RevTalks, Episode 12: Latané Conant on Dominating Your Market

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Randy Littleson: So sales and marketing don’t always address whether or not they have the right solution for the market. How do you approach diagnosing market needs?

Latané Conant: This is a really interesting one. I even changed my title when I was a CMO to Chief Market Officer. This is a passionate topic for me. I think you have to look at win-loss a lot. You need to conduct numerous interviews and analyze the competitive landscape—not just your competitors today, but also what companies are getting funded and what features others are adding. You need to stay very aware of the tech landscape to stay ahead.

Randy Littleson: I like to talk about that as alternative solutions.

Latané Conant: Exactly, alternative solutions to the same problem. I spend all Monday getting data ready and analyzing it. It’s about drilling into questions like, "What’s our stickiness with this product versus that product? If we combine these products, what’s the stickiness?" It’s about thinking through different scenarios and letting the data tell a story.

Latané Conant: What was really interesting is we bought this company, Saleswhale. We invested a lot in the product and called it conversational email, which was the worst name ever. People were like, "What? So, is that a sales engagement platform?" We were like, "No, you still need a sales engagement platform." It just didn’t work at all. But the technology was so interesting, and we saw our early adopters having all this success with it.

Latané Conant: So, we repositioned it as email agents. Rather than talking about it as a product, we talk about it as a use case. That was a light bulb moment. For example, we say, "This is an inbound agent, or an outbound agent, or a trade show agent." People are like, "Oh, I get that. These are the jobs that need to be done, and this is going to make it easier." Boom.

Latané Conant: Sometimes it’s about putting a different spin or combining that product with a workflow product or something else to bring them together in the right way. You have to be tenacious and okay with admitting, "That was a bad name. Why did we name it that?" It was probably me who named it—oops, bad decision. Moving on. That’s where adaptability comes in.

Randy Littleson: Yeah.

Randy Littleson: So you represent both sales and marketing here.

Latané Conant: I fight with myself all the time.

Randy Littleson: I bet you do. What do you think sales can teach marketing? And what do you think marketing can teach sales?

Latané Conant: It’s like portfolio management—balancing long-term and short-term gains and investments. It’s easy in sales to focus only on short-term portfolio investments and be very reactive. It’s easy for marketing to finish Breakthrough, take a week’s rest, and then start working on next year. Both are good mindsets, but you have to do both.

Latané Conant: However, there can be an over-rotation. Marketing doesn’t always understand that you need to produce short-term gains—you’ve got to get an asset out every month or every week. Sales, on the other hand, can be so reactive that they don’t plan ahead.

Latané Conant: One shift we’ve made is having a marketing forecast call. This was new for us because we think about monthly and quarterly pipeline, but no one was asking, "What are you going to do this week?" Now, every leader gets on and says, "What’s your call this week, and why?" If you don’t string weeks together, you can’t string months or quarters together. That’s been a shift for the marketing team.

Latané Conant: On the sales side, I have a fear of not being prepared. Salespeople—this is a generalization—tend to cram the night before the exam. That’s not me at all. These end-of-quarter slogs drive me insane. I’ve been working on pacing with sales—doing a little bit each day. We’ve been trying to move to more of a monthly cadence. We still close 50 percent of our number in the last month of the quarter, which drives me insane.

Randy Littleson: You’re a true software company.

Latané Conant: And it drives me insane. I haven’t quite gotten it to where I’d like, but we’re working on it.

Randy Littleson: I like what you say because I’ve been asked in the past, “What causes the conflict between sales and marketing?” One thing I’ve always believed is, one, if you’re not aligned on goals—if you’re not focused on the same goals of revenue, bookings, pipeline—you’re going to have a problem. The second thing is, the other root of it has always been time horizons.

Latané Conant: Yes.

Randy Littleson: Sales is very short-term, time-horizon focused. Marketing tends to be longer-term. So how can you meet in the middle?

Randy Littleson: I think you beautifully captured that in the way you described it. I think that’s absolutely spot on.

Latané Conant: Yeah, and sharing. Like, “Hey, these are the things I think are going to pay off: boom, boom, boom. And these are the things I think are going to pay off now.” It’s about managing a portfolio.

Randy Littleson: Yep. Let’s talk product for a second.

Randy Littleson: You guys just had your conference, Breakthrough, and you announced some exciting integration between our products, right? We’re very happy with that because we’ve long believed there’s great synergy between these products. You guys do a great job identifying who’s in-market, where they’re at in the journey, and creating a very valuable signal for people to follow up on.

Randy Littleson: Of course, as I talk to marketers, one of the biggest frustrations is, “We get a signal, and nobody follows up on it,” right? So, yeah, exactly. Our Rhythm platform absolutely helps people prioritize their day and focus on the right things. Can you talk a little bit about what you guys announced in terms of integration between our two products?

Latané Conant: Yeah, we are now integrated with Rhythm. You can push the signal to Rhythm and trigger any kind of orchestration. Absolutely.

Latané Conant: What I love about that—kind of back to Carrie’s research—is that when I think about Salesloft and Rhythm, I think most people see a sales engagement platform as email. But I think email is kind of table stakes at this point. I actually think we should start removing email from what salespeople do—they’re not great at it anyway, to be honest.

Latané Conant: What I love about Rhythm is that it’s all of the channels. It’s, “Hey, we need a LinkedIn touch,” or, “We need to make a phone call.” For us, we find that meetings booked via phone are so much better than email. I mean, email is almost like an ad impression these days. Rhythm ensures that the human aspects we want people to do are happening at the right time based on the signals. That’s the power of the combo, I think.

Randy Littleson: Boy, I love what you just said. I actually just listened to a QBR with one of our key customers yesterday. One thing that stood out is that the team mixing multiple modes of communication and touches—including phone calls—had the best success in terms of booking meetings. Teams relying solely on emails saw much lower results.

Latané Conant: Yeah. On the one hand, I’m like, “I don’t pick up the phone ever.” It’s a joke in my family—if you want me to pick up, you have to text me in all caps.

Randy Littleson: “I am calling, please.”

Latané Conant: Exactly. I’m the worst. So, I don’t get why this works, but the data, over and over, shows that calling is the most important.
Randy Littleson: Yeah, it makes a big difference. Latane, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you.