Spark of Ages
The Spark of Ages podcast is about the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence through a marketing lens.
We are living in the middle of the most important "spark for the ages". Our episodes are either about looking back to teach us what we can learn for this moment, or looking forward for where the next spark might be.
We highlight the stories from business leaders at the intersection of marketing, technology and innovation.
Spark of Ages
The Moneyball of Go-To-Market (GTM)/AJ Gandhi, Omar Akhtar - Benchmarker, B2B Recession, Coachella ~ Spark of Ages Ep 47
The B2B SaaS market is experiencing a significant slowdown with growth rates dropping, while traditional marketing channels deliver diminishing returns in an increasingly saturated landscape.
• Marketing benchmarks show companies growing faster than 20% spend 10-15% of revenue on marketing, while slower-growing firms spend only 7-9%
• Digital channels like SEO (search engine optimization), PPC (pay per click), and email are seeing declining performance metrics despite increased spending
• Today's B2B buyer completes 80% of their journey independently, yet companies still allocate 70% of go-to-market resources to sales
• "What's old is new again" – smaller, intimate events and personalized interactions are outperforming scalable digital tactics
• Successful companies balance brand marketing (awareness) and demand generation (conversion) equally
• Effective positioning requires elevating problems to the executive level by articulating significant business impact
• AI isn't changing what we should measure but enables better personalization at scale across industries and personas
• The brand versus demand debate represents a false dichotomy – both work synergistically to drive growth
The rules of B2B marketing are being rewritten before our eyes. In this revealing conversation with marketing benchmark expert Omar Akhtar and go-to-market guru AJ Gandhi, we unpack the surprising reality that most B2B SaaS companies are facing: we're effectively in a recession. Growth rates have plummeted from over 30% to just 11-20%, while traditional digital channels deliver diminishing returns despite increased spending.
What's behind this troubling trend? Market saturation, poor tool integration, rapid commoditization, and fundamental shifts in buyer behavior all play a role.
The most compelling insight? Companies growing faster than 20% annually are investing 10-15% of revenue in marketing, with a balanced approach between brand awareness and demand generation.
Whether you're managing a marketing team, leading sales, or driving overall growth strategy, this episode offers critical benchmarks and tactical approaches for navigating today's challenging landscape.
AJ Gandhi: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anjaigandhi/
AJ Gandhi is a distinguished Go-To-Market (GTM) leader and executive community builder. He currently serves as a Board Member for Plum Acquisition Corp. Additionally, he is a Limited Partner at Stage 2 Capital and GTMfund. AJ is also a co-founder of the GTM Leader Society. Just recently, AJ served as Chief Growth Officer for Marlin Equity Partners and held significant roles at Salesforce, Ring Central, Bain & and McKinsey. AJ is an alumnus of UC Berkeley and Harvard Business School.
Omar Akhtar: https://www.linkedin.com/in/omarbilalakhtar/
Omar Akhtar is the Founder and Principal Analyst at Benchmarker, leading research on marketing excellence for B2B tech. Previously, he was Head of Research at Altimeter, a Prophet Company, where he advised Fortune 500 companies, including Microsoft, Salesforce, Adobe, and Netflix, on marketing, data, and content strategies. Omar got his undergraduate degree in economics from Ohio Wesleyan, and then got a Masters in Journalism from Columbia.
Website: https://www.position2.com/podcast/
Rajiv Parikh: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajivparikh/
Sandeep Parikh: https://www.instagram.com/sandeepparikh/
Email us with any feedback for the show: sparkofages.podcast@position2.com
What does good or average marketing look like, specifically in terms of numbers?
AJ Gandhi:Because companies do marketing very differently depending on who they're selling to, how big they are and what channels are important to them, and so if everyone's doing the same thing, if everyone's using the same channels and the same kind of techniques and tactics, you know they're not going to be effective anymore.
Omar Akhtar:I don't want to sound a fear monger, but we're effectively in a B2B SaaS recession or at the cusp of it.
AJ Gandhi:If only 20% is really spent with sales teams, but you're spending 70% of your go-to-market resource on sales. Well, that's a problem.
Omar Akhtar:So I'm going to say something a little bit sort of maybe controversial, but bring it. Yeah, I don't think AI is going to change the way that people are measuring much, and not because AI is not this innovative way. Think of it this way I think AI would make a good marketer better and a mediocre marketer will stay mediocre.
AJ Gandhi:I mean, you look at SEO the traffic's down significantly because people on websites much less. You look at PPC and just the conversion and the efficiency rates are down significantly. So it's just like, hey, the incremental dollars don't make sense and just search volume's down as well.
Omar Akhtar:You look at big trade shows.
AJ Gandhi:It's like you know, you're not getting the yield there either.
Omar Akhtar:There was an era where you know, when we were getting better at digital, where you could do more with less, where you could put out more content and you could get more ads and you could personalize things, and there's a lot of good technology that helped us do that. I think we've reached the limit of doing more with less.
Rajiv Parikh:Welcome to the Spark of Ages podcast. We're going to get into the nitty gritty of one of my favorite subjects, which is go-to-market money ball. It's how data-driven insights and tactics from inside the marketing and sales trenches are revolutionizing the way companies drive growth in an AI world. This conversation isn't about incremental campaign improvements. We're talking about rethinking how you build go-to-market engines and about building strategies that deliver results where traditional playbooks are now falling apart. Two amazing guests today huge experts in this field.
Rajiv Parikh:Aj Gandhi is a distinguished go-to-market leader and an executive community builder. He's the co-founder of the Go-to-Market Leader Society and recently served as chief growth officer for Marlin Equity Partners and held significant roles at Salesforce, Ring Central, Bain and McKinsey. He's also on the board of a number of firms, including Plum Acquisition Corp. AJ is an alumnus of UC Berkeley and Harvard Business School. Omar Akhtar is the founder and principal analyst at Benchmarker, leading research on marketing excellence for B2B technology. Previously, he was head of research at Altimeter, where he advised Fortune 500 companies, including Microsoft, salesforce, adobe and Netflix, on marketing, data and content strategies. Omar got his undergrad degree in economics from Ohio Wesleyan and then got a master's in journalism from Columbia. Gentlemen, welcome to the Spark of Ages.
Omar Akhtar:Cool Rajiv, great to be here. Thank you for having me on.
Rajiv Parikh:All right. Well, aj Omar is in the Bay Area right now and AJ is currently having an amazing trip in Italy, so thank you for joining us late at night from Tuscany.
AJ Gandhi:Greetings from Florence. A Firenze, buona sera. Lots of good pizza and pasta and blowing my tummy every night.
Rajiv Parikh:Lots of wine and gelato, and gelato, oh my God.
Omar Akhtar:And you never feel full. That's the amazing thing about it you never feel full out there.
Rajiv Parikh:It's fantastic. Will you not feel full?
AJ Gandhi:Probably drunk the Italian wine is good. Chianti Classico makes all your problems go away.
Rajiv Parikh:I'm melting away. All right, let's define go-to-market a bit. What does it mean anyway? All right, let's define go-to-market a bit. What does it mean? It's really this evolution that's occurred, where we are taking sales, marketing, customer success and even product, where everyone works together to get the solution to market and works together to build growth and understand what customers are saying. It's like we had Chandar, who's now chief go-to-market officer at Workato, previously on our episode, so there's even people taking that on as a title, and so it's a real, real amazing movement and we just love having two amazing leaders in the space. So, omar, I'm going to start with you. You have recently published the 2025 B2B SaaS Marketing Spending and Performance Benchmarks Report, and it provides a unique data-driven look into the current state and future direction of go-to-market strategies, so maybe you can help us set the stage and talk about what your core findings are. Key takeaways anything that challenges conventional wisdom. Just highlight key areas of innovation.
Omar Akhtar:Yeah. So just to give you a bit of context, my company Benchmarker I formed it to take on specifically the marketing portion of that go-to-market cabal that you're describing, and what I really wanted to do was to figure out a couple of things. One, what does good or average marketing look like, specifically in terms of numbers? Because companies do marketing very differently depending on who they're selling to, how big they are and what channels are important to them, and I wanted to be able to give them that data to say that, okay, if you're this type of company, this is what marketing or good marketing looks like for you.
Omar Akhtar:I didn't think that there was a one size fits all sort of way of doing things, and so I go out there, I collect data, I do interviews, I do surveys of different companies and I split that data and I do it across a variety of topics. At the beginning of the year, I looked at budgets, then I looked at performance metrics and I'm looking at things like AI adoption and how that's going to affect things like headcount and a few different components. What I found with the two most recent surveys that I did one on budgets and spending and then one on marketing performance was that we're effectively I don't want to sound a fear monger, but we're effectively in a B2B SaaS recession, or at the cusp of it, and what that means is that the growth rates that we were used to, which used to be north of 30%, the median growth rate now is 11 to 20%, and so the companies that are doing better than that are in the north of 20%. That's a big decrease from when I did the survey last year 21 to 30%.
Rajiv Parikh:That's pretty recent. Right, it's a pretty recent change. Aj's talked about this. It's an explosive growth, post-pandemic pandemic, post-pandemic explosive growth and now things have cooled tremendously.
Omar Akhtar:Yeah, I think that's part of the whiplash for this and, aj, I'd love to kind of see your perspective on this where things went so fast and so hard and then AI comes onto the scene and everyone thinks it's going to be this big sort of SaaS renaissance, but what we're seeing is a lot of contraction Now. Part of it is, I think, that a lot of incumbents have just grown big and big companies don't grow very fast. They grow at around 10%. That's about healthy for big companies, but the thing that was concerning to me is that half of these companies are below 50 million in annual revenue and they're not growing at the rate that you would expect them to. There's a few different factors there, but that was sort of the big finding to me.
Omar Akhtar:The second one was that we're also in an era of marketing inflation, where the same amount of spending gets you worse results, and so where companies are spending more amounts on their channels like LinkedIn, like Google and on email marketing, but cost per lead is going up, but the amount of leads that they're getting back and the conversions they're getting, the rates, are even lower. Part of that is saturation. Part of that is just the channels that they're on, just don't work as well as they used to, and that's a real reality that we're facing, for if you're a SaaS executive, and if you're a SaaS marketing executive in particular, which is, you have to know the kind of scenario that we're operating in right now. It's not what it used to be and that requires a different playbook.
AJ Gandhi:Yeah, I think there's a lot of market problems out there right now. So I would concur, omar as well. I think the biggest one is look, there's been a huge amount of consumption of SaaS products and if you look at any mid-sized enterprise company, how many different SaaS applications do you have, even within a function finance, sales, marketing the number is incredibly voluminous, and so that's one problem is there's already a ton in the tech stack.
AJ Gandhi:Another problem is many of these tools don't actually work well together. So you may have all these tools, but because the information and data isn't shared amongst the tools, they're actually not that effective. I think the third thing that we're seeing actually is commoditization, so you can look at certain categories and just see, hey, what used to be a best of breed play, that was superior. You know.
Omar Akhtar:Look in the forecasting space, look in the sales engagement tool space, so forecasting you know, clary dominated sales engagement. You had sales loft you had outreach dominating.
AJ Gandhi:You looked at conversational intelligence, you had Gong and you had Forehead Chorus and these were individual tools and you could go out and those companies would sell them for 150 bucks per month per user and they all got big. They got to two, 300 million. But a big issue that they found is that suddenly, you know, gong has built all this functionality for all three categories. You've got companies like Avizo that have cropped up and they've built all these things plus, you know, know, customer success tools and plus many new ai tools, and they're actually undercutting the market dramatically. So you're seeing the market price for these tools just drop by 50 to 60 percent. And so you combine all these factors plus.
Omar Akhtar:That's where you've got a problem the last thing I would just say, and I really do think it all starts with the buyer is look, you don't compete against other people in your quote micro category.
AJ Gandhi:You're actually competing for the attention, for the relevance of the persona of your ICP and there are just dozens and dozens of companies going after that persona. So it's just noise and buyers are just more discerning because they bought so much.
Rajiv Parikh:Yeah, you're probably seeing similar things in the research, right? You're seeing that the buying groups are. Because of this proliferation of software packages, the buying group has gotten larger, right? I think Forrester talked about it earlier this year where buyer group has now moved from six people to as much as 14 people. Right, and because there's so many things that touch so many functions and before you want to deploy something, you want to make sure it's going to truly work in your environment. You just don't want to accumulate these gigantic tech stacks.
Omar Akhtar:Absolutely, and I love the point that Adria just made about competing for attention, because that's really the problem Head-to-head competition it's not as much of a concern, it's just like getting into the inbox of the person that you're trying to talk to. And part of that is because we've sort of lowered the barriers to entry for messaging and AI sort of made it easier for us to put content out at scale. And if you think about the average executive and I talked to them and I'm sure you guys are part of this think of how many messages you get every single day. And those are just the software sales messages. This isn't even counting all the other advertising that you're seeing just on your commute to wherever you're going.
Omar Akhtar:And that's a real reckoning for marketers who are tasked with the sole purpose of getting through to people. And when the product market is saturated. But the messaging channels are very, very saturated and breaking through is the one thing that the research is showing, which I'm happy to talk about, is what's old is new. Again, the stuff that you can't scale is the stuff that's working the events, the in person, the one on ones, that highly proprietary piece of data that you release as thought leadership. That's the stuff that's breaking through and increasingly that's the kind of tactical growth that we're going to see is in those areas.
Rajiv Parikh:So your digital spend, your LinkedIn, cosper, cosper Lead or Cosper Connect is going up right and just because people are seeing more of these things and they're not clicking. And so you need to find ways to connect with people more intimately. So are you seeing a shift towards events from the spend data, from the marketing spend data?
Omar Akhtar:Yeah, it's going up. So I think the median was around 18 to 20%. But on the high end people are spending 30% of their marketing program budgets on events and, the thing that was interesting when I talked to them, it doesn't necessarily mean big marquee events. What we find is that they're spending on sort of smaller boutique events where they're getting together a few executives, prospects and very intimate affairs, kind of like what you guys do with Go-To-Market Society which I got to say is a really great blueprint for how to do this thing where you're getting authentic conversations. It's not overly salesy. There's a lot more listening than talking Companies that are investing in that are raving about the results, whereas you're like, yeah, if you get people together, give them a good time, why wouldn't they be engaged? Right, it seems simple, but it's like, oh, people are waking up to it now.
Rajiv Parikh:When they're raving about results, is it because they feel good going to the event or are they actually seeing it in their movement into opportunities?
Omar Akhtar:Absolutely moving at opportunities. I mean, think of it the same way. I went to an event. There was a vendor there that was sponsoring the event and they did the event and it was a nice enough event. They weren't very pitchy, but I'm going to take their follow-up call because you know why wouldn't I? They were nice enough to call me over. That's just kind of human nature. If I eat your food, I'll take your call. So in the smallest microcosm of things, it's harder for people to reject you when they've seen your face. And if and try to scale it, you'll see that that's where most of the marketing is working today. That's amazing.
Rajiv Parikh:I mean, this is definitely something you've really built up AJ.
Omar Akhtar:Yeah.
AJ Gandhi:And I think there are a couple of things to kind of get into here. So the first one is related to kind of what tactics are working in demand, gen and look. Marketing, at the end of the day, is about being differentiated as a way of actually kind of engaging a prospective customer or your existing customer, and so if everyone's doing the same thing, if everyone's using the same channels and the same kind of techniques and tactics, you know they're not going to be effective anymore.
AJ Gandhi:I think this is where you know Udi Ledergore and his courageous marketing has done a nice job. It's like the unique programs. That's what really works and that's why what's old is new again really applies. I think what you also have to do is you know, when you are engaging people part of the reason I came in at the end of that dinner that you were a part of, and you know the solution provider definitely you know, created a nice quality experience but they also provided, you know, some really tangible value, what they did for every company that attended.
AJ Gandhi:this is a solution provider that's doing kind of SEO and kind of LLM search optimization.
Rajiv Parikh:AEO.
AJ Gandhi:Yeah, AEO GEO, whatever you want to call it, A-E-I-O-U.
Rajiv Parikh:We had a whole AJ. We had a whole show on that a little while ago. Good, good good. And we've had Udi on the show too, so yes, For those kinds of things.
AJ Gandhi:So you know that company did an assessment for every attendee and they actually had it at the printed out kind of asset. It was given to everybody. So I think the reciprocity principle does apply, as Omar highlighted. But you know, I think it goes back to some core principles these come back from like Craig Rosenberg and Topo days, it's like you want to be tailored, relevant and have a high value offer. So that's what kind of engages people. That's great.
Rajiv Parikh:I think one of the things you've definitely talked about, aj, is the notion about proactively educating the market, shaping a category You've brought folks on that will help you differentiate from the sea of sameness. There's that positioning and there's that understanding, so maybe you can describe some of that. And then how do we benchmark the value of that? You're at Marlins, you had 50 companies in your portfolio and you do a positioning exercise and then from that you look at the spends and marketing and sales and all that. So talk about how folks are creating, basically educating the market, shaping a new category and then selling into it based on differentiated positioning. Yeah, I mean.
AJ Gandhi:I think it starts with just why does your problem matter? And making sure that you're truly understanding if you're trying to sell the financial services midsize financial services companies or enterprise manufacturing companies.
AJ Gandhi:What do they really care about, you know? Is it inventory management? Is it compliance? Why is this an executive level priority? I think the problem that most companies are having today, and the reason that all the marketing metrics and sales metrics, frankly, are just tanking, is because you're selling it to a mid-level buyer with a solution for which there are other competitors, and that's not your only competition. You're also competing against. You know, five to seven other categories of potential spend that that same target persona could have. So, yes, they could spend on compliance software, they could spend on financial reporting software, they could spend it on, you know, some sort of tax software or workflow software.
Omar Akhtar:It's like well, which one do you?
AJ Gandhi:pick so well what matters and why, and so I think this is where it comes to the positioning and messaging challenge. So you really want to be selling the problem and really elevating the importance of solving that problem to the executive buyer I'll give you an example there's a company that I spent a lot of time with in the past year, and it provides service supply chain software. Okay, well, who cares about service supply chain? This is kind of like so sexy. It's super sexy, right.
Rajiv Parikh:It's just like I'm just getting ugh yeah exactly. Hair standing on end here. Well, guess what?
AJ Gandhi:You know that. Operations manager for service supply chain. You've got to imagine they're the most powerful person in a company, right? It's like in these billion-dollar manufacturing companies. However, when you actually take a step back and you actually really understand, that is hey. If a piece of equipment breaks, how long does it take for you to get replacement?
Omar Akhtar:parts out to you know, make that equipment operational again.
AJ Gandhi:Imagine that you're like a 10, 20, $50 billion company with thousands of products all throughout the world that have been produced over the last 40 years. You know. Imagine you're a Honeywell. Imagine you're, you know an American Airlines. Imagine you're these appointments as a doctor, Huge losses.
Rajiv Parikh:It's not just loss for revenue, it's actually like life's at risk as well. It's poor service for your patients, right, exactly, but you know that inventory carrying cost.
AJ Gandhi:You know you could be carrying hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars in inventory. So what's the right level, and where do you put it? So it's not just a cost issue, it's also very much a service and customer satisfaction issue. And then the issues can be even broader. When you elevate it up that way, it actually becomes a much higher value problem.
Rajiv Parikh:When you're elevating it like that, you're finding particular places where that persona is really going to care, and then you were highlighting that right. You're saying to them hey, if you don't solve this problem, here's the big problem. If you don't solve this problem, you could be out of a job, right.
AJ Gandhi:Well, it's actually much higher than that because, I mean, great Services director feels, but do they have the budget Do they have the IT priority?
Rajiv Parikh:So you have to make it an executive level.
AJ Gandhi:Yeah, you want to get to. I want to get to at the very least sort of the you know the FP&A lead for kind of manufacturing.
Omar Akhtar:I help them recognize hey, we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars of working capital.
AJ Gandhi:That's being wrapped up in inventory costs and there's actually even extra costs. Well, let's say, I'm trying to go fix something and I don't have the part, well, that's an extra truck roll and that may take an extra few days, an extra. So there's a big expense there as well. What's it take to actually get that fix? And then there's the customer experience factor as well. So when you roll all those things up and you actually take it to an executive level, then you actually start to hit very large numbers. And that's the kind of education that you need to go to those senior executives and highlight hey, these are problems that exist and how are you managing them?
AJ Gandhi:And it kind of helps when you know someone like McKinsey or Bain you know, writes a report that actually documents this, and so this can be part of the play as well as hey, let's get experts to validate that this is a multi hundreds of million dollar problem that really needs to be an executive priority, and so those are the kinds of ways that you know once people recognize they have the problem, then they'll engage much more than just saying, hey, this is going to be better inventory management and at that point the more exclusive event actually adds more value.
Rajiv Parikh:Exclusive event with the right kind of targeting If you can make it high enough level right as a problem. Then you can have that amazing experience and you can afford to market in the right way to build that buyer group Right. So that's where this positioning exercise really matters.
AJ Gandhi:Yeah, no, no. So, yes, I mean, I think that the mechanism of how you activate it across the buyer's journey is another thing, but it starts with what is the problem? Why does this problem matter? What's the business value of the problem? And I would actually highlight, you know, from all my work with companies, I think the positioning messaging thing is way too me too, in most companies, and then the value measurement part is actually another area that's acutely broken in most companies.
Rajiv Parikh:Awesome, and so let's talk a little bit about measurements. Omar, maybe you can give us a little bit about how, in this age right, we have so much more that we can do with AI. Yeah, we can measure many more things. So what are advanced frameworks, next generation proxies used to measure the impact of things that might have been unquantifiable in the go-to-market space, like grand affinity, authentic human connection, thought leadership? They're still looking at numbers.
Omar Akhtar:Yeah.
Rajiv Parikh:Having a great experience at an event may not be enough, right? So how are you seeing companies take these intangible strategies and then turning them into something measurable?
Omar Akhtar:So I'm going to say something a little bit sort of maybe controversial but Bring it.
Omar Akhtar:Yeah, I don't think AI is going to change the way that people are measuring much, and not because AI is not this innovative way. Think of it this way I think AI would make a good marketer better and a mediocre marketer will stay mediocre, and what I mean by that is saying that people that were already good at measuring or already had a good framework for measuring the value of what they were doing, are using AI to get faster at putting that information out and more accurate at putting that information out. But AI on its own isn't giving us any new framework for what to do. So marketing 101 is still marketing 101, which is, how many people did you reach and what did they think about you? And when they think about you, do they know what you do, which is everything AJ has talked about, and people sort of don't do those bits. They jump to sort of the AI will help us prove the numbers, but the stuff that they need to figure out is everything that I just said.
Rajiv Parikh:That's right. Maybe it's not giving you a new metric right, but now you can personalize the content that you send to people or personalize how you connect with people. How are you measuring that?
Omar Akhtar:It's the way that you've always measured it, which is that how many people reached this and when they think of a category do I come to mind? And if there's a shortlist, am I on that shortlist? There's no amount of AI that's going to change that metric, especially in SaaS. In terms of what you should be measuring, and those are the only things that matter, I'll push you a little bit on this.
Rajiv Parikh:I mean, you're doing these amazing surveys, right? You're getting in-depth with these B2B, mostly SaaS firms, right.
Omar Akhtar:Yeah.
Rajiv Parikh:So, and you're tracking, I think, the difference between those who are leaders in the space versus those who are laggards in the space. So are you seeing data there that this personalization oriented strategy or this better positioning, or how are you seeing this in the numbers?
Omar Akhtar:So the personalization bit I don't want to speculate because I don't have the numbers on that to say that people who are personalizing are doing better. I think other companies have done that. Here's what I can tell you about what the companies that are growing faster. That's what they're doing better. The number one thing is that they're spending more on marketing. That's sort of the one thing. That's kind of the big separator. So companies that were growing faster that's north of 20% and hit their revenue targets last year, those companies are spending sort of 10 to 12, sometimes even 13 to 15% on marketing. The companies that didn't hit their numbers are spending around 7 to 9% of their annual revenue on marketing and if you get bigger than that, then the number sort of goes down. But if you're a B2B SaaS company that's in the 100 to 500 million annual range and you're spending in the single digits on marketing, that's going to hamper you.
Omar Akhtar:There was an era where you know, when we were getting better at digital, where you could do more with less, where you could put out more content and you could get more ads and you could personalize things, and there's a lot of good technology that helped us do that. I think we've reached the limit of doing more with less, because now we've sort of cut marketing to the point that we can't actually sustain that same level of reaching eyeballs, which is the only thing that matters for marketing is how many people are you reaching? The single biggest differentiator is that you can't sort of cut your way to growth. You can either choose to be an efficient organization and try to stay profitable or you can try to grow beyond a certain limit. It's really really, really hard not impossible, really hard to cut your way and then achieve those growth figures.
Omar Akhtar:The second difference that I found was that companies that were growing were spending about sort of equal amounts of their marketing budget on brand marketing and demand marketing. Brand marketing is stuff that basically there's no click afterwards, it's purely awareness marketing, purely for eyeballs. We don't care what they did afterwards, we just want them to see the thing that we did. And demand generation the way that I classified in this survey is stuff that's more guaranteed to have them click on something, convert on something, take some sort of quick follow-up action, really demand capture. And I think in the past few years, because SaaS was such a hot category and people were buying software, we started to think that demand generation worked a lot better than it does. What happens is that you capture people that were already in market and a lot of people were in market, especially post COVID.
Omar Akhtar:You're going after low hanging fruit with demand Going after low hanging fruit and you capture a lot of that stuff. But that's like a drug. It's like it is like a drug John Miller called it a gumball machine where it's like dollar in and $10 out and what we found is that sort of that well is drying up and people neglected to do the top of the funnel stuff. And when you neglect the top of the funnel the effects aren't immediate. They happen sort of nine, 10, 12 months later. But now we're sort of seeing that is that the people if you look at the SaaS that's doing well, they're all incumbents. The folks that have a big brand presence, folks that got into a category, defined a category and they're staying there.
Omar Akhtar:People are still talking about Salesforce and HubSpot. They're still talking about sort of the big players in the market and if you think about your Fortune 500, it's really difficult to get them to go away from stuff that isn't like top of mind when it comes to brand. And that stuff matters is what I tell startups now is that if you're a category creator, you think you'll believe creating a category you can't neglect, just like what Clay is doing. I got to admit, embarrassingly, I don't quite know what Clay does. That's so different and special, but people love it. Yeah, yeah, People love it. And I love their logo, yeah, and they're everywhere. One day, when someone says, hey, we're looking for a software for like I don't know something, go to market, et cetera, I'm like I'll just go check out Clay, I don't know, Maybe they'll work out not to plug them too much, but that's a great example of of brand awareness. Can I go?
AJ Gandhi:back to the beginning of Omar's comment about spending on marketing for a moment, because I actually think it's a really important point what percentage of the buyer's journey is independent now versus with a salesperson? It's about 80% independent. If you rewound 15 years to when the Challenger sale came out, the big data point was 57% of the buying process was over. Before ever talking to a salesperson. Now people are saying well, net, net, it's probably 80%. Is the buyer doing their?
AJ Gandhi:own homework, talking to their peers. They're not even going to the analysts as much anymore, but what percentage of the budget is spent on sales as a total go-to-market effort? It's still about 65% to 70%.
Rajiv Parikh:That's actually down from that. I think in some of your studies I was showing what 70% is on sales.
Omar Akhtar:Yeah, If you split. Yeah, 70-30 split and like you're talking about Gen Z.
Rajiv Parikh:Nowadays, Gen Z is even more about self-education than the Gen X buyer.
AJ Gandhi:Well, so just look at the data again for a second there, and that is if only 20% is really spent with sales teams, but you're spending 70% of your go-to-market resource on sales. Well, that's a problem.
Omar Akhtar:But then you just say well, okay, well, let me see how the salespeople are doing.
AJ Gandhi:The performance distribution is incredibly skewed these days. The top performers are still top performers, but 60, 70% of the reps are not making quota. It's actually more like 70% of the reps are not making quota these days and average attainment is way down and it's increasingly bimodal. So you can actually just lob off the second half of the sales team and you would probably only lose 10, 15% of bookings. So that's a big problem when it comes to resource allocation. So very much agree, there needs to be more spend on marketing, but it's got to be the right type of marketing the things to think about are it really is all along the buyer's journey.
AJ Gandhi:So start number one with. You know what's the problem, we talked about that. But then figure out how do you actually move people along the buyer's journey and I think this is where.
AJ Gandhi:Salesforce really kind of nailed it back in 2010. And I got to be part of the team where I actually just kind of learned this from my colleagues. But we did these like CIO roundtables and it was 12 to 15 executives. We'd bring in three existing customers from Salesforce who are CIOs, who believe in the cloud, and then another dozen who are on the journey, and three, four hours. It was very much thought leadership. It was very much an information exchange.
Rajiv Parikh:That's what progressed the buyer's journey and those are the winning types of programs that works today. Now, If you were to name like a couple, two or three of the, we know Salesforce, they're the giant they're going to kick butt. We're dream is right around the corner. They're probably going to do it bigger and better than ever before, and a lot of the folks that are probably listening to us are saying, well, I'm not Salesforce.
AJ Gandhi:Well, my service supply chain example, richie even that's a company well under 100 million revenue Same thing applied and that is hey, let's get service supply chain leaders.
AJ Gandhi:let's get finance leaders together and talk about hey, why does this problem matter? How do you solve it, how do you think about integrating this with a larger ERP? And it's the same exact principle and that's what sort of works and progresses. It's the same thing that we're doing with, like go-to-market leader society dinners. It's like, hey, let's have a dinner table of eight to 12 people, let's have a couple of key topics it might be geo, it might be something else and let's progress and go deep on that conversation point in kind of a structured manner. And that's what. That's what really kind of works yeah, that's great.
Rajiv Parikh:And then what do you do? Like now we know that this work, you know, like omar started it and you, you really built up on it about kind of going back to some previous things where you're creating exclusivity. So how do you get companies who are so used to going the other way to unlearn the old behavior? Or they just get smashed in the head from their board.
AJ Gandhi:Well, I think you just look at the data points on these programs. I mean, you look at SEO, the traffic's down significantly because people are on websites much less. You look at PPC and just the conversion and the efficiency rates are down significantly. So it's just like, hey, the incremental dollars don't make sense and he and just search farms down as well. You look at big trade shows it's like you know you're not getting the yield there either. So you know attribution is not perfect.
AJ Gandhi:But there are a lot of these things that you can measure and you can just sort of see. Even if you pick your attribution methodology and you say, whatever it is, let me just follow it longitudinally, you're seeing it just tank for a lot of these kinds of programs and when that happens, you just naturally logically say, all right, let me cut back what doesn't work and let me try to innovate on some things that will actually capture people's attention. Here's what I would tell you. I mean, companies have problems just as much as they ever have, and so the question is what are those problems and how are you helping them? And how are you helping them? Think about it, and especially in this world of AI, companies succeed and quote sell stuff when their customers are struggling with high value problems and there's massive disruption out there right now, so that creates actually a ton of opportunity. As long as you can actually be perceived as the party, that it can actually help them succeed.
Rajiv Parikh:That's right. So there's that whole notion of AI washing. There's new AI native companies. There's a lot of stuff there. Omar, do you see anything in the data about this? You said there's maybe a SaaS recession. Is that because of these emerging AI companies and folks potentially using these alternative engines to build solutions that supersede SaaS firms, or is it something else?
Omar Akhtar:I don't think it's the case where people are building their own AI at scale. I think individuals are using AI agents to help themselves and some companies are talking about some processes they've solved, but there's nothing in any interviews I've done, especially with companies that are of a decent size, like if you're very small, you can do it, but if you're a hundred million dollar company, there's no sort of building of AI agents at a big scale and part of that is sort of corporate culture. It's tough to get these things and get buy-in for people. Individuals are doing it. I wouldn't say that a company is doing it.
Rajiv Parikh:Okay. So people are scared. I know a number of VCs that are really concerned about their portfolio, but it's not necessarily translating yet. Aj, you want a quick point on this Because I want to jump to my next one At the end of the day, AI is about use cases.
AJ Gandhi:It is not like oh use AI and your whole business transforms. To be honest, I would actually say this the workflows of companies haven't changed very much. I mean the workflow as an insurance company. It's still the same thing. But here's the issue. So much of the work in that workflow is manual, has variance and exists in big volumes so if you can use, ai to actually automate much more of that.
AJ Gandhi:That's a huge benefit. That makes that workflow, you know, much more efficient. I would say the same thing when it comes to abm and outbound. We were kind of talking about the point earlier about, well, what's the impact of personalization? Well, when I was at RingCentral and we were doing outbound, we were like, oh, okay, we're saying, hey, you should buy a phone system on the cloud in 2016, because most people still had PBXs, at least in the market enterprise, and that worked to a degree. But it wasn't differentiated If we said, hey, if I'm selling to a law firm, here's the value proposition.
AJ Gandhi:If law firm, here's the value proposition if I'm selling to an accounting firm here's the value proposition construction firm here's the value proposition of whatever, having any device and linking all these sites the conversion rate went up two to three x. But the problem was you just couldn't reliably do that for every micro industry that was out there. It was just too time consuming. When you think about the content and the, you know, back then we were doing sequences and call scripts and all that stuff. It was just too much work. But now you can say you know what?
AJ Gandhi:there are 20 industries that I can sell horizontal software into. I actually tailor to the 20 industries and I'm actually going to tailor to the four different personas. The finance persona the operations, persona, the whatever persona, and I can actually achieve all that because the AI tools make that possible. So does the AI itself just magically turn into massive bookings? The answer is no, because other people can do it as well, but it makes this part of the work much more automated. So I think you want to think about what are the use cases?
Rajiv Parikh:I think that's a great point to make. I mean, I can tell you at least before, when I would go into a meeting with a potential prospect or even a current client. It would take us a good amount of time days, maybe weeks to do the research and put together a messaging strategy. Now we can literally walk in and say well, here's something I put together for you, and here's all your personas, here's your industries, here's your solution, here's how we think you can reach the market better, and here's even a simulation of results, and you can be ready to go much faster Now. There's a lot more work to do after that, but the richness that you can get you can walk in with way more insight is the short answer and stimulate
Omar Akhtar:a much better conversation. I'll give you one more example.
AJ Gandhi:There's this niche category called value selling software. It's like ROI, business case kind of stuff. So there's a company out there which can actually analyze all your case studies and all your competitors case studies and synthesize it into what are the key value points and which company actually does a better job on what types of metrics in terms of driving business value.
AJ Gandhi:And you can do that outside in just by analyzing all the case studies that exist on the web, and they can do this for any company. So now, any company they go into, they go and do this analysis, preliminary analysis?
Rajiv Parikh:Yeah, it's amazing.
AJ Gandhi:Of their five competitors, plus the company.
Rajiv Parikh:That's going to wake you up, Omar. Is there something you want to add to that?
Omar Akhtar:No, I think it's a fair point to say and I'm all on board with this kind of personalization. I think the key thing to recognize is most companies do not do it in the sophisticated way that both of you are describing it. They'll put in their first draft and use that as their personalization technique. I mean, I get emails all day long people calling me Jennifer, so it's how?
Rajiv Parikh:did they get from Omar to Jennifer?
Omar Akhtar:Yeah, you tell me. I mean, it's one thing if it was also a similar South Asian name, but it's a completely different paradigm. Yeah, so, most people don't do that and I think that's a huge part of the reason they don't do that is because of the constant pressure to do things quickly and at scale and not put that sort of strategy behind it, which is why I feel like your AI is only as good as the person who's developing the strategy for it.
Rajiv Parikh:You really have to sit back and think about it and get moving. All right, I'm going to move into our next section. I hope you guys have a little extra time because I have a bunch of stuff for both of you and I think it's going to be super fun. So, okay, we're going to talk now about brand versus demand. I'm going to get your thoughts on this. So here we go.
Rajiv Parikh:In the marketing world, a fierce debate is raging. On one side, you have the champions of demand gen, who live and die by the numbers ROI, the dreaded MQL and immediate revenue. For them, marketing is a science of direct attribution. On the other side are believers in brand, who argue that the real value lies in building long-term trust, recognition and loyalty Things that don't always fit neatly into a spreadsheet. They see marketing as an art. We've compiled some interesting provocative opinions that challenge the core assumptions of both camps. So here we go. I'm going to bring these up. I'm going to ask you to take a bit of a side. I know you can give very nuanced answers, but take a side. So here's the question. Brand marketing is a luxury expense designed as strategy In a downturn. It's interesting. The first thing to cut is brand and advertising. And the last is demand, jen, because only demand directly contributes to the bottom line. Quick thoughts Omar Omar's shaking his head.
Omar Akhtar:Completely disagree. It's like trying to drain your gas tank before you run a race. It makes no sense to me that you would call brand a luxury item when it's the fuel of growth. Yeah, I hard disagree.
Rajiv Parikh:All right, AJ. Guys like you keep cutting ad spend during a recession, Go ahead defend it.
AJ Gandhi:I think the reason the ad spend is getting cut Rajiv is because it's diminishing in its effectiveness and that's whatever attribution methodology you're using. So people will cut and should cut things that have less value. What I think is kind of key is just in this world of LLMs, people shortlist much more quickly. So if you're not getting shortlisted, you're not in the game, and that's where I think brain comes in and it's sort of having a distinctive point of view. If you're not playing there and you're just running off of you know all this funnel metrics, I think you're going to lose a lot of the opportunity and you have to keep in mind the funnel metrics you know, for you know mid to long sales cycle.
AJ Gandhi:You don't really see the outcome for quite some time six to 12 months, so you may not really be seeing what's actually going on. So your other question earlier. I think the biggest incentive change that's required is actually just getting all go-to-market teams to measure the full funnel. And that is really kind of more bowtie-esque to use the you know Jocko from Wedding by Design's terminology.
AJ Gandhi:So it's not just acquisition, it's very much focused on expansion and retention, which I think most companies. There's so much more data for expansion and retention, but it's leveraged so much less than the acquisition metrics and I think there's way more juice to squeeze on expansion retention standpoint, but only if you focus on customers getting value, and that's the lack of sophistication on the right side of the bow tie is super diminished.
Rajiv Parikh:Absolutely. All right, I'm going to ask you the next one. I'm going to have some fun with this. Now we're going to go the other way. Spending on demand gen is a fool's game. You're renting attention instead of owning it. A strong brand is the only long-term asset a company can build, making demand gen nothing more than a short-term fix.
AJ Gandhi:I disagree with this strongly. I think you have to consider the whole buyer's journey. To me, brand is actually really critical in terms of getting into. I'm less the marketer that Omar is, but to me I always think of it as more top of funnel. I'm sort of getting into kind of the consideration game and then there are things that you need to do to nurture that buyer's journey as you go through the funnel. And I think that's where a lot of the demand gen programs come in. But I think you need the brand upfront.
Rajiv Parikh:Awesome, Omar. Quick response.
Omar Akhtar:No, I disagree. I completely, in the sense, I disagree with your statement. I agree with AJ. Like, look, there's no sort of having brand without demand. Those things don't work without each other. You can't cut one and then expect the other one to work. They're just different motions. They require different investments, different tactics. The biggest difference is that it's easier to measure demand and so we over-index some of the things that we can measure easily, and also it's quicker to measure it right.
Omar Akhtar:Like you can measure a brand but the effects are longitudinal over many, many quarters as you see the effect of it, and sometimes that does mean cutting ad spend. Not because you're cutting brand, it's because those ads aren't working on those channels. That's the way to sort of look at it. I'll give you an example Cybersecurity. They drive me crazy because they mess up all my data, because they're such an anomaly. They just don't do marketing the same way that everybody else does. Their marketing is very much event focused, it's relational, it's not spending ad spend, but they're still doing brand awareness. They're just doing it in a different way and because that's what's working for them. The way that they get top of mind is by doing events and in-person stuff.
Rajiv Parikh:That totally makes sense. It's very different for that area and it makes a lot of sense. Okay, here's the next one. Investing in brand is a moral obligation. In a world of aggressive, intrusive demand generation, a company has a duty to build a genuine connection with its audience, even if that connection can't be easily quantified.
Omar Akhtar:Hard to agree. I don't know if it's a moral obligation. It's business whether that's moral or not. I mean, you could be selling a very immoral product and still have to build a brand, but it's kind of a yeah, I don't see how you exist without building that, but yeah, yeah, I think in a noisy, noisy world you need to have a brand to actually sort of stand out.
AJ Gandhi:And if we go back to the most basics of marketing, like awareness and consideration. I mean, that's what a brand gets you. It gets you in the game.
Rajiv Parikh:Awesome, okay, the only reason brand building is valued is because it's impossible to measure. It's a convenient excuse for marketers who can't prove their ROI in a way to justify massive budgets without accountability.
Omar Akhtar:Yeah, hard to disagree and I think we know where I'm going to fall on all these. But I think about ROI and think about the stuff that you love the most in the world, the music you listen to or the art that you appreciate. There's so many things in the world that are great, have no ROI or any quantifiable impact at all, but I think that's what people sort of conflate as marketing is art and therefore should not be quantified, and I don't think that's the case. I think you should quantify your efforts and I think there's this idea that you can't quantify brand is also a misnomer. You can absolutely quantify brand. It just works differently in the way and people have been doing it for years. You don't think Coca-Cola is quantifying its brand well before demand generation? Of course they are. It just works differently. So I disagree with that.
Rajiv Parikh:Great answer.
AJ Gandhi:Yeah, aj quick, I think you very much can quantify brand. I mean, look at branded web traffic. I mean that's quantification of brand. So I think there's very much an opportunity to do so.
Rajiv Parikh:Great answer. I'll wrap it up with this segment with this one Entire brand versus demand debate is a false dichotomy. They're not two different strategies, they're the same thing. Every demand activity either strengthens or weakens the brand, and a strong brand is the single greatest driver of demand.
AJ Gandhi:No, I would agree. I think if you look at any kind of buying decision that's made, there are just so many different kind of inputs across that buyer's journey.
AJ Gandhi:It could be some content, it could be a website, it could be a phone call, it could be an email, it could be an event, it could be a case study, it could be a conference, it could be an analyst note. So these are all. They're just so many different pieces. I think it becomes a misnomer when you just try to say, hey, I'm going to look at the attribution of this particular asset or this particular campaign. When a customer makes a buying decision, they probably had dozens of touch points from marketing, from sales, from others, and trying to assign a discrete value on each one. I think it's a false science and you have to think about it just much more holistically.
Rajiv Parikh:I know you don't want me to give nuanced answers, so I'm going to try to be as sort of one-sided.
Omar Akhtar:Have some fun with this Last brand versus demand question Got it Absolutely.
Omar Akhtar:Yeah, look, I think yes, it is a false dichotomy because one feeds the other, but the debate is real. And the debate is real because there's pressures that are coming from a lot of different places. A lot of CMOs want to do things that are easily quantifiable, a lot of boards want to see results, a lot of CFOs want to see things that are sort of numbers-based, and what that does is whether they're trying to or not. What that does is it means that we end up over-indexing on things where we can show the numbers a lot clearer. So, while we know as marketing practitioners, that that dichotomy is false, the debate is very real, and the choices that people have to make in terms of the activities, that they have to choose one or the other, is also very real, and so I want to sort of empathize with marketers who have to face that choice in terms of the kind of tactics that they want to invest in, because they feel like they have to come on one side of that or the other.
Omar Akhtar:So that's the only nuance that I would point out.
Rajiv Parikh:I would say that I've seen it with companies that are going from earlier stage companies as they move up the chain and get more and more mature. If you have numbers you got to hit for your board or for your VCs or your investors and there is significant middle to bottom of funnel opportunity, it's just easier to do something that's very quantifiable. If you have a limited budget, it's easier to do that. You can do as what AJ suggests have a really good positioning, really good way of showing your product without having to spend so much on high level advertising and brand building. Think about a FinTech product.
Rajiv Parikh:If I need business loans, I need a freaking business loan and I need money right now. Who the brand is may or may not matter if I need money right now, but at a certain point I'm going to want to go to folks who want a trusted relationship, a long-term relationship, want someone I can go back multiple times and get that lending and multiple financial services from. Well then I need to trust you and therefore, having a brand that's trusted and reasonable, that has a personality, et cetera, is someone I'm going to care about, I'm going to care for. Eventually you'll have to do the numbers to show how one drives the other. And you can actually you can show the explicit tie of your brand advertising spend marketing to reduced cost of acquisition numbers because of brand recognition. So it can be done, it just takes some sophistication.
AJ Gandhi:And you can also look at trends as well. I mean, if you have a strong brand, you would expect a bunch of metrics to perform better, so win-loss rates, sales cycle duration, level of discounting deal size these are all factors to look at and if they're below certain benchmarks, you've got a problem. Or if they're showing a decline, you've got a problem and you've got to do something that's going to change the game and it's not going to be just like campaign mix that's going to do that Right.
Rajiv Parikh:So we need to get the B2B version of Cynthia Sweeney in. That'll instantly increase your demand. Okay, so here we go. Let's go to the Spark Tank. So you two are going to have a blast today. Today we're thrilled to have Omar Akhtar, a marketing innovator with a fascinating journey that includes playing in a rock band before becoming a leading voice in B2B SaaS marketing benchmarks. We're also joined by AJ Gandhi, a go-to-market guru and community builder, who's mastered the art of creating memorable experiences. Today, we've got a fun twist on our classic format that taps into the energy and cultural impact of music festivals.
Rajiv Parikh:Why festivals? You both have a deep love for live music and we thought this would be a fun way to play with something you both share a passion for, not related to B2B benchmarks. Here's how it works. I'll present you with three statements about music festivals. Two of them are absolutely true, no matter how crazy they sound. One is completely fabricated, designed to sound just plausible enough to fool you. Your job is to spot the lie. After each round, I'll count down three, two, one, and you'll both reveal which statement you think is fake. So you have to do it at the same time and you can't cheat from each other. So, omar AJ, you're ready to separate fact from fiction?
AJ Gandhi:Okay, all right, let's do it. Fact from fiction. Okay.
Rajiv Parikh:All right, let's do it, let's go. Music festival time. Remember two truths and a lie. So two are true. Here's number one. At Bonnaroo, the Centeroo Fountain is known as a quote perpetual source of happy times. Every year, it turns into a wild pool party, with attendees in swimsuits or sometimes not, cooling off, dancing and splashing in the illuminated water during the hottest days of the festival. Here's number two.
Rajiv Parikh:During Burning man 2025, this year, attendees participated in a big wheel dildo joust an annual not-safe-for-work event where costume competitors race on oversized tricycles in playful ruckus, battles for glory watched by laughing crowds at the edge of the playa. Number three at Coachella 2017, festival organizers accidentally set off thousands of biodegradable bubbles filled with colored glitter, blanketing the main stage and leading to a rushed cleanup as headliners performed their sets. So you ready? We got Bonnaroo, burning man and Coachella. You ready? All right, I got one for AJ and three for Omar. So the AJ thought Bonnaroo was false, omar thought Coachella was false. And guess what? Omar, you win this round. All right, yeah.
Omar Akhtar:I decided to go with. The most family-friendly option was obviously the one. That was not true, yeah.
AJ Gandhi:That's a good way of thinking about it. I think you know anything and everything happens at Barting Day.
Rajiv Parikh:So while Coachella has featured elaborate art installations and occasional outlandish moments, there's no record of a glitter bubble mishap on the main stage, the center route or, as it's informally known, for its pool party atmosphere. Festival goers often show up in swimsuits, and sometimes less, and turn the fountain area into a lively communal celebration between music sets and then the quote-unquote big wheel dildo joust is actually a legit thing. Participants ride in oversized toy tricycles, don silly costumes and participate in light-hearted joust for the enjoyment of festival crowds.
AJ Gandhi:So here we go All right round two enjoyment of festival crowds.
Rajiv Parikh:So here we go. Oh, all right, round two I got Omar. One, here we go. Number one at Lollapalooza 1995, testing your memory the band Pavement was pelted with mud and sod by the crowd during their set, prompting guitarist Scott Canberg to flip off and then moon the audience before stomping off stage an infamous example of festival antics. Number two Coachella 2018 went TikTok viral after a group of influencers attempted to camp inside the festival's signature flower installations, leading to a short-lived fairy camper hashtag, fairy camper mini trend and safety warnings from organizers. Three a girl attending Mysteryland 2015 jumped off a 30-foot railing, survived only with minor injuries and became a local festival legend, with organizers later referencing her in the official event guide. I got Lollapalooza, coachella and Mysteryland. Here we go. Which one's false? Three, two, one. Okay, I got two. Threes. Do you want to say why you think it was three?
AJ Gandhi:I don't think the lawyers. Let you celebrate someone who jumps off a tree.
Rajiv Parikh:Well, guess what? Guess what? You're both both wrong.
Omar Akhtar:Number two is false oh, man, oh, of course. Number two would be false because tiktok wasn't around in 2018. I should have known that yeah, yeah.
Rajiv Parikh:Well, coachella. Frequently trends on social media with elaborate influencer content and ephemeral micro trends. There's no reports of people successfully camping inside the flower installations or any resulting official safety warning.
Omar Akhtar:I forgot what life was like before influencers ruined everything.
Rajiv Parikh:So yeah, so Lollapalooza's notorious pavement incident in 1995 included a crowd hostility mudslinging in Canberra's mooning response cited multiple Lollapalooza retrospectives. That I can imagine response cited multiple Lollapalooza retrospectives that I can imagine, and apparently number three 2015, notorious incident where a young woman survived a massive jump and was referenced in festival literature thereafter. So all right, here goes number three. Aj, you have a good shot at catching up here.
AJ Gandhi:You should.
Rajiv Parikh:All right, here's number one. Here's the number one potential lie. Summerfest in Milwaukee regularly draws between 800,000 and 1 million attendees and is officially recognized as the world's largest music festival by the Guinness World Book of Records. Number two at Outside Lands 2014,. A performer rolled across the crowd in a giant inflatable hamster ball, creating a surreal moment that festival goers still talk about today as one of the wildest and most unexpected acts in event history. Then there's number three At EDC, the main stage was once made entirely of ice that melted during performances, forcing DJ sets to move indoors. So we have Summerfest Outside Lands and EDC.
Omar Akhtar:So you ready, oh man this is a tough one yeah.
Rajiv Parikh:It is a hard one. Three, two, one I got oh, I got a split decision here. So AJ is three, Omar is one. Aj, why'd you pick three?
AJ Gandhi:Well, I think one is true, just because it's so damn cold in Wisconsin that they celebrate the summers like there's no tomorrow. And I've heard it actually that it's an extraordinary summer experience in Milwaukee and Summerfest. I think three is a lie. Just because I imagine a stage being pretty massive and for that to be completely made of ice and melt within the period cleanly that you can actually have a show. It just seems like it would just be completely chaotic.
Rajiv Parikh:I can't.
AJ Gandhi:Imagine anyone would ever really plan to do that All right?
Rajiv Parikh:Well, guess what, AJ? Your logic is absolutely correct.
AJ Gandhi:Number three oh, yay, finally.
Rajiv Parikh:I got a tie.
Omar Akhtar:I'm actually kind of relieved that that's the case. That's good to know that there wasn't an ice stage, yeah evc is famous for elaborate and creative stage designs and productions.
Rajiv Parikh:There's never been a stage made of ice that melted and forced to move indoors. You know why? Because the festival takes place outdoors in las Vegas.
AJ Gandhi:So it'll be a little hard to handle desert climate.
Rajiv Parikh:But AJ's totally right. Summer Fest regularly exceeds 800,000 people over its 11-day run, and Outside Lands 2014 had a moment where the artist bowled over fans inside of a giant inflatable hamster ball.
AJ Gandhi:That happens in the Outside Lands.
Rajiv Parikh:It's just a thing.
AJ Gandhi:Right, you've probably seen that, right You've been yeah, it seems like it's what it seems like that's become a thing, that giant hamster ball things.
Rajiv Parikh:All right, here's the tiebreaker. Oh man, okay.
Omar Akhtar:Yeah.
Rajiv Parikh:So this is the main time I don't even have to multiply the points on this.
Omar Akhtar:So here we go.
Rajiv Parikh:This is all about Governor's Ball, so I hope you guys know about this.
Omar Akhtar:In New York right.
Rajiv Parikh:Yeah, yeah, all right. So at Governor's Ball 2017, a street performers sneaked onto the main stage during a headline act and began juggling flaming torches, captivating the crowd until a security officer escorted him off. The incident sparked a viral video and fueled rumors that Governor's Ball had unofficially started a guerrilla performance tradition. Number two at Governor's Ball 2024, singer Chappelle Rohn made a theatrical entrance, emerging from a giant apple statue, modeled after the Statue of Liberty, puffing on a blunt, which quickly became one of the most talked-about moments of the festival. Number three In 2016, due to heavy rain, the last day of Governor's Ball was canceled, prompting Kanye West to announce a last-minute show at the 1350-person capacity venue in Manhattan, which led to chaos as thousands showed up, overwhelming the small venue's capacity. So all three are governor's ball. What was the first one? Again, the first one is a street performer sneaked onto the main stage during a headline act and began juggling flaming torches, captivating the crowd until security escorted him off. So it was a viral video and had officially started this notion of a guerrilla performance tradition. So that was number one. Number two is singer Chappelle Rhone theatrical entrance giant statue model after the Statue of Liberty, while smoking. And then number three was Kanye West.
Rajiv Parikh:Okay, ready, three, two, one. Oh, at least I got different answers, one and two. So AJ's one, omar's two, omar, why do you believe two is right? Two is the false answer.
Omar Akhtar:I don't know. I feel like I know Chapel Rowan Like coming out of a giant apple tracks, but smoking a blunt while coming out of a giant apple, I feel like that's a bit. It's too many things thrown in the same performance and the other two just sound plausible. Like you know, kanye West would do something reckless like that and I would imagine that guerrilla sort of performers is a thing.
Rajiv Parikh:So that's where I went All right, AJ, defend your point of view.
AJ Gandhi:I think there's too much security in New York and, as a result, you're just not going to let somebody get on stage and actually perform. I think the moment that they would get on stage, that they would get whisked off immediately.
Rajiv Parikh:All right, they would get on stage, that they would get whisked off immediately. All right, one of you got the correct answer, and so there is a winner, and today, live from florence is aj, you're the winner all right that's some sound logic chapel ruins dramatic statue liberty apple.
Rajiv Parikh:Entrance was widely covered in press and social media, making her breakout governor's ball moment in 2024. And rain cancellations are a part of governor's ball history, with 2016 final day cancellation resulting in Kanye West's attempt at an impromptu concert in Manhattan, documented by multiple news sources. Aj, you're the winner, but that was a lot of fun and kudos to my staff.
AJ Gandhi:Wow Good, so amazing.
Rajiv Parikh:Yeah.
Omar Akhtar:That was so much fun.
Rajiv Parikh:All right, we're going to go to personal closers, so I'm going to throw you a topic you can choose to comment on it. I would ask you to give me really quick answers. So you ready, I'm going to start with AJ, then go to Omar on this one. What's something you used to really be into that now you find completely baffling about your past self?
AJ Gandhi:I used to like working on spreadsheets Omar.
Rajiv Parikh:that's self-explanatory.
Omar Akhtar:by the way, yeah, gosh, that's a really tough one. I guess I used to really be into fashion and I don't think that's the case anymore.
Rajiv Parikh:You lost your love. You don't read People magazine or whatever that is, or Cosmopolitan or anything there.
Omar Akhtar:Yeah, just sort of like the obsession with keeping up with it is like I find myself thinking wow, why was this so important?
Rajiv Parikh:Yeah, I guess that makes a lot of sense. I call my friends for that kind of advice, yeah, and. I'm about 10 years behind.
Omar Akhtar:All right.
Rajiv Parikh:Omar, you start on this one. If you had to choose a theme song that plays every time you walk into a room, what would it be, and what energy are you trying to bring?
Omar Akhtar:Gosh, you really should give me some more time to think about this. So there's a punk rock band called the Hives and they have a song called Come On, and it is just two words. The whole song is just come on, and it's just this raucous, like two minute blast of them just yelling come on, come on, come on, come on, and I listen to it almost every day when I'm trying to pump myself up. It's your hype song.
Omar Akhtar:It's my hype song. It's perfect amount of time for me to enter a room play it. It's over in less than two minutes. It's only two words. Gets the message across. That would be my song. Yeah, what a great answer, aj.
AJ Gandhi:Let's see. I think it would be Get what you Give by the New Radicals Just fabulous, good one.
Rajiv Parikh:What energy are you trying to bring to it, if you?
AJ Gandhi:kind of hear the lyrics to the song. It's about overcoming some hardships and like doing the right thing.
Omar Akhtar:And when you do the right thing your life becomes way better.
Rajiv Parikh:Those, to me are kind of inspiring words Beautiful. All right, Omar, here we go. If you had to share your expertise on something you love that has nothing to do with work, what would you teach?
Omar Akhtar:Cooking. I tend to get a little nerdy about cooking techniques and ingredients and being kind of insufferable about different kinds of cuisines and restaurants. So yeah, if you want to lecture on the best way to cook a steak that's not just throwing it on a grill, then I'm your guy.
Rajiv Parikh:All right, so you are really good at it then.
Omar Akhtar:No, I didn't say I was good at it. I said I'll lecture you on. It Doesn't mean I'm good at it. There's a difference.
Rajiv Parikh:There's the teach and there's the do. Right, yes, yes, all right. Aj, if you could be guaranteed to be really good at one thing that you're currently terrible at, what would you choose?
AJ Gandhi:I would want to be a Cy Young baseball pitcher. That's like I think it's the most commanding role in sports and I just think it's like the coolest job ever. It's like you have a three-hour baseball game and you basically come in and out for like an hour and a half of it and just mow people down. I think it's the most powerful position in all of sports.
Rajiv Parikh:I love it. That's a great answer. All the attention's on you. The whole game depends on you. You got to precisely locate. You got to study your batters. It's beautiful, Omar. What's a piece of technology from your childhood that you genuinely miss, and what would you bring back if you could?
Omar Akhtar:iPods. I think about my iPod so much more and, for whatever reason, my phone just isn't the same thing. That iPod was the most cherished piece of technology I've ever owned. It had like what what 2,000 songs, but they were all picked by me, curated songs that I would listen to over and over again, never get tired of it, and I just managed to hold it, take it with me everywhere, and it was such a personal statement to have that sort of in the back of my pocket and my phone just it's not the same thing that I can have access to every piece of music in the world and my phone it's just not the same. And so I really miss my iPod.
Rajiv Parikh:You miss the ability to curate it. It's your device, it's personal to you.
Omar Akhtar:Yeah, you choose its color just to feel the weight of it.
Rajiv Parikh:There's something about the wheel right.
Omar Akhtar:Yeah, nothing has come close to technology that I love as much as an iPod.
Rajiv Parikh:Yeah, great answer. All right, aj. What's a rule or boundary you've set for yourself that other people think is weird, but you're convinced makes your life better?
AJ Gandhi:I think I have to host two to four events per month to feel whole. So I think most people think. I'm crazy, for between luxury social events, go to market dinners, paella parties. Watches and whiskey, yeah, watches and whiskey is what's coming out.
Omar Akhtar:It's fun. I just like being around great people.
AJ Gandhi:It's such a busy, crazy, noisy world. What I think you need to do is create truly distinctive special experiences, and that's what brings people out Hear hear.
Omar Akhtar:I think that's great yeah.
Rajiv Parikh:Well, there you go. That's even a conventional wisdom breaker, and that's great, yeah. Well, there you go. That's even a conventional wisdom breaker who would say that they need to have four events a month to feel whole.
AJ Gandhi:I mean sometimes I think eight. It's crazy. So.
Rajiv Parikh:I just want to thank both of you for spending all that time today sharing your experiences, your wisdom, your learnings, your research. I deeply appreciate how much time and effort you guys put into this whole field of go-to-market. I love learning about what makes people buy, what gets them there. So having the two of you here just a treat. How thoughtful you both are and how interesting you are about it. So thank you. Thank you both for spending time with us.
Omar Akhtar:Thank you, raji, this has been wonderful. Yeah, it was great.
Rajiv Parikh:Great conversation. Wasn't that a fun conversation If you are into what makes people tick and how companies can build themselves up in this rapidly changing technology environment. There's so much here, especially in this AI-driven world. So Omar was talking about how old is new again, that the tactics of digital marketing, which we love so well and do use so much, in a way have been overused and don't differentiate, and so they need to compliment what's the more personal aspects of connecting companies together. So you take your brand, you have a distinctive level of positioning, you have a distinctive view of the world, and then you make that case on a person-to-person basis, in events, in dinners, in curated situations, but the problem has to be big enough for you to have those discussions with people. So it's about putting it all together and then what you would think is not scalable has to become scalable, and it's what's working for those companies that are growing faster than others.
Rajiv Parikh:I think the other point about AI and personalization it's stuff that we've covered somewhat before, but AJ, I think, laid it out really well and when I'm talking about those 20 industries and the five personas, I can build content about it at scale and build these sequences and the related digital marketing around it to really enhance the experience and really get people to the end. So tons of learning there. And then the whole notion of brand versus demand. At my company, we actually spend more on brand than demand, even though we're building demand and brand for so many companies, and so one has to reinforce the other and we forced a debate there. But really it's about putting them all together. But the pressure is still real. If you are in a company and you got to hit your numbers, it's going to be easier to do what's measurable, but you have to have a strong enough management team and a strong enough group of fellow go-to-market executives that are willing to pull together with you to help make the case for how brand and demand work together to drive current and future success. So lots of great stuff there, and I know I do a lot of events with AJ, but he definitely outpaces me, and who knew that? He just needs that to make his clock tick, and it tells you a lot about a person you know so well, and I think it's because he likes connecting with unique people and that's what these events give him.
Rajiv Parikh:Love, having both guests here. I hope you go to the Benchmarker report and subscribe to it. It's actually surprisingly very reasonable to get a lot of data about marketing for B2B SaaS firms. And, of course, take a look at GoToMarket Leader Society and, if you can, please come or sponsor some of the events there. I've gotten so much from it. We sponsor it at Position Squared and we also lead it. We do the website. We do a lot for it, because it's really an amazing way for people to connect and build long-lasting business and personal relationships. So this show is produced by Sandeep Parikh and Anand Shah, production assistance by Taryn Talley as well as Rhea Bhutta. It's edited by Laura Ballant. I'm your host, rajiv Parikh from Position Squared. We're a leading AI-driven growth marketing agency based in Silicon Valley. Come visit us at position2.com. This has been an F and funny production and we'll catch you next time. And remember folks be ever curious.
