of success there.
So really just making sure that again, from the top down, but
also from these internal teams, making sure everyone is really
aligned on what that value proposition is, can is, is one
(36:50):
of the most important things that I think we can help with as
well. Yeah.
And and why had shift like talking about the investment
thesis and what boards care about, talk about the diligence
side. Like when we're oftentimes we're
coming into these engagements working with just the PE
investor as they're signing an LOI or coming into a new
transaction. What are what are some of the
work that's happening there? And what are some of the
(37:11):
challenges that we're uncoveringand and opportunities that we're
able to help these firms navigate so that they can kind
of create more enterprise value as they close on the deal?
Yeah, yeah, we do a number of these every year, right.
This is sort of where PE investors are have found a
target. You know, they've signed an LOI,
they have they're building up their thesis to understand, hey,
(37:32):
you know, what is the thesis here to invest in this business?
What is the long term plan? They're often in between sort
of, you know, investment committee meetings and, and, and
decisions that are made and thenwe're brought in, right.
So our job is to help investmentcommittees and PE firms
understand what they're actuallygetting into.
So, you know, a lot of marketingteams have skeletons in their
(37:53):
closet. They have, you know, other
things that are going on historically.
And our job is to how, how quickly can we sort of uncover a
what's been going on in those businesses.
So number one is we sort of do an audit, right?
We just try to understand where all the investments been made in
the last two years and sort of list that out and sort of
understand what the ROI of all that investment has been.
(38:14):
So that's where we sort of start.
We have X amount of dollars in and we have X amount of dollars
out in terms of pipeline or revenue.
So and then we can benchmark that against other companies to
understand kind of where their efficiency is as a as under the
marketing engine. So I find our clients find that
very helpful. They can kind of compare that to
other companies in their portfolio, compare that to the
market in general. That's where we start.
(38:36):
From there we'll start looking at opportunities.
So based on that, we can break that down by channel to
understand, hey, these are the channels that seem to be working
well, so let's figure out ways to scale those.
These are the channels that seemto be struggling based on that
metric. What do we think, right?
Are there ways to optimize those?
Do we think we need to reallocate?
Are there net new channels that we're not investing in?
So that's sort of the program related version of that.
(38:58):
Like where are we actually investing?
So what that allows now is app for him to even before they jump
in and actually write their check to understand how much
wiggle room there is, how much opportunity there is to actually
optimize and improve things at the business.
And I think that's super valuable, right?
I think we've seen our clients, our B clients literally copy
based on parts of our deck and put them straight into their,
(39:20):
the investment committee to understand sort of what's going
on, right? And then we go all the way,
right. So not just the program level,
but then we'll look at the team and we'll look at other, other,
you know, the technology side ofthings and try to, you know,
give them an understanding of, you know, where all those things
sit. So by the end of a diligence
engagement, PE firm really has areally solid understanding of
what the opportunities are at a company, whether that's, and
(39:43):
have an understanding of, you know, where they might be cost
savings and takeouts and and where they might want to invest
more in. So I think going through that
engagement with us be firm partners often feel much better
about the engagement and feel better about the investment and
sort of can confirm a few of their hunches along the way how
much inefficiency? Are we finding inside these
(40:04):
engagements on average and Taylor, maybe you can take this
and far ahead you can jump in aswell as when we're meeting these
companies, we see their full data and and and we run this
audit in their existing spend like is there 30% in efficiency,
50% like how much more room is there to optimize existing that
part of that answer? Lies.
In the lack of information that has provided, right?
(40:27):
So sometimes we'll find like that reporting is just not
tight. And therefore like that's your
answer, right? If we're not able to see
pipeline through the closed one,that's the first thing is like
there's so much opportunity to increase efficiency if we can
just get that data and understand which campaigns are
(40:47):
producing and not producing, right?
So I think that's one thing we see with a lot of clients is
that they just don't they're noteven measuring or tracking these
things. And therefore they're probably
wasting a lot of spend. We don't know what what spend
they're wasting at because they have, they don't have the
reporting in place, but we can get like make an educated guess
that there's likely a lot of spend that's being wasted
(41:08):
because they're just not tracking those.
So, so part of that answer lies in like the lack of information
that's sent over with some of these diligence deals.
But Farhad, you can maybe speak a little bit more to kind of
what we're seeing on average. Yeah, I think.
On average, I think shave your, your, your sort of range is, is
within my range as well. I mean, I think 20 to 40% sort
of wastage or, or misaligned spend is very common for us to
(41:32):
see, unfortunately. And I think, you know, we're
pretty quickly able to identify where that's going and why
that's happening. And luckily often there are
opportunities to sort of reinvest that.
It's not necessarily that, you know, we just want to take that
cash out and, and, and starve the business, but it's like,
where else can we be spending that that money, right?
And I think it's, it's actually,if I may be so bold, like
(41:55):
egregious some of the spend thathappens and some of the issues
that we see and some of the mismanagement of spend often
we're seeing. I think the two big areas that
we often look into deeply is a on program spend on paid media,
just a huge overinvestment sometimes in certain channels
like LinkedIn or YouTube or evenpodcast ads, things like that.
(42:16):
We just wrapped up an engagementwith a large company, $100
million company that was had just signed a contract for 200K
a month on podcast ads, right? Even though they had a lot of
other fundamental advertising onGoogle and LinkedIn not figured
out. So you know, that was an
opportunity that we quickly wereable to fix.
The other big investment is often on the team side of
(42:37):
things, right? So we've had a couple of
engagements in the last year, $200 million plus engagements,
right, where the teams are just so over bloated, you know, 100
plus marketing teams for $200 million company.
And in both those cases we've been helped, you know, we've
helped the companies bring thoseteams down to, you know, closer
(42:58):
to like sort of 50 to 70 kind ofperson team and and they haven't
skipped a beat, you know, movingforward.
So, you know, there are a coupleof areas that we know where we
need to look into into into immediately.
And and it just, you know, it just helps to get a fresh, fresh
eyes on it. You know, luckily us at HTS
we've worked on like over 100 bebacked portfolio companies at
(43:18):
this point. So we just got so much
institutional knowledge and justbeing able to like pinpoint a
lot of sort of benchmarks and and understand how the market in
general should be, should be acting.
And so I think that that helps us.
Tatiana, I'm gonna just. Shift gears to as we're kind of
coming on to the close of the stuff is just one main topic
that is a hot button issue across private equity firms and
(43:40):
companies. It's just AI in general.
And as we're diligence and clients are in full engagements
with clients, one of the types of problems that we've seen is
the impact of AI on traffic and lead volume and opportunities
and pipeline in general. Talk about that piece and what
companies need to be thinking about and what investors need to
be thinking about from a marketing perspective just to
(44:02):
help these companies navigate a world where AI is just such a
dominant force. Yeah.
I mean, I think coming back to something that Farhad said
earlier, I think that the team is still going to be something
that's super important even in the era of AI.
So again, like what you put intoAI, the initial input is super
(44:25):
important to get a good output. So if we don't have people who
can think at that strategic level about what they're putting
in, it'll just be garbage in, garbage out.
So I think that's the first thing I wanna say is that I
think in this era of AI, the human element of this strategy
and of the thinking behind things is going to become
something that's more important than ever, even as we're looking
(44:47):
at ways that it can be used to streamline some of those more
basic day-to-day packs that we're doing.
I think another thing I'd add tothat is just on, I think another
area that's really changing quickly is on the SEO side.
We're looking at, you know, AEO,Geo, all these new acronyms now
and trying to figure out, OK, ifthis was a super important
channel for us historically, howis that shifting in this area
(45:10):
now and how do we optimize for that new world?
And I think that, again, that's that's another area where some
of those tools that are coming out are going to be really
important because we're going toneed to be looking at tracking
that a little bit differently aswell as optimizing our content a
little bit differently. So again, if that's been a
channel that's been super important historically, how are
we thinking about that in a different way going forward?
(45:33):
Taylor on. Your side as you're.
Looking at product marketing andcomms work and sales enablement,
are there places where companiescan find more productivity and
how do they implement some of that faster with the AI tools
and and and platforms that are available to them?
Yeah, I just want to jump. Off of Tatiana's point around
like website traffic quickly before productivity we're still
(45:55):
seeing. So if you think of, you know,
searching for something in chat TBT and getting response within
feed, if we're entering into a more clickless world, right,
we're not necessarily going intoa website to get that
information. We're seeing it within the feed
of Claude or Chachi PT or whatever you're using.
What we are seeing is that mostly that's impacting top of
(46:19):
funnel volume, but that our clients are still seeing bottom
of funnel volume for their kind of category keywords still going
to their websites. So there's a little bit of
differentiation there in terms of like if Tapa funnel converts
really well for you and that's the way that you're getting
people down the funnel, that's something to to really pay
(46:41):
attention to. If it's mostly your bottom of
funnel that's converting well, less of a worry in terms of
optimizing their of course you do want to do it overtime, but
less urgent in terms of productivity.
Like Tatiana said, I think that we're, we're seeing now people
really adopting AI aggressively and becoming these like master
(47:04):
prompts and really understandingwhat it takes to get good
responses and good outputs. So I'd say look for, look for
people like that to join your team, right?
You want, you want someone that knows how to use the tools that
is interested in it, because this is all changing so quickly.
You want someone that's staying abreast of all of these new
tools, how how the LM's are changing.
(47:26):
That person is going to be able to not just be an asset and
marketing, but probably help enable your sales team, help
enable your product team, and you're gonna find a lot of
productivity with that one or two people that are kind of like
the AI evangelists on your team.Yeah.
And and on that. I guess Farhad, you know,
everybody wants to talk about AIbecause it is the main topic.
(47:48):
But at the same time we meet these companies where they don't
have the basics in place and they want like they're looking
for these optimizations on the UI side when they don't have a
basic website, they don't have basic campaigns running.
So talk about that balance and educating these companies on how
much focus should be going towards AI versus the
fundamental things that are necessary to actually build a
(48:10):
good go to market organization. Yeah, I think, I think you've
hit the nail. On the head, right?
It's, it's sort of the fundamentals of marketing and
building a brand will always stay the same, right?
And I think that's that's important.
I think AI perhaps changes the way people find you or the way
people are talking about you or the way people perceive you.
(48:31):
But the, the, the fundamentals will always stay the same,
right? So I think when we go into
businesses and yes, you know, it's obviously a big buzz and
hype and, and, and, and there's a lot of people who are
interested in it. But yes, it's, there's again, an
order of operations, a fundamental that needs to be
there. And in fact, there's a lot of
studies now that show that, you know, to be on top of the AI
rankings and to be shown more in, in, in some of these MLM's,
(48:53):
it is the companies that have strong brand, it is the
companies that have strong reputations that are winning
there, right? So it those fundamentals will
always be so the fundamentals ofunderstanding who your customer
is messaging properly, understanding their pain points,
putting that out to the market, having the right programs,
having the right budget, having the right, the right copy and,
(49:16):
and, and, and right programs that go to market.
Those fundamentals need to stillbe done first.
You know, and I think, I think when we think of AI, I kind of,
you know, and you kind of alluded, alluded to this, just
pull it up into two simple areas. 1 is OK on the go to
market side, like whether that'sSEO and traffic, how AI is
affecting us and then be yes, onthe efficiency side and within
(49:36):
teams, you know, I think there should be an expectation to find
1520% efficiency by using some of these tools, especially on
the content side and things likethat.
So start there, keep it simple, right?
And I think and you know, not torun before we can walk when it
comes to marketing. Yeah, that's a great take away
to. Kind of close off the episode
and before we do, just any finalthoughts for investors or CEOs
(49:58):
as they're thinking about transforming their teams or
scaling their marketing efforts.And Titan will start with you
and Taylor the forehead. Yeah, I think it's to not be
afraid to pilot things and just like put stuff out in market and
see see how it is picked up, right.
So we have one client that like like SEO was their whole
(50:22):
marketing strategy. Obviously there's been a shift
with organic traffic with AI. There's a big competitor that
came into their space, kind of knocked them out.
So organic became really challenging for them.
They hadn't I'd really much elseright?
They'd really overrun decks on this one strategy.
So don't be afraid to pilot something.
(50:44):
Get something out quick and dirty.
A little ABM strategy. Test out a podcast, test out a
webinar series like this doesn'tall need to be perfect until you
get it into into market. Let's just kind of iterate, get
your MVP out there and get some quick learnings instead of
making sure everything's perfecton the back end before it's
(51:04):
launched, yeah. Farhad, do you want to have the?
Closing costs here, yeah, I think.
If European investor and you have companies in your portfolio
that are a little bit of a laggard, missing targets,
struggling to find scale. We are 100%.
(51:27):
Convinced that there is a solution for that and it is
marketing, right And I think I will urge all investors to.
Spend a little time going a little.
Bit deeper and that's super important just to go deeper and
to understand where the investments being made within
these marketing organizations, there is inefficiency to be
(51:47):
found. And unfortunately, I think, I
think that's where, you know, we've had some success as we've
got a framework to help understand that inefficiency, to
help understand how to scale. But my, um, my advice to
investors is to not perhaps automatically jump to solutions,
(52:08):
whether that's getting a new CMOor making changes or it's a
product issue, it's a sales issue, but really coming down to
the fundamentals of marketing like how are we going to market?
Who are we going to market with?How are we selling our story?
So I just think if you have a aninvestment that you would be
hoping is going better, I think it's well worth taking the time
(52:30):
to dig into those things. So that would be my advice.
Yeah, that's a great thought to.In the episode, and yeah, that's
something that I've been trying to evangelize for the longest
time, is that oftentimes your revenue problem is a marketing
problem. And I'm glad that we have the
three of you to shed light into that and, and how we're actually
helping our clients and bringingsome real life case studies.
So Tatiana Taylor Farhad, thanksa lot for doing this and
(52:51):
appreciate you sharing your wisdom.
Thank you. Thank you chef.
Appreciate. It.
Thanks. Bye.
Thanks. For listening to today's.
Episode before you take off, just a few requests from our
side #1 if you haven't done so already, please subscribe to the
podcast on iTunes or Spotify or YouTube or wherever you go to
listen to your podcast #2 If you're in the market for due
(53:15):
diligence services, strategy consulting, or fractional CMO
services, please get in touch with us at www.hassas.com.
And 3rd, please buy a copy of mynew book, Exit Ready Marketing.
It covers a ton of concepts thatwe take our customers through
private equity investors, B companies, CEOs, operating
(53:35):
partners, and marketers, and there's a ton of great value in
there. That expands on my previous
book, Post Acquisition Marketingas well.
So with that said, I hope you enjoyed today's content and
we'll see you on the next episode.
Welcome to the Private Equity Value Creation Podcast where we
interview leading investors, operators, bankers, and advisors
to help you answer one question.How do we increase the
enterprise value of our companies?
My name is Shiva Narayanan, and each episode I will dive deep
with a guest to help you become a better value creator and
(00:22):
capital allocator. So with that said, let's jump
right in and let's get started with today's episode.
Hey everybody, welcome to today's episode.
It's a different type of interview today.
I've actually asked Farhad, Taylor and Tatiana from our
client services team to be guests on the podcast.
And the reason I asked them on is they're the ones that are
(00:43):
regularly working with all of our private Equity Partners and
hundreds of clients across all the different B companies that
we work with. And the reason I wanted to do
this episode is that you often hear from me when I'm talking
about the challenges companies face, the problems that they're
actually countering and how we help solve them or how companies
in general should approach problems like that.
(01:03):
But we've never really had our client services team come in and
talk about their wisdom and expertise when they're really on
the front lines and engaging with these clients and seeing
their data first hand and talking to their teams and
transforming the organizations or even reporting up to the
private equity investors or their boards to actually make a
lot of those changes. And there's a lot of wisdom that
(01:24):
they have or have access to thatsometimes even I can't bring to
these calls sometimes because I'm not in the client services
side of our company. So I wanted to have them on and
go into a deep dive into the types of engagements that we do,
the insights that come back fromthere.
And how you as a listener, when you're thinking about your
specific company or an investment that you've made or a
(01:45):
portfolio company where you think that marketing can be a
huge lever, how to really think about that to scale that that
business faster? And there's just a ton of wisdom
on the call. Tatiana is a content and SEO
expert and she's helped hundredsof our client companies scale up
their organic traffic and she's done a lot of breakthrough work
on the API side more recently ascompanies are more concerned
(02:08):
about that and seeing declines in their organic search volumes.
Tatia, excuse me, Taylor is a product marketing and sales
enablement and comms expert and she's done a ton of work with
our clients on helping them position themselves better,
build messaging and, and messaging frameworks to be out
there and build a more thought leadership authority in a
particular marketplace. And Farhad is our resident CMO
(02:29):
and he's the one that is workingwith the boards and the CEOs and
the investors to really craft the marketing strategy, figure
out the budgets, figure out the team structures with the clients
that we're working with. So all three of them have done
this hundreds of times over. And there's just a ton of wisdom
that they bring to this episode.So I'm looking forward to you
hearing from them and hearing what they have to share.
(02:49):
And also thinking about how you can apply to your business and
also seeing more of the inside work of how dosas and seeing if
maybe it could it could be a fitfor the companies that you're
actually working on. So with that said, I'll leave
you to it and enjoy the episode.Alright, Farhad Taylor, Tatiana,
(03:10):
welcome to the show. How's it going?
Hey, Chief. Thanks for having us.
Great. Good.
Excited to have all three of youon.
Obviously, we worked together for many years, but for the
audience far ahead, why don't westart with you?
Let's give an intro of your roleand then we'll move on to Taylor
and then Tatiana. Yeah, absolutely.
Thanks, Thanks for having us. So I'm Farhad, I'm I lead the
client services team here at howto SAS.
(03:30):
And so as you guys might know, at HTS are really our jobs are,
you know, to help companies, founders, investors understand
and unlock the potential of marketing.
So really my role and you know, alongside Taylor and Tatiana
here is to make sure that we're providing value to our clients
and looking at, you know, doing audits of all the all the
marketing work, looking at looking at budgets, looking at
(03:51):
how, how much investments going into different areas and then
trying to find opportunities to scale and to find efficiencies.
So that's really our bread and butter daily.
And um, yeah, privilege to have that work over the last few
years here. So.
Awesome, Taylor. Yeah, Hi, I'm Taylor Moore.
I'm VP of Marketing here at Hasas.
On the client side, I I'm reallyhelping on the product
(04:14):
marketing, messaging, positioning side of things and
content and SEO as well. I've been in the SAS world for
over a decade now and on both the sales and marketing side of
the businesses. So I get to bring that unique
perspective to my clients as well.
Awesome and Tatiana last but notleast.
Yeah. Hey, I'm Tatiana.
So I'm the Director of Marketinghere.
(04:35):
Hassas. I've spent just under a decade
in B2 Visas Marketing, mostly focusing on content marketing
and SEO. And my role at HASSAS involves
working with our clients and ourteam of experts to uncover the
opportunities in their market and build data-driven marketing
strategies to just turn marketing into a growth engine
for them. Yeah.
And thanks for that guys. And the reason obviously we have
(04:57):
or having you guys on is the market often hears me speak and
talking about the problems we are helping companies solve.
But with the client services team, you guys are so close to
all of our investors and partners and and clients, you're
actually helping them solve day-to-day problems and you have
a very different view into theirrealities and what challenges
that they're facing. So let's start with with talking
(05:19):
about that forehead. When you're coming across these
companies and and you begin a client engagement, what are some
of the most common problems thatyou you see clients that are
really struggling with? Yeah, that's a good question.
I'm glad we're having this conversation.
Just given, you know, the current climate when we look at
the macro economic environment and and efficiency in general, I
think I think everyone here willagree that the number one thing
(05:42):
we see with clients is just thisissue of people tracking the
investment that they're making and kind of what the actual ROI
of that is. And it's just it's getting
harder and harder with other compliance issues and Internet
rules and things like that and cookies and things like that.
So it's getting complicated, butI think still seeing you know, a
large part of the market like not under investing in this area
(06:05):
and just not having some of the basic setup, right.
So for example, it's just a lot of companies that we work with
there are spending a lot of money and a lot of different
places that they cannot attribute directly to any
tangible outcome, whether that'snumber of leads or pipeline or
opportunities or or even actual revenue.
So it's sort of shocking the kind of kind of conversations we
(06:28):
have with clients. Again, this is we're seeing
this, you know, from anywhere inthe smaller range, you know, in
the 10 to $20 million sort of range, but also in really,
really large enterprise kind of companies as well, right?
And I think this is one of the biggest issues that we're
seeing. When you talk about the data
side and the tracking side, can you connect the dots for the
audience on like what? Why is that such a huge problem?
(06:50):
Like what are the marketing decisions or insights that
you're looking to get to with with that data so that the
companies can be better, better set up to actually scale their
marketing efforts? Yeah.
So I think if if you look at thenumber of areas of investment
that a modern marketing team needs to do, it's, it's huge,
(07:12):
right? We're talking 10 to 20 different
areas, specializations, everything from product
marketing to advertising to SEO to the website to messaging
events. There's just so many broad
categories of investment and what we're trying to get to is
how do people make decisions? How do CMOS, boards, investors
try to make decisions on where to invest, right?
(07:32):
That's the big problem. Over time, budgets get bloated,
investments keep continuing in different areas.
And we're not taking a pause to understand how all of that
attribution is, is actually happening and are we actually
investing the right place. So what we want to try to get to
is understand literally by everysingle channel that we're
investing in down to the campaign, down to the event,
down to the specifics, how much we're investing in any given
(07:55):
time period and what we actuallygot out of it, right?
And whether that's tangible things like leads and, and, and,
and pipeline and revenue or other sort of leading indicators
such as sort of eyeballs and impressions and other things,
right? So that's what we're trying to
get to is, OK, we've invested all this money, but So what and
what that will allow us to do once we sort of do that audit is
(08:15):
then to understand, OK, where dowe actually need to allocate the
actual budget, right? Are we actually allocating in
the right space? Because nine times out of 10
when we're brought in, there aremassive imbalances in where that
investment needs to go. Sometimes companies are over
indexing in certain areas that are just not driving any, any
leads or revenue pretty, pretty,pretty tangibly.
And in some places, you know, there are places there are
(08:37):
investments that need to be scaled up because those things
are working. And so it's just a, it's just
an, an exercise in understandinghow to find the right balance of
investment in a marketing team. And Tatiana maybe shifting to
you, when you look at this same conversation happening with CEOs
and boards, how does that lack of visibility, how, what are
(08:58):
what are the challenges that that's presenting to those,
those individuals as well? Yeah.
I mean, I think as you said, thefirst challenge really is just
that they don't have visibility into what marketing is doing,
what's working for the company, why marketing is making the
decisions that they're making, which then often creates a lack
of trust between the CEO and theCMO and the board and the
(09:20):
marketing team because it got, they just really don't know why
they're making those decisions that they're making.
So I think that, you know, when once we've done that audit and
have identified, OK, here are the channels that are working
for you that are doing what they're supposed to.
The next step is really to put together dashboards, make sure
that we have better visibility on that spend so that we're able
(09:41):
to trace up how it's aligned to broader business goals.
And start building that trust between what the marketing team
is doing and the CEO. Because the marketing team can
directly point to the impact that they're having on those
broader business goals. Aren't some of these things, and
this is a common question that Iget asked too, but I'm curious
what you guys think and Taylor, maybe you could take a shot at
(10:01):
this is, aren't some of these things kind of harder to track
when we're talking about productmarketing or content marketing
and some of the more softer marketing activities?
So how do, how do we address that for the boards and, and and
the CEO's that are looking for that visibility?
Yeah, it's a good question. I think.
I mean #1 I'd say prioritizing the things that are easier to
(10:23):
track and making sure that that is at least your baseline.
So just to to kind of put a finer point on what Farhad was
talking about earlier is, you know, a lot of times we'll see
our clients really just kind of focusing on chat tracking within
channel or reporting within channels.
So seeing that, you know, paid media and how it's working
within the Google Ads platform, but they're not seeing that all
(10:44):
the way through opportunity and close one and understanding
maybe there are certain channelsthat are converting better than
others into pipeline. So I'd say like first and
foremost, making sure that thosechannels that are trackable are
in a good place. I'd say also too, there's gonna
be like this forever debate within marketing of brand and
tracking brands. And there's of course things
(11:06):
that you can do around like big brand studies of recognition and
awareness in the market that arevery expensive.
There's some some brand work that's just the cost of doing
business, right. And I know CEO's don't often
like to hear that or CMO's are constantly trying to tie that to
a specific ROI. But there are some brand
(11:28):
initiatives are just this is this is what we need to do to
play in this space and building in some of that buffer of having
certain certain things that are not going to be able to be
directly tied to ROI. But if the majority of your
marketing spend that you have onpaid media is directly
trackable, I think that buildingin that 2030% buffer is an OK
(11:50):
thing to do depending on the space that you're playing in,
right? If you're in a very competitive
space where you have like multiple competitors are going
head to head with brands is going to need to be a focus and
you're going to need to invest in some of those larger thought
leadership brand plays that can't always be directly tied to
ROI and that's. OK.
And and I think, yeah, and I think there's other like these
(12:11):
are such foundational things, right, like building up your
brand, getting your messaging and positioning your product
marketing all in a good space, right.
That is like the foundation thateverything else is built on.
So for me investing in that willprovide dividends across all
programs, across all conversion rates will attract more people
and convert them faster and in abetter rate.
(12:34):
So for me it's like that's how you track it.
I think there are core metrics that over time and maybe it's
not a week to week metric, but it's a quarter to quarter metric
when we're looking at overall conversion rates and overall
sort of interest in in in your brand and that's some of those
things can be so. So there are ways to look at it.
It's definitely ways to track brand overtime, right?
Cheryl Boyce mentions like that's all trackable.
(12:57):
The tying it to ROI is forever going to be a difficult piece.
And yeah, Tiffany's point, like getting that as the foundational
layer for how we build a go to market is really important.
We're working with a client right now who's really unsure of
their messaging and they want itbattle tested and and to make
sure like, is this truly how we should be going to market?
(13:18):
And it's going to impact, you know, what we say on paid media,
what we say in content, the typeof content that we build.
So making sure that that is in agood spot by vetting, you know,
messaging and positioning with, you know, doing customer
analysis and understanding like insights there, win loss
analysis, understanding when when things were won and lost
(13:39):
based on the services and positioning there.
And then doing like a competitormessaging and positioning
exercise as well. So that's that's really the
foundation. Yeah, so, so let's talk about
that a little bit more. Taylor, how much are you seeing
the success of a clients marketing strategy or
implementation depend on the product marketing work or they
(14:00):
just don't have enough maturity or they haven't set up the right
assets to set up the rest of themarketing work that actually
needs to drive pipeline and revenue?
Yeah, I'd say, I mean it's goingto be a balance between spending
and over investing so many resources to get that messaging
100% perfect versus taking all the insights that, you know,
(14:23):
like I've just mentioned competitor customer, your
internal customer facing teams taking that and just write
battle testing it, put it in sales tax, put it in, put it on
the website. Like let's get some of that
messaging tested and iterate from there.
But I would say it is an extremely foundational part
that's going to inform all of the other parts of your go to
(14:45):
market. We've seen many cases where
clients have missed the mark andthey're kind of changing
positioning on the fly in order to update their go to market in
a more productive way. So I'd say it's it's very, very
important, but I think sometimeswe'll see clients over invest
the time to try to get it like that 100% versus taking
(15:08):
something that's 8090% of the way there and getting like
infields feedback. Just add to that is also like
there is and we talk a lot aboutthis, your content talks a lot
about this kind of an order of operations and marketing in
which we really want to get someof that foundational stuff down
and and also that idea of hot, warm, cold, you know which which
your content talks a lot about. But for those listeners who
(15:29):
might not be as familiar with it, it's this idea that we want
to create content or assets thatare serving the people who are
already in market first. So appealing to those people,
you know, they're already convinced that they need a
solution. They just need to be convinced
that your solution is the right one.
So creating that kind of content, you know, before moving
on to those colder types of content, which are like, OK, you
(15:50):
know, like what is XYZ or like just trying to convince people
that they need a solution at all.
And so really like making sure that we have that foundational
layer in place and working from,you know, hot, warm, cold is
super important just to see that, you know, because if we
don't have that hot contact in place, then why are we skipping
right away to trying to appeal to a completely cold audience,
(16:13):
you know, when, when they're notgoing to be as ready to buy.
So I think that that idea also ties into the idea of making
sure we have our messaging and positioning nailed down for
those people who are already in market and who are already
interested. Right.
Frank, can you talk about this piece and and expand on when
Tatiana just shared his? As much as you know, getting the
data in order is important as much as getting product
(16:33):
marketing is important. A lot of the companies that we
encounter just don't have the fundamentals in place.
And you can always over index insome of these areas where you go
in an extensive product marketing exercise or take on an
infrastructure project to make sure revenue office is
completely in order and meanwhile you're missing revenue
targets and projections. So just talk about that order of
operations a little bit. More, yeah.
(16:53):
In terms of order of operations,I think this is where, as you
said, a lot of people struggle and don't get it right.
So I think for me when I think about our operations, there is
the fundamental and foundationalpiece, right, which is what
Taylor sort of alluded to, whichis, OK, let's understand who
we're going after, what their pain points are, who we are and
how we're going to solve them, right?
This very simple, this can be a two page document that just
(17:16):
outlines that the next step for me is always to get, we need to
get that to market, right? So the obvious place is your
website. It'll be surprising how many
people's websites don't actuallyreflect that internal kind of
communication and internal work that's been done.
Like you go to website, it wouldn't even tell you what the
product does sometimes or what category they play in, right?
Simple things like that. So making sure that that, so
(17:37):
that's sort of your storefront, right, to get your web and web
assets and your customer facing assets up to date, right?
So there's that core sort of content work that needs to be
done from there. I mean, you know, it's your
standard marketing funnel. The idea is now how do we drive
traffic and relevant people to those assets, right?
So it's sort of the fundamentals, getting the word
out in terms of your content. And then how do we actually
(18:00):
drive traffic in people, right? And, and, and, and that can be
through outbound motions or getting people in front of the
right ICP that way. That can be sort of generating
advertising campaigns or SEO or other ways to sort of bring
people inbound. And that'll just depend on sort
of on your company's unit economics and, and, and, and,
and, and business model. But you know, that's how I think
about it. Sort of three big pillars of
(18:21):
getting the foundations right, getting that up to date, and
then start driving, driving people.
Tatiana, how often are you seeing when we're coming into
companies where because they're not doing things in the wrong
right order or just have the wrong priorities and there's
like a almost like a reset that needs to happen to refocus them
to say, OK, your product marketing is good enough or your
(18:42):
data infrastructure is good enough here.
The other things we need to focus on, like do you find that
the teams are working on the wrong things and that's
affecting their ability to get more resources?
Yeah, definitely. I, I think that that's actually
something we encounter quite frequently where it might like.
Part of I think part of the reason for that is because teams
(19:03):
will focus on the activities in which they're experts.
But if we haven't set up the right team, we might not be able
to capture the opportunities that exist in that market
because we don't have the peoplewho are are able to give the
depth to those activities that they need.
So for example, we recently conducted a due diligence
(19:24):
engagement where we're looking at a company's marketing
opportunity before acquisition and we found that there was a
big opportunity for them in SEO,in Google ads.
They, you know, aren't really appearing for searches and in
either way that are really fundamental to the software that
they they're selling. But a big part of that reason
was because there was no one on the team who was capable of
(19:46):
owning those activities. So part of part of our
recommendation there was that the team really did need to hire
specialists who could own and scale those areas of growth.
Because just having the resources on your team who are
capable of owning the areas of your marketing that are really
important for the company is, isalso something that is super
important and, and where we often will see a gap.
(20:08):
I just wanted to add to Tatiana's point, I think it's
such a good point on we'll oftensee our clients kind of their go
to market falls into what their the current level of expertise
on the team is, right. So we were working with a client
who had kind of grown their marketing team under the
leadership of this like brand generalist, like very strong on
(20:29):
the brand side, big on social, big on podcast, big on content,
but didn't have that like demandGen. mindset wasn't overly
metrics focus wasn't overly likeeverything was very like touchy
feely as opposed to driving pipeline.
So they had built an amazing brand, but they weren't really
(20:51):
generating predictable pipeline through predictable channels.
So what they ended up doing well, as we were working with
them is hiring someone to leave that demand you inside.
So the marketing leader kind of took over just the side of the
marketing team that was more brand content focused, hired us
upward demand Gen. manager, management director actually to
be more metrics minded, pipelineminded.
(21:15):
And that worked really well for them.
So yeah, it's, it's, you can seethese marketing teams kind of
growing up just restricted by the current talent that they
have. So what we really try to do when
we work with clients is what's the ideal go to market and then
how do we stop that up accordingly.
Yeah. Taylor, talk about the
resourcing side, because sometimes a lot of the strategy
(21:35):
work that you're saying and the people side is, is not aligned
and even they don't have enough head count or they have too much
head count or the wrong people in the wrong seats or the right
people in the wrong seats. Like how much of the success of
this is dependent on the people side?
Yeah. So when we're working with our
clients, that's often like team,our team recommendations is
often one of the last things that we assess because we want
(21:57):
to look at it objectively of, you know, if no one was at your
team, what is the ideal go to market, right?
Is it heavy content? Is it heavy partnerships?
And then the last recommendationwe make is around team and
budget. What are the actual resources
that are required to get this work done?
And sometimes that works really nicely with the existing team
that they have. And sometimes that's actually a
(22:18):
complete overhaul and either theexisting team needs to be
reallocated or we need to do a little bit more of a fresh start
of hiring people that are, you know, expert partnership
marketing or customer marketing because that's now going to be
50% of your strategy. So that is a thing that we
always try to kind of do and focus on last with that
objective lens of here's your ideal go to market, not your
(22:41):
mark go to market based on your existing talent.
So yeah. Yeah.
And I guess you're you're the one that's kind of working with
these clients and interfacing with the executives and the
private equity investors often and they often look at the team
as one of the biggest lovers, like private equity investors
just know that leadership changes everything.
(23:01):
So talk about that side of the awareness at the CEO level about
the team and resourcing and having the right CMO in place
and how we're addressing that and some of the issues and
problems that you see there. Yeah, absolutely.
And I think just to answer your previous question, like for me
like team is the biggest lever, right?
Like all of these activities arepeople based.
(23:22):
These are all sort of intellectual activities that
need the right thinking of the right people.
So yes, I think typically when we're brought in, it's like
someone at the organization has some kind of inkling that
something's not quite right here, right?
Like there, people are missing targets.
You know, we're not getting leadvolume, we're not converting
leads. There's something going on.
And that often can be traced back to decisions made by
(23:45):
marketing leadership, right? So I think, I think
unfortunately, what we see more often than we would like to see
is marketing leaders really focusing on the wrong things.
I think some of the mistakes that are happening are, as I
said, as I mentioned before, youknow, allocating resources to
some of the the wrong things, not taking a zoom out view and
like looking at the general landscape and understanding
(24:07):
where investment needs to be made.
I think another issue is sort ofcommunication and, and again
tracking and metrics. You know, marketers are not
often communicating their work and their efficacy up the chain.
So that the CEO's and boards need to understand how the
investments being made and, and what changes are being made and,
and how they're going to be adjusting.
(24:28):
I think CMOS too often and marketing teams in general are
not thinking as sort of businessowners and business leaders to
understand, hey, we are custodians of large amounts of
money and large amounts of investment that that these, that
these teams are making. And there's almost like an onus
and a responsibility to sort of invest that wisely and, and to
be able to prove ROI and, and, and, and, and do that.
(24:50):
So I think there's a number of issues like that which create
problems and tensions and marketing teams where there's
just sort of a blank check approach and people are not
tracking how, how things are going.
So I think you know, investors understand that really well,
especially coming into a new business that they've just
acquired or or revisiting a a company in their portfolio
(25:10):
that's struggling. It's the first place to look
right, especially if there's a significant marketing
investment. And that's what they're going to
find most often than not that these some of are some of the
issues that they're gonna companies.
Tatiana, do you have like an example from a client where the
team was almost like the throttle or the ceiling on the
company's ability to capture opportunities that were clearly
(25:31):
available to the to the company to scale revenue and pipeline?
Yeah. I think that one of the
companies that we worked with recently, example that comes to
mind is just that they were really focusing heavily on a a
strategy for SEO that just like wasn't really working.
(25:52):
But the internal team was reallybullish on this strategy and was
really pushing for it to really be the driver of what they were
doing for SEO. So I think because we were able
to come in and provide that unbiased perspective and really
point to other data points wherewe were like, look like this is
(26:12):
what we're seeing at other organizations.
This is what we're seeing based on external market research.
We really do need to shift strategy here.
And because this was just a major driver of leads for them,
that was something that was super important.
So helping them, you know, see that the way that the current
team was running this program was, was not aligned with how
(26:35):
the market and, and how SEO is changing and how it's changing
with AI and all of that. Yeah, helping them see that was
was a really important part of our engagement with them.
Yeah. And and forehead, like I guess
we run into this, this problem with a lot of clients where they
don't even have necessarily the right marketing leader to help
lead the organization. Sometimes there's a mismatch
(26:57):
where you have maybe a product marketing heavy leader, but the
company needs a demand Gen. leader or maybe they're more
inbound driven, but they need more ABM and that ends up being
a throttle on the business as well.
So talk about that mismatch and how do you go about navigating
that as a CEO or as an investor to get the right leader for your
business? Yeah.
I think that that's a very common, very common issue where
(27:21):
you have sort of legacy marketers that have sort of made
their way up or or hired in thatas you said, sort of have a
focus in one area and have weaknesses in others.
So obviously that has issues in terms of, you know, you really
need to be a almost or at one point a CMO needs to have been a
practitioner in a lot of different areas to really
understand deeply the areas in marketing.
(27:43):
And I think that's where we're lucky.
We have our team here that that have that and we can bring that
together. But often CMOS don't have that,
right? And especially CMOS that have a
long tenure and have experience,it's almost like the experience
is good, but they've also sort of grown up and, and, and, and
brought up in, you know, 20 years ago when marketing was
very different, right? And things have change if
they're not keeping up with the changes that that's part of the
(28:05):
problem. So I think the way I would
advise and how I advise investors and CEO is to look at
it is I think the CMO's job is sort of like that kind of how I
described like a custodian of investment.
Like I think a really important position that the CEO needs to
play is that that role of like understanding super, super
metrics minded, super finance minded, super investment minded
(28:28):
to understand how how things play and obviously having a
fundamental of all areas of marketing.
And I think I think if you have that lynchpin as as sort of the
centre of of the marketing team,that that goes a long way.
And then it's important to surround that CMO with really,
really strong subject matter experts and leaders in different
areas, right. So I think if you have that sort
of custodian related sort of finance minded CMO and around
(28:53):
them, build a really strong teamwhere they can rely on someone
to do the investment in the paidmedia side to make sure the
product marketing is up to date,to make sure the website and
having the marketing operations is is is is there.
So I think you know, it's it's really building a team around a
really smart business minded person and getting subject
matter experts mark deep marketing experts around them.
So that's how we like to advise our clients to build the team.
(29:16):
What that allows is for scale, it allows for, for
accountability in all those areas and really allows subject
matter experts to lead their ownareas and and and and, and, and,
and find and find some growth. So that's that's that's usually
our advice. That's great.
I want to shift gears a little bit to the value creation side.
And Taylor, why don't we start with you when we're coming in,
(29:36):
it's let's assume the team is ina good place, there is a good
CMO, there's decent resourcing or or supporting roles around
them. Talk about the strategy piece a
bit. Where are some of the biggest
opportunities for these clients when they think about driving
enterprise value or pipeline andrevenue and how should they
think about deploying their limited resources?
And then I'd like to actually goaround the table, Tiana, we'll
(29:58):
get your taken and far ahead as well.
Yeah. So I'd I'd say one of the
interesting or not often thoughtof opportunities is really
around like expansion or tappinginto your existing customer
base, right. Like there's always a very big
focus on focus in on new logo, but what can be done with kind
(30:18):
of like your friendlies or your existing customer base, right.
So one thing that will often do is help our clients map out that
white space and understands likeis there opportunity to grow
either within their existing base or get referred into new
logo through your existing base.So that often is a part of our
engagements where we're helping them map that and then creating
strategies for that. So for example, like one of our
(30:41):
clients had like Deloitte Spain,I believe as one of their one of
their existing customers. So mapping it a strategy of how
do you get introduced into Deloitte Canada by your Deloitte
Spain customer and, and what is that entire campaign look like
in terms of leveraging that Deloitte Spain contact and case
study and business case in orderto expand within your existing
(31:04):
customer base instead of just always focused on new logo.
So I'd say that's a really interesting way to generate more
more value and more pipeline without always trying to expand
into new logo. Tatiana, what do you think about
that? Like how often are you seeing
the cross sell and upsell opportunity be almost as
(31:25):
important, if not more importantthan landing that new logos?
Yeah. I think that's something that
we're seeing quite often on platform companies or companies
where they're selling multiple modules, especially because
we're often seeing that the close rates for those deals are
higher than net new sales. Exactly as Taylor said, like if
people already know you and trust you and have had a good
(31:45):
experience with you, then it just makes sense to find
additional opportunities there. I think especially as more and
more companies are focusing really tightly on account based
marketing, you know, big buzzword there really getting
their targeting down on the outbound side.
I think they really do need to focus on doing that same kind of
work within their customer base as well.
(32:06):
And I think that ties into the bigger point of there's often
opportunities to diversify theirmarketing mix that companies are
doing in general, especially if you know the earlier example
that that Taylor mentioned wherea company had grown really well
through that brand building and,and through less traditional
channels. You know, examples like that,
where we're seeing that historically their growth has
(32:26):
come really strongly from one place.
I'm just seeing like what other channels they can begin to
diversify into and and make surethat they're really making the
most of where their buyers are today across a broader range of
areas. Yeah.
And Farhad, on your side, like when we're coming into these
companies and you're looking at all these different value
(32:48):
creation levers, like our companies like almost
overlooking what's in the investment thesis or at least
marketers, they're like too focused on landing new clients
and not understanding what the investors really care about or,
or what's in that investment thesis.
Yeah, for sure. I think marketers often have,
you know, just a, a very narrow lens in terms of what they're
(33:09):
trying to achieve. I think it's not in, it's not
happening enough where markers are zooming out and are saying,
OK, what are all the opportunities across the whole
business? Because in the end, yeah, as you
said, right, what is the investment thesis, right?
We're trying to hit revenue goals.
We're trying to hit efficiency metrics, we're trying to hit
edit our numbers. And you know, I know you've
written a lot about this, like where can marketing fit in,
(33:31):
whether that's expansion, whether that's retention,
whether that's, you know, new logo.
There's so many areas where marketing and content can play a
role. And, and, and so, you know, our
job is often to sort of uncover some of that, to look at the
landscaping in general. And of course, you know, it's,
it's like natural for cross and CMOS to sort of jump into like
(33:52):
we just want more leads, more leads, more leads.
And of course that's always going to be a play a big part.
But we urge our clients to sort of look at their internal data,
look at find other opportunitiesthat's already sitting there
that are warmer, have better conversion rates, that have
better, better. And you know, often those upsell
and cross sell opportunities arereally handled by sales and it's
(34:12):
like sales lead motions and because you know, they own their
relationships and, and maybe sometimes come to customer
success managers, etcetera. But we are really big proponents
of getting those teams to talk to marketing and marketing to
start leading campaigns as they're the ones who are really
understand the prospect and, and, and, and how to, you know,
how to how to communicate that properly.
So yeah, our our goal is to get those teams to talk and start
(34:35):
moving forward. Is Taylor, is there like a
transparency issue where maybe the marketers are almost unaware
of the investment thesis or whatboards care about and CEO's care
about? And often when we're coming in,
like we get exposed to that because that's the person that
we're really working with or theperson that's hiring us.
And so we hear about the whole thing.
We see the management presentations, we have access to
(34:57):
data rooms and the SIM and all of that where maybe the
marketers don't see the EBITDA projections or don't see what's
the underlying investment thesis.
So do you think there's like an information gap?
There, Yeah, there's probably aninformation gap.
I mean, we've seen it done wallet a few of our clients, but
I would say more times than not,there's an information gap and
it has to do with like marketing's thought on how
(35:20):
responsible they are for revenue, right?
I think that that's that's a breakdown of a lot of clients of
ours think that they're responsible first and foremost
for leads as opposed to end revenue generated for the
company. And if that's the culture
within, it's like, maybe it maybe that's why they're not
getting seeing behind the curtain of what this investment
(35:42):
thesis is or you know, what the board is expecting.
It's because there's no culture of expectation that marketing
should be responsible for. This, I think that there is like
an element of transparency that needs to come from the top so
that everyone on the team does know what's going on and does
have the ability to feel responsible because they feel
like there is that transparency.And I think that goes for not
(36:05):
only again, from top down, but also like within teams.
I think another challenge that we're often faced with, with
which Farhad alluded to is that there's not a lot of
transparency between marketing and sales or a lot of alignment.
Again, sometimes in these ABM plays, the sales team is really
bullish on One Direction and then the marketing team is doing
something completely different. And then the sales team comes
(36:27):
back and is like, well, why aren't you helping us drive
leads in this vertical? And marketing is like, well,
we're working on this campaign and then and that can just lead
to some clashes and, and some lack of success there.
So really just making sure that again, from the top down, but
also from these internal teams, making sure everyone is really
aligned on what that value proposition is, can is, is one
(36:50):
of the most important things that I think we can help with as
well. Yeah.
And and why had shift like talking about the investment
thesis and what boards care about, talk about the diligence
side. Like when we're oftentimes we're
coming into these engagements working with just the PE
investor as they're signing an LOI or coming into a new
transaction. What are what are some of the
work that's happening there? And what are some of the
(37:11):
challenges that we're uncoveringand and opportunities that we're
able to help these firms navigate so that they can kind
of create more enterprise value as they close on the deal?
Yeah, yeah, we do a number of these every year, right.
This is sort of where PE investors are have found a
target. You know, they've signed an LOI,
they have they're building up their thesis to understand, hey,
(37:32):
you know, what is the thesis here to invest in this business?
What is the long term plan? They're often in between sort
of, you know, investment committee meetings and, and, and
decisions that are made and thenwe're brought in, right.
So our job is to help investmentcommittees and PE firms
understand what they're actuallygetting into.
So, you know, a lot of marketingteams have skeletons in their
(37:53):
closet. They have, you know, other
things that are going on historically.
And our job is to how, how quickly can we sort of uncover a
what's been going on in those businesses.
So number one is we sort of do an audit, right?
We just try to understand where all the investments been made in
the last two years and sort of list that out and sort of
understand what the ROI of all that investment has been.
(38:14):
So that's where we sort of start.
We have X amount of dollars in and we have X amount of dollars
out in terms of pipeline or revenue.
So and then we can benchmark that against other companies to
understand kind of where their efficiency is as a as under the
marketing engine. So I find our clients find that
very helpful. They can kind of compare that to
other companies in their portfolio, compare that to the
market in general. That's where we start.
(38:36):
From there we'll start looking at opportunities.
So based on that, we can break that down by channel to
understand, hey, these are the channels that seem to be working
well, so let's figure out ways to scale those.
These are the channels that seemto be struggling based on that
metric. What do we think, right?
Are there ways to optimize those?
Do we think we need to reallocate?
Are there net new channels that we're not investing in?
So that's sort of the program related version of that.
(38:58):
Like where are we actually investing?
So what that allows now is app for him to even before they jump
in and actually write their check to understand how much
wiggle room there is, how much opportunity there is to actually
optimize and improve things at the business.
And I think that's super valuable, right?
I think we've seen our clients, our B clients literally copy
based on parts of our deck and put them straight into their,
(39:20):
the investment committee to understand sort of what's going
on, right? And then we go all the way,
right. So not just the program level,
but then we'll look at the team and we'll look at other, other,
you know, the technology side ofthings and try to, you know,
give them an understanding of, you know, where all those things
sit. So by the end of a diligence
engagement, PE firm really has areally solid understanding of
what the opportunities are at a company, whether that's, and
(39:43):
have an understanding of, you know, where they might be cost
savings and takeouts and and where they might want to invest
more in. So I think going through that
engagement with us be firm partners often feel much better
about the engagement and feel better about the investment and
sort of can confirm a few of their hunches along the way how
much inefficiency? Are we finding inside these
(40:04):
engagements on average and Taylor, maybe you can take this
and far ahead you can jump in aswell as when we're meeting these
companies, we see their full data and and and we run this
audit in their existing spend like is there 30% in efficiency,
50% like how much more room is there to optimize existing that
part of that answer? Lies.
In the lack of information that has provided, right?
(40:27):
So sometimes we'll find like that reporting is just not
tight. And therefore like that's your
answer, right? If we're not able to see
pipeline through the closed one,that's the first thing is like
there's so much opportunity to increase efficiency if we can
just get that data and understand which campaigns are
(40:47):
producing and not producing, right?
So I think that's one thing we see with a lot of clients is
that they just don't they're noteven measuring or tracking these
things. And therefore they're probably
wasting a lot of spend. We don't know what what spend
they're wasting at because they have, they don't have the
reporting in place, but we can get like make an educated guess
that there's likely a lot of spend that's being wasted
(41:08):
because they're just not tracking those.
So, so part of that answer lies in like the lack of information
that's sent over with some of these diligence deals.
But Farhad, you can maybe speak a little bit more to kind of
what we're seeing on average. Yeah, I think.
On average, I think shave your, your, your sort of range is, is
within my range as well. I mean, I think 20 to 40% sort
of wastage or, or misaligned spend is very common for us to
(41:32):
see, unfortunately. And I think, you know, we're
pretty quickly able to identify where that's going and why
that's happening. And luckily often there are
opportunities to sort of reinvest that.
It's not necessarily that, you know, we just want to take that
cash out and, and, and starve the business, but it's like,
where else can we be spending that that money, right?
And I think it's, it's actually,if I may be so bold, like
(41:55):
egregious some of the spend thathappens and some of the issues
that we see and some of the mismanagement of spend often
we're seeing. I think the two big areas that
we often look into deeply is a on program spend on paid media,
just a huge overinvestment sometimes in certain channels
like LinkedIn or YouTube or evenpodcast ads, things like that.
(42:16):
We just wrapped up an engagementwith a large company, $100
million company that was had just signed a contract for 200K
a month on podcast ads, right? Even though they had a lot of
other fundamental advertising onGoogle and LinkedIn not figured
out. So you know, that was an
opportunity that we quickly wereable to fix.
The other big investment is often on the team side of
(42:37):
things, right? So we've had a couple of
engagements in the last year, $200 million plus engagements,
right, where the teams are just so over bloated, you know, 100
plus marketing teams for $200 million company.
And in both those cases we've been helped, you know, we've
helped the companies bring thoseteams down to, you know, closer
(42:58):
to like sort of 50 to 70 kind ofperson team and and they haven't
skipped a beat, you know, movingforward.
So, you know, there are a coupleof areas that we know where we
need to look into into into immediately.
And and it just, you know, it just helps to get a fresh, fresh
eyes on it. You know, luckily us at HTS
we've worked on like over 100 bebacked portfolio companies at
(43:18):
this point. So we just got so much
institutional knowledge and justbeing able to like pinpoint a
lot of sort of benchmarks and and understand how the market in
general should be, should be acting.
And so I think that that helps us.
Tatiana, I'm gonna just. Shift gears to as we're kind of
coming on to the close of the stuff is just one main topic
that is a hot button issue across private equity firms and
(43:40):
companies. It's just AI in general.
And as we're diligence and clients are in full engagements
with clients, one of the types of problems that we've seen is
the impact of AI on traffic and lead volume and opportunities
and pipeline in general. Talk about that piece and what
companies need to be thinking about and what investors need to
be thinking about from a marketing perspective just to
(44:02):
help these companies navigate a world where AI is just such a
dominant force. Yeah.
I mean, I think coming back to something that Farhad said
earlier, I think that the team is still going to be something
that's super important even in the era of AI.
So again, like what you put intoAI, the initial input is super
(44:25):
important to get a good output. So if we don't have people who
can think at that strategic level about what they're putting
in, it'll just be garbage in, garbage out.
So I think that's the first thing I wanna say is that I
think in this era of AI, the human element of this strategy
and of the thinking behind things is going to become
something that's more important than ever, even as we're looking
(44:47):
at ways that it can be used to streamline some of those more
basic day-to-day packs that we're doing.
I think another thing I'd add tothat is just on, I think another
area that's really changing quickly is on the SEO side.
We're looking at, you know, AEO,Geo, all these new acronyms now
and trying to figure out, OK, ifthis was a super important
channel for us historically, howis that shifting in this area
(45:10):
now and how do we optimize for that new world?
And I think that, again, that's that's another area where some
of those tools that are coming out are going to be really
important because we're going toneed to be looking at tracking
that a little bit differently aswell as optimizing our content a
little bit differently. So again, if that's been a
channel that's been super important historically, how are
we thinking about that in a different way going forward?
(45:33):
Taylor on. Your side as you're.
Looking at product marketing andcomms work and sales enablement,
are there places where companiescan find more productivity and
how do they implement some of that faster with the AI tools
and and and platforms that are available to them?
Yeah, I just want to jump. Off of Tatiana's point around
like website traffic quickly before productivity we're still
(45:55):
seeing. So if you think of, you know,
searching for something in chat TBT and getting response within
feed, if we're entering into a more clickless world, right,
we're not necessarily going intoa website to get that
information. We're seeing it within the feed
of Claude or Chachi PT or whatever you're using.
What we are seeing is that mostly that's impacting top of
(46:19):
funnel volume, but that our clients are still seeing bottom
of funnel volume for their kind of category keywords still going
to their websites. So there's a little bit of
differentiation there in terms of like if Tapa funnel converts
really well for you and that's the way that you're getting
people down the funnel, that's something to to really pay
(46:41):
attention to. If it's mostly your bottom of
funnel that's converting well, less of a worry in terms of
optimizing their of course you do want to do it overtime, but
less urgent in terms of productivity.
Like Tatiana said, I think that we're, we're seeing now people
really adopting AI aggressively and becoming these like master
(47:04):
prompts and really understandingwhat it takes to get good
responses and good outputs. So I'd say look for, look for
people like that to join your team, right?
You want, you want someone that knows how to use the tools that
is interested in it, because this is all changing so quickly.
You want someone that's staying abreast of all of these new
tools, how how the LM's are changing.
(47:26):
That person is going to be able to not just be an asset and
marketing, but probably help enable your sales team, help
enable your product team, and you're gonna find a lot of
productivity with that one or two people that are kind of like
the AI evangelists on your team.Yeah.
And and on that. I guess Farhad, you know,
everybody wants to talk about AIbecause it is the main topic.
(47:48):
But at the same time we meet these companies where they don't
have the basics in place and they want like they're looking
for these optimizations on the UI side when they don't have a
basic website, they don't have basic campaigns running.
So talk about that balance and educating these companies on how
much focus should be going towards AI versus the
fundamental things that are necessary to actually build a
(48:10):
good go to market organization. Yeah, I think, I think you've
hit the nail. On the head, right?
It's, it's sort of the fundamentals of marketing and
building a brand will always stay the same, right?
And I think that's that's important.
I think AI perhaps changes the way people find you or the way
people are talking about you or the way people perceive you.
(48:31):
But the, the, the fundamentals will always stay the same,
right? So I think when we go into
businesses and yes, you know, it's obviously a big buzz and
hype and, and, and, and there's a lot of people who are
interested in it. But yes, it's, there's again, an
order of operations, a fundamental that needs to be
there. And in fact, there's a lot of
studies now that show that, you know, to be on top of the AI
rankings and to be shown more in, in, in some of these MLM's,
(48:53):
it is the companies that have strong brand, it is the
companies that have strong reputations that are winning
there, right? So it those fundamentals will
always be so the fundamentals ofunderstanding who your customer
is messaging properly, understanding their pain points,
putting that out to the market, having the right programs,
having the right budget, having the right, the right copy and,
(49:16):
and, and, and right programs that go to market.
Those fundamentals need to stillbe done first.
You know, and I think, I think when we think of AI, I kind of,
you know, and you kind of alluded, alluded to this, just
pull it up into two simple areas. 1 is OK on the go to
market side, like whether that'sSEO and traffic, how AI is
affecting us and then be yes, onthe efficiency side and within
(49:36):
teams, you know, I think there should be an expectation to find
1520% efficiency by using some of these tools, especially on
the content side and things likethat.
So start there, keep it simple, right?
And I think and you know, not torun before we can walk when it
comes to marketing. Yeah, that's a great take away
to. Kind of close off the episode
and before we do, just any finalthoughts for investors or CEOs
(49:58):
as they're thinking about transforming their teams or
scaling their marketing efforts.And Titan will start with you
and Taylor the forehead. Yeah, I think it's to not be
afraid to pilot things and just like put stuff out in market and
see see how it is picked up, right.
So we have one client that like like SEO was their whole
(50:22):
marketing strategy. Obviously there's been a shift
with organic traffic with AI. There's a big competitor that
came into their space, kind of knocked them out.
So organic became really challenging for them.
They hadn't I'd really much elseright?
They'd really overrun decks on this one strategy.
So don't be afraid to pilot something.
(50:44):
Get something out quick and dirty.
A little ABM strategy. Test out a podcast, test out a
webinar series like this doesn'tall need to be perfect until you
get it into into market. Let's just kind of iterate, get
your MVP out there and get some quick learnings instead of
making sure everything's perfecton the back end before it's
(51:04):
launched, yeah. Farhad, do you want to have the?
Closing costs here, yeah, I think.
If European investor and you have companies in your portfolio
that are a little bit of a laggard, missing targets,
struggling to find scale. We are 100%.
(51:27):
Convinced that there is a solution for that and it is
marketing, right And I think I will urge all investors to.
Spend a little time going a little.
Bit deeper and that's super important just to go deeper and
to understand where the investments being made within
these marketing organizations, there is inefficiency to be
(51:47):
found. And unfortunately, I think, I
think that's where, you know, we've had some success as we've
got a framework to help understand that inefficiency, to
help understand how to scale. But my, um, my advice to
investors is to not perhaps automatically jump to solutions,
(52:08):
whether that's getting a new CMOor making changes or it's a
product issue, it's a sales issue, but really coming down to
the fundamentals of marketing like how are we going to market?
Who are we going to market with?How are we selling our story?
So I just think if you have a aninvestment that you would be
hoping is going better, I think it's well worth taking the time
(52:30):
to dig into those things. So that would be my advice.
Yeah, that's a great thought to.In the episode, and yeah, that's
something that I've been trying to evangelize for the longest
time, is that oftentimes your revenue problem is a marketing
problem. And I'm glad that we have the
three of you to shed light into that and, and how we're actually
helping our clients and bringingsome real life case studies.
So Tatiana Taylor Farhad, thanksa lot for doing this and
(52:51):
appreciate you sharing your wisdom.
Thank you. Thank you chef.
Appreciate. It.
Thanks. Bye.
Thanks. For listening to today's.
Episode before you take off, just a few requests from our
side #1 if you haven't done so already, please subscribe to the
podcast on iTunes or Spotify or YouTube or wherever you go to
listen to your podcast #2 If you're in the market for due
(53:15):
diligence services, strategy consulting, or fractional CMO
services, please get in touch with us at www.hassas.com.
And 3rd, please buy a copy of mynew book, Exit Ready Marketing.
It covers a ton of concepts thatwe take our customers through
private equity investors, B companies, CEOs, operating
(53:35):
partners, and marketers, and there's a ton of great value in
there. That expands on my previous
book, Post Acquisition Marketingas well.
So with that said, I hope you enjoyed today's content and
we'll see you on the next episode.
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