GTM Innovators: Creating Demand Through Community – A GTM Chat with Mark Kilens

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In this episode of GTM Innovators, we sit down with Mark Kilens for a conversation that brings us back to the GTM fundamentals. Mark is the VP of Marketing at EasyLlama and Founder of TACK. Mark shares how the most effective go-to-market strategies today are rooted in community, education, and trust. From building scalable programs to fostering authentic engagement, Mark’s insights may sound simple—but they’re powerfully foundational. Whether you’re refining your GTM motion or starting from scratch, this episode is packed with timeless advice on creating real demand through human connection.

Subscript to GMT Innovators Series on the following platforms:

Transcript:

Kyle James 00:00
Kyle, welcome to another episode of GTM Innovators by 3Sixty Insights. I’m your host, Kyle James, and today we’re diving into all things, go to market and community, and joining me today is, well, a good old friend who we’ve known each other for, gosh, 15 years now. Mark Kilens, Mark, welcome to the show today. Thank

Mark Kilens 00:26
you, Kyle, good to be chatting with you again. I know we haven’t seen each other in a physical sense in a while, but I remember those Foosball games way, way, way back. Those are fun, way back in the day at

Kyle James 00:41
HubSpot, yeah, like we were former colleagues. What many like way before the IPO of HubSpot, when it was like, a manageable company that you could, like, fit inside of one floor of one building, Cambridge Innovation Center, Cambridge Innovation Center. Man and well, what I’ve loved is like, since then, you’ve got a ton of great, awesome stuff. You know, you spent like, really bounce around, building communities, building academies, being, you know, VPS at lots of large organizations, like figuring out this, go to market stack and always like to, just to stop with people, start with people. I’m a big comic book fan. I love origin stories. Like, share a little bit more of, kind of the origin story that has brought you here. I might know it, but the audit the audience does it of, kind of founding tech and kind of now joining easy llama as kind of their new VP of marketing. And then we can kind of take it from there. Yeah,

Mark Kilens 01:34
I’ll try to keep this very concise. I will say I have this very strong, personal why that is guiding, and has guided a lot of my decisions since 2007 almost 20 years now. So that that’s in a nutshell, like why I’ve done what I’ve done. At the end of the day I started going down a path of mechanical engineering. Thought it was just too tedious. It’s not creative enough. I was bored. Basically, after a year of doing it in college, switch majors another three times, I think three or four times, ended up with a major and two minors in four years, did some undergraduate research, which led me to then go to grad school, dropped out of grad school three weeks in the week that Lehman Brothers collapsed, because I felt like this wasn’t that interesting. And also I don’t know Lehman Brothers just collapsed. I think the economy is going to collapse, and maybe this is not the best time to go to grad school. And then got a job in Jan 2008 which then led me to meet one of your good friends, still, Brian Whaley, at the first ever HubSpot user group. Because we were HubSpot customer at the time, based in Andover, Massachusetts, just north of Cambridge, and the rest is kind of history from there. I’ll leave it at that for right now.

Kyle James 02:57
All right, so you said personal lie, like, what is the personal lie. You have to share that piece of

Mark Kilens 03:01
it. Sure, sure, sure. To change the way the world views money.

Kyle James 03:08
Whoa, okay, okay, like, let’s go there. Let’s go there. Double click for me.

Mark Kilens 03:13
Well, I think money, you know, is probably the ultimate power outside of, say, the weather. Okay, there’s this thing that humans created for many purposes. And if you just look at the history of humanity, lot of good a lot of bad things have happened as a result of money. And I just have felt since 20 years ago, when I was studying a lot of different things, reading a lot of different things, I still do. I’m a ferocious learner. We’re just on a slippery slope. What a slippery slope right now, yeah. So, yeah. I mean, I can go, we don’t podcast. Can be about this, by the way. Kyle, so if you

Kyle James 03:49
want, yeah, so let me, let me see if I could tie it back a little bit more to go, to go to market here. So I’m a big fan, and I’ve always said that it doesn’t matter how good your product is. If no one buys, it doesn’t matter. It’s like a tree falls in the forest and no one hears. It doesn’t matter. Same thing, right? If you can’t sell a product, no one cares. If no one knows that there’s a product available they can’t buy. It doesn’t matter which goes into kind of that’s the sales and marketing motion, right there, summed up into like, your money comment, right? I

Mark Kilens 04:20
don’t think so. Actually, I think there’s something above that. All right, all right. You

Kyle James 04:24
got to sell the money, the valuation of money. No, no, you got to sell the problem. People don’t buy what you have. They buy the problem that they have.

Mark Kilens 04:36
They’re trying to see they’re trying to solve the problem. Your product could be a way they solve that problem. But if you can’t sell the idea of like, how to, you know, recognize that this is a problem worth solving, and this is how much money you think, you know you should spend to solve this problem. I’ll give you an example, like someone could tell me right now, Mark, you have bad breath. That’s a problem, because I’m gonna go speak to like a group of. Of key people in like, 20 minutes, I could buy a pack of gum, get a mint, brush my teeth, go to the dentist, use mouthwash. Like, how am I going to solve that problem? Right? This is a very transactional problem, but, you know, marketing is about that person then thinking back in their mind, how could I still solve this problem? Like, what is coming to mind right now, given the constraints I have so great marketing, you know, identifies with problems that people have, both consciously and subconsciously. Yeah, and then there’s a product, but it starts with a

Kyle James 05:31
problem. Yeah, yeah. No one cares what you do. They care about what’s their problem? What’s their pain point? Yeah,

Mark Kilens 05:36
most startups fail because they don’t focus on problem market fit. They focus too much on Product Market Fit

Kyle James 05:43
first. So how do you weave that like your superpower, at least, I’ve always considered your superpower in this is like your ability to breathe build community around things, right? Like the education aspect of your content, which very much builds the community. And, you know, like, tell me how you think about how this ties that stuff together.

Mark Kilens 06:03
Um, ties, sorry, like my personal why, or like, the problem Market Fit thing, the product market

Kyle James 06:11
fit both. I mean, I think probably more of the product market fit piece, right? But like, you know, you, you could clearly have found that as kind of the thing that is, like you’re known for, and you kind of made your, your, your, you know, name for, right? But it’s, but you wouldn’t have been driven to that if that didn’t help solve your personal why, right?

Mark Kilens 06:29
Yeah, so my belief, my personal why it’s, it’s going to get solved through a lot of different ways. You know, hopefully, maybe, maybe I’m able to help solve it with a lot of people in my lifetime. Maybe not. But one of the, one of the main things that is, I think it’s going to require to solve that problem of changing the way people, how the how people view money, is education. You know, educate people, teach people and explain to them, like, why their view of money is wrong or just inaccurate, what needs to change and how they should change it. And what that means. I think technology is going to be a big enabler of that problem that needs to be solved. So that’s why I’ve been so bullish on blockchain and crypto since 2012 Yeah, so going back to the like, the actual marketing of a product, of a problem, what we’ve done so far in the last 2030, years, I’d say it’s like, we’ve created a lot of transactional type of marketing experiences because of technology. Technology has enabled a lot of transactional type of marketing experiences.

Kyle James 07:31
And everybody wants to measure everything so they can measure individual transaction where the warm, fuzzy of like, the brand awareness piece is kind of like, becomes second nature,

Mark Kilens 07:39
yeah, yeah, it’s like, demand before brand, which is not sustainable, like, it’s not, not like durable, most likely. So, yeah, to me, you know, community is really about like, belonging, and it starts with like, the reason why someone would end up, you know, starting and then joining this community. So there needs to be some type of purpose, going back to my personal purpose, right? So that’s the thing I’ve always anchored on. And like that purpose needs to be everyone’s purpose, not just like the leader’s purpose. It needs to feel like each person can have ownership, can take ownership of it and and kind of, you know, mold it, mend it, whatever, to how they kind of view it. And then, you know, from there, there’s lots of other things and lots of other tactical things you do to really kind of grow and sustain a community. I think sharing of knowledge could call education. You could call it Training. Could call it learning, whatever, but sharing of of knowledge and stories is one of the primary ways you continue to have that flame be lit for that community, and it will continue to attract more members to the community. So that’s the reason why I thought, you know, early days and, oh, and oh, and by the way, like, I think community is one of the most powerful ways you actually create true Word of Mouth, which is one of the most, you know, low, cost efficient channels you could have and want as a business. So why not invest in that? It’s almost like stupid to not invest in community, because you just constantly have to throw money to acquire more customers, versus letting people help you acquire customers, versus the channels. So this whole shift of thinking in networks now versus channels and offers like channels and offers, unfortunately, HubSpot, like HubSpot, did a lot of like, not great things in terms of teaching people. And I think full responsibility for this is a lot of short term thoughts, long term, like, we should have been teaching that, but we should have also been teaching people a lot about, like, how to think about using networks, using people, places, brands as a starting point to your go to market, and then using channels and offers as a follow on to that.

Kyle James 09:58
Why do you think that more companies. Don’t take advantage of building community for the free word of mouth. Is it because it’s hard? Is it because people are lazy? Is it because people are not social enough? Because they don’t they don’t care enough about people’s problems? What do you think it is? Yeah,

Mark Kilens 10:16
I think it’s hard. I think there’s laziness. I think it’s hard to measure. There’s tons of reasons, right? People don’t believe in it. I mean, you got to believe in it, really, for it to work. People are impatient. Yeah, there’s, there’s a lot of reasons. Honestly, what

Kyle James 10:34
do you think is the most misunderstood aspect of building community? You know, like, like, a lot of that sounds like these people misunderstand it, but like, I don’t know. I’m just kind of trying to drill into like, is there one thing that we could leave people with, like, this is the one reason that you’re wrong that you need to do this? Well,

Mark Kilens 10:54
first off, there’s two types of communities. There’s two categories of communities there. There are rented communities, and there’s owned communities, and if you’re doing neither, you’re really just never gonna have a chance. I hate absolute statements, but I will say pretty confidently, if you don’t activate and grow rented communities and owned communities, your business is doomed. What is our rented community? LinkedIn is a rented community. It’s a network. It’s a place where people hang out. I call it like community led growth, right? Facebook is a rented community. If you’re a member of pavilion, it’s a rented community. You don’t own that thing they do. What’s the example of an owned community? Kind of what we built at HubSpot with HubSpot Academy, right? And a company can have multiple types of owned communities. HubSpot now has dozens of communities within their overall ecosystem. And each of these communities is a network, and they, it’s a node, and they, some people are part of multiple communities, multiple networks, but starting with the rented communities like that is like how people buy today. If you think about what people first GTM is, it’s matching how you market and sell, how you go to market, to how people buy. People buy in a very social, centric way for B to B and B to C. And what is social? It’s community, yeah. Like, it just it starts there first.

Kyle James 12:17
Like, the interesting thing about what I’m hearing you say, though, and correct me if I’m wrong, but really, that piece hasn’t ever changed. You know, I disagree. I disagree. Always bought community and social, right? Like, like, even think 100 years ago when you went to the feed store and you bought your animals came from your community, right? Like, okay, maybe some point in 60s and 70s, that very that, you know, went a different path, but like, or maybe, maybe, maybe, what I’m saying is, maybe it came back full circle, or it is the oldest form of kind of, you know, buying it was community led. You know, here’s the person you trusted. They built out the reputation over years or decades in this community.

Mark Kilens 12:58
I see what you mean. Yes, I thought you mean, like, meaning social networks haven’t changed and like all that other stuff. No, no, you’re right. No, no. That is the, that is the way that people have pretty much always done transactions, you know,

Kyle James 13:12
to, like, productize it and digitize it and scale it maybe, well, well,

Mark Kilens 13:18
there’s more than that. Because, like the hardware has had, it had major implications on community growth, right? The hardware being the mobile phone, the smartphone, because that has enabled now each person to be able to create their own community digitally and create content at a at a clip at scale that’s never, ever been seen in the history of human kind. Yeah? So there’s a huge difference. Like 2008 was a massive tipping point. Yeah, you know, almost kind of right, when we started HubSpot,

Kyle James 13:54
yeah. Can you can you build community without content? Can you build a community without having content depends how you define content. Okay, let’s content is God content such a broad thing, but Right? Exactly you’re writing, you’re sharing research, you’re sharing how to your instructions, I mean. And once again, I’m probably broadly or narrowly defines, but it could also be pictures and videos and elements from extra third parties. But it’s, yeah, I mean, it seems like it probably is the common bond between all of it, no.

Mark Kilens 14:33
So you can build community without content. What you can’t build community with without is value. Okay, you got to give members value. They got to give members other value. They got to give you some value back. Value creation is what you can’t have. You have to have, I should say, to build a community.

Kyle James 14:49
So what are ways that you give value, outside of sharing content,

Mark Kilens 14:53
which is conversation? I mean, so it’s conversation type of content where you’re giving ideas and sharing insights. Is that content to you? I. Yeah, sure. So then it is, then it’s content. So it goes, it’s all like, you

Kyle James 15:04
know? It’s like, no, but it’s, it’s useful to, like, get into the nuance, right? Because, like, a lot of times we just kind of bust through this, but like, I think understanding the nuance for people helps them break down. Like, to your point, what is the why? What is the core purpose? The core purpose you’re saying, is the conversation, but is the conversation loaded with content? Yes, but there are probably other elements of it too. I think it’s

Mark Kilens 15:26
more if I had to use a C like a word that began with became a C, it’s a conversation. You can’t build a community without conversation. Yeah, content. I don’t, I don’t know, yeah, I don’t think you need content first. I think you need conversations, and conversations have to result in value. Okay,

Kyle James 15:43
how do you measure it? How do you measure what do you use to kind of measure the ROI of these things? Is it all, I mean, I guess for a business, it’s all like bottom line, turn them into customers, but depends on

Mark Kilens 15:54
your business model, what you sell, who you sell it, to, how you sell it. That’s really hard to answer. Like it, I think it’s highly dependent on, on get your business and your GTM, you know, some companies are going to measure it in very specific ways, and they’re going to track it down to revenue, and there’s a funnel. Others are gonna be like, now we’re gonna measure impressions and share a voice and all those other like, it’s, it’s, you know, and sign up for the free product, right? Like, it’s very nuanced. I think

Kyle James 16:26
so so much. I’m curious how, how do you think the philosophy of, of kind of building these communities, creating these conversations, how has that changed? And let’s say you mentioned kind of 2008 is kind of a reflection point of when, you know, the last big, great recession changed a lot of stuff. Like, how has your philosophy, how to do this stuff changed since then?

Mark Kilens 16:47
Um, it’s, it’s just been changing more and more to be people first. Like, you know, we’ve, yeah, I think again. Like, HubSpot is partially to blame. Where it’s like, you know, go to our landing page, fill out a form, blah, blah, blah. Like, over time, that was just going to be terrible experience, right? It is now it’s terrible experience. So like, um, undoing the transactional experience of B to B, you know? So that’s how my views changed. And my view used to be like, No, you have to have a strong CTA to go to a landing page to sign up for an email. You have to have a lot of offers on your website, but now, because so many people have done that, so many people have the same content, so many people are saying similar things, yeah, that’s that doesn’t, that doesn’t work. That’s not That’s not good anymore. So you have to really think differently and bolder. Yeah, if you had to leave like two with two words for this from this podcast, it’s you got to be always investing in ways you can be more different and more bold and take a lot of chance. Go fast, take chances. It’s one of my personal mottos and and that’s what businesses don’t do because, you know, they want to be financially secure. They want to feel secure. They want they don’t want to have too much risk. You know, they’re always about risk reduction. I mean, it’s so, it’s, it’s, there’s tension with that idea, you know,

Kyle James 18:09
yeah, so how much of it can you share? Because I know, right, like you recently joined easy alarm as kind of their VP of marketing. And you’re, you’re back in the trenches. More is a is an individual contributor directly solving this, versus kind of tactic where you were kind of advising all these companies on it? Talk to me one, I’m curious. Like, what’s it been like you going back into that? What attracted you to kind of get back into that? And like, how are you taking, kind of the things that you’ve learned here and these new kind of ways that you’re thinking about it, maybe it’s not new, but the ways that you’re thinking about it now and kind of directly applying it to how you’re approaching, you know, solving those pain and getting those conversations going with the new community that you’re building.

Mark Kilens 18:53
I mean, I always knew I was gonna go back in house. Tack was not a permanent thing, at least in the business structure that we started with and evolved. Tell

Kyle James 19:02
everybody what tact is, just so the audience knows if that’s something they’re interested in.

Mark Kilens 19:07
Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s part community, part consulting now, so it’s a side thing that I do. There’s a community where I teach people in a one to many, and I have a small mastermind group that’s very, very intimate. But you know, GTM, people first, GTM, you know, how do you storytelling relationships and partnerships? Basically, how to use networks to bring your products to market and make them very successful. And then there’s consulting I still do on the side, but yeah, I did that for almost 20 months. One is like, I did want to go back in house because I wanted to find a job in a new way. I didn’t want to interview. I only had to interview three times in my life for a job. After college, my first job out of college, I interviewed with HubSpot, and I interviewed with airmeet. And after my experience, my last experience interviewing and kind of, what’s trend? What transpired? Like, I’m I, I really never want to interview again. So that’s partially why I start attack No. Saturation. The other thing is, I started opportunity the market that was going to last probably 18 to 24 months that I wanted to seize. And I we seized it. You know, we did pretty well. We created this idea of on demand, go to market services. We had a team of 30 people that we plugged into different businesses if Nick my co founder and I weren’t doing the work, and we were making a percentage of that of their money that they were making. So it was, it was really good. And these people were GTM operators, so, you know, it was a different agency model, way different. And people loved it, because they’re like, we’re not hiring agency, we’re hiring actual people that know what the fuck they’re doing. So anyway, that was good. That was fun. And it led me to find easy Lama, which is great at the end of the day. Tack was just about expanding my network, because ultimately, what I think I need to do is I need to be consuming you to Conversations. Yeah, exactly. It’s, it’s really fundamental stuff here. It’s like to be successful, like, it just requires persistence, patience and consistency, yeah, and conversations, um, but yeah. Then with easy llama, it’s like, Wait a minute. This is, this is an amazing team, bootstrapped. I wanted to go to a bootstrap company that was profitable for a few different reasons, that had a really big market, that were doing, that had great founders, great tech, great, big vision, bold ambitions. So, I mean, when I saw this, was like, check, check, check, check, check, check, check. And I was just like, Man, this is this is amazing. So, yeah, it’s exciting. We have a big launch. I don’t know this podcast probably has gone, so the launch has probably happened already. But on May 28 there’s, there’s this big launch, and that was the first big thing. I started full time April 1. And, yeah, we’re reinventing that business, because that business is using a very company first go to market motion, and we were going to, over time, change that to be more people first, and more network based, and not so dependent on channels and other stuff. You know? Yeah,

Kyle James 21:47
tell everybody, give everybody a little bit more idea about, like, what easy llama does. Can I like the education and kind of how you’ll do that? Yeah,

Mark Kilens 21:54
easy llama is, is right in the education space. It’s an all in one compliance and learning platform. So we help companies reduce risk, you know, human risk, company risk, and we help make their teams more productive, more efficient. We have a learning management solution. We have a compliance and workplace training solution. So those two things together are very powerful when you when you think about the human resource department, L and D, it that type of stuff. So we’re just trying to make better workplaces through the power of learning and education, which look at that goes back to my personal mission,

Kyle James 22:27
yeah. And I imagine, like, kind of HR is kind of your main persona that y’all go after, and that’s kind of where you’re building your communities is around those audiences. Yeah, yeah, we’re just

Mark Kilens 22:37
starting to but HR is the main one, learning, development, it. And then even, like, legal, there’s like, three or four kind of core buying groups, if you will. Yeah, what

Kyle James 22:46
do you find on, like, the biggest levers that you’re able to like, quickly and easily pull to kind of, like, get people excited, or the big wins that you’re seeing

Mark Kilens 22:54
other people partnering with other people. They already have an audience, they already have network, they already have conversations. They already have, trust partner with

Kyle James 23:02
other people. It’s that simple. And a lot of like, partner marketing with other Yeah, co

Mark Kilens 23:06
creation of people inside the company first, like our head of HR puja, she didn’t have a newsletter. She’s got a newsletter now that’s goes down on behalf of easy Lama. She wasn’t really posting too much on LinkedIn. Post on LinkedIn. We’re helping her do that, right? Like other people, is the way you go to market these days. And then yeah, we’ll, we’ll create a whole actual community at some point, maybe not this year. I definitely think 2026, but like, you know, partner with your customers. That’s the second place you start with. It’s like, wait a minute, we have, like, over 676, to 8000 customers. Like, we’ve done such little to actually partner with them, to help them see more value, but also help us get some more value like that. That’s where we’re starting. And, you know, internal, and then with, like customers, I’d

Kyle James 23:47
say, how are you how are you enabling that meeting? Like a lot of times, marketing and customer success might be a little bit siloed, but how are you getting into those conversations? And like, doing that to discovery, to find out where their partnership opportunities with your customers, because that’s, I hear you. That seems like a big win, but that’s, once again, another hard thing that a lot of companies really struggle

Mark Kilens 24:07
with. Well, the Yeah, you’re right. The first thing you got to do is make sure that your CEO understands how you need to create a united go to market team between your marketing, sales, CS and product not aligned. I hate the term alignment. I you know, we said it all the time at HubSpot. I think it just just wore me down. And after, like, looking at alignment and all this crap, you don’t align. You unite. You unite your teams. And there’s many ways you do that. You start with like the who, who are you going after? And why are you going after that customer, and what problems are you solving? Go back to the problem market fit, if you’re not united on the plane. United on the problems and the ideal customers, everything else is going to be a fucking harder excuse. My language, I’m sorry. I’m a little bit Friday. It’s just, it’s just, it’s just gonna be a lot harder. So like, you know, Hunter and I are CX later, like we need to be united on those things, and that’s and so I kind of run at easy. On the like, not just marketing. I kind of run the go to market side with Sam, our CEO. He ultimately makes the decisions. He’s the CEO. I think every CEO owns go to market. I think this most CEOs should look to their marketing leader if they have the capabilities and experience to do so to execute the go to market. It could be CRO as well. It could be like a VP of sales. It’s one of those probably that needs to then be the partner to the CEO to actually bring the vision the decisions to life. So in this case, with like Hunter, it’s like, look, here’s what we’re going to do to start activating the voice of our customer more. Here’s how we’re going to create some process to actually make customers become partners of us, and tactical things like building the initial formation of a customer Council, if you will, advisory board, whatever you want to call it right, like that thing, doing really smart things with getting people who fill out a 10 on our NPS. Because we have such so many customers, such high volume, we’re getting a lot of NPS responses, nines and 10s. We’re going to ask them to do a video testimonial for one minute, and also give them it’s either 50 or 100 bucks to do that. Like, it’s like, it’s just that type of stuff, you know, I mean, so it’s like, great. Now I can use that stuff in so many ways in my marketing. Like, so, yeah, it’s just, but you have to be aligned. Because if I give you’re not aligned on the who, right? And you’re not aligned on the problems, um, it’s not gonna make sense, right? If your customers are solving problems that marketing isn’t marketing or, you know, like, it’s like, What the What’s going on here? And then

Kyle James 26:32
once you’re kind of aligned and united, like, do you feel like, then it just empowers and enables people to, like, know what they need to do and who they need to get with. And,

Mark Kilens 26:41
well, yeah. And some of that has to be the Yeah. I mean, the CEOs, the CEO of the company, has got to be somewhat very clear in saying, hey, this person is helping me run the go to market like, there has to be like, there has to be like, a like. In the military, there is command and control, right? And that’s heavy, and that’s that. That’s what hurts a lot of companies. There’s not clarity on, like, who owns the ultimate responsibility, and decision making, power, like that has to be in place. That’s the other thing, I’d say. You know, those three things, roles, responsibilities, decision making, power, accountability, the problem alignment and the ICP alignment at a minimum, it’s those three.

Kyle James 27:25
Yeah, yeah. You can’t get anything done with committees, right? Like, the buck stops here. Who is the ultimate decision maker? So bad? Yeah, that’s always been a pet peeve of mine, too. Like, just tell me who makes a decision, and I’ll live with that. I’ll make the decision. Just we need somebody that makes decisions. What are, what are some of the early like you mentioned the video, minute long video testament. Are you starting to see? Have you started seeing wins with any of those are still kind of too early to tell it’s

Mark Kilens 27:55
too early. I mean, I started full time April 1. I was fractional for about two months before then. So I’m right now, as this recording is being done, I’m like seven weeks in full time, maybe eight. So it’s, it’s too early to tell. We could tell, though, like already we’ve changed how we sound, how we talk, especially in our ads landing pages. Way more people first versus company first by using just different styles of of how we write instead of first person or third person, it’s second person, making sure that a customer is always part of what we’re marketing in some way, either through an example quote, you know, soon videos changing the whole branding of like, our imagery to be real llamas, people at easy llama or customer images like this, stuff like that, right? Like, it’s going to be a multi phased approach to make the whole ship turn to be people first, but into Bebo really the network piece and the community piece, but, um, you know, everyone’s got to be again, aligned to that strategy. Like, if you’re trying to do that, the CEO is, like, I don’t want to do that. Like, it’s not, it’s not gonna, it’s not gonna go well,

Kyle James 29:15
you know, I just looked at, we’ve been talking for half an hour almost already, and I haven’t even asked you the question, but you start talking about content How is AI fit into all this for you, what are you guys doing with AI? Are you using it for content creation? You use it for optimization, or, like, how is, how is your teams taking advantage of what? What tools are you using with it?

Mark Kilens 29:33
Yeah, I mean, every tool that we use is gonna have some type of AI component to it, like Wistia is a good example. Wistia has a good amount of AI stuff baked into it, and we can get a lot of good stuff with Wistia thanks to all their AI stuff. Default is another one. Clay is another one. Send spark. That’s a really cool AI product. Instantly, that’s kind of some of the core stack. HubSpot. Obviously, huge. HubSpot, kind. Customer. Think we have every single hub except maybe operations, but I know we have marketing, sales, service. CRM, it’s more about, like, yeah, like, AI to me, it’s more about and then we’re gonna start building our own agents. We have the new thing that HubSpot came out with, like the MCP beta and like, some stuff there, and a few other things. It’s interesting because it unlocks a lot of the ways we can create smarter agents. But I think of the team to your question in like three ways. There’s full time people, part time people, and then, you know, digital workers always on people.

Kyle James 30:31
So recently posted, yeah, so like that.

Mark Kilens 30:33
That’s definitely where we’re going, like so, you know, I have a team meeting with everyone that’s part time and full time once a month. We just did the first one the other week, actually this past week, and people loved it. Soon, we’ll be inviting some actual agents into that meeting. What it will look like, I don’t know, but we’ll have an agent present to us something, and hell, maybe we could write it out or design it. Excuse me, where that agent is actually, like, having conversation with us. Like, I have you ever seen an agent in a team meeting? By the way? I’m curious. That’s I

Kyle James 31:07
mean, usually they’re just the culture, you know, call listen to and they give you the meeting notes, that kind of stuff. But actually, talk and interface, yeah, like, engage people. No, that’s what

Mark Kilens 31:16
I’m going to get to it very soon. I want to get to that point. What tool are you using for that? I have no idea. I’m going to talk to talk to some folks that I know that can help me build something like it, and we’re going to just try it, because, like, that could be really cool. Like, you could have, like, your rev ops agent,

Kyle James 31:29
yeah, in the media, interesting, yeah, or someone that you can query and, like, do all the back end, like, pull this report for me. I want to know this stat. You know,

Mark Kilens 31:39
it happens all the time. Yeah. And then that’s gonna be a huge company, whoever, whoever builds that, by the way, interest,

Kyle James 31:44
yeah, yeah. Fuck. Huge company, just an MCP layer that plugs into whatever. Yeah, that seems like it’s that seems like exactly where somebody, I could say Peter should go to, right? You’ve got integrations into that’s the products.

Mark Kilens 31:58
That’s Innovators Dilemma, right? I they might be able to pull it off, but that is classic Innovators Dilemma, very true. So maybe you build it. That’d be sweet. Yeah. I mean, because aren’t you part of, like, doing stuff with agent.ai?

Kyle James 32:13
I do stuff with a whole lot of different stuff, okay, yeah, a lot of it. I have conversations like this, you know, with some of their builders now, and learning and seeing why they’re building stuff, what they building and and how they think about building it. There’s, there’s so much going on with AI right now. It’s, it’s always a question I like to get to because it’s, it’s fascinating all the different ways that people are using it, you know, and I’ve had conversation with people that the way that it’s completely transforming like, like go to market internationally, where it was always the last thing you had to think about, how do we translate all this language from now, what now you do it in the product and write your legal terms and all this, it could be brought up much further in the process to you know how it how it, how it comes in and helps you write the product, right? You see cursor and all these things that, you know, I talked to engineers that are it’s, they’re writing less and less code and, like, just kind of vibe coding with these things. It’s a real thing now,

Mark Kilens 33:15
yeah, we just had an AI engineering sprint week, yeah, like, they, like, I don’t know what they did exactly. I should probably find out. But like, they spent pretty much a week retooling their systems to think, and they code with a lot of the AI stuff, right? Like, I think they tried everything that they could. Lovable riplet cursor. There’s a new one. I forget the name of it now, there’s a lot of but, like, yeah, they they were like, how could we think about each of these and what’s the best for kind of our setup, what type of code we’re writing our back end, like, all that stuff, you know,

Kyle James 33:49
yeah, there’s definitely a lot of concern, especially more in the enterprise space, all the governance around this, and how do we keep this data locked in so that it doesn’t get open and out? And I think you’re seeing more of that come into even the smaller companies. Yeah, right, because that’s that’s like your IP, and the more that it gets into these models and trains, but, but also, for every company going forward, your secret sauce is your data, right? That’s the special stuff that you have that you’re going to be able to build on. And the more data you have, the more you have to train on, the more power you’re giving your users, you’re gonna see more that scale. It’s no, you’re right.

Mark Kilens 34:27
It’s your data, and your network is two sides of that coin, right? It’s like the people and your data, because they one side is distribution, and data could play into distribution too, don’t get me wrong, but 100% agree, it’s data, plus probably like the network your

Kyle James 34:40
company has. Yeah, and the more you kind of have that data, and how do you segment it? Because the other thing you see happening, especially with these larger data sets, right, is like the older stuff starts hallucinating, or how good is your data? Because once you start introducing not ideal data, or you have. Partition stuff, enough of the stuff along the edges out. That’s where the hallucinations. And it asked, you know, it telling you to put glue in your pizza comes from, you know, and it’s solvable. And you’re seeing companies start to solve that, but, but it’s all about how you’re setting up your eval, you know, your eval, your your solution, then and getting in there and testing it and tweaking it, and then cleaning it up to be more and more specific, into what it what it’s trying to solve and do

Mark Kilens 35:30
exactly, exactly. Yeah. I mean, talk about just a big industry continuing to get bigger, yeah, the data industry. Yeah.

Kyle James 35:38
I guess, to that point, right with y’all playing with all this stuff, like, how do you think about kind of the buy versus build decision, you know, when you’re building out kind of a martech because it’s something else I’ve seen and heard a lot about, is companies trying to consolidate, right? Because there’s so much overlap in these various tools. Can we? Is this one good enough, versus we need these other bolt on solutions that you know are really good at specific things, but maybe we were good enough with what we have. Well,

Mark Kilens 36:07
I think, I think it depends on your philosophy. So my philosophy is, what’s the best possible buying experience I could create, and then pick all your tools, and then, then the decision is speed and maintenance. So I think we’re going to do a lot more, like really smart buying with not as much, like building a stuff

Kyle James 36:24
internally. So if let me repeat back what I think I heard you say in kind of cow language, it doesn’t matter what you think. If this is a better customer experience, that’s where I’m going for

Mark Kilens 36:36
Yeah, match your go to market to how people like to buy. Yeah.

Kyle James 36:41
If there’s pain in any part of it for them, we need to find a better way to do it. It doesn’t matter the tool, yeah, what? Uh, Mark, what advice would you give, you know, kind of first time VPs and marketing, kind of stepping in to kind of go to market leadership roles, especially kind of you’ve done this multiple times. And what are some lessons that you see that are repeatable or or scars on your back that you’ve learned the hard way that you kind of paid forward, um,

Mark Kilens 37:11
first try to really understand your superpower and kryptonite, if you haven’t, like, done a lot of self reflection, like, start there, like, what is your one or two superpowers. What’s your kryptonite? Then ask yourself, like, what is my like, core marketing, if you will, like, skill set? Yeah, it’s usually three or four categories, right? Brand, demand, product marketing, right? But you have to ask yourself to like, if you’re a first time VP, goes back to what we were just talking about, like, how are you and that CEO? Or, like, your boss, and then, like, hopefully they report to the CEO. Like, how are you, like, united? Like, are you united? If you’re not united, then trying to get the company united. Like, good fucking luck. Yeah. So just, it’s all about, like, how do you think about being united with your CEO? And that’s the most important thing you can you can interview for in the interview process, is you got you folks being united,

Kyle James 38:10
real talk. Yeah, whatever it takes, if you only to go out and have a few drinks to loosen up and, like, get into it and,

Mark Kilens 38:18
oh, yeah. And then you back channel the heck out of that person. You gotta like, because they, they could say, and they want to get you, you know what? I mean, yeah, you got to talk to current employees, former employees, maybe other people they know, like, yeah,

Kyle James 38:30
I want to, I want to dig something like you said, the superpower versus kryptonite. So when I hear people talk about that, they’re kind of two philosophies that they go out of from that one, and I’m curious your opinion and how you think about it. Is like, please. How do I lean? The number one is, how do I lean further into my strength and pass off and ignore all my weaknesses? Versus two, how do I take my weaknesses and turn them also into strengths? Does that make sense? Do you lean one way or another? As you think about it, kind of identified those things.

Mark Kilens 39:04
Oh, yeah. I mean, I always say, double down on your strengths, okay, and just be super aware of what maybe is your kryptonite. And like, don’t let it

Kyle James 39:11
get you got it, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, what’s one decision you wish you could do over in kind of your go to market career, like, is there been an experiment or something you tried that blew up horribly, that you’re like, man, if we could have only redone that with what I know now,

Mark Kilens 39:33
no, not really, actually. Now, I mean, knocking wood, it doesn’t happen. But no, I mean, I you know, is

Kyle James 39:38
that because you’re just okay failing and trying something different. You think, yeah,

Mark Kilens 39:42
I don’t. I mean, Nothing’s ever perfect. Everything can always be better. Like, I think you’re always failing. So like, it I just don’t. I don’t get stressed about that stuff. Honestly, I don’t know, like, I’m sure there’s a lot of examples. I just put it, I learned from them, and then I move on. I don’t like, I don’t dwell

Kyle James 39:58
awesome. Yeah. It’s, well, I guess in kind of wrapping, you know, I want to be mindful of your time Mark, like, what if I not asked you that I should have asked you that? Like, or, what final things do you want to kind of share with the audience out here, we’ve had some big takeaways. We kind of led with some right community, like thinking about conversations and and, you know, primary focus and your purpose, I’ll say,

Mark Kilens 40:24
I’ll say this for marketers listening. You marketers listening. I really think need to go from a marketing mindset to a CEO mindset, which is a go to market mindset. A lot of your job is, is being done by AI will continue to be done by AI. You need to move up a couple of pegs and think much more strategically, much more on the financial set. You gotta get really comfortable with P and Ls. You gotta really think like a CEO finance person, and also be really good on the marketing side, of course, and the best of the best, I think, really have strong sales acumen as well. So I think just marketing folks listening, like, don’t just stay in marketing. Like, if you do, I think you’ll, you’ll struggle long term in this environment.

Kyle James 41:18
You gotta understand all the, all the, all the pieces of the house, yeah, yeah.

Mark Kilens 41:23
I mean, yeah. I mean, I think there will come a time where, where there’s, you know, a lot of different agents, or AI type of people, digital workers, whatever you want to call them, doing a lot of the marketing you’re going to need. Like, your My estimation is, like, your market teams will be half as big as they need to be right now. And you already seen that, right the job market. I feel bad for a lot of people. Like, it is very hard. Like, it’s, yeah, yeah,

Kyle James 41:54
yeah. A lot of that content can be written or, or, you know, you need to repurpose something. You need to generate an image. Like, there’s a lot of these things that can do this. You just got to be able to pick it apart and like, why it’s not good, or why you gotta have, you gotta know what grade is.

Mark Kilens 42:08
What are we with you? That’s exactly why you’re hitting on something important. You need taste you need to be a craftsperson. You need to enjoy the craft making as much as the craft you make. I boom.

Kyle James 42:24
Super insightful. I think there’s a lot of great raw takeaways for people that might not want to hear some of these things, but they’re all, you know, dead, honest truth, Mark, how can people help you? How could people find you? Obviously, you’re all over LinkedIn, but, but you know, kind of give some more long about what you’re doing and how people can help you and, like, connect with you and things like that. I

Mark Kilens 42:46
mean, just sign up for Tech Insider. That’s where I shared a daily GTM idea or strategy or example. Every day, I do that. Every day, Kyle in the community. I also publish them on the website. But you know, people seem in Slack, and people love them. And I write, I write a weekly newsletter about all this stuff. So, yeah, attack insider.com, you

Kyle James 43:07
definitely know lack of here’s a framework to do this. Here’s thoughts about it, transparent with everything you do, which is great, like, pretty much, learn it, figure it out, and share what you’ve learned. And pretty much, I mean, but that’s

Mark Kilens 43:20
what a lot of people are doing now, which is good. I finally feel like we’ve come to that point, you know? I mean, like your Dharmesh and the crude agent.ai, is doing right? Very similar stuff. I feel like, Yeah, I like, what do you? What do you? So, what do you do? Like, you, like your hands and eight things. It sounds like a lot of different things. Yeah, yeah. So you trying to figure out the next thing

Kyle James 43:41
for Kyle, oh, I don’t know if I’m trying to figure out the next thing for Kyle or I just get bored doing one thing. So

Mark Kilens 43:46
maybe it is the next thing for Kyle is three different things.

Kyle James 43:49
Yeah, to your point earlier, having conversations is where you learn stuff, right? And in this market, it’s all about who you network with, who you have conversations with, what you can get connected into. I was just reading something the other day, like, if people are out there looking for jobs, like people are applying for hundreds of jobs and not hearing anything, you know randomly, like, I got an email earlier this week from a recruiter for a job I applied for in December asking if I wanted a screening call. No way, really, six months, six months later, yeah, just because I was curious, like, Sure, why not? Where’s this gonna go? I have no idea. Not I have no expectations at this point. But, like, that shows you how messed up the job market is right now. Wow.

Mark Kilens 44:37
Um, I’ve only had that happen once in my life, and it was actually, like nine or 12 months later. I kind of remember it, and it was, it was the Apple Store. This was back in like, college, and I applied to just do something at the Apple store. I worked at the University of New Hampshire computer store, which sold apple. My God, I work at the Apple store. I think it took like a year to get back to me, nine or 12 months.

Kyle James 44:58
You remind me my first job? Out of college where I ended up going back and working IT help desk for the college I went to school. Yeah, exactly at the end of the summer, I got an E, a letter in the mail. This was 2003 from them, saying, hey, we want you to apply for this nighttime help desk job. And I called them back. I said, you realize I graduated? Because I remember, like, a year before going by and putting in my my resume, that I was trying to get a job there as a student worker, and like, no, no, we realized that we just, we needed somebody, and had this sitting around and like, oh, I ended up actually getting that job. But it was kind of like, wow, that kind of after I’d already applied for all these other things. You never know how it’s going to come back and turn around. But it’s never wild, you know, right now, that’s

Mark Kilens 45:42
wild. That’s that’s pretty Yeah. It’s yeah. You’re right, yeah. But like you

Kyle James 45:45
very much, of my jobs over my career has all been word of mouth networking. It’s not just going out and applying for jobs. No, that’s broken today for anybody, especially anybody that’s anywhere up the the chain, you’re right, yep. Awesome. Well, hopefully everybody out there enjoyed this conversation. We take five star reviews only, so please leave those like and review and thanks again for tuning in. Mark. I appreciate the conversation. Thank you. And we’ll be back next time for the go to market, innovators. Until then, keep growing. Everybody.

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