The Innovator’s Marketing Playbook
Brand and marketing lessons from working across a portfolio of 500+ startups
In this conversation, Gary Survis, who has a diverse background in marketing and entrepreneurship, shares insights from his role as Operating partner at Insight Partners' Onsite team, the firm’s comprehensive growth engine, where he supports startups in their marketing and growth strategies. He emphasizes the importance of experimentation, creativity, and risk-taking in building game-changing businesses, and highlights the need for structured experimentation in portfolio companies. Survis also discusses the role of leadership in driving meaningful evolution and the challenges and opportunities for adopting AI in organisations. He suggests that AI should be seen as a tool to unlock target market opportunities and emphasizes the importance of data in driving AI-driven insights and actions.
Key Takeaways
- Experimentation, humbleness, creativity, original thinking, visionary, certain level of risk-taking, process-focused, KPI-driven, and strategic are essential qualities for game-changing entrepreneurs.
- A game-changing leader is paranoid enough to driving meaningful progress.
- Leadership plays a crucial role in driving structured experimentation and meaningful evolution to challenge accepted thinking and drive innovation.
- Less over-romanticising what brands are for CEOs and board members. Instead, let’s focus on the business outcome and helping unlock TAM.
- Modern word of mouth is continuously pulling information and listening to your customers, and playing it back to them to create personalised, relevant advertising
- AI is changing marketing, but organizations need to focus on how it can help with workflows in the three key buckets: marketing, customer support/ success, and R&D/ product development. Data is key to unlocking the value of AI and driving better insights and actions.
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Good to see you Gary. Thanks so much for taking the time and joining us here. To get started, I would love to start with a little bit about your background. Just for those who are joining us here, and aren't as familiar. I picked up on something in your bio where you say you're not a typical marketing guy. I thought that might just be a good jumping off point to explain what you mean by that and a little bit about yourself.
I think the place I like to start is I've been doing this for a really long time. And, my marketing background was beginning prior to the internet, prior to digital marketing. And so I have a very, what you might call traditional start, to my world and my first marketing company that I worked with was American Express. A very brand driven company, our tactics were somewhat limited - direct mail, maybe some print advertising or TV advertising. There just wasn't the sort of wide amount of tactical tools available.
And as I've progressed, I've been an entrepreneur and owned a business, several businesses and understood that aspect. I've worked as my sort of side hustle in sustainability. I bring that into my world. And, and now I'm very much focused on the startup world and the scaling world and very much in software. And so I don't come at this as one particular kind of marketer. I come here with all of these tools that I've collected over the years and hopefully leveraging them as things continue to change.
I think one of the most exciting things going into this conversation today is that more unique perspective you have that I don't think many people do - both in terms of your background and the diversity of experience you've had, but also this unprecedented view across such a large cross section of companies in your role at Insight Partners running the center of excellence around marketing and really supporting the startups in your portfolio.
So I would be curious to understand in this role what you're seeing across that universe of businesses today as it relates to marketing and growth and really what's keeping people up at night?
I think your point, Jason, is the right point in the sense of saying I have an incredible lab that I get to work with. It's over 500 portfolio companies across multiple industries, sectors, geographies, target customers. And it all is percolating, if you will, as my sort of lens to view change and to view how marketing is being practiced well, how there are challenges to it.
The bottom line is marketing is changing quite a bit, like not insignificantly. And I say to people all the time that what has worked in the past is probably not going to be what's going to work in the future.
And that change can be really scary for people, but at the same time, there's a realistic view that marketing has been changing since I started. So this is just another one of those changes. And I think, when you talk about brand, it remains amorphous, especially to the CEOs and boards. Brand investment is hard to measure.
I always like to plug our portfolio companies. We have a company that does make it a little easier to measure called Blue Ocean, which really tries to bring more of a quantitative approach to brand measurement. But the net-net is it's not likely to get any easier for marketers. You're not probably going to get more headcount. Growth is hard in a lot of businesses. Technology is changing. It's not clear where you should invest.
And AI for all the promise is not yet delivering all the ROI uniformly. I think there are pockets where it's happening, but they're not necessarily attacking the workflows the way they should. And I think at a very high level, people understand that brand is important and that it actually powers demand, but people struggle to demonstrate this.
And I think all of this is swirling around within our portfolio base.
What’s your and your team's advice for startups to help them get over that initial scariness or uncertainty as to how to tackle these new ways of marketing? Or how to experiment or push things forward in a way that you see could help drive better results at the end of the day? Is there anything in particular that you do to approach that?
I mean, one of the things that is common is there is a general lack of structured experimentation in most of our portfolio companies. I always say for most early organizations, there's not enough time, there's not enough money, there's not enough people.
And that, I think I've told you that before. And I think that's hence the pie lady story that you and I got to get to, yes. But the reality is that because there's this lack of an experimentation mentality, people tend to stick to what is easy, what is known and the tactical mix that is playing from their playbook. And part of our job is to push people out of their comfort zone.
I love a culture where people can agree to disagree and say, I don't know, let's test and see what it looks like. Our opinions may be wrong or we may not agree on our opinions, but that doesn't mean that you're wrong until you're proven wrong. And so let's, create that experimentation culture which challenges the norm and is driven by quantitative testing that really delivers the result, not just I, that's my opinion. And my opinion is what matters.
You mentioned the resistance to that in some instances being a very emotional one for leaders - whether that's marketing leaders or founders. And I feel it becomes a cultural dynamic almost as much as a marketing specific issue at hand where that level of experimentation, growth, quantitative assessment and learning is baked into the way that they operate.
Yeah. I mean, it goes without saying the role of the leader in helping organizations drive meaningful evolution can't be understated. And I think for many, many folks when they're in a leadership position and whether that be the CEO or the head of marketing or head of sales - there you're under incredible amount of pressure, pressure to deliver growth, pressure to deliver product market fit, pressure to deliver a variety of different things. And because of that, it's hard to step back and really challenge the organization or challenge accepted thinking.
I frequently say, I love a leader who's paranoid. Because paranoia is something that drives the ability to not just accept the current state, but fear that there's always a competitor coming after you, or there's always a market change that they need to deal with. And that paranoia is what I think ultimately drives meaningful progress for an organization.
That’s interesting. It reminds me of this podcast I was listening to recently with the head of marketing of open AI and how they look at the world through the lens of "We're a leader, but it's our lead to lose", as opposed to "we're good. We're here. We're already in this place."
A lot of the way that we try to partner with companies is around how can we help them elevate to truly game-changing businesses - really that top tier, iconic brands and businesses that people look up to.
What are some of the characteristics in addition to experimentation that you see is required? Or how do you also coach those startups and those teams to reach the fullest ambition and the fullest potential of their business?
Well, I think there are a variety of things that we're looking for. I'm looking for humbleness in the sense of being willing to recognize they don't know it all. I think I don't say this to brag. I say it more as a reality for any CMO. I've had more company experience than they have. They've worked seven companies, nine companies. I meet with seven or nine companies every day. Just the volume of revs gives me pattern recognition, which should be scary to people. It's really hard to stump me or my team. Cause we just see so much.
So there needs to be a humbleness to accept that there are others that may know more than you do. For your part, Jason, the same. I mean, you see a lot of companies, you have seen a lot of approaches. The folks you work with should be humble enough to recognize you have that experience.
I think I'm always looking for creative and original thinkers. I think it's important to be curious. I think it's important to want to be able to envision what could be. I think they have to have a certain level of risk taking. That it's not always safe decisions, but there's some need to block and tackle things.
I think they need to have a process focus. I think they need to be KPI driven. And I think that they should have a strategic mind. For the best portfolio companies, those leaders have a real strategic mind. And they're not simply a marketing leader, but they're a business leader.
And I think that those truly differentiate those companies that can drive truly breakout success.
What are some of those patterns that you're seeing within companies? And I know you touched on them a little bit, but, what usually jumps out to you when you're talking to a team? Where do you see the unknown unknowns for them that you would recommend these teams watch out for that might not be top of mind today?
Yeah, there are a variety of things and we really attack them from a level of saying, look, there is a ton of components to get people, process and technology humming within a given organization.
And if you're not being honest about your team and the skills your team has, that's a problem. I always tell CMOs and leaders, these are tough decisions. These are people, these are humans, these are hard choices, but in the end, everyone is counting on you to make those choices. Because otherwise who's going to make them?
And, when we talk about humbleness, there's also the humbleness to recognize that what you're doing isn't working and to re-envision what that means and to re-envision processes that will actually deliver it. You know, the old definition of insanity of doing the same thing over and again, expecting a different result. It's hard.
And then the last part around the technology is really about the fact that tech stacks are evolving quickly, AI is being infused in so much of it. And there's just a need to say, do I need this technology? Budgets are tight. So, do I need this? Can I add something else? Are there other ways to do it? And I think all of that comes together as, as you said, a very holistic approach - but you need all of these things to be humming.
There's also a bit of an essence of really being lean and scrappy and getting the most out of the least amount of resources possible to make some of these things happen.
One company we had the privilege of working with, with you was Workado. And it reminds me of how they created a community that was not necessarily even branded to be Workado, but it was targeted for their target customer base of those, I think we called them Process Pioneers or people who are looking to automate things.
Through that was an incredible way to get engagement. The result were successful events, but something that is more for the industry, for the community, and didn’t have the sales motion attached to it. And so therefore it was much more approachable. Meanwhile, they got incredible return, I believe, off of that and how it helped to establish them as leaders in the industry, just by participating in it.
I'm wondering are there any other examples that you've seen in the portfolio of really interesting and creative ways people have, I wouldn't say hacked, but have put together some really interesting marketing activations or campaigns to get them some exposure?
I think at every stage in a company's evolution, you have differing amounts of resources to put at any of these sort of initiatives.
And I love the scrappiness of some of the early companies that do some really strong guerrilla marketing kind of activities that are for the purpose of breaking through. There's a portfolio company, Winn.ai. I regularly appear in their LinkedIn ads on whatever they want me to do. I do whatever they want me to do. Last week, it was opening a box of something and understanding, you know, how that's the one experience that's there. Or smashing a keyboard once to show that you don't have to enter into a CRM anymore. There are these kinds of things which don't cost a lot of money, but are super creative.
I love to see that kind of scrappiness. I think it can be sometimes so much more effective and really help an organization build a brand when they don't have the resources to do some of the block and tackle of traditional larger brand work.
It's super interesting. I think that's a great segue into getting back into that brand conversation, which again, I know you said is quite amorphous, difficult to quantify for startups, and teams and boards notoriously are performance and analytically driven.
Usually, how do you, speak to founding teams or marketing teams about brand and the importance of it? What do you think the importance of it is across the portfolio, maybe at different stages? And how do you engage companies to make sure that they're approaching brands in a way that is going to really help them differentiate in what often I know across the portfolio are quite crowded, complex market spaces?
Yeah. So, if I had a dollar for every portfolio company that told me they are competing in a noisy space, I'd be a wealthy man because, you know, seriously, every space is noisy today. Every space is challenged. And I think that people underestimate the connectivity between brand and demand and what it does to power demand gen. And that's part of the, if you will, the amorphous part of all this where we all know at some level that if you have a strong brand, it's easier to drive more business.
It's just this question of what does that even mean at some level of getting a strong brand? How can you even get to that place? And what I'll argue for most organizations is that brand is like many things and let's embrace it. Let's embrace that it's a basket of things. It is your category. It's your messaging and positioning. It's what we call brand heart, your mission, vision, values, purpose, the brand experience that customers have interacting with you. It's your strategic brand. It's your visual brand.
When I start talking like this, you and I can embrace it and nod our heads and smile like, "Yeah, this is great stuff." But if I talk to a CEO about this or a board member, they're like, "I don't even know what you're talking about." The beauty and the majesty of creating brand is where people get stuck. And I wish we instead would start talking much more about it as from a strategic standpoint that says, “I've got a TAM as a company and you know what? My job as a marketer is to unlock that TAM. And there are many pieces I could unlock - I can unlock a vertical. I could unlock a geo. I could unlock a target customer persona. I can unlock any of those. I don't have unlimited funds. I'm going to invest in ensuring that there is a plan to penetrate that market that by the way includes some building a brand.”
Those elements we just talked about, about messaging and positioning and visual and all of those things that we know are necessary. But let's not over romanticize what this is and really just focus on the business outcome that people care about. I've unlocked some TAM. Here's my tactical going against that.
And let's not say I need more brand investment because no one knows what that means.
I think what you said resonates a whole lot, especially with a lot of ways that I have heard analogies being thrown out in terms of like demand creation versus demand capture and brand versus performance. Or I think it was one of the Airbnb founders that said, "Brand is a chandelier, performance is a laser" in terms of wanting to light up a room.
Going into brand building and back into how marketing is being disrupted. And I've tried my very best to not dive straight into the AI topic because that's what everybody jumps into directly today. But I think we'd be remiss not to mention it or talk about it, given the fact that it is such a pillar of the disruption that is happening or is expected to happen today.
I think it was really interesting to hear you say at the very beginning that it's showing up in places. It's not necessarily being embedded in workflows in the way that you might think it could be or would expect. So curious again in this broad view of businesses, how is this new technology impacting the portfolio as businesses, and also in terms of like their marketing functions as well?
So as you might imagine, I have a lot to say about this. It's what I talk about all day, every day. I started off earlier by saying what has worked in the past is not likely to work in our AI future. I mean, you only need to look at search and to see how search generative experience, AI overviews, GPT search are just blowing up like a tried and true channel.
I envision a world, it's a little dystopian, so just go with me, but it's a world where the bots are writing emails and then you have co-pilots reading the emails, and it's gonna be hard for you to connect. In the end, there's going to be a need for authentic communication and an ecosystem that is buzzing with who you are and what you are about. And I would argue that field marketing and events are going to become more critical because that's actual human connection.
And I think the other part of this, we just put out a blog this past week on it, is modern word of mouth. And the question is, what makes it modern? Why is it now modern all of sudden? And the answer to that, just to break it down, the process is basically you're gonna prioritize where in this ecosystem of communication there are opportunities for you to listen. And you're gonna harvest that, and then you're gonna analyze that, and you're gonna augment that with AI. And then you're gonna amplify it back out again.
So you can imagine I take all the information on my peer review sites. Take all my information that I have in Gartner reports. I take all my LinkedIn posts. I take Gong recordings. I take information that I'm able to get from websites and my competitors websites and throw this all in. But instead of doing this in a once off sort of tactical way. I do this continuously and I'm continuously able to deliver personalization of my message that isn't creepy but is relevant to the person.
It is taking all of this and understanding that the concept is evolving pretty quickly and I would add a few other points here to say 2023 to me was the year of random acts of AI. It's like, “look, AI could do this. Look, AI can do that.” 2024, as I was saying, is really about attacking workflows to attack what we call the AI scalability gap. This is that gap between getting you to say, "Look, I reduced how long it took me to write a blog." versus “I've re-engineered how content is created and promoted in our organization.” I've identified a workflow, a friction point. It could be in CS, it could be in SDRs. There are so many of them. You're looking to remove repetitive tasks. You're looking to provide better information through tools like modern word of mouth.
And in the end, we view this the core challenge to marketers today is, again, no one likes a good framework like we do, so we've created our SCALE Gen. AI Acceleration Framework. And that SCALE stands for structuring your data, doing change management, automating processes, leveraging technology, and evaluating talent. And all of these things are against having goals upfront and having a way to measure it on the back end.
But if you can attack all of these things, we can move from random acts of AI. We can start really delivering on what is necessary to cross that scalability gap. And we begin to start moving our organizations forward.
I'm sure I've given you more than you wanted to know on that answer, but it is something we think about deeply.
There's a lot of chatter, I would say, that also exists in the space of what are those truly breakout AI use cases? What is the product market fit for AI? How does this really adopt into enterprise grade production workflows in a way that's meaningful and how do we overcome some of the challenges that exist in hallucinations and accuracy in the process?
It's interesting to hear you speak about, again, the framework first and foremost, like, what do I do if I'm that person who's just dipped my toes in the water, but haven't really adopted it fully or thought really significantly about how this could impact the workflow? And then also the potential that you're saying like, there are tangible results being delivered across these workflows, despite some of the uncertainties as to, can I put this live? Can I put this in front of a customer? and how do I deal with some of the still development that's going to continuously happen and make these tools better?
You know, there was an article that was written and I apologize. It was in HBR. I just don't remember the author's name. And, he was talking about the AI trust gap. And he felt that this was the core to adopting AI in organizations. And he had I don't know, 12 different things. I won't remember them all, but they were everything from the black box nature of generative tools, the hallucinations that come out, the fact that people don't have the right skills, that there's built in biases into the systems, that people are challenged with figuring out, are they gonna lose their job if they do this too well?
The list goes on and all of this adds up to a lack of trust within these organizations and the people in these organizations. And I often talk about AI adoption at three levels. Level one is the leader. It's the CEO. It's how they put a stake in a ground and say, this is going to be a thing. One of my favorites, one of our portfolio companies, Copado, the CEO is Ted Elliott and Ted is just relentless. about using the tools and pushing his team to use the tools and figuring out how to use it in legal and talent and in marketing and in product. The leader has a role as with any great change.
But then there is the functional leader, the head of marketing, the head of product, the head of CS. And they have to take what the leader sets out as sort of the goals and translate it to their functional area. And then once that is done, it becomes the individual contributors to figure out how they are going to add to this. What is the workflows that they are going to focus on?
And it's interesting. The issues here for most of the organizations, McKinsey had done some analysis, which basically showed there are three key buckets. Bucket number one is marketing. Bucket number two is customer support / success. Bucket number three is R&D / product development. Those are where you're going to unlock the value.
There are known use cases. There are organizations already doing this. There are tools to support it. And so I think that it's a bit of a cop out to say, you know, "I'm going to wait to see how this works out." or, you know, "I'm not really sure if this is in the hype cycle."
I don't think we're at the top of the hype cycle. I think we're actually in a trough of disillusionment already. I think we're already having instances of people saying, you know, "this Microsoft code is not that good." And, and this is going to take some time to really work out in our systems. And I will say, incumbents, the software companies that are already in the tech stack have a built in advantage. They already there.
Show me how to leverage it. Show me how to take advantage of it. In the marketing sec, the hub spots of the world, the six senses of the world, any of these organizations which are already there have this ability to take organizations and show you how to drive value today because you're already there. I don't have to sell it. And I think that's part of the opportunity here.
There are some people who are coming out and promising that "We're going to change the entire way that you are interacting, it's going to be like Her - the movie Her.” And, we're just not there yet. So the products don't work. And then that's where a lot of this skepticism comes from.
Meanwhile, you have so many companies that are baking AI into what they already deliver in terms of their products. And so the question is, does it become more of a feature or does it become something that is truly transformative in the way that we experience certain products?
I would add on that one. The challenge is. So about a year and a half ago - perhaps two years ago - I don't remember. I did this session that was about how to market AI. And I said, the first thing about marketing AI is no one buys AI. No one cares. You can sprinkle AI in every other sentence. It doesn't make people want to buy your product.
The core things that drive people to buy a product are still those same things. I have a problem, you deliver a benefit. I want you to help me solve my problem. If AI is part of that solution, awesome. But like I said to someone, I said, the way you know this has gone wrong is when Coca-Cola puts out a Coke flavor created by AI. And I'm like, I don't choose what I drink because it's an AI flavor of the day. It makes no sense. Whose idea was that?
And I think that as you think about the challenges of marketing AI and of talking about AI functionality, you got to understand even generative in the not too distant future will not be differentiating for any product. It's a baseline capability. What is going to be different, what is going to differentiate products is going to be the data underlying it and how that data is helping tune those models. And if you have better data, you're delivering better insights, better action, better guidance. That's what's going to win. Not the fact that you have a generative model.
The models aren't necessarily proprietary. Everybody has access to a multitude of different models.
Therefore, what is your moat as a business? And I think that it goes back to that data that you have that can inform what these models can then do.
The defensibility of your moat is going to be harder going forward because in the old days, you would be able to create a moat that was sustainable over a longer period of time. And therefore the ability for you to monetize that was better because you had a longer period of time to do that.
Cycles are getting shorter. Fast followers are happening quicker. And even innovation is harder for an organization to grab onto and ultimately monetize because by the time they figure it out and get enough people to adopt it, we're onto the next thing already. It's just moving so quickly. The cycles are moving so much quicker.
It took a while for big data to just become dapp. It took a while. Today, it just happens almost within months. Features are immediately copied.
I think that yes, while adoption and the acceleration of technology continues to increase somewhat exponentially, again, whether it was big data or cloud computing or anything for that matter - things take time to get fully adopted.
I was looking at some stats today - the percentage adoption of even cloud. And it's like, how long has that been going on for? But there's still countless companies that just aren't there yet.
And I read an article, by the way, yesterday of how mainframes are having a major impact on AI, their great platform for AI. I'm like, wow, you can kill these guys.
Hahaha! There's always something. Well, I know we only have a couple minutes. I think we covered a lot. I don't know if there's anything else in particular on this topic or otherwise that's on your mind. Otherwise, just have one kind of quick, somewhat fun wrap up question.
I'm ready for you.
I'm bummed we didn't get to talk about the sustainability piece. I think that might be another episode or at least just a call.
Just to wrap up - say AI goes the path that everybody, the accelerationists think it goes, you know, that you said somewhat dystopian or not future that comes out.
What do you do in life and work? What's your plan for the post -AI future?
So I always like to start by saying, I'm an old dude. I'll be retired. I'm on the back nine. I may be on the back three. I don't know. And hopefully taking advantage of all the goodness that comes with that. But I do worry, sincerely worry for my children and my grandchildren because the paths aren't as clear about where and how you create a role for yourself in this new world.
But I'm willing to put out a proposition which says the human in the loop remains. I can't say we're going to be doing the same things. I can't say as many people will be doing what they were doing, but there will be many roles for the human. And I prefer to take what I call the Ironman approach to AI, which if you recall, you know, you've got Tony Stark, he's got Jarvis, he asked Jarvis questions, Jarvis moves things, put things down, but Tony is making choices. And I believe we will get to that place. I think we will become much more supercharged.
And I think forget about AI. I think one of the traits that we're in short supply of many times is curiosity and the desire to investigate what isn't known. And I'm going to take a super positive point of view that says this technology makes us better as humans. That this technology enables us to do things we only imagined.
And I don't have to go dystopian. I don't have to go, the machines are coming to kill us. And everyone's going to lose their job. I don't believe that is where it goes. I truly believe there will be massive disruption, but I think we can work that.
Absolutely. I there's always two paths in the way the world can go. And we can only think about what we choose to believe the future will hold. And I'm on your side as well. I think it's the better side to be on and work towards.