In this episode of GTM Innovators, we sit down with Jenn Steele, founder and CEO of SoundGTM, to explore how B2B partnerships are evolving as a powerful growth strategy. Jenn shares her journey from IT leadership to marketing powerhouse—spanning roles at HubSpot, Amazon, and beyond—and why she believes traditional partner marketing is broken. We dive deep into the challenges of scaling B2B partnerships, the role of AI in optimizing demand generation, and how companies can leverage their ecosystems for smarter growth. Whether you’re a GTM leader, startup founder, or marketing strategist, this conversation is packed with insights on modernizing your partnership approach and driving real revenue impact.
Subscript to GMT Innovators Series on the following platforms:
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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, let’s just call it modern affiliate marketing. And I’ve got my my guest here, Jenn Steele with me. Jenn, welcome to the show.
Jenn Steele 00:24
Thanks. Kyle, great to see you.
Kyle James 00:26
We go back a long way. You’re now kind of the the founder and CEO of SoundGTM, which, full disclosure, I am an angel investor in
Jenn Steele 00:37
Before you joined 3Sixty Insights. So no sort
Kyle James 00:42
but But you started out kind of an, it is, I remember, like, way, way back in the day before quickly becoming kind of a powerhouse in marketing world, right? Like and, and even as LinkedIn, you proclaim, self proclaimed go to market fanatics. So why don’t you start kind of giving us a little bit more of, kind of your background about how you went from it into HubSpot, into Amazon and like, yeah, rev ops, all this stuff, and kind of a marketing later, and then how that led to this new adventure, like, trying to solve, you know, demand gen from kind of the affiliate angle here for B to B,
Jenn Steele 01:18
yeah, wow, trying to pull all that together in a way that’s not going to bore bore. Anybody paying attention to this podcast is going to be a bit of a trip, but I have a degree in biology that I never used. I spent more than a decade mostly as an IT executive. I was running IT departments at law firms, and I burned out, like massively burned
Kyle James 01:40
out. Because who wouldn’t find that the most interesting thing in the world, right? You know,
Jenn Steele 01:45
your best day it at law firms is nobody knows you exist. And it turns out my ego is a little bigger than that. And what’s hilarious is I was like a wonder kid. I was so young for the job, etc, and so on. I got into HubSpot and like, where are my bicycles and my knitting needles? I was one of the oldest people at the company. After being one of the youngest people in my last industry, you were my boss for a quick second there at HubSpot, if I remember correctly,
Kyle James 02:13
yeah. And I was not a spring chicken there either back in the day, but compared to some of the young ones we had,
Jenn Steele 02:18
oh yeah, yeah. So when I burned out, I actually called it my business school, because I picked up my MBA. Because I’m like, I don’t have a degree in technology or business, maybe I don’t I don’t know what I don’t know. And they’re like, You need to talk to this company nobody’s ever heard of called HubSpot, because it turns out that the recruiter at HubSpot had gone to undergrad the same place I went to grad school. So that’s kind of how all that connected. I went. I jumped through a lot of hoops to get there, because it was, it was really kind of amusing to be like, Who is this? Like, shows up in suits. Because I wore suits to work. Shows up in suits. Just happens to like, blog and do social media and and I came in as a an inbound marketing consultant and went back in. That’s what I fell in love.
Kyle James 03:08
Yeah, we back in those this was what Sirika 2002 1010 it was 2009 Yeah. The Bad joke was, it was harder to get into HubSpot than it was MIT at the time or Harvard. Even, we had a lower admission acceptance rate then, because it was, like some 1% of applicants. It was crazy.
Jenn Steele 03:25
Yeah, it was, it was crazy. I do remember then, when I became a manager, it was like I had to finally block a calendar day that I couldn’t interview anything because we were just growing so, like crazy. So, but yeah, I went to HubSpot. From HubSpot to Amazon because, well, somebody made us an offer we couldn’t refuse. Did product marketing in AWS, and then I had my one year B to C marketing. I managed all of Amazon retail revenues from Bing across both free and paid search. But I’m a startup person, so I went from there to head of growth, where I was running sales and marketing at a recruitment marketplace, to product marketing for a big data company to and then I came back into martech, so product and marketing invisible was there, and we were acquired by Marketo, which was a very strange thing, given that I still miss HubSpot, like I wasn’t quite ready to leave when I did leave, and there I am, like suddenly acquired by Marketo. Going purple might be my favorite color, but I still have my weeble orange sweatshirt. Like, from there, Chief Marketing Officer at Madison, logic, Chief Revenue Officer at a financial a Fintech startup, which is actually where I met. My current co founder had a marketing reprieve, and then CEO at kiss metrics, speaking of old martech brands, where I stabilized and sold that company, and then one of my investors turned around and said, Do you want to take this if. Affiliates platform to market. And I’m like, No, B to B, affiliates is gross. But I realized that I kind of had to, and at first I started with, okay, so I have a closed loop. I can track everything that happens. We can compensate, kind of more of an affiliates model, but make it true, B to B, where we compensate on whatever people want. Did they convert? Did they attend a webinar? Do they do whatever? And then we realized that once you have the and we built that as a marketplace, and our marketplace is actually going pretty well. It’s been growing like gangbusters the last couple months. It’s awesome. But then we realized, once you have the track again, please. The had the marketing and sales at companies with fewer than 100 employees, sorry, less than 100 million in revenue. Have a hard time figuring out how to source stuff from outside. I love go to market. So I realized I drifted off your original question, which is why I love Go to Market. But why do I think that is it’s hard. I have failed at it. Yeah, um, trying to story time of how I failed at it. Um, I think my favorite story is so partner, partnership programs, partner marketing, B to B SAS, especially in martech, we’re like, well, we’re all selling the same people, let’s start doing partnerships. Like Marketo had a pretty robust partner program, although there stories about that that I’m going to just leave alone. And so I remember it visible. I was co head of marketing, and partner marketing did fall under my purview. And the head of partnerships was in like Bali, and his boss was in like, Hawaii, and Madison logic wanted somebody to train their sales team in Savannah, and they were doing their sales kickoff in Savannah. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to train. I mean, yes, I trained my own sales team on how to sell visible. I had a product marketing like, that’s what I did. But I’m just like, I didn’t want to go, so I went, I trained them. People were excited. I don’t think visible got a single deal out of that, but I did become the Madison logic Chief Marketing Officer six months later. And and I tell that story because it doesn’t really like people are excited about partnerships, but they’re so hard. Yeah, it’s so hard to get people outside the well, now they’re virtual walls, but they weren’t physical walls of your company to sell on your behalf. Occasionally, you’ll get the really excited customer, but it’s just otherwise, it’s really hard. I mean, at HubSpot, we were better at it than most because we created fanatics, yeah, and we created so much content that they had something to share, and we’ve created Sun content that made them want to share it. But it’s still I’ve been talking to Jean Hawkins, who was kind of leading up demand when, when I was at HubSpot, and she’s like, Oh, we tracked all this stuff by spreadsheet. It was a mess. And so it’s like it feels like it’s just a mess, almost no matter where you are. And a lot of people trying little things, like, you can look and see if you’re connected on LinkedIn. You can build a map. You can do some automation and ask people for intros. You can outsource your BDRs. You can do a lot of things. But if I were back in my cmo seat, and when I was there, I kind of ignored it, because it’s such a hard problem to solve. Yeah.
Kyle James 08:30
So when I hear you talk about this, this is where my mind goes, or how I think about it, explain it’s like, do you think? Tell me if this is right or wrong, like it is already hard enough to sell your own product, like you’re trying to add extra compla, making me be able to sell some other product too, and the only way it works is if I need that other product to make my offering more compelling. Is that kind of right?
Jenn Steele 08:55
If I’m a partner company? Yes, absolutely. Like when we were visible lead MD was a great partner, because we would outsource implementation to them. They were a great marketing consultancy. And so that was a symbiotic relationship. People who just needed attribution to help their product. It was a nice to have, not a need to have was their sales team comped on it. I don’t even know how we track the dang thing. So, yeah, I think that’s what it comes down to. It’s, it’s all about what’s in it for me,
Kyle James 09:27
yeah, yeah. Well, I think then to the attribution piece, right? Like, we all know there’s value in it, and there’s some ROI or whatever you want to measure it on, but like, it’s to your point, it’s so hard and it’s in a spreadsheet somewhere to actually know what it is. Well, it’s going to fall to the side, because they’re quite honestly, things that are easier measure, right?
Jenn Steele 09:49
Seriously, this one, I mean, it’s even hard to figure out what happened, because it’s like, oh, our partner said Joe Schmo came in from them, but we have it here. How did. Work exactly? Is it that there was an email intro and some sales rep put it in and forgot to tag it partner? Like, what happened there? And that’s actually something that we work hard with our product to solve.
Kyle James 10:12
So, so talk to me kind of about the whole affiliate marketing. Like, how do you think it like? Like, I’m going to give you the whole product analogy, if you could paint a magic wand, right? Like, if you could wave a magic wand, like, what is the way this could be done? Right? You know, I’m sure y’all are kind of going towards that, but knowing it’s so hard, because you got to focus on number one, first. You know yourself first. But, like, how do you find that synergy and what needs to happen to really, like bring it all together.
Jenn Steele 10:43
So we started, as I said before, with the hard part, with the marketplace. But the reason we started with the hard part is because there’s a lot of people out of work, and what’s in it for them, the value prop needing to make their mortgage was pretty clear. Now that doesn’t mean that all 600 and some odd partners on our marketplace all work deals at all times, but it does mean that there are some super motivated folks that help us out, and we’re actually in the process of talking to other folks about partnerships, like to help folks that have been incarcerated, or to help college students get sales experience. So hopefully we’ve got more of that. How you are going to help, however, like your partners or your affiliates, as you insist on calling them, although B to B, people do not love being called affiliates, although you’re right, it’s totally affiliates. It’s it’s this constant stream of enablement. If you talk to Heather K Margolis, who’s like the channel Maven, and she does consulting here, she says, the reason I said 100 million as the folks who want to help, help below that, is that that’s what she says, is like the difference between, can you staff this or not? Can Do you have the internal resources to do the constant because you have to do marketing on your partner’s behalf, whether those partners are executives or BDRs or ecosystem partners or channel partners, like whatever you call them, you have to enable them. You have to train them. You have to do marketing on their behalf. You have to do co marketing. It is not cheap, right, right? And as you said, you kind of need to feed yourself first. If you’ve got your own sales reps and BDRs, why in the world would you ever be staffing out this massive thing to help people outside your business’s walls?
Kyle James 12:37
Yeah. And so clearly, a mix, then, like smaller companies, sub 100 billion, right? Like, part of the challenge they have just people don’t know who they are. They don’t know what they do, right? And I have to imagine there’s some level of brand awareness. Like, yes, this is very much demand gen, but there’s also a brand awareness aspect of is like, Hey, we’re teaming up with this other company that maybe you do know better, or they complete me, or however you want to think about it, like they’re having an opponent that how, how do you think and talk about that angle of it? Because it’s, it’s not obvious, but it’s super obvious.
Jenn Steele 13:11
I mean, if you think brand and demand are are unrelated, then you’re doing it wrong. Um, having a strong brand presence makes it much easier to convert any demand. It makes it easier for people to find you. It makes it much like I know. The big problem I’m having with selling sound right now is that we are incredibly new. There’s like four people in the company, and I have been invested in brand, so which means that you have to tell people what you do. Like, do you have to tell people like, what HubSpot does? Did you have to when we were there? Absolutely, but now you don’t, right. And so demand is more like getting making sure that people know how HubSpot solves their problems at the right time to buy ie when their Marketo contract is renewing, as opposed to just being like, Hey, we’re here. You should do this thing,
Kyle James 14:07
yeah, yeah, yeah. So, okay, so then what I’m, what I’m hearing you say, is, like, because I, I guess, demand, demand, chin, brand awareness, like, I’m thinking of the funnel, right? Like I’m not, I’m a marketer. I’m somebody who’s consulted hundreds of companies on market, but I’m not a marketer, so I think very theoretical, or, like, framework or, yeah, but, but what you’re saying that essentially is early stage companies, or when you’re more in the early stages of the go to market, like collapse it, right? Your brand awareness and your demand gen should be kind of the same thing. And don’t get complicated. Keep It Simple Stupid, right?
Jenn Steele 14:39
I mean, think about it this way. So you want to do a partner event, right? Because it’s a symbiotic thing. And so you’ve got maybe an influencer you want to do stuff with, or maybe you’ve got another company you want to do stuff with. You’ve already established that there sunk they get something from it, and you get something from it. Okay, so now you do a happy hour at a conference, yeah? Well, somebody knows. One of you, and they come in the door and and honestly, if you’re the person with the weaker brand, you’re probably doing more of the legwork or picking up more of the bill, sure, but that’s where, that’s where the brand awareness starts. I mean, it’s not just buy my stuff, buy my stuff, buy my stuff. It is, hey, we’re partners. Oh, then check this out. If I know, if I went to a happy hour or dinner where there were partners, and then I needed a product, I could just call my call a company, a sales rep, and be like, can you intro me to company?
Kyle James 15:34
Yeah, yeah. So, okay, all right, now you time, but a note I took a few minutes ago, right with, with kind of the partner marketing, it really comes down to the individuals, right? And the personal brands and social media, how it’s enabled that in the last few years, like, so my question then would be, what this have been possible 10 plus years ago, before, like, social media became this thing, and people were building up so much personal but, like, personal but like, even selfishly, like, I very much say, like, I do this podcast because I’m a nerd who wants to, like, talk to smart people who know more than I do, and ask them lots of interesting questions, and I can’t normally get that opportunity. But like, it’s also building my personal brain selfishly, right, right? But like, it seems like that’s part of the equation is, like, social media has to be with this. And the personal brand is part of why. It makes
Jenn Steele 16:25
it work. It does. It’s something that is on our roadmap. Like, I wanted to solve the immediate sales problem. First, if you can’t track it, if you can’t close it, what are you doing? Plus, well, plus, that’s a platform my investor gave me, Okay, two reasons. One is you gotta solve the end of the problem. Because I was actually thinking about other platforms that like have done a lot to spur on their communities, have done a lot to do all of this stuff, and where they have a problem is closing the loop. So what we need to build out or partner? Because Why build a, why build a partnering referrals platform without partnering with other people or partner with folks. To do is so we can track the lead gen, right? You can, you start opening the loop on our platform with a tracked form, or calendar invite or something like that. And then we can track where it is in CRM through we integrate HubSpot, Salesforce, blah, blah, blah, and we can be like, Oh, the opportunity associated with this email address has now triggered that thing that you put in that it needed to trigger, great, and we have a payments platform, cool. We don’t track social. We need to track social. We need to figure that out. And likewise, we also need to trigger non monetary compensation, because I am mostly an enterprise background, and most of the time you can’t pay enterprise people, right? Or somebody that works, somebody that works at Amazon’s not supposed to take more than, like when I was there was 25 bucks worth of stuff. So there are scenes. I mean, we’re still early days, you know? Or what, 18 months out from incorporation, um, and so your point about social is well taken. I heard, actually, that from a couple CMOS last night,
Kyle James 18:03
yeah, like I said, I’m just listening and asking, what comes to my mind, yeah, what, what’s interesting too is, like, a lot of my research that I’m doing now is, like with Cloud, we’ve seen much more integrations, but I’m I’m picking up maybe, maybe the partner part is the obvious thing of what happens with integrations, right? You build integration with other platform because you don’t need these monolithic solutions anymore that lives in your own data center. Everything’s live in the cloud. As long as you can integrate this platform with that, like you’re building out that partnership network, it’s then just like, how do you support each other? And what is the tracking mechanisms you do to like see how much value this is partnership and more with you versus some other partner, right?
Jenn Steele 18:47
Right? Or partnershiping With all the partners, right? AWS has its marketplace. Salesforce has its marketplace. Most places, most giant companies that handle a lot of integrations do have marketplaces now, getting anything out of that marketplace, when you’re sitting on the marketplace is is easier said than done, because, of course, they’re the giant guy and they’re the little guy. So yeah, I It’s interesting to I have no interest in being your source of truth. I know you’ve already got a CDP, or, if you’re smaller, your CRM, or, hell, a Google Sheet. That’s your single source of truth when it comes to customers, I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in pushing the data and reading the data from your single source of truth that will allow you to not have a spreadsheet over on the left hand side that you’re swearing at, you’re double checking and then sending your finance teams when they have to send a bunch of 1090 nines in January. Nines in January,
Kyle James 19:43
yeah, yeah, that’s the messy part of it, right? Yeah? Like, yeah, partner and then partnering with companies is very much different than partnering with individuals, right? Because the compensation element is Messier, like you said, Well, you can rupture.
Jenn Steele 19:59
Both, right? Like you can rev share with both most company to company partnerships or some sort of rev share deal, but you have to track it directly in your CRM, and that’s actually where, where we come in. Yeah, I’m just doing that down a little bit too much, because I know that things can get super complex, but fundamentally, it’s a closed loop.
Kyle James 20:22
Yeah, yeah. So where do you see how do you see this playing out? Like, clearly, we’re in a crazy, wild time. Lot of technologies coming in. There’s a lot of disruption. There’s a lot of people on the sideline trying to figure out what they’re going to do next. And like, do you see more of that is mercenary, the right word where there’s a lot more, you know, sales reps who just pitch and sell a lot of different things, like, clearly, y’all are kind of betting on that at some level, right?
Jenn Steele 20:52
Yep, um, I mean, you know, our big goal someday is to basically allow you to track and compensate your ecosystem, enable tracking, compensate your ecosystem, however you need to. Our small goal, though, is to build that marketplace. In part because of the uncertainty, I’m not sure personally I have more of a messaging and product marketing thing I after I left because metrics, I honestly thought I’d be a turnaround CEO for the rest of my career. I never thought I would found something. And then for me, it was seeing the need. For me, it was seeing that all these VCs were saying the BDR model doesn’t work anymore because it’s too expensive to pay their base salaries. All these marketers were saying their cost per lead were going through the roof. Everybody’s saying all the AI outreach is like just polluting the heck out of things, and they’d rather buy from people. And then on the other side, it’s I lost my job. I lost my job. I mean, I can scroll through my LinkedIn and see so many open to work, you know, banners, or whatever they’re called, and and heaven knows, I’m a startup person. I have lost my job more times than I care to count. And so we hear the company loyalty is declining. We hear that trust is declining. We hear that people want to work on their own terms. I’m like, well, maybe I can put these two things together and have them help each other.
Kyle James 22:11
Yeah, it’s, it’s the gig economy for the white collar worker. Yeah, yeah.
Jenn Steele 22:15
Fundamentally,
Kyle James 22:18
that’s cool. I would. I want to dive like, something you said about, like, Never saw yourself founding a company like, you’re clearly entrepreneurial, right? Like, and you think like, and a lot of that, what do you think is some of the hardest things you’ve had to, like, learn or change going from like, let’s just say, 100 to 1000, instead of going down to what, what we kind of call zero to one or zero. Yeah, right. Like, it’s a very different mindset. But like, what are the lessons you’ve learned, like, takeaways that, like, you could share with others of that.
Jenn Steele 22:50
So I was much more 10 to 100 or whatever, that kind of growth person, especially in the marketing seat, that was definitely my, my jam. I was brought into companies specifically to take them into enterprise or to take them from 10 to 100 million. And I will say I actually do a much better job telling you everything that I’ve done wrong. So let me tell you all the mistakes. Then that that means I have made you
Kyle James 23:18
learn more when you fail. Jim, we both know this. So yeah, people, that’s a great lesson. Let’s share.
Jenn Steele 23:25
I am a sandbagger, and being a sandbagger the founder is a great way to not raise any money. So because they talk, I, in fact, I didn’t have our grand master. Let’s solve the ecosystem and referrals problem for B to B companies, until recently, until I realized, oh my gosh, we have the infrastructure. Why are we, like, limiting our use case? I a lot of it is that I am so accustomed to as cmo trying to give accurate predictions, or maybe, like, a little low so that we can staff accordingly, and anything else is a nice surprise, or I am so accustomed to having accurate financials to report off to my board so they know if my company is failing or not, yeah, that making a pitch catch is hard
Kyle James 24:15
because more the operational person than you are necessarily, maybe the creative person,
Jenn Steele 24:19
yeah, yeah. Yeah. And of course, my co founder is also a scale guy, and not zero to one. And so the two of us get together and we’re just like, but that’s inaccurate, and accuracy has so little to do with pitch decks,
Kyle James 24:34
yeah? Well, you gotta start somewhere. You just gotta get going. And then are you directionally correct, right, and then, like, right, learn and then iterate. And now you’ve got accurate data.
Jenn Steele 24:46
Yeah, yeah. Meanwhile, I’m going, like, oh, but if I’m predicting 100 million in revenue, you’re five, how do I actually get there? Okay, I what I need to do is get to 100k in revenue first. Yeah, that’s smart. I need to solve not that one. It’s. Yeah,
Kyle James 25:02
so how, how is, how have you found that? Like, do you feel like, as you’ve gone through that it’s gotten easier, or is it still, like, crazy hard, it’s still uncomfortable? And like, I’m glad we’re past that. And like, it’s, do you see it getting easier? I don’t know. There’s a whole lot of questions there
Jenn Steele 25:15
pick up. So the, as I said, the grand vision has only come recently, and now I almost feel like I’m a real founder, because now I’m like, now I want to solve this problem, and I know I can solve solve this problem, because I have been the scale CMO, because I have failed at partner marketing, or succeeded, if you count getting myself a job is that, um, you know, I have seen it fail and fail again and fail some more. I have been on the ground where we’re negotiating partnerships with folks like LinkedIn, like, I know what that looks like. I know what social media and influencer stuff looks like. I’ve worked in a marketing attribution company. I know how hard is it, it is to track social Yeah. And so I’m like, wait a second, and it’s, I’m starting to be that excited founder of, like, wait, I can solve this, um, and that has made things, and that’s only in the last like, month or so, and that has made, that has made me finally say, Oh, hey, maybe I am a zero to one person after all.
Kyle James 26:17
Well, what I’m hearing you say, right? Like, is you had to get going to, like, really put in the reps to figure out what the real problem was, kind of like, you thought you knew it, but then when you really got into it, you’re pivoting right? You’ve seen that pivot happen.
Jenn Steele 26:35
It took two weeks to revise my technology, so I wouldn’t call it if I’ve been parts of, like, massive pivots in the past. So, but you’re right. It is. It is a pivot from here. It’s a, like a very narrow fill your pipeline with a combination of outsource BDRs and executive referrals from our marketplace. That’s it. And if you want to do something else, you gotta buy another product. Yeah. And it’s that’s one thing, and it’s another thing too. And this actually reminds me of my very first interview with HubSpot, when our VP told me that HubSpot was being dumb, but it was a really cool thing, because they were trying to solve all of inbound marketing, right? And each of the platforms kind of, our SEO platform was probably our best, but our blog platform kind of sucked in. Our metrics kind of sucked, but it was a solution for, in our case, more FMB, a little more down market, but like it was the solution for them to do the thing. And I remember turning to my co founder and saying, Oh crap, we could be the solution for them to do the thing for for those heads of sales and marketing who want ecosystem growth to track it and enable it. And you know, as we move forward and build proprietary data, bring AI into it in a sensible way. Yeah, that was, it’s an amusing moment, shall we say, to be like, Oh crap, we’re trying to do this thing.
Kyle James 28:04
Let me, let me ask you this. Like, do you think it would have been possible to figured out that pivot slider, or otherwise, without the 18 months of like, struggling through doing the thing? Like,
Jenn Steele 28:20
probably not. I will say every time we’ve hit a brick wall. Um, something magical has happened in the company. Mm, so every time we have a truly crap tastic day. And once again, thank goodness for for a phenomenal co founder. He and I will complain at each other that day. I will drink some wine that night and complain at my husband, poor guy, and then the next morning, wake up early with 12 different solutions. And the ones that we’ve both come up with tend to be the ones that will work better.
Kyle James 28:52
Oh, that’s cool. Y’all both came that’s how our startup
Jenn Steele 28:55
pricing came up. Yeah, because we didn’t do startup pricing and we weren’t selling to founders, even though founders were coming in the door, because onboarding was a technical nightmare, and so selling at a price point that founders could do was just too expensive, and we needed people who had marketing operations, people who could do the technical nightmare part. Well, we needed to solve that technical nightmare before like week founder, my co founder quit in a huff, and so he put in the reps, and he solved the problem. And then when we hit, I wouldn’t say it was brick wall, but it felt like a very frustrating day, because there’s some there’s a few folks that I’m really hoping to work with in the future, yes, for funding, but because I love their brains, and I love how they think, and they’re just like, we need more traction. So we hit that, and the next morning, it’s like, well, actually, what happens if we drop the pricing? Oh, wait, what happens if we mimic hubspots, old HubSpot for startups program, and we do this crunch, the numbers, looked at the Tech? Oh, hey, we can watch it yesterday.
Kyle James 29:56
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s so cool. That’s. Cool, and we’ll definitely tell everybody a little bit more about the like, starter program in a minute. But, yeah, you brought it up. So I want to come back to the AI piece, right? Like, AI is everywhere, and this wouldn’t be right? Seems like aI comes up in every episode. Because I love everybody’s so curious about it now. But how are y’all leveraging and adopting AI into kind of what you’re building in the process, and how do you see that playing out over the next 18 to two years? Because one can see further that out.
Jenn Steele 30:32
If that two weeks feels like a stretch, sometimes I will so, so you do realize that we’re given that we’re trying to do referrals, ecosystem, affiliates, however you want to call it growth. We’re betting on people. However, AI has been part of our DNA from the very beginning. When people come onto their platforms, they have to write a compelling offer. They have to figure out how that works. Sometimes they don’t have a sales playbook. And so we’re using, we have custom gpts that we’ve been using for a long time to get us, you know, 80% of the way there. Sometimes they lose their mind and put the green check mark emoji in front of like, everything. But we’re using that. I do remember
Kyle James 31:21
if bullets are fine, I don’t need check marks where the bullet should be very sweet, like, I’ve noticed that don’t
Jenn Steele 31:27
use images. Yeah. I mean, I’m like, everybody who’s like, our jobs are in danger from all this content creation has never actually played with a custom GPT that can’t follow instructions. AI is bad at following instructions. Keep that in mind. So there’s that, and then it’s like all the other data. So okay, just look at my market, please. We have so to build good algorithms, you need a clear success and failure flag, right? I’m not talking about large learning models. I’m talking talking about like being able to predict and to advise effectively, because that’s what you want to use AI to do you need that data to predict. And so how do you know what kind of referral partner Shall we call them? You know, all the ecosystem will work with your kind of offer? Well, you don’t. I mean, we make assumptions, but we don’t, but our goal is to build the proprietary data, because we know which ones work which ones don’t. We know who’s registered for what, etc, to tell you so that we know exactly the kind of partners you should be going after. Yeah, yeah. And then payment, you know, like, what’s the best kind of payment for this kind of relationship? I mean, people don’t know. Most of our customers, when they come in the door, they’re like, What should I even offer?
Kyle James 32:49
Right? So, so what I’m hearing you say right now you’re still in kind of that data collecting mode to figure that stuff out, because that’s where Netflix, for example, just knows what I want because they’ve got enough guidelines. And as you get closer and closer to that, those things just kind of happen organically. Yes, AI magically, if you will.
Jenn Steele 33:10
Well, yeah, so it’ll take a minimum of basically 10,000 data points sure to do this. So success, failure will get to you first. Versus payments, just because of payments, is actually a little bit more complex. But the success failure to match up the partner with with a company 10,000 and that means that there have to be 10,000 referrals generated, and we need to know if they’ve succeeded or failed, and we have a default failure, you have to convert within a certain time window. So we do have a default failure, but it’s going to take a little bit of time. We’re hoping a year. In real startup terms, it’ll probably be a little bit longer, but, but 10,000 data points for a small startup is not anything to sneeze at.
Kyle James 33:57
How do you how’d you come up with number 10,000 is that like, Oh, is that out there somewhere? Is that, just like this seems it is kind of
Jenn Steele 34:03
out there somewhere. And it could be that we’re going to be able to combine other signals and do it with fewer data points, but in general, that’s the whole like it has to be able to learn from a data set, which means it needs to see as many cases as possible. 10,000 is actually for an accurate for something more accurate, statistically, we can, I’m sure we can do some stuff at, you know, 1000 data points, I just don’t know that I would trust sure
Kyle James 34:32
is there, and this is me trying to sound smart with something I heard on some YouTube videos that were, is there anything you can do with that with, like, synthetic data. You know, where it starts running its own scenarios. Like,
Jenn Steele 34:46
yeah, and that’s why we can do something with 1000 it’s just you start getting to something that I would be more willing to sell. Like, we will start running stuff earlier. We’ll check out the synthetic data. Up. But here’s an example of why that’s problematic. So we already have over 200 data points. I haven’t been out of the gate for very long, and some of the failure data points take six months to get but we have about 200 data points. If I were to build synthetic data on that, it would be heavily biased, because this is friends and family generated data largely, right? It’s early in our days, and so I will be able to somewhat predictably tell you what works for people who know Jen’s deal. Yeah, but if you want to be able to extrapolate that out beyond, you know, martech geek industries, then we need more
Kyle James 35:39
data. Yeah, and you’re probably skewed towards a couple of companies and or industries
Jenn Steele 35:44
Exactly. Yeah, that makes sense. Yup. So, yeah, you kind
Kyle James 35:48
of mentioned this too in the content creation. And so, like, I’m I might ask this, because this is what I saw a couple weeks ago when I was going into Upwork and posting a job where, hello, AI writer. They’re like, wrote, you know, hey, tell me basically a prompt, what do you want? What do you want to help somebody? So you saying that y’all are also starting to do that sort of stuff
Jenn Steele 36:06
to we haven’t embedded it in the product, but if you give us an ICP and persona and what the offer is, then we can create both the and your value prop, which most of you have on your website, right? But we can create the offer for the referral partner to be like, yes, I want to do this, and a sales playbook that gives them templates and, like, who the persona is and how to talk to them, etc.
Kyle James 36:31
Cool, and it’s probably 8090 plus percent accurate. Just it’s
Jenn Steele 36:34
about 80% okay, unless it loses its mind, yeah, for some reason they never do the number of templates I want them to do. So, yeah, you can’t pull the human totally out of it. And I’ll expose the offers GPT before I will the playbook, because the playbook just takes a little doing.
Kyle James 36:49
Yeah, nice. What? I know we’re kind of running out of time here. But what am I not asked that I should have goodness,
Jenn Steele 36:59
any other Can I turn this around on you. I want to turn this around on you though. I want to talk about, how do you look at ecosystem like? So y’all are doing all this analysis. Are people talking ecosystem like? Are people beating their head against pipeline like? How are you thinking about this.
Kyle James 37:20
I’ve heard in some of this has come up in previous podcasts, and otherwise, there’s a lot of interesting stuff in AI. I don’t know if I’ve actually shared this this way before, so hot take for the podcast. We’re seeing a lot this come up a couple in some of the recent episodes. The fuzzy middle right, like everybody’s first and last Attribution. How does AI kind of streamline some of that middle there’s a lot going on right now as far as, like, enrichment of data, and leads with AI, which is super fascinating and interesting, and a lot of efficiency starting to happen with, I mean, the stuff you see in gongs and the other tools of right Give me my call summary. But, but then, how can it go the other step? Just go ahead and write the and write the email for me too, to add stuff so you see a lot of that stuff starting to happen, which is driving so much more efficiency. And I was just having this conversation with with my wife Heather last night about this. And it’s like, you know, the thing I’m thinking about right now is, and you’re probably much, we’re probably both C’s on the disc. Very much, conscientious, very much. No, I’m a high di, are you? I’m very much a C, I’m very much, yeah, everything. I think probably why I do
Jenn Steele 38:34
it, think well together because, yeah,
Kyle James 38:37
I’m a little D, high C, but it’s very much of, like, all that stuff that I just described, of like the follow up email, uploading stuff in the seat on the deep I’m very good at that. I’m very good. I’m very not that, because I just think that way, right? And and all of those tools that I’m good at are getting off board into AI. So does that mean that, like, I get down the totem pole because people that are really good and strong, extroverts at relationship building, are going to be super unlocked because they don’t have to do all that other stuff anymore. That’s where I was been thinking about right now, and I’m starting to see that picture come into play. And I don’t know where that leads. Yeah,
Jenn Steele 39:15
I don’t know where repeatable works that require like that stuff. I don’t know what that’s going to do. I know that all AI has done for me is make me faster, yeah, and what I need to do is get off my butt and get agents to help me do all that stuff that I’m really bad at, as opposed to, oh, I have a to do. I need to send this email. Where did I put that call recording? Oh, wait, okay,
Kyle James 39:38
yeah, no, it’s, it’s wild. And you know, some of the other side projects I’m doing where, you know, I can, I could do called, do call interviews, and then make the six call transcripts, and then write the persona for it, where, normally I’m picking and pulling and pulling quotes to make a user persona that’s exponentially faster now. And. Then it’s like you can do it fast. That sounds great.
Jenn Steele 40:06
I think the bones might be better and more complete. I think what’s going to make it compelling, though, is the way that Kyle James explains it, or the way that Jen Steele can encapsulate a headline. Because messaging was one of my strong suits. Um, I think, I think that for a lot of us, it’s going to help us have time to think a little bit more.
Kyle James 40:29
I agree with that the creativity piece is going to become a little bit more important. And
Jenn Steele 40:33
the relationship, yeah, we ground our knowledge workers into the ground. I mean, we’re asking marketers, especially, more with less, more with less. Do this, do this? Do that? You think you’re going to get good content out of them? Probably not. Yeah,
Kyle James 40:46
yeah. And All right, now this is, this is old school, like, I think about this too, and then we’ll wrap this up. But like, 15 years ago, inbound marketing really started pushing marketers, creative marketers. You know, the bad analogy is, it’s a soccer mom who draws pretty pictures and comes up with great ideas for brand. Is the marketer persona of 20 plus years it was, yeah, and then they became this data driven, super analytical person who is who is so scared to try anything interesting unless it passed some A B test. And I like, are we started? We’ve completely, like, rubber banded that way, and now we’re starting to come back. And I think we’re going to see more of the creativity come back into things, because all the things we just talked about, yep,
Jenn Steele 41:35
yep. And I’m excited about it. Yeah. I’m excited to that not every single mark tech site is going to talk about growing revenue, and pipeline mine does, so I will admit, but I’m excited that that we get to see what humans can do.
Kyle James 41:49
Love it. Love it. Um, well, this was awesome. This was incredibly insightful. And hopefully, you know, and thank you for the raw conversation, because I know I dug into a couple of things, but that’s the interesting thing that, you know, people want to hear and learn. Let’s talk about how people can help you. You know, I know we teased a little bit earlier, kind of what sound GTM is doing from the startup sound standpoint. Share some of that. And, you know, give people your Latin long and how they can kind of connect and support you guys and all of that.
Jenn Steele 42:19
Sure, it is sound gtm.com, it’s a play on sound go to market strategy, and my co founder and I are in Seattle with the Puget Sound. So depends on where you are in life. Okay, if you need some help making money or signing up for our marketplace is absolutely free. Comment. Poke around. See if you can rev share. Heck, refer people to sound GTM, and I will rev share with you. Um, we’re we’re eating our own dog food, I think is the I hate that one, but yeah, um, if you want to talk pipeline and demand, like building demand, at any point, I will just geek out about that forever and think about it with you, because I just love it. So obviously I’m not going to complain. If anybody wants to talk about to me about that also wants to buy our product. But and then the startup discount is, if you’re pre 2 million rate, it’s identical to the old startup one. You get a 90% discount for year one over the list price, and then in year two, it goes to 60% discount. And then moving forward, I think I still do do a discount, because I’m a nice person at this point. Someday, yeah, yeah, exactly. And the other thing, though, is that as we as an industry, try to figure out ecosystem. I’m sure I’m missing what we need to track, what we need to measure, what needs to go on our product roadmap. So if you’re if you’ve got thoughts, send them my direction. LinkedIn is probably the best place to find these first you can actually get me. Jen@soundgtn.com Please don’t spam me. Or I am. Jen Steele on LinkedIn, j, e, n, n, s, t, e, and you’re a great,
Kyle James 44:02
witty follow who throws out all kinds of crazy conversation starters. So I mostly
Jenn Steele 44:06
rant. I need to get better by talking about my products.
Kyle James 44:10
It’s raw, it’s raw, but people like a little bit of raw stuff. Yeah,
Jenn Steele 44:15
I do not use AI for my LinkedIn, except for launches, where it cleans me up a little
Kyle James 44:21
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining and thank you everybody else, if you enjoyed this episode, please like subscribe five star reviews only. We don’t got a four star review. Go put on some other podcast. And if you have a suggestion for a topic or a guest, you could reach me at research at 3SixtyInsights.com thanks everybody for tuning in. We’ll be back next week with another go to market, insider or innovator, and until then, keep growing. Everybody you.