Rebuilding Asana’s Brand, Narrative, and GTM, with Prachi Gore (the CMO Who Grew Checkr to $800M)

0:00Dash, remember when McKeel from Optimizely won our Exit 5 live AI agent showcase? The 2000 custom landing pages? That was really impressive. So he's their director of AI innovation and he built them with Optimizely's agent platform, one for every account in an ABM campaign. He built them from signals like job postings, press releases, and leadership changes. That's like the holy grail of ABM. That's why today's sponsor, Optimizely, is where I'd point anyone who wants to know what AI agents can do for marketing. Their agent platform is built specifically for B2B marketers. Build your own agents or pull from a directory of 50 plus prebuilt ones.

0:35They also launch virtual teammates. These are digital team members that learn over time, can join meetings, complete tasks, support campaigns, and keep your website optimized. Why do I need to go to work? Let me get those. Okay, I need one of those. Same. Being asked to look into AI agents, which I know a lot of you listeners are right now, go check out Optimizely. Put them at the top of your list and you can go build cool stuff just like Mikheel did. Check them out at optimizely.com slash exit five. Hey, quick shout out to Webflow, who is also sponsoring today's episode. Their team actually ran one of the highest rated workshops at Drive this year, which is our big annual conference.

1:11People raved about that one. Guy, their chief evangelist, really knows AEO, and he shared a ton of advice on turning your website into an ongoing revenue driver. And that matters a lot right now, right? AI is cutting into organic traffic. I don't go to Google and search anymore. I'm talking to my AI agents all day long. So AI is cutting into organic traffic and buyers, just like you and me, are using AI to make purchase decisions about 95 % of the time. Webflow, they're a great team to follow on this. More than 300 ,000 brands, can you believe that, build on their platform. It helps you get discovered in AI search, build fully custom sites without a developer, govern your content, and see how agents read it all in one place.

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2:22Hey, my guest on this episode is Prachi Gore. She is the CMO at Asana. And within about six months of joining, she did five new product launches, led a new brand, new corporate narrative and positioning, and unveiled a new Asana Work Innovation Summit. Before that, she spent six years at Checker, where the business grew from over$100 million in revenue to$800 while she was there. At Checker, she had this PLG self-serve business and an enterprise business, and now they have a similar motion at Asana. I know a lot of people that listen to our podcast have that motion. So we talked a lot about that.

2:56What is her team structure? What do the marketers at Asana do? What are her big priorities for the year? How does she have the team structured and organized and where does she think things are going because of all the AI stuff that's happening in this world? And also we tell the story about how they actually did the Asana repositioning exercise and why she chose to not work with an agency or consultant, why they did it all in-house and what they learned through that. This was a really awesome conversation with the CMO of a product I know a lot of you are using and love and just an interesting insight into a high-performing marketing team and what they're doing right now.

3:29Enjoy my conversation with Prachi from Asana. Shout out to Asana. Our team is our power users. Marissa, she can't get me to log in, so maybe that's a product marketing thing later. We'll fix that. I need to see why not. I'm more of a Post-it note guy myself. Okay. We have notes, you know, in Asana notes. By the end of this call, I will be a power user, but excited to have you on the pod. You know, obviously, our audience is B2B marketers. I'm sure there's lots of Asana power users out there. You are relatively new-ish. Is it in the last year you joined? Yeah, my one-year anniversary is coming up soon.

4:12So, yes. Okay. Before this, you were running marketing at Checker. Yes, I was there for six years. What's the difference between what you were doing at Checker and with the audience that you're going after at Asana? And tell people who Checker, like who you sold to at Checker, which you kind of just that ICP and then what you're doing now. And I'm also curious as to like why Asana? You have an impressive resume. Why'd you take that job? Why'd you go there? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll share all of it. So Checker started off as a background checks vendor. And so in our early days, and I was there six years, so I joined when we were a four-year-old company, and then the business grew.

4:51But in our early days, our target audience was developers because we had APIs. And so all these companies and marketplaces wanted to use the APIs and include background checks as part of their application process for drivers, et cetera. And then we grew to serve the larger HR audience, so background checks for everyone. And then maybe halfway, like through my tenure there, we went from single product to multi-product company and started building all these other trust and compliance products for insurance agencies, for marketplaces. So the breadth of our audiences grew as our product grew. But the largest part of our revenue still comes from what I categorize as HR audiences.

5:34So that's Shepard. Asana is very different. Asana is a product that anyone can use. It's a horizontal product. So technically, anyone who wants to manage projects, we have people who manage their weddings through Asana and all the way to, you know, large, large Fortune 100 companies. Marissa is going to listen to this later because she's our content person and she goes and listens. I didn't know Marissa when she got married, but if I had to guess, Asana was heavily involved in her. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, so we have that. It's like one of the use cases, but we serve everyone. However, I'm a big fan of ICP.

6:08So within the universe of anyone can use Asana, we go after, I would say like ops audiences, but like marketing, marketing ops, campaign ops, creative ops, as well as like strategic ops, program management offices. So it's like marketing and ops as audiences are our primary audiences. It's interesting to hear you say that because through running Exit 5, right, we talked to lots of different marketing people in all different industries. And sometimes you talk to a company where it's like anyone can use our product. And to some people who have a really small like ICP, you're like, wow, that's amazing.

6:45But it can be a challenge because it's like, how do you do marketing to everyone? How do you make the website speak to all these people? And it's not just external. You have all these stakeholders internally who run different parts and they're like, we're battling with the sales over this segment or this product person wants more voice. And so it's interesting to hear that like anyone can buy a sauna, but from a who you're actively marketing to your focus? Is that the right way to read that? Exactly. I think what the ICP does is like it creates almost within your resourcing and investment decisions a prioritization framework.

7:18Or even like plays that we work with our sales team. It's like, hey, here's our H1 plays. Like, let's go after these target ICPs. And sometimes that's vertical, sometimes that's persona. But you got to like figure where you have the highest propensity to win, even if you are a horizontal, fairly horizontal product. I have a bunch of questions that I want to ask you in our doc. And I like to, our audience is all marketing nerds, right? Like kind of like you and me, they like to hear about how do you have the team structured? How does Prachi run the marketing team? I want to get into some of the stuff you've done in Asana.

7:52We'll all get there, but I'm just curious, what is the first year of your job been like? And you've been a marketing leader in the past. And so you've had an opportunity to, you know, this is not the first time you've joined a company as a marketing leader. What do you come in and do? How do you know the right time to make changes? Take me into the first year at Asana and how you've, and one more thing and I'll shut up. Everyone says like, don't come in and do a rebrand. Don't come in, all that. There's so much nuance to all that. It's different in every company. I want to hear like, what have you done?

8:21What have you come in and evaluated and changed or moved around or kept, right? I'll tell you what I've done at Asana. And then I do want to comment on like the rebrand aspect, especially when you go into a new job, but as a marketing leader. So when I came to Asana, there were two jobs to be done or like key objectives for me and my marketing team. One was Asana was going from a collaborative work management product or project management product to becoming work execution because the beauty of that collaboration that happened between humans and humans was that when you introduce agents into teams, and let's call them hybrid teams, the agents also need to collaborate with the humans or the agents themselves.

9:09So the collaboration aspect doesn't go away. It is needed. What is, especially in a multi-layered way, like if I have a brand strategist and both of us want to work with my brand strategist agent, then we need a collaboration platform. So what was amazing about this is that now that we have agents in the system, work can actually get executed. And we could talk more about like what kind of work. But that's very different from being a project management system. Now you're like moving towards a work execution system. So the branding, or I would say it wasn't even like visual branding, wasn't the first step.

9:47But the positioning, repositioning of who is Asana needed to happen. So you're saying like the Asana product strategy changed because it's like, wait, Dave's got a bunch of things on his to-do list that like an agent could just do. And not just that, because it's like you could say, okay, I could be like in an LLM agent or flawed or whatever. And that can happen too. But where the power was, is like, oh, Prachi, okay, I'll give you an example. The one that comes up as one of the most standard ones in any marketing flow. I need to update the website, create a new landing page for my campaign. whatever.

10:21The old process would have been, me, the marketer would have created, if you're a big org, like a ticket or something, or I would have gone and talked to someone in web to say like, I need to launch this new page. Then you bring in a designer, you bring in a content writer, if you're a skilled team, but if you're small, you have all these people playing. And before you even write something, you've had a kickoff call, you've had like action items, you've like done this whole process. In the agents in our system process, the marketer is still saying, hey, I need to, here's, we have a meetings product too.

10:52That's like that'll GA now in a month, but we use it. So we have done this kickoff meeting. The market is saying, I want to go do this. The meeting is recorded. It's an agent is taking the transcript, creating the action plan of what needs to happen. We have prebuilt agents like the creative brief writer, launch planner, but in this case, the creative brief writer is saying, okay, great, I got this. I'm going to write the creative brief based on this and suggested copy. Then it goes, we always have human in the loop. So someone saying like, this copy is fine or not fine or whatever. It's usually not fine.

11:23So they like give some prompting. But, you know, it's like to stand up. Like for some like SEO type of stuff, it's usually fine. Yeah. Well, I think, yeah, no, it's fine. You don't have to couch it. I think it's definitely helpful from going from zero to one. I like having the human in the loop. It's like, hey, like, let's give it the right feedback. But the beauty of this agent is like, let's say that copy came to you and me. We are like, I'm the web team. You're the content editor. And we are both giving it feedback. me for SEO or something, and you're giving it for like tone or just like creativity or just like not having a POV or something.

11:54This brand strategist now has executed on that feedback, but now it's created memory from both what I told it, as well as what Dave told it. And so this is like shared memory. And so it's like literally like a real teammate. Like I have a brand strategist teammate that multiple people have coached and which is different from your agent in an LLM. So I think that's the power that gives our teams is like, we are thinking about these workflows end to end and saying, okay, what are the steps that agents can do? Where do I want the human? And it can be a large part can be automated. Like this web example, our team was saying like, they save somewhere between 11 to 15 hours every week that they would have spent doing something, you know, around this.

12:36So your job, then I'm just like checking out the website right now. So your job as a marketing leader, did this story exist before you got there? Or did you need to come in and like basically talk about the new Asana to the world? We have to talk about the new Asana. What existed was this idea that we were going to become agentic. We had pre-launched like some agents, but nothing was GA. The story wasn't like flushed. And it was not about the workflow. It was about the agents, but it's not about the agents. The agents, there are many, every product is going to have them and are going to get commoditized.

13:10You need them, but largely there are many types of agents. So it was like the differentiation of our agents, which needs to stand out, but really the move was towards orchestrated execution. It's like moving from tracking to orchestration. So that had to happen when I came and this like whole aha of it's all about the workflow, which we could talk about through our process as we were uncovering what is that positioning. But yeah, so that was like one, it's like we got to reposition a startup. Yeah, I have that later. We'll get there. I want to talk about the position, I guess. Yeah, so that was one.

13:41And then two was, we have to bring growth back. Like the company is growing. This is publicly available data, but we are growing like in that 10 % range. How do we get to 20? How do we bring like inflective growth back? And so those were the two, were or are. But like when I first came in, those were the two objectives for the marketing leader. And so then I had to like take a step back and say, okay, how are we going to organize ourselves to go do this? and we have to launch five new products by June. So it was like, I was like, I was telling someone jokingly my first six months, I was like, I didn't think I was going to join here.

14:12Like reposition the company. We did end up doing a visual rebrand and launch five new products and a flagship event all in six months. So it was crazy times, but fun. And then I want to go back to the branding. I do firmly believe that you shouldn't just go in as a new CMO and like rebrand. You should, if something is categorically not working or is fundamentally changing, that will drive the objective that you've been brought in to drive and that's growth or whatever. And sometimes because it's rebranding for the sake of rebranding is such a costly project, not just like dollar wise, but the amount of effort and team effort you're putting in, it's like expensive.

14:53And so if I ever had the choice and if the current brand was working, I wouldn't like it would be the last. I love doing branding. I love doing positioning. It's fun. But I would not I would not try and touch it first if it didn't have to change. I think it's like one of those things that people love to just like debate about on LinkedIn. But I think there's just so much nuance to it. Obviously, if you went to a company and it was like so obvious that the brand didn't represent what the company was actually doing, then that actually could be a lever. I think that's crazy. By the way, five, five new products in six months.

15:25I'm just like typing some of these things as you say them so I can come back to them. I'm not ignoring you. Five new products in six months and a whole rebrand. How did you do that? How did you do that? Why didn't you push back? Why didn't you say no? And I'm saying that because I got a text from one of our members over the weekend and she was like, I just took this new job. Am I crazy? They want this, this, this, this, this in the first 90 days. Now, 90 days is not six months, but take me through that. How do you actually decide to go do that? How do you block and tackle it? You have a new team who doesn't know who you are yet or doesn't know your working style.

15:58There's a lot in there. It is. And it's not and was not easy on anyone. So it was a lot of fun, but also sweat and tears and learnings. I would say you asked the question, why did you not push back? The need to go tell the Asana story to go drive the growth, the inflective growth was needed. It was necessary. Our core market is growing at the rate it's growing. but we could deliver so much more value to our customers. We had to go tell that story. The five product launches came a little bit later and they came because our Eng team's productivity just skyrocketed with the innovation of coding tools.

16:38So a timeline, when I first got in here late last year, the timeline was more spread out through the year. And we have like two big events that we do, but our teams were just able to deliver this amazing innovation. And so it didn't make sense to hold that back and not announce it. So we pulled it forward and announced these products. However, we did stagger the EAGA launches so that we can do the due diligence on enabling our teams in detail, like, you know, having the plays and the campaigns ready. So the big external push and the GA's, EA's, GA's, we did stagger. But the announcement we had to go make because the products were going to be ready or were ready.

17:21This is going to happen. This is going to continue to happen. Like we were having this discussion around product launches and I've been around the block a lot. We used to do like these batch releases and product launches, not launch, but yeah, batch product releases. Then we went to like, hey, we could, why wait? Like we just like do, you know, the last three or five years were just like, go, go, go, like push your innovation. And right now I'm seriously, I don't know that we've decided that, but I am, as I think about next year, like I'm like, our teams are just launching something new every week.

17:52It's like, does it make sense to go back to batch to just like give our customers a moment to observe what is happening? And this is kind of where I was going with this is like, what can you take me into what some of those product launches even are? What's the playbook? Because yeah, you're I my one of my first jobs in marketing was like writing release notes. And it would be like once a quarter, like there'd be a bunch of new products, product updates, and I would write them and be a blog post in an email. You're Asana, a publicly traded company. Lots of people know you. Are you on stage? But also, do people care at that level?

18:27Can you tell me, when you say we launched the five products, what were the marketing components of those? And how do you decide what goes in there? And then even what you just said, if you're going to launch something every week, just because the product team ships something every week, does that mean the marketing team has to, what do you even do? Send an email about it? Make a video? Yeah. So I'll tell you about the five launches because we had pre-planned this big, our work Innovation Summit European event in London with about a thousand people in the room. That was in June. And so we decided to use that as our launch moment for all five, because two of them were going to launch at that, two were going to launch like a few weeks after.

19:05So we were like, okay, this becomes the moment. And we announced some of them as EA, some of them as GA. And so that was our launch moment. So we did get up on stage. We did bring our GMs on stage. We did bring our design partner customers on stage to talk about their experience. So we did make a big moment out of the launch. But a launch never just stops there. It's a rolling thunder afterwards, right? Like, yeah, we got the word out, but now we have to actually go sell these five products. And so in the back half of the year, we designed our entire campaign strategy around, it's like we called them the H2 plays, but it's like the five plays.

19:38And the five plays were all around these five products. And the five products are, I told you Asana is a horizontal product, anyone can use it. But for the core product that we build, all the features are great for marketing and ops teams. But we also have these other teams that are in our database use it in very hacky ways. And so we are just building full-fledged features for these personas. And those personas are agencies, like 20 % of our customers are agencies who use Asana. And so we've built like the client portal, the a timesheet budget, like just round out the full product for them so they can execute end-to-end workflows relevant to their job.

20:17The other audience is R &D teams like product and dev, and they've always used us in a program management capacity, but we are building out now, integrating with coding agents and things like that. So it's just like full coding end-to-end can work. That's called command. We launched a service management product. We had so many teams, employee service management, like HR ticketing, facilities. They were just using Asana to do that in hacky ways. So we are building out for like knowledge base and, you know, agent remediation and things like that. But when it needs a project, it can create a project in Asana.

20:49So that's the differentiation. So anyway, there's like some persona package products that we have five of these that we are building out and we launched them. I'll pause. I could go. What's the like, so yeah, what are like, I think people want to know, like separate from it being an Asana thing, if you covered up the brand, like what are the like go-to-market elements of that? Is it like emails? Is it sales enablement? Is it ads, creative? Like what's in the kind of product launch kit? Yeah, all of it, but varies by product. So I would say that the parts that were consistent across all five products was sales enablement.

21:24And the part in that sales enablement was it's all about the use case because we are selling workflows, end-to-end workflows. So we have to identify the canonical 10 that all of these companies will do. And so, and enable our sales team to be able to speak to it because it's the new audience they've never spoken. So like that enablement, of course, you know, your first call deck, like all of that, yes, we did demos, demos for them to go do, but we had these use cases. So it started, I like that though. It makes sense. Like it starts with, let's come up with 10 specific use cases that can get everyone to understand this, train the sales team.

21:58I think it's a good forcing function that if you have to train the sales team, that forces you to develop the 10 use cases. And then like, you can't go figure out what the ads are going to be unless you figure out. Until you figure that out. Exactly. So because we were doing this at an event and many of our sales people were going to be there, they would get questions. So we first leaned into the sales enablement. So we had webpages. So the webpages on our website and the sales enablement were the first starting points across all of these. And then as we developed the place, we started doing use case videos for each of these use cases that were either customer or asana or asana or just fictional of how you would do it.

22:34But a combination of use cases that are launching, we did a ton of persona content, I would say, like agencies is specifically one that we are going after more actively. So just content of like blog posts, I would say, but that type of like short form written content. And then the The distribution mechanism was add social, email, the same channels. But what worked for our first go at this, where we are creating most of our pipeline, is because we had so many, our install base, we have 170 ,000 paying customers that are paying. And then like the free universe is even larger. We had like a install base to go to.

23:15So through our community effort, we did a lot of training. So these were like a salon tour events, which were workshops. These were trainings. and then, and we are not worried, we're still doing them. Quick break for Zoom webinars. This is the platform behind the world famous Exit 5 Live. Someone on LinkedIn just said, I compare all other webinars against Exit 5 Live now. How good is that? So good. I want to print that out, send it to my mom, put it on my fridge. In a world of AI slot, we just want to make something that's worth showing up for, even a webinar. Especially a webinar, but don't you dare call it a webinar, even though I'd break my own rule and do that all the time.

23:50It's a live session. Our team puts over seven hours a week into each one of these, choosing the topic, the prep calls, building to run a show, and making it valuable and engaging. Zoom webinars is a big part of how we pull it off. We average 1 ,500 plus registrants per session, hundreds of people show up live, and the chat goes off. Yeah, the last time we have a new high watermark, we had 527 people live for an hour with us. Zoom does registration, emails, polls, analytics, and it all lives in one place. So running a polished session every two weeks isn't a scramble. At Showtime, our team swears by Zoom's production studio.

24:26They preset every scene and push each one live on cue. Clean transition, zero chaos, at least that anyone can see. Just please do not look at our internal slack. Okay, all the caps lock in there. Don't share that. That's our pro-level webinar production powered by Zoom. Check it out, zoom.com slash exit5. Learn more about Zoom and all the webinars and all their products there and come see it live. We do these basically every week now. Go and check them out. It's called Exit 5 Live and learn more about Zoom at zoom.com slash exit five. All right, if you're at a B2B tech company spending over$50 ,000 a month on paid media, Compound Growth Marketing wants to give you two free sessions to build out your 2027 plan.

25:07Free? Okay, I'm listening. What do you get? I know, free is usually too good to be true, but check this out. In the first session, they're going to learn your business And in the second, they will deliver you a custom plan. So you'd know how to split demand capture and creation, which channels drive the best ROI and where you're reporting has gaps. And look, I trust them with it. I've hired CGM twice. They're one of the best agencies I've worked with back in my day as a head of marketing. Twice. Well, I've hired plenty of agencies as a VP of marketing and that is rare. I'm more than just a thought leader, Dash.

25:36You should know that. So CGM helps high growth cybersecurity and enterprise software companies show up earlier in the buying journey with full funnel, paid media, AEO, and a dedicated GTM engineering team. Ooh, and a former VP of marketing started it. So they actually get B2B. That's right. John was one of us back in the day. So check it out. You can go book your 2027 planning session right now at compoundgrowthmarketing.com slash exit five. That's compoundgrowthmarketing.com slash exit five. Link in the show notes. The goal with this is like, because you have such a big customer base, is it let's get our existing customers using these new features.

26:15It's not like more. It's not like we want to we want to get this number of new customers because we have these new features. It's like, am I reading that right? Correct. I mean, we do want to get new customers. Of course, growth is always the goal, but growth will come through the new customers adopting it, using it, telling people about it. and we've seen like word of mouth is such a has always been such a big part of asana's growth like not not just since i got here but even before we have a 17 year old history that if our customers use it and love love it it keeps you honest so it's like instant feedback because they know asana you know so it's like a quick iterative loop with product but also they become raving fans you know so is this motion like because of the asana's like is it one of those like kind of product-led but also enterprise companies where you have, you know, okay.

27:05Yeah, we have a product led, for our core product, we have a product led motion. And that usually it's the graduation path once teams start using. But for our, we have two new products that is service management. And one is, you know, just workflows, like it's called Stack AI. It's an acquisition that we made. Both of those are direct to sales. So it does not have a PLG motion. It's direct to sales. And so that is the one audience where we are not minding our database. Like IT, we have to go create demand. We don't have, you know, people know Asana, but they don't perceive Asana as the product that solves the IT workflow builder problems.

27:43So it is a new audience with new, it's almost like positioning a new company, but with some kind of known, yeah, it's positioning. Okay, that was good. Good background. I feel that's great. That's good beginning to this. Tell me about your job. You run the marketing team. there's a hundred ish people on the marketing team. What are, what are your big goals for marketing? How do you have the team set up? I'd love to try to like get into like your job right now, running marketing 2026, heading into 2027. People are interested in like, who does what, how do you have the team? Are you doing weekly sprints, quarterly campaigns?

28:19Do you have four direct reports? Like, you know, those types of things. Can you kind of take me into like the, I guess this would kind of be like Prachi at the whiteboard showing me the marketing strategy for the company. Yeah, I mean, it starts with the KPIs. Our KPIs are we need to drive more new logo acquisition in our PLG machine for our four products. We need to go drive sales pipeline against all of our five products. And we need to change the brand, not just grow awareness, but change the brand perception about who Asana is. So those are our primary KPIs. in the first half of this year, we did most work on the third and the first, like we already have a scaled engine, like how do we optimize and the third.

28:59And then in the back half, we're doing a lot more work on the pipe build. So that's kind of like how we mapped out this year. Going into next year, that growth, number one and number two become more prominent, like that pipeline growth becomes real. We also make some of these products PLG. So how do you set up multi-product demand Gen frameworks is going to be top of mind for us. And then brand is a continued effort, but maybe that's a secondary KPI as we lean further. I mean, some brand takes years, but we had a lot of work on that upfront. In terms of team organization, we have two demand gen demand creation teams.

29:38I have a growth marketing team whose primary KPI is that PLG new logo acquisition or trials. and then we have a revenue marketing team whose primary KPI is pipeline for sales. Now, both of these teams are tight to the hip because there's a lot of digital channels and we do campaigns that has crossovers. So they have to be like one team in many ways, but they're two separate teams with different KPIs. And then I have a product marketing team, I have a brand and creative team, I have a comms team and a mocks team. So the rest of the team stack is pretty standard. Okay, I'll come back to, I want to come back to that in a sec.

30:15So the growth, you have the revenue and growth. Do they have shared resources? Are they each like running their own ads as an example? And they share learning? No. So I've done it. So Checklip was also a PLG and SLG company. So I've done it. I'm asking this question because every, so many people that listen to this one, and there's like a lot here, like a lot of, this comes up a lot, which is like, hey, we got, we got to sell to the enterprise, but we also have the self-serve thing. How do we work together? Because it's not perfect. Tell me, yeah, tell me about what you're doing. I'll tell you what we're doing at Asana and then I'll also reference my checker, how I had it designed at checker because I think the scale matters.

30:54So here they have their primary KPIs and they have dependency on each other's KPIs. Like we need campaigns to also drive some trials. We need digital channels to drive pipeline as we do. And so there's like our demand model has that, but they are the DRI and so they have to work with the cross-functional team. So let's say like on makeup, this is not true, but like, let's say in Germany, like our pipeline is down and paid search is not bringing anything. If that were a problem statement, then the DRI is my revenue marketing leader, but they would work with the digital team to figure out like what is happening with the budget go down.

31:27So they pull in the team to make the decision. Where is the digital, is the digital team part of the revenue team? Digital is part of growth. Oh, got it. Okay. Growth marketing has lifecycle education, so like expansion, but also digital acquisition, which is, you know, web, SEO, paid media, all the high volume channels. And so that is how we've structured it at Asana because our paid and web channels are very scaled. And if I start doing, if I start replicating efforts, it's going to be inefficient for us as a team. I'd rather give them primary KPIs and hold them accountable. and we have operating cadences that help us do that.

32:04At Checker, we did have a small portion of SLG budget that we ran through an agency that our revenue marketing leader did own. The subject matter experts from the growth team weighed in on the strategy with this agency, but they managed the agency themselves to kind of drive because it was like segmented in that way. Like Checker was like SMB was largely self-serve and enterprise was largely revenue. Here, anyone can come in through growth. So it's like, just, it's different in that way. Have you learned anything about the KPIs and incentives that matter here to foster the right relationships between the teams versus, I don't have as much experience.

32:42Just one small example, maybe this is just my outlier example, but it felt like when you silo the teams, they're very like, nope, this is my job. My job is to generate MQLs in this segment. And as long as I do that, I'm going to get my bonus and I'm going to do my job. And it's like, well, no, we could be helping this team. Have you learned anything about how to get everybody kind of rowing together, even though we have different goals? Or do they have different goals? Yeah. So the metrics matter. So their primary KPIs is the driving function for how they think, what programs they put, what strategies.

33:16But one of the things that I've always done is when you start over a year and you do your demand model of like, hey, where is this demand going to come from? I have carved out demand models by channel. So it's not just enough to say, okay, we have like a X million dollar pipeline goal. We take it down to like where we believe what channel is going to drive that. And so then have the, let's say, web marketer carry the goal, secondary goal of pipeline in addition to the trial. And so one way to do that would be, okay, I might need to change my type of funnel mix to bring in more ICP that's converting.

33:51So that's one. Not ideal, but it does help to give them a secondary KPI that they know is on their channel they're tracking. and then operating cadences matter also. It's like, so when we are running like funnel reviews for pipeline, we do invite our growth leads, especially like paid media, which is driving or, you know, web to weigh in and listen to the sales and feed feedback so they can take it back. So they have accountability because they are on the call versus the accountability is not connected in, in that way, just behind the key leader who owns it. So that's my way of doing it. Like in an ideal world, you could say like, hey, put both of these under one leader.

34:28It'll do. We definitely don't want to create inefficiencies, but that's a lot of like hierarchy that I am that leader. Like I can figure it out. I mean, I have four other things, but at some point, maybe we need to create that hierarchy. If like, but right now it feels like, okay, these two leaders can work together. Like we are part of one team. So that's how I've solved it. All right. Tell me, how do you run the team? So you're a member of the exec team as a CMO. You all have your offsite somewhere. You come up with these three key KPIs for the year. Now Prachi has to take these back to her team and then actually go and like make the bets and plan the strategy.

35:04Can you take me into like the team KPIs? And then also just like how, what does your team look like? You have 120 people on the team. They can't all report to you. Seems like you're very involved. Who reports to you? What is your direct reports like? What do you expect out of them? What is your operating cadence? People love that stuff. I'd love to get some of that from you. Let's take annual planning because we are into it. My play, I have a playbook for that and I think it works well. So my playbook is usually like these off-sites. We have enough warning that that off-site is coming, which is exec off-site.

35:33I love to do like a marketing leaders off-site or like session before that to like hash through like, what did we learn this year? What would we do differently? We all have a general sense of, or I have a sense of what our primary KPIs might be. It might change a little bit as we do this off-site, but where are we headed? And so we do a little bit of high-level brainstorming. So I take some of that thinking into my off-site. and sometimes I'll have a deep dive topic or not, but we'll work on that. And then, so what that generates is like more of a tops down direction of like here are the primary KPIs, here's what our job is.

36:06And like I have some input on what's worked or not worked from the team directly. And then once that offsite is done, then we do a full bottoms up build to say, okay, these are our top line KPIs. But we know, usually we know what our resourcing is. Let's do a bottoms up to say, what is it going to take to hit those goals? if you need more resources why usually we'll do a lot of debating within our own teams where we invest so we do what we do a top down we do a bottoms up there's always a gap it's like never happened that you have tops down and the bottoms up like matches and then it's like a negotiation negotiation with finance sometimes negotiation with sales sometimes to be like okay we can do this with this resourcing finances and know what else can outbound take or something you know so like then it's negotiation are you in the thick of this are you in the thick of this now for next year we yeah we kicked off planning so we are doing this right now and once like that the negotiation happens and we generally have a sense of like okay what is our envelope what is our resourcing what are our goals then we go and lay out plans and like i used to do quarterly planning only and be like okay we like we have a general sense of what quarter but like really get the quarter right i've moved more recently more towards like a six-month plan to just have more detail into future because it was just becoming too we were spending more time in planning meetings So I've like stretched that out to six months, but I don't go beyond six months.

37:26Like we generally know like, oh, we have this big event or like those things we know, which we have to pre-commit to. But outside of that, like we haven't decided exactly what campaign the theme is. And right now with the pace of innovation, we have to be nimble, like big or small teams doesn't matter. Like you have to be so nimble as a marketing team. So that's my framework. And then in terms of cadences, it's pretty standard. Like we do weekly marketing calls where we do a dashboard review, like the leaders talk about what's top of mind, what's working. We do MBRs, which is like monthly business reviews that are more deeper dive into insights and especially focused on if something's not working, what are we going to do?

38:04What is the action plan? And then we have QBRs at the company level. I also do marketing QBRs, especially for larger teams, because it gives me an opportunity to hear from the teams. So it's a pretty standard cadence. So we do that. What would be like a topic in a MBR? Like, what are you reviewing? All of marketing, parts of marketing and the same question for the QBR and then who's the audience for those? Yeah, so QBR, I'll start with the QBR. QBR is often functional. And so we look at the goals for the function. It's like a recap of the quarter and like a big priorities for the future quarter.

38:38Do you have to get up in front of the company and say, hey, we said we're going to do this this year. Here's how we're pacing towards that. And here's what's going on. So we don't do that at Asana level. So marketing is not presenting a QBR to the rest of the ELT, but my individual leaders are doing a roll up. And for Asana, we do weekly goal updates and then we do have goal reviews every month. And then we do what we call un-QBR, which are like strategy sessions every quarter. So, but our QBR is just for me to roll up what's happening in the business and what are our key priorities for Q2 or like future quarters.

39:13and then the monthly is more deep dive into the very specific things that we are seeing that are red or sometimes they are very green, like what more can we do? But it's mostly like if something's very red, like, so it's not like every function, every metric. We do a high level metric review, but it's like really focused on like, hey, I really want to discuss like enterprise demand or whatever, like one key narrow agency campaign or whatever that is top of mind for me or exec or is red or needs a ton of alignment and I just don't see it. So it's like we pick those topics, TBD. And then weekly is a dashboard review with high-level insight.

39:50What does your direct report structure look like? I have rev marketing, growth marketing, brand and creative, comms, product marketing, marketing ops. Then do you all spend time separate from the team, like with your leadership team? Yeah, yeah. Quarterly offsites, planning offsites. We have a weekly MLT call. I do one-on-ones with each one of them. So yeah. How do you keep things nimble, but also at the same time, not like burn out the team? I feel like a lot of times, one of the sentiments that I'm feeling right now in marketing is like, because things do change so much, like that is awesome.

40:26I hear you. We got to be nimble. But I've also seen like when you whiplash and change too much, everyone's like, it's hard to keep morale high when you're doing that, even though innovation is happening. Yeah. So it's not something that we've solved, especially with the pace that is happening right now. So I don't want to act like, oh, I have the perfect playbook. I think the things that are working for us, like, okay, I'll say two things. One is, I do think like the six-month planning forces to pick the biggest bets that we want to do anyway and gives us enough insight into what's coming in the next few months that we can drop if we need to pick something else up.

41:04So I think that versus quarterly planning, that the longer runway does help with that. I think the second thing is overemphasizing on just like context, communication and clarity. Like I've always done it as a leader, but I'm doing that so much more now on in terms of like getting the team to because sometimes they might foresee something that needs to change that will if I hadn't done that would come later as a like, oh, we got to go change this. And so that is another aspect that we are really trying to give a lot more clarity. And like that was some of the feedback from the team is like the monthly all hands feels like not enough.

41:39So let's do something weekly. So async comes bi-weekly, like we've done a bunch of things. But so communication, transparency and context across the board is the second thing. And I think the third thing that is helping is clear roles, very, very clear roles and accountability and a decision making framework. So when something comes and you have to move fast, I want to the extent possible, I want every person to know, can I make this decision myself? Do I need somebody else involved? When do I go to my boss? When do I go to Prachi? When do I go to a CEO? And so we've really tried to, we use this framework called RAD for decision-making.

42:16And we are really trying to like create like that clarity for every team, every project. And again, it's not perfect, right? This is work in progress, but I think those types of things are helping us and our team. Is that like a role specific? Would I have a framework or is it like team specific? How do I know when to deploy that decision making framework? Rad, we want to use it. It's like who's responsible, who has to agree and who's the final decision maker. So that's like rad. And we try to use the same framework across every single project. and I don't want to see, in Agree you can have multiple names, but in R &D I only want to see one name.

42:52And then when we move the project, we get that alignment across the board to say like, hey, this is my RAD, especially for bigger projects, smaller projects. Generally the team knows what has to come to me. And so that helps with, we saw some of this, especially when we were working through our product launches. It's like not having that RAD defined early on, we created some rework because, oh, like we need to get the CPO, but sometimes you need to get the CEO. And it's like, that was very avoidable. Like we could have gotten ahead of that with the framework. That's when we implemented it. So it seems to be working better now, but like this is going to test all of us as marketers.

43:29Like we, so. Yeah, I know. I mostly was asking, not because I think you'd have a perfect answer, but I kind of wanted to like say it out loud because I do think everyone listening to this is kind of navigating this. Yes, it is very difficult. Yeah. Okay, I want to wrap with one question I didn't ask you about, which I wanted to get to is, so you did this whole rebrand, not a rebrand, repositioning is probably the proper thing. And in this doc famously did not hire an agency or a positioning consultant to do this. Why you did this all in-house. Tell me why. And does that say anything about the future of working with agencies or was this just a thing that you needed to get done in house?

44:10Take me into that. Yeah. I mean, I have done positioning three or four times in the last 10 years and I've used an agency for every one of them, like agency or contract, like someone, like an expert for every single one of them. And I would have used one here as well. In fact, I did talk to the top three that I thought were top three. And we did talk about the project, got, you know, really went deeper. The biggest constraint why we didn't go with an agency was we We had, the time was not on our side. Like this entire repositioning and rebrand had to be done in 90 days, which meant like I needed a partner who could work at our pace.

44:51But I did know we have so many executives involved, like schedules, like all of this stuff was just going to like throw timelines off. And like the proposals I got, even if the personas we brought in were the kind of people who would work at our pace, they just didn't have the bandwidth or like the timelines were delayed. And so that was the forcing function to take a step back and say, OK, looks like I'm not going to be able to bring an agency here. Then what is my what is my path forward? What helped me here? What is the biggest value problem bringing an agency is A, they're experts. So B, you have like a sounding board, someone who you can work with on these these things, you know, someone who's bringing a fresh outside and perspective.

45:29Otherwise, you get kind of you get in your own world and it can be more inside out. For me, I was new. So I had the outside and perspective. But two is our CEO comes up from the marketing path. So he was an established CMO. Like, great. He's now CEO, like multiple times CEO, but he has that background. And so having him as a thought partner worked really well. And like, that was our alignment. Like, hey, I'm going to reach out to you more times than I would typically, but I need that thought partnership. So that kind of worked out. Oh, okay. I should have asked Dan Rogers. I interviewed him back in the day.

46:05He was the CMO at ServiceNow. I feel like, yeah. Okay. He's a really good marketer. Wow. I should have asked you about this. Yeah. So it helped having him as a sounding board and that helped move the project. I mean, and the positioning exercise really is like a company strategy exercise too. So the CEO has to be involved, if not lead it. But those two were like my drivers for why I didn't bring in an expert. Yeah. That's like a hugely positive thing then. And if you believe if like the CEO gets marketing, has done this before, that that is your agency is kind of you and the CEO working on this and rolling it out to the team.

46:42Yeah. I mean, you have to carve out time, right? Like that's hard, but we were both newish. And so it kind of helps. OK, you don't have to answer this question, but I'm going to ask it. I would be you mentioned like the top three. Are you able to tell me who the people you may have considered? Because everyone's going to ask, like, who should I use for positioning? Do you want to give me any names? You can pass. It's okay. No pressure. Well, I'll tell you who I think are amazing. And then these may or may not be the exact ones I reached up to. But I worked with April Dunford in the past. And so I've done work with her.

47:14Firebricks was one that I've met a couple of times, has been recommended. So I like Bob and Firebricks. And then Andy Cunningham is another one who I was introduced to, had great conversations with. So there were a few. I met quite a few of them. What about this guy called Claude? I heard he's great. Claude? I, oh, we could, this could be a whole hour. I think with excellent prompting and a lot of like your own POV inserted, Claude can be a great brainstorm partner for sure. And one of the things, like I told you, I created my brand strategist agent, or backup, Alina, that agent uses Claude. But I fed it frameworks that I believe for positioning books that I had read.

47:56I gave it very detailed, like an exercise of how I would do this. And then it became a pretty good brainstorm partner. So I will give it credit, but it's a lot of generic words. The aha has to come from you. It's all about the workflow. Now, once we got that, we were able to use cloud. I'll give you one just personal story related to that. So we had our big event in September and I needed to do the welcome, like the keynote, right? And I love writing, creating, public speaking. Like I would tell you that that's my thing. Yeah. But I could not get going on my talk. Like I just, and that's never happened.

48:34Like since I got good at this stuff, like 10 years ago. And I was like, oh my God, did I like, did AI like ruin my brain? Like, am I not allowed to have, and am I not able to have an original thought of my own? Right. And a friend of mine was like helping me on it. This guy, Harry Dry, he's an amazing storyteller and writer. He runs this website called marketingexamples.com. And he's like, dude, put, he's like, put away the AI, put it away. Like just, just what does Dave Gerhardt think? Like, what do you think? And I think that was such an important lesson because it's like, that is the unique thing.

49:03So for like you and Dan Rogers to have your own gut feelings, perspective, yeah. That's like what makes it good. It's like, you know, the homemade meal is what's going to make it unique. And I, that was such an important lesson. And I'm like, okay, the AI stuff is awesome. There's a lot of like interesting things. And it works, you know, when we use AI, it's like, I love seeing, and Dan does everything institute so we would like just feed it in cloud and be like show me the home page awesome we could move so fast because it's like this works this doesn't work but anyway i we use cloud and all of the lms a lot so i don't want to like but there are some things which i feel like start with yeah well you don't want to say anything because there's claude claude is like they're gonna run the world and so you don't want to put anything out into the background and it's a we use it a ton so there's a lot of stuff that claude can do and do well but some things just require human creativity input book law.

49:59Last question. Give me a name of one CMO that I should have on this podcast that now that you've spent an hour talking to me and hanging out, someone who's awesome, a peer of yours that you think, I'm not asking you to do the outreach, I'll do it. But who should I get? Wow. Okay. I love Amanda Bloomreach CEO. Like she is. Oh, I don't know her. Great. Okay. I'll send you a link, but she's Blue Reach, but she is amazing. I think she'd do great on the podcast too. Prachi, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. You did great. It was great to hear from you. I hope that you get at least one new LinkedIn message and connection after this podcast.

50:42You'll get a bunch, but you did great. I'm rooting for you all, Asana. Thanks for coming on the podcast. It's been great to have you. Thank you. I enjoyed this. Thanks, Dave. Okay. I'll see you later. Okay. Bye.

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