GTM 28: How Auth0 Took Big Risks To Avoid Pipeline Plateau

GTM 28: How Auth0 Took Big Risks To Avoid Pipeline Plateau

‘Thinking more out of the box instead of just following playbooks is something that I think is important.’
– Martin Gontovnikas. 

In this week’s episode, Scott Barker chats with Martin ‘Gonto’ Gontovnikas about taking big risks in marketing, Generative AI, and understanding customer behavior while making marketing strategies.

Gonto is the founder of Hyper Growth Partners. He previously worked with Off Zero where he started in branding relations and ended up in marketing and growth, growing with the company in revenue from 20 dollars to 20 million average revenue.

What you will learn: 

1. The impact of Generative AI on marketing

2. How to achieve big hairy audacious goals in marketing

3. Experimenting in marketing when risk tolerance is low

Highlights

(04:02) Generative AI for marketing

(09:56) Where will Generative AI be in 10 years

(13:31) Audacious goal experiments that worked

(22:53) Big audacious goals that turned out successful

(30:29) Restructuring back after implementing an audacious idea

(33:40) Running experiments when risk tolerance is low

(36:40) How long do you run an experiment before making a decision?

(39:31) What most revenue leaders believe but Gonto doesn’t agree with

(44:01) Fitting marketing strategies into users’ habits

(46:36) How to get in touch with Gonto

Quotes

‘There’s so many layoffs now but a lot of these layoffs are a result of companies doing things just because they think they have to be doing them not because they should do them. Understanding that maybe doing something different is better is very hard.’

‘If you’re going to try experiments, I would think about two ways of doing it. Number one is; you try absolute extremes. You’ll get an answer on which one is better very fast. So what that means is that you can still fail, but failing five times to find the one that works in one month is not the same as failing five months to find the one that does work. So failing faster is a good way to get to the objective.’

‘When we think about experiments or things that we want to try out, most ideas come from gut feelings from somebody on the team. That gut feeling may come from doing research, but the research and the data will not tell you what you need to do.’

‘Thinking with more out of the box instead of just following playbooks is something that I think is important’

‘When you’re doing marketing, I think that’s to drive people to come to your website and to convert, you need to live and exist inside their habits. If you try to change what they do in their day to day to get them to come. It’s not gonna work.’

‘Something I think is important when we do experiments is if they increase something very little, you need a lot of samples to see which one works better that means it needs to run for one month for two months or something like that, when you make an experiment where a and b are extremely different, that means that the change is likely going to be higher, and therefore you need less samples.’

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Before helping found GTMfund, Scott spent 4 years at Outreach as Director of Strategic Engagement. He was in charge of aligning key relationships with VCs, BoDs, ecosystem partners and community members to drive revenue and strategic initiatives across Outreach. Scott initially ran revenue/partnerships for Sales Hacker (which was acquired by Outreach in 2018). Prior to Sales Hacker, he led and built outbound Business Development teams at Payfirma and MediaValet. Scott also advises for a number of high growth start-ups and is the host/author of The GTM Podcast and The GTM Newsletter. At GTMfund, Scott leads all fundraising efforts and runs the media arm of the firm. He’s also responsible for assessing investments, team management, LP/community relationships and GTM support for founders.

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