Metrics Require Context - with Scott Stouffer, founder and CEO scaleMatters

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics and form decisions. Now on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Scott Stouffer, founder and CEO of Scale Matters. Today, we'll be covering three main topic areas with Scott. First, building go-to-market as a series of iterations. Is it a conscious or unconscious iteration process? Second, moving from static scorecards and dashboards to actionable insights. And third, optimizing your go-to-market motion faster while consuming less capital. Scott, please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast.

**Scott Stouffer** (1:15)
Sure, Ray. Thanks for having me, first of all. Well, my journey has been a long one. This is my fifth entrepreneurial stint as a CEO, having started my first company back in 1993, actually. I've been doing the early stage startup gig for quite a while. My passion is really around the go-to-market aspects, well, product strategy as well as go-to-market, and being a trained engineer, I've tended to be what I refer to as a quant CEO, one who really focuses on trying to manage by numbers, manage by metrics, etc. Seemed like a perfect fit to have a chat with you.

**Ray Rike** (1:54)
Well, this is the Metrics that Measure Up podcast, so we can geek out on data and metrics for the next 30 minutes, Scott. Let's jump right into it. One of the topics that everyone's talking about today is go-to-market. Your go-to-market strategy, your go-to-market motion, your go-to-market measurements of success. But one of the things in our earlier discussions, you talk about building go-to-market as a series of iterations, not spending six months to come up with the best big go-to-market strategy.
Can you tell me a little bit about your concept of having go-to-market being a series of iterations?

**Scott Stouffer** (2:32)
Yeah, sure. We've been drawing from learnings from the product development world. If you think about product development, the approach du jour is agile, and it has been for quite some time over the last 10 years or so. If you think about what was prior to agile development, it was this notion that you spend all this time building up these very detailed requirements, then development team goes off and builds the entire thing, and then you launch it. And it's not till 18 months after you start that you launch, and you've spent a lot of money, and it's not until then that you find out whether you've got something useful or not. Agile is, let's put little pieces out and iterate quickly. And so what you end up gaining in an agile environment is the opportunity not to waste a whole lot of money just to find out that something's not going to work. So if you apply that same concept and go to market, you think about it, what do you have to get right? You have to optimize for product market and message fit. Otherwise you've got kind of this perpetual friction that lasts throughout everything else you do. You have to optimize around a set of strategies, particularly if you're talking about new customer, new logo acquisition, you have to optimize around a set of strategies to source these prospects and try to find the strategies that are most productive in terms of return on investment and get away from the ones that aren't very productive. You have to optimize around a set of processes. There's an entire set of, for any given company, 10 to 40 steps from lead to deal. You think of that as a process flow, you have to optimize those processes, get rid of the friction, make sure they're repeatable, predictable, scalable and efficient.
Anyway, the point is nobody, I mean, no company is born having all of this stuff nailed. So by definition, it's a series of iterations that companies go through. The difference that we've seen between companies that are exceptionally good at this. So basically meaning they get to a highly optimized motion faster and burn through a lot less capital along the way. The difference between them and others is the notion that this process of iterating is conscious to them. They actually are very thoughtful about the fact that we are going through this series of iterations and experimentations. And when it's a raise to a level of consciousness, there are things you actually do differently. So for example, if you're going to try some new messaging, maybe in your sales pitch, people who consciously iterate before they would launch the new messaging, are going to say, okay, how are we going to measure whether it's more effective? Right? They never launch on a new iteration of anything without first knowing how they're going to measure whether it's better or worse. And contrast that with kind of what I'll call unconscious iteration. People just throw stuff out, right? I mean, they're constantly trying new stuff, but they haven't necessarily developed this mindset like a scientist would, if you will, right? Think about science. You set up a hypothesis, then you're going to run an experiment to test that hypothesis. And part of running the experiment or designing the experiment is making sure you can measure this stuff. And so the same concept exists in what we'll refer to as Agile Go-To-Market, which is we're going to do a whole bunch of kind of many iterations, many experiments, but we're always going to first make sure we have a way of measuring it in a very legitimate fashion, very clear fashion. We're going to put certain criteria for pass, fail, et cetera. That's what I'm talking about when I talk about conscious iteration. And as a result, what happens with the companies that do that is they basically find the failures much faster. And that's really why they end up more effective. The primary difference between conscious iteration and unconscious iteration is how quickly you find the stuff that's not working.