How To Build A Winning Marketing Playbook with Kyle Coleman, Global VP of Marketing at ClickUp | Ep. 406

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0:21Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the up. What is up, Kyle? Welcome back to the podcast. Excited to chat with you. You've been in so many different roles, seen you grow from being in sales to now all the way like in leading marketing teams, which is cool to see. Well, thank you for coming back.

1:02Kyle Coleman:I appreciate that. Yeah. I'm looking forward to the conversation, Daniel. It's always fun chatting with you. So you want to give just a little background where you're at right now and like how you got to where you're at. And then we'll talk about what's going on at ClickUp and what problems you're trying to solve. Yeah, for sure. So I'm the global VP of marketing at ClickUp. At ClickUp, we have two different revenue models. We have a product-led growth revenue model, and then we have a sales-led revenue model. I'm responsible for creating all things demand, pipeline generation, awareness for the sales-led motion.

1:34Kyle Coleman:So my team is sales PMMs, it's content and thought leadership, it's demand gen and marketing operations. And then, of course, near and dear to my heart is the SDR organization that also rolls up to me. So that's kind of how I was raised. As you mentioned, Daniel, I was raised through sales. I started my tech career as an SDR. I ended up leading a rather large SDR team. I did the same thing at my next company. And then I kind of stumbled my way into CMO. I've been a CMO twice now because I care about broadcasting messages as broadly as possible. And I know to what extent pipeline is the driver for a company's growth.

2:13Kyle Coleman:And I just saw the impact that marketing teams can make in doing both of those things. And that's why I gravitated more toward marketing than staying into more traditional sales. I want to go into the problem you're trying to solve right now. I know your boss is very big on giving people big, hairy goals for everybody on his team. And you have a big goal of solving like how to get to one billion ARR. Could you like, like unpack that? Like, why is the goal of that? And like, how are you working backwards to get to that goal? Yeah, it's a great question, Daniel. So the high level goal is to get to a billion dollars in ARR.

2:58Kyle Coleman:And, you know, it's something of an arbitrary number. A billion is a nice round number and it's aspirational and it's cool. and very few software companies ever achieved that mark. So it's something of a rallying point. But what's underpinning that goal is to be an enduring, legendary company that is fit for public markets, that's profitable, that's attractive, that's known for the sales organization we have, that's known for the product and for the customer experience that we deliver. And all those things combined means we're a billion-dollar company. And so it's a billion-dollar ARR sort of shorthand for all the other supporting goals that we have.

3:33Kyle Coleman:It's also a rally cry for the company to say, what got us here is not going to get us to this next level. We need to reinvent ourselves. We need to hold ourselves to different standards. We need to find new and different ways to generate pipeline, to generate revenue, to do these things that we've never done before. And if we just try and continue to run the old playbooks, it's not going to work. So that's why having bigger, meatier, hairier goals is important is because it requires people to think and act differently. And I'm happy to dive into some of those different ways that we're thinking and acting, but that's kind of what's underpinning that$1 billion number.

4:07I really like those big hairy goals because I think one, it gets leaders and then people under leaders to think creatively of how to achieve that goal. If you have like an easier or like a semi good goal, big goal, you might just do the basic actions to get you to X goal. But yeah, I want you to unpack like how you are thinking of breaking this down. I know you come from the mindset of marketing and sales working well together, having a good system. So how do you impact this for us?

4:42Kyle Coleman:Yeah. Yeah. So with respect to the company level goal and what Gaurav, our COO, talks about is this billion dollar number, as we just said. My goal that he gave to me, the number that's on my back, Daniel, is, and he's very clear about this. And I think he's right to be clear about it. He's like, I don't want you to just come in. And the same thing that was already is going, was going to happen at the company is what happens. Like you need to provide incremental value, which is to say value on top of what would have happened without you. And the number is a hundred million dollars. I need to create a hundred million dollars of incremental pipeline this year.

5:22Kyle Coleman:So what am I doing? Like there's a million things that I could do to try and get to that a hundred million dollar number. and I'm happy to talk through a handful of them, but I'll pause there. Any questions or comments about that? No, no, no. I love the thought process. I mean, I think a lot of market, I like how he thinks like that because a lot of marketing departments, you just add, if you add someone, you might just be like, in a year, we went to X amount, but like you don't really know like the impact of that person to your team, especially a leader to your team trying to create an X goal.

5:55So I like that. I need to create an incremental amount that ClickUp probably is going to grow X amount this year without you. So what are you doing to unpack that? So we should talk about like, let's, let's get into like how you think about creating that a hundred million dollars.

6:10Kyle Coleman:Yeah. Yeah. So there is not, I don't have it line itemed out yet where I could put like, this, this line item is going to be worth 15 million and this one's going to be worth five. I don't have that yet. I will get to that level of specificity at some point, but the way I think about my charter, the way I think about the goal of this demand team that we've put together is we're responsible for leading the market externally with thought leadership. And we're responsible for leading the company internally with the way we think about ourselves, the way we talk about ourselves, the way we present ourselves.

6:40Kyle Coleman:What is our narrative? What is our point of view? These things are really, really important. We can't go and create all this pipeline, all this revenue, if we're not true industry leaders, true thought leaders. So that dovetails into part two of our mission statement, which is creating and capturing as much demand as possible. We need to create as much awareness as we can so that when the SDR calls that person, they're familiar with ClickUp. When the AE is on that call, the prospect has an understanding of what we do. We need to create and capture as much demand as possible, which segues into part three of our mission statement, which is designing and winning the category.

7:14Kyle Coleman:We need to think differently about what this category is that we're in. The existing category is not sufficient, Daniel. Like the existing category is called collaborative work management. That's the old way of thinking about how work gets done. Software is converging. AI has unbelievable capabilities. Many of that, all of those products and capabilities are baked into ClickUp's platform already. And we need to market to be aware of this new category. So all of these parts of the mission statement are acting in unison. and it's by unpacking each of them, this is our path to$100 million in incremental revenue.

7:48Kyle Coleman:So before I get into, I know I'm like dodging your question, answering with specificity, but I think it's really important that marketing teams have these higher level missions and make sure that they are a leadership function inside of their company. Otherwise, you're going to be a ticket-taking company. Otherwise, you're going to be a support mechanism for the sales team. That's not what we are. We are a leadership function for the market, for the company. We're generating as much pipeline as possible and we're winning the category. And that is the service that we provide to the company. And I don't think you dodged it.

8:20I think we're going down level by level. So like the high level goal, billion. The next goal, I need to get a hundred million of that this year because that's the incremental value. how I'm going to do that. I need to make sure we win this category where we have thought leadership internally and externally. We need to redefine this category. I mean, also the point you made with, I see this problem all the time with sales teams. One sales rep has one market. Another sales rep has this market. This market has 80 % brand awareness, this market has 20 % brand awareness, this rep is crushing it, that rep's not crushing it.

9:08And they think it's because of that. And it's like, actually, no, we might need to move some marketing efforts so we can get brand awareness in these markets as well. So to help those reps out, it's not always a rep problem. It could be that there's no awareness in those markets. And I see that all the time too. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, okay, let's, we'll break the next goals down step by step. So I know you're one of your favorite ones. We'll go to your favorite one first is like winning the, winning a category. You've been talking about this all the time. So how did, how, how do you think about winning category?

9:46Like what does it mean to win a category?

9:49Kyle Coleman:Yeah. For me, it means architecting the future that our customers need to live in. We need to have a point of view that brings to life the current state of the problems that our customers are having and architects the future for what success looks like when you solve these problems. To the extent that we can bring this vision to life, now we have this from to journey. We have this value journey that we can take our customers on. The crisper and clearer we are about this point of view, the more our customers trust us that we understand their universe, the more they're willing to invest in us as partners with them to solve this and help them realize this promised land.

10:30Kyle Coleman:So one of the first things that I've been working on here, Daniel, is we need to be really crisp about the problem that we solve. If you look across our space, collaborative work management, again, is the name of the category, the existing category, a lot of it is around productivity. A lot of it is around efficiency. A lot of it is around time savings. And those are all very useful things, of course, but it's not visceral. There's no emotion in any of those problems. Now, Daniel, if I go to you and I say, hey, your team could be 20 % more efficient, is that going to get you to leap out of bed?

11:01Kyle Coleman:Probably not. And so what is a different way that we could frame the problem? And what is a different way that we could present that problem to our customers to get them interested in our point of view, to get them interested in our product. And that's one of the first things that we're starting to do. So how do you do this? It's not an easy thing. Right now, we designed a field survey where we asked our 800 customer-facing people that exist at ClickUp. We asked them, what are the problems that we solve for practitioners? What are the problems that we solve for executives, practitioners and executives?

11:36Kyle Coleman:We want two different levels because they're very different altitudes. And then the follow-on questions are, what are the impacts of solving those problems? And we got really unique insights from the hundreds of people internally that contributed to the survey. So that's part one, ask as many people internally as you can. Part two, I would, right before we started recording this, I was on with one of our best customers and I was asking him the exact same questions. What were the problems before ClickUp? How did you communicate those problems to your executives? What's been the impact now of your multi-year engagement with ClickUp?

12:06Kyle Coleman:What have we actually made happen for you. And just really try and understand from the field's mouths and from customers' mouths, what is the problem that you solve? And then the marketing spin on that is the language that you put around it. How can we make it more emotional? How can we create language that we can own? And if we own that language, now we're checking the box of leading the market externally. We're checking the box of leading the company internally with visceral emotional language that we can craft a story around. And so this is, I think, the tip of the spear when I think about how am I going to hit my$100 million pipeline number?

12:41Kyle Coleman:I need to be different than any of the competitors in the space. I need to think differently about the problems that we solve in the future that we're architecting. And I need to take that to market really, really sharply internally across our company, but also externally. Yeah. I mean, like just even me thinking about ClickUp as a company, um i know click up like because i see click up everywhere um i also see some of the competitors a lot too i kind of know what both of you two do but i if you ask me right now like what does the five people do differently or what they solve differently i probably couldn't give you a succinct answer um like i could be like i should maybe try all three of them and see which one works better for my company today.

13:27But I might go with ClickUp more because I ClickUp is out marketing people like these people.

13:35Kyle Coleman:And that's the interesting thing about it. And it's something of a counterintuitive thing for many marketers. It's definitely a counterintuitive thing for many product leaders and many product-led CEOs is many people think that marketing your solution is an effective way of marketing features, functions, capabilities. And of course, to a certain extent, you need to do that. I believe, and I learned a lot of this from Christopher Lockhead, who authored Play Bigger, and he has a sub stack called Category Pirates, that a more effective way of marketing is actually marketing the problem that you solve, evangelizing the problem that you solve, because that gives you authenticity, and it gives you credibility.

14:13Kyle Coleman:And if you're loud, and if you understand the problem that your customers are having well enough, and you communicate it crisply enough, they will assume that your solution solves that problem. You don't have to be as on the nose about this actual solution and all the bips and bots and features and functions. And so that's what I really want to try and do. And right now, as you look across our space, nobody in our space is communicating really clearly about this problem. So it's a huge opportunity for us to come in and be thought leaders and show up differently against the rest of the competitive set.

14:46Kyle Coleman:And that's something I really want to focus on one thing i want to get a picture into so okay the the category problem you're gonna attack and that's a messaging thing that's a like how you're like gonna change the language on landing pages on ads on the way you pitch text all that stuff part of the things that makes click up so unique too is like there's a plg motion there's also like a sales let motion and you've been in both arenas of plg and sales that how do you think about those like like what needs to improve in those motions to like get that incremental that because there's a lot of things that especially when you're that side you tweak a one part of the cycle three to four percent that's that's millions and millions of dollars so how do you think about like tweaking the the processes for like PLG and just like actual, like bigger sales deals?

15:50Kyle Coleman:Yeah, it's a great question, Daniel. Generally speaking, and this is not true a hundred times out of a hundred, but generally speaking, the PLG motion, the self-serve motion is gonna be a better fit for smaller accounts, down market accounts. Normally there are companies that are, you know, between under 25 employees, let's say under 50 employees. When you are, when we are selling to larger companies, upmarket companies, 1 ,000, 5 ,000, 10 ,000 employees, that's normally a guided sale. And they're very different audiences. The mom and pop shop, super important customers of ours. We have thousands, tens of thousands of these mom and pop shops who are customers and they're extremely valuable customers of ours.

16:28Kyle Coleman:And we take their feedback very seriously. What they need is not necessarily exactly the same as what the 10 ,000 person enterprise company needs, but there is overlap. They're not totally distinct either. They're trying to manage projects. They're trying to execute projects. They're trying to grow their companies. They're trying to do things from a strategic level that are more or less the same. And therefore, top line messaging can often be more similar than different between these two very different audiences. However, the velocity at which we get to the feature level messaging has to be much faster in the down market segment because they care more about the features and the capabilities.

17:04Kyle Coleman:That's what they're really investigating versus an enterprise sales-led deployment where we're controlling more of a narrative. We're controlling the narrative in a more complex ecosystem that has more competing apps, that has more tools, that has more data, that has more stakeholders. And so we can use a lot of the same messaging. It's a matter of emphasis and it's a matter of speed at which we get to that. Okay. So what does your product actually do? And we need to do that a lot faster in the PLG motion that we'd have to do in the sales motion. Which makes total sense because one stake, probably one buyer with a credit card, at plg where like big enterprise multiple stakeholders have a procurement care about security care about these big problems that you don't even need to think about when you're marketing to a small mom and pop care about integrations care about all these things that you don't really care about so i'm going to talk about like the non-plg because you also you came from the sales background.

18:11So I want to talk about what are some like things that you're seeing right now or planning on changing, um, and at, at the size of the company you are on to make the sales team more efficient that you're getting into, um, bigger accounts that you're winning these deals more effectively, all those things.

18:30Kyle Coleman:Yeah. One of the, the main thing, and this is probably the thing I've been able to do most immediately because I'm very passionate about it, and I have a lot of experience having done this in the past, is we, ClickUp, have an unbelievably horizontal platform. If you want to do something on our platform, you can probably bend the platform to your will and do that. And that's very useful, of course, and that's why we have such a large PLG motion. However, saying that you're everything to everybody is not always the best marketing strategy because everything to everybody is often nothing to nobody.

19:03Kyle Coleman:And so the first thing that we've been doing is we've been quote unquote productizing the platform. What are the top 10 use cases that exist for ClickUp? Many of them are across marketing teams, the way you execute campaigns, the way you do creative production, the way you run your field events, those types of things. And then of course there's OKRs, corporate initiatives, there's general project management, there's product launches and engineering, there's top 10 use cases, right? So we're productizing the platform and then we're creating all of the relevant bills of materials for each of those use cases, pitch decks, demo videos, demo flows, one pagers, thought leadership content, how to oriented blog content, social content, yada, yada, the build materials is very long.

19:47Kyle Coleman:And then we can architect real demand gen campaigns around each of these use cases. So the first of our campaigns we're doing, it's launching at the end of May around our first use case. And we're showing the company that if we organize the product around these use packaged use cases, we're going to be able to create a type of demand that's going to be more predictable for the sales team to have 10, 20 opportunities that are on the same theme versus bouncing across a bunch of different themes because our platform is so extensible. So we're creating unified demand. And the other useful component of this, Daniel, is we're able to integrate AI into these use cases that lends itself to a different type of pricing model.

20:31Kyle Coleman:So the PLG to SLG motion is very useful that we have internally, but many of our sales-led opportunities are anchored to PPU, price per user packaging or pricing, because they come from the PLG universe. Now with this more packaged use case approach that incorporates AI, we can start using AI as a pricing lever on top of the price per user. How many customized agents are you creating using ClickUp? What does your AI credit consumption look like? Are you using us for connected search the way that you might use Glean? How much AI usage are you going to have and how can that serve as a really useful lever inside of these opportunities that we're generating?

21:09Kyle Coleman:So the average deal size, we should start to see go up pretty significantly. The value that we're creating, we should start to see go up pretty significantly. And that's the first thing that we've really been focused on is what are the most popular their use cases and how can we create more of a prescriptive value journey for our customers that show them start here, go here, because that's what customers really want and need. And that'll really help us increase the demand or the value capture that we get from these appointments. This hurts to say, but a lot of marketing ops are built on top of accidental processes.

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24:03Kyle Coleman:That's a great question, Daniel. So let's go back. What we've talked about, we've talked about top line narrative definition and problem identification. And then we've talked about kind of the click down from there, which is the use cases that your platform actually makes possible. And so the hierarchy here, as we think about this is when we define the big problem that we solve, now the next thing we need to do is we need to take that problem and we need to extend it into the use case that we bring to life. There should be complete unity and cascading of the messaging from the top line to the next level down.

24:34Kyle Coleman:And so we want to make sure that when we're presenting the big problem that we solve, it still is about we can take down all of these various use cases. But most people, Mr. and Mrs. Demand Gen Marketer, are interested in how they execute campaigns using ClickUp. And here's how we do it, and here's how we eliminate that pain. And so a lot of it is making sure that there's a message resonance from one level to the other. And then there's audience segmentation. So this is all about promotion. And we're very sharp about who are we promoting this campaign execution use case? Who are we promoting it to?