 Okay, welcome to this episode of SuperCharge. My name is Fredrik Szilander. I'm the Chief Marketing Officer of SuperOffice, and I will be your host today. Today's topic is Back to Basics in Sales and Marketing, and our special guest is Karl Karel, Chief Revenue Officer and Co-Founder at GetAccept. With the current economic climate, we know a lot of revenue leaders are getting pushed to achieve more with less resources. In the coming 30 minutes, we will share our hands-on advice on how you can get more bang for the buck. Stay tuned. If you have any questions during the talk, please use the chat, and we will try to answer as good as we can. But before we dive into the questions and the talking points, I want to introduce SuperOffice, and then I will let Karl introduce himself and GetAccept briefly. So SuperOffice, we are a European CRM company founded in Norway in 1990, and we help primarily established mid-sized B2B companies to achieve profitable growth by being better at attracting, growing and retaining their customers. And we are especially strong in supporting companies who do have an existing base of customers and business relationships that they deeply want to take care of and nurture. I joined SuperOffice one and a half years ago and spending approximately a decade in the sauce marketing area. Before that, I worked in sales for a couple of years, and I must say I love to be in this intersection between sales and marketing. I think this will be super for today's session. Karl, would you like to introduce yourself and GetAccept? Definitely, Fredrik. Thank you for having me excited to be here. I think it's a fantastic topic. It's always great when you actually have marketing and revenue leaders gather together talking about the entire funnel and the entire cycle. But yeah, quickly, my name is Karl Karel. I am CRO and co-founder, one of four co-founders of GetAccept. We've been around for seven years, started as a startup in Silicon Valley, first office in my second bedroom, and we've grown from zero dollars to tens of millions of dollars in ARR and over 200 people with offices in seven different countries. And you may ask yourself, okay, then what does GetAccept do? We partner, of course, with fantastic companies like SuperOffice when it comes to CRM, but we are a digital sales room platform and this is a new software category that we are the founders of, which essentially is how do you create the best selling and buying experience from when you've spent all those hard-earned sales development money, marketing money, so opportunity all the way to close and ensuring that you have one microsite, one link that lives on through that entire journey to ensure, for example, that you have things like meeting agendas, recording, sales decks, all your content, all the way through CPQ and eSignatures, perfectly sync with your CRM to ensure that you can run a smooth closing process or account executive process for your quota-carrying reps. So that's a little bit about our platform, about myself. I'm Swedish, native Swedish, but spent 10 years abroad, gone to business school in the US, spent a lot of years in Silicon Valley. So I think I'm a little bit different in the sense from when I've now moved back to Sweden and running the business from here, stumble upon some cultural differences from working in South America and North America for many years, but very excited here to take a little bit more of a global standpoint, how you can push your organization to get more and do more with less, which I think is a fantastic subject for today's current situation. Thanks, Carl. Yeah, truly sounds exciting. And now I know you are all saying you're in Spain at the moment, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, taking some time actually on vacation, but took some time to record a great webinar with you. So in Barcelona, I enjoy being on my bicycle when I have time off. So when I do have the chance, you find me probably in some mountain suffering, trying to get up a hill. So yeah, that's what I tend to do when I have time off. Wonderful. And yeah, and I'm in Stockholm in our office here. So great to have you all here. Thanks, Carl. Let's jump over to the talking points. And to get started, we start in the new economic reality. I mean, we all know that we're facing a new economic reality. And what does this mean? And why do you think we need to refocus and rethink the way we work with sales and marketing, Carl? Yeah, I think that's a great question because I think anyone who's joining this webinar is obviously thinking and saw the tagline there, okay, how can we do more with less? And I think you can view it from two different half-glass, half-full, half-empty perspective. I'm a half-glass-full kind of person. As an entrepreneur, I think you have to be half-glass-full type of person. I actually think there's a positive situation here, but what you need to really do is start to think about your organization and effectiveness and of course, productivity and profitability into your entire revenue motion. And we've afforded a bit in the previous economic climate that there were an abundance and access to capital. It was easier to grow. You could spend more to get dollars today. You need to be more cash efficient. And I think there's a couple of things that I'm hoping we're deep diving in today. One part is, of course, like how do you refocus and focus on the right type of ICP, for example? What has changed with your target market? How has the economic climate impacted them? Because that ultimately, of course, impacts you. So what's the profitability into your business models? So I think one thing that I kept in mind during this time is, and I've learned also from a long time in Silicon Valley, is cut quickly. Understand your go-and-go criteria. The other thing that I think is a big challenge, and now I'm speaking more from a sales organizational perspective than your reps, is how do you re-educate then your sales organization and build a sales-enablement motion with coaching that actually then can win deals in that new refocused ICP? Because when you're changing, don't think for a second that the entire organization just will automatically follow because you change the strategy on how you refocus. So I think they have to go kind of in tandem when you're focusing on this new setup or changes to your organization that you need to do. But again, I think the good thing is that great organizations, great individuals, great leaders are not shaped when you have tailwind. Great people are shaped when you're in headwind. That's when you have the opportunity to strike against your competitors. I think it's really important to rile your organization up and have that common goal or common enemy that we will come out strong out of this. So when things change, we can actually continue to accelerate in a repeatable sales motion. So that's a little bit how I view the current setup. But of course, we all have different challenges in your business and hopefully you can get something out of this conversation that one or two golden nuggets, hey, this applies to me as well. I can try this as my organization today. And I mean, what do we need to do different? Is it, could you give us some examples or what strategies do we need to employ on a high level? Yeah. Where do we start? I think an easy way to start, which then trickles down and I think this is probably information. When I speak to RCMO on our end, for example, is understanding the win-loss strategy over the past recent couple of months. So I think an easy way to start is making sure that you understand, okay, why are we winning deals today in the current economic climate and why are we losing deals? And then based on that data, what then is, do you have a trend? I studied statistics. So I love trends and numbers from college. So when you have that understanding, then we can start to have a conversation. You're a marketing leader. So if we start to sit down and then have a chat about, okay, where are we spending our hard earned marketing dollars for example, or euros or Kronos or whatever it is, what are we generating? How is that impacting the sales organization and how is our product impacting our customers today? Have that changed and then start to reiterate on how you're doing that across the entire funnel. I think that's an easy way to start and start to gather information and then be very, very clear with understanding, okay, what is success? What is no success? You understand that they cut quickly or no go or go criteria. But I think, I don't know, from your perspective, Fredrik, I'm assuming this is a challenge obviously that you're seeing from marketing, you're getting more pressure. What do we get out of our marketing dollars? I'm assuming you're feeling the same pressure to make sure that you maximize the bucket of cash that you have available to do your efforts. Yeah, for sure. And I think it's good to start with, I should say the finish line. So I mean, we obviously want to generate more revenue for the company and looking backwards and see what was the source of the deals, for example, what was it campaigns or was it inbound, outbound? And of course, what kind of product or, I mean, product here, you can go quite deep into this, looking at a lot of numbers. But, and I can elaborate a bit more on it briefly, but you said something that caught my mind and it was product, how if the product was used differently in this new economic reality, et cetera, would you also involve product in these kind of calls? I think it's extremely important. I think that's to me from learning and now I've spent so much time in Silicon Valley and seeing really, really successful companies grow from zero to hundreds of millions in ARR, for example, and understanding what it is. If you have product involved in the revenue motion, first and foremost, you will build a product that people love. That was the first thing that we learned. We went to something called Y Combinator, StartTech Accelerator. Their motto is, make things people want. It sounds easy. Yeah, it's very easy, sounds very easy. But I think it, in the end, you need to talk to your customers to understand them. Another motto they sent all the time that's still ringing in my head to this day. I'm still in sales meetings every single week as a sales leader, even if we have 70 salespeople. I'm on sales calls every single week to understand what are the customers saying? We're recording all of our calls with another software to ensure and do analysis of these things. But you really have to obsess about your customers and understand what they want, what they need, what challenges they have. And to be able to do that effectively, you need to your product owners or service line owners to actually listen into those calls and participate. So for example, our product managers who handle certain parts, for example, integrations, like super office understanding what is the super office customers talking about? What is their reality? And how is our solution for them? And how do they understand it? So yes, I think if your product department or service department that we set in services is not talking to your customers and understanding what they want, you're not growing as effectively as you could and you're not building the best platform or offering or service that you could. So if you're not doing that already today, that's a checkbox what you need to do immediately after this webinar. Cool, thanks. And just to follow up on your question regarding marketing, it's still the truth. A lot of, I guess, marketing leaders are today pressured on their budget and I'm very sure there will be a tendency to focus more on short-term plays, meaning that protecting the brand-building bodies will be increasingly difficult. I believe more funds will be allocated to sources where it's easy to track the results and digital channels for example. You can easily see Google ads traffic or LinkedIn traffic or it could be, yeah, different digital channels are so easy to track. It might be a problem in the future if we are investing less in brand-building activities and activities harder to measure. That will be the biggest concern because it's so easy to find more money to, as an example, Google ads to capture demand but if the demand was actually created somewhere else by recommendations or, I don't know, podcast or whatever it could be created in many areas, then it will be, and we reduce those kind of activities, there will be less demand to capture maybe in the future. That might be a risk. But at the same time, we need to focus on the revenues and the profitability to even have the opportunity to win in the future as well. So balancing short and long-term activities will be a challenge for many marketing leaders, I believe. And I agree, you're talking about deal attribution, which I think is so extremely important when it comes to this. And there's two things to look at as well. Of course, you can do deal attribution, like you're talking about from a marketing standpoint, how are we automatically tagging leads that come through our sales funnel? But the other side of what you think is extremely important, you're a CRM company. Every company should have had input fields from the account executives or the quota-carrying rep to actually input data when they talk to the client and should be instructed to talk to the client. Where did you actually find us? Was it an event? Was it something else that happened? We have one thing that is the best investment we've ever made is a $99 suit that we give to all of our employees that if you've been to an event or get accepted as being, you've never missed us. People remember us not just because, ah, you're the guys in the crazy suits. That's something we've had since day one, for example. That's $99 per suit. We have hundreds and millions of ARR attributed to those suits probably as a single source of revenue. Just to give you an example, you can be creative with your money, you can do a lot more with less. But I think, again, going back to the win-loss analysis, if you don't understand where your revenue is coming from and even if you have hard to interpret direct traffic, then you have to spend more time talking to them to understand them. Again, it comes back to the same thing if you're not talking to your customers, even the ones that you do lose, then who doesn't become customers? Maybe it's relevant how they found you. Then it's a different question. You may be lost because your product was not good enough or you didn't solve the one, two, three core problems that they had in a competitor. Did that better? Maybe you shouldn't pursue that because you didn't have a good product market fit for them, for example. But I think obsessing about deal attribution is also something very important. Otherwise, professionals like you and me working both ends of the funnel, it's impossible for us to maximize our output when we have strategic discussions, hey, what is actually working? Or are we a little bit putting our finger in the wind and hoping for the best that the wind blows in the right direction? Again, I love to think about data, but you should not obsess on just automating everything. You can actually provide a process where you get qualitative data throughout the entire process and nurture that data into super office like a CRM, for example, to ensure that then you can base your decisions on a repeatable sales and marketing motion based on that data. That's good. So good insights. Start talking to your customers, even those you lose and see where they are coming from. Where did they hear about us? Or where did they hear about you? It could also be added as a form field, as an example on the website. And it could be for sales reps to answer, to ask as well. Next point. So we need to get more effect with less resources and one key is then, of course, to better understand where revenue today are coming from, what channels or where to capture the demand. But using our resources more efficient, do you have any ideas to this? I mean, we have a set of sales reps, you have some marketing budget. Any ideas there? A lot of ideas, I think, get except what's created as a business and this is my third company, I've bootstrapped two companies in the past, failed with one, succeeded with another. I think having that in your DNA, we actually have do more with less as one of our core values in the organizations. I think one way is obviously making sure that your entire organization are thinking about this. I don't think great leaders should enable their organization to come up with ideas. You're directing it. You're orchestrating the ideas as a leader. If ideas are coming from organizations, I think it starts a little bit. If you don't have that DNA, maybe start thinking about communication and stuff like that to get those ideas from the entire organization. It's very hard to do everything by yourself as C-level leaders, for examples, or VPs to get everything done. When it comes to revenue, I think it starts to a different subject that I know you're very passionate about, Fredrik, and I think that's how you refocus your ICP to put that money into a motion that actually creates more with less, and I think you have to start there. So again, going back to that question, and I think you have a couple of points here, Fredrik, around the ICP question that I think is really insightful. Yeah, good points. And yeah, we will soon jump into the ICP topic and talk about marketing again and doing more with less. I was reading a post I think on LinkedIn the other day here that if you have a large marketing budget, it's quite easy to hide. You can hide behind a big marketing budget and you can be inefficient and still generate a lot of busts or leads or revenue. But having a small budget, it's actually quite good to spark creativity because you need to be creative to see, okay, what can I do with 5,000 euros as a marketing budget? I mean, you can do a lot. I'm very sure. I mean, you might use an external agency to produce a video, a customer's case testimonial, but you could also do it like this, like a interview series with a customer and you just record it and it's for free. And you could send maybe survey five customers and you do five testimonials in a video, podcast format, and you can transcribe it into text for like zero cost. You could co-host event. We can have a partner. I mean, we can do something together. We share the costs. We get double distribution. Maybe you have a customer. I mean, those who listen might be in the manufacturing industry or in construction or whatever and we might have a customer selling vending machines. Maybe they have a cool new fancy product they want to showcase for construction companies and they might have a cool office. Hey, we can invite them to your office. We don't have to pay money for a fancy hotel. You can show off your nice coffee machines and we can have a leader from one of our customers as a speaker for free as well. And most likely more impactful than those standard conference venues with paid speakers who are sharing the same story over and over again. So yeah, I actually believe in some cases don't listen here dear CFO but sometimes a smaller budget is better, right? Because you need to be creative but the budget is sometimes needed to speed things up but also to maximize the reach for distribution. I think you're hitting on a very important point and that's being genuine across your messaging and your events or your communication in general. And I mean, that's something we're very passionate about, get accepted is that for example, like you say, when you run an event it's not about the amount of many dollars or sex or nox or whatever you're spending. It's the people you put there and how they're engaging with the audience that you have for example. And I agree with you maximize your utilization of your office spaces and stuff like that. As I mentioned, I mentioned the suits as an example. Instead, we did that because we couldn't afford to sponsor the conferences where we knew our clients were. But we got more conversations with the people at the conferences and they remember us more than the people who spent 100 grand to sponsor that conference. And I think again, it comes, you have to have these ideas and get people excited about these things. And I think sending great people to events is always an easy way of hijacking something or doing something that generates more bust than necessarily a big spend and relying on that. And there's many different small things. You mentioned a couple of great things that I think are excellent here on how you can get that extra juice for the squeeze that you're doing, essentially. But then having to rethink a little bit what you've done and understand it, for example, you're mentioned one thing that I think is interesting. It's events like if you have your ICP dialed down, is there any events, smaller events that maybe are not high cost that you can go to meet these people and talk to them in person, get insights to them what they're interested in. I have a clear example of what we've done. We work a lot with partners, right? And we try to understand, we ask them, what other events do you go to? And then we try to go to those one events. We maybe send one person figuring out, are there a lot high density of those people here? Great, then maybe we should invest in sending some more people next time. Maybe it's not the sponsorship, but it's sending three people, for example, next time. Then maybe that becomes a sponsorship for year two or year three. But those are a couple of examples where you can maximize a little bit your revenue and also explore, still continue to explore different options and give you experiments on what's working for your business. Yeah, another thing, I mean, it ties back maybe to the suits or guerrilla marketing activities. I did a similar thing, I'm not a similar thing, but a guerrilla marketing activity at a previous employer. And so we were targeting HR executives and we knew that in a venue in Copenhagen, there will be a HR executive network. So from the largest companies like Mash, Fortune 500 companies, and they were gonna be hosting this network meeting in this hotel. So I just called the hotel and said, hey, can we have like an after work lounge kind of in the lounge area where we buy a lot of some drinks and champagne and we have some jazz, so we have massage therapists. And it costs like nothing, right? I had a jazz band for, was it 1000 Euro max a band? 1000 Euro max a band? You paid some drinks for 1000 Euro and massage therapists, I don't know, 500 euros max or something and we had a whole lobby and the only, let's say, cave it was, so everyone was allowed to go there on other guests as well, but it was very visible for all the executives. But this was a low cost effort to get in front of all the people visiting this venue compared to being part of the event and paying 20, 30, 50K euros to be a part of the event as a regular attendee. So you can do a lot of these things. And I know there are some famous examples of, I think it was some of our big American competitors. I don't wanna name them out here, but those big events where a lot of sales leaders are, you could wrap Uber taxis outside, we have our Aula mascot who could be there dancing with the get accept suits, right? And like a mascot as an example is also a very strong brand element that is very recognizable. And most likely you can see example from pizza boxes to construction trucks or whatever, having clear paintings in pink or orange. It's really, it finds its place in the brain of people so it's become memorable for a low cost. I personally love those types of efforts and we have a line of them in the past that we've tried some more successful, some less successful and that's, but it's quite fun to do these things as well. And I think one of the key things that I think from this discussion, when you're listening to think about it, it's like get excited about doing more with less. I think it's a really important thing. And a lot of these ideas are not coming from myself or any of my co-founders for that matter or from our CMO. A lot of the ideas are coming from within the organization because we have asked them to be creative. We've asked them to think what must we do to get more out of these dollars, for example? What can we do? And people get quite excited about these things. So posing these challenges is, I think again, if you have a really, really engaging communication towards your organization, towards your teams, you can get so much more out of them in the same way. Again, getting them to come up with the ideas is I think really, really key to ensuring that you maximize your budgets. Yeah, cool. Okay, time to talk about ICP. I see time is taking here, but a key element in focusing your resources is being very clear between sales and marketing, also product, who is our ideal customer profile. And I mean, the whole definition of ICP is something I try to came up in my mind. It's like, imagine you only have, I don't know, 50K Euro marketing budget and you have two or three sales reps and you cannot afford not to hit your quota. What customer would you focus on? I mean, it has to be, it has to be that. I mean, it could be that your company go bankrupt. So you have to really focus. And ICP is a narrow set of customers that greatly benefit from your product or solution. And these customers are more likely to convert into paying customers. They will stay longer, so less churn. They will benefit from the features and services you have. And when I say a narrow set of customers, I mean a narrow set of your total addressable market. So I mean, ICP isn't just any customer who would benefit. It has to be the cream de la creme of customers for you. So as an example, we, as a CRM vendor, I mean, any company would benefit from better structure, improve sales processes, having one source of truth for everything around the customer. But it's a huge difference to serve a Fortune 500 company where it takes startup. None of them are ICP for us, but we could still sell to them. I mean, but who should we build features for? It could be, you know, some cool, I mean, a startup company might use some premium software that they want you to quickly connect with a click and Fortune 500 companies, they will have, you know, advanced TCCs and lawyers who need to double check and the IT security, there will be so many things and integrations to SAP or something like that, huge difference. And we need to really define the ICP and we need to be specific. And I mean, I said before that mid-sized companies in Europe might be our sweet spot, but that's not specific enough. I also said established. We also see the majority of our customers, they have Microsoft as opposite to Google Workspace. We support both, but we see that more of them have the Microsoft ecosystem, they might have Visma, as AirPiv vendor, but so to summarize, I mean, to define your ICP, you need to nail the thermographic criteria. That's like demographic, but for companies. So industry, size, geography, job titles, business maturity, it could also be technographic. So what kind of tech stack are you seeing if you're tech savvy or what competencies do they have internally as an example? And we also need to be very clear on what business problem we are solving for them. So that is to very summarize ICP as ICT, where you have the total addressable market, your potential customers, and then you try to really narrow it down to those who really benefit. You need to do it by much more than your size. It has to be more specific. So that's from me, from marketing. So Carl in sales, would you agree or disagree? 100% agree. I think you're bringing up some key points. I think a little bit what I can add on top of this. I think number one thing is, of course, you have to set the ICP and an understanding of how many data points can be utilized to become as specific as possible. And of course you have to think about your team size when it comes from sales. How many people can we actually serve? How many accounts can we have on SDRs, BDRs, or if you have full cycle AEs? How are you then organizing and training them to communicate correctly? For example, if you're targeting technographics and let's say you're selling to people who actually do have Google and Microsoft, let's say you want to do that, then are you specifying those teams that you have account executives and SDRs working that vertical? Do we have other people working the Google vertical versus the Microsoft vertical? Just an example, another part of that is as well, again, I spoke a bit about sales enablement. Ensure that people understand the changes that you're making. You have to be very quick to when you explain why you're refocusing so they understand the purpose and what they need to do as ICs, individual contributors, to ensure that they're successful in that vertical. So for example, I can give you an example of what we have done. We cut one of our largest revenue streams from paid ads because we knew that they're not as profitable as we want them to be and they're creating more issues. As you said, we have a higher churn on them but they're generating quite a lot of ARR for us on that bottom line. But it's just too costly, for example. And it's distracting our organization from focusing on what we know is we actually talked about ICP and we have something called HVC high value customers that we're tracking as well. So a further refinement of the ICP to be really, really, really narrow where we're sending absolutely best reps after that segment, best SDRs and BDRs, best AEs, best customer success team to onboard them, to understand them and continue to be able to duplicate that journey. And we're running several different experiments on these ICPs and HVCs to see, hey, because it's not enough for us, okay, can we generate a demand? Okay, great. They all work. But hey, we're not really good in having that initial conversation or turning them into opportunities. Okay, is there a vertical that we're turning opportunities better? Okay, great. Let's focus on that one. Then can we actually win the deal and then continue to reiterate on this continually? And if you're a sales leader or revenue leader of any sort, if you are not thinking about these things, you're missing out. Because again, if you find something that's repeatable through the entire sales motion and marketing motion, then you can pour in a lot of energy to that one and actually accelerate growth quite quickly. So what was the effect from us doing this? It hurt, it was a hurtful decision to say no to quite a lot of dollars every month. But the thing is we saw an immediate effect within 30 days on the ACV going up immediately the first month after. Does this mean or? Yeah, correct. Average deal size in that segment immediately went up. What we even did to further this, to further focus is we cut commissions on that segment that we didn't want to pursue to ensure that we don't have a sales organization incentivized to actually sell and earn money on something that the business is not earning money on. Again, if I jump in, do you also see a higher sales velocity number since you got higher average deal size and did it also benefit the sale cycle length as well? No, actually what happened is we actually increased our sale cycle length but we increased our win rates. So I don't think necessarily you have to have a little bit of ice in your stomach when you make changes, right? Of course you won't see 30 day changes. We saw it because we were so convinced that this was the right choice. When it came to that, we have then continued to see better progression in these segments, but you have to really understand again, the choices that you're making, are they made on a hunch or do you know that they're repeatable? That's what I meant. You really have to understand entire motion. We talked about product talking to your customers. Hey, can we actually build a product that we're asking for? Are they asking for three things in the roadmap that we know we're not going to build within a year or two maybe then it's the wrong because then they will churn later down the line if you're a product company. The other side of it, again, the win-loss strategy, when we're losing deals, are we losing deals because we can change something in our sales process, then we then can win them or is it inherently something we can't solve? But I think you have to continue to ask yourself these questions along that sales cycle to analyze. Hey, are the opportunities that we're feeding to our account executive on a quota carrying reps, something that can be repeatable? But I think I'm very passionate about sales enablement and coaching. You have to ensure you can't just, if you have an organization, even if it's 10, 20, 30, 50, 100 salespeople, are you actually giving them the ammunition and the training and the coaching to be successful when you're changing? Don't expect you as a C-level leader or VP to think that, hey, just because I understand it, do they understand it? And again, it comes down to one key thing that I think is, I think the most important thing for great leaders compared to mediocre leaders is their effectiveness in communication when you're making changes, when you're trying to improve an organization, how do you get people to understand that? For example, again, doing more with less, are you engaging your organization to want to do that or are they just doing it because you're telling them to do it? And I think that comes down more to a leadership lesson than it comes down to anything else. Great advice. So, okay, we're soon, we're approaching the end of this talk. I mean, you shared a good example of killing your darlings, might be cutting a revenue stream to actually achieve better profitability or increase average deal size. And from marketing, I have to say, cutting some trade shows or physical events are usually popular areas to, not popular areas, but efficient areas to cut costs. Same goes with some paid, often Google Ads is one area where you can reduce, but you have to be careful. I mean, it all depends. I can't recommend to everyone here listening to just cut their costs here because you need to analyze what are you bringing in from these channels before you do it, but you can really evaluate if these activities like trade shows, if they are bringing the value you want, often you want to focus on where it's common to have expectations on leads and business opportunities, reality, and it's often requested by sales who want to be there because they wanna meet with some potential customers. And it's quite costly. It can be 10 to 20 K euros to attend a big event and you bring five or 10 people who spend a lot of time and there's a planning, there's swag and you know, merch that needs to be produced. And that's one on area. But beside looking at pure lead generation, it's often covered by, okay, it's brand building. That's the usual thing. It's like, okay, we didn't get as many leads or business opportunities, but we were there, we were making a big splash, but then the question is if you really did that kind of, you created that kind of splash effect or if you were diluted by 30 other vendors. So, but okay, so, but last things, so last talking point is costly mistakes to avoid and maybe some share some mistakes we've made ourselves. And do you have any mistake to share, Carl? A fair few, I've done a lot of mistakes and continue to this day. And I think it's, I hate when people talk about their successes only, I think it's really important to share your mistakes. I think number one thing that I've learned personally is just trusting your gut feeling and hit the off switch when you don't believe in something and doing that quicker. I think that goes to hiring and firing goes for the same advice, right? Like if you don't believe in it, fire very, very quickly, for example. But then it goes to something like events, for example, it's so easy to get in, just if you generate one more client with this contract value, then we can motivate the events. I think the mistake that you have to make is, the mistake that you have to think about is, okay, maybe that's true and maybe you can have a positive from an investment. But today, let's say you don't have more cash to spend on the next event or the next initiative, which we have done a couple of times, what's actually the alternative cost to these things? And one thing that you learned the hard way as well with events, if you're sending five of your best salespeople to an event that flunks, that's five of your salespeople's time for three days or four days or two days that could be spent to talk into those high value customers instead. So I think that to me, the biggest mistake is just not the investment in dollars, it's the investment in time that you're spending on your organization. And valuing time more than money, I think is a mistake that I did. I valued dollars rather than time in the beginning. So I think more about alternative cost in time is one thing. But then when it comes to initiatives that we've done, for example, is that we've been tricked again by paid ads at GetExcept that, hey, they are generating MQLs, but they're way too small contract values, they're still generating money to the organization. But what happens then is our customer success organization has to handle so many small accounts and we're not delivering the best customer experience to them, they're very price sensitive, for example. And this comes to a cost then to again, pouring that time into our high value customers instead, who maybe wanted to spend $30,000 more with us, $50,000 more with us, but because we're not spending enough time with them, we're not figuring these things out because we feel obliged then to spend time across the entire revenue model, support model, customer success model, because we spent those harder on cash to get that revenue. So that's a costly, costly mistake that I don't think I or we would repeat is again, what is it actually that we bring in qualitative wise, not just in terms of dollars, how is that impacting our entire business? Like you mentioned something earlier that rang so true to me was when you're sending clients into the funnel and then have products speak to them and they think, hey, these are the features that we need to build because these clients are screaming louder than the others, but they're the wrong clients screaming on our product building the wrong things and actually telling product managers, hey, it's okay to say this client is not important because we're not building for them. They just end up being the one screaming the loudest. Again, very costly mistake, but things you learn across the road. How about yourself, Fredrik? So also many mistakes, of course, that's something I have to admit then I guess everyone should admit because that's how we learn, right? But running campaigns or activities with external agencies when you, let's say both as a client and also the agency doesn't truly understand neither the customer or the product. It's like the blind leading the blind or something because sometimes you want to just outsource a problem and say, we wanna drive a paid social campaign or ABM campaign or something. But if you don't truly understand who you're targeting what messaging truly resonates with the audience it will just be painful. And there will be a lot of opinions and there will be mistakes, expectations and that's just terrible. So sometimes you need to figure it out yourself. You need to truly understand the basics we have spoke about the ICP, the problems we're solving for them. We need to do the groundwork and that's why maybe the takeaway of this session. So the groundwork, the basics of sales and marketing I believe that should needs to be done internally before you can even think about outsourcing something you need to deeply understand this and it doesn't cost anything to call a customer watch a recording and you can also use digital channels like this to interview ICP customers and you create a lot of content from it for free. And it's more likely that your customer or more curious to see how their competitors are doing then it's like, oh, okay, your competitor is achieving, selling 20% more by doing this tactic. They're just like, okay, I wanna see this. And in the same goes if someone is pitching me to sell a software or something as a marketer and get sales leader, you get a lot of phone calls or emails, but very few truly have a strong pitch. Imagine if they were name dropping our two competitors how they helped them achieve something I truly won't maybe grow pipeline or something like that. But instead it's like, hey, we helped Coca-Cola and Nike to grow their website traffic by 20%. I was like, okay, I don't care. Instead, I think that's a great example, engaging your customer base and creating content. I think customer proof is so powerful across the entire revenue funnel in general. We invest a lot in G2 crowd and case studies and ensuring getting people on video and inviting them to our events because it speaks a lot louder when somebody's actually talking about how they're using your product or your services and how that's impacting your business. And something for example, I think this webinar is an example as well. Genuine content that's non-scripted and non-orchestrated to down to the detail is generally what people want to listen to. People don't want to see yet another 20 slides on PowerPoint or Google slides. People want to listen to the real content from real people talking about real problems and how they sold them. Yeah, let's hope and thank you for this session, Carl. And let's see if we have any questions in the chat and we will try to answer them. And I hope everyone who listened also appreciated this non-scripted conversation with real people, as you can see. I'm not a robot. We're not generated by AI. But thank you for tuning in and thank you for participating, Carl. Thank you, Fredrik. It was a pleasure. Bye-bye.