CONTENTS
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peerbound-podcast/id1708825056
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5GO3n6pATX10fkY8lgf3GX
"Jason Perocho: What we're seeing is a big pivot toward the articulation of ROI, for not just your tool, but helping people understand how your tool also fits in this ever-expanding technology stack."
[0:00:17] Sunny Manivannan: Welcome to The Peerbound Podcast. I'm your host, Sunny Manivannan. Joining me today is Jason Perocho, the SVP of Marketing at Amperity. Jason has an incredible background. He is a graduate of the United States Naval Academy, after which he was a pilot in the US Navy, and then later worked with the Pentagon. After that, he joined the private sector and has held marketing roles in companies like Salesforce, where he was in product marketing, and a product marketing leader that entire time. Then later, joined Braze, where Jason and I were colleagues for a good part of our time there. And most recently joined Amperity, where he is now the Senior Vice President of Marketing. Jason, it's such an honor to have you on The Peerbound Podcast finally. Welcome.
[0:01:08] Jason Perocho: Thanks, Sonny. Man, what an intro?
[0:01:11] Sunny Manivannan: Definitely. Well deserved. We're going to dig into your story, which I'm really excited about. Tell me a little bit about that transition from public sector to private sector. How did you end up in marketing?
[0:01:25] Jason Perocho: The honest answer is, I never really intended to end up in marketing, but found my way here just because I had a passion for it. You mentioned that I graduated the academy and became a pilot. Unfortunately, one day I was in training, and landed, and I had this like crazy pain in my abdomen. I looked down and I was like, "Oh God, what is that?" I decided to put it off for as long as possible as all good pilots do, because they don't want to get disqualified. But eventually, the day came that I said, "Let's get this checked out." Went in for a routine visit, but three weeks later, got a call, found out it was unfortunately cancer, which grounded my pilot career, but began my marketing career. Which I know is a really weird segue, but like my time in the Pentagon was ultimately writing speeches for a secretary. Once, the assistant secretary for the Navy, then assistant secretary to Defense. Anyhow, if you could sell Congress on a budget, you could sling enterprise software.
[0:02:28] Sunny Manivannan: I mean, incredible background. When you first joined Salesforce, what was that process like? What were the interviews like? How did they perceive your background? Did they know what skills you brought to the table? Did you know what you were getting into when you joined the private sector in the technology industry?
[0:02:47] Jason Perocho: No, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I remember sitting through my first few interviews in business school and absolutely just flailing. I did not know how to interview coming out of the military. In fact, before I went into tech, I thought maybe I'd want to be a CPG marketer. This unnamed company basically flat out told me and said, "Hey, we don't believe military folks are creative enough to do marketing." I was like, "Oh. Wait. What? Oh, okay. I mean, it takes some creativity to land a plane on a carrier. But okay, fine, fine." Everybody, to each their own.
When I finally started getting into it and I discovered CPG marketing wasn't for me, I was more in the tech, the high speed, because I just love interesting tech. That's why I flew planes. I started realising that getting in and breaking in is super hard. Mainly, because we have as veterans have trouble translating our skill set from our military life to our professional life. Not only that, it's hard to find companies that are willing to take a chance on you that say,
"Hey, we see that value of that old skill set and we're willing to invest time and resources to help you develop in this environment now."
[0:04:01] Sunny Manivannan: Yes. I mean, looking back on it now, more than a decade later, clearly, the dots fall into place very nicely. But I can imagine at the time, it was not exactly clear, that perhaps, even you. How did you know that you were going to be a great marketer? There's no way you could have known at that time.
[0:04:15] Jason Perocho: I did always find something exciting about taking these complex ideas when I was in the military and just like simplifying it down. In the military we have the KISS acronym, or keep it simple stupid. That's just a mantra that's just in the back of my head. It's like, "All right. Cool, cool technology, great, great conversation engineer. But explain it to me like I'm in third grade or I'm in high school." I just get such a thrill out of that and evangelising these new technologies that was all over Silicon Valley and beyond, just making it relatable to all my friends that don't live inside of this tech sphere. So, that was one of the reasons why I knew that this is kind of a calling, a place that I absolutely just want to debate.
[0:04:57] Sunny Manivannan: Totally. I mean, heck, even within five minutes of talking to you about this, I've already figured out a few things that ex-military veterans can contribute in the workplace. So, surprising that all these recruiters could have figured that out after all these conversations, but glad we're here. Let me ask you a little bit about your sort of first private sector role. What surprised you in a positive way and then what surprised you in a not quite a positive way?
[0:05:21] Jason Perocho: What surprised me in a positive way when I went to Salesforce was just how much structure they had around the product marketing position. I later found out like Salesforce was one of those companies that revolutionised the idea of product marketing. So, at Salesforce, product marketing really is the lead growth engine. When it comes to executing big strategy, it's all on product marketing to coordinate across the entire go-to market teams. There's such a well -oiled machine that just like simply plugging in and doing the everyday job was just heading heels above, like what some of my other cohorts were learning at other companies. It gave me this great foundation to build off of and innovate on top of.
But when it comes to the hard things, the hard things were really around messaging. Writing speeches is one thing for Congress, but getting short, concise, pithy for the private sector was just a whole another level. I remember going in and writing my first press release and having to present it to a woman. Her name was Jane at Salesforce. Those at Salesforce know who this Jane is. She would put it up on the board when you brought it in and just rip it to shreds. She's like, "Don't know what that means. What is that? That's inside baseball. Can you even write English?" I was like, "Whoa." I thought my military instructors were intense. This is a whole other level of intensity right now, but I thank her and all my mentors there at Salesforce for everything they taught me about positioning and messaging.
It was accrucible to get through there, to get through positioning and messaging, but I think it's the only way that product marketers truly learn.
[0:07:08] Sunny Manivannan: Yes. Your story reminds me of – my first job out of college was a GE aviation, where – you know this. I used to build aircraft engines. That was my first job out of college, was in aerospace engineering. My Jane at Salesforce was named Tyler at GE. Anybody from that part of my life is listening to this will remember very similar feedback delivered in a very similar way. But looking back on it all the years later, it's very valuable.
[0:07:34] Jason Perocho: One of the lessons is just to take feedback and know that it's not personal. They are trying to get you better, but sometimes, especially at that executive layer, they don't have the time to put all the feelings around and be like, embrace you with a hug. They're just like, "Nope, nope, nope. Yes. Nope, go fix." It's a hard lesson to learn for some folks.
[0:07:56] Sunny Manivannan: Yes. I mean, this is a rabbit hole we'd go down forever. But one of the things that I've reflected on about feedback, and you really just said this is, when somebody's just saying to you something very directly, that's just how they're thinking in their brain. They're just comfortable enough with you to just say it the way that they think it. Now, we've added all the sort of extra layers of political correctness. I've got to say it a certain way and so on, and someone that is useful and important, it's important to be respectful. But now we've gone too far the other way where it's no longer clear what this person is trying to communicate. That's not to anybody's utility.
[0:08:35] Jason Perocho: There are all different types of leaders. Some will sugarcoat it for you, others will tell you very directly. But I think it's just an ever-evolving skill set on how to manage up to get the information you need out of them to be successful, and then to also recognise that it really isn't personal.
[0:08:54] Sunny Manivannn: Totally. I love it. Let me ask you a question about, Salesforce is an interesting place to start your tech career, because by the time that you were there, they already had different business units. They already had different products. On one hand, you are really neck deep in the details of, for example, writing press release. On the other hand, you're also representing a company that has so much revenue is really a standard bearer for an industry. Any challenges with that? What did you learn from that? How did you deal with that?
[0:09:24] Jason Perocho: Yes. Salesforce is a behemoth of a company, but each product was in a specific zone. So, there were like four zones of products. There were the startups that were just trying to figure out how to make money, call that the tier one, the zero to 50 million zone. There are products that we're trying to scale for growth, that's like the 50 million to 300 million. There were products that we're trying to get to their first billion, which is a whole another operational scale, which is 250 million to a billion. Then, there were the billion plus products that were just giant machines. Just machines in order to crank and turn and continue that growth rate that we're targeted at.
When I went into Salesforce, I didn't know it at the time, but I was being put into this special category because that's where my veteran skill set truly shined at. It was like, "Hey, this kid has some operational rigor. He's always looking at scale, but he's not afraid of these nebulous environments, and you just go try something." So, I found myself always in that tier two zone of, "Hey, here are the products that are 50 million and trying to get to that next growth spurt." Which meant, really figuring out what is the product market fit, what is the right use cases that we're specifically going after, and what's the right go-to market around that product or portfolio to make them successful.
[0:10:40] Sunny Manivannan: What an incredible experience. I want to ask you a little bit on the flip side of what did you have to unlearn about Salesforce as you moved on from that behemoth of a company, as you said, to smaller, more nimble companies?
[0:10:56] Jason Perocho: I learned really quickly that how much of a system Salesforce had, and how much harder it is to build that system from scratch. You don't even recognise, even the agreement on nomenclature, what's the purpose of a first call deck? How does the sales process work? What are the expectations at each stage? What are the right video vendors to go to for X, Y and Z? All that was thought off to, all you need to do was plug in your great ideas into it. But when you move to a smaller company, it's like, okay, I want to take some of that structure and bring it down, but also right size it for the company that I'm at.
That takes a little bit of experimentation at first, because you could put too much structure in and frustrate your leaders because you're not producing results fast enough. Or, you're creating these one-offs, but like nothing's scalable when they're just looking for scale.
[0:11:52] Sunny Manivannan: Fabulous. Let me ask you a question about career advice. So, as you're going through this space of your career, no doubt, you had mentors and they gave you a whole bunch of advice. What's career advice or any examples of career advice that stick out to you? If you could tell us a story about that, that would be great.
[0:12:08] Jason Perocho: Yes, I've got two.
[0:12:11] Sunny Manivannan: All right, let's hear it. The first is to make sure that you pick a job. Don't let a company recruit you, because when you pick the job, you're fulfilling a need that you've defined in yourself. When a job is recruiting you, they've defined a need, and they're seeing whether you fit inside of it, because sometimes, it's like mutually line up and people get lucky. But I've been talking with hundreds of folks, people are usually more satisfied when they go out, reach, and get something that satisfies the need of what they want in their career to get to their next level.
I always say that you get to pick your first job inside that company, then you get kind of thrown around. Then, you start feeling it out whether you like it or not, and you use that as input for your next job.
[0:12:57] Sunny Manivannan: Totally, loved that. Okay. What was the second piece of career advice?
[0:13:00] Jason Perocho: The second piece of career advice is that, you have to have a team around you to be successful. In order to get by or get past certain levels, it's not about how smart you are anymore. It's about how well you can navigate really sticky situations. So, the team that I recommend everybody have is one, an executive coach. Like an executive coach is there to help you think through in a structured way problems that you'll see in corporate America. Two is a mentor, somebody that's usually a step or two ahead of you that could either pave the way for you or reflect in a close enough timeframe that they could give you actionable advice on how to be better at the job you're at in order to get to where you want to go.
The third is a therapist. Because in the end, you're going to have to figure out how to emotionally regulate yourself. You lose the gossip that you might have had when you're like a manager or an individual contributor. You have to figure out a way to compartmentalise that and have a right output for that in order to keep it productive in the workplace and at home. Because trust me, you don't want to come home and just bitch about work all the time. Your partner will be like, "Can we talk about something else? What about me?"
[0:14:16] Sunny Manivannan: That's great advice. You're so spot on. As you really step into, let's say, the VP levels of our organisation, there's just a distance between you and the day-to-day sort of happenings at a company. Things happen, people do crazy things. Most of these things just don't matter at that point because you're trying to figure out what are my goals, am I achieving my goals, am I helping this company move forward, and am I doing a great job, and is it valuable.
The support systems I think often go by the wayside because people say, "Well, I don't need that. I'm going to do it myself" and so on. There's a whole host of excuses that we can all make, but no doubt that if you're serious about your performance, you've got to have a P.
[0:15:02] Jason Perocho: Yes, absolutely.
[0:15:05] Sunny Manivannan: Really cool. Love that, Jason. Thank you. Let me ask you a little bit about what your priorities are now at Amperity. The technology industry has gone through a lot of changes in the last two years. We're all, I think, not quite inventing a new playbook, but we're dusting off a very old playbook that many of us haven't had to turn to before 2010. I think many of us really started our careers when it was boom times, and it's just been boom times until 2022. So, we're all kind of learning some new muscles. What's top of mind for you at Amperity? Tell me about what you're working on, what you're excited about.
[0:15:46] Jason Perocho: Yes. I mean, I think with any marketing lead right now, the first thing that's top of mind is performance. Are we driving enough pipe? Are we driving the right pipe? Are we helping our sellers advance that pipe? Even after the sale, what motions do we have to make sure that we're keeping the customers that we've just spent so much money on acquiring? All along the way, we're trying to find the most cost effective, yet personalised journey to do. It seems like those two are almost at odds with each other. It's like, "Hey, be cost-effective, but yet, personalise the entire experience."
That's exceptionally difficult for us, because we at Amperity target enterprise businesses. So, businesses that make over $250 million run rate. There has to be a level of personalisation in order to win those types of deals. First and foremost is that. The second with performance is also the health of my team. We can talk and wax poetic about performance, and I could deliver the greatest SQLs and SQOs. But if I'm not looking out for my team and helping them navigate through some of the trials, and these new things, and new modals of reaching out the customers, and them feeling good about it. Then, the first thing is just not going to happen.
So, very much focused in on, hey, how can we create a culture of experimentation? How could we create a space in which people can authentically grow? How do we make sure that as they grow, their incentives are aligned with business incentives?
[0:17:28] Sunny Manivannan: Speaking of sort of what you're trying to do and what CMOS are trying to do, would love to get your take on, what do you think is more broadly going on in the software industry or SaaS industry now? Do you think that we're in for a protractor downturn? Do you see any green shoots? How does AI play in all of this? Is there like a next act that's fueled by AI? Where do you stand on where is the industry's going?
[0:17:52] Jason Perocho: First and foremost, everybody has to prove their value. I think, Gartner has rang the bell on this one. But 30%, 35% of SaaS seats, or consumption, or whatever you've bought goes unused. It's just shelfware. At the same time, there are more SaaS companies than any time in history. How are you ensuring that you're getting the utilisation and even in that utilisation that your customers are seeing value? So, I think what we're seeing is a big pivot toward the articulation of ROI for not just your tool, but helping people understand how your tool also fits in this ever-expanding technology stack.
If your business can't articulate how you fit into a tech stack, what your role is, and what would happen if you were to remove that piece. Then, I think that that business is in trouble. So, first and foremost, like value articulation. AI is super important, and I think that's the question that we're getting pressured a lot from like the C-suite. It's like, "Hey, how are using AI to save dollars, to save people, et cetera, et cetera? It's like, I don't want to get left behind the curve."
But for all the wonderful predictions about what AI is, I think there's also, at the same time just so much risk around AI, that at least we see inside of the enterprise segments that businesses are not willing to take on yet. So, everything from LLMs being how accurate, like, "Oh, not there." Even at the best are like 98%, 99 % accurate. That 1% of error is still unacceptable for a lot of CISOs out there. How accurate are predictions? How can we validate those predictions? Can we unpack those models?
As kind of a future AI state, I don't think that black boxes are the future of AI. We have to, as an industry, let people know how and why our AI functions the way it does, so that the entire process and all the transformations can be auditable to ensure that businesses are staying in compliance. Because even though the reward is high, the risk is equally as high, especially with everybody leaning in with a patchwork of regulations out there.
[0:20:08] Sunny Manivannan: I love what you said about, even if it's 98% accurate, that still may not be good enough for some CISOs, especially the enterprise. It's certainly, 98% would not have been good enough for you as a pilot. If you were told, "All right, get into this plane. It's going to be fine 98% of the time." The other 2%, we don't know. Maybe it'll be okay, maybe it won't." I don't think you would have gone on that plane.
[0:20:30] Jason Perocho: It's like giving somebody like a thousand skittles, but telling them 20 of them will kill them. But go ahead and eat as many as you want.
[0:20:36] Sunny Manivannan: That's exactly right. Unlimited, go for it, free for all.
[0:20:41] Jason Perocho: Yes. Are you going to eat anything from the bag of skittles?
Probably not.
[0:20:45] Sunny Manivannan: Are you using any AI solutions within your marketing team?
[0:20:47] Jason Perocho: We're using a ton of AI. In all honesty, I've actually now probably used a combination of perplexity.ai, claw.ai for 50% to 60 % of my searches or my research compared to Google. I've been training my team as such. We love, for example, in Perplexity, the ability to trace back the source of where that recommendation came from to validate that came from a human being. In claw.ai, it's just like really, really good about synthesising down large meetings and getting the actual thing.
AI is being used in our business to more augment us and take away a lot of the mundane things that we would do. I'm sure even with this podcast, you're going to create a transcript off of it, summarise it, and send a newsletter out to your audience. I think that's a great use. I mean, it's human in the loop, it's productivity focused. Not necessarily completely replacing folks at this point.
[0:21:48] Sunny Manivannan: Yes. The plane has gone a lot better and more advanced, but the pilot is still there.
[0:21:52] Jason Perocho: There's a lot of talk about drones and such, but we still have pilots flying in the sky, and there's just this risk factor that even with software glitching at 1%, it comes down to almost like a philosophical problem. Would you rather the human make the mistake or would you rather a artificial intelligence make mistake? Because who learns from those mistakes and what are the costs of those outcomes? We're thinking about pilot in commercial airlines, why there might always be a pilot in there. The optics and just the humanity associated with it is sometimes hard to replace.
[0:22:25] Sunny Manivannan: You see AI eventually taking some portions of jobs. Where do you where do you stand on that? There's definitely some – one of the interesting observations as I talked to other CMOs and just across the SaaS industry is, there's a lot of excitement for AI at the C levels. Not as much excitement at the sort of more – the levels where the real work of an organisation gets done, like at the master level, the tractor level, and so on. Not as much excitement. Some excitement, but not as much. What do you think is going on? How do you see the future of AI in the workplace?
[0:22:57] Jason Perocho: I do think that there will be the ability to do more with less people. I'm just going to call the spade the spade, because if you're removing all like the transcription time, the meeting summary notes you're able to get more through. If you're getting able to get more throughput through, you might need less people. So, I do think there is some aspect of losing some current jobs that we have today But I also think that there is the creation of future jobs tomorrow that we really can't anticipate at this point, even if they are only temporary. Like prompt engineering, for example.
In our product at Amperity, we have this feature called AmpGPT that allows users to just interrogate their own data and find insights. So, if your boss, your CEO has ever given you a one-off question. Yes, simply just ask that question in, and will give you the answer, and graph it for you. Now, while that seems just like this magical tool on the surface, it doesn't just happen. It's not like this person's writing SQL code anymore. What they're actually doing now is that they're training the algorithm. They're doing prompt engineering and they're training what the semantic tags are on all the data. So that, when natural language is used, the natural language knows how to look up the different rows and columns stored inside of your database.
That's just an example of how you can see jobs starting to shift more than necessarily replace. I believe there will be more jobs. The ultimate question is, depending on how fast technology moves, can you create as many new jobs as the jobs that you're destroying?
[0:24:33] Sunny Manivannan: History is any indicator. The answer to that question is yes, that you will create just as many of your jobs. If not, more. Unemployment rates have stayed fairly stable throughout many technology changes, right? There's not many marketers writing with quill and ink anymore. We're all using computers, we're all using the internet, and now we're using AI. It seems like the jobs are still there. So, it will be very interesting to see how this plays out.
[0:24:59] Jason Perocho: Even the last thought, I think this is a great opportunity for not so much like the demand generation or the product, even the product marketers. I think it's a great advantage for the creative economy, because in the end, people put value on uniqueness and newness. So far, what I've seen, I haven't seen a lot of AI being able to derive something completely from scratch. We're bringing 20, 40 disparate sources together and create something brand new. Everything is a derivative or almost a copy. I think in the future, people will value more creativity, more out thereness, more out there thinking. The thinking that just is obviously comes from a human, that might be more imperfect than AI can produce. So, creative economy I think is going to get a boost here in the future.
[0:25:45] Sunny Manivannan: We started talking about SaaS. So, let me move over to the SaaS talk section of this episode. I want to ask you a couple of questions about different SaaS companies and what are your thoughts. I'll start off by asking you, what is your favorite SaaS company homepage? The only company you can't mention is your current one. So, tell me your favorite SaaS company homepage.
[0:26:04] Jason Perocho: I thought about this for a little bit. I have a nephew out there that loves like interactive games online like every other kid. Just kind of addicted to the iPad at this time. But there's this company called Spline that creates 3D games, 3D images. I love it because their homepage is so interactive to show what their value is.
Not only that, they show this beautiful, what you're able to create, and have some experimentation on the front page. But on the backside, their dock site is super clean and very solution-oriented. Because as great as the technology is that you're presenting forward, there has to be some probably hands-on keyboard person making that happen. They're going to need some guidance on how to utilise your products. I think having a great doc site that's easy to navigate, that's descriptive, that helps people figure out the ins and outs of their product is just absolutely amazing.
[0:27:05] Sunny Manivannan: Okay. Amazing. spline.design is the home page for those who are interested. That's very cool. Tell me a little bit. we're obviously in the customer story business, so I get obsessed with customer stories. I've read so many customer stories over the last few months. What's your favorite SaaS customer story and why do you like it?
[0:27:23] Jason Perocho: One customer story is more of a highlight for marketers out there that are worried about their brand and why brand is so important. The customer story that was told by us was actually given by Marc Benioff and he was talking about how they were trying to break into the Barclays account. Barclays being the largest bank over there, overseas, in the United Kingdom.
Marc had us prepare for weeks for this, to think of every in and out of this person could possibly say, with a complete review of the roadmaps, like we are breaking into this business. He meets with the president, sits down. When he sits down, Marc starts his pitch. The CEO just goes, "Stop. I don't care." He said that, "Anybody could come in here and pitch me their software. Guess what? I have more money than God. I could probably go create that myself. What I want to know is, do you actually believe in the values that are on your website? Do you really donate 1% of time, money, equity, to businesses, to charities like LGBTQ.
Marc is like, "Oh, yeah, absolutely. Here's X, Y, here's Z, here's all the things that we've done in the past year." He pushed, he was like, "Why?" He said, "Well, you know, my son recently came out as gay and I want to do business with people that have the same values as me and support my family." Tracing this all the way back to customer stories, it's like, yes, the problem, the solution, the aha moment are important.
But the real goal on customer stories is really when you align values between brands, and you highlight that value. Because in the end, the entire model of SaaS is that it's software as a service. You could leave at any time. Vendors need you to be there for three years to even make back the cost of acquiring you. It's really about putting that relationship first and making sure that when you're communicating out in this customer story, you're communicating the values of your company and why people would want to work with you.
[0:29:39] Sunny Manivannan: Absolutely, love that story.
[0:29:41] Jasom Perocho: That's one of my big stories. It's really stuck with me for a while, and just always, as a marketer in me, like, "Hey, tell the product story, but also be human, and tell the story about how the brands compliment each other."
[0:29:58] Sunny Manivannan: Absolutely love that story. So spot on that we all tend to get really excited about the product and we forget about the people, and still it's a partnership that is beyond just technology. It's a real person-to-person partnership that hopefully will go on for a long time. Like you said, the vendor wants this relationship to be a forever relationship, and it's going to go through ups and downs, and it's really about who's going to be on the other side of the table? Not, what technology is on the other side of the table.
[0:30:26] Jason Perocho: Yes. People don't buy technology because it's cool, and has a slick UI, and it solves a problem They buy technology, because they have a feeling that it'll make them better. It'll get them promoted. Because like in the end, there's a personal reason why. So, if you're not like putting the, not just the customer, but the person, the champion at the forefront of your story, you're not telling that story correctly.
[0:30:48] Sunny Manivannan: Right on. I want to ask you a little bit about favorite technologies that you use. If you could give me – this time, I will let you do two. One person, one business. Tell me a little bit about what technologies you really like to use.
[0:31:02] Jason Perocho: Oh man, I probably already gave it away. But qual.ai/perplexity.ai are two of my absolute favorite tools. They save me so much time. They help me ideate, they help me summarise some of these notes, they help me research. It's just so much more easier and intuitive than Google, using quotes, plus signs, all of the stuff that you used to do in order to get search engines to perform for you. Just absolutely amazing. If you're not using it, you're probably behind. So, that's my professional.
As for personal, it's honestly Strava. I am a workout fiend. Sometimes I do two workouts a day. I think keeping my body in shape helps me keep my mind in shape. But I also like tracking things and gamification of things. The fact that I could track every single workout, see my progress, and also compete with my friends on who's running longer distances, who's lifting heavier weight is super huge for me. I did learn to shut off the location sometimes, when you're on military bases. Because that was a big no no in the military. But after that little hiccup, absolutely love it, now that I'm a civilian again.
[0:32:16] Sunny Manivannan: Amazing. That's outstanding. Love that. Let me ask you, let's go to the Peerbound talk section where we just talk about your peer influences, who's your inspiration, or what inspires you. I'd have to start off by asking you about a book or a movie that you'd recommend to everybody that you've consumed recently.
[0:32:36] Jason Perocho: I thought about this question a lot because you did prepare me for it. I've changed my mind since, and I think a great book is Slaughterhouse-Five, written by Kurt Vonnegut, because I love the way that it's structured. Because it's structured by not being structured at all. It's about this guy, Kilgore Trout, that can jump around to any time point in his life. As you're reading the story, you're not reading it from birth to his death. You're just reading about little anecdotes and learning along the way about what makes this person who he is.
I think that's the most applicable way to even think about marketing and kind of the mindset that you need in marketing. You're not going to have – nobody's ever going to lay out to you the full customer journey. You're just going to get bits and pieces of it. And as you're reading it, you're going to have to put it all together, and make the story in your head, and figuring out what that means and how to apply it to other people. It's like that nonlinear thinking, but also able to piece things together and create your own story or truth out of it, I think is totally essential to be successful in this industry.
[0:33:41] Sunny Manivannan: I love that. I mean, so spot on, that we exist in different timelines and we exist at different levels of detail as marketers all the time. We also exist in a completely incomplete world where we wish we had 90% more information than we actually do have. There's just no way, there's no way.
[0:34:03] Jason Perocho: Then, for a professional book. There's a great resource that I always refer back to it's called, FYI: For Your Improvement. It's not something that you read back to front, but it's an executive book that's very situational. It provides context on different situations that you'll be either managing your teams, managing your peers, or managing your bosses, and how to work through those in very digestible frameworks. It's something that you just rabbit ear and bookmark and you come back to as you see the problems arise. No need to memorize it all, but it's just such a great bookshelf reference material to figure out how to be a better leader.
[0:34:42] Sunny Manivannan: Amazing. Love that as well. I know this is a dangerous question to ask a Salesforce alum, because there are so many amazing marketers that started their career or spent a significant amount of time in Salesforce. But my last question to you is, who is your favorite SaaS marketer? On this one, you can give me as many names as you can muster and tell me why.
[0:35:02] Jason Perocho: There's just a laundry list of people to name. Going to like my very first boss, Mike Stone, who saw something raw and was like, "Yes, outside thinking from the traditional SaaS world, let's hire him, and develop him in a whole new way." He hired a team of outside thinkers, whether it was this woman, Lisa Henderson, who had advised me of more branding. She created the Katy Perry persona. There was Simone Kritz, who was like my first manager, who like founded Marketing Germany. Even my peers, like Julian Armington, who helped me understand different aspects of working with the sales teams.
God, I could just name, go on and on like throughout that, through the Salesforce journey. But if I just jump to the chase and answer the question directly, it's somebody that we both know very well and her name is Sarah Spivey. The reason being is that, I've had a lot of great leaders in my life. I've never had great leaders that are also just effective communicators that get me to run into direction. Sara is one of those people that you can sit down with for 15 to 30 minutes and get marching orders for the next week.
The thing that I want to emulate is to be able to so succinctly summarise my advice and pointly push people in a direction that requires very little words. Even the story's too long. She would have probably said it in like 10 seconds and given like a really thoughtful answer why. So, my shout out to Sara Spivey.
[0:36:41] Sunny Manivannan: I love it and love all those names and to walk down memory lane as well. Sara, as you know, was a former guest on The Peerbound Podcast. She was awesome, and I can't wait to share more from that conversation in the coming months and years. But yes, she was just an incredible, incredible person, incredible manager, and great to reminisce jointly. Everything you said was also my experience. She was very consistent across the board and yes, we all we all loved her. So, great stuff. Thank you, Jason. This was just an incredible conversation. I really enjoyed this tremendously, loved your perspectives on AI, and the future. As well as what we all experiencing as people in the SaaS industry today versus a couple of years ago even.
Really, really love hearing your stories of moving away from public sector in military into the private sector, and how that sort of shaped you into the marketer and leader that you are today. So, thank you so much for joining me, and looking forward to sharing this episode.
[0:37:47] Jason Perocho: Thanks for having me, Sunny. Always fun to wax poetic with you and catch up.
[0:37:52] Sunny Manivannan: Love it. Thanks, Jason. See you.
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peerbound-podcast/id1708825056
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5GO3n6pATX10fkY8lgf3GX
"Jason Perocho: What we're seeing is a big pivot toward the articulation of ROI, for not just your tool, but helping people understand how your tool also fits in this ever-expanding technology stack."
[0:00:17] Sunny Manivannan: Welcome to The Peerbound Podcast. I'm your host, Sunny Manivannan. Joining me today is Jason Perocho, the SVP of Marketing at Amperity. Jason has an incredible background. He is a graduate of the United States Naval Academy, after which he was a pilot in the US Navy, and then later worked with the Pentagon. After that, he joined the private sector and has held marketing roles in companies like Salesforce, where he was in product marketing, and a product marketing leader that entire time. Then later, joined Braze, where Jason and I were colleagues for a good part of our time there. And most recently joined Amperity, where he is now the Senior Vice President of Marketing. Jason, it's such an honor to have you on The Peerbound Podcast finally. Welcome.
[0:01:08] Jason Perocho: Thanks, Sonny. Man, what an intro?
[0:01:11] Sunny Manivannan: Definitely. Well deserved. We're going to dig into your story, which I'm really excited about. Tell me a little bit about that transition from public sector to private sector. How did you end up in marketing?
[0:01:25] Jason Perocho: The honest answer is, I never really intended to end up in marketing, but found my way here just because I had a passion for it. You mentioned that I graduated the academy and became a pilot. Unfortunately, one day I was in training, and landed, and I had this like crazy pain in my abdomen. I looked down and I was like, "Oh God, what is that?" I decided to put it off for as long as possible as all good pilots do, because they don't want to get disqualified. But eventually, the day came that I said, "Let's get this checked out." Went in for a routine visit, but three weeks later, got a call, found out it was unfortunately cancer, which grounded my pilot career, but began my marketing career. Which I know is a really weird segue, but like my time in the Pentagon was ultimately writing speeches for a secretary. Once, the assistant secretary for the Navy, then assistant secretary to Defense. Anyhow, if you could sell Congress on a budget, you could sling enterprise software.
[0:02:28] Sunny Manivannan: I mean, incredible background. When you first joined Salesforce, what was that process like? What were the interviews like? How did they perceive your background? Did they know what skills you brought to the table? Did you know what you were getting into when you joined the private sector in the technology industry?
[0:02:47] Jason Perocho: No, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I remember sitting through my first few interviews in business school and absolutely just flailing. I did not know how to interview coming out of the military. In fact, before I went into tech, I thought maybe I'd want to be a CPG marketer. This unnamed company basically flat out told me and said, "Hey, we don't believe military folks are creative enough to do marketing." I was like, "Oh. Wait. What? Oh, okay. I mean, it takes some creativity to land a plane on a carrier. But okay, fine, fine." Everybody, to each their own.
When I finally started getting into it and I discovered CPG marketing wasn't for me, I was more in the tech, the high speed, because I just love interesting tech. That's why I flew planes. I started realising that getting in and breaking in is super hard. Mainly, because we have as veterans have trouble translating our skill set from our military life to our professional life. Not only that, it's hard to find companies that are willing to take a chance on you that say,
"Hey, we see that value of that old skill set and we're willing to invest time and resources to help you develop in this environment now."
[0:04:01] Sunny Manivannan: Yes. I mean, looking back on it now, more than a decade later, clearly, the dots fall into place very nicely. But I can imagine at the time, it was not exactly clear, that perhaps, even you. How did you know that you were going to be a great marketer? There's no way you could have known at that time.
[0:04:15] Jason Perocho: I did always find something exciting about taking these complex ideas when I was in the military and just like simplifying it down. In the military we have the KISS acronym, or keep it simple stupid. That's just a mantra that's just in the back of my head. It's like, "All right. Cool, cool technology, great, great conversation engineer. But explain it to me like I'm in third grade or I'm in high school." I just get such a thrill out of that and evangelising these new technologies that was all over Silicon Valley and beyond, just making it relatable to all my friends that don't live inside of this tech sphere. So, that was one of the reasons why I knew that this is kind of a calling, a place that I absolutely just want to debate.
[0:04:57] Sunny Manivannan: Totally. I mean, heck, even within five minutes of talking to you about this, I've already figured out a few things that ex-military veterans can contribute in the workplace. So, surprising that all these recruiters could have figured that out after all these conversations, but glad we're here. Let me ask you a little bit about your sort of first private sector role. What surprised you in a positive way and then what surprised you in a not quite a positive way?
[0:05:21] Jason Perocho: What surprised me in a positive way when I went to Salesforce was just how much structure they had around the product marketing position. I later found out like Salesforce was one of those companies that revolutionised the idea of product marketing. So, at Salesforce, product marketing really is the lead growth engine. When it comes to executing big strategy, it's all on product marketing to coordinate across the entire go-to market teams. There's such a well -oiled machine that just like simply plugging in and doing the everyday job was just heading heels above, like what some of my other cohorts were learning at other companies. It gave me this great foundation to build off of and innovate on top of.
But when it comes to the hard things, the hard things were really around messaging. Writing speeches is one thing for Congress, but getting short, concise, pithy for the private sector was just a whole another level. I remember going in and writing my first press release and having to present it to a woman. Her name was Jane at Salesforce. Those at Salesforce know who this Jane is. She would put it up on the board when you brought it in and just rip it to shreds. She's like, "Don't know what that means. What is that? That's inside baseball. Can you even write English?" I was like, "Whoa." I thought my military instructors were intense. This is a whole other level of intensity right now, but I thank her and all my mentors there at Salesforce for everything they taught me about positioning and messaging.
It was accrucible to get through there, to get through positioning and messaging, but I think it's the only way that product marketers truly learn.
[0:07:08] Sunny Manivannan: Yes. Your story reminds me of – my first job out of college was a GE aviation, where – you know this. I used to build aircraft engines. That was my first job out of college, was in aerospace engineering. My Jane at Salesforce was named Tyler at GE. Anybody from that part of my life is listening to this will remember very similar feedback delivered in a very similar way. But looking back on it all the years later, it's very valuable.
[0:07:34] Jason Perocho: One of the lessons is just to take feedback and know that it's not personal. They are trying to get you better, but sometimes, especially at that executive layer, they don't have the time to put all the feelings around and be like, embrace you with a hug. They're just like, "Nope, nope, nope. Yes. Nope, go fix." It's a hard lesson to learn for some folks.
[0:07:56] Sunny Manivannan: Yes. I mean, this is a rabbit hole we'd go down forever. But one of the things that I've reflected on about feedback, and you really just said this is, when somebody's just saying to you something very directly, that's just how they're thinking in their brain. They're just comfortable enough with you to just say it the way that they think it. Now, we've added all the sort of extra layers of political correctness. I've got to say it a certain way and so on, and someone that is useful and important, it's important to be respectful. But now we've gone too far the other way where it's no longer clear what this person is trying to communicate. That's not to anybody's utility.
[0:08:35] Jason Perocho: There are all different types of leaders. Some will sugarcoat it for you, others will tell you very directly. But I think it's just an ever-evolving skill set on how to manage up to get the information you need out of them to be successful, and then to also recognise that it really isn't personal.
[0:08:54] Sunny Manivannn: Totally. I love it. Let me ask you a question about, Salesforce is an interesting place to start your tech career, because by the time that you were there, they already had different business units. They already had different products. On one hand, you are really neck deep in the details of, for example, writing press release. On the other hand, you're also representing a company that has so much revenue is really a standard bearer for an industry. Any challenges with that? What did you learn from that? How did you deal with that?
[0:09:24] Jason Perocho: Yes. Salesforce is a behemoth of a company, but each product was in a specific zone. So, there were like four zones of products. There were the startups that were just trying to figure out how to make money, call that the tier one, the zero to 50 million zone. There are products that we're trying to scale for growth, that's like the 50 million to 300 million. There were products that we're trying to get to their first billion, which is a whole another operational scale, which is 250 million to a billion. Then, there were the billion plus products that were just giant machines. Just machines in order to crank and turn and continue that growth rate that we're targeted at.
When I went into Salesforce, I didn't know it at the time, but I was being put into this special category because that's where my veteran skill set truly shined at. It was like, "Hey, this kid has some operational rigor. He's always looking at scale, but he's not afraid of these nebulous environments, and you just go try something." So, I found myself always in that tier two zone of, "Hey, here are the products that are 50 million and trying to get to that next growth spurt." Which meant, really figuring out what is the product market fit, what is the right use cases that we're specifically going after, and what's the right go-to market around that product or portfolio to make them successful.
[0:10:40] Sunny Manivannan: What an incredible experience. I want to ask you a little bit on the flip side of what did you have to unlearn about Salesforce as you moved on from that behemoth of a company, as you said, to smaller, more nimble companies?
[0:10:56] Jason Perocho: I learned really quickly that how much of a system Salesforce had, and how much harder it is to build that system from scratch. You don't even recognise, even the agreement on nomenclature, what's the purpose of a first call deck? How does the sales process work? What are the expectations at each stage? What are the right video vendors to go to for X, Y and Z? All that was thought off to, all you need to do was plug in your great ideas into it. But when you move to a smaller company, it's like, okay, I want to take some of that structure and bring it down, but also right size it for the company that I'm at.
That takes a little bit of experimentation at first, because you could put too much structure in and frustrate your leaders because you're not producing results fast enough. Or, you're creating these one-offs, but like nothing's scalable when they're just looking for scale.
[0:11:52] Sunny Manivannan: Fabulous. Let me ask you a question about career advice. So, as you're going through this space of your career, no doubt, you had mentors and they gave you a whole bunch of advice. What's career advice or any examples of career advice that stick out to you? If you could tell us a story about that, that would be great.
[0:12:08] Jason Perocho: Yes, I've got two.
[0:12:11] Sunny Manivannan: All right, let's hear it. The first is to make sure that you pick a job. Don't let a company recruit you, because when you pick the job, you're fulfilling a need that you've defined in yourself. When a job is recruiting you, they've defined a need, and they're seeing whether you fit inside of it, because sometimes, it's like mutually line up and people get lucky. But I've been talking with hundreds of folks, people are usually more satisfied when they go out, reach, and get something that satisfies the need of what they want in their career to get to their next level.
I always say that you get to pick your first job inside that company, then you get kind of thrown around. Then, you start feeling it out whether you like it or not, and you use that as input for your next job.
[0:12:57] Sunny Manivannan: Totally, loved that. Okay. What was the second piece of career advice?
[0:13:00] Jason Perocho: The second piece of career advice is that, you have to have a team around you to be successful. In order to get by or get past certain levels, it's not about how smart you are anymore. It's about how well you can navigate really sticky situations. So, the team that I recommend everybody have is one, an executive coach. Like an executive coach is there to help you think through in a structured way problems that you'll see in corporate America. Two is a mentor, somebody that's usually a step or two ahead of you that could either pave the way for you or reflect in a close enough timeframe that they could give you actionable advice on how to be better at the job you're at in order to get to where you want to go.
The third is a therapist. Because in the end, you're going to have to figure out how to emotionally regulate yourself. You lose the gossip that you might have had when you're like a manager or an individual contributor. You have to figure out a way to compartmentalise that and have a right output for that in order to keep it productive in the workplace and at home. Because trust me, you don't want to come home and just bitch about work all the time. Your partner will be like, "Can we talk about something else? What about me?"
[0:14:16] Sunny Manivannan: That's great advice. You're so spot on. As you really step into, let's say, the VP levels of our organisation, there's just a distance between you and the day-to-day sort of happenings at a company. Things happen, people do crazy things. Most of these things just don't matter at that point because you're trying to figure out what are my goals, am I achieving my goals, am I helping this company move forward, and am I doing a great job, and is it valuable.
The support systems I think often go by the wayside because people say, "Well, I don't need that. I'm going to do it myself" and so on. There's a whole host of excuses that we can all make, but no doubt that if you're serious about your performance, you've got to have a P.
[0:15:02] Jason Perocho: Yes, absolutely.
[0:15:05] Sunny Manivannan: Really cool. Love that, Jason. Thank you. Let me ask you a little bit about what your priorities are now at Amperity. The technology industry has gone through a lot of changes in the last two years. We're all, I think, not quite inventing a new playbook, but we're dusting off a very old playbook that many of us haven't had to turn to before 2010. I think many of us really started our careers when it was boom times, and it's just been boom times until 2022. So, we're all kind of learning some new muscles. What's top of mind for you at Amperity? Tell me about what you're working on, what you're excited about.
[0:15:46] Jason Perocho: Yes. I mean, I think with any marketing lead right now, the first thing that's top of mind is performance. Are we driving enough pipe? Are we driving the right pipe? Are we helping our sellers advance that pipe? Even after the sale, what motions do we have to make sure that we're keeping the customers that we've just spent so much money on acquiring? All along the way, we're trying to find the most cost effective, yet personalised journey to do. It seems like those two are almost at odds with each other. It's like, "Hey, be cost-effective, but yet, personalise the entire experience."
That's exceptionally difficult for us, because we at Amperity target enterprise businesses. So, businesses that make over $250 million run rate. There has to be a level of personalisation in order to win those types of deals. First and foremost is that. The second with performance is also the health of my team. We can talk and wax poetic about performance, and I could deliver the greatest SQLs and SQOs. But if I'm not looking out for my team and helping them navigate through some of the trials, and these new things, and new modals of reaching out the customers, and them feeling good about it. Then, the first thing is just not going to happen.
So, very much focused in on, hey, how can we create a culture of experimentation? How could we create a space in which people can authentically grow? How do we make sure that as they grow, their incentives are aligned with business incentives?
[0:17:28] Sunny Manivannan: Speaking of sort of what you're trying to do and what CMOS are trying to do, would love to get your take on, what do you think is more broadly going on in the software industry or SaaS industry now? Do you think that we're in for a protractor downturn? Do you see any green shoots? How does AI play in all of this? Is there like a next act that's fueled by AI? Where do you stand on where is the industry's going?
[0:17:52] Jason Perocho: First and foremost, everybody has to prove their value. I think, Gartner has rang the bell on this one. But 30%, 35% of SaaS seats, or consumption, or whatever you've bought goes unused. It's just shelfware. At the same time, there are more SaaS companies than any time in history. How are you ensuring that you're getting the utilisation and even in that utilisation that your customers are seeing value? So, I think what we're seeing is a big pivot toward the articulation of ROI for not just your tool, but helping people understand how your tool also fits in this ever-expanding technology stack.
If your business can't articulate how you fit into a tech stack, what your role is, and what would happen if you were to remove that piece. Then, I think that that business is in trouble. So, first and foremost, like value articulation. AI is super important, and I think that's the question that we're getting pressured a lot from like the C-suite. It's like, "Hey, how are using AI to save dollars, to save people, et cetera, et cetera? It's like, I don't want to get left behind the curve."
But for all the wonderful predictions about what AI is, I think there's also, at the same time just so much risk around AI, that at least we see inside of the enterprise segments that businesses are not willing to take on yet. So, everything from LLMs being how accurate, like, "Oh, not there." Even at the best are like 98%, 99 % accurate. That 1% of error is still unacceptable for a lot of CISOs out there. How accurate are predictions? How can we validate those predictions? Can we unpack those models?
As kind of a future AI state, I don't think that black boxes are the future of AI. We have to, as an industry, let people know how and why our AI functions the way it does, so that the entire process and all the transformations can be auditable to ensure that businesses are staying in compliance. Because even though the reward is high, the risk is equally as high, especially with everybody leaning in with a patchwork of regulations out there.
[0:20:08] Sunny Manivannan: I love what you said about, even if it's 98% accurate, that still may not be good enough for some CISOs, especially the enterprise. It's certainly, 98% would not have been good enough for you as a pilot. If you were told, "All right, get into this plane. It's going to be fine 98% of the time." The other 2%, we don't know. Maybe it'll be okay, maybe it won't." I don't think you would have gone on that plane.
[0:20:30] Jason Perocho: It's like giving somebody like a thousand skittles, but telling them 20 of them will kill them. But go ahead and eat as many as you want.
[0:20:36] Sunny Manivannan: That's exactly right. Unlimited, go for it, free for all.
[0:20:41] Jason Perocho: Yes. Are you going to eat anything from the bag of skittles?
Probably not.
[0:20:45] Sunny Manivannan: Are you using any AI solutions within your marketing team?
[0:20:47] Jason Perocho: We're using a ton of AI. In all honesty, I've actually now probably used a combination of perplexity.ai, claw.ai for 50% to 60 % of my searches or my research compared to Google. I've been training my team as such. We love, for example, in Perplexity, the ability to trace back the source of where that recommendation came from to validate that came from a human being. In claw.ai, it's just like really, really good about synthesising down large meetings and getting the actual thing.
AI is being used in our business to more augment us and take away a lot of the mundane things that we would do. I'm sure even with this podcast, you're going to create a transcript off of it, summarise it, and send a newsletter out to your audience. I think that's a great use. I mean, it's human in the loop, it's productivity focused. Not necessarily completely replacing folks at this point.
[0:21:48] Sunny Manivannan: Yes. The plane has gone a lot better and more advanced, but the pilot is still there.
[0:21:52] Jason Perocho: There's a lot of talk about drones and such, but we still have pilots flying in the sky, and there's just this risk factor that even with software glitching at 1%, it comes down to almost like a philosophical problem. Would you rather the human make the mistake or would you rather a artificial intelligence make mistake? Because who learns from those mistakes and what are the costs of those outcomes? We're thinking about pilot in commercial airlines, why there might always be a pilot in there. The optics and just the humanity associated with it is sometimes hard to replace.
[0:22:25] Sunny Manivannan: You see AI eventually taking some portions of jobs. Where do you where do you stand on that? There's definitely some – one of the interesting observations as I talked to other CMOs and just across the SaaS industry is, there's a lot of excitement for AI at the C levels. Not as much excitement at the sort of more – the levels where the real work of an organisation gets done, like at the master level, the tractor level, and so on. Not as much excitement. Some excitement, but not as much. What do you think is going on? How do you see the future of AI in the workplace?
[0:22:57] Jason Perocho: I do think that there will be the ability to do more with less people. I'm just going to call the spade the spade, because if you're removing all like the transcription time, the meeting summary notes you're able to get more through. If you're getting able to get more throughput through, you might need less people. So, I do think there is some aspect of losing some current jobs that we have today But I also think that there is the creation of future jobs tomorrow that we really can't anticipate at this point, even if they are only temporary. Like prompt engineering, for example.
In our product at Amperity, we have this feature called AmpGPT that allows users to just interrogate their own data and find insights. So, if your boss, your CEO has ever given you a one-off question. Yes, simply just ask that question in, and will give you the answer, and graph it for you. Now, while that seems just like this magical tool on the surface, it doesn't just happen. It's not like this person's writing SQL code anymore. What they're actually doing now is that they're training the algorithm. They're doing prompt engineering and they're training what the semantic tags are on all the data. So that, when natural language is used, the natural language knows how to look up the different rows and columns stored inside of your database.
That's just an example of how you can see jobs starting to shift more than necessarily replace. I believe there will be more jobs. The ultimate question is, depending on how fast technology moves, can you create as many new jobs as the jobs that you're destroying?
[0:24:33] Sunny Manivannan: History is any indicator. The answer to that question is yes, that you will create just as many of your jobs. If not, more. Unemployment rates have stayed fairly stable throughout many technology changes, right? There's not many marketers writing with quill and ink anymore. We're all using computers, we're all using the internet, and now we're using AI. It seems like the jobs are still there. So, it will be very interesting to see how this plays out.
[0:24:59] Jason Perocho: Even the last thought, I think this is a great opportunity for not so much like the demand generation or the product, even the product marketers. I think it's a great advantage for the creative economy, because in the end, people put value on uniqueness and newness. So far, what I've seen, I haven't seen a lot of AI being able to derive something completely from scratch. We're bringing 20, 40 disparate sources together and create something brand new. Everything is a derivative or almost a copy. I think in the future, people will value more creativity, more out thereness, more out there thinking. The thinking that just is obviously comes from a human, that might be more imperfect than AI can produce. So, creative economy I think is going to get a boost here in the future.
[0:25:45] Sunny Manivannan: We started talking about SaaS. So, let me move over to the SaaS talk section of this episode. I want to ask you a couple of questions about different SaaS companies and what are your thoughts. I'll start off by asking you, what is your favorite SaaS company homepage? The only company you can't mention is your current one. So, tell me your favorite SaaS company homepage.
[0:26:04] Jason Perocho: I thought about this for a little bit. I have a nephew out there that loves like interactive games online like every other kid. Just kind of addicted to the iPad at this time. But there's this company called Spline that creates 3D games, 3D images. I love it because their homepage is so interactive to show what their value is.
Not only that, they show this beautiful, what you're able to create, and have some experimentation on the front page. But on the backside, their dock site is super clean and very solution-oriented. Because as great as the technology is that you're presenting forward, there has to be some probably hands-on keyboard person making that happen. They're going to need some guidance on how to utilise your products. I think having a great doc site that's easy to navigate, that's descriptive, that helps people figure out the ins and outs of their product is just absolutely amazing.
[0:27:05] Sunny Manivannan: Okay. Amazing. spline.design is the home page for those who are interested. That's very cool. Tell me a little bit. we're obviously in the customer story business, so I get obsessed with customer stories. I've read so many customer stories over the last few months. What's your favorite SaaS customer story and why do you like it?
[0:27:23] Jason Perocho: One customer story is more of a highlight for marketers out there that are worried about their brand and why brand is so important. The customer story that was told by us was actually given by Marc Benioff and he was talking about how they were trying to break into the Barclays account. Barclays being the largest bank over there, overseas, in the United Kingdom.
Marc had us prepare for weeks for this, to think of every in and out of this person could possibly say, with a complete review of the roadmaps, like we are breaking into this business. He meets with the president, sits down. When he sits down, Marc starts his pitch. The CEO just goes, "Stop. I don't care." He said that, "Anybody could come in here and pitch me their software. Guess what? I have more money than God. I could probably go create that myself. What I want to know is, do you actually believe in the values that are on your website? Do you really donate 1% of time, money, equity, to businesses, to charities like LGBTQ.
Marc is like, "Oh, yeah, absolutely. Here's X, Y, here's Z, here's all the things that we've done in the past year." He pushed, he was like, "Why?" He said, "Well, you know, my son recently came out as gay and I want to do business with people that have the same values as me and support my family." Tracing this all the way back to customer stories, it's like, yes, the problem, the solution, the aha moment are important.
But the real goal on customer stories is really when you align values between brands, and you highlight that value. Because in the end, the entire model of SaaS is that it's software as a service. You could leave at any time. Vendors need you to be there for three years to even make back the cost of acquiring you. It's really about putting that relationship first and making sure that when you're communicating out in this customer story, you're communicating the values of your company and why people would want to work with you.
[0:29:39] Sunny Manivannan: Absolutely, love that story.
[0:29:41] Jasom Perocho: That's one of my big stories. It's really stuck with me for a while, and just always, as a marketer in me, like, "Hey, tell the product story, but also be human, and tell the story about how the brands compliment each other."
[0:29:58] Sunny Manivannan: Absolutely love that story. So spot on that we all tend to get really excited about the product and we forget about the people, and still it's a partnership that is beyond just technology. It's a real person-to-person partnership that hopefully will go on for a long time. Like you said, the vendor wants this relationship to be a forever relationship, and it's going to go through ups and downs, and it's really about who's going to be on the other side of the table? Not, what technology is on the other side of the table.
[0:30:26] Jason Perocho: Yes. People don't buy technology because it's cool, and has a slick UI, and it solves a problem They buy technology, because they have a feeling that it'll make them better. It'll get them promoted. Because like in the end, there's a personal reason why. So, if you're not like putting the, not just the customer, but the person, the champion at the forefront of your story, you're not telling that story correctly.
[0:30:48] Sunny Manivannan: Right on. I want to ask you a little bit about favorite technologies that you use. If you could give me – this time, I will let you do two. One person, one business. Tell me a little bit about what technologies you really like to use.
[0:31:02] Jason Perocho: Oh man, I probably already gave it away. But qual.ai/perplexity.ai are two of my absolute favorite tools. They save me so much time. They help me ideate, they help me summarise some of these notes, they help me research. It's just so much more easier and intuitive than Google, using quotes, plus signs, all of the stuff that you used to do in order to get search engines to perform for you. Just absolutely amazing. If you're not using it, you're probably behind. So, that's my professional.
As for personal, it's honestly Strava. I am a workout fiend. Sometimes I do two workouts a day. I think keeping my body in shape helps me keep my mind in shape. But I also like tracking things and gamification of things. The fact that I could track every single workout, see my progress, and also compete with my friends on who's running longer distances, who's lifting heavier weight is super huge for me. I did learn to shut off the location sometimes, when you're on military bases. Because that was a big no no in the military. But after that little hiccup, absolutely love it, now that I'm a civilian again.
[0:32:16] Sunny Manivannan: Amazing. That's outstanding. Love that. Let me ask you, let's go to the Peerbound talk section where we just talk about your peer influences, who's your inspiration, or what inspires you. I'd have to start off by asking you about a book or a movie that you'd recommend to everybody that you've consumed recently.
[0:32:36] Jason Perocho: I thought about this question a lot because you did prepare me for it. I've changed my mind since, and I think a great book is Slaughterhouse-Five, written by Kurt Vonnegut, because I love the way that it's structured. Because it's structured by not being structured at all. It's about this guy, Kilgore Trout, that can jump around to any time point in his life. As you're reading the story, you're not reading it from birth to his death. You're just reading about little anecdotes and learning along the way about what makes this person who he is.
I think that's the most applicable way to even think about marketing and kind of the mindset that you need in marketing. You're not going to have – nobody's ever going to lay out to you the full customer journey. You're just going to get bits and pieces of it. And as you're reading it, you're going to have to put it all together, and make the story in your head, and figuring out what that means and how to apply it to other people. It's like that nonlinear thinking, but also able to piece things together and create your own story or truth out of it, I think is totally essential to be successful in this industry.
[0:33:41] Sunny Manivannan: I love that. I mean, so spot on, that we exist in different timelines and we exist at different levels of detail as marketers all the time. We also exist in a completely incomplete world where we wish we had 90% more information than we actually do have. There's just no way, there's no way.
[0:34:03] Jason Perocho: Then, for a professional book. There's a great resource that I always refer back to it's called, FYI: For Your Improvement. It's not something that you read back to front, but it's an executive book that's very situational. It provides context on different situations that you'll be either managing your teams, managing your peers, or managing your bosses, and how to work through those in very digestible frameworks. It's something that you just rabbit ear and bookmark and you come back to as you see the problems arise. No need to memorize it all, but it's just such a great bookshelf reference material to figure out how to be a better leader.
[0:34:42] Sunny Manivannan: Amazing. Love that as well. I know this is a dangerous question to ask a Salesforce alum, because there are so many amazing marketers that started their career or spent a significant amount of time in Salesforce. But my last question to you is, who is your favorite SaaS marketer? On this one, you can give me as many names as you can muster and tell me why.
[0:35:02] Jason Perocho: There's just a laundry list of people to name. Going to like my very first boss, Mike Stone, who saw something raw and was like, "Yes, outside thinking from the traditional SaaS world, let's hire him, and develop him in a whole new way." He hired a team of outside thinkers, whether it was this woman, Lisa Henderson, who had advised me of more branding. She created the Katy Perry persona. There was Simone Kritz, who was like my first manager, who like founded Marketing Germany. Even my peers, like Julian Armington, who helped me understand different aspects of working with the sales teams.
God, I could just name, go on and on like throughout that, through the Salesforce journey. But if I just jump to the chase and answer the question directly, it's somebody that we both know very well and her name is Sarah Spivey. The reason being is that, I've had a lot of great leaders in my life. I've never had great leaders that are also just effective communicators that get me to run into direction. Sara is one of those people that you can sit down with for 15 to 30 minutes and get marching orders for the next week.
The thing that I want to emulate is to be able to so succinctly summarise my advice and pointly push people in a direction that requires very little words. Even the story's too long. She would have probably said it in like 10 seconds and given like a really thoughtful answer why. So, my shout out to Sara Spivey.
[0:36:41] Sunny Manivannan: I love it and love all those names and to walk down memory lane as well. Sara, as you know, was a former guest on The Peerbound Podcast. She was awesome, and I can't wait to share more from that conversation in the coming months and years. But yes, she was just an incredible, incredible person, incredible manager, and great to reminisce jointly. Everything you said was also my experience. She was very consistent across the board and yes, we all we all loved her. So, great stuff. Thank you, Jason. This was just an incredible conversation. I really enjoyed this tremendously, loved your perspectives on AI, and the future. As well as what we all experiencing as people in the SaaS industry today versus a couple of years ago even.
Really, really love hearing your stories of moving away from public sector in military into the private sector, and how that sort of shaped you into the marketer and leader that you are today. So, thank you so much for joining me, and looking forward to sharing this episode.
[0:37:47] Jason Perocho: Thanks for having me, Sunny. Always fun to wax poetic with you and catch up.
[0:37:52] Sunny Manivannan: Love it. Thanks, Jason. See you.
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peerbound-podcast/id1708825056
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5GO3n6pATX10fkY8lgf3GX
"Jason Perocho: What we're seeing is a big pivot toward the articulation of ROI, for not just your tool, but helping people understand how your tool also fits in this ever-expanding technology stack."
[0:00:17] Sunny Manivannan: Welcome to The Peerbound Podcast. I'm your host, Sunny Manivannan. Joining me today is Jason Perocho, the SVP of Marketing at Amperity. Jason has an incredible background. He is a graduate of the United States Naval Academy, after which he was a pilot in the US Navy, and then later worked with the Pentagon. After that, he joined the private sector and has held marketing roles in companies like Salesforce, where he was in product marketing, and a product marketing leader that entire time. Then later, joined Braze, where Jason and I were colleagues for a good part of our time there. And most recently joined Amperity, where he is now the Senior Vice President of Marketing. Jason, it's such an honor to have you on The Peerbound Podcast finally. Welcome.
[0:01:08] Jason Perocho: Thanks, Sonny. Man, what an intro?
[0:01:11] Sunny Manivannan: Definitely. Well deserved. We're going to dig into your story, which I'm really excited about. Tell me a little bit about that transition from public sector to private sector. How did you end up in marketing?
[0:01:25] Jason Perocho: The honest answer is, I never really intended to end up in marketing, but found my way here just because I had a passion for it. You mentioned that I graduated the academy and became a pilot. Unfortunately, one day I was in training, and landed, and I had this like crazy pain in my abdomen. I looked down and I was like, "Oh God, what is that?" I decided to put it off for as long as possible as all good pilots do, because they don't want to get disqualified. But eventually, the day came that I said, "Let's get this checked out." Went in for a routine visit, but three weeks later, got a call, found out it was unfortunately cancer, which grounded my pilot career, but began my marketing career. Which I know is a really weird segue, but like my time in the Pentagon was ultimately writing speeches for a secretary. Once, the assistant secretary for the Navy, then assistant secretary to Defense. Anyhow, if you could sell Congress on a budget, you could sling enterprise software.
[0:02:28] Sunny Manivannan: I mean, incredible background. When you first joined Salesforce, what was that process like? What were the interviews like? How did they perceive your background? Did they know what skills you brought to the table? Did you know what you were getting into when you joined the private sector in the technology industry?
[0:02:47] Jason Perocho: No, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I remember sitting through my first few interviews in business school and absolutely just flailing. I did not know how to interview coming out of the military. In fact, before I went into tech, I thought maybe I'd want to be a CPG marketer. This unnamed company basically flat out told me and said, "Hey, we don't believe military folks are creative enough to do marketing." I was like, "Oh. Wait. What? Oh, okay. I mean, it takes some creativity to land a plane on a carrier. But okay, fine, fine." Everybody, to each their own.
When I finally started getting into it and I discovered CPG marketing wasn't for me, I was more in the tech, the high speed, because I just love interesting tech. That's why I flew planes. I started realising that getting in and breaking in is super hard. Mainly, because we have as veterans have trouble translating our skill set from our military life to our professional life. Not only that, it's hard to find companies that are willing to take a chance on you that say,
"Hey, we see that value of that old skill set and we're willing to invest time and resources to help you develop in this environment now."
[0:04:01] Sunny Manivannan: Yes. I mean, looking back on it now, more than a decade later, clearly, the dots fall into place very nicely. But I can imagine at the time, it was not exactly clear, that perhaps, even you. How did you know that you were going to be a great marketer? There's no way you could have known at that time.
[0:04:15] Jason Perocho: I did always find something exciting about taking these complex ideas when I was in the military and just like simplifying it down. In the military we have the KISS acronym, or keep it simple stupid. That's just a mantra that's just in the back of my head. It's like, "All right. Cool, cool technology, great, great conversation engineer. But explain it to me like I'm in third grade or I'm in high school." I just get such a thrill out of that and evangelising these new technologies that was all over Silicon Valley and beyond, just making it relatable to all my friends that don't live inside of this tech sphere. So, that was one of the reasons why I knew that this is kind of a calling, a place that I absolutely just want to debate.
[0:04:57] Sunny Manivannan: Totally. I mean, heck, even within five minutes of talking to you about this, I've already figured out a few things that ex-military veterans can contribute in the workplace. So, surprising that all these recruiters could have figured that out after all these conversations, but glad we're here. Let me ask you a little bit about your sort of first private sector role. What surprised you in a positive way and then what surprised you in a not quite a positive way?
[0:05:21] Jason Perocho: What surprised me in a positive way when I went to Salesforce was just how much structure they had around the product marketing position. I later found out like Salesforce was one of those companies that revolutionised the idea of product marketing. So, at Salesforce, product marketing really is the lead growth engine. When it comes to executing big strategy, it's all on product marketing to coordinate across the entire go-to market teams. There's such a well -oiled machine that just like simply plugging in and doing the everyday job was just heading heels above, like what some of my other cohorts were learning at other companies. It gave me this great foundation to build off of and innovate on top of.
But when it comes to the hard things, the hard things were really around messaging. Writing speeches is one thing for Congress, but getting short, concise, pithy for the private sector was just a whole another level. I remember going in and writing my first press release and having to present it to a woman. Her name was Jane at Salesforce. Those at Salesforce know who this Jane is. She would put it up on the board when you brought it in and just rip it to shreds. She's like, "Don't know what that means. What is that? That's inside baseball. Can you even write English?" I was like, "Whoa." I thought my military instructors were intense. This is a whole other level of intensity right now, but I thank her and all my mentors there at Salesforce for everything they taught me about positioning and messaging.
It was accrucible to get through there, to get through positioning and messaging, but I think it's the only way that product marketers truly learn.
[0:07:08] Sunny Manivannan: Yes. Your story reminds me of – my first job out of college was a GE aviation, where – you know this. I used to build aircraft engines. That was my first job out of college, was in aerospace engineering. My Jane at Salesforce was named Tyler at GE. Anybody from that part of my life is listening to this will remember very similar feedback delivered in a very similar way. But looking back on it all the years later, it's very valuable.
[0:07:34] Jason Perocho: One of the lessons is just to take feedback and know that it's not personal. They are trying to get you better, but sometimes, especially at that executive layer, they don't have the time to put all the feelings around and be like, embrace you with a hug. They're just like, "Nope, nope, nope. Yes. Nope, go fix." It's a hard lesson to learn for some folks.
[0:07:56] Sunny Manivannan: Yes. I mean, this is a rabbit hole we'd go down forever. But one of the things that I've reflected on about feedback, and you really just said this is, when somebody's just saying to you something very directly, that's just how they're thinking in their brain. They're just comfortable enough with you to just say it the way that they think it. Now, we've added all the sort of extra layers of political correctness. I've got to say it a certain way and so on, and someone that is useful and important, it's important to be respectful. But now we've gone too far the other way where it's no longer clear what this person is trying to communicate. That's not to anybody's utility.
[0:08:35] Jason Perocho: There are all different types of leaders. Some will sugarcoat it for you, others will tell you very directly. But I think it's just an ever-evolving skill set on how to manage up to get the information you need out of them to be successful, and then to also recognise that it really isn't personal.
[0:08:54] Sunny Manivannn: Totally. I love it. Let me ask you a question about, Salesforce is an interesting place to start your tech career, because by the time that you were there, they already had different business units. They already had different products. On one hand, you are really neck deep in the details of, for example, writing press release. On the other hand, you're also representing a company that has so much revenue is really a standard bearer for an industry. Any challenges with that? What did you learn from that? How did you deal with that?
[0:09:24] Jason Perocho: Yes. Salesforce is a behemoth of a company, but each product was in a specific zone. So, there were like four zones of products. There were the startups that were just trying to figure out how to make money, call that the tier one, the zero to 50 million zone. There are products that we're trying to scale for growth, that's like the 50 million to 300 million. There were products that we're trying to get to their first billion, which is a whole another operational scale, which is 250 million to a billion. Then, there were the billion plus products that were just giant machines. Just machines in order to crank and turn and continue that growth rate that we're targeted at.
When I went into Salesforce, I didn't know it at the time, but I was being put into this special category because that's where my veteran skill set truly shined at. It was like, "Hey, this kid has some operational rigor. He's always looking at scale, but he's not afraid of these nebulous environments, and you just go try something." So, I found myself always in that tier two zone of, "Hey, here are the products that are 50 million and trying to get to that next growth spurt." Which meant, really figuring out what is the product market fit, what is the right use cases that we're specifically going after, and what's the right go-to market around that product or portfolio to make them successful.
[0:10:40] Sunny Manivannan: What an incredible experience. I want to ask you a little bit on the flip side of what did you have to unlearn about Salesforce as you moved on from that behemoth of a company, as you said, to smaller, more nimble companies?
[0:10:56] Jason Perocho: I learned really quickly that how much of a system Salesforce had, and how much harder it is to build that system from scratch. You don't even recognise, even the agreement on nomenclature, what's the purpose of a first call deck? How does the sales process work? What are the expectations at each stage? What are the right video vendors to go to for X, Y and Z? All that was thought off to, all you need to do was plug in your great ideas into it. But when you move to a smaller company, it's like, okay, I want to take some of that structure and bring it down, but also right size it for the company that I'm at.
That takes a little bit of experimentation at first, because you could put too much structure in and frustrate your leaders because you're not producing results fast enough. Or, you're creating these one-offs, but like nothing's scalable when they're just looking for scale.
[0:11:52] Sunny Manivannan: Fabulous. Let me ask you a question about career advice. So, as you're going through this space of your career, no doubt, you had mentors and they gave you a whole bunch of advice. What's career advice or any examples of career advice that stick out to you? If you could tell us a story about that, that would be great.
[0:12:08] Jason Perocho: Yes, I've got two.
[0:12:11] Sunny Manivannan: All right, let's hear it. The first is to make sure that you pick a job. Don't let a company recruit you, because when you pick the job, you're fulfilling a need that you've defined in yourself. When a job is recruiting you, they've defined a need, and they're seeing whether you fit inside of it, because sometimes, it's like mutually line up and people get lucky. But I've been talking with hundreds of folks, people are usually more satisfied when they go out, reach, and get something that satisfies the need of what they want in their career to get to their next level.
I always say that you get to pick your first job inside that company, then you get kind of thrown around. Then, you start feeling it out whether you like it or not, and you use that as input for your next job.
[0:12:57] Sunny Manivannan: Totally, loved that. Okay. What was the second piece of career advice?
[0:13:00] Jason Perocho: The second piece of career advice is that, you have to have a team around you to be successful. In order to get by or get past certain levels, it's not about how smart you are anymore. It's about how well you can navigate really sticky situations. So, the team that I recommend everybody have is one, an executive coach. Like an executive coach is there to help you think through in a structured way problems that you'll see in corporate America. Two is a mentor, somebody that's usually a step or two ahead of you that could either pave the way for you or reflect in a close enough timeframe that they could give you actionable advice on how to be better at the job you're at in order to get to where you want to go.
The third is a therapist. Because in the end, you're going to have to figure out how to emotionally regulate yourself. You lose the gossip that you might have had when you're like a manager or an individual contributor. You have to figure out a way to compartmentalise that and have a right output for that in order to keep it productive in the workplace and at home. Because trust me, you don't want to come home and just bitch about work all the time. Your partner will be like, "Can we talk about something else? What about me?"
[0:14:16] Sunny Manivannan: That's great advice. You're so spot on. As you really step into, let's say, the VP levels of our organisation, there's just a distance between you and the day-to-day sort of happenings at a company. Things happen, people do crazy things. Most of these things just don't matter at that point because you're trying to figure out what are my goals, am I achieving my goals, am I helping this company move forward, and am I doing a great job, and is it valuable.
The support systems I think often go by the wayside because people say, "Well, I don't need that. I'm going to do it myself" and so on. There's a whole host of excuses that we can all make, but no doubt that if you're serious about your performance, you've got to have a P.
[0:15:02] Jason Perocho: Yes, absolutely.
[0:15:05] Sunny Manivannan: Really cool. Love that, Jason. Thank you. Let me ask you a little bit about what your priorities are now at Amperity. The technology industry has gone through a lot of changes in the last two years. We're all, I think, not quite inventing a new playbook, but we're dusting off a very old playbook that many of us haven't had to turn to before 2010. I think many of us really started our careers when it was boom times, and it's just been boom times until 2022. So, we're all kind of learning some new muscles. What's top of mind for you at Amperity? Tell me about what you're working on, what you're excited about.
[0:15:46] Jason Perocho: Yes. I mean, I think with any marketing lead right now, the first thing that's top of mind is performance. Are we driving enough pipe? Are we driving the right pipe? Are we helping our sellers advance that pipe? Even after the sale, what motions do we have to make sure that we're keeping the customers that we've just spent so much money on acquiring? All along the way, we're trying to find the most cost effective, yet personalised journey to do. It seems like those two are almost at odds with each other. It's like, "Hey, be cost-effective, but yet, personalise the entire experience."
That's exceptionally difficult for us, because we at Amperity target enterprise businesses. So, businesses that make over $250 million run rate. There has to be a level of personalisation in order to win those types of deals. First and foremost is that. The second with performance is also the health of my team. We can talk and wax poetic about performance, and I could deliver the greatest SQLs and SQOs. But if I'm not looking out for my team and helping them navigate through some of the trials, and these new things, and new modals of reaching out the customers, and them feeling good about it. Then, the first thing is just not going to happen.
So, very much focused in on, hey, how can we create a culture of experimentation? How could we create a space in which people can authentically grow? How do we make sure that as they grow, their incentives are aligned with business incentives?
[0:17:28] Sunny Manivannan: Speaking of sort of what you're trying to do and what CMOS are trying to do, would love to get your take on, what do you think is more broadly going on in the software industry or SaaS industry now? Do you think that we're in for a protractor downturn? Do you see any green shoots? How does AI play in all of this? Is there like a next act that's fueled by AI? Where do you stand on where is the industry's going?
[0:17:52] Jason Perocho: First and foremost, everybody has to prove their value. I think, Gartner has rang the bell on this one. But 30%, 35% of SaaS seats, or consumption, or whatever you've bought goes unused. It's just shelfware. At the same time, there are more SaaS companies than any time in history. How are you ensuring that you're getting the utilisation and even in that utilisation that your customers are seeing value? So, I think what we're seeing is a big pivot toward the articulation of ROI for not just your tool, but helping people understand how your tool also fits in this ever-expanding technology stack.
If your business can't articulate how you fit into a tech stack, what your role is, and what would happen if you were to remove that piece. Then, I think that that business is in trouble. So, first and foremost, like value articulation. AI is super important, and I think that's the question that we're getting pressured a lot from like the C-suite. It's like, "Hey, how are using AI to save dollars, to save people, et cetera, et cetera? It's like, I don't want to get left behind the curve."
But for all the wonderful predictions about what AI is, I think there's also, at the same time just so much risk around AI, that at least we see inside of the enterprise segments that businesses are not willing to take on yet. So, everything from LLMs being how accurate, like, "Oh, not there." Even at the best are like 98%, 99 % accurate. That 1% of error is still unacceptable for a lot of CISOs out there. How accurate are predictions? How can we validate those predictions? Can we unpack those models?
As kind of a future AI state, I don't think that black boxes are the future of AI. We have to, as an industry, let people know how and why our AI functions the way it does, so that the entire process and all the transformations can be auditable to ensure that businesses are staying in compliance. Because even though the reward is high, the risk is equally as high, especially with everybody leaning in with a patchwork of regulations out there.
[0:20:08] Sunny Manivannan: I love what you said about, even if it's 98% accurate, that still may not be good enough for some CISOs, especially the enterprise. It's certainly, 98% would not have been good enough for you as a pilot. If you were told, "All right, get into this plane. It's going to be fine 98% of the time." The other 2%, we don't know. Maybe it'll be okay, maybe it won't." I don't think you would have gone on that plane.
[0:20:30] Jason Perocho: It's like giving somebody like a thousand skittles, but telling them 20 of them will kill them. But go ahead and eat as many as you want.
[0:20:36] Sunny Manivannan: That's exactly right. Unlimited, go for it, free for all.
[0:20:41] Jason Perocho: Yes. Are you going to eat anything from the bag of skittles?
Probably not.
[0:20:45] Sunny Manivannan: Are you using any AI solutions within your marketing team?
[0:20:47] Jason Perocho: We're using a ton of AI. In all honesty, I've actually now probably used a combination of perplexity.ai, claw.ai for 50% to 60 % of my searches or my research compared to Google. I've been training my team as such. We love, for example, in Perplexity, the ability to trace back the source of where that recommendation came from to validate that came from a human being. In claw.ai, it's just like really, really good about synthesising down large meetings and getting the actual thing.
AI is being used in our business to more augment us and take away a lot of the mundane things that we would do. I'm sure even with this podcast, you're going to create a transcript off of it, summarise it, and send a newsletter out to your audience. I think that's a great use. I mean, it's human in the loop, it's productivity focused. Not necessarily completely replacing folks at this point.
[0:21:48] Sunny Manivannan: Yes. The plane has gone a lot better and more advanced, but the pilot is still there.
[0:21:52] Jason Perocho: There's a lot of talk about drones and such, but we still have pilots flying in the sky, and there's just this risk factor that even with software glitching at 1%, it comes down to almost like a philosophical problem. Would you rather the human make the mistake or would you rather a artificial intelligence make mistake? Because who learns from those mistakes and what are the costs of those outcomes? We're thinking about pilot in commercial airlines, why there might always be a pilot in there. The optics and just the humanity associated with it is sometimes hard to replace.
[0:22:25] Sunny Manivannan: You see AI eventually taking some portions of jobs. Where do you where do you stand on that? There's definitely some – one of the interesting observations as I talked to other CMOs and just across the SaaS industry is, there's a lot of excitement for AI at the C levels. Not as much excitement at the sort of more – the levels where the real work of an organisation gets done, like at the master level, the tractor level, and so on. Not as much excitement. Some excitement, but not as much. What do you think is going on? How do you see the future of AI in the workplace?
[0:22:57] Jason Perocho: I do think that there will be the ability to do more with less people. I'm just going to call the spade the spade, because if you're removing all like the transcription time, the meeting summary notes you're able to get more through. If you're getting able to get more throughput through, you might need less people. So, I do think there is some aspect of losing some current jobs that we have today But I also think that there is the creation of future jobs tomorrow that we really can't anticipate at this point, even if they are only temporary. Like prompt engineering, for example.
In our product at Amperity, we have this feature called AmpGPT that allows users to just interrogate their own data and find insights. So, if your boss, your CEO has ever given you a one-off question. Yes, simply just ask that question in, and will give you the answer, and graph it for you. Now, while that seems just like this magical tool on the surface, it doesn't just happen. It's not like this person's writing SQL code anymore. What they're actually doing now is that they're training the algorithm. They're doing prompt engineering and they're training what the semantic tags are on all the data. So that, when natural language is used, the natural language knows how to look up the different rows and columns stored inside of your database.
That's just an example of how you can see jobs starting to shift more than necessarily replace. I believe there will be more jobs. The ultimate question is, depending on how fast technology moves, can you create as many new jobs as the jobs that you're destroying?
[0:24:33] Sunny Manivannan: History is any indicator. The answer to that question is yes, that you will create just as many of your jobs. If not, more. Unemployment rates have stayed fairly stable throughout many technology changes, right? There's not many marketers writing with quill and ink anymore. We're all using computers, we're all using the internet, and now we're using AI. It seems like the jobs are still there. So, it will be very interesting to see how this plays out.
[0:24:59] Jason Perocho: Even the last thought, I think this is a great opportunity for not so much like the demand generation or the product, even the product marketers. I think it's a great advantage for the creative economy, because in the end, people put value on uniqueness and newness. So far, what I've seen, I haven't seen a lot of AI being able to derive something completely from scratch. We're bringing 20, 40 disparate sources together and create something brand new. Everything is a derivative or almost a copy. I think in the future, people will value more creativity, more out thereness, more out there thinking. The thinking that just is obviously comes from a human, that might be more imperfect than AI can produce. So, creative economy I think is going to get a boost here in the future.
[0:25:45] Sunny Manivannan: We started talking about SaaS. So, let me move over to the SaaS talk section of this episode. I want to ask you a couple of questions about different SaaS companies and what are your thoughts. I'll start off by asking you, what is your favorite SaaS company homepage? The only company you can't mention is your current one. So, tell me your favorite SaaS company homepage.
[0:26:04] Jason Perocho: I thought about this for a little bit. I have a nephew out there that loves like interactive games online like every other kid. Just kind of addicted to the iPad at this time. But there's this company called Spline that creates 3D games, 3D images. I love it because their homepage is so interactive to show what their value is.
Not only that, they show this beautiful, what you're able to create, and have some experimentation on the front page. But on the backside, their dock site is super clean and very solution-oriented. Because as great as the technology is that you're presenting forward, there has to be some probably hands-on keyboard person making that happen. They're going to need some guidance on how to utilise your products. I think having a great doc site that's easy to navigate, that's descriptive, that helps people figure out the ins and outs of their product is just absolutely amazing.
[0:27:05] Sunny Manivannan: Okay. Amazing. spline.design is the home page for those who are interested. That's very cool. Tell me a little bit. we're obviously in the customer story business, so I get obsessed with customer stories. I've read so many customer stories over the last few months. What's your favorite SaaS customer story and why do you like it?
[0:27:23] Jason Perocho: One customer story is more of a highlight for marketers out there that are worried about their brand and why brand is so important. The customer story that was told by us was actually given by Marc Benioff and he was talking about how they were trying to break into the Barclays account. Barclays being the largest bank over there, overseas, in the United Kingdom.
Marc had us prepare for weeks for this, to think of every in and out of this person could possibly say, with a complete review of the roadmaps, like we are breaking into this business. He meets with the president, sits down. When he sits down, Marc starts his pitch. The CEO just goes, "Stop. I don't care." He said that, "Anybody could come in here and pitch me their software. Guess what? I have more money than God. I could probably go create that myself. What I want to know is, do you actually believe in the values that are on your website? Do you really donate 1% of time, money, equity, to businesses, to charities like LGBTQ.
Marc is like, "Oh, yeah, absolutely. Here's X, Y, here's Z, here's all the things that we've done in the past year." He pushed, he was like, "Why?" He said, "Well, you know, my son recently came out as gay and I want to do business with people that have the same values as me and support my family." Tracing this all the way back to customer stories, it's like, yes, the problem, the solution, the aha moment are important.
But the real goal on customer stories is really when you align values between brands, and you highlight that value. Because in the end, the entire model of SaaS is that it's software as a service. You could leave at any time. Vendors need you to be there for three years to even make back the cost of acquiring you. It's really about putting that relationship first and making sure that when you're communicating out in this customer story, you're communicating the values of your company and why people would want to work with you.
[0:29:39] Sunny Manivannan: Absolutely, love that story.
[0:29:41] Jasom Perocho: That's one of my big stories. It's really stuck with me for a while, and just always, as a marketer in me, like, "Hey, tell the product story, but also be human, and tell the story about how the brands compliment each other."
[0:29:58] Sunny Manivannan: Absolutely love that story. So spot on that we all tend to get really excited about the product and we forget about the people, and still it's a partnership that is beyond just technology. It's a real person-to-person partnership that hopefully will go on for a long time. Like you said, the vendor wants this relationship to be a forever relationship, and it's going to go through ups and downs, and it's really about who's going to be on the other side of the table? Not, what technology is on the other side of the table.
[0:30:26] Jason Perocho: Yes. People don't buy technology because it's cool, and has a slick UI, and it solves a problem They buy technology, because they have a feeling that it'll make them better. It'll get them promoted. Because like in the end, there's a personal reason why. So, if you're not like putting the, not just the customer, but the person, the champion at the forefront of your story, you're not telling that story correctly.
[0:30:48] Sunny Manivannan: Right on. I want to ask you a little bit about favorite technologies that you use. If you could give me – this time, I will let you do two. One person, one business. Tell me a little bit about what technologies you really like to use.
[0:31:02] Jason Perocho: Oh man, I probably already gave it away. But qual.ai/perplexity.ai are two of my absolute favorite tools. They save me so much time. They help me ideate, they help me summarise some of these notes, they help me research. It's just so much more easier and intuitive than Google, using quotes, plus signs, all of the stuff that you used to do in order to get search engines to perform for you. Just absolutely amazing. If you're not using it, you're probably behind. So, that's my professional.
As for personal, it's honestly Strava. I am a workout fiend. Sometimes I do two workouts a day. I think keeping my body in shape helps me keep my mind in shape. But I also like tracking things and gamification of things. The fact that I could track every single workout, see my progress, and also compete with my friends on who's running longer distances, who's lifting heavier weight is super huge for me. I did learn to shut off the location sometimes, when you're on military bases. Because that was a big no no in the military. But after that little hiccup, absolutely love it, now that I'm a civilian again.
[0:32:16] Sunny Manivannan: Amazing. That's outstanding. Love that. Let me ask you, let's go to the Peerbound talk section where we just talk about your peer influences, who's your inspiration, or what inspires you. I'd have to start off by asking you about a book or a movie that you'd recommend to everybody that you've consumed recently.
[0:32:36] Jason Perocho: I thought about this question a lot because you did prepare me for it. I've changed my mind since, and I think a great book is Slaughterhouse-Five, written by Kurt Vonnegut, because I love the way that it's structured. Because it's structured by not being structured at all. It's about this guy, Kilgore Trout, that can jump around to any time point in his life. As you're reading the story, you're not reading it from birth to his death. You're just reading about little anecdotes and learning along the way about what makes this person who he is.
I think that's the most applicable way to even think about marketing and kind of the mindset that you need in marketing. You're not going to have – nobody's ever going to lay out to you the full customer journey. You're just going to get bits and pieces of it. And as you're reading it, you're going to have to put it all together, and make the story in your head, and figuring out what that means and how to apply it to other people. It's like that nonlinear thinking, but also able to piece things together and create your own story or truth out of it, I think is totally essential to be successful in this industry.
[0:33:41] Sunny Manivannan: I love that. I mean, so spot on, that we exist in different timelines and we exist at different levels of detail as marketers all the time. We also exist in a completely incomplete world where we wish we had 90% more information than we actually do have. There's just no way, there's no way.
[0:34:03] Jason Perocho: Then, for a professional book. There's a great resource that I always refer back to it's called, FYI: For Your Improvement. It's not something that you read back to front, but it's an executive book that's very situational. It provides context on different situations that you'll be either managing your teams, managing your peers, or managing your bosses, and how to work through those in very digestible frameworks. It's something that you just rabbit ear and bookmark and you come back to as you see the problems arise. No need to memorize it all, but it's just such a great bookshelf reference material to figure out how to be a better leader.
[0:34:42] Sunny Manivannan: Amazing. Love that as well. I know this is a dangerous question to ask a Salesforce alum, because there are so many amazing marketers that started their career or spent a significant amount of time in Salesforce. But my last question to you is, who is your favorite SaaS marketer? On this one, you can give me as many names as you can muster and tell me why.
[0:35:02] Jason Perocho: There's just a laundry list of people to name. Going to like my very first boss, Mike Stone, who saw something raw and was like, "Yes, outside thinking from the traditional SaaS world, let's hire him, and develop him in a whole new way." He hired a team of outside thinkers, whether it was this woman, Lisa Henderson, who had advised me of more branding. She created the Katy Perry persona. There was Simone Kritz, who was like my first manager, who like founded Marketing Germany. Even my peers, like Julian Armington, who helped me understand different aspects of working with the sales teams.
God, I could just name, go on and on like throughout that, through the Salesforce journey. But if I just jump to the chase and answer the question directly, it's somebody that we both know very well and her name is Sarah Spivey. The reason being is that, I've had a lot of great leaders in my life. I've never had great leaders that are also just effective communicators that get me to run into direction. Sara is one of those people that you can sit down with for 15 to 30 minutes and get marching orders for the next week.
The thing that I want to emulate is to be able to so succinctly summarise my advice and pointly push people in a direction that requires very little words. Even the story's too long. She would have probably said it in like 10 seconds and given like a really thoughtful answer why. So, my shout out to Sara Spivey.
[0:36:41] Sunny Manivannan: I love it and love all those names and to walk down memory lane as well. Sara, as you know, was a former guest on The Peerbound Podcast. She was awesome, and I can't wait to share more from that conversation in the coming months and years. But yes, she was just an incredible, incredible person, incredible manager, and great to reminisce jointly. Everything you said was also my experience. She was very consistent across the board and yes, we all we all loved her. So, great stuff. Thank you, Jason. This was just an incredible conversation. I really enjoyed this tremendously, loved your perspectives on AI, and the future. As well as what we all experiencing as people in the SaaS industry today versus a couple of years ago even.
Really, really love hearing your stories of moving away from public sector in military into the private sector, and how that sort of shaped you into the marketer and leader that you are today. So, thank you so much for joining me, and looking forward to sharing this episode.
[0:37:47] Jason Perocho: Thanks for having me, Sunny. Always fun to wax poetic with you and catch up.
[0:37:52] Sunny Manivannan: Love it. Thanks, Jason. See you.
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peerbound-podcast/id1708825056
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5GO3n6pATX10fkY8lgf3GX
"Jason Perocho: What we're seeing is a big pivot toward the articulation of ROI, for not just your tool, but helping people understand how your tool also fits in this ever-expanding technology stack."
[0:00:17] Sunny Manivannan: Welcome to The Peerbound Podcast. I'm your host, Sunny Manivannan. Joining me today is Jason Perocho, the SVP of Marketing at Amperity. Jason has an incredible background. He is a graduate of the United States Naval Academy, after which he was a pilot in the US Navy, and then later worked with the Pentagon. After that, he joined the private sector and has held marketing roles in companies like Salesforce, where he was in product marketing, and a product marketing leader that entire time. Then later, joined Braze, where Jason and I were colleagues for a good part of our time there. And most recently joined Amperity, where he is now the Senior Vice President of Marketing. Jason, it's such an honor to have you on The Peerbound Podcast finally. Welcome.
[0:01:08] Jason Perocho: Thanks, Sonny. Man, what an intro?
[0:01:11] Sunny Manivannan: Definitely. Well deserved. We're going to dig into your story, which I'm really excited about. Tell me a little bit about that transition from public sector to private sector. How did you end up in marketing?
[0:01:25] Jason Perocho: The honest answer is, I never really intended to end up in marketing, but found my way here just because I had a passion for it. You mentioned that I graduated the academy and became a pilot. Unfortunately, one day I was in training, and landed, and I had this like crazy pain in my abdomen. I looked down and I was like, "Oh God, what is that?" I decided to put it off for as long as possible as all good pilots do, because they don't want to get disqualified. But eventually, the day came that I said, "Let's get this checked out." Went in for a routine visit, but three weeks later, got a call, found out it was unfortunately cancer, which grounded my pilot career, but began my marketing career. Which I know is a really weird segue, but like my time in the Pentagon was ultimately writing speeches for a secretary. Once, the assistant secretary for the Navy, then assistant secretary to Defense. Anyhow, if you could sell Congress on a budget, you could sling enterprise software.
[0:02:28] Sunny Manivannan: I mean, incredible background. When you first joined Salesforce, what was that process like? What were the interviews like? How did they perceive your background? Did they know what skills you brought to the table? Did you know what you were getting into when you joined the private sector in the technology industry?
[0:02:47] Jason Perocho: No, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I remember sitting through my first few interviews in business school and absolutely just flailing. I did not know how to interview coming out of the military. In fact, before I went into tech, I thought maybe I'd want to be a CPG marketer. This unnamed company basically flat out told me and said, "Hey, we don't believe military folks are creative enough to do marketing." I was like, "Oh. Wait. What? Oh, okay. I mean, it takes some creativity to land a plane on a carrier. But okay, fine, fine." Everybody, to each their own.
When I finally started getting into it and I discovered CPG marketing wasn't for me, I was more in the tech, the high speed, because I just love interesting tech. That's why I flew planes. I started realising that getting in and breaking in is super hard. Mainly, because we have as veterans have trouble translating our skill set from our military life to our professional life. Not only that, it's hard to find companies that are willing to take a chance on you that say,
"Hey, we see that value of that old skill set and we're willing to invest time and resources to help you develop in this environment now."
[0:04:01] Sunny Manivannan: Yes. I mean, looking back on it now, more than a decade later, clearly, the dots fall into place very nicely. But I can imagine at the time, it was not exactly clear, that perhaps, even you. How did you know that you were going to be a great marketer? There's no way you could have known at that time.
[0:04:15] Jason Perocho: I did always find something exciting about taking these complex ideas when I was in the military and just like simplifying it down. In the military we have the KISS acronym, or keep it simple stupid. That's just a mantra that's just in the back of my head. It's like, "All right. Cool, cool technology, great, great conversation engineer. But explain it to me like I'm in third grade or I'm in high school." I just get such a thrill out of that and evangelising these new technologies that was all over Silicon Valley and beyond, just making it relatable to all my friends that don't live inside of this tech sphere. So, that was one of the reasons why I knew that this is kind of a calling, a place that I absolutely just want to debate.
[0:04:57] Sunny Manivannan: Totally. I mean, heck, even within five minutes of talking to you about this, I've already figured out a few things that ex-military veterans can contribute in the workplace. So, surprising that all these recruiters could have figured that out after all these conversations, but glad we're here. Let me ask you a little bit about your sort of first private sector role. What surprised you in a positive way and then what surprised you in a not quite a positive way?
[0:05:21] Jason Perocho: What surprised me in a positive way when I went to Salesforce was just how much structure they had around the product marketing position. I later found out like Salesforce was one of those companies that revolutionised the idea of product marketing. So, at Salesforce, product marketing really is the lead growth engine. When it comes to executing big strategy, it's all on product marketing to coordinate across the entire go-to market teams. There's such a well -oiled machine that just like simply plugging in and doing the everyday job was just heading heels above, like what some of my other cohorts were learning at other companies. It gave me this great foundation to build off of and innovate on top of.
But when it comes to the hard things, the hard things were really around messaging. Writing speeches is one thing for Congress, but getting short, concise, pithy for the private sector was just a whole another level. I remember going in and writing my first press release and having to present it to a woman. Her name was Jane at Salesforce. Those at Salesforce know who this Jane is. She would put it up on the board when you brought it in and just rip it to shreds. She's like, "Don't know what that means. What is that? That's inside baseball. Can you even write English?" I was like, "Whoa." I thought my military instructors were intense. This is a whole other level of intensity right now, but I thank her and all my mentors there at Salesforce for everything they taught me about positioning and messaging.
It was accrucible to get through there, to get through positioning and messaging, but I think it's the only way that product marketers truly learn.
[0:07:08] Sunny Manivannan: Yes. Your story reminds me of – my first job out of college was a GE aviation, where – you know this. I used to build aircraft engines. That was my first job out of college, was in aerospace engineering. My Jane at Salesforce was named Tyler at GE. Anybody from that part of my life is listening to this will remember very similar feedback delivered in a very similar way. But looking back on it all the years later, it's very valuable.
[0:07:34] Jason Perocho: One of the lessons is just to take feedback and know that it's not personal. They are trying to get you better, but sometimes, especially at that executive layer, they don't have the time to put all the feelings around and be like, embrace you with a hug. They're just like, "Nope, nope, nope. Yes. Nope, go fix." It's a hard lesson to learn for some folks.
[0:07:56] Sunny Manivannan: Yes. I mean, this is a rabbit hole we'd go down forever. But one of the things that I've reflected on about feedback, and you really just said this is, when somebody's just saying to you something very directly, that's just how they're thinking in their brain. They're just comfortable enough with you to just say it the way that they think it. Now, we've added all the sort of extra layers of political correctness. I've got to say it a certain way and so on, and someone that is useful and important, it's important to be respectful. But now we've gone too far the other way where it's no longer clear what this person is trying to communicate. That's not to anybody's utility.
[0:08:35] Jason Perocho: There are all different types of leaders. Some will sugarcoat it for you, others will tell you very directly. But I think it's just an ever-evolving skill set on how to manage up to get the information you need out of them to be successful, and then to also recognise that it really isn't personal.
[0:08:54] Sunny Manivannn: Totally. I love it. Let me ask you a question about, Salesforce is an interesting place to start your tech career, because by the time that you were there, they already had different business units. They already had different products. On one hand, you are really neck deep in the details of, for example, writing press release. On the other hand, you're also representing a company that has so much revenue is really a standard bearer for an industry. Any challenges with that? What did you learn from that? How did you deal with that?
[0:09:24] Jason Perocho: Yes. Salesforce is a behemoth of a company, but each product was in a specific zone. So, there were like four zones of products. There were the startups that were just trying to figure out how to make money, call that the tier one, the zero to 50 million zone. There are products that we're trying to scale for growth, that's like the 50 million to 300 million. There were products that we're trying to get to their first billion, which is a whole another operational scale, which is 250 million to a billion. Then, there were the billion plus products that were just giant machines. Just machines in order to crank and turn and continue that growth rate that we're targeted at.
When I went into Salesforce, I didn't know it at the time, but I was being put into this special category because that's where my veteran skill set truly shined at. It was like, "Hey, this kid has some operational rigor. He's always looking at scale, but he's not afraid of these nebulous environments, and you just go try something." So, I found myself always in that tier two zone of, "Hey, here are the products that are 50 million and trying to get to that next growth spurt." Which meant, really figuring out what is the product market fit, what is the right use cases that we're specifically going after, and what's the right go-to market around that product or portfolio to make them successful.
[0:10:40] Sunny Manivannan: What an incredible experience. I want to ask you a little bit on the flip side of what did you have to unlearn about Salesforce as you moved on from that behemoth of a company, as you said, to smaller, more nimble companies?
[0:10:56] Jason Perocho: I learned really quickly that how much of a system Salesforce had, and how much harder it is to build that system from scratch. You don't even recognise, even the agreement on nomenclature, what's the purpose of a first call deck? How does the sales process work? What are the expectations at each stage? What are the right video vendors to go to for X, Y and Z? All that was thought off to, all you need to do was plug in your great ideas into it. But when you move to a smaller company, it's like, okay, I want to take some of that structure and bring it down, but also right size it for the company that I'm at.
That takes a little bit of experimentation at first, because you could put too much structure in and frustrate your leaders because you're not producing results fast enough. Or, you're creating these one-offs, but like nothing's scalable when they're just looking for scale.
[0:11:52] Sunny Manivannan: Fabulous. Let me ask you a question about career advice. So, as you're going through this space of your career, no doubt, you had mentors and they gave you a whole bunch of advice. What's career advice or any examples of career advice that stick out to you? If you could tell us a story about that, that would be great.
[0:12:08] Jason Perocho: Yes, I've got two.
[0:12:11] Sunny Manivannan: All right, let's hear it. The first is to make sure that you pick a job. Don't let a company recruit you, because when you pick the job, you're fulfilling a need that you've defined in yourself. When a job is recruiting you, they've defined a need, and they're seeing whether you fit inside of it, because sometimes, it's like mutually line up and people get lucky. But I've been talking with hundreds of folks, people are usually more satisfied when they go out, reach, and get something that satisfies the need of what they want in their career to get to their next level.
I always say that you get to pick your first job inside that company, then you get kind of thrown around. Then, you start feeling it out whether you like it or not, and you use that as input for your next job.
[0:12:57] Sunny Manivannan: Totally, loved that. Okay. What was the second piece of career advice?
[0:13:00] Jason Perocho: The second piece of career advice is that, you have to have a team around you to be successful. In order to get by or get past certain levels, it's not about how smart you are anymore. It's about how well you can navigate really sticky situations. So, the team that I recommend everybody have is one, an executive coach. Like an executive coach is there to help you think through in a structured way problems that you'll see in corporate America. Two is a mentor, somebody that's usually a step or two ahead of you that could either pave the way for you or reflect in a close enough timeframe that they could give you actionable advice on how to be better at the job you're at in order to get to where you want to go.
The third is a therapist. Because in the end, you're going to have to figure out how to emotionally regulate yourself. You lose the gossip that you might have had when you're like a manager or an individual contributor. You have to figure out a way to compartmentalise that and have a right output for that in order to keep it productive in the workplace and at home. Because trust me, you don't want to come home and just bitch about work all the time. Your partner will be like, "Can we talk about something else? What about me?"
[0:14:16] Sunny Manivannan: That's great advice. You're so spot on. As you really step into, let's say, the VP levels of our organisation, there's just a distance between you and the day-to-day sort of happenings at a company. Things happen, people do crazy things. Most of these things just don't matter at that point because you're trying to figure out what are my goals, am I achieving my goals, am I helping this company move forward, and am I doing a great job, and is it valuable.
The support systems I think often go by the wayside because people say, "Well, I don't need that. I'm going to do it myself" and so on. There's a whole host of excuses that we can all make, but no doubt that if you're serious about your performance, you've got to have a P.
[0:15:02] Jason Perocho: Yes, absolutely.
[0:15:05] Sunny Manivannan: Really cool. Love that, Jason. Thank you. Let me ask you a little bit about what your priorities are now at Amperity. The technology industry has gone through a lot of changes in the last two years. We're all, I think, not quite inventing a new playbook, but we're dusting off a very old playbook that many of us haven't had to turn to before 2010. I think many of us really started our careers when it was boom times, and it's just been boom times until 2022. So, we're all kind of learning some new muscles. What's top of mind for you at Amperity? Tell me about what you're working on, what you're excited about.
[0:15:46] Jason Perocho: Yes. I mean, I think with any marketing lead right now, the first thing that's top of mind is performance. Are we driving enough pipe? Are we driving the right pipe? Are we helping our sellers advance that pipe? Even after the sale, what motions do we have to make sure that we're keeping the customers that we've just spent so much money on acquiring? All along the way, we're trying to find the most cost effective, yet personalised journey to do. It seems like those two are almost at odds with each other. It's like, "Hey, be cost-effective, but yet, personalise the entire experience."
That's exceptionally difficult for us, because we at Amperity target enterprise businesses. So, businesses that make over $250 million run rate. There has to be a level of personalisation in order to win those types of deals. First and foremost is that. The second with performance is also the health of my team. We can talk and wax poetic about performance, and I could deliver the greatest SQLs and SQOs. But if I'm not looking out for my team and helping them navigate through some of the trials, and these new things, and new modals of reaching out the customers, and them feeling good about it. Then, the first thing is just not going to happen.
So, very much focused in on, hey, how can we create a culture of experimentation? How could we create a space in which people can authentically grow? How do we make sure that as they grow, their incentives are aligned with business incentives?
[0:17:28] Sunny Manivannan: Speaking of sort of what you're trying to do and what CMOS are trying to do, would love to get your take on, what do you think is more broadly going on in the software industry or SaaS industry now? Do you think that we're in for a protractor downturn? Do you see any green shoots? How does AI play in all of this? Is there like a next act that's fueled by AI? Where do you stand on where is the industry's going?
[0:17:52] Jason Perocho: First and foremost, everybody has to prove their value. I think, Gartner has rang the bell on this one. But 30%, 35% of SaaS seats, or consumption, or whatever you've bought goes unused. It's just shelfware. At the same time, there are more SaaS companies than any time in history. How are you ensuring that you're getting the utilisation and even in that utilisation that your customers are seeing value? So, I think what we're seeing is a big pivot toward the articulation of ROI for not just your tool, but helping people understand how your tool also fits in this ever-expanding technology stack.
If your business can't articulate how you fit into a tech stack, what your role is, and what would happen if you were to remove that piece. Then, I think that that business is in trouble. So, first and foremost, like value articulation. AI is super important, and I think that's the question that we're getting pressured a lot from like the C-suite. It's like, "Hey, how are using AI to save dollars, to save people, et cetera, et cetera? It's like, I don't want to get left behind the curve."
But for all the wonderful predictions about what AI is, I think there's also, at the same time just so much risk around AI, that at least we see inside of the enterprise segments that businesses are not willing to take on yet. So, everything from LLMs being how accurate, like, "Oh, not there." Even at the best are like 98%, 99 % accurate. That 1% of error is still unacceptable for a lot of CISOs out there. How accurate are predictions? How can we validate those predictions? Can we unpack those models?
As kind of a future AI state, I don't think that black boxes are the future of AI. We have to, as an industry, let people know how and why our AI functions the way it does, so that the entire process and all the transformations can be auditable to ensure that businesses are staying in compliance. Because even though the reward is high, the risk is equally as high, especially with everybody leaning in with a patchwork of regulations out there.
[0:20:08] Sunny Manivannan: I love what you said about, even if it's 98% accurate, that still may not be good enough for some CISOs, especially the enterprise. It's certainly, 98% would not have been good enough for you as a pilot. If you were told, "All right, get into this plane. It's going to be fine 98% of the time." The other 2%, we don't know. Maybe it'll be okay, maybe it won't." I don't think you would have gone on that plane.
[0:20:30] Jason Perocho: It's like giving somebody like a thousand skittles, but telling them 20 of them will kill them. But go ahead and eat as many as you want.
[0:20:36] Sunny Manivannan: That's exactly right. Unlimited, go for it, free for all.
[0:20:41] Jason Perocho: Yes. Are you going to eat anything from the bag of skittles?
Probably not.
[0:20:45] Sunny Manivannan: Are you using any AI solutions within your marketing team?
[0:20:47] Jason Perocho: We're using a ton of AI. In all honesty, I've actually now probably used a combination of perplexity.ai, claw.ai for 50% to 60 % of my searches or my research compared to Google. I've been training my team as such. We love, for example, in Perplexity, the ability to trace back the source of where that recommendation came from to validate that came from a human being. In claw.ai, it's just like really, really good about synthesising down large meetings and getting the actual thing.
AI is being used in our business to more augment us and take away a lot of the mundane things that we would do. I'm sure even with this podcast, you're going to create a transcript off of it, summarise it, and send a newsletter out to your audience. I think that's a great use. I mean, it's human in the loop, it's productivity focused. Not necessarily completely replacing folks at this point.
[0:21:48] Sunny Manivannan: Yes. The plane has gone a lot better and more advanced, but the pilot is still there.
[0:21:52] Jason Perocho: There's a lot of talk about drones and such, but we still have pilots flying in the sky, and there's just this risk factor that even with software glitching at 1%, it comes down to almost like a philosophical problem. Would you rather the human make the mistake or would you rather a artificial intelligence make mistake? Because who learns from those mistakes and what are the costs of those outcomes? We're thinking about pilot in commercial airlines, why there might always be a pilot in there. The optics and just the humanity associated with it is sometimes hard to replace.
[0:22:25] Sunny Manivannan: You see AI eventually taking some portions of jobs. Where do you where do you stand on that? There's definitely some – one of the interesting observations as I talked to other CMOs and just across the SaaS industry is, there's a lot of excitement for AI at the C levels. Not as much excitement at the sort of more – the levels where the real work of an organisation gets done, like at the master level, the tractor level, and so on. Not as much excitement. Some excitement, but not as much. What do you think is going on? How do you see the future of AI in the workplace?
[0:22:57] Jason Perocho: I do think that there will be the ability to do more with less people. I'm just going to call the spade the spade, because if you're removing all like the transcription time, the meeting summary notes you're able to get more through. If you're getting able to get more throughput through, you might need less people. So, I do think there is some aspect of losing some current jobs that we have today But I also think that there is the creation of future jobs tomorrow that we really can't anticipate at this point, even if they are only temporary. Like prompt engineering, for example.
In our product at Amperity, we have this feature called AmpGPT that allows users to just interrogate their own data and find insights. So, if your boss, your CEO has ever given you a one-off question. Yes, simply just ask that question in, and will give you the answer, and graph it for you. Now, while that seems just like this magical tool on the surface, it doesn't just happen. It's not like this person's writing SQL code anymore. What they're actually doing now is that they're training the algorithm. They're doing prompt engineering and they're training what the semantic tags are on all the data. So that, when natural language is used, the natural language knows how to look up the different rows and columns stored inside of your database.
That's just an example of how you can see jobs starting to shift more than necessarily replace. I believe there will be more jobs. The ultimate question is, depending on how fast technology moves, can you create as many new jobs as the jobs that you're destroying?
[0:24:33] Sunny Manivannan: History is any indicator. The answer to that question is yes, that you will create just as many of your jobs. If not, more. Unemployment rates have stayed fairly stable throughout many technology changes, right? There's not many marketers writing with quill and ink anymore. We're all using computers, we're all using the internet, and now we're using AI. It seems like the jobs are still there. So, it will be very interesting to see how this plays out.
[0:24:59] Jason Perocho: Even the last thought, I think this is a great opportunity for not so much like the demand generation or the product, even the product marketers. I think it's a great advantage for the creative economy, because in the end, people put value on uniqueness and newness. So far, what I've seen, I haven't seen a lot of AI being able to derive something completely from scratch. We're bringing 20, 40 disparate sources together and create something brand new. Everything is a derivative or almost a copy. I think in the future, people will value more creativity, more out thereness, more out there thinking. The thinking that just is obviously comes from a human, that might be more imperfect than AI can produce. So, creative economy I think is going to get a boost here in the future.
[0:25:45] Sunny Manivannan: We started talking about SaaS. So, let me move over to the SaaS talk section of this episode. I want to ask you a couple of questions about different SaaS companies and what are your thoughts. I'll start off by asking you, what is your favorite SaaS company homepage? The only company you can't mention is your current one. So, tell me your favorite SaaS company homepage.
[0:26:04] Jason Perocho: I thought about this for a little bit. I have a nephew out there that loves like interactive games online like every other kid. Just kind of addicted to the iPad at this time. But there's this company called Spline that creates 3D games, 3D images. I love it because their homepage is so interactive to show what their value is.
Not only that, they show this beautiful, what you're able to create, and have some experimentation on the front page. But on the backside, their dock site is super clean and very solution-oriented. Because as great as the technology is that you're presenting forward, there has to be some probably hands-on keyboard person making that happen. They're going to need some guidance on how to utilise your products. I think having a great doc site that's easy to navigate, that's descriptive, that helps people figure out the ins and outs of their product is just absolutely amazing.
[0:27:05] Sunny Manivannan: Okay. Amazing. spline.design is the home page for those who are interested. That's very cool. Tell me a little bit. we're obviously in the customer story business, so I get obsessed with customer stories. I've read so many customer stories over the last few months. What's your favorite SaaS customer story and why do you like it?
[0:27:23] Jason Perocho: One customer story is more of a highlight for marketers out there that are worried about their brand and why brand is so important. The customer story that was told by us was actually given by Marc Benioff and he was talking about how they were trying to break into the Barclays account. Barclays being the largest bank over there, overseas, in the United Kingdom.
Marc had us prepare for weeks for this, to think of every in and out of this person could possibly say, with a complete review of the roadmaps, like we are breaking into this business. He meets with the president, sits down. When he sits down, Marc starts his pitch. The CEO just goes, "Stop. I don't care." He said that, "Anybody could come in here and pitch me their software. Guess what? I have more money than God. I could probably go create that myself. What I want to know is, do you actually believe in the values that are on your website? Do you really donate 1% of time, money, equity, to businesses, to charities like LGBTQ.
Marc is like, "Oh, yeah, absolutely. Here's X, Y, here's Z, here's all the things that we've done in the past year." He pushed, he was like, "Why?" He said, "Well, you know, my son recently came out as gay and I want to do business with people that have the same values as me and support my family." Tracing this all the way back to customer stories, it's like, yes, the problem, the solution, the aha moment are important.
But the real goal on customer stories is really when you align values between brands, and you highlight that value. Because in the end, the entire model of SaaS is that it's software as a service. You could leave at any time. Vendors need you to be there for three years to even make back the cost of acquiring you. It's really about putting that relationship first and making sure that when you're communicating out in this customer story, you're communicating the values of your company and why people would want to work with you.
[0:29:39] Sunny Manivannan: Absolutely, love that story.
[0:29:41] Jasom Perocho: That's one of my big stories. It's really stuck with me for a while, and just always, as a marketer in me, like, "Hey, tell the product story, but also be human, and tell the story about how the brands compliment each other."
[0:29:58] Sunny Manivannan: Absolutely love that story. So spot on that we all tend to get really excited about the product and we forget about the people, and still it's a partnership that is beyond just technology. It's a real person-to-person partnership that hopefully will go on for a long time. Like you said, the vendor wants this relationship to be a forever relationship, and it's going to go through ups and downs, and it's really about who's going to be on the other side of the table? Not, what technology is on the other side of the table.
[0:30:26] Jason Perocho: Yes. People don't buy technology because it's cool, and has a slick UI, and it solves a problem They buy technology, because they have a feeling that it'll make them better. It'll get them promoted. Because like in the end, there's a personal reason why. So, if you're not like putting the, not just the customer, but the person, the champion at the forefront of your story, you're not telling that story correctly.
[0:30:48] Sunny Manivannan: Right on. I want to ask you a little bit about favorite technologies that you use. If you could give me – this time, I will let you do two. One person, one business. Tell me a little bit about what technologies you really like to use.
[0:31:02] Jason Perocho: Oh man, I probably already gave it away. But qual.ai/perplexity.ai are two of my absolute favorite tools. They save me so much time. They help me ideate, they help me summarise some of these notes, they help me research. It's just so much more easier and intuitive than Google, using quotes, plus signs, all of the stuff that you used to do in order to get search engines to perform for you. Just absolutely amazing. If you're not using it, you're probably behind. So, that's my professional.
As for personal, it's honestly Strava. I am a workout fiend. Sometimes I do two workouts a day. I think keeping my body in shape helps me keep my mind in shape. But I also like tracking things and gamification of things. The fact that I could track every single workout, see my progress, and also compete with my friends on who's running longer distances, who's lifting heavier weight is super huge for me. I did learn to shut off the location sometimes, when you're on military bases. Because that was a big no no in the military. But after that little hiccup, absolutely love it, now that I'm a civilian again.
[0:32:16] Sunny Manivannan: Amazing. That's outstanding. Love that. Let me ask you, let's go to the Peerbound talk section where we just talk about your peer influences, who's your inspiration, or what inspires you. I'd have to start off by asking you about a book or a movie that you'd recommend to everybody that you've consumed recently.
[0:32:36] Jason Perocho: I thought about this question a lot because you did prepare me for it. I've changed my mind since, and I think a great book is Slaughterhouse-Five, written by Kurt Vonnegut, because I love the way that it's structured. Because it's structured by not being structured at all. It's about this guy, Kilgore Trout, that can jump around to any time point in his life. As you're reading the story, you're not reading it from birth to his death. You're just reading about little anecdotes and learning along the way about what makes this person who he is.
I think that's the most applicable way to even think about marketing and kind of the mindset that you need in marketing. You're not going to have – nobody's ever going to lay out to you the full customer journey. You're just going to get bits and pieces of it. And as you're reading it, you're going to have to put it all together, and make the story in your head, and figuring out what that means and how to apply it to other people. It's like that nonlinear thinking, but also able to piece things together and create your own story or truth out of it, I think is totally essential to be successful in this industry.
[0:33:41] Sunny Manivannan: I love that. I mean, so spot on, that we exist in different timelines and we exist at different levels of detail as marketers all the time. We also exist in a completely incomplete world where we wish we had 90% more information than we actually do have. There's just no way, there's no way.
[0:34:03] Jason Perocho: Then, for a professional book. There's a great resource that I always refer back to it's called, FYI: For Your Improvement. It's not something that you read back to front, but it's an executive book that's very situational. It provides context on different situations that you'll be either managing your teams, managing your peers, or managing your bosses, and how to work through those in very digestible frameworks. It's something that you just rabbit ear and bookmark and you come back to as you see the problems arise. No need to memorize it all, but it's just such a great bookshelf reference material to figure out how to be a better leader.
[0:34:42] Sunny Manivannan: Amazing. Love that as well. I know this is a dangerous question to ask a Salesforce alum, because there are so many amazing marketers that started their career or spent a significant amount of time in Salesforce. But my last question to you is, who is your favorite SaaS marketer? On this one, you can give me as many names as you can muster and tell me why.
[0:35:02] Jason Perocho: There's just a laundry list of people to name. Going to like my very first boss, Mike Stone, who saw something raw and was like, "Yes, outside thinking from the traditional SaaS world, let's hire him, and develop him in a whole new way." He hired a team of outside thinkers, whether it was this woman, Lisa Henderson, who had advised me of more branding. She created the Katy Perry persona. There was Simone Kritz, who was like my first manager, who like founded Marketing Germany. Even my peers, like Julian Armington, who helped me understand different aspects of working with the sales teams.
God, I could just name, go on and on like throughout that, through the Salesforce journey. But if I just jump to the chase and answer the question directly, it's somebody that we both know very well and her name is Sarah Spivey. The reason being is that, I've had a lot of great leaders in my life. I've never had great leaders that are also just effective communicators that get me to run into direction. Sara is one of those people that you can sit down with for 15 to 30 minutes and get marching orders for the next week.
The thing that I want to emulate is to be able to so succinctly summarise my advice and pointly push people in a direction that requires very little words. Even the story's too long. She would have probably said it in like 10 seconds and given like a really thoughtful answer why. So, my shout out to Sara Spivey.
[0:36:41] Sunny Manivannan: I love it and love all those names and to walk down memory lane as well. Sara, as you know, was a former guest on The Peerbound Podcast. She was awesome, and I can't wait to share more from that conversation in the coming months and years. But yes, she was just an incredible, incredible person, incredible manager, and great to reminisce jointly. Everything you said was also my experience. She was very consistent across the board and yes, we all we all loved her. So, great stuff. Thank you, Jason. This was just an incredible conversation. I really enjoyed this tremendously, loved your perspectives on AI, and the future. As well as what we all experiencing as people in the SaaS industry today versus a couple of years ago even.
Really, really love hearing your stories of moving away from public sector in military into the private sector, and how that sort of shaped you into the marketer and leader that you are today. So, thank you so much for joining me, and looking forward to sharing this episode.
[0:37:47] Jason Perocho: Thanks for having me, Sunny. Always fun to wax poetic with you and catch up.
[0:37:52] Sunny Manivannan: Love it. Thanks, Jason. See you.
