Why go-to-market is more than campaigns

Luis Clark (00:00)
the industry has trained them to think in launch mode rather than market strategy. campaigns are messages, channels, timelines, assets. Go to market is about the market itself, who you’re targeting. how you win, how you price, how you sell, how you scale.

Dave Heywood (00:26)
This is Marketing Careers Uncovered, and I’m Dave Heywood Today we’re getting into the guts of go-to-market, or GTM for short. But we’re not necessarily talking about campaign planning and channels here. What we’re getting into today is what it’s really all about, where product, sales, marketing, all plan and pull in the same direction. My guest today is Luis Clark, and he’s…

EMEA go-to-market lead at monday.com where he helps pull together go-to-market in a surprisingly complex environment. So we’ll be hearing a little bit today about his background approach and how he thinks, alongside what go-to-market really means, why storytelling on its own necessarily isn’t enough, and how you can make your own career leaps, even when you might not think you’re the most obvious candidate on paper.

Can you tell us a little bit about what you were doing and what actually prompted the quite drastic, if you’ll forgive me, career change and ended up somewhere like monday.com?

Luis Clark (01:25)
In honesty, it didn’t feel drastic. It kind of did, but didn’t. So I come from, I was a broadcaster to begin with. just had a passion for music and a passion for connecting. And it seemed like a great outlet for those passions. So was on air for 12 years on various commercial radio stations, both here in the UK and some abroad. That morphed its way into management roles.

which became group management. And it was a part of that I realized actually I’ve gone into change management because when you were at the group level we were doing mergers, acquisitions. And although I was working on the content side of the business actually when you’re dealing with that amount of change and rebranding radio stations you’re into workflows, processes, people change. And when I realized that, okay.

all this experience, I’ll put some qualifications to it. So I went out and did a Prince II project management course and it was quite easy to do. There’s a lot of jargon you have to learn, but really it’s the jargon that goes alongside the experience that you’ve already been putting into place. And then I also put myself through the pain of doing an HR management CIPD course because I’d been doing TUPE transfers and going through lots of restructuring. I

walked the path and it was a case of putting the certification to the path I’ve been walking. That then became commercial change management and strategic change. When I left one organization and went into another, went to work for Bauer Media for six, seven years. Again, there were more mergers, more acquisitions, more structured changes. And that’s where Monday.com came into my life in bringing that in to help us with a lot of the change that was going on within the organization.

changing our workflows, our processes, seeing that, you if we make these changes here, we can reallocate our resource over here. This is gonna make us more money and more profitable. So that then led into monday.com because it brought all these elements of my career together from content into change management, into the software and SaaS world that helped bring, it’s almost like these three things came together into this one.

role that I now do. It’s almost like a perfect fit. But what you were saying was like a drastic change. It’s actually not. It’s transferable skills. It’s Mr. Miyagi. Wax on, wax off. You’re picking these skills up by osmosis and you don’t realize the value they have until you’re put in the right environment to use them.

Dave Heywood (04:02)
taking your role now at monday.com, you wouldn’t necessarily have a go-to market background on paper when you sketch some of that out. So what was it that really made you take that leap and how did you position yourself with those transferable skills to end up where you are?

Luis Clark (04:18)
think it was, when I looked at the job description and I went through the skills that they were looking for and the things that they were looking to do about how you can help customers understand the value that they’re going to get from having this product. So that value led sell, I can absolutely do that. I’ve worked through all these different change projects, worked with all these different stakeholders. I understand the motivators or how to speak.

CFO or CTO, because they’ve all got their own individual WIIFM’s the what’s in it for me. When you understand what they’re looking for, now I can start, these are your pains, right? This is where a work management system can come in and help you with those and join you up, because you’re looking at this just at your world, but when you look at it from the wider business, if you can connect these different elements, and as an example, you know, you can talk about, and I’ve mentioned this before, we’re all project managers.

Right. Whether you’re running a marketing campaign, whether you’re running a big change project within an organization, a marketing campaign is project. Right. So all these things that we do, whether you’re in finance and you’re doing, ⁓ you know, monthly accounting, that’s again, it’s just an agile on repeat every month. We’re all running projects. So if we’re all running projects and the other thing is projects we always used to think of as one-off change events.

They’re not, they’re constant. We’re doing them every day. So if we’re all doing projects and we’re all doing them every day, why are we all using different tools in order to manage this across the organization? It seems madness that one’s in this tool, one’s in that tool, somebody else is in spreadsheets, somebody else is doing this. Put everybody in one place and suddenly that cross dependencies across these different work streams, all those pain points start to disappear, all that effort in trying to chase things down.

moves to one side, which means now I can concentrate on the things that actually make the biggest difference to moving the business forward. And I’m not caught up in this. Where’s this? Where’s that?

Dave Heywood (06:17)
How confident did you feel stepping into your role at Monday?

Luis Clark (06:22)
massive imposter syndrome, huge imposter syndrome. As soon as I got there, I be fair, I nearly didn’t come because of the fear factor that I’ve got 30 plus years experience in ⁓ media marketing campaigns here. Now I’m going into the software world. What do I know about software? I know about Monday, but the wider picture even go to market. didn’t have direct experience in that.

But actually, when I got there, took me, took probably about six months to find my feet and really understand where I could help contribute. And that was working with the sales teams that I had that deeper understanding how to write the RFP. You know, the processes that go underneath the bonnet within organizations in getting large CRM work management deals across the line. And coming back to what I was saying earlier, understanding how to speak C-suite.

Dave Heywood (07:14)
Yes, and how did you deal with that imposter syndrome for the first six months? Because that’s a hell of a long time to wait it out, right? I hope something comes here where I can really get my teeth into it.

Luis Clark (07:25)
Well, it starts to build over time because you find, I come back to that Mr. Miyagi, the wax on, wax off, right? Somebody throws something at you and you find that you’re able to deal with it.

Dave Heywood (07:35)
what I really want to get into with you now is this term, go to market.

Lots of people that I come across still confuse or equate go to market with campaign planning and delivery. Why do you think so many of us are confusing and conflating that still?

Luis Clark (07:54)
think it’s the industry has trained them to think in launch mode rather than market strategy. And you’re absolutely right. know, campaigns are messages, channels, timelines, assets. Go to market is about the market itself, who you’re targeting. Coming back to that point I was making earlier about the value that you’re delivering, you know, how you win, how you price, how you sell, how you scale. And the confusion normally comes down to go to market sounds like marketing. So,

People assume that it is. I think for years it lived inside marketing decks. So lots of teams still think Go To Market is that big launch campaign. But reality is that, you know, it’s a pillar inside a much bigger commercial plan. A lot of teams also, I think, jump straight to the fun bit, the creative, the messaging, the channels, but you have to do the background work first, the segmentation, the value prop, the motion, the enablement.

Otherwise, you’ve just got the fireworks without anything to light them with. And I think the biggest difference is that marketing is execution. Go to market is the strategy disguised as marketing. you know, positioning how the business intends to win. Who are we targeting? Why will we win? What are we selling? How is it going to land across the full funnel? And then campaigns are just how you then tell the world.

Dave Heywood (09:10)
Yeah, that’s a really, really nice way of looking at it. And how does that actually manifest at monday.com? Who’s involved and how does that all come together if you can paint a little picture for me?

Luis Clark (09:23)
I mean, it’s because it’s multi-products. There’s a diverse set up of teams that, you know, and it’s literally a global setup. So, you know, there are teams headed up in Tel Aviv. We’re expanding a lot of the go-to-market functionality, particularly around some of the products like CRM in London at the moment. And then there’s also large teams in Sydney and ⁓ New York. So,

If you’re to target each one of those markets, each one of those markets will have their specific nuances. There’s a common theme in terms of how we go to market and what the central messaging is. But then how we tackle that and make sure that we’re connecting with the local markets is then the responsibility of the regional heads of marketing to be able to do that. But we’ve just pulled also go to market under a centralized structure.

So although there are the nuances between the various brands, it’s now being pulled together into a central strategy pillar.

you have to tell your story better and connect the value to their pain points better than anyone else.

Dave Heywood (10:21)
And actually I’ve often found as well over the years is that you’re not necessarily always competing with another vendor or someone similar. You’re also competing with someone actually choosing to do nothing. And often that’s quite an alluring one because that costs someone nothing to do nothing.

Luis Clark (10:35)
Yeah.

Well,

that’s not true. Standing still is actually costing you more than you realize, because you’re standing still while everybody else is moving forward. If you think about it like a three-legged race, when we were back at school, everybody else has started. They’re already halfway down the course. You’re standing still. And that gap is your competitive advantage. So the longer you leave it before you start to get off that start line, the bigger the gap, the more your competitors are pulling ahead. So actually standing still is actually a very risky strategy.

because then you’ve got to run twice as fast to be able to even catch up,

let alone get ahead.

Dave Heywood (11:14)
Yes, that’s one of the pieces you’ve got to land as part of that messaging. Otherwise, someone will look at it from a purely accounting perspective and go, well, actually, I can choose not to spend any money here and not see the opportunity cost of standing still.

Luis Clark (11:27)
But it’s like a marketing

campaign, because I think actually the same principles apply. People look at marketing and go, it’s a cost to the business. No, it’s not. It’s the price of doing business. Because that’s what’s driving your funnel. That’s what’s driving the customers into your business in the first place. So it’s not a cost. It’s the price of doing business.

And the same thing goes with things like ⁓ with Monday as a piece of SaaS software in this modern way and in the world we now work in, it’s actually, it’s not a nice to have, it’s an essential to have. You need to have a way of being able to connect your data, your people, your processes all into one place. Because otherwise, again, you’re burning resource that you don’t have. We’re all being asked to, from a marketing perspective, we’ve got more channels to create content for than we’ve ever had before.

So let’s say we’ve got three times the places, then three times the content we need to be able to do it in. Everybody wants it in five minutes. I need this campaign on it, know, live in the next two weeks. So if we need to do it faster and we need to do more of it, they don’t give us three times the people to deliver three times the work. So the only way that you can find that capacity is to go back to how you work to be able to find the time.

Dave Heywood (12:40)
Now, in terms of storytelling, again, just to pull us back onto that thread, one of the things we’ve, as marketers, have been trained on until the cows come home is this concept that attention spans have become shorter. we were talking before we started about actually, I don’t believe that attention spans have got shorter.

for shitty boring content has just gone through the floor because we can skip this and skip this stuff. But we’ve got into this piece of, you we’ve got to make the story simpler and shorter and punchier. Can you go too far with that? there.

Luis Clark (13:22)
needs

relevance. I think of things like diary of a CEO, right? It’s an hour, hour and a half long. I watch all of it. It’s interesting. It’s relevant. It has value. And that’s what it comes down to. In the radio world, I used to tell the radio presenters that it’s like you’re playing a fruit machine, right? The payoff has to be worth the amount of money that you’re putting in there. And you need to know that actually I’m going to get that return.

albeit you’re, you know, I don’t encourage gambling in any way, but you want that payoff at the end of it, right? If you’re asking me to keep feeding the machine and there’s no payoff value at the end of it, then I’m not going to invest my time. Think of money as time. I’m not going to invest my time if I don’t have that payoff at the end of it. So, you know, when I watch things like diary of a CEO, the learning, the things you come away from that, it’s, you know,

It’s stuff you can take into your day to day. has a real value. So I don’t think it’s about necessarily the length of things. It’s about the value that that brings. Do the two balance out.

Dave Heywood (14:29)
Yeah, I’ve constantly had to challenge that with colleagues across different parts of different businesses who will often go to, is this a bit long or how short does this need to be? don’t know. Forget the length. Forget the length. Just make it not boring, please.

Luis Clark (14:42)
How good is it?

Yeah.

If it’s relevant,

interesting, entertaining, does it make me, you know, laugh, marvel, understand something? It’s down to relevance and the value that it gives. Otherwise, why should I invest my time in it?

Dave Heywood (15:02)
Yeah, yeah, it’s a really, really simple practical principle

Luis Clark (15:06)
Cause a lot of brands, think, you know, they’ve got a message that again, I come back to, this is the story they want to tell, but they’re not thinking about it. How’s this going to be heard? Right? Because it doesn’t matter what message you’ve got. If it’s not interesting, it doesn’t matter how many channels you put it on or how many times you put it on there. It’s still not interesting. People won’t engage with it. So it’s all about that creativity that, you know, the value of what it is you’re trying to communicate.

Dave Heywood (15:31)
Taking all your experiences so far, is for anything you used to believe about or think about go to market or your own skills that you sort of now know isn’t quite right, has your views shifted of what go to market really is all about?

Luis Clark (15:48)
My view, I don’t think my, I think I’ve got a deeper knowledge and a far greater understanding of it. you know, what I thought has just become more practiced. And I think, you know, the more practiced you are, the more confident you become at it. And I think with one of the things that, you know, just in general, it’s just about practicing. You are what you practice, you know, as a presenter.

when I’m hosting events and people say to me, do you get nervous? It’s just like, actually, no, I don’t because I’ve I’ve practiced to the point where it feels familiar to me. You know, when you feel uncomfortable with things, it’s normally because things are unfamiliar. So it’s how do you make the unfamiliar familiar? And a lot of that is practice. And there are certain things that you can do even when presenting at a boardroom. heard a great piece this week, you know, stand by the door and shake people’s hands when they come in because then

these people are not unfamiliar to you, they’ve become familiar. then it helps with dealing with nerves in these situations, make as much of the unfamiliar familiar, and it makes you therefore it builds your confidence. So I think you just grow.

Dave Heywood (16:58)
Yeah,

and even if something does go wrong, then you can quite easily… course correct go on.

Luis Clark (17:02)
But people are your side.

When you’re presenting something, when you sit in an audience and something goes wrong, you’re really feeling for that person. You’re willing them to succeed. Right? So the audience is absolutely on your side, but what they want from you is value. Right? Give me something. I’m not my, you’re constantly fighting for my attention. So therefore they’re the principles you have to be playing here coming from their point of view, not about what you want to say. It’s how are they hearing this? Keeping their interest.

Like reading a newspaper, selective exposure, selective attention, selective retention. Selective exposure is the Freddy star ate my hamster. That’s what makes that headline stand out amongst all the other noise. Same when you’re coming to do a presentation at a conference, same when you’re doing a sales pitch. Your opening is how you then capture people’s attention. Selective exposure. Selective attention is the bit in bold, the high impact language that keeps me reading this story. And selective retention is the value, the emotional connection.

that I gave as part of that story because that’s what makes you memorable. It’s a chemical reaction. you create an emotion, the brain stores it. If you don’t create the emotional reaction and the only emotion you’ve got was, is dull, I’m going back to my phone, you’re forgettable.

Dave Heywood (18:15)
That’s been really, really helpful. Thank you. Lots and lots of stuff, really, and some practical tips as well. And particularly helpful as well to get our heads around what storytelling actually is and means. And yeah, it’s not about the length, but actually it’s about really getting under the skin of relevance.

and connecting people and building a network It’s not about being the loudest or the most extroverted. It’s about thinking about who and where you can connect to get new ideas and perspectives, challenge yourself, be challenged and get more and more confident to take some of the leaps of faith that you’ve made

throughout the years and got you from A to B to C to D and yeah you said it yourself you know you would never have imagined where you would have ended up and ended up now but if you’d have played it safe and gone well I’ll stay I’ll stay in radio then

Luis Clark (19:07)
Yeah. You’ve got to try.

You gotta try, know, have fun. Never stop learning.

Dave Heywood (19:16)
thank you ever so much, Luis and thanks to you for listening as well. If you’ve enjoyed today’s conversation, don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review, or share with a friend or colleague. And we’ll see you next time.