So yeah, Hugh o Flanagan is my name board. And Bren in Dublin, have lived in a whole bunch of different places. Spent a lot of my time in in the UK, spent a lot of my time in Dublin. I've lived in the US for a time as well. Software founder, I had built a business before, which we had exited back in 2021 that business basically built an AI voice solution for blue collar workers. So the concept of that was people that worked in hotels and healthcare and manufacturing, they worked on their feet, their eyes and hands are super busy. They didn't have any technology. And so we, we built a product to try give them the benefits of technology that you and I have at the desk, but when they're on their feet, the voice thing didn't really work. A lot of the news reports, actually, when we sold didn't really pick up on this, but, but the voice solution didn't work because it was 2017 2018 voice technology was, and still is, pretty terrible. But what we had built was kind of an engine that understood everything that every person on a large team had to do at a given point. So we replaced kind of paper checklists, paper assignments. So some kind of you know, our marquee client was Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group. So they used us across all of their properties. They had 35 properties around the world for their like housekeeping teams, their maintenance teams, that sort of stuff. We exited that business 2021. Got stuck into a whole pile of lockup periods and non competes. But I'm free as of a couple of months ago to do my next thing, which is exciting and where we're trying to go now is really born out of a pain and just a struggle that we had in building our last business, which is, you know, more and more data that exists now in organizations is unstructured, and more and more of that unstructured data is conversational, and a lot of it is stuff that your customers and prospects are telling you. It's feedback on your product, it's feedback on your service, feedback on add ons, just whole bunch of different stuff, and typically it just comes in from, you know, 1015, different sorts of of places, and it's near impossible to keep on top of it all. We have BI tools, and I'm sure you guys use some of these. We have BI tools for reporting unstructured data, but we've got nothing for unstructured data, and so it's just really difficult to keep on top of it all. So that's kind of where, where we're going to give you a little bit of context. And I've kind of wanted to deep dive a little bit on some of your experiences and the problems. I don't, I don't usually speak to people with as as impressive as careers, so I'm going to make the
I was just trying to appear. I was like, Oh, I've just come from a call where I was with a fellow cmo who I was like, I don't really know what we're doing. She's like, me,
good, good, good. And I know, I know you've run product marketing teams in the past. So have I a lot of this stuff actually kind of filters into that. But yeah, that's me, maybe, maybe you get better context on you, and then we can, yeah,
for sure. So I've been in marketing my entire life, well, my entire life, my entire career, and, yeah, in technology marketing since after graduate school. I think I just found the faster moving companies more interesting, and have worked in either data companies. So the company I'm at currently is a sort of spatial analytics company. And right after grad school, I worked at a mobile analytics company. And then in the middle, I had this brief foray into edtech through both sort of LinkedIn and sort of their hiring solutions, and then through multiverse and its educational technology solutions, what's knitted all those experiences together? I feel like it's a each of those companies, I found something I'm very interested in. Like, I like a story I'm interested in telling. So I find it very difficult to do marketing if you don't have a genuine interest in the story. And with carto, like, I have a geography degree, and I was always interested in, you know, just like how the world fits together, and like, what, how, like human mobility impacts landscapes, you know, that's, it's always been like, an interest of mine. And so think carto has really allowed me to lean into that. And then, yeah, I feel like, what do I get passionate about? Definitely the product marketing piece to me. You know, demand gen is the marketing you can measure, and product marketing is the marketing that helps you build a sustainable business.
Interesting. It's the stories and the anecdotes and the value props exactly
like if you haven't got the right if you haven't got the right beta customers who've given you the right feedback on why it's valuable that you fed into your packaging, pricing, positioning through product marketing, like, what have you got? You know, I feel like demand gen it captures demand. We want to think about demand gen engines as generating demand. In reality, I think the demand is generated through your brand and product marketing activities and then captured by odomain Gen teams. No one, you know, no one clicks on an ad for a problem they've never heard of or thought they had, you know,
yeah. And I was actually thinking of that exact point when, when I was, I was looking at Cardo, when we first connected, and it was talking about, you know, built for, geospatial analysts. And then I look at a bunch of the companies, a bunch of the logos, and I mean, you guys have raised a ton of money, and I'm sure things are moving really quickly. And one of the things I was thinking of is like, how do someone like Vodafone or booking.com consider themselves to be geospatial analysts? What what is that in their minds? It was just wasn't a term that I'd come across very frequently.
Oh, sorry, how does booking.com consider they have geospatial analysts? Sorry,
yeah. Like, how do they, you know, you say that card is built for geospatial analysts? Yeah. And if you ask booking.com or Vodafone, they wouldn't say, we're a geospatial analyst, analysis company, right? So, so, yes, that's a great question, each of really specific personas within those organizations. Or how do you think through that?
So there's two ways. One is which is the easiest? Well, no, there's two ways. Each has their own pros and cons. One is the geospatial department. Who knows exactly how to do spatial analysis, knows the business problems it solves, but they are wedded to their existing tool, ESRI, right? They've been using it since university. They've built their career on knowing that tool back to front. And so they can be reluctant to change, but they're aware of the limitations of that tool. You know, it's very it's not interoperable with BI tools. So they're aware of the challenges they you know, and so, and they know they can see the greater impact they can have with a tool like carto. But you know, change is hard, right? And so there's much more change management to do with them versus an analyst in the rest of the business who may have done lighter spatial analysis, just because it's not the bread and butter of what they do. Wish they could do more, but they never have, because these specialist JS tools like ESRI are custom, you know, they're, they're, they're custom languages, right? They like, they don't know how to use ESRI, and they're not going to invest their time learning how to use ESRI. When to them, it's like niche use cases. And so for them, it's about being able to use SQL, the language they already know, being able to integrate carto with their data warehouse they're already using with the APIs, into the other tech stack elements they're already using, and to be able to expand the use cases they solve with spatial but then you've got to convince them there's ROI in expanding the use cases they already do with spatial and that, like, expanding their spatial investment is getting worth more to them than expanding their investment in other areas of their of their analytics or, like data engineering stack,
yeah, interesting. And it's a similar thing that we kind of see as well. Because, you know, if, if bi, you know, power, bi, click or something Tableau, you know, are supposed to exist in a world of structured data. When we start talking to people about unstructured data, you start coming up about, you know, they built out full bi teams. They pulled out bi analysts. They have developers that just specialize in this area. And it's a similar kind of thing, right? We're trying to think of, how do we, how do we approach this that doesn't need that all that kind of deep rooted expertise and skill and just, you know, habit that these businesses have built up? Yeah, and this is really interesting from from a marketing perspective. So, so when, when you think of customer feedback, customer prospect feedback, and when you think of all the various places that that comes in for you guys, I didn't see intercom or Zendesk or anything on your on your website, so I don't know what you're using, but I'm assuming you guys, you know, have a bunch of recorded sales calls, you've got a bunch of emails, bunch of support tickets, probably do some QA and research and and so on so forth. So it comes in all those different places. How do you think about marketing using that information? Maybe ways that that you do it today and you feel like you've got to figure it out, or ways that you wish you could,
great question. So I think you're saying, how do we get like, Voice of field, Voice of market insights and, like, what do we do with them?
Yeah, like, like, like, the old school version of this would have been, hey, let's go through every single interaction we have. I'm going to manually type up the voice of the customer report. Like, we will see them. I've done them myself. But, like, not, not all that scalable, huge. Is time consuming, but, but the value out of that is high, right? So I'm just thinking of how you think about that value and that kind of world. So how
I've done it so far across, like, these sort of more scrappy scale ups, I'll use multiverse and carto rather than, like, you know, LinkedIn is one. I don't know if you use long or anything to record your sales calls, but like, you know, keyword word clouds from Gong, you know, before I just redid our sales deck, and before I did that, I watched 15 stage one opportunity calls from AES at like, obviously at 2x speed, I think actually even faster, maybe three or 4x speed. But like, you know, I watched them like, and then I then I did word searches. I sort of saw what the key trends were from those calls. And maybe I could have watched eight calls, but I was new to technology, so I watched 15, and then, and then I saw what the trends were, and I searched for those words. And I basically built a picture of how I thought the current sales deck was using, being used, what I thought was going well, what wasn't, and therefore what I thought needed to change with the new one, and I used that to inform the new sales deck. And so that's a good small scale. And then I think that multiverse, we basically had a program of Gong insights, plus we'd use a company called guidepoint to speak to prospects that we didn't engage with. And then guide point, basically we find ICP prospect, you can pay, like, a couple $100 per prospect or something. And you can find people in your ICP that you know, you don't, you can't get, you've never had the chance to speak to today. And you can pay to do like a, you know, 30 minute, one hour call with them, you know, saying, like, you know, have you ever heard of this company? Like, you know, looking at the site, what do you think it does? How do you see value? You know, what do you use today for this solution? Do it blind, or you can do it named.
That's really interesting. And I see so much, you know, I've used every sales recording tool possible. They're getting better at summaries. Like Gen AI is obviously helping. I think their transcripts are like, really horrendous. And even just basic stuff, like, I can't, can't, having built a voice tool in the past, I can't understand how, how a transcript. Can't understand whose microphone is the input in that moment, right? It's just basic stuff, but, but it's complex, Okay, interesting. And so when you were doing the sales deck exercise, what were some of the kind of headings or themes that you were looking at? Like, are you going through? Okay, how are people describing the problem? What's a value like, like, as you, as you went through those 15 calls, you probably did a bunch of rough notes in a Google Doc. Or notion, like, what are the themes or the headings that you're thinking about as you do that?
Um, good question. I'm usually thinking about like, where do prospects see value right now? Like, what's appealing to them? What are their what are their objections? Um, what problems are they trying to solve? Um, what rooms are they trying to solve? Like, yeah, where are they seeing value? What are their objections? Like, what else are they considering to solve those problems? What are they using today and and, like, who are they like? How do those themes differ between, if we've spoken to like a super technical GIS person versus like the economic buyer, you know,
interesting. I'm just super interested in this example based on where we're headed. Okay, so, so build the notes, look at the sales deck, and then you basically re design the deck yourself. Or, like, what's the process from there? I
actually did it myself, just because, well, one, because I like to pick IC. When I knew in a job, I picked some IC projects that a, I think I should own as the marketing leader, and B, that'll be good forcing function for me, you know. And I picked this one, and I started with, like, sketching out the narrative. So just like, honestly, like, 12 to 15 bullets of, like,
you know, the story of
the story. And then I turned that into, like, a rough sketch slide, so, like, not beautifully designed, or anything sketched out rough. And then I once had the rough sketch, I socialized it with, like, you know, CSMs and all the people all that feedback, yeah. And then did a final nice, clean version, and then launched that as a pilot, left the old one still there for a month, launched the new one as a pilot said, for one month, you can use both, you know what I mean, and then I'm going to retire this one in a month, once I'm confident you that there's no additional feedback that we've missed here for the new one. And I feel like you can do that same exercise when you're like, migrating from, if you're like, migrating users from, like, one platform to the next. But you know what I mean, it's kind of like the same logic. It's like, migrate your earliest your users who are like, early adopters, first, your tiger team, you don't know, your sales tiger team, you know, get their feedback, take the rest, leave the old version there still, and then pull it away. I kind of follow that same format for, like, when we make big changes, not, you know, small, updating a sell sheet, whatever, take tear the old one down. But like, you know, when you're fundamentally asking a seller to change what they do every day,
yeah, you're going through enablement for everybody, and getting, you know, changing all the way. I feel like,
especially like in a remote world, like, you could write an enablement session if you want, but like, people aren't really listening. It's only when they've actually, like, tried to use the deck on the road and they're like, I got pretty stuck here. You know?
Yeah, they lost for words. Interesting. Purpose of that exercise higher close one rate, or, like, shortness. So the purpose
of that exercise is to improve? Yeah, close. One rate primarily, I think secondarily, ASP, because you're hoping that through this new version of selling, they're going to do a better job of broadening the aperture to, like, bring in additional use cases or additional stakeholders before they narrow it to features and functions. Our sales team was like, very quick to be like, oh, like, you know, like, let me show you how you can use, like, h3 or quad bin in this tool. And you know what I mean, rather than being like, what are you using ESRI to solve for today? Do you, like, you know, like, are you interested in bringing Are you looking for a new solution for all of those problems? You know? Like,
yeah, yeah. So getting more hardcore into discovery than just surrounding the solution? Yeah. Interesting. So, so when you think of feedback from customers and from prospects and how it informs the work that you and your teams do, what do you think are some of the biggest problems or challenges? And then my follow on question from that'll be like, what's what's that business impact? What's that business metric that it's hurting. Sorry, I missed the beginning of the question. So for customer and feedback, sorry, customer and prospect feedback that you guys get, what do you see as something like the biggest challenges or problems associated with that? Like, if you could solve one thing, and in terms of how you guys process, what do you think our biggest problem
is in the market right now? What's the biggest problem processing that information?
What? What's biggest problem processing that information? Because you get at your scale, you're going to get a ton of stuff, right? And what we hear from from folks at similar stage and market is like I spoke to a security automation company the other day. They've raised $135 million a teeny bit more new guys. And he basically said, Hey, we're best in class. We're, like, well, exceeding the rule of 40 and best case, we use 10% of our customer sales. And so I'm like, I'm really trying to, you know, I'm having follow on conversations with him about, like, hey, like, what is the impact of that? Like, you guys are doing great. Like, is that 10% just good enough? Or, like, is that big fucking problem for you guys? Like, like, how did it see it? Yeah,
so I think the biggest problem is always when you're looking at feedback, you're looking at feedback from people who are already talking to you, and so that you've got massive selection bias there, right? And so I think if you're deciding on something like, can we appeal to this ICP, or does this product meet the needs of this market? Like, absolutely, the right place to start is, you know what, what you already have access to, right? The phone calls that you know. But I think it's about like, what, what's the dollar value of the decisions you're going to make off of it if I'm going to make a decision to enter a new market, be that segment, country? Yeah, I'm probably going to do 12 guide point calls with people who've never spoken to us before to check have my themes already from my internal research, you know, and then check they match. And that is actually like, how the rule of 12. There's this guy called George siders, and he basically, if you're doing B to B enterprise sales, you know, he basically says, like, 12, like, qual calls like, you know, you can actually see the themes after eight, after 12. You either know if you're talking about a problem with a clear solution, or if you're talking about a problem that's got such disparate solutions, it's going to be very hard for you to create a clear solution. And you know that already from those 12 calls, and that's how like, if PE companies are thinking about buying a company, like that's what they do. So they use guidepoint themselves. Interesting, yeah, it's
based on it, because I read about this little probability before, once I heard the number was 11, I think when I read it, but once you, once you exceed 11 conversations, the difference between 11 conversations and 100 conversations reduces to like point 00, percentage of probability in terms of becoming more accurate. So actually, you just need to have the small number of
I'm sure it depends how tight your ICP is like, when we used to be really, we were really strict on the rule of 12 at LinkedIn. But like, our ICP is CHROs at Fortune 500 companies, right? Speak to 12. CHROs at Fortune 500 i 100% believe that represents the 500 like, yeah. I think if your ICP is like so carto, we have a very clear persona, but that persona works at insurance companies in catastrophe analysis. It works at cell phone companies in network optimization. It works at Walmart in operations and logistics. And so sometimes I wonder, you know, and maybe because I don't know it as well yet, but I wonder sometimes if that, you know, there must be something around how tight your ICP is and therefore how reliable that 12 is, you know, yeah,
and is it? Is it rule of 12 per vertical, right? Totally,
totally. And I think that probably comes down to like companies who are at smaller stages, we probably should have a small enough target where 12 works, you know, yeah,
yeah, yeah. But I mean, to scale, you either got to sell to more more ICPs or build more products, right? Yeah. And have you guys considered, or are you going, like, entirely verticalized in your go to market? Is that something that like,
about Account Based Marketing, and we certainly think about priority verticals. Our priority verticals are financial services, insurance and telco and those priority industries. You know, I don't think will like those. Those are sort of based on ASP, win rate, LTV. I do think these will change enormously. And we do have
there because the tool solves the problem for them the best, or because that's just happened to be where the traction came, a bit
of both. So the tool solved the problem for them very well. We already had, in each case, we had an example of a customer in that industry who demonstrated that we could, you know, like, tell us in telco, you know what I mean, we had a high SP, high LTV, satisfied, high MPs customer, who we were, like, if we could get more like this, and the data shows that we can, so you've got them in the pipeline, then, you know, we can reach x million. So there's a combination of that, but we also still are a SaaS platform that can be used by any industry. And so there's a combination of these very focused, targeted industry targeted industries. And then, you know, at the end of the day, what comes inbound, some of it, of course, I do target with account based campaigns, very specific targeting. And some of it comes organic through organic search. And, you know, content consumption, content downloads. And, you know, so we do service, you know, with strict criteria on, like, you know, strict med pick criteria on what they have to be solving for. We serve all industries, and we have a lot of general marketing that's for all industries. When we think about Account Based Marketing, like, campaigns just for X, campaigns just for y, that's very much, you know, in the telco, financial services and insurance,
okay. Okay, makes sense. So in a couple of minutes left, let me, let me tell you, paint picture of where I think we might go, and just get your kind of crude feedback, and feel free to tear the shit out of it if you think it's bad. So as I said, kind of you know, if the items of the structured data, there's nothing today, really an unstructured data. Nothing in gathering the story. It's gathering the values of those stories and those anecdotes and that feedback that comes in and and we're not thinking of like, Hey, you got all these bugs in the system and they clog up 30% of your support tickets. Like, yeah, stuff is already solved. It's more actually like helping people to understand a lot of the stuff you're doing in the sales tax by the themes of like, Hey, what are the stories about the problems? What are the value props that people are engaged in? And then how do we, you know, connect to all those various sources on one side and then give that to the people that need to make decisions based on that data. So how do we automate the process of you going through 15 sales calls to try to figure out what this is, instead of making that a once off task to do a big project like we doing the sales deck. How do we deliver that on a recurring basis? We've played around with a whole bunch of kind of little ways to build the product and given it to, like, honestly, like founder friends who are running, running much smaller SaaS companies, and you guys to play around with, try it and give us some feedback. And where we're coming out right now is like, hey, what if we just, like, really simply connect to all these sources. Someone can tell us what they care about, and we just send them a report every Friday morning, and that's what they get. And like, maybe in the future, there's this whole sophisticated platform way of, like, searching and, like, you know, generating trend reports and doing all the sort of stuff and bi that you do today. But actually, like, Could our first product just be simple, like, PDF report that can send your email or to you on Slack, and it just gives you a breakdown. And could we curate that report to each decision maker in an organization, you know, typically, heads product, heads marketing, and give that to them? So that's kind of where, where we're thinking, I don't know, yeah, I'm curious what you think on idea value. Like, yeah, we'll start there and then. So
I love the idea. So I think where, like, where do a lot of BI tools. Like, I have local dashboards, Salesforce dashboards, you know what I mean, I get, who knows how many dashboards I go into every day. Yeah. And I don't think BI is like, quote, unquote, solved that, because depending on the data source, like our go to market is in Salesforce, our product data, when we need to pull data from the data warehouse and other sources, including Salesforce, is in looker. But the challenge with sending a PDF report is that I often change so someone sent me a report yesterday. I'm like, the time it takes from an MQL to come and stay to an OP, and I was like, Holy hell, that's so many days. That's crazy. And then I was like, Oh, wait, I just need to filter for like, the last six months when we've been keeping that on this. And then I was like, Oh, the insights, totally different. It's actually fixed moving on. You know what I mean? But the original report they sent me, like, if I take an action on that, take an action on that, like, it would be totally correct, because the time period, one challenge with, like, sending a PDF is that, like, I would say, at least half the time I will find the PDF helpful, but then I will have a follow up. Oh, I wonder if I just look at this for the UK, or I wonder if I just look at it for this quarter. I Yeah. And so I'd say that's where that like, and maybe that drives it back into the product. And that's helpful,
yeah, maybe we build a way for you to actually see what's feeding into that. And yeah, I often question to the stories around
Yeah. QUESTION the underlying data is something I do a lot, just because I know, just like everybody, right? You know, oh, you pull from that field in Salesforce? Oh, no, no, no. Don't use that one. You know?
Yeah, no. Onsen, and it's kind of unspoken knowledge in an organization. Interesting. Okay, so, so it's more about questioning the underlying data. One of the things that we did try, which is really hard problem, was basically, I don't know if you've used perplexity, but it's basically like an AI search engine. It leverages GPT four but, but we wanted to build a Q and A functionality on any unstructured data in your business, so you'd be able to say like, Hey, what are customers saying about this feature in the last 30 days? Or, you know, how are salespeople positioning this particular problem with this particular ICP, and it streams an answer like GPT would? I'm really passionate about that as a place to go. It's just like enormously difficult to build. I need to raise as much money as you guys have right now to do that well. So I think there's interesting ways, if you guys could do, if you as a leader, could get one thing on feedback, what do you think it would be
from, from a from a search like, from a sort of AI, authentic search type,
exactly, yeah, from or reporting tool, like, if you could, if you could look at one thing every day or every week about customer feedback, what do you think that might look like or feel like?
Great question. Like, I think, I think win loss analysis is not done often enough, because it's hard to do, because customers never want to get on the phone, especially the lost customers, re engaging them, is very hard. And I think from my role, I would want to know, like, why are we winning? Why are we losing
Interesting? Okay, awesome, right on time. I like, super, super, tremendously, incredibly. Appreciate your time. I know you have so much on it was really great to connect. Thank you so much. We like you.
I didn't keep in touch. Let me know how it goes. I'm always interested in, like, fucking the mere startup Well, anyone who I might have a company of value, I'm like, Hey, let's stay connected, because there's not that many. Yeah,
it's hard, yeah, yeah. And maybe we build a bad one, but hopefully we build a good one, but yeah, I would definitely keep you posted on whichever direction we go. We're figuring it out. And thank you so much for your time. Have a great weekend. You too.
