220: Mark Roberge on Looking Ahead and Adapting to The Future of Sales

What's poppin' y'all, your man James, Say What Sales Buckley, and we are ready for this episode of Make It Happen Mondays with your host, John Barrows. Big shout out to our partners, and I want to share with you, we've developed some incredible relationships with great teams, tools, and organizations that deliver value to the sales community. Sales Loft, Proposify, Gong, Vidyard, Chili Piper, Intro Hive, and our newest partner, Salesforce Sales Cloud. Major advantages can be gained from leveraging Salesforce Sales Cloud, like a shared view of every customer, automated workflows, easy integrations, and a level of customization that your company needs in order to streamline your sales process and maximize the delivery of value to your clients and prospects.

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This is a very candid conversation around business today, the changes that are coming, and where we're all headed as sales and marketing and general business best practices shift and morph as we bounce back into some sense of normalcy. Let's kick it off here with JB and Mark to get it in gear. Take it away, pal. Good afternoon, everybody. This is John Barrow's making it up on Monday. Hopefully, you had a fantastic weekend. Mine was chill, which was nice. Stuff from my house is still being repped apart, so it's driving me crazy. I'm still living in my basement right now, but man, am I excited for this conversation because it's the second time around, and I am in a different mindset right now and extremely curious, and this person's way smarter than me in a lot of ways.

So, Mark, Robert, how's it going, brother? Dude, thanks for having me back, man. It's great to reconnect. Yeah, it's awesome, man. And for everybody who doesn't know Mark, HubSpot, CRO, founding member, he's killing it right now with Stage 2 Capital that we're going to get into, and a professor at Harvard, right? How's that going for you, by the way? How's the Harvard professorship going? Even though you're wearing an MIT shirt right now, by the way. Well, you know, I went to MIT, and my buddies, my classmates are always like, dude, what the hell? Why'd you go teach at Harvard? I'm like, isn't that the ultimate compliment to MIT? Yeah, absolutely. Taking their grads to come and teach there. You know?

No, it's just like, I feel very blessed to have spent time here in Boston and to have experienced MIT as a student and Harvard as a faculty member. I mean, Jesus, like, you just like, I can die right now. You know what I mean? It's like, it's just crazy. But yeah, it's cool, man. I mean, honestly, like, there's so many awesome aspects to it. I would say one of my favorite things is the school is awesome at contributing to the, like, getting rid of the inequality divide. Okay? Like, half the students are female. I would say, like, a third or a quarter are from protected races. And so, and they're just obviously so great at finding and attracting the most talented folks from those demographics all over the world.

Yeah. Like, half, you know, a third are from outside the U.S. and bringing them to my office. You know what I mean? It's like, and so, like, it's such an opportunity to be able to, like, partner with these Ferrari minds and, and kind of do, do my part in, in, in mentoring, you know, these folks who've been left out of many equations. So that's, I can go on and on about what I love about the job. That's one of my favorite things. I love it, man. Did I hear right that, that Harvard's moving to like, you know, to, from an equality standpoint where it's like a percentage of your parents' income versus like a dollar figure? I heard something that we're trying to make it easier for people to afford to go to college.

Yeah. I mean, I don't know the university stuff. I sit in the faculty meetings for the business school and it, it, I don't know the exact numbers, but it, it blows, like you, you do not, you're not left out for affordability. There's, they have so much financial support and access that like no one gets in and doesn't go because they can't afford it. That's awesome. And it's, it's off the charts. It's awesome. That's fantastic. Well, look, let's, the reason I wanted, and the reason I'm excited for this conversation, and, and we kind of talked about it in the prep for this as we were leading up, which is, you know, I'm a, I'm in an interesting spot right now because for the first time in my career, I've been able to take a step back and not be, you know, in the business as much and start being, you know, working on the business and also starting to look out a little bit further of what has, what is happening right now in the sales ecosystem and sales culture and where we're going.

And my hypothesis here is that we're in this weird transition where, you know, we're moving, you know, technology is coming in, artificial intelligence, but we're, and everybody understands quality and the experiences is, is, is what matters most, but yet we're still in the hyper growth phase of, you know, for sales reps specifically, you know, making 50 dials, hitting your cadences and those types of crap. So we're, we're in this transition where I feel like we're teaching the machines how to do our jobs and, and I think a lot of things have to break right now. And I wanted to kind of pick your brain a little bit on what you're seeing out there specifically around the model of growth, right?

You got this new, um, scale, the science of scaling for, for small, small organizations and how to do product market fit and those types of things. The, where I'm going though, is the predictable revenue model. Okay. That was fantastic. You know, whatever, 15 years ago, whenever, so 20 years ago in Salesforce kind of thought about, you know, segmenting the roles and not that they invented it, but they definitely expand. Kind of. Like invented the cause of the BDR and SDR for sure. Yep. So, you know, and that, that's great for companies to scale organizations. You bring in cheap resources, you beat the crap out of them, you scale them, you know, outbound and then they go, you know, enterprise and all the way through.

But I've always felt like it hasn't really been a great model from a customer standpoint, right? Nobody likes to be handed off five times before they talk to somebody who, so I believe we're going back to full cycle sales with customer service actually being a component of that. But where are you seeing things right now and what COVID did to this, to shake things up? And where do you see things moving towards, say in the next three to five years here from a sales model standpoint? Yeah, yeah, there's a lot there, John. So I would say, first off, you know, Aaron Ross is a good buddy to us, right? Like he's, he's just like, he had so much success there and his work like really brought to the industry 20 years ago, the concept of like specialization by stage of, of the cycle, which is great.

I think one, one thing to like even pre COVID, my perspective on your question is these models are not right for every context, right? And I think that's what we suffer from in the industry is what I call the inappropriate copy and paste, right? And, and, and that, that happens in many dimensions. Like we're talking about demand gen strategy, whether to use SDRs or not, but that also happens in terms of the rep you hire. Like, I mean, I've, I've seen so many reps who are the top rep at this company and then join this company, the new company, and they're the worst rep. Well, it's because there's no universal answer to the right rep for that job. Like it depends on who you're selling to and what you're selling and what stage you're at and what stage the category is at and all these things.

Are you an evangelist? Are you, are you an activity player in a mature market? Right. It, it also happens a lot in compensation design. Like most compensation designs are, uh, the CEO basically like, Hey, Mrs. VP of sales, why don't you design the compensation plan? And the VP of sales just takes it, the comp plan from our last company. Right. Like that's so wrong. It's like, Hey, Hey, Mrs. CEO, like, guess what? What's your big strategy for this year for the company? Right. And can that be reinforced through the sales comp plan? Bingo. Light bulbs go off, right? That now we're talking about avoiding the inappropriate copy and paste. So that's, that's what I see here. John is like, um, yeah, like SDRs are cool, but like, let's not start there nor assume that's what we're going to do.

In fact, like you can't start there. Like I, and you know, I do a lot of my work. I start out when the company is around a million or two in revenue and I'm like, don't do SDRs. Right. Don't do SDRs because once you give them to the reps, there's no going back. Right. You can't take SDRs away. Right. It's just like, and, and, and his founders are like blown away because they've read all the books and they've seen all the successful models and everyone's using SDRs. I'm like, no, don't start there. Let's start with like three full cycle salespeople and let's run that for six or eight months. Right. And let's establish the benchmark of like, of the funnel. Let's establish like how many connects do they get?

How many opportunities per week do they create? What's the close rate per opportunities? Given the fact that they're spending 40% of their time prospecting and, you know, half their time prospecting half their time. And then once that's cooking eight months later, let's introduce an SDR. Yeah. Right. And then let's tell the reps, like, listen, this is an experiment. Like, I'm not going to add an SDR and your quota stays the same. Like, why does that make sense? Right. It's like, if we're going to add an SDR and add costs, like we need to, you know, we'll do the math on this, but it's usually like a 25% lifting quota. Yeah. So if you, if you all pull it off, 27% lift 30%, great. No more cold calling for you.

Right. But if you don't like, this is a full cycle wrap. So that's my, I guess what should have been a short answer, but it's like, no, it's not, it's not a fit for everyone. And we can, we can talk about growth and not PLG and that kind of stuff, but that, that would be my first point. And, and that's what I'm, I've always worried about. And I've always wondered, especially in the tech SaaS space is, is such the me. And look, I've been the benefactor of that in so many ways, you know, I trained Salesforce. So now every other SaaS company is like, you train Salesforce coming. I'm like, do you really need this training? I'm like, you know, let's, let's pump the brakes here. I'm not sure that you're ready for this training.

You don't have the infrastructure. You can't track it. You can't do these. No, no, no, no, no. We just, we just got to go. And so I guess the question is, is like, whose fault is that? Are we still, are the, are there, are the vast majority of VCs out there still pushing hyper growth revenue over everything? And screw profitability because we're just trying to get as many people as possible here? Or is it just the, I don't want to say the lazy factor of founders, but to say, oh, let's just, you know, everybody says, oh, replicate success. Don't invent yourself. But there, there's, I think there needs to be a little bit of the, hey, let's take a fresh perspective on this and let's not do what we used to, what everybody else has done, kind of blue ocean type of shit.

So where is the disconnect? I mean, I think it's both. I think it's both the, the founder slash management team and it's the investor slash board. And I don't like, I don't know if it's like a blame game. It's kind of like if you and I being go to market, people tried to like help people on engineering, like what would we do? I don't know. Like, I think, I think like Google's good at engineering, copy what they do. Like, I think that's kind of intuitive, right? It takes a depth of experience that you and I have been blessed with in our, to understand what we're talking about here. So, so maybe the, the takeaway is like, you know, just don't assume that's the case. You know what I mean? Like go, go like seek out, like, you know, certainly like go talk to like some go-to-market companies that you look up to, but certainly have a pretty significant lens of like what's unique about their context versus yours.

And is the best practice that you're seeing applicable, but it certainly happens at all levels. And I don't, I, you know, venture capital has been, I've, I know amazing bases. I have a lot of great friends of VCs. They're the, some of the smartest people in the world, but I, I do agree with you that in this case, they're not helping the situation. Um, they, they had maybe had like a successful investment a decade ago. They were, they really studied how that worked and they just say, do that. Yeah. And, and like, that's, that's not good. That's not good. Cause it doesn't always apply. And that's where I'm like, I just think, you know, I've been preaching this for a while that agility now is the kind of the, the, the, the new competitive advantage, right.

And the ability to reinvent, try new things, whatever. And it's almost like what got us here. Isn't going to, what isn't going to be what gets us there. Uh, especially with this kind of awakening of, of the COVID scenario of accelerating a lot of things that were on their way, right? Like artificial intelligence, remotes, all these different things were kind of chugging along, but COVID overnight turned it say, Oh, you can now, you know, send, sell a multimillion dollar deal without having to meet somebody in person. Everyone's saying everyone's like both on the buyer and the seller side. I've talked to so many enterprise reps who are like, you know what? I'm going to think twice about like that flight to London that, that clogs up three of my days just to like, make sure that this contract gets over the line and the relationship.

Like, yeah, maybe I'll lose some of those here and there, but like that three days of other work I could have been doing. And I think the buyers too are like, well, I don't know. I don't know if we need to fly in our leadership team from Hong Kong and London and Paris and San Francisco to this one room to talk to this vendor where we could just jump on a zoom this afternoon. Yeah. You know what I mean? So it's like, it's, it's cool. It's cool. The, the, the monstrosity of changes that are going to come out of this is, I don't even know what they are. I love it. I mean, I couldn't be happier. I literally like for me, I was, you know, I was, I was, I was already living this thing, dude. I was already living this life, doing all my calls from my backyard.

The only, the only thing I don't like about it now is I, like, I have to put a shirt on. I can't be in my bathing suit anymore because they expected me on video. You know what I mean? Like, I love it. So, so let's talk about kind of, so the model, I agreed, like it's not for everybody, but you got to kind of take a look at your own situation. And, and I love the, you know, kind of starting with quality and then quantity, you know, once you prove out those, your own conversion ratios, maybe using some baseline metrics from industry standards, as far as what those conversion metrics should look like from full cycle sales and stuff. But where are you seeing the money going right now on, on the VC side of the house with this product led?

Cause I, I'm hearing a lot of, Hey, uh, almost all the money is going towards product led, the slacks, the tableaus, the, those type of scenarios. And, and so it's almost like, if you look at society wise, there's, you know, the haves and the have nots or, you know, upper and middle class is kind of going away. Right. Cause you either have huge, you know, people who are uber rich or everybody else. It's almost like I'm seeing the same thing in, in product or in company launches, you're either going huge with a massive enterprise complex, whatever it is, and it's going to be a different model or the money's going straight towards like, let's cut out the middleman here. Let's get it straight in the hands of the consumer, see what happens and hopefully it goes viral and then push it upstream.

So where's the money going? No, dude, I love this stuff, man. Like the product led growth stuff I'm so bullish on. And I'm going to tell you all like what, how I've been studying this. And then I'll tell you like what I'm seeing and this is something that I got to do a lot more writing about this summer. And these conversations are great. Cause like, I just, I learned while we talk it through, but I'm, I'm very bullish, like in the same way that SAS was the disruptive is the disruptive business model in the public markets today. I think PLG could be that 10 years from now. Okay. And, and, you know, believe me, like if you can try to remember back to Oh five, there was tremendous skepticism of SAS in the public markets.

It's like, everyone's like, there's no way these CTOs and CIOs are going to put their data out in the cloud. Like, and then today I look at snowflake and all these amazing companies and it's like dominant, right? I think that's what PLG, the potential has. So I'm leaning in very hard. So what, what's my exposure to product-led growth and growth in general? It, it started deeply at HubSpot actually, when in 2013, Halligan and Dharmesh were like, yeah, we don't want to just be a marketing software company anymore. We want to be a full go-to-market software company starting with a CRM. And so Roberge, you team up with this brilliant product leader, Christopher O'Donnell, and you guys figure this out and, and figure out how to bring us into the CRM market.

And by the way, don't do it in the same way we did it with HubSpot, where we did content marketing, generating MQLs for an inside team. Um, like I want, I want you to do it like Dropbox ask or what we'd call today Slack ask or, or Atlassian ask. So the first thing I did was I flew out to San Francisco and looked up my buddy, uh, Brian Balfour, um, who is like an, a brilliant growth, um, thought leader. Um, and, uh, I had, I remember I was sitting in like, uh, the St. Regis or something and had a cocktail with him. He's like, so what's up? I'm like, I want you to move back to Boston and like run growth for us on the new CRM. And he's just laughed. I'm like, what is so funny? He's like, dude, you know how many times I have this conversation?

Like I'm an entrepreneur, like I'm not going to join, uh, you know, an $80 million business. It never worked out. And like, he was, he had so many fans that are at our company from, from Dharmesh and a lot of the product people. And, and sometimes I learned a little bit about sales through the days so I can be convincing where need be. And, um, yeah, he moved with his wife. Um, and we, we got to work with him for three years and I learned so much about growth and, and that, you know, Halligan tells me that that worked out like that. That is a big contributing factor to, um, where the stock price is and the growth of the company is. We, we, we really turn the go-to-market machine on its head in terms of PQLs and PLG.

And, you know, we, the big, one of the big momentous shifts that I think applies here that is, is, is, it's about adopt before buy, not buy before adopt. Right. So like that, that's an important framework where, um, what does that mean? Like in typical sales, we go through, get prospect, do discovery, find out needs, tailor pitch to those needs to convince them that we can solve them. They sign contract, give us money. We onboard them. Then they hopefully see value. Okay. That's buy before adopt, but PLG is adopt before buy. Right. So I had to convince my skunk work sales team initially on that effort where they were, they had come from the marketing software. So they, they, they were used to, uh, we'd, we'd get these people into the CRM and, and then they'd call them up and they'd start doing discovery and then try to like tailor the pitch and then some, and I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Don't do that. You're going to ruin the motion, do the discovery and then show like literally whatever they're trying to do, set it up and do it. Don't talk about money. Just like, like if they want to run a dashboard on something, set it up with them. And then let's set a meeting for a week from now. And then like, once they've adopted it, then we'll start pitching it. So that, that was like an important thing. So the other piece, John, in there is, um, so then, you know, I kept studying, kept studying it and I know the Atlassian folks. Well, I know the Dropbox folks. Well, I know the Slack folks. Well, and I like really close to that. And then I started this class at Harvard this year called decoding growth in Silicon Valley, which was supposed to be a field trip class, but obviously we're not doing field trips in COVID.

So I ran it as a Thursday night class for the first time this year. And I was very fortunate to get the head of growth at Pinterest, at LinkedIn, at Lyft, at Facebook and at Shopify to come in as guests. And we also did Tesla and Disney and, uh, Adidas and, um, and the NBA just to study some things outside of consumer tech. Yeah. And that was just so cool. Like every night we would just meet these people and like talk to them about growth. And I learned a lot about the best practice in there that we can, that we can dive into. But it was funny that like all the best companies put their growth team in the product org and the companies that weren't satisfied with their growth efforts had growth in the marketing org.

That was really interesting. Um, and one of the things like we can, like, I've never said this publicly before. And, and one of the, like the, the interesting, like ideas or visions that I had from this, cause these growth teams that are done well at Pinterest and Facebook, they, they have basically, there's a, there's a product manager, full stack engineers, designers, data scientists, and marketers. That's kind of the team. Right. And I was trying to experiment with like, how does this apply to B2B? And I think what it is, is like, it has to be a cross-functional team. And we don't see this in these B2B orgs. I don't, I don't, I haven't really seen this, but he needs to be a cross-functional team that maybe sits in product.

Honestly, I think it does. Interesting. And it has a PM that kind of runs it. And there's full stack engineers, designers, data scientists, salespeople, marketers, and CSMs. It's a, it's not like a 50 person team. We're talking like maybe two, one or two of each. So it might be like a 10 person team. And, and you might even start with a five person team where you have people that play multiple roles. Maybe there's someone who's a designer and an engineer and they're the same. Right. And, and that's never been done before, but I think that's where the optimal outcome occurs. All right, everybody. I hope you're enjoying this conversation. I agree that there needs to be a level of understanding that one size doesn't fit all.

We can't just go around saying things like do what Nike did or grow like Oracle grew. That's not helpful at all. Here's what's popping at JB sales coming up. Send me your stories of sales wins or losses, lessons learned, funny happenings on call. This is all valuable stuff. These are fun stories for you to tell us that could be featured on next week's episode of Make It Happen Mondays. But today we're giving a big shout out to Bo Hux, an account executive from Datadog. Bo got the cold brush off from a prospect, but called him back the next day and used a JB sales cold call opener to earn the right to keep talking. He was able to deliver the elevator pitch and then transition into discovery with ease.

Now that same prospect that barked at him is pumped to learn more on their next call. Great job, Bo. Keep polishing off your approach, my man. We see you. Opening a cold call can be challenging, but transitioning into value can be even more challenging. Learn how today at ondemand.jbarrows.com and gain the additional skills you need to be a sales professional instead of just the sales rep. Let's give it back to Mark and JB to finish off this brilliant conversation. So because this is right in line with what I'm thinking, because I personally think that like the SDR and the BDR role, right, that that is just should and is flowing right under marketing as opposed to sales. Right. Because with all the tools and technology, they're going to be more about leveraging technologies to make impressions to help ABM that then drives full cycle sales.

But I think the full cycle sales rep is going to have to actually move more towards customer success. I mean, I'm seeing so much customer success now. Right. We actually created a whole new customer success program because we are seeing so many of them being put into our sessions to say, oh, we have to now get them to sell. And they hate it. Right. I mean, they hate the word sales. It's fundamentally the same job if you do it right. But is that where kind of. I mean, again, this is one area where I wish I was crisp on it because it's but it's cool because we're riffing, we're brainstorming, we're learning. But it's like, I definitely agree with you. I definitely think that the blurring of CSM and sales is happening.

I like I love it when I see founders go out there and they've got their two engineers and their designer and themselves and they're doing founder selling and then they have to start. They have to build the go to market team. I love it when they hire a CSM first. Yeah. That's so cool. Right. Like that. I think that's better, especially if the founder can actually sell a little bit. Right. And and you're absolutely right. At scale, these PLG motions, people are like finding this thing. They're coming into the product. They're adopting the product without talking to anyone. And the go to market function is really just trying to like address leakages. It's like, oh, shit, like this person came in and activated, but they never set up the dashboard.

So let's call them and find out why and get them to set up the dashboard. Not sign a contract, just move them through the motion with like what they call human the loop today. Right. So so that's what it looks like at scale. But I think what I'm getting at, too, in the initial part is like if you're introducing PLG growth, either as a new company, seed funded or within a large organization, what these people, I say, put it in product. And what is what this is essentially done at the best growth companies is traditionally we were functionally organized. We had sales, we had marketing, we had finance, we had R&D, product and engineering and R&D on the roadmap and sales on the growth, the revenue growth.

And so what was happening was optimizations to the product that were would optimize the funnel were competing with the roadmap and you couldn't get the engineers minds here. And that's what these teams have done is they've separated growth from the R&D. So R&D, you still own the roadmap, but here's this growth team and you own the funnel and guess what? There's engineers on it. And all those engineers work on is how to grow the funnel. And that's why if you put them with the sales team, it's not that the engineers are subservient to the sales people. The sales people and the CSMs are just a data point. But those engineers and product managers don't care about the roadmap. Don't worry about the roadmap.

You are in charge of accelerating the funnel. And that hasn't really been done in B2B where they've dedicated, not often, like maybe in the worlds of Slack and other places, and definitely Dropbox. That's the difference is if you're committing product and engineering resources away from the roadmap and just to improving the funnel. But where's the feedback loop then? So, because doesn't your roadmap dictate by client feedback so you can make adjustments? Yeah, there's a really interesting question of like, what's the blurred line? Because clearly to build like a new product that's going to take nine months is in the roadmap. Okay. And clearly tweaking, adding like an activation notification in the product to hopefully increase activation is a growth enhancement.

Right. But like, how do you differentiate? There's some, there's a lot of blurriness there. So, I don't know. I haven't thought about enough about that one. Like, if you talk to Belfour and Sean Ellis, who also came into class, they will say like, there's this whole thing about like, you maintain this experiment log of what you've done and what you want to do. It's all, you know, and that's almost like your roadmap for growth. And they do want you to have like some quick wins that will take like a week and it works. And they want you to have some bigger bets, right? And, but you are right. There is this gray area of like, of those bigger bets. Does that belong in growth or does that belong in roadmap?

I'll have to think a little bit about that one. Well, and it also is kind of interesting, like for me, I always wonder, you know, lead versus follow, right? Do you, do you do what the market tells you based on feedback and where things are going in the trends? Or do you break out like the whole, but you know, but let's go back to the quote from Henry Ford, right? If I, if I did what the market wanted, I would have built faster horses, right? So where's the, where's the innovation of, I'd like, look, there's design thinking, right? Where we kind of understand how people move and then we build products around that and we get their feedback. But then there's the visionaries that say, Elon Musk, I'm going to fucking Mars, whether you like it or not, I don't give a shit.

This is a really important question. I wanted to almost interrupt you to make sure we got to this because it's like the way I might like categorize it is, okay, fine. I'm a salesperson in this company, or I'm a sales leader in this company, or I'm a founder listening to this right now. Like, does this mean I should drop everything and pursue PLG like Mark and John are talking about? And no, no, like I, and I have been doing a lot of thinking. This also gets back to where we started the inappropriate copy and paste, right? Same thing. Should I have SDRs? Maybe, right? So we have to think it through. So, so here's my thinking on if PLG should apply. First off, if it is, if a PLG model is possible in your category, meaning you're in a particular sector and, and, and you could, you could imagine that someone could start a company PLG oriented and it will work.

You got to do it then because they're going to disrupt you. So that's the first thing is like the urgency of it is I do think you will, if you're operating in a category that can run PLG, if you don't do it, you will get disrupted. Okay. Now that begs the question of like, well, how do I know if my category can do PLG? Okay. There's two, two bullets I'll have there. The first one is, is it an evangelistic category? Like, can, can, can you, can you explain the value prop in a, in a eight word or less Instagram ad? Or is it something that you need to like talk to someone for five minutes for them to get it? If it's the former PLG is possible. If it's the latter, not like PLG is not going to work.

You can't evangelize through PLG maybe over time in five years when the category matures, but like you can't. The second thing is, it's really applicable if, uh, your, your product and value prop has low time and effort to retainable value. Now I've been working on those words. Okay. That's the low time and effort to retainable value. It says a lot in the smaller. Okay. So low time. Okay. Meaning how long between I click install. And when I see value drop box, awesome. I hit install. My whole thing's backed up. Nope. Right. Workday. Not good. No install. And then all my benefits work. Right. Like you can't do work day. Okay. So that's low time effort. Right. How much time do I have to put in again?

Dropbox one minute backed up work day frigging six months of like a thousand hours of professional services time. Okay. Right. And then retainable value. Okay. So maybe if we look at HubSpot, if you remember that website greater, uh, site we created, where you put in your URL and within 30 seconds, it spits out your SEO report. Yeah. Awesome value. Low time and effort. This is great. It crawls my website and it displays the $10,000, uh, uh, engagements that SEO consultants were doing. This is awesome. It's not retainable. Right. Once I do it, it's like, I got the information. I'm not going to go back to it every day and keep running it. Right. But, but Dropbox backing yourself up Slack, um, doc, you know, doc, you signed to some degree, you know, that you want to sign stuff, um, Atlassian with like some of their tools.

Right. So that, that's what I would say is look at it through those two lenses. And if you're feeling good about it, then you have to at least try it. You got to at least try it. Cause you're going to get disrupted. And if you dig in and you find out it doesn't work, then that's fine. That's great. That's good to know that PLG is hard in your industry and you can be less paranoid about competitors. And what you end up with is a really easy to use product. Right. Cause you just spent like six months. Shit. I could, I couldn't get the funnel to work, but what we ended up with is this really easy to use product, which is awesome. You know, that, that aligns with my, one of my guiding principles, which is, you know, when you're making decisions, always ask yourself like, what's the worst case scenario?

Right. And if you're cool with the worst case scenario, go ahead and do it. If you're not cool, then do something different. And that is a perfect worst case scenario. Worst case scenario. You just developed a kick-ass, easy to use product and it didn't go viral, whatever, but, but you're on your way to building a sustainable business that you can scale and you've modeled out now and all that other stuff. Yeah. And I want to add just one more important point, John, which is the, you can't put this off for two years as like an early company because the longer you put it off, it's, it's almost impossible to do. Can you think, yeah, you can't like, if you're like a million dollar company right now and you're like, oh yeah, I'm interested in PLG, but let's just scale the 10 million.

And then we'll think about if we do PLG at that point, you're, you're, you have like made it a thousand times harder. Okay. And, and, and like the reason is it's hard enough to get PLG to work with a clean slate. Yeah. Right. Where it's just like, okay, I'm going to put, where's my line on the pricing and like, what's the free and what's, what's paid and what's that kind of stuff. When you're trying to do that without cannibalizing a $20 million revenue stream, it's almost impossible. I'm telling you, I'm going through that right now. Like literally with JB sales, I'm going through that right now. We developed a nice professional services wing, you know, or doing, you know, 3 million give or take.

And then we created this on demand platform. We have this online that was works with, you know, existing corporate clients and stuff like that, but we have this on demand and thankfully, you know, I've been able to continue to generate revenue and have somebody else manage that entire side of the house for me. So we've almost had a clean slate with like a nice soft engine plus, you know, with a brand that kind of helps bolster it. But I mean, figuring this out and reverse engine, it is a completely different mindset of the B2C and growth of phase of product led versus professional services going after corporate. So I'm actually feeling, I don't want to say a little bit of that pain right now, but I'm definitely seeing the challenges.

Just be aware of it. And it's like, if you're trying to go through this, you're in your business and you're finding yourself, well, that makes sense, but there's no way we could put that feature in the free product. Right. Because it will cannibalize our existing product. Then you're screwed. Well, because like your competitor is going to do it. You almost have to cannibalize yourself. And I'll tell you how to do it. It's very tricky. And we're doing this with some of our portfolio companies that are at scale is what you have to do is find a safe sandbox to run the learning in that doesn't cannibalize your core business. And then once you're confident in the learning, you cannibalize yourself.

Okay. So that's what we did at Hubswell, right? Our safe sandbox was the CRM. And once we figured that out, that go-to-market motion took over the marketing software product. But that was a three-year journey while we were public. You know what I mean? I was going to say that. And like that's tricky to navigate. So that's what you have to do. Like we have a company right now that's doing amazing enterprise, but they want to go to PLG. So it's like, great, like do PLG and S&B because no one's selling there. It's not going to mess anything up. And like what you learn in terms of an individual person downloading using your software, that individual looks, whether they're in a 50-person company or a 50,000-person company, it's the same experience.

So let's just learn here. Love it. And then once we got it, then we'll disrupt the enterprise business. Yeah, and I wish more companies would take that approach, again, agility and cannibalizing yourself. I mean, we've had plenty of discussions here about like stuff that we're releasing and those type of things. I'm like, well, shit, that's a core tenant of our, like what people spend thousands of dollars for us from a training. But I'm like, you know what? Fuck it. Let's get it out there because if we don't get it out there, somebody else is. And that's where you have to kind of look at that thought leader brand perspective too. That's why I think the brand is so important because if you get out there and your brand can protect you against a lot of those cannibalizations.

Because at least in my experience, the market, once your brand is authentic and it's confirmed by a majority of people out there, you can start to play around with some things and shift stuff around. And that's, I think, the luxury that we have right now. We've built a brand on quality and those type of things. And so we're just like, all right, fuck it. You know, have that, have that, have that. And the cool thing is it forces us to innovate. It forces us to evolve and it forces us to get better. And I, and I just think that mentality right now is, is the ones who are going to succeed are going to have that mentality moving forward. And the ones who are going and doing what everybody else is doing just because they've done it before are going to be the ones that fail hard.

There's a huge why now on that with the pace of change and how you're right. The, the agility, the disruption, it's critical. Yeah. Awesome. Last question. Um, if you're a rep right now, uh, what should you be paying attention to? Like if you're, if you're building your career, you just come in as an SDR to an organization. You don't really understand product led. Like what, what should you be, forget about like what your track is going to be and all that shit. That's your choice, right? What should you be paying attention to right now? If you think sales is your career? Sure. I would, I, and this applies to a lot of different roles. It's just like, uh, perhaps pay a little less attention to the company and a lot of attention to the category in which you're operating.

Okay. Okay. And, and how bullish you are on the category. Um, for example, like let's say artificial intelligence or even like something like cannabis or something like, um, like even the PLG motion. It's like, let's just say artificial intelligence. Like fine. If you're bullish on that category, which I would be, um, like go pick an interesting backed, whatever you think is the best one, whatever you can get into artificial intelligence company. Guess what? If you're wrong about the company, but you're right about the category and artificial intelligence blows up in a good way. And your company goes bankrupt, your marketability is huge. Like no one has experience in artificial intelligence and you're sitting here with experience.

It's like, you're going to double your salary and be such a hot commodity. So there's just something to think about is like really do a lot of thinking about how bullish you are about the category that you are in. Cause even if you pick the wrong company, it will, it'll really like propel your career. Well, it's just like, I mean, let's do the cannabis and like you brought it up and also like Bitcoin and crypto and those kinds of things. It's like, I'm bullish on it. I, I, I'm bullish. I see that future. I'm, I'm making a whole bunch of mistakes right now, blowing a bunch of cash, especially today, since Bitcoin's down to $35,000. I'm bullish on blockchain technology. I have zero investments in crypto or even in blockchain.

Like, it's just like, I'm bullish on it. I just don't know about it. If I would definitely like, if there was like this fund that invests in 50 different companies, I would do that. Sure. But like, um, but yeah, I'm bullish on that. I'm bullish on that category. And I think it goes back to just, you know, what I always say is you got to be passionate about what you do. Right. And so if you, if you're bullish on it, because you're passionate about it, you're going to end up being successful in that, in that field. If you really, really genuinely think that it's interesting and, and you want to learn about it. Right. Otherwise you're just going through the motions like everybody else. So for sure.

Awesome. Well, Mark, look, uh, we could keep talking. I appreciate you telling coming on here. I could talk to you for more than a few hours. I think we've got to grab a beer one of these days. Like I said, you're going to come to my Halloween party coming up in October. Oh, I can't wait. I love Halloween. I've, I've tons of costumes. I have the Chewbacca costume, the Spider-Man costume. So I like, whatever your theme is, I'm going to lean in hard. Perfect. So, uh, I know you have, uh, you got a book is the new book or is it the, the model that it's coming out? Like I haven't really, like the way I write a book is like this. I talk about things and then things come to, so yeah, I have a 40 page ebook on the science of scaling that's on the stage two website, if you want to check it out.

And that's like allowing you to avoid the cop inappropriate copy and paste and understand specifically when you're ready to scale sales and how fast it goes. It's like a data scientific approach and I'll write that up in the next year and publish it. Um, but yeah, you can check out that work and give me feedback. Yeah, that's awesome. And you're all over LinkedIn. So just for everybody who doesn't know it's Mark Roberge and it's R O B E R G E. Look him up on LinkedIn, follow all his cool shit. He's put some really interesting, I actually just listened to a couple of podcasts you had and, uh, before coming on this and just, you know, I really recommend people taking a deeper dive into some of the stuff you're doing over there.

Cause I just, I'm, I'm astounded with the cool shit that you're working on right now. Thanks man. Thanks man. It's always fun to catch up. Likewise. And, uh, look everybody, hopefully you enjoyed the conversation. Got you to think a little bit differently, right? Uh, start paying attention to your own career and some of the markets that you might want to be into, but know that change is coming. And if you're not ready for it, you're screwed. So thanks y'all for listening. Like I always say at the end of my podcast, go out there and make somebody smile today. Cause even if you had a shitty day, you made somebody smile, you know, you had a good day in the world needs a lot more of that these days.

So thank you all for listening and I'll talk to you again. All right, everybody, this has been a great conversation. Is it right to follow what works and learn that pattern of success and then repeat it? Or should we be more visionary and step outside the box? Well, from a sales perspective, I suppose the complexity level is what really needs to be focused on there. Hiring SDRs to start just because Salesforce does it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to work for your five person company or the products or service that you sell. Low time and low effort lenses. Try new things. Be ready to fail. This is all gold from people that are in growth day to day, getting their hands dirty. Prepare for the worst case scenario and learn how to lose to win.

Man, have you ever looked at things through lenses like this? Very helpful conversation. We appreciate Mark coming out to the show and talking with John. Before we sign off today, I want to give a shout out to the frontline reps, making companies productive and profitable every day by making those cold calls, sending those emails, running those campaigns and seeing those results. You are the reason that we do what we do. Our aim is to better prepare you for winning conversations that close more deals and set meaningful meetings. That's the name of the game and JBSales is here to help. So join us and become a member today to learn how to sell better than yesterday at ondemand.jbarrows.com and follow us on Instagram for daily tips and techniques and tactics at JBSalesTraining, all one word.

We'll see you there. Be sure and check out our weekly sales webinars that happen every single week. These are live webinars with great value for you. And they will immediately impact your pipeline. Register for them all at jbarrows.com in the blog and events section. And we'll see you next week when we bring you another guest to help you sell better. Get out there and make it happen. Thank you.