How CleanTech Companies Build Scalable Growth Systems Eben Meyer, CEO @ CleanTech Growth Lab

Today is the last episode in a series of episodes that I've done with Yeb and Meyer from Clean Tech Growth Lab. All about scaling from series A to series B. First episode, why is customer acquisition cost structurally high in climate tech? Episode two, potentially the most important thing that you could do about it is to time your outreach

correctly. Use publicly available data, synthesize it into signals. And third, this episode is about how to build the foundation of that system so that it can be repeatable, that you can have metrics, that you can track things and uh go into your series B round with confidence standing in front of investors and future customers saying,

"I know exactly where I need to allocate my resources in order to continue growing in this market segment or expand into new segments and geographies." Thank you as always to Clean Tech Growth Lab for being a partner of the podcast and the producers craze and friends. And with that, I give you yebin.

Welcome to another episode of The Grove. Shout out to you, Yebbin, for being a partner company to this podcast. and Crazy Friends mentioned just before I pressed record. This is part three in uh in a series that Yebin and I are doing about go to market scaling from series A to series B. Got all the context in the

previous two episodes. First one being CAC is structurally high in climate tech. That's a fact. Second, there's been a revolution and what you can do about it as far as buying signals. So the third one today we're going to run through how to structure a system and utilize all this stuff. Yeah, I took

notes last time we talked about this. I think you have a beautiful framework for doing it. If you could just high level give us what we're talking about. Hey Blake, so good to chat to you again. Um excited to be here and yeah I guess following on from last time you know we

spoke about the problem. uh we spoke about CAC and what I would love to do and really get into the details with you on is like okay let's look at customer acquisition cost as more than just a number because it doesn't exist in isolation let's look at it as part of all the in interconnected bits that

exist in a go to market strategy um how those interact and how they essentially compound each other because there are different stages you know there's a stage for marketing there's a stage for sales there's a stage for executive leadership And I think understanding the relationship between those stages and how they help each other or hurts each other uh puts

you in a very different position. So yeah, I think looking at that, looking at the mechanics and looking at some things that we can actually do, small things, big things that we can actually do to start improving that system.

Okay. So what are the So I've three pieces written here but uh you know add to it or take away but what what are the the I guess the three sections or the sections of this system the way that you design it.

So yeah, I mean it's always good not to think in silos like as with any system you want to see the connections between the parts but in terms of ownership it's really helpful to have some kind of ownership like I was saying you know you have the marketing side which is really about what you're feeding into that

system um which is going to kickstart everything down the line. So the efficiency of that part of it is really important. Um and then the the sales part which is going to be more focused on things like pipeline velocity and the conversion rate of the deals that you see in the pipeline. Really important.

Um and a lot of interesting things that can be done there. And then that feeds into the revenue visibility or maybe you could call it like a diagnostic layer where you're looking at the other two parts of the system and you're making you know really big important decisions on where does the budget go, where does the the

channel strategy begin, how do you make hiring decisions, how does your go to market system work with these three parts uh all connected to each other. So I think that's like the that's the high level and what I'd love to do is to get into like okay what are the marginal improvements you can make in these and

then what would be the the impact of those marginal improvements uh down the line. Yes. uh we had think I think it's it's really useful the way that uh because a lot of times there's there's a real focus on okay we have a problem it's a marketing problem we have a problem it's

a sales problem but if we're actually implementing this mental framework that it is a system and everything interacts then the problems might not be specifically clear if you look at it through just a marketing lens or just a sales lens and it might be clear if you look at them together and the transfer

of information or activities uh or lead leads, you know, whatever between the two. Uh and something you said that was really uh really useful for me was in in this in between depending on how you structure the system there's either compounding debt where you know you're over time it's little by little over

time these little losses uh they stack up or there's compounding interest if you structure it correctly. Um, how how do how do we understand that? I that's a great way to describe it as well. It's like if you have a heavy really tight knot and you're trying to pull on it, you often make it tighter um

without understanding the intricacies of those little those little elements of the cords that feed together. I mean, okay, what is the knots? I think um you know the research will vary but roughly I mean according to research by paddle the custom acquisition cost has ridden risen by 60%. Just over 5 years.

No and it's not like it's not like products have become 60% more valuable right uh in terms of price point. So this is a really really big knot that everyone's um working on. It's a little bit less in B2C but in B2B yeah this is a really big number.

If you want to try and take the the core like responsibilities of each of those stages in contributing to that number, I think with marketing, it's going to be all about precision. You know, it's going to come down to are you reaching the right people? Are you able to engage those right people? Are they from the

right companies? If the job of marketing is to engage and educate audiences and then to convert them into leads, the question is, can you do that at a sustainable cost? And the question of that being yes or no often comes down to precision. Um, so that's the responsibility of that first stage. And you can see how if marketing

does that job well, the leads that sales is going to receive, they're going to be much more likely to to close cuz they're on target. Um, and they're going to be much more likely to be willing to have a conversation with sales because they actually already know about the company that the salesperson represents. So

there's that there's that first link. And then within sales, like we were saying, conversion, pipeline, velocity, this is really about are you knocking on the right door? Um, and are you knocking on the right door announced or unannounced?

Um, and is somebody home? That's ultimately like the big thing, you know, that we spoke about with signals. So, um, we can break this down in a second, but really, um, the lead quality is going to be your main input for that.

And then the relation, what's the relationship between sales and then like the executive layer? Well, if sales is struggling to close deals and if the deal cycles are very long, that's going to impact what you're able to analyze and what you're able to see again at the diagnostic level. Um, so you want to be

able to answer these questions like what's what's working? Why is it working? Where's the revenue coming from? Um, what kind of influence is your marketing actually having on sales deals? And is that making a difference to pipeline velocity? Is it making a difference to close rate? These are all questions that we we want to know the answers to, but

the systems that are set up don't answer it by default. And so it's necessary to go in make a couple of changes to get that. So I think yeah back to the idea that you raised compounding interest when something is going wrong at the top at the marketing stage that's going to compound into sales that's going to

compound into the revenue diagnostics and if you leave the revenue or the executive layer of this piece untouched. You also don't know how to inform marketing again which will keep making the wrong decisions. And so that's the kind of intertwined uh Gordian knot that we want to try and untie. And the good

news is if you can do that, that same connected nature of the problem is going to be in your favor and you're going to start seeing positive interest. And that's really what we want to we want to go towards.

Man, it's a master class. You know, we've had we we've had uh you know, a number of conversations just uh the two of us working together personally about this stuff specifically because it's so it's so core. It's so interesting to me.

I consume a lot of information about it and I do really appreciate the way that you've decided to uh digest it and also communicate it because it it makes so much sense when you're you know if if this episode was around five years ago for me I would have been you know I

would have exited seven companies by now you know what I mean so so I just I appreciate it it's it's just really fun it's really fun yeah I really wish Yeah like the like these are often things like the things that I'm speaking with my team about on a daily basis. We're like, why has it

taken us this long uh to learn these things, right? Cuz I really do wish that I had this when I was starting. I think I would have made a lot I would have made smarter mistakes. Better mistakes. I would have still made lots of mistakes, but I would have smarter mistakes. Making better

mistakes. That's what we're here to do. Just make better mistakes. Awesome. I'll make a shirt about that. That's great. All right. So, you ready for I wrote down some questions. Is this about to be bop bop? All right. Oh, this framework that I love, if this is truly a system, uh, where do you see it typically

breaking for climate tech companies that that you're working? Yeah, I mean I I have a bit of bias here because I spend most of my time thinking about marketing, but I really do think, you know, just based on the numbers that we've seen the most waste in the marketing space.

Um, and like I was saying, that's about like precision. So most B2B marketers are going broad when they really need to go narrow. And it's not entirely the fault of the marketer. I mean we use ad platforms to reach people right and these ad platforms are designed for reach and volume because that's what their revenue model is based

on you know they have shareholders too um even a platform like LinkedIn which is a B2B platform is guilty of this is guilty of trying to expand your audiences and expand the cost of using their platform because for them that's a positive incentive. Um, and this is the biggest, this is kind of like the root

issue. And being a marketer who's advertising to B2B audiences means constantly swimming upstream against that force and against that incentive that the media platforms put on you. And I think the research is pretty good, but I think it's also quite optimistic, which is sobering.

um about 40% is the number that people throw around that 40% of digital ad spend is either going to misaligned audiences or with the wrong titles or the wrong companies or to nonhuman traffic. Another problem that we face with these and I mean that's a really really high rate 40% of everything you

put in. But we audit ad accounts as well and we've seen up to 62%. which is just most of your money um going to people that can't buy your product. Yeah. I've I've I've heard uh and this is from not you know spending most of my time in in marketing, spending most of

my time on the other side in sales. But um I I've heard a saying that says 50% of your marketing budget is working and 50% of it is not. It's just you never know which one is which. Yeah. Yeah.

So how do you go to that? Was that was that OG or someone? It's like a there's an ad legend who who stated that. I'm not sure who I have no idea. I I would I would I would credit them if I knew, but I don't.

Yeah, I should I should have known that. I'm the marketing guy. Um but yeah, that's exactly the problem. I mean, it's getting better. Like, we have more visibility. We have more tools. It's just that we need to to wield them. And yeah, if you're a marketer listening to this, like there are definitely some

common traps or common checks and balances that really make a difference. Um, and I would approach those differently for different channels. Like if you're setting up a campaign on LinkedIn, by default, there's going to be this setting called audience expansion, which LinkedIn uses to take a small audience, make it bigger. Um, supposedly to improve your reach and to

improve your like the scalability of your campaign. But the problem is that if you have specific accounts that can buy you and you have specific titles for decision makers, audience expansion essentially removes that and brings in new titles, new accounts, new industries, um which just doesn't help you if you're selling something very

specific, right? Um as as most of us are in the B2B space. So that's one of the biggest um errors that we see on campaign setups. Do do you see? So I think so I think we could if we wanted to go in a couple directions at this point where we're saying okay you have you know if it's a

system we see a lot of uh waste in spend in advertising in marketing which totally makes sense you know this this audience expansion thing and and it's a really good point that you make about their business model is they want you to spend more money on advertising. So even though they want, you know, your money to work for you so

that you stay on the platform, it's also if it works perfectly, you're not going to spend as much money as you can. So with with this uh with this, I guess feature that you're speaking to, yes, it is not helpful if you're selling something very specific, but at a certain point of of of company growth,

it could be useful because you're running experiments that could see if there's other segments or geographies uh that you could expand into. However, because of this um this this focus on series A, I feel like sir companies that have just raised a series A are not typically looking to spend their money experimenting on new geographies or

segments. They're looking to really hone in and and uh get get repeatable the the segments that they've found traction in. So, if you're a series A company and you're approaching your P, you know, you're you're marketing from this perspective of precision, you know, and and and like you said, it's something's probably broken. How do

you go about trying to address that or fixing it? Yeah, such a good so well put, by the way. Like, it's not it's not even about the the testing. It's like you have limited resources in terms of runway, and that's both money and time. So any any time spent advertising to someone who's outside of

your market is time that should have gone to that market. Um and that's the other thing. You can't get those three months back or you can't get those six months back that you're running that. Yeah, experimentation super important but controlled experimentation is what you want, right? Um yeah, I'd say the biggest the biggest

element here again is targeting. Like if you're targeting a chief information officer, then you should also expect to receive some information analysts. There's a thing called master titles on LinkedIn which will basically spread it to people that have a similar title, which sometimes it does very well. You know, if you type in a chief information

officer, you'll get the CIO as well. Great. That's what you want, but it will also include people you don't want. And so the best way to combat this is do your positive targeting that you're you're doing, but next to it put negative targeting of the titles that you don't want. Um, and LinkedIn does

give us the tools to do this. Uh, thankfully, which is the audience manager where you can go in and you can actually you build an audience and then you can go and analyze that audience for the complete composition and you can scroll down and down and down. You can see all these titles. Um, and we see

anywhere between 20 to 30% of the titles that you actually want to target um, are doubling up on titles that you don't want. And so just going through that list, uh, building a negative list, it doesn't take that long. This is the quickest way to eliminate waste from that part of it. Um, you can do the

same. I mean, so that's for titles. You can do the same for seniority levels. Um, we've seen an ad account that was spending about 5k a month. about 70% of that budget was going to entry and junior level titles because there's there's a lot of them and they eat up the budget and they're they're cheap

clicks. You know, these people are hungry to learn, hungry to to see the content. So, same thing, you exclude these titles, uh you exclude the seniorities and you also exclude certain uh industries like just to give an example so it makes a bit more sense. If you let's think if let's say you're

targeting asset managers of uh renewable asset portfolios you know people managing huge solar and wind farm assets you can target asset managers which you should but you will also get asset managers of financial institutions people that are managing financial portfolios totally different job totally different uh buyer type and so it's about anticipating that um finding that

and then again excluding it and you can do the same with industries where let's say you're targeting utilities right this is very relevant for I think a lot of the guests that you've been speaking to you can target utilities on LinkedIn which is again it's really good it's the only platform in the world

where you can do this but they don't distinguish between electric and water utilities so you need to in this case if you're finding that kind of like it's not breaking down your audience as you know it to It's better to go and build your company list, find the the LinkedIn URL to find

the domains. Uh there are tools to do this and to automate this process and then you upload that as a company list onto LinkedIn. Now you only spend money on those exact companies and no one else. Uh and that's the best way that you know this you can imagine this is upstream so it affects everything else

right so so so we're saying so we're saying if the tool you know if you're not doing anything do use uh you know whatever whatever ad platform using LinkedIn or other but LinkedIn's a very huge B2B marketing platform use the exclude feature because a lot of the clients that you're seeing are not doing

that and it will I mean 70% is insane to me of your budget uh you know alone that you can be saving and then additionally in the utilities example if LinkedIn does not give you that level of granularity there are third party tools that you can build a list and then upload it is what you're saying where

you can get that distinction between utility types okay so say we've done that okay we've we've uh you know we've done that where where what is the next thing to look at I mean you talked about going from precision to velocity you know what do you see in your clients once you guys tweak these things fix the

the precision pipeline Now you head to the next step. What do we see? Um, so if you've done that right, if you've done the precision part right, you're going to be looking at your your lead flow. That's really going to be the big the big metric that you look at. Um, if you don't mind, I want to just add

something on the market in me. Uh, do it. So like Google, so search, right? search which is both SEO and paid search and AEO or AI visibility when GPT recommends your business. um we see so let's take like Google paid search for example this is again like huge amounts like 35% of budgets are going in an unoptimized way

um and this is typically because these again these platforms were built for consumers not businesses and let's say you're targeting energy efficiency for real estate portfolios uh very niche audience you're also going to catch residential consumers that are trying to improve their energy efficiency So, I mean, you know what I'm going to say. Same principle applies.

Have negative lists. Make sure that you're curating that negative list. So, you you can exclude the budget. And this is so important because the volume sits in the offtarget keywords, right? So, there are more residential consumers than there are real estate um you know um building portfolios. And so, that's why it's so important. I just want to

mention that. Uh another big Yeah. brand versus non-brand. Like most companies are spending quite a lot of money on taking their name, their company name, and getting it to the top of the search page results, which has a place. But what happens is when someone's ready to convert, they already know about you. So they Google

you or they put you in a in a AI LLM and your paid ad comes to the top. They click it, they go and ask to speak to sales. So, it looks like a great conversion journey, but the truth is they already knew about you and they were already looking for you and they

were going to scroll down until they found you anyway. And you're just paying to make that slightly more convenient for that person. Uh, that's that's called branded search, right? And branded search because it's measurable gets most of the influence. Um, the alternative to brand is non-brand. So, instead of someone searching for your

company, they're searching for your category. I'm looking for energy efficiency optimization, right? as a as a as a tool. Now, if they don't know about you and they're searching for that category and then you show up, you're actually changing the revenue that you can gain from the market, right? That's that's making a difference in somebody's

understanding of your company rather than just catching people that already were looking for you. Um, so that's just a big that's an people overindex on brand because it's the most measurable, but sometimes you have to do things that you can't measure. Um, so yeah, just just bring that up. That's so No, I No, I think that's important

again because it's really in the weeds about how to think about this precision layer and what what is an actionable way that somebody out there who you know this this might be new to right a founder who is saying like hey you know we need you know we have um we know that

we're selling into asset managers and solar uh but want to do B2B and we know that people that uh some people are searching directly for our company but most people are searching for solutions for example And we're getting in, you know, into like different types of buyer journeys and how to nurture those and

stuff. But I mean, h like as a from a strategy perspective or, you know, from your perspective, if you were going into a company, how would you tell somebody to actually handle and execute on addressing those those different buyer journeys?

Yeah. I'd say don't I mean the buyer journey as a whole, that's a good topic. That's a big one. But in terms of you know, search just the example that Yeah. the the example you gave, people looking for your company and not spending too much money on just making that slightly more convenient. People searching for your

your overall solution and where that money is actually useful. Yeah. What you're what you're able to commit to that channel. Don't spend more than 20%. On branded search. So allocate the allocate the lion share to non-brand search. And when you find that there's the time to up your brand search is when you're finding that competitors are

starting to bid on your name. So if they're trying to steal traffic from you, then yes, be defensive and you can up uh the bids on your own brand name. But otherwise, diminishing returns, you're not going to see an impact from that.

That that that that line right there. I'm going to get that tattooed so don't forget that. All right. Seriously, I mean that that I really appreciate you going back into that because that is super actionable, something that, you know, I don't have um visibility to and something that I I literally can use after we get off this

call. So, say so say we do this, right? So, say um you know, we're allocating resources, we're thinking about precision, we're thinking about marketing in in uh you know, scientific terms and being really useful with our resources. How do we go into the the the velocity layer? How do we think about sales after this if we improve who we're

reaching and the marketing qualified leads are better? And how do signals play into this? Yeah. Okay. So, the problem is you're knocking on a door, you're unannounced, and nobody's home. This is what leads to, you know, no no sales conversations. And being unannounced, that's up to marketing to solve. Like, marketing needs to make

sure the account already knows about you. They understand the problem. they understand that you have a solution to the problem. And so ju just using that analogy because it's helpful. So then in in this sense where where where the holes would be is if you're showing up not necessarily unannounced but no one's home. So if

somebody was home, you'd be received but nobody is home. Uh and and they would know about you if they're not. Right. Okay. Yeah. Exactly. You know the them being home is are they are they able to buy? Are they entering a buying motion or are they in a buying motion?

Sure. And announce just being the awareness. Um, and this is super important by the way because I mean there's there's a lot of data on these things and on buying journeys and how that's changing. And on average, this is based on a study from 2025. On average about 40% of like the buyer's journey has already

progressed to 40%. Usually it's 60% by the time they speak to someone or by the time they're asking for sales. uh conversations or demos and most of them so this is supposed to be above 90% which is a crazy figure most of them have already got the winning vendor on their short list. So by the

time someone comes to your sales team they've already made up their mind on who they would like it to be and now they're starting to do a validation and a due diligence process. It's more like we know who we want and we want to make sure that we are making the right decision,

which means it's so important that marketing has to be advertising to accounts that sales is wanting to close, right? That's just a a reinforcement that those two need to be playing the same game. That's the announcement part. And then yeah, when nobody's home, that's coming back to signals, right?

Which is what we spoke about last time. And we can go into this in a bit more detail if you like. Yeah. So I we we we spoke all about signals, how to acquire them, what they mean, what they mean relative to uh uh hedging against uh structurally high um customer acquisition costs and clean

tech. But with this you know within this framework that we're putting forward you know how do we actionably uh find and integrate and utilize signals uh so that we are showing up at knocking on someone's door they know who we are when we get there and they are home I you know the most important place to

start is to look at your closed one deals and then see if there are any patterns that can find in the close one. And usually sales leaders uh especially the veterans, they're going to have strong intuition about this because they're in the market. They already know what's happening in the market. They have a

sense that uh yes, a rate case is often going to be followed by a solution for dynamic line rating to improve the you know stability of transmissions cables because the utility has to move at that point. This is knowledge that sits inside of um the basically like the leaders of the space.

But when you're trying to onboard new BDRs, they're not operating from that same level of intuition. And so the most powerful thing you can do is to give that intuition to your juniors and your mid-levels that are running sales. So the way to do that, look at your close one, look for those patterns, you know,

interview your sales leader and start to put these down. Right? These could be like a number of things. There could be regulatory or enforcement triggers. So maybe there's violations, permit renewals, or maybe there's uh consent order deadlines. There's something with strict timing attached to it. It could be procurement signals.

These are often lagging indicators though. You know, an RFP and RFQ comes quite late. It could be corporate commitments, could be operational stresses, all kinds of varieties of signals. And the first step is to find what's the one that's been most present in your best deals.

what are the what are the environ what are the events around the accounts that you can close and then start with that. So focus on that because then when you're when your team's doing outbound instead of them doing outbound against the whole market they're doing outbound against that portion of the market that's ready to buy. So that's the

timing uh benefit right limited resource rather allocated to the accounts that are in the right uh you know timing or buying window. The other element is then context. So usually when sales goes out and has to knock on a door, it's it's a big ask to get someone to care about your product and you can speak to their

value prop, you can speak to like general pain points, but these usually fall flat. But if by contrast, if you know what the actual operational situation is of the company that you're reaching out to because you saw this signal, because you saw this regulatory deadline that's hitting them, you can go to them in a much different

uh spirit, right? It's not, hey, pay attention to me. I'm a vendor. I I want to I want to tell you all about how great our product is. You can actually go to them on their terms and you can say to them, hey, I saw that you're experiencing this this challenge right now. That's really tough. We've seen it

before. um here are some things that could be helpful in what you're facing. Do you want to jump on a call? We can have a consultation about it. So, you can actually be much more specific. Hey, my head is my head is going. I'm just I'm thinking about all the ways um to to

like actually because one thing that I love is the whole experience of going out doing outreach over time, collecting data, finding who is out there that actually needs it, finding that and then really digging in and and and uh growing, you know, into into a particular segment to a market and then doing it over again in a different

market and it really you climate tech specific like making uh tangibly making a good impact in the world. And these are like the nuts and bolts of like how to build the car in order to to drive it. So um quick question. So we uh we're just transitioning away from uh signals and the velocity section of this uh of

this framework um and into uh the third segment that I have written down here which is uh the executive layer like you were speaking to and visibility. So just quickly again um uh so precision you're reaching out to the right people. We talked about different ways you can actually do that. It leads to uh

velocity and at the velocity layer where you want to show up at houses where people are actually there. That's where you can utilize signals to make sure people are actually there. Um and and you spoke about your experience with that. So if these are the inputs into the system. So we talked about

precision, velocity, marketing, sales. If these are the inputs in the system, what are the outputs to measure whether we're experiencing compounding debt, compounding interest, or a combination of both? Yeah. So, you know, usually this is something that companies will visit on a quarterly basis. you're looking maybe you have a there's a board meeting or

there's a quarterly sales target um a go to market team review that's happening. So you typically look look at this on a quarterly basis and you're looking at the classic metrics of you know what was our revenue for the quarter are we above or below quota what was our pipeline so let's say you have 5 million revenue

target your pipeline's us going to be 3x that 4x that for for coverage above the revenue and you start to look at these really big numbers which are the result of many many leading inputs and you're starting to try and understand you know what was the cause what was the effect And the challenge with this is that

typically our CRM aren't giving us the data broken down in the way that we can actually understand what was the cause and what was the effect or what's actually led to that number because these are really revenue is a really slow indicator actually right it's based on a lot of other things. So the biggest

challenge that we have in B2B is that the length of that sales cycle and the number of touch points that are needed on that then that makes the analysis quite hard. If you're analyzing an e-commerce brand for instance, you can see this click led to the sale. It took it took two hours to complete the sale,

right? This is a this is an easy attribution problem. We don't have that luxury. So, how do you make sure that you're able to see the full picture, right? Um, right now most companies like twothirds of companies are using what they call last touch attribution and that will show you what was the channel that

generated the lead in the CRM that gets associated with revenue when that deal closes. And this is an important thing to understand, but really this is not um an accurate picture. This is like saying instead of this team winning the game, it was the striker that won the game.

Uh, and the last touch can go to we can go to Google search because guess what? You were bidding on brand and you caught the you caught the click at the last minute. But meanwhile, there were all kinds of events that happened before that. There were um in-person events, there were LinkedIn ads, there were

other search ads, right? And so that last touch is a very um it's a very singular point of of of data. And it's important then to ask the question of okay of all the deals in the pipeline where is the influence really coming from and in practice what we typically see like LinkedIn is because of the

targeting abilities it's usually the primary driver over a longer period of time. And if you can't see that influence and if you can't measure that it's going to be very hard to diagnose like okay where do we spend the budget for the next quarter where do we if we want to build pipeline where do we need

to allocate that and yeah just while we're on the topic of channels like there was one channel that's been heavily underindexed uh in the spaces that we often talk about like industrial buyers utility buyers these incumbent industries um especially in the states now most of us will use Google um search or or some alter

alternative form. But actually with older audiences uh you have a very very high percentage of search coming from what used to be called Bing Ads. Today it's just called Microsoft ads and most people are surprised by this. But it's it's very common in these kinds of incumbent audiences because they're all using the default uh setting.

So one thing is that that channel doesn't get the reach that you think it should get. The second thing is most people don't know that Microsoft acquired LinkedIn in 2016. So you through Microsoft ads, you can actually lay ABM targeting on top of your search ads and ABM targeting on top of your

display ads as well as titles and seniorities and functions. So it's a very powerful channel that most people aren't using. And again, this is only something that you'll see if your attribution window is more than just the the last touch.

Yeah. So really important there is, you know, you can do this in Google Analytics. You can alongside your last touch model, you can set up a first touch model which will tell you who's getting them to the website first. And you can set up a linear model as well. And linear is going to look at all the touch points

along that journey and it's going to try and weight them in an intelligent way for you. And that's already, if you can do that, you already have a much better view than what most people are looking at when they look at these these deals.

Okay. So, so say I'm in charge of growth. Let's just say I'm in charge of uh both sales and marketing or I'm in charge of marketing and I'm collaborating directly with uh someone who's in charge of sales. Um because it usually doesn't get much more complicated than that. Uh at at at series A teams are much bigger than

that. So it what would you say are we talking about like a single dashboard with these uh you' mentioned traditional metrics is you know so I guess the the the insight isn't in uh what metrics to be tracking because traditional metrics do the job.

It's just setting up your system so that those traditional metrics actually give you useful information. So, are we and correct me if I'm wrong, but are we talking about a single dashboard? Are we talking about two or three dashboards across the length of the system to to get at uh an accurate understanding of

of the systems performance? Like what are these outputs and how are we accessing them? Yeah, I mean the most important data is going to be coming out of your CRM. uh it just needs to be tagged properly which comes down to so tagging properly comes down to like having the right UTMs on the campaigns that you're running. Um

having your source types all allocated to either inbound or offline uh which is often sales sourced or like founder sourced. These are just hygiene um exercises that make a big difference. But yeah to the question of attribution it we do need additional tools for this and I'm not affiliated with any attribution tools so I can just speak

freely here like um they are very well established platforms like dream data uh it's a powerful tool but it's expensive same with hockey stack very powerful tool but it's expensive it's a YC alumni um we actually use a tool called fibler just because it can integrate attribution from LinkedIn can and from Google ads in one view and that gives

you your attribution picture of you know of all the deals in the pipeline which ones were touched by marketing uh from a paid point of view which ones were touched by organic marketing and then you can run analysis on like your pipeline lift so you can see what was the conversion rate lift from those

that were touched by marketing and you can see what was the velocity lift as well and that's why we that's sort of what we use um in our in our analysis of the the accounts that we ordered. Cool. So, we're e so we're looking at um ensuring that uh hygiene practices are solid. We're talking about our CRM

dashboards and we're talking about um you know individual dashboards from the different marketing platforms we're engaging in unless we decide to use one of those aggregation tools um that that you just mentioned. Okay. Um, one of my favorite questions is, you know, pulling all this down into, um, you know, something we can actionably use like

today or tomorrow. If, you know, since you guys, uh, operate within this this uh, perfect system every day. That's what you guys do as an agency. I know. I know. I know. Um, from from my perspective, I'm I'm fan fang growing a little bit, but um, what what is what is the the day-to-day, you know, of of

someone that has, you know, we talked about the different ways to build towards the system. So, I guess you can talk about, you know, once you start to engage with a series A company, CMO, you know, head of growth, cso, whatever, CEO, uh, what does the first like 4 to 8 weeks look like to put the system in

place? Uh, or if it's that long, I don't know. And then after it is in place, what is the day-to-day? Do you break it down into like like you mentioned quarters or we talked about two week sprints, you know, what what is the uh um the day-to-day setting up the system and then after the system's operational?

Yeah. Um yeah, definitely happy to talk about how we like to operate because we we like to operate in in rhythms. But maybe just before I jump into that, like I think if you're listening to this at home and you want to just do something for yourself, I think the most important thing start with the diagn diagnostic

part of it cuz you already have a lot of that data and then it's about asking the questions of the data until you don't get the answer that you need and that's usually when you know you need more granularity, right? So we need to know what percentage of pipeline comes from inbound versus

outbound versus founder sourced. We need to know what percentage of revenue. We should know what percentage of pipeline that does not convert to revenue is getting influence from other channels and those those highlight some really interesting parts of your GTM strategy.

You know, it's going to influence what's happening. So, if you get if you got a lot of pipeline and you can't close it, the question is could we have been doing more on the marketing side? Could we have been doing more from a targeting or from a signal side, right, to make sure

those are the right deals? And that's an analysis that at scale is hard to do, but you can always go down into the CRM and you can always look at those exact deals and you can start to understand that. So I'd say that's the first improving visibility is always the most important thing. Um, and so that's

usually what we begin with. Uh, some people that we work with in the beginning will have uh existing spend that they're running and if that spend is wasting money then that's the first thing that we pay attention to. Right?

So if if you're bleeding out, you want to put a a tourniquet on the wound, that's usually where we start. Um, and we we follow this framework for optimization, which I I really love because, you know, it's so tempting to look at an ad campaign or an outbound campaign and to look at it daily and to try and make

these changes um which in reality is changing your course of direction way too often. So we follow uh three layers in optimization, right? You have your daily layer which is more based on things like am I paying less than I need to for a click? Am I paying less than I need to for an impression? Um are my

leads being followed up in time? These are like very very important daily things that we need to be optimizing. Those are the things we do on a daily basis and those those are basically hygiene operations. And at the end of a week, I think it's very good to look at like what have you shipped, what do you

want to be shipping the next week and to cover these as these operational checkpoints. So there's there's what we call a weekly growth loop and it keeps us, you know, really focused on outcomes. And what those growth loops add up to is they add up to a monthly sprint and this is pretty much in our experience the

best cadence for making structural changes to your campaigns and your marketing and your sales. So a monthly sprint is zooming out looking at the data and looking at what's happened over the last four weeks. What have the experiments yielded? Four weeks being a very good balance of seasonality across the month. Right? So you get to see

things starting to normalize and based on that insight that you have on a monthly cadence, you want to then project the next month's plan, which will be, oh, we saw better performance from this channel. We're going to shift the budget allocation slightly or we're seeing this messaging is improving. So when you create three more variations of

that messaging, these are the monthly kinds of changes you can make and then knowing that after another month you'll get that data. Now this is good to keep things moving forward but you're being very iterative right in these kinds of changes and that's usually not enough.

So we say follow a weekly operational cadence, follow a monthly diagnostic cadence and then follow a quarterly what we call like the big strategy high picture eagle eye view. And that's about looking at things like what's changed in the market, what's changed in terms of uh regulation, what's changed in terms of where people are allocating uh

capital like mergers and acquisitions and how is that impacting your buyers. So that the quarterly review is like a it's a luxury that you get to step back and you really get to then ask bigger questions of yeah we've made 10% improvement month on month but what can we do over the next 3 months

that will give us 100% improvement and that's where you're taking more like the moonshot uh picture. But if you take moonshots without the weekly accountability on your operational changes the moonshot goes nowhere. And that's why it's important. So weekly, monthly, quarterly, you need to have all three kind of functioning together.

Unbelievable. This is uh not only have we covered Okay, let me just let me just take a step back because I think because I think this is really awesome. I I feel so passionately about this this uh this content. I appreciate you laying all this out. So as a summary of our series

here which eternally grateful to you for we have just the the very truth that incle techch climate tech whatever name you want to use CAC is structurally high if you're doing B2B when then we talked about uh how to get around this and utilizing signals that that idea of only a certain amount of

people I believe common term is 3% out of the addressable market is ready to actually move on your product at any given time. And the the revolutions that have happened as far as AI and data acquisition and acting on that data has all made that um a lot more uh people are able to act on that uh more than

they ever have been. And then you know we come into this conversation and we say now that we have an understanding CAC is high we have this ability to utilize signals like we never have before. How do we literally set up our not only do we cover how to set up a system, the framework of thinking about

system, but how to operate it? Uh how to how to how to how to u create accountability uh and and consistency and um you know iterative growth, which is how things actually happen. So I I'm going to take uh you know, some time after we stop here to analyze what we're doing. I don't know, maybe publish

a book or something. But this is this has been really this has been really awesome. So is there are there any final thoughts about any of uh any of what we've we've covered as we as as we come to a close on our on our journey here together?

Um well just thank you man for the for the questions and the bouncing and it's been yeah it's always such a pleasure chatting to you about it and I think the message I would want to land with here is really you know we're facing this big challenge. It's clearly growing. The challenge is growing year on year on

year. It's the interconnected nature of that challenge that makes it hard to solve. But that very that very challenge is huge opportunity. And so I just want us to see it as like how can we get compound interest on our side. I've heard people say that Einstein said that was the most powerful force or the

eighth wonder in the world or something like this. I don't know if that's true. Yeah, we we could do that. Sure. We we attribute it to him. Who knows? But that's really true. It's like it can be very scary if you're in debt, but if you've got interest working in your favor, as these systems should be working in

our favor, then we can all get to net zero much faster like and we we should be getting there much faster. So, I think it's it's a very positive um vision and you can solve these things individually and that will give you results. But if you can solve them together, if you can get

sales, marketing, and like executive leadership at the same table working together on this as a as a connected picture, uh it's more fun and you're going to see better results. So, I think that's that's a very exciting future.

Master Class. Well, thank you. Thank you so much. Uh I I know this wasn't the point of what we're doing, but I do uh for anyone that's made it here. Everything we talk through is literally what Yeban and their team does on a daily basis, and they do it extremely well, especially for clean tech, better

than anybody that I am aware of. I'm a huge fan. Uh I know you wouldn't uh make that plug yourself, so I'm giving you the credit. So uh I think everyone should listen to this, try it themselves if they want. It's too hard. Just just let Evan do it.

It's very kind to help. Any questions, reach out. Um we love sharing what we've learned. Beautiful. Well, thank you. I I know we'll have another one. We'll find things to talk about, but uh for now, um you know, you have a great day and I'm looking forward to it.

Have a great day. Cheers.