Ruthless Experimentation & Prioritization on a Budget for Early Startups | Kirsten Kalsky of Ohanafy

When it comes to those early years in a startup, speed is your weapon. And I think that can sometimes be a double-edged sword because because you think you have to move so fast, decide so fast, you don't feel like you have the time to experiment. If you don't experiment and understand what's really working and then you go down a path and it ends up failing, you could have pivoted and you could have made a better decision actually a lot sooner. As soon as you have employees lose the sense of trust of what is our overall goal here, that's when you start to harvest a culture of What am I actually contributing to? When you start small and then all of a sudden triple your employee size in six months, you want to still keep that startup culture. And the biggest thing that I think contributes to a startup culture, it's not ping pong, it's not snacks, and it's not a cool office. It is that everyone feels like they're contributing to the success of the organization at the time. I guess the biggest lesson, especially in a startup culture, is... Welcome to the Marketing Masters Podcast, where we interview CMOs and VPs of marketing and tech to help give you an inside look. at what other tech marketing execs are up to and to see what's working these days in marketing. I'm your host, Lee Cooper. I'm co-founder and CEO of Cooper. We're an SEO marketing agency that helps tech companies grow their organic search traffic. And today I'm joined by Kirsten Kalski, CMO of OhanaFi. OhanaFi is the number one AI-powered CRM and sales platform for distributors. Think food and beverage, for example. Today we're discussing a lot of different things. for early stage seed startups with some great insights into things like the value of mentorship in personal career development and the development of your people. The early stage marketing, especially in. event marketing demand gen lead scoring thought leadership abm that kind of stuff the challenge of marketing on a startup budget especially for those of you who are pre-series a the approach of just ruthless prioritization the value of testing experimenting and measuring your roi everywhere you go a little bit on kirsten's view of the layer cake of marketing instead of maybe the traditional marketing funnel that you might be used to, and then cultivating a startup leadership culture of experimentation, as well as building a strong foundation of internal alignment before you scale and strategically building trust and becoming an authority in your space. If you're pre-series A or you're interested in any of these things, then you won't want to miss this episode. Let's hop into it. Kirsten, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I guess really quickly, just so that, you know, people know where you're coming from, they know a little bit about you and that sort of thing. Maybe you can sort of introduce yourself and like, where did you come from originally? And like, how did you make it into marketing? Yeah, so originally, I studied digital design. At the time, it was a very new program. I went to UNCW, which is a North Carolina school here in Wilmington, North Carolina. And I paired that with PR and marketing. so i came out kind of double double majored in that sense um knowing i wanted to get into the design side and quickly out of college i landed a job at a tech startup here in town that was focused in fintech called encino and started my career there um and it just quickly expanded from that point yeah i'm curious like when when you're at encino a little bit about you know, what kind of marketing you were doing, sort of the audiences you were targeting, like, just kind of like, what were all the things that you were doing there? Yeah, so when I joined, the marketing team had four people. And I really came in to help manage our website, all of our graphic content, our, you know, think about from presentations to anything that the brand touched. And then being in a startup world, as you know, you constantly are wearing different hats and juggling different tasks. So I quickly expanded out of just design because I was managing our website. It naturally flowed over into SEO and SEM, something that we weren't totally focused on at the time because, you know, the technology was providing was truly the first one in its space. so our organic growth online was happening um without having a large budget behind it but i kind of took hold of that seeing it was an area that we were eventually going to really need to invest in so i would go home at night and you know um get my google certifications and work on all that and kind of add that into my tool belt in addition to being a designer as well as our website manager yeah so a little it sounds like a little bit everything digital a little bit everything web you know, kind of jack of all trades. I guess Jill of all trades might be more appropriate. But yeah, I mean, I'm curious just like really quickly if there's any like one major takeaway you had from Encino or anything, just like one big lesson that you kind of took from there or just everything. I mean, I guess the biggest lesson, especially in a startup culture is that it's just in constant change. And if anyone has been in that environment or is looking to be in that environment, it's something you need to be very comfortable with. I always like to say, respond, don't react. So you might be in a tough meeting where all of a sudden you're expanding into new markets, you're changing your ICP, you're evolving your product offering, and you think about marketing being the tip of the spear in terms of getting that awareness out there and feeling the pressure of making sure we're representing it. correctly and not always constantly changing messaging so there's there's that ability to be flexible but also understand how to remain consistent from you know a very the best way to explain is like you have to put the best foot forward for the company when you're trying to break into a new space so being able to to really understand what change is going on and what actually needs to be reflected publicly for the brand and for the company. And that was something that was definitely a lesson that I've learned over time and taken into my job now. Whereas as a startup, you're constantly changing your ICP or you're evolving it and you're evolving your messaging as you're finding your niche and gaining more customers and making sure that you're able to be flexible enough within the marketing realm to support that. Yeah. yeah it's kind of a tough issue where you know everyone tells you that brand is all about consistency and yet at a startup i mean there is basically nothing that is consistent which is it's a good thing at that stage that you know like you're you're iterating on things move moving quickly but it does make the whole brand consistency thing very very you know difficult but it sounds like you kind of took that lesson from encino and then you moved it on over to ohana fi i'm curious like sort of a little bit of the story there on moving to ahanafi and sort of the where you are now yeah so i would say one of the biggest pieces to this is having a very solid mentor throughout my entire career so the gentleman i worked for that was the cmo at encino um as he left and exited that company we remained very close in touch because he helped me really grow my career and he really pushed me into these areas that i was uncomfortable with And I remember when I was, you know, in those beginning stages at Encino, he would always tell me one day I was going to be a CMO. And I'm like, yeah, OK, like maybe. But that's so far off into the future. Anyways, fast forward, the startup ecosystem here in Wilmington is quite small in a sense. So everyone kind of knows what's going on. And he approached me. at one point and saying hey this great new startup i really like what they're doing i'm super passionate about it i really think this is something you need to look into because they need someone to come head up marketing so that is kind of what pulled me into this the second thing being is both Encino and now OhanaFi they're a salesforce built company so that means that they have built products on top of the salesforce platform so we are a salesforce partner and understanding the complexity of that relationship as well as selling and marketing a product that is part of the Salesforce ecosystem is quite a, I mean, it's an amazing opportunity to be part of that ecosystem and to really build your own brand off of it. But so having that experience with Encino, I think really helped me navigate the jump into now where I'm at at Hanify. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. It's also great for me to hear personally on the whole like um the whole mentoring front because i just feel like everyone i've ever talked to who became an a player they almost always say like oh i had a great manager i had a great mentor you know something like that and then you know when i got into management um for me i feel like the most rewarding aspects was just sort of like trying to help people get to their next level um so it's very much a recurring theme the the whole mentoring aspect of it absolutely yeah and just you know i felt like It was nice to have someone help me guide my career and make those decisions of what I should focus in based off my skill sets. Because sometimes you don't realize the skill set you have and how you can apply it. So a lot of my experience in marketing obviously has been on the digital side. So coming into AhanaFi, there was really a need for more of that marketing background rather than your more traditional events and PR and content. We obviously... do all of them. But I think that the leadership team here at Ohanafai really saw the need to do things like demand gen, SEM, and all these things a little bit sooner on within a marketing organizations. Whereas I saw typically they didn't kind of invest into that until later on, you know, a few years down the road when the brand and all that kind of strategy was already very established. So I think because I came from that background, it made me a really solid fit for OhanaFi. And my mentor really helped pull that out of me and recognize like, this is your strong suit. This is what you need to start building your career in. Because I think there's a couple different ways someone can come into a CMO role, right? Like, you know, let's be real. I'm a very young CMO and we're at a startup here. and i could have probably stayed in a larger corporation and continued to gain all my experience in all the different areas of marketing or a scenario like this where what i was doing and already building a career on was a really good fit to test out and you know see if i could handle like a larger role like a cmo but at a smaller tech startup so yeah yeah you know i'm curious about the the new startup a little bit about you know ohana fi what you guys are doing, you know, who's your audience, you know, that sort of thing. Just give people a quick like intro on what is OhanaFi up to? Yeah, so like I said, we're built on Salesforce. So naturally, out-of-box capability is very strong tools in terms of CRM and a sales platform. But we found that there was a really huge gap in white space within the distribution space. We originally started the company selling into alcohol producers. So think about distilleries, wineries, breweries and then we quickly evolved from that seeing that you know there's kind of a three-tier system within alcohol space in the u.s where you have the ones that make it you have the ones that distribute it and then you have these retailers that sell it that middle tier the distributors they cannot be bypassed right when it comes to selling alcohol it has to get onto a third-party truck to make it to the retailers and they did not have any updated tech opportunity like options within the industry our main competitors have been around since the 90s and Salesforce has not broken into that space entirely in terms of just focusing on that distribution network so we got kind of naturally pulled into that space after starting the company within alcohol production space so now our ICP is really on alcohol distributors um but that doesn't mean i think you know within the next five years i see us being the number one crm and sales platform for any type of distributor whether someone's moving beverages or furniture right at the end of the day their sales model is very similar so we built a platform customized for that this model yeah that makes a lot of sense i i just personally have noticed that like SaaS kind of left this weird dead zone for a lot of these kinds of businesses. You know what I mean? Like there was a lot of SaaS selling to other, you know, tech companies or digital, you know, or enterprise. But then a lot of things that I would consider somewhere in the ballpark of like local slash SMB and people who are not like super digital techie types. It's like they got left behind and there were no products for them. And then you check in and you're like, how is there no CRM for this kind of thing? Like what? Who left these people behind? But I'm curious, like given, you know, this is kind of your non-tech sort of audience, like what does their typical customer journey look like? Like how do they find you? How do they kind of build that relationship and sort of move down that pipeline? The distribution space is interesting. A lot of them are actually privately, most of them are privately held. Huge acquisition space. so like a lot of older industries that have been around for a very long time it's very relationship driven so we you know i talk about my digital background but we do place a high priority on these events because these people are really buying from a human they're not buying from a vendor right so it does take a lot of time to establish ourselves in terms of thought leaders in the space which has been a lot of our focus over these last few months is just really pushing ourselves out there in terms of being a leading thought leader on like how to actually use ai and data in your business because this industry is a bit of lagger in terms of them taking on tech besides operations so they have an amazing foundation in terms of um having like an erp in place but it's like actually educating these business leaders of how you need a real tech stack. So when you think about a customer journey, it's a lot of education upfront and then kind of taking them through that process. Like our sales cycle is at a minimum six months for these larger corporations. And, you know, I'd say that marketing is really part of that the entire process, right? From bringing in the demand gen, bringing in the interest, helping educate them, helping them push them down the funnel in terms of getting them to engage in us, whether they meet us at an event or attend a virtual event like a webinar, or we get introduced to them through one of our associations that we're part of. So, you know, once they kind of convert, right, they're sitting with our sales team for a long time. A lot of demos, a lot of deep dives. Oftentimes they're bringing in a tech role from the company to do a deeper analysis on the Salesforce platform. And then on that point, we have actually our, you know, our strongest part of our business model is our actual implementation and customer support. So we really, really try and keep all of our implementation in-house. Obviously all of our support is in-house and we really pride ourselves on having like very superior customer support. Yeah. yeah that makes a lot of sense so i guess it sounds like events were one of the major like channels in there um and am i missing any other like major channels that these people are kind of going to um i would say the leaders of these companies so you're talking c-suite they're going to be the most active in person at such like you know in scenarios like that but then you actually have to think about the entire committee that surrounds that C-suite, which are the actual end users of the platform. So think about VP of sales, head of operations, any technical admins. So from a demand gen and awareness perspective, we hit the entire committee surrounding that buying committee and the influencers of them as well as the buying committee within the C-suite. So events are our arm of getting in touch with the right people. But I actually look at events as like these tent poles that you place along your marketing campaign timelines where you do a lot of your demand gen and awareness around these big events. So that way, since we're a new company, we've only been in it for two years. So that way there is hopefully some awareness about us as we go into these events. So that way you can really, really get a return on our investment. Because as you know, some of the largest marketing budget goes towards these events. So I would say our demand gen. and support around that is one is actually our biggest arm um outside of yeah yeah so mostly events and then supporting the with demand gen kind of like around the events is that sort of the right way to think about it yeah and then you you know you fill all that in with your content and your media type content from anything from videos to white papers to feature documentation and things like that and we do you know obviously we're doing pr we're doing all the things i would just say when i think about a full marketing strategy those are your biggest pieces i'd say for us at this point and getting our brand out there yeah yeah no that makes a lot of sense so it sounds like you know it's kind of event dimension around it it sounds like in some ways you do focus on the event marketing aspect and i know you know before when we were talking there was also a big emphasis around sort of like there is events but when you're at you know that size you know and you're very early on and there's only so many events you can go to and that sort of thing there's also all the the demand gen around it and i'm just curious like sort of the relationship between the two and how those connect like what are the problems or you know what are you getting out of most in the events and then how does that kind of compare to the rest of the demand gen i don't know if that makes sense no absolutely and there's a there's another you know very important piece to this is our sdr team So you're like inside sales group, right? We actually have a fairly small one because I think the model is really changing when it comes to selling SaaS, right? So our marketing and sales team is in extreme lockstep because obviously sales is who's going to the vent and representing. And so what we've done is we've put a pretty complex MQL model in place. So that way, as we're doing all this awareness and doing a lot of the demand gen work, we're scoring our prospects. So we try and really focus on that outbound that we do ahead of event and post events. We're really focusing our target on the audience that's engaging the most. So that way we have the highest rate of return when we're physically at these events and we're engaging with the right people. We're making the most of our time there because we are a small team, because we can only go to so many events. We just want to make sure we're maximizing the engagement when we're physically there. And I think having an appropriate scoring model that is actually. you know we have multiple scoring models but we do have one that actually really does look at an engagement before and after an event to help even push that you know quality even further yeah i'm actually curious a little bit about you know that scoring model if you wanted to get into it um because i've worked with a lot of clients who are like series a and b and they're sitting there and they're working on different models and you you know how it is like there's a lot of different opinions on how to do the scoring and sales and marketing sometimes kind of go back and forth I'm just curious kind of like how how you guys came to that and then what what did you like come to yeah so I mean first and foremost an MQL and scoring model really should be a very flexible fluid part I think you always have to start somewhere like we started obviously ours from scratch so we had to get a benchmark and baseline and then we just constantly measure back on it so the biggest piece of that is like looking at your conversion rate of mql to an actual sales lead so you know you can you can make your best guesses you can do all of your research out there but the thing that's missing when you do your research and look at other people's scoring models is they're not in the same industry you are so what might count as a high score for someone out of the distribution space might be entirely different for my icp so we're constantly kind of adjusting and tweaking ours I think the biggest thing that happened though was from COVID, right? So, so much of that sales process was happening in person, more onsites, more onsite demos. So it was, it was kind of hard to actually put a score behind those kinds of engagements. Whereas now so much of the sales process is just happening virtually. So there's a lot of different actually touch points you can score on and because of COVID and because of how much that kind of flooded. Right. The Internet, you know, are all of our LinkedIn feeds went from like a couple updates a day to now hundreds of updates a day just because of those. So I think pre covid, it was seven touch points to remember a brand. Now it's like over 14. It's doubled in the last few years. So I think placing different priority on different engagement is really the most important part. what we probably back in like, you know, the golden era of selling SaaS, like I'm talking more so like 2013, 2015, well, you know, well into pre-COVID, you could probably look at an email open, probably not thinking much of it. Like, yeah, okay. Now you look at an email open and you're like, wow, finally. So I just think like it's in a constantly evolving scoring model. And those who set one in the beginning and then hold it true, then I would really say you have to look at the actual quality of these conversions. Because the only way that you know your work in marketing is actually being influential is if it's actually resulting in true leads. And we have a goal, 200 MQLs a quarter, but then we also have a conversion goal on that. And that's just as important of one. Yeah. So it sounds very much like, you know, adapting early and often to what is actually converting rather than just like, I defined an MQL and then I'm going to throw it over the wall and it's all going to be good. You know, exactly. I mean, it sounds that makes a lot of sense. So it sounds like that keeps marketing nice and aligned with, you know, sales, especially early on. And then, you know, sales is kind of doing a whole lot of outreach in it, you know. in advance of the events you know obviously at the events and then following up after i'm curious like you also mentioned the the demand gen that goes into that i'm curious how that sort of you know goes into through and out of um events and sort of like what that process looks like as well yeah so like i said we do like a ton of awareness leading into event whether it's aligning with the sdr team and they're targeting a certain particular you know set of attendees going or we're just targeting as a whole whether it's targeted linkedin campaigns email campaigns remarketing campaigns through search through the google network so we kind of look at all these different channels of how to do a general higher level awareness whereas then we let the sdrs take a more selective list whether that's your c-suite and your buyers are actually attending and we kind of surround them you can think of it in that way and then obviously you have your engagement happening at the event and then you have your post follow-up And a lot of times in these industries, the same people attend all the same events. So at the end of the day, if we're attending an event for the very first time and we haven't been there yet, it's kind of hard to gauge what we're actually going to get out of it. But knowing that we're going to roll into the next event and see some similar faces, changing that engagement going into it. Also, I think a really big thing to call out is when you're a small startup is how you actually engage our suite suite at these events. So not every event am I going to send. I might send a salesperson if we have a booth or we're exhibiting, or I might actually send our founder. If it's a different type of event where we're not exhibiting, there's nothing like that going on. It's just more so relationship building and putting my founders as a thought leader and not just sending Ohanify, but I'm actually sending Ohanify CEO and he has his own brand and representation himself. So I think that's also where marketing plays a role is trying to understand, first of all, what do we actually expect to get out of this event? Let's not pretend we know everything. We're new to this industry. and the right people and the right way we want to engage when we're there. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of good stuff in there. I guess, you know, one aspect of that is sort of like, how do you build a lot of the awareness and sort of the, you know, like, what is the process for building that awareness? Not just for Ohana 5, but it also sounds like your founding team. Yeah. So we actually are dabbling in, I mean, I think it's. it's part of our strategy when it comes to content and demand and perspective we actually do build founder content behind our CRO and CEO mainly about kind of the more forward-looking future topics for this industry which is mainly around data and AI so a lot of the content we put like out on LinkedIn for example that's authored by either one of those those are kind of the main topics so we do newsletters from them A lot of times we'll kind of go through the process of introducing themselves through in-mails, connecting with people personally that we're seeing or attending these events and really making them a familiar face with these people. So a lot of it is through social networks, mainly through LinkedIn, as you know. So, yeah, I'd say that's probably our most direct way. And we do a lot of video content as well with our founders. They tend to get the most engagement. People like to see a real face. And like I said, at the end of the day, they're buying from another. They're not buying just from OhanaFi. They're buying from the people that's building this company. When you buy a tech platform that's going to be a six-month-long implementation, a five-year contract, you are looking at them as a partner. And a lot of these companies, they don't have a tech department, right? So they really look at us as kind of like that extended arm of their business, helping them run that part of their business. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So basically, it's firstly, it makes sense that they're really just buying into the founder, the belief in them, the belief in almost like I want to say it's almost like hiring them as part of an extension of their own business. You know, I mean, it's not literally a hire, but it has that kind of feel. Whereas like when you buy, you know, you buy a Snickers or something like that, you're not. hiring the sneakers you know i mean like you're you're just buying a candy bar and there are some of those like kinds of uh sales where it's very transactional you know like stuff where you can just go do the free trial sign up for it you're good to go but this is very much more strategic complex sales where it's like executive to executive level relationships um and just kind of like believing in the people and so you you back that up by creating a lot of thought leadership content sounds like primarily on linkedin um for for your your founders and kind of like backing them up giving them a lot of like thought leadership forward looking stuff that that kind of thing does that sound right yeah exactly and to the point of how we engage in events as well and how marketing does support that we also look for any opportunity to kind of pitch ourselves and get on whether it's an opportunity to present at these events so um or be part of any other subgroups within these memberships so a great example is our cro is actually part of one of the larger wholesaler associations in the us they have a subcommittee that's just focused on ai so he's on that committee for example so he sits in our meetings he contributes content he offers things for that that committee and he's really become the go-to person when they want to talk about ai and data within your sales platform And then another example is our CEO will be on the innovation panel at 100 Met's coming up. So it's not just about sitting at a booth or sitting at the bar at the end of the night and talking about, you know, and giving your pitch. Right. So it's really like we don't actually go there to truly sell. We go there to consult. We go there to talk about what we're doing and what we're building. We're not going there to sign a contract necessarily. Yeah. In some ways, it's more like you're setting up your founders to be like pillars in that community. not to pitch to the community, you know, very, very different angle. Yeah. And these businesses have been in business for 60, 80 years, right? Like they want that relationship and they're going to take a while, right? To get comfortable and really build that trust. Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. So, I mean, it kind of sounds like a lot of it is, you know, you know, thought leadership for the founding team, that sort of thing. And then helping them sort of build themselves up at those events. so that they just naturally have the relationships and the network and then that kind of like works itself out into basically you know complex sales and and that kind of thing um so exactly in some ways like i kind of some part of me hears the echoes of like account-based marketing somewhere later down the line like i can kind of see how at some point you you might or might not be able to send founders to just absolutely everything you know what i mean and as as the sales team eventually kind of scales then the question is like, how do you support the sales team doing a very similar role in kind of building that network? And it sounds like it could go down the path of ABM, but like, let me know if I'm insane there. No, no, you're correct. I mean, at the end of the day, everything is kind of ABM. If you really want to look at that under the demand gen umbrella, right? Because whether you're doing one-to-one, one-to-some, or one-to-many, right now we're in that one-to-many realm. because we're still trying to really pare down who our focus is. But we also want our general brand awareness across them all. So, you know, within the distribution space, you can really start to segment by essentially their revenue, whether they're more on the craft end or whether they're big distributors that are supporting the Molson cores and the constellation brands of the country. So we are already doing a slightly ABM approach. But yes, as we go forward and as we really start to navigate these larger enterprise deals, we will definitely move into that motion. But that doesn't mean we won't continue to do this general high-level awareness that we're doing across the entire industry. But when it comes to event selection or very highly focused and targeted campaigns where you're building, for example, a resource center that was just built for this one distribution prospect. where they hit this landing page and their logo is on top and you talk about the partnership we can have together and you build resources out specific to their business model and the brands that they're selling and things like that that's when you just get super targeted because you know the potential revenue out of these deals could could be very you know influential for a company at our size in my previous role we didn't start doing abm until years into the business because i think it does take some time to really define and get the sales team aligned with that but i actually see a lot of potential doing that early on while we're small while our marketing and sales team is so close in what we're doing it will just make that motion easier to build and get started now yeah yeah that makes sense and that it sounds kind of like that's one of the main things is just while you're small that has sort of defined a lot of the things that you can do and then like where to prioritize your time would that be the biggest thing that sort of determines your marketing right now it's just like where you are in terms of size and scale and that kind of thing exactly and one to not you know one to mention in in that list is budget right so we've got investors we haven't done a series a yet i have i have investors to answer to why we just spend x on this event whatever it may be so i think it's constant what i like to call is ruthless prioritization and at the end of the day at this size everything we do really needs to focus on supporting that revenue model and how are we generating leads how are we helping push deals forward so i think that's why when i came in i saw the need to start a demand gen motion very early on yeah that makes a lot of sense so like main problem being like you don't have that much budget and you need to know that it is it is driving something how do you like Ruthly ruthlessly prioritize I'm curious like how how did you go through the journey of finding that really the things to prioritize were sort of like Events and demand gen as opposed to like someone might think of something else They might have some favorite channel that they they liked or they knew how to work You kind of zeroed in on these couple like what led you to that? I'd say it was a combination of looking at tools available to us with a small team as well as testing, right? So for example, we have a PR firm, but I really look at when you have a small marketing team, what can you outsource and what can you turn on and off easily? If I hired someone internally just to run PR and all of a sudden Q3 rolls around, for example, we don't hit our number and I'm looking at how I can slim down budget. You never want to be in this scenario where you're looking at headcount as a way to slim down your overhead. So I look at that agency support. So we did some PR at the beginning of this year. As we were really breaking into this new space, we took a lot from them. We came up with a content model with them. We got a lot out of it. And then I paused them for the next three months because we got so much from it. We can then pull that in-house and continue to use that on our own. So that's a great example of how you can kind of prioritize, hey, I know we need to do this, but PR doesn't necessarily mean we're filling pipeline. but we know we need to do it so how can we get support from it and then really like get a lot out of it and use my internal team to really maximize it as well as looking at different tools within the marketing space to support you so when it comes to content i remember you know a few years when i first started Encino we had multiple people dedicated just to content i mean when you're selling these very complex um platforms that are built on salesforce you really need to go into that that education piece and and really educate on what the technology actually does from a product standpoint and feature ability but nowadays i have one content person and because you have different tools like ai that's helping knock out this content and because we're like i said we're small there's actually a lot of agile practice in that where they can literally walk over to the product team and say okay tell me about these new features they spit out a bunch of technical jargon my marketing content person goes back and and can create stuff very quickly because we do have supporting tools like ai content supporting tools and then additionally just investing in the right tech from the start so i worked on multiple different marketing automation platforms and i knew going into this role i wanted to be a hub swap shop just knowing that we are getting um do you know a really strong partnership out of hubspot and the way they have really evolved their their marketing platform it's kind of the best on the market in my opinion right now so investing in that tool early on and getting the most out of it so it's kind of a combination of tools and really looking at your people and not saying hey i'm hiring you just for this i'm gonna hire you for multiple things but you're gonna have the support from from a lot more tools and tech because we're investing in that part early Yeah. So it sounds like a little bit of it is figuring out like what things that you can sort of outsource to an agency that's a little cheaper than a full, you know, headcount, as well as like taking the headcount you have and seeing how much you can maximize them with a lot of these tools, like a lot of AI these days. And just like recently, you know, just sort of support your point there. I was talking to a former client of mine. we have a very good relationship and he's like yeah man i mean there's just so much you can do now with ai and offshoring there is like an incredible amount of work that you can do that before you could not really do and it's like when you are in that situation if you're you know seeing your pre-series a and you don't have that kind of budget in some ways it's it's like a good time right now between all the tools that are out there and the ai and some of the agencies and some of the like offshoring you can do you can get a crazy amount done despite a very low budget and like kind of really squeeze that budget for for a lot and that kind of sounds like the main thing that you've you've been you know getting to as well as using the right tools that you know you're going to invest in you're going to be using going forward like like HubSpot yep yeah I mean that that kind of that makes a lot of sense in terms of sort of like addressing that problem of like hey we only have so much budget how do we get some you know the most results for it and it sounded like your second prong to that was also a lot of testing and I'm assuming that's sort of like figuring out what you did get out of out of that amount of budget and then sort of how to move forward I'm just curious like sort of what is your thought process going through that yeah I would say the the most we've tested in that we didn't know for the first time did this year all these associations we join so um within our space there's a lot of because they do have to really advocate for their position within the supply chain they are a lot of like state level associations as well as national associations that a lot of these business leaders are involved in so there's obviously ways as a supporting partner we can get involved so we've kind of selected some of our target areas geographically to invest in being members of these associations and really utilizing those partnerships to do as much as we can with them and getting in front of their attendees and engaging in their hosted webinars so i'd say when it comes to like us testing where to invest our budget i kind of looked at these associations that are also very aligned with these events of how can we partner with them and then essentially use them as an extension of our awareness and their channels because these associations have been around for a very long time there are trusted space for these business you know owners to go to and get advice and get consulted on of other you know tech vendors that they might want to consider so there's been a lot of testing there um whether it's something you want to pay for an e-blast through their membership or you want to pay to host a webinar whatever it may be so that was something kind of new to me in this space and so far there's been a really good return on it especially if you think about it when one contract is a six-figure contract and we may have paid two thousand dollars to host a webinar i mean clearly there's an amazing return on that so i think that's also something to know as a as someone in a marketing role it's it's understanding what channel and what activities is going to result in getting in front of what type of icp so when we do these demand gen campaigns where we're sending emails and things like that which obviously is extremely low cost we're not worried nearly as much about the spend and return on that versus investing a couple thousand dollars into an e-blast or a webinar or an article that we're paid for. But we know the audience that that's going in front of is a very focused audience and the buyer we want to be in front of. So. Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. So a lot of, you know, measuring ROI, it sounds like, and really knowing which ICP you're going after with that campaign. does that sound right exactly and which channel right the the vp of sales or literally the guy on the truck delivering the product versus the ceo they're not engaging the same channels so you have to actually find where your people are engaging and who you're trying to target yeah in my my own little mental model i kind of think of that as like how much money do you go in do you put in what channel does it go through and then what icp does it reach on the other side if that kind of makes sense exactly Exactly. And those are like, I kind of look at marketing as I've always in my head, like a layered cake. You have your top level brand awareness. I call them my evergreen campaigns. Think about that as your Google search, your GT reviews, your profiles out there aligned, your website, making sure everything that is aligned and that's running constantly, right? That's your SEO and that's your SEM. constantly running. And then the next layer below that is your demand gen. And your demand gen is still quite large audiences. Like I spoke about that one to many, but they're starting to get more segmented. They're getting segmented a little bit more by channel. What are you hitting your social channels? What are you hitting in your email marketing? What are you hitting in your virtual events? What are you hitting in your in-person events? And those are starting to get more segmented by probably industry, like the actual business type, or maybe how large they are in revenue. And then the next layer below that is when you really start getting into your personas. So how are we going to actually look at that and then focus in, okay, here are our C-suite, here's your buying committee, and here's your supporting buying committee. And then how are we going to engage with them even more particularly and create content and engagement that's very specific to their role? So that's kind of how I've always seen it. And then how do you allocate budget across that equally or not equally, depending on what the goal is that quarter, that year, right? Back to my favorite word, flexibility and ruthless prioritization. That is a lot, I think, for good early stage startups. Because the thing is, at that stage, you just don't really know anything. And I almost fear the founders who think that they do. You know what I mean? Because that's startups. It's like, we don't know what's going to work until we've tried it. And so, yeah, absolutely. Flexibility, it's that adaptability, the agility, and then sort of. You know, just testing it, measuring it, seeing what our why came out of it and then prioritizing that versus everything else. It looks like you were going to add something there. Yeah, I was just going to say, and I think that really comes back to your people. So we are a very young leadership team. We have a young founding team, but all of us have been in a startup at some point in our careers before doing this one. And I think we learned the good and bad, the things that worked and didn't work. and i think we were all able to bring that thought and mentality into this and understanding that it's okay to take risk it's okay when we fail as long as we measure it and then we tweak it or we change it going forward because none of us pretend to know everything and we don't know everything i mean i think we would fail very quickly if we acted that way so that really comes down to a culture perspective and that what you're actually trying to cultivate across your organization and that comes from the top down yeah that's a really interesting point because i you know i've worked with a lot of different startups and just personally you know i kind of like survey the different you know cmos and vps of marketing i've worked with and sometimes the founding team it's like clear that you know a lot of cmos and vps they have like strong personalities and strong opinions on things like that um which i think is like a strength to some degree is that you have that that force of will and a certain strength of like opinion on things that you can sort of drive people in that direction and set that that vision in that direction but sometimes one of the things that i find interesting is sort of comparing the clients that i think are you know growing like gangbusters versus the clients i've seen where i'm like i don't know how far they're gonna go you know what i mean like and that's obviously something i usually kind of keep in my head um but there are patterns to it you know like you see enough startups from what i've seen the startups that i kind of question have like founding or executive members who don't just have a strong opinion but it's also taken as fact like they just know that this thing is the way that it is and you know maybe they're right maybe they're very smart individuals and they're very experienced but What will kill them is when they have an assumption that this thing is just a God-given fact and it's not, and then they don't have the adaptability to adapt to that situation. Whereas all the best founders and executives I've known, they may openly admit that they just don't know the thing, which kind of sounds weak in a meeting, you know what I mean? But on the other hand, it's because they recognize they don't know the thing. it requires experimentation they look at the results and they're willing to learn from it that means that they have growth and that they can kind of like adapt forward into that situation and so i actually have a lot more faith in that even though it may not like sounds super assertive and confident in a meeting. But I usually see that that kind of culture is what makes the right people. And then from there, even if they make the wrong decisions today, they learn from it and they start making better decisions tomorrow. And then they're making some of the best decisions, you know, a couple of years time. And they really know the space very well because of that kind of culture. But yeah, that's just like a random aside for me. I don't know if that like resonates or if you have anything on that. Yeah, I think I do think, too, when it comes to those early years in a startup, speed is your weapon. And I think that can sometimes be a double edged sword because because you think you have to move so fast, decide so fast, you don't feel like you have the time to experiment. But I actually challenge that way of thinking, because if you really think about something, if you don't experiment and understand what's really working and then you go down a path and it ends up failing. you could have pivoted and you could have made a better decision actually a lot sooner. So I think it's just, I think it's a bit of a younger mentality of just because we do something and just because we experiment on it doesn't mean it needs to stay within our plan, right, of attack. Like, let's all be modest enough to understand when we fail. And to say, yep, we tried it, it didn't work, doesn't mean we need to stick with it just because we said we would. You know, so I think at the end of the day, it actually allows you to move even faster because I've been in scenarios where you just make a decision, but not a ton of reasoning behind it. And then all of a sudden you're six months a year down the road and you're not getting the results out of it because you didn't have that trial period where you're like, okay, is this actually what we need to do here? Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. And in some ways it kind of comes back to what you were saying before about, you know, that flexibility and you know being able to sort of turn things on and off i'm curious kind of coming back to that whole you know central problem around you know you only have so much you need to move fast and you only have so much budget that's kind of like the the central problem of being a startup in a way is like, I want to grow fast, but I only have this much. And you had a few tactics I think you were talking about between agencies, AI and tools and things like that. And I'd love to sort of dig into details around each of those and sort of see like what your methodology is just so that other people might be able to learn from that and sort of think, hey. is there something i could be doing with agencies or something i could be doing with ai or you know tools i should be investing in sort of like give them some brass tacks on what they could do um so i don't know if you have like a certain methodology or a process to that that you'd be willing to share yeah it's funny because my brain can go in a bunch of different directions with that but i actually think about the use of tools and a clean process internally and letting that be your foundation that you then build on top of so if your house is not in order it's going to be hard to bring on an agency so at the end of the day making sure that everyone within your marketing and revenue organization and the company as a whole understands your brand your purpose and what you're selling and your product because everyone needs to be in lockstep So that way, when my in-house person is managing our PR relationship, I know she's singing from the same song sheet as my SDR person and their email outbound. Just making sure everyone across the board is saying the same thing and representing the brand in the same way. So that's what I mean by having your house in order. And to even double click on that, it's actually a lot of organization from like a tool and resource perspective. So how are you updating your sales team on your recent content? How are you sharing your changes and evolutions and your messaging? So we do a lot of alignment meetings. We're not like a crazy weekly. We don't need that. But I'd say at least once a month, we pull together the sales team and the marketing team and we sit down and we align what's working, what's not working. What have we updated? How do we want to talk about this piece of the product? What has changed in the product? what does now need to reflect in marketing collateral and sales collateral so i'd say that that constant alignment and and doing it frequently because that to your point like things do move very fast things change often so that alignment needs to happen quite frequently another more tactful example is your communication tools internally so obviously we're a slack shop but that is it but we also like eat our own dog food so we are also salesforce internally so we make sure all of our tools are connected well so i'd say our three main things is like the way our hubspot instance the way our slack communication and then the way our sales team engages within our leads within salesforce so whatever crm you're using making sure that what your marketing team is running their campaigns out of and then what your sales team is using to then engage track and push them through the sales funnel that they actually have a clear view of all those touch points A lot of times a lead gets passed to sales. Sales doesn't see all the things that happened to make that person become elite. Whereas I made sure that when a lead flowed through HubSpot, hits your communication channel, whether that's an engagement in Slack internally or whether that's a notification out of your CRM. And then as it gets pushed into your sales tool, making sure that your sales team has access. to all the pieces of collateral and touch points that that lead went through. So however that looks like for another organization, for us particularly, it's activities in HubSpot. So if I go to the contact record in HubSpot that just MQL'd, I can see every point that made them MQL. I can see every email they opened. I can see every landing page they want to. So as the SCR, when I pick up my phone and call this person for the first time, I'm going to have a very educated conversation on what they're already interested in. So my cold call all of a sudden is no longer a cold call. So for us, all that information flows in. It actually hits an internal Slack channel. So they see it right away because we know how quick you need to be on those things. And then from there, the sales team will pick it up and put it into our CRM tool, which is Salesforce. And then that's where we run the sales process of it. that makes a lot of sense so it the main emphasis i'm hearing though is like a lot of internal alignment and not just you know on you know some branding stuff but also strongly between marketing and sales which i feel like at that size you can really get marketing and sales to get in the same room on a lot of things and then starting from extremely like good alignment there before you start going into you know agencies and that kind of stuff Exactly, because it's all part of the same funnel. So when we say, for example, a real situation is we use an association and we run a webinar that's hosted by a state association in the beer wholesale. Here's an example. We do the webinar, we get the attendee list, we see who engages in the webinar, we see who attends, we run that list into our HubSpot. Marketing then runs at that list. We do the follow-up. We send the recording back after. We watch the engagement happen. Then all of a sudden, we get these conversions coming out of it. That initial touchpoint was said webinar. Said webinar costs $2,000, let's say. Sales team picks that up. They see how they engage. They convert them to lead. Literally, I can then look at that lead list and say, okay, this event cost us $2,000 and we get X amount of leads out of it. We already know our return. kind of closing the loop on our conversation right like that also comes back to extreme testing and understanding the return on like on your spend and that's what i mean by like alignment because if you don't have your house in order and your process in order scaling and getting a larger team and a larger stream will be will be very difficult to teach that you know unless you already have a process like that in place Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So really, you have to set that all up before you start talking about trying to scale. Like you need the foundation before you can build stuff on top of it. If you don't have a good foundation, you start adding the agencies and doing all this other stuff. Like, well, what is it that they're really doing? And, you know, are they aligned with the rest of the whole process? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that that makes a lot of sense, I guess, kind of digging deeper on on that. is there anything where you've seen like other organizations where it's just clear alignment didn't happen or something like that for me thinking from my own um perspective i've worked for a few startups where you know they got their big you know series b or something like that and there was a culture of like oh, we have money, we need to just start hiring people left, right and center, especially engineers. I don't know what it is, but you know, it's that San Francisco, Silicon Valley culture of like, hey, we've got a bunch of VC money, spend it, spend it fast. And they were like, they're hiring every engineer who looked reasonably competent. And they were just like, there was a goal to triple headcount. And I didn't understand why. And now at the time I was like a younger person, I was just a specialist. So Maybe there was more wisdom behind it than I knew, but it kind of just sounded like triple headcount for the sake of tripling headcount as though that's a metric of growth. And the problem that I saw there was kind of like, well, basically, I don't even know what the process is in the organization is right now, but we're going to triple that. Whatever that is, we're going to triple it. And so I've seen situations where people started scaling, but kind of like what you're saying, they didn't necessarily have that. you know upfront foundation that alignment knowing what they were doing but they were whatever they were doing they were scaling it you know what i mean um i'm curious like if you have any tips or pointers around that of like things that you've seen go wrong if you will and then sort of like better practices yeah i mean i i experienced that as well in my previous company the grow at all costs you know, where you do do big funding round and then all of a sudden you just need to then answer for all that influx of resources. And that means dumping money into marketing, dumping money into product, dumping money into the sales team. I'd say the biggest hindrance I've seen out of that click of growth is misalignment across the organization. So all of a sudden you have product building. x y and z it's not aligned with what sales is actually selling then marketing is torn between the two you know and then all of a sudden the over like the the high level company goals are all of a sudden very muddy and no one really understands what they're marching towards and as soon as you have employees lose the sense of trust of what is our overall goal here that's when you start to harvest a culture of what am i actually contributing to And I think when you start small and then all of a sudden triple your employee size in six months, you want to still keep that startup culture. And the biggest thing that I think contributes to a startup culture, it's not ping pong, it's not snacks, and it's not a cool office. It is that everyone feels like they're contributing to the success of the organization at the time. And that's what keeps people engaged in working the long hours and committing their lives to it for a few years. which i'm sure anyone in an environment like that would laugh um but yeah i think it's making sure that as you scale especially the leadership team really takes it on their shoulders to make sure it's still extremely clear what we're all working for and the way each department is contributing to that goal yeah yeah no that i think that that's very powerful because you know you were saying like people starting to wonder whether or not they're actually doing anything I definitely, I was in that position before where I was kind of like, who are all these people? What are they all doing? What am I doing? And there was even like questions of like, who are the managers? Like who reports to whom? What is happening? And it's sort of like, it kind of does take the wind out of your sails because like the best part about being in a startup is like, you know that you're working long hours. You know that in some places you might be paid a little bit less. But on the other hand, what comes out of it all is that you're not working at one of these really large organizations where people can just crawl into a cubicle and basically just live in the cubicle. and you don't know what they do, and they might not know what they do, but they have a job, it's a very different culture, whereas in startups, yeah, you know it's tough, you know it's a lot of hours, but you know that everything you do has a very direct impact. It creates real growth. Your work matters, and you matter. You know what I mean? To me, that's one of the best parts of startups, rather than just being another one in the thousands of cubicles in a giant cubicle farm. It's a very different culture, and that's why people... you know come here so it's kind of an interesting thing that you you raise that if everyone still has good organization good alignment they know what they're contributing towards it kind of keeps that startup culture and it keeps people motivated to keep doing what they're they're doing you know that makes a lot of sense and it really really resonates but i'm curious like sort of a little bit of you've kind of explained how you do that especially between marketing and sales which i think is important Because I've definitely seen there be a marketing department just go off in its own direction. And then there'd be a sales department and decided to go into its own direction. And somehow there was like a magical handoff in between, but no one was super clear on it. And I think you've kind of talked a little bit about that. Once you have the alignment that you sort of created, how do you go about sort of scaling it or rather using the budget? that's you know within your means to sort of like you know use that as efficiently as possible so you're kind of talking about various tools and ai and that kind of thing i'm curious like how do you leverage your alignment into that yeah um i mean it's extreme feedback right so every time we run a campaign or every time we send someone to an event we're really big on making sure there's kind of these alignment sessions where they can provide feedback directly every time we run campaigns well obviously we they were running them out of hubspot but they do end up in our crm and salesforce then every time a campaign wraps up there's actually an area where a sales rep or a marketing member can go in and give feedback on what they felt worked well or work didn't work well and that way we have like this all like this one place single source of truth to look at internally of like how things are performing so that way when we go back and do our q1 review q2 review we actually have a place to look at and it's not just numbers you can obviously that's super important we have our high level department goals how many mqls what's our conversion rates what's how many deals are closing that marketing has actually helped influence like we look at all those numbers but then we take it a level deeper where we actually get feedback and we talk through because at the end of the day you can only measure so much from a marketing impact standpoint so i want to sit down with my sales rep my ae that just came back from an event i'm like tell me who was there tell me were they the right people the conversations that you have did anyone know who we were yet like when people came by the booth were like oh i think i've heard of them or did they sit there and say i know who salesforce is and then i take that feedback back and i say okay next time we head to an event salesforce is going to be their logo is going to be in our banner because everyone knows salesforce at this point you know like it's little things like that that you're not going to get feedback through a number yeah Yeah, that makes sense. So feedback early and often, and it sounds like from everybody, even on those qualitative things that are not going to show up in your typical metrics. Exactly. Yes. And having a place for it all to sit because we've all been there and done that where you're meeting to meeting every day and you get Slack messages, you get emails and every, all these different things are coming at you throughout the day and all these different communication channels. So we really try and keep everything with the sales and marketing organization in the same place. yeah yeah that makes sense I mean overall I mean a lot of sort of what I've been hearing is flexibility testing feedback and a lot of just like listening to the feedback and the results of things and really being grounded in the actual results not just an internal sense of motion or something like that actually I'm curious overall like you know have you had any any like really good stories or any really like great results or you know great numbers that kind of came out of that like a big win if you will i would say our biggest wins happening right now um is becoming the ai spokes people if so you will within the beer distribution space so by getting our cro involved in that subcommittee all of our pr focus this year has not been about ohana fi and product growth and what we're doing It's really been about how we think AI and data analysis needs to support the distribution space in the next five years. So we really took our content strategy and really pushed on that. And now I get calls, which is rare. I get calls from associations saying, hey, we have this speaking engagement and we need someone to talk about AI and distribution. And we thought of you guys. So not necessarily sitting here and saying we closed the deal off of it. But I consider that a huge win because. we're we're in this for the long haul and i have the understanding that yes we want to contribute it to pipeline we want to be able to really support that but another day i'm also thinking about the five ten years from now and being a truly trusted partner in this space so there's been a lot of really wonderful momentum out of that i will also say one of our bigger successes is as we've broken into this new distribution space really understanding the segments and getting more particular with our messaging and we're seeing our open rates above 40 right now which i think any marketer would kind of like what how and i think it has a lot to do with just the way we're engaging with them and the way we're positioning ourselves and the way we're not selling ourselves off the bat yeah yeah and in some ways what i hear in that is like for a company that's very very young you're actually really building some solid relationships and kind of building that network where people see you as a real authority to go to because it'd be very easy for these companies who have been around you know like you're saying 60 80 years and see this you know young you know tech company has already been around for like a couple of years and be like oh they're just some punk kids you know like and yet they're they're coming to you and they're like seeing you as a resource and an authority i mean that that's a pretty big deal for such a small and such a young young company Exactly. Yeah. And so, you know, we are growing from a customer acquisition immensely. But as you know, I am very big on when you put a customer out there as your spokesperson. That means anyone can pick up the phone at any time, get that person on the phone and say, tell me about Ahonify. Tell me your experience. So I'm very strategic on who we announce as customers because I want to make sure we have our best foot forward in that way. So until we have that really strong customer advocacy program, which I think you understand, that takes years to build, especially when you have implementation process that takes six months. We're a two-year company. you know we're just rolling off some of our first implementations this year so that does take a long time to build so as we as we gain momentum in that space i'm also focusing on how do we build trust and that is to me on being like the tech leader in terms of understanding the future of the industry and being a voice of reason in that sense yeah yeah in many ways it sounds great because it's like you have a very strategic way of looking at it i've worked with a lot of like uh companies that go after smb and it's very transactional and they're like hey i'm talking my stuff and here you have like a very long view a five-year view on how you're going to build up you know a hanify as sort of a whole resource in the relationship you know and a resource in the network in the community and then you know not worrying too much about like hey can we slap a logo on the website because i've heard that one before they're like oh we dropped our pants we did whatever we could do just to make sure we get this customer and put the their logo on the the website and then behind the scenes they're like really unhappy customers and like i've heard this kind of thing but you're you coming from a very like strategic perspective on it yeah does that sort of sound right absolutely yeah Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that makes a lot of sense. I guess just for the sake of curiosity, you have some wins there, you know, and sort of like the things that have been working well. I'm just curious if you had anything that like didn't work as well or you just saw something and were like, yeah, we're not doing that anymore. You know what I mean? I would say the one thing, not necessarily that it hasn't worked well. It's just we haven't started it and I'm feeling the need to start it. One of our biggest differentiators in our space to our competitors is how often we product release and how often we update and innovate on our product. So I'm actually seeing an opportunity from a white space of how we can also own that kind of messaging of how your tech partner needs to actually take your feedback and build it back into the product, which we truly do. So now I'm already thinking like, how do we weave that into our content strategy from a marketing perspective? How do we actually start branding our releases? How do we get release updates out there? That's some meant for customers, obviously, because they're way more in the weeds versus what can we just put out there from a product update through a PR lens to let people know how much we're innovating. So I'd say not necessarily didn't work. It's just something I'm seeing like, okay, this is something we need to get on. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. And it's it is it kind of comes back to the whole part where you guys are very flexible, you're getting a lot of feedback, and you can sort of almost like have that manifest out into the messaging and saying hey your your tech partner needs to be flexible your tech partner needs to be taking your feedback moving forward and then you can kind of alley up that into saying like hey this is how they should be growing with you over the next five years as ai takes over and you can see the technology beginning to advance the things that you do well you know that comes from having a tech partner who can who moves quickly you know over those next five years and is a strategic partner so yeah it kind of it sounds like there's a lot of good stuff in that that space and in some ways it sounds like it's a symptom of all the things you're already doing so it's easy to market you know rather than like marketing it first and then figuring out how to do it later and then it not happening yeah yeah so yeah i guess is there anything else you know, like any like big main lesson you'd want to sort of like pass forward to other people or anything that they could sort of learn from or implement themselves? I would say, you know, from a career perspective, once again, like that mentorship and really connecting with other people in your industry and marketing roles to understand what's working, what's not. You know, we talked a lot about testing internally and looking at your own data, but sometimes it takes a long time to build that. So there's no harm in trying to find networks and other CMOs or other VPs of marketing who are trying similar things and getting insights from them and what's working. So to me, that's just like growing your own personal network and just maximizing your skill set within your employees. I try and reassess constantly my team, what they're enjoying, what they're not enjoying, because typically people are going to excel in the work that they're enjoying versus not. and just because you put someone in this bucket and you hired them for this the amount of times i've seen someone actually work better in a different role or with different tasks maybe they're better at project management versus writing content or whatever it may be i think really being flexible in terms of your resources and your skills and when i say resources that doesn't mean just budget that doesn't mean just you know what you have in terms of agency support it's actually your people which is your most important resource yeah yes it sounds like a little bit of you know, your own community, your own networking, your own like mentoring, but then simultaneously mentoring the people below you and sort of seeing what they can kind of grow into, recognizing that they're kind of the heart and soul of your team. You know, they're the backbone of a lot of everything. So getting mentored and doing mentoring on both sides, it sounds like. I guess, you know, really quickly, is there anywhere where people can find you or your company? Yeah, obviously the worldwide web, ohodify.com. But I would say honestly, our most authentic and engaging content is going to be on our social networks, whether it's on LinkedIn. We do post very regularly on our website from a resource perspective, different blog articles, different thought leadership pieces and white papers. So if anything, anybody out there is actually really interested on like a B2B model in the Salesforce ecosystem, I'd say we're definitely a good resource for learning more about that as well. Yeah, sounds good. I guess anything else you want to share or anything you'd want to highlight with OhanaFi? I think we're good. I feel like we covered a lot and I really appreciate our conversation today. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, thanks again for being on the show and, you know, love having you. Thanks so much. Appreciate it. Yep. That was Kirsten Kalski, CMO of OhanaFi. You can find her and OhanaFi at OhanaFi.com. That's O-H. a n a f y.com or on linkedin and i'm your host lee cooper it takes us a long time to put together these podcasts so we'd love it if you only took a few seconds to rate and review this episode on spotify or apple podcasts and if anything really stood out to you tell me whatever you liked most or least about this episode at lee cooper-marketing.com and i'll see you next time

Welcome to the Marketing Masters Podcast, where we interview CMOs and VPs of Marketing in tech to give you an inside look at what other tech marketing execs are up to and what’s working these days in marketing.

I’m your host, Lee Cooper, Co-Founder & CEO of Cooper, the SEO marketing agency that helps tech companies grow their organic search traffic.

I’m joined by Kirsten Kalsky, CMO of Ohanafy. Ohanafy is the #1 AI-powered CRM & Sales Platform for Distributors.

Today we’re discussing a lot of different items for early-stage, Seed startups, with some great insights into
* The value of mentorship in personal career development and the development of your people
* Early-stage marketing especially in Event Marketing, Demand Gen, Lead Scoring, Thought Leadership, and ABM
* The challenge of marketing on a startup budget
* The approach of ruthless prioritization
* The value of testing, experimenting, and measuring ROI
* The layer cake of marketing (instead of the traditional marketing funnel)
* Cultivating a startup leadership culture of experimentation
* Building a strong foundation of internal alignment before you scale
* And strategically building trust and becoming an authority in your space

If you’re pre-Series A or you’re interested in any of these things, then you won’t want to miss this episode.