Matt Baker

Some of the first things I look for when optimizing a subscription brand: 1. Products that retain well but aren't prioritized on selling 2. User feedback 3. User experience to improve adoption and retention. Want me to take a look at your program? DMs are open.

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It’s hard to find someone in tech who hasn’t heard of Calendly or been sent a Calendly link. Calendly now serves >20 million (🤯) users. Millions more sign up each year. And these aren’t only individuals — 86% of the Fortune 500 use it. Their funnel is a CMO’s dream — and biggest nightmare. Just ask Jessica Gilmartin. “It worked, but it was inefficient and expensive,” she told me. Starting in January, Jessica overhauled the sales motion. Calendly changed how they organize their sales team, score leads, route leads to reps, and bring automation into the process. And the results are pretty dramatic. Do yourself a favor and read the full story in Growth Unhinged: https://lnkd.in/ea2k4Js4 The takeaway: folks pay too much attention to getting new leads & not nearly enough on serving the ones they already have. #marketing #saas #growth #sales

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Don't be boring. Tell a helluva story. As an agency... RFP responses... Pitches... Every pre sale interaction... ...should tell a story. A really really really compelling story. Traditional RFP's often suck. They suck the life out of a process that CAN have so much potential and actually be fun/exciting. You often have to respond to very specific questions. You often don't get to present your response unless you make it to the 'finals'. You often have a finite amount of space/page length to answer those questions. Regardless of how boring your response may be...it should tell a story. It should paint a picture of what working together could look like. That story should, somehow, be woven into every single answer. Every single page. Every single interaction. It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't kinda situation. And I feel for agencies. I'd argue you should give just enough 'magic' to get the brand excited to speak with you more. To make them want to dive in deeper. But, one might argue, if you don't give ENOUGH, you may not make it to the next round. You're competing against against the OTHER agency responses as well. If everyone, except you, does something, you stand out. That could be a good thing, or a bad thing. And it varies from RFP to RFP. Something that works on one RFP, could eliminate you in another. What I do know is this. Above all else, do these 3 things. 1) Know your audience. Know what makes them tick. Know what they want, what they need -- both personally and professionally. 2) DO NOT BE BORING. I'd rather be eliminated for doing something wacky than not shooting the shot. If you're unsure how something wacky will be received...see #1 above. 3) Tell a story. Not just any story. The story of how their brand, and your agency, joining forces, will be the best decisions both sides have ever made.

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🗞 A must-read for anyone who's re-evaluating their GTM motion or looking for advice on driving better efficiency. Jessica Gilmartin, CRO and CMO at Calendly and Stage 2 Limited Partner, breaks down how she overhauled their product-led sales approach, sharing the success they've achieved with tactical advice and tons of detail. 👇

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Last year I put together as comprehensive of a list as I could of every single active venture backed startup in Boston over the last 5+ years. Very useful exercise! ...very difficult to maintain. Friends of LinkedIn - do you know of a tool that can automatically & publicly update this table for me weekly to keep the people of Boston informed of their venture backed population? I will highlight the tool on the page to the hundreds (soon thousands) of people that view it every month! Link to the manual version here: https://lnkd.in/ek9wSfUD The AI should also be able to answer this question: Which weighs more? A pound of bricks or a pound of feathers? Happy Friday to you!

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How do you do messaging for multiple ICPs? What do you do when one of these scenarios applies? · Expanding from one ICP to two (or more) · Needing to talk to several ICPs at once · Messaging when you're a multi-product company · Writing home page copy for multiple audiences Anthony Pierri 🎸and I are gonna talk about it for 60mis, and discuss what makes sense when. We'll share our overall thinking about the matter, but will mostly focus on audience Q&A. Come join us next Wed (June 12) to discuss this topic. Bring your questions. Free event. Registration link in the comments.

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Imagine if shoppers didn’t have to leave their email to make a purchase. Clinikally (YC S22) tried this with their product recommendation emails, boosting conversion rates to 71%. Here’s their approach: ✅ Added an interactive product recommendation widget via Mailmodo ✅ Subscribers could shop directly in their email—adding items, adjusting quantities, and entering shipping details ✅ This fast-tracked checkout and increased sales Check out their template and read the full success story: https://lnkd.in/gmD7Njtm #emailmarketing #shopify #ecommerce

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Want to hear from arguably the best developer marketer in...the world?! 💳 Stripe’s first marketing hire + 9 years of successful tenure 🔧 Retool’s Head of Marketing 🔥 OpenAI’s VP Marketing 👆I don’t think that modern developer marketing leadership pedigree gets better than that! Krithika M. is an epic marketer, leader and advisor and she is the person you want to talk to if you’re figuring out developer GTM from the early days (or GTM in general, she does more than just developer work!). Here’s an abbreviated preview of one of my favorite questions - I’ve cut the practical examples she dives into which are ✨gold ✨ so go check out the full piece at calyx.substack.com. Q: How do you build an excellent developer brand? Krithika: There are three unspoken rules of developer branding. These are hard won learnings, I can’t believe I’m just dropping them here! 1. Be non-transactional. What I mean by that is if you put out content, don't expect anything in return - not an email address, not a download, not a subscribe. Nothing. Share in-depth learnings, or a unique perspective that people can't find anywhere else. You should aim to make people feel like they’ve found “their people”, or their niche. 2. Sweat the details, and consider them the business value of delight. Taking a few extra cycles to really imbue delight into the things that you're putting out there pays off with developers (and pretty much all audiences). 3. Steal liberally, but not from your industry. If you follow somebody else's playbook in your category and try to do the same thing as them, you’ll end up in a derivative space or optimizing for local maxima. If you can go and take a look at companies in completely different domains, you can learn a lot.  ~ We also dig into whether developer marketers have to be technical, how to teach a scaling marketing org “good taste” and how the marketing team at OpenAI targets every audience from B2B, B2C and B2D. You don’t want to miss it!

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GTM and RevOps are being redefined in 2024! And we are right at the heart of it with our Person-level / Buyer-level Website visitor identity product. There has been a lot of chatter on LinkedIn lately about Clay. So last week, we set up a Clay table, and populated it with warm leads directly off the website, captured using SiteStop (by Kwanzoo). We connected the table to our OpenAI account, and with a few prompts had personalized emails for each target prospect. And all this for less than a penny per email! We are also experimenting with Instantly.ai for getting personalized emails out at scale to 1000s of prospects daily.  This week has been super interesting conversations with prospects who are SMB as well as Mid-Market. Lots of positive feedback on our JumpStart pricing for SMBs, where it’s ZERO platform fee, ZERO monthly subscription fee, and every $ paid goes towards a WARM LEAD off the Customer’s website. Mid-Market Customers have been super excited about our latest release with support for lead capture control at an individual website page level, tagging of leads by high value page or ICP, advanced lead filters (by the lead’s account revenue, industry, size, relevance of the lead’s title keywords). We also now report on the traffic source of every lead! Many Customers wonder what might be the contribution of these website warm leads to the overall lead volume they need to drive off their website for the Sales team. What % of ALL leads might they expect over say 12 months, relative to say form fills (request-a-demo, contact-us), or content downloads on their site? We cover this and more in our 22+ LinkedIn “INSTA” style videos (each less than 2 minutes). The videos range from GTM concepts, to how Person-Level ID really works, and how to use this data alongside ABM and Visitor ID tools that provide Account-level or Company-level insights. A few recent videos are also Customer Stories! Some cool stats and metrics there for your review… How about this? 37% of all Deals closed (New Business, Expansion, Cross-Sell) at one  Mid-Market Customer over the past 12 months had one or more “Warm Leads'' delivered to the SDR team using Kwanzoo’s unique Person-level Visitor ID tech, prior to the creation of an Opportunity (that later closed) at that account! BTW, this Customer uses us alongside Demandbase. See first comment for link to all of our LinkedIn INSTA-style videos. We have lots of Customer Enablement content on the product, and how-to videos on best practices around setting up the product with proper guardrails for effective demand gen. See second comment for link to our YouTube channel. (And there is a lot more coming there over the next couple of weeks!) Have questions? Let’s chat! #b2b #marketing #sales #gotomarket #usa #BuyerLevelID #PersonLevelID #VisitorID #WebsiteVisitorID #abm #demandgen #salesdevelopment #insidesales #sdr

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Looking to turbocharge your resume? Keren is an amazing CEO and founder and her resume insights and advice are 🚀!

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There's gold in these hills: 👉 Investments in retention can double as acquisition vehicles 👉 Customers do all of the selling to the prospects who join the events 👉 You can do no wrong by doing right by your customers Timeless lessons, Drew Neisser.

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Some of the best threads in the Healthy Competition community... aren't even about competitive intel or product marketing. They're usually found in the "careers" channel. Some of the most recent topics have been around: - how to navigate layoffs - creating "win docs" to use when asking for raises - fractional work - job interview tips - growing beyond director-level titles - what to do when you're juggling too many requests I don't think this element in a community is talked about enough. Usually, they're marketed as a place to get the TACTICS, TEMPLATES, FRAMEWORKS, etc. for a certain role. And yeah, we certainly share those things in the Healthy Competition community for competitive intel and product marketing. But what's equally as important, IMO, is just seeing how other folks in your role are navigating their work life. There are some nuances with the CI and PMM roles that make it more relatable and resonant when you hear it from people in those roles vs. general marketers, sellers, product managers, etc. That's where I see the majority of people connecting with one another and experiencing the real value of community.

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Drop In Venture Funding To Black-Founded Startups Greatly Outpaces Market Decline Chris MetinkoGené Teare February 27, 2024 Venture funding to Black-founded U.S. startups last year totaled only $705 million — marking the first time since 2016 that the figure failed to even reach $1 billion, Crunchbase data shows. The decline in capital to Black-founded companies greatly outpaces the overall decline in startup funding. While total venture dollars in the U.S. fell 37% last year, funding to Black-founded startups dropped a staggering 71%, according to Crunchbase data. Last year’s total investment in Black-founded startups in the U.S. marks the lowest amount since such startups raised only $582 million in 2016. The drop in total dollars also meant Black-founded startups received their lowest share in the venture market since at least 2016, per Crunchbase. Black-founded startups received less than 0.5% of the $140.4 billion in venture funding all U.S.-based startups received last year. In 2021, Black-founded startups received 1.4% of all U.S. venture funding. In 2022, it was 1.1%.

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Start-up rules - Hire all around athletes - In the early days at CarGurus, we always looked to hire the smartest people we could find, often at the expense of "industry experience". In fact, none of the early employees at CarGurus had any automotive industry experience. Hiring the smartest people we could hire allowed us to have employees that were flexible and could take on ever changing roles. Additionally the lack of "industry experience" allowed everyone to come at the problem of "car shopping" with a fresh perspective. Our early hires at CarGurus often had to quickly change roles and adapt to new challenges. In the early days, we had no product managers but rather hired software developers that enjoyed thinking about the user experience. While product management is an important role in larger companies, in our early days not having product managers allowed our development team to move faster with less layers of decision making. When we began to build our inside sales team to interact with auto dealers, we converted a number of our employees from our editorial content team - they went on to be fantastic inside sales reps! We had hired smart, flexible people into our editorial team so they were able to take on this new role and bring creative ideas to the table. Many of our early executives came from management consulting backgrounds. What they lacked in operational experience they more than made up for in strategic thinking and data analysis. When you build out your team, always hire the smartest people you can find. Often this will come at the expense of "industry experience". In the long run, this will become an asset as your team can approach difficult problems and bring a fresh, flexible perspective to problem solving.

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It turns out, the Long Island Sound IS water. For these and other insights, check out this post about our seed funding round. 😬 #startups #fundraising #newyork

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Where are ALL the CSuites? Sure you are out there "looking" but is keeping quiet doing you any favors? For venture backed growth stage SaaS leaders the all important investor relationship/impression could be affected by your lack of a digital presence *Here's what a recent Kickstand -Pavilion Report has to say ➡ Companies AND executives who attempt to play it safe by keeping quiet aren’t doing themselves any favors: ✨Nearly two-thirds (65%) of tech investors feel that a lack of social media presence, including top executives, is a red flag when evaluating tech companies for investment. ✨Investing time and resources into building a strong, authentic social media presence is not just worthwhile but essential for today’s executives. It’s a strategic investment that pays dividends in enhanced trust, deeper engagement, and ultimately, a stronger, more resilient brand. ✨In a world where digital narratives can define a company’s success or failure, the question is no longer if executives should engage on social media, but how they can do so most effectively, authentically, and strategically – and how their companies can best support them along the way Still want to play it safe? *Source document in the comments #saas #growthstage #careergrowth #ownyourfuture

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Tomorrow, I'm sharing a new episode with Robbie Crabtree on how to unlock your storytelling superpower. Robbie was a criminal prosecutor with 102 jury trials and has since then helped 100s of founders raise $750M+ through storytelling. We talked about: - U-shaped curve to tell great stories - Five steps to structure a story - Two stories that everyone should have 📌 Get it in 24 hrs: https://lnkd.in/gTq37_id

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This is our first major new product launch at UserEvidence. Introducing UE Research Content. The feedback from customers has been incredible - incredibly disruptive to the traditional model of expensive and slow Analyst research. Thought leadership content is crucial for building awareness and moving B2B prospects down the funnel. But here's the problem: 71% of decision-makers say less than half of thought leadership provides powerful insights (Brighttail). Original Research - e.g. the "2024 VENDOR State of INDUSTRY Report" with substantive, interesting, survey data and industry trends projections - is the way to go, and is consistently a high-performing and wide-reaching asset type that works well in Content, PR/Marcomm, Analyst Relations, and Demand Gen. But creating these original research reports is a painful, slow, expensive process, regardless if you're doing it internally, or working with an agency or Analyst firm. - source a survey panel of 500+ industry professionals - come up with good questions that pain the industry narrative/direction you want - analyze the data and write copy about they key themes and takeaways - hand it to design to turn into a designed report - atomize the report into snackable content It's par for the course for these reports to cost $60+ ($100k+ if it's Gartn3r or Forre$ter ;) - and take 4-6+ months. UserEvidence Research Content enables marketing teams to quickly and cost-efficiently (like 1/3 of the cost and 1/2 the timeline) create substantive and thought provoking long-form industry trends reports - "2024 State of X" reports, Buyers Guides, and more - and use the UserEvidence Platform to atomize and create derivative short-form content and social content from the underlying research. In the words of our first UE Research Content client (who has now done several projects with us), Immuta, "Our newest report launched only two weeks ago. We've already gotten picked up by three media outlets, are capturing leads, and the sales team is leveraging stats in their presentations" + "We couldn't be happier with the results from UE Research Content, the content is THAT good." Check out the blog post for more info, and to see example Research Content created by Immuta and others. Boost! 🚀 #thoughtleadership #contentmarketing

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The sweet spot for research is something that is shocking in magnitude but not at all shocking in direction. Something that leaves your jaw open, but opened it when you were nodding along. Over the last two months, my team (shoutout Arjun Sangwan & Christian J. Ward ) and I have combed through data for over half a million businesses to help answer the question, "How much does a business benefit from being found in more places?" What we found hit the research sweet spot - shocking in magnitude, not in direction. We discovered that regardless of size, region, or industry there seems to be a beautiful pattern between brands that put their information in more places and their respective success on Google. Not only did they see 17% of website search traffic coming from non-Google sources, but those that synched data to over 75% of these publishers saw Google website traffic 186% higher than businesses synched to under 50%. Simultaneously obvious and shocking. Check out the whole study here: http://yex.tt/49PivOC

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