Marketers of Technology
00:03:17 · Ralf Paschen
And at this time, product marketing was not the typical product marketing people that just creating white bearers and data sheets and all that. I was really starting with messaging positioning. Who is my target persona? What's their pain? What are we solving? And what she faced is something everybody still faces in or faces exactly right now in all the startups out there is what is my messaging? What is my positioning? What are we solving? What's the pain? Why now? All these kinds of pieces happened years ago when I started this whole team. And we built a complete marketing team, brought a marketing team around this, and we made several times category leaders, being several times a Gartner force leaders because of that and so on and so forth. It was a start of career being a product marketer, being a VP product marketing, moved into roles at CMO then, next up CMO, which is not archival for product marketing person because he understands messaging positioning. The rest is you understand it over time and become CMO. Then I... The company grew bigger and bigger, got exit. We sold a company to... For $650,000,000, a start up out of Austria, to a company called CA, which was based in New York. And one and a half years later, we got acquired by Broadcom. So big company. So let's say this kind of whale eats small fish. Okay. Not small fish for $6.50, but eating a fish, it comes to whale and it comes to bigger whale. And then you get it in the end of the game and just get thinking of them out, I'm really born for a corporate because corporate means something different, okay? A corporate means you work with more and more and more people and get everybody aligned. It's like getting a supertanger 10 miles away from coast to the left. Okay. So it takes a while. This is a difference in startups. So I consider big on startups, started in startups again, London based, Israel based company, helped them from scratch, from zero, get the marketing up, get the messaging, positioning, everything back on track and then get into execution. So not only you typically doing the positioning messaging, like everybody else is calling it right now, the days is everybody calls themselves go to market, go to market engineer, go to market something, go to market whatever, pick and choose, go to market mouse, whatever. Everybody calls them go to market. The meaning of go to market strategy.
00:05:32 · Ralf Paschen, Andres Figuera
Define the strategy from the top and be able to execute it, not just waiting for ChatGPT tell you what to do. You need to understand how to execute. So this is the difference, and that is the foundation of GTM Consult. After all this corporate and after all these things, do this as a really a as a go to market adviser for CEOs or COO's, not for a VP of sales, not for anybody below, because you need to do this from a strategy perspective. Because my perspective, go to market is owned by the CEO, nobody else. And that's the point. And nowadays days, everybody calls a go to market, which is fine. I take it. So... But the point is about how do you execute. You can not... You can... Say it this way. You can build a plan on ChatGPT and Claude easy. I would say you can. If you have the right skills and get downloaded, all good. You can plan it, but you cannot execute it. And that's the difference, like plan a rooftop. You cannot execute a rooftop, right? You can plan it. Same thing. [00:06:27] S1: I get that. And Ralf, one question. How long ago did you found GTM Consult? [00:06:32] S0: So GTM Consult was a sidekick for a while, because I helped people when I was together with companies which I'm allowed to from a contract perspective. Four years ago, I started full time last year June, last year July, with full engagements, fractionals, everything. I do everything from left, right, top down, workshops, everything. But I also do fractional, I do project based, all of it.
00:06:32 · Ralf Paschen, Andres Figuera
[00:06:32] S0: So GTM Consult was a sidekick for a while, because I helped people when I was together with companies which I'm allowed to from a contract perspective. Four years ago, I started full time last year June, last year July, with full engagements, fractionals, everything. I do everything from left, right, top down, workshops, everything. But I also do fractional, I do project based, all of it. [00:06:55] S1: Oh okay, understood. And do you have like an industry that you specialize in or the customers that you work with or the companies that you work with, do they have a certain pattern or anything that I do. Makes them similar?
00:07:07 · Ralf Paschen
[00:07:07] S0: I do typically IT operations, IT automation, DevOps, workplace management, which is my sweet spot because I know the competition there. I know the whole market there. I know everything there. IT automation is really the case for it. But I do this for all others as well, because the messaging position is all the same. It's just the structure, get the structure in place, understand your target persona, what's the problem, solution. And that, for example, also in ServiceNow, I experienced a bill in two years as a CMO from scratch. They were a full marketing up, 6% public contribution to sales with an area I had no clue with... A clue about what ServiceNow, because I come from SAP. I build over ServiceNow, I build over ServiceNow, build the partnerships, build those partnerships with ServiceNow, build the engagements, the stores, everything. So the mechanics are always the same, but it takes a little bit more, one or two months to understand what is exactly what you're solving, because that's what I do first thirty days, understand really what are you trying to solve, guys? And there are different companies in different stages. That's the reason why I define 3,000,000 ARR to 75, not bigger, because then we are talking about corporate again. I can help corporate as well, sure, but they are slower. They're like a supertanker, takes time. And what I say is that if you're interested and hungry enough to build a go to market which scales, that's something which I'm interested in. Just see you say, just try it out, I'm not interested. You're hungry enough to change because when I come in, it's like a storm. Because I look at everything. I look at absolutely every piece because I understand execution and I understand excuses very, very well. I know where to look for. I know what to look looking for the sales of what I'm telling people. Can you look for that I can replace my head of marketing? That's not what I'm doing. I look for that I can help the head of marketing to be great. That's what I'm looking for. Okay. You people you have get better and greater because maybe they have a lack of getting dimensions behind them to get going. This is often the case because the... You know, marketing is a cost center. Just... You cost me money. So you get the most pressure. That's all it is. And that's what I typically approach in here.
00:09:17 · Ralf Paschen, Andres Figuera
Looking at the challenges, looking at the problems, and how much supportive a CEO really is to his team and to his company. [00:09:24] S1: That's amazing, man. And Ralf, do you have certain regions that you work with? Do you work globally with every single company that reaches out and looks for your assistance. How does that look like for you?
00:09:34 · Ralf Paschen
[00:09:34] S0: I give up Asia Pacific. I'm not doing Asia Pacific. I cannot help with that. That's not my that's not my gameplay. It's a total different play. What I typically do is help companies to scale from the German market or from the German speaking market into The US market because I know the playbook of The US market, but also the other way around. Because US market to the German market, everybody believes they can utilize The US playbook, it doesn't work. And I can explain the reason for it because most people missed it out. Maybe they get something out of this studio today of podcast, which is everybody kind of know it, but nobody follows it because they all try to go to London first. And London is like, let's say UK is like US kind of a little bit. Now they're trying it go into the German market which is a big market. All the brands is a big market. Okay. And now they try the same. We sell features. We are doing the cowboy shooting. We're doing everything. Let's bomb. We're doing the full presentation. We're doing a harbor tour of our products. We're doing everything. This is happening. This is happening as of today. And I can tell you, this is not working because there's not one person in Germany who makes a decision. Not one person. There's always a seat of people making the decision. It's called in the Gramium or in a in a, you know, in a kind of roundtables. They all make the decision. I guarantee you, in this room there's no vendor, absolutely no vendor allowed. So if you want to get a fast decision, let's say a 2 k, 20 k deal, yeah, of works. If you go higher in enterprise sales, talking about 100, one hundred and fifty, two hundred k deal, definitely happened. Okay. So that's the point you're running into. That's the point you're running into. And then you have another person which is called procurement. You have another person which is called legal, which can overrule anybody before, including the CEO, by the way. Okay. So to understand that market here, you need to understand how to play that book. It's a trusted advisor approach here in sales. You need to know somebody who knows somebody to help you to get on the game. In The US, you can call call someone. Here call calling, you get fired up on this call call. Okay? So you have to be prepared to do call call.