The GTM Podcast is available on any major directory, including:
Harmony Anderson is an entrepreneurial marketing leader with deep expertise in building global GTM strategies at growth startups. She is currently the VP of Growth and Marketing at Superhuman, the most productive email app ever made for teams. She has also led high-performing teams at Armada, Engine, Outreach, and ThousandEyes.
She is deeply passionate about creating world-class marketing campaigns, leveraging data-driven strategies to accelerate customer acquisition, engagement, and retention. She also drives extreme rigor around operational excellence and efficiency, ensuring GTM teams execute with precision using repeatable and predictable playbooks.
Discussed in this Episode:
- How to develop unique positioning and messaging for an AI company
- Why UGC matters for your brand and how to get users to create content about your product
- The impact of lightning marketing campaigns and follow-on ‘thunder’ campaigns
- Three core channels for launching a new B2B marketing program
If you missed GTM 142, check it out here: Why Most B2B Marketing Fails (And How to Fix It) with Udi Ledergor
Highlights:
05:12 – The #1 mistake in AI messaging: sounding like everyone else.
07:24 – Use outcomes and data to differentiate your AI product.
11:06 – Why nailing 3-5 core use cases beats going broad or too niche.
12:38 – Turning website visitors into believers with demos and interactive content.
14:01 – How to keep up with a market that changes every week (hello, agentic AI).
15:08 – Building campaigns that fuel your narrative across every channel.
17:16 – Behind Superhuman’s most successful campaign ever: “New Year, New Inbox.”
20:04 – Unlocking 60% growth through user-generated content and affiliate advocacy.
21:38 – Why webinars and virtual events still drive real results (and feedback).
23:12 – How to keep your messaging fresh while staying focused.
25:11 – The difference between brand umbrella, campaign, and program — and why it
matters.
27:02 – Harmony’s lean, high-impact program playbook for early-stage teams.
31:06 – Building a hype train: how to activate champions at launch.
33:01 – Hot take: marketing shouldn’t be measured by pipeline alone.
35:12 – Why NRR (not just pipeline) should be a marketing KPI.
Guest Speaker Links (Harmony Anderson):
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harmony-hickman-anderson/
- Superhuman: https://superhuman.com/
Host Speaker Links (Sophie Buonassisi):
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi/
- Newsletter: https://gtmnow.com/tag/newsletter/
Where to find GTMnow (GTMfund’s media brand):
- Website: https://gtmnow.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow/
- X/Twitter: https://x.com/GTMnow_
- YouTube: /@gtm_now
- The GTM Podcast (on all major directories): https://gtmnow.com/tag/podcast/
Sponsor:
ZoomInfo’s GTM25 Virtual Summit
Wednesday, May 7th 2 PM – 4:30 PM EST | 11 AM – 1:30 PM PST
This is your moment to rewrite your Go-To-Market playbook with AI-powered strategies. Join ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck and top industry leaders to learn how to accelerate pipeline, boost close rates, and transform your revenue teams. The future of GTM is here.
Sign up here: https://www.zoominfo.com/gtm25-virtual?camp_id=7017y00000wIvGCAA0&utm_source=gtmfund&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=virtual&utm_content=gtm25-lightning-st
The GTM Podcast
The GTM Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.
GTM 143 Episode Transcript
GTM 143 Episode Transcript
Harmony Anderson:[00:00:00] With storytelling and messaging and positioning, like it’s never done. You’re constantly trying to make it better,
The more you invest in building champions within your users and your customers, more demand you’re gonna drive in the future.
I honestly like never had a campaign that was this successful ever in my career. I think it was because we really were thoughtful about what the message was and when we launched it. But one of the big things that made it so successful was we have a lot of amazing users.
my advice for a lot of brands when they’re thinking about their messaging and positioning
is what are the outcomes and ensuring that you have data to back up those outcomes. [00:01:00]
Sophie Buonassisi: Hello, and welcome back to the GTM Podcast. This is Sophie Boni, VP of Marketing at VC [00:02:00] Firm, GTM Fund and our media brand GTM. Now I’m joined by a fellow marketer, Harmony Anderson. Harmony, welcome to the podcast.
Harmony Anderson: Thank you so much for having me. It’s so great to be here chatting with you today.
Sophie Buonassisi: Super, super happy to be chatting with you here and it was great to see you in person in San Francisco recently.
Been looking forward to this conversation for a while.
Harmony Anderson: It’s gonna be fun.
Sophie Buonassisi: Definitely. And before we dig into it, always like to do a quick bio for the listeners. Harmony is an entrepreneurial marketing leader with deep expertise in building global go-to-market strategies at growth startups. She’s currently the VP of Growth and Marketing at Superhuman, the most productive email app ever made for teams.
She has also led high performing teams at Armada, Hotel Engine, Outreach, and Thousand Eyes. She’s deeply passionate about creating world-class marketing campaigns, leveraging data-driven strategies to accelerate customer acquisition, engagement, and retention. She also drives extreme rigor around operational excellence and efficiency, [00:03:00] ensuring GTM teams execute with precision using repeatable and predictable playbooks.
Harmony Anderson: Thanks for the intro. I appreciate it.
Sophie Buonassisi: Absolutely, and thank you. We actually got connected by us becoming Superhuman customers, which is kind of the, the long and short maybe the behind the scenes for everyone listing though I know, you know, Max and folks at the Fund for a long time dating back to Outreach.
Harmony Anderson: Yeah, it’s such a small world. Max actually hired me at Outreach way back when and was one of the best people I’ve ever worked with. So it’s good to be connected in a different capacity now. It’s a lot of fun to see what you all are doing right now.
Sophie Buonassisi: 100%. And likewise, we appreciate it. I mean, back in, gosh, time flies. It was probably Q3, Q4 we were at a point where we just said, you know, we need to figure out some kind of email productivity. And so we went around, ran a few tests and did our bit of due diligence and ended up, uh, finding that superhuman.
It was kind of highest performing, best fit. It’s been a lot of fun and we’ll dig into some examples. But what I really wanted to connect on today [00:04:00] is a very, very common inquiry, and I thought you’d be the perfect person for the topic, because both of us as marketers, you have to pay extreme attention to messaging and the attention to detail around messaging.
And now you know how to market ai. Is such an interesting topic ’cause everyone’s claiming to have ai. So how do you actually market something that everyone’s claiming to have? And that’s what
we’re gonna be digging into today.
Harmony Anderson: it’s such a fun topic and, the last few companies I’ve worked at have been very AI focused.
and I had this realization
last year I was like, kind of in
between jobs took some time off and I
was researching kind of cool companies, like, okay, where could I potentially
wanna go in-house?
And,
One of the things I noticed was, uh, I was doing
research on LinkedIn And, every time
I went
to a company profile on
LinkedIn, they all used the same
words. Like, literally I could not figure out what the
companies did. it was all do ai, we do AI in different
industries or
different types of [00:05:00] products, but they all
sounded exact same.
And I think that’s the hardest part as a marketer is like yourself apart. now in the world of ai, which just everywhere.
Sophie Buonassisi: Definitely. Yeah. I used to do a lot of message testing actually, uh, back in the past life around conversion optimization and seeing kind of top of funnel impact all the way through to retention and revenue. And it was so interesting ’cause you’d strip back, you know. For example, all the messaging from a page and see, you know, what does it actually articulate?
How does it speak from imagery? What if you blur it over? You know what, if you take the messaging without the other context, can people understand it? So
always an interesting exercise.
Harmony Anderson: It fun It’s like, it’s a fun challenge marketers, right? Like it’s never ending. there’s 101 rate ways to
write something and,
I was actually working
with my CEO the other day trying write copy for our, our homepage and,
, he was like, I will
rewrite It 22 times until get it right.
And that’s the
hardest part is just, it’s, subjective, really. It is. And so, but it’s, it’s, I think it’s one [00:06:00] of the most challenging parts of being a marketer is storytelling and writing and positioning and just making sure it fits with your audience and it, and it resonates.
Sophie Buonassisi: Absolutely. And so in a crowded AI market. What would you say are the key components to actually helping people stand
out from a messaging and positioning perspective?
Harmony Anderson: Yeah. So, um, there are two things I’ve learned over the last few
years of trying to build positioning, messaging,
storytelling for brands. And,
two things I’ve learned are one.
Focus on the outcomes. really be thinking about, the pain
that your market has, your,
prospects your customers.
And, how your solution
actually solves the pain and actually drives outcomes
for the business. So really focusing that value selling, um, value
positioning versus just future selling feature positioning.
so for instance, like we just did this
huge survey study over the last couple of months, focused on AI productivity,
which is what Superhuman
does.
We’re an AI native email app, [00:07:00] and we learned that, leaders
across
multiple different industries, specific specifically within tech and then within professional services, are expecting a
basically 300%, I mean, gigantic productivity gains through AI over the next few years.
They feel like they’ve only gone to around 20% of that over the last and a half
since like AI became
much more popular and they have no idea what it really means and what they need to do to actually get to those
productivity gains. and so we looked at that and we
said, okay,
as a marketing team, like do
we fit within that Like how much, how much gains and, what are the outcomes that?
our
solution has and solves within the market? And, we basically updated and are
still in the process honestly, of updating all of
our messaging positioning to align to that.
so it’s, it’s very data-driven. it’s outcome based of, we’re an AI solution that actually.
[00:08:00] Insert your value prop, we save your sellers time
managing their email, and therefore they have more time to actually drive revenue or to close the deals or to go to the amazing
events and,
and network.
They don’t have to be constantly like triaging their inbox. That’s a great example of just how we’ve leveraged it. But, my advice for a lot of brands when they’re thinking About their messaging and positioning
is what are the outcomes and ensuring that you have data to back up those outcomes.
It’s one of first things I would think about
and that,
Sophie Buonassisi: and I love the data tied in there. It’s almost a framework in terms of
the messaging, the data, the outcome.
Harmony Anderson: Yeah. And then, the next thing I always tell people too is show don’t tell. what learned the, uh,
talking to a lot
of buyers and doing the survey and doing a ton of research is people still don’t understand ai. They really don’t, they don’t, they don’t
like deeply get how AI or like the vision of how AI can be integrated into their
day to make their
lives.[00:09:00]
Better. and so one way to set yourself apart is like, we don’t just
do ai, show them what it actually
means within their workflows or within their day to day. So my, my second is like, show don’t tell. Um, talk about of course, like you have your position, your messaging, your storytelling upfront, and
then back it up with videos with.
Demos, putting it into perspective for them as a user and
for
their particular use case
is so incredibly valuable for them. Then being able to see the vision of like, oh my gosh, I didn’t even
think I could use AI
to do X, Y, Z. and so.
Like email for us is like so intrinsic. It’s like, before I even had heard of Superhuman, like I had, I use Chat BT or Claude, all the time to like write content, write
messaging, you know, like have it
like, paraphrase, you know, like a big thought.
Bank, and pull up notes. But I didn’t actually realize that I could use AI to do things like. Triage my inbox, like I don’t need to do anything. I
just log in and it’s Like, [00:10:00] basically done for me. Half my emails are written, it’s prioritized. My inbox, uh, it’s helped with my calendar. Like, it just, it totally changes your mindset of, how you can integrate it into your day to day.
Sophie Buonassisi: What kind of advice would you have or what are your thoughts on website messaging and positioning around the show? Don’t tell because you made two really good points there on, you know, focus on the outcomes and show don’t tell because use cases can be so nuanced. nuanced. What can companies do to kind of show, don’t tell, knowing that
everybody has different use cases.
Harmony Anderson: Yeah, I mean, I, I think that’s a really great question, and it
depends on.
- What your product does, who your
market is, like, who’s your core ICP and like really deeply understanding
who you have built your product for. I think a lot of companies, either can generalize too much and say
like, my product fits for everybody.
Like everyone kind of has like,
the
rose colored lenses when it comes to their product. and so it can either be like way too broad, and then therefore it doesn’t resonate with. Anybody. So that’s like
one thing
[00:11:00] that can really
trip you up as a marketer.
or they go too detailed and like too pigeonholed and
one very specific use case that
isn’t actually gonna help you drive substantial demand because it’s too narrow and too niche. and so that’s one thing. I mean, this is
just.
This is marketing 1 0 1. I
know you know this, Sophie, but it’s, really being thoughtful and strategic
about who your
market is
and who you’re talking to. um, and then taking that and saying, okay, what are like the top
three to five? I would
say I wouldn’t go
deeper than that. what are the top three to five? use cases, whether or not it’s for a
function, it’s for a vertical. it’s for very user. a buyer persona. Like everyone. You know,
segments there market differently. and then focus on those first three to five, get those live, and then, track, measure and optimize and iterate from there.
Sophie Buonassisi: That’s great advice.
That’s fantastic.
Well, we’ll definitely see a rise in videos.
Harmony Anderson: Yeah, for sure. Videos. And then there’s a lot of different demo type of software out [00:12:00] there where there’s like videos and there’s just product walkthroughs. There’s, interactive gaming where you can actually build, like simplified versions of
your features and your solutions that people can actually like, get their hands into it. I think with AI it’s really important to think about like all of the
unique creative ways you can, um, build this into your collateral, whether or not it’s
a website or it’s an email or whatever, um, or if it’s even in product. but I think the big thing is just understanding how people
research.
How do they actually discover and learn about a product? And, one thing too that I, I always try to go back to is,
AI is a really
interesting space right now where
there’s ai,
there’s AI native, there’s AI powered, there’s agentic ai,
there are AI agents. They’re like, there are all these like buzzwords around ai.
And most people
don’t know what they mean. Again, it goes back to like,
you have to educate the market.
You have to have your [00:13:00] story, talk about your outcomes, and then you
need to be able to
show
how
your product
actually fits in there. so that’s another thing of just like, don’t lose sight of that.
Like make sure you understand like how educated truly your market is on like what you’re trying to sell. ’cause they may not be at all. And so then you kind of gotta start from the basics.
Sophie Buonassisi: And what do you use when
you’re looking to assess how educated buyers are?
Harmony Anderson: Yeah, so we talk, I mean, we’re constantly doing customer calls, calls with customers, calls with prospects. We
do surveys like
the one I was kind of mentioning, the productivity and AI survey we did, last month. I also will do like SEO research,
like are people searching for these things? Are they clicking on articles about it?
how often do we see it,
listed in PR in press, it’s like truly doing like a market analysis of these
things. and it’s so
much is changing in AI right now that,
like two weeks ago a lot of our messaging positioning actually
for the last six months
was as AI powered So I use that as an example. And about a month ago we decided like AI powered isn’t [00:14:00] explicit enough for like what we’re actually doing, which we believe is, it’s
easier to, to talk about it
when it when we use the words and keywords like AI native. And then, so that was like a month ago, we decided to make that switch. And then even a couple days ago we were like.
Now people are talking about agentic ai. It’s like where do we fit that in to the overarching
Sophie Buonassisi: so
quickly.
Harmony Anderson: literally
changes week. over week. And so, it, it depends what you’re in, what
industry you’re in and
what you’re selling. But, going deep into that
and, and just recognizing that, people start
out at different levels of like their knowledge on things like ai.
And so it is up to you as a marketer educate, inform, and then really talk about how you drive outcomes and
success.
Sophie Buonassisi: Makes sense, harmony, and I mean, those are two fantastic tips. So focus on outcomes show, don’t tell. Once you have that kind of pain, the messaging, the outcomes for those personas, and a good understanding, how do you think about actually leveraging that kind of almost felt, feels like you’ve.
You’ve created it into more of a storytelling [00:15:00] component, and you’ve almost emphasized the storytelling necessity in this age of ai. How do you actually translate that into a demand gen engine?
Harmony Anderson: the kind of
approach I usually take in, the philosophy I have is take the storytelling.
Package it up into a campaign
and then leverage that
campaign
in all of your different channels. So like, you know, where do you
actually put it in
market? And make sure you can push it as far and
as fast as possible through the market? One of the big things I always think about and what I do when I
go
into new companies is I try to
schedule like a large tier one or like a marquee campaign launch as fast as humanly possible. it could be a campaign that’s focused on a specific story or a
message.
It could be a campaign that’s focused on a product or like a major product launch. It could be seasonal, like there’s a lot of different types of
campaigns and, a lot of
businesses and
marketing leaders define that differently. So I would say like, make
sure
you’re all
speaking the same language, as you’re actually building a
campaign framework and structure. but
[00:16:00] take the messaging, the position, the outcome based stories that you’ve
built, package it
up into a, a really thoughtful campaign with campaign with
programs that
align and put it into
market.
And I’m a firm believer of, like the
lightning strike mentality of, or strategy where, you package it up, you have
a moment in time where like you make a huge splash and then you
follow it up with the rolling thunder.
And I know it’s like, I’m like, there’s so much marketing jargon in that, but it actually really works. And
I’ve seen tons of success doing
that, and then just ensuring that, You don’t just have like a campaign and that’s it. Like you’ve gotta keep going. Like what is the fast follow, what are the campaigns that, that, aligned to that,
that you do the next month or the next quarter?
What are the product launches that support it is? so incredibly, incredibly valuable.
Sophie Buonassisi: , a hundred percent. And you guys had a really cool campaign actually at the beginning of the year and I remember seeing it ’cause we were pretty fresh customers at that point. And I was like, that is so clever. New year, new inbox. How did you think about the planning process around.
One, the [00:17:00] messaging, kind of the packaging of that campaign. If we wanna get, you know, really tactical for people listening, that itself as a campaign and
then the thunder
afterwards.
Yeah. that’s a really
Harmony Anderson: great question. So I started at, the end of
November, superhuman. We had an executive offsite, and I
remember hearing our CEO and one of our leaders say that
we usually will see a site spike in
new
users in January because people have, new Year’s resolutions that
are
around like.
Productivity and efficiency and like, I wanna be better at
my job, or I wanna be better at X, y, z, like the gym effect as we were calling it. And so I like had this light bulb
moment where I was like okay, they see a slight spike, can we actually make that a thing? Like how big can we make that? and it was perfect timing ’cause I usually like to launch a
campaign really quickly regardless after I start.
And so I
went to the team and I was like.
I’ve heard this is a thing, let’s make it a bigger thing and really lean into this seasonal view of like New Year’s resolutions. we have [00:18:00] a product that
truly solves a pain and an efficiency and productivity pain.
And so like, let’s lean into that story.
And then it was, okay, what data do we actually have
to, add
in to the actual
narrative and, you know, pain points. So we, we have a lot of great,
product data that’s based on, like saving time.
So you can save four hours per week
with superhuman. we know, the few superhuman ai your
35% more efficient and productive within your day, within your email, like within your inbox. and we took
that and we basically built this brand new, end-to-end,
campaign that included, long form
strategic content. We actually had a virtual event, a customer webinar, which I’ll get into in a second.
We had a video. We had, very thoughtful ad
messaging, end to end for all of our different channels.
We did a big social takeover. we increase paid. Program. So we had this also run in all of our Google programs. We [00:19:00] did organic and paid social. we also increased our affiliate, advertising as well.
and we just like, we took it and we’re like,
let’s just
put it everywhere. Increased spend. Have a really thoughtful story, have really great creative, and it’s seasonal, so we’re like, it was, it was almost like the
perfect storm of a campaign. We did it all at once and I’ve honestly like
never had
a campaign.
that was this successful ever in my career. This is the, the top, top, like best it’s ever been. And I, I think it was because we really were thoughtful about, what the message was and when we launched it. Timing was everything for this one in particular. but one of the big things, that made it so successful was,
we have a lot of amazing users. We have tens of thousands
of users who would literally do anything
for superhuman. Like they love the product so much, they talk about it all the time. We don’t even have to ask people to publish
content on our behalf. They just do it. They’re sharing in Twitter, on LinkedIn, and, uh, that has.
Primarily been a lot of, mostly
organic. [00:20:00] and, so we said maybe if we just like give them, you know, a little more of a push and a little bit more of an incentive to be sharing. And, it was part of the reason it was
so successful. We like heavily
increased, user
generated content, UGC and affiliate
and, it
drove, we had a 60% increase in new seats month over month throughout that campaign, which is like really, really incredible.
Sophie Buonassisi: Wow, that’s incredible. That almost feels like an elongated lightning in a way. The thunder itself was just naturally created through, I’m sure user generated content so
forth after the
campaign.
Harmony Anderson: It kept
going and going and going And the one thing with seasonal campaigns are that they’re
seasonal. So like there is an end date, like especially with like, new Year’s
resolutions,
like I gave it six weeks. It’s like we have
six weeks of this campaign. And so as we’re
planning for this campaign, we also in real time have to be planning for when it becomes irrelevant because we’re too far
past this New Year’s resolution type of.
Timeline.
And so we planned for that at the same time. And so we had this evergreen, we like [00:21:00] pivoted from, okay, new year, new inbox, an amazing event. we have all of this great, positioning. We have data-driven outcome, storytelling. And
then
six weeks in, and I think we did it
like right between five
and six weeks.
We took out the seasonal positioning and then we made it evergreen and it kept going,
honestly, like. The momentum slowed down a little bit, but it got us through to our next major product launch, which happened about eight weeks after, after this campaign launch,
which was great.
Sophie Buonassisi: That’s incredible and that’s a helpful timestamp for anyone listening. Just thinking about the volume or kind of size of Splash and
impact on that timeline between your next campaign too.
Harmony Anderson: One thing we did too, which I tell marketers as well of like, there are programs that are kind of like, I would
consider somewhat old school, but still have a lot of legs. And one of those are virtual events or webinars. Like, you hear you hear the
word webinar and you’re like, Ugh.
Like, do I actually have to attend a
webinar? And it’s just like annoying. but our webinar [00:22:00] strategy, like in Q1, we drove,
gosh,
5,800 registrants, for our virtual events and, well over like 2000 attendees. And, uh, and that was both with
customers and
prospects. But one of the best things was we got
so much great customer
feedback, on the virtual event, so.
Webinars and events don’t necessarily need to
just be for driving direct demand, but they can serve a, a
greater purpose too, of getting feedback from your users, thinking about the roadmap for your product, like just having that extra
connection point
is something that I would,
not underestimate because if there’s still, like virtual events are still alive and well, so, highly recommend keeping those as part of your strategy.
Sophie Buonassisi: You heard it here, everyone, digital, live events, webinars, they’re here to stay
Harmony Anderson: Here to
stay.
Sophie Buonassisi: and that’s fantastic. It is a feedback loop in itself, right? And one that you can actually run at scale as opposed to more the one-to-one interviews. Like you said, you’re always talking to customers, so I’m sure that’s just a different format, different kind of narrative, different feedback loop in the [00:23:00] spirit of feedback loops.
Earlier you mentioned, you know, the language is changing so quickly now, the latest is a agentic workflows. How do you think about the packaging speed and execution of campaigns in respect to the quickly evolving timeline? Because it does feel like now things are shifting quicker than ever before. How do teams, you know, founders, marketers, anyone listening, how do they keep
up from a campaign
perspective with that?
Harmony Anderson: I
mean,
that’s a really great question, and it’s not easy. Like I’m not
gonna pretend like there’s a silver bullet with that. I would say the big thing is just you have to constantly be listening and evolving. Like I am a firm believer with storytelling and messaging and positioning, like it’s never done.
You’re constantly trying to make it better, whether or not there are new buzzwords that are coming up in the market or you are launching new product
features, and so therefore your narrative changes. there, it’s just a constant iteration in making it better and improving it. I will say that [00:24:00] I don’t like doing larger overhauls.
Of messaging and positioning more than like, one to two times per year. And that’s like, that’s like even
pretty, like that’s a lot even in and of itself. but campaigns are, are how
you can take that foundational umbrella narrative and, and, messaging and.
and.
Making sure it’s relevant in the
market at a
given
time. Like, that’s the great thing
about
campaigns is like They, don’t have to live
forever. They, you can have evergreen
campaigns and it’s just your core foundational narrative and they
just keep going. but you can also
react. I. To the market
with
campaigns. And so, that’s one thing just to think about
is when you’re put in the time and effort, when
you’re doing, overarching positioning, but know that
it’s never set in stone.
And if you wanted to change,
you know, like what we did a month ago was we changed everything from AI power to AI native, like almost overnight.
You can do it, and that’s [00:25:00] okay. And so, especially in the world of AI
that is changing literally weekly, uh, it’s okay to make those, to evolve. It.
it.
Sophie Buonassisi: Very cool. Great advice. And you know, we’ve talked about campaigns and more of the outcome focused emphasis and overall narrative. How does that fit into like a program perspective? Like what, what does that really kind of mean
for the overarching program?
Harmony Anderson: Yeah. So I mean, I look at my definition of a program are, um, the channels
and the
plays that, drive a campaign narrative. So like you’ve got your overarching
messaging,
positioning is your like major brand umbrella, and then you have campaigns underneath that. And then within
campaigns. You have programs and so like you can’t have a successful campaign without programs that actually like fuel it.
one of my like general
philosophies for marketing end to end is that everyone, they
consume content different ways. They care about different things. Some [00:26:00] people are really
deep on digital and so they
see advertisements, some. Aren’t just surfing the web, and so they
need emails.
there’s just a bunch of different ways
to drive demand and to
drive awareness around your brand. And so you’d need a pretty
healthy breadth and depth of programs
to fuel your campaign, to fuel your narrative. so a few of them for me that are really always like low hanging fruit that I would just generally do, are,
Paid social. Like I’m,
I work in tech and I work in startups. Like LinkedIn is just like, it’s all over the place. You got, you gotta have your organic and your paid social. a lot of times, um, it growths startups where there isn’t a, a
super healthy database of buyers that you can then nurture
and prospect into.
And so I
would do,
you know, account based content syndication or I would try to like get my, my content out there, like through different channels that like are within
communities that I don’t. Have access to. I’m also really focused
on doing
co-marketing, similar to like, you know, our partnership
with Go to Market Fund and and GTM now.
now.
and [00:27:00] thinking about the companies out there
that
have similar audiences but aren’t competing with you, like,
how
can you partner with them to get your name out there? so those are a lot of the things that I’m thinking
about. Usually when I’m,
I’m trying to think about programs or
like,
what can I do or I can drive the biggest impact without the largest budgets
and go as hard and heavy into those as possible before you actually like start expanding beyond it.
Sophie Buonassisi: I love it. Always a perspective, especially in the startup world. looking at the ROI and
getting every bit of juice from the squeeze.
Harmony Anderson: Yeah. exactly. Yeah. Quality. Quality over quantity though for sure. I still, I always believe that. Um,
so, you know, keep for sure. Keep that in mind. is like a best practice.
Sophie Buonassisi: Great advice, and this has been super tactical, really helpful. Now I’d love to transition over to a bit more of a story from your career. ’cause you’ve had an incredible, incredible career built marketing programs at multiple fantastic companies. what are some of kind of the, the key learnings, or was there a [00:28:00] pivotal moment throughout your career that stands out
most for you?
Harmony Anderson: there’s one thing, this is more of like a. Professional
development learning that I’ve had over
the last
15 years-ish. But, Um, I’ve worked at a lot of great companies, a lot of great people. I always come in as like, I
own usually large budgets and I spend a lot of money
because I’m a marketer.
And so like the biggest thing with that is like bringing leaders, one, like making friends, building relationships within, you know, the companies
with your, your. Business stakeholders, making sure you bring them along the journey with you. you’ll have a lot less friction as you are scaling and as you’re hiring
and, learning and piloting and testing new things.
but one of the things I’ve learned early on are I. Every single company I’ve gone
into, actually, except superhuman, I’ve known somebody who has worked there prior, like they’ve all been through referrals. and I used to take a lot of stock and put a lot of stock into like the
feedback people would give me about, who to talk to.
Who’s the right person you should know, like what are they, like,
what do they care about,
especially when it comes to senior leadership. [00:29:00] and I’ve had it happen
one
or two times and outreach was like the, most
extreme time it happened where I came in and the, the people I knew were like, oh, you know, this
senior leader, like just.
Super intense, like be careful with them. Like, gave me kind of like this,
kind of
scary feedback on like, working with this, it was the
CRO at the time and so I was like super nervous. I was like, okay, I’m
gonna like, just stay away, steer clear
and uh, it really, I. Hurt my success in the very beginning, like the first six months of my
tenure at Outreach. and this person who, like I had gotten this feedback about now is like one of
my
closest mentors. She, is incredible, like, has
helped
me in my career
many times. Like we have a really close bond and connection. so my, my learning was, come in with a completely open mind.
Don’t put too much stock
into the feedback you’re getting about
who you should work with and what
you should think about
and what messaging does work or
what it doesn’t, and really go in with an open mind and like build your [00:30:00] own
perspectives as you go into a new company or as you’re building new things or trying new campaigns. Like, what worked then doesn’t always work now
from a program perspective.
and you never know when it comes to people. So. make friends, build relationships, and focus on data that’s gonna make you really incredibly successful marketer.
Sophie Buonassisi: Great advice . Always keeping a blank canvas. I think it’s very easy and common for there to be some paint on that canvas from other people’s opinions, their perspectives, and often, you know, well intentioned, but there is a reason that you’re entering fresh us to bring that fresh perspective.
And like you said, everything changes. So that is fantastic advice Walt Harmony. I would love to end with two questions here, always the same. What is one tactic or strategy that is working for
you right now?
Harmony Anderson: I mean, to put simply user generated content, UGC, your
customers are your best advocates. They should help you sell your product, like lean on them to help you, story tell. And, the more you invest in building [00:31:00] champions within your users
and your customers, like the more demand you’re gonna drive in the
future. The faster you’re gonna be able to grow. So lean into that. If you have amazing users, you have champions like help them, help support you as a brand and as a business.
Sophie Buonassisi: And how would people. Go into that. Let’s just say, I wanna break this down even, even more tactically. For a company that hasn’t yet dabbled in user generated content, what would be that first step recommendation
for them to get started? How do you actually encourage that? that?
Yeah. Yeah. So a couple of the things
Harmony Anderson: we do, um, which is very
tactical, but like when we launch new products, when we have betas, we of course, like we allow our best users on our betas with the
expectation that we’re gonna look at their data and they’re gonna
give us feedback on the beta
before we ga. One of the things we do with all of our
launches is we do like, um, hype trains. From our beta users. And so let’s say we’ll allow a thousand new users onto the beta. Um, we’ll give them a couple [00:32:00] days and then we do
email programs and campaigns to them. And
we
will
even do like, exec outreach as well, uh, via email and
via social and encourage them to talk about it
publicly. And so, we’ll, we’ll
even sometimes give them incentives and
like fun swag and things to actually do it. but a lot of times, like, you know, again, like.
Communicate with your best users. Like a lot of people will love your product. They probably do love your product
and are willing to talk about it, and don’t be scared to ask them.
Um,
so that’s one of the fun things
is like putting together these hype trains
of like, you know, who they are. if you have product data, like use the product data and, and communicate with them and encourage them to, speak on your behalf.
Sophie Buonassisi: That’s great. Love the hype train verbiage too. And I mean, influencer strategies are commonly talked about now, but you know, the deepest connections are from your best users, from your greatest advocates, so it’s fantastic that you’re tapping into that
Harmony Anderson: Yeah,
absolutely.
Sophie Buonassisi: advice.
And what is one widely held belief that revenue [00:33:00] leaders have that you
think is bullshit or no longer serving us?
Harmony Anderson: marketing goes through lots of like big
swing evolutions and you know, early
on, let’s say like 20 years ago, it was, like so brand centric
and brand was hard to track, but like, that’s what marketers do and it’s kind of like this like fun visual like, Business, you know, like strategy.
Then it shifts, starts shifting into demand gen, where it’s like marketing actually should play a role in
driving pipeline. So they need to have a pipeline
number. and then we completely shifted away from
like Brand and storytelling and customer success And like
churn and retention. And I think now my biggest
thing is marketing should not only be measured on direct pipeline attribution. Like that shit is not the end all be all.
In fact, I don’t think you
should really
ever be talking about attribution unless it
is for budget purposes and ROI on actual
spend. but marketing plays a big role in brand growth. So just like
how people perceive you in the [00:34:00] market,
driving top of funnel, supporting sales on converting through the funnel, driving
retention, expansion, and like that full customer life cycle, like marketing should own That journey end to end
realistically. and so don’t only focus on the pipeline because it’s just such a, such a narrow view of what marketing can do for a business.
Sophie Buonassisi: Oh, harmony. My heart is singing right
now. I am so passionate about this too. I love that you said that. I think that this is step two for us. You know, first and foremost, we are so top of funnel focused. Now we’ve progressed down the funnel. Like you said, that’s just the beginning really. It’s, you know, the efficiency metrics and the brand sentiment that feeds into efficiency of conversion, of retention, all the things.
And so pipeline is only a small kind of slice of the pie. It’s more of progression in the right direction.
Harmony Anderson: On like the data set and what marketing can own. There’s one of the examples of this is, uh, our executive team, we have of course, key [00:35:00] results that each of us as leaders are accountable for. And we have lots of like, you know, managed pipeline metrics and, um, SALs like what marketing needs to support when it comes to pipeline.
But the metric that I am held accountable for is the marketing leader. Is, , net revenue retention for a very specific piece of our, customer database. So like five plus self-serve net revenue retention is, the big one for me. And it just depends on the priorities of your business, but um, it’s not just about that pipeline growth, like it can go so much deeper and farther into the funnel than that.
Um, so just one example of, uh, what marketing can do and what they can own.
Sophie Buonassisi: That’s fantastic. Well, it sounds like you’ve got a lot of great alignment. ’cause that’s, I mean, often such a necessary piece in terms of connecting marketing to the greater holistic go-to-market engine as opposed to purely pipeline is that alignment and buy-in to the value that marketing brings. Any advice to, you know, leaders for encouraging?
That kind of alignment or shifting [00:36:00] marketing perhaps to focus on NRR or other metrics beyond just pipeline.
Harmony Anderson: Yeah, I mean, I think the big thing is just really look at where your business is at and its growth, the tenure, the life cycle of your business. Are you really early stage?
Do you actually. Have, you know, tens of thousands of customers or not? Are you self-serve? Are you product led? Are you sales led? I think it’s asking a lot of those questions and then figuring out, um, what is the business impact you as a marketer can have, and where does that hit the funnel? Um, is one of the, the.
The biggest things to really focus on and think about and just make sure you’re completely aligned with the rest of your leadership team. And if something feels off, like ask the, ask the questions because it probably is. Um, uh, that’s my, that’s my big advice is just it’s, it kind of depends on where your business is at, but have that alignment, ask the right questions early on, and, and everyone will hopefully, ultimately be successful.
Sophie Buonassisi: Communication. [00:37:00] Always key.
Well,
harmony, this has been fantastic. Really appreciate the time, the tactical all the advice. Where can people find you and connect with you?
Harmony Anderson: Yeah, find me on LinkedIn please. Um, I love networking. I love connecting with people. We’re also hiring a bunch of superhuman, um, across almost every single org.
So find me. I love to connect and, uh, don’t be shy.
Sophie Buonassisi: Perfect. Well, wonderful. Thank you again, harmony to all the listeners, thank you for hanging out with us and we will see you next episode.
The post GTM 143: Why Most AI Messaging Fails and How to Actually Stand Out in a Crowded Market | Harmony Anderson appeared first on GTMnow.