Dr. Maya Huber of TaTiO on qualified leads that never show up

Maya Huber 00:30

Etgar, great to be here, thank you so much for taking the time. It's been a long time since we saw each other, I think back in 2020, four years ago. You've been on a hell of a ride since then.

Maya Huber 01:01

[unclear @ 01:01]. My PhD is on the future of work and job analysis. TaTiO is a virtual job-simulation platform. We enable recruiting teams to have a more engaging and qualified hiring process using virtual job simulation. At a high level, we have technology that lets us simulate almost any job without code, and lets candidates try out jobs before they even apply. We measure candidates based on their skills and match them to the best job. The idea is to help organizations build a more skill-based database and decision-making process, and to help job seekers understand the job better, to support a better decision on both sides.

01:31 TaTiO is about five years old now. We operate in the US market, and lately also in Europe, and recently we came back to Israel as well, so I'm excited about that. We went through a round of moving out of Israel, but not going back, and I'm excited about that too.

Maya Huber 02:31

I really appreciate marketing, and I knew I would need a marketing team soon in the process. It wasn't the first five people we hired, but it was among the first ten, partly because in HR tech and workforce technology, when you're trying to reach candidates and get attention in such a crowded space, I was convinced I needed a distinctive marketing team.

03:02 Setting up KPIs was actually something crucial, because it took time for me to understand how to set a KPI. At the beginning it was about generating more leads, and it took us a while, more than a while, and at least one bad hire, to understand that we needed to define what "qualified" actually meant. One of the mistakes I made early on: it was the hype of HR right after COVID, everybody was looking for a solution to find employees, and we rode that wave. We built a campaign around the idea of "HR Rebels." I saw myself as a rebel, as a founder, as an HR Rebel coming out of HR and the marketing team, and I thought everybody, all our audience, was like me.

03:33 We came out with a campaign, a cool one, about being an HR rebel and changing the way we look for people, going beyond the resume. We received hundreds of leads a month, and it took us a while, and a lot of money, to understand that those leads were not qualified. Those were people cheering for a good idea and for good advertising, clicking because it was clickbait.

04:04 So if I move forward to more recently, working with people who were more goal-oriented, the way we set KPIs covered the whole funnel: from lead, to qualified lead, to the whole lead-generation process, making sure marketing and sales were working together on those two KPIs, in line with each other, and ultimately closing more.

Maya Huber

The main KPI is a qualified meeting, not a qualified lead. By "qualified meeting" I mean, of course, that it fits the list of criteria we have for a specific audience: I check that they're in our industries, in our locations, that the person we're meeting is relevant, so the company can be relevant. But if the person I meet is not senior enough, that's not a qualified meeting. So a meeting needs to meet all those terms, and then the person needs to show up.

05:37 This is a very common problem that people don't talk about enough, and sometimes it looks very easy, especially with the US market: they'll tell you "yeah, yeah, I'm back in a minute, I'll be there," they'll click on the lead, on the email, and they'll set the time, and they'll never show up. Sometimes it's because they're not interested, but sometimes they just need to be nurtured. So for me, a qualified meeting is about people showing up, that's the main KPI.

06:22 I think the toughest thing is, first, to identify what "qualified" is, and to be really specific, but not to exaggerate: talk about the specific persona, the company, the relevant industry, but sometimes you also want to leave room, because we've had clients who came in for a specific product or a specific role, and we found a way to expand the definition. Identifying what a qualified meeting is was hard, but once we did it, I can tell you, having clear KPIs removed a lot of stress from the tension between sales and marketing.

07:09 I learned from great people to write everything down. I'm a messy founder, creative, I want to just push forward and do it, don't ask me to write an article, but I wrote everything to the point, not leaving any doubt, like teaching a six-year-old child how to read. That's how we did it, and to this day we still do it.

07:41 One more thing: recently we've been working more through resellers, and being that specific about goals and KPIs with our own marketing team helped us work with their marketing team too, so it's not just about the internal team, it's also about communicating the way you work to your partners.

Maya Huber 09:13

I turned out to be, I have to say, I wasn't always. I had two experiences: one with a sales and marketing team killing each other every day at a small company trying to grow, clashing all day, blaming each other. I can tell you I've seen this also happen at unicorns, so you can feel better about yourselves: the bigger the company, the bigger the problem.

09:43 But at the same time, I also had a different experience, with sales and marketing working together amazingly. I actually sent my sales and marketing teams to conferences together, without me, just them, handling the conferences together. So I have the perspective of doing it wrong and doing it right.

10:14 What made the difference, I think, is identifying things together. It's not me, as the founder, or the head of HR, or the head of sales, crafting a scope of work on my own and handing it down. We had meeting after meeting discussing it and finalizing it together. I'm a visual person, and I think with AI today it's easy to explain this: I wanted all of us to imagine the same persona, so that if we each had to draw it right now, we'd draw the same thing.

10:44 I gave examples that were as visual as possible: who is this person, where are they located, how do they talk, what are their interests. We did deep dives, and it was hard work, at least three months of going through people's LinkedIn profiles, analyzing what they're interested in, what they wear, what they eat for lunch, what support they're looking for, because every word and every tone of voice matters when you sell, and I learned that the hard way.

11:46 I want to say, as a researcher, I thought I was doing amazing market research. I'd read The Mom Test, I think it's one of the best books for entrepreneurs, and I thought I wasn't making the mistakes in it. I absolutely was making them. It took a while, and a lot of money that was lost, and a lot of tears and frustration, to understand I was doing it wrong.

12:17 When I did it again, I didn't do it alone. I have to thank the people who worked on that with me: [name unclear] led sales-enablement work to help build a shared sales and marketing agenda, and [name unclear] was my head of marketing at the time. We all worked on it together, and there was a lot of arguing in the office, until we all understood exactly who we were targeting, and then everything made sense: sales understood why marketing approached it a certain way, why we chose account-based marketing instead of just cold outreach, and how to build the script for lead generation or cold calling.

12:47 Another thing I want to mention: I wrote everything down. There's a script for the demo, a script for cold calling, and a script for what we say at conferences, exactly what I want the team to say, so we use the same language and ask the same questions. It's hard work, but it pays off: the number of things to argue and fight about between sales and marketing goes down.

13:18 I created a team, they were one unit, there was no competition between them, because they knew that none of the KPIs would be achieved without them working together.

Maya Huber 14:49

That's a great question. Looking back, I don't think I planned it, but I think it was on my mind as a founder to hold both agendas. We worked in waves. When we were focused on lead-building, that's what we did, I pushed the team on that. Those projects kick off, they give you volume, and then it flows over to the sales team, and you just adjust and track numbers.

15:21 Once those projects were done, we invested a lot in a different, higher-level approach: the marketing of the company's overall agenda, but also a lot about me personally. The idea was that I'm a domain expert, and we understood that was a value in our industry, because in HR tech, not many founders come from HR, which is surprising, and we understood we needed to push that forward.

15:52 So we took days filming videos of myself, or I worked with my team sharing my professional thoughts about the market and about issues that were coming up, they collected everything, and every week they had an assignment: write a post, write an article. Over time we built up a library of content, and we shared it in parallel with any lead-generation process we ran. We invested heavily in this. For me it was a way to build brand awareness for the industry, and also to build trust with investors, [unclear @ 16:22].

Maya Huber 17:24

I wish that when I started I'd had a conversation with you asking me to measure this, because at the beginning, especially when you start, I was a first-timer, in love and excited. I'd raised money, I had money, I'd hired a team, I thought it would be easy. I didn't track it.

17:57 When you have a startup you fail, and you fail a lot, sometimes hourly, and you don't always know the reason unless you try, and that's okay, you need to fail. I can't tell you now whether, back at the beginning, I failed because of bad marketing, a bad product, or bad timing. You don't always know, and sometimes even when you measure, you still don't know.

18:27 In the last year, again working with great people, I started measuring performance properly, and I think, to your point, sometimes you're not generating a lot of leads, but your marketing is still doing great, and the way to know that is you feel it, you see it, not just in the pipeline but through conversations with people in the industry, who kept telling me, "Maya, you're everywhere," when we were a small, tiny Israeli company running in the US: "where's your marketing team?" We got that kind of feedback, that positive reputation, in almost every conversation.

18:59 I remember a conversation with a prospect who told me he ran a marketplace and knew a lot of our clients, and he said, "listen, I know we have a lot of mutual clients," and we didn't actually have even one, but from his perception, we were everywhere and everyone was using us. For me, that's great marketing. So it's a combination of testing things, and sometimes when the results are down, it doesn't mean your marketing team is doing a bad job.

Maya Huber

I'll say the first thing is timing: when to have a marketing team, or maybe not a full marketing team, but a marketing person. I thought the first thing I needed to do was bring in an experienced, C-level marketing person, and it was a mistake, because what I actually needed at that point was someone who would get their hands into the dust and dig in with me, and that C-level person, it wasn't his way of working, and that's fine.

20:32 I think the understanding you need is what kind of persona, and when. I think it's true for every position in marketing: what exactly do you need, do you need market awareness right now, or do you first need to understand if there's even a market...

Maya Huber 21:35

First of all, that person should be agile, ready to get their hands dirty even if they're senior, to look at the market with their own eyes rather than just asking other people the questions and then coming up with creative ideas from a distance, ready to work hard. Of course it depends on the size of the company, but I think at a growing company, up to a hundred employees or so, that's mandatory, because you never know.

22:29 The second thing, I said working hard, so the third thing is critical thinking, and this is generally true about employees: I hate it when people do everything they can just to keep me satisfied, that's not the point. I always tell my employees, I have my mother and my husband to tell me I'm beautiful and smart, everyone else needs to question what I do, because if you don't question what we do every day, we won't succeed.

22:47 So for me it's crucial: ask questions, be critical, and at the same time, be ready and strong enough to take feedback and not feel attacked by it, if it's given the right way, and stay focused on the work that actually matters, to get a deeper understanding of the end market.

Maya Huber

I'll say two things. One, the obvious one: as a first-timer I thought I didn't know anything, and that I shouldn't trust my gut, and that was wrong. I was surprised, and I can tell you I'm doing right now something I thought was the right thing to do five years ago, but back then I listened to my board of advisors instead [unclear @ 23:40].

23:40 Second, I was surprised by hiring the right people. I thought there was a specific type of person who works in this space, in startups, and I did it the wrong way, meaning the opposite of how I'd have done it working in government or the private sector. It's pretty much the same: people are people, organizations are organizations. You need people who believe in your idea and want to work with you, and they can be super talented, with amazing experience, and still not be great people to work with.

Maya Huber

If people still think it's a hundred percent fun and drinks all day, it's not. What I'll say is a misconception about women founders: I get a lot of people trying to help me or advise me, and at the beginning I thought, great, people want to help, but now I understand people think women in startups need more help than men. We don't need more help, we need to do what we need to do, and to succeed.

25:13 I'll say something on a personal level: this conversation came after I published a post in some groups about how, for me personally, it's tougher to interview women than men, and I mean that in the sense that I want them to succeed because of who they are, not because "I'm a woman, give me a discount," which I don't want to cheer for. In the past week I talked to more than fifty amazing women, across founders, marketers, advisors, consultants and investors, and I had to tell most of them that being on this podcast wasn't the right fit for them, because they didn't match the kind of guest this show has.

26:18 I'll use this moment to say that women founders, and generally companies doing a round B and up, I'd love to talk to and invite onto this platform, and as a father of two daughters, this matters to me personally.

Maya Huber

I'll tell you, because I want to be honest: we went through some layoffs recently, because of the situation in the country, and one of the things I had to lay off was my marketing team. I thought I'd deal with it, they left some materials behind, but I can tell you one of the things I'm missing is my marketing team, and I feel its absence every day. So I'm not pleased with our current marketing, and I feel, more than ever, that marketing is crucial when you're growing a company. So maybe that's a good closing thought: marketing is not a nice-to-have.

Maya Huber

Thank you, thank you for having me. Bye-bye.