0:00:08 - Alex
Great Well, welcome back to another episode of Experience Focus Leaders. I'm delighted to host Guillaume Caban, also known as G, and I think G in this case stands for the Godfather of Growth, at least in my mind. That you'll tell us what it really means, but Guillaume ran a growth at some of the most exciting B2B companies, like Drift and Segment. He's now advising some of the most exciting B2B companies through his new platform, hyper Growth Partners, which provides B2B companies with ways to grow faster in exchange for equity. Guillaume, welcome to the show.
0:00:55 - Guillaume
Thank you, Alex. I know when I meet a fellow European because they can pronounce my name properly.
0:01:01 - Alex
Oh well, I married a French woman, and so I can do a very good French accent. I realize that ability is good, Impressive, so we could always switch into exaggerated French accent to highlight points. But I think well, I mean I was actually thinking of like how would I Frenchify that? You're like, you are too gross with Givenchy's to odd couture to high fashion.
So you're like you really love this topic. You know you're one of the first, in my view, to look up what are the most. You know what are the innovations, what are interesting startups doing. You're applying it, you're using it across gazillions of companies that you and your colleagues, you know, contribute to. So this is a masterclass in this discipline. So really, you know, really excited to have you on. I guess some of the topics that would be relevant is maybe take, take a stab back for, for our audience that are less familiar with the function of growth as for how it emerged from, from the inbound era of Hopspot, maybe over to, you know, the present day, and then let's kind of spend some time as well, wow, wow.
0:02:18 - Guillaume
Okay, let's see. Let's see, it's interesting. I think that there's like two kind of like time tracks. We can kind of run it in parallel, which is like growth has a function, with normalizations, and also like my story, which evolved in parallel. And to all people thinking like, how did I land here? Honestly, I got incredibly lucky, I was at the right place at the right time, multiple times in a row, all right, which led me to be at, say, doubling down growth just as it was becoming a thing. But there's to take a step back.
Growth as we think of it today comes from B2C platforms, namely Facebook and drawbacks and a couple others, but no, primarily Facebook, I'd say, back in the mid 2000s, where there were some teams that were facing incredible usage volume and so they had the capabilities, things to know, number of users, of testing many different website experience variants. Facebook, you know, features per day, per day, which it's a combination of volume, technology tools and access to engineers and analysts at the same time. And that just started to happen mid 2000. Before that, you either had high volume and, like some, I'd say, specific B2C platforms, mostly like content, but there was no like engineers and analysts that attached to that, or there was the opposite right and they were able to reignite growth and basically to create winning variants at scale and that became popular. It took another I'd say five years before that started to arrive in the world of B2B. But here's the catch In B2B you don't have volume right.
You're just never going to have Facebook volume in B2B. It's never going to happen, which means most of the time you can't run that number of variants and so it. Growth took a different face application in B2B and it is a lot more growth hacky in the sense that you're going to find you're still using engineers and analysts but you're doing a lot more demand gen E stuff. Especially in the mid, early 2010s when we were doing most of the B2B SaaS, was sales led to just creating leads for sales team. I'm not saying that in a you know, patronizing way. Right, that was the core function.
0:05:09 - Alex
That's where I evolve, right and so level said, for people those leads are incredibly valuable, right Like so it sort of was there may not be. This is the lifeblood of the business, right they're, you know, especially in the enterprise sales context. But even in the current world of product led growth, it's still kind of a high value thing to find your target audience that cares about. So now that you're talking, about product led growth.
0:05:38 - Guillaume
it's interesting, which is this is coming full circle. As I said, like we went from like B2C teams doing like A B testing in app to B2B teams doing demand gen growth, hacky stuff top of all outside of the app, and now that we're doing PLG products on B2B SaaS, now growth teams are in B2B doing in app, let's say, testing let's come back full circle to the original thing of growth right and, to be honest, both teams exist depending on the business and how the business runs.
You have some business with ourselves led, some are PLG and you're going to have either like a top of phone growth team or a bottom of funnel, middle of funnel, like app growth team.
0:06:26 - Alex
And it almost feels like, at least in large chunks of B2B world, there's sort of this hybrid category, which some people call product led sales, which you know, basically still says, hey, let's use some demand gen and top of the funnel tactics to get people into the product and then be very sophisticated about how we, you know, expand those opportunities through adoption was in companies and this sort of gray area like I'm really curious at what you're taking and how that's evolved, because people like to simplify. It's like PLG is the flavor of the day. You know the sales led is like old school and only works for the you know, for the you know articles and excentures. I think you're, as a practitioner, probably see the gray areas and the interconnections much more. You know, take us through that.
0:07:17 - Guillaume
I think that there's two thoughts that come to mind when you ask that. One is every board and CEO slash founder basically wants low-cac. This is like that's the goal, Like all the rest is like means to end right. They want low-cac and high-LTV, and so there are like a few ways and I'm just going to you do tour.
0:07:41 - Alex
So for those that are not, you know in me. You know more in the marketing or sale side of the spectrum that are not deep. You know more in the creative side. Cat is customer acquisition costs Correct and LTV is lifetime value.
0:07:57 - Guillaume
Yes, sorry so basically, how expensive is it to acquire people versus how much money they bring? And it's really just a cash flow question. It's like when do you start making your profits and for how long do you make a profit after you acquire them? All right. A fun example sorry yeah, that I like to use is if you offered every customer of your SaaS a free Tesla you know to purchase, you would have 100% conversion, right, but then your cac would be a Tesla like 40, 50,000 bucks, right. So not profitable for most people, right? Most businesses.
0:08:35 - Alex
I think Greta Turnberg is a little too young. But other than that, yeah, I think you're, I think you're good yeah.
0:08:41 - Guillaume
Yeah, Thank you. It's about capital efficiency, yeah, and if you can bring low-cac, high-LTV, you have a very capital efficient business. Thus you command very high. So multiples on your next evaluation very effective founder or CEO, Okay. There are a few ways to have low-cac and high-LTV. One is have a competitive mode on the top of funnel where the acquisition is fairly efficient and that is not going to be paid because that is priced in the click. That's the whole point of AdWords and others. That gets priced in the click. Okay. So it can be outbound, it can be a CEO or it can be PLG. And the reason why founders love conceptually PLG is because users acquire other users they acquire themselves for free. So conceptually it sounds great. In practice, almost every business I work with at scale does a combo of trying some PLG on small and medium businesses and doing effectively some product-led sales on the mini-market and enterprise. Everyone does kind of both.
0:10:09 - Alex
So that's very practical application. So you started talking. Let's stick to the top of the funnel for a second, because one of the things that I love about growth is that something that worked yesterday may work today, but much worse and may not work particularly well tomorrow. So I think that is the reason why we are like we see this near and dear to our heart is we could still see people sending out 30-year-old formats like PDFs at a pretty large scale in the B2B world because they read somewhere that the playbook 20 years ago was.
You created an offer and then you gated, you asked people to fill out a bunch of things and then after that you get to download your 50-page PDF and it does work to some degree, but it sort of takes you back to a kind of pre-World Wide Web consumption experience, which may also take away from your brand positioning, from your product positioning, make people not engage, and so we see this and we go this is crazy. We understand why people may want to print something but download it, but you may not want to lead. Was that on the screen is the first step that you would drive people towards. But yet I see this kind of every day and you see, probably this, plus a bunch of other things that people do that's no longer working. So what are some of these kind of crazy things that you go? Why are we doing this? What is it in the human behavior for marketers that should be performance-driven, innovation-driven that's preventing us to apply the latest lessons?
0:11:55 - Guillaume
Yeah, and so I want to take a step back here. It's like why is? Why does growth exist compared to, like, marketing? In substance, that's what you're asking, right, you're describing what marketers, marketing teams, are doing and you're saying what they're doing is not effective. Why are they doing it? That also asks the question of like, why do growth teams exist and why are they capable of doing other things? And it's a question of incentives, right? A marketing team, if you look at how they incentivized, they're not incentivized to take risks. Okay, because every time you take a risk, there's a high chance of failure no the virus, but there's a chance of failure as a marketer.
When you fail, you launch a campaign that doesn't work and is a failure. That's a huge problem. It's a huge problem. It's better to do something which is fairly standard, typical, so you can have some mediocre but okay-ish results. Then you try and stand out, take a risk and like go home right.
0:13:07 - Alex
Keep your job, you know, by IBM.
0:13:10 - Guillaume
By IBM is what you're saying, right, don't take risks by Oracle. Right, and so don't take the risk. The growth works because the incentive is different. They operate like angel investors, right, really, they have limited information, they have a reasonable hypothesis and they're going to launch a lot of tests to see which one sticks. And failing at 70% within the growth team is normal. That's part of the job, because the 30% 20% that succeed will pay for all of the failures, will compensate. Those are the outlying experiments, the outlier winners in angel investments right, and so the operation principle is different, the returns are different, the quality of the ship is different right, and that's why it works. But that is also why growth teams don't last very long, because eventually one of those failures has a high internal political cost and it kind of like disbands the team. Right, and so it's very, very hard to have a separate growth team with a separate culture that operates for a long period of time. Right, it's effective, but it's difficult.
0:14:30 - Alex
This is super fascinating. So when I kind of think of the way some investors describe what it takes to succeed, is that you need to have some sort of cook in your product, right, that may drive maybe PLG or other things, but it's something that delivers well on the product, and then some kind of competitive edge in distribution. And let's say that. Let's label that as growth for now, even though it's not there and it's literally like this is the playbook, and you need this playbook not just one time when you're like in series A to series B. Ideally, this is a playbook that you have, like you said, this portfolio strategy, and like one distribution strategy slows down, you have two or three others that can pick up. You've tested them and then you maybe let marketers or whoever else in the product team to execute it.
So there is this sort of investors get this. And yet what I'm hearing you say is these growth teams don't last. So help us reconcile. Is it, you know? Is it just the pressure of large organizations? Is it something that is just kind of as a discipline and hasn't, like, matured sufficiently?
0:15:45 - Guillaume
Yeah, yes, there are extremely few chief growth officers extremely few that I can name that have actually made it to the executive team and stayed in that CGO role. So there is. That's the first thing. Second thing is think of growth. What does the team look like? Okay, it is a collection, a handful of marketers, engineers, sometimes the PM or something like that. Right, an analyst. Okay, so you either hiring so one person needs to be able, as a leader, to effectively hire a talent, a plus talent in all those different roles, which is very difficult, okay, or Bravo, from other teams, right, take over, right, and then that person is going to be pushing experiments on the turf of either marketing or product, okay, and every time they fail that's very visible. Every time they succeed, what happens? Well, they need to move on to the next experiment. So they ship back, or they hand over the winning experiment back to the team that owns that surface area at the marketing or product, or product.
0:17:07 - Alex
If you're on the receiving end of that, they get the glory. They get the glory in the end Exactly, you know the great project. Exactly what do?
0:17:13 - Guillaume
people love it Exactly that. If you are on the receiving end on marketing or product and you get the blame when you fail, but the growth guys don't, that's their job, but when they succeed they get the glory and then you need to clean up and document that. Ah, come on Like that's terrible and so that's hard to maintain at scale because the boundaries are not clear. There's no surface area. That's clearly the ownership of growth. It's very rare. I'll give you a couple of questions Do you pay pain marketing and growth or in marketing? Do you put SEO there or in marketing? Do you put outbound there on sales Right, or do they touch everything and so it is effective at a scale at, say, around 50 to a couple hundred employees, because those boundaries are not super well defined. There's lots of jobs to be done.
0:18:10 - Alex
A lot of generalists. The CEO still, who is the ultimate generalist? Still kind of supports this right.
0:18:16 - Guillaume
But if you pass the thousand, it's not. It's very, very rare, very difficult. There are exceptions because in some cases there are exceptional leaders. Look, for example, at Luke at Shopify, chief growth officer right, and similarly he owns all the top of funnel.
0:18:35 - Alex
All of it Right. So then, if that we've, what you're describing is kind of the underlying challenge to the discipline how do you go one right if you still want to deliver disproportionate growth? If you're, let's say, the CMO, right and there was a sort of role like growth marketing persona, right, like maybe they don't work as well was the product team, I would recommend.
0:19:01 - Guillaume
How would you go about? It depends on the stage. Very, very different stage. If we look At, say, at the early stage, marketing doesn't matter. In most cases. What you want is the engine at the early stage, called, like, series a, series B. You just want more leads, right, and you basically want to capture all of the early adopters market and so you can have a team that is effectively just growth Right, and they try to find Commitative advantage One or two channels where they have much better character TV ratios than the next competitor.
0:19:35 - Alex
And it's almost. There's no religion because there's no big organizations, yet your agile. So whatever you gain the advantage, you double down on that.
0:19:42 - Guillaume
Yeah, then as you grow, you probably going to standardize, stabilize some of the key channels generally starting my paid and you're going to start investing in brand marketing awareness events, partnerships which are outside of the world of growth Right. And my recommendation is, as you grow, you probably want to separate brand awareness events Into a brand marketing team, have a Product marketing team and then have a growth team which is in charge of dementia Right, very close to, like, all of the core channels. That is my recommendation. Eventually, at scale, late stage, I would have one growth team doing top of funnel and one growth team doing product. Growth in product close, very probably embedded in the product team, depends on leaders, mostly depends on leaders.
0:20:42 - Alex
So but like I think let's take a step back. So what would you describe fundamentally is just good, good business, right, like you find a clever way to, you know, find, find and engage your target audience. Right, that you know converts into, you know, profitable customers over time. So this cacti to be thing. Yet it feels like when we outside of maybe investors right there, really paying attention to this sort of disproportionate outcome models, when you speak to an average marketing or product meeting, this is not the conversation that would happen and so you know the the bigger opportunity. It seems that, even if right, like maybe the growth lives in different pockets or the way you organize it differs, but like you still want to imbue this philosophy across the organization. Right, and it's a life philosophy. Right, you're experimenting.
You find the you know broadly like where's the big gains that don't don't suck the life out of you, right like that, are sort of like so how, where you finding, I mean this seems like common sense.
0:21:53 - Guillaume
But people are not. Take her as Alex. People are not like very few people, like you know gambling of the gambling mindset. Every time you take a growth experiment, you're running a hypothesis, you're running a numbers game on likelihood of failure and likelihood of success. So two things one need to be very creative, come up with ideas that no one else has Right Time and time again. And then you need to be really grounded grounded in numbers and in in you know building your hypothesis properly. The problem there is that that's that's a unicorn personality.
The opposite ends of the spectrum. Yeah, okay, and so having somebody that does both is extremely rare. Right, you tend to have either very creative, crazy folks who like, especially like if you look in the brand side of marketing, that very good, very creative, yeah, and we just like they never look at numbers.
0:23:07 - Alex
Yeah, they don't get it. I create, I create. Therefore I am it's like totally divorced from output or outcome.
0:23:13 - Guillaume
Yeah, or you have on the opposite side the people who do paid marketing and they turn. They turn knobs and dials every day to like optimize the CPC, the cosmic click, but, like creativity is not their forte. Right, having an organization that's capable of doing both, a whole team that's capable of doing both appreciate the creativity, the craziness, see the opportunity in the crazy idea and then run with it. And then religiously look at the numbers, implement analysis and do postmortem. It's very hard.
0:23:50 - Alex
It's this Renaissance unicorn that we're looking for, and it's interesting that you still have a, you know, a huge audience of fans that are reaching out to you right, that are kind of trusting your input on what are the best companies, whether it's like Sequoia Sequoia Scout role or kind of your own advisory role, where it seems like the, the VCs, are the ones that are bringing you in Absolutely, you know, more often not so you're kind of the sort of special forces that comes in and helps organization is. Are you imbuing that DNA or you sharing your best practices, you know, and collections of what are you doing when you have a typical engagement?
0:24:31 - Guillaume
Yeah, that's a good question. Generally, I mean, I've been doing this for like a couple of decades now, for better or worse, and and generally I come loaded with a bag of tricks because I I know what's very likely to work based on things I've done in the past couple of years and similar businesses All right, so I can replicate past successes and gave and give this team a feeling of sensation that they are extremely good and everything they touch is working Right. But slowly I'm edging them towards experimentation, taking more risks and getting away of things that are tried and true that I know, by the time engagement is over If I did a good job. They are testing hundreds of experiments per quarter literally 100. Right.
0:25:27 - Alex
So you're starting with low hanging fruits around pattern matching, you can find arbitrage effectively. Yeah, based on your previous experience, like hey, in this industry, this arbitrage still remains. Let's go take, take, take the low hanging fruit, yeah. And then over time and say you need to find new areas of arbitrage competitors. Yeah, it's very easy.
0:25:48 - Guillaume
Yeah like you just come in the outside eye, you look at the funnel, you and you ask for the conversion rate per stages. You saw that the bottom of the funnel you see where most of the pipeline in dollars is is leaking Right and just work your way up and generally at every stage you can find unnecessary friction that was added for the wrong reason over time and you ask the question like can we remove this friction?
Right, and we just like make a way with it right and and we create a better user experience. I give you two very obvious examples. One is everyone in the PLS and part of the sales business has a demo contact us form and at least half of the businesses I talked to request unnecessary fields on those forms. And the last one the first name and last name, company name, role and title Right and in addition to email and and other things, right.
0:26:47 - Alex
And I always say the same thing, they get a little arrogant, I think. Sometimes they ask for your phone number, which is like yes, yeah, I'd love to share.
0:26:54 - Guillaume
that was you, and would you like me to say is if you have a demo form, yeah, that means you're trying to create leads for your sales team. What you care about is qualified leads, not the others, obviously, and so that two things that can be true. Either this person is qualified and they're using a business email, and that company is extremely likely to be existence with your data vendor, be it zoom, info clobber to whatever Right, and in that case you don't need to ask for the first name, last name and company name. You can extract all of that from the data vendor. Or that person is not qualified. They're using a Gmail or whatever, or like it's a super small business in somewhere else in the world and you're never going to talk to them anyways, and so the added value you get from capturing the data from them is rich, it's non existent and it's costing you 7 percentage points per field.
0:27:46 - Alex
Right. So we have five fields. You're basically, you know, having your conversion rate. If you're not more right, yeah. And then if you and people thought, oh, I'm going to be very clever, I'm going to ask you for your email first, and then I'm going to expand that field and ask you for five other things and, like you're, yes, you don't need that. You're creating the asshole.
0:28:07 - Guillaume
If that person is qualified, yeah, you don't need to find anything. You want to talk to them regardless? Okay, and so we're adding friction for the purposes of qualification. That's not necessary. I'll give you another example yeah, if you know that person's qualified, what is the experience? The experience is they fill a form to get an email saying hey, we got your form, we'll get back to you. Then an SD qualifies them in Salesforce. Right reaches out to them by an email, says hey, alex would love to talk to you. Here's a calendar, lee. There's a few back and forth to try and book the meeting and then they talk to an A by by then, probably like a week has passed and the appetite has gone down. What if, like Alex is on the website, alex puts his email Alex is qualified. Great company. Just Off-rape, cal-ly chili Piper link. Pop up just there. Just there on the spot. Right, just do the qualification behind the scenes with our friends from Madcudoo. Others, just like off of the cheap hyper there, Right, that's much less friction.
Even better, what if you don't need to book the meeting? You have an A that's available and you just hey, like, let's just jump on the zoom. Right, Alex is there on the site right now. Alex has intent, Alex is interested. Let's just do the call right now. Right, much less friction. Because every stage of that process I described earlier filling a form, getting an email from the SD, booking Cal-ly attending the meeting you are dropping by 20% the audience at every stage. If you compress that then you're getting all that conversion back.
0:29:39 - Alex
Yeah, I love it.
0:29:40 - Guillaume
Well, my mother is not.
0:29:41 - Alex
French, but you're like a brother from another mother because you're speaking the language and the sort of thing that we see. So, for example, like you know, I got to this, you got me to this e-book, right, and like, imagine I could just book a meeting, whether it's again Chili, piper or Cal-ly or Hopspot meeting, like it's a live in bed right inside there. I booked that meeting or chat to your point, and you know, but I continue to consume the content, right, like I'm still like I'm interested. Now, why are you like making me go download this PDF or whatever leave you know, like find it somewhere in like in the bowels of my computer. I'll never come back to your site because I have 50 tabs open, right, and so that's one thing.
Or like, I paid a buttload of money to implement Hopspot marketing automation or Marquette-o, and I'm not, you know, I'm not smart enough to know, through tracking codes and some of these content, that I already know who you are. Even right, like forget new people. Like people still are innovationforced to fill out forms, even you know, you know who they are. So it's like it feels like we're creating a bad customer experience before the purchase To follow some playbooks or some, like all you know lead gen numbers that we need to plug in to talk about this, because this sort of signals, in my view, that, like you know, whatever, don't trust us that we're an easy to use, easy to work with as product, because we're kind of adding a bunch of, you know, banana spills right in front of your entrance point into our product.
0:31:21 - Guillaume
And that is all that exists, because a long time ago, leads were cheap and salespeople were expensive, and so we were protecting, in the CAC mix, the headcount cost salespeople at the expense of generating a lot of cheap leads, because clicks and SEOs was cheap. Now the top of funnel is expensive Leads. A qualified lead is like hundreds of dollars these days. Right, there's no point in protecting the salespeople's time, especially because most of that is automated, and it was with AI, right. And so what we should be doing is making sure the qualified lead gets the least friction possible, because we already paid for the qualification in the acquisition. If we did a good job, no extra friction necessary.
0:32:13 - Alex
Well, this is like. I love that you brought in the AI, because what we're advocating, we're thinking about, is like how do you bring the high value engaging experience that a sales rep you know I don't think AISDR generally provide that much value, you know, in the customer interactions, although there are some exceptions, but like, let's say, sales rep does generally, you know if they know their space provides some value but they're expensive to your point. Still right, like they may be not, you know, as expensive as you know relatively, but still a, you know, highly expensive to scale type of function. And then what if we could take what the best sales reps do right in terms of they really create a choice, educational experience for a customer. They really kind of have an interaction of some kind and we start putting that into more scalable mechanisms. Right, whether it's a interactive product tour or it's a you know the ebook that allows you to find the problem that you actually give a damn about versus just generic stuff, right?
Or a presentation you know webinar presentation, where you jump exactly through the parts that matter to you. Or this podcast. We're going to record it into chapters and put it in a podcast so you don't need to listen to the whole hour although I recommend everybody does but to the parts that really resonate was your current pains. So that sort of is what great marketers, great salespeople are able to do, but yet I think it sort of hasn't become scalable. You know what's preventing. What's preventing these right? Why are we standing against general spammy? You know sounding things that everybody was going to pattern match and could recognize. It's AI generated stuff.
0:33:57 - Guillaume
Yeah, I think, because, going back to creativity, I think all those things worked at some point in time in the past. Right. When they came out, a lot of those things had created a fairly significant boosting conversion rate for a short period of time. What happens, though, is that the audience gets I mean, the tactic gets abused. The audience becomes desensitized but the marketers are still running the campaigns.
0:34:30 - Alex
Right. So the generals that are fighting the last war right there, like the marketers, are fighting the last tactics. That work is kind of pulling them out.
0:34:41 - Guillaume
And so one of the issues is we're all kind of like doing a rat race to the bottom in terms of quality because we are mimicking, or hoping to mimic, human generated content efforts. Probably we're trying to mimic human effort in order to elicit reciprocity from the audience.
I'm just looking for the cheapest ways to do that. I come from a time and place a while back, where we used to like offshore all content creation right at scale, right, and we would have people in other countries far away which are extremely cheap, create like hundreds of content pieces, landing pages and whatnot.
Right and in order to have the audience believe that there was the time and effort of somebody close to them doing that, in order to get reciprocity Right and that kind of work. It was just an arbitrage right. It's an arbitrage Now with AI, you can do that with even greater scale and even lower cost, and it's just another arbitrage right. And the more, the higher the quality of the output and the lower the costs, the more it's going to be abused and people are going to be desensitized.
0:35:59 - Alex
So we're going to. It's raised to the bottom for attention right in engagement. So what are the things that are perennial, right, like? What are the things that will never go out of fashion? Do those exist? Or are we just always kind of on this curve of, like writing something and then learning, when there's a right time, to jump off or de-emphasize certain things, like because I think, fundamentally, you want to believe that there is perennial value?
0:36:32 - Guillaume
Yeah, there's two things. The approach that always works is generating true value for your audience in a way that's not. That's truly helpful. Okay, if you look at most Albinon emails and most content pieces, the goal is really to lead. You're talking about your product, your company, right, but what if you could create something and I can share examples that was about not you but about them, about their business, their job, the real part on their face, or something that you discovered that they should attend to? That is truly helpful. Now, you're creating value. That will always work. That's one. And second is reciprocity, right. True reciprocity always works because, as humans, that's like thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of years of evolution that have taught us to elicit reciprocity.
0:37:37 - Alex
Got it. So we're starting with the customer, right, like kind of the old fashioned Steve Jobs quote, right, but it's sort of perennial. True, you know you start with the customer and then walk backwards to either technology or tactic or whatever it is, and if you can deliver that value and ideally you know using, since you're in growth deliver that value quickly, right, like, and hopefully at some degree of scale, that's where the opportunities. And then on the reciprocity. So let's talk about this right. Obviously, you know you're the master of Chaldeany and you know that sort of is the one of the core principles. But how do we create true reciprocity, that sort of feels, you know, really authentic?
0:38:22 - Guillaume
Because I think for one way, like you said, yeah, it's like, does it feel authentic or is it authentic? And so here's the gist of it, You're trying to sell to them. It's never going to be truly authentic. We're not talking of, like a personal connection here where, like I'm, you know, giving somebody away with like no second thoughts, I am, I want to engage, I want to get something in exchange, truly like I'm in a commercial exchange here, I'm doing business, okay, this is not a nonprofit. Okay, but you can create as much, can get close to it, and you should strive to get close to it. Okay, there are ways to do that. But here's the, here's the thought experiment. Okay, if you think of, like all the emails, outbound emails topic I know well, that we've sent over the past couple of years, we've tried to create the feeling, the perception of humanness, the human world. This there's merged tags. There's been, you know, generated images with, you know, the whiteboard, the whiteboard with your name on it. Now we have deep fake video as DRs. Why do we do that? Here's one At home you have a letterbox.
In the letterbox you get mostly junk mail. That junk mail you throw away with almost no, you know, feeling emotions, you just don't care. Just take the pie and split it in the trash bin, right? You, absolutely, you, absolutely don't care. Right Now, let's say that in that pie you find this letter. And this letter comes from this like old senior person that has written your name, alex, on it, all right, and there's that name on the back, and they have the stamp and they put the stamp on the envelope. How likely are you, alex, to take that envelope from this unknown person and throw it in the bin without opening it?
0:40:20 - Alex
Well, I'll answer it. Most likely my kids are gonna open the envelope these days. Yeah, Right. So they're becoming the bots, but you're right Like so it's very unlikely, Very unlikely. Why is that?
0:40:32 - Guillaume
Why do you open the envelope when you don't know that person? You don't expect an email from a mail letter from them. You don't really care. Why do you do that? Why, and that is because you know it is an effort to write with you with a damn pen, all right. These days it's an effort to put it in the mailbox, all right. And there's a reason for that effort. You elicit reciprocity. You respect that effort by doing some of yours and your curious, the two things reciprocity, curiosity. You can't escape that, in the same way that if somebody comes to you and it is like some kind of like this, some holiday event or something, sometimes somebody has a gift for you and you don't have a gift for them, you'll feel terrible. And it's reciprocity. You need to give something back. And so when in my marketing and let's get to content and PDFs here for a second most are trash, most of the white papers and ebooks, the content itself is like not inspiring.
This is not just useful, but sometimes it is Like I have a couple of like PDFs which I and white papers that I download religiously every year because they contain benchmarks. I need to go back to that. They're useful and I show them in my slides right and in my Zoom calls. I get back to those because there's something unique, valuable in there. All right, and so again we're going back to the thing. There is value. Value elicits reciprocity. If that somebody is asking me something, I'm very likely to give it Because now I'm what you're describing?
0:42:11 - Alex
is. We're putting a bunch of blocks in front of the value. So let's assume you wrote you put your life into some beautiful book, ebook, white paper, whatever, it is right, you're still driving a bunch of money that is expensive, increasingly right For startups to get people to your website. Then you're putting all these obstacles in front of them. Right, like you're the forms, the not knowing who they are.
0:42:39 - Guillaume
Because you suppose that the content is so valuable. You suppose they believe there's so much value that they will expense their reciprocity first, the part of the exchange first, before accessing the content. And you do that because the content is bad, because you know that once they see the content they're like, ah, this is terrible, I gave something, I got nothing back.
0:43:00 - Alex
So we're like in this sort of like people that think they're in the customer engagement business end up being in the kind of value destruction business, especially as the content landscape becomes competitive. Right, because again the tactic like maybe there was a world where an ebook was novel, right, and you could get away with all sorts of stuff if you had, like a very niche subject. Now that's becoming less and less so right, and you know, same for the sales presentations and so on. So very interesting. Now you know a lot of pessimism right here. Yet you know you're thriving, your business is doing, you know is doing well. You're attracting all the top leaders in the growth world as part of your organizations and tell us about what like, what is what's kind of, what's the special sauce that is driving your kind of, your opportunity for you, and you've kind of created effectively a new model of these kind of experts. You know their earning equity through their advice.
0:44:07 - Guillaume
I think the couple of things that I realized. One is advisory if not taking seriously doesn't work. If you're just doing like a coffee here and there are the founders, like nothing gets really done right. And this first thing and second is for the advisor, it's the same game as the angel investor. You need to do a lot of advisory roles in order to find one outlier. That's almost impossible to do. So what I've built is something that is a hybrid between a VC firm where we have a lot of deal flow, meet a lot of founders, get intro to some other VCs, but we don't invest. We do sweat equity. We take equity in exchange for that effort right At scale and we pool the equity in a common investment vehicle across all the companies on a given year. Okay, so everyone that's part of the advisory network gets exposure to every company on one given year. That's very exciting for the advisor.
On the company side, it's really about being able to bring unaccessible talents at their stage to empower their team currently to go faster and de-risk. Right, if you are somebody like me, somebody like Luke, lena, verona, dairos, contractor, people that have had major growth roles over the past couple of years. How likely are you to go and take the risk at the Series A or Series B company? Very unlikely. Why would you do that? There's no rational and most of those people also financially successful. They don't care, right? So the only way for you to be able to access that very rare talent right, say rare, we're talking like less than 100 people in B2B SaaS it's a small talent pool that has the know-how of doing B2B growth time and time again, right, and so we're just giving you access to the talent. It's not an agency. There's no junior people, there's no freelancers. It's just a marketplace where we can find you senior talent that's willing to think about your company challenges in the world of marketing growth a couple of hours a week and empower your team. Got it.
0:46:35 - Alex
That's really helpful. One of the things that I find that surprises me and motivates to reach higher is that you brought up that all of your experts are in the world of B2B SaaS, and that's kind of. Historically, the software companies have been more innovative in some of these techniques, but yet the majority of marketers are maybe in B2B actually, but not necessarily in B2B SaaS companies, and they still need to be creative. They still need to be analytical right, because that's sort of the nature of the discipline that you need to combine those two to be ultimately successful. So what can we do to bring the B2B SaaS to the rest of the world? Right, and maybe it's not going to be relevant for your firm right, because you need disproportionate outcomes that are venture-backed. But still, the lessons that you've learned I hope they are applied beyond this niche. What's your take?
0:47:39 - Guillaume
Yeah Well, first and foremost, this is my niche, and I always love a good niche market of very low competition, and so that's why I operate there.
0:47:52 - Alex
So you're applying your own. You're applying your own growth type. Obviously I'm surprisingly.
0:48:00 - Guillaume
That's the first thing, and so, yeah, that's a good niche where we operate and we play very well there. Outside of that, there are some people doing it. There are people like Sean Alice who is doing evangelism and education in larger businesses like PayPal and others. Right, I think it's a challenge. I think it's a multi-year challenge and I'm not even clear whether it's actually going to work out yet, whether the large organizations are, whether the role to come first or call on discussion, the role of growth will sets foots and have a defined existence in large organizations. Right now, it's still a day-to-day battle. All right, I'm being called by public companies on a fairly regular basis like held them, set a growth team, and I just for now, most of them. They just don't have the buy-in to take those risks. So you're asking me, what does it take? It takes competitive pressure and willingness to do something different. All right, then you're coming to say, if you're not willing to do that, you're not gonna have a growth team and that growth team is not gonna succeed.
0:49:21 - Alex
The last question will AI create that competitive pressure Right? Will the sort of you know, creation of content at scale, saturation of the channels you know everybody trying to do PLG and so there's only that many products that you could try as a normal human being Will that kind of create the pressure to continue innovation? What is gonna, what do you anticipate is gonna happen in the future, to the discipline?
0:49:47 - Guillaume
Yeah, it is going to change more than we thought, in the sense that it's going to change the way that we buy. And the way that we buy has been if we put away PLG, it's been through humans, all right. Humans creating content. Humans creating like emails, communication, pdf, you know all of that. Humans on calls, humans on chats we're having like human-to-human conversations.
Maybe one too many, right, but if you pursue that thought process far enough couple of quarters I'm talking maybe a year or two you're having humans buying from AI. There are people working on that right now, like right now and that is likely to start happening in engineering products where a sales discussion negotiation will be between a buyer and an AI, and then between AI and AI. Like there's an AI that's making a recommendation, like hey, here's the tools we should check, and then it's gonna reach out with an RSP to like all the vendors and there's the AI on the receiving end that gets the RSP forecast the price, sends back the data and then there's a call that's being made, all right, so that all of that is very likely. All the software technology buying is likely to be heavily automated.
0:51:19 - Alex
And when that happens and you think this is- transactional or like, because I think if you're trying to create new categories, I don't see this happening as well. I see this as much more mature transactional.
0:51:31 - Guillaume
Yes, but most companies don't create categories. Most companies jump into an existing category with a small difference Got it.
0:51:40 - Alex
So the more commoditized the area, the footprint, and as technology matures, the more it will be dependent on this type of interaction.
0:51:51 - Guillaume
Yes, absolutely, you're just gonna be filling RSPs automatically. Love it Very much, like the trading business and the stock business right If you think of like start buying and selling public stock. I mean, it's been like most of the trading is automated, entirely automated, and squad funds and it's some form of AI algorithmic trading that does most of the trading entirely All right. So the rest is like very marginal. It's mostly companies publishing quarterly reports and some algorithmic checking the news, the numbers and making a decision. There's no reason. It gets different, like no reason.
0:52:47 - Alex
So is there a breakout from that? That is a game changer. Right Back to creating new categories or engaging the human spirit where it still has control.
0:53:05 - Guillaume
For now, I've tested a couple of like large-language models for growth purposes. They don't try crazy things. It is mostly because they rely on you know, existing literature. Right, they are not great yet. I don't know what happens in the future, but they're not great yet at being extremely creative and thinking out of the box, because they are the box. No.
0:53:33 - Alex
Well, if anybody needs to create a large-language model on growth, it's Guillaume Guillaume. Thank you so much for coming over.
0:53:41 - Guillaume
Thank you, Alex.
0:53:42 - Alex
Insightful discussion. I always love your insights and opinions and you know again the track record of some of the companies we love and use. You were kind of one of their early advisors to G2. You know we love Godard. So if the people that we think are already like mountains and you know in the world are still tapping your advice, you know this has just been a real privilege. Glad to share this Was our audience, Guillaume. How can people connect and follow your thoughts?
0:54:14 - Guillaume
Yeah, absolutely. Feel free to reach me at hypergrowthpartnerscom. My email is g at hypergrowthpartnerscom. That's very easy, and you can find me on LinkedIn.
0:54:25 - Alex
Awesome, if you need growth. That's the email I would write down. Guillaume, thank you so much for coming.
0:54:30 - Guillaume
Thank you, alex, have a good one.