Anthony Kennada, founding CMO of Gainsight, explains why focusing on serving a specific persona enabled Gainsight to grow before achieving traditional product-market fit.
Opinion
Companies should allocate incremental 2023 budgets to sales reps over marketing
“This year is all about growth, and if you can, if you have sales, you know, the sort of, like, dollar in, dollar out type of at least aspiration for a sales team of saying, okay, if I hire one more rep, get them productive, we can then kind of achieve the grow…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Building owned audiences will become existential for B2B marketers
“Fundamentally in a world where first party data is the most important currency for marketers, it's actually going to become existential for us to figure out how do we build that direct relationship.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Customer success was not an accepted profession when Gainsight launched
“Customer success managers didn't have a platform of choice, they didn't have, they weren't empowered to actually make a lot of purchasing decisions at the time, and just that name, customer success, there was like,
Handful of them at Salesforce, But it wasn't…”
Insight
Thought leadership without product marketing effectively makes you a media company
“If that doesn't translate to the product value, then it's all for, then you are a media company, frankly. Like, you're not a software business at the end of the day, so I think it's important to kind of have product marketing then convert all of that.”
Disclosure
AudiencePlus spent $0 on paid marketing and $50k total pre-product
“We've been in market for about six months, not with a product, but just kind of building our audience, and we've spent zero dollars on paid, we've spent probably, outside of the salary of one marketer, you know, 50,000 dollars total, like something along those…”