Enhancing Hypergrowth Value Messaging

Pete Thornton 0:00
All right. Welcome, everybody to The SaaS Ramp Podcast. I’m your host, Podcast Pete, here today with a special guest. Happy to have Matt on the call, Matt Groetelaars. Matt is formerly a second segment, Twilio and now founding partner of go-to-market operators network. Matt, welcome to the show.

Matt Groetelaars 0:23
Great to be here. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I feel like this is, in some ways, just a continuation of many of the great conversations you and I’ve been having in the last several months, just over zoom calls, I’m glad we’re finally having an opportunity to sort of maybe bottle up some of those insights and share them with with a little bit of a broader audience. So appreciate you having me on.

Pete Thornton 0:44
Totally. Yeah, yeah, this is like, we are almost having to like re-record some of the conversations we’ve had in the past. So like, those are the best ones for like, Hey, could you just say that when I press play, that would be it would be very impactful. I thought it was like super interesting about yourself and just lead like, like anybody who has come into a go-to-market team or like come into enablement is just generally your story of like, of how you obtained it because it’s not like you got like a master’s in sales enablement or go to market before you entered this world. So tell us about yourself. Like, what’s the background?

Matt Groetelaars 1:20
It’s such a good question, Pete, because one of the interesting things, right, it’s in spite of all of us, maybe at surface level, or at LinkedIn profile level of just standing someone’s background, it might look like, you know, we, we’ve done these different tours of duty at different organizations that all blend together. But I think it’s always interesting, when you dig into the backstory, there’s always something that’s interesting about how people got into the world of tech, or specifically the niche they’ve carved out. And certainly I like to think it’s the case with, with, you know, parts of my journey, I mean, we know what I was always I always knew growing up, I wanted to be in something in high growth Tech, I had a vision of making the move out to California when I was growing up on the East Coast. And I had this idea of, you know, wanting to be in the idea of like, an Apple computer in the early days. And, you know, I ended up in, in college, as an accounting major, actually, which was just about felt like the kind of one of the polar opposites of what my vision was of getting out to California, and was set to go be an auditor at Ernst and Young, ironically enough for apple on the Apple account, excuse me. And I had a couple of friends that were in cars that were starting a startup pretty early stage, and they were looking for some sales interns, and they tried to recruit me and said, they thought I’d be really good at this, you know, cold calling, and, you know, sort of pounding the bones and getting after getting after, you know, trying to try to get folks interested in what we were building. And, you know, the rest is sort of history for me, I had to last, you know, several years of my career that sort of that that brought me and caused me to ditch the accounting degree. And, and brought me into the world of sort of high growth and go to market and one thing led to the next. And along the way, I’ve worked at a number of pretty early-stage companies in a bunch of different areas, touching a bunch of different sorts of types of go-to-market motions. But, you know, I’d say in particular, the last couple years were spent at a company called segment, which got acquired by Twilio. And, you know, we managed to have a really, really great outcome there. But I think, in particular, we saw a lot of really, really interesting go-to-market challenges that I feel so many of the companies out there today that are on the bleeding edge are faced with, and a lot of really interesting lessons. And that was a chapter that was in particular an interesting one because I also made a pivot into enablement at that point in time versus sales leadership. So I was kind of really involved at a very unique vantage point and seeing how we had to build and rebuild different parts of that go-to-market engine over the couple of years at segment as we grew to a pretty, pretty substantial size. So that’s a little bit of my background in a nutshell. And a little bit of the backstory.

Pete Thornton 4:15
Yeah, I love it. I love it you like the idea this is many calls in a row now, where people in like higher level positions have had an idea from an earlier age of where they wanted to be at I don’t think that that’s like exactly the norm some people fall into it and like modify a skill set or something like that. But it’s really cool. Like, what do you want to be when you grow up like Steve Jobs? That’s a different type of uptake. So, and I also think I also knew a lot of people who have like, become Californians like chosen not born there, but like, you know, wanting to get out to the Bay Area, and for that very reason. So I think there’s something strong about the intention behind that three people in particular that I’m thinking of you can add Arnold to this to this mix as well, like you could go as far as you want it with this idea of like people wanting to go out for something like that. So cool backstory as far as how you got here.

Matt Groetelaars 5:11
Yeah, well, I think it’s interesting. The world’s changed a ton. What was the case maybe 10 years ago, we’re about like you, not only was there the sort of the vision and the dream that maybe I had for being out west than in California, but I think that in many ways in order to “play the game” in terms of early-stage tech, it felt like you had to be in the Bay Area. Right. And I think that as a particularly accelerated, of course, from COVID perspective and the impact it’s had, but I think that’s changed a lot. It’s a credit to much of the technology and the tools that allowed us to work remotely and do this. And it’s, it’s a great thing. But you know, that was certainly the case. I think one other interesting thing, I’ll just say, Pete, were related to what you brought up there a minute ago around having clarity on the Northstar or direction, I think you are right, I probably did have a decent degree of clarity on Hey, I know, I want to do something in the world of high growth technology. And I know I aspire or look at, you know, companies like Apple and what they’ve done or what individual like Steve Jobs have done. And I respect that. But I certainly was pretty far away from having an idea of like, what does that specifically look like? And I think, just like the journey for an entrepreneur, finding Product Market Fit needs to be willing to sort of deal with the uncertainty and the twists and turns. And it’s not as linear journey, I think, same deal for careers and finding the right track. It’s kind of sitting in that, hey, I have this aspiration in this area, but I don’t yet know how I’m going to channel that. And being willing to try a bunch of different things out. As I look back on it, obviously, if I hadn’t tried out being a sales intern and making cold calls, even though it didn’t sound like it was going to be necessarily a fun thing to do, you know, hour by hour, I might have ended up being you know, an accountant and being an auditor, and my life would look very different. So, I think it’s certainly hopefully that that’s encouraging folks out there that are still at the beginning of the trailhead, so to speak, right, that sort of, it’s navigating that uncertainty, and that’s where the beauty of the process really is, right? And where the value gets created.

Pete Thornton 7:23
Yeah, I do love that you turn that in like the, like the product market fit piece, because it’s like you have this idea, you’re trying to shuffle it into which box it will be a best fit for and maybe even your accounting background, like that is very systemized. productize. Like that is a very like you are trying to understand what a cycle might look like what a replicable, repeatable state, it’s like state like sales stages, essentially. So not surprised at all that like with an interest in SaaS, hypergrowth sales, you know, or became an interest in sales. And like overlaying it on that kind of background, or even your ability to get an accounting degree, you know, to like, walk through those repeated steps. I’m super not surprised it turned into something like go-to-market enablement and like, you know, what you’re eventually lead yourself into, but I won’t get too far ahead. When we get too far ahead. Let me backtrack a little bit. You mentioned specifically about some go-to-market challenges at segment acquired by Twilio, do you want to unpack any of those, like some of the things that you were seeing there? And just kind of like, let us know, like, what challenges they were seeing through that hypergrowth period themselves?

Matt Groetelaars 8:29
Yeah, it’s a great question. We’ve spoken about this in the past, on a related point, which is that certainly any company that’s on this sort of trajectory of loosely, let’s call it hyper growth, right, but of growing very, very quickly at elevated levels, compared to, you know, what a company would conventionally be growing at, you know, generally speaking the case for like a venture-backed model, right, you know, these companies chip as they go to market, right, there tend to be these similar buckets of challenges that I think time and time again, even as I’m advising different founders, or different go to market leaders are working with different teams, you see the same kind of challenges rear their head, right. I think, you know, we have many of those same ones at segment. And What’s always interesting to unpack is how do companies solve for right, these the same problems that we all face along the growth trajectory? How do we solve for him? Right? And so, I think, for context, what I’ll share is, when I joined segment, we were, you know, approaching, you know, let’s say about 70 ish million of revenue. Arr. The business was fairly far along from that perspective, but certainly still several years to go until you could get to a whether it was an IPO or an acquisition or a real, real great outcome. And there was no Over sales enablement in the business at all, and it was actually sort of Midway for me through, I was interviewing for a sales role. And it was midway through the interview process for that. But the hiring manager for the role said, you know, hey, I think you could do this job. But our CEO, Peter started to talk a lot about enablement. And this starting to be something that we were really are maybe 12 to 24 months behind the ball on. And I think, based on what you’re talking about, that you seem to be really interested in this sort of thing? Would you want to do that? And, and so there was no enablement in the business at all. And you had CEO, the company starting to say, hey, we’re starting to see some real things that are both headwinds, as well as that signify to us that we should have put this in place a lot long, Berg out. Now, it’s funny because for those of us that are in enablement, four or five years later, we hear about a business at that level of runway, right? And we’re like, Oh, my goodness, how could you not have an enablement in place? So I think the world has changed in terms of the function and the expectations and how critical it is seen as making that investment early. And I think, you know, I would hope if Peter were listening to this podcast, he would certainly concur and agree and say, hey, if I could have gone back and done it again, I would have done it two years earlier. But you know, I’d say what, like in terms of the specific challenges, just in the same way that engineering organizations have this concept of technical debt, right, which is when there’s just simply so much innovation that’s pumped out new functionality, new features, new products, that the engineering teams oftentimes can get behind. And they need time to catch up on all of the stuff that got ignored maybe along the way, and just pushing out new product and building reliability into the product building functionality fixing bugs. And so they have to, they can’t ship new product that as fast of a rate. I think in a very similar way, we have the same concept and go to market. And it doesn’t get talked about us enough. But it’s basically when you have a company and a product that’s pulling in a market that’s pulling for this product so strongly like segment was that it you almost ignore along the way, some of the go-to-market fundamentals that are critical things like, what’s this engagement process going to be like? Like, what are our value drivers that customers are buying this for? What happens when we have champions leaving an account that we’ve sold in the past, and now we have no contact there, and we need to go resell value. And we’re sort of back to square one with a customer we’ve had for several years. So I think it was a lot of those host of challenges that specifically were going on at segment and I got really lucky because we had a CRO Joe Morrissey join about six months after I got into segment. And Joe and I had the just really, really good fortune of being able to partner up and I got to see what this world-class sales leadership look like. And got to help, you know, be a part of rebuilding different parts. Because over the three-year window, as you know, Pete, I think in high growth companies, right, every six to 12 months, you end up feeling like you’re almost taking something and it’s so different by the time a year has passed, that you’re almost having to redo that entire process or that entire way that something’s done. So that was sort of I guess, hopefully that gives a little bit more color there. But those that was sort of a lot of the situation that we were coming into. And I think it was kudos to this, like some incredible execution that was done prior, but also just saying, hey, we need to take a couple steps back here and say, if we really want to make this company world-class, we have to rebuild some of these things in a pretty serious way.

Yep. Okay. Yeah, that’s a really interesting way to put that. When you mentioned about 70 million, and like that being behind today’s curve on when they typically bring in sales enablement, a lot to say, though, like, if the CEO is giving it, his level of interest in this as a priority at the CEO level, like that is that’s a fairly progressive thought coming from your standard, maybe more like product-driven CEO at that time, especially. So that’s, that’s, that’s interesting, and how you wove into it coming into the sales role. Maybe before I go on to something I know we want to unpack, how important was it for you to have seller experience? And then how important was it for the CEO to actually kind of like grant his backing to this role and his passion or understanding of the need behind it?

Yeah, two really good questions. Really, really good questions. I was going to actually, if you hadn’t asked about sort of Peter segments, CEO and co-founders championship or sponsorship for the importance of enablement, I was going to proactively bring that up because I think this is something I see time and time again, as I talk with him work with high growth companies, and trying to help them along the way is folks are talking about enablement, much more consciously than they would have a couple years ago in terms of the importance of it, but I still think most organized Asians don’t actually set up the right ecosystem for enablement to have the level of strategic impact that it can have. And I think Peter did a really great job of doing this at segment, it wasn’t just talking the talk in terms of that upfront interview process and saying, Hey, I think we’re 12 to 24 months behind. But when I did get into the business, I remember actually selling my early on work that I was driving. I like my exact sponsor for it was Peter and I would be sharing like, I was interviewing a number of our account executives to distill and identify trends that were leading to early stage, pipeline success, early stage, basically successfully driving big deals forward with some of our reps, but wasn’t largely widely happening in that business. And I remember, you know, sharing these research insights that I was spending hours and hours on, and I would expect, you know, Peter to take several days to get back to me, within like six hours, he’d be coming back with detailed feedback, suggestions, recommendations on how to drive things forward. And to me that showed me, what does the champion really look like, it’s the kind of person that is going to fiercely help you sell the impact of what you’re doing and unblock things. But they’re also going to within and behind closed doors are going to be really, I think, helping to be critical in their feedback. So that way, you can get to a better end outcome, right? So I’d say, you know, in terms of that piece, it was really, really important for the success because it let the entire organization know, hey, this is not just going to be we’re not just going to say in a month’s important and put the bunks in place, we’re going to, you know, we’re going to really show you that this is something that you need to be leaning into to be successful here. And so I think that’s on that front. In terms of my background. And looking back on it, I think we always have the benefit of hindsight. You know, in terms of how important something may or may not have been, I’ll say this, when it came to me ultimately started to build and implement teams of my own. And when it comes to me advising folks on how to structure and building teams, I feel it’s very important to have at least a large number of folks on that team, who have done some kind of customer-facing role before, because it simply builds empathy for the people that you are actually supporting in the organization who are doing those jobs that I look at as sort of the hardest jobs in the organization, the ones that are on the frontlines working with customers day in day out. And second is it builds credibility with those people, right? Because if they can see that you get it right on that level. They’re just, they’re going to be much more likely to lean in and engage with what it is that you’re putting out there. So for me, I feel it was super helpful in both my me getting up to speed with knowing what did I actually need to enable because I had been successful myself, but I had also been in other situations where I wasn’t successful, as well as how am I going to get buy-in? So that way, it’s not sort of like the body rejecting the Oregon sort of a thing in terms of trying to implement change when we were going to make changes.

Pete Thornton 18:10
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. No, did I that second, I have certainly experienced on the seller side like, in in a way, you can almost cheat your way through the first enablement role, because you’re like, Hey, I’m, you know, it’s like, if you’re, if you’re coaching, after you play, you’re like, Well, what was the best coach I had? What did I need as a player? What’s the worst coach, I had? Don’t do that. Do this. Try to be empathetic to your previous needs when you were in a different role. So yeah, totally makes sense.

You mentioned something about the— I love of this part because this is a little bit of like the backend, like, why would you do a podcast? Why would you try to unpack some of these things and in high growth, hypergrowth SaaS, and you mentioned about repeated challenges along the way. So like, like seeing things over and over again, like, I love the idea that you might be able to actually codify some of these pieces as each stage in the journey. I’m curious, like, from what you saw at segment from your time, they’re moving through those growth stages. So very rapidly. Have you seen those same challenges again since then in your work, since a segment like is it just is everything is unique little Snowflake? And you have to treat everything differently? Or is there a bit of a playbook that builds over time?

Matt Groetelaars 19:26
I think that it’s tricky because you want to be conscious of not just taking the same exact playbook that has worked in one place and saying, Hey, we have what looks like at face value, we have one of the same big problems going on here. Therefore, let’s take what worked in the past. Let me take what we did at segment when we had that problem and just do the same, because two things Number one, it doesn’t, that there’s the correlation and causation sort of thing, right in terms of hey, just because it worked in the past doesn’t necessarily mean that they We’ll work that same way this time. And second is, could we be? Couldn’t we maybe be doing it even better? Right? Is there this idea of continuous improvement that could exist? Right. That being said, I think, you know, I will say that the thing that I find interesting that I see as a very common trend, almost universally, and this is interesting, because in today’s go-to mark a world, we’d love to be talking about these different go to market motions. PLG or sales assist, or, you know, are you tops down? Or bottoms-up. All of these models actually think all start to converge? And I saw this ad segment? Because I think it said, Well, we had what was a product lead group business for a very long time. Most of you know, when you think about it, right? For a segment, a large chunk of its early revenue came from self-service, signups and direct, direct signup, right in that regard. And a large chunk of the company’s revenue, even when I joined was still attributable to those sorts of self-service motions. But I think as we were, then as I would have been there, in the later years, we were decidedly became much more tops down in particular in, you know, the enterprise, for example, right. And I, I’d say that, as I’m even advising or working with different companies that might have what’s decidedly a bottoms up model, or decidedly a top-down model. That one of the biggest challenges ICP is, how do you as an organization actually understand, like, what is the center of mass problem that you are solving for your customers, right? In terms of if you looked across, you know, whether it’s a, yeah, an SMB customer of yours, or a big enterprise account, like a Nike or a Walmart of the world? What are the what is the general landscape of problems that are solved, that are pretty universal, and are also universal to whatever level in the organization these people are at? Because what I think starts to become a challenge for every single company is, how do we articulate the problems we solve at different levels, because let’s say that I’m a product lead growth business, right? My initial adopters, my real, super fanatic users, that got me traction in that account, they may be sitting at lower levels, they might be individual contributors. But now when I want to go sell a multimillion-dollar deal, and it’s an enterprise account, and all of a sudden, I’ve got a lot of people at Nike that have started using this freemium tool. And we now want to go sell a big contract there because there’s a need. It’s sort of how do I go articulate the problem that we’re solving for all those users at an executive level? Right? How do I go have a value-based conversation when another level in the organization, I might need to be having a completely leading with a completely different value proposition? And it’s how do you make sense of all of that? And how do you tie in all the use cases and the distinct motions that go with that? Because it’s extremely rigorous. It’s very complex. And it’s not a data problem. And it’s not an art problem. It needs systems thinking, but it also needs to recognize that there is a little bit of an art form to some of these things when they’re done really well. And so, I’d say that’s one of the really, really big ones that I think most CROs are grappling with, regardless of where whatever sort of stage of company you’re talking to.

Pete Thornton 23:19
Okay. Okay, so we’re living this one. So I have a vested interest beyond just like intellectual capacity. So because you mentioned everything from like this product led growth, or like a bottoms up motion, talking about a single user. Again, you know, I’m currently at postman. So it’s like, it’s like, that’s the 22 million developers utilize. Postman definitely bottoms up adoption there. However, over the course of the last, really strongly 18 months, we’ve developed an enterprise motion, and that is more of a top-down type of motion. So there’s this idea of this transition from the single user to enterprise teams, the individual contributor all the way through to the executive team. And, and you bring up in your, your terming is like center of mass. So like, would you go back into that? Like, what do you mean by that particular definition? Any examples would be awesome.

Matt Groetelaars 24:13
Yeah, yeah. I have a visual in my mind, which I would almost, I’d almost show but it’s sort of when I talk about center of mass. What I mean is, if you imagine, Pete, that you and I were, we were working on building a startup, and we had built some kind of productivity tool, and we’re trying to go sell it to Walmart. And we go talk, you know, you go look at Walmart and think about roughly speaking, there’s, you know, groups of individual contributors just to simplify individual contributors, maybe people that are director level folks, and then their C level executives, maybe if we were to like, think about three different levels of that account, that when I say center of mass, what I mean is you might hear the person at the individual contributor level talk about a pain point and their role. In one specific way, oh, I need to, you know, tie together manual data points to manage vendor compliance or to manage supplier compliance, right? The director-level person might not say the problem that same way, they might say, Hey, I’m trying to understand which vendors we should be strategically doubling down on based on prior profitability and margin performance. And I have to wrangle data from multiple systems. And the C-level executive might say, we’re trying to think about our five-year vendor management strategy to optimize for top-line revenues and gross margin performance. All three of those examples are just articulations have the same problem. Right. But they’re nuanced and different, but they’re all talking about the same underlying problem of optimizing for vendor performance and workflows. And, you know, the value that can have for the business. When I say Senator Max, and I think then the big challenge from there is, how do you actually identify what are the types of people that are at what levels in the organization that how would they articulate those problems? And how do you tie that into kind of an organization-wide thesis? But also, how do you identify people in the business who are going to be champions for helping you get something done? Right, helping you get a deal done at the end of the day? I think that that that’s sort of the big concept that I have that I think is really, really challenging, right?

Pete Thornton 26:26
Yes, yeah. Yeah, well, well painted, by the way, like, I see all of them. So there, I have a graph going on. For anybody just listening. Apologies, I am making a graph out of my fingers. But, but, and I can see like it was contributors, all the way up to execs, and kind of like this time flow as well. And then the example of Walmart, like, just really sustained like, you can kind of visualize it happening to the various ranks. It’s interesting with product lead growth because it’s such an advantage to be able to gain traction, a product-market fit adoption, through those individual contributors, but then very rapidly, it can kind of have, you know, it’s a double-edged sword, where now you have to kind of transition your messaging very rapidly because you’re growing very rapidly, and see if you can keep them happy while also being able to go and discuss that slightly different version of value to executive teams. So that’s interesting.

Matt Groetelaars 27:18
Yeah, well, I mean, exactly right. And take it take another example. Like, another simple example I’ll just provide for maybe a minute is a tool I’ve been using a lot more of myself recently, that’s a great product lead growth company, I think, right, which is loom. And I’ve been using loom a lot recently to just kind of simply just like, save myself in meetings that don’t need to be meetings, right? recording my screen for a few minutes to walk through a concept that I’m sharing with someone I’m advising or maybe someone I’m consulting with, and, and then just sharing the loom video rather than having a meeting. But look at me if I were to land into a company and my next operator role because of that I might be someone who’s a champion for loom, because I was actually a champion when I was using it as an individual contributor to do things myself. But depending on the leadership level that I’m in, or the role I’m in, the way that you might speak to the value prop of loom is not Oh, it’s helping you save a bunch of time of your employees and save meetings, which is maybe not what an exec cares most about. But hey, maybe it’s helping drive a culture of people. People unengaged in servers, maybe are regularly complaining about too many meetings. Tthere’s a tie into attrition of employees because they don’t feel like they have enough deep time to focus. And so if you’re selling to a certain HR leader, that might be the outcome I sell against, but if I’m selling to a sales leader, I might be selling against being able to leverage loom to record engaging personalized videos for prospects and for customers that are going to help drive conversion rate. So the outcome I would sell against could be completely different. Even though the product could I could solve for both of those things. And so I think that’s another sort of quick example that just popped into my mind there.

Pete Thornton 29:04
That’s a good one. I can see it on my little toolbar right here. That’s so perfect. Okay, yeah, it makes sense. So like, like, those are challenges can unpack, we’re able to work with heavily, but I know you’re doing something interesting today, and maybe even leveraging those. So like, how did the things that you learned when you were segment and like some of the challenges you help overcome there? How’s that informing the work you’re doing today?

Matt Groetelaars 29:29
For me, what we did at segment was, we started to really codify against this, this challenge that we’re talking about Pete, right, around sort of how you how do you both get rigorous about codifying and understanding your value proposition but also, how are you going to engage with different customers at multiple different levels of any different given company? How are you going to engage with them thoughtfully? You know, we did a lot of interesting things around him. You based sort of selling motion. And I think that created huge unlocks for us, frankly, you know, largely just in terms of aligning us internally about the way that we saw our own value propositions as a company, and how we were going to go apply those and engage with customers in a way that just hadn’t happened in the history of segment before. In fact, one of the other co-founders of segment Calvin, French, oh, and who is our CTO, he wrote up a blog post, which we can drop in the show notes, maybe for folks, but he wrote up a blog post on you know, how to how to do b2b Selling done right. And it was based on his experience, having gone through what we did at segment to mature our motion. And so I think the way that I’m applying this today, in short, has been, how can you help organizations just start to better codify a lot of this stuff earlier on in their lifecycle, because, frankly, there’s a magic to just writing these things down and getting a basic, you know, whether it’s a sales process document, as well as just value drivers articulated and differentiators articulated just earlier on just getting started with it. So that way, the team as you build the team, everyone’s anchored around the same concepts. And that way, as every quarter passes, it should continue to get evolved and iterated based on real customer feedback and what’s working and what’s not and what the market conditions are. I think a lot of the times, what I’m doing with organizations is encouraging them to start on that process earlier, and start in earnest. Because that level of alignment inside of the company is going to manifest customer experiences that for a customer could very well be a differentiating factor in why they decide to work with you or not, because, frankly, you just help that you to help them do a better job of understanding their problems, and how they can go from where they are today to where they want to be in the future. And help them understand what do they need to put in place to bridge the gap? And so I think it’s, it’s taking some of these great, you know, for instance, value-based models that are really, really well applicable, and saying how can we start on this? Not when we’re a billion-dollar unicorn? How can we start on this one, we’re at $3 million in revenue, and how can we make sure every three to six months that we, you know, look at that, and we keep updating it? Because I think that just the value on Lockback and have over the course of several years is huge, right? So that’s the big thing that I’ve sort of been seeing these days in terms of Alma how I’m applying this in today’s environments.

Pete Thornton 32:41
Yeah, okay. Okay. That’s fantastic. I know, you’ve had a couple of additional organizations you’ve worked with over the course of time. Any, any, let me just kind of open it up broadly for you like, like, anything you’re doing today that you find interesting that you think audience would find interesting as well. And any kind of closing thoughts around this, just this value selling framework in general? And some of the things that you’ve seen through this motion this very, like, now popular and profitable motion, but something that’s a little bit newer in the marketplace?

Matt Groetelaars 33:15
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I mean, I think overall, if I were to sort of just summarize or recap, I think a couple of the big overarching points that I see here: I think we’re in such an interesting time, right? It’s in particular, with, with, you know, all these rumblings of, of recession. Are we in a technical recession? Are we not? I think everyone feels like the circumstances on out in the market have changed, no doubt from last year. And I think what it means is, you know, as the circumstances out on the playing field, metaphorically change, leadership, and the operator is right, that the coaches that are going to help orient the teams towards these changes and how to reposition that skill set matters even more, right. And I think, you know, the thing that I that I’ve been working on lately that I’m super excited about has been this go-to-market operators network, because I think, you know, being a great operator is a craft, it’s an ever more important skill. And it’s an ever more high leverage skill, as many of the sort of lower value add tasks can be automated now, right, like leadership and being an operator is a very high leverage. And I think building a purpose-built sort of community for how we can hone that as go to market, specifically operators, right? Because there’s a mindset, there’s a set of tools that work, there’s a set of practices that are appropriate to our field. I think it’s been really rewarding to see how come, how can you get a bunch of these interesting minds that have again, the similar problems, but are maybe each solving it differently within their respective organization? How can we get together and share and distill those learnings? And then on the flip side, what are some of the tried and true things where you don’t need to reinvent the wheel and there is a framework that really does work very, very well. And in those instances, it’s the, you know, the companies, we work with our portfolio company that’s helping, you know, helping them gain the confidence that, that some of these things are trusted, and that they will be the right things for them to set down earlier on in their life cycle that will have sort of this compounding effect. So that really, I think, for me have been, have been the big the big things of late. And I think, especially just again, coming back to this idea of like this value-based model, I think it’s for go to market operators just to know, again, just getting started in that on that course earlier, and continuing to be able to pull the community together to share learnings of how people are iterating, these frameworks and these approaches, as they mature the company as it grows. I think that’s just distilling all of that down. There’s a lot of magic to be made there. So I think those are sort of some of my closing thoughts, but it’s been really, really enjoyable to sort of just be able to riff on a few of these topics further with you today. And, and yeah, I mean, I certainly I would love to hear from others that listen to this, that maybe resonate with some of these things they want to hear, hear from me about some of the things that we did in particular segment, or that I’ve seen work elsewhere. I’m always happy to share some of those best practices and jump on a call with folks and just talk them through some of these things that you’re you’re what they’re faced with these days. So that’s always an open offer.

Pete Thornton 36:34
Yeah, that’s a great offer to that. So then, while you’re at it, like anybody wants to reach out, the best contact, you prefer LinkedIn, have email you like, whatever, we can put it in the show notes as well. But love to know what that is.

Matt Groetelaars 36:48
Yeah, I’m trying to be more of a digital minimalist these days. I recently read the book Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. I’ve gotten in the habit of even treating my text messages like an email inbox these days just because I feel like it results in me spending less time on the phone overall. That being said, LinkedIn is always great for me. I check it regularly. And I make a point of sifting through the various different types of messages and outbound messages or solicitations and really like prioritizing generally, folks that are either looking for some level of mentorship or sharing advice or best practice sharing. So I make a point of checking that a couple of times a week and just finding time to connect with folks. I think that’s how you and I originally got connected as well. Pete So LinkedIn is always solid for me. And, and yeah, I think that’s the most place.

Pete Thornton 37:47
Perfect. Okay, that’s fantastic, Matt, wonderful discussion. Thank you so much for the insights really, really appreciate it as always, and I know there are many more to come. So thank you.

Matt Groetelaars 37:56
Yeah, thank you. Take care. Cheers.