Get Intentional With the MOVE Go-To-Market Framework

Episode 161

November 30, 2021

This week on the Kula Ring podcast we sat down with return guest Sangram Vajre, the co-founder of Terminus. He chats us through his latest book, ‘MOVE: The 4-question Go-to-Market Framework,’ which was created to propel businesses forward in their go-to-market process. Sangram pulls excerpts from this book and shares his knowledge with Jeff and Carman on how marketers can approach their go-to-market to be more intentional and make better decisions for their companies.

Get Intentional With the MOVE Go-To-Market Framework Transcript:

Announcer: You’re listening to The Kula Ring, a podcast made for manufacturing marketers. Here are Carman Pirie and Jeff White. 

Jeff White: Welcome to The Kula Ring, a podcast for manufacturing marketers brought to you by Kula Partners. My name is Jeff White and joining me today is Carman Pirie. Carman, how are you doing, sir? 

Carman Pirie: I’m doing well. I’m doing well. But look, if you hear my stomach growling during this podcast, I’ll apologize in advance. We’ve set a recording time that’s right around lunch and I did not plan in advance. 

Jeff White: We should have brought snacks. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. But then you’d hear snacks. 

Jeff White: Yeah. No, we need quiet snacks. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. 

Jeff White: Fruit roll-ups. 

Carman Pirie: Oh. 

Jeff White: Things like that. 

Carman Pirie: Is that even real? Well, no, we know fruit roll-ups are not real, but-

Jeff White: Well, they’re real. 

Carman Pirie: … it has to be like the most simulated of simulated foods. 

Jeff White: Yeah. I don’t know. 

Carman Pirie: It’s right up there with-

Jeff White: I haven’t had one since I was in junior high, so…

Carman Pirie: It’s right up there with a Pop-Tart or something. Anyway, we digress. But it’s good to be chatting and I’m excited about today’s conversation. It’s a return guest to The Kula Ring. 

Jeff White: Yeah. Friend of the Kula Partners agency. Yeah. 

Carman Pirie: Indeed. Indeed. Same guest, new book, so let’s kick it off. 

Jeff White: Yeah, and certainly our guest, author of I believe three books, perhaps more to come, most likely, and Sangram Vajre is the co-founder of Terminus, and as I say, the author of numerous books, including MOVE: The 4-Question Go-To-Market Framework, the latest book, recently a Wall Street Journal bestseller. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Sangram. Good to have you back. 

Sangram Vajre: Hey. Thank you, guys. It’s exciting to be… When you said second-time guest, that’s like oh my God, where should I send my check? Because that’s like that’s quite an honour. 

Jeff White: It was better than three books. 

Carman Pirie: And I’m happy to provide some financial transfer information after this interview. 

Sangram Vajre: Put it in the notes. 

Carman Pirie: Exactly. Sangram, it really is wonderful to have you on the show and thank you for the advanced copies of the book. It was great to dive in and kind of understand more about your latest thinking in terms of the MOVE framework. I guess normally we would have folks introduce themselves and their company. I feel like introducing Terminus to marketers is getting to be… well, something that maybe doesn’t need to happen that much, but let’s do it. Let’s introduce Terminus for those who may not know what it is and then we can dive in from there. 

Sangram Vajre: Yeah, and my salespeople think I’m such a horrible salesperson because I hardly talk about Terminus, like even from the day we started, and I think there are 400 Terminators, as we call ourselves, who sell the product, so I feel I don’t need to do that, so I’m rusty at it. But ultimately we started in 2015 with this whole idea of flipping the funnel, and the idea was to look, less than 1% of the leads turn into customers. There’s gotta be a better way. And we started on this bandwagon of account-based marketing. Account-based marketing is not certainly a term that we invented. It was there for a while, so we don’t take any credit for the term, but we do take shamelessly credit for evangelizing the term and making it more widely known through the works that we did with the Flip My Funnel Podcast, the Flip My Funnel events, and all the books, and everything that we have done. I think we tried to really make it mainstream over the years. 

So, now, seven years into it, I can’t believe it because my daughter was literally four weeks when we started Terminus, so she’s seven years this month, on Halloween, so it’s been seven years building the company, Terminus. We are about 400 people in. 1,000-plus customers. Building an account-based marketing platform that now not only does advertising, which is where we started, account-based advertising but now has chat, account-based analytics, account-based data. We just acquired another company two weeks ago. And then account-based… Sigstr was another company we acquired, so email signatures, but ultimately what we want to do and help our customers do is to be able to target better, engage with their target accounts better, and then as a result of that, have better results. That’s what we do. 

I don’t know how that is for a pitch, but that’s it. 

Jeff White: I think that nails it. And I mean, Carman won’t be able to relate to this, but I’ll have to take the proud dad moment, but I started this company when my daughter was seven days old, and she’s now turning 18 in two months, so-

Sangram Vajre: Oh, wow. Congratulations. That’s a long route. 

Jeff White: Yeah, so I’m a little grayer for it, for sure. 

Carman Pirie: I don’t know. It’s-

Jeff White: Carman’s had to listen to my stories about my kids. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. I have no point of reference on this like I can’t… I don’t know. Half the things I do in my life are about not remembering things. 

Jeff White: It’s certainly not trying to leave children behind. 

Carman Pirie: Exactly. But nevertheless, look, Sangram, this latest book is really a continuation of that flip the funnel journey, as you mentioned, and really dives into this notion of go-to-market. So, look, let’s start with some of your own questions from your book. What is go-to-market and why is it so hard?

Sangram Vajre: Yeah. You know, when we started this book, it was based on a similar premise. Just like ABM, less than 1% of the leads turned into customers was the thing that we latched on and it’s still on our website, it’s still what we talk to our customers about. Don’t be lead crazy, be customer crazy is what we tell them. And I think if anybody is listening to this, if you’re not driving, then you could literally go and search for something called SaaS valley of death or business valley of death. What you will see is articles after articles of companies dying after they hit $10 million or so in revenue. 

So, it’s literally saying, well, starting a business is hard. Starting a manufacturing business is really hard because you’re really talking about labour, and time, and material, and all that type of real sense, and getting to a million in revenue is hard. It’s like less than 1% of the companies even get to that number. But then it was really interesting and eye-opening for us in the research of the book that 0.4% of the companies hit $10 million. Just 0.4%. Of the 1% of companies who get to be a million, only 0.4% survive to get to see $10 million. What’s crazy, that it’s.04 who actually make it over $10 million and get over $50 million in revenue. So, the numbers just go down and down. That’s why it’s called the valley of death for companies who actually grow. They go there to die. 

And it’s unacceptable, and the reason, McKinsey had this study, and SaaStr and all of these companies did studies. Regardless of the industry, the reason a lot of these companies die is not that their vision all of a sudden becomes outdated. They don’t know what they’re doing, where they’re going. Actually, the vision becomes more real to them. It’s not because you can’t hire people, although people can say right now is the hardest time to hire great talent because of how many people are looking for great jobs and opportunities, and it’s clearly an employee market. It’s not any of those reasons. It’s actually because the study cites and there’s articles that will talk more detail into it that they don’t have, or they don’t evolve their go-to-market. 

So, companies evolve their products. They evolve their strategy. They evolve their ability to do things. But not the go-to-market. And over and over, they have studies of hundreds of thousands of companies across industries, and one common denominator is go-to-market. And to your question, how do you define it, I think… One of the people we interviewed was Brian Halligan, the ex-CEO of HubSpot, but you all know the company and what they have done. He was the CEO until last year and now he’s the chairman right now. It’s a public company. Over 100,000 customers, right? And one of the people we interviewed was him, and Brian, I said, “Brian, how do you define go-to-market?” And he gave me the best definition. There’s a fuller definition in the book, but I think this is good for the podcast. This is a podcast definition, if you will, which is he said, “Sangram, to me as the CEO, go-to-market is like a product.” And we put that as a quote in the back of the book. 

He said, “Go-to-market is like a product. It’s an iterative process. It’s not a strategy that you go with a bunch of your leaders and buddies over the weekend on an off-site and come up. No, no, no. That’s your vision casting. That’s building your team. That’s about goal setting. That’s what all that is. Your go-to-market really is about figuring out how to change and make decisions like should I hire a salesperson or should I go acquire another company? Should I put money in the marketing bucket, or should I actually hire people on the engineering team to make our product better?” So, all these are decisions that a CEO needs to make around go-to-market, and it’s one of the most unsexy parts of this job because people look for vision casting, people look for great talent, but go-to-market is what CEOs own, and it’s one of the hardest things to do, but it’s literally not just yearly or quarterly. It’s literally monthly or weekly that he would make go-to-market decisions. 

And that really made us think like, “Whoa. This is a much different and a bigger conversation than most people think about.” 

Carman Pirie: It’s interesting to me, this notion of people… It’s almost like once you reach a certain point, your certain revenue threshold, that would be different for different businesses and different industries, but there’s a level of almost feels like validation that comes along with that, like, “Oh, we figured out how to go-to-market now. We’re a $10 million company. We’re a $50 million company.” Or what have you…So, that’s not something we need to figure out again. 

Jeff White: Instead, you need to keep reiterating.

Carman Pirie: Yeah. And Sangram, I guess what you’re telling us is that’s actually the thing that you need to keep refiguring out. 

Sangram Vajre: Yeah. Oh my God. What’s interesting about it, and the MOVE is, as you guys have read the book, it’s an acronym for Market, Operations, Velocity, and Expansion. Those are the four questions in the book. Market, Operations, Velocity, and Expansion. What’s interesting about that is what we found in our research. I was so dreading this, guys. I was so dreading this. It’s like gosh, I hope I don’t give a list of 50 questions to people nobody would remember and nobody’s going… We’re not Gartner, Forrester, right? We’re not trying to run a research advisory firm. 

So, I want to make it simple for operators to go ask these questions. I want to use the language they use. So, as we interviewed Brian Halligan, CEOs, as I said, we interviewed Geoffrey Moore, who wrote Crossing the Chasm, a really amazing book. If you have $10, don’t buy my book, buy Geoffrey’s book, because it’s so good. It’s really good. It’s a classic. He gave a quote for the book, too. And like Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight. Across industries. SaaS, across the board. What was interesting in these elements was we started with about 50-ish questions and it came down to these four questions over and over again. 

And what’s awesome about it is that these questions remain the same, regardless of your industry, but also regardless of the stage of the business you’re in. You could be in any stage of the business right now. You could be a sub-$10 million company. You can be a $50 million company. You can be a $100 million company. It doesn’t matter. The questions will remain the same, but the answers will be different, and that’s what this book really goes into is like you still have to figure out what your next move is, but the move will depend on the stage of the business you’re in. 

Jeff White: Let’s dive in a little bit, and I have to say, I love the notion of thinking of this as a product instead of just something that… It’s not a project, it’s a product. This goes back to one of our earliest guests on The Kula Ring, Monique Elliott, who at the time was with AVB, and she looked at marketing initiatives, an eCommerce platform, whatever that marketing tool was going to be, and convinced their management to think of it as a product in the same way that they think of the machines they sell as products. And you know, when the C-suite thinks of something as a product, they can’t help but want to improve upon it, whereas if it’s a project, it has a budget line item and then it’s done. And it’s the same kind of thing with this. 

But you know, how did you kind of come to the realization that these were the four questions that really mattered, and what kinds of answers… let’s talk about the questions themselves a little bit, as well, how they come to life under the acronym, MOVE. But yeah, let’s dive into those and talk about how this kind of came to be as the solution for the framework. 

Sangram Vajre: Well, initially it was dreadful because we did hundreds of interviews. Honestly, the best thing, there’s so many negative things about COVID that we all know, and feel, and recognize, but one of the best things that happened was you could pick up the phone and talk to anybody, right? Because the world, for a moment there, just opened up. Doesn’t really matter. Which is why I literally just like if I’m gonna be in the basement doing this stuff, might as well make the most out of it. 

So, we talked to hundreds and hundreds of senior leaders and CEOs, and VCs around it, and we talked to VCs for example, Kelly Ford, who had 200-plus exits of companies investing over and over again, and they created a center of excellence for go-to-market, so we studied their model for VCs, for investing in early-stage companies. We studied what Mark Roberge did. He’s a Harvard Business School professor. He was the CRO at HubSpot and specializes in taking companies from $0 to $100. We looked at his model. We looked at several models and that’s how the research really… So, what I’m really proud of, guys, more than anything, is the research that went into this book. It’s not like me sitting here like, “Oh, let me just think about a new way, a cool acronym that I can put on my shoot.” No, it really was very research-based. 

And these questions, after about I would say 30 or 40 interviews, me and my co-author Brian, we were looking at each other like, “Are these people just talking to each other behind our backs?” Because they were all saying the same stuff, but somebody would say… One of the common questions we asked was, “What keeps you up at night? What do you think about go-to-market?” And they would say stuff like, “Hey, I wish we could figure out how to scale our business. I wish we could figure out how to get to the next growth level for our business. I wish our teams would be more aligned.” So, they kept using similar phrases, but they all had a different vocabulary for it, and I think what we, and Brian and I have done is that we’re not putting in this book something that you’ll be like, “Oh, I’ve never heard that before.” 

I think you may have some concepts you may not have heard, but for the most part, it’s very logical. But I hope we have given people the vocabulary around to say, “Hey, if you really want to talk about this, just talk about it using this context,” and it came over, and over, and over again, to a point that after about 20 or 30 calls, we were like, “Hey, let me just get it out of the way. Are these the questions that summarize the way you think about go-to-market?” And they’re like, “No, no. Let me think. No, actually, that covers that question, covers that question.” So, it really came down to these four questions and thankfully we were able to, and that’s the marketing brain in us, like, “Let’s just make it call it something that people could remember, MOVE.” 

So, the questions are like who should you market to, what should you do to operate your business effectively, when can you scale your business. That’s probably the most common question of all. And the fourth one is where we can grow the most. That is a question I think as you start growing your business and find something working, that question becomes more important. But it remains the same no matter what stage of the business you’re in. 

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Carman Pirie: It’s kind of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, that can seem so simple as to be elementary. On the opposite side, of course, is that that’s I think in some ways what makes it powerful. As an example, I think one of the challenges I see an awful lot of manufacturers face is on that expansion side, which is about choosing a priority. They may serve five or six or seven verticals with a wide range of products, and there can just be paralysis about managing them, and keeping them going, and they don’t necessarily think about, “Okay, yeah, but what’s the real focus that’s going to drive expansion? Where can we really place our effort?” 

So, yeah, I think there’s a beauty in the simpleness of the question in some weird way. 

Sangram Vajre: Yeah. And you know, what that reminds me of, this is a conversation with Scott Dorsey, who’s the CEO of ExactTarget, and he was the one who talked about expansion. In the E, initially, like remember market, operations, velocity, and expansion. The E initially was ‘experience.’ That’s what we thought we would do. We would talk about experience. Creating amazing experiences. We know experiences are what people are looking for, like at the end of it, experience is what it’s all about. But he pushed us. He said, “Look, I take that for granted that we need to make amazing experiences. I think we wouldn’t have a business if we created shitty experiences. Somebody’s gonna come and just knock us off and charge more than us just because they create better experiences.” 

Case in point, taxis versus Uber. I found myself when I was travelling one day, I was standing at an airport waiting for Uber. At one point, Uber used to be fast, but now I was standing in the airport waiting for my Uber for about 10 minutes and there was a taxi right in front of me. Literally, a taxi right in front of me, and the whole time I’m like, “Why am I waiting for 10 minutes for Uber, that I don’t know what they’re gonna charge, I have no idea who I’m gonna be with. I see the guy right in front of me. I see the taxi in front of me. I can get home 10 minutes early. Literally. I can beat the traffic. But I’m still waiting right there for my Uber. Why?” Because of the experience, the idea of taking the credit card out, and swiping it, and not having the number, and don’t know… It’s just like experience is so important. 

So, I remember Brian and Scott making the point, like the look, without experience, you’re not in business, and in the book, we covered that, especially product and where it lands in the go-to-market framework. But he pushed on this thing. He’s like, “Look, when we hit about $10-plus million in revenue, my number one question became this: Where are we gonna grow the most? Are we gonna grow locally or globally? Are we gonna grow through our sales team with the foot on the street or are we gonna have an agency way to grow? Are we gonna build products right now to support our customers? Are we gonna just acquire another company and figure out what goes there?” So, these questions are the ones that he struggled with and said, “Hey, when I go back and think about $10, $20, $30, $50 million in revenue, that was the question that kept me up. That was the question I was struggling with the most.” 

Because of course, we have to create a kick-ass experience, so the E, I want to give credit where credit is due, was really pushing us, saying that there cannot be a company growing at the scale they need to grow if they’re not thinking innovatively about the expansion. An example in our case, and you all know, bringing HubSpot back into the game here, 40% of their revenue comes from the agency partner program, right? That’s their business model. And that wasn’t their business model when they started, but they had to figure out an expansion strategy. 

So, when you think about manufacturing, you’re a service in many ways, right? One of the things we talk about in the book is that your go-to-market team is not just marketing or sales. It is marketing, sales, and customer success. To manufacturing, it means customer service, right? So, that is so big. That is, as a matter of fact, the most important thing that drives the business. In the book, when you look at the platform market fit, you will see something really interesting. We turn the order of these three different departments or functions, and so sales-marketing, which is what we had in problem market fit and product-market fit, we said, “Customer success plus sales and marketing.” So, we reverse the order of it, and that was not a typo. That was on purpose because we realize that customer service becomes a big part of what drives your business further, faster. 

If your customer service is actually taken care of and they know how to take care of customers, how you build new products, how do you add more services to it, that’s what’s gonna drive your business forward, and not just your sales and marketing. 

Jeff White: Yeah. I think that there’s great truth to that, and within the manufacturing space, we have an awful lot of experience in speaking with manufacturers who are not interested, necessarily, in driving net new relationships. Their entire opportunity is within their existing customer base. And you know, really they can grow significantly simply by servicing those existing relationships at every level, you know? Whether that’s through some kind of outside sales, or inside sales, or actual service and repair type relationship, so there’s a ton of opportunity there. 

Carman Pirie: I do think they maybe struggle to recognize the revenue upside potential in the customer service relationships. You know, I think an awful lot of manufacturers would be very quick to pound their chest and say, “We provide exceptional customer service,” and in many cases that is probably true. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ve looked at that service function and said-

Jeff White: Through the lens of-

Carman Pirie: How can we arm it for the upsell, and the expansion, and how can we make it a more conscious, intentional thing?

Jeff White: Yeah. And it’s not necessarily at all related in most manufacturers with the marketing and sales function. There isn’t kind of a cohesive discussion going on between the CMO, and the VP of sales, and the head of customer service or success. 

Sangram Vajre: Yeah. I think that people would probably love the truth around retention is the new acquisition that we have in the book, where I’ll tell you a quick story. I was with a bunch of VCs, were investing in a company. They were about $50 million in revenue and we’re doing another valuation for them, and the valuation of that business was about half a billion, so $50 million, $500 million valuations. The CEO of that company was really mad. Really upset. Really going crazy. He’s like, “How is it that one of my competitors has $30 million in revenue and their valuation is $1.2 billion? And I am $50 million. We have $50 million revenue. You guys are saying that the business valuation is $500 million. Why? It doesn’t even make sense. I’m going about growth; we’re growing so well.” 

And it was fascinating. We had to break it to him, and this goes back to the point that you both are making, especially in the manufacturing business. They’re like, “Look, if you run a $30 million business today, we would actually have valued you much higher because the $20 million business that you have today, there’s no repeatable business there. These use cases don’t make any sense. They are ad hoc. The work that you do there is not repeatable, not scalable, so you are not tying in more resources in servicing those $20 million businesses. And the profile that you’re going after over there does not match to what your repeatable business is, so if you take just the cohort of these $30 million customers that you have, your valuation would actually likely be higher than your… Because you’d really think you’d have something that’s really cool. It would be higher than $1.2. But because you have this $20 million business that is not good, not core, not helping you, is draining on you, and you can’t fire all these $20 million now, and as a matter of fact, you actually have all these engineers and customer support people working on stuff that they shouldn’t be working on. They should actually be working on this, which actually takes you away from getting bigger deals on the core part of it.” 

So, we give all these things, and at the end of the day, it really occurred to them. It’s like, “Look,” and I could never forget this, where the conversation was, “I wish we were not that aggressive about acquiring net new customers and we were more aggressive around keeping the best-fit customers.” And I think you think about that in a manufacturing world. I’m curious to get both of your perspectives on it. I think that’s what manufacturing does really well. And if you can then do better at it, they would be leaps and bounds over other customers, because that’s not something most of the industry does well at. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. It’s interesting. Jeff and I were talking actually in the lead up to this discussion about this a little bit and about the nuances or differences between manufacturing and SaaS, and that world and one of the differences often is I think switching costs. Now, there can be some significant switching costs with a variety of SaaS platforms, no question, but there are also examples of, “Oh, you want to buy our product? We have an import-export function to help you import your data from this other CRM and make switching costs almost go away,” or whatever. Right? 

That’s not as often the case with many B2B manufacturers. The glue’s a lot stronger. So, I agree, they do a better job of retention, but they also have bigger handcuffs, so I think the interesting learning for a manufacturing organization here may be what if we acted like we didn’t have those handcuffs? What if we approached it as though 100% of these customers could leave immediately with no switching costs? Would we service them differently then? And would that provide a level of fuel to expand those relationships? 

Sangram Vajre: Yeah. You know, I was having this conversation probably the last couple of weeks, is right now, we’re recording this right now in October timeframe, and right now if everybody stopped selling the net new business today, and actually just focused on your existing business and actually figuring out ways to upsell, cross-sell, you would likely end up having a higher revenue for your business. 

Let me unpack that a little bit. At this point in the year, you already should know where you’re gonna end up as a business-like if you’re in October and don’t know where you’re gonna end up, well, you do not have a predictable business and you have a whole bunch of problems in your business. 

Jeff White: It doesn’t matter if we’re talking manufacturing, SaaS, or selling turnips out of the back of a truck. 

Sangram Vajre: Yeah, like in October if you don’t know where you’re gonna be in December, you got problems. You need to go-to-market help, a doctor, right away. You need to contact Kula Partners ASAP. But in general, the other part of the coin, the other side of the coin is this: This is the part where you can look at the end of the year and you already know how many companies you have on the renewal for your existing business, and if you could actually take your attention, take some of that time back, and put in your existing customers, even figuring out… We have something called the Top 50 Customer Program, right? So, every executive on the team has to have personal relationships, cell phone numbers, of one of our top 50 customers. Period. No matter what and no matter where they are, we have a list of 50 customers, the top customers because of the revenue, because of the innovation. There are a bunch of criteria for how we came up with that top 50 list. 

And the goal of our executive team is that each one of our executive team has five or seven of these people and that together we have these 50 customers that we need to have personal relationships with, that we’re talking to them on a regular basis. We’re texting with them. We are asking them, “Hey, what are your strategic priorities?” We’re not trying to just sell our product to them, because they already have it. We’re trying to say, “Hey, where can we help? Can we connect with another CMO to who we are talking to? Can we put you on a speaker slot? Could we help you with a board connection so that we can give you a board member that you might be looking at or advice?” In some cases, we have helped people transfer to another job or function because… So, we’re guiding them. So, we’re there, to be there, to be present, and supportive. 

And what we’ve found in that process was, and I wish more companies would do this, is that every time they would say, “You have been so grateful and helpful for us. We need to figure out how we work more together.” And then we would do, “Well, let’s think about it. Maybe we talk about a three-year renewal as opposed to a one-year renewal, right?” So, that takes care of a lot of issues that you think of renewal stuff. We talk about creating workshops for their team, where they now all, the entire team is now certified in certain things that they did not think about before. 

So, jumping into these top 50 customers will change your understanding of what really works for your business and will really open up other opportunities that you’re not even thinking. So, right now in October, if you’re looking at the end of the year, you should know where you’re gonna end up, but you should actually focus on your top 50 customers now and build those relationships, so as you get to the renewal part, it’s not a surprise. You should never lose a customer. Somebody should be fired if one of your top 50 customers leaves and you have no idea. That should be such a no-no. 

People leave, and companies leave, and people, customers, that happens all the time, but if it’s on your top 50 list and if they leave and you had no idea, you just see a dip in your numbers, you’ve got a problem. Somebody’s not doing their job, and someone needs to be fired. 

Carman Pirie: I find it’s interesting because of course in the world of manufacturing, you don’t have that kind of world of retention in the same way. You don’t think about it in that way. 

Jeff White: Yeah. You don’t think about ARR, necessarily. 

Carman Pirie: Right. But you hear an awful lot of marketers, I don’t know how many we’ve had on the show, but it’s gotta be over a dozen who have top advice, basically, is get out and talk to customers. Which, you know-

Jeff White: On the face of it. 

Carman Pirie: You almost kind of almost roll your eyes, like, “Yeah, okay. Great. What are we gonna do? You just call them up?” And it’s like, “Well, yeah. Actually, you do.” But Sangram’s notion here is there’s a real-

Jeff White: Operationalize that. 

Carman Pirie: There’s a real interesting nugget there to say what if every member of the marketing team had text message access to one of our top 50 customers? What-

Jeff White: Or top 10, depending on… Yeah. Whatever that looks like. 

Carman Pirie:  What would it mean? I think that, of all the kinds of thought experiments to end the show on, I really like that. That’s gonna leave me thinking for quite some time about how that could come to life and what that could mean, particularly within a manufacturing enterprise. 

Jeff White: Yeah. 

Carman Pirie: Sangram, thank you so much for sharing a little bit of the book with us today. I know that… I think we got into only one truth of go-to-market and there’s at least six in the chapter, so I think we’ve left lots for our listeners to go and discover for themselves but thank you for sharing your experience and wisdom with us today. 

Sangram Vajre: Absolutely. And all the proceeds for the book for the first year goes to New Story Charity, which is ending homelessness, so anything people do to buy this book, and 10,000-plus people have done that, is really for a great cause that I’m really passionate about, so that’s just another thing that I wanted to put out there for people as they’re thinking, considering the book. 

Carman Pirie: Well, that’s terrific. 

Jeff White: Nice. 

Carman Pirie: That’s terrific. 

Jeff White: We’ll link it up in the transcript below the episode. Thanks so much. 

Carman Pirie: Absolutely. 

Sangram Vajre: Thank you so much, folks. 

Jeff White: Cheers. 

Announcer: Thanks for listening to The Kula Ring, with Carman Pirie and Jeff White. Don’t miss a single manufacturing marketing insight. Subscribe now at kulapartners.com/thekularing. That’s K-U-L-Apartners.com/thekularing.

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Featuring

Sangram Vajre

Co-founder of Terminus

A Wall Street Journal bestselling author, Sangram Vajre co-founded Terminus in 2014 and ever since has been teaching the business of marketing with his signature frameworks. He’s an international keynote speaker, was named one of the top twenty-one B2B marketing influencers in the world, and is the host of a top-fifty business podcast called FlipMyFunnel.

The Kula Ring is a podcast for manufacturing marketers who care about evolving their strategy to gain a competitive edge.

Listen to conversations with North America’s top manufacturing marketing executives and get actionable advice for success in a rapidly transforming industry.

About Kula

Kula Partners is an agency that specializes in maximizing revenue potential for B2B manufacturers.

Our clients sell within complex, technical environments and we help them take a more targeted, account-focused approach to drive revenue growth within niche markets.

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