How Mutiny gets customers (2500 qualified meetings in a year!)

As one of the founding members of Mutiny’s marketing team, Ryan Narod has a rare story to tell.

I recently sat down with him to chat about how their humble two-person beginning has evolved into a well-oiled marketing machine (albeit still a remarkably small team for how much they achieve).

He takes us through how they plan out each year, the structure of their team, and some pretty unique philosophies to how Mutiny gets customers.

I can’t wait for you to apply these insights to your own company.

What you’ll read here are words. Some Ryan’s. Some Lindsay’s. Some mine.

— Brendan

Below, we’ll explore:

Mutiny’s top performing marketing channels
How the business is forecasted at the highest level, and how the marketing team meets those goals.
How Mutiny attracts and retains top marketing talent
What to do when you start to max out on your TAM.
The secret to building a tenured and passionate marketing team.

1. How far out do you plan your marketing in detail, and how has that evolved over the years?

At the board level, revenue is forecasted on an annual basis.

Then we put together a base plan and a reach plan.

You’re operating at the base plan for the first couple of quarters. The idea here is to use the first half of the year to build toward your ‘reach’ goals.

Then, when we reach mid-year, we decide whether to stay at the base plan or start operating under our reach plan.

That’s how the business is forecasted at the highest level, so revenue then dictates how much pipeline we need to support the plans, how many AEs we need, BDRs to support AEs, and all the way down to how many meetings we need and how much marketing investment it’ll take to get there.

On a quarterly basis, we look ahead 1-2 quarters to figure out programs we’re going to invest in. This can include big creative ideas , as well as run-rate decisions like how much we’re going to invest in paid.

And then, we go even deeper and we split up each channel by week. For example, say we’ve forecasted 120 meetings this quarter for paid. With 12 weeks per quarter, we set a target of 10 meetings per week for paid.

For attribution, everything rolls up into 4 channels:

Inbound
Outbound
Paid
Events

Three of these channels are very measurable (outbound, paid, events), where Inbound is sort of a catch-all for everything that can’t be clearly measured.

Weekly targets are set for each of these four channels, but we also forecast how certain programs will impact each channel.

For example, when planning out the Surv-ai-vor campaign, we forecasted how that was going to impact Inbound and Outbound, on top of the direct number registrants that we can attribute to “Events”.

2. How many marketers do you have? How has that team changed over time?

We have five marketers in total, and each is mapped to a channel mentioned above:

1. Regina Magaril – owns demand gen, which includes events, paid, and inbound

2. Stella Li – owns paid and ABM

3. Stewart Hillhouse – owns content, which drives inbound

4. Andy Schumeister – owns product marketing

5. Liam Goldfarb – owns outbound, with 3 BDRs on his team

Outbound isn’t counted in those five, even though they are a marketing function. There is a BDR manager and three BDRs, so there are four total doing Outbound who report to me as well.

We do run Outbound and Paid as connected programs, in that the teams develop campaign hypotheses together and attack the same accounts from both angles.

They each have their own numbers, i.e. if someone responds to an ad, it goes to Paid, while an Outbound response would obviously go to Outbound.

It creates a “healthy tension” across both channels while maintaining a vested interest in working together.

That’s where we are now, but before, it was just me and one other person (Stella Li). Marketing was basically made up of our earliest channels, Outbound and Paid.

We had targets like getting 5 meetings on the calendar a week, and to do that, we automated the shit out of SDRing.

Then we started to ramp up inbound by hosting a virtual event that generated roughly 3000 leads. That obviously stood out as an opportunity to repeat it, and turn it into a lot of additional content.

That’s when we hired our content maven, Stewart, and his first job was to take these events and slice them into a bunch of different pieces of content.

Community for us then was really a rebranding of webinars. We do these virtual events, but what happens in between them to help create a sense of belonging so it’s not so hard to come back and invite people again? This has also evolved since.

3. How do you create an overall marketing strategy?

Strategy is three things coming together:

Product marketing → Business and product, who you sell to (know the user, know the magic, connect the two)
The numbers → Looking at where the numbers come from and being able to turn a revenue number into what our pipeline and meetings etc. need to look like
What’d you learn? → Looking back at last year, what should we double down on or move away from?

Our strategy for that plan looks like this:

Product Marketing → look at our ICP and adjust our story accordingly
Numbers → we want to double, so what can double, and what can only increase incrementally?
Learn → last year, we learned that every conference sponsorship was a waste, and big creative campaigns did great for the business (Surv-ai-vor)

Now bring those three things together and we start to build our strategy.

4. Do you use OKRs (e.g. objectives, key results, 70% goals, etc.) in some form?

When we go into quarterly planning, the only input I give the team is the number we need to hit (revenue > pipeline > meetings), and the three buckets of things that are important to reach those numbers (objectives).

Then the team proposes their KRs to ladder up to those objectives.

Everyone throws a lot of stuff on the board, and after staring at it for a bit, we take things off, add things, consolidate, and elevate it to more fun and exciting goals.

Objectives anchor on messaging, and the KRs have to match the number.

5. What’s your primary tool for tracking tasks and campaigns? And for production?

Spreadsheets.

We run mid-quarter retros where we look at what we signed up for a month ago, determine if it’s on track, and what course corrections we want to make going into the second half of the quarter.

We’ve also developed processes for how we run the business on a weekly basis.

These processes and rituals are also ran through spreadsheets, but we’ve figured out the right cadence even for how I structure my week:

Monday: Prep-day for week and meetings
Tuesday: Team status check-ins
Wednesday: Head-down work days
Thursday: 1-on-1 meetings, career coaching
Friday: Slack-up recap

6. What were the best-performing channels for you? Did that change over time?

In 2023, outbound was almost half of our pipeline, inbound around 35%, paid 10%, and events 5%.

From the numbers, Outbound looks really good, and Events looks really bad, but we can all agree that all of it is really important, and each channel helps support the others in some regard.

7. Is there something unique or philosophically core to how the marketing team and leaders think about acquiring customers?

This could be described in three layers.

Distribution (top of funnel) → Our philosophy is go fast, go alone. Go far, go together.
Get shit done → While having fun and creating room to innovate.
Convert to Revenue → Marketing is tightly aligned with sales.

We just did 360 peer reviews, and more than one sales rep said things like, “I’ve never been at a company where prospects actually want to talk to me.”

Maybe this is unique because we market to marketers, but Sales helps evangelize our work.

They invite us on calls and are curious about how we run our programs because they’re talking to our buyers. So there’s just a strong level of alignment and mutual respect that helps translate everything we’re doing into revenue.

8. What is the difference between average marketing leaders and those who are able to attract, hire and retain top talent?

My biggest piece of advice is to keep focus and shield your people from distractions.

A better approach is to set the strategy and let people see how their work impacts the metrics that matter.

Also, find the balance of independent and collaborative work – iterating on skillsets, who reports to who, do we have good managers, people are proud of their output with few barriers in their way.

We do fun shit. We get to be creative, laugh, and play games.

It’s not much of a science, but if it’s not fun for me, it’s not fun for anyone else.

Customers can tell, too.

How to use this info:

1. Send a DM to your teammate: “Lindsay — I read about how Ryan at Mutiny generated 2500 qualified meetings with a marketing team of five. I thought there’s 3 things in there that might really help our team. Mind if I send them over?” Then send her this link.

2. Meeting with your boss: “I found a unique marketing philosophy that focuses on layers (distribution, GSD and revenue) instead of just channels. Think we can do the same? If so, this might be worth bookmarking.

3. Linkedin Post: 3 ways Mutiny attracts and retains the top marketing talent (make sure you connect with & tag Ryan!)

Thanks for reading!

This is part 12 of a long series of CMO-level interviews about how the top SaaS companies *actually* get customers.

If you have a tip or feedback, I’d love to hear it.