In this conversation, Jason Niedle speaks with Dave Boyce about the transformative impact of AI on sales and marketing. They explore the freemium model, the importance of empathy and metrics in customer engagement, and the need for businesses to adapt to the AI revolution. Dave shares insights on building human-robot hybrid teams and the necessity of architecting growth strategies to leverage AI effectively. The discussion emphasizes the importance of understanding customer journeys and the metrics that drive success in a rapidly changing landscape.
Takeaways
- AI is revolutionizing sales and marketing processes.
- The bow tie model emphasizes the entire customer journey.
- Advisory services are crucial for growth in SaaS companies.
- Freemium models allow users to experience products before commitment.
- Empathy and generosity are key principles in customer engagement.
- Metrics should focus on usage retention rather than immediate revenue.
- AI can enhance human capabilities in marketing and sales.
- Building hybrid teams of humans and AI is essential for future success.
- Architecting growth strategies is necessary to leverage AI effectively.
- Understanding customer journeys is critical for successful engagement.
Sound Bites
“AI will make it easier for buyers.”
“We are in a revolution.”
“We need to architect our growth.”
BeyondSaaS Transcript
Jason Niedle (00:00)
Today we’re talking with Dave Boyce, executive chairperson and EVP of Product of Winning by Design about how AI is automating sales and marketing.
Welcome to Beyond SaaS. I’m Jason Niedle, founder of Tethos. We’ve taken what we’ve learned from amazing leaders and put that into our hyper growth playbook,
at tethos.com/podcast. Today I’m really excited to chat with Dave. As I mentioned, he’s the executive chair of Winning by Design, and they’re a global growth advisory and research firm that help recurring revenue teams, like you SaaS leaders out there, architect sustainable growth. They work with SaaS companies to architect a pipeline that covers awareness, education, selection, mutual commit, and on through onboarding, retention, and expansion.
And they do this through self-guided solutions and advisory services and consulting and training. I’ve checked out their website and it kind of blows my mind. You have a lot of amazing content and I’m going to dig deeper after this because it looks fantastic. Dave is a seasoned entrepreneur and product strategist. He has sold five SaaS companies, including exits to Oracle and Amazon, as well as many years on the board of Forrester Research.
And I like that you are highly focused on aligning product development with go-to-market strategies. And in fact, I’m kind of excited to hear about your upcoming book, Freemium, because I think we can all learn something from that. And that’s scheduled for release in late August 2025. So welcome, Dave.
Dave Boyce (01:23)
Jason, wow, what an intro. Let’s do that. But yeah, aligning product strategy and go to market is definitely a core passion.
Jason Niedle (01:25)
you
Cool. So we’re going to definitely get to that. Before I forget, you have a quick tip for our listeners on anything fun or great or educational.
Dave Boyce (01:38)
Well, you know, the book that I recommend to people, I know this is boring, but I’m a nerd. The book that I recommend to people is a book called, Competing with Luck. It is not Clayton Christensen’s most famous book, that would probably be The Innovator’s Dilemma, but Competing with Luck is a really good book to get you at the kind of core essence of empathy that’s at the center of getting a go-to-market strategy right.
Jason Niedle (02:00)
I’m going to look that up. I haven’t heard of that one, so I’m there. So I did my attempted overview of Winning by Design, but let’s hear it from you.
Dave Boyce (02:07)
Dang, it was pretty good. It was pretty good, Jason. And when you went through those kind of phases, awareness, education, selection, onboarding, retention, expansion, that’s all built into what we call a bow tie, traditional funnel, tipped on its side, awareness, education, selection, right? So now I’m getting all the way down to, and commit is the knot of the bow tie. But that’s where kind of the
customer journey begins, not where it ends. Many of us who grew up pre-SaaS would have said, okay, great, there’s your funnel, it ends at commit. No, that’s not it. Right, you’re done. Never confuse implementation with sales. No, actually, we actually have a whole journey like the onboarding, retention and expansion, like all of that impact achievement, it happens
Jason Niedle (02:39)
I got the signatures, screw them.
Dave Boyce (02:55)
what we call the right side of the bowtie. And it should expand out if we’re actually retaining and expanding correctly. We should have a net revenue retention of north of 100%, which means we actually get bigger as we proceed with that customer and deliver recurring impact. So for Winning by Design, that’s a core principle. We have other core things around kind of.
Jason Niedle (03:11)
Interesting.
Dave Boyce (03:16)
We have core methodologies, frameworks, blueprints, and we use all of that to try to normalize the way that you operate your business. And we want to make it kind of interoperable with other service providers and software providers who also have adopted the same frameworks. So you waste way less time kind of in translation, and you could spend that time and energy on innovation.
Jason Niedle (03:35)
So I was looking at a site and help me like consolidate it all down. I saw great courses, saw certification programs, I saw consulting, I saw this wide range of things, but how do you boil it down? What’s the, if there is one, what’s the main bucket?
Dave Boyce (03:49)
The easiest way to think about it would be advisory. And for those of us that have been in the SaaS world for a while, and Jason, I’m assuming that’s true about both of us, we’ll all remember Serious Decisions. Serious Decisions was purchased by Forrester. And as you mentioned, I was on the board of Forrester when that purchase went through. I’ve been off the board of Forrester for one week. One week. I was on the board for eight years.
Serious Decisions was a great kind of partner for building your business. They defined the demand waterfall. You had great frameworks. You had great advisory. You could meet with your advisor, you know, as often as you wanted to help you kind of build out. And for them, it really was just the left side of the bow tie. So when Forrester bought Serious, they went up market. They’re now serving bigger clients. We serve clients in that kind of growth stage, kind of $20M to $500 million. And we’re stepping into the void that
serious decisions left. we’re building, it’s an advisory service. First and foremost, Jason, can it include training? Yes. Can it include consulting? Yes. Can it pull in kind of education? Yes. But your core kind of river guide is as an advisory service that helps you get from here to where you’re trying to go.
Jason Niedle (04:52)
Very cool. And tell me a little of the journey. How did you end up there?
Dave Boyce (04:55)
So I, you know, when we sold Inside Sales to Aurea about four years ago, I just decided, you know what, I’m going to take a beat. I’m going to figure out like what I want to do next. And one of the core observations I had made over the course of building those companies that you mentioned and selling them is that the world is steering into self-service. Like buyers are learning about the companies themselves. They’re trying things themselves.
I had built a freemium company in the past, a product-led growth company in the past, and so I just said, you know what, I think that’s where the world’s going. I think it’s an irreversible trend and I want to get smart about it. So I took about six months, Jason, to just go deep. And that’s when I committed to writing this book. That’s when I started teaching PLG in the MBA program at BYU. And that’s when I called Jaco, who’s the founder of Winning by Design, and I’m like, what are you doing about product-led growth? And he was like, why do you ask? And I’m like…
because I think the future of software belongs to it. And he’s like, OK, we see the same thing. We don’t know the timing. But do you want to come figure it out with us? And I’m like, yeah, totally. That sounds amazing. So that’s how I intersected with Winning by Design. I’ve been with Winning by Design for four years, building out PLG practice, now the AI practice, and also on the board.
Jason Niedle (06:09)
Very cool. And obviously the AI stuff we’ll get to because it’s just revolutionary in every which way in our industry. And I can’t wait to get to that part of the discussion.
The freemium model is so interesting to me. I’ve thought about it in many different ways, shapes and forms, but you have someone who shows up who’s already qualified to use your product, they’re already interested in your product. You obviously have to drive the funnel to get them there. But tell me more, this is your specialty, you’re teaching the first course ever, I think at BYU on the topic. Give us a little deeper insight into this.
Dave Boyce (06:37)
Yeah, first course ever in the world and we’re doing it at BYU, like at least MBA level course. Freemium is a really easy way to kind of get your head around it, but it really boils down to kind of self-service. Like, I’m a consumer or I’m a B2B purchaser, and I bring some of my expectations from my consumer life into my business life. Like, why are you gating information? Why are you gating the product? Why are you gating my ability to kind of learn more and get hands on?
And it turns out that we’re not. We’re pulling those gates down. We’re inviting people in and experiencing impact from the product before I have to make a commitment is a core tenet of this strategy. So, you think about, probably all the products that we use to get ready for this podcast. You know, you probably never talk to a salesperson about any of those, not about Google Docs, not about your Gmail, not about Riverside Studio
that was all kind of try before you buy, come in, self-serve your way in. Maybe you had to make a commitment before you could start using Riverside, but you didn’t have to talk to a salesperson or get onboarded. The product did all that work for you, and I believe that’s where the future’s going. And I think AI will actually make it even easier for me as a buyer to self-serve my way towards success with products that I go out and discover and learn about.
Jason Niedle (07:49)
So you’re working with companies that are doing 20 million and up and it’s not a $40 seat that they’re often selling. I imagine you don’t want to look at somebody unless it’s a 30K and up purchase, right? A 50K purchase. Does that work with Freemium Model and how?
Dave Boyce (08:02)
Yes, it’s a great question. Many of the companies we work with started by doing PLG and then they needed to add an enterprise motion. So think about GitLab, Asana, Calendly, DocuSign, Dropbox. These are all customers of Winning by Design. They started with a freemium model or a PLG model and now they needed to add kind of a structured and architected sales assist or maybe even a sales first
motion. But other companies started with a sales led motion. And then they realize that their industry is going towards self service, they may have a competitor nipping at their heels, or even a competitor that’s not nipping at their heels, but that’s getting PLG right. Now, like, you know what, we don’t want to wait around for that to disrupt us. Like zoom did to WebEx or go to meeting, like we don’t want to wait for us to get zoomed.
Jason Niedle (08:49)
Mm.
Dave Boyce (08:51)
We’re going to actually go disrupt ourselves and we’re going to build a self-service motion in. We do work on all aspects of that, Jason, but a multi-GTM, usually by the time you get up closer to a hundred million dollars, you have multiple GTM motions going. One might be self-service, one might be a sales assist, one might be enterprise first, and each of those has to be built, architected and managed in a very specific way.
Jason Niedle (09:17)
Cool. So I’d love to rope this all back to you personally. The cobbler shoes is always kind of the hard question. Like, how are you doing these things for yourself? How do you see it for you?
Dave Boyce (09:27)
Well, first of all, putting a book out called Freemium, you can’t gate it, right? So I’m giving that book away for free. It’s on a website called productledgtm.com. And one chapter at a time, I think I’m on chapter 14. All the chapters will be out there by the time it’s available to, or by the time it ships. So it’s a freemium kind of release model. Of course I have to do that. I would be a hypocrite if I didn’t.
And then Winning by Design, you mentioned there’s a lot of free content out there. And I will admit, Jason, and here this is the cobbler shoes, it’s more free than freemium. Because there was an ethos when Jaco founded the company that he just wants to make a dent on the industry, he wants to contribute to the industry. And so putting content out there, he figured it would come back to him via karma.
Jason Niedle (10:01)
Mmm.
Dave Boyce (10:16)
Great, amazing. So nothing gated, lots of stuff out on YouTube, lots of videos and courses and frameworks, and then you put it all into a book, which you can buy for hundred bucks, you can basically get all the IP in a book. Okay, great. And then we’ll advise on top of that. We are building in some of the connective tissue now, so we’ll bring you on a journey on your own, and then at a certain point, we’ll make it evident when you should call in an advisor, and at your option, you can upgrade to the premium piece of
But initially it wasn’t all stitched together, it was just free.
Jason Niedle (10:45)
And some people might not call it karma. They might call it branding and trust and thought leadership. right. So all those things have their path that will come back. I love that. Our average product here over a year is maybe a hundred grand or something like that. 50, a hundred grand. How would it work in, in a marketing and branding business? How would it work in a service-based business? When you look at this flow line of
Dave Boyce (10:49)
Yeah, right.
Jason Niedle (11:06)
How do I develop a proper GTM that’s based on the freemium strategy for something that traditionally hasn’t been?
Dave Boyce (11:10)
So I believe in that business, it might indeed start with content. Like you may have some intellectual property that’s typically been at the core of your service delivery or consulting offering or service delivery offering that you would then want to free up and put on the front side of a paywall and just start to build engagement. Now, the core principles of any good product-led growth
strategy one is empathy. We talked about that at the top You really got to understand the end user and what she’s trying to is generosity like that’s what you’re trying to accomplish? Cool. Take it Well, what do I owe you? Nothing. Like when do I pay you? Never. like that is the ethos of like what a what a freemium company feels like Eventually, I’m going to get to a point like with Dropbox where I have more storage than
is allowed on the free program. Eventually, I’ll get to the point on Zoom where 40-minute meetings aren’t doing the trick for me and I’m going to gladly upgrade, or on Canva where the features that I need access to are on the other side of a paywall. But what I really want to do is be generous in the beginning, so empathy, generosity. And then the third thing is metrics. So if you’re building out, let’s say you put some content on the front side of a paywall.
And you are just giving it away and you’re allowing people to self-serve their way to success on some sort of an SEO or content strategy or pipeline generation strategy, like you’re literally giving it away and they’re feeling really connected to you because of how generous you’ve been and how well you understand their problems. You’re going to want to know what’s working and what’s not and you’re not in the room at this point. So what are they reading? What’s their journey like? What do they do next? And all that’s going to come back to you by way of metrics.
So you’re going to instrument all of this stuff so that you can see what’s working and what’s not, where the impact is being developed. And you’re going to know when it is the right time for you to engage with that customer, either with a digital invitation or human invitation to go to the next step, which would be a paid relationship.
Jason Niedle (12:50)
.
There’s a consultant who has advertised, has crazy advertisements and then he gives away his literal book, right, which I have. The only book that I’ve ever, I think, done this with Sabri Subi and Sell Like Crazy is his book and he sends it to you for maybe shipping, like five bucks or something like that. Right, so empathy, his ads are amazing and brilliant, generosity, I got the book. And then I’m in that email chain and I’m seeing his emails nonstop and they’re smart and most of them are
Dave Boyce (13:10)
there you go.
huh, right.
Jason Niedle (13:29)
again giving like here’s my new other free video or here’s that or you know ⁓ and of course there’s all these these unanswered elements of it all of well don’t know how to do that right so maybe I need them and I don’t know how do that so maybe I need them but tell me a little bit more on that metric side of things because I think I get the empathy and the generosity and on the generosity by the way collect emails collect information or just fully take it
Dave Boyce (13:33)
Here you go.
Right.
Jason Niedle (13:50)
because emails are a form of payment, right?
Dave Boyce (13:52)
Right, they are, for sure. So, my favorite example of this is Substack and the productledgtm.com is on Substack. When you go to Substack, it’s all free, Well, it’s not all free. Some authors put stuff behind the paywall, I don’t. But when you get invited there, it says join, and then you can give it your email, or you can click a button that says no thanks.
and then that modal disappears and you’re still in the content. I think that’s a really nice way of approaching it. Like, if you want to join, great, you’ll be part of it, you’ll be on the receiving end of my stuff. If you’re not ready to join, just dismiss it and take a look at what I was providing to you. So I do like collecting emails and I do like an authenticated user so I can see what her journey is. But the reason is not so that I can annoy her, of jam her inbox with emails, it’s just so that I can
Jason Niedle (14:19)
Mmm.
Mmm.
Dave Boyce (14:44)
add value to her over time. And if she’s not ready, fine. No problem. Come one and done.
Jason Niedle (14:48)
And
then so tell me in that case, are the metrics? Like how are you looking at metrics there?
Dave Boyce (14:52)
So then it’s usage metrics. The very first thing in a freemium business that you want to optimize for is usage retention. It’s not money, it’s not contract size, it’s not conversion to paid, it’s usage retention. Recurring revenue will eventually be a function of recurring impact, but recurring impact is a function of usage. So I need to know that she’s coming back and she’s coming back again and she’s coming back again. So if I have a software product,
Jason Niedle (15:09)
Mm-hmm.
Dave Boyce (15:17)
I’m looking at kind of a key moment that I’ve defined that is called impact or first impact and then recurring impact. How often is she coming back to generate a report or a payroll or whatever the software does in a content or consulting business like yours? I’d want to know how often is she coming back to consume the next guide or the next template or the next framework?
so those are metrics and I’m going to track those and I’m going to track things like daily active users, weekly active users, monthly active users. And then for any individual, I’m going to track things like fit and readiness. Fit meaning is she in my ICP? Readiness meaning is she at a point in her journey where it might make sense for us to engage?
Jason Niedle (15:51)
Mm-hmm. ⁓
Dave Boyce (15:58)
So that’s what I’m tracking and then I’m going to show up in a useful way, just like the person at Nordstrom does when you’re browsing the shelves. I’m going to show up in a useful way and if they’re not ready, cool, I’m going to disappear. But I’m not going to attack them as soon as they run through the door and I’m not going to keep attacking them if they say no. I just want to know kinda where are they and how can I be helpful.
Jason Niedle (16:16)
Yeah, for sure. And I like, as I think about it now, your chapter by chapter strategy gives you a literal way to see like, okay, if they came back and they came back and they came back and I’m getting a high rate on my returns, right? Because someone’s usually they’re not just going to jump to chapter eight, you know, so they may, but you’re going to have some sort of a funnel of usefulness. ⁓
Dave Boyce (16:34)
Sure. And if they do,
that’s a signal , too. Like, what is it about chapter eight? What can I learn about that? Right. Yeah.
Jason Niedle (16:38)
Yeah, why is that one getting the jump? Oh, and that’s the interesting one to everybody.
That’s amazing. So we have this insanity of the AI revolution right now. And I keep thinking back to it, like all the historical revolutions in time, and a lot of people got put out of work, and a lot of people got rich, but everybody had to change, and the world changed at the same time. And it’s slamming into the marketing world, and I see so many people coming to me. I saw a $20 million company the other day with no marketing people,
like not even ahead of marketing to coordinate the elements. And they didn’t seem to particularly care. They’re doing okay. And they’re using AI tools and it seems all right. What does that mean for our world? Where do we need to be going? If AI is going to take 70% of the GTM tasks in the next few years, as you’ve mentioned, like what should we be doing?
Dave Boyce (17:23)
Well, I love the way you frame it. It is a revolution. You know, I was looking at self-service and PLG as a revolution. think AI just underscored, put it three exclamation points after it. It’s like, whenever I run into an issue where I don’t understand something, like I had to transfer my son’s broken iPhone to a new iPhone last night and I got stuck on the two-factor authentication, I’m not going to
Jason Niedle (17:44)
Mmm.
Dave Boyce (17:45)
Apple.com sorry Apple, I literally went to chat GPT. And it said, Oh, your son’s phone is broken. So you can’t do two factor authentication. Great. Then there’s a workaround. But you got to understand some stuff. I’m like, thank you so much. That really helped me and I got it done. I actually got it done. The so in a revolution, like just like you said, some people lost their jobs and some people got rich. It is there may be a temporary reset.
Jason in kind of in labor supply and demand match up. So yeah, we remember when all the switchboard operators lost their jobs. We remember when all the buggy manufacturers lost their jobs. Eventually we end up on the other side of that revolution and the people who’ve learned the new technology are the employable ones. They are the ones that get out front. So I talked to a lot of early career starters and
It is my number one recommendation, like in an AI enabled world, the AI native person or AI fluent person is most employable. So I had someone reach out to me, I think it was this week, Jason, beginning of this week. Hey, I’m in the middle, it was one of my MBA students. I’m in the middle of looking for full-time job. In the meantime, what can I do for you? That’s really smart. Like he wants to volunteer, he wants to roll his sleeves up.
Jason Niedle (18:53)
Hmm.
Dave Boyce (18:57)
And he wants to get on some growth initiatives which in our business is going to involve AI. So let’s say a month from now he’s sitting in a job interview, he’s going to be AI fluent based on what we’ve done over the course of that month, whereas he may not have been if he was just bemoaning the fact that AI was coming for his job and he couldn’t get any interviews.
Jason Niedle (19:16)
Yeah, and
he’ll have verifiable experience and he might even have a letter of recommendation. Yeah, he’s killing it. So how do we learn how, you know, I’m using AI every day. I’m looking at various tools. I’m looking at like what things in my flow can be replaced and why should they replace and then searching for the tools that match that. But at the same time, it’s almost not enough.
Dave Boyce (19:19)
Totally. There it is.
Yeah. Yeah.
Have you deployed anything yet?
Have you deployed anything yet?
Jason Niedle (19:37)
We use six or eight different tools all the time regularly, but I still feel like, in some ways, like, my wife would say I’m on the cutting edge, but I would say I feel like I’m on the trailing edge, you know?
Dave Boyce (19:40)
Okay? Yeah.
I facilitated an exec summit two days ago in San Francisco. It was five tables of eight people. so for part of it, I was just at a table and then part of it I was at front of the room. But our table, by the time we were done with our discussion, was like, my gosh, are we behind? And everyone’s like, yeah, we’re behind.
Jason Niedle (20:03)
think the more you look at it, the more you feel like you’re behind. Like I’ve had this is
podcast 50 through four, right? And podcast one, I didn’t feel like I was like way behind. And now I’m like, my God, I got to do 10 times more in the AI area. like, what are we, what are you doing to supercharge all that?
Dave Boyce (20:13)
Right.
Right away.
So we’re just getting into it. We’re pushing ourselves into the unknown. We’ve deployed two agents of our own within our own go-to-market motion. And we’re just learning. Somebody said this to me the other day. I really kind of like it. It’s bad to miss a slow train. It’s even worse to miss a fast train.
Just get on the freaking train. Like you’re going to learn some stuff. It’s not going to be perfect. The first agent we deployed was not perfect. It was not perfectly trained right out of the gates. It wasn’t doing his job the way we wanted him to. We had to, we took an extra month to even launch it live. And even now I think it has some problems. Okay, great. But I know more about Agentic. This is an inbound SDR than most people on the planet because I now have, since February we’ve had this agent live and we’re
monitoring and tuning it. Our other agent did a little bit better out of the gates, but it’s broken a couple of times. It’s more of a back office agent. And we keep adding to it. So I just think getting in the game, I have suggestions for how to get in the game, but however you do it, you’ve got six or eight things deployed, great. You mentioned your wife, she’s probably using ChatGPT for something. I don’t know, I used ChatGPT last night for my iPhone config.
Jason Niedle (21:22)
Mm-hmm.
Dave Boyce (21:26)
There’s assistive, there’s agentic, it kind of doesn’t matter. Get in there, start getting experience, and then you will in fact be in the 99th percentile if you’re just getting in the game.
Jason Niedle (21:36)
It doesn’t feel like it, but I believe you. What do you see as the breakthrough innovation opportunities for us here? Where do we really break through to the next level?
Dave Boyce (21:38)
Hahaha.
Well, and go to market, and go to market specifically, is that what you’re thinking about? Yeah. I mean, the big thing is use AI to scale where humans can’t.
Jason Niedle (21:49)
Yeah.
Dave Boyce (21:57)
Okay, well, why can’t I scale? Oh, because I have limited hours in the day, because I have limited cognitive ability, because I have limited memory, because I have limited, you know, span. So what can AI do that I can’t? Well, it can go do a whole bunch of research that I can’t. It can show up right in front of an interested buyer the second she registers her interest, where I can’t. I might be asleep. It can work 24-7.
It can do a lot of kind of signal detection. We were talking about signals earlier and to surface the right things for assistance at the right time. AI can do a bunch of stuff that I never could have done and it can help me be better at my job. Those are mostly, Jason, the things that I see working right now are the things where AI is doing stuff that a human couldn’t. Initially we were like, AI is going to replace all humans. Yeah, it will replace humans in certain circumstances. But
If a human’s better at her job, why would I replace it with a robot? If an AI is better at a job, why would I have a human do it? ⁓ so if I can figure that out and then The things some of the things that I’m most excited about are the signal detection in the back like if we’re collecting signal either marketing signal kind of the you know, the final generation world which we’ve done forever with
Jason Niedle (22:53)
Mm-hmm.
Dave Boyce (23:10)
manually coded triggers and scores, with Marketo and Eloqua and, what can I do with that? What about engagement signal? I’ve got this conversation we’re having right now is being recorded. If I then sent that transcript through an AI, would tell me something if it were a sales call, it tell me something about your level of interest and, where my risk is in this deal. And it could append and score, a forecast for me. Okay, great.
Or even usage data, like if I’m in a PLG company, somebody like we were talking about before, how is the product being used? That’s all signal that can then surface the right opportunities at the right time and not have my humans wasting their time.
Jason Niedle (23:46)
One of our earlier guests, Robin from Claap.io, has this amazing sales tool. So a lot of people have the transcription of all their sales calls, but theirs is optimized for the sales process. It’ll look, and sales cycles are often quite long, so it’ll look over a year and say, okay, who closed and who didn’t and why, or what through lines do I see here, or how can I consolidate all this discussion so that when you’re on the next discussion, you know the pain points
and it’s pretty miraculous and it’s things that a human wouldn’t do. We wouldn’t sit there and consolidate 200 phone calls and figure out where they’re failing or maybe where the common objection that they’re hearing or all these cool things that you can now have done.
So all the things that don’t need to be done by a human or couldn’t even be done by a human with that much data are incredible. But it kind of makes me also want to get back to one of the things that I’m always fascinated by is like, have a great team, you have great strategies, you have all these AI tools, but you still have your own internal constraints, right? What is a constraint for you from faster growth and why does that exist? What’s there?
Dave Boyce (24:48)
Well, in GTM, you’ve got kind of three things you can manage when you’re going for growth.
You’ve got input, throughput, and output. If you’re just talking about the machine. Input, throughput, and output. So where are my constraints? If my constraint is input, then I really got to work on leads. That’s a hard thing. That’s a function of kind of address size of my addressable market and my ability to identify ICPs within that. Okay, got it. Throughput could be just an execution thing.
So I like to think about a self-service happy path. So can my customers kind of get all the way through their journey on their own? If so, great, let’s just keep that going. And then once in a while, based on signal, I want to pick somebody up off of that path. And then when I execute kind of my human assist things, that’s throughput. Both of those are throughput. Self-service happy path is throughput, human assist is throughput. And then the output is what I’m looking for. That’s the growth. And that can either show up in
acquisition retention or expansion.
Jason Niedle (25:39)
I love that analysis, the broad analysis. Now, if you apply it back to Winning by Design, where are you constrained?
Dave Boyce (25:43)
Yeah.
⁓ constraints, yeah. So is this true confessions moment Jason? I thought we were friends. It’s good. No, we confess to our friends. It’s fine. ⁓ So our constraint is not
Jason Niedle (25:52)
I try to get there. That’s why I wait almost till the end. I want to get you like warmed up and happy and then I want to hit you with the hard question. We can cut this part if we have to.
Dave Boyce (26:10)
it’s not input, it’s not interest, it really is… And again, Cobbler’s Children, it’s building that kind of throughput machine. Like it’s making sure that we are bringing people on a journey. So where we’ve historically made mistakes, Jason, is we said, you like Winning By Design? Cool, here. How about signing up for a million dollar consulting project? I’m going straight for the close. How about take me to dinner first?
So we’ve had to stitch some of that together and I don’t think we’re perfect at it. We need to work on that throughput. We need to meet people where they are, meet them on their journey, create a self-service happy path, create off-ramps from, I should say on-ramps to more of paid kind of engagement, just make it comfortable all the way along. That’s where our constraint is. It is not input, it’s not demand, definitely not.
Jason Niedle (26:52)
just continually almost smoothing that funnel and old language. That’s awesome. I know I don’t have you forever here. let’s see I can get two more quick questions out of you here. Trends ahead for growth, what do we need to be looking for in the next year? What do we need to be doing or looking for in the next year ahead?
Dave Boyce (26:57)
Right, exactly.
So I believe that in the next year ahead, we are going to have human robot hybrid go to market teams. I really do. Like you’ve already got six to eight working within your organization, some manager, and you mentioned the $20 million company that’s, you know, got no marketing people and not even someone to orchestrate it. Eventually they will have someone to orchestrate it. But, you know, we’re going to have human robot hybrid teams, robots hopefully doing the things that humans can’t do and humans doing the things that they can uniquely do.
That machine needs to operate within a framework. You know, the robot needs instructions, the human needs instructions, needs to be architected. So I think a big opportunity over the next year is to really architect your growth. Like, and I’m using that word deliberately, like, what am I trying to do? Do I understand what I’m trying to do? Do I think about it like a system? Do I know which tasks a robot could do better? Have I thought about it at that level and can I stitch it together into some orchestrated kind of customer journey?
If I can’t do that or it’s kind of blowing my mind, that’s what I would want to get to. Because as soon as you have that written down, let’s just call what you write down a playbook. There’s lots of different artifacts that would come out of that design process. But let’s just think about a playbook. Is a playbook helpful to a human? Of course. Like, you know, here comes a new employee and I want her to know what her job is. Here’s a playbook. Amazing. That’s going to help me get onboarded. Is a playbook helpful to a robot?
Also, of course, like robots learn just like humans do, and they can read and they can read diagrams. And so if you, if you can instruct the robot, get the exact same playbook to a robot. Now I have a chance of operating a human robot hybrid team, but I don’t, if I haven’t architected it, if I’m just assuming that tribal knowledge is going to carry the day and I hire a good salesperson or a good marketer, and then she’s just going to do what she did there over here.
That’s an unarchitected kind of happenstance operation, and it’s not set up for success once I start introducing robots.
Jason Niedle (29:01)
Yeah, especially in the new world ahead. Absolutely. Any final thoughts here before I let you go?
Dave Boyce (29:05)
Well, Jason, you’re good interviewer. That’s one final thought. And I think you’re right. We’re in a revolution. I’ve heard about it, talked about the calculator moment. Like, we didn’t have a calculator. We used to do everything out by hand, long division, pencil, whatever. And then we did have a calculator. OK, cool. So you want to say, no, calculators are going to hurt us. They’re going to soften our brains. We’re never going to be able to do math again.
No, you kind of like to figure out what’s life look like on the other side of the calculator where you use it and you want to step up. That’s what we got to do in this new world.
Jason Niedle (29:34)
I love that. So tell readers where to find your book.
Dave Boyce (29:37)
So the best places, productledgtm.com, there’ll be a link there for all the pre-orders. You can go to your favorite place, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target. I mean, it’s available for pre-order everywhere. It’s a benefit of working with Stanford. They have a really good machine for getting it out for pre-order. But if you just go to ProductLedGTM.com, you’ll get invited to join. You can say no thanks, or you can join. And if you do join, you’ll get updated every time I release a chapter.
Jason Niedle (30:02)
I’m joining and you’ll have my email. And what about Winning by Design? Tell us where to find you there.
Dave Boyce (30:04)
Rock on, brother.
Yeah,
winningbydesign.com also, you said you went to the website. There’s lots of free content there as well. As we get better, you you can join there too. And as we get better, we’ll bring you along our self-service Happy Path journey. There’s lots of content on Winning by Design too, and we’d love for you to join that family and see you out there.
Jason Niedle (30:23)
including I imagine summits and webinars and all those cool things, right?
Dave Boyce (30:26)
summits and webinars and and Slack groups and you can join groups when you’re part of our advisory service, can join groups and consult with peers. It’s a good comfortable place to be in this industry.
Jason Niedle (30:39)
Brilliant, I’m going to study all that. Dave, thank you so much for being on Beyond SaaS. For tech leadership out there, we’re committed to exploring growth. We’re dropping episodes twice a week right now on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And you can find me, Jason Niedle, at tethos.com, T-E-T-H-O-S dot com. If you got some value today, please share the episode with a friend. And I love questions and comments for future guests. Until next time, this is Beyond SaaS.
