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[00:00:00] Daniel Palay: You need to embed yourself in their workflows. And guess what? If you are responding to every single message of, "Hey, do we have a story that does X?"

You don't have the brain space or the time to do those strategic things like being a true partner to all of those organizations across the business.

[00:00:27] Sunny Manivannan: Joining me today is a very special guest, Daniel Palay, who is the Director of Customer Marketing at Grafana Labs.

Daniel has a wealth of experience in customer marketing and in customer marketing leadership, and I'm so excited to chat with him today. Welcome to the Peerbound podcast, Daniel.

[00:00:42] Daniel Palay: Thanks so much. So I'm honored to be here.

[00:00:44] Sunny Manivannan: Great. I wanna start at the beginning. Tell me about early career. How did you find your way into customer advocacy and marketing?

[00:00:52] Daniel Palay: Yeah, I, well, a full disclosure, I got my degree in political science and history. I graduated college in 2008. Joined a small little campaign that I'm sure nobody's heard of, the Barack Obama campaign in, '08 to do operations for the state of Missouri and then over time I worked a, a few political jobs.

The bigger backstory is my dad has his PhD in computer science and so my way of rebelling against my parents was I'm gonna get a degree that is completely as far away from computer science as possible. My sister did the same. She got a degree in costume design. I got a degree in political science, and here I am in my second startup because guess what, if you're a kid from Mountain View, California somehow it's in your blood to to end up back in computers right?

So eventually I worked my way through a couple political science jobs, nonprofits, and then as luck would have it — there were many reasons why marrying my wife was, an amazing thing, but her brother-in-law, now my brother-in-law, happened to create one of the more successful open source softwares in the world called Logstash.

And I don't know whether or not it was because he wanted to work with me or if he was so ungodly tired of me complaining about my old job. He is like, fine, I'll find you a job. So he recommended me into a company called Elastic, it was called Elasticsearch at the time, to be a marketing coordinator.

And, luckily enough, I was able to get the job in March, April of 2014, as just an ombudsman doing social media, kind of consolidating customer stories. And then in July of that year, our CMO came over to our- my desk and said, "Hey, Daniel, we just had a, we just had an SLT meeting and, we agreed that we needed to decentralize all of our customer stories, all of our case studies in one place. Go."

So like most of us in customer marketing, I don't think we got our start in customer marketing. It was, an opportunity that was either afforded to us or we were voluntold that was now our job. And so that's how it started. July of 2014. It started, with a big giant spreadsheet. I, you know, looking at here's a case study here.

What did it talk about? Here's a quote that was part of it. Here's a link to all of these things. I still have a screenshot of that spreadsheet somewhere to remind me of what did the bad times look like, right? I used to call it the spreadsheet of awesome because it was this like Decartian thing.

I think therefore I am, if this is awesome, therefore I guess the youngins call it manifesting it these days. So I was manifesting that. It was awesome. It really wasn't. And so over time I kind of like- it went from let's consolidate it to let's do interviews, let's, you know, okay, cool, we're gonna have conferences.

Daniel, you were kind of doing this over here. You're now in charge of the external CFP. Then it was like, let's do video. So it built up over time. So when I joined Elastic, I was. Employee 72, when I left there were over 2000. I was the first customer marketer, and then over time we added more. I start, I got into, customer marketing management helped set goals and KPIs, was responsible for all of these different events around the world.

And then I got hired, I joined the team here at Grafana Labs to build up the function again. So I've had the opportunity to take the learnings— some good, mainly, I'm sure as we'll talk about bad habits and bad behaviors that I learned the first time and tried to do it better, here and now.

I've been at Grafana Labs for almost five years.

[00:04:16] Sunny Manivannan: That's incredible and number one, I bet your dad is still laughing about the fact that his two children tried to rebel and just ended up right back in the exact same industry where he spent his career.

[00:04:28] Daniel Palay: Yeah, exactly. Although I will give a shout out to my sister. She's a nurse now, so she is, she has a very noble profession. I, however, am on my second startup, and it's funny, my dad has never worked for startups. He's worked for well-established company, but like, again, the child that tried to get as far away is now on his second high growth startup in the valley.

[00:04:47] Sunny Manivannan: Good. And hey, customer marketing, I would say is a noble profession for sure. Um,

[00:04:51] Daniel Palay: I, I'm not badmouthing, but I look at like, my sister's a labor and delivery nurse, and I'm like, okay, cool. I get that what you do is much more world changing than when I do, but I'm very proud of what I do too.

[00:05:02] Sunny Manivannan: Exactly. It's a different tier. It's a different tier of nobility, for sure. Well, that's really cool. it's incredible to hear all the ways that people find themselves in this function. And actually your story is not common, but it's also not crazy atypical where you just get, as you said, voluntold into solving a business problem that then becomes this function called customer marketing and advocacy.

That's how so many of us ended up here.

[00:05:27] Daniel Palay: Exactly. It's, like it's a happy accident, right? Sometimes it's like you don't know what you're getting into until you're there and you're like this is amazing. And I like to tell people, you know, I didn't fall into customer marketing until I was 26, 27, and I spent a lot of my early career finding things that like I would like it when I started, but eventually over time you're like this isn't for me.

I finally found as I got more and more into customer marketing, the thing I'm really passionate about, it combines a lot of the things in political science like how do you talk to people? How do you reach them with something that they care about? Make an argument that's persuasive for either them to make a decision to use your software or even more when you're talking to an advocate, what do they want to hear?

What do they want to feel in order to feel good about talking publicly? And so it combines those passions into something that I really, really enjoy.

[00:06:23] Sunny Manivannan: I love that. And by the way, all the lessons that you learned working in political campaigns, it's all very applicable here. You're just trying to, you know, mobilize voters versus advocates are voting for you in many ways when they do things with your company and you do have to influence them and you do have to persuade them to go do something that is well out of their way in normal business.

[00:06:44] Daniel Palay: Exactly, and even down to the way we communicate, write emails, you know, try to, the, the best way I think about politics and how it sort of converts over to customer marketing is you want your voters or your supporters or your advocates to feel like what you're saying is actually their ideas.

They need to see themselves in what you are portraying. And so as we prep speakers, as we sort of write case studies, we take this and then like think about the audience that's listening to them. We want them to see themselves in what is being said and be like, this is now my movement. This is now my passion.

It's a nice, again, a nice nexus of all of my background and throw in the fact that I just, I love getting up in the morning and tackling the challenges of customer marketing. And that's a really great place to be in both personal and professional life.

[00:07:33] Sunny Manivannan: Totally. I know that when we talked about preparing for this episode that you changed jobs during the pandemic in that sort of first year into the pandemic. What prompted that for you? And that was a time of reflection for all of us in many ways. What changed for you, or what did you actively think about when you entered this new job?

You know, now you've been at Grafana for five years, but what changed for you?

[00:07:58] Daniel Palay: Yeah, I think, one, an opportunity to build again. Right. Like I said, we, I was employed 72 at Elastic. We had gotten over 2000 things, had like.we were starting to change a little bit and then I had the opportunity to join Grafana Labs at that time to build up a team again.

And I think the cool part about building up a team from beginning, if it's your second time, you can, like, I don't pretend to know everything that is right, but I know what not to do first, right? And so I felt like getting to the ti like time to value or, or showing the way that we could do it better the second time.

That was exciting. The way I pitched it internally, the way I knew how to carry myself, but on a personal side, you're right, Sunny, the pandemic was a time of reflection of what is most important to us? What is healthy for us? You know, it's, it's weird to talk about health when we were talking about a global pandemic, but we were all.

Locked in our houses, some in a different position than others. Obviously you're in New York. That was a different feeling than what we were here in, in California, where like I could walk outside and not see anybody and it would be fine. Um, but I reflected a lot of, like, I had developed a lot of unhealthy behaviors, whether it was reacting or somebody would send me a message at 11 o'clock on a Friday and I'd be like sitting there with my wife on the couch watching tv and I'd be like, you know what?

I gotta respond to this. Nicely enough, Jenny happens to be a board certified behavior analyst, and so she'd look at me and be like, "You're reinforcing bad behavior." I'm be like, what the hell are you talking about? Then she'd explain to me in layman's terms, I mean, this woman has a master's degree, so she was trying to explain it to me like I was, her peer and I was uh, 5-year-old here.

Like, you know, help me out. And so like you are, they're asking you for something. You are giving it to them. They're going to ask for it again. And so this is just a vicious cycle and. There was one thing when we were in an office, right? There was a difference between like home life and work life, and you could compartmentalize as soon as I walked outta the office.

Now, I'm not talking about severance here, right? Like we still kind of understand ourselves in and out. But you walk outta the office, you're in this different mindset. Now we're all locked at home. There is no difference between home life and work life. And if you allow those lines to blur.

Suddenly you are just, for me, it's, you're just work Daniel all the time. You're never home Daniel. And that is unhealthy if you're here all the time. And so that got me thinking of how can I make these little incremental changes to be healthier, not only from a work perspective, but I started, like, I just started walking every day and you know, I walked to sort of get away for a little bit, then I start, I enjoyed it and so I started walking more.

Not as a brag, braggadocio standpoint because God knows I've gained a lot of it back. Thank you, parenthood. But like I ended up losing like 30 pounds in the first year because I just let myself have that time to myself while I'm here to give me that break in between work, Daniel and home. Daniel I, there you go.

[00:10:49] Sunny Manivannan: That's incredible. I mean, some of what - a lot of what you're saying resonates with me as well. I think we went through some similar journeys during the pandemic as a lot of us sort of just thinking about, okay, what really matters in life? And you take one, you take community and companionship for granted when when we were before the pandemic and well, you just go to work and you go to an office and you forget that hey, you're also seeing people.

These are people that you've gotten friendly with and you've built really real relationships with and all of a sudden that's taken away. And it's very interesting this point about separating work, Daniel versus, you know, home Daniel. And I think that's a lesson that a lot of us learned, probably for the best and that have stayed with us.

[00:11:29] Daniel Palay: Mm-hmm.

[00:11:30] Sunny Manivannan: I wanna ask you about this idea of saying no. In customer marketing, we are, as a group of people, I think one, we're positive in general. We're optimists, we're not pessimists, and we love people and we want to make people happy. And so that combination, frankly, is great at work for the company, but not always great when it comes to being.

Strategic as a function or really, you know, making sure that every time you say yes to something, you're doing your best work. what sorts of things did you start saying no to? If you have any examples and what changed for you as a result at work, if you could walk us through that would be really helpful.

[00:12:12] Daniel Palay: Yeah, and I'll take a step back here. I think it's rooted, in the desire, and this visceral need to prove value. Right. You know, I think we exist in a time, especially after I joined Grafana at a time where layoffs, we, it just keeps popping, back up. And we as customer marketers tend to be at that tip of the spear that like, oh, like anybody can do this.

AI can do this. Let's just, I don't understand customer marketing, so let's just lop 'em off, you know? And that's a, real honest to goodness fear. and so we just sit there and like, how do we prove value? The way you prove value is you say yes to things. You are that guy, if you will, and not only if you are that guy, you're proving value to the people that you're responding to.

But it feels good to be that guy, right? It feels good to be, wanted to, appreciated, to be like, I can always deliver on things and so that's how I think about it is it just traps us in this cycle of proving our value, especially to people that don't understand modern customer marketing.

A lot of people, a lot of executives, oh, customer marketing is just case studies after case study on the website, logo after logo, because that's what they maybe periphery knew about, 10 years ago. But the market, the job has changed. and then going back to your actual question about what did I say no to?

I think at the beginning at Grafana Labs I said no to, like, I am not going to create story after story after story. We have to be strategic about this. There's only two of us on this team. What makes the most sense? Okay, so let's look at the opportunity data about where our money is coming from.

If the money is coming from, manufacturing. Why am I telling a story in aerospace? Like, uh, just an example, right? You know, cool. Like space Grafana is the best Grafana… anyway, so it's a bad example, but like. But you know what I mean? Like, these are things that like you only have so much time in your day.

You only have so much man hours or, however you wanna put it, how do you like, have the most impact? And so, like I said, I thought through changing the, like saying no to changing behavior in general. And so if we think about why behavior is the way it is, it's actually what we're me like we're measuring ourselves on.

So if you take out the numeric measurements, right? I need to produce 10 case studies. I need to have 10 logos, I need to have five advocates and say, actually, I want to help my core constituencies internally. Whether it's sales go to market, product marketing executives get from their point A to point B faster.

You actually then start saying yes to the things that move the needle across the entire business and no, to the things that are just on a whim. Oh, I need a reference call at 11 o'clock on a Friday. Okay, cool. Why do you need that? the customer's out of the office for the next two weeks?

Can we have this conversation like next Wednesday? So it's never a like, I'm gonna just shut you down. It's like, let's think about this more strategically and how it can have a much. Broader blast radius, if you will, to make our teams a much more foundational level than a pure just request responder, if you will.

[00:15:29] Sunny Manivannan: I think one of the very interesting things that you just said is this idea of, okay, sales is asking you for something. In their mind, they're beginning the negotiation with you. But for a customer marketer that can often come across as say, you need to do this or else bad things will happen immediately to your life and to your career, blah, blah, blah.

And so they're making their first offer, which is, I need this in 24 hours. But you're just saying yes.

[00:15:55] Daniel Palay: Yeah.

[00:15:56] Sunny Manivannan: They're expecting a counter offer of, okay, when's the actual call happening? Oh, it's happening in two weeks. Why don't we do this in a week then, and everybody will be happy.

[00:16:05] Daniel Palay: Exactly. And if you respond back saying yes, they're gonna expect you the next time to say yes. And you have set that expectation from the very beginning. Whereas if you say, okay, cool, what's the most important thing that you're looking for? you've mentioned industry, you've mentioned use case.

You mentioned product. You know your prospect the best. What's gonna move the needle the most for it? Because guess what, I could break my back trying to find a hundred percent of what you're asking for, but guess what? Nobody's use case is a hundred percent the same. So let's concentrate on what is gonna move the needle the most.

Okay, cool. To your point, Sunny, it becomes this sort of back and forth negotiation, but not in a, like a acrimonious negotiation. It is. In the service of helping their customers, helping your internal customers get from point A to point B faster. and so you end up finding this, okay, cool. It's actually the industry that really matters.

Cool. let's go down this list. We found this person. Does this really work? All right, cool. We'll get them on a phone call. And then not only have you proved value and impact. You have subtly changed the behavior of this, of the person who's asking you because as opposed to the like, when they come to you the next time, they're not gonna be like, I need a hundred percent of this.

They will have strategically thought through. Oh, the last time I interacted with Daniel and his customer marketing team. They asked me to think through the most important thing, I need this. And so then the next time you're having this conversation, you don't have that two day or whatever back and forth because everybody's busy.

You know exactly what they need and when they need it, and it becomes a lot easier to fulfill those things going forward.

[00:17:50] Sunny Manivannan: I love that, and that's the real power of saying no, right is no. Starts the conversation.

[00:17:54] Daniel Palay: Exactly.

[00:17:56] Sunny Manivannan: And a yes just ends the conversation right there and not in your favor. And then you're just, now you're not a partner to sales. You're just sales is sort of assistant, and that's a very different place to be.

[00:18:07] Daniel Palay: Exactly. And a sales assistant, if you will, is something that can be replaced via a AI, Right? You know, this is something that, y'all Peerbound do well, it's not like you are replacing the like, "Hey, do we have a customer refer a story that, does x," right?

That is something that is amazing to automate, but if you have turned yourself into the customer marketer that is literally just responding, do we have a customer that does x. You are replaceable by an AI tool. If you are a customer marketer that can have a conversation to give them a human to, to bounce ideas off of, to, to be a true partner.

That is something that, again, makes you a strategic human that you cannot, you can augment with AI, but you cannot replace.

[00:18:56] Sunny Manivannan: I love what you just said, and just on that point, you're absolutely right. And the reason why we automate those things at Peerbound. And by the way, when we first started talking about these ideas, now, you know, two years ago, the customer marketers. There was a lot of fear of, oh no, I spent a lot of time doing this today.

What happens if AI's gonna just do this for me?

[00:19:16] Daniel Palay: What do I do instead? And now we're two years in and you know, the progressive marketers that have gone down this path are so much happier. There's so much more. Turns out there's three full-time jobs in every current full-time job today in SaaS. I think we all know that every CEO wants, you know, every employer do three times as much as they were doing two years, you know, four years ago.

[00:19:35] Sunny Manivannan: And those other, the other two x that was never getting done before turns out to be way more strategic, way more interesting in many ways, and incredibly valuable to the company. It's not short term. You know, you're not responding to every sales rep and getting that immediate dopamine of giving a response, but boy are you adding a massive amount of impact to the company that you were never able to before.

And that to me is the real promise of ai. Yes, it's gonna take the job you were doing before, but let's face it, it wasn't that great to be a sales assistant. It is much more great and strategic to be a partner to not just sales, but every other, revenue te team within the company.

[00:20:10] Daniel Palay: Exactly. It allows you that time to embed yourself in the teams again. I like to talk about core constituencies, right? I view customer marketing as a service organization to the rest of the business. Yes, Sales in one instance is a core constituency, but guess what? So are your executives who are speaking on, on earnings calls if you happen to be a public company, at investor events.

So are product marketers who are trying to put together launches. And so if you start thinking of yourselves as this service organization to core constituencies, what does that mean? You need to embed yourself in their workflows. And guess what? If you are responding to every single message of, "Hey, do we have a story that does X?"

You don't have the brain space or the time to do those strategic things, like being a true partner to all of those organizations across the business.

[00:21:05] Sunny Manivannan: Totally. Well, this leads us very nicely into talking about metrics, and I know this is a favorite topic of yours because you just recently gave a great talk at the CMA summit in San Francisco, and we'll include that presentation in the show notes just so everybody can read it. But you used this really wonderful.

Which keeps you out of trouble, but gets the point across. And you said, who else thinks their current metrics are a bunch of hogwash? Tell me about that. What, what got you to even talk about that topic?

[00:21:35] Daniel Palay: Yeah, I, so, again, I'll go back and anchor it on the conversation I had with my wife, three or four years ago around behavior, changing the way we act, changing the way we reinforce not only our, customers, you know, lowercase C customers, behavior but also our own and how we say, oh, you, you mentioned the word dopamine.

Like you get that dopamine hit of oh, cool, I did something awesome. I have wanted, I want more of that. Uh, but then I, I started thinking the natural follow up to that is you can change all of the behavior you want. But if you don't change the underlying conditions that have brought upon those, that behavior, you're just gonna fall back into it.

And that underlying condition is the KPIs that we either set for ourselves or that are forced upon us by people that, again, I go back to our living in the past of what customer marketing is and so that was really the genesis of, I think as a whole. Metrics in customer marketing are a bunch of hogwash, right?

It is a bunch of things that in the past you're like, okay, cool, I want to like number of stories produced. That's a metric that can show like the more you produce, the more you're in front of sales and be like, "Hey, look, customer marketing has done this thing." Again, if we're here all the time, we must be valuable.

But then if you take a step back and say. Is more really better? The answer is no. Because again, if you go for quantity by nature, quality is going to go down. Not by any fault of your own, but by sheer timing. And eventually, somebody's gonna click on a link on your website and they're gonna see that there's nothing there, and that house of cards that you've created is just gonna fall down.

But beyond that, a number of stories produced is a thing that there are just too many variables that go into it. You could say at the beginning of a quarter, I'm gonna produce five case studies. As a customer marketer, you could do everything, right? You could identify the customer, you could interview the customer, you could get pre-approval to interview the customer.

You could write it up and then send it off, and then crickets, maybe the customer's on vacation, maybe the deal or the relationship has soured a little bit or God forbid, maybe that customer has left, whether it's layoff or whatever. And then all of a sudden, through no fault of your own, you're not gonna hit this KPI that you have set because somebody's like, we need to produce more.

There's that side of things. There's the like percentage of reference requests fulfilled, again, I'm a, I'm an Uber nerd. I was an Uber nerd in high school. I'm like, I like good grades. I like 95%. I like a's, Cool. That is something that, that I can attach my head to.

But also it's one of the, it's the, like the for foremost metric of showing value. Somebody asked me for something, I deliver on it. But again, you are not giving yourself grace enough to say, what about the unreasonable, unfair asks if you, at the beginning of the quarter say, I'm gonna respond to 95% of the things that I get asked.

What happens if 10% of them come in at 10:00 PM on a Tuesday and they say, I need it by 9:00 AM on a Wednesday? You are already set up to fail through. Again, no fault of your own and If by some act of God you pull a rabbit outta the hat 10 times and you're able to do that, the person that you're able to do that for will be like, cool.

Thank you for doing your job. Not, oh my God, you went above and beyond and did something that I did not expect you to be able to do. so like those are just two examples. and I have several more. Like I could go down and get on my soapbox. Go down rabbit holes, get on my soapbox. Whatever, metaphor you wanna use, I could talk about this for days.

But it's resetting those types of things that I just think are unfair and unhealthy and unattainable for us in customer marketing.

[00:25:35] Sunny Manivannan: Totally. And by the way, everything you're saying absolutely resonates given my experience of speaking to so many folks in this community and in these roles. And based on something you said earlier, every time you do pull a rabbit outta the hat, you're actually just reinforcing that behavior. From, and then they'll, you know, next time they won't ask you at 10:00 PM they'll ask you at 11:30 PM and expect it by 9:00 AM. Well, let's see what Daniel can do this time.

[00:26:00] Daniel Palay: Exactly, and it, it is the proverbial give a mouse a cookie and they're gonna expect not just the cookie again, but the cheese and whatever else they want. It's funny we can boil our problems down to a children's book, but as the father of a 14 month old, I read these books, I'm like, Hey, that's kind of what life is like.

I, you know, now as a near 40-year-old.

[00:26:22] Sunny Manivannan: Yeah, my favorite were always the elephant and piggy books and we have that entire collection, which is a lot of books, but you know, we still read it and the boys are now, you know, much older and we still read that stuff and it's still, the simplicity of these universal human lessons is just staggering.

[00:26:38] Daniel Palay: Exactly. We have to take a step back and remember that there, there's a reason why we teach kids these lessons in these ways because you should remember them. And some way along the, somewhere along the way we lose our perspective and we just get too far in the weeds where we just have to take a step back.

Slow down for a second and really think about what's important.

[00:26:57] Sunny Manivannan: That's right. Yeah. And one of the great, joys, and humbling parts of being a parent is you're supposed to be the adult and you're supposed to know all these things. And then, in your quiet, honest moments to yourself, you realize, actually we're not doing some of these things even though we're in our, thirties, forties, whatever it is.

And that could be pretty humbling. So that's good. let me ask you now, we talked about metrics that are bad and I couldn't agree more. I think all these activity metrics should really go by the wayside. What are, in your view, some good metrics? What are the metrics that you would like for this function to measure itself on?

And let's talk about that.

[00:27:32] Daniel Palay: Yeah. Uh, I'll, I'll start with net dollar retention of advocates versus non advocates. One of the things that I didn't mention in terms of bad, metrics to measure yourself by is. Revenue influenced, right?

 The amount of money that our deals or our reference calls or whatever influence along the way, I think it's a bad metric because, how much of a percentage of a deal, is a reference call really worth unless you are in the mind of the person?

Who is making that call? No pun intended. You don't actually know. So you're making up a number and no metric, no KPI should ever be a made up number, but I want to give deference to the people who want to be able to show monetary value because we want to attach ourselves to something's important.

I get that, especially in this time where, we either exist in organizations that money is the bottom line. Or, we wanna make sure that we can show this because of the fear of layoffs. Right? I get that. And so net dollar retention allows you to have this money metric, but done. for those of, people listening who don't know what that net dollar retention is, it is the percentage of which any customer grows year over year. So in year one, if somebody signs a contract, they renew flat In year two, that's a hundred percent net dollar retention. If they contract, anywhere from being, like spending less to, to not being a customer, that's anywhere between 99% and zero.

If they spend more, it's above a hundred percent. Obviously, Sunny, you know this, but just sort of going through this and guess what? Every CFO uh, tracks this, our CFO reports on this quarter over quarter. Nicely enough, I have a list of all of my advocates, all of my customers who are advocates. I could pull this information and say, guess what?

Of the people who are advocates, they have a higher percentage NDR year over year than normal customers. And suddenly, me as a customer marketer, and us as a customer marketing team, are speaking the language of executives and saying our strategic work is actually bringing in more money, year over year, not dollar over dollar, but year over year percentage wise than the normal, everyday customer.

And so, and that unlocks a whole lot of other metrics that you can go down the line like percentage of customers who are advocates like your total advocate market, if you will, as opposed to, you know, total address addressable market. Because if you say year over year, we have gone from 50% of our customers are advocates to 65, and you've already shown that advocates spend more year over year.

You're tying it back to revenue no matter what you're measuring.

[00:30:10] Sunny Manivannan: I love that. I mean, even just in this example, imagine a conversation with your CFO that starts with, I produced six case studies this quarter.

[00:30:18] Daniel Palay: Yeah.

[00:30:19] Sunny Manivannan: The immediate question's going to be so what? But a conversation that starts with, "Hey, here's what I discovered is that people, customers who are advocates in our advocacy program, their NDR is, 20 basis points higher than customers that are not in the advocacy program. Can we get more investment?"

That's a very different conversation. 'Cause then now you're talking about, okay, like how does this happen? What does the advocacy program look like? That is a way higher level conversation. And you know, this function is uniquely qualified to have it given how closely you work with customers, and we just haven't been having that nearly enough.

But I love that example.

[00:30:59] Daniel Palay: Yeah, and full disclosure, it's I feel a little bit of a hypocrite in this. Like we haven't perfected that yet, but I think this is one of those things where like we are re-imagining how we are tracking advocates. And the cool part is we've decided on this metric before we have built the thing.

So as we build the thing, we can be like, this is the thing we need to anchor it on.

[00:31:19] Sunny Manivannan: Totally. One of the other metrics that you talked about, and I think you listed this one as an honorable mention. Is, you talked about deal velocity with or without customer. You know, CMA, customer advocacy involvement. And so, you know, in a sales cycle that could be, Hey, was their customer story shared, relevant, not relevant, could be references and so on. Tell me more about this deal velocity thing.

[00:31:43] Daniel Palay: Yeah. Uh, you know, basic definition, how quickly does something go from new, uh, uh, open to close one, right? in that process— and you want, as a customer marketer, you want to be a value add. And this is where I, I caution people. If you were to just throw in a report or say, show me of all of the deals we have ever closed, show me how quickly they close if customer marketing is involved.

To your point, Sunny, like does somebody use a case study? Does somebody use a reference call versus not? I will almost guarantee you when you run this report, you're gonna get shocked and it'll say customer marketing slows things down. And you're like, what? What the hell? Like, how do I put that?

Like what am I doing that I'm slowing things down? Take a deep breath. Don't worry, because, and again, Sunny, you've been in the sales game, some deals will just close, right? This is the nature of deals. Like if you interject yourself in a deal process, you will slow it down because you have a very motivated buyer.

You have a system that is set up to go quickly. If you're like, actually slow down, I need to connect you with somebody to talk like, like, no, like I just wanna- give me, let me give you my money. And so in every business there will be a threshold. There'll be a sort of nexus where, the deals actually naturally get longer.

And so you wanna make sure that as you're tracking this, you find that nexus to say, okay, cool. At ours is somewhere between 125,000 and 500,000, right? somewhere in there, there's this point where our involvement speeds things up — not because we are slow, but because the natural sales motion is quicker at the lower dollar amounts.

So find that number before you just throw out like we're gonna measure this because it's gonna get ugly very quickly.

[00:33:28] Sunny Manivannan: That's right. Look, reference calls do sometimes slow deals down just because, but they may increase your win rate and so on. There, there's a whole bunch of different metrics related to, you know. How do you actually influence a, there's net dollar retention is one thing. That's your existing customers and how do they grow, but how do you accelerate, you know, revenue, new revenue coming in the door through new customers is another ball game altogether.

Um, and I think I find that fascinating. That's

[00:33:53] Daniel Palay: Yeah. And again, it ties back into that overall revenue metric, but done right. And not just that, like, hey, like let's do revenue influence, because that's something that's peoples talk about, but everybody in the company is trying to get a piece of that. A hundred percent of the pie.

And I'm sorry, but if the demand gen is saying We influenced this, this is not an example here at Grafana Labs don't get me wrong, but the said, this webinar influenced this deal. And you're like, well, they spoke to this person, and sales is like, well, I talked to them on a cold call. You're like, okay, cool.

What actually influenced it? Like it's a collection of the whole, and you get into this, I get on this like Disney kick I guess is like Incredibles is this like people, uh, like the main antagonist said if everybody is super, nobody is super. If everybody is influencing a hundred percent of the revenue, nobody is influencing a hundred percent of the revenue.

[00:34:48] Sunny Manivannan: That's right. Yeah. The other saying that came to mind is success has many fathers with failure as an orphan.

[00:34:54] Daniel Palay: Yes.

[00:34:54] Sunny Manivannan: it's like nobody wants credit for something that didn't go well, but everybody will, you know, stand in line for credit when something goes right. But you're right, I think customer marketing has to define its piece and be able to defend it.

Hey, say like, if we didn't have this, this wouldn't happen. And that sort of real correlation, has to be there for, you know, somebody like a CFO to actually pay attention.

Speaking of CFOs, SaaS companies have changed in how we spend money. And what our expectations are of, colleagues and teammates and every new headcount, every dollar spent on, especially new tech.

And, you know, amount of scrutiny, I think is much higher than it was five years ago when it was the good old days and, cash was free and, or close to free. what are you seeing from your vantage point? what would you advise other customer marketing leaders or customer marketers?

When they sort of think about, 'cause we still have to grow, right? there's no, you can't stay in place 'cause then you're just falling behind. So how do you, what's your guidance for people who wanna grow efficiently? and make an impact in this environment.

[00:35:57] Daniel Palay: Yeah, it's a great question. I think we go back to what we talked about AI, right? New technologies, new anything. Like there's the fear of the unknown, right? there's the fear of, if I don't use this, if I don't throw myself a hundred percent into this, I'm gonna, I'm gonna lose my job, or, or what have you.

And we see this across every org. You get like a boss or an executive, like, uh, not drinking the Kool-Aid, but the like buying into the hype and saying, thou shalt do this, and you like, yes, of course I'll do it. But it's use AI in a strategic way to free yourself up from the day to day, not mundane tasks, but the tasks that take up your time because they're important, but that don't allow you to think at that higher level.

if you are in the weeds of like, I must produce X or I must respond to Y, you don't have that time and space to be like, how do I actually, impact the people that I work with on a day-to-day basis? How do I impact the stories, the customers that I work with? If you're again tied into I must produce X case studies, you start doing quantity. You don't take a step back and be like, if I produce this one story and I do it really well, it actually turns into 10 other things that I can give to other people and show value in a different way and have impact to all of these different core constituencies. So I guess the basic answer to your question, Sunny, is embrace AI as a force multiplier, to yourself, right.

Our CMO will always tell us like, AI is not gonna take your job, at least not today, but somebody using it correctly will. And so it's not a threat, it's a figure out a way to use it correctly in your space. Use it strategically, whether it is like writing emails or doing research or doing like taking transcripts and writing little sort of spotlights again, freeze you up from that stuff that would've taken you 10 hours or whatever is now done in an hour.

But the flip side is you have to take that. You have to actually think, okay, cool, I have nine hours back. What will I do with it? You can't just be like, alright, I'm gonna just do more of the thing that like will get me like 10 hours back. No. What can you do with it? That's my, that is my recommendation to any customer marketer or customer marketing leader. Not only ask that question, but have an answer to it. to say like, when your boss comes to you, okay, cool, you're using ai, what are you doing? It's not just what am I doing, but what am I going to do with that time? I get back.

[00:38:37] Sunny Manivannan: That's great. I love that. I have one last question for you, which is. You lead a team of customer marketers at Grafana and Grafana has grown tremendously in the last five years, obviously, and would love to know what do you, how do you know the team is doing a good job? What are the things that you look at as a leader?

Because a lot of listeners, you know, are in those IC positions and they aspire to leadership and you've now done this, successfully at two companies that have scaled really significantly. What advice would you have for somebody who wants to make that next leap?

[00:39:11] Daniel Palay: That, that's a great question. Uh, the easy answer is have a team that's made up of Gina Lopez and Paola Johnson because they make my life, really easy as a, as a leader. so shout out to, to, to my team. But I, uh, transferable because no, you cannot hire these two people away from me. I'm keeping them,

[00:39:29] Sunny Manivannan: Uh, no, they should be, they should be celebrated for everything they, they do. I think, I, that's part of it. Find the people that compliment your skills, right? I am very well aware of blind spots or way my mind works that like, it'll take me longer to do this or or not think about it a certain way.

[00:39:48] Daniel Palay: Take advantage of the people that work for you, not in a, take advantage of your workers, but take advantage of their skills. Hire people, build your team based off of blind spots, based off of areas that will play well together. I even go back to what we talked about in terms of fulfilling references.

You don't have to fulfill something a hundred percent of it. 'cause guess what? There's a hundred percent of what you need to do as a team. If somebody on your team is good at it, 70% and somebody else is 30%, that equals a hundred percent. So you can play off of each other in how you go about doing it.

I would highly recommend is anybody jumping into management, anybody who's looking for, how to build teams, build for complimentary skills. Don't just hire yourself.

[00:40:37] Sunny Manivannan: Awesome. Well, Daniel, I really, I think I could keep talking to you for several hours, and just the amount of wisdom that you've imparted in just these few minutes has been incredible. I'm so honored that you joined us. Thank you very much.

[00:40:51] Daniel Palay: Thank you very much, Sunny. This, this has, been an honor on my side, so, uh, appreciate it and I hope what I said gives some perspective and helps other people be happier and healthy because gosh knows I am.