🎮 George Valdes: Monograph, Head of Marketing

Market-to-Revenue

18 minutes with George Valdes, Head of Marketing at Monograph. Don’t be afraid to challenge your market. Ask, “Why do you think it needs to be this way?” Starting the community. Hire subject matter experts who understand the memes and inside jokes of the industry. A lot of those inside jokes are coming from pain. When you understand the memes of the industry, you can probably create your own. Identifying blockers. Move fast and playbook things. Irreversible and reversible decisions. Building an exceptional brand. Enabling workflows for architects.

18 insights. 7 rapid-fire questions. Show transcript.

What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?

1) Enable workflows to happen for architects and design professionals. First off, it's helpful to set the context that we service architects, or in the broader sense, design professionals. So essentially, everyone that is part of the pre-construction process, you can think of the construction process being mostly general contractors, we're really trying to enable workflows to happen for that group of people.

2) A very simple pricing structure. In terms of them how we convert the market into revenue, we have a very simple pricing structure that's on a per user basis at this point. We mostly target the largest segment of the industry, which is the SMB market, so small-medium sized businesses. Anywhere between 1-person firms all the way up to around 60-person firms. In the US and in Canada. So, we're very specific. We're really honed in on this market because we feel that this is where the most underserved area of the industry. That's the main lever.

3) Building an exceptional brand. Part of our go-to-market strategy is building an exceptional brand because we get to speak to such a specific audience. A lot of our team comes from the industry, I myself have a background in landscape architecture and architecture, we're able to speak specifically to the pain points that the industry has, with an authentic bent. We're very authentic in our own experiences. We're able to connect with people, even on an emotional level, which I think is very unique, and very special, about what we're doing here.

What are 2 hard problems that you recently overcame?

1) One that's always very difficult to pull off is a user conference. We did our second user conference, called Section Cut, about a month ago. It's hard because it's so many different moving parts, but we have a really amazing team here that was able to work asynchronously, autonomously, and in many different ways, while collaborating, at the same time, to execute an amazing show for our customers and our broader community. So I think that’s one. It's almost like two in one because it's just such a difficult endeavor to pull off.

2) Finding the right person to join our leadership team. The other thing that's been difficult, that we've been able to accomplish recently, is we have now a full leadership team. I think this is important. Robert, up until recently, our CEO, was really heading up sales, and I think we now have a team in place, with our new head of sales, that's going to allow us to really focus in and solve even harder challenges as we move forward. I think that one, just finding the right person. Why it's difficult, I’d say, is because we have a very unique culture here at Monograph. We operate, not only remotely, fully remote, but we also have a 4 day work week. And so, finding a leader that can resonate with that, as part of the challenge of operating the sales team, was really important to us, alongside the fact that, culturally, they had to really be a good culture fit, and a good addition to the team.

What are 3 roadblocks you are working on now?

1) Splitting the funnel from a “free trial” motion to a “book a demo.” We're actually going to shift, not fully, our GTM, but mostly. It's an interesting balance. We're basically going to be splitting the funnel from a free trial motion to a book a demo. The reason for this is that we're seeing higher conversions on booking demos at the moment. So, one of the things that we're doing is essentially pre-qualifying through our website folks, and then routing them appropriately to a free trial of they're out of, let's say, our ICP, or ideal customer profile, and then routing them to booking a demo. This is a whole cross-functional motion that we have to be fully aligned on in order to make it work. And so I'd say this is one of the biggest challenges.

2) We’ve recently adopted an OKR model, and the team has various levels of experiences with this. And so, it's making sure we're building the right cadences to be able to move the needle on these OKRs in a way that gets everyone rowing in the same direction.

3) How to tease out the nuances of our product to the market? We've done an exceptional job of building a great brand, and one of the things that we're working on now is how to tease out more so of our products, like the nuances of our product, to the market. That’s a piece that's really top of mind for me, that I feel very confident we can crack, because we have an exceptional team in place now on the marketing team that can help pull that all together. But, it is one of those things where, as we've been building out more differentiation in our a product, we want to continuously make sure we're having that differentiation to the community.

What are 3 mental models that you use to do your best work?

1) Irreversible and reversible decisions. I like this idea, borrowed from Amazon, of, “There are two types of decisions; irreversible ones and reversible ones.” Or like, “There's two types of doors; one-way doors and two-way doors." I learned this a lot during my time at WeWork, about the importance of being able to move quickly with relatively little information. This was actually a very helpful mental model to decide on how fast to move on something. Obviously, depending on the budget of the things that you're working on, in my case, I was working with a project that any one location that I was helping to open up was, for pre-sales, about a million dollars in budget. Thinking about the trade-offs of that, and just communicating that, was really important. But also factoring in, “Okay. Who do I need to bring in, and how quickly?” Also, making it very clear for them whether this was something that we need to move slow on or be quick on.

2) Move fast and playbook things. We use this one here at Monograph: move fast and playbook things. It's about the idea that we should do things that don't scale at first in order to understand whether they work, as quickly as possible, meaning that you're always going to make the trade off between quality and just execution. If you can narrow your hypothesis down on what you're trying to examine, and you can make that trade-off on quality, because it's not going to impact the actual answer you're looking for. So as a really clear example, let's say you want to know whether a specific channel, or a specific form of content, might work. You could spend the time belaboring on like how perfect that piece of content is, or you could really just answer the first question, which is like, “Does this new asset work in the wild, period?” And then, as you start to learn from that, then you might optimize on quality later, while also thinking about scalability, which resonate...