Building GTM Systems That Scale With Nemanja Zivkovic

00:03 Welcome to another episode of marketing for marketers the series where we introduce some of the brightest minds in marketing to unlock the strategies that actually generate pipeline. So my guest today is the manja zivkovic founder of funky marketing and a seasoned GTM strategist who's up to 100 companies build demand engines that actually move revenue isn't here for trends gimmicks or playbook fluff. He's known for building full funnel systems that connect positioning content and pipeline, which is something we're very very interested here at dealfront.

00:32 Emmanue, welcome. I'm excited to sort of dig into this with you and the who, what, when, where, why of building scalable GTM systems that actually cut through in today's very, very different world. How are you? I'm good. I'm good. I'm actually glad to talk about all these things because like,

00:50 The world gets more complicated in a way and let's move the other way around and kind of like go to the basics, build the systems. Cause that is actually help us grow. Right. Usually the question that I on the podcast probably we'll talk about it here as well. is AI how it will affect things, you know? And then I'm like, do we have the basic foundation set up? No, then let's keep the AI question, you know, cause I see a lot of things.

01:16 are changing, but to actually be able to leverage all those things that are changing, we need to go back to the beginning and who we are. Why are we here? You know, know all these foundations, who we are as a company, who we are as people, and then go back to all these things being the LinkedIn profile, being the market, being the, you know, how we deal with competitors, anything. It's interesting because I've spent most of the day to day building out a 19 step.

01:43 AI agent to turn these podcast episodes into really decent blogs, not just, you know, okay ish blogs, but 19 steps to try and get into a blog that our copywriter would be proud to write herself. That's that's what we're going after. So one one side of my brain is like working on that side of stuff. And then foundationally, as a marketer, I'm an absolute lover of systems. Systems are all different kinds were probably

02:09 going to be talking about very, different types of systems here, but my brain works in a systematic way. love logic. love, uh, you know, removing any ambiguity and emotion from things. And I think this is why I'm pretty interested in this conversation to kick things off in your world, you know, someone who's built out a hundred of these systems. What does a scalable GTM system actually look like? Yeah, I'll give you the answer and then I'll tell you how to all these things that I'm right in my role and the way it's scalable.

02:39 GTM system, basically like a living organism, an ecosystem that connects on one hand brand content acquisition, other hand conversion expansions into a continuous loop. So not just like let's get awareness at the top. have SQLs at the bottom, but building the infrastructure where every part of the business talks to the other parts of the business. So if content works, it's not just let's get more eyeballs.

03:05 Right. It informs sales conversations. It fuels success enablement. It strengthens the position. It creates all the feedback loops, like the thing that you mentioned that you are doing with a podcast. Most companies kind of the way I feel it like scale with volume. Right. And I learned how to care more about precision and velocity. Can we repeat this outcome that we get and increase the speed with less dependency on luck? If yes, then we can scale. Right. But

03:34 Back in the days, was totally out of those things, right? Processes. was getting away from them, but then what he said, you should be a GM of the agency. And I was 13 months into my first role in marketing, an Indian, Serbian based company, 15 people. I was the last one coming and there were two owners that they say, this guy is crazy. He's sharing everything he learns. He moves fast. I didn't know everything, but I knew more than I thought that I know because of the experience I have.

04:03 previously, and basically they say one day, are the GM, you have all the responsibilities that we have, but also you are responsible for everybody from the team. And I didn't know in a single process, they disappear for two months and I needed to build it from the start. literally Google what's the processes and, and then build it up from the scratch, build one on ones, everything, and started creating a system. And I started to like, you know, the patterns.

04:30 Right. I still do a lot of the things based on our hint. Like I would give a person a chance if I have like this feeling that this person might be the great fit for that, but I will have a system to help them actually do the job. So that's kind of the history. I really have it to do on my hand, like the whole mountain ecosystem to remind me of my hometown and of this. what job did you go into at that agency before being?

04:56 Social media manager, but that was kind of like the agency focused mostly on SEO, working with the automotive industry, car repair shops, then some e-commerce, some software apps at the time. It was like 2015, 16, something like that, very early days. So I needed to learn SEO. didn't know SEO. Like my first job was literally read this article, add a meaningful comment so we can start building links, right? At the time that was.

05:23 the link building and then basically because I was reading a lot, was always feeling like I'm behind because it was, you know, I finished the work that I get to the watching a lot of videos, reading a lot of articles. I was sharing that to the team, bumping it up and basically, you know, I was the one pushing things forward. mean, that was always kind of like what I did in companies and even for myself, right? Cause I came from the activism background, youth work.

05:50 community and then I look always the community first. And when I got to the first company, when I saw I don't need to write a project to sell it to somebody else. can go to sell it directly to my customer or the target audience that basically switched the equation for me. And I just got up from that point. Yeah. It's interesting going from a social media manager to GM in a short space of time. And it was the two owners or founders who

06:18 Yeah, like social media manager. Then I took over the marketing team. were like design team and development team. Uh, and then basically taking over the whole thing. I was actually the first ever GM that they had. They didn't have confidence in anybody else before. Which certainly speaks to your attitude. And I think it sounds like you've applied the same attitude you process to what you're working on now in these building out systems and things. So you've said quite a few times that.

06:46 B2B marketing should operate more like a system rather than a set of campaign. What do you mean by that? Well, look like if we, if we think from the perspective of campaigns, they end. Like if we think from a perspective of systems, they evolve kind of like the thing with strategy and a plan, right? Plan is something that you do internally inside the company. It doesn't change. Those are set to faction that you are set up to do.

07:10 Strategy on the other hand is something that evolves and it has also external factors. It needs to accept them and then kind of evolves, not go straight to the wall, but find a pattern that will kind of break the wall or go, you know, kind of like with campaigns. This campaign is all, let's reset it or let's do another one. But with, um, if we think through the systems, then basically it's not new budget, new goals.

07:38 new messaging. It's like if you build a system, every action compounds to it and it builds more to it. Let's say the podcast we are recording one, right? It's part of the system. It's not just the publish episodes. You are slicing content for distribution. You are feeding the social, you are nurturing the audience, you're using snippets in sales outreach. Maybe somebody is sharing them in their Slack channel. it's

08:02 dark funnel as well, turning transcripts into the articles. So SEO in a way, it's kind of like modern link building. I actually use the podcast to get to the U S market from coming from Serbia, because I was able to, uh, to talk with people on the same level and they saw like what I know. And then they recommended me like Peplaya, Rory Sutherland. I had all those people on a podcast. understand. Then when I see, I have a question on the website and

08:30 When I asked them, how did you hear about us? So why do you want to work with us? They say like, I recommended you, I don't know you, but that must be good. Those kinds of things. But basically I even use it as an onboarding for the people that I hired. We had a specific podcast when me and Marty Sanchez, a friend shared how we actually build the companies in the first 12 months. And we recorded like every month or every two weeks. don't remember how it is like 30 something episodes. use that.

08:59 batch of episodes to give in a first week to people that I was hiring to learn how my mindset was shifting as I was building the company. Right. So every part of it compounds with, and it goes in the loops. You just add, you add, and it never ends basically. Uh, and that's kind of like system thinking, you know, it's not about being everywhere. It's about making sure everything you do, letters up to the business outcomes and basically feeds.

09:27 the next section. okay, we've done this, but can we do more with that? What can do more with that? And it goes on and on and on. It's interesting, I'm responsible for branding content, primarily content, and we operate in a systematic way. So in exactly the way you said, we almost never have campaigns for content. We might have a campaign to launch a new series, but the way we operate in terms of blogs, playbooks and stream series is always on just indefinite. It's not a case of how many blogs are we doing?

09:57 This quarter, it's just what's the average run rate one blog or three blogs a month, right? Let's just keep doing it. It's the same system, the same flow. And we never stop essentially the compounding returns of that system over time. So I'm very, very familiar in the not avoidance of campaigns, but getting out of the thinking that something has to have a start date and an end date and then you forget about it, which is how I started in marketing, right? You would have your OKRs and it would be right. We're going to run a campaign on this special offer. Christmas is coming up, even if it was B2B, right? You'd be

10:26 rip Christmas special offer for recycling or whatever. And then you'd finish and be like, right, what's the next infographic campaign we're doing or whatever. And it was just these blocks of work. And then you'd forget about the piece of content. And there was not much strategy or thought put into how the content, if it was done systematically, like I said, would just compound over time, network effect, et cetera. Um, okay then. So where do you, you said you recorded this

10:52 setting up the company or the business and it showed how your mindset and guess strategies and tactics changed over time over the first 12 months. So where do you think most companies go wrong when trying to build out these demand engines, these repeatable engines? It's kind of like the same as, as if we are talking about marketers, right? We go after tools, after the content volume, you know, after advertising, basically I think we all try to do what we are the best at.

11:22 Not trying actually to see what's the best fit for the company. Right. Uh, and it goes on and on. I mean, it's kind of natural, but I feel like we need to forget a lot more things before we actually start to learn new things and apply them. Every day I learned something two days ago. learned from the little outs. She's not a teenager, like third years of the university. I like charging $10,000 per month for.

11:51 ghost writing. And she said her biggest weakness is not that she's young, it's that she's lazy.

12:01 gets more than seven to 13 customers per month. And it's 13 times, $10,000, 13 times. Right? That's how lazy she is. And I'm like, we have so many things inherited. Like we need to work with these companies. We need to close this. We need to do this in a way we need to be embraced by community, by those kinds of things. So that's one part of it. If you look at the companies, I they over hire, over stack and over produce things.

12:29 They do all those things separately, not having a unique narrative that goes into the strategy. And then the strategy fuels everything that they do. So they pump up, I don't know, like 30 posts a week and have zero pipeline coming from marketing or they have no idea actually. They don't even measure it the right way. So that's also kind of like a different thing, but the real mistake is like, I think skipping the hard part. like the positioning, if you don't know who you are for and.

13:00 Why you are like that to win. No system will save you. think that's the like entry point. The second mistake is everybody is chasing attribution, you know, like a religion. And I feel like some of the most valuable demand signals live in a total darkness, right? In the correlations into the content shares into the influence. For example, middle of the funnel is essential. I keep repeating that and.

13:27 Whenever I come to the company, ask who owns the middle of the funnel. Nobody owns it. Not sales, not marketing. Nobody owns the middle of the funnel. And that's where the conversations are happening. Right. The discussions, like that's the social selling part. If, if you want to go there, it's amazing. Cause that's where the deals are breaking. You actually have the acquisition, you have people, but they break in the middle of it. And also trying to measure everything. If you're trying to measure everything, you miss what actually moves the needle.

13:57 Right. So you need to actually measure just the most important things. Now, which are those things that are the most important? Well, that's kind of an interesting, I always like to say measure the goal, which is not when you get the customer, but when they get the value from the product, for example, or the service, whatever it is, but product is easier to explain. So for example, like Slack, when do you get the value? When you send three messages, right? Not when you open the account.

14:26 For example, if I use the deal front, sure, I see somebody comes to my website, right? And if I don't do anything with it, well, it's just the information that I see in my email. You're informing me that that company visited my website, right? But if I go and get more information, incentives about that company, if I then turn on the, the email loop to do the outbound to kind of act on that, that changes the thing. And then I have like the full front machine in front of me.

14:55 that I can use to actually get that company to become a customer. I'm just trying to think. So in terms of the, I think the most important thing that I got from that was that it's almost impossible to build a successful repeatable demand engine without the core context or the core, your reason for being, your reason for existing. If you haven't nailed that, you can build as many systems as you want, but it's just not going to work, which I think is probably the biggest takeaway. So for the, you know, for anyone listening is to

15:25 ensure that your problem that you're solving is nailed. The product market fit is nailed, all of that sort of stuff, which is again, it's an ever changing thing with the pace at which companies in the market and things are changing. depends, you know, like if you're building the company, I think product market fit is definitely the only thing that you should look for until you don't nail it. Everything else doesn't matter. But the thing is that, and that's why I left like

15:52 The company, when I was like the second person, were doing lead, Jen campaigns and marketing automation and this kind of stuff. Cause I think at one point we went totally opposite of where we should go. Like marketing automation actually means not operating blind, but actually knowing how customers are finding you and converting and actually automating those pets so they can choose. Not saying these are the past that you should use. That's bullshit. That doesn't exist. Oh, um, from that standpoint.

16:21 Uh, you know, you need first to find out what are customers doing? How are they finding you? Where do they go to buy? Is that the same place where did you go to get educated? How do they call your product? I was thinking that's also important. And then when you know that basically marketing is facilitating the sale. you're just facilitating the way they are coming to buy from you. No, you often work with tech and task companies. So.

16:48 What would be one GTM tactic that sounds really smart on paper and maybe gets loads of hype on LinkedIn, but rarely delivers in the real world? Yeah, you guys had my friends and also your friends on the podcast, Andrii Zinkievic and his partner, right? It's the answer is account-based marketing platforms. Right. Because especially when companies, you know, buy them before nail their basics and you know, a lot of early stage.

17:17 SaaS teams, they kind of go for it because they see a lot of noise on LinkedIn, a lot people talking about it. So they drop five or six figures on tech that just sits there because they don't have enough signals or content to actually activate it. Right? So you don't need account-based marketing software to do account-based marketing. The important thing to say, you need a clear ICP, you need a sharp message, you need a good offer, and you need somebody who can actually close a deal. And you need to know companies that you are selling to, right?

17:44 Those are 50 companies. know where the people inside those companies inside the committees that I need to sell to. And then you, you can even act manual. You don't need a tool right away. Tool helps you scale that motion. Right. So that's one thing. The other answer is, uh, over automated outbound. Definitely. Cause everybody thinks that they can scale call with personalization and scale. I don't need to talk to anybody. I can just automate those messages. all seen it to LinkedIn inside the email.

18:13 these days even on WhatsApp and Viber. But the moment your prospects feels like they are inside the sequence, you're out of the game. And it happens a lot faster than we think these days. It's interesting because I think even if the reality is that Gentic automated, there's this big fad at the minute of people getting rid of their teams altogether or replacing it with 20 AISDRs. There's a very well-known company who was running ads on the tube and on billboards and things saying,

18:43 get rid of humans, you'll know the one I'm on about. But I don't think I've actually seen a good review about these AISDRs or agents or AIAEs to your point. I don't think they actually work. So it's just the shiny object thing, right? Of people trying to automate everything. AI agents, I think, will work in the future. I think it's too early to have them as perfectly set up as people say they are.

19:08 So you've had yourself huge success with organic inbound, like, you know, no ads, cold outreach. What's your process or what's your stance on building content that actually drives inbound pipeline? That's actually kind of like a good question. And I'll tell you the answer. then I'll tell you, how did I come up with all these things and found out I never create content to go viral, right? I created to filter and to remove all those that are not fit.

19:36 I did it from the start when I started funky marketing, was having a mindset. I don't need to have a client for like five months. If I don't close the door that I want it happened on a second date. That's just how it was. My goal is always to track the right 5%, not the 95 % that I need to get educated, right? They get educated during the process, but I talked to those 5%. So, uh, 5 % meaning the

20:05 present cashflow, right? 95 % is those who are not on the market and it's a future cashflow. So I talk about the things that resonates deeply with the people that I want to work with. Right. And I already working with those companies. So I know what are the problems, right? B2B decision makers who care about the systems, about the growth, about long-term brand equity. But the thing that changes the equation is I write in my voice. So no sugar coating. Everything is raw. Even when I use the LGBT, everything is

20:35 I tell it to be raw and I'm consistent. think from 2017, I'm posting daily, even twice or three times a day, depends. my focus is on 5%, but I educated the whole cities in a month with the contents. That consistency then builds familiarity, right? People know me, feel familiar with the company, it builds trust and trust equally turns into the pipeline.

21:01 And I feel like trust is the only thing that matters today in B2B. So the most importantly, I repurpose things like hell. Cause I need to find a way from 2019 to talk about B2B in all kinds of different ways. Right? So that's a lot of years talking about the same topic. So one idea, formats, 100 distribution plays. And that's how actually you've been inbound without paying for ads. Sure. If you have a budget.

21:31 And you can invest. Sure. want to make sure that every piece of content that I put out is seen by the right 50 or 20s out there. But the one thing that I mentioned to you prior to answering is like 19, there was a wave like no lead gen, we're not talking about the main gen. Right. There was a, that shift happening with Chris Walker with Refine Labs.

21:55 Like he exited Refine Labs yesterday, I he sold the company or his partner in it, which kind of like rounds up the whole COVID part of the B2B. Basically just riding a wave, right? And just talking about this, then my first company was Impehub Belgrade. So I was able to prove my hypothesis working with 200 startups.

22:20 Um, in a year, cause I was getting them startups to the pre acceleration program that they run. and then basically close 63, 64 deals in 18 months, 47 in a year, all inbound, all via LinkedIn in a first year. And people thought because I was educating my team, whoever comes to the team, we are all marketers. So I educate them how to create content, how to talk about the things and it multiplies the effect.

22:51 People thought like, uh, you know, we are everywhere and we look much bigger than we actually are. Like to, to give you a comparison, like Megan from Refine Labs was referring us clients who doesn't go to Refine Labs. They don't have the budget for them, like 25 K a month start or something like that. I don't remember what it was. They say go to Nemanja funky marketing. The problem was that I wanted those clients who can pay as well. Right. But, but it doesn't matter.

23:20 People thought that we are like competitors and behind the scenes we are all working together, trying to, you know, get companies to do good things so they can actually get results. But if you had to pick, I don't know, like your top three, let's say top three formats on LinkedIn that work well for you or top three, like types of posts, what I mean by that? Is it a story about your past? Is it a listicle? Is it a video? What works well?

23:48 Yeah. I mean, text always works well because I know copywriting, which for a lot of people is a hard thing to do because I came from email automation, email marketing, those kinds of things. So I learned how to write good emails and that translates into writing a good text post. So I can actually, you know, drive them through the post with the rhythm. So it's not boring. And I usually post the full post with 3000 characters.

24:15 Right. So it's like an article, every post it's like an article. So that's definitely one format that actually has changed the thing for me is a few years ago, I was dancing in a video. Right. Cause it was cause I was learning how to be an entrepreneur. And I said the post was about mental health and availability because I was in a 40 square meters. My wife was going to the job, coming back, drinking beer. And I was like working, growing higher, seven people that year.

24:44 close 47 companies and I was still learning how to be an entrepreneur. Uh, so that was kind of scary, but just sharing those things resonated with a lot of huge companies. Right. So from that part and the thing which is not type of the post is distribution. I think that's probably besides knowing who I am and knowing the positioning and how I want to be perceived when I entered the room is distribution. You know, do I know how to distribute the story so people actually understand it in a format that they understand?

25:14 Cause there is this thing, let me give to the listeners something that will be of value. Like you need 12 months to two years to actually nail the content platform fit. The right content for the right audience on that platform. And if you are able to create high quality posts and you can post them a lot at scale, you know, one per day, at least maybe even more. As much as you get there, the fastest you will get to understand what works.

25:44 And then you can lower the number of posts and get to the quality formats that resonate the most. I usually use my profile to kind of experiment with everything and then I can implement that for the clients. think that's a very, very good tip. think, you know, even the inbuilt analytics nowadays give you a pretty good gauge on what's working. Okay. So let's talk about alignment. So in terms of these systems, how would you connect sales marketing and

26:11 customer success or like the revenue engine. How do you connect it inside a system that actually scales? Yeah, that's always a good topic. And a lot of companies, when you come in, there, those all departments work is silence, right? You probably know that as well. Well, basically you stop treating them like a separate teams. Sales actually is marketing. Customer success is the manager. And the only way to connect them is to build a shared language and shared incentives. So what does it look like in practice? It's

26:37 joint planning, shared KPIs. For example, in one of the companies I was working with, nobody had trust in marketing. There was a sales companies. And so what we did from the start, instead of trying to fight it and you marketing needs a space, needs more budget, those kinds of things. said marketing will inherit and have the same goals and KPIs as sales. Then instantly those two teams works together towards the same goal. Sure. Sales can have the price.

27:04 But they started to value marketing more because they see if they started to achieve their KPIs regularly. Basically marketing has its part in doing that because they are doing some of the things that sales doesn't. And then it compounds the, you know, to getting their KPIs. Basically how does it work? Weekly things with marketing listens to the sales calls. Customer success also shares their calls, churn signals as well. Sales also tests.

27:32 the positioning, the messaging, and comes back with the feedback. And there's only one source of truth, right? Usually an ocean doc or CRM layer where everybody sees what's working and what's not. And what I like to do every quarter to have them sign in who owns which part of the buying journey, right? Which part of the process. So like sales owns this, buh buh buh buh buh bullets. It could be as simple as that. Marketing this, customer success this. So, uh, when they sign to it.

28:03 It's not like something that's, I don't know, legal or whatever it is, but it makes them think about it and not to forget when they sign it once in a quarter. And then when we get into the thing that something happened, you know, we know who's responsible for it. And then they also feel it and they treat that part of the funnel like, Hey, I own that. So, you know, from that point, yes, to the.

28:30 Other stuff that we talk about, like for example, from the marketing standpoint, if marketing does a good job and educates the market, creates demand. So what we treat as an SQL is somebody who comes to the website and says, I want to talk to sales, right? Nothing else. So when that happens, sales has only the quality leads. And basically they have one job to close it. So you don't need more people in sales. You can have just two or three of them who knows how to close them and then we close them.

29:00 because they are great at what they do. So when this is the situation, then sales also has time to go and do the outreach, right? Do the other hand and they do their part of closing the existing demand there. And when you look at it through those lenses that sales doesn't say marketing does a shitty job again. They say actually those leads are good. Marketing actually does a good job. So you don't need 10 people in sales to waste time to try to convince people.

29:29 to actually, you know, buy something because they just downloaded an ebook. Right. So from that standpoint, if marketing does a good job, it instantly creates the alignment inside the company. Cause usually where it breaks is that something is wrong in, for example, in SAS company, they say we need to have more sales training or we need additional sales reps cause they are sales companies.

29:56 And they think from that perspective, but usually what's the problem is in marketing. And what I learned that the complex problems comes out because we need to nail the foundation and foundation is alignment. Do we align them around the KPIs around the goal? How do we do that? Not only digitally, but also offline. Do we get them into the same room? Who owns the conversation? How often does those conversations happen? All these things are extremely important.

30:22 You spoke about that notion doc or sort of internal knowledge base. What does that look like? Usually there are all these things that we say is their foundation of the team. Who is the ICP? How do they call us? How do they come to buy from us? Which platforms? What are they doing on those platforms? Who are the influential people for that audience? What's their jobs to be done? And how what we sell solves the problems of each of those people. So like, for example,

30:52 CFO, how do we convince the CFO? CMO, how do we convince them? CTO as well. So we have all the knowledge base. It's over there. Then what we also have there, and I think it's crucial part, especially if we talk about, for example, tech startups, it's strategic narrative. I usually use NDRuskin template for that, which is in five stages. And it is like, what's the big change in the world? So we can show them like.

31:20 It's happening no matter what they do. The second one is, can we prove that? That is not only in our head that this actually happened. The third one is the promised land. How does it look like if they buy from us and their problem is solved? The fourth one is why us? So how are we different from the others? And the last part is some people need more convincing. So they're like case studies, testimonials, but also materials that we can give to the people who can actually sell for us inside the companies.

31:50 Right. So when we have, start with that, then I move to the strategy. So that's the crucial document when we can see, okay, we are missing that part or we are missing that part. So we need to create all those things. When you have all those things, then we move to the strategy and then we see how do we create content? How do we go with advertising with all these things? So, so that's kind of into, into that notion document. Also a lot of incentives we have from the, from the sales calls, from customer success calls.

32:20 Because these days the problem was back in the days that you needed to teach salespeople how to extract the information from the sales calls. What did you talk now when we have AI, it's much easier. The only reason I ask is because we're

32:36 We're thinking about optimizing systems and notion being one of them. in my head, I was just trying to think how that, you know, how that would look, how you build it out. Okay. Can you share a specific example of a system or funnel transformation implementation builds that delivered real like board level impact? Yeah, I was thinking what can I share? And I came up. That might share the latest one. So I'm working with Microsoft. I can share it because.

33:03 It's not boring as a company. came from the product team. What does it mean? Like, some guys who own seven products and they say you don't have a budget. Company doesn't give us the budget to go into that. have our own budget for the products. So we want to have a system that will allow us to become evangelists for our products and be no name inside the company. And we can actually get more people to convert and start using the product.

33:32 And I want to share this example for one single reason. So that was something that they needed to sell to the company as well. Right. So I needed to help them sell that thing to the company. What was actually interesting here. So they're engineers. So what works. If we can have a test, prove it. They can see that it works and then we can expand from there. like five of them, two months inside, let's call it the accelerator.

33:59 When they learn everything about LinkedIn, about the platform, about how the people that are influencers in the space work reverse engineering, all those things, seeing how the newsletter works in the equation. Do they do the podcast? Do they do the post? What kind of post they do testing the shit out of it. And then basically seeing what works, what didn't, how it was. And then basically, okay, now we have a test product. Now we can go and scale it towards the company. like then.

34:27 26, 27 people get inside the program and now it's a totally different motion. Now the company sees it. Now they see the tangible result, meaning how many people converted, how many people started to talk about the product, how many people, when they actually came to buy the product, they actually said they heard from these people, right? Or from LinkedIn, from the platform. And basically those are the signals that they say, okay, now we can set.

34:53 a part of our marketing budget as a company inside that program to scale it further. So that's kind of one. The second thing that I can share with you might be interesting, totally different thing. It's the tech development company that had a big budget, meaning they had enough budget to open the new market each month. Doesn't have to be like a big market, but it could be a small one like

35:21 Serbia, example, or Bosnia or whatever it is, or one of the states in the U S. So they were measuring success by how many people they hire per month. So, uh, in three months working with them, like the, they scale from 350 people to 800 people. Crazy. But what they were doing, they needed to show potential people that will come work for them that they are the right place for them.

35:48 So they needed to showcase the employees, to show the culture, to show how they're solving problems with which companies they are working on, in which industries, and to show that, you know, cause they needed the high level engineers. So kind of showing these are the problems that we are solving. And they interesting enough for you. So we created a system that works for them and actually activated people from the company. And it was kind of interesting. had like.

36:15 uh, marketing, sales, engineers, and, and C level inside for like three, four months. When we create a system for each of them, what are the things that they are sharing? How are they sharing? What's the, their personal benefit inside the company's benefit so they can understand and actually go all in. And kind of the thing that I want to share might be interesting for the people. made a mistake over there because at one moment marketing says we know everything.

36:42 So they stopped doing, we have like a basic training. So we'll go through it, but on a lower scale, right? But the engineers, they say, aha, I get the benefit. So they, they respect each step of the process of the system. And then they started growing and because marketing didn't show up that much towards the end sales as well, like other companies started to pitching the engineers to come working for them instead of engineers attracting other people to come to work for the company. Right? So we needed.

37:12 to switch the agenda a little bit and go into the boarding games. For example, they say we love boarding games and if somebody comes to the team and they hate boarding games, we will hate them and they will feel bad. And you know, we don't want that to happen. So they started to talk about boarding games on LinkedIn. And it was kind of like, okay, we will attract only the right people by talking about that. Uh, you know, so there are tons of examples, but the thing that always works is let's see what we have as our main resources.

37:42 Are those the people is that the community is that maybe the advertising budget is we have and we have the good salespeople so we can leverage that. Or we have the founder, which is very well known inside the community. Right. So that can be also one of the things that changes for a couple of SaaS companies that we're working with recently. That is the thing that changes the equation. Why? Because sure, people can buy the product.

38:09 Right. And there are tons of SaaS companies and they are all changing now with AI and those kinds of things. But if the CEO is known as the superstar in the industry, in the community, then that switches totally the thing. Like I can get the product and this guy can actually help me get the most from the product. Then it's bought and it started to be a premium service. Right. From that example. And one more I want to share is not going to belong Turkey startup.

38:38 call user guiding, they were sort of stuck in between which category they want to go. So it was a no code tool. It was a project management tool. was user onboarding tool, a lot of different things that they can be named for and go for a category. So in 2018 or 21, we didn't have AI. So we had to listen to the sales calls and the customer success calls. And we saw that people call them a lot of different names. So more than three. we say, okay.

39:08 We have like six category that gets the most mentioned. So we go for them to be able to do that. What do we need to do? We need to build a media company, but in this case, what does it mean building a media company builds through the text content. through the articles. Right. So we need to own the Google for those six categories. So, um, what did we do? didn't hit, they had only one writer in the team.

39:36 My team at the time took over and we wrote 20 articles with 5,000 words, all specific, all to help them rank and grow. At the same time, we created a system for the new writers when they come in so they can learn how to write those articles. So one by one, they hire actually students from the, I don't know, English language university or something like that. And then one by one, we basically lower the amount of article that we are producing. They started to pump in.

40:06 articles that they are producing on their side. At the same time, it was the company started by three or four, I don't remember, friends. So one, was the CTO, one was the founder, one was the CMO, and one was the guy for the ops. Right? So we activated them on LinkedIn. And it turns out that a lot of people knew the product. So in the first month, I always say when we activate them, the first month is how people know you. Like they got two offers.

40:35 to be part of the next investment round. The CTO got invited by Google docs team to go and host a workshop about user onboarding and it blew up. Like they talk about this, they become top 10 Turkish startup. I even got the screenshot somewhere, like on a conference, they were sharing the map of how they are acquiring customers and what they're doing inside the system. And like marketing, there was funky marketing logo. Right. For, from that part, that's how they grateful.

41:02 They were for us for creating the whole system and everything from that part. the, particular example, it was a system that created or wrote content for that cohort, four. Basically the system that creates content that ranks them on top of the pages for six categories that they were going after, but also establish them as thought leaders inside their categories on LinkedIn. the other hand.

41:30 Yeah. So the specific to LinkedIn, the system was what was it using as the source material to create that thought leadership content for, for those four. It was different things. Definitely one of the things were the articles that we were writing. Couple of also eBooks and those things that we were using, but also having half an hour conversations with each of them using the sales calls as well. And for the founder, it was the most specific because

41:56 Usually founders are trying to get away from all these things, right. And go their own way. So turns out he was the guy who was writing his own blog. Nobody knew about it. He just told us out of the blue that he writes every day. It wasn't a stop stock. was some, something else. I don't remember, but he said, you have tons of content over there. I'm writing. So try to use those things and I will get to you, you know, the things that I got from meeting with investors from the.

42:25 You know, from the vision side of things that you can go and implement. Oh, so that was the hardest one to go with the city. And the content for him, but it wasn't good tool. So from that standpoint, it wasn't that hard. It was like the engineering content. Okay. We've only got a few minutes. So I'll ask one more question, just to wrap things up. If you're a marketing leader, getting started with system building, as in you've never built one before.

42:53 What's the first place like ground zero? What's the first thing you need to do or where you should start from? Yeah. The first thing is analyze everything. Right. So I usually say before you even go inside the company, try to get as much external things that you can use. Judge, GPT, deep research and get everything that you can about the company, about the competitors, about everything that you can then use that and try to say, is this right? Is this not right? And those kinds of things. And then get inside the company.

43:22 with the customers existing and X ones X customers. Usually you don't get the chance to talk with them, but I pretend that I have the permit because I know the names and I try to call them. Some of them that I get, need to get this one. So basically why do you do that? To see the gaps inside the pipeline, right? Do not try to build the system in theory, but look at the funnel and ask where are we leaking revenue?

43:48 Is it in the part, which is at the top brand awareness? Is it lead quality? Is it the conversion? Is it how we define the SQL, the MQLs? Are those the right things? And then go one level deeper. What behavior do we want to change at that stage? And then reverse engineer the system to support the behavior, right? From messaging to touch points to internal processes. The main thing that I want to say is don't overbuild, right?

44:16 build what solves the problem today and basically design it in a way that you can evolve it tomorrow. Right. As I say, it's always evolving, never ending, but go like what I want my customers to do here and they are not doing it. There must be the reason. So you go in, you find the reason and then you reverse engineering back. Okay. To be able to do that, they need to do this, this, and this. Are they doing this or no? Why not? You find the reason and then you basically build off from that.

44:46 Interesting. Okay. Well, I appreciate you jumping on. I've certainly got quite a few ideas off the back of that conversation. There's a couple of systems tools that I'm already thinking about building, which is only a good thing. Although I have a very, long list of things I want to be building. It was quite a good recorded another episode this morning where the chap suggested you have two post-it notes of the kind of it's kind of like the need and wants who's like every time something frustrates you write it down on the post-it note and that's what you build. You build.

45:15 things to reduce frustration. And then he said, you have another post-it note of just ideas. They're not necessarily frustrations. They're like nice to haves. They're like, oh, that would be cool. And you prioritize the red post-its that say, and then you eventually get through to the green post, the need versus the want. And I thought that was quite a good way of doing it. For somebody who builds a product and dig from the product perspective, that's great. Well, like I said, I appreciate you jumping on. I think it's going to have been a very, very useful episode for those listening or watching. So I appreciate you finding the time.

45:45 I think it's something that we're definitely going to be writing more about that we're going to be building out more of ourselves. So I think it's a really, really good sort of 60 minute introduction to building outs and demand engines. So I very much appreciate you finding the time. For inviting me and nice to meet you and chat about all these things. Likewise. And for those listening or watching, we will catch you in the next episode.