Speaker 1: 0:05

Welcome to the Spark of Ages podcast. Today we're sitting down with Chander Pathabhiram, a marketing maestro who's basically a rock star. With over 25 years in strategic marketing, chander has been the chief marketing officer at companies like Marketo and Coupa, helping grow Coupa from $150 million to over a billion dollars in revenue. These days, he's the chief go-to-market officer at Workato, where he's revolutionizing how companies approach marketing and strategy.

Speaker 1: 0:35

But Chandler's not just about numbers he's a storyteller at heart. He's been recognized by LinkedIn as one of the top five CMOs in the world to follow and has a philosophy that boils down to one simple mission set up sales to win. He gained these insights while cutting his teeth at some great companies Accenture and IBM. Originally from Chennai, chandler did his undergraduate at PSG College of Technology in India, with a background in mechanical engineering, love engineering and went to University of Texas for business school. Some of the key takeaways you can expect from this episode the impact of the latest AI innovations on go-to-market strategies and the agentic economy. Specific practical operational challenges that go-to-market teams face due to the proliferation of AI agents. And, finally, chandr's go-to-market journey and valuable lessons learned throughout his career. Chandr, welcome to the Spark of Ages.

Speaker 2: 1:36

Rajiv, thank you for the very kind introduction. It's awesome to be here, my friend, and great to chat with you today.

Speaker 1: 1:41

Yeah, great. I've been following you for many, many years. As you probably know, workato is one of the companies that are heavy in the B2B space, and so I'm so used to seeing you up on stage and it's great to get to know you in person and then have you on our show. So this is going to be a real treat.

Speaker 1: 2:00

It's great to be here. Okay, so let's start. In your thought leadership, you've highlighted the agentic opportunity and the need for a new agentic stack to address agent sprawl. What are the most significant practical operational challenges that the proliferation of AI agents creates for go-to-market teams trying to effectively reach and engage both human buyers and other agents, and engage both human buyers and other agents? So how does this change or necessitate a fundamental rethink of traditional go-to-market processes, beyond just adopting AI point solutions?

Speaker 2: 2:33

Yeah. So I think, first of all, let's talk about the positive things of it and AI agents. It's reigning agents everywhere If you look at every software company and everybody's launching their own version of agents. So it's here, it's starting to get real, and the real the Twitter headline of why is that? It can bring the best version of ourselves every day, every minute. You know there is no productivity pause when it comes to agents, unlike human beings that you know, at five o'clock in the evening, you know we get tired, but there is no productivity pause and there's no plateau of productivity. It's all the peak of productivity when you have agents working alongside you to bring the best version of ourselves. And from a go-to-market perspective, from sales to marketing, to customer success there's a lot of opportunities for us to go from being reactive to proactive and being as responsive as possible, both as individuals, as an organization, and really be the most responsible organization and drive not only just the efficiency of it, but the responsiveness of it. That's the good part of it, right?

Speaker 2: 3:28

The challenge today, to a large extent, is that, first of all, if you lose a baseball metaphor, this is probably in the bottom of the first inning in terms of real adoption right. There's a lot of experimental AI as opposed to actionable AI that's happening. The challenge today is a lot of the AI is at the edge. All these agents are at the edge. When I say at the edge, it's about SDRs driving some productivity in terms of looking at LLMs and making sure they have the best emails being sent, marketing content, et cetera. People visiting websites and how do you make that easier in real time, et cetera. Or engineers developing code and getting partnered with cloud and stuff like that to make some very better code. But it's not more for the code of a business, which is in terms of when I'm running my order to cash or my purchase to pay or my financials. Can these agents actually operate at the core of your business and really help bring those business processes and scale them in real time? That's the challenge today and to do that, going back to you know that's the effect. The cause to do that is the stack has to be fundamentally reimagined and that's the journey we are at Workado and other companies.

Speaker 2: 4:27

And how do you look at the stack bottom up, in terms of the simplest level is can you look at this? It is a three-layered stack. There is an element of these models and people have choice when it comes to models. There will be a lot of choice when it comes to these models. It's going to get commoditized over time, but there is going to be models.

Speaker 2: 4:43

And then, below that is the ability to give the most enterprise context and skills for these models to learn it's not LLM, it's ELM right Enterprise Learning Models, contextual. And above that is the ability to get the most easy way for you to build these agents, cross-functional agents, and have a foundation for that. So if you can provide this kind of think about it in three layer ways, you know the foundational context and skills, the models and then, on top of that, the ability to build these agents with the right governance, trust and the ability to avoid agents crawl. And I think that is the stack. I give you a long answer, but I want to set where the context is and where this work can go to in terms of the agentic opportunity.

Speaker 1: 5:22

I think that really helps. I mean, when you're talking about go toto-market, you have to start with a strong foundation. But even if you take an LLM, any type of LLM, to make it enterprise and I think this is the first time I'm hearing ELM so enterprise LM, that's a whole different layer of intelligence, complexity and it's what enables you to build trust when you're running these teams. That's right, enabling this effort.

Speaker 2: 5:48

That's right. And so you know there's an interesting part, right? If you look at the revenue that's coming from AI today, right, there's two kinds of things. First is a lot of these, you know, boards, and I'm a board of a public company and the board is looking at CEOs and says, okay, what is your AI strategy today? And obviously the CEO and stuff, okay, what do we do?

Speaker 2: 6:06

There's a CIO and then the trusted partner for them a lot of times is this SI, both the strategy firms like BCG and McKinsey, as well as the Accentures and the Deloittes, and so there's a lot of that experimentation of these AI projects is happening with these firms at the helm, in addition with the CIO. But really, if you look at the helm in addition with the CIO, but really if you look at the revenue, 90% of it is really POCs, and so if you look at Altimeter, they call it ERR Experimental Run Rate rather than ARR, which is really repeatable revenue, and so that's really what the challenge is how do you go from experimental to actionable and the governance and the trust and these policies are very important. Otherwise, for a public company, for example, the CFO is a CFNO when it comes to kind of implementing all of these without that governance and trust. So that's really where the game is as we look at today.

Speaker 1: 6:55

Wow, it's amazing. It's very difficult to make that leap. It's very exciting to talk about it and then experiment with it. Right, the innovation teams are playing with it, and then you're talking about actually putting it into practice. So that's potentially at the public company level and at Workato, as an automation and AI and, heavily I'd say, an integration firm that puts it all together. You're selling to these larger companies and mid-sized companies, but then you're also implementing this in-house, right? You're eating your own or drinking your own champagne, right? So how does the go-to-market playbook that you're building at Workato for selling these sophisticated automation and AI solutions differ, right? Yeah, in terms of strategy and execution, compared to the go-to-market models that you employed at companies like Marketo and Coupa?

Speaker 2: 7:47

Yeah, yeah, I think you know again, like I said, you know we are drinking our own champagne and what Workato is. You know we use and our history has been that. We've been we're modern middleware founders of Tipco, have been the founders of Workato, where we connect to applications. We connect to where the sun doesn't shine in an enterprise all parts of the enterprise and provide that context. And now we're building very aggressively and very thoughtfully this whole stack which includes the agentic layer, right? So if you look at that and how we're drinking our own champagne, in the go-to-market side of the house, it ranges from sales to marketing, to customer success. So let's give me a few marketing examples, right. One is when customers to marketing to customer success. So let's give me a few marketing examples. Right. One is you know, when somebody, for example, when some, first of all, the simpler use cases are the when, when you get a lead, the responsiveness is instantaneous. The latency gap between getting some action happening by a prospect and you're responding there used to be a latency gap. That latency gap is zero right now. So instant responsiveness in terms of leveraging the LLMs and being contextual from an SDR and doing that that's kind of the simpler use cases, but even more advanced use cases. For example, somebody comes to a Google AdWords search, comes into you and then looks at a specific page but doesn't go forward Like that you can give within five a response on is going to the user contextually. Hey, you search for this ad word, came to this page and here is a follow-up saying that it is an offer that we can give you. Right, and so that's the real-time responsiveness information of the point of action. Even somebody who sits at the pricing page but doesn't go there immediately, we can go look at that and say, okay, you attended the pricing page, you're looking at this information. Here is something that I can keep responsive to you. Right, from a sales perspective. Right.

Speaker 2: 9:26

One of our customers is using Workado. You know CPQ generation. It takes 30 minutes to create a quote for this company. Today they're able to do it in one and a half minutes from 30 minutes to one and a half minutes because they're leveraging the models plus the Workado capability, the automation capabilities, in combination to drive that efficiency play. And the customer success example is it's a common example across the board where someone like Sally in the customer success department is reasonably reactive when a customer success tickets comes in, because she has to triage it across multiple systems and she's not able to proactively know hey, the NPS score went down or the adoption and my snowflake is actually showing that they're not adopted it.

Speaker 2: 10:11

But really changing the game from reactive to proactive, because you can listen everywhere with these agents and be instantaneous, and that's on the customer success side too. And if you just extend to the back office IT, the concept of provisioning and deprovisioning can completely be non-humanized and get automatically done when an employee joins the company from that perspective. And so there's a lot of these different use cases, even in finance, like different automation scenarios. But the key in this context is don't think functionally but think process. You have to think about it because the process grows across these different systems. It's not like a Zendesk agent versus a Salesforce agent versus a Mercado agent. How do these things work across these systems? And think about it at a process level as opposed to just a function level. I think that's what's going to make it successful and that's some of the things that we are doing with our own technology.

Speaker 1: 11:05

So that's the part that's different about what Workato is doing, because you're a firm that ties together multiple applications into processes. That goes across applications, goes not just within function, but across function. You're thinking about it differently than you would have maybe at Marketo or Coupa 100%, because I was very functional, siloed, when I came to Marketo.

Speaker 2: 11:30

I'd wake up in the morning and think about marketing, because selling to marketers but ultimately order to cash is not a functional thing, it's a process thing. Purchase to pay is not a functional thing, it's a process thing. It cuts across boundaries right and fundamentally, if you're actually a technology that is helping companies cut across boundaries and streamline information flow across these systems. The same thing that is true for applications is also true for agents, and except that the challenge here is that if the app sprawl was X, the agent sprawl is 1000X because you will have more. So that's kind of what's coming. But really the ability to think about this at a process level helps our customers have a fundamental advantage. And even when we call our agents, just from an optical alignment perspective, we call it agent X, agent X, sales agent. X is the cross-functional thing as opposed to the agent F, for any company is a functional thing as opposed to X being the cross-functional thing as opposed to the agent F, for any company is a functional thing as opposed to X being the cross-functional thing.

Speaker 1: 12:28

So that's the advantage. That's amazing. And then how do you get people to work across functions? That's probably something you guys had to cure as well, because a lot of times people don't want to work across functions. So is that part of the sale that, if I buy from Workato as part of the deal is I'm not going to just do a bunch of things that are very functional in nature and then try to cross.

Speaker 2: 12:55

I'm going to sell it at a different level and make it a company-wide process. The whole idea of automation is that you don't have to go pull something and go do the first mile. Something comes to you and say that people will start working better when it says, okay, something is triggered in something and comes to me to do something, as opposed to me going and trying to find out what I need to do. When that happens, it seamlessly cuts across boundaries. So I'm not an approval person, a credit approval or inventory person or something saying what do I need to do, as opposed to something comes to me saying do it right now and then I do it and then it moves the thing forward Right, so that is abstracted from each user. That process flow is abstracted from each user to say that you're in marketing or you're in sales or you're in inventory. It just goes through. It seamlessly Solves the problem Right.

Speaker 1: 13:40

So then, when you're selling it right, but when you're selling it right from a go-to like so you've taken on this interesting title of go-to-market executive, you might be. I know there's companies starting to move that way. I saw that ZoomInfo relabeled itself as go-to-market for its stock ticker right, and some of the competitors, like I think Demandbase, changed itself from saying it's an ABM system to a go-to-market system.

Speaker 1: 14:02

But you're one of the first ones that took on. I think, in terms of the sale of this, you could choose to sell something functionally and say I'm going to solve this specific problem, or you can choose to sell it as well. I'm not going to go there unless I can get something that, unless I can get something that's more of a process flow. Is that part of the filtering, when you guys think about it, when you guys try to drive the motion?

Speaker 2: 14:30

It is, it's a part of and near not or right, and so certain times what happens is at Lashing, for example, has a very specific financial need, which says that I got to close my books. 30 systems within finance connecting all roads lead to Rome, right, erp, and I need to connect all this stuff. It's painful and okay, I'm going to use Ricardo to kind of automate this process and do it in half the time to close books for a public company. But in addition to that, it's an or.

Speaker 2: 14:54

In addition to that, it teams and business technology teams have the purview of processes across these different functions. Right, they're looking at it saying, hey, why do I need technologies that are these that are connecting these applications? Because I see the siloed problem. And how do I go from siloed to synergy? And a lot of times business technology teams and IT teams are tasked to do that. That's historically what middleware happened, right? So when you open the door through those teams, fundamentally, you know many times you're the burnt victim of saying that this is a problem, that my organization is not as streamlined, it's more siloed than it needs to be. And so when you open the door through that buyer persona, you're fundamentally approaching it from a process perspective, as opposed to approaching it from a very functional selling, to marketing or sales or customer support, which tends to look at it siloed.

Speaker 1: 15:40

I think that's a really interesting way of doing it. It changes the dynamic because a lot of times I'll take'll take.

Speaker 2: 15:48

you know, a salesperson say I'll take the first thing I can get, and this is this is creating a different bar and it's a really smart way of going it is, and I think I also think that there's fundamentally a functional challenge when you sell only to a line of business, when you're selling, you know these AI technologies. Again, the challenge is going to be the agent sprawl I talked about. But the other thing is you know executives buy platforms, practitioners and functions buy products, and so you've got to kind of position as a platform, say, when you're looking at it holistically across the board, then just looking at it as a specific product for a particular functional use case. Right, that's the approach.

Speaker 1: 16:18

That's great. So you talked about agent sprawl, right, you have with AI. There are vast data sets customer conversations, campaign performance so are you seeing that AI is changing the metrics that are important for go-to-market teams to track and prioritize? Are they changing fundamentally or are they basically similar to what you've always had, but you're doing it faster, more effectively? And are there specific data sources that you're seeing that are becoming more important than they used to be in this AI-driven framework?

Speaker 2: 16:55

Yeah, it's a good question, man, but ultimately, if you go back to first principles, you know go-to-market is go-to-market, selling is selling Ultimately. You gave me that thing about set up sales to win, so I'll answer the question this way. I'm responsible for organizations ranging from growth marketing to corporate marketing, to partnerships, to go-to-market strategy, to operations and stuff and even incubation sales outside of just the enterprise sales teams. So why do we exist? We exist to drive harmony across these functions. There's either harm or harmony in organizations. So harmony across these functions to ultimately set up sales to win.

Speaker 2: 17:31

So the metrics, ultimately, are these three things In all go-to-market. You can boil it down to three metrics Win more, win bigger, win faster right. Are you winning more? It's just your win rate. Are you winning bigger, which is your ASP, and winning faster, which is the sales cycle? So AI, non-ai, all these things, et cetera, right. Ultimately it comes down to these metrics.

Speaker 2: 17:51

I don't think the mindset of metrics changes, but it really is driving, as I said, the efficiency and the responsiveness at a scale that's never been done before. The efficiency and the response. That's really the opportunity here, so that you're really focusing on what matters most and driving all these efficiency issues. You know salespeople fundamentally they don't like to do a lot of things right, and salespeople do what you inspect, not what you expect. And so imagine you kind of so every time you look at a pipeline report or you look at any of these Windroth analysis and all these things, I mean there's a lot of these data has to be kind of further calibrated because you know it's some salesperson in Abilene, texas putting the data in and you don't know if that's true or not. But getting that out, getting the deficiency more, getting them to be more responsive, that's the aha from this perspective, right, and to do that. And you talk about agents and stuff like that for success.

Speaker 1: 18:44

So maybe one way of thinking about win more, win bigger, win faster. So when I'm running the buyer journey, when I'm trying to understand the buyer journey, maybe before, where I might key up on a single type of buyer or a single and a secondary type of buyer as part of driving my motion, Now I can hit multiple secondary type of buyer as part of driving my emotion. Now I can hit multiple, like once it lights up that a company may be interested in my, my capabilities. I can now address multiple buyers, multiple types of folks with different types of messaging almost simultaneously and helping the salesperson think through how they get you know the system the marketing system can get to them and the salesperson can get to them as well.

Speaker 2: 19:24

You can't.

Speaker 1: 19:25

And it's hard. It's not simple because you still have to approve all this content and think about how you customize it and all that. But I can open up multiple layers.

Speaker 2: 19:35

You can, Rajiv. I think there's a two-edged sword here. Just to be very clear, going back to fundamentals of go-to-market, right, the ability for you to kind of think holistically I talked about processes, opening the door through IT and the ability to see the impact across areas of go-to-market that AI can do is high and, yes, like that. So there's, on one hand, the ability to go do that positioning. The other hand is the first principles of go-to-market is, while you're scaling an organizational, it's not like the larger, even going from a hundred million to a. So your success is inversely proportional to the amount of buyer centers that you deal with, Meaning the smaller the amount of buyers.

Speaker 2: 20:15

When I say a buyer center, for example sales, is a buyer center, sales and sales associate, right. You go try to open the door with four or five different buyer centers, you're kind of getting dilute sales enablement problem, your positioning problem, your website problem and all these things. So there's a balance there problem, your website problem and all these things. So there's a balance there. And my philosophy has always been that when you're trying to open the door in a scheme, when you're scaling the organization, you have to make sure buyer centers in such a way that they are one or less one standard deviation away. So procurement and finance are close cousins. We're trying to sell to procurement and supply chain at Coupa. That's two standard deviations away and that's a challenge when you're scaling an organization right. You look at a company like ServiceNow when it was growing. It's brilliant because they sold to IT as the buyer center ITSM.

Speaker 1: 20:59

they didn't worry about anything else.

Speaker 2: 21:01

And they went up the stack in terms of category expansion, but to the same buyer center. And a lot of times organizations get challenged when they go broad across multiple. Because I'm a platform. That's the great news I can sell to anybody. The bad news is that you're a platform and you try to go after five different buyer centers when you're scaling. That's a fundamental challenge. I actually wrote about it two weeks ago, put this picture that the number of buyer centers that go to market sex is inversely proportional. So my point is even with AI, you just have to be careful that you don't dilute those first principles of go-to-market and try to spray and pray.

Speaker 1: 21:32

I think yeah, I think you nailed that in terms of if you go too broad and try to hit everything with too broad of a capability, you're going to have all these people potentially fired up and you're diluted as a company and the other right, the client is potentially diluted, right? I'm actually thinking more that within the group that's trying to buy from you, where before I might be able to hit the IT group, or I might be able to hit the innovation group or maybe even one of the functions that would be working with IT as part of that. Now maybe I can go after finance and procurement as part of it, where I might have relied on my champion to go do the job for me. Now I can actually hit all those areas through marketing and through PDA et cetera.

Speaker 1: 22:23

And I wonder, not wonder. But then we have the metric of does that actually accelerate the sale? If I'm going to create all that extra input, how do I create an experiment, experimental group that does this and then understand can I get a greater sales velocity or opportunity velocity to enable that to occur?

Speaker 2: 22:42

Yeah, it's a good question, man, and you know it also centers around, like you know, where your core existing champion is today, and if IT has a lot of power in the organization, they can essentially try to go force that decision across teams. The bigger question you're asking, the more meta question that you're approaching, is that when you're looking at these agents, is that a line of business sale or an IT sale? And so that's the meta question in this perspective. So I think there's two answers to this.

Speaker 2: 23:12

If you're looking at I give you example of sales or customer success or these things the way it's positioned today, some of these functional apps functional agents sorry, not apps are still being a line of business sale, because the Zendesk buyer says I'm going to buy a Zendesk agent, or a Salesforce buyer says agent, whereas when you're looking at these agentic platforms that can help companies not only just buy these agents but also custom build them and scale them with governance and trust, that is an IT sale, right. And so you have to think through what are you? Are you a very specific niche agent for a specific line of business? In that case, you open the door with those line of business, or are you fundamentally a platform that is trying to help these companies scale their agent tech framework with governance and trust and also build agents, then I feel, and I believe, that you're best suited to open the door with IT with a set of proof points.

Speaker 2: 24:10

That's the point of saying, hey, I have this agent tech, sales agent tech, marketing, agent tech HR, that I can go to the line of business and demonstrate that. But that's a proof point of how this platform can actually scale.

Speaker 1: 24:23

One of the things I do like about since we've interviewed Rishi before on this podcast, who was your chief growth officer, right? So one of the things I do like about the way Workato sells is that it is through example, right, it's not necessarily. Well, I'm sure at some point it is. It's like, oh, we're an iPass platform and, as a result, we do all these technical sounding things Like you talked about. I can enable my sales team to be immediately responsive. If somebody gives me a business card during the trade show, right, it automatically looks up information on them, automatically pulls it together, it automatically gives me the data it. It then puts the information in the right systems, but I don't have to leave my slack instance to to know or communicate with it or work with it.

Speaker 1: 25:11

That's right, right, so that's something you guys are really good at is telling that story from an example point of view, and that's one of the things I think you've written a lot about. Is marketing as storytelling, right. How to reach the heart and build a bond, maybe. Talk about how could does AI help you with that as well? Is that? How do you keep authenticity with that?

Speaker 1: 25:32

emotional resonance that you're building up.

Speaker 2: 25:35

It's a hard question. It's really hard, right? I mean people think heart to head rather than head to heart, as you said, right, as a brand, you have to connect heart to head. Your ethos is heart to head. I mean, what's the Greek line? Ethos, pathos, logos. Ethos meaning credibility, pathos meaning emotion and logos meaning logos. Ethos meaning credibility, pathos meaning emotion and logos meaning logic. So emotion before logic, right, if you're credible, you can drive with emotion. That's a storytelling answer. I think.

Speaker 2: 26:01

Look, you know, there is a tremendous opportunity it's early about how AI can help, you know, improve your storytelling from that perspective. Again, this concept of enterprise learning. I'll tell you one example. I was helping a large VC firm I wouldn't say what the name is today to help them rebrand before I joined Workato, a very well-known VC firm, really good founders or at least really good managing partners and stuff like that and they kind of gone a little off in their positioning from where they were and they want to really kind of up-level their positioning and stuff like that. And they've gone a little off in their positioning from where they were and they want to really up-level their positioning and stuff like that.

Speaker 2: 26:34

So we went through a workshop for a few weeks. And so I was trying to say, okay, how can I leverage AI to help on this emotive storytelling and these things? So I use one of these models all these models are reasonably good and then I fed the brand ethos into a document and said what this brand stands for. And then I kind of fed it also the whole Steve Jobs think different commercial, like 1997, in terms of what that whole storytelling is, and said, given this brand ethos, I want something stylistically aligned to this whole think different kind of a story. What I got back in like 40, 50 seconds, was incredible.

Speaker 2: 27:14

It was absolutely. I mean, that would have taken a set of copywriters, you know, some time to kind of come up with it, right. But of course it's a starting point, not an ending point. There's always human in the loop for it to kind of go further, to calibrate it. But that element of this idea of smarter together, you know the wisdom of the crowd right, and leveraging the wisdom of all the data that's sitting out there, is incredible from a branding perspective and how you can look. No, you have to keep your the essence of your brand, but, man, there's significant opportunity. That just one practical example.

Speaker 1: 27:41

And when I show I love that example because we had a similar situation where my my team was going to present, as part of doing a website, was going to present a new, uh, a refinement to their logo. And, uh, you know, I was like you know, you guys just can't send that low. A bunch of logo designs. You've done all these interviews, you've done all this research. Hey, we need to put it together in a set of frameworks. So within a week, literally from the monday that we brought it up to the friday that we had the workshop, the team developed a whole, used one of the common frameworks, built a whole brand architecture, messaging architecture that aligned with the interviews that they had and came up with a whole bunch of examples of ways the company can reposition themselves or refine their positioning. And while these chat tools or AI tools didn't come up with the answer, it enabled us to iterate much faster.

Speaker 2: 28:36

Absolutely, it's the, it's the latency loop. I go back to the point right, the latency loop of going from idea to execution. You know, if using a, I mean it's closing the chasm between what your idea and execution, is right, that's really the, the brilliance of the models, and it actually turned out to be, you know, pretty good Like, for example I'll tell you one more example right, we just did a big partnership announcement with Anthropic for the MCP right.

Speaker 2: 29:01

It's a new, hot new protocol, a model context protocol that is happening in the AI space in terms of how you provide skills and context to different agents that everybody's building. So Anthropic has this standard and so Workado obviously being we connect where the sun doesn't shine it's a great feeder of context and skills into MCP. So we're going to announce it in New York and the previous day we were just quickly doing a partnership agreement and stuff like that. So I said I just fed it from engineering Write me a one pager kind of a solution sheet of the workado anthropic value proposition, mcp value proposition right, yeah, what?

Speaker 1: 29:40

my product marketer will probably take in a few days and write it in different styles.

Speaker 2: 29:44

Give me it's from engineering, like you learn and then stuff.

Speaker 1: 29:46

It's incredible man.

Speaker 2: 29:48

But that's again. But those are use cases at the edge I talked about right.

Speaker 1: 29:51

Right.

Speaker 2: 29:52

The opportunity really is to go in from the edge and if I'm drawing my order to cash and my efficiency of my you know financials and my purchasing and provisioning, that is going to be the game changer in terms of these organizations and how they get you know, reduce the latency loop, close the chasm and be extremely responsive.

Speaker 1: 30:09

That's really the game here. You've talked about earned channels right and the peer bond world at one point in your discussions or in the things that you've written and talked about how their existing customers significantly influence prospects. So how are you leveraging the latest AI capabilities to fuel brand advocacy and gather actionable insights that actively shape brand perception?

Speaker 2: 30:32

Yeah, that's a good question. I think first of all, I keep saying our existing customers and gather actionable insights that actively shape brand perception. Yeah, it's a good question. I think, first of all, I keep saying our existing customers are our best sellers. I tell our sales teams all the time no offense to you, our best sellers are our customers.

Speaker 2: 30:45

And the more you can bring existing customers into the prospect cycle, the better your chances are, especially if they like your product and deal acceleration happens through community activation, that's right. Your product and deal acceleration happens through community activation, that's right. You really think about deal acceleration happens through community activation. And then can you create that flywheel of you drive the awareness, the acquisition, the advocacy that actually drives the awareness and the acquisition right. And I think that's the simple framework to think through it.

Speaker 2: 31:06

And so, from our perspective, like you know one of the ways, like you know one of the ways, like you know, I guide a company called PeerBoundai.

Speaker 2: 31:12

Since you said the word PeerBound, it kind of struck me Sunny is running the company. Used to work on my team, really smart guy, again like you, a HBS guy, and he's running it. But just an example of what used to take me, you know days to look at a case study and so think about, like you know, the customers come spoken in. Some, you know we have this deal analysis, the win-loss report, and potentially they've said something in some webinar or some interview that we did. But the ability to turn around and create these advocacy stories instantaneously in different formats, in different kind of you know form, functions like some of them could be a one slider, some of them could be a longer two-page PDF, some of them could be the website, the problem solution views. But everybody to do that and one of these examples is this company, for example, we use Ricardo also for that and get those advocacy stories at the hand of sales instantly is an awesome, awesome, one actionable thing that they do.

Speaker 1: 32:04

Right, it's almost like as they're. Two comments on this. One is I think Forrester talked about this recently at their B2B conference the notion of a buyer network. Yep, right, it's not before we would have internal and external drivers to it. We knew about the notion of, oh, you have to influence analysts, you have to influence your customers to help them drive advocacy right, but now they formalized it into a set of a whole bunch of different, you know, areas that we have to, that we want to drive towards. Right, it's not just the analyst, it's the reviewers, it's just there's so many different, disparate channels now that we want to, that we want influence to them. And the cool part, like you're talking about, is that with AI and with the ability to understand context while the salesperson is speaking, perhaps as they're talking on a Zoom call, it could literally bring up some of these examples. Right, the hit on my competitor. I hear about an objection. It could literally pull up things. So lots of really interesting and cool ways to pull information together instantly.

Speaker 2: 33:24

Look, it's a really good point. I think there's two variations to this right. I think one is again going back to the latency loop. It's contextual information of the point of action that you can get based on being real time and stuff like that for the seller, like if I'm selling to company X, this particular use case, this particular thing and you know we have a reference bot that we have built, for example, as one example right in terms of getting real time information based on if I'm selling to X, y at the point of action, information based on if I'm selling to X, y at the point of action.

Speaker 2: 33:53

The second point you made is actually a very interesting point, which is, look, if I have a piece of asset, like a customer has given some sort of an endorsement on our value proposition relative to a competition for any of us, right, and then why? What's our? In their mind? You are what your buyers think you are right, and so let's start with that. And so that perception from their perspective, why you think they think you're different, why they bought you, et cetera, that piece of content, asset, et cetera, can be contextualized. Selling it to an analyst has a different kind of nuance to it than selling it to another prospect, then putting it on your website, then sending it to an influencer, et cetera, right, so the ability to kind of nuance that in real time and do that, I think it's a huge, huge, huge benefit that it would have taken us. Think about a traditional way of doing this right. It sends to some corporate marketing team, a customer marketer looks at it, and then they have to go and the analyst relations person takes that and now they have to go customize it. I keep going back to the same point that latency loop and closing the chasm is really the value in this perspective.

Speaker 1: 34:57

Welcome to the Spark Tank, where we ignite the unexpected connections that fuel go-to-market innovation and occasionally set fire to conventional business thinking. Today, we're thrilled to have Chandler Pithabhiram, a true go-to-market guru, who can probably turn a startup pitch into a market revolution faster than most people can order a coffee. This is the ultimate word association challenge, where your first instinct could either unlock a million-dollar insight or create the kind of beautiful chaos that makes corporate strategy meetings actually interesting. Here's how it works. I'll start with a word related to go-to-market marketing or business strategy and, chandar, you'll respond with the very first word that pops into your mind no filtering, no board-level deliberation, no consulting your inner management consultant. Then I'll respond and we'll keep this chain of associations flowing for at least three back-and forth volleys for each term. So, chandar, are you ready to spark some go-to-market brilliance?

Speaker 2: 35:57

I'm ready to spark some go-to-market thoughts. There we go.

Speaker 1: 35:59

No, PowerPoint required. All right, here's the first word, something you know really well Demand.

Speaker 2: 36:05

Essential.

Speaker 1: 36:06

Scale.

Speaker 2: 36:07

Hard. Why? Because most companies try to scale it before they nail it and you have to nail your instant repeatability as a growing company. Both this scale it and that's the trap that organizations fall into.

Speaker 1: 36:17

I think this happens a lot. Tehi Nam of Storm Ventures talks about this a lot, where he talks about the founder. We quickly, the founder makes a couple deals, it doesn't, it's not repeatable because the founder knows so much. And then they quickly turn on sales and marketing and they say what the hell?

Speaker 2: 36:36

nothing worked that's right, and I think tahi and I'm on, I'm privileged to be on a board with him and using the board of markello too. I think he talks about the nuance between product market fit and go-to-market fit. Yeah, and product market fit is finding a initial set of use cases, but the real go-to-market fit is nailing the rinse and repeatability and then try to go do it and that's the challenge. That's hard for organizations.

Speaker 1: 36:55

It's hard to take that step. Yes, you got to do your deal grind All right. Next one Giving Go-givers.

Speaker 2: 37:04

Philanthropy Should start earlier in life, because giving can be not only just about money but about time, and people can start giving earlier in their life their time to to causes as much as giving money Once they get more money later in their life.

Speaker 1: 37:20

I love. I love that notion that you know, a lot of times folks will say I'm going to make a bunch of money and then I'll start giving and you can give from day one. You know, salesforce, I know, talks about this a lot as part of their corporate philosophy. But you have time, you have. Whatever money you have, you can give.

Speaker 2: 37:38

Yeah. So I think that sequentially, people have talked about being a go-getter and then being a go-giver, but I think that's a parallel thing, that you can be a go-giver as much as being a go-getter early in your life. And I'm privileged to be part of a board of directors for one school at a time. It's a charity cause helping rural kids in India with better schools and stuff like that and you know. And so again, the message that we send to people obviously we have the privilege of people giving money. We've established themselves and are very charitable, but it doesn't have to start there. It can start earlier in life. I wish I had done that earlier in my life to start being a go-giver in terms of my time as much as being a go-giver in terms of my money later on.

Speaker 1: 38:16

I think that's just a great way to build up your sense of purpose, your sense of connection, your sense of community and, frankly, it sounds like and I know you've done this most of your careers always be willing to give of yourself and your time and your experiences, because that always comes back in some way and accelerates and creates a virtual cycle, a virtuous loop.

Speaker 2: 38:35

That's not from a charitable perspective, but in terms of helping people grow in their careers too.

Speaker 1: 38:39

I love it Okay, chennai.

Speaker 2: 38:42

Hometown.

Speaker 1: 38:49

For me big temple, big, gigantic temple. I went there in 1985 and my parents when they forced us go through south india in the middle of summer and we stopped in chennai and I was like this is one of the hottest places I've ever been in it's a really spectacular temples yeah, no, it's great temples.

Speaker 2: 39:07

That's why I say chennai is a city. Madras was an emotion. Uh, because I grew up in Madras and it was called Madras and my feelings are about Madras. Madras is an emotion, chennai is a city, and that's the way I always go back to my times in. You know Madras as I use, I always think of it. I don't call it Madras.

Speaker 1: 39:23

Really. So you see it as Madras because you grew up, because that was, that was your heritage, that's where you that's why I say Chennai is a city.

Speaker 2: 39:30

Madras is a feeling. It's an emotion. I love it. That's beautiful Future Game-changing. I think we are at a time we thought the internet was truly the game-changing technology for times, but AI is going to be incredibly more.

Speaker 1: 39:47

I've never seen this. I mean I've been Like you. I've never seen this, I mean I've been like you. I've been through multiple, multiple, what I thought were game changing times, everything from the PC to the network, to the internet, to mobile, to blockchain, and nothing is like this one.

Speaker 2: 40:05

Incredible, and that's why the windshield is a lot more exciting than the rear view mirror, even though the rear view mirror has a bunch of technologies. I think it's I mean, it's both it's exciting. That's why I use the word game-changing. There's multiple areas that could be very, very positive. There's other areas, you know, that may not be very positive too, so that's why it's incredibly game-changing.

Speaker 1: 40:25

I think it's so. If you were to advise kids on what to think about with this environment, this AI environment, what would you say to them? Is there something you've said to your kids or your nephews and nieces.

Speaker 2: 40:40

Well, you know, there's a school of thought, you know, which says that you know what AI cannot replace is human emotion, and so human connection and human emotion. So I keep telling my kids you know, learn what AI is, but don't forget what makes you uniquely different. And start with the heart and not the head. And it can solve a lot of the head, but the heart is what uniquely is different. And so I tell my kids that you know, liberal arts may be a great degree in the future, as much as computer science is right. My daughter is actually doing psychology and data science, and so there's an element of the AI piece and the data science, a lot of it, and then the psychology piece. Again, people think hard to head, and those pieces are the ones that have a potential not to be replaced, where everything else can be.

Speaker 1: 41:27

So she is playing with models and she's thinking about them in the psychological context which is really interesting, they have to come together they have I mean, I think it's why a lot of the llm makers have added once instead of just question, respond, like the search engines used to be, or are it always asks for I can do more for you. Do you want to keep going? It's, uh, it's, it's understanding that psychology of how to drive greater usage and connection and value.

Speaker 2: 41:56

It is. It's interesting, right, like you know, tomorrow, do you think your psychologist or your counselor will be replaced? You know it's a good question. I mean that human connection, and so you know if you're talking at something, potentially, but if you're talking with somebody in terms of, you know, getting that human connection, that's probably one career path, that one of the few career paths that may not be as impacted as any of the technology career paths today.

Speaker 1: 42:23

You know, we may have to have a special training for kids on getting them to meet other kids and talk to other kids.

Speaker 2: 42:30

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 42:31

So it'll be so easy to talk to your AI agent.

Speaker 2: 42:35

That's actually fascinating.

Speaker 1: 42:36

There's the messiness of human relationships, right that, meeting your first friend, having your first rejection, having being part of a group.

Speaker 2: 42:46

Yeah, I mean, you think about this. Like you know, Elon Musk had his Optimus Prime, the robotic launch, right. So think about these agents walking around your house. We've been talking about agentic and enterprise and stuff like that. But think about you know, your bartender can be an agent sitting around your house. We've been talking about agentic and enterprise and stuff like that. But think about you know, your bartender can be an agent sitting in your house, or maybe someone who's a companion, If someone's sitting in your house who just does all this stuff and keeps you engaged five years from now. Yeah, it's possible, it's possible.

Speaker 1: 43:13

We don't want to lose that human connection right.

Speaker 2: 43:15

You don't.

Speaker 1: 43:25

That's why hard to head, you know you think hard to head, I think there's a shot. Yeah, that's time. So, chanda, did you always know that you wanted to work in technology? I know you. You came in as a, you went for mechanical engineering. I didn't know if that was something you were interested in or that was part of the normal course of things. You have to be a doctor, an engineer. Was there like a specific moment or project that sparked your passion then for go-to-market from engineering? So where'd you get that passion?

Speaker 2: 43:43

That's a good question, man. I was the only guy in my college, I think, went to business school when I was 21. Because early in life I think it's an element of discovering yourself and it's important to kind of, I feel, to understand what you're not good at and what you're not passionate at as much as what you're good at Right. And so I think when I did the engineering piece, I think it gave me a great foundational of structured thinking. But I didn't have an onlyness. If each one of us is a product, we think about what is my onlyness? Where can I be really great at my product? I didn't feel that I had that differentiation, my onlyness.

Speaker 2: 44:16

And I was lucky enough in my life that I realized that early in my life that I should qualify out rather than qualify in this thing. I knew what I was qualifying out of and then the journey of qualifying in into what I needed to go was a longer journey, but I knew early on, as I was going through the degree, that I think you're going to be very successful in life in one thing. One is you have to find your Venn diagram of what your passion and your DNA is right. And I also think that when you pick careers that match your personality, you tend to be a lot more successful than careers that don't match your personality.

Speaker 1: 44:47

So is that what you found? Like you were going through the process, you were in engineering. I'm sure you did well in school and then you found-. I was actually reasonably good this is good, I'm good, but my persona is more meant for business, that's right let me. Let me put the two together. And did that hit you as you were in the middle of it? Is or is there someone in your life that came in that gave you that? Or did you do some internship that opened it up for you?

Speaker 2: 45:11

I think there's a combination of things. You know, I've inspired my family. My brother-in-law was a business person, so I was inspired by that. My dad died when I was 16, so it was kind of. You know, I was he's one of my mentors. My brother-in-law was a business person, but I also inherently, you know, as I went through it, I was involved in drama, I was involved in a lot of these, these, these kind of storytelling things, and I just not.

Speaker 2: 45:30

It's where you naturally align yourself to, like where your passion is right and and and you just have to stick to it.

Speaker 2: 45:36

I I was talking to a UC Berkeley MBA class about a few years ago as I was graduating, and one of my points was that, hey, just don't become management consultants or financial bankers just because everybody else is, and if your onlyness is something different, go pursue it because you'll be great at it.

Speaker 2: 45:52

Right. And so, luckily for me, I didn't know what my onlyness was when I was 20, but what I knew, what it wasn't was. I didn't know what my only nest was when I was 20, but what I knew, what it wasn't, was going to be a mechanical engineer. So that was the process of qualifying out that I did. But naturally, I think you know, over the years I was in management consulting and then I was lucky enough to kind of transition that into marketing in 2000 in a startup in Silicon Valley that failed. Management consulting was actually really good, but then I kind of started realizing that you know, my onlyness could be accentuated If I was a product, that area. I could really shine in that and kind of where your personality comes out, the job function matches your personality and just build on that.

Speaker 1: 46:30

You've said before that failure is the feature, not the bug. Yep, could you elaborate more on this philosophy, what that means to you in practice?

Speaker 2: 46:39

Every time we go here, people reverse engineer wisdom and do anything in their lives right. They can go and say, if they're successful here, they go back and say, oh, all these great things happen A lot of times. As we know, we learn more from where we did mistakes and where we did not follow. The path wasn't as rosy as what you think it is. Everybody makes it out to be, when you have success, right, and so that's what I kind of looked at. The best lessons for me, my second business school was right.

Speaker 2: 47:06

All these startup failures that I had professionally and I've been batting at 50% in startups right. 50% was successful, 50% was not. And even in successful startups, you went through some challenges along the way that you failed. And even in successful startups, you went through some challenges along the way that you failed. And so those are the best lessons. And there are two kinds of jobs right Jobs that you're successful and jobs that you learn from, and so that's the second part of that right, and so, from my perspective, that's why I've always talked about some of the best lessons when it comes to whether it's in positioning or messaging or go to market.

Speaker 1: 47:37

Yeah, if you were to pick one of the businesses that didn't go well and something big that you learned from it that you'd like to share, I'd love to hear it.

Speaker 2: 47:46

Yeah, I think you know like, for example, I'll talk about a business that actually didn't go well in the first half and went reasonably well in the second half, pretty well in the second half. This was a company called Castan. I spent quite a few years in it. It was the first appliance company in the middleware space. Right, I think you know.

Speaker 2: 48:04

The big lesson for me is you have to sell and position your product to a market that values your onlyness and differentiation. So, for example, if you're selling an iPod, don't go try to position an iPod to a person looking for a stereo system, even though that your board and your VCs might say, hey, go and play the enterprise, play and go drive it to the enterprise, because that's where the money is. Whereas if you're really building an iPod, where it's all about simplicity and not comprehensiveness, pick a market segment that values that onlyness. So we're building an appliance that was simple and good, but we're trying to go position this for the largest of large companies. We failed. When you look at a company like HubSpot I really really respect Yamini and team what they're doing is that they realized over the years is that they are building simplicity. They're not building this big comprehensiveness. But they said I'm going to stick to a market that values that which is the SMB, rather than trying to go force fit myself into a market that doesn't value it.

Speaker 1: 49:00

The siren song of that is very, you know, very attractive. It's very magnetic to go keep going up market for them.

Speaker 2: 49:06

but to focus on simplicity, You're right, asp goes up, and gravity doesn't work in enterprise software. What that goes up doesn't come down, and so once you go up market, you can't do that, and so that's one lesson of like you know position and sell your products to markets that value your onlyness, right, and I think that's one. You asked me for one.

Speaker 1: 49:24

I have 50, but that's one. I love it. No, that's fantastic, I really appreciate it, and I think you mentioned the other one about buyer centers and really understanding the buyer center and really yeah, that was a big thing even in one of my recent companies that when we started diluting our buyer centers.

Speaker 2: 49:45

A great metric that captures it is the NRR If you're actually selling well and if you're able to expand within the same buyer center, naturally your NRR will go up from that perspective. But if you're selling really well but your NRR is not great it's below 110, it shows that your cross-sell motion is not being fixed, unless you have adoption challenges or churn leak, which is a different problem. But if that's also not bad in fact in our case our sale was good, our churn was really good, but NRR was not great. But that's because you're having the dilution of the buyer-centered problem. So that was one perspective, right it's?

Speaker 1: 50:17

amazing yeah.

Speaker 2: 50:21

And there's a lot of lessons in terms of management and people and stuff like that, because that's the you know in any function you're running the function and you're doing the. You run marketing, you do marketing, you run sales, you do sales. I think some of these lessons I talked about is doing the function. There's so many lessons from failure on running the function right, on what management things, and you know, when you trade up on talent and trade down on camaraderie, you pay the price right From those perspectives, that's really interesting.

Speaker 1: 50:44

Yeah, trade up on talent, trade down on camaraderie, okay.

Speaker 2: 50:47

You do that, you pay the price.

Speaker 1: 50:48

That's a whole thing in and of itself. Yeah, yeah, that's a whole element of itself. Okay, now that you're deeply involved with AI and go-to-market, so Now that you're deeply involved with AI and go-to-market, so how has that technical foundation that you had from your engineering days influenced your understanding and strategic approach to implementing and leveraging AI within go-to-market functions today? So do you find that your engineering mindset provides a unique advantage in navigating technical complexity and practical applications of AI compared to someone from a purely marketing or sales background?

Speaker 2: 51:19

I think so. I really do think so, because you can fly the plane depends on what lane level you fly the plane at, right, when you're fully approaching it, from understanding the technology. At 10,000 feet, if you don't have a little bit of a technical background, you kind of cursorily understand it. Of course, you understand the value of it, et cetera, right. But if you fly the plane at 1,000 feet, it gives you a little bit more nuanced perspective on here's what's happening, here's how you can actually come to the table with more, you know, with a little bit of a point of view. You know that's thoughtful, as opposed to a general point of view saying, yeah, we need to increase productivity, we need to do this, this, this, et cetera, right.

Speaker 2: 51:53

I do think, look, a technical degree helps you on two things. One, it helps you really think about framework-based thinking, right, which is very, very important from my perspective. As you think in frameworks, you have to think in philosophies and frameworks, right? That's very, very important in terms of how you do it. The second thing it does is that if you're in the technology fields, it gives you an advantage so that you can fly the plane a little bit. You're not going to be a technical architect. You're not going to be a deep product manager, but it's not that you are six standard deviations from what the hell is going on in terms of what the technology is. It gives you that advantage from my perspective.

Speaker 1: 52:27

Yeah, I think, more than anything else, or as much as what you're talking about, you can fly at that lower level and the people you're talking to feel that you're more believable because you have that aha with them, that connection with them, who are the more technical folks, and they in a way, work harder with you and for you and around you.

Speaker 2: 52:47

That's one thing. Yes, that's the team that works. But the second point is important is when you're dealing with technical founders in organizations and you're on the go-to-market side of the house, you just have to make sure that having the skillset benefits you, I feel, because technical founders respect you more when you not only bring the skills that are important for the job, but the ability to kind of think in their shoes and you don't have to be exactly in the depth of it, but the ability to translate that piece.

Speaker 1: 53:13

I think it's important, it's that connection piece that you're trying to build the connection piece, exactly the right. It's that connection piece that you connection piece, exactly the venn diagram, all in the venn right, values in the vent, right? So, all right, here's a bunch of rapid fire questions for you. So I'm gonna it's more personal questions, I'm just going to basically hit you with a quick question and then just give me whatever pops off the top of your head. You can elaborate, of course, but this is the rapid fire segment as part of us closing up.

Speaker 1: 53:40

What's the next thing you plan on starting Book, tv show, movie podcast and why that thing?

Speaker 2: 53:46

Book, because I think B2B marketing and go-to-market is something. There's a lot of books on B2C marketing, go-to-market taught in business schools and stuff like that, but the nuance in B2B is very different and I feel that there's an opportunity to write something that's actionable, practical, based on scaling companies. So I plan to do that.

Speaker 1: 54:03

I think that's a huge area for study. If you had a billboard with any message to your younger self, what would it say and why that specific message?

Speaker 2: 54:13

I borrow something that my friend told me years ago and I've actually kind of internalized it CTFO, chill the F out. I love it. Don't get too stressed about what's going to happen. Just live the journey and hopefully something good and regardless of what happens, it'll happen.

Speaker 1: 54:30

What is a belief or perspective that has completely changed your mind in the last few years and what triggered that transformation?

Speaker 2: 54:39

completely changed your mind in the last few years and what triggered that transformation. I was okay. This is actually true. I think what I've learned over the last few years is that you, as an executive, you come into organizations and you try to say that here's my playbook that I want to implement right, and because people hire you because you've implemented a successful playbook in different kinds of companies. But the biggest mistake is to bring a playbook from A to B rather than bring a philosophy. The biggest lesson for me is that bring a philosophy from company A to company B to company C. As an executive, that's going across, but do not make the mistake of bringing the same playbook. A philosophy, for example, practically says set up sales to win is a philosophy between Coupa and Marquero and Workado. But if I try to bring the same playbook I tried from Marquero to Coupa to Workado I will consistently fail, because each one is unique. It's nuanced both in terms of its culture, its DNA and the market segments and product, et cetera.

Speaker 1: 55:33

So that's the biggest belief system that I've changed is that it's not about the playbook, it's about the philosophy. I really like that. Chandra, when we were talking once, you mentioned that you had an option to go and be a CEO of a particular company or take on this senior executive role as a head of go-to-market, and you decided to take the go-to-market leadership role. Why?

Speaker 2: 55:56

Yeah, it's a good question. Look, it's a little bit of soul searching because there is an element of ego involved in everybody and says I can go do this right. And a friend of mine gave me this advice that just because you could do it doesn't mean you should do it. If a great company equals great product times, great go-to-market times, great culture, the simplest thing to look at this formula right A CEO's job is to go look at all these three functions to create a great culture, great product and great go-to-market. Now, as a first time CEO going in a lot of times you're going to get this opportunity where there's some hairiness in the organization right and sometimes the product could be red, the go-to-market could be red and the culture could be red in these situations. So I had to kind of do a little bit of soul searching and says I was actually at a late stage opportunity and I looked at it and says I'm not a product person.

Speaker 2: 56:42

In the technology space, in this AI driven world at the pace of which innovation is happening, if you take a CEO gig and you don't have the dominant, you don't have the DNA for that particular domain or something. From a product perspective, you might spend five years doing a lot of hard work, give your life and soul, because every problem is your problem, and you do that, but you might not end up successful at the end of it Right. So in the risk-adjusted return if I check the ego at the door is that if the product is great and you can bring your go-to-market strength to an organization and then bring your philosophies in creating culture, then your risk-adjusted return, both emotionally and monetarily, can be high. And that's what I traded up on. I was talking to Biden Deiter about this.

Speaker 2: 57:23

You know the guy from Bessemer. He gave me some guidance on this right Now that I was asking for guidance. We just had a conversation and we kind of bought it up, and so I think that recalibration for me was important and so that's why I said I'll pick a great product with a great founder CEO and if I can bring, if I have the ability, the opportunity to kind of bring my go-to-market presence into it, then I feel fulfilled in the organization benefits. And that's what I did.

Speaker 1: 57:47

So it's a great way of really examining and understanding yourself. Do you have a favorite life motto that you come back to and share with your friends, either at work and life?

Speaker 2: 57:56

At the end of the day, life is about you know, with your friends, either at work and life At the end of the day, life is about you know H-E-R. Health experiences and relationships. And so I think I go back to this is obviously the health piece you can control as much as you can, but it's about experience and relationships. Right, when I look back in my career in any organization, like you know, you're going to pick two to three really close friends and a bunch of acquaintances, right. But that's really for me is that, when I look back at it, the experiences I've gone through, it's very important and the relationships that I've built, that to me is the most important life model. Like, ultimately, at the end of the day, when I go back to reflect on IBM or Castine or Mercado or Mercado or Coupa stuff, there's been two to three relationships, deep relationships that I've built, that I've really really good friends, and so that I think is important.

Speaker 1: 58:37

And I think if you look at those three companies and I'm sure there's others there are many common people across all three of them, so that probably helped you think through these.

Speaker 2: 58:47

We can do this and we can build two to three good relationships, Like in Marketo, for example. Right, I was just talking to my two good buddies from Marketo, Sanjay and David. We're talking about this and so I think, but you have, it's about experiences and relationships.

Speaker 1: 59:06

It's amazing, okay, if you could instantly gain mastery in a skill completely unrelated to your professional field what? Would it be Singing? And?

Speaker 2: 59:10

why? Why, Because I love to do karaoke and sing. My problem is my DNA is a little smaller circle than my passion circle, Right, and so I got to get my DNA circle to be as big as my passion circle and so then it works. But I do like doing it. It's a good stress reliever. It's a good thing and I actually love doing it. But I'm getting better at it. But I would hey, if I had a chance to be awesome at it, I would take it up anytime. That's amazing.

Speaker 1: 59:43

I would love to sing as well. I can hold a tune, but my wife is a fan of it.

Speaker 2: 59:47

I'm a minimum viable product or minimum lovable product, but I am not world-class at it by any means right.

Speaker 1: 59:55

I like to pick songs that you can say and speak. Yeah, and it doesn't require you to hit all these high notes, so I can do Billy Joel. You May Be Right and I can do that really well. And I don't have to sing it that well, you don't have to be a good singer to do it.

Speaker 2: 1:00:13

He is, but I don't have to be. You're not picking Vivian Rhapsody is what you're telling me.

Speaker 1: 1:00:16

No, All right. What's a seemingly small act of kindness or generosity you've received that had a disproportionately large impact on you?

Speaker 2: 1:00:25

I just told you the story that you know. Somebody gave me these small books. Oh, that's awesome, and each one has actually each one. I may not have told the story when this started, that my team at two companies ago each one gave me a book of their personal jobs with a personal note in it about me. It was generous from a perspective of the amount of affection and the amount of things that was done and I just felt it was amazing, but from my perspective, I'll take that for life.

Speaker 1: 1:00:53

Is there just something you want to get, and it can be personal, it doesn't have to be financial.

Speaker 2: 1:01:03

Something you want to get, or that's just something, and it can be personal, it doesn't have to be financial.

Speaker 1: 1:01:06

Something that, if it just, it just explodes. It's something you're just striving to grab. Oh, the moonshot from from that perspective, yeah, um you, you could be a singer, you could be a rock star singer, you could be what's up, or you know what's a personal moonshot that may be related to something you're awesome at.

Speaker 2: 1:01:19

Okay, if I get to become a really really good personal singer and continue to play tennis till I'm 70, then I'm good. Those two things will be very good for me. I'm playing tennis every day. If I'm continuing to play till I'm 70 and 15 years to go and then get to really become a really good singer, that'll be great.

Speaker 1: 1:01:38

Take business out of it for a second. No, I think that's wonderful. I think it's something that you can keep doing, keep enjoying, and you could still, in all those things relate to lots of people and help a lot of folks in the business skill that you have. So I love it. It comes together so beautifully. So thank you so much, chandler. It's been such a thrill to have you talk with me. It's everything I dreamed of, and more, in having you on this show.

Speaker 2: 1:02:03

So thank you so much, Rajeev. Thank you, man. I didn't even know the hour went so quickly. It was great riffing with you and appreciate you really being very thoughtful of guiding me through the conversation.

Speaker 1: 1:02:17

Wow, that was amazing. As I mentioned before, I've known Chandler over the years and this was just a terrific discussion by him. He's so well thought through in terms of his life, understanding, his business understanding, his technical understanding, understanding and he has just so much to offer, from early stage to larger company to even public companies where he's on the board of a public company Love his notion of heart to head and the power of telling stories and being able to structure those stories in a way that people can understand them yet connect with them. Ethos, pathos, logos I mean that was just brilliant. It was just a pleasure to have him there and I love his statement to himself, which is CTFO, chill the F out. And I definitely appreciate his ideas for business when it comes to picking the right buyer group, really understanding that buyer group, reiterating some of the things we've learned in previous podcasts about the notion of a founder-led sale and how something has to be repeatable before you turn on sales and marketing and scale it in an appropriate way, and really understanding the metrics behind that. I'm probably going to listen to this multiple times just because I took away so much from it, and I hope you do it as well. So thanks for listening.

Speaker 1: 1:03:40

If you enjoyed the podcast, please take a moment to rate it and comment. You can find us on Apple, spotify, youtube and everywhere podcasts can be found. The show is produced by Anand Shah and edited by Sean Maher, aidan McGarvey and Laura Ballant. I'm your host, rajiv Parikh from Position Squared, an AI-driven growth marketing company based in Silicon Valley. Come visit us at position2.com. This has been an FNFunny production and we'll catch you next time. And remember folks be ever curious.