Join John Eitel as he explores Canva's impressive transition from a product-led growth (PLG) model to a robust enterprise-level powerhouse. In this deep dive, we'll uncover how Canva adapted its strategies to scale up, focusing on signal-based selling to enhance B2B engagements. Discover the tactics that propelled Canva's growth, and learn how these approaches can be applied to your business to drive success.
Whether you're a startup enthusiast, a B2B marketer, or a sales professional, this video offers valuable insights into evolving business models and maximizing customer interactions through targeted selling strategies.
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John:
Sandy mentioned for context, I joined Canva, you know, who is an Australian, uh, super unicorn, darling startup, you know, that really kind of started in the consumer space, right. They created a great, easy to use design tool, um, you know, that they gave away free to everybody and built some great virality around it. And then they started to monetize it. But my time at the company was a really fun part of their journey and evolution because they started to see folks taking it to work at really big companies. So Microsoft, Amazon, Google, you name it. And it was an interesting moment for them because they had said, you know, we never really thought we'd, one, get into B2B kind of enterprise. We thought we would always just be kind of on the low end of the spectrum here and serve that massive population. And we never had a sales team.
Andy: Today, my guest is Jon Atel, a seasoned sales and go-to-market leader with an impressive track record in the tech industry. John was the Chief Revenue Officer at Demandbase, where he applied his extensive experience to drive growth in the B2B marketing and sales intelligence space. What I find fascinating about John is his unique perspective, having worked on both sides of the product-led growth and sales-led spectrum. Before Demandbase, John spent three years at Canva, where he played a pivotal role in their expansion into the B2B market. He helped build out their entire sales team and strategy, taking them from a purely product-led growth model to a hybrid approach that significantly boosted their revenue. Now, John's journey is a great example of how the lines between PLG and sales-led motions are blurring in today's SaaS landscape. He's got some really interesting insights of how a company can leverage both approaches to fuel their growth. Now, we'll also get his take on the current state of VDB sales, including the impact of economic headwinds and the growing importance of data driven decision making. So whether you're a startup founder looking to scale your sales efforts or a seasoned sales leader wanting to stay ahead of the curve, I guarantee you'll walk away with this conversation with valuable insights and practical strategies you can apply to your own work. And if you enjoyed this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it will help the podcast tremendously. It is a lot of work, y'all. So with that, I bring you Jon O'Tell.
John: Jon, my man, how's it going? I am great, Andy. Good to see you, bud. Let me move you over to my main screen here. I'm getting that. It's been a while since I've used Riverside and I Upgraded my camera setup.
Andy: So oh, yeah, it's looking good, man. You're looking good.
John: You the skins looking good everything You must have a good skin routine John That's pretty funny man, I got Adam to hook me up here and if you've talked about this with Adam at all, but I You know, he's a bit of a nut on a lot of things in his life. But one of them is his camera recording set up there.
Andy: What did he set you up with? What did he set you up with?
John: Well, so I mean, he has like a punch list and being a good friend as well. He loaned me his IT guy to come over and kind of look at things and His IT guy is actually like, man, I'll come and like pimp your studio out. Really? We'll see. It'll continue to get better with time. But yeah, he's he's a nut. But yeah, I got the teleprompter camera kind of set up here, which his deal was. And I get it. Actually, I felt it. But he's like, you don't make eye contact at the cameras up here. And you're looking at the screen down here. You know, it's just like, human nature to kind of look where, you know, kind of the other person is, but the camera's, you know, off kilter on you. So anyways.
Andy: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. I got mine set up too. I got the light here. I've got the, the fancy ass camera, like in front of me with the teleprompter and all that stuff. Well, that dude, that's why I was having issues getting this set up. Cause it's like, I haven't done a pod in like a couple of weeks and if you don't do it every day, it's like, shit, what do I do again? You know, like you have to be like every day. That's the one starting all over. Yeah. Yeah, that's what it was. I was like, the screen I can't get the teleprompter on what the hell's going on here. So anyways, that was the deal. So make sure you practice once you're once it guy gets you all like sorted on that. So yeah, man, well, you you you I don't know if you want to chat about this, but you took some time off. What have you been up to?
John: Man, it's been fun stuff. I mean, I thank you so much, too. I owe you a huge thank you for, you know, jumping through hoops to try and find Ms. Surf guy. We ended up not leaving the compound that we were in. And, you know, that was good, too. I was out there for a buddy's 50th birthday and we had a house in… God, what is it? Starts with a P, maybe. Palmea? No, it's… God, what is it?
Andy: Pedregal?
John: Pedregal. Yeah.
Andy: Yeah. Yeah. Down in Mexico.
John: And we had like the whole, yeah, kind of chef and you know, team there, you know, so like, it just didn't make sense to leave. We left a few times for like dinners, but like I went into town, you know, for all of like 30 minutes and I was just like, yeah, not my not my vibe.
Andy: Yeah, downtown Cabo is a little even the San Jose to San Jose is more of my vibe. Everyone's retired and like, you know, like, yeah, just trying to like, go to dinner and hang out, not like, go to Squid Row and all this crazy party stuff in Cabo, which, you know, yeah, you and I talked about that.
John: As I said, that's more my vibe. Although in Pedregal, we're, we were pretty far away. So yeah, yeah. Am I freezing up on you? It looks like I froze.
Andy: No, no, you're good with me. No, you're good with me. Okay.
John: So yeah, let me know if it does. I also probably could have used a reboot before one of these. That's, that's always kind of like my routine before I get on a podcast is like, just shut down all windows, reboot, you know, make sure that you're not, you know, having any resource hogs going on while this is happening.
Andy: Yeah, man. Hopefully mine, if I freeze to let me know, but, um, well, dude, I think what would be interesting. So I was doing some research on some topics that would be like useful for the, the audience that we have here. And I think, There's two things that I want to kind of dive into you with you, which is the first one is like the whole signals, you know, trend that's going on right now and get your take on that. Right. And like dive into that. Cause you read demand based. So for people listening, um, John was the CRO or CSO chief sales officer, same thing I think, right. At a, at demand base, um, which is, you know, kind of one of the big dogs in the space as it relates to signals and all that fun stuff. And then you were previously also at Canva, which is interesting, right? So that brings me to my next point, which is I want to chat about the PLG versus sales led motion. And I think this would be interesting because one, I'm trying to do it with distribute and figure out the PLG and then how that leads into the sales led motion and that whole vibe there. And then second, I think is you hear a lot of people that do PLG and they all, you know, the shiny toy is, man, we should get into like sales led. Right. And then everyone that does like enterprise sales led is like, we should do PLG and everyone just wants what they don't have. Right. So I think diving into that and setting the record straight for a lot of people, cause you did this at Canva and just kind of going over the advantages and disadvantages of that would be super interesting. So man, let's start with. Yeah, let's start with a signals topic like where you know, where do you you're obviously friends with Adam Robinson, who is, you know, kind of, I would say blazing the trail on more of the PLG type, you know, signal bled, let's call it product. So I want to get your thoughts on this, john, and where you know, where do you think it's going? And do you think it's all hype in terms of, you know, everything that's going on today? Yeah,
John: No, I mean, I think the shortest answer is actually, I think that it's real. And I would say that the hype is well-warranted. Now, interestingly enough, I think there is a lot of noise out there in the signals world. That's definitely what I love to call out. I love signal-based selling because I think it has become It's so hard to outbound prospect the old way, right? The volume-based game of hundreds of calls a day, thousands of emails in a week, that's changed. For better or for worse, I can argue both sides here, but I think it has changed the landscape of how you do things. you know, being able to reach out to the right buyer at the right time, you know, with the right, you know, kind of signaling intent is so powerful, right? You know, I think instead of trying to spend all this time turning over a lot of rocks, like turn over a few rocks, but have, you know, better conversations, better outcomes, and you know, better engagement. And so I do think, you know, huge believer in it. And I think that that's, you know, the the magic that the internet gives us now with all these tools that we have out there, but there are so many out there. That's, you know, it creates a lot of I would say, you know, chaos, there's a lot of bad signals out there to sometimes are misused signals that cause the sales team to not trust it. Right. So I think that's right. You know, if I ever talked to anybody who's a naysayer, it's like, yeah, well, like, You know, we keep getting these emails that somebody came to the site, but we don't know who it is, right? Or we don't have any kind of understanding of why they came there, you know, or where they spent time or, you know, some of the other complimentary signals that need to be matched to that as well as the underlying data to show. you know, who it was that reached out. Right. And so I think like botched implementations of signals and misuse of the wrong, you know, wrong signals, not all signals are great, you know, you know, can can lead you to believe that, okay, it's, it's all hyper, it's just, you know, kind of, you know, fake magic out there. But I've seen it and I think it's so powerful. I think it can be used for existing customers, for acquiring customers. It really can show you who's in market for your products at the right time when they're looking for it so that you can align with them quickly and be able to show up with value on that first conversation because you know that they're already informed on you possibly by the signals that you got. You can see some of the things that they're engaging with or some of the product behaviors that they're taking if they're an existing customer. And then you can show up with information on what they're looking to buy. You can show up with some insights on things that they may be stuck on. You know, largely what's, you know, needs to be happening. Like the, you know, the other big trend that I'm seeing is that the, you know, the sales kind of buyer journey has changed, you know, it's not linear anymore. It's not the funnel that we all grew up kind of looking, you know, looking at. I have a running joke that it resembles a spaghetti bowl more than a, than a linear funnel because they, you know, customers, buyers, you know, come in and out of the process at different times. They self-inform. They go talk to 10 other people before they talk to you, right? They've done a lot of research in a lot of these cases. before they come to you. And so, you know, trying to treat them in the old way of doing things of like, you showed up on my website. So let me just start with like a, you know, overview of us and put you through, you know, three or four phases, you know, that they don't want to have, right. Creates a bad experience. So, you know, being able to, again, to say, here are the customers that, you know, are most interested in you or willing to buy or showing these intense signals. And here's the things that they care about, like now go, right. And I think you can, you can start to have you know, days of prospecting where you're not calling on 100 people, you're calling on 10, but your win rate, your your hit ratio is going to be, you know, seven out of 10, if it's done correctly.
Andy: Yeah, yeah. And there is a lot of controversy right now around like privacy in all of these signals, right, which I think more so maybe in Europe, I know a lot of people aren't doing the Europe like, you know, because of GDPR and signals on the side and all this stuff. And you know, I love my brothers and sisters over there in Europe. Don't get me wrong, but there's definitely been some posts where they're calling out people and saying, you know, this is absurd. It's violating my privacy and all that stuff. I mean, where's your head at with that? You know, it like, is it just like in the U S we don't care. Screw it. Like, you know, tell them everything. And like, you know, are other people going to get used to it? Like, you know, where's your head at when it comes to that controversy? Or how do you battle that? You know?
John: Yeah, look, I think Europe is probably way too far on one end of the spectrum here, right? And they've been pioneering with some, you know, laws and jurisdiction and things that like, you know, no one else is doing. And I do think it makes it really, really challenging over there, you know, to get things done. You know, I think that probably, you know, inversely on the US side, maybe we're probably too fast and loose and too open on some of these things. And you're starting to see a little bit of that catch up of like, what is You know, kind of the settle out in the middle. I do think there's something interesting to be said about this. You know, I think that one of the companies that I was at, you know, two, three companies ago, we commissioned a generational expert to look at the different kind of, you know, generations. And, you know, you talk about, you know, kind of Gen X, Gen Y, Gen Z, millennials, right? All these things, you know, baby boomers as well, right? And what they kind of make up in the world of kind of buyers out there. Um, and what it really came back and told you was that there's even kind of differing opinions on, you know, what, uh, privacy means on the internet. Right. You know, I think that's no baby boomers, which are my parents, your parents. Right. Uh, you know, when I tell my, my mom, what I do for a living, like she was like, that's creepy. And I'm like, mom, that's the internet and the internet knows more about you than you do. Uh, you know, at times. You know, and it's a good example. Like they, they don't really understand it. You know, they feel like it's creepy, you know, and they feel like it's, uh, you know, an invasion of privacy, you know, I'm Gen X and, you know, I think like Gen X on down, I mean, I, you know, came out of high school or was in high school when computers became a thing and the internet was becoming, you know, the big booming thing that it is today. Right. And so. I think we're a bit more understanding of the technology. Then you take it down to millennials, Gen Y and Gen Z, which are now starting to become the largest part of the buying population. The numbers are there and it's kind of interesting. The interesting thing about them is that they grew up with the internet in place. Like that's all they know is a world with internet, right? I can remember a world before it, uh, you know, you're, you're a millennial, as I say, so I'm guessing, you know, you, you've pretty much known the internet most of your life, right?
Andy: Yeah. Tell us about like, yeah, I would say the internet having my first computer, I had like, I was probably shoot, what was I? 12 or 13 or something. Yeah. Right. Teenage years, you know, right. When it was like, A dial up AOL. Yep. I remember those days, man.
John: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's interesting. So my, you know, my kids and millennials, like, again, who have had the internet around all the time, like, they understand, like, that there is no privacy on the internet, right? They understand that the technology that we utilize You know, as a give take relationship and they appreciate in some ways that the Internet is customized and personalized to them. And so I think like, that's what makes this challenging too, right? Is like, we've still got in the workforce today, you know, all the different audiences out there. What also I took from this study that we commissioned that I thought was interesting is the younger generations that, again, are becoming the largest population of buyers out there, they don't mind that they give up some of their privacy if it makes for a better internet experience. you know, the unpersonalized internet or the unpersonalized sales approach is a pretty bad one. Like I, you know, followed another person who was talking about this privacy situation. And they were like, like, I tried a day of like, complete, you know, secure and privates, you know, browsing, you know, where I did everything anonymously through VPN, you know, kind of blocked off all the cookies, I turned off every kind of if fifth I think as this world adapts, it's going to be, I think there's going to be some balancing back to your question of, is the EU right and the rest of the world wrong? I think there's probably somewhere in the middle is probably right. And I do think the way that these signals get deployed too, I think is important too. How you approach and use it in your sales process is important too. Don't be creepy about it. Yeah. Show up informed, you know, at that time, the buyers looking for information, don't show up saying, Hey, you know, I know you're on our internet or on our site on, uh, you know, we saw you browsing our site and we know that you're, you know, kind of, uh, interested in our product, right? Like, I think there's a better way to approach it, right. That shows that you have these tools at your disposal. Um, and you're using it in a way to, to help them, you know, kind of make a better, more informed decision and guide them through that process.
Andy: Yeah. And what, what, what is like the North star for what this signal based sales looks like? Right? Like we, you, you mentioned botched implementation. So like, what is the North star for that? Like if someone was to say, you know, Gen X, baby boomer, whoever, if they were like, Hey, we're going to go on a demand based RV to be all the signal thing. Like. What does the North Star or what is that great look like today? And I'm sure that it's always going to be changing, but like, what's a great implementation look like and the results that I guess you can expect from that. Right. I think the obvious answer is, Oh, they're on my web. The easy answer today is they're on my website. Let me hit them up now. And like, hopefully they're ready to buy. Right. And like, yeah. That's kind of, I feel like we're in like the embryonic stage of signals or like, that's, that's what's happening today. But like where, what's like the vision of where this goes? Right. And like what, what, what should occur?
John: Yeah. Yeah. I think like, you know, what, what is good look like versus botched in my mind, you know, one, I think it's multiple signals. I think when you just go out and purchase one signal and don't have, you know, kind of other kind of balancing points to it, like that's, that's botched in my mind. So I think it is a, It's going to be a multi-signal world and trying to decide what are the most important ones for you to capture a buyer in process at the right time. It may be one vendor, it may be multiple vendors. I think there's a lot of great vendors out there that have five, six different great signals that they rely on here, but maybe it might be one of them plus a few others. The multi-signal Implementation I think is what the Utopia looks like. I love some of these vendors too. There's a bunch out there that could be basically becoming an aggregator for that so you get the collective view. And I think that's a really powerful thing too. Again, when I see it go wrong, it's marketing sending over an Excel file of saying, here are 50 customers that are showing intents, go after it kind of thing. And I think, you know, with some of our best customers at Demandbase, you know, we set them up with the multiple signals and things that we were able to deploy. We integrated them with Salesforce because, you know, salespeople don't need more tools right now, right? We need to try and think about how do we consolidate their views or collapse their views. So bringing it into You know, common tools that they know. And the ones that I saw do it really well, you know, had these signals feeding into Salesforce. They were able to, you know, prioritize their, their work day in Salesforce. So they could say, okay, of the customers that I'm going to call on, here's the 20 that I'm going to prioritize right now because of, you know, X, Y, and Z that's been kind of called out here. Look, they're also integrated with the action layers there too. I know you've got a connection helping build outreach in the early days, having the ability to launch outreach sequences straight out of that, right? With also copy that's maybe even AI generated the first draft for you of knowing these three things are happening, this customer is the right person to reach out to. Here's, you know, potentially, you know, that that first draft Andy of the email that needs to go out, you know, for you in this process.
Andy: Yeah. Yeah. And I think some of those products are common room. Is that one of them? That's like doing all those things. Yeah. This is not sponsored folks, but common room. If you do want to sponsor, let me know. Yeah. Common Room, what are some other ones out there today that people are looking at? There's Common Room. DemandBase, are they doing the aggregate thing? Or I'm guessing you're not there at this point in time. My guess is they'll acquire one of these guys or something because they're, you know, big, who knows. But Common Room, what are some other ones out there that are kind of doing this?
John: Yeah, Common Room's great. And I talked to the team there often and have, you know, been, you know, friends to them in the past here. And I would say they're doing some great things. Like I think DemandBase has chosen to integrate, you know, with Salesforce and other, you know, kind of large, uh, you know, kind of platforms or platforms at large companies you use. Cause that's the majority of the customer base there. But, you know, if you're a smaller company getting up and running and maybe you don't use Salesforce and you don't have, you know, some of the standards that you would see at a big company, you know, common room is a great place to get started. Um, you know, in scale, they make it really easy out of the box again, to give you that combined look at all these signals kind of pulling through together. Yeah. Others, I mean, look, I think that's the neat thing that's going on right now, too, in this whole signal space is there's so many new ones that are popping up, right? You know, you've got, you know, the demand bases, the six senses of the world, you know, that have been doing this for quite some time. But then you have, you know, the, the, the common rooms coming in, you know, we mentioned RB2B, you know, I think that, uh, you know, another piece of this is having, you know, the enrichment data to follow Clay. Everybody's, you know, talking about Clay these days, obviously. And so having that being, being part of the package, you know, but I think it really is, you know, um, being able to put those pieces together based on your unique needs. Cause everybody's go to market is different, you know, and that's, that's the important thing to note here. And then, you know, kind of leveraging the components in the right places there.
Andy: Yeah. Yeah. And let's shift gears now. I want to, I want to talk about, cause I think that I personally want to learn about this at your time at Canva, which was. You know, you were the GM of North America or the right, or the VP of sales or GM in North America. Right. So, man, there's so many questions I have about that just because they, they are like the big dog when it comes to PLG, right. They're kind of like one of the, you know, one of the big five PLG, Miro, Canva, what are the other big Sigma all, you know, there's a few of them. But my question to you is like, you've worked with both product led growth and then sales models, right? Cause demand base is definitely more sales led, right? If people don't just sign up and do that, cause it takes. You mentioned big implementations, right?
John: Deployment partners, integration, marketing ops.
Andy: Yeah, it takes whole teams, right? It's a massive project. I want to go over, how do you see these approaches complementing each other in B2B SaaS companies? That is my question because you've seen Canva, I'll say it again, and from the outside in, it looks like Canva, in what I've heard from people, they have a hard time actually doing the enterprise sales motion, getting whole teams to buy. I don't know if that's true or not. That's just kind of like what I've heard from people on the street, you know? Maybe not. Maybe yes. Who knows? But like, you know, they're having trouble kind of getting into that world and like selling like the entire companies cause they're so PLG. So I want to see, you know, your thoughts on how these compliment each other today. Cause I'm, I'm super curious about, and I have a million follow-up questions for you on that.
John: Yeah. Well, let's, let's riff on this one for a bit. Cause I do think it's interesting.
Andy: Yeah. Yeah.
John: Look, I, you know, as Andy mentioned, for context, I joined Canva, you know, who is an Australian super unicorn, darling startup, you know, that really kind of started in the consumer space, right? They created a great, easy to use design tool, you know, that they gave away free to everybody and built some great virality around it. And then they started to monetize it. you know, for SMBs. So if you, you know, were, you know, I'd love to use the example of my wife opened up a cupcake shop because she loved to bake, you know, with her love of baking, you know, quickly, she'd learned that she'd have graphic design needs, you need to make store signage, you know, Instagram posts, you know, you name it, things like that business cards. And so for, you know, a very small price, you know, Canva was great for all of these, you know, kind of SMBs to get up and running and cover their needs in an effective way there. What they started to see and they did all this and they grew rapidly all without a sales team. So this is one of those magic stories of like product led growth, which is, you know, the product's so great, it sells itself and has this high virality. But my time at the company was a really fun part of their journey and evolution because they started to see folks taking it to work at really big companies. So Microsoft, Amazon, Google, you name it. And it was an interesting moment for them because they'd said, we'd never really thought we'd one, get into B2B kind of enterprise. We thought we would always just be kind of at the low end of the spectrum here and serve serve that massive population. And we never had a sales team, right. And so, you know, through some fits and starts, they realized really quickly that you don't just kind of find yourself an enterprise and grow to wall to wall deployments all by yourself, like product led growth will only take you so far. Yeah. And so it was a really neat one. And so when I joined, we actually went out and we surveyed all these customers. We asked them about, you know, their usage of Canva and why they were using it. And it was everyday people, you know, like us, not having graphic design backgrounds that really need to create visual content on a regular basis. And so good example of this is like, you know, on LinkedIn, it feels like every sales team member these days is creating, you know, content. They're showing thought leadership, they're demonstrating. the value of their brand, which is so powerful, right? But they're creating a lot of this without a design background. And so, you know, Canva allowed them to be able to build videos, to be able to do a lot of editing and things like that, that would typically take designers to get involved on. Also, the other thing that we saw was it was the sales team that had a big pitch the next day and they realized, okay, we need to customize the deck to fit this specific use case. They reached out to the design team and the design teams haven't scaled really over the last 10 years to the size and demands of most companies out there. And so they got the common answer of like, yeah, we can get back to you in like two to three weeks. Right. And so, you know, sales team, you know, it was like, okay, that's not going to work. Tomorrow's the pitch. I'll figure it out. Let me use Canva, you know, and so, you know, made us realize that again, there is this population within, you know, companies that need to create, want to create, but don't have the access or power to do so. And so we created an enterprise grade version of the platform that was secure and scalable. You know, allowed to keep, allowed you to keep teams on brand, which is always the, you know, kind of CMO's biggest concern. Yeah, exactly. That, uh, John and Andy, the sales guys are going to go out there and put the logo in hot pink cause they felt like it that day. And, uh, you know, that's, that's hugely offensive to the brand. And so anyways, we, we, we gave them the ability to create content, you know, quickly, easily, not you over utilize, you know, the design talent there. let them focus on the really high value impactful work that they need to do. And so it's this really, really powerful moment. So I think it was a neat, neat time. I was there for just about three years. We built a pretty robust sales customer success and kind of pre and post sales team. To go after that, we launched North America, we launched London. The company grew exponentially during that time. But it was, for me, I would say, a great exercise in where the world is going in an extreme case here. I do think that everybody, as you mentioned, needs parts of these strategies in their go-to-market, right? Canva at the time was probably 95% PLG, and they were thinking, how do we shift that to be more kind of 80, 20 or 70, 30. And look, I think I talked to a lot of, you know, companies out there that, that want to have, you know, PLGP part of the strategy. And I'm like, look, it could be 1%, it could be 10%, it could be, you know, let's make it 50%. But trying to figure out how do you make a frictionless, you know, kind of entry point to get people into, you know, into the platform, utilizing it and getting as much value out of it. The big art and what we had to figure out at Canva was, just for context, when I joined, they had 50 million monthly active users on the platform. I mean, that is, you know, as big as some countries. And so, you know, it really was that kind of needle in a haystack moment of like, how do you, how do you use signals? We had to, we had to be pioneers in deploying signals early on there to be able to go through that because you can't build, you would never want to build a robust sales team to go out there and have them touch all of those. Right. So I was like, okay, how do we. surface the ones that make the most sense to have a sales touch on them. How do we prospect utilizing the product usage we're seeing and then other signals, right? So we built a really robust signals engine to do that, but it was all about applying sales talent where you needed sales talent. And letting PLG continue on its own too, right? You definitely don't want to, you know, the trick of bringing in sales-led growth on top of product-led growth is, you know, making them additive, not cannibalizing one over the other here. And so, look, we did that and it was a lot of fun. We made a ton of mistakes, so I'd say like that was also the fun part about being there is that The company doubled in size, so it went from $250 million to $500 million in the year one when we brought together this PLG plus SLG motion, which Uh, is incredible. I, you know, I've, I've been through some really fast growth stories and this was, you know, kind of probably like 10 X the fastest growth story I've been a part of, you know, which was good. And then, you know, we doubled it again. We went from, you know, 500 to a billion, uh, in revenues and, and, you know, they, they're pretty public about this, even though they're privately held, but, you know, hearing that they're nearing the 2 billion mark. So that's, is continued. Um, you know, as they work through this, they've got different challenges to your point. The look, what are they, um, is probably the thing that they've got to figure out the most in that, you know, they have a vision of, you know, it goes wall to wall and lots of companies and. you know, everybody when you sign into Okta as an employee, you know, you get to see it as one of the tiles in your Okta there and they've had some wins to that level, but it hasn't been as broad. Yeah, and I do think it's, you know, it's a little bit tricky. One of their bigger challenges that I felt was that The brand is well known, but it's well known as a consumer brand. And so, you know, you could get conversations a lot of times, you know, with my sales team, they could meet with the CMO of X, Y, Z, big company. And the CMO would say, love it. You know, I've used the product. Like I created a birthday card for my, my son or an invite for, you know, a birthday party that we did here. I don't understand why we would use this at, you know, Amazon, right? Uh, and so you had to kind of take them through that journey and that story of how, you know, this is, this is really just where we got our beginnings, but this is the power of the tool and what it allows you to do and how it's going to help your team, you know, create and communicate more effectively visually.
Andy: Yeah. I want to dive into when you joined, there was 15 million people. When you left, there was probably. 50 million people, who knows, I don't know, some massive number, right? And like, you said it was a needle in a haystack trying to find the people that wanted to buy that were end users, right? Or the people that basically were good prospects to, you know, get your foot in the door to the bigger accounts, right? In layman's terms. So like, Getting a little bit tactical here, and you were probably too high to get super into the weeds, but what were some of those main signals you looked at? Were they product use signals? Was it just as simple as domain names and matching that against company size? Like, and then once you did that, what was the process to do that? And how did you focus reps? Because the big problem, as you know, when you have 15 million potential people you can look at, I just look at that. And I look at sales reps and I say, Oh my God, that's going to be a massive distraction. You know, like, like, where do you focus? Right. Cause getting them focus is, is one of the harder challenges. So like getting a little more tactical there. What, like, what the heck did you do?
John: Yeah, and to clarify, so when I joined, it was about 50 million, 5-0. Oh, 50, okay, yeah. Yeah, they're nearing 300 now. So yeah, I mean, just the numbers got massive. And taking you through it, I think the easy stuff, and this is kind of like low-hanging fruit for everybody out there, and typically what you do in this is you're looking for You know, John or Andy who signed up at, you know, AWS or, you know, at, at Yeti or Starbucks, right. You're looking for people who signed up with company domains and you, you know, again, we could see their usage patterns. We could see if they were creating teams. And so, you know, really easy to go out and say, okay, 10 people just signed up, you know, at Starbucks, you know, yesterday, let's, let's reach out to them. and talk to them about, you know, a larger platform play. And so we had some early wins on that and allowed us to get kind of traction and prove out this kind of B2B use case. But what we started to figure out quickly also was that, you know, those would lead to kind of stall points is what I call it. But like, we would get up to about 50 users at Starbucks, just as an example. And, you know, there was this belief at first of like, 10 will grow to 20, 20 will grow to 40, you know, I'll wake up tomorrow and it'll be 100. And they started to stall at kind of different points. And every time you found these stall points, again, you have to watch these patterns and trends and look for where are things stalling. But what we were finding was this was a team that went rogue independently in the company, right? They pulled out a corporate card and signed up for it. They probably weren't really talking a lot about it with other folks because they didn't want people to shut them down. Oh, interesting.
Andy: Yeah.
John: We started to spot rogue IT purchases. And so we started to realize, and I've heard other companies are going through this, like Calendly, the CRO, and I used to talk quite a bit. they had a similar situation where they're like, why are we only getting into this size? And then we're stopping. And that's exactly it. It's like, you know, when you get to whatever the corporate threshold is that they can kind of sleep, you know, slide under the radar, you know, that's usually where you're blocked. And it tells you that, you know, your sale is going to happen basically at a higher level, right? Like this is your time to go kind of above and, and, and move into, uh, you know, maybe a CMO for a broader implementation or the chief sales officer, or, you know, uh, you know, someone who's got more authority, who's going to be able to champion this purchase, you know, bring it to IT and make sure that they're bought in on that. And so, yeah, there's a lot of talk in like PLG about, you know, uh, you know, product led leads here. And I think that, you know, these are not leads is what we started to find when they got to that stall point. These are, you know, kind of almost a signal, this is a signal that someone has a pain there. Because they've started to use the product, but the people that we're working with aren't probably the right people to champion a wall to wall deployment. And so We had a lot of like fits and starts and I would say kind of like moments where, you know, we would reach out to the CMO and we would say, hey, you know, I want to talk to you about this. We had 50 people, you know, at your company sign up. And that was the wrong way to approach it. I'll say like for folks that are listening to this, that are going through this journey, this was an interesting aha or epiphany. And that when we said that, you know, like here's the usage, the CMO, all they heard was like risk and problems and like someone went outside of the process. And so they almost didn't even want to hear the pitch. You know, they were just kind of like, you know, I can, I can almost see them on Slack, like firing up, you know, a conversation with it to see how do we block it at the firewall and stop this, you know, right away. Um, and so it required us to.
Andy: Yeah. I'm running into this literally right now with distribute, right? Like, it's so funny because you're like, here's the mistake people made. They go to the scene. I'm like, dude, I just did that.
John: So I'm the dumb dumb doing that right now because we did it for a while and had to learn through it. So again, that's hopefully the benefit for your audience is they get to learn from folks that made some mistakes so they can move through them faster. So look, here's what we did. We actually were like, okay, stop leading with usage and adoption. Use that as the signal again. So this is the reason you're reaching out to that CMO because you know that they've got a pain point there. But you've got to sell them on the broad and revision first. And so we flipped our pitch deck almost on its like kind of ear. And we started off with like, you know, look, we want to get a conversation with you. We want to talk to you about this new enterprise offering. We want to talk to you about how it's helping all these big brands in the world, right? You got to establish your credibility. So again, we had to show some you know, progress that we'd made with some other teams that were doing innovative things here and then talked about why. And we talked about how the world's becoming more visual, how everybody wants to communicate, like, you know, CMO, how would you feel about like turning your a thousand sellers globally into like brand ambassadors and a megaphone for your brand? Right. And so like, then the CMO is leaning in, right. You know, they're, they're like, okay, that's exactly what we want to do. Like, there's so much. You know, social selling going on right now, there's so much brand awareness that can be pushed through your employees, right? So again, they're buying in, you know, we talked to him about the brand control and how we make sure that like, you can control what they're putting out there. You can give them, we used to call it, one, also words matter. So like, as soon as we use brand control, like, People on the user side were like, stop, the CMO loves it. So we actually kind of flipped it to freedom within a framework, but we're like, we're going to give them freedom within a framework that you define. So you're not controlling anybody and the CMO is happy and everybody wins here. Um, but as we got to the end of the presentation, you know, like, usually the objection we would hit at the end is like, great. I love it. I think it's awesome. But it sounds like another tool and we just don't have time to learn about another tool. Like, it's going to take some. you know, heavy lift on our part to enable and train or, you know, we're, we're, we're rolling out so many other things. And so then that was the time to like, let me show you, you know, something that's already happening. So there was a team of 50 folks that, you know, you have signed up, you know, it's such and such as team and the product organization or in the marketing organization. Here's how they're using it today. Let's turn them into the, uh, you know, the heroes in this story and use them for this pilot and use case. And so again, it's a, it's a way to flip the conversation and use it to up level into new ways. So anyways, that's, that's a quick, quick pro tip. I'm glad you're experiencing it. Maybe there's others that might be. batting their head against the wall right now here on this topic. But I think, you know, that's one. And I think your question was also like, as the population continue to grow, you know, how did you get better and better about this? I think another signal we saw that was a false signal, you know, was using domains as the proxy. And we started to see this over and over again. Once we kind of, you know, we got all the low-hanging fruit, we started to realize that during the pandemic, a lot of folks blurred the lines between work and home. You know, we all felt it, but I think a lot of folks used work emails to sign up for things that might be non-work related, right?
Andy: Oh, interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
John: So good example of a signal gone wrong, right? Like John or Andy, you know, again, we, we, we kind of got maybe a little bit confused over the last few years because home became work and work became home. And, you know, you know, the division of like using my Gmail versus, you know, my demand-based email became probably less of a priority. And so we started to see that and we were like, okay, again, we ran a very lean sales team in the beginning. So it was like, okay, we can't go after everything. So let's go a couple of clicks deeper. Let's look for folks that signed up with corporate domains, but then created a team and started to share designs amongst each other. That's B2B usage versus John or Andy who've signed in to create a birthday card for their kids. The other side of this is, back to our earlier conversation about being anonymous on the internet, there were a lot of folks who were trialing this out using a Gmail account. There were some great opportunities lurking in the mix that would have probably failed the first test of, did they sign up with a big company alias here? And so we were able to apply that same filter on there. Like did John Itell at Gmail sign up and did he add 10 people to the team there and Andy was in it and he and Andy are actively sharing designs and creating together. And then again, back to not being creepy, we created, you know, kind of a stealth SDR team. We called them the Canva coaches. They were probably, you know, kind of one part sales, you know, kind of development talent, but also like probably blurred the line between CX a little bit. And that, you know, we were like, okay, when you see this signal, Andy just signed up, you know, he's invited 10 people to join. He's starting to share designs. assign a Canva coach to it in the system and have them do a walkthrough and tutorial and help them see how they can unlock some of this other feature set that they may need. Set up an initial call, invite them to some of our kind of training and webinars. Not with the inclination to just, you know, close them right then and there. Nurture them a little bit along so that when they got to 40 users, now it's like, okay, let's bring in an enterprise AE at this moment. At this point, we've done the right nurturing along the way to make sure that they're engaging with the platform, they're utilizing the platform. Now they're at a critical mass, let's go. And that was a really powerful thing. So we did a number of evolutions on this. Like that was probably the fun, you know, most fun part about this whole thing too, is that over those three years, we probably iterated on our pitch deck 10 times. You know, we probably evolved our signal strategy, you know, 10 different times. We brought in outside vendors and outside signals too, right? Like, you know, we were really great at utilizing, you know, product usage and adoption, which is the thing I think where everybody should start, like start with what you control and what you see regularly. But then think about like, what do you want to bring in from the outside? Like, is there newsworthy events, right? So like, is there something going on externally that should be matched to their usage that kind of plays into this? You know, are they doing things more innovatively that, that you've been able to pick up on through some of these other alerts and signals, like layering those pieces in there as well?
Andy: Yeah. A couple of things that you said that I'm like, that I'm thinking of, like lessons that I've learned so far is like, I like the, the Canva coach model where it's not like, Hey, I'm a salesperson. It's a coach. I'm trying to educate you like that fun stuff. That's one interesting way to like frame an SDR. Right. Because as soon as people think like, Oh, you're in sales, like they're just trying to sell me. So I like that more of a nice way of putting it. I like the second thing I really liked that you said is the freedom within a framework. Right. Because as you sell, as you go from like a creator type tool, like my, like distribute, right. You're kind of like a sales creator in a way, right? Like you're,
John: Um, you're on a similar path as a very unique things, but also there's a lot of parallels here, right?
Andy: Yeah. A lot of parallels that I'm personally learning selfishly. And I'm sure I have some other people out there that are creating things like clay and all that fun stuff. Right. Um, the third thing that I think was the most interesting was your, your. The push first pull method. And that's how I thought of it, where it says pushing the CMO and saying, Hey, you have 50 users, like you should buy now, you're kind of pulling them in and saying, like, here's how you should think about where the world is going and how to think about creating great design and more efficiency in your, you know, design and your output and your assets and that. So I like that. It's just that simple framing, how you frame it, the switch of versus like pushing them like by now, by now, by now. Hey, let's take a step back and let's actually create a narrative around like why this is good for you versus like why this is good for us because you have 50 people. So I like that like push versus pull method, which I think bigger picture, this is where This is where sales is going, right? Or this is where like, the mansion and all this stuff is going. I think this is why like, putting content on LinkedIn, you know, Adam's big on that. I'm big on that. And like, this is why it's it's becoming so big is because people don't want to be pushed anymore. They want to be pulled in and do things on their own terms, which I think they always have been. But like, now more than ever, ever, because they're being bombarded with 100,000 emails a day, you know, kind of vibe, and they're like, just being pushed up. And now I think it's coming to a point where people are like, no, I want to like make my own decisions, do my own research, be pulled into what I think is, you know, a product that I have brand affinity to and all that stuff. And, um, canvas got a great brand. We can't even go into this, but like, you know, the power of brand with everything becoming so saturated, you know, there's everyone's building a new demand base, you know, every day or trying, you know, so how do you stand out? But. Anyways, now I'm just blabbering. But John, this has been amazing, man. We need to figure out a way. We need to all get together and go wake surfing sometime soon before it gets freezing, man.
John: Yeah, yeah. Right now is ideal. And yeah, well, I've got a wetsuit, so we'll figure it out when the time is right, even if we get drawn to that. But yeah, no, I always enjoy our catch-ups, Andy. And yeah, would love to get out on the water with you.
Andy: Yeah, let's do it soon, man. And I think me and Adam and then Chris as well are, we were gonna do an event back in May. Like a go to market event, but I think we're gonna like we might spend one of I don't know where their heads out. Adam just had a baby. So I might just spin it up alone. Just do kind of a, you know, go to market like meet up for like a bunch of, you know, people in that space here in Austin. So we'll see, but I'll keep you posted on that. But you know, wanted to get something to get everyone together and helping each other out and all that fun stuff. So it sounds great, man.
John: Yeah, keep me posted. Let me know where I can help.
Andy: Yeah, man. And then a side note, what's the latest with you? Well, we won't record this. Let me stop. But
