CONTENTS
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"Harriet Johnston: The way marketing gets a voice at the table is by being the voice of the customer, rather than just coming in with what's up marketing strategies."
[0:00:11] Sunny Manivannan: Welcome to The Peerbound Podcast. I'm your host, Sunny Manivannan. Joining me today is Harriet Johnston, the Vice President of Marketing at Ashby. Harriet, such a pleasure to welcome you to The Peerbound Podcast. Great to have you here.
[0:00:27] Harriet Johnston: Thank you so much, Sunny.
[0:00:29] Sunny Manivannan: Well, let's start by asking, what made you join Ashby and what is Ashby?
[0:00:35] Harriet Johnston: What is Ashby, is probably easiest out, and it makes more sense why I joined. The super, super high level recruiting software that in-house recruiting teams use to manage everything from building out their interview plan, listing a job through to sourcing candidates, accepting inbound applications, managing the interview process, and then extending an offer, and all of the scheduling and stuff that happens in between. I think the things that make Ashby really interesting is the timing when they entered into the market.
We chatted briefly about this when we caught up the other day. But, since the iPhone, and iOS, and Android, there was this big sort of movement towards point solutions. And you should be building everything in sort of the app model of like go very deep on a very narrow area. I think it swings back and forth at different points in sort of the evolution of SaaS. But at the moment, we're very much move back towards compound startups or compound businesses, where you're seeing a lot of consolidation of software. Buyers are often looking for single-point solutions. You have less context switching, better UX workflows. Then, with the advent of AI, and all those sorts of things, single layers of data that you can start to access and sort of automate on top of.
When we think about what Ashby's doing, it's kind of bringing together a whole bunch of different point solutions into a single solution. Then, your second question, sorry, why did I join Ashby? Super transparently, I was pretty stoked with my role at Brex. I was reporting to some amazing people, and getting to do some pretty cool work, and it was a great company. I had a friend reach out to me asking if I'd be open to a calibration interview with the founder of this company and recruiting software called Ashby, Benji. So, I was like very happy to try and help out.
First conversation with Benji kind of left me thinking like, "Oh, this is a really smart guy building a very interesting product in a space that's been like largely undisrupted for a little while." There's been a proliferation of a lot of point solutions, kind of supporting these legacy ATS products, which is sort of the core of what our product is, but hadn't really kind of made that much progress. From there, I started chatting to him a lot more about what the customers think, what are the investors, sort of thesis around this, blah, blah, blah.
Eventually, where I landed was like, I was excited about the team that he was hiring. I was excited about a really consistent product roadmap, which I think for marketers is something that we often underestimate the value of when we're looking at roles, because it just takes time to do good marketing. Then, I spoke to a few customers, and spoke to a few investors, and was just like, "Oh, shit. This is pretty exciting." So, I can step into a company with no brand, or marketing presence, fantastic product market fit, and kind of build something, the way that I want to. Which I think in previous companies I have been, I've either been too junior or too late to be able to do that.
[0:03:34] Sunny Manivannan: Sounds like the perfect combination. If I remember correctly, Ashby was still in stealth mode –
[0:03:40] Harriet Johnston: That's right.
[0:03:40] Sunny Manivannan: – when you joined. Sort of job number one was to really take them and do a launch.
[0:03:45] Harriet Johnston: Yes. It was fun trying to do research on the company, because you'd search ashbyhq.com, and you get this like blank landing page with a couple of interesting logos, and type your email in here to join the waitlist and learn more. Then, there was just an inbox that the sales team was sort of managing from there. First job was like, what is our basic messaging and positioning going to look like in this market, and how do we define differentiation? I think we knew very clearly what that looked like at a product level. But then, it's about elevating that up to a narrative and something that people can buy, I think. 101 B2B marketing, but it's a more emotional sale than a B2C transaction is, and yet we still always seem to sort of orient around. Save this, 2X speed on this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, which is really just sad.
[0:04:37] Sunny Manivannan: I'm happy that you brought up this idea of how do you establish positioning and messaging for a company that's clearly a disruptor, but in a space where perhaps, expectations have been set by the previous crop of solutions. This is a very mature space, companies like Greenhouse, Lever, and others have been in the space for at least in the ATS space for a long time. So, how did you think about competitive differentiation, and separating yourself from the pack in the space? What did that look like for you and the company?
[0:05:11] Harriet Johnston: The first job was to work out like how are customers going to be able to anchor Ashby in terms of other products that they would be comparing? I think, every business goes through that like question of like, are we category-defining or do we fit naturally into an existing category? I think there are definitely times where you are category defining and doing something just very differently. That basically should only ever be the case where you are asking the user to do something fundamentally different from the way that they have been doing that specific job previously. Therefore, there isn't a clear comparison to what you're kind of offering, and there's some fantastic stats that founders love to anchor on when you talk about category definition around, "If you're able to do it, you'll own 70% of the market, blah, blah, blah." But you also then need to be committed to like several years of no one really understanding what you're doing and spending, I mean, at least millions of dollars kind of building it out.
For us, we were like, well, the closest thing that we fit into today is an applicant tracking system, which is sort of the core purchasing decision that you're going to make. But what it looks like compared to any of our key competitors, is you start with your applicant tracking system, and then you go and find a point solution for scheduling, a point solution for sourcing, and your CRM, a point solution for your analytics or your BI tool to manage it. So, we ended up – and I do not claim the final copy on this. But with, not just another ATS, which kind of placed us very clearly in the category, made it very clear that we didn't fit into kind of the preexisting construct. Then, the narrative that we built beyond that was – this is sort of the Franken-stack that you're probably used to using if you're a pretty sophisticated recruiting team. This is how you can consolidate these four or five points solutions, and that legacy ATS into a single solution with Ashby. The implication of this in terms of total cost of ownership is going to be all of these different benefits.
Transparently, we are reworking a lot of our messaging now, but it certainly got us a long way in terms of helping people understand whether or not our product fit inside their sort of buying consideration scope.
[0:07:29] Sunny Manivannan: It's fascinating to me that you decided to stay in the category and just say we are the right approach for 2024, or 2023, or whenever you finally ended up really going to market. Because the buying climate has certainly changed. All in one today I think has a lot more appeal to the sophisticated user, even than it did – certainly than it did four years ago, when everybody was saying – it almost felt like, if you were a director at a company and you didn't have a software solution to call your own, that you didn't really belong.
[0:08:06] Harriet Johnston: Yes, 100%. I mean, we've been able to 6X in size, and acquire publicly listed tens of thousands of persons, companies with this strategy. I think you don't have to be new and different every single time. You just need to help your buyer work out how or when the right solution for them. I think we get so carried away without benefits as opposed to thinking about how the buyer is going to be evaluating the purchase.
[0:08:36] Sunny Manivannan: As a product marketer myself, I obviously had a long read through your website. What struck me very early on, it's just the simplicity of, we are an ATS, we are all in one. Here's what we mean by all in one, here are the different products. The products are not named crazy things. They are named things that you would expect them to be named. It's just really, really well-executed basics, and it's so rare to see that. Kudos to you and the team for executing on that, and the success that you've achieved today. So, congratulations.
[0:09:08] Harriet Johnston: Appreciate that. Big shout out to Tony, who's been doing a lot of that work.
[0:09:12] Sunny Manivannan: Harriet, I want to ask you about building a marketing team. I think, over the last year and a half, it's been a lot of the opposite story of rationalizing, or right size, or any of the other buzzwords that you want to do, to basically describe, you are reducing the size of your team. Now, here you are, you've built a team from scratch over the last few years at Ashby. What is that like? What has it been like for you? How do you design your marketing team to achieve the goals that you want to? How do you even start thinking about that?
[0:09:41] Harriet Johnston: We've been very lucky, I think, I guess intentional. We'd be frustratingly patient with hiring operating principle at the company, which is very much like lived and breathed day to day. So, we generally open headcount after we need them, as opposed to preemptively. There are plenty of implications for that, but I think, ultimately means, to date, we have never been in a position that we need to even consider downsizing. The headcount is growing into the business, always. In fact, yes, in terms of hiring, and building out a team, obviously being a recruiting software, I thought a lot about this for the last sort of 18 months. Then, unlike a lot of companies that I've worked out in the past, where I've had amazing TA teams supporting me, it's been largely hiring manager-led. Then, only recently, have we been sort of really scaling up our TA teams.
Part of that was, founders wanted us to be dogfooding the product, and really living and breathing inside the experience every day. Then, part of it was sort of frustratingly patient with hiring and just moving very slowly in terms of expanding out any of the different teams. If I was starting this all again, or kind of going back to the very beginning, the first thing that I always think you should do when you're building out a team is kind of ask the questions that I'm shocked people don't ask to get headcount open, and they just go for it. But it's like, what am I trying to do over the next sort of 6, to 12, to 18 months, and how are we defining success. I think you kind of go through the exercise there, being like, what is the North Star metric that our business is operating against. That will almost always be, in our case, annual recurring revenue or some sort of revenue metric.
You then pare down to what is marketing's responsibility and contributing to that top line goal so that we are directly tied to the North Star. In Ashby's case, it is demo, stage two demos booked, which is a qualified sales demo. That is, first call has happened, and the sales rep has said, "Yes, we have an active deal here," and they've moved them into stage two. I think a little asterisks there, and I won't go into this because I'm talking about hiring now.
It's a really valuable thing as a marketing team to kind of pay attention to MQLs, and pay attention to sort of stage one deals. But you're never going to earn credibility or respect from your sales team, or broader business if you are generating trashy leads or just really large volumes, contacts inside your CRM that you're able to outreach to. There are some nuanced asterisks as to that depending on your business type. But for the most part, anchoring on a stage two, or sales-qualified demo will just set you up to be much more successful and a hell of a lot more ruthless in terms of the channels that you're going to invest into medium long term.
Then, as long as your sales cycle isn't crazy long, and I think like anything sub, six to nine months falls into this definition. It's worked and I've tried a bunch of different types of ways of measuring success in this one, seems to carry the most sort of weight, and best direction for the team.
But that ramble aside, you've got your North Star, you've got your team hero metric, and then you go back through and you're like, "Okay. What do we need to do to be able to get there?" That is, spending a lot of time with your existing customers, and prospects, and sort of deeply understanding where they hang out, what motivates them, what they're needing, or not receiving at the moment that your product is uniquely positioned to be able to benefit them with. Then, rather than doing any of the streamline, powerful, automate language, like speak back in the language that they're using as to what that's going to be. Then, you can define very quickly what channels are going to make the most sense because they are hanging out in those spaces. Then, what are the messages that we need to be able to deliver to them? Then, what are they not getting today that they want, that we can maybe be like useful, or helpful to build that top of funnel?
In my experience, in my career to date, that boils down to the same marketing strategy everywhere, at a very top line, which is you need, and everyone talks about it a bit differently with their model and fancy diagram. But it's either like demand creation, demand capture, or fuel engine, or insert buzzword, buzzword. That is essentially any good marketing strategy is going to be a combination of having the creative, the narrative, and the story that you need to be able to deliver. Then, it's the engine or demand capture, which is the infrastructure to be able to identify at a contact level who you're going after in a B2B world, at least, have the infrastructure be able to actually outreach to them, and have accurate contact information attached to them. Then, the channels that you're going to be operating inside in terms of trying to add to our reach.
So, very long-winded way of saying that in almost every instance, you're going to land, that your original marketing team needs to be a combination of someone that can do content and that can be either in the shape of a product marketing manager or in terms of a content manager. I could ramble when we get there about what a great content manager should look like. We have Adam who is incredible. It's going to be someone who can create creative. I think teams wait way too long to hire designers, and it just stops you from being able to behave the size you want to be perceived as for a really long time. So, you get shitty creative, being output against great messaging.
Then, you're going to need someone in demand generation, or growth marketing, depending on the kind of audience that you're going after. They're kind of your first three roles. Then, from there, you're going to be starting to think about the layer below that, which is going to be much more nuance to the types of channels, and the types of messaging that you're trying to output. Some of the common ones are going to be like a community lead, and there, I have a strong opinion that that person should represent your ICP, as opposed to just being sort of generic community. That you might be looking for like a data scientist, if you have really interesting information you want to be able to extract, you might be looking for recruiting operations, if you're running particularly complex plays in terms of your demand gen strategy. List goes on, and on, and on, and on.
[0:16:00] Sunny Manivannan: Yes. You've covered so much ground in terms of what do you do when you are the first marketer, and you're the marketing leader in a company that has to do everything from scratch.
[0:16:12] Harriet Johnston: I think I was at a conference last weekend; Emily Kramer had this great sign that she had up, which was a picture of a ram with a big red mark through, and it's like no random acts of marketing. It's such a real thing when you have not defined exactly what your marketing strategy is, and you're sort of executing against lots of activities, so you have a less of an issue for us. But a founder that's just got like lots of ideas, and you're kind of actioning idea, actioning idea. So, it's going back and be like, what do we need to do, and then very quickly identifying the kinds of roles that we needed to hire out to be able to go for that demand creation, demand capture foundations work that underpins a strategy.
[0:16:55] Sunny Manivannan: It's fabulous. One of the things you said that really struck me is, this idea of, don't wait too long to hire a designer because then, you're handcuffing yourself with bad design while you may have great everything else. But the bad design will sort of bring everything – hold everything back. That's not something I hear too often. Tell us a little bit more about that. What does it take to go get that sort of first designer role approved in marketing? Why do you prioritize that so much, and what's been the impact in Ashby?
[0:17:24] Harriet Johnston: Something you want to be vetting for when you're joining a company is like, does the leader that you're going to be working for actually believe in marketing? Then, if they do, do they prioritize brand? I think if the answer to those two questions is no, probably stay away from that role. But in my case, it was – we needed to build a website, because we didn't have one in place, we need to be able to build sales collateral because we didn't have any outside of some decks that sales team kind of pulled together themselves. We didn't have any brand blueprint to be able to start scaling content. But the ambition of the company was to be doubling year on year or more for the intermediate future.
So, the conversation that I had with Benji was, if we want to be able to have a really strong foundation that we can scale consistently on. And if we want to show up as the size that we want to appear in the market, then it's going to be really important that we both have great messaging, and we have like supporting creative. I think, great creative without great messaging is like so many of those terribly fluffy brands that you see in the D2C space. Then, great messaging with shitty creative is just like, it doesn't get noticed. You just scroll straight past it because it gets lost in the sea of other information that is being thrown at people every day. I think I was lucky. I don't want to pretend that I had some sort of like super sophisticated approach, but Benji was extremely reasonable. Yes, that makes a ton of sense. We brought on Meno, initially in a contract capacity, and then he's been sort of scaling up, and is very much an embedded part of the team today.
[0:18:58] Sunny Manivannan: It's fabulous. It's incredible. I love what you said about the flavor of the month, D2C brands. We all see the subway ads, we all see the ads everywhere, and they all look the same now. You're no longer sure what the product is anymore, but you just know what the vibe, you know what it looks like, and you know what it is.
[0:19:14] Harriet Johnston: No one's taking the time to understand what they're actually selling. You definitely need both.
[0:19:21] Sunny Manivannan: That's right. Now, that makes a lot of sense. Wonderful. How do you get people to join your company, and your team, and not another equally attractive, or perhaps even more attractive opportunity? How do you really attract the best talent?
[0:19:37] Harriet Johnston: I will not turn this into an infomercial for Ashby.
[0:19:41] Sunny Manivannan: You did promise me that and you stood true to your promise.
[0:19:43] Harriet Johnston: I did promise you that, so I will not do that.
[0:19:45] Sunny Manivannan: I'm a fan of Ashby and I did some of the marketing for you.
[0:19:49] Harriet Johnston: Amazing. I think it is kind of a three-part piece, like one, you need to have a very clear point of view in the market about what you're trying to solve, how you're trying to solve it, and like demonstrate product market fit. I think, increasingly, people are getting good at sniffing out companies that are just sort of like talking a big game or don't actually know what they're trying to offer. So, getting very clear there.
I think, the second is like making sure that your job descriptions are differentiated and compelling. I think it's the same as product marketing 101, and we have a pretty strong point of view internally that JD should start at the top with who you are as the hiring manager, and why it would be interesting to come and work with you, who Ashby is, and what we're trying to do, and why it's an interesting problem to solve. I think, recruiting software is not the sexiest product in the world to be trying to push. We're not unfortunately solving any of the world's biggest perils. There's like, definitely a mission there, like you're helping talent teams find great candidates, then build these interesting things. But it's not AI, and it's not curing cancer, and it's not like building something that has truly like category defining, never been built before.
It's finding what those things are inside our products that make it compelling. A lot of that for us is, I guess, the compound startup concept. But then, more interestingly, I think the candidates, we have a pretty novel approach to communication style. So, most people's calendars will have only a few hours of meetings each week, and then we have very strict guidelines around how to stack an email, and all these other channels. It pretty much makes people just much more efficient. So, we have like long-form content, explaining what that looks like. We don't have company values, we have operating principles, and then kind of talking through how that's different and interesting. So, you start to build what is the business and why is it different?
The next part of your JD, you should tell the person exactly what they will be doing and who you do not want to hire. I think that last part is so often missed, like in my job descriptions, it'll be like, this probably isn't a fit for you if, and one, two, three, four. So, people are able to self-select out a lot more easily. Then, I think, I mean, if you're operating in New York, Denver, or California, or Washington, it's illegal not to do this now. But in a lot of places, it's still a case. Be transparent about what your comps look like. There's like, you shouldn't be posting roles with no idea what you're willing to pay someone. There are tools like open comp and pay, and those sorts of things now, where you can get really fairly reliable benchmarks.
Talk about what your kind of culture is going to look like, and then, be really transparent about the interview process. I think, so often, people kind of enter into an interview process, and they kind of don't know who they're talking to next, or what they're expected to do. It reduces their ability to perform in any of those interviews, and therefore, your ability to consistently evaluate whether or not the candidates are good. So, that's sort of the very rumbly like, have a really clear point of view of what you're doing, have a really good job description. Then, as you start interviewing candidates, make sure you deliver like a good interview experience. It's really not that hard.
We track our candidate NPS, just like a survey that's automatically triggered afterwards. The number of times I hear comments like, it was so good to get feedback. This is the first time that has happened in, insert number of interviews that I've done. It's so nice not to be ghosted through the interview process. It was so great hearing back from you, every time within 24 hours of the interview happening. Like these things that are very easy to do, and tools like Ashby make it much easier, because you can set automatic reminders, or point things out in your pipeline. But even if you're running this no notion table, like staying on top of that will exponentially increase the likelihood of an offer acceptance at the end of the cycle, which is ultimately the reason that you're running this entire process. So, more than worthwhile to invest in properly.
Then, you should treat every single candidate that comes through your process as a potential customer. Even if they're not directly inside your ICP in terms of who you're targeting, it's amazing how quickly word of mouth spreads on brands, and it's a touch point at a much deeper level with just about any other kind of touch point you're going to have with the prospect. Three different processes.
[0:24:31] Sunny Manivannan: That's very – I mean, there's so much insight packed in there. The last thing you said, I think is particularly interesting in the sense that you don't – most people don't think about recruiting as a brand building opportunity for the company itself. You often hear the phrase employer brand versus – there's a marketing brand, there's an employer your brand, and people treat them as two distinct things. But it is really ultimately just one company, and it's one company's brand. The VP of marketing should care a lot about what a candidate's experience is with your company.
[0:25:08] Harriet Johnston: Totally agree. It's not hard to do, like generally, if you're getting brand right on the brand side, or product side of the house, you've got 90% of the assets. I think, like at least, what I'm observing at the moment, like employee-led content is the next sexy thing following community in terms of how people are starting to sell. This is an awesome opportunity to kind of bring those two things together, and demonstrate not only to your prospects that you have smart people working on the problem, that is going to be what they're purchasing against. But it also gives people kind of a platform where you think about how you retain top talent. It's sort of, kind of, usually comes down to like, do they feel like they belong in the organization? Do they feel like they have growth opportunities in the organization? And do they feel fairly compensated? In terms of that growth piece, helping people build their own platforms or brands within your organization, as long as it's done within kind of the guardrails that you need it to is awesome.
[0:26:11] Sunny Manivannan: It's great. I was chuckling when he talked about some of the – from a technologist's perspective, would seem to be a basic feature of, make sure that you don't ghost employees, use technology to have reminders sent to make sure that you're following up. Those are very basic features from an engineering perspective, but those are the features that actually do matter to employees, and ultimately, what mattered to – whether your product creates value, and whether it's – ultimately, your company's brand relies on this sort of thing happening in a programmatic way. It's always fun when technology enables us to just be more human, toward each other.
[0:26:46] Harriet Johnston: Exactly. I think, ultimately, that's what a really good ATS is doing for you. It's giving you real time, reliable data so that you can understand at a macro and micro level exactly how the candidate experience is being managed. And it's holding you accountable where you drop the ball, so that you can kind of come back and make sure that you're improving the process.
[0:27:11] Sunny Manivannan: To our listeners, I promised the Ashby commercial is over. I'm going to ask Harriet some difficult questions now. Starting with this one, which is, what's been the most challenging thing that you've done at Ashby to date?
[0:27:25] Harriet Johnston: I think probably the most competitive piece with Ashby to date has been trying to maintain a narrative that works in a rapidly changing environment. So, to provide a little bit more context there. When I first joined Ashby, it was the very tail end of hyper growth, free VC dollars, very low interest style environment where you didn't have to do much to grow. And TA teams were being stretched in really brutal ways, where they're being told to hire faster than they've ever been able to hire before. So, they were buying this ATS, and then they were buying all this point solutions I talked about before. It was becoming kind of this – it was just like, we just need the infrastructure to get us through to hit this headcount number.
Then, we saw sort of this total U-turn in terms of what the environment looks like. So, we had this 12-month window where we were seeing truly talented talent leaders. just being like, let go, left, right, and center. I think the statistic is one, and two heads of talent in the tech space in particular had been let go in the last 18 months.
[0:28:39] Sunny Manivannan: Wow, I didn't realize that.
[0:28:40] Harriet Johnston: Yes. All of a sudden, you see this finance, putting a ton of pressure, saying you need to spend less money now. TA teams kind of going back through and being like, "Where can we cut costs? How do we try and retain as much of that headcount as possible?" The narrative that we were able to build out of that was this concept of the Franken-stack, the beautiful world of Ashby afterwards. That worked for 12 months. We grew on that kind of messaging really, really effectively. Now, we're in a year where it's been more than 12 months, since all of those contract renewals came up, and people made a decision whether or not to like switch ATS, as in consolidate on Ashby, or to just operate on their core ATS, and kind of ignore these different point solutions.
Franken-stack doesn't work anymore, because no one has won. They either have consolidated or they're the big ones. So. it's like a new messaging challenge where you're like, okay, so that works really well for us, we need to be able to let that go, and realize the reality of what our existing environment looks like. I think, total cliche, but the way marketing gets a voice at the table is by being the voice of the customer, rather than just coming in with lots of marketing strategies.
What we've been doing and making sure we do and we have like roles inside our team, like everyone has to be either speaking to at least one customer, or listening to at least a couple of customer calls every week. Is staying close to that changing narrative, so we can try and kind of keep up with it. But the implications, the bigger. and bigger you get is, you're changing your narrative, you're also changing your website, and you're changing all of your sales collateral, and you're training a sales team on how to speak about the product differently.
There's a lot of cascading implications, and I think, probably our biggest challenge so far is just making sure we're staying in front of that narrative all the time, even though it's changing a lot. And being comfortable with the fact that things that have been working for us, even three or six months ago, don't necessarily work for us today. I think that's probably one of the biggest themes in marketing at the moment. We've got proliferation of amazing technology right now that enables you to do all kinds of weird and wonderful things, whether it's AI-based STRs, or personalization at levels we've never been able to achieve before through products like clay.
There's just so many different kinds of moments and you're so you're asking your team to change there, then you're asking your team to rethink messaging constantly. Then, you're asking the team to reproduce all of these assets that happened before. I think that requires level of systems thinking and organization that doesn't necessarily fall inside the natural core skill set of a really creative marketer.
[0:31:19] Sunny Manivannan: The idea of having to change messaging every 12 months is so scary to every marketer, but I think in this market, it's almost – it is a necessity to be able to do that. How do you stay on top of voice of the customer at Ashby?
[0:31:30] Harriet Johnston: I think there's sort of a – it's three parts. I love talking in threes. I don't know why. I think, the first one is, it shouldn't be something that you do sporadically. It should be something that's kind of always on and built into the culture of your team. So, as a marketing leader, when I'm talking to peers, strongly recommend building systems and expectations with your team that they are staying close to that voice, and challenging each other. Sor of like, idea meritocracy in terms of where the messaging no longer feels like it's resonating. That's across the entire board. It doesn't come as this like, messaging was working, then all of a sudden, tomorrow, it's not. It's like, hey, messaging is becoming less and less effective, and we're catching it as it's happening. So that we're starting to move the ship as when it's occurring.
I think the second piece is, it's not marketing's job by itself to do messaging, and it should be a team sport that's kind of across your leadership as well. So, Mike who's in our sales team was super involved. Chapman, who's a solutions engineer. Benji, who's our founder. Kelsey and her team, and customer success were pulling, and asking for inputs from a lot of different groups at different times, and dedicating time, and making it a company priority to make sure that we're ln track as opposed to just being product marketing, or just marketing.
Then, I think the third thing is like, when you talk about the three pillars at the top, like the foundations piece as being thoughtful on really simple, easy things. Like naming documents properly and keeping things in folders. Having a basic tool that costs virtually nothing that will help you understand when assets haven't been looked at for several months. So, you kind of keep your database clean. Then, being thoughtful about the kinds of tooling that you use for design, so that you aren't working in really static assets that are hard to sort of test or change.
That kind of goes all the way through to our website. We use a product called Story Block there, which means that anyone can go in and edit text, and build blocks and stuff, rather than relying on engineering every time. Then, we can deploy our engineer against kind of higher bandwidth work. It means that our designer has like a ruthless system in terms of how we manage our sigma files, with naming conventions, and dates. Then, even down to like Google Docs and Drive, there are rules around how we have our drive set up and what you name each document, and then what the first three lines in every document looks like. It just makes everything a hell of a lot more searchable. I don't think you worry about trying to do this retroactively, it'd be a total waste of time. But it's easy today to start introducing some basic inventions, and if anyone wants to send me a LinkedIn message, I am happy to share kind of our templates on it.
[0:34:22] Sunny Manivannan: You're about to get a whole lot of LinkedIn messages.
[0:34:25] Harriet Johnston: I welcome it. I started my career out as a lawyer, so I think a lot in like document management, and systems, and it really does just make life so much easier moving forward.
[0:34:38] Sunny Manivannan: Wonderful. Well, listen, we're coming up close to the end of our conversation. I just have a couple of more questions for you. This is a section that's titled Influential Peers. Works or people that have influenced your career. I'll start off by asking about a book or movie that you'd recommend to everybody and why.
[0:34:56] Harriet Johnston: Yes, for sure. I saw this question in the email you sent me. I think a book that probably isn't recommended all of the time that I think is just fantastic is Storytelling with Data. I think one of the gaps or perceived gaps for a lot of marketing teams is they don't know how to communicate the way that so many other departments think and operate. This book basically just like walks you through foundations of like, use this kind of table, or graph, or chart to tell this kind of story.
It was my boss back at early days of Uber, Georgie, who now leads marketing for them globally, that gave it to me. She's like, "You need to get your shit together in terms of these slide decks, they are awful. If I see another graph that looks like this." It made such a difference to how I could communicate, because suddenly, I could show up in meetings, presenting ideas or strategies in the same language as our sales, finance, and sort of the rest of the leadership team.
Then, I mean, I think the other thing on books is like, it helps a lot as a marketer also to read fiction, and biographies, and those kinds of things, and keep stretching your mind in different directions. It's very easy to end up like – I think David Gerhardt's Exit Five Podcast, Peerbound, like your podcast, like they're fantastic resources, but you all start thinking the same way, and it's like important. So, some of the best books I've read in the last couple of months has been Educated, Why Fish Don't Exist, and Creativity, Inc.
[0:36:32] Sunny Manivannan: Great. Those are great recommendations. I don't know if I've read Storytelling with Data, but I have a similar story to you earlier in my career of a chart that was just way too colorful. I got some colorful feedback from my manager at the time, which I still remember. Love Creativity, Inc. as well, that's just certainly worth the reread. Great. Last question Harriet is, who are your favorite SaaS marketers and why? I know you probably have a long list, but give us some of the ones near the top of the list for you.
[0:37:05] Harriet Johnston: For sure, I will exclude my team, because I don't want to mention just a few people, but some really incredible people there. I am very proud of what we felt. Kevin White and Gunter with HyperGrowth Partners, I think produce some really interesting thought leadership. Just like a very hacky approach to demand generation, or growth marketing, which I appreciate deeply. So, we've been able to build pretty cool prospector, and a lot of automations as a result of working pretty closely with them. So, big shout out. Dimi who I worked with, and Alisha at Brex. Alisha is one of the best product marketing managers I've ever worked with and it just takes like a very, very practical, and thoughtful approach to product marketing. I don't think she does that much thought leadership, and Dimi's a little bit the same. But definitely worth a follow or connect [inaudible 0:38:04] for that. I can keep rambling for the next 15 minutes. I spent a lot of time like reading and following other people in the space just to try and make sure that I'm at least trying to keep up with all of the new stuff that's coming out.
[0:38:18] Sunny Manivannan: Fabulous. Well, listen, thank you so, so much for stopping by The Peerbound Podcast. I learned a lot from you, and I strongly suspect our listeners will as well. So, once again, a huge thank you and congratulations to you on all the success and great work at Ashby, and wishing you the very best.
[0:38:33] Harriet Johnston: Thank you so much. I love your podcast. So, it was an absolute pleasure getting to be here. Thank you, Sunny.
[0:38:40] Sunny Manivannan: Thanks, Harriet.
[END]
Tune in on Apple Podcasts or Spotify
"Harriet Johnston: The way marketing gets a voice at the table is by being the voice of the customer, rather than just coming in with what's up marketing strategies."
[0:00:11] Sunny Manivannan: Welcome to The Peerbound Podcast. I'm your host, Sunny Manivannan. Joining me today is Harriet Johnston, the Vice President of Marketing at Ashby. Harriet, such a pleasure to welcome you to The Peerbound Podcast. Great to have you here.
[0:00:27] Harriet Johnston: Thank you so much, Sunny.
[0:00:29] Sunny Manivannan: Well, let's start by asking, what made you join Ashby and what is Ashby?
[0:00:35] Harriet Johnston: What is Ashby, is probably easiest out, and it makes more sense why I joined. The super, super high level recruiting software that in-house recruiting teams use to manage everything from building out their interview plan, listing a job through to sourcing candidates, accepting inbound applications, managing the interview process, and then extending an offer, and all of the scheduling and stuff that happens in between. I think the things that make Ashby really interesting is the timing when they entered into the market.
We chatted briefly about this when we caught up the other day. But, since the iPhone, and iOS, and Android, there was this big sort of movement towards point solutions. And you should be building everything in sort of the app model of like go very deep on a very narrow area. I think it swings back and forth at different points in sort of the evolution of SaaS. But at the moment, we're very much move back towards compound startups or compound businesses, where you're seeing a lot of consolidation of software. Buyers are often looking for single-point solutions. You have less context switching, better UX workflows. Then, with the advent of AI, and all those sorts of things, single layers of data that you can start to access and sort of automate on top of.
When we think about what Ashby's doing, it's kind of bringing together a whole bunch of different point solutions into a single solution. Then, your second question, sorry, why did I join Ashby? Super transparently, I was pretty stoked with my role at Brex. I was reporting to some amazing people, and getting to do some pretty cool work, and it was a great company. I had a friend reach out to me asking if I'd be open to a calibration interview with the founder of this company and recruiting software called Ashby, Benji. So, I was like very happy to try and help out.
First conversation with Benji kind of left me thinking like, "Oh, this is a really smart guy building a very interesting product in a space that's been like largely undisrupted for a little while." There's been a proliferation of a lot of point solutions, kind of supporting these legacy ATS products, which is sort of the core of what our product is, but hadn't really kind of made that much progress. From there, I started chatting to him a lot more about what the customers think, what are the investors, sort of thesis around this, blah, blah, blah.
Eventually, where I landed was like, I was excited about the team that he was hiring. I was excited about a really consistent product roadmap, which I think for marketers is something that we often underestimate the value of when we're looking at roles, because it just takes time to do good marketing. Then, I spoke to a few customers, and spoke to a few investors, and was just like, "Oh, shit. This is pretty exciting." So, I can step into a company with no brand, or marketing presence, fantastic product market fit, and kind of build something, the way that I want to. Which I think in previous companies I have been, I've either been too junior or too late to be able to do that.
[0:03:34] Sunny Manivannan: Sounds like the perfect combination. If I remember correctly, Ashby was still in stealth mode –
[0:03:40] Harriet Johnston: That's right.
[0:03:40] Sunny Manivannan: – when you joined. Sort of job number one was to really take them and do a launch.
[0:03:45] Harriet Johnston: Yes. It was fun trying to do research on the company, because you'd search ashbyhq.com, and you get this like blank landing page with a couple of interesting logos, and type your email in here to join the waitlist and learn more. Then, there was just an inbox that the sales team was sort of managing from there. First job was like, what is our basic messaging and positioning going to look like in this market, and how do we define differentiation? I think we knew very clearly what that looked like at a product level. But then, it's about elevating that up to a narrative and something that people can buy, I think. 101 B2B marketing, but it's a more emotional sale than a B2C transaction is, and yet we still always seem to sort of orient around. Save this, 2X speed on this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, which is really just sad.
[0:04:37] Sunny Manivannan: I'm happy that you brought up this idea of how do you establish positioning and messaging for a company that's clearly a disruptor, but in a space where perhaps, expectations have been set by the previous crop of solutions. This is a very mature space, companies like Greenhouse, Lever, and others have been in the space for at least in the ATS space for a long time. So, how did you think about competitive differentiation, and separating yourself from the pack in the space? What did that look like for you and the company?
[0:05:11] Harriet Johnston: The first job was to work out like how are customers going to be able to anchor Ashby in terms of other products that they would be comparing? I think, every business goes through that like question of like, are we category-defining or do we fit naturally into an existing category? I think there are definitely times where you are category defining and doing something just very differently. That basically should only ever be the case where you are asking the user to do something fundamentally different from the way that they have been doing that specific job previously. Therefore, there isn't a clear comparison to what you're kind of offering, and there's some fantastic stats that founders love to anchor on when you talk about category definition around, "If you're able to do it, you'll own 70% of the market, blah, blah, blah." But you also then need to be committed to like several years of no one really understanding what you're doing and spending, I mean, at least millions of dollars kind of building it out.
For us, we were like, well, the closest thing that we fit into today is an applicant tracking system, which is sort of the core purchasing decision that you're going to make. But what it looks like compared to any of our key competitors, is you start with your applicant tracking system, and then you go and find a point solution for scheduling, a point solution for sourcing, and your CRM, a point solution for your analytics or your BI tool to manage it. So, we ended up – and I do not claim the final copy on this. But with, not just another ATS, which kind of placed us very clearly in the category, made it very clear that we didn't fit into kind of the preexisting construct. Then, the narrative that we built beyond that was – this is sort of the Franken-stack that you're probably used to using if you're a pretty sophisticated recruiting team. This is how you can consolidate these four or five points solutions, and that legacy ATS into a single solution with Ashby. The implication of this in terms of total cost of ownership is going to be all of these different benefits.
Transparently, we are reworking a lot of our messaging now, but it certainly got us a long way in terms of helping people understand whether or not our product fit inside their sort of buying consideration scope.
[0:07:29] Sunny Manivannan: It's fascinating to me that you decided to stay in the category and just say we are the right approach for 2024, or 2023, or whenever you finally ended up really going to market. Because the buying climate has certainly changed. All in one today I think has a lot more appeal to the sophisticated user, even than it did – certainly than it did four years ago, when everybody was saying – it almost felt like, if you were a director at a company and you didn't have a software solution to call your own, that you didn't really belong.
[0:08:06] Harriet Johnston: Yes, 100%. I mean, we've been able to 6X in size, and acquire publicly listed tens of thousands of persons, companies with this strategy. I think you don't have to be new and different every single time. You just need to help your buyer work out how or when the right solution for them. I think we get so carried away without benefits as opposed to thinking about how the buyer is going to be evaluating the purchase.
[0:08:36] Sunny Manivannan: As a product marketer myself, I obviously had a long read through your website. What struck me very early on, it's just the simplicity of, we are an ATS, we are all in one. Here's what we mean by all in one, here are the different products. The products are not named crazy things. They are named things that you would expect them to be named. It's just really, really well-executed basics, and it's so rare to see that. Kudos to you and the team for executing on that, and the success that you've achieved today. So, congratulations.
[0:09:08] Harriet Johnston: Appreciate that. Big shout out to Tony, who's been doing a lot of that work.
[0:09:12] Sunny Manivannan: Harriet, I want to ask you about building a marketing team. I think, over the last year and a half, it's been a lot of the opposite story of rationalizing, or right size, or any of the other buzzwords that you want to do, to basically describe, you are reducing the size of your team. Now, here you are, you've built a team from scratch over the last few years at Ashby. What is that like? What has it been like for you? How do you design your marketing team to achieve the goals that you want to? How do you even start thinking about that?
[0:09:41] Harriet Johnston: We've been very lucky, I think, I guess intentional. We'd be frustratingly patient with hiring operating principle at the company, which is very much like lived and breathed day to day. So, we generally open headcount after we need them, as opposed to preemptively. There are plenty of implications for that, but I think, ultimately means, to date, we have never been in a position that we need to even consider downsizing. The headcount is growing into the business, always. In fact, yes, in terms of hiring, and building out a team, obviously being a recruiting software, I thought a lot about this for the last sort of 18 months. Then, unlike a lot of companies that I've worked out in the past, where I've had amazing TA teams supporting me, it's been largely hiring manager-led. Then, only recently, have we been sort of really scaling up our TA teams.
Part of that was, founders wanted us to be dogfooding the product, and really living and breathing inside the experience every day. Then, part of it was sort of frustratingly patient with hiring and just moving very slowly in terms of expanding out any of the different teams. If I was starting this all again, or kind of going back to the very beginning, the first thing that I always think you should do when you're building out a team is kind of ask the questions that I'm shocked people don't ask to get headcount open, and they just go for it. But it's like, what am I trying to do over the next sort of 6, to 12, to 18 months, and how are we defining success. I think you kind of go through the exercise there, being like, what is the North Star metric that our business is operating against. That will almost always be, in our case, annual recurring revenue or some sort of revenue metric.
You then pare down to what is marketing's responsibility and contributing to that top line goal so that we are directly tied to the North Star. In Ashby's case, it is demo, stage two demos booked, which is a qualified sales demo. That is, first call has happened, and the sales rep has said, "Yes, we have an active deal here," and they've moved them into stage two. I think a little asterisks there, and I won't go into this because I'm talking about hiring now.
It's a really valuable thing as a marketing team to kind of pay attention to MQLs, and pay attention to sort of stage one deals. But you're never going to earn credibility or respect from your sales team, or broader business if you are generating trashy leads or just really large volumes, contacts inside your CRM that you're able to outreach to. There are some nuanced asterisks as to that depending on your business type. But for the most part, anchoring on a stage two, or sales-qualified demo will just set you up to be much more successful and a hell of a lot more ruthless in terms of the channels that you're going to invest into medium long term.
Then, as long as your sales cycle isn't crazy long, and I think like anything sub, six to nine months falls into this definition. It's worked and I've tried a bunch of different types of ways of measuring success in this one, seems to carry the most sort of weight, and best direction for the team.
But that ramble aside, you've got your North Star, you've got your team hero metric, and then you go back through and you're like, "Okay. What do we need to do to be able to get there?" That is, spending a lot of time with your existing customers, and prospects, and sort of deeply understanding where they hang out, what motivates them, what they're needing, or not receiving at the moment that your product is uniquely positioned to be able to benefit them with. Then, rather than doing any of the streamline, powerful, automate language, like speak back in the language that they're using as to what that's going to be. Then, you can define very quickly what channels are going to make the most sense because they are hanging out in those spaces. Then, what are the messages that we need to be able to deliver to them? Then, what are they not getting today that they want, that we can maybe be like useful, or helpful to build that top of funnel?
In my experience, in my career to date, that boils down to the same marketing strategy everywhere, at a very top line, which is you need, and everyone talks about it a bit differently with their model and fancy diagram. But it's either like demand creation, demand capture, or fuel engine, or insert buzzword, buzzword. That is essentially any good marketing strategy is going to be a combination of having the creative, the narrative, and the story that you need to be able to deliver. Then, it's the engine or demand capture, which is the infrastructure to be able to identify at a contact level who you're going after in a B2B world, at least, have the infrastructure be able to actually outreach to them, and have accurate contact information attached to them. Then, the channels that you're going to be operating inside in terms of trying to add to our reach.
So, very long-winded way of saying that in almost every instance, you're going to land, that your original marketing team needs to be a combination of someone that can do content and that can be either in the shape of a product marketing manager or in terms of a content manager. I could ramble when we get there about what a great content manager should look like. We have Adam who is incredible. It's going to be someone who can create creative. I think teams wait way too long to hire designers, and it just stops you from being able to behave the size you want to be perceived as for a really long time. So, you get shitty creative, being output against great messaging.
Then, you're going to need someone in demand generation, or growth marketing, depending on the kind of audience that you're going after. They're kind of your first three roles. Then, from there, you're going to be starting to think about the layer below that, which is going to be much more nuance to the types of channels, and the types of messaging that you're trying to output. Some of the common ones are going to be like a community lead, and there, I have a strong opinion that that person should represent your ICP, as opposed to just being sort of generic community. That you might be looking for like a data scientist, if you have really interesting information you want to be able to extract, you might be looking for recruiting operations, if you're running particularly complex plays in terms of your demand gen strategy. List goes on, and on, and on, and on.
[0:16:00] Sunny Manivannan: Yes. You've covered so much ground in terms of what do you do when you are the first marketer, and you're the marketing leader in a company that has to do everything from scratch.
[0:16:12] Harriet Johnston: I think I was at a conference last weekend; Emily Kramer had this great sign that she had up, which was a picture of a ram with a big red mark through, and it's like no random acts of marketing. It's such a real thing when you have not defined exactly what your marketing strategy is, and you're sort of executing against lots of activities, so you have a less of an issue for us. But a founder that's just got like lots of ideas, and you're kind of actioning idea, actioning idea. So, it's going back and be like, what do we need to do, and then very quickly identifying the kinds of roles that we needed to hire out to be able to go for that demand creation, demand capture foundations work that underpins a strategy.
[0:16:55] Sunny Manivannan: It's fabulous. One of the things you said that really struck me is, this idea of, don't wait too long to hire a designer because then, you're handcuffing yourself with bad design while you may have great everything else. But the bad design will sort of bring everything – hold everything back. That's not something I hear too often. Tell us a little bit more about that. What does it take to go get that sort of first designer role approved in marketing? Why do you prioritize that so much, and what's been the impact in Ashby?
[0:17:24] Harriet Johnston: Something you want to be vetting for when you're joining a company is like, does the leader that you're going to be working for actually believe in marketing? Then, if they do, do they prioritize brand? I think if the answer to those two questions is no, probably stay away from that role. But in my case, it was – we needed to build a website, because we didn't have one in place, we need to be able to build sales collateral because we didn't have any outside of some decks that sales team kind of pulled together themselves. We didn't have any brand blueprint to be able to start scaling content. But the ambition of the company was to be doubling year on year or more for the intermediate future.
So, the conversation that I had with Benji was, if we want to be able to have a really strong foundation that we can scale consistently on. And if we want to show up as the size that we want to appear in the market, then it's going to be really important that we both have great messaging, and we have like supporting creative. I think, great creative without great messaging is like so many of those terribly fluffy brands that you see in the D2C space. Then, great messaging with shitty creative is just like, it doesn't get noticed. You just scroll straight past it because it gets lost in the sea of other information that is being thrown at people every day. I think I was lucky. I don't want to pretend that I had some sort of like super sophisticated approach, but Benji was extremely reasonable. Yes, that makes a ton of sense. We brought on Meno, initially in a contract capacity, and then he's been sort of scaling up, and is very much an embedded part of the team today.
[0:18:58] Sunny Manivannan: It's fabulous. It's incredible. I love what you said about the flavor of the month, D2C brands. We all see the subway ads, we all see the ads everywhere, and they all look the same now. You're no longer sure what the product is anymore, but you just know what the vibe, you know what it looks like, and you know what it is.
[0:19:14] Harriet Johnston: No one's taking the time to understand what they're actually selling. You definitely need both.
[0:19:21] Sunny Manivannan: That's right. Now, that makes a lot of sense. Wonderful. How do you get people to join your company, and your team, and not another equally attractive, or perhaps even more attractive opportunity? How do you really attract the best talent?
[0:19:37] Harriet Johnston: I will not turn this into an infomercial for Ashby.
[0:19:41] Sunny Manivannan: You did promise me that and you stood true to your promise.
[0:19:43] Harriet Johnston: I did promise you that, so I will not do that.
[0:19:45] Sunny Manivannan: I'm a fan of Ashby and I did some of the marketing for you.
[0:19:49] Harriet Johnston: Amazing. I think it is kind of a three-part piece, like one, you need to have a very clear point of view in the market about what you're trying to solve, how you're trying to solve it, and like demonstrate product market fit. I think, increasingly, people are getting good at sniffing out companies that are just sort of like talking a big game or don't actually know what they're trying to offer. So, getting very clear there.
I think, the second is like making sure that your job descriptions are differentiated and compelling. I think it's the same as product marketing 101, and we have a pretty strong point of view internally that JD should start at the top with who you are as the hiring manager, and why it would be interesting to come and work with you, who Ashby is, and what we're trying to do, and why it's an interesting problem to solve. I think, recruiting software is not the sexiest product in the world to be trying to push. We're not unfortunately solving any of the world's biggest perils. There's like, definitely a mission there, like you're helping talent teams find great candidates, then build these interesting things. But it's not AI, and it's not curing cancer, and it's not like building something that has truly like category defining, never been built before.
It's finding what those things are inside our products that make it compelling. A lot of that for us is, I guess, the compound startup concept. But then, more interestingly, I think the candidates, we have a pretty novel approach to communication style. So, most people's calendars will have only a few hours of meetings each week, and then we have very strict guidelines around how to stack an email, and all these other channels. It pretty much makes people just much more efficient. So, we have like long-form content, explaining what that looks like. We don't have company values, we have operating principles, and then kind of talking through how that's different and interesting. So, you start to build what is the business and why is it different?
The next part of your JD, you should tell the person exactly what they will be doing and who you do not want to hire. I think that last part is so often missed, like in my job descriptions, it'll be like, this probably isn't a fit for you if, and one, two, three, four. So, people are able to self-select out a lot more easily. Then, I think, I mean, if you're operating in New York, Denver, or California, or Washington, it's illegal not to do this now. But in a lot of places, it's still a case. Be transparent about what your comps look like. There's like, you shouldn't be posting roles with no idea what you're willing to pay someone. There are tools like open comp and pay, and those sorts of things now, where you can get really fairly reliable benchmarks.
Talk about what your kind of culture is going to look like, and then, be really transparent about the interview process. I think, so often, people kind of enter into an interview process, and they kind of don't know who they're talking to next, or what they're expected to do. It reduces their ability to perform in any of those interviews, and therefore, your ability to consistently evaluate whether or not the candidates are good. So, that's sort of the very rumbly like, have a really clear point of view of what you're doing, have a really good job description. Then, as you start interviewing candidates, make sure you deliver like a good interview experience. It's really not that hard.
We track our candidate NPS, just like a survey that's automatically triggered afterwards. The number of times I hear comments like, it was so good to get feedback. This is the first time that has happened in, insert number of interviews that I've done. It's so nice not to be ghosted through the interview process. It was so great hearing back from you, every time within 24 hours of the interview happening. Like these things that are very easy to do, and tools like Ashby make it much easier, because you can set automatic reminders, or point things out in your pipeline. But even if you're running this no notion table, like staying on top of that will exponentially increase the likelihood of an offer acceptance at the end of the cycle, which is ultimately the reason that you're running this entire process. So, more than worthwhile to invest in properly.
Then, you should treat every single candidate that comes through your process as a potential customer. Even if they're not directly inside your ICP in terms of who you're targeting, it's amazing how quickly word of mouth spreads on brands, and it's a touch point at a much deeper level with just about any other kind of touch point you're going to have with the prospect. Three different processes.
[0:24:31] Sunny Manivannan: That's very – I mean, there's so much insight packed in there. The last thing you said, I think is particularly interesting in the sense that you don't – most people don't think about recruiting as a brand building opportunity for the company itself. You often hear the phrase employer brand versus – there's a marketing brand, there's an employer your brand, and people treat them as two distinct things. But it is really ultimately just one company, and it's one company's brand. The VP of marketing should care a lot about what a candidate's experience is with your company.
[0:25:08] Harriet Johnston: Totally agree. It's not hard to do, like generally, if you're getting brand right on the brand side, or product side of the house, you've got 90% of the assets. I think, like at least, what I'm observing at the moment, like employee-led content is the next sexy thing following community in terms of how people are starting to sell. This is an awesome opportunity to kind of bring those two things together, and demonstrate not only to your prospects that you have smart people working on the problem, that is going to be what they're purchasing against. But it also gives people kind of a platform where you think about how you retain top talent. It's sort of, kind of, usually comes down to like, do they feel like they belong in the organization? Do they feel like they have growth opportunities in the organization? And do they feel fairly compensated? In terms of that growth piece, helping people build their own platforms or brands within your organization, as long as it's done within kind of the guardrails that you need it to is awesome.
[0:26:11] Sunny Manivannan: It's great. I was chuckling when he talked about some of the – from a technologist's perspective, would seem to be a basic feature of, make sure that you don't ghost employees, use technology to have reminders sent to make sure that you're following up. Those are very basic features from an engineering perspective, but those are the features that actually do matter to employees, and ultimately, what mattered to – whether your product creates value, and whether it's – ultimately, your company's brand relies on this sort of thing happening in a programmatic way. It's always fun when technology enables us to just be more human, toward each other.
[0:26:46] Harriet Johnston: Exactly. I think, ultimately, that's what a really good ATS is doing for you. It's giving you real time, reliable data so that you can understand at a macro and micro level exactly how the candidate experience is being managed. And it's holding you accountable where you drop the ball, so that you can kind of come back and make sure that you're improving the process.
[0:27:11] Sunny Manivannan: To our listeners, I promised the Ashby commercial is over. I'm going to ask Harriet some difficult questions now. Starting with this one, which is, what's been the most challenging thing that you've done at Ashby to date?
[0:27:25] Harriet Johnston: I think probably the most competitive piece with Ashby to date has been trying to maintain a narrative that works in a rapidly changing environment. So, to provide a little bit more context there. When I first joined Ashby, it was the very tail end of hyper growth, free VC dollars, very low interest style environment where you didn't have to do much to grow. And TA teams were being stretched in really brutal ways, where they're being told to hire faster than they've ever been able to hire before. So, they were buying this ATS, and then they were buying all this point solutions I talked about before. It was becoming kind of this – it was just like, we just need the infrastructure to get us through to hit this headcount number.
Then, we saw sort of this total U-turn in terms of what the environment looks like. So, we had this 12-month window where we were seeing truly talented talent leaders. just being like, let go, left, right, and center. I think the statistic is one, and two heads of talent in the tech space in particular had been let go in the last 18 months.
[0:28:39] Sunny Manivannan: Wow, I didn't realize that.
[0:28:40] Harriet Johnston: Yes. All of a sudden, you see this finance, putting a ton of pressure, saying you need to spend less money now. TA teams kind of going back through and being like, "Where can we cut costs? How do we try and retain as much of that headcount as possible?" The narrative that we were able to build out of that was this concept of the Franken-stack, the beautiful world of Ashby afterwards. That worked for 12 months. We grew on that kind of messaging really, really effectively. Now, we're in a year where it's been more than 12 months, since all of those contract renewals came up, and people made a decision whether or not to like switch ATS, as in consolidate on Ashby, or to just operate on their core ATS, and kind of ignore these different point solutions.
Franken-stack doesn't work anymore, because no one has won. They either have consolidated or they're the big ones. So. it's like a new messaging challenge where you're like, okay, so that works really well for us, we need to be able to let that go, and realize the reality of what our existing environment looks like. I think, total cliche, but the way marketing gets a voice at the table is by being the voice of the customer, rather than just coming in with lots of marketing strategies.
What we've been doing and making sure we do and we have like roles inside our team, like everyone has to be either speaking to at least one customer, or listening to at least a couple of customer calls every week. Is staying close to that changing narrative, so we can try and kind of keep up with it. But the implications, the bigger. and bigger you get is, you're changing your narrative, you're also changing your website, and you're changing all of your sales collateral, and you're training a sales team on how to speak about the product differently.
There's a lot of cascading implications, and I think, probably our biggest challenge so far is just making sure we're staying in front of that narrative all the time, even though it's changing a lot. And being comfortable with the fact that things that have been working for us, even three or six months ago, don't necessarily work for us today. I think that's probably one of the biggest themes in marketing at the moment. We've got proliferation of amazing technology right now that enables you to do all kinds of weird and wonderful things, whether it's AI-based STRs, or personalization at levels we've never been able to achieve before through products like clay.
There's just so many different kinds of moments and you're so you're asking your team to change there, then you're asking your team to rethink messaging constantly. Then, you're asking the team to reproduce all of these assets that happened before. I think that requires level of systems thinking and organization that doesn't necessarily fall inside the natural core skill set of a really creative marketer.
[0:31:19] Sunny Manivannan: The idea of having to change messaging every 12 months is so scary to every marketer, but I think in this market, it's almost – it is a necessity to be able to do that. How do you stay on top of voice of the customer at Ashby?
[0:31:30] Harriet Johnston: I think there's sort of a – it's three parts. I love talking in threes. I don't know why. I think, the first one is, it shouldn't be something that you do sporadically. It should be something that's kind of always on and built into the culture of your team. So, as a marketing leader, when I'm talking to peers, strongly recommend building systems and expectations with your team that they are staying close to that voice, and challenging each other. Sor of like, idea meritocracy in terms of where the messaging no longer feels like it's resonating. That's across the entire board. It doesn't come as this like, messaging was working, then all of a sudden, tomorrow, it's not. It's like, hey, messaging is becoming less and less effective, and we're catching it as it's happening. So that we're starting to move the ship as when it's occurring.
I think the second piece is, it's not marketing's job by itself to do messaging, and it should be a team sport that's kind of across your leadership as well. So, Mike who's in our sales team was super involved. Chapman, who's a solutions engineer. Benji, who's our founder. Kelsey and her team, and customer success were pulling, and asking for inputs from a lot of different groups at different times, and dedicating time, and making it a company priority to make sure that we're ln track as opposed to just being product marketing, or just marketing.
Then, I think the third thing is like, when you talk about the three pillars at the top, like the foundations piece as being thoughtful on really simple, easy things. Like naming documents properly and keeping things in folders. Having a basic tool that costs virtually nothing that will help you understand when assets haven't been looked at for several months. So, you kind of keep your database clean. Then, being thoughtful about the kinds of tooling that you use for design, so that you aren't working in really static assets that are hard to sort of test or change.
That kind of goes all the way through to our website. We use a product called Story Block there, which means that anyone can go in and edit text, and build blocks and stuff, rather than relying on engineering every time. Then, we can deploy our engineer against kind of higher bandwidth work. It means that our designer has like a ruthless system in terms of how we manage our sigma files, with naming conventions, and dates. Then, even down to like Google Docs and Drive, there are rules around how we have our drive set up and what you name each document, and then what the first three lines in every document looks like. It just makes everything a hell of a lot more searchable. I don't think you worry about trying to do this retroactively, it'd be a total waste of time. But it's easy today to start introducing some basic inventions, and if anyone wants to send me a LinkedIn message, I am happy to share kind of our templates on it.
[0:34:22] Sunny Manivannan: You're about to get a whole lot of LinkedIn messages.
[0:34:25] Harriet Johnston: I welcome it. I started my career out as a lawyer, so I think a lot in like document management, and systems, and it really does just make life so much easier moving forward.
[0:34:38] Sunny Manivannan: Wonderful. Well, listen, we're coming up close to the end of our conversation. I just have a couple of more questions for you. This is a section that's titled Influential Peers. Works or people that have influenced your career. I'll start off by asking about a book or movie that you'd recommend to everybody and why.
[0:34:56] Harriet Johnston: Yes, for sure. I saw this question in the email you sent me. I think a book that probably isn't recommended all of the time that I think is just fantastic is Storytelling with Data. I think one of the gaps or perceived gaps for a lot of marketing teams is they don't know how to communicate the way that so many other departments think and operate. This book basically just like walks you through foundations of like, use this kind of table, or graph, or chart to tell this kind of story.
It was my boss back at early days of Uber, Georgie, who now leads marketing for them globally, that gave it to me. She's like, "You need to get your shit together in terms of these slide decks, they are awful. If I see another graph that looks like this." It made such a difference to how I could communicate, because suddenly, I could show up in meetings, presenting ideas or strategies in the same language as our sales, finance, and sort of the rest of the leadership team.
Then, I mean, I think the other thing on books is like, it helps a lot as a marketer also to read fiction, and biographies, and those kinds of things, and keep stretching your mind in different directions. It's very easy to end up like – I think David Gerhardt's Exit Five Podcast, Peerbound, like your podcast, like they're fantastic resources, but you all start thinking the same way, and it's like important. So, some of the best books I've read in the last couple of months has been Educated, Why Fish Don't Exist, and Creativity, Inc.
[0:36:32] Sunny Manivannan: Great. Those are great recommendations. I don't know if I've read Storytelling with Data, but I have a similar story to you earlier in my career of a chart that was just way too colorful. I got some colorful feedback from my manager at the time, which I still remember. Love Creativity, Inc. as well, that's just certainly worth the reread. Great. Last question Harriet is, who are your favorite SaaS marketers and why? I know you probably have a long list, but give us some of the ones near the top of the list for you.
[0:37:05] Harriet Johnston: For sure, I will exclude my team, because I don't want to mention just a few people, but some really incredible people there. I am very proud of what we felt. Kevin White and Gunter with HyperGrowth Partners, I think produce some really interesting thought leadership. Just like a very hacky approach to demand generation, or growth marketing, which I appreciate deeply. So, we've been able to build pretty cool prospector, and a lot of automations as a result of working pretty closely with them. So, big shout out. Dimi who I worked with, and Alisha at Brex. Alisha is one of the best product marketing managers I've ever worked with and it just takes like a very, very practical, and thoughtful approach to product marketing. I don't think she does that much thought leadership, and Dimi's a little bit the same. But definitely worth a follow or connect [inaudible 0:38:04] for that. I can keep rambling for the next 15 minutes. I spent a lot of time like reading and following other people in the space just to try and make sure that I'm at least trying to keep up with all of the new stuff that's coming out.
[0:38:18] Sunny Manivannan: Fabulous. Well, listen, thank you so, so much for stopping by The Peerbound Podcast. I learned a lot from you, and I strongly suspect our listeners will as well. So, once again, a huge thank you and congratulations to you on all the success and great work at Ashby, and wishing you the very best.
[0:38:33] Harriet Johnston: Thank you so much. I love your podcast. So, it was an absolute pleasure getting to be here. Thank you, Sunny.
[0:38:40] Sunny Manivannan: Thanks, Harriet.
[END]
Tune in on Apple Podcasts or Spotify
"Harriet Johnston: The way marketing gets a voice at the table is by being the voice of the customer, rather than just coming in with what's up marketing strategies."
[0:00:11] Sunny Manivannan: Welcome to The Peerbound Podcast. I'm your host, Sunny Manivannan. Joining me today is Harriet Johnston, the Vice President of Marketing at Ashby. Harriet, such a pleasure to welcome you to The Peerbound Podcast. Great to have you here.
[0:00:27] Harriet Johnston: Thank you so much, Sunny.
[0:00:29] Sunny Manivannan: Well, let's start by asking, what made you join Ashby and what is Ashby?
[0:00:35] Harriet Johnston: What is Ashby, is probably easiest out, and it makes more sense why I joined. The super, super high level recruiting software that in-house recruiting teams use to manage everything from building out their interview plan, listing a job through to sourcing candidates, accepting inbound applications, managing the interview process, and then extending an offer, and all of the scheduling and stuff that happens in between. I think the things that make Ashby really interesting is the timing when they entered into the market.
We chatted briefly about this when we caught up the other day. But, since the iPhone, and iOS, and Android, there was this big sort of movement towards point solutions. And you should be building everything in sort of the app model of like go very deep on a very narrow area. I think it swings back and forth at different points in sort of the evolution of SaaS. But at the moment, we're very much move back towards compound startups or compound businesses, where you're seeing a lot of consolidation of software. Buyers are often looking for single-point solutions. You have less context switching, better UX workflows. Then, with the advent of AI, and all those sorts of things, single layers of data that you can start to access and sort of automate on top of.
When we think about what Ashby's doing, it's kind of bringing together a whole bunch of different point solutions into a single solution. Then, your second question, sorry, why did I join Ashby? Super transparently, I was pretty stoked with my role at Brex. I was reporting to some amazing people, and getting to do some pretty cool work, and it was a great company. I had a friend reach out to me asking if I'd be open to a calibration interview with the founder of this company and recruiting software called Ashby, Benji. So, I was like very happy to try and help out.
First conversation with Benji kind of left me thinking like, "Oh, this is a really smart guy building a very interesting product in a space that's been like largely undisrupted for a little while." There's been a proliferation of a lot of point solutions, kind of supporting these legacy ATS products, which is sort of the core of what our product is, but hadn't really kind of made that much progress. From there, I started chatting to him a lot more about what the customers think, what are the investors, sort of thesis around this, blah, blah, blah.
Eventually, where I landed was like, I was excited about the team that he was hiring. I was excited about a really consistent product roadmap, which I think for marketers is something that we often underestimate the value of when we're looking at roles, because it just takes time to do good marketing. Then, I spoke to a few customers, and spoke to a few investors, and was just like, "Oh, shit. This is pretty exciting." So, I can step into a company with no brand, or marketing presence, fantastic product market fit, and kind of build something, the way that I want to. Which I think in previous companies I have been, I've either been too junior or too late to be able to do that.
[0:03:34] Sunny Manivannan: Sounds like the perfect combination. If I remember correctly, Ashby was still in stealth mode –
[0:03:40] Harriet Johnston: That's right.
[0:03:40] Sunny Manivannan: – when you joined. Sort of job number one was to really take them and do a launch.
[0:03:45] Harriet Johnston: Yes. It was fun trying to do research on the company, because you'd search ashbyhq.com, and you get this like blank landing page with a couple of interesting logos, and type your email in here to join the waitlist and learn more. Then, there was just an inbox that the sales team was sort of managing from there. First job was like, what is our basic messaging and positioning going to look like in this market, and how do we define differentiation? I think we knew very clearly what that looked like at a product level. But then, it's about elevating that up to a narrative and something that people can buy, I think. 101 B2B marketing, but it's a more emotional sale than a B2C transaction is, and yet we still always seem to sort of orient around. Save this, 2X speed on this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, which is really just sad.
[0:04:37] Sunny Manivannan: I'm happy that you brought up this idea of how do you establish positioning and messaging for a company that's clearly a disruptor, but in a space where perhaps, expectations have been set by the previous crop of solutions. This is a very mature space, companies like Greenhouse, Lever, and others have been in the space for at least in the ATS space for a long time. So, how did you think about competitive differentiation, and separating yourself from the pack in the space? What did that look like for you and the company?
[0:05:11] Harriet Johnston: The first job was to work out like how are customers going to be able to anchor Ashby in terms of other products that they would be comparing? I think, every business goes through that like question of like, are we category-defining or do we fit naturally into an existing category? I think there are definitely times where you are category defining and doing something just very differently. That basically should only ever be the case where you are asking the user to do something fundamentally different from the way that they have been doing that specific job previously. Therefore, there isn't a clear comparison to what you're kind of offering, and there's some fantastic stats that founders love to anchor on when you talk about category definition around, "If you're able to do it, you'll own 70% of the market, blah, blah, blah." But you also then need to be committed to like several years of no one really understanding what you're doing and spending, I mean, at least millions of dollars kind of building it out.
For us, we were like, well, the closest thing that we fit into today is an applicant tracking system, which is sort of the core purchasing decision that you're going to make. But what it looks like compared to any of our key competitors, is you start with your applicant tracking system, and then you go and find a point solution for scheduling, a point solution for sourcing, and your CRM, a point solution for your analytics or your BI tool to manage it. So, we ended up – and I do not claim the final copy on this. But with, not just another ATS, which kind of placed us very clearly in the category, made it very clear that we didn't fit into kind of the preexisting construct. Then, the narrative that we built beyond that was – this is sort of the Franken-stack that you're probably used to using if you're a pretty sophisticated recruiting team. This is how you can consolidate these four or five points solutions, and that legacy ATS into a single solution with Ashby. The implication of this in terms of total cost of ownership is going to be all of these different benefits.
Transparently, we are reworking a lot of our messaging now, but it certainly got us a long way in terms of helping people understand whether or not our product fit inside their sort of buying consideration scope.
[0:07:29] Sunny Manivannan: It's fascinating to me that you decided to stay in the category and just say we are the right approach for 2024, or 2023, or whenever you finally ended up really going to market. Because the buying climate has certainly changed. All in one today I think has a lot more appeal to the sophisticated user, even than it did – certainly than it did four years ago, when everybody was saying – it almost felt like, if you were a director at a company and you didn't have a software solution to call your own, that you didn't really belong.
[0:08:06] Harriet Johnston: Yes, 100%. I mean, we've been able to 6X in size, and acquire publicly listed tens of thousands of persons, companies with this strategy. I think you don't have to be new and different every single time. You just need to help your buyer work out how or when the right solution for them. I think we get so carried away without benefits as opposed to thinking about how the buyer is going to be evaluating the purchase.
[0:08:36] Sunny Manivannan: As a product marketer myself, I obviously had a long read through your website. What struck me very early on, it's just the simplicity of, we are an ATS, we are all in one. Here's what we mean by all in one, here are the different products. The products are not named crazy things. They are named things that you would expect them to be named. It's just really, really well-executed basics, and it's so rare to see that. Kudos to you and the team for executing on that, and the success that you've achieved today. So, congratulations.
[0:09:08] Harriet Johnston: Appreciate that. Big shout out to Tony, who's been doing a lot of that work.
[0:09:12] Sunny Manivannan: Harriet, I want to ask you about building a marketing team. I think, over the last year and a half, it's been a lot of the opposite story of rationalizing, or right size, or any of the other buzzwords that you want to do, to basically describe, you are reducing the size of your team. Now, here you are, you've built a team from scratch over the last few years at Ashby. What is that like? What has it been like for you? How do you design your marketing team to achieve the goals that you want to? How do you even start thinking about that?
[0:09:41] Harriet Johnston: We've been very lucky, I think, I guess intentional. We'd be frustratingly patient with hiring operating principle at the company, which is very much like lived and breathed day to day. So, we generally open headcount after we need them, as opposed to preemptively. There are plenty of implications for that, but I think, ultimately means, to date, we have never been in a position that we need to even consider downsizing. The headcount is growing into the business, always. In fact, yes, in terms of hiring, and building out a team, obviously being a recruiting software, I thought a lot about this for the last sort of 18 months. Then, unlike a lot of companies that I've worked out in the past, where I've had amazing TA teams supporting me, it's been largely hiring manager-led. Then, only recently, have we been sort of really scaling up our TA teams.
Part of that was, founders wanted us to be dogfooding the product, and really living and breathing inside the experience every day. Then, part of it was sort of frustratingly patient with hiring and just moving very slowly in terms of expanding out any of the different teams. If I was starting this all again, or kind of going back to the very beginning, the first thing that I always think you should do when you're building out a team is kind of ask the questions that I'm shocked people don't ask to get headcount open, and they just go for it. But it's like, what am I trying to do over the next sort of 6, to 12, to 18 months, and how are we defining success. I think you kind of go through the exercise there, being like, what is the North Star metric that our business is operating against. That will almost always be, in our case, annual recurring revenue or some sort of revenue metric.
You then pare down to what is marketing's responsibility and contributing to that top line goal so that we are directly tied to the North Star. In Ashby's case, it is demo, stage two demos booked, which is a qualified sales demo. That is, first call has happened, and the sales rep has said, "Yes, we have an active deal here," and they've moved them into stage two. I think a little asterisks there, and I won't go into this because I'm talking about hiring now.
It's a really valuable thing as a marketing team to kind of pay attention to MQLs, and pay attention to sort of stage one deals. But you're never going to earn credibility or respect from your sales team, or broader business if you are generating trashy leads or just really large volumes, contacts inside your CRM that you're able to outreach to. There are some nuanced asterisks as to that depending on your business type. But for the most part, anchoring on a stage two, or sales-qualified demo will just set you up to be much more successful and a hell of a lot more ruthless in terms of the channels that you're going to invest into medium long term.
Then, as long as your sales cycle isn't crazy long, and I think like anything sub, six to nine months falls into this definition. It's worked and I've tried a bunch of different types of ways of measuring success in this one, seems to carry the most sort of weight, and best direction for the team.
But that ramble aside, you've got your North Star, you've got your team hero metric, and then you go back through and you're like, "Okay. What do we need to do to be able to get there?" That is, spending a lot of time with your existing customers, and prospects, and sort of deeply understanding where they hang out, what motivates them, what they're needing, or not receiving at the moment that your product is uniquely positioned to be able to benefit them with. Then, rather than doing any of the streamline, powerful, automate language, like speak back in the language that they're using as to what that's going to be. Then, you can define very quickly what channels are going to make the most sense because they are hanging out in those spaces. Then, what are the messages that we need to be able to deliver to them? Then, what are they not getting today that they want, that we can maybe be like useful, or helpful to build that top of funnel?
In my experience, in my career to date, that boils down to the same marketing strategy everywhere, at a very top line, which is you need, and everyone talks about it a bit differently with their model and fancy diagram. But it's either like demand creation, demand capture, or fuel engine, or insert buzzword, buzzword. That is essentially any good marketing strategy is going to be a combination of having the creative, the narrative, and the story that you need to be able to deliver. Then, it's the engine or demand capture, which is the infrastructure to be able to identify at a contact level who you're going after in a B2B world, at least, have the infrastructure be able to actually outreach to them, and have accurate contact information attached to them. Then, the channels that you're going to be operating inside in terms of trying to add to our reach.
So, very long-winded way of saying that in almost every instance, you're going to land, that your original marketing team needs to be a combination of someone that can do content and that can be either in the shape of a product marketing manager or in terms of a content manager. I could ramble when we get there about what a great content manager should look like. We have Adam who is incredible. It's going to be someone who can create creative. I think teams wait way too long to hire designers, and it just stops you from being able to behave the size you want to be perceived as for a really long time. So, you get shitty creative, being output against great messaging.
Then, you're going to need someone in demand generation, or growth marketing, depending on the kind of audience that you're going after. They're kind of your first three roles. Then, from there, you're going to be starting to think about the layer below that, which is going to be much more nuance to the types of channels, and the types of messaging that you're trying to output. Some of the common ones are going to be like a community lead, and there, I have a strong opinion that that person should represent your ICP, as opposed to just being sort of generic community. That you might be looking for like a data scientist, if you have really interesting information you want to be able to extract, you might be looking for recruiting operations, if you're running particularly complex plays in terms of your demand gen strategy. List goes on, and on, and on, and on.
[0:16:00] Sunny Manivannan: Yes. You've covered so much ground in terms of what do you do when you are the first marketer, and you're the marketing leader in a company that has to do everything from scratch.
[0:16:12] Harriet Johnston: I think I was at a conference last weekend; Emily Kramer had this great sign that she had up, which was a picture of a ram with a big red mark through, and it's like no random acts of marketing. It's such a real thing when you have not defined exactly what your marketing strategy is, and you're sort of executing against lots of activities, so you have a less of an issue for us. But a founder that's just got like lots of ideas, and you're kind of actioning idea, actioning idea. So, it's going back and be like, what do we need to do, and then very quickly identifying the kinds of roles that we needed to hire out to be able to go for that demand creation, demand capture foundations work that underpins a strategy.
[0:16:55] Sunny Manivannan: It's fabulous. One of the things you said that really struck me is, this idea of, don't wait too long to hire a designer because then, you're handcuffing yourself with bad design while you may have great everything else. But the bad design will sort of bring everything – hold everything back. That's not something I hear too often. Tell us a little bit more about that. What does it take to go get that sort of first designer role approved in marketing? Why do you prioritize that so much, and what's been the impact in Ashby?
[0:17:24] Harriet Johnston: Something you want to be vetting for when you're joining a company is like, does the leader that you're going to be working for actually believe in marketing? Then, if they do, do they prioritize brand? I think if the answer to those two questions is no, probably stay away from that role. But in my case, it was – we needed to build a website, because we didn't have one in place, we need to be able to build sales collateral because we didn't have any outside of some decks that sales team kind of pulled together themselves. We didn't have any brand blueprint to be able to start scaling content. But the ambition of the company was to be doubling year on year or more for the intermediate future.
So, the conversation that I had with Benji was, if we want to be able to have a really strong foundation that we can scale consistently on. And if we want to show up as the size that we want to appear in the market, then it's going to be really important that we both have great messaging, and we have like supporting creative. I think, great creative without great messaging is like so many of those terribly fluffy brands that you see in the D2C space. Then, great messaging with shitty creative is just like, it doesn't get noticed. You just scroll straight past it because it gets lost in the sea of other information that is being thrown at people every day. I think I was lucky. I don't want to pretend that I had some sort of like super sophisticated approach, but Benji was extremely reasonable. Yes, that makes a ton of sense. We brought on Meno, initially in a contract capacity, and then he's been sort of scaling up, and is very much an embedded part of the team today.
[0:18:58] Sunny Manivannan: It's fabulous. It's incredible. I love what you said about the flavor of the month, D2C brands. We all see the subway ads, we all see the ads everywhere, and they all look the same now. You're no longer sure what the product is anymore, but you just know what the vibe, you know what it looks like, and you know what it is.
[0:19:14] Harriet Johnston: No one's taking the time to understand what they're actually selling. You definitely need both.
[0:19:21] Sunny Manivannan: That's right. Now, that makes a lot of sense. Wonderful. How do you get people to join your company, and your team, and not another equally attractive, or perhaps even more attractive opportunity? How do you really attract the best talent?
[0:19:37] Harriet Johnston: I will not turn this into an infomercial for Ashby.
[0:19:41] Sunny Manivannan: You did promise me that and you stood true to your promise.
[0:19:43] Harriet Johnston: I did promise you that, so I will not do that.
[0:19:45] Sunny Manivannan: I'm a fan of Ashby and I did some of the marketing for you.
[0:19:49] Harriet Johnston: Amazing. I think it is kind of a three-part piece, like one, you need to have a very clear point of view in the market about what you're trying to solve, how you're trying to solve it, and like demonstrate product market fit. I think, increasingly, people are getting good at sniffing out companies that are just sort of like talking a big game or don't actually know what they're trying to offer. So, getting very clear there.
I think, the second is like making sure that your job descriptions are differentiated and compelling. I think it's the same as product marketing 101, and we have a pretty strong point of view internally that JD should start at the top with who you are as the hiring manager, and why it would be interesting to come and work with you, who Ashby is, and what we're trying to do, and why it's an interesting problem to solve. I think, recruiting software is not the sexiest product in the world to be trying to push. We're not unfortunately solving any of the world's biggest perils. There's like, definitely a mission there, like you're helping talent teams find great candidates, then build these interesting things. But it's not AI, and it's not curing cancer, and it's not like building something that has truly like category defining, never been built before.
It's finding what those things are inside our products that make it compelling. A lot of that for us is, I guess, the compound startup concept. But then, more interestingly, I think the candidates, we have a pretty novel approach to communication style. So, most people's calendars will have only a few hours of meetings each week, and then we have very strict guidelines around how to stack an email, and all these other channels. It pretty much makes people just much more efficient. So, we have like long-form content, explaining what that looks like. We don't have company values, we have operating principles, and then kind of talking through how that's different and interesting. So, you start to build what is the business and why is it different?
The next part of your JD, you should tell the person exactly what they will be doing and who you do not want to hire. I think that last part is so often missed, like in my job descriptions, it'll be like, this probably isn't a fit for you if, and one, two, three, four. So, people are able to self-select out a lot more easily. Then, I think, I mean, if you're operating in New York, Denver, or California, or Washington, it's illegal not to do this now. But in a lot of places, it's still a case. Be transparent about what your comps look like. There's like, you shouldn't be posting roles with no idea what you're willing to pay someone. There are tools like open comp and pay, and those sorts of things now, where you can get really fairly reliable benchmarks.
Talk about what your kind of culture is going to look like, and then, be really transparent about the interview process. I think, so often, people kind of enter into an interview process, and they kind of don't know who they're talking to next, or what they're expected to do. It reduces their ability to perform in any of those interviews, and therefore, your ability to consistently evaluate whether or not the candidates are good. So, that's sort of the very rumbly like, have a really clear point of view of what you're doing, have a really good job description. Then, as you start interviewing candidates, make sure you deliver like a good interview experience. It's really not that hard.
We track our candidate NPS, just like a survey that's automatically triggered afterwards. The number of times I hear comments like, it was so good to get feedback. This is the first time that has happened in, insert number of interviews that I've done. It's so nice not to be ghosted through the interview process. It was so great hearing back from you, every time within 24 hours of the interview happening. Like these things that are very easy to do, and tools like Ashby make it much easier, because you can set automatic reminders, or point things out in your pipeline. But even if you're running this no notion table, like staying on top of that will exponentially increase the likelihood of an offer acceptance at the end of the cycle, which is ultimately the reason that you're running this entire process. So, more than worthwhile to invest in properly.
Then, you should treat every single candidate that comes through your process as a potential customer. Even if they're not directly inside your ICP in terms of who you're targeting, it's amazing how quickly word of mouth spreads on brands, and it's a touch point at a much deeper level with just about any other kind of touch point you're going to have with the prospect. Three different processes.
[0:24:31] Sunny Manivannan: That's very – I mean, there's so much insight packed in there. The last thing you said, I think is particularly interesting in the sense that you don't – most people don't think about recruiting as a brand building opportunity for the company itself. You often hear the phrase employer brand versus – there's a marketing brand, there's an employer your brand, and people treat them as two distinct things. But it is really ultimately just one company, and it's one company's brand. The VP of marketing should care a lot about what a candidate's experience is with your company.
[0:25:08] Harriet Johnston: Totally agree. It's not hard to do, like generally, if you're getting brand right on the brand side, or product side of the house, you've got 90% of the assets. I think, like at least, what I'm observing at the moment, like employee-led content is the next sexy thing following community in terms of how people are starting to sell. This is an awesome opportunity to kind of bring those two things together, and demonstrate not only to your prospects that you have smart people working on the problem, that is going to be what they're purchasing against. But it also gives people kind of a platform where you think about how you retain top talent. It's sort of, kind of, usually comes down to like, do they feel like they belong in the organization? Do they feel like they have growth opportunities in the organization? And do they feel fairly compensated? In terms of that growth piece, helping people build their own platforms or brands within your organization, as long as it's done within kind of the guardrails that you need it to is awesome.
[0:26:11] Sunny Manivannan: It's great. I was chuckling when he talked about some of the – from a technologist's perspective, would seem to be a basic feature of, make sure that you don't ghost employees, use technology to have reminders sent to make sure that you're following up. Those are very basic features from an engineering perspective, but those are the features that actually do matter to employees, and ultimately, what mattered to – whether your product creates value, and whether it's – ultimately, your company's brand relies on this sort of thing happening in a programmatic way. It's always fun when technology enables us to just be more human, toward each other.
[0:26:46] Harriet Johnston: Exactly. I think, ultimately, that's what a really good ATS is doing for you. It's giving you real time, reliable data so that you can understand at a macro and micro level exactly how the candidate experience is being managed. And it's holding you accountable where you drop the ball, so that you can kind of come back and make sure that you're improving the process.
[0:27:11] Sunny Manivannan: To our listeners, I promised the Ashby commercial is over. I'm going to ask Harriet some difficult questions now. Starting with this one, which is, what's been the most challenging thing that you've done at Ashby to date?
[0:27:25] Harriet Johnston: I think probably the most competitive piece with Ashby to date has been trying to maintain a narrative that works in a rapidly changing environment. So, to provide a little bit more context there. When I first joined Ashby, it was the very tail end of hyper growth, free VC dollars, very low interest style environment where you didn't have to do much to grow. And TA teams were being stretched in really brutal ways, where they're being told to hire faster than they've ever been able to hire before. So, they were buying this ATS, and then they were buying all this point solutions I talked about before. It was becoming kind of this – it was just like, we just need the infrastructure to get us through to hit this headcount number.
Then, we saw sort of this total U-turn in terms of what the environment looks like. So, we had this 12-month window where we were seeing truly talented talent leaders. just being like, let go, left, right, and center. I think the statistic is one, and two heads of talent in the tech space in particular had been let go in the last 18 months.
[0:28:39] Sunny Manivannan: Wow, I didn't realize that.
[0:28:40] Harriet Johnston: Yes. All of a sudden, you see this finance, putting a ton of pressure, saying you need to spend less money now. TA teams kind of going back through and being like, "Where can we cut costs? How do we try and retain as much of that headcount as possible?" The narrative that we were able to build out of that was this concept of the Franken-stack, the beautiful world of Ashby afterwards. That worked for 12 months. We grew on that kind of messaging really, really effectively. Now, we're in a year where it's been more than 12 months, since all of those contract renewals came up, and people made a decision whether or not to like switch ATS, as in consolidate on Ashby, or to just operate on their core ATS, and kind of ignore these different point solutions.
Franken-stack doesn't work anymore, because no one has won. They either have consolidated or they're the big ones. So. it's like a new messaging challenge where you're like, okay, so that works really well for us, we need to be able to let that go, and realize the reality of what our existing environment looks like. I think, total cliche, but the way marketing gets a voice at the table is by being the voice of the customer, rather than just coming in with lots of marketing strategies.
What we've been doing and making sure we do and we have like roles inside our team, like everyone has to be either speaking to at least one customer, or listening to at least a couple of customer calls every week. Is staying close to that changing narrative, so we can try and kind of keep up with it. But the implications, the bigger. and bigger you get is, you're changing your narrative, you're also changing your website, and you're changing all of your sales collateral, and you're training a sales team on how to speak about the product differently.
There's a lot of cascading implications, and I think, probably our biggest challenge so far is just making sure we're staying in front of that narrative all the time, even though it's changing a lot. And being comfortable with the fact that things that have been working for us, even three or six months ago, don't necessarily work for us today. I think that's probably one of the biggest themes in marketing at the moment. We've got proliferation of amazing technology right now that enables you to do all kinds of weird and wonderful things, whether it's AI-based STRs, or personalization at levels we've never been able to achieve before through products like clay.
There's just so many different kinds of moments and you're so you're asking your team to change there, then you're asking your team to rethink messaging constantly. Then, you're asking the team to reproduce all of these assets that happened before. I think that requires level of systems thinking and organization that doesn't necessarily fall inside the natural core skill set of a really creative marketer.
[0:31:19] Sunny Manivannan: The idea of having to change messaging every 12 months is so scary to every marketer, but I think in this market, it's almost – it is a necessity to be able to do that. How do you stay on top of voice of the customer at Ashby?
[0:31:30] Harriet Johnston: I think there's sort of a – it's three parts. I love talking in threes. I don't know why. I think, the first one is, it shouldn't be something that you do sporadically. It should be something that's kind of always on and built into the culture of your team. So, as a marketing leader, when I'm talking to peers, strongly recommend building systems and expectations with your team that they are staying close to that voice, and challenging each other. Sor of like, idea meritocracy in terms of where the messaging no longer feels like it's resonating. That's across the entire board. It doesn't come as this like, messaging was working, then all of a sudden, tomorrow, it's not. It's like, hey, messaging is becoming less and less effective, and we're catching it as it's happening. So that we're starting to move the ship as when it's occurring.
I think the second piece is, it's not marketing's job by itself to do messaging, and it should be a team sport that's kind of across your leadership as well. So, Mike who's in our sales team was super involved. Chapman, who's a solutions engineer. Benji, who's our founder. Kelsey and her team, and customer success were pulling, and asking for inputs from a lot of different groups at different times, and dedicating time, and making it a company priority to make sure that we're ln track as opposed to just being product marketing, or just marketing.
Then, I think the third thing is like, when you talk about the three pillars at the top, like the foundations piece as being thoughtful on really simple, easy things. Like naming documents properly and keeping things in folders. Having a basic tool that costs virtually nothing that will help you understand when assets haven't been looked at for several months. So, you kind of keep your database clean. Then, being thoughtful about the kinds of tooling that you use for design, so that you aren't working in really static assets that are hard to sort of test or change.
That kind of goes all the way through to our website. We use a product called Story Block there, which means that anyone can go in and edit text, and build blocks and stuff, rather than relying on engineering every time. Then, we can deploy our engineer against kind of higher bandwidth work. It means that our designer has like a ruthless system in terms of how we manage our sigma files, with naming conventions, and dates. Then, even down to like Google Docs and Drive, there are rules around how we have our drive set up and what you name each document, and then what the first three lines in every document looks like. It just makes everything a hell of a lot more searchable. I don't think you worry about trying to do this retroactively, it'd be a total waste of time. But it's easy today to start introducing some basic inventions, and if anyone wants to send me a LinkedIn message, I am happy to share kind of our templates on it.
[0:34:22] Sunny Manivannan: You're about to get a whole lot of LinkedIn messages.
[0:34:25] Harriet Johnston: I welcome it. I started my career out as a lawyer, so I think a lot in like document management, and systems, and it really does just make life so much easier moving forward.
[0:34:38] Sunny Manivannan: Wonderful. Well, listen, we're coming up close to the end of our conversation. I just have a couple of more questions for you. This is a section that's titled Influential Peers. Works or people that have influenced your career. I'll start off by asking about a book or movie that you'd recommend to everybody and why.
[0:34:56] Harriet Johnston: Yes, for sure. I saw this question in the email you sent me. I think a book that probably isn't recommended all of the time that I think is just fantastic is Storytelling with Data. I think one of the gaps or perceived gaps for a lot of marketing teams is they don't know how to communicate the way that so many other departments think and operate. This book basically just like walks you through foundations of like, use this kind of table, or graph, or chart to tell this kind of story.
It was my boss back at early days of Uber, Georgie, who now leads marketing for them globally, that gave it to me. She's like, "You need to get your shit together in terms of these slide decks, they are awful. If I see another graph that looks like this." It made such a difference to how I could communicate, because suddenly, I could show up in meetings, presenting ideas or strategies in the same language as our sales, finance, and sort of the rest of the leadership team.
Then, I mean, I think the other thing on books is like, it helps a lot as a marketer also to read fiction, and biographies, and those kinds of things, and keep stretching your mind in different directions. It's very easy to end up like – I think David Gerhardt's Exit Five Podcast, Peerbound, like your podcast, like they're fantastic resources, but you all start thinking the same way, and it's like important. So, some of the best books I've read in the last couple of months has been Educated, Why Fish Don't Exist, and Creativity, Inc.
[0:36:32] Sunny Manivannan: Great. Those are great recommendations. I don't know if I've read Storytelling with Data, but I have a similar story to you earlier in my career of a chart that was just way too colorful. I got some colorful feedback from my manager at the time, which I still remember. Love Creativity, Inc. as well, that's just certainly worth the reread. Great. Last question Harriet is, who are your favorite SaaS marketers and why? I know you probably have a long list, but give us some of the ones near the top of the list for you.
[0:37:05] Harriet Johnston: For sure, I will exclude my team, because I don't want to mention just a few people, but some really incredible people there. I am very proud of what we felt. Kevin White and Gunter with HyperGrowth Partners, I think produce some really interesting thought leadership. Just like a very hacky approach to demand generation, or growth marketing, which I appreciate deeply. So, we've been able to build pretty cool prospector, and a lot of automations as a result of working pretty closely with them. So, big shout out. Dimi who I worked with, and Alisha at Brex. Alisha is one of the best product marketing managers I've ever worked with and it just takes like a very, very practical, and thoughtful approach to product marketing. I don't think she does that much thought leadership, and Dimi's a little bit the same. But definitely worth a follow or connect [inaudible 0:38:04] for that. I can keep rambling for the next 15 minutes. I spent a lot of time like reading and following other people in the space just to try and make sure that I'm at least trying to keep up with all of the new stuff that's coming out.
[0:38:18] Sunny Manivannan: Fabulous. Well, listen, thank you so, so much for stopping by The Peerbound Podcast. I learned a lot from you, and I strongly suspect our listeners will as well. So, once again, a huge thank you and congratulations to you on all the success and great work at Ashby, and wishing you the very best.
[0:38:33] Harriet Johnston: Thank you so much. I love your podcast. So, it was an absolute pleasure getting to be here. Thank you, Sunny.
[0:38:40] Sunny Manivannan: Thanks, Harriet.
[END]
Tune in on Apple Podcasts or Spotify
"Harriet Johnston: The way marketing gets a voice at the table is by being the voice of the customer, rather than just coming in with what's up marketing strategies."
[0:00:11] Sunny Manivannan: Welcome to The Peerbound Podcast. I'm your host, Sunny Manivannan. Joining me today is Harriet Johnston, the Vice President of Marketing at Ashby. Harriet, such a pleasure to welcome you to The Peerbound Podcast. Great to have you here.
[0:00:27] Harriet Johnston: Thank you so much, Sunny.
[0:00:29] Sunny Manivannan: Well, let's start by asking, what made you join Ashby and what is Ashby?
[0:00:35] Harriet Johnston: What is Ashby, is probably easiest out, and it makes more sense why I joined. The super, super high level recruiting software that in-house recruiting teams use to manage everything from building out their interview plan, listing a job through to sourcing candidates, accepting inbound applications, managing the interview process, and then extending an offer, and all of the scheduling and stuff that happens in between. I think the things that make Ashby really interesting is the timing when they entered into the market.
We chatted briefly about this when we caught up the other day. But, since the iPhone, and iOS, and Android, there was this big sort of movement towards point solutions. And you should be building everything in sort of the app model of like go very deep on a very narrow area. I think it swings back and forth at different points in sort of the evolution of SaaS. But at the moment, we're very much move back towards compound startups or compound businesses, where you're seeing a lot of consolidation of software. Buyers are often looking for single-point solutions. You have less context switching, better UX workflows. Then, with the advent of AI, and all those sorts of things, single layers of data that you can start to access and sort of automate on top of.
When we think about what Ashby's doing, it's kind of bringing together a whole bunch of different point solutions into a single solution. Then, your second question, sorry, why did I join Ashby? Super transparently, I was pretty stoked with my role at Brex. I was reporting to some amazing people, and getting to do some pretty cool work, and it was a great company. I had a friend reach out to me asking if I'd be open to a calibration interview with the founder of this company and recruiting software called Ashby, Benji. So, I was like very happy to try and help out.
First conversation with Benji kind of left me thinking like, "Oh, this is a really smart guy building a very interesting product in a space that's been like largely undisrupted for a little while." There's been a proliferation of a lot of point solutions, kind of supporting these legacy ATS products, which is sort of the core of what our product is, but hadn't really kind of made that much progress. From there, I started chatting to him a lot more about what the customers think, what are the investors, sort of thesis around this, blah, blah, blah.
Eventually, where I landed was like, I was excited about the team that he was hiring. I was excited about a really consistent product roadmap, which I think for marketers is something that we often underestimate the value of when we're looking at roles, because it just takes time to do good marketing. Then, I spoke to a few customers, and spoke to a few investors, and was just like, "Oh, shit. This is pretty exciting." So, I can step into a company with no brand, or marketing presence, fantastic product market fit, and kind of build something, the way that I want to. Which I think in previous companies I have been, I've either been too junior or too late to be able to do that.
[0:03:34] Sunny Manivannan: Sounds like the perfect combination. If I remember correctly, Ashby was still in stealth mode –
[0:03:40] Harriet Johnston: That's right.
[0:03:40] Sunny Manivannan: – when you joined. Sort of job number one was to really take them and do a launch.
[0:03:45] Harriet Johnston: Yes. It was fun trying to do research on the company, because you'd search ashbyhq.com, and you get this like blank landing page with a couple of interesting logos, and type your email in here to join the waitlist and learn more. Then, there was just an inbox that the sales team was sort of managing from there. First job was like, what is our basic messaging and positioning going to look like in this market, and how do we define differentiation? I think we knew very clearly what that looked like at a product level. But then, it's about elevating that up to a narrative and something that people can buy, I think. 101 B2B marketing, but it's a more emotional sale than a B2C transaction is, and yet we still always seem to sort of orient around. Save this, 2X speed on this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, which is really just sad.
[0:04:37] Sunny Manivannan: I'm happy that you brought up this idea of how do you establish positioning and messaging for a company that's clearly a disruptor, but in a space where perhaps, expectations have been set by the previous crop of solutions. This is a very mature space, companies like Greenhouse, Lever, and others have been in the space for at least in the ATS space for a long time. So, how did you think about competitive differentiation, and separating yourself from the pack in the space? What did that look like for you and the company?
[0:05:11] Harriet Johnston: The first job was to work out like how are customers going to be able to anchor Ashby in terms of other products that they would be comparing? I think, every business goes through that like question of like, are we category-defining or do we fit naturally into an existing category? I think there are definitely times where you are category defining and doing something just very differently. That basically should only ever be the case where you are asking the user to do something fundamentally different from the way that they have been doing that specific job previously. Therefore, there isn't a clear comparison to what you're kind of offering, and there's some fantastic stats that founders love to anchor on when you talk about category definition around, "If you're able to do it, you'll own 70% of the market, blah, blah, blah." But you also then need to be committed to like several years of no one really understanding what you're doing and spending, I mean, at least millions of dollars kind of building it out.
For us, we were like, well, the closest thing that we fit into today is an applicant tracking system, which is sort of the core purchasing decision that you're going to make. But what it looks like compared to any of our key competitors, is you start with your applicant tracking system, and then you go and find a point solution for scheduling, a point solution for sourcing, and your CRM, a point solution for your analytics or your BI tool to manage it. So, we ended up – and I do not claim the final copy on this. But with, not just another ATS, which kind of placed us very clearly in the category, made it very clear that we didn't fit into kind of the preexisting construct. Then, the narrative that we built beyond that was – this is sort of the Franken-stack that you're probably used to using if you're a pretty sophisticated recruiting team. This is how you can consolidate these four or five points solutions, and that legacy ATS into a single solution with Ashby. The implication of this in terms of total cost of ownership is going to be all of these different benefits.
Transparently, we are reworking a lot of our messaging now, but it certainly got us a long way in terms of helping people understand whether or not our product fit inside their sort of buying consideration scope.
[0:07:29] Sunny Manivannan: It's fascinating to me that you decided to stay in the category and just say we are the right approach for 2024, or 2023, or whenever you finally ended up really going to market. Because the buying climate has certainly changed. All in one today I think has a lot more appeal to the sophisticated user, even than it did – certainly than it did four years ago, when everybody was saying – it almost felt like, if you were a director at a company and you didn't have a software solution to call your own, that you didn't really belong.
[0:08:06] Harriet Johnston: Yes, 100%. I mean, we've been able to 6X in size, and acquire publicly listed tens of thousands of persons, companies with this strategy. I think you don't have to be new and different every single time. You just need to help your buyer work out how or when the right solution for them. I think we get so carried away without benefits as opposed to thinking about how the buyer is going to be evaluating the purchase.
[0:08:36] Sunny Manivannan: As a product marketer myself, I obviously had a long read through your website. What struck me very early on, it's just the simplicity of, we are an ATS, we are all in one. Here's what we mean by all in one, here are the different products. The products are not named crazy things. They are named things that you would expect them to be named. It's just really, really well-executed basics, and it's so rare to see that. Kudos to you and the team for executing on that, and the success that you've achieved today. So, congratulations.
[0:09:08] Harriet Johnston: Appreciate that. Big shout out to Tony, who's been doing a lot of that work.
[0:09:12] Sunny Manivannan: Harriet, I want to ask you about building a marketing team. I think, over the last year and a half, it's been a lot of the opposite story of rationalizing, or right size, or any of the other buzzwords that you want to do, to basically describe, you are reducing the size of your team. Now, here you are, you've built a team from scratch over the last few years at Ashby. What is that like? What has it been like for you? How do you design your marketing team to achieve the goals that you want to? How do you even start thinking about that?
[0:09:41] Harriet Johnston: We've been very lucky, I think, I guess intentional. We'd be frustratingly patient with hiring operating principle at the company, which is very much like lived and breathed day to day. So, we generally open headcount after we need them, as opposed to preemptively. There are plenty of implications for that, but I think, ultimately means, to date, we have never been in a position that we need to even consider downsizing. The headcount is growing into the business, always. In fact, yes, in terms of hiring, and building out a team, obviously being a recruiting software, I thought a lot about this for the last sort of 18 months. Then, unlike a lot of companies that I've worked out in the past, where I've had amazing TA teams supporting me, it's been largely hiring manager-led. Then, only recently, have we been sort of really scaling up our TA teams.
Part of that was, founders wanted us to be dogfooding the product, and really living and breathing inside the experience every day. Then, part of it was sort of frustratingly patient with hiring and just moving very slowly in terms of expanding out any of the different teams. If I was starting this all again, or kind of going back to the very beginning, the first thing that I always think you should do when you're building out a team is kind of ask the questions that I'm shocked people don't ask to get headcount open, and they just go for it. But it's like, what am I trying to do over the next sort of 6, to 12, to 18 months, and how are we defining success. I think you kind of go through the exercise there, being like, what is the North Star metric that our business is operating against. That will almost always be, in our case, annual recurring revenue or some sort of revenue metric.
You then pare down to what is marketing's responsibility and contributing to that top line goal so that we are directly tied to the North Star. In Ashby's case, it is demo, stage two demos booked, which is a qualified sales demo. That is, first call has happened, and the sales rep has said, "Yes, we have an active deal here," and they've moved them into stage two. I think a little asterisks there, and I won't go into this because I'm talking about hiring now.
It's a really valuable thing as a marketing team to kind of pay attention to MQLs, and pay attention to sort of stage one deals. But you're never going to earn credibility or respect from your sales team, or broader business if you are generating trashy leads or just really large volumes, contacts inside your CRM that you're able to outreach to. There are some nuanced asterisks as to that depending on your business type. But for the most part, anchoring on a stage two, or sales-qualified demo will just set you up to be much more successful and a hell of a lot more ruthless in terms of the channels that you're going to invest into medium long term.
Then, as long as your sales cycle isn't crazy long, and I think like anything sub, six to nine months falls into this definition. It's worked and I've tried a bunch of different types of ways of measuring success in this one, seems to carry the most sort of weight, and best direction for the team.
But that ramble aside, you've got your North Star, you've got your team hero metric, and then you go back through and you're like, "Okay. What do we need to do to be able to get there?" That is, spending a lot of time with your existing customers, and prospects, and sort of deeply understanding where they hang out, what motivates them, what they're needing, or not receiving at the moment that your product is uniquely positioned to be able to benefit them with. Then, rather than doing any of the streamline, powerful, automate language, like speak back in the language that they're using as to what that's going to be. Then, you can define very quickly what channels are going to make the most sense because they are hanging out in those spaces. Then, what are the messages that we need to be able to deliver to them? Then, what are they not getting today that they want, that we can maybe be like useful, or helpful to build that top of funnel?
In my experience, in my career to date, that boils down to the same marketing strategy everywhere, at a very top line, which is you need, and everyone talks about it a bit differently with their model and fancy diagram. But it's either like demand creation, demand capture, or fuel engine, or insert buzzword, buzzword. That is essentially any good marketing strategy is going to be a combination of having the creative, the narrative, and the story that you need to be able to deliver. Then, it's the engine or demand capture, which is the infrastructure to be able to identify at a contact level who you're going after in a B2B world, at least, have the infrastructure be able to actually outreach to them, and have accurate contact information attached to them. Then, the channels that you're going to be operating inside in terms of trying to add to our reach.
So, very long-winded way of saying that in almost every instance, you're going to land, that your original marketing team needs to be a combination of someone that can do content and that can be either in the shape of a product marketing manager or in terms of a content manager. I could ramble when we get there about what a great content manager should look like. We have Adam who is incredible. It's going to be someone who can create creative. I think teams wait way too long to hire designers, and it just stops you from being able to behave the size you want to be perceived as for a really long time. So, you get shitty creative, being output against great messaging.
Then, you're going to need someone in demand generation, or growth marketing, depending on the kind of audience that you're going after. They're kind of your first three roles. Then, from there, you're going to be starting to think about the layer below that, which is going to be much more nuance to the types of channels, and the types of messaging that you're trying to output. Some of the common ones are going to be like a community lead, and there, I have a strong opinion that that person should represent your ICP, as opposed to just being sort of generic community. That you might be looking for like a data scientist, if you have really interesting information you want to be able to extract, you might be looking for recruiting operations, if you're running particularly complex plays in terms of your demand gen strategy. List goes on, and on, and on, and on.
[0:16:00] Sunny Manivannan: Yes. You've covered so much ground in terms of what do you do when you are the first marketer, and you're the marketing leader in a company that has to do everything from scratch.
[0:16:12] Harriet Johnston: I think I was at a conference last weekend; Emily Kramer had this great sign that she had up, which was a picture of a ram with a big red mark through, and it's like no random acts of marketing. It's such a real thing when you have not defined exactly what your marketing strategy is, and you're sort of executing against lots of activities, so you have a less of an issue for us. But a founder that's just got like lots of ideas, and you're kind of actioning idea, actioning idea. So, it's going back and be like, what do we need to do, and then very quickly identifying the kinds of roles that we needed to hire out to be able to go for that demand creation, demand capture foundations work that underpins a strategy.
[0:16:55] Sunny Manivannan: It's fabulous. One of the things you said that really struck me is, this idea of, don't wait too long to hire a designer because then, you're handcuffing yourself with bad design while you may have great everything else. But the bad design will sort of bring everything – hold everything back. That's not something I hear too often. Tell us a little bit more about that. What does it take to go get that sort of first designer role approved in marketing? Why do you prioritize that so much, and what's been the impact in Ashby?
[0:17:24] Harriet Johnston: Something you want to be vetting for when you're joining a company is like, does the leader that you're going to be working for actually believe in marketing? Then, if they do, do they prioritize brand? I think if the answer to those two questions is no, probably stay away from that role. But in my case, it was – we needed to build a website, because we didn't have one in place, we need to be able to build sales collateral because we didn't have any outside of some decks that sales team kind of pulled together themselves. We didn't have any brand blueprint to be able to start scaling content. But the ambition of the company was to be doubling year on year or more for the intermediate future.
So, the conversation that I had with Benji was, if we want to be able to have a really strong foundation that we can scale consistently on. And if we want to show up as the size that we want to appear in the market, then it's going to be really important that we both have great messaging, and we have like supporting creative. I think, great creative without great messaging is like so many of those terribly fluffy brands that you see in the D2C space. Then, great messaging with shitty creative is just like, it doesn't get noticed. You just scroll straight past it because it gets lost in the sea of other information that is being thrown at people every day. I think I was lucky. I don't want to pretend that I had some sort of like super sophisticated approach, but Benji was extremely reasonable. Yes, that makes a ton of sense. We brought on Meno, initially in a contract capacity, and then he's been sort of scaling up, and is very much an embedded part of the team today.
[0:18:58] Sunny Manivannan: It's fabulous. It's incredible. I love what you said about the flavor of the month, D2C brands. We all see the subway ads, we all see the ads everywhere, and they all look the same now. You're no longer sure what the product is anymore, but you just know what the vibe, you know what it looks like, and you know what it is.
[0:19:14] Harriet Johnston: No one's taking the time to understand what they're actually selling. You definitely need both.
[0:19:21] Sunny Manivannan: That's right. Now, that makes a lot of sense. Wonderful. How do you get people to join your company, and your team, and not another equally attractive, or perhaps even more attractive opportunity? How do you really attract the best talent?
[0:19:37] Harriet Johnston: I will not turn this into an infomercial for Ashby.
[0:19:41] Sunny Manivannan: You did promise me that and you stood true to your promise.
[0:19:43] Harriet Johnston: I did promise you that, so I will not do that.
[0:19:45] Sunny Manivannan: I'm a fan of Ashby and I did some of the marketing for you.
[0:19:49] Harriet Johnston: Amazing. I think it is kind of a three-part piece, like one, you need to have a very clear point of view in the market about what you're trying to solve, how you're trying to solve it, and like demonstrate product market fit. I think, increasingly, people are getting good at sniffing out companies that are just sort of like talking a big game or don't actually know what they're trying to offer. So, getting very clear there.
I think, the second is like making sure that your job descriptions are differentiated and compelling. I think it's the same as product marketing 101, and we have a pretty strong point of view internally that JD should start at the top with who you are as the hiring manager, and why it would be interesting to come and work with you, who Ashby is, and what we're trying to do, and why it's an interesting problem to solve. I think, recruiting software is not the sexiest product in the world to be trying to push. We're not unfortunately solving any of the world's biggest perils. There's like, definitely a mission there, like you're helping talent teams find great candidates, then build these interesting things. But it's not AI, and it's not curing cancer, and it's not like building something that has truly like category defining, never been built before.
It's finding what those things are inside our products that make it compelling. A lot of that for us is, I guess, the compound startup concept. But then, more interestingly, I think the candidates, we have a pretty novel approach to communication style. So, most people's calendars will have only a few hours of meetings each week, and then we have very strict guidelines around how to stack an email, and all these other channels. It pretty much makes people just much more efficient. So, we have like long-form content, explaining what that looks like. We don't have company values, we have operating principles, and then kind of talking through how that's different and interesting. So, you start to build what is the business and why is it different?
The next part of your JD, you should tell the person exactly what they will be doing and who you do not want to hire. I think that last part is so often missed, like in my job descriptions, it'll be like, this probably isn't a fit for you if, and one, two, three, four. So, people are able to self-select out a lot more easily. Then, I think, I mean, if you're operating in New York, Denver, or California, or Washington, it's illegal not to do this now. But in a lot of places, it's still a case. Be transparent about what your comps look like. There's like, you shouldn't be posting roles with no idea what you're willing to pay someone. There are tools like open comp and pay, and those sorts of things now, where you can get really fairly reliable benchmarks.
Talk about what your kind of culture is going to look like, and then, be really transparent about the interview process. I think, so often, people kind of enter into an interview process, and they kind of don't know who they're talking to next, or what they're expected to do. It reduces their ability to perform in any of those interviews, and therefore, your ability to consistently evaluate whether or not the candidates are good. So, that's sort of the very rumbly like, have a really clear point of view of what you're doing, have a really good job description. Then, as you start interviewing candidates, make sure you deliver like a good interview experience. It's really not that hard.
We track our candidate NPS, just like a survey that's automatically triggered afterwards. The number of times I hear comments like, it was so good to get feedback. This is the first time that has happened in, insert number of interviews that I've done. It's so nice not to be ghosted through the interview process. It was so great hearing back from you, every time within 24 hours of the interview happening. Like these things that are very easy to do, and tools like Ashby make it much easier, because you can set automatic reminders, or point things out in your pipeline. But even if you're running this no notion table, like staying on top of that will exponentially increase the likelihood of an offer acceptance at the end of the cycle, which is ultimately the reason that you're running this entire process. So, more than worthwhile to invest in properly.
Then, you should treat every single candidate that comes through your process as a potential customer. Even if they're not directly inside your ICP in terms of who you're targeting, it's amazing how quickly word of mouth spreads on brands, and it's a touch point at a much deeper level with just about any other kind of touch point you're going to have with the prospect. Three different processes.
[0:24:31] Sunny Manivannan: That's very – I mean, there's so much insight packed in there. The last thing you said, I think is particularly interesting in the sense that you don't – most people don't think about recruiting as a brand building opportunity for the company itself. You often hear the phrase employer brand versus – there's a marketing brand, there's an employer your brand, and people treat them as two distinct things. But it is really ultimately just one company, and it's one company's brand. The VP of marketing should care a lot about what a candidate's experience is with your company.
[0:25:08] Harriet Johnston: Totally agree. It's not hard to do, like generally, if you're getting brand right on the brand side, or product side of the house, you've got 90% of the assets. I think, like at least, what I'm observing at the moment, like employee-led content is the next sexy thing following community in terms of how people are starting to sell. This is an awesome opportunity to kind of bring those two things together, and demonstrate not only to your prospects that you have smart people working on the problem, that is going to be what they're purchasing against. But it also gives people kind of a platform where you think about how you retain top talent. It's sort of, kind of, usually comes down to like, do they feel like they belong in the organization? Do they feel like they have growth opportunities in the organization? And do they feel fairly compensated? In terms of that growth piece, helping people build their own platforms or brands within your organization, as long as it's done within kind of the guardrails that you need it to is awesome.
[0:26:11] Sunny Manivannan: It's great. I was chuckling when he talked about some of the – from a technologist's perspective, would seem to be a basic feature of, make sure that you don't ghost employees, use technology to have reminders sent to make sure that you're following up. Those are very basic features from an engineering perspective, but those are the features that actually do matter to employees, and ultimately, what mattered to – whether your product creates value, and whether it's – ultimately, your company's brand relies on this sort of thing happening in a programmatic way. It's always fun when technology enables us to just be more human, toward each other.
[0:26:46] Harriet Johnston: Exactly. I think, ultimately, that's what a really good ATS is doing for you. It's giving you real time, reliable data so that you can understand at a macro and micro level exactly how the candidate experience is being managed. And it's holding you accountable where you drop the ball, so that you can kind of come back and make sure that you're improving the process.
[0:27:11] Sunny Manivannan: To our listeners, I promised the Ashby commercial is over. I'm going to ask Harriet some difficult questions now. Starting with this one, which is, what's been the most challenging thing that you've done at Ashby to date?
[0:27:25] Harriet Johnston: I think probably the most competitive piece with Ashby to date has been trying to maintain a narrative that works in a rapidly changing environment. So, to provide a little bit more context there. When I first joined Ashby, it was the very tail end of hyper growth, free VC dollars, very low interest style environment where you didn't have to do much to grow. And TA teams were being stretched in really brutal ways, where they're being told to hire faster than they've ever been able to hire before. So, they were buying this ATS, and then they were buying all this point solutions I talked about before. It was becoming kind of this – it was just like, we just need the infrastructure to get us through to hit this headcount number.
Then, we saw sort of this total U-turn in terms of what the environment looks like. So, we had this 12-month window where we were seeing truly talented talent leaders. just being like, let go, left, right, and center. I think the statistic is one, and two heads of talent in the tech space in particular had been let go in the last 18 months.
[0:28:39] Sunny Manivannan: Wow, I didn't realize that.
[0:28:40] Harriet Johnston: Yes. All of a sudden, you see this finance, putting a ton of pressure, saying you need to spend less money now. TA teams kind of going back through and being like, "Where can we cut costs? How do we try and retain as much of that headcount as possible?" The narrative that we were able to build out of that was this concept of the Franken-stack, the beautiful world of Ashby afterwards. That worked for 12 months. We grew on that kind of messaging really, really effectively. Now, we're in a year where it's been more than 12 months, since all of those contract renewals came up, and people made a decision whether or not to like switch ATS, as in consolidate on Ashby, or to just operate on their core ATS, and kind of ignore these different point solutions.
Franken-stack doesn't work anymore, because no one has won. They either have consolidated or they're the big ones. So. it's like a new messaging challenge where you're like, okay, so that works really well for us, we need to be able to let that go, and realize the reality of what our existing environment looks like. I think, total cliche, but the way marketing gets a voice at the table is by being the voice of the customer, rather than just coming in with lots of marketing strategies.
What we've been doing and making sure we do and we have like roles inside our team, like everyone has to be either speaking to at least one customer, or listening to at least a couple of customer calls every week. Is staying close to that changing narrative, so we can try and kind of keep up with it. But the implications, the bigger. and bigger you get is, you're changing your narrative, you're also changing your website, and you're changing all of your sales collateral, and you're training a sales team on how to speak about the product differently.
There's a lot of cascading implications, and I think, probably our biggest challenge so far is just making sure we're staying in front of that narrative all the time, even though it's changing a lot. And being comfortable with the fact that things that have been working for us, even three or six months ago, don't necessarily work for us today. I think that's probably one of the biggest themes in marketing at the moment. We've got proliferation of amazing technology right now that enables you to do all kinds of weird and wonderful things, whether it's AI-based STRs, or personalization at levels we've never been able to achieve before through products like clay.
There's just so many different kinds of moments and you're so you're asking your team to change there, then you're asking your team to rethink messaging constantly. Then, you're asking the team to reproduce all of these assets that happened before. I think that requires level of systems thinking and organization that doesn't necessarily fall inside the natural core skill set of a really creative marketer.
[0:31:19] Sunny Manivannan: The idea of having to change messaging every 12 months is so scary to every marketer, but I think in this market, it's almost – it is a necessity to be able to do that. How do you stay on top of voice of the customer at Ashby?
[0:31:30] Harriet Johnston: I think there's sort of a – it's three parts. I love talking in threes. I don't know why. I think, the first one is, it shouldn't be something that you do sporadically. It should be something that's kind of always on and built into the culture of your team. So, as a marketing leader, when I'm talking to peers, strongly recommend building systems and expectations with your team that they are staying close to that voice, and challenging each other. Sor of like, idea meritocracy in terms of where the messaging no longer feels like it's resonating. That's across the entire board. It doesn't come as this like, messaging was working, then all of a sudden, tomorrow, it's not. It's like, hey, messaging is becoming less and less effective, and we're catching it as it's happening. So that we're starting to move the ship as when it's occurring.
I think the second piece is, it's not marketing's job by itself to do messaging, and it should be a team sport that's kind of across your leadership as well. So, Mike who's in our sales team was super involved. Chapman, who's a solutions engineer. Benji, who's our founder. Kelsey and her team, and customer success were pulling, and asking for inputs from a lot of different groups at different times, and dedicating time, and making it a company priority to make sure that we're ln track as opposed to just being product marketing, or just marketing.
Then, I think the third thing is like, when you talk about the three pillars at the top, like the foundations piece as being thoughtful on really simple, easy things. Like naming documents properly and keeping things in folders. Having a basic tool that costs virtually nothing that will help you understand when assets haven't been looked at for several months. So, you kind of keep your database clean. Then, being thoughtful about the kinds of tooling that you use for design, so that you aren't working in really static assets that are hard to sort of test or change.
That kind of goes all the way through to our website. We use a product called Story Block there, which means that anyone can go in and edit text, and build blocks and stuff, rather than relying on engineering every time. Then, we can deploy our engineer against kind of higher bandwidth work. It means that our designer has like a ruthless system in terms of how we manage our sigma files, with naming conventions, and dates. Then, even down to like Google Docs and Drive, there are rules around how we have our drive set up and what you name each document, and then what the first three lines in every document looks like. It just makes everything a hell of a lot more searchable. I don't think you worry about trying to do this retroactively, it'd be a total waste of time. But it's easy today to start introducing some basic inventions, and if anyone wants to send me a LinkedIn message, I am happy to share kind of our templates on it.
[0:34:22] Sunny Manivannan: You're about to get a whole lot of LinkedIn messages.
[0:34:25] Harriet Johnston: I welcome it. I started my career out as a lawyer, so I think a lot in like document management, and systems, and it really does just make life so much easier moving forward.
[0:34:38] Sunny Manivannan: Wonderful. Well, listen, we're coming up close to the end of our conversation. I just have a couple of more questions for you. This is a section that's titled Influential Peers. Works or people that have influenced your career. I'll start off by asking about a book or movie that you'd recommend to everybody and why.
[0:34:56] Harriet Johnston: Yes, for sure. I saw this question in the email you sent me. I think a book that probably isn't recommended all of the time that I think is just fantastic is Storytelling with Data. I think one of the gaps or perceived gaps for a lot of marketing teams is they don't know how to communicate the way that so many other departments think and operate. This book basically just like walks you through foundations of like, use this kind of table, or graph, or chart to tell this kind of story.
It was my boss back at early days of Uber, Georgie, who now leads marketing for them globally, that gave it to me. She's like, "You need to get your shit together in terms of these slide decks, they are awful. If I see another graph that looks like this." It made such a difference to how I could communicate, because suddenly, I could show up in meetings, presenting ideas or strategies in the same language as our sales, finance, and sort of the rest of the leadership team.
Then, I mean, I think the other thing on books is like, it helps a lot as a marketer also to read fiction, and biographies, and those kinds of things, and keep stretching your mind in different directions. It's very easy to end up like – I think David Gerhardt's Exit Five Podcast, Peerbound, like your podcast, like they're fantastic resources, but you all start thinking the same way, and it's like important. So, some of the best books I've read in the last couple of months has been Educated, Why Fish Don't Exist, and Creativity, Inc.
[0:36:32] Sunny Manivannan: Great. Those are great recommendations. I don't know if I've read Storytelling with Data, but I have a similar story to you earlier in my career of a chart that was just way too colorful. I got some colorful feedback from my manager at the time, which I still remember. Love Creativity, Inc. as well, that's just certainly worth the reread. Great. Last question Harriet is, who are your favorite SaaS marketers and why? I know you probably have a long list, but give us some of the ones near the top of the list for you.
[0:37:05] Harriet Johnston: For sure, I will exclude my team, because I don't want to mention just a few people, but some really incredible people there. I am very proud of what we felt. Kevin White and Gunter with HyperGrowth Partners, I think produce some really interesting thought leadership. Just like a very hacky approach to demand generation, or growth marketing, which I appreciate deeply. So, we've been able to build pretty cool prospector, and a lot of automations as a result of working pretty closely with them. So, big shout out. Dimi who I worked with, and Alisha at Brex. Alisha is one of the best product marketing managers I've ever worked with and it just takes like a very, very practical, and thoughtful approach to product marketing. I don't think she does that much thought leadership, and Dimi's a little bit the same. But definitely worth a follow or connect [inaudible 0:38:04] for that. I can keep rambling for the next 15 minutes. I spent a lot of time like reading and following other people in the space just to try and make sure that I'm at least trying to keep up with all of the new stuff that's coming out.
[0:38:18] Sunny Manivannan: Fabulous. Well, listen, thank you so, so much for stopping by The Peerbound Podcast. I learned a lot from you, and I strongly suspect our listeners will as well. So, once again, a huge thank you and congratulations to you on all the success and great work at Ashby, and wishing you the very best.
[0:38:33] Harriet Johnston: Thank you so much. I love your podcast. So, it was an absolute pleasure getting to be here. Thank you, Sunny.
[0:38:40] Sunny Manivannan: Thanks, Harriet.
[END]
