Integrating GTM in a PLG Company - with Shane Murphy-Reuter, President GTM Calendly

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, Founder and CEO of Benchmarkit, and your host of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed and benchmark validated decisions. Now, on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics at Measure Up podcast. Today, I am joined by Shane Murphy-Reuter, the president of GoToMarket at Calendly. We'll be covering four primary topics for Shane today. First, the primary role and responsibilities of the top GTM executive in a PLG company, the key inflection points in scaling a product-led growth company, how to evolve a brand from the buyer's perspective, and lastly, how to build an integrated GTM organization within a PLG company. So with that, Shane, would you mind taking a moment to give a brief overview of your journey becoming my guest here on the Metrics to Measure Up podcast?

**Shane Murphy-Reuter** (1:22)
Absolutely. It's wonderful to be here, Ray. Thanks so much. Yeah, you know, as you mentioned right now, the president of GoToMarket at Calendly, but I spent the last 10 years, so the second half of my career in a variety of GoToMarket executive roles, primarily CMO, plus kind of ownership of the PLG business. But this is the second role where I've also owned sales in a role which is really trying to bring together all of the different components of GoToMarket to create a more seamless customer experience because ultimately that's our job. And so yeah, you know, being at Calendly now, I think five months, about five months. So it's been a wonderful journey, great company and excited to chat through everything that we're doing.

**Ray Rike** (2:09)
Okay. Well, let's not understand your background and pedigree too much here, Shane, because you were the head of marketing at companies, including both Webflow and ZoomInfo, correct?

**Shane Murphy-Reuter** (2:20)
That's right, Chad. Yeah. My B2B experience has been AdRoll, Intercom, ZoomInfo and Webflow. So I've seen that. Like I've seen every type of go-to-market motion from ZoomInfo, which is purely sales led. We passed a billion in ARR when I was there all the way to, you know, something more like Calendly, which is predominantly self-serve. So, yeah, I've been fortunate in the last 10 years to work with some credible brands and, yeah, it's been an exciting journey.

**Ray Rike** (2:49)
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Well, let's start right there then. So a lot of great brands, a lot of success, a lot of experience. So tell me a little bit about kind of how that background and experience, how did that inform how you actually entered into this new head of GTM World Calendly? What did you think as far as priorities, et cetera? How did it form how you entered the company?

**Shane Murphy-Reuter** (3:51)
Yeah, yeah, it's a great question. So maybe I'll go even a little bit further back. I actually spent the first part of my career, first half of my career in consumer marketing, where in consumer, there are two things that are primarily different than in B2B. One, brand is extremely important in consumer, particularly if you're selling something as simple as, let's say, perfume, right? Like, no, there's not really a product differentiation in perfume, it's smelly water, it's all brand, right? Now, I worked in more technology companies like telecoms, but having a very strong brand position, being able to communicate that into market was really important and a core part of like as I grew up as a marketer. I'll explain in a second how that kind of influences how I've thought about Calendly and other companies in a second. The second thing that is different in consumer is there's not really a sales team. There isn't this concept of like, hey, go to market is like partly owned by marketing, who often own the self-serve number, and then there's the sales team who own the sales number, and they try to collaborate to create a unified experience. There's just one team, which is marketing that creates a customer experience. When I joined B2B, I was like, wait a second, why is this so siloed?
Why are sales and marketing so disconnected? Why is the self-serve experience and the sales experience so binary? It just made no sense to me. Anyway, those two things really influenced a lot of my career. Since moving to B2B, in particular at Calendly, I joined Calendly at a time where we are predominantly self-serve, but we had gone on the classic journey of building a very large upmarket sales machine with mixed success, I would say. It drove a lot of growth, but wasn't particularly efficient because like many other companies I've been at, the sales side of the business and the self-serve side of the business were not really connected and thought about as a unified system. As I've joined Calendly, two big things are on my mind that are exactly what I've just talked about. One, we're at rapid pace of becoming a multi-product company. We're currently known for scheduling. We will become known for a lot more if I do my job right over the next year or two. Brand positioning, how do we take these products to market? How do we reposition Calendly in the mind of the customer is critical to everything I'm doing right now.