Building a hybrid go-to-market motion — Giancarlo Lionetti's Lessons from Confluent, Dropbox & Atlassian

 Most of the time when people talk about these quote unquote different motions, they talk about them as an or you either have a product led motion or a human led motion, but the truth is you have a company go to market. And as part of that, you're actually really catering to your customers in the way your customers are trying and buying through different mechanisms, right?

Whether it's through the product or through humans, they're inextricably linked, they aren't different parts or pieces to the puzzle. They actually are connective tissue.

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for today's episode of in-depth. I am really excited to be joined by Giancarlo Lionetti most recently he was the COO of Confluent. Previously, he was the VP of growth at Dropbox, where he led their self service and monetization efforts. And before that GC spent six years at Atlassian as a sales engineer and product marketing manager for developer tools.

What stands out to me is this isn't a career path you hear about very often in tech, as he puts it. It's more of amaze than a ladder. This functional diversity can bind with his deep experience at some of the most special B2B companies in the last 20 years gives him a really unique perspective. In today's episode, we dig into why he advocates for a hybrid go to market strategy that brings together more traditional selling with modern product led growth.

We start by getting into lessons from GC's time at Atlassian and Dropbox, including his takes on the differences between their business models and what it takes to make a multiproduct go to market motion. Then we dive right into his advice for executing on a hybrid approach, covering everything from his litmus test for picking the right metrics to the structure of his weekly meetings.

I thought it was particularly interesting to hear GC explain how he sinks tons of time into understanding the customer journey, mapping out the Delta between reality and the ideal vision. He shares examples of how too much experimentation at Dropbox impacted the customer journey and walks us through the process of running this mapping exercise with his team.

He also shares plenty of pro tips about pricing, packaging, and activation, as well as a broader diagnostic framework that he's developed to evaluate a company's go to market strategy. We wrap up by focusing on team building for a hybrid go-to-market from the hiring profiles. He looks for to getting the team structure right to designing the interview process.

In my view, GC share some really tactical advice here that any founder product or go to market leader will learn a lot from, there are tons of examples of specific, impactful experiments. You ran metrics that did or didn't work out and common traps that he sees teams falling into. I really hope you enjoy this episode.

And now my conversation with GC. Well, thank you so much for joining. We're excited to do this with UGC Ryan 

 Uh, interesting place to start our conversation. And I'm super excited for this one might be to talk a little bit about some of the insights you've gleaned from the different roles that you've had.

And I think unlike a lot of exact sir leaders that often have a much more linear path to whatever function they're leading. You've been an account manager, sales engineer, you've touched product marketing, you've led growth, and you've held sort of the more classic title of COO at some of the most special B2B companies that the last 20 years I'm interested.

If there are any insights or lessons that you take for maybe each one of these chapters of your career, my guess is that as a VP of growth or CMO, you might have a different view of that role coming up in a much more classic go to market 

 funds. So the way I describe my career to most folks is my career has been less of a ladder and more of a maze.

And I really think that's relevant in today's new go-to market world, because there are now so many different pieces that make up your go to market. And if you think about it, and you think about the trajectory of my career and the different roles I've held, this is especially early days. It didn't really matter to me what role I was linked.

As long as I was having an impact on the customer and revenue, those were the two most important things. And I could learn about different aspects of the go to market from that. That was good enough for me over time. You need to start bringing those pieces together, but if you actually look at those different roles across my time, all the way from Atlassian to more recently Confluent, they actually do have a connective tissue.

It's really started off. Almost a very sales centric point of view, and then moved into a more marketing point of view and then moved more into combining both of those disciplines in more of a growth in CMO role. But there's connective tissue there between many of them. And I could jump into maybe each one of them, if that's relevant to some degree during my time at it last year in Dropbox and Confluent to give you a little more insight.

 would be great. And I'm curious how one informs the other in the sense of, do you think about marketing differently than other marketers because you started in more of a classic AAE capacity. 

 Yeah, totally. I think you hit the nail on the head that one does inform the other and actually changes your point of view of another role that you may take in the future.

And so let me kind of break it down for you a little bit, like edit last year, my journey there was quite unique. I was their sub 40 million. Many of the folks listening to the podcast today may know them as the X billion dollar giant, that is considered a product led growth machine. And when I was there, we were really trying to figure out that model.

And I was a sales engineer, and then I went into product marketing, a little dirty secret is we actually tried sales with me there as well, but I held a really diverse set of roles. I call out three things from my Alaska new career that I think were relevant to future roles. First is I developed this incredible respect for what I call our customer funnel.

What that means is when you look at your funnel today, ultimately there's a lot of what we talk about, whether it's on a different podcast or blogs, et cetera, like the core metrics. I was obsessed with what I call micro conversions. And at year that was really extreme because they didn't have what we know as human-led sales as part of their funnel, there were humans in the process, but ultimately they weren't selling.

And for me, that was important and a big eyeopener for my career. Every step that a customer went through in that last year funnel was important to getting them to a monetization moment and to ultimately give that last year and money. And that was huge. And I became a student of that model in this and these micro conversions.

And I wanted to know everything that a customer did during that journey, but also the metrics and the impact that those things were having. So that was first takeaway. Second was I learned that humans were necessary in the selling process during my time at Alaska. And that's probably counter-intuitive to how people think of their business model, but humans were really the key to what I would say, optimizing the model that they had.

Almost everything we did from a human perspective was to learn. And we took those learnings and built it back into our machine. And that machine could include everything from our marketing to our growth, uh, stuff and all the way to products. And so when you really think about that, there's this incredible feedback loop that's informing our go to market and our business model that was very relevant there.

And then the last thing I'd say I learned is just a very data driven approach at Atlassian was incredible in creating these foundational KPIs and metrics that the whole organization understood even very early days. And I believe that still exists all the way till today. And we had a really good sense of what was driving the business from a KPI and metrics perspective.

So those are three key things that really informed, I would say the rest of my career. So if you think about my journey at Dropbox, ultimately I went to Dropbox as more or less like an IC and my aspirations. There were to figure out how to bring together what they call their bottoms up or self-serve business.

And. That's kind of like the buzzword of 2020 and 2021, but that was also something at last year and was pioneering very early days and many, many years ago with that though, when I was at Dropbox. If you think about that experience, it was quite unique because Dropbox had this incredible freemium business model, all the aspects of the customer funnel, metrics, data, all those things were as important at Dropbox as they were at at year.

But we were trying to bring it all together into what I call building a machine. And with that, that was part of my role at Dropbox and becoming the VP of growth there over time, I started off there as a party of one taking many of these things that I learned at at Atlassian and trying to translate them into the Dropbox world and building on this freemium motion.

And so things like building a more operationally. Efficient go to market model, especially from a bottoms up perspective. Second is building out a more human centric motion to inform your growth product and sales motions. Third is building a very, very data driven approach to how we ran our go to market and ultimately how we were able to inflect the business.

And that's some of what I learned during my Dropbox days is in which led me to my role as CMO of Confluent. 

 I don't know if you have any reflections on this, but the one thing that I've been intrigued by is obviously Dropbox and Atlassian are in different markets, but they do have a similar type of go to market motion.

At the same time, Dropbox has kind of flat-lined around a $10 billion market cap company. And Atlassian is almost a hundred billion dollar market cap company. And I'm curious, do you have any reflections on the why or a thesis as to like, what are the underpinnings of that and is any of it tied to the way in which the product is brought to market?

 Fantastic question. I will give you the full GC opinion on that, which is if you think about it last, this model, and this was even early days, the model still exists at last year's model was primarily centered around a particular audience. That audience was developers. And when you think about developers, that was core to everything at Atlassian did early days, but the beauty of Atlassian is model and ultimately, which is reflected in its pricing, packaging and product set is that they knew there was this ecosystem of different audiences and personas that surrounded this developers, project managers, product managers, designers, et cetera.

And they were able to create a world in which. Tools and products ultimately also cater to these additional audiences or these new audiences, but they were always connected to the developer. And I think that was unique for it lasting because ultimately the market was not just developers, which is a massive market, but the market went well beyond developers in the ecosystem around developers, which is very diverse and large as well.

And so from that perspective, I think at last year's audience and market was actually quite large. When you think about Dropbox, I think you could think about it in one of two ways. The first is you could look at it as a potential go to market challenge. Like could they, or we have done a better job with bringing Dropbox's offering to market in maybe a different way.

I think that's a fair way to look at it just because you've seen success maybe across other companies. I don't know if I fully personally believe that the reason for that is, and it's not just cause I worked there and was there, but I think Dropbox's go to market has always been instilled is incredibly efficient and incredibly focused and incredibly predictable.

And those are the things that make it special as a company beyond just like awesome product that it is and the viral nature of the products. But on the flip side, I think maybe the question to ask, which I'm going to parallel this now to Atlassian was although Dropbox had a broad market, it's the question really for Dropbox may have been, was that market big enough?

Was it maybe 10 billion is how big that file sharing market was at that time. And now Dropbox is I think doing a great job of trying to expand beyond that file sharing market. So for Dropbox, it wasn't necessarily about the core audience that they were going after, but maybe it was the fact that like the actual final sharing market wasn't as big as everybody thought it could be.

And there's many reasons for that, um, competition, different products coming out there that are tangential. 

 There were a couple of things that you shared around the idea of the role of the human and the go to market as it related to the first chapter of your career and it Lassie and that I want to get to, but before we talk about that, you just made me think of an interesting thing, which is how do you think about the go-to market machine as it relates to multi-product?

And so can you talk a little bit about what do you have to get right. To make a, multiproduct go to market particularly earlier on in a company's life, not when it's a multi hundred billion dollar company, but when you're aggressively trying to grow and maybe new products are in the tens of millions, not hundreds of millions of ARR, what does that machine look like?

 So I'll give you two, if not three areas that I think are incredibly important and relevant, the first is when you're moving into a multiproduct family and this even is relevant across skews as well, when you have a single product, but when you're moving into a multi-product family and you want to create that machine in that go-to market for your organization, the first thing I often think about is the consistency across pricing and packaging.

If you really study it last year, this model, whenever they introduce a product to the market, it looks very similar. Two other products in their portfolio. And so what that means is pricing is similar. Skews are how you move up in options is similar. So they develop this very consistent view of the world that they try to map to each of the offerings that they're bringing to market.

That makes it incredibly simple. If you think about that from an internal perspective and how to operationalize around that, because what you do for in Atlassian in terms for JIRA, you're ultimately doing for confluence and you're doing for any other product in their family set, or maybe even any other product that they build or buy.

And that consistency is incredibly important, especially if it's a new muscle. Second is you have to really understand how it fits into your overall product makeup. So oftentimes what can end up happening is you'll end up building or buying a product that doesn't naturally fit with maybe your current audience or an audience that's connected to your current product set.

So it's really hard to some degree upsell or cross sell this new thing that you're putting out in the market at last year was fantastic at connecting those dots saying, okay, there's a developer we're going to build or buy another tool that caters maybe to that audience or an audience that's connected to the developer.

And I think early days, that was very deliberate. And again, it made it almost over-simplified that multi-product approach. Because again, internally we understood it and externally it was very easily understood. And then the last thing I'd point out early days in bringing a new product on board is focused.

I almost hear this time and time again, where you almost pivot your whole organization to that new product, or you do the opposite where you put something out in market and you just kind of wait and see what happens and you don't put enough attention on it. It has to just become naturally part of your family of products and how you're instrumenting your go to market.

And early days, that's very difficult to do. That's the truth just cause you're probably getting used to building for one product in one motion, but ultimately you want to introduce that new thing into your audience, but also introduce that new thing internally and how to work around 

 that. Maybe we could start by talking about, because there are a lot of similarities to the work that you did at Dropbox and Atlassian.

And how you think about what great looks like when we're talking about a modern hybrid go to market. What does it look like when it's working? Well? What does it look like when something's broken in some way? 

 So when you think of a hybrid go to market, to clarify that I'm going to start with a couple ways to view the world today, the first way people view the world today is what I call a very product led motion.

What that means is you lead with product. You can use your product as the adoption funnel or the monetization funnel. So what that means is people go, we'll use the product, learn from the product, try and ultimately could buy through the product itself. The second motion that we talk about is what I'll refer to you as human led.

So human led is when you have human interaction as part of the process, ultimately for most of us, we know that as our very traditional sales model, you can have an inject humans at different points in your funnel, but there's a human led motion to what you do. How I think about it is both of those are important.

And most of the time when people talk about these. Quote-unquote different motions. They talk about them as an or you either have a product led motion or a human led motion, but the truth is you have a company go to market. And as part of that company go to market, you're actually really catering to your customers and the way your customers are trying and buying through different mechanisms, whether it's through the product or through humans, they're inextricably linked, they aren't different parts or pieces to the puzzle.

They actually are connected to. And so to answer your question directly, when you think about what good could look like in terms of hybrid go-to market, it really centers around KPIs. You want to make sure there's connective tissue between your product led KPIs and your human led KPIs. And oftentimes you're trying to figure out how do these motions connect, and there is some experimentation that's part of that.

But the example I can give you is you really want to think through what are the tipping points for your customer to go from potentially a free user to a paying user, which could be through a self-serve or very transactional emotion to a potential enterprise deal. And your KPIs need to actually reflect that.

One of the metrics that I point out there from a very tactical perspective is. When someone's in their product led journey, what is the conversion rate and what is the thing that could take them from what either is a small deal or a free user to a qualified, potentially larger deal and into that human lead funnel.

And if I give the example of Confluent, when we created our cloud product at Confluent, the first thing we did was we created a free offering. We created a way for users to try the product in a way that was very natural and frictionless. The second thing we did, we created emotion is what we call pays you go.

So what that meant was these users got to a point where one, we were ready to monetize them, but two, they were using it. It's in a way that was monetized bubble and they would pay as you go. And ultimately that meant you could put in your credit card and use the product and continue to use it in particular for most users was in production or at scale.

But what we realized during that process was we weren't tipping or flipping these customers over to our sales motion because ultimately the motion that we created really was relevant in more automated way. But what we also realized was if we could get signal on how they were using the product, there was natural breaking points of taking them from a pay as you go motion to a more what I would call human led motion and how we did that is we actually experimented with ultimately like the amount of throughput that they were using, like how much, and how often were they using the product?

And if they were using it in a certain way, then we would say, okay, they're actually ready to talk to a salesperson because they're using. Past a point, not just in a point of production, but they were using it at a certain scale. And that's something you can experiment your way into as far as picking the right KPIs.

So that's one thing I'd call out. Second thing I'd call out is just around like how you organized your teams. And so what I mean by that is it doesn't mean that everybody necessarily needs to report into one leader, but your org design and how you think through your hybrid motion is incredibly important.

If you think about your current go to market model, and maybe you're introducing something that's product led or something, that's human led where I've seen it work. And what has won is creating almost like these pod structures that include what I call a diverse set of people from the company. And that diverse set really comes from people from different teams, whether that's product management, whether that's sales, whether that's growth, et cetera, and they're meeting on a weekly basis, they really are reviewing the funnel end to end because again, in most cases, A lot of what you're doing on the product led side could and should feed what you're doing on the human led side.

And so really having this common framework of when you meet what you talk about, the tactics you're doing to push different parts of the funnel, this is incredibly important for folks to understand, as you start to build this hybrid or more complex, go to market motion across your teams.

 Super interesting. Can you share more on in terms of the pod structure who is there and what does that look like? Either? If the main touch point is a weekly meeting, if I was watching one of those meetings that you are running, what sort of going on and what are folks talking about? 

 I'll give you two ways to think about it. The first is you want the main DRIs and the DRS usually come from the KPIs that you're measuring to be in the room. And the folks that are in the room in most cases are someone from your growth side marketing. Product management, data science or revenue analytics, and in some cases, different operations teams.

So that could be sales, operations, business, operations, marketing, operations, et cetera. The reason this is important because really when you think about a hybrid go-to market, each person in that room, Owns a piece of the go-to market pie there, whether they're building an experience in the product, whether we're selling in a particular way or wherever we're running a specific experience with a growth team, they all have a piece of the go-to market pie in this hybrid go-to-market market.

And we would structure the meeting in the following way. The first is. We'd review the common KPIs that we all agreed upon previously. So there is a set of KPIs that we go through weekly and ultimately everybody in the room is expected to at the minimum, understand those KPIs, but also be able to interact and talk about their specific KPIs.

So there's an owner and a DRI for each of these KPIs. The second is we try to give each other an. On what is happening in different parts of the funnel from a tactical perspective? What experiments are we running on the growth side? Are we changing any messaging and positioning? Are there any launches coming up?

Is there anything new or different that we're seeing or doing on the sales side? Do we need to change something on the backend from a data perspective or an operations perspective in our tools or infrastructure, and you really talk about. Every week and every week may feel excessive to some, but ultimately what I've found over my career is having these weekly check-ins, they don't need to be as deep, every single meeting will allow you to talk about these things and really not miss what I consider is the details and the devil's in the details with these hybrid go-to market strategies and plans and execution.

So from that perspective, I would say that you have to develop a way to do that on a weekly cadence. The last thing I'd say we did that I think was really important and that you would notice in one of those meetings is we spent a lot of time understanding the customer journey. And so we did this during my conference experience and we did this during my Dropbox experience.

We structured a part of this meeting to really understand every step that a customer went through and the interactions they had at those steps, because the truth is what happens in your product. Could impact a sales conversation that you have or what messaging you give a user could impact something that their experience in the product or a sales conversation they're having as well.

And so there was these different aspects of the customer journey that was important to understand, not just from a DRS perspective, but I wanted everybody in the room to really understand it because it could impact their part of the journey. So those are a couple of things I'd call out in terms of that meeting and what she'd like to realize and notice in a meeting like that.

 That's really interesting in terms of constantly coming back to the customer journey, how did you go about discussing that? Did you do it in reverse in the sense that you chose a new customer and backtracked and walk step-by-step through their journey? Or how did you actually explain that in the meeting?

 When you think about customer journeys, they're pretty complex. In most cases, when you talk about the customer journey, the first thing you get is a little bit of a cringe like, oh, do we need to map everything out? What if we don't even know every part of the journey? What if we can't measure every part of the journey, but I think it's incredibly important to do that, especially for those of you listening on the podcast today, early days is understanding every interaction a customer's having along the way, good or bad. It's almost like you want a document. What I call the factual journey and that's incredibly important. So the first way I'd say that we did, it was, we did work our way backwards in exactly how you just described it. Everything from when a customer closed one or potentially even when we lost them in backtrack all the way to the top of the funnel.

So where did they actually come from? We wouldn't know if they came from a paid ad. What experience did they have? And then what were the experiences that converted them to a paid user? But there's another part to this. That's incredibly important, which is no customer journey or no customer funnel, at least in the organizations that I've been at is perfect.

As you start to map out these customer journeys, you'll realize both the goods, but you'll also realize the beds. And what we spent a lot of time doing is also mapping out what we would call our ideal customer journey. And so over time, what you'll realize, you'll create this, go to market. You'll create this customer journey that has legacy and has to some degree, even some baggage to it.

And there's probably good reasons why you created or changed or added or subtracted from your funnel over time. But really what ends up happening over time is those changes in those experience could become pretty disparate and to some degree almost broken. And what I really tried to do was help people understand what's our ideal journey.

And then what's the Delta in between. And how do we explain. And test our way into what we would consider a better journey and making sure the experiments and tests prove that what we were thinking, whether it's through intuition, through customer interviews, and even maybe what our data was telling us was the right thing to do.

And so the way it answered that really. We mapped out the journey from when a customer purchased backwards. And then the second piece of that is actually starting to map out what you would consider your ideal customer journey as well. A fun example I could give here is at Dropbox. When I first got to Dropbox, they were roughly a $400 million company.

We were a business that was focused primarily on consumers, starting to go into the teams, business side of things. And over my journey there, we became a very experiment, focused team. Everything was about running experiments, running them at scale, and the truth is running them in volume. We wanted to learn as much as we could and impact the funnel in responsible and positive ways.

And when I got there, we were probably running. About 10 experiments, a quarter across different parts of our funnel that can include the website that can include onboarding that can remain include churn experiences. By the time I left there, if you ask me at any given time, how many experiments we were running, we were roughly running anywhere from potentially 50 to 60 experiments across different parts of the funnel.

In some cases, maybe even more, if you think about that, that has a huge impact on the customer journey because you're changing different experiences across multiple parts of the funnel. And what happened over time was, and I would consider this an area where. It's hindsight, we ended up actually creating journeys that were pretty disparate or broken because there was all these experiments that happen.

And we weren't connecting the customer journey from all the way from let's say, when they entered our funnel to when they purchased. And so as we started to do that with this exercise of building up a factual journey, and then thinking through the ideal journey we noticed along the way that we had broken many pieces of our funnel, they actually didn't make sense whether it was something as simple as the designer, the aesthetics of it, or like the messaging, or potentially even the call to actions.

That was something we had to course correct over time because we came so proficient and good at experimenting, but we actually forgot about the customer journey, a little. bit I think that was one of the bigger learning lessons for me, especially as you're thinking of your hybrid go-to-market as well, is that you can and should experiment across your funnel.

But you also have to take a step back at times and understand that how that's impacting the customer journey, whether the test or experiments you run have an incredible impact, or maybe not as good of an impact.  

 What are some examples just to bring it to life. When you're talking about these, go to market experiments, you sort of share it, I think, in the high level, but are there like three to five that come to mind?

That's like, when I'm thinking about really good experimentation and maybe some of the unlocks you've had.

  This is a fun question. So this is when I'm going to get animated during this. There's a couple areas that I would say that were impactful experiments for the team, and they all describe them in Dropbox terms.

But I would say that they worked everywhere, that I've been at that's at last, and then that's confluent. And I'm going to get really tactical here because I think this is a fun topic. The first is what I call your money pages across your website. So when you look across most websites, and if you actually look at metrics for Dropbox in particular, we had a couple of months.

The first money page was our homepage. People came into the funnel, dropped in and signed up for the free thing. The second money page was our plans page. And so that was where you would learn about the different offerings for Dropbox, whether it was something free or something that you would have to pay for the third money page was kind of like our trial pages in Dropbox's terms.

So they had a free product and they ultimately had a way to try different products in particular, our business products. And what I learned across those from a very tactical perspective was, and this one's pretty straight forward. Simplicity mattered almost every experiment that we ran, that simplified things like our messaging, that simplified things like our positioning, that simplified things like our pricing or packaging that made it much easier for a user to understand almost always won And I'll give you a. Perfect example here. We had one of our money pages was this Try page for Dropbox business. And we had an incredible amount of traffic, both flowing through that page and converting on that page, but we believed our conversion rates could be higher. And we actually learned this through a team that we had Self-Serve Assist which if you think about self services, that is a team that ultimately is on the chat modal that's on your website.

They're the team that's talking to customers about questions that they have, but a very customer success customer service oriented team. And the one thing that this team was telling us was, Hey, when people come to this trial page, we ask them for a team. name And they really didn't understand why they were trying the product.

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Giancarlo ‘GC’ Lionetti has been the CMO of Confluent, a VP of Growth at Dropbox, and sales engineer and product marketing manager at Atlassian. He digs into building hybrid go-to-market motions that combine product-led growth and traditional sales. 

Building a hybrid go-to-market motion — Lessons from Confluent, Dropbox & Atlassian

Giancarlo ‘GC’ Lionetti digs into building hybrid go-to-market motions that combine product-led growth and traditional sales. 