Gadi Eliashiv of Singular on whether a marketing leader needs marketing experience

Gadi Eliashiv

Hi, great being here, thanks for the time.

Gadi Eliashiv 00:30

I'll try and go back, not too far back. I grew up in Israel, in the center of the country, if I'm being forced to describe it, but then people make fun of me for that. As soon as I was out of the house I lived in Tel Aviv, the classic Israeli move into the center of the country.

01:01 After a while I relocated to San Francisco. I've been there for seven years, and then I've been living in Austin, Texas for the last three years, so I've been in the US for over ten years. I recently became a citizen, which is exciting. I'm married, two kids, and that's kind of where we are. My background: I've been coding since I was super young. I always found computers fascinating. I was doing a lot of hacking and reverse engineering when I was young, and then I naturally got into the elite intelligence forces in the Israeli military, 8200, and spent seven years in the army.

01:31 Then I joined a company called Onavo, which was a bunch of people I knew from the military, and I had a lot of fun. Eventually Onavo was acquired by Facebook and became Facebook Israel, so it's pretty cool, it felt like we were part of something meaningful there. Right before the acquisition I left to start my own company. I always knew I wanted to start a company, and that's how I started Singular. If I describe Singular really quickly, I'll say that we help growth teams solve really complicated data challenges: attribution, marketing analytics, ETL, anything that has to do with marketing and data.

02:03 As a side note, I also like building physical things. I was working on building houses and furniture, I built a deck, I built this thing behind me, and I'm trying to develop more hobbies, like I'm fixing up old cars, so I bought a pickup truck and I'm trying to replace the engine. Trying to do things not just in the virtual realm but also physical.

Gadi Eliashiv

That's great to hear, I appreciate it.

Gadi Eliashiv 03:04

It depends, because we're talking about a history of about ten years of building companies. In the beginning I knew nothing, and my plan was, we're going to bring somebody who did some marketing, they came from a company similar to ours, and we'll do what they said. That's a really bad idea, because you have to become, I'm not saying an expert, but you have to know enough about what other companies are doing and get deep into what the key KPIs are. That's where investors can help you. Whatever answer I would have given you ten years ago is definitely not the answer I give you today, but you realize pretty quickly what you need to measure.

03:35 Today, the thing I ask my marketing team to deliver, most of my go-to-market team, there are two terms we use. One of them is what we call stage two ARR, and I'll explain what it means: basically it's a sales-qualified opportunity, which means I don't care about the leads they drive, I don't care about people signing up for a webinar, I don't care about website visits. The KPI they need to hit is pipeline, and not just any pipeline, an actual opportunity with a company that has ARR attached to it and a number to hit.

04:05 Now, obviously I do care about signups and demo requests and webinar participants, these are all early indicators, but for me the main KPI is the actual pipeline to drive. I know that's what's going to enable us to hit our goals, because whenever we have pipeline I know the product is really good, I know our sales team knows how to do it, I know we can service the customer successfully, I know they stay for many years. So it's almost like the main thing I need to sell for each quarter, as the goal increases, is getting more pipeline. That's KPI one.

05:07 The other thing we measure is not just what was sales-qualified, but also closed-won ARR, and this is a good balance, because sometimes if you have a regional team you might have sellers in certain regions who just started out, and they might qualify a bit too zealously, so you get more inflated pipeline than you think, and then none of it closes. Maybe your win rate is 50% normally, but suddenly in this particular region that rep has a win rate of 15%. Maybe they're qualifying too much, maybe it doesn't make sense. That's why we also have closed-won ARR as the actual metric, to balance it out. So these are two high-level KPIs: when the CEO asks what to track, it's basically pipeline, and pipeline that closes.

Gadi Eliashiv 06:08

In the early stages we were a lot more busy executing basic tactics. We had this big event we were preparing for, or maybe our own event we were hosting, and the marketing team was telling me how many registrants we got and how many of them were relevant people, or we had a webinar and we were really obsessed with how many people attended. That's important, because when you build your channels you need to make sure the fundamentals work. You can't just be the CEO who says I need pipeline and closes, well, you can, if it works out and you have all the perfect levers in place, but more times than not you need to know the details that help it.

06:38 Being able to assess things in a more granular fashion in the beginning was helpful, so we could build repeatable programs. Now I know that every webinar I do gets a certain amount of participants, but I know how much pipeline it translates into. I know how many organic demo requests I should expect every month. I know how many content downloads I'm going to get for certain pieces. I know, if we do an event, how many meetings to expect. Those are the early metrics, and I think we evolved from it, almost like a funnel, from top-of-funnel to bottom-of-funnel metrics over time.

07:08 The other thing we looked at is which of these are baseline metrics and which are more long-term. Baseline is, I know I need to deliver a certain amount of programs every month or every quarter. Long-term, we try to shake up the plan a bit: we have this new product coming out, we have this new market we want to go into, this change we want to capitalize on. What you also try to do is analyze what you could do less of and still hit your numbers, almost like analyzing the incrementality of your actions. What if I didn't do fifteen different pieces of content every quarter, but five, that frees up time to do something else. That's another evolution, not just setting goals but measuring how many activities you're doing and changing things up.

Gadi Eliashiv 08:10

Maybe I'll start with the communication. I think it can always be better, honestly, everybody feels like they want to hear from me more, I need to talk in more company all-hands and communicate that better. But one of the early lessons I got was, build a really strong executive team. With that we have some great executives who really helped me not only delegate most of the work, and I kind of choose what I want to work on, but there's a group of people I can go to and communicate really quickly and efficiently, and I think there's good alignment that comes from them, and then they propagate the rest of the work.

08:41 I'm lucky enough that I can talk to, let's say, my president, who used to be our CRO and now is president and owns all of go-to-market. When I work with him, and I work with our VP product, and I work with my co-founders, we're able to quickly discuss, okay, what's the strategy for 2025. We start with the high-level goals and figure out how to break it down by each product and by each region, and analyze how much pipeline we need. I think that all starts with where we want to be, but then we also do the work to break it down into individual tasks, and that immediately helps show the short-term versus the long-term.

09:44 The short-term is more the baseline, the things I know I have to do this quarter and next quarter. Long-term is if I need to plan a year, a year and a half out, and I'm asking myself, how do I get to a point where I've developed this new channel that's going to drive this much pipeline? What do I need to do to get there? I need a budget for it, I need to prove success at a smaller scale, I need to hire people to do that, I need the product to be live, or whatever we're counting on, maybe some release.

10:15 Communicating with your exec team is important. The other aspect is communicating to the company, and that's just as important, because eventually they have to hear it from me. I could talk to my executives all day long, but it wouldn't necessarily translate as well to everybody in the company, so they need to hear from me as well, and I think that helps a lot, both with morale and with being able to execute.

10:46 With investors it's a different rhythm. I have one-on-ones with some of the more active board members, but I usually do the update in the board setting, and the goal in board meetings, at least what I was taught, is like, never surprise your board members. If there's anything major coming up, you want them to be prepped ahead of time. Board meetings are usually there just to agree, which doesn't mean they're not valuable, they're very valuable, but you don't want to surprise them. It's just a different setting than when you talk to the company internally.

Gadi Eliashiv 11:18

Everybody in the company makes fun of me for sticking to the data, I'm a data-driven guy, I hope I'm data driven enough, but certainly very technical. Over the years we actually built our own custom attribution for this. We basically take every opportunity we have in our CRM and try to understand how it got created, what touch points affected it. We have a few models for that, but the main model is an MTA model, multi-touch attribution.

11:49 In really simple terms, you look at every opportunity you have. Let's say we have a deal and we started an opportunity with that account: we look at the last ninety days, this can be adjusted, and try to find what we did against that account and all the various employees there. Did they attend a webinar, did we meet them at an event, did the salesperson get a lead from the partnership team, did they come in as an inbound demo request, that happens a lot. Then it does some sort of weighting on all these touch points to come up with the multi-touch number.

12:20 There are obviously different algorithms you can apply and different customizations, and there are things you have to fix. For example, every one of our demo requests is also going to have an SDR reaching out because they're responding to the demo request, so you have to neutralize that, make sure you're not marking everything as an SDR touch point. After doing all that cleanup you get a dashboard that shows how each of the activities and channels the company runs contributes to pipeline. That's one way of measuring marketing effectiveness, the mathematical, scientific side.

12:52 The other side is where you do things because there's a belief that they help you. For example, we do a ton of content and thought leadership, and I'm not sure all these webinars are necessary, but I do know that eventually it really helps create a brand, it helps create awareness. In a lot of those areas it's harder to measure, but it's still something that contributes, so we try to do a mix. I feel like the company's gotten really good at this. I was so proud to see people, when they present to me or even internally, go through the Tableau dashboard and pull numbers, we're way more data driven than we were before, so I'm very happy, and we've been doing it for many years now, it's working really well for us.

Gadi Eliashiv 14:26

I think it's probably a mix. It's a great answer, and it's funny, because a lot of times the level of measurement we do for our customers, who have marketing budgets probably ten times, not a hundred times, the size of our own budget, they're way more sophisticated in their measurement, and rightfully so, they should be. Hopefully we grow into those marketing budgets over the years, but when you deal with some of these Fortune 100 companies it's just insane.

14:57 I can't say we're at the level of sophistication of measurement that we offer in our own product for all these aspects, but I'd say it's slightly different from a consumer business and a B2B business, in two aspects. One: in the last few years, especially through Covid, we kind of got lucky, because a lot of the activities we wanted to do, that we felt the hunch we needed to do, also happened to be in a digital setting where you could do some sort of tracking. I'm not showing a billboard to a bunch of people and wondering if it works, I'm doing a webinar, and if I do a webinar I can see who's signing up and whether they keep consuming my content.

15:27 The approach we took is we chose a bunch of activities we thought would be valuable, and we were able to both invest in it because we believed in it, and also start to see results that were directly measurable, which was awesome. But these activities on their own aren't going to directly attribute a ton of revenue, and we keep doing them because we've seen, in a very large number of cases, that people literally recognize us because of this. For example, when we started we were less known, our investors used to call us the best kept secret, which was sort of an insult, because it means you don't need to be a secret, people need to know your brand.

16:28 We entered a space that already had some household names in attribution, and we came in with a different approach, a different product, we merged into attribution and we weren't as known, but we were able to turn that around in a few areas. You mentioned the support, we've been hearing people raving about the service we provide, how powerful the product is, but the other key aspect was thought leadership. This is one of those areas where you get enough of a positive indicator every once in a while that you feel it's worth keeping investing in.

16:58 I'll give you an example, it might be a silly one. I was once at a conference, and people didn't even know my name, but they were like, you're the guy from the webinars, and privacy, we watched all your content, it's amazing. It's literally people walking up to me who work at the largest customers, some of them prospects, some of them Singular customers, and you're like, wow, this really reaches a lot of people and they care about it.

17:29 I think there's a unique opportunity to combine creating a brand with doing a lot of things we like, talking about technical things, measurement, privacy. We got lucky there, I think it was a good time and we took advantage of it. Other than that, we have a certain amount of investment in events that we have no idea if it returns the yield, but if you don't do that investment you might cause some damage. For example, I remember events where you have a lot of your customers there, and they kind of expect you to take them out, throw a party, do all sorts of things. There's enough common sense on things you should invest in, but it's not as scientific as I wanted it to be. A lot of our activities are measurable directly, but I probably don't know their true, complete value.

Gadi Eliashiv 18:00

The thing I've seen myself do multiple times, and I assume others do as well, I've seen some friends do the same, is not having the right leaders, or maybe not having the right leaders for the right time. Maybe one of the best lessons I've had over the years is how much of a difference you can see from a different leader. It's literally to the point where you might have problems you think are simply unsolvable, it seems so difficult, all the signals are like, we're in this position in the market, this is impossible, people are saying X, Y and Z, the team isn't excited, and then a leader changes and all these problems that seemed impossible just go away.

18:30 You're like, oh my God, this was all, I don't want to say gaslighting, but it's almost like you gaslight yourself. You're like, this is impossible, all this stuff is really complicated, and then you bring the right leader and everything seems possible. I think that's a mistake people can make in general, and for founders especially, ones who need to build a marketing team, you kind of have to always look at what other companies at your stage are doing, what their team looks like, and whether your leaders are up to speed.

19:00 A great way to do that, by the way, is if you have good investors, they will help you. Norwest is one of our investors, and they have a phenomenal service team for their portfolio companies. They have a CMO who works with all their companies, and that's an amazing resource, because they bring you the benchmarks of what you don't know. They show you, okay, all these other companies we have in our portfolio, they could survey hundreds of companies, this is how their marketing team looks, this is what their leader does, this is how much money they're spending, this is the return on investment, this is the percentage of their budget that goes to marketing.

Gadi Eliashiv 20:02

I have to be honest and say I've hired multiple times and failed in a lot of cases, so take my advice with a grain of salt. I think it's hard. I always ask myself, did we bring the wrong person, or the right person at the wrong time, and sometimes I think it's the latter. We're such a different company today than we were two years ago or five years ago, and it requires different leaders.

20:33 It's hard to say precisely what I'd look for, but I look for the things I think are going to be meaningful for success in the next two years, not forever. I'm okay with the fact that people will only be valuable for a certain period of the company, it's the well-known concept that you need people who can help you scale to the next level, but they're not going to be there all the way through IPO. So trying to figure out whether this person should take me to the next level is what I'm focused on now.

21:04 Obviously there's a lot of personal attributes I'm interested in, for example, am I going to like working with this person, and this is my pet peeve, can they admit a mistake. I hate when people don't, if somebody admits a mistake I'll be okay with it, but if they're trying to make it seem like it wasn't a mistake, that just drives me nuts. Things I know would be a fit for me or the people I work with. I do care about people who can handle data and look at information and decide based on that, especially for a leader, I think it's really important.

21:35 In the past we always looked for people who understood our space. The funny thing is, and this is maybe a curveball, the best leaders we've had in marketing in the past, it's changed since, were actually not marketers. One of the best leaders we had was our chief architect. The guy was super talented, he went on to start a company and recently sold it. He was a phenomenal person who grew up in Singular for many years, and we moved him from an engineering job to manage marketing, and he did one of the biggest transformations this team has ever seen: the best execution, the best delivery, the best creation of a new channel.

22:20 So our marketing leadership journey has been weird, it hasn't been classic, textbook marketers succeeding in the role, it's been different people. It's actually very interesting.

Gadi Eliashiv 22:40

I knew a few facts. I knew he was really smart, I knew he knew the product, he understood the business because he'd spent a while being close to the business, so he definitely had a really good understanding of it. We got lucky, because that guy was effectively entrepreneur material, he went on to start a company. He was very capable of managing people and getting things done.

23:06 I think having someone who could constantly evaluate what they do, logically make decisions about what we need to do, and be able to choose what not to do, that matters. One thing I see consistently with marketing teams is you talk to them and get overwhelmed with a million things they want to do, they're like, oh, we want to do fifteen thousand pieces, we're going to do fifteen thousand events, we're going to do a hundred different webinars, and they're not pausing and stopping and asking, wait, what's most important, what are my priorities, is this actually improving the metrics.

23:41 I think he did that instinctively, because he didn't have the bias to just execute on the things he knew, since he didn't know any of that, so he would pause and ask, what's the most important thing to do right now, and I think that attribute helped him a lot.

23:55 Now, I do think experience matters, and we hit a glass ceiling. Then you need the next leader to take you further. He was definitely very instrumental in taking us from, I wouldn't say zero to one, but from one to ten, on an imaginary scale of the marketing team being built, but he's not the person to take us from ten to a hundred, that's a different person. A lot of his attributes were what we needed at the time.

Gadi Eliashiv 24:22

It's more of a personal thing, surprising to myself. I've been in the military, and then in a few startups, and before Singular I'd been at Onavo the longest. Everything I knew about startups was that the core team was the most critical thing ever.

24:36 In Singular we have this unreasonably great employee retention, literally people are still with the company for eight, nine, ten years, which is insane. I remember the first time we had oldtimers leave, a few years ago, people who'd been with us for about five years, and they left, and I thought the world was going to end. All this core talent, the people I recruited, who used to work for me at previous companies or in the military, or who were the first engineers, not quite the founding team but close, I thought the world was going to end.

25:07 I think it was a maturity thing. We were so used to the fact that we could retain this talent forever, that when they left, the world didn't actually end. It's funny, it was almost a different phase, you used to feel safe being surrounded by all those people you knew, and then they go and you're on your own, you're like, okay, we're going to do something else, you started this thing, you're going to stay with it, and you almost have to grow up, you're like, I'm not with the people I know anymore, it's new people, are we going to be okay.

25:37 Obviously I have my co-founders, who are amazing, and they're in the same boat as I am. But I think that was surprising, I thought it was going to be really bad and it didn't, we're fine, we're here, we're better, we're more scalable. I miss all those people, they're all amazing and they would be a phenomenal value add, but a company evolves, a company grows, and it looks different, and maybe that's more of a maturity thing. It might not be surprising to a lot of people, but I think a lot of young founders, when they start, all they hear about is the team, the team, the team, and after ten years you can't expect people to be in the same place.

Gadi Eliashiv 26:38

I don't know if it's still a misconception, but it's something you learn. When people think about startups they think a lot about perfect execution with the smartest people, and you have to be experienced, and a lot of that is true, especially if you go to IPO and all that. But the thing you realize when you do startups is there's so much randomness and luck involved. You can sell your company at an amazing multiple if the right people and the right fit suddenly emerge, even if your revenue is minuscule, or you can have an incredibly tough time despite having all these things align.

27:09 It's not an excuse not to have perfect execution, you should strive for really good execution, you should put really smart people in place, you should always, as a CEO, kind of fire yourself and let other people do the work as much as you can. But maybe the thing new startup founders, not existing ones, think is, I'm going to go in and just focus so much on execution, go-to-market, hiring, scaling, and you have to remember that if you're looking for a strategic outcome, some outcome for your shareholders, there's a lot of randomness until you become a really big company, and then you'll be measured by your metrics, but there's so much randomness.

27:39 Don't underestimate the fact that it might be just as important who you're having drinks with and who your relationships are with, as doing the right executions. That's a lesson I had to force myself to learn, because I'd been so heads down into the business, not looking left or right, and I think that's a mistake. It's not even just about acquisition, it's like, we bought a company, and buying that company was very serendipitous, I met the founder at an event, and I had this strategy, but I just didn't know this company existed. It works both ways, and this was a very strategic acquisition for us. Things like that could happen, so maybe that's sometimes a misconception.

Gadi Eliashiv 28:39

I would focus a hundred percent on go-to-market super early, take every learning I know today to build a scalable SaaS business and apply it on day one. For example, we took years until we built our PLG motion in the product, it's been amazing for us, it's been explosive in number of customers, but the first five years we didn't do that, it was stupid, I think we just didn't know enough about go-to-market. We built an exceptional product, we got amazing enterprises to use it, but I would focus very aggressively on go-to-market.

29:10 There'll probably be other tips I'd give myself. If you already have an idea and you've started a company, that would be my advice. If you're still thinking about starting a company there'd be other advice. But if you have a startup and you're on day one of Singular, I would lean so heavily into go-to-market, and not as much into the tech or the product, which I personally really enjoy, but I would have brought all my learnings and done things differently from that point.

Gadi Eliashiv 29:40

It's been a pleasure talking to you, I'd love to hear your thoughts too. I think there are interesting discussions worth bringing up, like how do you manage sales and marketing friction, that's a common thing that happens and you have to manage it. You asked me about finding a great marketing leader, I'd love to hear if somebody has the answer. Dealing with competitors is interesting, and talking about pricing and go-to-market structure, do you do PLG, do you do a sales-led company, I think those are interesting areas worth digging into in the future.