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Episode Overview
Reid Carr: Marketing is often confused with promotion, but really it's about much more than that. Marketing is about knowing and understanding your customers so well that your product or service fits them and ultimately sells itself. In short, marketing is about insight above all else. Today we're joined by Madhav Bhandari, VP of Marketing at Storylane, where he is helped grow the company from $2 million to over 10 million in ARR in just two years. But that's only one chapter, he's also scaled revenue and marketing engines at Hubstaff, Close, and Bonsai. Madhav, welcome to The Marketing Remix.
Madhav Bhandari: Thank you so much. Excited to be here.
Reid Carr: Yeah, it's awesome having you here.
- What appeals to you about SaaS?
- What makes a growth strategy truly repeatable?
- What happens when you bet big on disruption?
- How do you align disruption with product and sales?
- How important is in-person time for creative breakthroughs?
- What can enterprise marketers learn from startups?
- What’s next in your growth journey?
- Final thoughts and takeaways
Episode Transcript
Reid Carr: So you're at Storylane now, but you've played a pivotal marketing role at several fast-growing SaaS companies. How did you start your career and how did you end up where you're now?
Madhav Bhandari: Yeah, it's an interesting story. So when I got out of college, actually my background is in computer science engineering. So just that to marketing is a very sort of diverse jump. But for me right out of college I thought I wanted to build a business, but I didn't know how. So the next best path was to join an early state startup. So I joined a three person startup, did everything from sales, customer success, marketing, everything.
And then I just sort of figured out, okay, here's how to just run a couple of things to be able to maybe build a business or whatever. And then, yeah, then in that journey I started writing a lot, but my journey, what I was doing, and I think what I found was writing actually turned out to be the most scalable networking hack for me because I was like able to connect globally with everybody. And then through that I basically, the next couple of roles happened from there. And then it's just always been like whenever I've joined at a company, it's mostly, it's less about MQLs, SQLs, all of that. It's more about like, okay, how do we make money? How do we run the business? That's how I sort of operate.
Reid Carr: Yeah, yeah, I mean you got to connect marketing to the revenue and think pretty much everyone wants it that way.
WHAT APPEALS TO YOU ABOUT SAAS?
Reid Carr: So mean, we talked about all these SaaS based companies. What appeals to you about that category of company?
Madhav Bhandari: I think one was a more strategic reason. On my end, I felt the boring and the unsexy is where the largest growth is. If I would've gone into a consumer space, it's incredibly cutthroat there. But in B2B and all it's relatively, it's easier to sort of, I guess move up a little bit faster there. I would say that was one reason. But I think the other thing was also always B2B is something I've enjoyed. I just naturally sort of leaned into it and I found it to be something that was working for me and then the subsequent opportunities to spend there, I didn't really make a conscious move, okay, let me move through consumer, I just enjoy B2B, so I changed that.
Reid Carr: Yeah. Well, so looking back at all of this, what's key inflection point in your career that shifted how you think about marketing's role and driving that business growth? You talked about connecting it to the revenue. Was there a moment that stuck out in your mind? You're like, that's the stuff right there?
Madhav Bhandari: Yeah, there's maybe two points that happened because, so I think early on in my career was probably at this company where I mentioned Hubstaff, where I was sort of the right hand man to the CEO and I was just sort of working very closely with him and I just sort of figured out, when you're sort in that early stage phase, you just got to test fast and figure out what's working, think of it more from a portfolio perspective than just individual channels and being a channel manager and all of that. So that's what I think working under him sort of mentoring under him for about four years was very critical in the way even today, a lot of the mental models I have from that time. And then I would say the second pivotal point was actually about three years ago, and I've been in marketing for about 15 years and I think after about 10 years I was just so, I wouldn't say burnt out, it was more like I was bored of the playbook because it's like the same thing you keep doing again and again, whether it's conversion rate optimization, email marketing, copy, SEO ads, whatever.
And then I basically decided to take a year off, went fully fractional, only focused on the work that I actually liked, I actually talked to my therapist and he was telling me that there are other parts of your job that you hate or other parts of the job that you actually love. And then there were certain parts I loved, so I'm like, let me just remove the parts I hate and focus on the parts I love. And actually that one year sort of got me rediscover my love for marketing. So the last two years have been one of the most fun for me and just I'm in that phase, which I was maybe 13 years ago where I'm consuming a lot of content. I'm at gyms, I'm listening to the podcast, I'm thinking about things. It is just like there's this new energy, it's a new playbook, it's a new sort of goals in life. So that I felt was also pivotal for me.
Reid Carr: Yeah, so it's interesting, I mean, focusing on what you love, what you hate about the role. I mean, thinking about some of the stuff that you weren't into, they're not necessarily unimportant things. Did you find alternative ways to solve for them or what was the play there?
Madhav Bhandari: The full story is I basically, I kept seeing the same pattern for a couple of years. I was tackling the same playbook and when I went to my therapist, he's like, the original question was, do you completely hate your job or do you like some parts and hate some parts? And the truth was that I liked some parts and I hated, and what I found was I enjoyed the storytelling bits, I love the creative side of it and all that, but what I hated was just a bunch of things like either let's say reporting to a board or for example, hiring. The small, small things were just stacking up over time. And then I thought, let me not do all of that. Let me just focus on the creative bit for it. That's what I did for one year. So when you go fractionally, you have the freedom to choose which project you want to work on.
So for me, it was more like, okay, this is a project I like, I'm going to work on this. And so for one year I did that, and then it just happened to be the year that there was this whole AI change that was happening. And then I was just, by the end of it, one of the fractional clients actually was Storylane. And then we were like, okay, let me just come in full time because you do miss the full in-house energy. And it's just been like, there's a lot of people that ask, hey, what changed? Why is your playbook so different from the other companies? And I was just like, that one year just gave me just such a different perspective because I also became a dad at that time. All of those things factored into this whole sort of new marketing career path that I'm on right now.
Reid Carr: Yeah. So you said Storylane was one of the fractionals in there. I mean, what was the tipping point where they were like, hey, they needed you to take full-time and they were just going to either it's going to be you or somebody else, or what was the situation there?
Madhav Bhandari: Well, they didn't really become a fractional client. They came as a fractional opportunity. I knew the other co-founder for 10 years at some other places, and then they said that's the classic startup problem. What they say is that, look, everybody has great ideas. We need somebody to go and execute all of this. So I don't think the fractional will work, but if you want to join full time, we'd love to consider that. And then just at that time I was like, let me just explore. These guys are going insanely well, maybe it's an interesting opportunity. And I had a couple of chats with the CEO and it was just like we aligned so well. I felt it was good, so I took the jump.
Reid Carr: Oh, that's awesome.
WHAT MAKES A GROWTH STRATEGY TRULY REPEATABLE?
Reid Carr: So you've helped, obviously Storylane as well as some others grow from the single digit ARR to 10 million and beyond. What patterns or principles have you found to be truly repeatable in that journey? And then what's been maybe a little bit harder to replicate?
Madhav Bhandari: Harder to replicate? Where?
Reid Carr: In terms of what type of principles that you've found that you can repeat and some that you just like, hey, this is really very much a one-off circumstance based on maybe what the company is.
Madhav Bhandari: Yeah, I think one change or, well, one thing that I've been constant is treating marketing sort of like an investment portfolio and you being the fund manager than anything else. It's not isolated to SEO or creative or this or that. You're basically given this budget to bring in some sort of incremental growth. That's what you've been hired for. And so the way I think about marketing is more, think of it, you've got your whatever mutual fund investment portfolio, whatever you call it, and the stocks are your channels and the investors is the CEO. And so you've got to curate the portfolio based on your growth targets, based on the budget you have, based on the risk want to play with based on the CEO's risk appetite and curate that. So it's very different. If it's a bootstrapped company, their goals might be different. It's very different if it's a VC-backed company. It's very different if it's an angel strapped. So depending on that, curate the portfolio and sort of always keep that portfolio in mind. And so the reason why I keep emphasizing the portfolio bit is knowing which are the channels that are emerging and just go hard at them knowing that, okay, these are the ones that drive incremental growth. And then knowing the channels which are not working, or let's say low risk, low return, identifying that whole matrix and figuring out which ones to pick up to bring that incrementality, I think that is very critical. Otherwise, you'll just be focusing on one channel at a time. That I think is one growth framework that has worked really well at all of these companies.
And then I think the other thing that I would also say is in terms of growth is just I think more relevant than ever before today is just the willingness to think a little differently. Because I feel like, I mean, I was just creating my deck and there's this MarTech landscape report that's very popular. It shows the number of vendors, it's very popular cited by speakers. It's like 2015, the total number of vendors in MarTech was 11,000, and now it's 150,000 and Vibe coding it'll be like, in 10 years, it'll be like half a million, right?
So the product isn't really the mote anymore. I think at least that's how we are heading. The GTM motion is the mote. So if you've got to stand out, you look at everything right now, especially in B2B, everything just looks the same, same website, the same visual identity, the same webinar strategy, the same ads and all of that. So just to be able to think differently, do things differently actually works pretty well. And there's a way that, I mean, just asking that question to think differently doesn't make sense. The way I like to think about is what's a pattern in an industry that you want to interrupt? So it's things like, okay, everybody has the same structure of the website, or everybody has a B2B website. Well, why do you need a website? Could it make sense to maybe create a different version of it?
That's an interrupt. Not every pattern interrupt works, but that's another way to think about it. So that's what I've been doing quite a lot at all of these companies, whether at Hubstaff, the big pattern in wrapped and unlock was just revealing transparently our entire revenue, our entire marketing budget, our entire sort of team strategy and all of that. Nobody else was doing that, and that allowed us to stand out at lows. It was a lot about just things like, okay, product marketing assets are all sort of biased for you are the perennial champion and the other is the perennial loser, the competitor. We went with many different ideas to actually interrupt those patterns. So that worked pretty well. Even at Storylane, everything from, for example, this jacket, you don't see that—usually it's like a hoodie and all of that. So we are constantly chasing after the next pattern interrupt that makes sense for us. And 1 out of 10 interrupts just becomes super big. So I think these are two big ones that work really well for me.
Reid Carr: Yeah, I mean, it's interesting how you identify what the patterns actually are and then insert within that, whatever that interrupt is.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU BET BIG ON DISRUPTION?
Reid Carr: Is there anything you can look back on that was kind of a particularly big bet in terms of a way you were disrupting? I mean, there's one thing to be a jacket and another thing to really put a big investment into something that was a big interruption.
Madhav Bhandari: So about the start of last year, there was, well, maybe six, seven quarters back, we had been investing in SEO and we were like, well, three, four years we had grown to about 10, 15,000 a month. And being a PLG product, you really want to sort of get a lot of traffic to people to drive PLG revenue. So just normal blog or normal SEO strategy wouldn't cut it. So we had an idea where, okay, everybody has content on their pages, why don't we remove the text and just replace it with a demo? So a demo sort of like a iframe player where you have the demo running. We found a couple of clusters, for example, we sell to marketing and sales. We start going after their tutorial keywords, something like, hey, how do I merge a custom field in Salesforce? Hey, how do I update a certain lead form in Salesforce because all of these people are our ICPs and we created a hundred pages with just the demo on it and nothing else.
And the goal was, okay, if this works, maybe we get 200 KA month by the end of the year. We smashed that goal in 45 days and Google loved it. And it was like, okay, this is interesting. It's clearly adding value. So we actually scaled it up to, at this point, 7,000 pages. It's right now at about quarter million traffic, but it is the single biggest thing that actually helped us grow really fast and get some great deals out there. So that's a bet that did really well and had a very scalable potential. And I see this scaling to a million traffic a month, and it's not just traffic. I've talked a lot about it. There were massive deals that came out of it. But again, that came from that whole pattern interrupt thinking that, okay, there's a pattern in the industry, but does Google really need text for you to rank? Maybe it doesn't. So that's how,
Reid Carr: Yeah. Well, that's awesome.
HOW DO YOU ALIGN DISRUPTION WITH PRODUCT AND SALES?
Reid Carr: So there's one thing to align or marketing with search or some of that kind of stuff, but aligning marketing with product and sales. What are some of the keys to aligning those things together when you get down to, because at the end of the day, you're selling a product that people have to use. There's also, you're also promoting some stuff, but how do you bring those two things together to make sure that marketing, as you're trying to interrupt patterns, is still aligned with what the product can deliver?
Madhav Bhandari: For sure. So when I talk about the whole pattern interrupt thing, I basically put it into a framework called pipe. And the way it works is the first step is obviously spotting the patterns. That's the P in the pipe. The second is sort of finding the interruption. What's the interrupt? But not all interrupts make sense. So you also got to identify what are the interrupt guardrails? Is it on brand? Is it off brand? Does it educate about the product? Does it live anywhere in that buyer journey? Right? A lot of times, sure, a pattern interrupt is you wear a duck suit and a dance and center of Dreamforce, right? Or is it going to educate about the product? No, right? So you've got to identify what the right guardrails are, and that's why we have a system in place to be able to identify those.
And then how do you make it repeatable so it's not a one-off thing that you go in? How do you make it repeatable as part of your organization structures? So we have a couple of things in place. Every quarter get the team together in a boardroom, and we call that exercise called the lockin, which is like, no agenda, nothing for three days. We'll just be in a boardroom and just sit down and just chat about our work. What could we do differently? What could be a pattern we could interrupt? The goal is by the end of it, we come up with a bunch of ideas. So it's basically creating that sort of cultural changes in there. And then, yeah, it's figuring out, going back to your question, it's aligning them. One is obviously once you have the guardrails, you'll obviously be able to come up with campaigns that will work well for you in terms of a buying journey.
But also the other thing I would say is if certain channels that end up doing well, for example, this demo SEO experiment I was telling you about, that allowed me to make a very strong case to the product saying that, listen, I've got quarter million traffic coming in from search. There's a very heavy use case. I think you should build a feature into the product. So that's a very business case. It was not even a negotiation. It was, I'm sold. This is a very big opportunity. So that's how you sort of align them there. There's not so much of us sitting on calls every week and aligning and all of that. It's more around just you do your thing, you do it right at the right guardrails and everything, and then sometimes there'll be a new insight that'll emerge and you pass that on to sales or product and then sort of figure it out.
HOW IMPORTANT IS IN-PERSON TIME FOR CREATIVE BREAKTHROUGHS?
Reid Carr: So you mentioned getting everyone in a room or some of these quick 15 minute conversations that when they're sold on the kind of traffic you're driving, how important is it to get people physically in that room? Or are you able to do some of this stuff virtually? What does that look like?
Madhav Bhandari: I think it’s very important, especially because we are a full year remote team. So we do twice a year annual offsite, but then that's not enough. I think for creative brainstorming, you can do it virtually, but I think in person you sort of dedicate your time because a lot of us have kids and all that. When you're working remotely, you're not that disciplined for three days. If you can just get them in the boardroom together, you're just sort of putting your brain to a certain thing, you'll definitely emerge with ideas. I'm not saying that's the only thing, but I think it does work. I am not saying it's the only thing that works, but it's a good system to be able to do that with a fully remote setting for us at least.
WHAT CAN ENTERPRISE MARKETERS LEARN FROM STARTUPS?
Reid Carr: And it sounds like you've mostly operated with pretty lean teams to get done what you need to get done. In our case, a lot of our audiences is big enterprise entities. But from your perspective, leading these smaller lean teams with a lot of creativity, like what you're talking about, what do you think some of these bigger marketing organizations could learn or maybe even unlearn from startup marketing like what you're doing?
Madhav Bhandari: Yeah, I think the biggest thing is just because we work with a lot of enterprises, the one thing that I see always is that either you bring in a fresh perspective, you bring in a new person—somebody from a startup world and all—because when you actually look at their entire motion, it's like there are so many things that are just like, I mean, I keep coming back to pattern interrupts, but they're following some of the most boring patterns. So things like, okay, if you have to book a demo, why does somebody have to talk to sales to be able to see the product? Or things like if you have a pricing page, why do you not have pricing in there? Why does somebody again have to talk to somebody? Or let's say your website, why does it have the colors that exist?
And oftentimes the conversation is larger around change management and all that, but if there's a board or if there's a leadership that is fully on board or sold that, okay, we need to bring in some organizational level changes, it's just about going through that same pattern interrupt exercise. Like, okay, what are the patterns? What are the smaller companies doing that we are not doing well? And the guardrails are, for our organization size does it make sense? For our product does it make sense? For our brand does it make sense? It's just identifying those, it helps if you get in somebody from a startup coming in as a digital transformation person or whatever. It brings in a fresh perspective, but you still got to do the work. So yeah, I think that's honestly the biggest thing. That's why enterprises, when they become big, that's where they become slightly dry; they become less innovative and all of that.
But then it's worth looking at certain companies that even though they grew, they continue to sort of innovate. One example I constantly look at is Gong, right? They're at 1600 employees, it's not enterprise, but it is fairly large and it's 1600 employees. They're still interrupting patterns, they still have innovation in their culture. Another company is Rippling. They're doing amazing. So it's worth learning from them. What are they doing? I don't have an insight into what they're doing, but I do know that culturally in terms of the top, for example, Gong’s CEO, he himself is a big strong believer in pattern interrupt. So if you've got somebody pushing from there, it'll be an organization level cultural thing ultimately.
Reid Carr: Yeah. So did you study pattern interruption? Where did you kind of pick that up?
Madhav Bhandari: It's funny. So I heard the term from a YouTube influencer. YouTubers use it quite a bit. So they talk about, okay, we should have pattern interrupts in our video because there's this whole sameness. And then I was just walking one day and I was like, I used have these conversations with my brand lead and all of that. I'm like, Hey, how do we stand out? How do we stand out? And I always used to realize that's a very directionalized question. It's like, okay, what am I supposed to stay? How do you think differently? Okay, I'm not going to start thinking differently right away. So there needed to be sort of a directional framework and pattern interrupt was just like, that's a very interesting way to think about things. There's patterns everywhere, thousands, which ones do you choose to interrupt and how do you interrupt them? So I tested that out with my team and it was just the simplest way to get started.
Okay, let's say in this lockin we want to get come up with 10 ideas to do in product marketing and brand. So we're like, okay, let's now look for patterns in our industry. Let's look for patterns in our own brand. Let's look for patterns in other categories and let's figure out what are the interruption ideas. And I suddenly realized that that produced more results than how do you stand out or how do you think differently? And so that's why I was like, I thought maybe I would make this a pattern, a pattern of making pattern interrupts. And that's when I built this internal sort of framework for us.
Reid Carr: That's great. So it's interesting because I think you can equate a lot of the pattern then to avoidance of maybe risk. So people see those patterns and decide to fall into the pattern. But if you're trying to stand out, you've got to do something completely different.
Madhav Bhandari: Not for the sake of it, but the honest answer. If you look everywhere right now, I can give you any category, any brand, everybody's doing the same thing. And so it's going to get really, really hard with, I don't know how much it's true for B2C, but for B2B, it's getting really, really difficult to stand out in categories. It is just so many vendors that's just coming in day by day. So that's the thing that, I mean, I'm in a bunch of CMO circles and that's, everybody's been talking about that. How do we stand out? That's the big moat that we need to solve for over the 10 years and a hundred percent something. If anybody's thinking right now, they should be seriously thinking about it.
Reid Carr: So now looking ahead at Storylane or in B2B marketing in general, what are some frontier areas that you're most excited about right now? And well, I'll just start with that. What are you most excited about in your domain?
Madhav Bhandari: Yeah. Well, domain as in, are you talking about my portfolio or are you talking about more around our category particularly?
Reid Carr: Well, I would say at Storylane specifically, and then I would say more broadly, maybe even B2B. Got it.
Madhav Bhandari: For me, I think the big one right now, just on a playbook perspective is, so what I've been experiencing a lot is that the traditional performance marketing motion, whether that's with ads or SEO or outbound and all of that, the effectiveness of that is going down irrespective, no matter how many vendors are trying to say that, no, it's not dying or whatever—it is dying. There's a whole sort of push thing that's going down and there's more of a pull tactic that's going in, and people are trusting peer-to-peer recommendations quite a bit. So I mean, even today I'm using tools. I came from a CMO conversation I was in, or maybe it came from a internal club that I'm part of. It's now very rarely about me going in on Google and searching for, okay, what's the best automation software? No. So what I believe is that your customers are going to be very critical to get newer customers, and your customers are going to be very critical to expand into them like your existing accounts. So I've been thinking a lot about customer marketing. That's basically what I've been thinking because it's an interesting one to share. Do you know about this company called Seismic?
Reid Carr: Yeah, I’ve heard about it.
Madhav Bhandari: So I met the VP of marketing, and it's funny, I think somewhere he mentioned to me that there are about 400 million in ARR approximately. And they drive 80% of their revenue from existing customers, 80%. And I asked them, how many customers do they have? They have 2000, right? We've got like 4,000 customers and we share about thousand companies. And I was like, then I did the math and I'm like, the average customer is paying them 5 million per account. And essentially what they're doing is they're adding in more seats, they're giving in more products, they're adding in additional services, supporting them with professional services and all that, trying to just expand in there. And then if you do that really well, then they're organizing these breakfast tables and dinners and everything to facilitate recommendations. So something that we've also been experimenting with is, okay, we won't go to a conference, but we are going to sponsor two customers that will pay for their flights, accommodation, everything, just go there, mingle around, talk about Storylane, and we feel that whole peer-to-peer thing works a lot better. So that's kind of where I see massive opportunity and something that I've been thinking about for our playbook at Storylane.
WHAT'S NEXT IN YOUR GROWTH JOURNEY?
Reid Carr: Well, I mean is there anything that you're personally trying to get better at? Is it oriented around that or other areas around the business?
Madhav Bhandari: Yeah, and I think for me personally, it's more around the whole, I would say the standing out bit is probably the big bit for me, just uncovering certain things on a pattern again and again, I think we are getting there, but we still have a long way to go because it's like, or maybe, I guess increasing the chances of the pattern being successful. Let's say right now if it's two out of 10, how do we get to four or five out of 10? So predicting what will work is something that I'm thinking about. So I don't have a very clear answer. I think from a skill level or a channel level, I mean, I've been in marketing, so copywriting, I'm constantly always working on storytelling. How do I tell a better story and all of that. But just what I'm really trying to understand is how do I get more of our customers talking about us and what is a individual skill on my end that can make that happen?
There's a bunch of initiatives that support that, whether that's writing a book and to start getting those warmer intros or being able to create a very good in real life strategy to be able to facilitate those conversations. Or I don't know, creating internal influencers or partnering with CS. That's another thing that I've been thinking a lot. How do we make a GTM motion where customer support, sales and marketing are actually part of the same unit? Because I think that is because we work so much with CS, they recommend us the customers to invite to conferences. So it's a lot of those things. I don't have a very clear answer on it, I would say because just a lot of thoughts around that.
Reid Carr: I would say well, a lot to get better at all the time. I would imagine.
FINAL THOUGHTS AND TAKEAWAYS
Reid Carr: So it's come to a conclusion here, how would our folks, our listeners, get to connect with you? What should they know about Storylane as we bow out here?
Madhav Bhandari: Sure. Yeah. So you can always connect with me on LinkedIn, just search for me Madhav at Storylane. I'm fairly active there. And Storylane is a demo automation software. It's based on the premise that why should prospects have to talk to sales or put in their credit card information or fill a form to be able to see the product, why can't they see it earlier? And so we build a sandbox environment for them to see it. And there's biggest companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, everybody uses Storylane. So yeah, and we are basically building the future of buying—B2B buying particularly.
Reid Carr: Well, that's great. Well, that's a wrap for today's episode. Madhav thanks for sharing your insights and for pulling back the curtain on what it takes to really scale marketing. Appreciate having you here.
Madhav Bhandari: Thank you so much.
Reid Carr: Absolutely. And for our audience, be sure to check out our show notes from this episode and more at reddoor.biz/learn. And as always, subscribe to the marketing remix and leave us review wherever you get your podcasts.