In this GTM Advice episode, Kate VanLue, VP of Revenue at AudiencePlus, answers a fast round of questions and shares her go-to-market advice with you. 

Stephanie Cox: What is your biggest go-to-market challenge that exists today, and how would you tackle it?

Kate VanLue: Yeah, I think it's just like the noise that we're all facing. Everybody's trying to get attention from the same buyers in the same ecosystem today, especially if you're an enterprise SaaS, it's noisier than ever. AI has provided a lens or a means for people to send more email than ever. So I think it's like trying to figure out where there's space for you and how to have like a unique brand voice and build relationships in the right way in order to stand out and be different from everybody else.

Stephanie Cox: Where would you focus your efforts if you had limited resources and had to drive immediate results?

Kate VanLue: I’m good at this one. I would say, relentless, like ICP profile focus, like know who your people are and don't deviate from that, and know why too, what makes that true for someone. And then I think, you know, whether that's like target lists or like whatever it is, like focus on your strengths, focus on then what helps people form a relationship. Like for us, we do a lot of content collaboration as a starting point for our relationship with prospects or with future customers. Or like, you know, field events, dinners, things like that get very, very focused on who your people are. And then like tailor your process and your leadership and everything else around that profile of individual.

Stephanie Cox: How do you ensure there is alignment across all go-to-market functional areas (i.e. sales, marketing, product, and CX)?

Kate VanLue: Like relentless communication. Our Slack is incredibly noisy, even with like what few people there are on our team. It's just like constant communication. Also, we use EOS for our like operating framework, which means that every quarter we figure out what our like collective business goals are that affect our bottom line ultimately and our growth. And then every person on the team is responsible for creating rocks or goals that support the team and the company goals. So in that way, we've all like pre-aligned on what we're measuring on a weekly basis with a scorecard and like how is everybody measuring to that goal that we've already determined supports our company goals. So it's like a bit of an upfront alignment, continuous checking in on that. And then also just like, lots of day-to-day communication with each other.

Stephanie Cox: What is the one dirty little secret in go to market that nobody talks about, but everyone needs to know?

Kate VanLue: I have like a real bone to pick with intent data right now. It is like my latest thing. I think, specifically like the battle between marketing and sales, with it a little bit, and then the solutions that support it. And I wish we could pull, I wish we could go back in time because I myself have had bad experiences and sales, like salespeople hate it. Like we don't like it. And it's because we've been trained that it's like actually not really intent. It's like, some kind of scrape signal that may or may not even be accurate. It's like not. I know that marketing thinks they have to provide lists to sales. We don't even want lists in a perfect world. I just want everybody to have heard of our brand and want to know what we do, and think we're really cool and think our content's great and you're maybe a little funny and whatever. And I know that's like easy for me to say. 

Give us true intent, even if it's less involved, less volume, less quantity. Someone that read our blog,  listened to our podcast. Like there are infinite ways now to measure someone who is in market or getting closer to being in market. There are so many businesses that are still using crappy data. They don't have to do that anymore. Give your sales team the right type of leads, I'm going to say to go after. Data points to use.

And then also by the way, like, I don't know why suddenly, I don't know. It's all tied up in marketing attribution and this whole thing. And I don't want to like make a bunch of enemies, but like the number of sales calls I have with marketers who tell me their sales teams don't have any compensation about booking their own meetings and are relying entirely on these lists from marketing and marketing intent. No wonder there's shitty alignment.

Like, you know, AEs, get on the phone or get maybe an email or DM or whatever it is, book your own meetings. They close better anyway. At least half of them or 25 percent, like something. And then also marketing, like focus on quality instead of quantity, find better intent data for your salespeople. Like this third party, like scrape data isn’t cutting it. And it just makes us mad.

Stephanie Cox: What do you think is the biggest misconception about having a career in go-to-market?

Kate VanLue: I think there's like, I don't know. I think the misconception still is like what it is and who owns it…maybe a little bit. Maybe this is colored by some, like also like chatter lately that I've seen, but I think like ultimately, the act of delivering your product to your customers has to have a focused owner. And although I own revenue for a team, there are a lot of different components of execution between the top of the funnel and getting someone to renew happily year over year. And someone really has to own that. And so there are times when I really feel like go-to-market is my Job because I own pricing and packaging and I own our sales story and our narrative and I'm doing all these things. The reality is that like without our CEO as kind of the conductor of all of that. The execution falls apart pretty, pretty quickly because it really does span everything from what you do in your product to how you bring people in funnel to how you get them to renew everything in between there.

Stephanie Cox: What is the one skill that go-to-market professionals need to have mastered to be successful?

Kate VanLue: I think you have to be able to perform experimentation that is backed by data. So I think being able to like read and tell a data story in a leadership role, let's say maybe, but even like, you know, as an AE you gotta know your business. If you don't have access to that data, find out there are great resources, no matter what CRM or whatever tools you're using to help you report, build, like do things that help you understand better. But you, you know, think like experimentation is the important thing, but you have to experiment in a way that tells you whether or not it's working and when to like move on, and not just check boxes, for the sake of doing it. So the data aspect of it is extremely important.

Stephanie Cox: What is the one thing you wish you knew sooner?

Kate VanLue: It just never gets easier. It changes. It changes. The difficulty just shifts. But there's never, especially today when like innovation is happening so quickly, that if you don't constantly evaluate whether you're doing something right, whether your product is still innovative, whether your sales process is innovative. Your collaboration with your customers, like all of the above, your website, I mean, every, you know, just as soon as you've settled, you have to shake things up again, or you have to be like mindful of maybe the need to do that. Like there's never any, any rest because of how quickly we're all moving. So you, you know, you achieve one goal and then there's one right around. And things get hard all over again.

Stephanie Cox: What is the one piece of advice you would give someone looking to grow their career in go-to-market?

Kate VanLue: I would say, it's kind of goes back to like my cold calling, comment earlier. But if anybody wants to have a career in sales or marketing or like as a CEO, that's a business user, right? That maybe doesn't come from like a product background or an engineering background is to be an SDR first. Even if you're not, and you've not done it before, like take a minute, figure out what they're doing, like side by side shadow. I used to make like, and I, I didn't always win friends doing this, but when I was at a bigger organization at one point, I put into place where like one of the requirements of onboarding for anybody in the company during their first week was to sit side by side and shadow an SDR. Um, because unless you understand like what it takes to get somebody interested in the first place. It makes it hard, I think, to understand your place in the execution of it all a little bit. But also it's just the best possible skill set that you can have and learn, I think, as you get into maybe a marketing or sales career.