Mehul Patel - Prosimo

Mehul Patel, Head of Marketing and Customer Insights at Prosimo, discusses the innovative go-to-market approach at Prosimo. He emphasizes the importance of understanding buyers and their purchasing behavior, and tailoring the go-to-market strategy accordingly. Patel also mentions the significance of data visualization and tracking success through key performance indicators (KPIs). He advises startups to have a clear story and let the data support it. Additionally, Patel highlights the importance of internal marketing and getting everyone in the company to think like marketers.

Transcript

INTRO:

The Demand Generation Club Podcast is back, and we're turning up the heat with season three. Get ready for insightful conversation with experts from Splash, TrustCloud, WorkRamp, UserGems, and more as we dive deep into B2B marketing approaches that are making an impact in 2024. This podcast is brought to you by SaaSMQL, the SaaS growth agency that helps B2B software companies land seven-figure deals with highly targeted multichannel campaigns. Since 2018, SaaSMQL has helped over 100 SaaS companies generate millions of dollars in sales pipeline and recurring revenue. To learn more, go to saasmql.com.

Franco Caporale:

Hello and welcome everyone. I'm here with Mehul Patel, who is Head of Marketing and Customer Insights at Prosimo. Hi, Mehul. Welcome to Demand Generation Club.

Mehul Patel:

Hey, Franco. Thanks for having me on.

Franco Caporale:

I want to ask you right away about your background, and tell us more about your career trajectory and how did you end up working at Prosimo?

Mehul Patel:

Yeah. So yeah, I started my career as an engineer back in London doing second and third-line support, and then from there moved on to doing a business analyst role and then investment banking for a couple of years, and then from there, I actually came back to the company that I was second-line engineer and did a product management, and for about 15 years did about product management. Company I was working for acquired Cisco. Product management again. Had my own startup in cyber security. And then probably about five years ago I kind of moved into the marketing team. Initially as product marketing. So really not too away from the engineering and the product side and then into kind of marketing at Prosimo from that perspective. So security infrastructure and cloud networking has typically been my background in terms of the B2B aspects.

Franco Caporale:

You're obviously very data oriented, even your title says it very, very clearly. Before we jump into the main topic of the episode, do you have favorite tech stack that you cannot work without? What is some of the tools that you use?

Mehul Patel:

Yeah, so it's funny. I mean we're fortunate enough, at least in Prosimo, our CEO is very data driven as well, so he understands the need of just looking at things and analyzing. And as is my team all around. So I think typically we've started BigQuery, we have Tableau in-house and we've kind of moved to using actually going full data studio aspects of those things. I think just having the ability to want a data warehouse that can just bring some of these data aspects together and then setting up the visualization, probably a thing. So whatever tools there, I mean if you're tinkering away, you can typically find things, but the best thing can work at Google Sheets. And then once you can do automation, then you bring up the stack.

Franco Caporale:

Yeah, visualizing the data makes this a crucial aspect of what you do, I'm sure. And so I want to jump straight into the main topic, which is this innovative go-to-market approach that you have Prosimo. So tell us a little more, you said something that really, really stuck with me, which is you cannot sell an advanced innovative product the old way. You have to be innovative even with your go-to-market strategy. So tell us more, how do you approach your go-to-market at Prosimo?

Mehul Patel:

I think, like I said, in one of the conversations that I had when I first joined was with Ramesh and I was like, I just don't like marketing. And he's like, great, why don't you like it? And it's just... I go, it's full of fluff, right? It's just kind of trying to figure out the 2000-foot view and trying to get to the meet. If you want to win in the game, you can either win with what everybody else is doing and follow that rule book or you start creating your own play field. And so I take that to very heart and I said, look, if you've got innovative products or innovative technology, everything around you needs to be questioned. And what I mean is that some things work well in certain environments and other things just doesn't make sense. So why would you follow the same category?

So that's what I mean, if you know your buyers, if you know how they assess product. If you look at psychologically how old they are and then the sex and everything like that, then you can sort of determine how do they buy things today and why would you force them to buy your product a way that isn't normal to them? So that's kind of where you have to look at how your buyers are buying stuff, how they assess stuff, who they are impacted by. All those things. And then sort of work up from that perspective, how do you fit into that groove? Because trying to change human behavior is not something a small startup or a big company can do unless it's years of, So why would you try and fight against that curve?

Franco Caporale:

So what are the signals that you try to identify very early in order to build this strategy? Because obviously you need a lot of data to be able to reverse engineer this journey.

Mehul Patel:

I think really honestly, it starts with, and I think a lot of founders do this, a lot of early startups do this as well. Is unfortunately there's no substitute for hard work. You just have to have people going through each process manually having on the conversations, trying to listen in on calls, trying to get feedback. And then I think the biggest thing I'd say is have a thesis. So capture some data, go back, make some changes, come back, assess the data. It's very hard to do because you're trying to obviously build the company, you're trying to build the market. But if you have the discipline and the time that you look at it this way, then you'll start building out the steps and then you do it. Some people may say it's, well, you're a startup, so you have to be scrappy, so you have to be scrappy.

But ultimately if you think about, okay, in two years when we are successful, we want to figure out what makes us successful or are we going to try and capture and say, if we do more of X, then we should see some return from that perspective. So that's kind of how you start. You have one conversation, me and I have. I have another conversation with a similar person. I have a fourth conversation and then I say, okay, is there something about the person I'm speaking to? Is there something about how it gets them excited? And then learn from there. And then as you build out a data set, typically you'll start off in an Excel or a Google sheet, and then as the Excel sheet starts getting crazy, you'll start reassessing it and from that perspective and then you start building on top. I don't think it's just like, yeah, here's a playbook.

Franco Caporale:

What tells you that the bottom-up approach is the right strategy? Because many companies today go like the top-down approach. Let's go straight to the decision-maker, let's go straight to the C-level to sell them.

Mehul Patel:

So here's the thing, and I think it's a combination of both, in the early days. I don't think you can live with one without the other. In a large... Your ICP determines kind who the buyers are. If it's large organizations, you can't get away with, hey, I'm just going to go to the engineer and Franco cap, put his credit card down and we're going to get a two-million-dollar order. That isn't going to happen. But what we can do is through Franco, try and understand one or two small insertion points and try and map them to some business initiatives out the top team. And that's where the sales team, the enterprise sales team, comes into value. Because they understand Franco's boss's boss's boss is dealing with this big business initiative. But the other thing that the enterprise sales team can do is also understand how to help the VP transact.

I think a lot of startups and a lot of B2B enterprises do not understand the complexity around transacting with a small firm. Transacting with a Cisco and AWS, super easy deals are done and kind of happen, but when you have a hundred-person, a fifty person, and you want to transact, you need to go top down because you need to articulate business value. And so I think the combination is you start off with the business value, I think absolutely. And somehow over the course of your learnings, you've got to get to that, okay, what does it mean for Franco the engineer or that section that use your product every day? And so that's how you start to combine and say, okay, now we know what we say at the top. We kind of know the value that we can. If we show you Franco the product in XYZ, the likelihood is that he's going to be hooked on something.

And then what we are doing is over the course of you to go to market, you're trying to bridge that left-hand transport to the right-hand as smoothly as possible. I think that's where the deal speed, the size of the deal is one thing, but how quickly things can transact, the more alignment that has from top and bottom, the more likely you're going to get successful. If you look at a lot of traditional B2B, and even some startups today, they will start at one, either the top or a middle, and they'll hit a ceiling or a floor depending on kind of where you're coming top down or bottom. If you're coming top down, you'll get to the business value, maybe you'll get the transaction order done. But then when it comes to deployment, it's like six weeks, eight weeks, 10 weeks, and software's still staggering through.

The bottom-up only is like, well, you'll get to a certain level, maybe you'll get $10,000, $20,000, and that's it. Then you're trying to convince and say, okay, now we spent six months helping Franco and now we've got to spend another six months going to his boss. It's kind of that. So I think if you're selling to large fortune 100 companies, which we do, the quicker you can get to the bridge of what the value is. Hopefully the deal size and the velocity goes up,

Franco Caporale:

And to do this bottom-up approach, obviously you need a lot of volume of leads, contacts, users that go through your funnel. How do you fill the funnel?

Mehul Patel:

Yeah, actually I would argue that I don't think you need hundreds of thousands of leads. What I think need to do is be precision-led in terms of the people that are in your funnel that are likely to buy. Because I personally and I sort of concur that in our company, we don't want to talk to anybody that is just browsing to understand a high-level solution. Sure the content's there, you figure it out. What we want to have people in the database and we want to nurture them very particularly, is here's the value, here's how you move A to B. So I think yes, you're going to have... I mean if I take LinkedIn, that can be anybody's CRM. What you've got to get to is from LinkedIn to 300 people, 500 people that you know are going to do something. And I think that's where again, the top-down and bottom-up approach comes because both the sales team and product and the marketing team should be going after that company.

So the question becomes less about number of leads, but the number of companies. And then yes, within that company, how many people you go for is a company discretion. We choose 10 to 15 people at different titles. Sales team would typically focus on the top directors and above, and the market and the product team is geared to get the product adoption aspects. And then once those two roads meet, eventually the... The ideal conversation for any B2B company is I go to your boss's boss, and when the boss hears, oh, Prosimo does X, Y, and Z. You go to him and say, hey, I've been using Prosimo for two weeks, and look at this data, and the data that you send them has, oh, there's a logo of Prosimo. The boss is like, oh, these guys already reached out to me or I've had a dinner with X, Y and Z with them. When the best conversations happen in kind of our world. And that's hard to do from a marketing standpoint, it doesn't happen overnight.

Franco Caporale:

What are some of these signals that tells you, okay, this is now a hard lead or hard qualified account?

Mehul Patel:

So I think moving away from just downloads, I think it's trying to figure out, and this is the hard bit I think is time spent on what piece of content. And so I think the way that we've set it up, and kudos to Adarots for PMM for doing this, is have a funnel just like a sales funnel. It sells as S-one to S-five and one, and each one constitutes graduation. We have an M-one to an M-four. M-one is anybody, M-two is you've maybe downloaded some asset. M-three is you've taken a lab like actual dedicated 30, 40 minutes of engagement and you've seen the product in action in some way, shape or form. And then M-four is, hey, I'm signing up to the product and I'm able to do one or two things. And then the other one is obviously I'm going to go to the website, I've seen enough, I'm going to actually book a set meeting with the sales team.

And so those are the M-fours. And so what you've got to do is the content you push, the messaging that you push, the story that you tell, ideally it wants to fit in those four buckets. Or whatever the bucket makes sense from your marketing funnel. The key thing here is unfortunately, I think back in the day, you could get away with just marketing and doing all this stuff, but if you want to do a PLG, I think it's like, it involves the product team. The head of product, the director of PMM. It involves RSCs. They need to be part of that storytelling. It always involves the RSCs, right? They need to know what's been cooking underneath the cook covers. And then from that perspective, go down from an [inaudible 00:11:51]. Signals are time spent on site, and the more time you spent with a specific piece of content, the more likely you are that you know what we're saying and you're seeing the value of the product.

Franco Caporale:

And one other question I have for you is how do you track the success of this? How do you understand what is driving, what correlates to results and what are the KPI that you look at more closely?

Mehul Patel:

So I think the way that we look at them, it's really weird. Because we've just signed this... Six weeks ago we we're doing our first sort of QBR and a theme is each stage of the funnel, it's literally going to be, for example awareness. So we looked at LinkedIn, how many mentions do you have, how many comments do you have on a given post? And then from there, how many people visit the website, what part of the website is being visited, how much time there's been spent on it. So it's very meticulously sort of looked. And then obviously the assets are really easy. Because we... As a strategy for about the last eight weeks, what we've moved away is anytime we release a brand new piece of content like video content, it gets gated. After that, it just gets shared on social and YouTube so people can just consume that content.

We don't want to gate after the events happen. And so from that perspective, it's all about making sure that the content is one. So you've got access to it, but trying to measure how much time you're spending. And then after that, I mean once you sign up to a lab, we know you're going to spend 30 minutes, 90 minutes going through an instructional session. So we don't anticipate our labs to be like a hundred people. We anticipate 15, 20, and if there's a demand, we'll do another one. So it's very custom from our perspective.

So at each stage, you're measuring volume to a degree, but it's again time bound and then trying to figure that metric into them. And then you go back to the truth, which is how many meetings you've had with the account and then how many actual signups you've had and how many people using the product. And then you take the ones that have met that success criteria and then you go back and say, okay, well yeah, like 40% of the people that came in, they did this first. So clearly that's the hook that you want to amplify and spend money on in terms of station.

Franco Caporale:

That's awesome. I want to ask you one additional question. If you're starting from zero, like you are a startup, how long it takes you think to build this data infrastructure and this whole approach that you have at Prosimo?

Mehul Patel:

You know what it's based on? I think it's based on the number of customer conversations that you are privy to. If you're fortunate enough to have 10 decent customer conversations and three wins, the ratio is really high. You'll understand PANs very quick. And I say that, I mean it's always the what if, right? I would say in six months, great. But honestly, if you're data driven and you know this, the more data you have, the quicker you can build the infrastructure. If you have one meeting a month, don't bother wasting your time building the infrastructure, right. That's the hardest bit. And I think to do that as a marketing unit, as a product team, as even a sales team, just listen to customer conversation. Each time you have a customer conversation, if it's slow, let's say you're having two conversations a week, analyze them, you want to get more of those.

So if you analyze what you have, you'll get more. If you're having 10 or 15, you don't need to analyze a conversation, you need to look at the result. If you're having 30, well, don't look at the results. You know that you're having conversations. So you look at and say, well, what's driving people to the conversation? And from 30 conversations, how many of them are moving to the next step? So I think it's kind of based on volume coming in, and then based on that, you've got to try that.

But you should have a goal. You should say, okay, the ideal funnel I have for my product is X, Y, and Z. I think the other thing is you can get lost, and I kind of learned this in the banking data. It's like looking at raw data. You will never come up with a story. You have to have a story and your data should support that story. That's the way the banking works. That's the way the world works. I can show you a chart that says, I'm a 120% margin driven, or I can show you the same chart and the same data and say, I'm actually losing money right now. It's depending on how you frame that conversation. So I would say you have to have a thesis. You have to believe in something that's going to be valuable and then let the data support that.

Franco Caporale:

Absolutely. Right. What is one initiative that you are working on or you're planning for the next few months?

Mehul Patel:

So we're an infrastructure company, cloud and networking company. And so our buyers are typically tinkering with cloud technologies. And so if that's how they're used to consuming services and playing with it, we have to meet those people where they're used to trying out technology. And so they're engineers at heart, which means they want to play with the product very quickly. But I would say the majority of them are trying to take this cool technology and apply it to a business outcome. So one of the things that we're trying to do in the next six, eight weeks is, like I said, we'll come back to the lab. The lab is, okay, here's a fundamental overview of cloud networking, how it works, what it does. But in that lab, the way it's been designed is to do 80% tech, but why are you spending 60 minutes doing this? This is what it could unravel for you.

And I'm sure we're not the only ones in the industry that are doing this, but it's just, I think that is the way that a B2B tech company is going to have to be successful. Like I said, coming back to the earlier point, if you've got cool technology, great, but if it doesn't do anything for the bottom line, that bridge between I've just developed this gen AI thing that can do 50% whatever I'm doing. If it doesn't save any money or do anything, it's just a personal tool.

Franco Caporale:

One last question, Mehul. What is the one thing that you wish you knew at the beginning of your B2B marketing career?

Mehul Patel:

I would say that the one thing would be when you are in the role, I think it's very insightful because more and more I think B2B tech is marketing is not your traditional marketing. I'm learning that from peers. I think it's changed, evolved immensely, and I think the big part of that is just as much as you marketing externally, you need to market internally and get people to understand. If everybody thinks like a marketing person in the company, then I think as a marketing leader, your job becomes significantly easier. Because it is in there. So I would say not knowing that everybody's job is to market when I'm doing other functions and knowing that now and making sure that people understand that without it, Achilles heel.

Franco Caporale:

Yeah, especially on the engineering side, right? There's always...

Mehul Patel:

All the engineers over the last 10, 15 years, especially at Prosimo as well. They all are very articulate. I just think that everybody that's smart platform and know, fortunately enough, marketing has the power to give them the platform. So I think do that, use that. Definitely leverage marketing to bring your brand and your voice, personal, brand and voice out there.

Franco Caporale:

Mehul it was really great speaking with you today. I really enjoyed it. So thank you again for joining the Demand Generation Club.

Mehul Patel:

Thank you. Thanks for the time as well. I appreciate it.

CLOSING:

That's a wrap for today's episode of the Demand Generation Club podcast. If you're curious about how we're landing enterprise deals and unlocking millions in recurring revenue using account-based marketing and integrated direct mail campaigns. Check out our website, saasmql.com. That's S-A-A-S-M-Q-L.com. We share tons of content every week on tried and true strategic ABM initiatives that actually generate pipeline from enterprise accounts. Thanks for tuning in.