Gurmeet Judge
Encompass solutions founder and CEO Gurmeet Judge interview successful business leaders as he dives deeps into the world of business to help people like you become successful business leaders!
Gurmeet Judge
Why Most Companies Can’t Scale (And How AI Changes Everything)
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Marketing and sales alignment drives growth. It creates clearer messaging, stronger lead handoff, and a better customer experience. When both teams move in sync, conversions improve, revenue grows, and scaling becomes more predictable.
In this episode, I sit down with Mark Gordon, the “Rebel CRO.” He has helped scale companies from $1M to $30M+ ARR by fixing what most businesses get wrong: clarity and alignment. If your message is unclear, outbound is falling flat, or you are still carrying sales yourself, this conversation is for you.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/markdouglasgordon/
https://www.igtms.com/
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Business Leadership Challenges
01:38 The Importance of Right People and Direction
03:57 Aligning Marketing and Sales for Success
08:59 Bridging the Gap Between Marketing and Sales
11:58 Creating Effective Messaging and Content
13:57 Training and Systems for Consistency
16:24 Navigating Decentralized Work Environments
19:06 The Impact of AI on Marketing and Sales
20:16 The Transformative Power of AI in Business
27:09 Scaling Businesses with AI Efficiency
28:50 Mark's Journey: From Sales to Marketing Expert
32:47 Understanding Market Positioning and Customer Acquisition
36:03 The Importance of External Perspectives in Business Growth
Introduction to Business Leadership Challenges
SPEAKER_01The thing that founders need to work on the most, it'd be very simply this. It's getting the right people on the bus, making sure that they're in the right seat, and make sure that they know where the bus is supposed to be going. When you do not have marketing and sales locked in, you end up taking on anybody who wants to work with you, right? And so whether that's a product or a service, you start, you try to end up being a little bit of everything for everybody because you're so afraid you might lose any opportunity. In most organizations, you have a sales leader and a marketing leader that are actually competing for resources and attention within the organization, right? You you have budget for customer acquisition. The marketing leader thinks it should all be marketing, and the sales leader thinks it should all be sales, and they're trying to fight for that positioning, and they're not even talking to each other about how to deliver leads. And unless you have a CEO who is very sales and marketing focused and can do be the balancer or the director for those two departments, then you you have these silos that are operating independently. What I would say is having a very locked-down sales environment where everyone has to follow a very specific script is probably going to chase away your top performers. You better have a really great product or system or something else that makes it worth it for someone to deal with that. At the same time, you know, if you have no systems in place, the salespeople get mad because none of their deals can get over the finish line, right? If you allow a salesperson to submit crap into the system, then the system's broken all the time, like I can't get my deals done. It's like, well, yeah, because everyone's submitting crap and you don't want rules.
The Importance of Right People and Direction
SPEAKER_00So you have to just be very welcome to Business Leadership Podcast. In this episode, I had a discussion with Mark Gordon. Mark is a rebel CRO. He scaled company from 1 million to 30 million plus in a revenue, rebuilt GTM engines in SaaS, services, and a tech. His core idea is that most companies face clarity and alignment issues, not sales problems. Mark founded Integrated Go to Market Solutions, helping B2B founders align messaging, legion, sales process, and tech into a closing system. If your team can explain what you do, your outbound sales get ignored, and you are still the top salesperson, this episode for you. Let's dive in with Mark Gordon. Before we start the discussion, I just have one quick favor to ask. What we find recently is about 35% of people who watch our content don't subscribe to our channel. So if you haven't subscribed to our channel, please subscribe, send us your feedback, and share with your friends. Your support is very important to us. Allow us to focus on our right direct discussions and deliver value on a weekly basis. Thank you. Enjoy this episode. Please welcome Mark Gordon. Hi guys, welcome to Business Leadership Podcast. Today our guest is Mark Gordon. Mark, you've been working with the business leader. You've been helping them out with the you know both uh marketing and sales in many different areas. So I'm looking forward to learning from you, looking forward to discussion. Thank you so much for time today, Mark.
SPEAKER_01Thank you so much for having me. I'm really looking forward to this as well.
SPEAKER_00Likewise, so you you work with a lot of business leaders, Mark. Let's start with what do you see some of the biggest challenges these years, people up against what problem they're trying to solve in the business?
SPEAKER_01For founders, you said, or for sales leaders? You broke up there for one second.
SPEAKER_00The founders. Let's talk from a business leadership standpoint.
Aligning Marketing and Sales for Success
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I still think if I had to articulate, you know, the thing that founders need to work on the most, it'd be very simply this. It's getting the right people on the bus, making sure that they're in the right seat, and make sure that they know where the bus is supposed to be going. And I know that that sounds overly simplified, but I just still find that founders are trying to make it work with the people they already have, even when they know they're not the perfect fit, or they accept these kind of negotiated truces in their business where they know somebody is good enough but not great, and they think that they're gonna get differentiated results. But the reality is that the formula for how well your business is gonna do is right people, right seats in the direction of the bus. And though you have to change those things if you're not getting the results you want.
SPEAKER_00Got it, got it. So if you give us a little background, Mark, what is uh I uh your company uh, you know, IGTMS about, you know, what do you guys do? Is that the focus of your company, or what do you guys do in that company?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so an integrated go-to-market solutions, we come in sort of as fractional chief revenue officers, but instead of a long-term engagement, we do four-month go-to-market overhauls, transformations, where we sit down and analyze everything from messaging, product market fit, customer acquisition cost, and total lifetime value through lead generation, sales execution, and what we call revenue technology. We make sure all those things are aligned in a very specific focus, and that unlocks growth for the companies that we work with. And we have all sorts of different stories and the problems we solve for each client can look very different. Sometimes it's a personnel problem, sometimes it's a messaging problem, sometimes it's a leadership problem. But usually it comes down to the right people in the right seats and with a very clear direction on where they're supposed to be going.
SPEAKER_00So, do they have a direction, Marcus? That seems to be the top you know leadership challenge, right? Not having a direction. You know, people you can deal with the later on, but if the company doesn't have a right direction, they don't know where they're going. That's a hard problem to solve from a marketing standpoint.
SPEAKER_01Well, yeah. So when you don't when you do not have marketing and sales locked in, you end up taking on anybody who wants to work with you, right? And so whether that's a product or a service, you start you try to end up being a little bit of everything for everybody because you're so afraid you might lose any opportunity. And you can't dial in your sales and marketing until you're willing to say who you're not for. Because if you're for everybody, the people that you should be most for don't know it. They don't know whether they get to your website or anything else. And so that struggle of saying, okay, this is who we're for, meaning we're not gonna take on every project that walks in the door. We're not gonna sell or try to sell to every single person who can buy our product or service. We're gonna say we're the absolute best in this niche, messaging for that, and then delivering marketing and sales that leads to predictable growth is the step that a lot of these founders need to take. And and so, really, what I mean by saying knowing where you want to go is is okay, saying what do we do and who do we do it for, right? And then what is the thing they can expect, the value they can expect from doing that with us. And until you nail that, everything else is very hard. And once you've nailed that, most things become very easy.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that is a challenge. I think a lot of service companies deal with uh markets. They don't want to lose a market by being a niche on a certain area, they want to capture the whole market and uh you know they want to stay general. I think that's that's a challenge with a lot of technology companies as well, that they want to stay general because they don't want to lose uh any any piece of the market. So by doing that, they they it's very hard to compete. That's very hard to go in the in one direction. I guess as you mentioned, that you're trying to be you're trying to cater to everybody, not to a specific audience.
SPEAKER_01Well, again, I think you see to sometimes too, people are like, oh, we want to be you know an upscale brand or a luxury brand, and we want to be able to be it for everybody. Well, that's those two things do not work together, right? If you want to deliver a differentiated customer experience, it means that you're the best at what you do. In order to be the best at what you do, you have to narrow your focus. You can't be the best at a hundred things or even three things most of the time, right? And so by saying this is what we do and who we do it for, you give yourself a chance to be exceptional at it, and then you can charge those premium prices because you'll be able to deliver a differentiated result. And so, you know, in in my business too, you know, I could if I could say I could teach sales and marketing to anybody, right? But by niching down and making sure that we focus on what we focus on, we ensure that we deliver the absolute best results because we know those markets, we know those clients, and we know what those what they what they need.
SPEAKER_00So you you you mentioned a good point there, Mark. If you if you uh specialize in something, then you can almost control the prices you want to charge, right? Otherwise, you end up uh being a very you know price conscious, you know, the company. But if you specialize in something, nobody can do better than you do. You can definitely control the price, you can demand the prices that you want.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. Absolutely, especially if there's an ROI on what you do, right? I mean, then it becomes you know a no-brainer.
SPEAKER_00Got it. So, how do you guys help out in a sales side? I know you guys focus on a marketing side, but how do you guys uh interact the sales? How do you how do you bridge the gap from a marketing to sales market?
Bridging the Gap Between Marketing and Sales
SPEAKER_01Well, the first thing is we have a centralized messaging that we align on, meaning what we know what we do, we know who we do it for, we know what our position is among our competition in the marketplace. Oftentimes we're also trying to articulate what makes us different. Maybe we even try to create a subcategory that we own that makes us different than our competition. But once we know who we're targeting, we make things much easier for sales, right? Because now sales is coming into a situation where they know what kind of customers they're gonna be having conversations with, what the needs are of that specific customer group, and then they become problem solvers instead of salespeople. And with that, what we're looking for is since you the challenger sales methodology, which is a big part of what we believe. And we kind of combine some of our own IGTMS secret sauce with it. But you know, we believe that salespeople in 2026 need to be providing value to their target audience by at a minimum giving them a new perspective or way to see the problems they have and hopefully a potentially new solve for what those problems are. And I think if you can do that, you can do it a genuine way for a niche audience, I think sales becomes pretty easy.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that I heard so from a lot of business leaders the challenge is that both marketing and sales are not on the same page. You know, they they marketing trying to communicate something else, but the messaging is different, but the sales trying to sell, right? So there's always a disconnect. How do you bridge that that communication and messaging gap between these two teams, uh Mark, even though they're trying to achieve two different things?
SPEAKER_01Well, you just explained the entire need for the chief revenue officer position. And that's where I was a CEO and a chief revenue officer, because in most organizations, you have a sales leader and a marketing leader that are actually competing for resources and attention within the organization, right? You you have budget for customer acquisition, and the marketing leader thinks it should all be marketing, and the sales leader thinks it should all be sales, and they're trying to fight for that positioning, and they're not even talking to each other about how to deliver leads. And unless you have a CEO who is very sales and marketing focused and can do be the balancer or the director for those two departments, then you you have these silos that are operating independently. And so just the idea they would ever be able to work together, it it the system is built specifically so they're competing, they're never going to be working together in a collaborative way. Everyone's trying to take credit for the success, and so they're all trying to win the game by themselves. And so that's why you know we are that fractional chief revenue officer piece for companies that are not big enough to go out and have a chief revenue officer. Because when you start the strategy up here and you get to dictate down to marketing what the messaging is, and you dictate to sales what the messaging is, now you have alignment by nature, right? Now, now that is one direction everyone's operating in. In other words, you have somebody at the top saying the bus is going here. Your job is to get us there, as opposed to, hey, we have a bus, where do you want to drive it? And then two people are driving it in different directions. And so, and that's the difference between having that chief revenue officer leadership or not.
Creating Effective Messaging and Content
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you know, one of the challenges see is a market is content creation. You know, both marketing marketing creates content uh you know, for for for their own use and sales created content. And sometimes the content that creates a messaging going out to the customer that sometimes is confusing, or it's not on the same page, or could be two different directions. So I think those are the challenges that that that you know these days there's organic content, there's a content that's created by companies. So there's so much content out there that both team creates the content, but it's not aligned properly.
Training and Systems for Consistency
SPEAKER_01I think what you're describing is really just a failure of leadership. And I know that's like a harsh way to say it, but you know, when I come into a new company with a client, I'll interview their entire leadership team and a couple of their clients. And I ask people very candidly, what does your company do and who do you do it for? Some people can't answer at all. Most people answer in two minutes or three minutes of just blabbing on and on, and they're kind of missing it and trying to give an all-comprehensive answer. And everyone's two or three minutes are either a little bit different or significantly different, and then you wonder why people aren't on the same page and no one knows, no one knows what's going on or what their role is. The best companies, when you meet those eight people, they have a one or two sentence explanation of what that company does and who they do it for. And that simplicity and alignment makes messaging easy, right? And then beyond those one or two sentences, they have real documents that say, here's how we talk about it, here's how we don't talk about it. Not only here's who we're for, but here's who we're not for. And that clarity allows somebody to have freedom to create content that's within the boundaries of the game that we're playing, right? The same thing we see, you know, maybe another way to say it is like culture and values, right? Every a lot of companies have culture and values, but if you don't have mechanisms for how you hire to, fire to, and promote to those core values, they're just words on a piece of paper on a wall, they don't mean anything. Until you're willing to fire your best salesperson because they're living outside your values or promote somebody who is, or not promote somebody who deserves a promotion because they're not living those values, they're not core values. It's the same thing with your messaging, marketing, and sales. Until you're willing to fire somebody in marketing for living outside your messaging, you don't have messaging. Until you're willing to promote somebody who does a great job just because they're promoting the messaging that you've aligned on and it's working and they're getting leads, you you know, you don't have messaging. You have to, you have to create a playbook or a framework for which in people need to live. They everybody needs to understand the rules of the game and their direction of the bus. And then within that, have as much freedom as you can possibly give them to get results. But freedom without that, those that that that responsibility for results and without those frameworks in place, it's anarchy. So I think everyone wants freedom and no one wants anarchy. So how do you put the things in place that allow for freedom without anarchy?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, I think that's where the lot of hard work comes in, uh, Mark, as well. You know, you you could build the playbooks, you know, you train people, you bring them to the level where you want them to, everybody's in a sync, but then the turnover happens, right? You start from a zero again with the new people, right? So so that's I think that's where the lot of hard work, that's where the playbook comes in uh very handy, or all the training comes very handy. That how do you bring somebody from outside and bring them on the same level where the other people are, you know, they've been working on the same projects?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you know, people people they say oftentimes people don't fall to the level of expectations, they fall to the level of your systems, right? And another way to say that is they'll fall to whatever level that you tolerate people falling to, right? Is is as a business, what behaviors or messaging or things like that do we tolerate? Where do we want freedom and where do we want standards? And you have to be very, very clear about those things, and then you have to be willing to enforce them. And and uh, this sounds like uh being like, you know, like uh Machiavellian about some of this stuff. I'm not like in any way. I think I believe in a very happy workplace, and but but I believe that that structure actually creates the room for people to experience happiness and joy. Without that structure, people are very confused, they feel like they're in a dark room where they can't find the walls. You know, real people want direction and then freedom to operate inside of that direction. They don't want complete freedom in a way where they can't find where the infrastructure is or where they have that support system in place to make good decisions for the business outcome. And and again, that that lack of being able to find the walls is what is why you have a messaging, you know, a marketing team and a sales team operating in completely different universes. You have to be of the lead.
Navigating Decentralized Work Environments
SPEAKER_00And how do you train people, make sure that they they you know not only we created a content, recruited uh the you know, all the playbooks, but they practice that ongoing basis because if once you repeat, if you repeat it once or twice, people are gonna forget about all this stuff, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, again, we people don't do what you expect, they do what you inspect. And so, you know, one of the things that when I was in the mortgage industry, we'd have these huge sales teams all over the country, and we'd have loan officers that were making the company millions of dollars a year, making themselves a million dollars a year, and people would be like, Why can't you just train them? Why can't you just train them? It's like to fill out the file correctly, right? It's like, I'm not gonna fill the file. It's like guys, because it's not a priority for them and it's never going to be, and we have to decide are we willing to fire a million-dollar producer who's making millions for the company because they don't fill out the form correctly? No, we're not. Okay, well, then what are we willing to do? How about this? How about we design a system so that until the form is filled out correctly, they can't send it to the next step. And then we have an inspection process on the other side that if they somehow get it through and it's not filled out correctly, we just kick it back to the loan officer. We say, Hey, listen, it's not filled out correctly, fill it out again. Well, they'll be so mad. Well, they'll be mad twice. But you know what loan officers don't want to do? Fill out the form four times. So you know what happens is you they learn you train them through negative reinforcement of sending the file back to them. You don't train them through another class or suggesting it or begging them. You make it so it's impossible for them to get to the next step without doing it correctly. And then sure enough, all the problems went away. Suddenly, all of our loan officers were had no problems with training once we once the penalty for not being trained was they had to do more work. And that was it, because they all know how to get paid, they all know how to get the job done. And so, how can you create systems that make it less painful for people to do things the right way? And that and and and until you do until you have to change if you have a problem with the result, you need to change the incentive structure. It's very simple, right? So the training comes down to okay, hey, you're if we we inspect your we have AI, listen to your calls. If you don't follow these processes, you're gonna have to go for extra training. If you do follow these processes, you don't have any extra training. Guess what? No one wants to come to the extra training, everyone suddenly follows the protocol. It's very simple, right? Again, so if you're if you're if you if you the train and again, you have to ask yourself also how important is it to you? Or they have to get to a certain close rate, right? If you close 40% of your deals, I don't care what system you're using, right? 40% of your calls become sales. Say whatever you got to say as long as it's ethical, right? Like just get it done, right? So where where are your values? Where are your rules of the game?
The Impact of AI on Marketing and Sales
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Does that does that make it a little bit difficult? Because a lot of people work in a decentralized environment these days, some people in office, some people working from home as well. Does that make that that following the system? I understand, you know, we get a bit built about the checks and balances in a system. So make sure we check all the stuff before we can process something and and put them through the training. But but working remotely or on disc, you know, decentralized environment these days, does that create a little bit of challenges that what it used to be before COVID?
The Transformative Power of AI in Business
SPEAKER_01Well, I'd say it creates some new challenges, but I would say overall, it's never been easier to run inspection processes. I mean, we literally have AI that could listen to every single thing that we do, see what we're doing, report back to us. Like, I mean, there's never been for the companies that want it more transparency into what's going on inside their organizations. You can have complete control, whether someone's here or anywhere. What I would say is companies should be very thoughtful about what their culture is and what's really important to them, right? And so, what I would say is having a very locked-down sales environment where everyone has to follow a very specific script is probably going to chase away your top performers. You better have a really great product or system or something else that makes it worth it for someone to deal with that. At the same time, you know, if you have no systems in place, the salespeople get mad because none of their deals can get over the finish line, right? If you allow a salesperson to submit crap into the system, then the system's broken all the time. Like, I can't get my deals done. It's like, well, yeah, because everyone's submitting crap and you don't want rules. So you have to just be very thoughtful about the cost-benefit analysis of having these infrastructures and inspection processes in place. And again, that's why it all really starts with knowing what's really important to you as an organization. Where are we going? What are our culture and values? Are those aligned for performance? Right? Do we value performance over everything else? And you know, if you want to have an A player in every C, you better create an environment where motivated people can thrive. What does that mean? It means clear guardrails and freedom within them. It means systems that reward the that that that force compliance in the areas where we have to have compliance and don't force it in the areas where we don't need to have it. And and so you need smart system designing it and you need people who understand both oper operate, you know, same the way you need somebody over top sales and marketing as a chief revenue officer, you better have a president of the company that has a deep understanding of both operations and sales and can lead on both sides of that equation as well. Because if those teams aren't working together and they're under siloed leadership, that fractures your organization as well.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. You mentioned a couple of times AI and a market. Is that changing the the you know the the landscape by both a marketing and a sales site? And and how about you know the the the people who've been in a business for a long time, they have to work extra hard to pick up the skill set, right? I the that's not a skill set we we had for many years.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, I I I can't think of Anything that is in my I've been in the workforce since 2004. 22 years. We've we've I've over and over again been told everything's changing. Like for instance, in the mortgage industry, which was in for a very long time, they kept telling us the loan officer was gonna go away, everyone was gonna get their loans online, they'd have no local loan officers. Yet almost the vast majority, and by the way, they told me realtors were gonna go away, no one was gonna use a realtor. In 2025, a higher percentage of real estate transactions were done with a realtor than ever before, and most people got their mortgages through whoever their realtor recommended, the same way it was 22 years ago. AI, I don't think, is going to be like that, and I think it is it is, and so we have we've built a false sense of security around well, things don't really change. We've heard they're gonna change, but they change very slowly, people can adapt. AI has not been that for us in our business. I would say that it's completely changed the way that we hire, and I'll give you an example. If you have average or slightly above average people in 2026, their work product is three to five times, they're three times as productive in a lot of cases as they were five years ago. Well, now you have three times as much average work. If fewer better people paid above market for exceptional work is the only business model that makes sense today because you can multiply that person's great work by three times, by five times, by ten times, depending on what role they're in, based on the amount you're able to leverage with AI. And so if you haven't seen it in your business yet, you're already falling behind. I almost every process that we have here at IGTMS is aided by AI. My preparation for this call today was a report that was generated for AI that reminded me of all the things that we talked about in our pre-interview. It did a summary for me with all the questions you've asked to your previous guest. I was able to read that for eight minutes before we started this call today to prepare. It would have taken me hours to prepare for this meeting, yeah, a year or two ago, right? Or two years ago. And so if you are using this to make your life more efficient, you're you're you're already falling behind, you just can't see it yet.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you know, it's uh one of the examples. I was playing with it over the weekend. I know these days you can go to AI and simply say, listen, give me, give me uh 10 companies in my, you know, that for for my ideal client. Here's a here's a report for my ideal client. Use this and give me 10 companies and give me their CEOs, uh, you know, the contact information, and plus uh, you know, show me the company's revenue and and and how big the company is and put that on an Excel sheet and send it to me. You know, that would happen in about like three, four minutes. In the olden days, we would have spent probably you know days and days to trying to figure out that information and and look for contact information and and uh you know then company information would have taken days to to figure that out.
SPEAKER_01I mean, we take it steps further than that, even. You know, when someone books a call on my calendly, it's immediately sending a message into my AI that is creating reports and custom outreach for that person to warm them up for our calls. And then when I get to the sales call, it tells me what questions I should be asking, what events are going on in their company, any PR releases they've had out, and all that is being delivered directly to us my Slack as a direct message from my AI bot named Dottie, who does all this pre-work for me in doing that, right? And she reminds me if I have a sales call coming up, and she reminds me there's somebody to follow up with, and we've all these things that are built out. And so, you know, is it perfect yet? No, can we automate everything away? No, but it does it see. Am I five times as productive at this job as I was three years ago?
SPEAKER_00Absolutely, but without having a personal assistant, you know, it's giving you all the stuff you need to to to function.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and you know what my personal assistant does now, they build out more AI capabilities, right? I mean, that's the my personal assistant spends time figuring out how to automate a new thing or a new adding in a new thing. I mean, that's that is the new assistant. It's how do we take this thing that you would have used to have done for me and make it so it happens every single time? And where are the new opportunities that are coming up every day? And and by the way, there's a new version of AI every day that changes what our capabilities are. It's impossible to keep up. And so, you know, it's it's not just a matter of the minimum competency level of using these tools in your day-to-day, it's as a founder understanding the the capabilities of these tools so you can even start to imagine what's possible with the next automation, the next thing, and the next iteration. And now that the models themselves are being built by models, right? You know, on Claude's last launch, 80 or 90 percent of the model was built by the previous model. We can expect that though that iteration to accelerate.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, either cloud or or manus. You know, if you look at these kind of AI models, they have an AI agent very powerful. You know, they're not just simply just chatting with you, they actually take an action on your behalf, whatever you wanted to do. They will go to different systems and they will do whatever you want them to do.
Scaling Businesses with AI Efficiency
SPEAKER_01We have a I have a computer running full-time where it's in a very different version of my Chrome, just working on my stuff all day.
SPEAKER_00Very interesting. You think that will that will impact the sales people as well? You know, one of the the you know, limit we had with the sales, how many contents can you handle? How much how many uh leads can you handle? Making them productive, that that that you know, ceilings get removed because you can handle a lot more work that you know that previously you could you could handle. That'll definitely give them a much bigger pipeline to handle.
Mark's Journey: From Sales to Marketing Expert
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I'm gonna say too. I think I think each, yeah, for sure answer is yes, it's gonna impact it. I think two things are gonna happen. One is I think in-person contact may become more important. So you may see salespeople that in some ways can handle less clients, in some ways, or because they have to go visit people or develop those personal relationships or spending more times at conferences. So I think human touch is gonna continue to become more important at the same time. Yes, something that would have taken a salesperson three hours of research should now be done automated in three minutes, and it should take them 10 minutes just to read what the results were. And the and I will tell you that even this, like I do so many calls, I had a hard time remembering what why I was coming here today. I would have had to spend it, I could spend an hour refreshing my memory. I didn't have to. I had my transcript from that first call with you. It was loaded in, it had all my information, it prepared me for the call, predicted questions you were gonna ask, gave me suggested answers, told me what to do. From I usually I mean, it's all there. And so, yes, if you aren't using that as a salesperson, the same way you would for a podcast, it's it that's wild wild to me. The sales call I had right before this call. You know, I I I thought I remembered, and I had notes from the first call, and I was like excited for this one. And then I went and checked my AI, and it I it's it brought up three things I'd completely forgotten about that ended up being the things that got the deal sold. And so, you know, it's just it's incredible what you can do with it. And if you're not using it, I promise you, you're not gonna lose your job to AI, you're gonna lose your job to somebody who's using AI better than you.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, what can business owners who are looking to scale company market looking to build a company, scale companies, how can they use this to to you know scale up, you know, or add a speed to their business what they're trying to, you know, go.
SPEAKER_01Well, I think there's I I think there's limitless possibilities. I also think it's here's here's my best advice. We used to say we used to say explorers get killed and settlers get fat. What do I mean by that? You know, the people who were the first people that came to America, and they, you know, the reason why we all remember Lois and Clark in America as explorers is because they're the only ones who survived. Everybody else got killed on the journey, right? Settlers get fat. So, in other words, with all of these things with AI, you don't have to be first. You do not have to be a pioneer, you don't have to be an explorer, you have to be aware of what people are doing. And then once there are real use cases of people in your world who are using these things for efficiency, you need to be fast to adopt and commit and to be able to measure what you think success looks like and decide if you're gonna keep going down the path. And so, you know, I I I do see some companies I think are obsessed with being on the cutting edge and they end up kind of running themselves in circles or trying a lot of fits and stops and starts that don't kind of kind of work out. But in terms of efficiencies, I would just say this. I think that in terms of repetitive or automated tasks, you should be having that anything that you would have outsourced to an overseas assistant that you would have paid five or ten dollars an hour to can now be done by AI. And I think you're gonna see it continue to expand from there.
SPEAKER_00Very interesting. So let's talk about your journey. Mark, how did you get involved in marketing and sales? Like, you know, if you walk us through your journey, how do you get so uh good and in this like you know at the market, both marketing and sales?
Understanding Market Positioning and Customer Acquisition
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I'll give you the the the two-minute version. Started out as a salesperson in the mortgage industry. Well, we did a year in insurance, and then I switched to the mortgage industry. I had tremendous success right out of the gate and moved into management. And then 2008 hit, and my company ran out of business, and I was like, I don't know what to do. So, me and my girlfriend at the time, who's now my wife, and another friend of mine, we started our own mortgage company right in the middle of the financial crisis. And while everybody else was crying over spilt milk, we were dumb and young and and ambitious, and we built a company out of that. So that that was a that was a great experience building a company in my 20s, learning through mistakes. I'd never read any books, I didn't know any successful entrepreneurs. I was just winging it and figuring it out. And we made millions and millions of dollars in mistakes, but we learned from those things. And then I sold that company and thought I'd stay there after I sold it. That did not work out and decided I was gonna start over again. So then I met another guy who had just kind of inherited a very old mortgage company that wasn't doing any business, and he was younger than me and smarter than me, and he'd read every book and he knew all these amazing rich people. And I was like, I'm gonna go learn from that guy for a little while. And that was the best decision I ever made because then I was able to read all the books and do all the different things and apply all that book knowledge to all the pain and suffering I'd already experienced as an entrepreneur, and uh that was an amazing experience. And then when I after about 20 years in the mortgage industry, I had enough, and so I took a year off and started kind of just seeing what I wanted to do next, and really everything seemed like a good idea, and nothing seemed like a great idea. So I started helping my friends and family with their businesses, and I loved it. And they and their business started thriving. And I was like, I know I think this is what I want to do. And so we decided that was gonna be what we did full time. We created IGTMS, and I said, listen, I just want to help people grow their businesses and help them overcome obstacles that were very obvious to me. And here's the thing I think that that really locked it all in. In the mortgage industry in the United States, there are about 2,000 companies all selling the exact same product at the exact same price. All there is as differentiation is sales and marketing. And when you come from that world and then you go into areas where there is some product or service differentiation, you have real deep experience of knowing what matters and what doesn't matter and how to bring those products and services to market. And so that's kind of been my superpower here, which is kind of finding the way to sell what other people are having a hard time figuring out how to sell and really helping people find that product market fit and that messaging fit. And so that's kind of how I got here. And now, you know, I do two entrepreneur meetings a day with founders who are in some kind of need some help or some advice, whatever it is. And when there's a fit for both of us, you know, we take those people on as clients and we help them get to the next level.
SPEAKER_00Very interesting. All right, yeah, definitely, you know, coming from mortgage industry, you know, if a sales and marketing is a key for them, you know, it you know, it'll help you, you know, understand very deeper level that is a this is the differentiator in in those industries. So, you know, you can bring that knowledge and wisdom to uh to other industry.
SPEAKER_01It's you know, it's apply it's applied to everything that we every high-ticket business we found, we've been able to apply what we call our core four system, which is that messaging and and product market fit, lead generation, sales execution, and revenue technology. And when you when you're an expert in those four things and you can bring them together in a business, the results seem to follow very quickly.
SPEAKER_00So if a business leader trying to take on these these challenges, you know, a lot of people, especially a lot of business leaders I know, business owners I know, they don't come from a sales or marketing background, they all come from a technical background, they're trying to build the businesses. If they want to start on a journey, where can they start? You know, what is the what what's the area they can start from and and then build upon it?
The Importance of External Perspectives in Business Growth
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I'm gonna go back to them, you know, not to beat a dead horse, but what do we do? Who do we do it for? Who do we not do it for? And what is our place in the marketplace? Understanding based on your price and what service you plan to deliver and the level of execution, making sure that you understand what your customer acquisition cost is gonna be, what the lifetime value of a customer is, and do those things make sense based on your growth trajectory? And if you if you don't have that little equation right, then you need to go pay somebody to help you. And it's sometimes it's not that you aren't smart enough or anything else, it's sometimes or experienced enough, even it's that when it's your company, it's very easy to lie to yourself. We are we are really good at as human beings of seeing the things that we want to see to give ourselves the hope we need to keep going forward. And you know, I know some very talented entrepreneurs that are 10 years into a path that you know, they're like, if we just do this, I'm like, it shouldn't be this hard. You're too good. You're on you're trying to sell the wrong thing to the wrong people, it doesn't work, right? Go do something else, right? And like, but they're they're pot committed, they've raised money, their family put money over, and they're like just stuck on the path. You know, sometimes you need somebody else to come in and go, like, the math doesn't work on this thing, right? Like the or your your position is wrong in the marketplace, or the cost to acquire a customer doesn't justify the amount of revenue that you're gonna take in. Those things are universal principles, and it's just stunning to me how often I run into very smart people who've never even thought about those things before. You know, they're they're three years into a business adventure and they're like, What do you mean, customer acquisition cost? What do you mean lifetime value? What do you mean that the math doesn't work? And I'm like, it doesn't work. Or I'll go to the website, I'll be like, I've been on your website for nine minutes and I cannot tell what you do. I don't know what you do, I can't see it. It's like, what do you mean? It's obvious to me. It's like, no, it's not, right? If you can't explain it to my mom or an eighth grader, you haven't figured out how to explain it. And everybody tells me, like, my industry is different, it's technical, people get it. No, they don't. They don't. If I don't get it, they don't get it. I promise you. You can't try to sell it to the people who already get it. Because if you're relying on somebody, and by the way, those people will never tell you they don't get it because their ego is attached to pretending they get it. They think you're telling they're supposed to get it, they're gonna say they get it. Test it with your mom, test it with your friends. If you can't, if you go to a dinner party and you're not excited to tell people what you do, it's because you don't know how to explain it in a way that they'll understand, you're probably gonna struggle as a business.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And you know, other part of that, Mark, is that there's so many items business owners have to have to tackle on whether it's a financial problems or or trying to scale, you know, trying to solve product or service problems. There's so many areas and and there's so many uh blind spots, you know, when they're trying to do something. That's where we need a people like you to simply you know, spot, you know, find those blind spots and help uh help a business owner to get wherever they need to get to. I mean, you can get there by making mistakes or spending, you know, five, ten years to to solve small problems, or find somebody who has solved those problems before and then know the blind spot and help you get there much faster. I think those are the only two choices. Otherwise, you know, you're gonna spend a lot of time, uh, you're gonna waste a lot of time and you're gonna go through a lot of trial and approaches.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, some of the irony of all of this for me is that when I was a business owner in my first mortgage company, I thought the idea of a consultant was ridiculous. I was like, I'm gonna hire somebody from outside my business to come in here and tell me to like run my business. I'm like, what do they know? We're different, we're unique, Snowflake. I just felt like I feel like we were doing something so revolutionary. It's one of my greatest regrets. I I lost millions of dollars thinking I was unique and different, I had to figure it out on my own. When like I I look back on the problems I had now, and it was so obvious from anybody on the outside's perspective, but we didn't have anybody with any outside perspective. We were, I didn't know any better, right? I was I was young and stupid. And so, you know, I'll just share as if you're if you're out there and you're having trouble figuring out what to do next, or it's not obvious, or you've been trying the same thing over and over again and it's not working, it's probably there's probably a very simple answer that you just can't see because of your blind spots. Bring somebody else in. You're and keep hunting, by the way, until you have a full-body yes about the person you're bringing in. It should feel good when you'll this person into your business. If it doesn't feel good, there's probably a reason. But keep meeting people until the right person emerges. And when you find that person, jump on it because the right mentor or consultant can save you millions of dollars and thousands of hours of pain.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And and and a business have a flexible point too, right? What got you to a million, it's not gonna get you to five million. What got you five million, it's not gonna get you to 10 million, right? And those fluctuation points need different solutions. You know, every every point's gonna be different. What you're trying to, you know, and that's what I'm learning in a business. So what got you here is not gonna take you to the next step. It simply means that the problems are different, they're gonna come in a different form, different shapes. You're gonna need an expert like you who's who's been there before, can help you get over those uh those challenges.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and I'll share this too. There's another thing that I think I had trouble with, and I see other founders have trouble with it's not just that you have to operate differently, you have to become a completely different version of yourself, right? Like, I you know, where one of my when I think about like Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, and I think about all the different versions of a CEO that he had to be along the way as he went from guy in a dorm room to running one of the biggest companies in the history of Earth. Like, you have to be you have to evolve as a person in a way that like doesn't even really make sense, right? Like, I mean, it's just it's a crazy fast evolution process, you know. As a founder, if you're stuck where you're stuck, it's because you have to now find a new way to operate, you have to become a different person. You have to your ego, which used to be attached to sales, now needs to be attached to leadership, or it used to be that you are a problem solver, now you need to be a system builder, and like those things are are very different, they require different things, different learning, different reading, different people to grow and learn with. And so I just think that if if if you're stuck, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, right? And I think the the faster you can introduce new information to yourself that it might help you see your problems differently and who you need to be differently, that's gonna be the way forward.
SPEAKER_00That that is the purpose of our channel to just provide different perspective, people can look at different ways and you know and and solve those problems. Very interesting. Great point, uh Mark. Where can people find you? How can they connect with you?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, this is the part I'm absolutely the worst at. So my website is IGTMS.com. That's i integrated go to market solutions, IGTMS.com. My LinkedIn, I'm Mark D Gordon, and uh you can reach out to me there, or on Instagram, I'm MarkdGordon, and you can reach out to me there. Any of those work, follow us along on the social media, igtsms.com. We also have a free go-to-market assessment. So if you're wondering where your company is doing, how your company's doing in terms of messaging or your public go-to-market presence, there's a completely free assessment on our website that your company can take. Go there, fill it out. We'll send you back a score and we'll recommend what you can do to improve it in 25 different areas. And then if you want, I'm happy to hop on a call with you as well to kind of walk you through uh what I would do if I was running the business there as well. So that's that's where you can find me.
SPEAKER_00Very interesting. I'm gonna include all those links below this video. Mark, people can click a button and they can, you know, whether they want to take an assessment or they want to connect with you, they can just click a button and reach out to you. But I will strongly recommend business leaders who are listening, you know, uh business owner or watching or listening to us, you know, click a button below, talk to Mark. You know, I gain different perspective. There's so much uh wisdom um over the years that you've been working uh Mark. I learned uh it, you know, a lot of things. I'm sure business owners who can uh you know connect with you, they're gonna take away a lot of uh experience, a lot of knowledge, and in and a lot of knowledge. Who knows where the discussion is gonna take you, but it definitely gets a different perspective after talking to you.
SPEAKER_01I really appreciate you having me on. Yeah, thank you so much for having me here. Awesome.
SPEAKER_00Likewise, Mark. Thank you so much for time. We'll talk soon.
SPEAKER_01Thank you. Thanks again.