Most B2B marketing still runs on a single number: the marketing qualified lead. Jon Miller is one of the few people who can tell you where that number came from, because he helped build the system that produced it — first at Marketo, where he helped create the marketing automation category, then at Engagio, then at Demandbase.

What makes this conversation different is that Jon went back and diagnosed his own creation. He’s not quietly onto the next thing. He’s saying, out loud, what the MQL got wrong about how people actually buy — and he’s careful to credit what it got right before he takes it apart.

The short version: roughly 95% of buyers have built their shortlist before they ever talk to a seller. The MQL was designed to catch the last 5% who raise their hand. So the real question isn’t how to optimize lead capture. It’s what you do with everyone who isn’t ready yet — the 95% the old model was built to ignore.

We get into why buying behaves more like weather than a vending machine, the three-tier model Jon uses instead of MQLs, why he thinks legacy automation tools can’t keep up, and how the best CMOs are quietly rewiring what they report to the board. If you’ve ever felt like you were pedaling into a headwind running the playbook that used to work, this one’s for you.

About Jon Miller

Jon Miller founded Marketo in 2006 and helped define the marketing automation category. He went on to found Engagio, which was acquired by Demandbase in 2020, served as CMO at Demandbase, and is now building Phave, an AI-native marketing automation platform.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Jon Miller and his journey
01:24 Diagnosing the MQL model
03:27 The gumball machine / nonlinear buying idea
07:23 What the MQL got right
10:14 The three-tiered model of engagement
14:22 The role of CMOs in modern marketing
18:17 AI’s impact on marketing automation
19:55 The Spotify playlist analogy
22:53 The Peppers and Rogers/one-to-one thread
24:43 Common mistakes moving off the MQL
25:25 The three CMO dashboards
27:25 Advice for CMOs making the shift

A few things worth taking away

• The MQL started as a good idea — a contract between marketing and sales — and got gamed over time as teams chased volume.
• Buying isn’t linear. With six to sixteen people on a buying committee researching in places you can’t even track, “run a campaign, get a lead” no longer describes reality.
• Hand raisers are the gold standard, but waiting for them means you only ever talk to the 5% who already built their shortlist without you.
• Jon’s three tiers — hand raisers, MQX, and MEX — give you a way to work the 95% instead of ignoring them.
• When you move off MQL volume as your headline metric, expect the numbers to drop before quality and conversion rise. Set that expectation early, or you’ll hit a buzzsaw.
• The strongest CMOs report pipeline across all sources to the board and stop fighting over who sourced what.

A few lines that stuck with me

“Put your quarter in, get your gumball out. Put your campaign in, get your MQL out. I just don’t think that’s the way buying works.” — Jon Miller

“If you only wait for somebody to raise their hand, you’re talking to the 5% in market. And they’ve already built their shortlist without you.” — Jon Miller

“You can’t get there with a rules-based system. You just end up with spaghetti.” — Jon Miller

Resources mentioned

• The B2B CMO Project — research on the strategic CMO and the three-dashboard model
• Mike Bosworth, Solution Selling
• Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, The One to One Future
• Kathleen Schaub, Marketing in the Great Big Messy Real World

Transcript

Brian Carroll (00:05) Welcome to The B2B Roundtable, where we go inside the ideas, people, and decisions shaping modern revenue teams and how they actually work. I’m Brian Carroll, and today my guest is Jon Miller.

I first met Jon way back in 2006, when he founded Marketo and helped build the marketing automation category as we know it today. In 2015 he founded Engagio, which was acquired by Demandbase in 2020. Now he’s building Phave, an AI-native marketing automation platform.

Here’s what makes this conversation different from other podcasts you’ve listened to: Jon didn’t just build the next thing and quietly move on, the way a lot of founders do. He’s gone back and started diagnosing the problems with something he previously created. He’s talking about what’s wrong, and why it’s failing buyers today.

And here’s why it matters right now. Before they ever talk to a seller, 95% of buyers have already designed their shortlist. The MQL is built to capture the last 5% who self-identify. What about the 95% who haven’t yet?

So, Jon — when did you first start thinking the MQL model was broken, not just underperforming? How did you get there?

Jon Miller (01:24) It started, more than anything else, during my time at Demandbase. After we merged Engagio and Demandbase together in 2020, the first thing I did was help the product team unify the two platforms. But then in 2021, I took over as CMO.

And I had my playbook. This is how I do it: I create definitive guides, big, rich, meaty pieces of content. You run lots of other thought leadership, like webinars, and you generate leads from all of it. Most of those leads won’t be ready to buy right now, and that’s okay — that’s why you nurture them and score them. You know a little something about that. Then eventually, when they’re ready, you pass them to sales. That was the playbook, and it’s the playbook I ran at Marketo.

To a degree, it’s the playbook I ran at Engagio too, although there we also layered on an account-based motion that we’ll get to. So here I am at Demandbase, running that playbook, and the exact same tactics that worked for me at Marketo just weren’t working.

At Marketo, it felt like I’d had a tailwind pushing me forward, making everything work better. At Demandbase, it felt like bicycling into a headwind. That’s what got me thinking: okay, what’s going on here? Over time, I diagnosed multiple problems — like most complex things in the world, there were many reasons it wasn’t working.

Jon Miller (02:56) But more than anything else, it came down to three things. One, buyer saturation. Two, the fact that the traditional model missed important things like brand. And three, the fact that the MQL is really focused on people, not accounts. We can dive into any or all three of those.

Brian Carroll (03:15) I want to understand what you noticed was broken first. As you’ve reflected on it and done the research — what are we getting wrong about how buyers buy today?

Jon Miller (03:27) Let’s start with the core philosophy behind the MQL: that you can run a campaign and get a meaningful response that’s valuable on the other side. That’s how we thought of it at Marketo. If I needed more MQLs, the natural response was, well, let’s run more campaigns.

It trained us to think of buying like a gumball machine. Put your quarter in, get your gumball out. Put your campaign in, get your MQL out. And I just don’t think that’s the way buying works. Arguably, in the early days of Marketo — simpler buying committees, heavy demand, lots of latent need for our product — okay, maybe you could argue there were elements where it worked then.

But fast forward to today, and buying is much more complex. There are six to sixteen members of the buying committee, not one person. And as you said in the intro, that whole committee is going through a complex set of research — happening not just on our website, but increasingly off it, in closed communities and in conversations with AI agents, all invisible to traditional tracking.

When you have that kind of complexity, the model of marketing as a simple linear gumball machine starts to break down. Kathleen Schaub coined a really good term for this, which connected to my math and physics background. She called it “marketing in the great big messy world,” and she pointed out that marketing is actually a complex, nonlinear process — not a simple linear gumball machine.

Jon Miller (05:19) I studied complex nonlinear processes in college, and it turns out that’s the origin of what’s now called chaos theory. The weather is a complex nonlinear process. The stock market is a complex nonlinear process. And these processes are known, among other things, for their unpredictability — their sensitive dependence on initial conditions. The idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can cause a hurricane in Japan. Most people have heard that one.

If you embrace the fundamental idea that buying is just as complex as the weather, then it’s an impossible task to say, “I’ll run this one campaign, and that will lead to buying.”

Brian Carroll (05:46) That’s right.

Jon Miller (06:03) Or, “Where did this deal come from?” “Well, they stopped by the booth at the trade show.” No — it’s a much more complex system than any of those simple explanations can really capture.

Brian Carroll (06:16) The gumball machine analogy hits on something people are really struggling with. Attribution. The MQL has been elevated all the way to the board — board members and CEOs care about it because it’s a visible KPI. And there are a lot of misses in how we think about it, because we don’t actually know how many MQLs become real customers. Partly because of what you just described about how buyers buy.

You wrote something on LinkedIn about a three-tier model — this marketing-engaged layer, where people are consuming content but not showing buying signals yet. Most demand gen teams would say those aren’t worth chasing, because there’s no buying intent yet. Can you make the case for why that’s wrong? Why is that exactly where the fight is being lost?

Jon Miller (07:23) It’s worth starting by saying there was some real goodness in the original concept of the MQL. Specifically, it was a contract between marketing and sales. Marketing said, “I’m only going to pass you things that reach this bar, where there’s strong evidence this is worthy of sales attention.” And sales said, “Okay, I commit to this service-level agreement for follow-up.” That was a genuinely good thing about the MQL.

The problem is that over time it got bastardized. Under pressure to hit pipeline targets, some marketing teams gamed the scoring thresholds. I saw so many companies basically say any responder to any campaign was an MQL. And I’d think, that’s not what it was.

That behavior — driven by the desire for more MQLs — is exactly what led sales to start cherry-picking and ignoring most of them. So what was sales cherry-picking? Hand raisers.

Jon Miller (08:31) I’ve talked to some CMOs who say that’s the only thing they report now: hand raisers. People explicitly asking for a sales connection. And that makes sense — these are people you want to talk to. But I think it’s a hundred percent too passive.

Jon Miller (08:49) And it’s too late. If you only wait for someone to raise their hand, you are by definition only talking to the 5% in market. Those people have already created and aligned on their shortlist without you, which means you’re column B, fighting an uphill battle at best.

Mike Bosworth wrote Solution Selling a while ago, and there’s a lot of wisdom in that old book. The idea of solution selling is that helping a buyer see pain they haven’t prioritized — bringing latent pain into an active evaluation — is really valuable. And if you can be the vendor guiding that process, you help shape the buying criteria. So the question is: how do we make that happen?

One way is an investment in branding. Building a brand that creates urgency around the problem you solve, builds a connection between your company and the ability to solve that pain, and generates positive feelings around that connection — that’s incredibly valuable. We could do a whole other podcast on branding.

But there’s the question of how you tie solution selling together with the goodness the MQL brought to the table. Because solution selling gone wrong just becomes cold calling, and that’s not good for anybody.

That’s why I came up with the three-tier model. The top tier is hand raisers. Let’s all agree that’s the gold standard — it’s what sales wants more than anything, and we should track it. But then there are two other tiers. Tier two I call MQX.

The X is important, because making the X stand for “lead” usually isn’t the right answer — unless you have a low-value, highly transactional purchase that one person can make. Most of the time, it’s a more complex buying committee. So I’d generally say tier two should be MQA — marketing qualified account — or even MQBG, marketing qualified buying group. As a sidebar, MQBG is a mouthful, so I usually drop the M and just call it a QBG.

What these all have in common is some signal that there’s a good chance this account or buying group is actually in an evaluation stage — starting to form their shortlist or consensus, maybe they already have. You’re not waiting for them to raise their hand. If you can reach out to those companies at the right time…

Jon Miller (11:46) …in the right way, it can be valuable. The key is that MQX does not mean this person is ready to buy. It means marketing believes, based on the data, that this account might be in market. There’s an interesting debate about whether we should even call it “qualified,” because it’s not qualified the way a salesperson uses that word.

I like using it because it’s a familiar mental model, but you could also call it a marketing recommended account or a marketing indicated account. If the word “qualified” carries baggage at your company, fine — use something else. Then there’s my third tier.

Jon Miller (12:27) I call it MEX — marketing engaged account. This is really the 95% that aren’t in market. You could cold call into that 95%, but the idea of MEX, as opposed to just your target account list, is that it’s someone from your target list who’s also engaging with your brand and ideas. There’s some level of engagement, even if there are no buying signals. They’re showing interest in your topic, even if not intent to purchase. Odds are that’s a warmer outreach than a truly cold call.

But 100%, do not reach out to that person and pitch a demo or a sales meeting. This is about what Bosworth calls solution selling — helping them understand and quantify the cost of the status quo, and creating hope about what the future could be, maybe by sharing examples of what other companies are doing.

That’s not how typical SDRs reach out today. It’s a one-to-one way of building brand and awareness. And a person with “sales” in their title might not be the right person to do it — which is why some companies have MDRs, market development reps. But that means different economics and different compensation. You can’t pay an MDR on this quarter’s pipeline if what they’re doing is planting seeds for a year from now.

Brian Carroll (14:13) That’s right.

Jon Miller (14:13) So that was a lot of framework. But I think hand raisers, MQX, and MEX make a lot of sense.

Brian Carroll (14:15) A lot was going through my head listening to that. You brought up brand, you talked about engaging differently, and you touched on how SDRs work. The current playbook has an SDR follow up on a scored lead, incentivized one way: get a demo, schedule an appointment. So they’re focused on the last mile, the end of the buying process — but the majority of leads they talk to are nowhere close to that. They’re in the early stages.

You’ve been digging into this through CMO dinners and conversations. How are CMOs responding right now? What are you seeing and hearing, and what do you think teams need to do to get from where they are to where they need to go?

Jon Miller (15:21) I see a wide variance in how marketing leaders are responding to these pressures. This is a dramatic oversimplification, but you can bucket most marketing leaders into either a strategic CMO or a tactical CMO.

The tactical CMOs, whether they want to be or not, work at companies that primarily view marketing as pipeline generation. They’re pressured into the traditional playbook and traditional metrics — MQLs, marketing-sourced or marketing-influenced pipeline. These CMOs will give the right kind of acknowledgment — “I know the MQLs aren’t right, and I’m reporting on these other things too” — but they still feel like, “Yeah, but I have to report the MQLs.”

The strategic CMOs are the ones elevating the role. First and foremost, they’re executives of the company who bring their understanding of the market and the customer, so they’re in the room when strategic discussions happen. It’s the concept of the CMO as chief market officer, not chief marketing officer. Those CMOs are driving conversations about the changing buyer, the importance of brand, and the need to think long-term, not just short-term.

Jon Miller (16:54) That said, they’d all agree that pipeline is permission. Even a strategic CMO, if they’re consistently missing pipeline, doesn’t get to go invest in the big new brand project. They get that. But how they tackle it, and how they talk about it, feels a little different. That’s probably the biggest delta — and it runs through into the dashboards they present, how they interact with their peers, and how often they talk to the CFO and about what.

Brian Carroll (17:29) It sounds like the tactical CMOs are more subject to that gumball-machine dynamic — MQLs, driving demand, generating the numbers. And for the strategic CMO, it’s not that they ignore those things; demand generation still matters. But they’re thinking bigger picture about strategy, like how important brand is in B2B.

I want to pivot to one of the challenges all of us are dealing with right now — not just brand, but the technical environment we’re operating in. I’d like to talk about how AI is changing what’s possible. Whether you’re a strategic or tactical CMO, it has a huge influence. What can you do differently for these marketing-engaged leads, for example? How might we approach that?

Jon Miller (18:35) Part of the problem is that tools like Marketo — which I obviously helped create — were built around the mental model of the MQL, of marketing as a linear, simple buying process. In rules-based platforms, very much if-this-then-that, you end up with static nurture paths. You’re lucky if you have two or three paths for two or three personas, let alone understanding the right thing for each person in each account.

When you embrace the modern buying process, where 95% aren’t ready to buy, you need to create latent pain, stay in touch with that 95%, and then catch the signals when they might be becoming qualified — pre-hand-raiser, but ready to reach out. The legacy tools like Marketo just can’t keep up with that. The nurture tracks are too rigid and too limited for engaging the broad market before they’re ready to buy. And they’re too email-centric for when you don’t have permission for a huge fraction of that database.

The analogy I like is that instead of putting people in specific nurture tracks, we want to create a personalized playlist for each person. I like playlists because people understand Spotify. There’s a whole library of songs that could play at any time. But…

Brian Carroll (20:19) That’s right.

Jon Miller (20:20) …what their AI does is think about me — what I’ve liked and listened to, what I’ve engaged with, what I haven’t listened to in a while — and it builds a playlist for me. Even if you and I both like 80s songs, we’ll get different playlists, because we’re different people who’ve engaged with different things. Every single person on Spotify gets a completely unique, personalized playlist.

Can we use AI to apply that same idea to marketing? For the 95% that aren’t in market but that I need to engage over time, let’s craft a personalized playlist for each of them — based on who they are, where they work, what else is happening across their buying committee, and what we know about them.

If we have opt-in permission, that playlist should include email touches — but it won’t always. Sometimes it’ll involve advertising. It might involve LinkedIn touches. It could be a whole variety of ways to interact, by picking the right offer, the right channel, the right content, and the right time.

So legacy marketing automation is rule-based and list-based. It’s too person-based, meaning you can’t really build playlists that look at the account level and go multichannel into advertising.

Jon Miller (22:01) One other thing, which we haven’t talked about: our whole conversation so far has focused on net-new business — acquiring the new customer, the new account. But a lot of these concepts — hand raiser, MQX, MEX — also apply to post-sale, especially for expansion into new buying committees, product qualified leads or accounts, and product adoption campaigns. The legacy tools don’t handle any of that well either, and new AI-enabled approaches can. Which, not surprisingly, gives you a pretty big hint at what I’m trying to build at Phave.

Brian Carroll (22:28) So Phave — that’s what you’re working on right now. AI-enabled marketing automation to deliver these personalized, one-to-one journeys. It sounds like the promise is kind of like what I was reading way back in Peppers and Rogers’ one-to-one marketing, except now we can actually do it — the way you described with the playlist. Anything you’d add?

Jon Miller (22:54) It’s funny you bring up Peppers and Rogers. In the intro, you said I’m an entrepreneur who keeps coming back and revisiting what I’ve done before. The way I describe my journey — from Epiphany, the company before Marketo, where I wasn’t a founder, to Marketo to Engagio and now Phave — I’ve been on a journey to deliver on the one-to-one future.

Each of those companies would have said we’re trying to do one-to-one marketing. Each got us closer, but not quite. What I’m so excited about, living in 2026 in the age of AI, is that I think we’ll finally be able to deliver on what truly is one-to-one marketing, as envisioned by Peppers and Rogers back in 1992.

Brian Carroll (23:47) That vision has been around a long time, but with every iteration we’ve struggled to get there. There was always some limitation. And it seems like right now, the promise of AI to actually deliver on it is real.

Jon Miller (24:02) You can’t get there with a rules-based system. You just end up with spaghetti.

Brian Carroll (24:05) Yeah. Anyone who’s built very complex nurturing journeys knows there’s an eventual breakdown. The more personalized you want to get, there are only so many if-then statements and branches you can build before it gets too complicated — and it still doesn’t do what you’re trying to do.

For listeners thinking, “Okay, what does this mean for me right now?” — how can someone move their organization away from MQL logic? And what are the most common mistakes you’ve seen teams make when they try?

Jon Miller (24:43) The common mistakes. First, doing it alone, without full alignment and buy-in from the rest of the executive team. The single best thing a CMO can do is enlist the head of sales — and the head of post-sale, if they exist — and propose the new set of metrics as a team. That’s number one.

Number two, when you start changing these things, set the expectation that quantity is likely to go down. The quality will go up and the conversion rate will go up. But if people don’t expect the raw numbers to be lower, you can run into a buzzsaw and get into trouble.

What I recommend is that CMOs be very thoughtful about their measurement architecture. We actually published a research report about the strategic CMO on the B2B CMO Project website, where we talked about three types of CMO dashboards.

The first is what you show the board. At the board level, these should be business outcomes. First off, the best strategic CMOs own pipeline — they report on pipeline created, new and expansion, across all sources. That last piece is the key. You’re not reporting marketing-sourced or sales-sourced; you’re reporting on whether there’s enough pipeline for the business. Because at the end of the day, if there is, the board doesn’t care who sourced it. And if you believe in complex nonlinear buying, trying to track where a deal came from is a fool’s errand.

From there, marketing can share in reporting other key metrics — opportunity win rates, net revenue retention, customer acquisition cost. The last board-level one is marketing efficiency: total pipeline generated per dollar of marketing investment. That’s your top level.

Your second level is CEO- and CFO-level indicators. This is where things like hand raisers and MQAs kick in, along with pipeline quality and brand health. Then you save everything else for the marketing team’s operational metrics — including MEX, that third tier: market development metrics, account engagement, program performance. That’s all important, but it doesn’t belong in your CEO- or board-level reports.

Brian Carroll (27:25) If you could go back and have someone give you advice on what to do differently — what advice would you give a CMO who’s ready to make this shift?

Jon Miller (27:36) Some of what I already said — building a committee, working with your peers — is really important. But if I had to narrow it down to one thing, it’s this: earn your seat by being a business executive first.

Surface problems, in marketing and in the market, before other people do. That builds credibility. Spend a lot of time with your peers — the CRO, the CFO. Understand their challenges. Then you’re in a better position to demonstrate how marketing helps them, not just marketing.

And own the customer voice. I alluded to this earlier, but it’s the single most powerful thing the chief market officer can bring to these strategic discussions. If you’re a strategic CMO who’s established that level of credibility, people aren’t going to question the metrics you report — whether it’s MQLs, MQAs, or anything else — because they know you’re a strategic part of the leadership.

Brian Carroll (28:42) Excellent advice, Jon. We’ve covered what I hoped we would today. This matters so much, because as the buying dynamics have changed, people need to approach things differently. What you’ve shared is going to help a lot of people start thinking about how to address the 95% who aren’t in market.

We’ll share the resource Jon mentioned in the show notes. Jon, thank you for joining us today. I’m excited to see how things develop as you build Phave, and I’m really glad you could be on the show.

Jon Miller (29:15) Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

Most B2B buyers say they would rather buy without talking to a sales rep.

That sounds like a sales problem. Brent Adamson says it is deeper than that. Buyers are not just avoiding sellers. They are struggling to make confident decisions.

Brent is one of the clearest voices in modern B2B sales. He is co-author of The Challenger Sale, the book that changed how many sales and marketing teams think about commercial conversations. In this episode, we talk about his new book, The Framemaking Sale, and why the next era of sales depends less on persuasion and more on helping buyers make sense of complexity.

The short version: buyers do not need more information. They already have too much. They need help knowing what matters, what to ignore, who to involve, what questions to ask, and how to move forward with confidence.

We get into why 75% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free buying experience, why customer confidence matters more than supplier confidence, how framemaking differs from Challenger, why thought leadership can make buying harder, and what AI changes about the role of the human seller.

If your sales or marketing team is still trying to prove value by adding more content, more insight, or more follow-up, this conversation will make you rethink the job.

About Brent Adamson

Brent Adamson is a researcher, speaker, and author best known for co-authoring The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer. He spent years leading research at CEB, later Gartner, on B2B buying, sales effectiveness, and commercial transformation.

His latest book, The Framemaking Sale, focuses on how sales professionals can help buyers make confident decisions in a world of complexity, information overload, misalignment, and uncertainty.

Connect with Brent on LinkedIn

Get the book: The Framemaking Sale

Chapters

00:00 Why buyers prefer rep-free buying
04:12 Becoming the seller buyers want
09:40 What buyers need from salespeople
11:35 Why decision confidence matters
16:05 What framemaking means
21:26 Framemaking and The Challenger Sale
25:39 Buyers need sensemaking
28:18 Helping teams become framemakers
35:01 Marketing’s role in framemaking
39:34 AI and the future of human selling

A few things worth taking away

• B2B buyers are not always trying to avoid humans. They are trying to avoid sales interactions that make buying harder.
• The 75% rep-free statistic measures buyer preference, not buyer reality. Many buyers still have to talk to sellers, but that does not mean they want to.
• Decision confidence is one of the strongest drivers of high-quality, low-regret deals.
• The confidence that matters most is not the buyer’s confidence in your company. It is the buyer’s confidence in themselves and their own decision.
• Most sales and marketing teams are still trying to build supplier confidence. Framemaking shifts the goal toward customer self-confidence.
• Buyers are overwhelmed by complexity, information overload, internal misalignment, and uncertainty about outcomes.
• The Challenger Sale helped sellers reframe the customer’s thinking. The Framemaking Sale helps customers make sense of competing ideas so they can decide.
• Thought leadership created a new problem. Everyone sounds smart, so buyers are left with more content, more claims, and less clarity.
• Marketing can support framemaking by interviewing customers about the buying journey, not just the product outcome.
• The best question from Brent: “If you had to do it all over again, what might you do differently just to make your lives a little bit easier?”
• AI may answer questions, summarize options, and produce tables. But buyers may still want to talk to someone they trust before making a hard decision.

A few lines that stuck with me

“The data does not say 75% of B2B buyers would prefer a human-free experience.” — Brent Adamson

“What would it take to be the one seller, the one sales team, that your customers actually do want to talk to?” — Brent Adamson

“It’s not customers’ confidence in us that matters. It’s customers’ confidence in themselves.” — Brent Adamson

“While we’re all in sales and marketing solving for getting customers to know something, the single biggest secret passage to growth is getting customers to feel something.” — Brent Adamson

“What if your value as a seller isn’t your expertise, but your access to the experience of other companies like them?” — Brent Adamson

Resources mentioned

• The Framemaking Sale by Brent Adamson
• The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson
• The Challenger Customer by Brent Adamson, Matthew Dixon, Pat Spenner, and Nick Toman
• Gartner research on rep-free buying experiences
• Robert Cialdini, Influence, and the idea of social proof
• CEB / Gartner research on decision confidence
• Ecosystems and value management maturity models

Listen and subscribe

If you found this episode helpful, subscribe to the B2B Roundtable Podcast wherever you listen.

Full transcript

Brian Carroll:
Welcome to the B2B Roundtable Podcast, where we bring together ideas, people, and strategies shaping the future of sales and marketing.

Today, I’m joined by my friend Brent Adamson, one of the most influential voices in sales. You may know Brent from his book The Challenger Sale, which reshaped how we think about commercial conversations.

I’m excited because we’re talking about his new book, The Framemaking Sale. And it couldn’t come at a more urgent time. In a recent survey, 75% of B2B buyers said they’d prefer to purchase without ever talking to a sales rep. Is this the end of sales as we know it, or could it be the start of something better?

We’re going to talk about why buyers have lost confidence in sales, what’s driving this shift, what it really means to be a framemaker, how leaders like CMOs and VPs of Sales can build teams customers actually want to talk to, and what the future of selling looks like in an AI-driven world. Brent, you open your book with that stat — 75% of B2B buyers would prefer a rep-free buying experience. That’s wild.

Brent Adamson:
First of all, it’s great to see you, Brian. Thanks for the invite. That statistic comes from Gartner research, one of the last pieces I worked on before leaving in 2022. We asked thousands of B2B buyers: “If you could buy a large complex solution without ever talking to a sales rep, would you prefer that?” Seventy-five percent said yes.

Now, that doesn’t mean they actually buy without sellers. It means they’d prefer not to. The data shows a big and growing gap between customer preference and customer reality. That gap represents risk for sellers.

Brian Carroll:
So it’s not the end of sales. It’s the end of salespeople not adding value.

Brent Adamson:
Exactly. The question at the heart of this book is simple: What would it take to be the one seller — or the one team — that customers actually do want to talk to? If you can be that person, showing up less like a seller and more like a human, you can differentiate not only from competitors but also from the overwhelming flood of information customers already face.

Buyers don’t want more information. They want confidence.

Brian Carroll:
What are the ways sellers unintentionally undermine buyer confidence?

Brent Adamson:
One of the biggest findings is around decision confidence. When customers feel highly confident in their decisions, they are up to 10 times more likely to make a high-quality, low-regret purchase.

But most sales and marketing teams focus on building confidence in the supplier — “trust us, our brand, our product.” What actually matters more is the buyer’s confidence in themselves.

The real opportunity is helping customers feel confident in the questions they’re asking, the research they’ve done, their alignment as a team, and their ability to execute. That’s what framemaking is all about.

Brian Carroll:
Can you define framemaking? How is it different from Challenger Selling?

Brent Adamson:
Framemaking is about creating the context — or frame — that helps customers make sense of complexity and move forward with confidence.

It’s built around two key moves: prompting and bounding.

• Prompting means introducing ideas or perspectives they may not have considered.
• Bounding means narrowing focus so they can prioritize what matters most.

Together, those moves create a frame that gives customers both ease and agency. The decision feels simpler, and they feel like they made it.

Challenger is part of this lineage. It’s about teaching and reframing. But in today’s world of overwhelming content, simply adding more insights isn’t enough. Customers don’t need another smart idea. They need help making sense of all the smart ideas already on the table.

Four forces undermining buyer confidence

Brent Adamson:
In the book, we unpack four big challenges that undermine buyer confidence:

1. Decision complexity — too many people, too many steps.
2. Information overload — endless content, conflicting advice, and AI adding even more noise.
3. Objective misalignment — different stakeholders with competing priorities.
4. Outcome uncertainty — even if they believe the solution works, buyers fear their team won’t implement it well.

The job of a framemaker is to help buyers navigate these challenges by simplifying, prioritizing, and guiding them without taking away their sense of ownership.

From Challenger to Framemaker

Brian Carroll:
If I’m a VP of Sales or Marketing, how do I coach my team differently? How do I stop undermining confidence?

Brent Adamson:
Challenger was about showing up with powerful insights. That still matters, but in today’s content-saturated world, simply adding more insights can overwhelm customers further.

What buyers need now isn’t just more ideas. They need help making sense of all the ideas. That’s where framemaking comes in. It’s not about proving how smart you are. It’s about helping customers feel smart and confident in themselves.

Brian Carroll:
That word, sensemaking, is powerful. Buyers are overwhelmed. They don’t want another rep adding noise. They want someone to help them make sense of it all.

Brent Adamson:
Exactly. And that’s the opportunity. Show up as the one person who helps buyers cut through complexity and feel good about moving forward. That’s how you become the rep they actually want to talk to.

A story of framemaking in action

Brent Adamson:
One of my favorite examples is from a sales rep we call “Tara.” She sold human capital management solutions. In a discovery meeting with the head of HR, she suggested bringing procurement into the conversation early.

Most reps would avoid procurement until late in the process. But Tara said: “In working with other customers like you, we’ve found that when procurement gets involved earlier, things go much smoother. You might consider inviting them now.”

That simple nudge reframed the process, avoided future roadblocks, and built customer confidence. That’s framemaking in action. It doesn’t have to be grand. Sometimes it’s just a well-placed phrase that frames the decision differently.

Marketing’s role in framemaking

Brian Carroll:
What role does marketing play in this shift?

Brent Adamson:
A huge one. Marketing can gather stories, lessons, and pitfalls from customers and feed them back into sales plays and content. Instead of just creating thought leadership about the supplier, marketing can create confidence content: tools, checklists, benchmarks, and diagnostics that help buyers feel more confident in themselves.

Imagine win-loss analysis focused not on why customers chose you, but on what they wish they’d done differently in their buying journey. That insight is gold. It can shape sales plays, create useful collateral, and make your content strategy far more valuable.

AI and the future of selling

Brian Carroll:
With AI moving so fast, what does the future of sales look like?

Brent Adamson:
AI can surface options, compare vendors, and even create frameworks. But at the end of the day, customers are still human. After all the data, many will say, “I just wish I could talk to someone.”

The sellers who thrive will be the ones who become that someone. The person who helps customers feel clarity, confidence, and connection. That’s the future of sales.

Closing thoughts

Brian Carroll:
Brent, you landed it. At the core, this is about empathy and human connection.

Brent Adamson:
Yes. There’s never been a better connection between doing what’s right for sales and doing what’s right for humanity. If you want to hit quota, win big deals, and earn that President’s Club trophy, the way to do it is by helping customers feel confident in themselves.

Brian Carroll:
And that’s what The Framemaking Sale is all about. If you want to dive deeper, get a copy. It’s packed with strategies, stories, and tactics that will change the way you sell.

Brent, thanks as always for joining me.

Brent Adamson:
I appreciate you, man.

Most teams don’t struggle because they lack automation or content. They struggle because they’re guessing about the buyer’s journey instead of understanding it.

At best, nurturing becomes educated guessing.
At worst, it becomes scaled annoyance.

And in a world where AI and automation can multiply messages instantly, bad nurturing doesn’t just waste time. It erodes trust faster than ever.

Buyers don’t experience funnels.
They experience relevance, timing, and intent.

When those are missing, even “helpful” messages feel intrusive.

This is why lead nurturing fails when teams guess the buyer journey.

The Real Problem Nurture Is Supposed to Solve

Most leads are not uninterested.

They’re unresolved.

They stall because priorities shift, internal consensus breaks, risk feels too high, or timing simply isn’t right yet.

Traditional funnels assume steady, forward motion. Real buying journeys don’t work that way.

Buyers pause. They loop back. New stakeholders enter. Urgency fades and returns.

Nurture exists to manage uncertainty over time.

Not to push.
Not to remind.
Not to “stay top of mind.”

Its role is to preserve context, build trust, and support progress when buyers are actually ready to move.

(Related reading: Why Lead Generation Was the Wrong Mental Model)

Progression vs. Activity

One of the most damaging assumptions in marketing is that more activity equals more progress.

It doesn’t.

Open rates are activity.
Clicks are activity.
Form fills are activity.

Progress looks different.

Progress shows up as:

• Clearer problem definition
• Better internal alignment
• Reduced perceived risk
• Increased confidence to engage

Buyers don’t move because you sent more emails. They move because something became clearer or safer.

Nurture should answer the buyer’s next question, not repeat your last message.

Nurture as a GTM System Function

When nurture works, it doesn’t live in one place.

It shows up across inbound follow-up, outbound sequences, SDR conversations, sales follow-ups, closed-lost re-engagement, and account expansion.

That’s why treating nurture as “marketing’s job” breaks the system.

Nurture is a shared GTM system function.

It connects:

• Demand Clarity – who this system is for
• Lead Management – how signals flow
• Sales Development – how humans engage
• Executive decisions – what the system optimizes for

When these parts are disconnected, nurture becomes guesswork. When they’re aligned, nurture creates continuity across the buying experience.

Why Lead Nurturing Fails Without Lead Management

This is the part many teams miss.

Lead nurturing isn’t primarily a content problem. It’s a lead management problem.

When your lead management system captures the right signals, nurturing becomes helpful instead of spammy.

Those signals include:

• Fit against your ideal customer profile
• Intent vs. casual interest
• Buying-group engagement
• Where the buyer is actually stuck

When those signals are missing, nurturing turns into noise dressed up as personalization.

Effective nurture depends on a system that makes the journey visible, then routes the next best action with context.

This is the bridge between GTM systems and real pipeline movement.

(See: How to Do Lead Management That Improves Conversion)

Where Lead Nurturing Breaks Down

Most nurture programs fail in predictable ways:

• Teams guess buyer stage based on content consumption instead of buyer reality
• Automation replaces judgment and scales weak assumptions
• Context is lost at handoffs, quietly eroding trust
• Email becomes the system instead of one tool within it

These are not tooling problems.

They are system design failures.

The Real Risk of “AI-Powered” Nurturing

AI doesn’t make nurturing smarter by default.

It makes it faster.

If your assumptions are wrong, AI will help you be wrong more efficiently.

The teams winning with AI aren’t sending more messages. They’re using better signals and stopping messages sooner when relevance drops.

Automation should amplify understanding, not replace it.

The Bottom Line

Lead nurturing isn’t about moving leads through stages.

It’s about helping buyers move through uncertainty.

That only happens when nurturing is grounded in real customer understanding, supported by strong lead management systems, and designed to build trust instead of pressure.

If your nurturing feels busy but ineffective, don’t add content or automation.

Fix the system. Learn the buyer. Then scale.

Where to Go Next

• Who is this system actually for?
  Start with Demand Clarity and Ideal Customer Profiles.
• When is a buyer truly ready for sales?
  That’s the role of a Universal Lead Definition.
• How do signals move without losing context?
  Explore Lead Management and Flow.
• What does this look like in practice?
  See the case studies.

Customers care more than ever about the values of the companies they buy from.

It is more than purpose. It is more than what you sell.

They want to know what kind of company you are, what you care about, and whether your company exists to do more than drive profits.

That is why I interviewed Dr. Philip Kotler, known as the father of modern marketing. Dr. Kotler is the S.C. Johnson & Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and co-author of Brand Activism: From Purpose to Action.

In this conversation, Dr. Kotler explains what brand activism is, why trust in institutions has fallen, how customer expectations have changed, and why companies need to think carefully about purpose, reputation, and action.

We also talk about what brand activism means for B2B companies, why it cannot be treated as a marketing campaign, and how leaders can use frameworks, scorecards, and customer research to make sure their actions are authentic rather than superficial.

About Dr. Philip Kotler

Dr. Philip Kotler is widely known as the father of modern marketing. He is the S.C. Johnson & Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

He is the author and co-author of many influential marketing books, including Brand Activism: From Purpose to Action.

Chapters

00:00 What is brand activism?
02:21 Why brand activism matters now
04:05 The evolution of branding
06:53 How customer expectations changed
09:01 Brand activism in B2B
14:24 Why this is not just marketing
16:59 What marketers can do
20:47 A framework for brand activism
24:49 Authenticity, empathy, and action
28:41 Where to learn more

What is brand activism?

Dr. Kotler: Brand activism is a movement toward making a brand do more than just tout the virtues of a product or a service, its usual function, and to identify some value or values that the company has and cares about.

For example, The Body Shop, when it started under Anita Roddick, was not only selling skincare products. The company was also fighting for animal rights, civil rights, fair trade, and environmental protection.

So, her brand was active. I do not mean that all other brands are passive, because they do a lot of work. But the implication is that companies carry reputations, and they want to carry a good reputation.

More and more consumers would like to know what kind of company this is and what it cares about.

Our society is saddled with many problems. Does the company care about any of these problems, or does it just think it is supposed to make money?

An increasing number of companies would like an identity that goes beyond just making the product or service. That is what we are calling brand activism: the brand that connects with some cause or causes.

A lack of trust in society

Brian: That is a helpful distinction. You recently wrote a book on this topic. I would love to know the story behind why you wrote Brand Activism and why now.

Dr. Kotler: If you look at barometers, like the Edelman Trust Barometer, the level of trust in society today has certainly been falling.

As a result, many companies are not going to be trusted either, as part of government not being trusted and other institutions not being trusted.

Companies ought to be the first to fight against bad companies, rather than stand near them or be part of them.

At this time, companies want to be profiled in a certain way. The reputation a company has could be whatever happens in its course of behavior. Or it could be something designed better.

Consciously better.

What are the stages of branding?

Dr. Kotler: The whole idea of a brand has gone through several stages. I think brand activism is probably the highest stage.

Brian: That would be great.

Dr. Kotler: The first stage is when the company simply does its best to feature the good side of its product and services. The brand name was an identifier.

Then brands moved into trying to define the company’s positioning, but not social positioning. Just their positioning: Walmart is lowest price, Disney is family entertainment, DuPont is highest quality, and Toyota is long-lasting, reliable performance.

In that second stage, the brand became not just one mentioning a product, but positioning the product.

Then the brand moved further to define a set of qualities about the company. For example, John Deere might describe itself by its quality, integrity, and innovation.

This is really positioning, but it is multi-positioning. It says the company stands high on a number of traits that most people value.

But this could move into a fourth stage where the brand adopts a very specific cause. A company may say it cares about the climate problem and wants to help move solutions toward keeping a safe climate in the world. Or it could be some other cause.

Then brand activism is alive with that development: going from corporate social responsibility to the company saying, “Here is one of the things we are going to move forward on, to the extent that we can afford to do it. We want to make more useful products, make money doing that, but we also want to push forward some cause that would help all of us.”

So that is the evolution of branding, and brand activism is one of its latest stages.

How have customer expectations changed?

Brian: What has really been driving brand activism, and how have customers changed their expectations?

Dr. Kotler: Customers were asked how they feel about the economy and society. We would hear them talk about concerns and fears related to immigration, a decline in ethics, gun control, high federal budgets, high debt, and education failure.

There are all these social issues, and they become the ground out of which brand activism becomes important.

We would say that companies do not have the right to be silent about these issues.

An increasing number of people would argue that companies owe it to their consumers to show that they care for more than just their product and making money.

That is the groundwork that inspired brand activism.

What about B2B companies?

Brian: Do you see a difference between B2B companies and B2C companies with brand activism?

Dr. Kotler: No, I do not see a difference. I think both types of companies will want their reputation to go beyond just making their product as well as possible.

If you take equipment companies like John Deere or consumer companies like McDonald’s or Coca-Cola, many B2B and B2C companies have made their brands more active.

Brian: Some of the brands that come to mind are Nike, Patagonia, Ben & Jerry’s, and Starbucks. Do you have B2B examples people could look to? I was thinking perhaps Salesforce.com or Apple.

Dr. Kotler: I am glad you mentioned Salesforce.com because Marc Benioff is one of the pioneers in this area.

He has been distraught about homelessness and affordable housing in San Francisco. He personally encouraged other companies in San Francisco to pool their money in a fund that could be used to double the budget for fighting homelessness in San Francisco. That kind of thing comes from a B2B company.

I would think that B2B companies have generally been slower as marketers. Most of what we know about modern marketing, aside from sales training and thinking, came from the consumer side.

It is not just a sales thing

Dr. Kotler: It was P&G and Unilever that created a difference between the concept of sales and the concept of marketing.

A company might say, “I do marketing because I have a salesforce and I advertise.”

That is not marketing.

That is just having two resources that could be used within the marketing framework. It is not equivalent to creating a sound and effective total strategy that will keep a firm alive and well for years to come.

Marketing is more than just sales.

That concept of marketing came to the B2B world later than it came to the B2C world. But then B2B discovered marketing and is doing more with it now. I think they will do more with brand activism.

Remember, B2B companies are very close to their customers. Consumer companies do not know as much about individual customers. B2B companies know through the salesforce every buyer and what they are like.

Pretty much any business buying from another business knows a lot about the values of the seller. That is why they are buying from that seller.

There is less need for B2B companies to get into brand activism because it is happening anyway.

Brand activism is not just marketing

Brian: Brand activism is not a marketing thing, right? It goes deeper into business strategy and purpose. Do I understand that?

Dr. Kotler: Absolutely. No CMO will take the brand that he or she is responsible for protecting and enhancing and suddenly move into brand activism alone.

That is a corporate-level decision. No one plays around with choosing an issue like gun control, the environment, or overcrowded prisons and just does it through the marketing department.

This is part of designing and protecting the firm’s reputation and meaning.

We often see the word “purpose” coming up now in the literature.

What is your purpose as a company?

“Well, I make cars.”

That is fine. But fundamentally, what are you contributing? How are you justifying your company in terms of making life better in society?

Brand activism works best when inspired by leaders

Dr. Kotler: Brand activism must come down from the top. It should be discussed at several levels of the company.

One benefit of being brand active is that your employees may be more turned on to the company and its contributions.

They tend to be proud of their company because it cares about more than just making widgets.

That is probably a motivation for the CEO and the executive suite to choose values carefully and put them into the brand framework.

It can help not only current customers, but also attract more customers and excite employees about the company’s purpose.

What can marketers do?

Brian: I get that marketers cannot do this on their own. It needs to come from the CEO, the board, and the executive team. So what can marketers do to support brand activism?

Dr. Kotler: If the impulse is going to come from the CMO, here is what can be done.

Let us say you are in a company that is not doing brand activism. There is no display of its values or the issues it cares about.

One could ask, “Wouldn’t it help if we start worrying about the future of water and whether there will be enough to make our Coca-Cola?”

The water problem will be a very big issue in the future. Maybe the marketing group should bring that to the executive suite and put into the brand work some mention of conserving and protecting good water.

So it is possible that senior management is stimulated initially by someone in marketing who sees that it would be a good move to refresh the brand.

The CMO’s role in the process

Dr. Kotler: Every brand gets tired over time.

One of the key requirements of the CMO is to be able to kick that old view of the brand and put in some fresh insight and meaning.

The brand manager who begins to care a lot does not have to be quiet about it and may successfully get the company at the top level to endorse the issue.

The CMO can research any issues that might arise or embarrass the company by taking that cause.

If there is any level of real risk, brand activism probably will not be adopted.

I believe brand activism is something to be brought to the attention of senior management by the CMO, or in another way, to consider taking action.

A framework for brand activism

Brian: As I understand it, you put together a framework so people can put brand activism into their organization. Can you describe that framework?

Dr. Kotler: The first need was to describe the different types of brand activism chosen by a company.

The first type is social activism. That means taking a stand on gender, LGBT, race problems, aging problems, education, or healthcare.

The second is workplace activism. The company might address issues of corporate organization, CEO pay, worker compensation, or labor and union relations.

The third is political activism, such as lobbying, voter rights, or gerrymandering.

The fourth is environmental activism, with concern about air and water pollution, emissions, and conservation.

The fifth is economic activism, where the company takes a stand on wage and tax policies that affect income inequality and the redistribution of wealth.

Finally, there is legal activism, where the company discusses policies that impact corporations, such as tax policies, citizenship policies, or employment laws.

That is the framework. We provide maps, canvases, and scoring systems that can help a company get serious about adopting brand activism.

A scoring system helps a company understand how it was viewed before it went into brand activism, what it expected to accomplish in the minds of customers and the public, and how impactful the adoption of that issue has been.

It can also help measure the effect on sales growth, profit levels, market share, and other outcomes.

We need a scoring system to know if we should increase brand activism on that issue, stay where we are, or decide it is not working at all.

Being authentic and genuine

Brian: The thing I am hearing is that we need to decide our purpose or reason for being beyond money. From there, the framework helps show where we are today and how we can improve.

How do you see empathy fitting into this for the customer? Sometimes companies “pink it up” for women’s issues, but it is not authentic. Do you have thoughts on that?

Dr. Kotler: We are concerned about authenticity. Promoting an issue can get lost in superficial talk by the company when there is no real commitment.

We would say to the company: “You are active about being against pollution. What have you done with that position?”

If the only thing you have done is talk against pollution, but take no action, then we are not impressed.

There is a term you may remember, green-grassing. It is about appearing to be a green company through talk, but not doing much about it.

I believe there should be research with customers. For example, ask whether customers know if Company X cares about some social issue.

If, after doing brand activism, hardly any customer noticed that you took a stand on that issue, then it is not working. Probably because you are just talking it up and not committing.

When it works well, brand activism enhances the value of the firm in the minds of existing customers, employees, and potential customers.

It may even be an entry point. Discussing pollution, for example, can open your company to people who do not know much about your company but care deeply about pollution. They may be happy to see another ally in that fight.

The word empathy suggests this question: Will customers feel that the company is sincere and genuinely cares about the issue, or will they not believe it is authentic?

Additional resources

The Case for Brand Activism — A discussion with Philip Kotler and Christian Sarkar

Purpose matters to marketing

Get the book: Brand Activism: From Purpose to Action

Why does so much marketing stink?

Michael Brenner has a direct answer: “Most of the marketing that we do that stinks and doesn’t work is because some executive with a big ego asked us to do it.”

That line gets to the heart of this conversation.

Bad marketing usually starts inside the company. It starts when teams make decisions around internal pressure, executive preference, sales requests, product priorities, or ego instead of asking what actually helps the customer.

In this episode of the B2B Roundtable Podcast, I talk with Michael Brenner, Former CEO of Marketing Insider Group and author of Mean People Suck, about why empathy matters in marketing, leadership, and business.

Michael argues that empathy is not soft. It is one of the most practical ways to improve marketing, build stronger cultures, help employees feel more engaged, and create better customer experiences.

We get into why marketers feel frustrated, why many companies still create marketing customers do not care about, how to put the customer back at the center of the business, and why the simple question “What’s in it for the customer?” can change the work.

If your team is tired of creating marketing that checks internal boxes but fails to help buyers, this conversation is worth your time.

About Michael Brenner

Michael Brenner is the Former CEO of Marketing Insider Group. After a 25-year career inside corporate marketing departments, Michael built his work around content marketing, employee activation, thought leadership, and helping companies create marketing that serves customers.

He is the author of Mean People Suck and The Content Formula.

Connect with Michael:

• Mean People Suck
• @BrennerMichael on X/Twitter

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Michael Brenner
01:20 Why Michael wrote Mean People Suck
03:35 Why so many marketers feel miserable
05:15 Why empathy matters in marketing
09:20 Why customers do not care about brands
13:30 Why the buying journey does not start with your product
16:00 Putting the customer at the center
23:00 Asking “what’s in it for the customer?”

A few things worth taking away

• Most bad marketing is created to satisfy internal requests, not customer needs.
• Marketers struggle to care for customers when they do not feel cared for inside their own companies.
• Empathy is tied to employee engagement, customer loyalty, retention, and business performance.
• Customers do not care about your brand as much as your company thinks they do.
• The buying journey usually starts with the customer’s question, not your product name.
• Marketing should help customers solve problems, not just promote the company.
• A better org chart would put the customer at the center, with every department asking how to serve them.
• The best marketing and selling feels like helping because it is helping.
• The question “What’s in it for the customer?” can stop a lot of wasted marketing activity.
• The three pushback questions are simple: Who is this for? Why is it important? How are we going to measure the impact?

A few lines that stuck with me

“Most of the marketing that we do that stinks, that doesn’t work, is because some executive with a big ego asked us to do it.” — Michael Brenner

“The math isn’t enough to get people over the challenges that we’re facing and how to do marketing that doesn’t suck.” — Michael Brenner

“The companies that have effective marketing are those that are empathetic.” — Michael Brenner

“We just aren’t that important. We’re not as interesting or important as we think we are.” — Michael Brenner

“The buying journey doesn’t start with a search for our product.” — Michael Brenner

“We wouldn’t do half of what we do if we asked what’s in it for the customer.” — Michael Brenner

Resources mentioned

• Mean People Suck by Michael Brenner
• The Content Formula by Michael Brenner
• Marketing Insider Group
• 2019 Marketer Happiness Report from MarketingProfs
• The Service Profit Chain from Harvard Business Review
• Mean People Suck Companion Guide PDF

You may also like

• Bring more innovation to your demand generation now
• 4 Steps to Do Lead Nurturing That Helps More Customers Buy
• 8 Questions to Steer Your Marketing Priorities

Listen and subscribe

If you found this episode helpful, subscribe to the B2B Roundtable Podcast wherever you listen.

Full transcript

Brian Carroll:
Michael, welcome to our show. I’m so excited to have you here with us today. Can you tell our listeners just a little bit about yourself?

Michael Brenner:
Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me, Brian. It’s great to talk to you today. As you know, I’m Michael Brenner. I’m the CEO of Marketing Insider Group. After a 25-year career inside corporate marketing departments, I went out on my own and started squarely in the B2B marketing and content marketing space, now branched out into content development, employee activation, and thought leadership programs. I’m fortunate enough to get to run around the world sometimes and give speeches. It’s been a blast, and I feel really fortunate to be able to do what I do.

Brian Carroll:
So cool. For our listeners, you may not know this, Michael, but you’re one of the very first people I interviewed when I first launched this podcast. That was like three years ago.

Michael Brenner:
Yeah, exactly.

Brian Carroll:
It was funny because we were talking about this topic of empathy, and I just would love for our audience, can you tell us this story? You just wrote a new book, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today. For those who are watching the video, can you hold it up? What’s the book title? Mean People Suck. Tell me why you wrote the book. Why now?

Michael Brenner:
Again, I have to give you credit. You were out in front of this empathy topic in marketing I think long before me. Kudos to you. It just took me a little bit longer, but essentially as a content marketer and as a former internal corporate marketer, I reached out to folks that I know that are still living and breathing corporate marketing struggles every day.

One of the things I found was that they were miserable. It’s almost like that scene from, I think it’s Poltergeist, where the obsessed woman has “help” written on her. Was it Poltergeist? No, I forget which horror movie it was. Maybe it was The Shining. I can’t remember.

Anyway, there was a woman possessed and the words “help” showed up on her stomach because I feel like a lot of internal corporate marketers feel that way. They’re miserable.

When you get down to it, what I’ve found is that it’s largely because they hate their boss. They don’t love the corporate culture. They’re not happy with what they’re being asked to do. They feel they don’t have an impact.

When I looked at why content marketing programs aren’t successful, the answer superficially was content ROI. What’s the ROI of content? And if you don’t mind me, I’m not being promotional, but I actually wrote a book called The Content Formula, all about content marketing ROI.

And when I went back to folks I sent the book to, what I found was that it wasn’t enough. The math isn’t enough to get people over the challenges that we’re facing and how to do marketing that doesn’t suck.

The reason I wrote the book is that most of the marketing that we do that stinks, that doesn’t work, is because some executive with a big ego asked us to do it.

Brian Carroll:
Right.

Michael Brenner:
Executives love seeing logos on stadiums, and they love seeing Super Bowl ads, and all the things that we make fun of marketing about largely come from a request from sales or marketing or product people.

The companies where content marketing is successful or marketers are happy are making an impact because there’s a culture of empathy. Their cultures don’t suck. The companies don’t suck. The leaders don’t suck. That’s why I wrote the book. Maybe a long-winded explanation, but that’s why.

Brian Carroll:
Well, and I think you’re also just talking about the state of affairs for marketers. It’s hard for marketers to actually care about the customer when they themselves aren’t necessarily cared for. They don’t feel safe. They’re anxious, or they’re frustrated, or they’re challenged.

You also talked about empathy. It seemed like this book was written for two people: for those who are experiencing this, but also for leaders. Why does empathy matter especially to marketers, and does it lead to better results?

Michael Brenner:
Yeah. One of the stories that I tell in the book, the very first corporate book that I read, and I have to give credit to the former CEO at Nielsen, my first company who made most of us in the company read the book. And I was like, “Oh, here we go.” And I read the book. I was like, “Wow, this is actually really pretty cool.” It’s called The Service Profit Chain. I write a lot about it.

It’s a book that isn’t talked about much, but the premise is simple. Three or four Harvard Business Review professors got together and said, wait a second, we’ve seen this correlation between engaged employees, happy employees, happy customers, and higher stock prices, happier stock investors.

Brian Carroll:
Right.

Michael Brenner:
They did some actual research and found that where there’s employee engagement, there is customer loyalty. Where there’s customer loyalty, there’s higher spend rates and retention and higher stock prices.

The key to those environments, those cultures, those companies where there were happy employees was empathy. The company’s purpose was to make their employees happy because they knew happy employees created happy customers.

It’s totally intuitive and yet it’s counterintuitive. That’s one of the reasons we reconnected was my LinkedIn post, “Empathy is the counterintuitive secret to success.”

The thing is, I think life has beaten us down and gotten us to believe that we should take what we want and put our elbows out and get to the front of the line. It’s actually the opposite. It’s counterintuitive that if we help people, we can actually get what we want.

It’s definitely true for marketing, which really has a bad reputation. Most people think marketing is propaganda and promotion, but the companies that have effective marketing are those that are empathetic. It’s those that are empathetic to their customers and don’t just create promotion and propaganda.

Empathy really is the key in marketing and business and in life. I wrote the book trying to straddle all three of those perspectives. I hope your listeners out there take a look, and hopefully they can get back to me and tell me how well I did to try to straddle those three.

Brian Carroll:
Well, I just want to say I’m excited for you. I’m excited for this book because big-picture empathy, or caring for customers, or wanting to help people, is pretty easy to talk about. Right? I think if you were asking your own executives, do you care about your customers? Do you have empathy for your employees? I don’t think anyone would argue with that, but it’s easier to talk about than it is to do.

One of the things you talked about was the customer journey and what the experience is for customers, why they don’t care about brands anymore, and how brand doesn’t matter. So why is that?

Michael Brenner:
Well, the first thing is I think it’s important for marketers and especially brand marketers, corporate marketers, but also I think those who are in the trenches need to understand how to explain this to executives. And that is that we just aren’t that important. We’re not as interesting or important as we think we are.

My former company, Nielsen, did a survey of brands and found that 77% of consumers said they wouldn’t care if the brands they use disappeared completely. We’re seen as replaceable in many aspects.

While we think we’re super important and we think we’re super interesting in the companies we work in, our customers are just trying to get through every day and trying to meet the challenges they face. They’re trying to stay awake. The bar is low.

Yet so many brands don’t create any kind of messaging or stories that resonate. And so that’s really the trick: if you truly care about your customers, you don’t talk about yourself as much.

When I meet somebody new, I don’t say, “Hi, my name is Michael Brenner, and I’m awesome.” That’s the last thing I would ever say. If I want somebody to actually listen to me, I say, “Hi, how are you?” My first thing is outreach. It’s empathy. It’s not promotion and propaganda and ego.

I think we just forget that sometimes when we’re sitting inside the corporate marketing department.

Brian Carroll:
Well, you’re illustrating the point that empathy is easier to talk about than it is to do. Part of what I’m hearing you say is we’ve got to overcome our own bias thinking that we have the answer.

Really often I think marketers come from the perspective, “If I were the customer, how would this appeal to me?” Or as you talked about the leader who wants to see the logo, well, that’s not a customer-focused decision in their calculus.

How might marketers use empathy in their approach to customers? What are some of your thoughts on that from your work and research?

Michael Brenner:
In my first book, The Content Formula, I talk about my year-long struggle to get my colleagues inside SAP to see and to have empathy for our customers. I started with data. The data often leads to the conclusion that, for example, at SAP we were selling a cloud computing solution called SAP HANA, which now has a little bit of brand awareness but then didn’t have any.

What I tried to show my colleagues in marketing was that people weren’t searching for our product name. They weren’t searching even for SAP cloud computing solutions. They were searching for things like “what is cloud computing?”

In every industry, no matter what thing you sell, if you sell cybersecurity solutions and you sell the world’s greatest cybersecurity solution named Alpha, I’m just making this up, people aren’t searching for Alpha as much as they’re searching for cybersecurity solutions.

When I found the data didn’t work, I moved to fear, FOMO in a way, but really fear. I went to the sales team and actually showed them that I use this term, “the buying journey doesn’t start with a search for our product.” And the sales team understood that actually better than my peers in marketing.

I used search. I said, “Hey look, when I type cloud computing into Google, IBM and Oracle and Salesforce show up, but SAP didn’t show up at all.” They got angry. That anger then translated to direct mandates over to my peers in marketing, who finally created the atmosphere and environment for me to create customer-focused content.

It was kind of like a mafia move, if you will. I kind of strong-armed them to see that it was the right thing to do.

Brian Carroll:
It’s interesting though because I think, here’s the thing. You and I talked about this offline before. When marketers are in our buildings, who is talking to customers more, marketers or salespeople?

Michael Brenner:
Yeah.

Brian Carroll:
I think the point you made is you went to the people who were talking to the customer.

Michael Brenner:
Yeah, exactly.

Brian Carroll:
They had that insight. And ironically, we’re in marketing. We’re supposed to influence messages of customers, but we actually are not in the building.

I want to ask you a question. You have a lot of great stories in your book. Do you have a favorite story? And if so, which one?

Michael Brenner:
Yeah. One of the things I talk about in how to create empathy inside the organization is to rethink the org chart. I talk about how org charts are boxes and lines, and they show who’s above and below us. Basically, they show who directs orders down to the minions who do the work.

I talk about how org charts miss the most important person, and that’s the customer. I’m not suggesting every company should recreate the org chart, but if we rethink the org chart, it would look more like a bullseye.

You have the customer at the center, and all the departments branching out from there would be thinking, how should I best serve this customer? There are a couple of stories in the book of people, and they’re not all necessarily marketers, but certainly a few who’ve done that.

One is Amanda Todorovich from Cleveland Clinic. She has a very famous empathy video. If you Google Cleveland Clinic empathy video, you’ll see an internal video. It was originally created to help executives inside Cleveland Clinic see that Cleveland Clinic is more than just a business. It’s more than a hospital operation.

It’s an organization that serves patients. The concerns that patients have are matters of life and death and giving birth and dying. Amanda’s team’s video was extremely impactful. I get chills just talking about it. I use it in every presentation, and it has 4 million views online.

They released it publicly at the request of their executive team because they really understood the impact of, hey, what makes us different isn’t because we have great surgeons and we have utilized some certain technique or equipment. What makes us unique is that we really care for our patients.

It’s empathy tied to a corporate mission, all the way down to the content that Amanda and her team create every day, which serves patient needs. That’s one of my favorite stories from an empathy perspective.

There are probably 15 stories. I could keep going. I’ll stop myself because I love talking about the people I call champions, the champion leaders, the people that celebrated others and achieved success because of that.

That’s the counterintuitive nature of empathy. It’s help others, live your life in service of others, and you actually get what you want. That’s really at the heart of the book.

Brian Carroll:
Well, in my experience, I 100% agree. Personally, for our listeners, at some point in time, my Jerry Maguire moment was by actually not focusing on convincing people.

I’ve always had the best marketing and selling feels like helping because it is. The reality is I realized my Jerry Maguire moment is I wasn’t living that. I was trying to convert people instead of connect and help.

The irony is, when you actually focus on, “Hey, what do they care about? How can I help them?” What I love with Cleveland Clinic is it’s not just a marketing thing. It’s what they do.

In my own experience, by not trying to get leads, I got 303% more just by helping people. It’s crazy.

Do you have tips for developing deeper empathy that you could share with our listeners? I know you wrote a book that has exercises that go deeper, but anything someone listening can come away with to begin saying, okay, I don’t disagree, but how?

Michael Brenner:
Yeah. There are a couple of tools I wanted to develop for your listeners. For the people who were like me, sitting and getting asked to do stuff that we know won’t work, the highest-level insight is ask what’s in it for the customer.

For example, your sales leader comes over and says, “I’d like a brochure for this niche industry event we’re going to.” It’s going to cost you $4,000, and it’s a couple of designers and a printer to get created. Just ask, “What’s in it for the customer?”

Do people really read our brochures? Are they going to throw it right in the trash? You might think it’s important to stuff that inside the conference bag, but I’ve never read a brochure myself from a conference.

If we ask what’s in it for the customer, as opposed to thinking of our jobs as just doing what the sales team or the product team or our boss tells us to do, the answer I think is sometimes surprising. We wouldn’t do half of what we do if we asked what’s in it for the customer. And so that’s the highest-level tip.

I offer three deeper level questions. I call it the pushback. It just goes a little bit deeper.

• Who is this for?
• Why is it important?
• How are we going to measure the impact?

If you ask those three, those are three deeper-level questions from the “what’s in it for the customer?” overview.

Again, you wouldn’t put your logo on a stadium. You wouldn’t create a brochure that costs a lot of money to print and kills trees. You wouldn’t do a lot of the things that we do that we roll our eyes about when we think about marketing and all the propaganda that comes outside of companies.

Brian Carroll:
It’s so funny as I listen to you. As I talk with marketers, often VPs will lament, and we forget what it’s like to be a customer even though we’re all customers ourselves. That’s kind of the crazy thing.

Some of the things that we think suck, are we doing those same things when we reach out to our customers? We’re the recipients of marketing. We’re the recipients of sales messages.

Any other thoughts? Because I wanted to highlight you just because your message is so important. It’s so timely, and it’s so needed. But any other things you wish I would’ve asked about before we close?

Michael Brenner:
No, I think we’ve covered the main tips. I appreciate you bringing me on and letting me share these tips with the readers. I’d love for your audience to read the book.

Again, everything I do, I’ve done in support of this desire to try to help people. I started blogging before I had a business just because I wanted to share what I know. The keynotes I give, the books that I write, and even the client work that I do get paid for is really to try to help people, and it’s worked for me.

I don’t think I’m smarter than other people. If it works for me, I think it’s the secret for many of us to live a life that’s maybe a little more meaningful, a little more impactful.

I just talk to so many people. I talk about this crisis of engagement and empathy. The world feels like a meaner place these days.

The three takeaways from the book are: be kind, be cool, be you.

Be kind is just because it’s the right thing to do.

Be cool is don’t take things personally. A lot of the mean people we meet aren’t psychopaths and narcissists. They’re just having a bad day.

Be you is because the people who are living their fullest life know what their purpose is, and they’re working in support of that. It’s often in service of others. So that’s how I’ll leave it.

Brian Carroll:
Well, and as I listen to you, I’ve always felt and believed marketing can and should be a force for good. Often people view it as being about manipulating and coercing. It’s like, no, it’s actually about making a difference, helping people achieve results, and helping people transform in positive ways.

What’s the best way to connect with you and find out more about your book?

Michael Brenner:
Well, you can check it out at meanpeoplesuck.com. You can find more about me at marketinginsidergroup.com. I’d love to connect with your folks personally on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter at BrennerMichael.

Brian Carroll:
And for our listeners, Michael has offered to share some resources. You’ll find them in the show notes. I’ll provide those links along with the story. I’ve made some notes of things that we’ll share as well. Really excited for you. Thank you again for being with us today, Michael.

Michael Brenner:
Yeah, thanks again, Brian.

Has our devotion to work and hustle become the UnAmerican Dream?

Some of the hardest-working people I know are in sales, marketing, consulting, and entrepreneurship. We often hear stories about how hustle, grit, and sacrifice led to success.

But there is another side to that story.

The constant pursuit of professional success can leave damaged relationships, poor health, anxiety, loneliness, and personal wreckage behind it.

I know because I lived some of that story myself.

Shortly after building and selling a successful company, my 17-year marriage ended. My pursuit of business success had left my health and relationships in serious need of attention.

I had to redefine the kind of life I wanted to live. I had to make different choices. I had to set better boundaries.

That is why this conversation with my friend Carlos Hidalgo matters so much to me.

Carlos is author of The UnAmerican Dream. In this episode, we talk about entrepreneurship, sales and marketing burnout, family, work devotion, hustle culture, and why Carlos believes work-life boundaries are more useful than work-life balance.

This conversation is for sellers, marketers, entrepreneurs, consultants, and leaders who feel pressure to always be on.

The question is not whether work matters.

The question is whether work has taken a place it was never meant to hold.

About Carlos Hidalgo

Carlos Hidalgo has worked in B2B marketing, sales, demand generation, and customer experience for more than 25 years. In 2005, he co-founded ANNUITAS, a demand generation agency. He later stepped away from the company and started a new business focused on customer experience, VisumCX.

Carlos is the author of Driving Demand and The UnAmerican Dream, a more personal book about redefining success, restoring relationships, and establishing healthier boundaries around work.

Connect with Carlos:

• @cahidalgo on X/Twitter
• Carlos Hidalgo on LinkedIn
• Carlos Hildalgo Co
• The UnAmerican Dream book website

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Carlos Hidalgo
01:08 Why Carlos wrote The UnAmerican Dream
02:56 Why he walked away from the company he co-founded
05:00 What gets in the way of life, liberty, and happiness
07:59 Why Carlos rejects work-life balance
11:01 How to set work-life boundaries
16:47 Why hustle culture is destructive
22:15 Designing your job around the life you want

A few things worth taking away

• Walking away from an unhealthy version of success usually is not a single moment. For Carlos, it was a 10-month process.
• Work-life balance may be the wrong goal. Balance is fragile. Boundaries are more durable because they protect what you value.
• Boundaries should not be built alone. Carlos built his with his wife and invited trusted people to help him see what he could not see.
• If you say you value family, health, faith, friendship, rest, or fitness, your calendar should show it.
• Hustle culture turns constant availability into identity. That damages people and relationships.
• Sales and marketing leaders are often overwhelmed because the system rewards being always on.
• Leaders create pressure even when they do not intend to. A late-night email from a boss can silently tell the team they are expected to respond.
• People need permission to turn off if you want them to bring their best work.
• You can design your career, job, or business around the kind of life you want. But first you have to define that life.

A few lines that stuck with me

“We have made work our God.” — Carlos Hidalgo

“I don’t believe in work-life balance.” — Carlos Hidalgo

“For me, the idea of boundaries is they are more permanent.” — Carlos Hidalgo

“Define what you value, and then say, ‘What are the things that I’m letting get in the way of those things?’” — Carlos Hidalgo

“There is a story on the other side of every hustle story.” — Carlos Hidalgo

“Life is short. I want to make sure I’m here for it.” — Elle Woulfe, quoted by Carlos Hidalgo

Resources mentioned

• The UnAmerican Dream book website
• The UnAmerican Dream by Carlos Hidalgo
• Carlos Hidalgo’s LinkedIn post on leaving ANNUITAS
• VisumCX
• Claire Potter on LinkedIn
• Elle Woulfe on LinkedIn
• PathFactory
• Alexis Ohanian on hustle porn

You may also like

• New research: Empathy and solving buying problems
• Growing B2B Sales with Trust and Empathy
• Why customer advocacy should be at the heart of your marketing

Listen and subscribe

If you found this episode helpful, subscribe to the B2B Roundtable Podcast wherever you listen.

Full transcript

Brian Carroll:
Hey Carlos. Really glad to have you here on the show. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about your background?

Carlos Hidalgo:
Yeah. Hey Brian. Always a pleasure to talk to you. I have been in B2B marketing and sales for over 20 years. I think right now it’s about 25 years, which is hard to believe.

I’ve been both client-side, and then in 2005, I co-founded an agency. That agency is still running. I left that agency at the end of 2016, beginning of 2017, to start another business. So you could say I’m a bit of an entrepreneur. I love creating things.

Now I work with B2B companies in the whole area of customer experience under the new brand VisumCX, and then just wrote my second book. First book was on demand generation, so if you ever have insomnia, go for it. You can read that. But this book was The UnAmerican Dream, which is more my story and a whole lot more personal than the first one.

Brian Carroll:
I wanted to ask you about that. Can you tell the story about why you wrote this book, The UnAmerican Dream, and why now?

Carlos Hidalgo:
Yeah, great question. When I left ANNUITAS, which was the first company that I had co-founded and started, I put a post on LinkedIn about why I was leaving.

It was more to get back to what I should have been doing in the first place, which was cultivating those meaningful relationships, especially with my children and marriage.

I was struck by the number of calls and emails I got from fellow entrepreneurs and fellow business leaders who were saying, “So, how did you do this? What steps did you take because I am at my wit’s end? I’m never seeing my family,” or “My marriage is falling apart,” or insert whatever they were going through.

I was really surprised. Wow, this is not just me going through this.

So that’s the why. But the why now is the idea of that book came to me over those two years. It was over two years ago. But I needed to work on me first.

I had to get some things straight in me. In the introduction, I believe I say I first had the idea in 2016. When I told somebody the title, they said, “It sounds like an angry book.”

I believe if I had written it then, it would have been an angry book because I had a lot of things that I had to work through and deconstruct some things that I had held to be true which weren’t true.

So I needed to wait. Waiting, I believe, made it a much more authentic book, a much more vulnerable book, but not an angry book in any way.

Walking away from the UnAmerican Dream

Brian Carroll:
As I was listening to you, and I’m going to ask the same question you got asked by many people on LinkedIn. How did you walk away from this UnAmerican Dream, and what do you mean by that?

Carlos Hidalgo:
Yeah. Wow. How I did it? From the outside, it probably seemed like, oh, he woke up one day and was like, “I’m done.”

It was a 10-month process for me. I really wrestled with the decision. And you know, Brian, you’ve started businesses. You’re an entrepreneur yourself. When you start something from scratch and you put everything you have into it, the term I hear often is, “This is my baby.”

I wanted to make sure that, first and foremost, I had come to a place where I’m like, “I’ve got to do everything I can to get back those relationships that I had neglected for so long.”

So I tried to do that within the context of the first business. That took me 10 months. I kept wrestling with what should I do and how should I do it?

It was a conversation with a colleague in the lobby of the Westin who encouraged me. He said, “You know what you need to do. You just need the courage to do it.”

I called Suzanne, my wife, at that point a few hours later and said, “I’m leaving.”

When it came down to it, I really just pulled the ripcord because I didn’t have a big buyout waiting. I didn’t have this big hoard of cash in the savings account where I could run for months and months.

It was a risk. It was scary. It was like, “Okay, so what am I going to do now?” But everything panned out, and everything worked out. I would do it again in a heartbeat. It was the best professional decision I ever made.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness

Brian Carroll:
Well, Carlos, for our listeners, it will come through. You and I are good friends. I was just thinking about you as an entrepreneur and as I know you. Entrepreneurship is in your blood. It’s part of your history, part of your family history.

As I was reading the book, you wrote about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What’s getting in the way of that?

Carlos Hidalgo:
Wow, so much is getting in the way of that. I think first and foremost is we as Americans are on this treadmill and this pace, and we have made work our God.

We work more than any other group, any other nationality in the world. So just think about that.

I just read a stat last week where 32% of Millennials will not take more than a four-night vacation because of work. Seventy percent of the population says, “I don’t have work-life balance.”

I was in Nashville this last weekend, and the people we stayed with, he’s like, “I didn’t take all my vacation. I can’t.”

I think part of what’s getting in the way of our happiness is we’re slaves to our jobs, we’re slaves to our career, we’re slaves to our businesses, and that’s a choice that we have made. I know people will debate me on that all day long, but it is a choice that we have made.

Quitting weekend work

Carlos Hidalgo:
I literally, before this, saw a LinkedIn post that said, “If you’re reading this on the weekend, it’s clear that you’re a top performer.”

So the message there is if you’re not connected to your profession on the weekend, you’re not a top performer, which is a total fallacy because I don’t work weekends anymore.

I used to all the time. I don’t any longer, which means I’m not on LinkedIn, I’m not promoting anything, I’m not doing anything for my clients, and everybody knows that. That’s a boundary I chose.

Social media, loneliness, and disconnection

Carlos Hidalgo:
The other thing I think is really getting in the way of our happiness is social media and these stinking things. We are so attached to, and I will use the word addiction, to our devices and to social media.

We’ll put something on Facebook, and then 20 minutes later we’re going and seeing how many likes. We retweet. “How many followers do I have?”

We have created what I call social loneliness, where we are so socially connected, but we are so utterly lonely because people don’t really know us.

We haven’t built a relationship. As human beings, we’re wired for relationship. When we put those things ahead of what we’re wired for, our happiness or our ability to choose happiness severely wanes.

Why boundaries matter more than balance

Brian Carroll:
There’s so much there, Carlos, as I’m listening to you. Something I remember from a conversation you and I had a while ago, when I was trying to start my company again, you talked about setting boundaries instead of trying to get work-life balance. Why is that?

Carlos Hidalgo:
I don’t believe in work-life balance because I tried it. At parts of my career, I tried it. Other parts, I was like, “I’m completely unbalanced and I’m good with that,” which when I think about it makes me want to shake my head.

The stats will show you 70% saying, “I can’t achieve work-life balance.” So when I see that, I see the reality is it doesn’t exist.

The picture I get is my daughter, who was a gymnast for 14 years, up on that balance beam. Nothing made me more nervous. I had kids in theater and kids in sports, and they could perform and I’d get a little nervous, but man, when she was there, you think about that. It’s hard to balance, especially across a trajectory of time.

So what I did is I rejected the idea of balance. Maybe it’s semantics, but for me, the idea of boundaries is they are more permanent. If I draw a boundary or install a boundary, it takes work to move.

So I’ve adopted boundaries. And when I say “I have,” we have, because I’ve done it in community, first and foremost, with my wife.

Brian, you and I have talked about my boundaries, and I’ve invited you into that community of people who have permission to be like, “Hey, I’m kind of seeing this stuff,” or “What’s going on here and how are you doing with that?”

Because God forbid if I’m the only one who’s going to determine if I’m balanced.

Defining what you value and want to protect

Carlos Hidalgo:
What we did is we defined what we want to protect. What do we want to value?

For me, time with my family, time with my wife is priority number one. My health, both physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual, is really important.

So I go to the gym regularly. I meditate. I take time to just stop and think and shut off my phone and close my computer.

Some days, it’s just staring out the window. If you were to look at me you’d be like, “Is this guy really working or what?” But I’m thinking.

Those are the types of things that I protect.

The counter to that is I’m so much more productive in my work because there is a boundary around the time that I’m working.

I am absolutely focused on what I’m doing for a living. So my clients get the best of me as well as my relationships.

How to set work-life boundaries

Brian Carroll:
For those out there who are seeing this, it’s not easy to do. At least, for me it isn’t. Do you have any tips and advice on what you found we can do to get better at setting boundaries or non-negotiables in our life?

Carlos Hidalgo:
Yeah, you’re right. It’s not easy to do. I’m the first to say I don’t have this all figured out. I’m on the journey with everybody else. I may be a few steps ahead, but I also know people who are so much farther ahead than I am.

Three weeks ago, I picked up my phone and wanted to check my email at 8:00 at night, and Suzanne was like, “So, what are we doing because this is two nights in a row?” And it was completely appropriate, totally gentle. But that’s what I wanted.

Back to the question. I think, first and foremost, you have to do it in community with your closest relationships. If that’s a spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend, close friend, close coworker, even your boss, say, “I want to give the best of myself in all aspects of my life, professionally, personally, whatever else.”

Do that in community and then sit down and really write down what you value.

I was talking to somebody the other day who was talking to me about how much they value their physical fitness. Then literally, almost in the same breath, it was like, “Well, I don’t have time to go to the gym.”

Okay, so you don’t really value your physical fitness. You may say you do, but your actions say you don’t.

So really define what you value, and then say, “What are the things that I’m letting get in the way of those things that I say I value?”

When you do that in community, you’re going to get a much different perspective than if you do it in isolation. The people we surround ourselves with can point out our blind spots, which is of huge value to us and should be embraced.

Asking for help and hearing the truth

Brian Carroll:
That’s really good. I can identify with the blind spots and the need to have a feedback loop. There are things every person has that we can’t see in how we’re living our life or how we’re showing up. We won’t know unless we ask people, “What do you see that I’m missing?”

How would someone start the conversation about this?

Carlos Hidalgo:
I think it starts with being really honest, first and foremost, about here’s where I’m at.

I’m not here to judge people who are going to work 14 hours a day. If that’s what you and your community have decided is good and works for everybody, who am I to say you’re wrong?

I think just asking the question, “How are we doing?” Asking the question, “Hey, here’s what I want to be doing. I value family time, I value fitness, I value fun. What do you see that I’m doing that’s getting in the way of that?”

If you’re going to ask that question, be prepared for the answers.

Part of the work I had to do was to sit down and hear some things that were pretty unpleasant. I didn’t want to hear about things I had done, choices I had made, decisions I had made.

That is not a fun thing to go through, but it makes us better. It makes us more aware.

Communicating your boundaries

Carlos Hidalgo:
I am so much more aware now, even more so than I was even just a year ago, of when I’m in my personal boundary after working hours. Not checking my phone, not trying to stay engaged, not returning that text.

I’ve gone to the extent of making my partners, my clients, and my professional connections aware of that. So oftentimes if I do get a text at 7:00 at night or 9:00 at night, what I’m starting to see is, “Hey, I know you’re not going to get this till the morning.”

I’m like, “Yeah, you’re right.” Even if I see it, I’m not going to respond to it.

Why hustle culture is destructive

Brian Carroll:
I was thinking about the LinkedIn post you brought up about, “Hey, if you’re looking at this on a Saturday…” There’s this whole notion of work devotion or hustle porn. Why is that such a thing today? Why is it destructive?

Carlos Hidalgo:
I think the reason it’s a thing today is you’ve got so many loud voices out there promoting it.

You’ve got Kevin O’Leary who literally says, “25 hours a day.” In the interview that I quote in the book, it is, “It’s 24/7. Get used to it. Get over it.”

You’ve got Jack Ma with his ridiculous 9-9-6, 9:00 to 9:00, six days a week. You’ve got Grant Cardone with his unhealthy approach to 95 hours a week, and the list goes on.

Daymond John’s “rise and grind.” We’re not real entrepreneurs unless we do this.

I think those voices are so loud. And when I couple that with “I’m the scarce resource to my organization,” which means I’m working long hours, I’m always available, we make that part of our identity. It is a perfect storm.

The reason it is destructive is we only have a certain amount of time each and every day. Twenty-four hours a day. 86,400 seconds.

If I’m devoting the majority of that time to my work, something has to suffer.

Either I suffer, which means I can’t give the best of myself to my relationships, or my relationships take a hit.

Fundamentally, as human beings, we are wired for relationship. When we start to move against what we’re wired for, we start to see anxiety, anger, sleeplessness, and loneliness.

I was doing research on that this morning. It is off the charts. Over half of Americans are saying they have feelings of loneliness even though we’re so connected.

Just like all porn, hustle porn is destructive. It’s toxic. I agree with Alexis Ohanian. I applaud him for taking a stand against it.

Honestly, I would be delighted to have the individuals that I just named shut up because they are doing a disservice to entrepreneurs and business leaders and families everywhere.

That’s why I had Suzanne write a chapter, because there is a story on the other side of every hustle story. I lived that hustle lifestyle for far too long. It’s not sustainable. It did damage to us as a family and to me personally.

Sellers and marketers are overwhelmed

Brian Carroll:
I really appreciate you sharing that there is another side to this. As entrepreneurs, and you and I have worked in the sales and marketing world for a long time, is this happening in sales and marketing? If so, what can we do to change it?

Carlos Hidalgo:
Oh, it is. I work with marketers on a day-to-day basis. I’m seeing more and more. When you say, “So, how’s it going?” they’re like, “Oh my word. I’m slammed. I’m overwhelmed. I have so much to do. There’s not enough hours in the day.”

I get emails from clients at 10:00 at night. I got a text from a client not long ago that said, “I feel completely overwhelmed, and I’m so down. I don’t know what to do.”

At the last conference I was at, I asked a bunch of marketers, “How many of you feel there’s not enough time to accomplish what you want to do in a meaningful way?” Virtually every hand out of 200-plus went up.

I am definitely seeing this on the marketing and sales front.

Giving people permission to turn off

Carlos Hidalgo:
I think what we can do about it is, first of all, business leaders, if you’re listening, start to create a culture that gives your people permission to turn off.

When you are sending them emails at 10:00 at night, even if you’ve said, “Hey, we have a culture where we have our working hours,” you’re putting them in a position of, “Can I tell the boss to wait?”

That is a disadvantage you’re giving to your people.

If you really want the best of them, you will allow them time to step away and turn off and not feel they have to shorten their vacations or be connected on vacation or connected at 9:00 at night.

That’s number one as a business leader.

Designing your work around your life

Carlos Hidalgo:
Number two, there’s a corporate profile in the book of a lady named Claire Potter who is in a sales role. Claire works for a multibillion-dollar organization.

What she did was, “Hey, I just had my first child. I travel. My husband travels. That is not sustainable. I’m going to create a new job role in my organization, and at the same time, I’m going to create a plan B. I’m going to start to talk to recruiters and understand what jobs are available that would now suit my lifestyle.”

Then she went to her organization and said, “If you want me to stay, this is my new job.”

Her organization said, “That’s awesome. We value you. We want you in the organization.”

She took the initiative to say, this is what I’m going to do.

Another profile in the book is Elle Woulfe, who is the CMO at PathFactory. One of my favorite lines in the book, she closes with, “Life is short. I want to make sure I’m here for it.”

Elle had an opportunity to get a very high-profile job with a great company. She decided for her family and for her own sake that she was going to take a role which is still a great role with PathFactory, but it didn’t pay as much. But it enabled her to live the life she wanted.

Define what kind of life you want, and then go design your career, your job, your business around that and what that looks like.

Closing

Brian Carroll:
As I’m listening to you, Carlos, I’m just thinking you’ve talked about what’s happening today in all spheres of life. I think you’ve written something really important. I hope our listeners found value in it.

What’s the best way to connect with you and to find out more about your book?

Carlos Hidalgo:
You can follow me on Twitter at @cahidalgo. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn, Carlos Hidalgo. Then theunamericandream.com, where we’ll list all the information about the book release, videos, articles, and this podcast as well.

Brian Carroll:
Fantastic. For our listeners, we’ll be including those links in our show notes. Carlos, thanks again for joining us and sharing your perspective. It’s so needed.

Carlos Hidalgo:
Thanks, Brian. It’s an honor to connect with you, and I want to thank you and your readers to know how much involvement you had with this project because you saw some very early drafts. You provided great feedback, and actually, you’re the one who said, “Why don’t you have a couple of questions at the end of each chapter to include and involve the reader?” I took that suggestion, and that’s been well received as well.

So thank you for your friendship, your support, and your involvement with this project.

Brian Carroll:
Thanks, Carlos, and again, thanks for your work and all that you’ve done.

Carlos Hidalgo:
Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Sales and marketing alignment is not really about sales and marketing.

It is about the customer.

Today’s buyers are in control. They do not experience your company as a marketing funnel, a sales process, a handoff, or a department chart. They experience one buying journey.

That means we can no longer afford an artificial divide between marketing and sales.

That is why I interviewed Heidi Melin, then CMO at Workfront, about how to get sales and marketing operating as one revenue team.

Heidi has spent her career leading marketing in fast-growing software companies. In this conversation, she shares why alignment starts with a shared view of the customer, how teams can stop arguing over numbers, and why marketing’s job does not end when a lead is handed to sales.

We talk about building one revenue process, using customer interviews to understand how buyers actually buy, creating shared goals and metrics, bringing finance into the revenue conversation, and balancing data-driven marketing with customer empathy.

About Heidi Melin

Heidi Melin is a career CMO with deep experience in fast-growing software businesses. She has led marketing teams through growth, digital transformation, sales alignment, demand generation, and customer-focused revenue strategy.

At the time of this interview, Heidi was CMO at Workfront.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Heidi Melin
00:34 How sales and marketing operate as one team
02:30 Why revenue is one business process
03:32 Focusing on the customer buying process
08:15 Mapping the customer buying process
12:56 Why marketing cannot stop at the handoff
16:15 Running weekly revenue team meetings
25:50 Bringing empathy back into marketing

A few things worth taking away

• Sales and marketing alignment starts with the customer, not the org chart.
• Marketing and sales are not two separate business processes. They are part of one revenue process.
• The handoff matters, but it is not the most important thing. The buying process is.
• Teams waste too much time arguing about whether the number is right instead of diagnosing what needs to improve.
• Shared metrics matter because they give sales, marketing, finance, and operations one view of the truth.
• Customer interviews are one of the best ways to understand how buyers actually move through the buying process.
• Marketing’s job does not end when a lead becomes an opportunity.
• A weekly revenue team meeting can help turn sales problems, marketing problems, and finance problems into shared revenue problems.
• Technology should support the business process, not drive it.
• Even in B2B, you are not selling to companies. You are selling to people.

A few lines that stuck with me

“It’s one business process, not two separate business processes.” — Heidi Melin

“We’re just trying to facilitate a buying process.” — Heidi Melin

“You have to go all the way back to the customer.” — Heidi Melin

“There is nothing that is more valuable than interviewing customers that have just been through that process.” — Heidi Melin

“It’s not a marketing problem. It’s not a sales problem. It’s not a finance problem. It’s a revenue team problem.” — Heidi Melin

“You’re not selling to companies. You’re selling to people.” — Heidi Melin

Resources mentioned

• Heidi Melin on X/Twitter
• Workfront

You may also like

• 4 ways to adopt human-centered marketing and get better results
• The Biggest Contributor to B2B Revenue
• 31 ways to improve marketing-sales alignment quickly
• 3 Good Questions to Align B2B Marketing, Sales, and Strategy
• How Sales Hustle and Automation Can Hurt Customer Experience

Listen and subscribe

If you found this episode helpful, subscribe to the B2B Roundtable Podcast wherever you listen.

Full transcript

Brian: Well, Heidi, welcome and thanks for joining us today. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and your background?

Heidi: Absolutely. I’m a career CMO. I’ve been in marketing for my entire career, having started really on the advertising side, but mostly focused on fast-growing software businesses. I recently joined Workfront, and I am the CMO at Workfront.

Brian: Well, I’m excited to talk with you about our topic today, which is sales and marketing operating as one team. How can sales and marketing operate as one team even though both groups may report to different people?

Heidi: Throughout my career, I’ve had the opportunity to work really well with some sales teams, and I’ve also learned my fair share from working with sales teams and marketing teams that don’t align very well.

All of those lessons learned include things like ensuring that the goals are aligned and ensuring that the marketing team has the same goals as the sales team. Certainly, the marketing team tends to have a broader view of the marketplace and a longer-term view. But the immediate-term goals have to be aligned.

Being aligned on lead generation or demand goals with the sales teams is critical. We talk about it inside Workfront as one view of the truth because so many times we’ve all probably sat in meetings with sales and marketing executives, and you spend most of the meeting arguing about whether or not the number is right instead of diagnosing what we need to work on in order to improve.

Ensuring that you’re working on a common set of numbers is hard. It sounds really easy, but it’s hard. That is one of the things that I think is key to success: ensuring that measurement and all of the programmatic and process-oriented partnership between sales and marketing is aligned because it’s one business process.

Brian: Yeah. Go ahead and finish your thought. I was going to dive in and ask about processes, but go ahead and finish your thought.

Heidi: The way that I think about it is marketing and sales historically have been thought of as two separate business processes where there’s a critical handoff. We talk about it as a critical handoff.

But really, the way that I think about it is it’s one business process, and inside a company it’s focused on the revenue of your business. That starts from the time a marketing team targets a specific customer or prospect and they raise their hand and ask for more information or engage, all the way through to closed business.

So it’s one business process, not two separate business processes.

And oh, by the way, it’s aligned to something way more important than a sales team or a marketing team. It’s aligned to how a buyer buys your product. We forget that sometimes. We’re like, “Oh, well, the marketing process does this.” I’m like, oh no, no, no. We’re just trying to facilitate a buying process.

Brian: So the focus is the customer.

Heidi: Yeah. When you flip that and you look at the focus on the customer, all of a sudden marketing and sales, from an outreach and engagement perspective, have one unified goal, which is to move a buyer through a buying process.

When you have that change of mindset, that becomes really important. I’ve worked in businesses where we focused really cleanly on that critical handoff, and that handoff was treated as the most important piece. Frankly, it’s a critical piece, but it’s not the most important piece.

Brian: I appreciate that distinction. Back when I had written my book on lead generation, I talked about it being like track. I used to compete in the 4×100 race and how you don’t want to drop the baton, so I used that as an analogy.

But to your point, marketing now is going beyond handing off the lead. It goes all the way to how we continue with and retain our customers too.

Heidi: Yep. It should support that, and we have the tools to support that entire life cycle.

When I first joined Workfront, one of the things we did was, as soon as we handed off an opportunity to the sales team, it was like, “We’re out. We’re done. Check. We’re finished.”

Frankly, there are so many tools in a marketing toolkit that we can align with a selling motion and be more successful in helping to nurture prospects through a buying process. To me, that has been an evolution enabled by technology, and it’s critical in ensuring that sales and marketing are aligned.

Brian: As we talk about this whole idea of alignment, and you brought up measurements, it sounds easier said than done to get marketing and sales to agree on common goals and measurements. What have you found that works to get to that place where you’re looking at the same numbers?

Heidi: I think it has to start big picture and really understanding targets and targets by sales teams and working backward from there.

If we understand that as our goal, our goal from a marketing perspective is certainly to raise awareness for the business and drive demand for the business. But our ultimate goal is to drive revenue for the business.

If we can all understand our revenue goals and then the steps we need to take in order to get there, we can back out of that and ask: What kind of demand generation volumes do we need to have in order to meet those revenue goals?

Then we agree with the sales team not only on what qualification criteria we’re going to use and how we’re going to evaluate whether or not a lead is truly a good lead or a bad lead, but also ensure that from a volume perspective, the marketing team is lined up to support the revenue goals of the company.

Backing it out that way is really critical.

We’ve all been in situations where there’s a pendulum swing that goes from, “The leads are terrible and we’re getting way too many of them,” to, “The leads are high quality but we’re not getting enough of them.”

That’s a constant balancing act with the sales team. There may be reasons to shift or change qualification criteria based on the maturity of a field sales organization or a time during the market, like market seasonality. There are lots of reasons to make those changes, and you can’t do that in a vacuum.

Brian: As you talked about not doing things in a vacuum, often sales and marketing have different views of the universe, down to different views of what works, what doesn’t, and how we’re going to judge performance.

Sometimes we can mean the same thing but use different words to describe it. Sales may call it prospecting. Marketing may call it demand generation, for example.

When it comes to performance and strategy, you could be looking at different opposing data sets. What have you found to break down the silos and start having conversations so it feels like we understand and we’re working together?

Heidi: To me, you have to go all the way back to the customer, and you have to understand the buying process of a customer.

If you can look at the buying process of your customer and map that out to not only the activities and programs that you engage with in order to move that prospect or customer through a buying cycle, but also understand how it maps to a sales process, that is really important.

If you can map out the buying process from the time someone raises their hand or engages in some way all the way through to closing business and revenue, and understand how the customer or buyer operates during that and how that maps to our internal process, you can really demonstrate where marketing adds value and where sales adds value, and where both of us add value.

That’s where you can look at language and metrics and ensure that at each stage you have the right metrics that you all agree on and the right language you’re using to describe it.

To me, you have to go all the way back to: How does your customer buy your product?

If you don’t know that process and you don’t know how your marketing programs or your sales teams operate aligned to that, then you’re missing a big piece.

Brian: What do you suggest for a listener who says, “That sounds great. How might I go about doing it?”

What have you found works, or what advice might you have for someone who would like to go back to that beginning? Is it journey mapping? Is it interviewing customers? What are the steps you would recommend?

Heidi: I think it’s a combination. There is nothing more valuable than interviewing customers that have just been through that process.

As marketers, we don’t always have as much engagement directly with customers as I think we should. So sitting down with customers that have just gone through a sales cycle, understanding the process they went through, really listening to what their needs are, and starting to look at that is key, because you see commonalities for how customers buy whatever product it is.

Brian: Right.

Heidi: Then take that, make some assumptions, standardize it, and map it to internal processes.

We just did this recently at Workfront, and we learned a lot. One of the most valuable things we learned was that there were stages we weren’t touching. We weren’t touching the buyer in the buying cycle.

We were getting them to engage, but then we weren’t continuing that conversation in a way that helped move them forward, or we weren’t providing the kind of nurture programs that we could in the early stages of the sales cycle.

To me, taking the time to step back and spend time with customers, listening to how they buy software, is absolutely the place to start.

It’s great practice for marketing teams to do that work, and it creates a lot of synergy with the sales team. Many times, the criticism a sales team has is that they’re on the front lines. They’re the ones on the phone. They’re the ones in person talking to customers.

A common criticism is that the marketing team is sitting in a back room somewhere developing programs and campaigns and not listening to or touching customers.

Having and leading that discussion with a sales organization is really beneficial because it demonstrates the engagement that we all need to have with those customers as they go through a buying process.

Brian: I’m so glad you brought this up because I find that, for the most part, marketers often do get isolated, especially in B2B, because salespeople are often having more conversations, or sales development reps are, or whoever.

Marketing, in effect, is isolated. What you’re saying is, get this buyer insight, and from that marketers have a different perspective. We aren’t going to look at just how do we get the deal done, but how do we actually serve the customer and help them progress? So you can bring a different perspective. Is that what I’m hearing?

Heidi: That’s absolutely correct. It brings a different level of perspective, and it also takes away from where marketing teams can sometimes get stuck, which is in activity-driven programs where they’re doing a lot of programs that generate volume and activity but don’t necessarily move the ball forward.

Paying attention to how we can do things at different points in time to move the ball forward is awesome.

It also gives them a broader perspective of not just stopping when that lead is handed over. Like, we’re done. Marketing’s done. Marketing’s green. We’re good.

Certainly, take responsibility for that portion of it, but our job doesn’t stop there. Stepping back from the customer perspective is a way to do that.

Brian: As I’m listening to you, it sounds like helping marketers have that view of the customer and that buyer insight matters. What else can sales and marketing do to get this unified view of the customer?

Marketing might look at it from one perspective and sales will look at it from another perspective. Sales is really focused on what’s going to drive revenue in the first or second quarter, while marketing needs to think three, four, and years beyond that.

Heidi: I think the first step is to sit down and map it out together. You have to start somewhere.

I’m a true believer in starting with a rough idea based on customer insight of what that buying process looks like all the way through the life cycle, not stopping just at revenue, but looking at how we continue to engage those customers.

In the case of Workfront, like many businesses, we have a land-and-expand strategy where that relationship with customers continues well beyond that first sale.

Understanding that all the way through and having a first pass, and then sitting down as a senior leadership team and really refining it together, both the sales and marketing team members, is really valuable because then you start to share language like we talked about.

You start to understand where the disconnects are. Sometimes when you do that, there are insights that you uncover where you think, “Oh my gosh, they thought we were doing this and we thought they were doing this, and actually no one’s doing it. We have this big gap.”

It gives you a lot of visibility.

To me, that is an extremely valuable exercise, and it doesn’t have to be perfect either. People talk about journey mapping, and they spend months and months and sometimes years on mapping that journey.

To me, if you can get a basic journey down and map your business process to it, you’re going to be much farther ahead than most companies. The quicker you can move on that, the better.

Brian: So to sum it up, what I’m hearing is to get good enough so you can act on it. That’s where the value is. That’s where the find is through that shared learning.

Heidi: And then you refine it over time.

One of the most valuable things or tools that I have used in my career is when you bring together the sales team, the marketing team, and the finance team together as a revenue team, and you solve problems within that group. Things get a lot easier.

To me, that’s one of the tools that is really beneficial because we all have to be operating as a team. That’s the only way you can get away from, “Marketing’s not doing what they’re supposed to do,” or “Those salespeople aren’t doing what they’re supposed to be doing.”

We do it on a weekly basis at Workfront. We have a weekly revenue team meeting, and that includes our CFO. It includes our head of sales and myself, as well as folks on the operations team.

We go through a common set of metrics. We have one view of the truth, and then we also tackle challenges that we may have. For example, if we’re seeing something in our pipeline, we ask: How do we tackle that issue? What’s the right way to do that?

With that combination of people, we’re all tackling the problem. It’s not a marketing problem. It’s not a sales problem. It’s not a finance problem. It’s a revenue team problem. So there is shared ownership of issues.

Brian: Sometimes it can feel a bit like this dysfunctional triangle with marketing and sales and finance. What I love is that you’re saying, “No, this is actually a strength.”

By working together to solve problems, that changes things. Sometimes marketers feel like, “Well, finance doesn’t get it. They’re just trying to…” I spend most of my time justifying why what I need to do is going to make a difference in the business, and vice versa.

What I like is that you’re talking about actually working together, and it’s not just quarterly. You’re doing it weekly.

Heidi: We’re doing it weekly, and everyone brings a different lens. There’s a different lens brought to the table with each perspective, and that helps with problem solving.

Brian: That’s really cool. How can marketers raise the performance of sales or the process today?

Are there things you see right now, or gaps you’ve noticed, where marketers could start looking at how to raise the performance of the sales team and make a bigger impact?

Heidi: I think the strength of sales enablement programs is tremendous.

As you look at developing marketing campaigns, ensuring the inclusiveness of those campaigns with the BDR, ADM, inside sales function, as well as with the sales and sales leadership teams, and ensuring engagement and alignment, is really important.

To me, that is one of the most valuable pieces of communication: ensuring that the campaigns we’re investing a company’s money in are well understood and agreed to by the sales organization so they can support them as they continue through a buying process.

It isn’t just about developing a campaign to identify a lead and/or a qualified sales opportunity and stopping there.

Instead, it’s about developing the campaign and enabling the field representatives, whether they are on the phone or in person, to carry those same messages forward and giving them the tools to do that.

That is one thing I feel really strongly about.

One of the areas that can be frustrating when a sales and marketing team isn’t working well together is when the sales team says, “I don’t understand or know the campaigns you’re running in my territory.”

There’s no excuse for that anymore.

We have technology that enables that today, and we have common systems and platforms that we’re using, whether it be a marketing automation platform or a CRM platform. There’s no excuse.

To me, that’s a really important responsibility marketing has: ensuring that campaign development is not only informed, but also supported all the way through the buying process.

Brian: That’s great. We talked about sales enablement, but what other advice might you have for marketers and listeners who want to improve operating as one team?

I’ve heard regular meetings, getting the right people in the room, common language, and mapping from the customer. What else would you say would be helpful or marketers should be thinking about?

Heidi: I would say aligned and shared goals. A common set of key metrics that the entire team is looking at is extremely important.

It shouldn’t be metrics by team or by channel. It’s metrics for the marketing organization that we all play a role in.

In addition, ensuring that there’s visibility to the work going on in the business is important.

Not to be self-serving, but that’s one of the places Workfront actually helps us a lot. We can see what everyone else is working on, and that is a really valuable tool to ensure alignment and also ensure better use of our investment dollars so we’re not overlapping with each other or working against each other.

The visibility into the programs we’re investing in at a very detailed level is an important part of working together as an organization with a common goal.

Brian: As I’ve thought about what you’re able to do, you have this advantage where you’re in the business of helping companies work better and smarter and have that visibility without having to do reports. It’s right there.

As you think about what you see as a leader, what would you say is the most significant trend affecting your work today as a marketing leader?

Heidi: Marketing has changed so much. That’s such a loaded question because if you look over my tenure, not just at Workfront but over my career, the technology that we have at our fingertips today as marketers is literally overwhelming.

One of the skills that I think is really important for marketing leaders across marketing organizations, regardless of B2B or B2C, is to understand technology and the impact technology has on your business process.

It’s understanding where technology can help you solve problems, and looking at technology to support business process, not drive it.

The reason I say that is because I’ve worked in many organizations where there are so many tools out there that will solve problems. It’s really easy to say, “We have this problem. Let’s go get this tool.”

I call this “that-tool-itis,” and we’ve had our fair share of it. I’ve seen that at Workfront as well as other companies I’ve worked for.

Understanding at a deeper level how technology can support your business and your business goals is a really important skill.

That speaks to digital transformation. You think about marketing as one of the organizations in an enterprise that has been digitally transformed. We do marketing so differently today than we did 10 years ago.

Digital transformation has really driven lots of change, not just in marketing, but in departments in large enterprises. They’re constantly changing and having to adapt the way they work.

To me, that is the biggest change that’s going on in industry today. No company on the planet would say, “We’re not going to transform digitally.” Companies have to in order to keep up today.

But it happens department by department. Marketing is on the early end, but it’s changing the way knowledge workers work in any organization. To me, that’s the hardest thing to keep up with.

Brian: I think a lot of listeners are nodding as you’re speaking to this right now because we deal with it every day.

So with all this technology, how do you see empathy or customer empathy fitting in? We have this technology, and yet at the same time there’s this aspect of connection. How do we connect and better understand our customers? Where do you see empathy fitting into the mix in marketing right now?

Heidi: I think it is an area that has probably been overlooked.

As marketers, especially, have adopted technology, it’s become all about the data. It’s become about the analytics. It’s become about the numbers.

We’ve forgotten that there’s actually a customer on the receiving end, and it isn’t just about the numbers. It’s about tying to the emotions and how a customer feels as they go through a buying process.

Being deliberate about ensuring that messaging is targeting people is hard. It’s one of those things that I think a lot of companies have forgotten in this age of digital transformation and this age of an overwhelming amount of data.

The marketing job has become a data-centric job, not a people-centric job. I think that needs to balance out.

Both are critically important because, even in a B2B setting, you’re not selling to companies. You’re selling to people.

Unlocking the insights and emotional triggers that people have is how you’re going to move things forward. It’s how you can use technology to support that versus just using technology as an enabler.

I think it’s gotten lost as marketing has gone from almost 100% art to really science-based. We’ve forgotten the people component, and that’s something we have to layer back in.

The companies that are doing well are the ones that have done that successfully.

Brian: Yes. Well, you’ve been so great. How can listeners get in contact with you and learn more from you?

Heidi: Absolutely. You can follow me on Twitter at @heidimelin and then certainly check out Workfront.com.

Brian: Thank you so much.

Heidi: Thanks, Brian.

Do you routinely look for ways to bring more innovation into demand generation? Or do you feel like your marketing approach is falling behind?

A lot of marketers talk about innovation. Fewer connect it back to revenue, sales follow-up, customer experience, and the actual work of getting things done.

That is why I interviewed Jeanne Hopkins, then CMO at Lola.com, about how marketers can bring more innovation to demand generation without losing sight of the whole business.

Jeanne has led marketing in B2B technology companies, including HubSpot, Ipswitch, and Lola.com. In this conversation, she shares why creative ideas are not enough unless they get executed, why marketers need to think beyond leads, and why the best demand generation teams stay connected to sales, customers, employees, and the broader community.

We also talk about the danger of “arts and crafts marketing,” the importance of generating revenue, why marketers should walk a mile in the sales team’s shoes, and how empathy helps marketers understand customers, finance teams, office managers, and business travelers.

About Jeanne Hopkins

Jeanne Hopkins is a marketing leader with deep experience in B2B technology, demand generation, revenue marketing, and customer experience.

At the time of this interview, Jeanne was CMO at Lola.com, a corporate travel management solution for finance teams, office managers, and business travelers.

Connect with Jeanne:

• Jeanne Hopkins on X/Twitter
• Jeanne Hopkins on LinkedIn

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Jeanne Hopkins
00:31 Jeanne’s path from accounting to marketing
03:19 Driving innovation in demand generation
06:27 Avoiding arts and crafts marketing
09:41 The four circles of marketing
12:04 The immediacy trend in marketing
14:20 How marketing can help sales
23:31 Advice for future CMOs

A few things worth taking away

• Innovation in demand generation is not just about new ideas. It is about turning ideas into execution.
• Creative marketing that does not connect to revenue can become “arts and crafts marketing.”
• Marketing’s job is not just to generate leads. It is to help generate revenue and support the whole business.
• Marketers need strong relationships with sales leaders if they want demand generation to turn into real pipeline.
• Customer marketing matters because getting customers is not enough. You also need to keep them.
• Jeanne’s four circles are employees, customers, prospects, and community.
• People expect answers right away. Speed and responsiveness are now part of the customer experience.
• Marketers should secret-shop their own website, forms, chat, phone numbers, and follow-up process.
• Marketing teams should call and review their own leads so they understand what sales experiences.
• Empathy helps marketers understand sales teams, finance buyers, office managers, business travelers, and customers.
• Future CMOs need to communicate clearly, speak confidently, and present well to leadership and the board.

A few lines that stuck with me

“I don’t want to be a totally early adopter, but I want to be on the forefront before competition catches up with us.” — Jeanne Hopkins

“Being creative is great, but innovation isn’t going to matter unless you can get it done.” — Brian Carroll

“My job is to generate revenue.” — Jeanne Hopkins

“It’s not marketing. It’s not sales. It’s us together.” — Jeanne Hopkins

“If you don’t start with employees and customers, the rest of it is all for naught.” — Jeanne Hopkins

“Have you ever filled out one of those forms on your company?” — Jeanne Hopkins

“Walk a mile in their shoes and you’ll build some empathy for how hard it is.” — Jeanne Hopkins

Resources mentioned

• Jeanne Hopkins on X/Twitter
• Jeanne Hopkins on LinkedIn
• Lola.com
• Drift
• Expensify
• SAP Concur
• Toastmasters

You may also like

• What is empathy-based marketing?
• Why Marketers Fail at Customer Empathy and How to Fix it
• Getting sales enablement right to increase results

Listen and subscribe

If you found this episode helpful, subscribe to the B2B Roundtable Podcast wherever you listen.

Full transcript

Brian: Well, Jeanne, welcome to our show. I’m really excited to have you here. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about your background?

Jeanne: Well, thanks, Brian. My undergraduate degree is in accounting. Believe it or not, I started in an accounting office where I was told on my annual review that I probably didn’t have a future in accounting because I was too loud for the office.

Everything balanced, and everything was good, but I was too noisy for a nice, cut-and-dry accounting office. So that’s when I moved into toys. I worked for Milton Bradley Company in their in-house advertising agency. Then I moved to LEGO, and then I moved into other consulting companies.

Then I got into software, which was an internally funded company called Datum E-business Solutions, which delivered a trusted time application.

A long time ago, way back in the year 2000, it used to be that you’d send an email, and maybe somebody would send it back, but it would be three hours later or three hours before. That’s because networks were not on the same timing device.

So the whole concept of timing and having to be secure became critically important to all networks. From there, I was selling into IT, B2B technology companies, that sort of thing. So that’s my gig.

Brian: Very cool. You’re with Lola right now. Tell our listeners a little bit: what does Lola do?

Jeanne: Lola.com is a corporate travel management solution that allows finance people, office managers, and business travelers themselves to see their full travel and integrate with an expense platform.

I know, Brian, you’ve probably done some expenses before.

Brian: Yeah.

Jeanne: You take a picture of the expense, you watch it go into the cloud, you fill out the form, and it takes a half an hour or an hour. I bet you avoid it, right? It’s one of those things.

Brian: It’s something you wait until the last minute to do. If the reports are due on Monday, you’re doing it Sunday night.

Jeanne: Of course, taking away from family time.

Brian: Right.

Jeanne: We’re integrated with Expensify, Concur, and a whole bunch of different finance applications, as well as travel. So you can book your travel with us.

We have a complete support network that helps you get checked in and makes sure that when disruptions happen, like we were just talking about the polar vortex in Minnesota, people who aren’t traveling in and out because it’s too darn cold can be rerouted or brought back sooner or later.

Those are some of the hiccups that business travelers endure, and we’re trying to mitigate that for them.

Brian: Very cool. I wanted to highlight you because you’ve brought so much since you and I met. We could date ourselves a bit here, but way back, as we’re speaking, I think at a MarketingSherpa Conference.

Jeanne: 2006, yeah.

Brian: Yeah. I was really impressed by you and how you were bringing innovation, creativity, and out-of-the-box thinking. You’ve continued to do that throughout your career.

How did you start thinking differently about driving innovation and out-of-the-box thinking with how you do demand generation?

Jeanne: Well, I can’t claim the credit myself. I would say there were a couple of different influences.

Both my parents are, I call them, artists of a kind. My dad paints, he plays music, he writes. My mom sings and plays music and paints.

When I was in high school, I majored in art. We had to submit a portfolio and do all that, and I enjoy thinking from an artistic view of the world. That’s the left-handed component of me.

But then, when I graduated from high school, I went to college for accounting because I’m ultimately practical, right? I said I could always get a job adding things up.

What that’s allowed me to do is I read constantly. I read all the time. I’m always trying to look for something that’s a little bit different, a little bit ahead of the curve.

I don’t want to be a totally early adopter, but I want to be at the forefront before the competition catches up with us.

I’m lucky to have a creative outlook. My dad was a newspaperman. He was a managing editor of the newspaper in western Massachusetts, in Springfield, and I can look at things and look at story ideas.

Like, is this a story? Just us having a conversation right here, Brian, is a story, right?

Brian: Yes.

Jeanne: We each have a story. We have a backstory that goes back some 13 years now.

Brian: Right.

Jeanne: We know each other. We worked together. You have a family. You know my family. That’s a story.

So I sent a note to my internal content team, and I said, “Hey, I’m doing this podcast. When it gets published, I think we should do a press release and post it on the blog and backlink to Brian’s blog because that’s where he’s going to be posting it.”

But that’s not really creative. That’s all execution.

Brian: Right.

Jeanne: Don’t you think that’s where people kind of drop the ball?

Brian: I do. I think it’s like bringing the two pieces together.

What I’ve respected about you is that you were always willing to try something new, and you would see it through. You wouldn’t let it drop. I think it’s both sides.

Jeanne: Are you saying I’m a nag?

Brian: Well, I think a little bit. But you want things done well, and you personally own it.

That’s something for our listeners that I saw. Being creative is great, but you also had this very practical side you brought to it. Creativity isn’t going to matter much, or innovation isn’t going to matter, unless you can get it done.

Jeanne: A place I worked a few companies ago, one of the salespeople contacted me and said, “Oh, they’re completely rebranding. They’re doing all this kind of stuff.”

I feel like marketers that go the rebranding route, the new-logo route, they’re arts and crafts marketers because while that’s important and a brand is important, it’s not as important as generating revenue.

You want to be in a place, and you know this from InTouch, where you’re generating leads. You had a whole methodology of developing scripts, contacting people, and you had a multi-touch program.

So many salespeople, it’s like, okay, I generated almost 2,000 leads last month in January.

Brian: Yeah. That’s great.

Jeanne: But almost 1,000 of them were untouched by sales because we don’t have enough salespeople.

Working with an organization to make sure that if people are downloading content, you want them to get touched. They may not be ready to buy, but you want to make sure they’re touched.

So I’m trying to come up with a solution internally to figure out what I can do to help the sales organization achieve the revenue targets that we have as an organization.

I think one of the challenges that many marketers have is they don’t look at the whole business.

Brian: Yeah.

Jeanne: Because our job is not just as marketers. This concept of the arts and crafts marketer saying, “Okay, I’m going to change this logo from orange to pink,” and therefore all these people are going to come to us and say, “Oh, I love your new logo and can I buy from you?” That’s not going to happen.

You haven’t given anybody anything of value.

I feel, and have always felt, that my job is to generate revenue. If I’m not attached to revenue at a reasonable ROI, I mean, I could be attached to revenue but I don’t want to be expensing so much in the variable expense that happens in marketing. I want it to be fair to that company.

Brian: Right.

Jeanne: That becomes challenging for many marketers.

If I looked at what this brand person is doing, you’re going to spend a couple hundred thousand dollars with an agency. You’re going to go through this whole process. My understanding is this individual has been there for eight months, and the sales team hasn’t seen a single lead.

I would stick a fork in my eye if that was the case. My job is to generate leads.

I have to have an excellent relationship with sales. I want to make sure that the sales leader I’m working with is somebody that I like and respect, and we’re joined at the hip so that together we can grow the business.

It’s not marketing. It’s not sales. It’s us together.

Brian: As I listen to you, I want to call attention to something you’ve said. It’s so important that you go beyond the lead. You’re looking at the whole business and focused on revenue.

Some people call it full-funnel marketing. I think it’s just part of being a good marketer: looking at execution.

How do we take this person we built a relationship with, or started a conversation with, and carry it through to helping them become a customer?

Jeanne: Yes. And stay a customer.

Brian: Yes.

Jeanne: Because when you really think about it, I feel like there are four circles.

The center circle is employees. If employees don’t have a sense of what’s going on and they’re not being communicated with — here are the events that are coming up, here are the PR things that are coming up — what’s the full transparency so that employees know what’s going on with product, marketing, sales, team, and everything?

The next one is customers. Unfortunately, customer marketing as a concept is not something marketers really dig. They know customers are there, but they don’t really think about them until they’re gone.

You have to figure out a way to communicate with your customers. How is the product keeping them sticky? Is the service department doing the right thing? Are the customers successful with the product?

Then the next level is prospects. A lot of marketers just focus on prospects. What’s the conversion rate, visit to lead, visit to CTA, CTA to opportunity, opportunity to customer?

That’s all great, but you also have a community. When I worked at HubSpot, as an example, we had a million people who were part of the community.

They were not going to become customers, but you know what they did? They amplified content. We had a new ebook on something, sent it out, the community would leverage it, and that’s really what you want.

But if you don’t start with employees and customers, the rest of it is all for naught.

Prospects look at reviews. Prospects look at what other people are buying. You have to have a really strong core of employees and customers. That’s the holistic view in my mind.

Brian: As I talk with CEOs, I hear the metrics they care a lot about are customer acquisition cost and lifetime value because those tie together the diagram you just talked about.

How much effort and money do we need to spend to acquire a customer, and how well are we keeping them?

Jeanne: Right.

Brian: That’s something, as you’re highlighting, that’s so important, and I’m glad that you talked about it.

What would you say is the most significant trend affecting your work today as a marketer?

Jeanne: I think it’s the immediacy of things.

I think we are all suffering. You’ve read about the attention span of a goldfish and all that kind of stuff.

Brian: Yeah.

Jeanne: But it’s the concept that we use Drift on our website because people want to get information right away.

At my previous company, Ipswitch, we implemented Drift. It was a global company. We expanded the hours for the third-party company that was monitoring all of our Drift interactions, acting as kind of a tier zero to funnel people to the community, answer in Spanish, and do different things with our Drift implementation.

Over the course of eight months, we generated $3.6 million worth of pipeline because people got answers right away.

We’ll set up a demo. We’ll make sure you get to the right salesperson.

There’s such a flood of information. People want information. They want answers right away.

So the great thing about Drift and this implementation that we leveraged is that it is a personal one. It’s not a robot. It’s, “You want some help? Let’s schedule this. Let’s do this.”

Point them in the right direction to get people the answers they want when they want them.

I’m sure you’ve had these instances where you send a note, and this has been happening to me increasingly. You send a note to the contact desk email thing, you fill out the form, and you never hear back.

It’s just a black hole.

You wonder as a marketer, have you ever filled out one of those forms on your company? Do you know if anybody’s ever going to get back to you?

What a wasted opportunity.

Brian: I just want to call out a great tip: be a secret shopper of your own web experience, your own 800 experience, and even your own Drift experience. How does it feel?

Seeing things from the customer point of view, and thinking about connecting with salespeople, what can marketers do to raise the performance of salespeople and drive more revenue right now, in your opinion?

Jeanne: It’s an opinion, but I think most marketing people would benefit from some sales experience.

I’m lucky enough, in the course of my career, to have worked in sales. I carried a bag and carried a quota.

I like marketing people to feel that they’re tied to sales and their ability to hit their numbers. It’s not just, “Here, I generated a thousand leads and throw them over the fence. You deal with them.”

Have you ever called any of those leads? Have you ever touched any of those leads when people are saying, “I don’t know who you are. I never downloaded this. I never did that.” That happens all the time.

Brian: Yeah.

Jeanne: If salespeople, out of every 10 leads they get, hear eight of those say, “I don’t know who you are. I don’t know why you’re calling me. I don’t know this,” they’re going to start to avoid the leads you’re sending them.

Brian: Yes.

Jeanne: Even though you tell salespeople you’re going to have 100 nos before you get a yes, selling is hard. It’s very, very difficult.

It’s our job as marketers to scrub the leads. That’s what I’m trying to do here. Before I throw them over the fence, I want to scrub them.

We’ve taken out international. We’ve pushed to nurture anything that’s a public email address. They want company email addresses, and we’re trying to narrow this down as far as our service-level agreement with them.

My advice would be: walk a mile in their shoes, and you’ll build some empathy for how hard it is.

Brian: That’s something I wanted to talk to you about. Do you think marketers need to use more empathy with their approach, both to helping sales and with customers? If so, why?

Jeanne: I think empathy’s a tough thing, Brian.

You talk about the emotional quotient, like the intelligence quotient, your EQ. We all come at things slightly differently.

I think understanding who you’re trying to sell to matters. So, finance people, for example. I’m lucky enough in my career that I’ve always had a good relationship with finance people.

If I want more money, for whatever reason, I want to be able to say, “Give me $100,000 and I’ll get you $500,000, and this is how I’m going to do it. I’ve done it before.” That sort of thing.

Most marketers, with finance people, are over budget and don’t understand how to talk to a finance person.

Brian: Yes.

Jeanne: Let’s talk about finance people in travel.

Finance people are the bad guys. They’re always the bad guys, right?

They’re the ones that kick back your expense reports. They’re the ones that say, “This isn’t going to be covered.” They’re the ones that say, “You need to get your invoices in within the next five days,” or your expense reports or whatever.

It’s always bad cop, bad cop, bad cop.

These people don’t travel, so what do you think their viewpoint is of a salesperson who is traveling or maybe overspending? How do you think they feel?

Brian: They probably feel the person is being irresponsible or not looking out for the best interest of the company. Or, at the worst end of it, they feel like they’re entitled and want the white-tablecloth treatment.

Jeanne: Yes. They want to be business class.

If you’re a finance person and you rarely travel, how can we talk to them?

We’ve been doing this series of webinars on implementing a travel policy. How to sell your travel policy within an organization. How to take the pain out of creating a travel policy.

In our consult, we can put parameters like nobody takes a first-class trip. They can bypass it, but if you’ve set up a travel policy and somebody books first class to go to Austin or something, it gets triggered, and they know that when they were doing it, it was out of policy. That’s very intentional.

It’s sort of like video cameras at Walmart or something. You’re looking at it going, “Oh, well, okay, you’re being watched a little bit.”

That provides a level of transparency and clarity to the employee, where most employers have policies that are “use your best judgment.”

So what is your best judgment?

Your best judgment is what? I need to stay at the Intercontinental for $400 a night? And you’re like, “Oh, no. The La Quinta’s perfectly fine for 99 bucks a night.”

What’s reasonable? Is the La Quinta 20 miles away from your meeting and you have to rent a car for $150 in order to go back?

It’s trying to rationalize what works and what doesn’t work for an organization, but also taking the emotion out of it.

Brian: It’s interesting because you’re thinking of the experience of what it’s like to be in finance, and you’re trying to help solve the problem they’re dealing with.

We’re human. We don’t want to feel like the bad guys all the time, even people in finance or HR or whoever it may be. They serve a huge value to the organization in driving profitability and ensuring people have payroll met and all these important things.

Jeanne: Absolutely.

Brian: It sounds like you’re trying to see from their experience how to make it better, and then you focus on helping them solve it.

Jeanne: Another example is another persona that is a user: the office manager or whoever is responsible in the office for booking.

You’re responsible for booking people to go from office A to office B on a regular basis. If you had the ability to see this all in one place rather than worrying about this person’s travel itinerary and that person’s travel itinerary —

Brian: Yeah.

Jeanne: What we figured out from an ROI calculator that I worked on is that the average business trip takes 60 minutes to book.

You go to four to five sites. You might go to Marriott. You might go to JetBlue. You might go to Delta. You’re trying to map out your itinerary.

You’re trying to get it for a reasonable price but also on your schedule because you want to be home on Friday night. You want to be home Friday night no later than 5:00 so that you can have supper with your family and watch a movie, right?

But if you had a choice, this becomes problematic for people. Then you, as an individual, are talking to Donna at the front desk about, “No, I want to come back here.”

You’re going back and forth, back and forth. The flight is gone. This is that.

If you could manage it all, save time, and save productivity, that’s good for the company. It’s good for you as the traveler and for that poor office manager who is like a rock-hard wall.

That’s having the degree of empathy for the user, the customer, and as a business traveler too, because we want to help them be able to get home.

The busiest travel times that we see are Sunday nights. People start booking Sunday night, and they’re booking Mondays and Tuesdays for travel.

It might be traveling out two weeks, but they’re thinking about their schedule.

Another thing that happens is people don’t think about changes. Think about the business trips you’ve been on. I’m pretty sure one out of three of your business trips changes.

You book it out two weeks in advance, and then suddenly somebody wants to meet you here. They can’t meet you at this time. They’re gone.

So you end up trying to change your travel, and your flights are not refundable, and your hotel is prepaid.

What do you do?

Those are some costs because you can’t get your money back.

Brian: Right.

Jeanne: So we’re trying to deal with refundables and say, don’t always go non-refundable because you’ve got a one-out-of-three chance that’s going to go away. You might as well spend the extra 50 bucks to make it refundable and not worry about it.

Brian: What I’m hearing is, again, you’re looking from the experience of the customer. You said earlier, for the sales team, walking in their shoes, but also looking at the emotions you’re dealing with: frustration, annoyance, anger.

Jeanne: Yes.

Brian: And helping them feel more calm because business travel is hard and bringing sanity to it for that person.

For our listeners, can you share your favorite advice for someone who wants to get better at demand generation? And along with this, I’m thinking about someone who wants to be a leader like yourself. You’ve led in marketing. How can someone improve and get better at their career to someday be a CMO?

Jeanne: I would say the most important thing they need to learn is how to speak.

They need to know how to speak in front of a group without using all those crutch words.

If we’re talking on this podcast and every other word I said was “um,” “you know,” or “like,” those are all crutch words that we don’t feel comfortable listening to.

Brian: Right.

Jeanne: I would suggest that people who want to move forward in their careers join a group like Toastmasters or start a group like Toastmasters, so they have the practice of being able to do this.

That way, you can have conversations on webinars, on podcasts, and present in front of your company.

As you know, speaking in front of people is extremely intimidating.

How do you get over that hump where the people in the audience are feeling just as scared as you are?

You need the ability to present your company and present your point of view.

If you get called into a board meeting, and every CMO is in the board meeting every single board meeting, you have to be able to present your information in a way that makes sense to the board and builds that level of internal confidence.

That would be the advice I would share.

Brian: I really appreciate your advice.

I was talking to another marketer who said the reason he speaks at events outside of his company is that his internal credibility went up because he was speaking at all these places outside. There was a bit of that halo effect, not to mention the experience you just talked about of being a better communicator.

We could talk a lot more, but what’s the best way for readers or listeners to get in touch with you and follow your advice? I know you’re on Twitter. What are some of the other ways?

Jeanne: Twitter and LinkedIn connections are good. I like being connected on LinkedIn with people.

That’s pretty much it, or you can email me at jeanne@Lola.com, and I’ll be glad to help out in any way that I can.

Brian: Well, Jeanne, thanks again. I really enjoyed catching up with you today.

Jeanne: Thanks a lot, Brian.

Brian: All right.

Most B2B buyers do not want to wait.

They come to your website with questions, context, and intent. But too many B2B companies still force them through forms, delayed follow-up, and disconnected sales processes.

That is the problem conversational marketing was built to address.

In this episode of the B2B Roundtable Podcast, I talk with Dave Gerhardt, then VP of Marketing at Drift and now founder of Exit Five, about how B2B companies can use real-time conversations to connect with buyers while they are ready to engage.

At the time of this conversation, Dave and Drift were helping define the conversational marketing category. They were also challenging one of the most familiar habits in B2B demand generation: putting forms in front of content and calling every form fill a lead.

The short version: buyers do not always want another piece of gated content. They often want an answer. They want help. They want a path forward without having to wait for someone to follow up later.

We get into why content has become a commodity, how the #noforms movement started, why chatbots should handle digital paperwork instead of replacing humans, how plain text emails build trust, and why the BDR problem is often a process problem, not a people problem.

If your website still treats every buyer the same way, this conversation will help you rethink what it means to help buyers in the moment.

About Dave Gerhardt

Dave Gerhardt, also known as DG, was VP of Marketing at Drift when this interview was recorded. He helped build Drift’s brand and helped popularize the conversational marketing category.

Dave is now the founder of Exit Five, a community and media company for B2B marketers. He is also known for his work on founder brand, B2B marketing, content, community, and practical marketing leadership.

Connect with Dave:

• @davegerhardt on X/Twitter
• Dave Gerhardt on LinkedIn
• Exit Five

What we cover

00:00 Introduction to Dave Gerhardt and Drift
01:08 What conversational marketing means
02:59 Rethinking content and lead generation
05:31 How the no forms movement started
08:47 Capturing leads without relying on forms
09:50 Real-time conversations on your website
14:24 How empathy powers conversational marketing
18:18 Reverse engineering how you like to buy

A few things worth taking away

• Traditional B2B marketing systems were built for later: fill out a form now, wait for follow-up later.
• Modern buyers expect immediacy. They are used to getting answers, rides, products, and help in real time.
• Content is no longer enough to differentiate. Everyone has blogs, podcasts, videos, and PDFs.
• Gating a low-intent content asset does not automatically make someone a qualified lead.
• The #noforms movement was not about removing every form overnight. It was about challenging marketers to create a better path for buyers.
• Conversational marketing can create a fast lane for high-intent buyers who want answers now.
• Bots should not replace humans. They should handle the digital paperwork that forms used to handle.
• Timing matters. Asking for a demo on the first blog visit feels different than asking after someone has returned several times.
• Empathy starts by remembering that people do not browse B2B websites for fun. They are usually there for a reason.
• Plain text emails can work because they feel closer to how real people communicate.
• If BDRs are rewarded for activity volume alone, they will often create low-quality activity. That is a process problem.
• The best way to start is with one contained experiment, such as a request-demo page, contact-us page, pricing page, or high-intent website path.

A few lines that stuck with me

“Drift connects you now with the people who are ready to buy now.” — Dave Gerhardt

“Most of the traditional marketing and sales systems were built for later.” — Dave Gerhardt

“You can’t just write a four-page PDF and slap a form in front of it and say, ‘Here you go sales team. Here are some leads.’” — Dave Gerhardt

“How do you ask a question to a form? You can’t.” — Dave Gerhardt

“We don’t use bots to replace a human. We use bots to handle the digital paperwork.” — Dave Gerhardt

“Nobody is just browsing a B2B website for fun.” — Dave Gerhardt

“Think about how you buy, and start thinking about how you can reverse engineer your buying process to match what you would like.” — Dave Gerhardt

“The reason they do bad things is because they’re not incentivized to do the good things.” — Dave Gerhardt

Resources mentioned

• Drift
• Conversational Marketing by David Cancel and Dave Gerhardt
• Exit Five
• Quote Investigator on the “sharpen the axe” quote

Listen and subscribe

If you found this episode helpful, subscribe to the B2B Roundtable Podcast wherever you listen.

Full transcript

Brian Carroll:
Well, cool. Dave, I’m glad to have you with us today. Tell us a little bit about your background and what you all do at Drift.

Dave Gerhardt:
So, my background. I don’t even know where to start. I love marketing. I do marketing at Drift. VP of Marketing. Been here for three-ish years, right since the beginning of the company.

The way that I talk about Drift is Drift connects you now with the people who are ready to buy now, which is a big change from how traditional marketing typically works, where most of the traditional marketing and sales systems were built for later.

Go to my website, fill out this form, and somebody on the team is going to follow up with you later.

But there has been a huge shift in the way that we all behave and communicate online, and the now is more important than ever.

I think about walking outside this building. If I called a Lyft on my phone, the driver would be there in about one to two minutes, and that is what we expect from everything.

Except in the B2B world, where the rules, for some reason, don’t apply to how we actually all do things in real life.

Brian Carroll:
Right.

Dave Gerhardt:
So our mission at Drift is really to transform the way businesses buy from businesses, and the way that we do that is through conversational marketing.

What is conversational marketing?

Brian Carroll:
That sets us up. You have this new book coming out. I have highlights all over this book, and I wanted to talk about it. What motivated you to write the book? Why now?

Dave Gerhardt:
The reason we wrote the book is because we heard so much about the power of conversational marketing, and we felt it firsthand.

We use conversational marketing and Drift to run our whole business, and we have become one of the fastest-growing companies in this industry. It’s not because we have some secret. Our secret has been that we’ve used our own product and really made conversations the center of our business.

As we created this category of conversational marketing and started to educate more people about it, we were like, “You know what? It’s time to write the book.”

We had enough stuff to say and enough case studies, examples, methodologies, playbooks, and blueprints.

We said, “Let’s make 2019 the year that we write the book and do the best job we can trying to help educate the future of marketing and sales on this next wave.”

Why content and lead generation need to change

Brian Carroll:
As I read through it, you started with this premise that marketers need to rethink the way they’re doing content and lead generation. Why is that?

Dave Gerhardt:
Because content is a commodity.

Everybody has a podcast. Everybody has a blog. Everybody is in video. Everybody is on social media.

Five or ten years ago, you could say, “You know what makes us unique? We are a B2B company, and we have a blog.” And people were like, “Blogging? No way!”

Today, all that stuff is a commodity.

Nobody is going to be on their commute home tonight thinking, “You know what I wish I had more of? I wish I had more content from a B2B brand. I need another B2B podcast.”

There has to be some other way to compete.

You can’t just write a four-page PDF and slap a form in front of it and say, “Here you go sales team. Here are some leads.” We are all starting to ignore that.

I try to avoid filling out forms if I can. I hate talking on the phone. I never answer numbers that don’t normally call me. I never reply to cold emails.

Something had to give. That is the shift we have seen in the market.

David Cancel, who I wrote this book with, calls it the shift from supply to demand.

Customers have all the power today. Ten years ago, they didn’t have any of the power.

If you sold iced coffee, you could be the only person who sold iced coffee. You could say, “Brian, you have to go through my process. You want one of my iced coffees? Come back at 5 o’clock tonight, call me on this number, and I’ll talk to you.”

Now customers have all the power. By the time I’m ready to buy an iced coffee, I have already evaluated four or five other companies, and I’m there in your store for a reason.

It’s about adapting to the way people behave and want to interact online. Information is free now. It’s not something that can be a differentiator for you anymore.

How the #noforms movement started

Brian Carroll:
I first heard about this a year ago, this whole idea of the #noforms movement. For our readers who are not familiar, what do you mean by no forms? How did this happen?

Dave Gerhardt:
You need no forms because marketers got into this world of abusing forms. And I’m not preaching to anybody. I did this too.

One of the first things I did at Drift was write an article about the growth marketing influencers you should follow on Twitter. I made a Twitter list, put it in a Google Sheet, and put a form behind it.

I said, “Hey, you want to get my list of 50 people to follow on Twitter? Put your email in here.”

That person is not a lead. There is no intent there. I’m just gating something that is a commodity.

We started the #noforms movement to challenge marketers to rethink how they do demand gen and how they capture leads.

It started because about three years ago David Cancel called me one morning on my way into work. He said, “Hey, you got a second?”

I knew something was wrong because he never talks on the phone. He only texts. He only sends IMs, Slack, WhatsApp, and text messages.

So when he called me, I was like, “I’m getting fired. Here we go.”

It was actually worse than getting fired.

He said, “I think we need to get rid of all the lead forms on our website and our content.”

I was like, “Okay. And do what? I’m your first marketing person here. You pay me to generate leads, and you’re taking that away? What are you going to measure me on?”

He said, “You’re missing the point. If we’re going to build a business around conversations, we need to lead the way. We need to remove our forms and show businesses how to generate demand and drive sales without having to gate content and use lead forms.”

It was a major moment for us. If we were going to build this thing, we had to live it firsthand.

It wasn’t just a marketing lesson. I remember sitting next to two of our engineers. We shared a little table together, and they said, “Okay, you’ve got no forms, so what would you do here?”

We were building it as we went.

It was transformational for our business because we got to see how it worked firsthand. Then we got to go and educate the world.

You say “no forms” to marketers and people are going to jump off the side of the boat.

But for us, it was, “Hold on. Let me show you how you would do a webinar registration without a form. Let me show you how you would do this on your pricing page without a form.”

That gave us an opportunity to educate the market.

How to capture leads without relying only on forms

Brian Carroll:
For other marketers hearing this, it still stings and feels like heresy, this idea of no forms. If I get rid of forms, what do we do to capture leads? How do we engage people who stop by?

Dave Gerhardt:
The short answer is to have a conversation.

That is why Drift exists. The way you capture leads now is by having an actual conversation with somebody.

Forms work. The best advice I could give you is, don’t actually replace your forms at first. That is what you do eventually after you are successful with conversational marketing.

Use conversational marketing in addition to your forms to start.

You create a second net that creates a fast lane for the best people. If somebody has high intent and lands on your website, they don’t want to fill out a form. They want to get an answer now.

Drift creates a fast lane for those best people.

And how do you ask a question to a form? You can’t. You either fill it out or you don’t.

Real-time conversations on your website

Dave Gerhardt:
We see this happen all the time. Somebody will come in on our website, and when a named account comes to the website, our sales reps get a notification on their phone that says, “Hey, the VP of Marketing at Dropbox is on the website right now.”

We had an example like this. The CMO at Starbucks comes to the website and says, “I was interested in doing this, but it looks like you don’t integrate with Slack, so we’re not a good fit.”

At that moment, the sales rep pops in and says, “Whoa, hold on a second. We do integrate with Slack. Can I show you? Here’s a help doc.”

Long story short, they have a 40-minute conversation. That turns into a demo. That deal closes a month later.

How does that happen in the world of a form? It doesn’t.

The only opportunity is you either fill out the form or you don’t. There is no conversation, and that is the heart of conversational marketing.

Using bots and AI to handle digital paperwork

Dave Gerhardt:
The next question people ask is, “Does that mean my team has to sit there on chat waiting for new messages 24/7?”

No. That is where we use bots and AI.

We don’t use bots to replace a human, and we don’t want to put anybody out of a job. We use bots to handle the digital paperwork, the stuff that was normally used for a form.

A bot can ask the same questions a form can ask in two seconds instead of adding the friction of someone filling out a form.

That way, as a marketer, I can do what I’m good at, which is getting people to talk about Drift and coming to our website. And sales can take calls all day.

That is the kind of relationship conversational marketing can help create.

Creative ways brands use conversational marketing

Brian Carroll:
As I’m listening to you, I think of two ways of building a relationship. One is if you get rid of forms, you’re making things available to people and helping them. And two, it’s through conversation. That is how we build relationships.

Do you have any stories of brands applying this?

Dave Gerhardt:
There are so many. I’ve seen creative ways people have used conversational marketing.

We have a customer who uses it not to book sales meetings, but to sell tickets to their event. Every person that lands on that website gets a message: “Hey Brian, nice to see you here. Did you know that right now we’re running two-for-one tickets? Do you want to get one?”

That is a conversation to sell event tickets.

We have customers who use conversational marketing instead of forms to do webinar registration, and it makes webinar registration one click. It can double the number of conversions by simplifying the webinar registration.

A lot of people use conversational marketing with content: “Hey, you just finished reading this article about thing X. I bet you’d also like part two, which is about thing Y. Do you want to go check that out?”

The bot leads them to another piece of content.

Customer experience and timing

Dave Gerhardt:
It would be annoying if every time you visited our blog, a bot said, “Do you want a demo of Drift?”

You would say, “No. I just want to read this article.”

But what if on the fifth time you come to our blog, we ask for the demo? And the message is, “Hey, let’s be honest. You kind of come here a lot. Can I show you what the Drift product is all about?”

That is such a different ask. It’s about being more patient and doing it when the time is right.

Imagine you had a store. If every person who walked in was asked, “Do you want to buy something? Do you want to buy something now? Can I show you where to buy something?” you would scare them away.

But that is how most B2B companies operate on their website.

How empathy powers conversational marketing

Brian Carroll:
We know how that feels in the retail setting. We don’t want to have that experience. How do you see empathy playing a role in conversational marketing?

Dave Gerhardt:
Most B2B marketers treat the people on their website like they are dumb.

Like they did no research and just stumbled on your website in the middle of the desert and said, “What does this cybersecurity company do?”

It doesn’t happen that way.

Nobody is just browsing a B2B website for fun. You are not lying in bed on a Saturday morning going through B2B company websites.

Step one is to understand that the people who are there are there for a reason. They probably listen to your podcasts, watch your videos, read your blog, got on your email list, or heard from a friend.

If someone comes to the Drift website and does not find what they want, they are going to Google “Drift alternative” and find one of our competitors.

It is all about empathy. It is understanding who somebody is and why they are on your website.

My wife and I bought a new car about a month ago. We walked into the dealership and already had everything narrowed down. We just wanted a test drive.

That is how we behave as people. That is how we all buy.

But then something happens in our brains when we go to work in sales and marketing. We say, “I have to make sure we don’t tell them anything about this unless they talk to us.”

The old sales rep tactic was, “You want to know the price? Let’s get on a call.”

No. Just tell me the price over email.

It starts with empathy and understanding that the goal should be to have a conversation with somebody who is in your store. Your store as a B2B company is your website.

If I had a store, I’d have somebody in front and somebody in the aisles saying, “I’m here if you need anything. Let me know if you have any questions.” That is how we think about conversational marketing.

Put the customer first

Brian Carroll:
We’re all customers, and yet when you’re a marketer, you’re not your customer. You need to think about that experience and ask how you can help them.

Dave Gerhardt:
The customer has to be first.

The easiest way to be empathetic is to think about what type of marketing you react to.

We don’t ever think like this. We think, “I’m just going to send this email for the fourth time in three days.”

Hold on. We are all the same. I’m not B2B Dave at work and then Dave the dad at home. I am the same person in all walks of life.

We live in a world where I can order Starbucks on my phone. I can order a car on my phone. I can order four boxes of diapers and have them sent to my house tomorrow.

Then when you go to a B2B website, we want things to work the same, but they don’t.

To break into empathy, you do not have to only think about what somebody else feels. Think about how you buy. Think about the last thing you bought, and start reverse engineering your buying process to match what you would like.

Why plain text emails work

Brian Carroll:
In the book, you talked about the power of plain text emails. Why plain text emails?

Dave Gerhardt:
This is something we first started doing about three years ago. We did plain text emails because people started to get banner blindness in email.

When I saw a highly designed HTML banner email, I was like, “This is a promotion from a company.”

We wanted all of our emails to look and feel like they were being sent from a friend.

Our whole email marketing strategy was, “I’m going to a wedding with my family in New York. I’m meeting my mom and dad at the train tomorrow. How would I email my mom to make sure we’re going to be there on time?”

The subject line would be “Tomorrow?”

“Hey mom, I’m just making sure we’re still on for tomorrow. We’ll be there at 1 o’clock. Do you need anything from me?”

Why do our marketing emails have to be different than that? That is how we talk. That is how we communicate.

So we started thinking: what if we ditched the banners, ditched the design, and started sending plain text emails written like they were from a friend?

Making marketing feel human

Brian Carroll:
It was written as if it came from a real person, because it did.

Dave Gerhardt:
The thing that was frustrating for me was I got responses from people like, “You’re trying to be too sneaky. I don’t like this. It felt like a real person.”

Wait a second. Doesn’t that say something about the state of the industry?

B2B marketing is not supposed to sound like a real person?

No. That is exactly why we are doing it. I want it to sound like a real person.

When you subscribed to our blog, you would get an email from me that said, “Hey, I just want to get this out of the way. My name is Dave, and I’m VP of Marketing at Drift. Even though this is an automated email, I wanted to let you know I’m a real person, I’m really here, and I actually wrote this. If you ever get spammed or feel like your inbox is being disrespected, just email me directly.”

That email disarms people because it says: I’m a real person. Nobody is trying to spam you. We’re real. We’re human.

That little piece of humanity helped us build a relationship with those early subscribers.

Treating people as people, not leads

Brian Carroll:
The way I would describe it is that you’re treating people as people, not as leads. Not as objects to convert.

When I first started, before it was called business development reps, my VP of Sales said to me, “Just be people with people.”

I was 23. I was an intern trying to sound important because I was calling executives. When I embraced the fact that I was 23, didn’t have a lot of experience, and was just who I was, there was authenticity.

Dave Gerhardt:
I love that.

No 23-year-old BDR is going to know more about marketing than me. That’s not a knock. You just graduated college and are in an entry-level sales job.

If you reach out and try to tell me that you can triple my conversion, there’s no way.

So how can you be human? How can you show who you really are?

“Hey, look, I’m at this company. I’m not a marketing person, but we have this product that has seen great results for customers like you. Can I show you how it works?”

That little change makes such a difference.

Why the BDR problem is often the process

Brian Carroll:
You talk about the problem with business development reps being the process, not the people. How do you mean?

Dave Gerhardt:
It’s probably not a people problem.

The reason sales, marketing, or BDR teams do bad things is because they are not incentivized to do the good things.

If you say, “Brian, you’re a 23-year-old BDR. You have to make 200 calls today. That’s all I care about,” what are you going to do? You’re going to make 200 calls.

Or, “You have to send 300 emails today.” Then you’re going to send a bunch of automated, terrible emails.

If you incentivize behavior like that, then of course that will be the result.

But if you said, “You need to get two meetings a day. I don’t care about how many activities, inputs, or outputs. Two meetings a day.”

There are two ways to do that.

You could send 300 emails and hope you get two replies, which probably means you have to blast people.

Or you could reach out to six perfect dream customers and book two meetings from that. That means you spend half your day doing research.

It’s the same process for sales and marketing that we have to bring back.

How to start with conversational marketing

Brian Carroll:
If we were having coffee together and I said, “Dave, how do I get into conversational marketing? Where can I start?” what would you say?

Dave Gerhardt:
Pick one to two things, one to two places where you can be successful right away.

The biggest mistake people make is, “I bought Drift. It’s everywhere. Let’s see what happens.”

No. What is your plan?

Most websites have a contact-us button or request-demo page, and that pops out a 13-field, 15-field, or 20-field form. That is easy. We could replace that.

Start with that one page. Have a contained experiment on that one page. Prove out success and then start to expand.

Then put it on the pricing page. Then put it on the homepage. Then put it on the blog.

You need a motion that you are trying to improve. Maybe you think you can double the conversion rate on your homepage by doing this.

Start with one or two familiar patterns, whether it is your blog or your request-demo button, and learn.

You will learn more than you thought you would. Some people say, “I only want to book sales demos.” Then they start using Drift and say, “I haven’t booked a demo yet, but I’ve had five conversations this morning that blew my mind, and now I need to change my homepage.”

That is the stuff you cannot quantify until you get out there and have real conversations with people.

Closing

Brian Carroll:
Very cool. What’s the best way for readers and listeners to get in touch with you and find out more about the book?

Dave Gerhardt:
I’m Dave Gerhardt, one word, pretty much everywhere online: Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram. The easiest way to find out about the book is Drift.com/book.

Brian Carroll:
Fantastic. For our listeners, we’re going to put these links in the show notes. Dave, thanks for joining us. I really enjoyed our conversation and look forward to us talking more.

Dave Gerhardt:
Thank you. I appreciate it, Brian. Thanks for doing it. I know we had a bunch of back and forth trying to get it done, so I’m glad to do it and thanks for talking sales and marketing with me.

B2B lead generation has had to reinvent itself over the last decade.

Sales teams have always taken an account-based view. They think in terms of target accounts, buying committees, opportunities, and relationships.

Marketing, though, has often been trained to think in terms of leads.

That creates a problem.

In B2B, you are almost never selling to one individual. You are selling into a buying team. And the bigger the deal, the more people, departments, and functional areas get involved.

That is why many B2B marketers eventually hit a wall with a purely lead-based approach.

Account-based marketing is not just a campaign. It is not just advertising to a list of target accounts. And it is not just marketing.

ABM works best when sales, marketing, customer success, and other revenue-generating teams operate together around the accounts that matter most.

That is why I interviewed Jon Miller, then CEO and co-founder of Engagio. Jon and his team had just released the second edition of The Clear and Complete Guide to Account-Based Marketing.

In this conversation, Jon explains how account-based marketing differs from traditional demand generation, why marketers need to adopt the language of accounts, and how empathy, relevance, and measurement all fit into a stronger ABM strategy.

About Jon Miller

Jon Miller has spent his career building marketing technology companies. He co-founded Marketo with Phil Fernandez and later co-founded Engagio, an account-based marketing platform.

Jon brings a deep perspective on marketing automation, account-based marketing, revenue teams, customer data, and how B2B companies can move beyond lead-based thinking.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Jon Miller and Engagio
00:14 Why Jon started Engagio
02:20 How Jon defines account-based marketing
03:13 Net fishing versus spearfishing
04:35 Why ABM is a go-to-market strategy
08:07 Why marketers need to stop thinking only in leads
10:09 How empathy and relevance fit ABM
18:04 Tips to do ABM better

A few things worth taking away

• ABM is not a campaign or tactic. It is a go-to-market strategy.
• Traditional demand generation is like fishing with nets. ABM is more like spearfishing.
• ABM works best when sales, marketing, and customer success coordinate around target accounts.
• ABM should focus on the full revenue journey: landing new accounts, accelerating deals, expanding relationships, and retaining customers.
• Marketers have been trained to think in terms of leads, while salespeople think in terms of accounts.
• One of the biggest shifts in ABM is getting marketing and sales to use the same language.
• Empathy and relevance are two sides of the same coin.
• ABM requires understanding the pains, motivations, and emotional risks buyers face inside complex purchases.
• Many teams pick too many target accounts and then cannot deliver the personalization required.
• Starting ABM with advertising alone can create disappointment because ads are not a strategy.
• You cannot be account-based if your systems cannot show account-level data.
• ABM metrics should focus less on quantity and more on quality, engagement, and relationships with the right accounts.

A few lines that stuck with me

“Account-based marketing is spearfishing as opposed to net fishing.” — Jon Miller

“ABM is a way of running your go-to-market.” — Jon Miller

“If it’s just marketing, it’s not a strategy; it’s a campaign.” — Jon Miller

“We taught marketers to talk about leads.” — Jon Miller

“Empathy and relevance are really just two sides of a coin.” — Jon Miller

“It’s not about counting the people you reach. It’s about reaching the people that count.” — Jon Miller

Resources mentioned

• Jon Miller on X/Twitter
• Engagio
• The Clear and Complete Guide to Account-Based Marketing
• Empathy and sales with Brent Adamson
• Putting Empathy in Account Based Marketing

You may also like

• Growing B2B Sales with Trust and Empathy
• Why Customer Advocacy Should Be The Heart of Your Marketing
• Putting Empathy in Account Based Marketing
• 5 Ways to Immediately Boost Account Based Marketing
• Getting Sales Enablement Right to Increase Results
• Empathetic Marketing: How To Connect With Your Customers

Listen and subscribe

If you found this episode helpful, subscribe to the B2B Roundtable Podcast wherever you listen.

Full transcript

Brian: Well Jon, welcome. Why don’t you start by telling us a little bit about your background and what inspired you to start Engagio?

Jon: Sure, great. I’m excited to be here and have a chance to hang out with you again. It’s been a while since we talked.

My background: I’ve been in marketing technology almost my entire career. My undergraduate degree is actually in physics. When I was coming out of college, I ended up doing a lot of work with companies that were trying to take advantage of all the customer data they had to make decisions.

Because I came to marketing with that quantitative and analytical background, that led me into a series of marketing technology companies that were basically all about trying to use all that data to drive better customer decisions and one-to-one interactions. I was very much inspired by the Don Peppers and Martha Rogers book The One to One Future.

I worked at a company called Exchange, and then I was an early employee at a company called Epiphany, which was probably the leading marketing technology company of the mid-90s.

After we sold Epiphany, I co-founded Marketo along with Phil Fernandez. I think that’s arguably, or maybe not even arguably, the leading marketing technology company of the last 10 years or so. It recently sold to Adobe for just under $5 billion.

So I had this long career in marketing technology, but one of the trends I think is always true is that marketing is changing all the time, as well as the underlying technologies. I felt about four years ago that Marketo wasn’t, frankly, moving fast enough to keep up with all the new trends and changes in how marketing was done.

So I was inspired to start a new company that would really be seeking to build out the next generation of marketing products that could take advantage of all these new trends. One of those big trends is what’s now known as account-based marketing. That is where I really decided to start and focus, to have Engagio be a platform for account-based marketing.

Brian: Well, there are a lot of definitions out there about account-based marketing, and I’ve talked with CMOs and VPs who see account-based marketing as just good marketing.

But I’d love to ask you, you just had this new book come out, The Clear and Complete Guide to Account-Based Marketing, and you’re on your second edition. How would you define it?

Jon: First of all, let me just say I’m really excited about the book. It is a second edition. I wrote the first one about three years ago, and I’ve learned a ton more about ABM in the last three years.

I’ll start with a colloquial definition of ABM, then I’ll give you my formal one.

I think the colloquial one I like to use is a comparison back to the kind of marketing that we did with Marketo. That is the marketing that I like to describe as fishing with nets.

When you’re fishing with nets, you run your campaigns and you don’t care which specific fish you catch. You just care: did I catch enough? Then you can do lead nurturing and lead scoring to run it through the system.

But when you’re going after bigger or more strategic accounts, or maybe you’re going after your existing customers for expansion, or you’re in a narrow industry, any time you have a specific list of named accounts, you don’t want to wait around for those big fish to swim into your net. You’re going to find ways to reach out to them proactively.

It’s much more like fishing with a spear.

To me, that’s the simple definition of account-based marketing: it’s spearfishing as opposed to net fishing.

My formal definition is that account-based marketing is a go-to-market strategy that will coordinate personalized marketing and sales efforts to land and expand at target accounts. Can I explain what some of those words mean?

Brian: Yeah. If you could break that out, that would be great.

Jon: First of all, I’m very precisely calling it a strategy. ABM is a way of running your go-to-market and how your sales, marketing, and customer success teams work. It’s not a campaign or a tactic.

So you really do need to say, “We use ABM as our go-to-market strategy, or at least one of our go-to-market strategies.”

Second, ABM is really all about being personalized. There’s so much noise in the market today. If you’re spearfishing and you’re trying to reach the right people at the right companies, somehow you’ve got to break through all that noise. The best way to do that is with relevance, resonance, and empathy, which I know we’ll talk about.

ABM is actually a misnomer because we’re saying it’s account-based marketing, but right there in my definition I’m talking about marketing and sales. I think we should talk about that a little bit more later.

ABM is about landing and expanding. Especially today, so many companies earn revenue through subscription models and recurring revenue models. Just focusing on new business, which is what net fishing is all about, is really a limited, myopic focus.

ABM expands, or changes, the marketer’s mindset to focus on the entire revenue journey: landing, creating new pipeline, accelerating existing deals, and expanding and retaining existing relationships.

ABM plays across all that. That’s why I chose that definition.

Brian: Well, it makes sense, and I appreciate what you’re talking about: the overarching trend. CEOs are focused on lifetime value, LTV, and CAC, customer acquisition cost. ABM is providing an answer to that.

There still is so much confusion out there, and you say ABM isn’t just about marketing. How do you mean? How is it really different from demand generation? Because I still think people out there, even though we’ve just talked about the definitions, are still getting confused.

Jon: I always thought it was ironic that we called the category Marketo played in “marketing automation.” People thought marketing automation meant you have fewer humans doing less work.

The reality is the exact opposite. When you buy a tool like Marketo, or any marketing automation platform, it requires work. People have to do stuff.

In many ways, marketing automation is a misnomer in the same way that ABM is a misnomer because ABM is not just about marketing.

If you’re focused on the entire revenue journey — creating new pipeline, accelerating existing deals, expanding and retaining relationships — that can’t just be marketing. It has to be an orchestrated business initiative between the different functions.

Frankly, if it’s just marketing, it’s not a strategy; it’s a campaign.

At Engagio, and with a lot of our customers, their strategies are not called ABM. They call it something like account-based everything, or the account-first initiative, or something as simple as account-based sales and marketing.

I’ve seen all of those at play, and I think it really is the right way to think about it. Otherwise, as I said, it’s just a campaign.

Brian: I think that’s a huge distinction, especially as people are thinking toward the future.

I liked in your book, as I was reading it, you have a quote: “Salespeople never talk about how many leads they close. They talk about how many accounts they closed.”

Do you find that marketers see this differently, and why?

Jon: Well, yeah. I mean, this is my fault and a little bit your fault.

Brian: Sure.

Jon: We taught marketers to talk about leads.

Brian: Right.

Jon: Literally, we called it lead nurturing and so on. The technologies that we use, like Marketo, for example, were built to be lead-based systems. You can’t even log into Marketo and look at an account, for example.

So we created this world where marketers talked about leads and salespeople talked about accounts, which almost by definition meant they were not on the same page.

That’s not the only reason marketing and sales have trouble getting along, but it certainly didn’t help.

I think a big part of ABM, put simply, is marketers adopting the language the salespeople use and being on the same page.

Brian: Yeah. I think salespeople have practiced, in some ways, the very things you’re talking about in your book. They may have called it strategic account selling, major account selling, or target account selling.

But they did focus on these accounts. As you talked about, now marketers are coming alongside salespeople and working on these accounts together.

We’re going to talk about some process steps, but I wanted to step back to something you said earlier: there’s so much noise out there. We have more channels, more content, and more technology to reach customers than ever before. But connecting with them has never been harder.

I am, of course, a big proponent and fan of empathy. How do you see building empathy for our customers to bridge that gap of connection and trust and account-based marketing fitting together?

Jon: In ABM, once you’ve identified the accounts you want to go after and the people at those accounts you want to reach, you’ve got to find a way to reach out to them and engage them.

It’s such a crowded, noisy market, and people love to ignore unwanted marketing and unwanted messaging.

I think at the core, if you want to cut through the noise, you have to find a way to delight your prospects, educate them, and add value to them.

Empathy and relevance are really just two sides of a coin. If you empathize with your prospects, the people you’re trying to reach, it means you understand their pains.

If you understand their pains, you’re going to be in a much better position to teach them something about their specific economic motivators and their specific pains. That is how we stand out.

I think it’s very much like The Challenger Sale, which is so popular on the sales side of the equation. That’s what the best salespeople do. They teach, and they tailor, and they do that by having empathy with their customer.

So very much these things go hand in hand. I’m sure you have additional thoughts on that because you’re the empathy expert.

Brian: I certainly do. For our listeners, we had Brent Adamson, who is co-author of The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer, so we got Brent’s thoughts about this.

I’ll share my perspective. At a deeper level, you talked about pains. Neuroscientists have shown that we rationalize our decisions, but all our decisions are based in emotion.

So what we need to do is connect to, as you talked about, the pains, but also the results people want.

We have to think about when they’re making a purchase, where it’s a complex sale, and ABM is oriented to that. Multiple people are involved.

What causes us to change is that we see something in it for us. What causes us to stay stuck is like trying to climb a mountain.

If I want to climb and I have to take other people with me, some of them don’t want to go. Or I’m concerned about how they feel about doing this. How will my team see me?

I’m going to be concerned about whether this is going to add 10 extra hours to my week when I’m already maxed out.

There’s this personal stuff happening inside your customer because we’re all customers. We all make decisions emotionally.

What we need to realize is that just because it’s B2B, we think it’s less emotional. But the reality is the stakes are higher. It’s more emotional.

That’s the thing I find: we’ve got to tune into every stage of the journey and what’s happening.

Jon: That’s a great point.

The only thing I’d also add is I think the emotions in B2B tend to be more about avoiding negative emotions, whereas B2C might be about seeking aspirational emotions.

Because in B2B, there’s such a disconnect between the fact that if you make a good purchase, your company is a little bit better off. If you make a bad purchase, you can lose your job.

Brian: Yeah. Often people start journeys by saying, “Hey, I’m learning about this, and I feel inspired and hopeful we could actually do something.”

Pretty quickly after that, it goes to despair. Like, “Oh my gosh, is this even worth it? I want to try to get this into our company, but it’s so hard.”

For that person, they’re really saying, “Do I want to do this? Is it really going to be worth it?”

As you talked about the pain, changing is painful. There’s so much there.

I loved that you laid out a process based on what you’ve seen as a proven approach: these seven ABM process steps. We probably don’t have time to go through all of them, but where do you see marketers getting stuck or needing to put more attention in those seven ABM process steps?

Jon: For the listeners, I’ll summarize the seven steps down and keep it simple. It’s really about who, what, where, and measurement.

Who do you want to go after? Which accounts? Which people?

What are you going to say to those accounts that’s actually going to be empathetic and relevant?

Where is how you actually get that message in front of them. What channels? How do you orchestrate those interactions?

Then the last piece is measurement of the whole thing.

In terms of your question, where do people get stuck, it’s really a maturity curve.

Obviously, to start, you need to pick your accounts. That is a process that has to go hand in hand with sales. The companies that are less mature can get wrapped around the axle right there. They just can’t find a good process for how marketing and sales actually collaborate around an account selection process.

Once they’re past that stage, the next area I see people get stuck is that they pick too many accounts to really be able to deliver the level of personalization and relevance that’s truly required to be successful with ABM.

I’ve seen people pick 200 tier-one accounts. Having 200 tier-one accounts means you are not creating a bespoke, customized interaction with deep account-relevant research at every one of those 200 accounts.

There is a set of interconnected challenges there, but it starts with recognizing that you’ve got to be able to break through the noise and stand out. That requires being more relevant, and you have to right-size the number of accounts you pick to your actual ability to be relevant.

Then the third challenge that the most mature companies run into is scaling the whole thing.

Great, you’ve identified some accounts, and you’ve identified things that you can do that are going to help you stand out. It worked great in your pilot.

Now, how do you start to automate some of those steps to bring it to the next level and make sure that any time a target account is doing something interesting, your sales team knows about it and you’re following up appropriately?

It has to become a machine and not a whole series of one-act heroics.

I’d say those are probably the three areas, if you look across the who, what, and where, where people get into trouble.

Brian: That’s really good, Jon.

Along these lines, I wanted to ask, for someone out there who’s listening and thinking of beginning ABM, or someone who’s started it, do you have any tips or actionable advice you would give to someone over coffee if they said, “Hey, how do I do better?”

Jon: Yeah, a couple tips.

I think the first is that I see a lot of companies start their ABM journey with display advertising. I think they do that because it’s really easy. It’s an easy button. You just have to spend some money, give them your account list, and hey, you get to say you’re doing ABM.

But I’ve also seen that lead to disillusionment with ABM quite frequently because the reality is, I don’t care if you’re doing account targeting or not. Ads are ads.

Brian: Right.

Jon: I don’t click on ads. I don’t even notice ads. I’m sure that’s probably true with a lot of other executives.

So my first tip is don’t get seduced into thinking that you can really just start with ads. I think of ads as a nice thing you layer on top of an existing program, but not your first step. That’s my first piece of advice.

My next piece of advice is that you really have to think about your technology infrastructure.

At Marketo, I started trying to do ABM with Marketo and Salesforce and the systems that I had. It was hard because those are lead-based systems, and the data in those systems doesn’t wrap into your account.

I made my marketing operations team crazy just trying to set up the processes so I could even measure whether or not we were having an impact at the account level.

If you’re looking to start, I think it’s worth thinking about: what is your account foundation? How do you look at data at an account-based level?

It’s kind of obvious when you say it that way. You can’t be account-based if you can’t look at your accounts. But I see a lot of people missing that as a place to start.

Brian: That’s very good.

As I was looking through the book, this is a book you’re offering for free to people for providing information. You put a lot of effort and energy into it. It’s very well done.

What’s your favorite chapter in your book, and why?

Jon: My favorite chapter? Sophie’s choice. I’m not going to pick one. I’m going to pick two here.

Brian: Okay, sounds good.

Jon: First, I really like the whole part two of the guide, which is all about the different styles of ABM.

The concept of ABM entitlements is totally new in the second edition. I like it a lot because when I go and talk to our customers about how they take their ABM program to the next level, this concept always comes up: the different styles and the entitlements.

It’s related directly back to the problem I talked about earlier, which is that people tend to pick too many accounts and therefore aren’t able to deliver enough wood behind the arrow.

So I think part two about the styles of ABM entitlements is one of my favorites.

The other one I like a lot is this whole section on ABM metrics and measurements, partly because I’m a quantitative, measurement, numbers guy.

But it’s really struck me how different the metrics in ABM are from the metrics in traditional demand generation.

In a nutshell, the metrics in traditional marketing primarily focus on quantity. Back to net fishing, it’s all about how many leads did I generate? How many opportunities did I generate? How many people attended my webinar? How many people showed up at my event? And so on.

It totally misses out on the much more fundamental questions around quality.

First of all, are these the right people from the right accounts? It’s not about counting the people you reach. It’s about reaching the people that count. Are you measuring that?

Even furthermore, it’s about understanding the depth and the quality of the relationship. How engaged are these people with you?

Most salespeople would rather have meaningful engagement from a decision maker at a target account than 100 random leads. ABM metrics really embrace that concept.

Brian: Totally. That’s great.

Is there anything you wanted to add? Otherwise, I was going to ask what’s the best way for readers and listeners to get in touch with you.

Jon: We’ve been talking a lot about the book. The big thing I want to add is go grab it. It’s 175 pages. It’s easy to read, with lots of charts and tables, but it’s packed with actionable, useful information.

You can grab it on our website at Engagio.com/guide. Just Engagio.com/guide.

That’s a great way. If you want to see a demo of Engagio, you can check a box there as well, and we’ll get in touch with you.

If you want to reach me personally, probably the best way is over Twitter, where I’m just @JonMiller. J-O-N M-I-L-L-E-R.

Brian: Perfect. Well Jon, thanks again for joining us and sharing your insights. I’m really glad we got to reconnect after so long.

Jon: Yeah, it’s been great. Thank you.

Brian: Thank you.

B2B teams have more channels, more tools, and more “signals” than ever.

And buyers are tuning them out harder than ever.

Not because buyers hate marketing.

Because they hate being treated like a target.

This is the core problem: modern GTM systems are optimized for activity — touches, sequences, attribution — while buyers are trying to do something else entirely: reduce risk and make a safe decision.

That is why trust and empathy are not “soft skills.” They are conversion infrastructure.

In this conversation, I interviewed Steve Woods (@stevewoods), founder and CTO at Nudge, about what it takes to build real B2B relationships in a world full of automation, hustle culture, and buyer skepticism.

We talk about why automated sequences are losing effectiveness, why buyers want a guide instead of a pursuer, how trust affects deal progress, and how sales and marketing teams can use automation to support human connection instead of replacing it.

Author’s note: This transcript is edited for clarity and readability.

About Steve Woods

Steve Woods is the founder and CTO of Nudge. Before Nudge, Steve co-founded Eloqua, one of the early leaders in marketing automation.

Steve has spent his career thinking about how sales and marketing teams use data, relationships, trust, and timing to help buyers move forward.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Steve Woods and Nudge
01:35 From marketing automation to relationship intelligence
02:53 Why deal slippage is relationship slippage
04:10 Why hustle collapses trust
06:18 What buyers actually want from salespeople
08:21 Buyers need meaning, not more information
10:19 How empathy and automation fit together
14:37 Nudging buyers forward with a give

Quick answer: How do you build trust and empathy in B2B sales?

You build trust and empathy by helping buyers make progress before asking them to buy.

That means maintaining context, offering useful next steps, and trading self-promotion for perspective. Automation can support the research, timing, and relationship tracking. It cannot replace the human work of building trust.

A few things worth taking away

• Trust moves deals. Activity alone does not.
• Buyers want a guide, not a pursuer.
• Automated sequences are decaying because they strip away context.
• The best outreach is a give, not a disguised ask.
• Your system should surface relationship risk, not just track touches.
• Deal slippage is often relationship slippage.
• Automation can support empathy by surfacing context, timing, and useful next steps.
• Sales teams need better “gives” from marketing: useful insights, data, tools, and perspective that help buyers move forward.

A few lines that stuck with me

“The core was getting the trust and the relationships.” — Steve Woods

“Buyers are all about developing an understanding and guiding themselves down a journey.” — Steve Woods

“You can’t automate empathy. You can’t automate trust.” — Steve Woods

“You haven’t asked first. You’ve given first.” — Steve Woods

“That’s not a give. That’s an ask.” — Steve Woods

Why buyers are tuning you out

It is tempting to blame channels.

But the real issue is behavioral.

Buyers have learned to protect themselves from noise. They have been trained by years of spammy follow-up, vague “checking in,” and fake personalization.

So they do what rational people do. They ignore you until they need something specific.

Trust becomes the differentiator because it reduces buyer risk:

• Risk of wasting time
• Risk of looking foolish internally
• Risk of choosing the wrong vendor
• Risk of being pressured into the wrong timing

That is the frame for everything below. Not “how to nurture.” Not “how to get replies.”

How to become safe to engage.

Resources mentioned

• Steve Woods on X/Twitter
• Nudge
• The Manifesto: Hustle no longer works for sales. It’s time to #HoldTheHustle.

You may also like

• 4 Steps to Do Lead Nurturing that Helps More Customers Buy
• How Sales Hustle and Automation Can Hurt Customer Experience
• Empathetic Marketing: How To Connect With Your Customers

Listen and subscribe

If you found this episode helpful, subscribe to the B2B Roundtable Podcast wherever you listen.

Full transcript

Brian: So, Steve, tell us a little bit about your background and what inspired you to start Nudge.

Steve: Sure thing. You and I have known each other, obviously, for a long time. A few decades.

My history prior to Nudge was Eloqua in the marketing space. Obviously, that’s a space you’re very familiar with. You work a lot with marketers.

At Eloqua, we were able to see this wonderful transition as marketing went from kind of an arts-and-crafts discipline to a very measured lead generation and demand generation discipline that started to connect with sales.

Here are leads that are qualified. Here are leads that are interested. That was a wonderful transition to see.

But looking over the fence at the world of sales, we realized that the core of getting those deals done was the next step.

The core was getting the trust and the relationships, and the breadth and depth of relationships in our organization, that would then allow that deal to move forward, the trust and the empathy to be developed, and ultimately the deal to be closed based on those relationships.

As the Eloqua story was winding down, Paul and I decided to jump in and tackle relationship intelligence, and use relationship intelligence as a way to understand where empathy is being built, where trust is being built, and how you can make a sales team more effective by focusing their efforts on the right initiatives.

Brian: That’s really cool, just how you took your story from where you were to what you’re doing right now.

What are some of the lessons you’ve learned about building a company now versus when you were building Eloqua, and thinking about what you’ve learned over the past decade?

Steve: I think the thing that we were lucky with more than anything at Eloqua was being part of a major change in a space.

Marketing went from unmeasured to measured, and there were all the effects that had on the people and the processes and the technology and the understanding.

We were lucky to be a core part of that, and that helped us flow along with that river.

What we were trying to do with Nudge was be a little bit more proactive and say, “What’s going on at a macro level that is going to be a dominant theme of a space for the next decade?”

Looking at sales and looking at relationships, it became very clear that relationships, trust, and empathy were the core thing, and it was unmeasurable. It was intuitive.

Every sales leader, when you’re talking about deal slippage, deal progress, or your forecast, it’s all about the relationships and the trust. But it’s not measurable. It’s self-reported by sales reps who often have happy ears on the process.

So we thought, “If we can figure out how to put measurement around trust, empathy, and relationships, and then build the tooling on top of that to help people drive the ship in the right direction based on that, then we’re going to be part of a very interesting transition.”

That’s turned out to be true, as you’re seeing the evolution of the sales space. It’s a really interesting place to find ourselves in the middle of.

Brian: Prior to us having our interview, we were just talking about some of the changes that have happened in sales, what’s been happening for our customer, and how difficult it’s gotten for people to get things done, including buying.

One of the things that got us reconnected is that I read the post you wrote about holding the hustle. What inspired you to think about hold the hustle, and how has it influenced how you do your own outreach at Nudge?

Steve: Absolutely. That, as with many things, sort of stemmed from a rant, which is always a good place to start.

It’s interesting because we’re really working in this space of sales. We spent a lot of time and developed a series called “How I Buy,” which interviews buyers on how they actually go about buying.

On the other side, we spent a lot of time talking with salespeople on how they sell.

It was Mars and Venus.

Buyers are all about developing an understanding and guiding themselves down a journey. They selectively bring in salespeople when they need some deeper points of view, and they really want them to be thoughtful co-conspirators on a journey.

Then you talk with salespeople, and it was automation, numbers, a thousand emails a day, and “Hey, did you get my last email?” sequences.

It was all hustle, hustle, hustle.

It was bizarre to look at these and realize they were attempting to describe the same animal.

At the same time, you’re seeing the effect of this. Maybe the first of these automated sequences you received as an executive felt like diligent follow-up. “Oh look, they’re following up.”

But you get those today, and I think my spam folder is filled with hundreds and hundreds of “Hey, did you get my last email?” messages.

So the rant was, “Stop. We just have to stop this in sales. It’s not working. It is not going to work. It’s going downhill, and it’s going to have to continue to go downhill.”

That developed into the Hold the Hustle thesis, and that got a huge response.

I think everyone intuitively got that, and we were able, luckily, to articulate something that a lot of people were feeling: why the tooling they were told to develop and employ is just not driving anything that even came close to building trust and empathy.

Brian: As part of my work interviewing customers, it’s surprising how little impact marketing has in their own journey, in terms of the marketing of the vendor and how they’re learning in the process.

But what was particularly insightful is what a difference the salesperson makes in the customer experience, in terms of building trust. Customers want to know the sales rep is their advocate. They want to know they’re talking to them straight. They’re not pitching to them.

As you’ve done your own outreach, can you share any stories of people who’ve held the hustle and what they’ve seen? If they were doing it one way and changed, what have you noticed? What’s been the result?

Steve: Absolutely.

If you look at what buyers are looking for, it is that person to go along with them on a journey and challenge them, educate them, make them squint, turn their head sideways, and look at a problem in a new light.

That’s what people want.

The facts and information are all out there. What you’re looking for as a buyer is not that. You can get that. You can Google something and find any facts and information.

What you want is the “so what?”

What does it mean? What are the challenges? Where is it going to work? Where is it not going to work?

The salespeople who have been able to say, “No, that is my job. My job is to challenge people,” go deep on customer problems.

They try to understand that aspect of the customer’s world better than the customer. They focus on the right question.

When you get hit with that question of, “Huh, I didn’t think about it that way. Okay, now I’m listening,” now there’s an opportunity for us to talk because I didn’t think about my own world in the way that you just asked about it.

Now the light bulb has gone off, and I realize that there’s something more for me to learn.

That’s when that bar of trust starts to move forward.

It’s the sales reps who come at it that way and find opportunities to say, “Is something going on in your world, Brian? You’re probably thinking about it this way, and I’m going to push you to think about it that way. Here’s why. Here’s a story, and you’re maybe going to be a little uncomfortable with the story.”

But it’s going to give you some insight that you wouldn’t have gotten just doing a Google search.

Brian: I like the word insight. As I was listening to you, I thought that everything you were saying is helping your customer have that insight and find that aha.

Because if we’re going to drive change, and that’s what people are doing when they decide to solve a problem or buy something, change is hard.

Not only that, helping other people experience change is even harder.

So how do we do that?

It sounds like a lot of the work you’ve been doing has been connecting the dots, helping people understand the relationships, and helping them go through that journey.

As you think of automation, and you’ve been a part of this space for a long time, how do you see empathy and automation fitting together in how sales and marketing do outreach today?

Steve: I think that is the key question.

I think the answer is a little bit easier than it would seem, because the simple version of the answer is: you can’t automate empathy. You can’t automate trust.

But there’s a lot of background work that goes into finding the opportunities to say, “Oh, there’s a chance here that I can add a little bit of value to your world that you wouldn’t have expected.”

To do that, I need to understand my world. I need to understand you, your history, your business, and what’s going on right now.

Then I need to put those two together and insert a point of view in the conversation.

Doing all that background research to say, “What’s happening right now with you, your journey at large, and your journey with my business specifically?” and then mapping that out to a point of view can be done through a lot of automation and AI.

The conversation — “Hey Brian, saw this, thought that, here’s what’s going on, here’s how you might want to think about it” — that’s a very human thing to do.

Automation can put enough of it on a silver platter to say, “Here’s where Brian’s at, and these next steps on the journey might make sense based on all of this history and where he’s at right now today.”

That can be facilitated by automation. It’s a lot of research and grunt work, and it can be optimized a lot better to tee up those silver platter moments.

Brian: I think that really is the tricky thing, right?

It’s pulling together the right data and then also having empathy, which gives you that intuition or insight to ultimately say, “Okay, emotionally, I’ve got more emotional intelligence of what the situation needs, what this person is looking for, and what they’re experiencing.”

How are they going to have that next conversation? What would be useful to share with them at this point in time?

Let’s get really practical. Can you talk about any actionable tips or advice you’ve learned through your own experience that could help sellers do better outreach right now?

Steve: Absolutely.

I think the easiest step for anyone who’s trying to build relationships is, quite simply, to look at those relationships and ask, “Where am I losing touch?”

Most people don’t do that.

You have the first conversation. If it goes to a deal, great. Ninety percent of them don’t, and they just drop off.

The best reps used to do this manually with Excel spreadsheets.

One of the things we focus on with Nudge is where you can say, “Look, just make sure I’m in touch with these people every three months. That’s it. I just need to reach out.”

That puts a floor on your relationship building.

But then the next point is, okay, I now need to develop this logical next step for where that person is on the journey they’re mapping out.

So I need to understand what’s going on in their world.

What’s happening with their company? What are the new recent events that have happened? Have there been any executive changes? Where are they on their journey with my organization?

This is sort of an advancement of the digital body language concept that you and I chatted about over the last decade.

Where are they? What have they done? What have they looked at? Have they used a free trial? Did they get value out of it? Where are they on that journey?

Given all of those things, what can I nudge them to do next?

Can I say, “You’re probably here, and you’re probably thinking this. But if you just did this one little thing, thought about it in a different way, or looked at a data set I’m going to send over to you, your perspective would evolve.”

It’s not a sales pitch. It’s not, “Hey, let’s do a one-hour sales call.”

It’s, “Let me show you a new perspective that you might appreciate.”

If you can do that and you can guide them along this journey, what you’re doing is pushing them forward on a journey, but you’re also building trust.

You haven’t asked first. You’ve given first.

In doing so, you’ve built those little tiny nuggets of trust that eventually will guide you to be able to say, “Hey, let’s do something here. I think you’ve gone down this journey, and your next step on the journey actually is to become a customer of ours. Here’s what that would look like. We’ve built all this trust. Let’s make this happen.”

Brian: I love that. If our audience were just to take those insights and apply them, I think it would make a difference.

As I was listening to you, there are two ways of building relationship. One is like we’re doing: having a conversation, dialoguing together.

The second way is reciprocal altruism. What it really means is we give something of value to someone without expecting anything in return. It doesn’t feel like there’s something attached to it.

That really is the trick: to know it isn’t about being tricky. It’s focusing on, “My intention is to help this person. To do that, I need to understand. To do that, I need to understand where we are in our relationship.”

As you talked about, where they’re at in their journey, what are the questions they’re dealing with? What might they be thinking about? What might they be feeling at this moment?

So that I can actually help them and present what would be useful at that point in time.

Steve: Yeah. It’s interesting because if you extend that train of thought, you get this really interesting challenge for the rest of the world, the world of marketing.

Marketing, for the last decade, has not focused as much as it could on those value-added nuggets that I as a salesperson can give to you when the moment is right.

When you’re at that point on the journey, what is my give?

If a sales team doesn’t have those gives, then they’re kind of stuck with, “Hey, let’s set up a 60-minute sales call.”

Well, that’s not a give. That’s an ask. That’s a big ask. So the answer is no.

The evolution of marketing that we’re seeing today in some of the top organizations is to be able to come up with those things that are actual gives.

They’re useful information. They’re useful data sets. They’re useful documents, trials, or experiences.

They’re not traps.

They’re not a half thing where you need to take a sales call to get the other half thing.

They’re actual gives that build trust and move a buyer along the relationship.

It’s a really interesting challenge for marketing, and some marketers are getting into it with quite a bit of gusto.

Brian: I think that is difficult unless someone is able to think beyond, “My role as a marketer is to generate a lead or get an MQL.”

Some people have called it full-funnel marketing. Other people have called it revenue marketing. I think it’s really about customer marketing and customer experience.

It starts with the first touch and continues throughout.

It’s having marketers see beyond that, because a lot of the trust building is happening through that human being — the sales rep or the sales development rep.

What can I do to equip them so that every touch they have with that customer is a positive experience and is helpful?

That’s really the best brand building.

All the other things that we want to have in marketing — brand, conversion, more opportunities, more pipeline — it all starts with adding value.

To do that, it requires us to maybe take the pedal off trying to focus on conversion all the time.

Steve: Yeah. I think the focus on conversion kind of made sense in the world that we were in 10 years ago, where a deal, if I can overgeneralize, was a big moment in time.

Brian: Yeah.

Steve: A customer went from not a customer to a big three-year contract, multiple hundred thousand, now they are a customer. Over the wall to customer success, out of the world of sales.

That’s not the reality now.

Most buying journeys look more like a ramp than a step function.

You come in, maybe you’re on a trial product, maybe you’ve got one team, maybe you’ve got a month-to-month license, and then your experience grows and evolves and builds from there as you achieve success and go down that journey’s pathway.

You ultimately become a very successful, large enterprise client.

But it’s not a step function. It’s a growth process.

If you, as a marketing team, are thinking forward like that, you’re giving your sales teams — whether you call them sales teams, account farmers, customer success reps that have revenue responsibility, whatever they look like, whatever business card they hold — the tooling to help guide buyers along that journey to become more and more deeply ingrained with your organization, more trusting, and more successful.

Brian: Well Steve, thank you. This has been fun. What’s the best way for readers and listeners to get in touch with you?

Steve: I exist on all forms online. Steve.Woods@Nudge.ai. You should be able to find me on LinkedIn or Twitter. And nudge.ai is our website. So if you can’t find me, you’re not trying hard enough.

Brian: Thanks again.

Steve: Thank you, Brian.

Growth for B2B companies is hard.

It used to be that you could accelerate growth mainly through customer acquisition. Ramp up sales. Ramp up marketing. Fill the funnel. Close more deals.

But that is not enough to sustain growth anymore.

The best companies are learning how to grow through customer success.

That is why I interviewed Kia Puhm, CEO at DesiredPath, about how companies can transform the customer success journey and drive revenue from existing customer relationships.

Kia brings a practical and deeply customer-centered perspective on how companies can help customers adopt software, get value faster, build loyalty, and grow over time.

We talk about disruption, customer-centric thinking, journey mapping, customer empathy, moments of truth, and why customer success is not just about making customers happy. It is about operationalizing a better experience so customers can succeed, stay, and grow.

About Kia Puhm

Kia Puhm is CEO at DesiredPath. She has more than 20 years of experience in the software industry and has built post-sales functions across rapidly growing software companies.

Her work focuses on helping organizations improve customer success, customer experience, adoption, retention, and revenue growth through more customer-centric operating models.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Kia Puhm and customer success
01:32 Kia’s background in post-sales software growth
02:41 Disruption as the biggest customer success trend
03:28 Moving from vendor-centric to customer-centric
05:18 Using journey maps to improve customer success
09:24 Applying empathy to customer journeys
12:58 Capturing emotional moments of truth
15:26 How to improve customer success

Quick answer: How do you improve customer success and drive revenue?

You improve customer success by helping customers adopt your product, get value from it, and experience less friction along the way.

That requires more than onboarding checklists or support tickets. It requires understanding the customer’s journey from their point of view, identifying emotional moments of truth, and aligning your organization around helping the customer succeed.

A few things worth taking away

• Growth cannot rely only on new customer acquisition.
• Customer success is a revenue strategy, not just a service function.
• Companies need to move from vendor-centric thinking to customer-centric thinking.
• Customers often struggle not because they cannot understand your software, but because they have to figure out how to operationalize it inside their own environment.
• Journey mapping is useful only when it reflects the customer’s perspective, not just the vendor’s internal process.
• Empathy helps teams understand what customers are thinking and feeling at each stage of the journey.
• Moments of truth can determine whether customers stay, leave, expand, or lose trust.
• Customer success should be operationalized as a repeatable, disciplined approach.
• Journey mapping is not a one-time exercise. It should be refined continuously with customer feedback.

A few lines that stuck with me

“Customers stay loyal when they’re having good experiences and the product is delivering on the promises that it says it’s going to deliver.” — Kia Puhm

“We put the onus on them to understand how to operationalize, how to take that software and put it within their environment.” — Kia Puhm

“We make it easier. We make it feel easier. We make it more enjoyable to bring that software into their organization.” — Kia Puhm

“How can you understand someone’s point of view if you’re not thinking from their perspective?” — Kia Puhm

“You don’t have to have it absolutely right and perfect at the beginning.” — Kia Puhm

Resources mentioned

• Kia Puhm on X/Twitter
• DesiredPath
• Kia Puhm on LinkedIn

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Full transcript

Automated: This call is being recorded.

Brian: Hi everyone. I’d like to welcome you to today’s B2B Lead Roundtable Podcast. This is Brian Carroll, and I’m really excited to have Kia Puhm with us today.

She is going to be our guest, and we’re going to be talking specifically around the areas of customer success.

Kia is an entrepreneur. She’s an executive. She’s held a number of positions at companies, from Oracle Eloqua, Day Software, and now Adobe.

What she’s done over the past years is launch an advisory firm helping customers accelerate growth through innovation in the area of customer experience.

I’m wanting to bring Kia here to talk with all of you because as you think about how you develop your business and your revenue, Kia’s got an amazing perspective on how we accelerate and grow our existing customer relationships, which is something that many companies don’t focus on nearly enough.

Kia, thank you for joining us. Can you tell us a little bit more about your background?

Kia: Thanks, Brian. Happy to be here. Sure, absolutely.

I come from an educational background in computer engineering and from a practical experience background of 22 years in the industry, working at rapidly growing, very dynamic software companies.

I guess I’ve built every post-sales function, and always the common denominator has been: how do the organizations I lead get customers to adopt software so that they are using it and getting value out of it?

That then translates into loyal customers, which can translate into additional revenue at some point in time.

I had to do that with a finite, limited amount of budget and resources, so I always tried to figure out how to drive that adoption equation while doing what I could with what I had available to me and using that in the most efficient manner possible.

Brian: Right now, as you look at the work and the type of things you’re doing, what’s the most significant trend that’s affecting your work today?

Kia: Great question. I’m going to have to say disruption.

With all the changes happening out there to businesses, with technology and data and information we have, and artificial intelligence, and just the way the world is changing, it’s changing how we operate.

So the biggest trend in the work that I do with my customers, and helping them understand their customers and how to support that, is how do you do that in a continually disruptive environment where things are always changing?

Brian: Right now, as you see this disruption happening, how are companies responding?

I’ve read your work. We’ve had conversations about this. It seems that in this time of disruption, companies are still pretty vendor-centric.

How can they move from this vendor-centric approach or product-focused approach to being more customer-centric?

Kia: Absolutely. I think that is the key in terms of disruption-proofing an organization.

There have been a lot of studies done and a lot of research that shows companies that are operating from a customer-centric viewpoint and really deliver amazing customer experience far outperform their competitors that aren’t customer-centric.

So I do think that is where companies are moving toward, and that is how we adapt to all these changes that are continually happening.

The reason I think that’s important is not only the obvious — customers stay loyal when they’re having good experiences and the product is delivering on the promises that it says it’s going to deliver — but also as our customers keep evolving and changing, so too are the ways that we operationalize that and support those customers.

If you are customer-centric, it means you are observing that evolution that’s happening to your customer base, and you’re able to be very agile and nimble in responding to that as a business.

If you keep using that information, that observation of a customer, either passively or through active engagement with them to find out that information, you can feed that into your organization and continually change and respond to that to continue to drive value for customers and the loyalty that you need to keep growing your own business.

Brian: As I was listening to you, this is something I spend a lot of time helping companies on the front side with: acquiring customer relationships.

Bringing this operationalizing approach, or as you talked about, this evolution, is something I think you’ve been working a lot around with customer journeys to help companies understand that.

Tell us about how you use customer journeys to help improve how companies grow customer relationships and improve customer success.

Kia: Absolutely.

I know you and I have had conversations at other times and are completely aligned in terms of the approach that we look at.

I use customer journeys to facilitate customer-centric thinking to make sure that an organization understands empathizing with and understanding what customers are trying to accomplish when they purchase your products.

When you understand it from the customer viewpoint, specifically as it relates to software, how you support and deliver the various services that you need to in order to help that customer adopt that software fully and continue to drive ongoing value from that software can dramatically change when you look at it from the customer’s standpoint.

What I see all too often, and it’s so natural for us to do this as vendors, is we define the value proposition that our product is meeting in the market, and we organize ourselves for how we’re going to deliver on that value proposition, and then we tell customers all about that.

It’s a very vendor-centric approach.

While we don’t walk in their shoes, we’re trying to push the product in an environment that we’re not necessarily familiar with.

I think problems with retention and why customers have difficulties adopting software are not because they don’t necessarily understand the value or can’t learn the software or understand it.

It’s because we put the onus on them to understand how to operationalize it, how to take that software and put it within their environment.

If we start to employ a customer-centric approach and if we understand why, in general, our customers buy our products, what their environments typically look like, what some of the common trends and challenges are within their work environment, and how that software could seamlessly or best fit into that, we now take a lot of that burden off that customer.

We make it easier. We make it feel easier. We make it more enjoyable to bring that software into their organization.

The faster we do that, the more we make it feel seamless and easier and have a better experience with that, the better they’re going to adopt it.

Then they’re going to recognize the value because it felt easy, and it’s going to meet the objectives that they set out to achieve when they purchased the product, which then translates into loyalty.

When you build that loyalty through trusted-advisor-type relationships, that’s where you can start to talk to them about doing more, which is that ultimate nirvana of expansion and driving more revenue out of that install base.

I use those journeys as the beginning step of understanding, walking in the customer’s shoes, seeing what that looks like, so that then we can figure out how to align organizationally to that journey and translate that into something that makes sense from their perspective because it’s coming from their perspective in the first place.

Brian: I really like your thinking there.

For our regular listeners and readers, you just heard the episode with Brent Adamson from CEB, now Gartner. Brent said that as difficult as selling B2B is today, for our customers, buying is even harder.

I wanted to ask you, from your perspective, how are companies developing journeys, and how does empathy help organizations develop journeys that are really aligned and really helpful?

Kia: Great question.

I think we’re still in the infancy of journey mapping. There are definitely people and companies that are quite advanced in it, and there’s a lot of information out there on how to conduct journey mapping and do that effectively.

When I talk about the infancy, I think we map out the customer’s journey, but we still do it from our perspective.

Brian: Right.

Kia: In the work that I do, I actually haven’t seen it yet.

I’m waiting for the day somebody shows me a journey map that they’ve done that reflects the customer’s viewpoint and their perspective versus a vendor-centric approach.

To answer your question about how they’re going about doing it, I think the process of creating a journey map has a lot of information available.

Where it becomes interesting, and this is the work that I do with my clients, and where it starts to create this agile business model, is when you look at it from that customer’s perspective, as I mentioned previously, and then you start to align the operations.

I refer to this concept of an agile business model.

If you’ve got that journey, then you start to add on what is in place. What is that methodology?

Not just processes, but the role alignment and systems alignment and technology that need to be in place to support that customer journey.

Now you’ve got this business model.

And if you’ve got this closed-loop feedback, where you’re getting input from customers and feeding it back in, this is where the agile comes in.

You can respond to that and continually improve your operations as you’re getting that feedback from customers, as they’re evolving, so that you’ve got this agile, optimized business model.

That’s where I think journey mapping is not just the mapping per se. It’s how do you operationalize all that and create that agile business model, which I think is the next stage in evolution.

To your point about empathy, it’s just common sense. How can you understand someone’s point of view if you’re not thinking from their perspective?

I think that takes the skill set of empathy to be able to understand that.

That’s the interesting work that I quite enjoy doing with clients. It’s getting those aha moments where they say, “Oh. Wait. I thought I was doing it from the customer’s perspective, but now I see I’m not thinking from their perspective.”

Then it’s just that training to keep thinking from the customer’s perspective, and then things start to click. It’s honing those empathy skills.

Brian: I appreciate what you said.

The challenge we have is companies are really good at our company-level value proposition, department level, and maybe even at a persona level.

But what I’m hearing from you is that to really understand how people think, we need to understand how they are thinking about their business now and also understand the emotions.

What are they feeling at various points of their journey? Am I understanding correctly?

Kia: Yeah, absolutely. That’s definitely a component.

In the industry, people often refer to the concept of moments of truth.

Moments of truth can be make-or-break interactions that customers have with your company as a brand that could be deciding factors of whether they continue to be your customer or not.

They also tend to be highly emotionally charged at those moments of truth.

Then there are other times in the journey that might not be critical moments of truth, and they’re less emotionally charged.

I think there are emotional elements there that help you understand that customer perspective.

You need that emotional component and understanding because what needs to be accomplished at a certain step in the journey can be delivered in multiple different ways.

If you know what the feeling of that customer might be, if they’re feeling angst about using the software, if they’re feeling really excited about it, if they’re feeling bored about it, you might approach the discussion with the customer differently.

You might approach how you’re instructing them differently or how you’re working together with them.

Those things all have an impact.

When you have that visibility, you can be much more targeted and effective with how you are moving that customer through that journey.

Brian: As I was thinking while you’re talking about it, our listeners are probably saying, “This sounds really good,” but how would they go about doing this?

What types of actionable advice or practical advice do you have for those who want to improve customer success or improve how they’re currently building their customer journeys right now?

Kia: That’s a great question.

Sometimes it can feel overwhelming or abstract. People often confuse customer success or customer experience with just making somebody happy or feel good.

I actually look at it very much as a disciplined way of operationalizing how you’re going to engineer an amazing experience for customers, not only in the business outcomes they get but also in that emotional experience, so it can become a very consistent, repeatable methodology and approach.

It can feel overwhelming, like, “Where do I get started?”

The advice there is definitely journey map and understand what that would look like from the customer’s perspective.

Then start to see how your organization is aligned in each stage of the journey to support that journey and those emotional points in that journey or those critical moments of truth.

That makes it feel more organic and not like this huge monolithic initiative that needs to be done where you can’t get started until you’re absolutely sure it’s perfect before you launch it.

This is where this concept of agility is so empowering and why I employ it with my customers and why I think it’s so powerful.

Mapping these things out, maybe you don’t get it right, but if you start to have this concept of closed-loop feedback, where you’re reading and understanding the customer more and more, then you can start to make continuous improvement and really create that agile business model that keeps getting honed and refined as you learn more about it.

You don’t have to have it absolutely right and perfect at the beginning.

In fact, you might have it completely wrong.

But if you map something out and you start to observe it and validate whether things are right or wrong, and start to use customer feedback to inform how you should tweak operations or what you’ve got in place to provide a better customer experience, that’s where you’re going to continually optimize that approach.

It should continually be dynamic forever.

None of us have static customers. They’re just as dynamic as we are in our business operations.

So let’s make sure that we’re continuing to observe them and see how they’re improving or what they need help with and build that into our model.

So the actionable advice is: journey map. Build some initial model, observe it, and then keep honing it.

It’s not just a one-time effort.

Brian: That is terrific.

I think a lot of people, often, as they do their journey map, it’s like, “Ha. I’m done.”

I think, as you’re sharing, it’s ongoing. We’re going to continually learn as we dialogue with our customers, as we interact, and as we evolve and so do they.

I really appreciate all the thoughts and ideas you shared with us today.

What’s the best way for our readers and listeners to get in touch with you?

Kia: Absolutely. The best way is through my LinkedIn account. It’s Kia Puhm, P-U-H-M, and Kia, K-I-A.

Or contact me directly. I’m also on Twitter and LinkedIn. If you want to reach out to me directly via email, it’s Kia@kiacx.com.

Happy to answer questions or connect with folks who are looking to learn more, or just peers who are passionate about this space and want to talk about it as much as I do. I would love to connect.

Brian: Well, thank you again for joining us, sharing your ideas and your experience, and I look forward to us continuing to talk more.

I know our listeners got a lot of value. We’ll also share some links from Kia for our listeners and readers that you can visit at the B2B Lead Blog.

Kia: Thanks, Brian.

Are you applying empathy as part of your sales and marketing approach?

Why? Because according to Brent Adamson, empathy may be the one word that matters most to sales and marketing success.

It is tough to buy.

B2B customers are overwhelmed with too much information, too many choices, too many internal stakeholders, and too much risk. They are trying to get their colleagues to agree. They are second-guessing. They are worrying about what happens if they make the wrong decision.

This is part two of my interview with Brent Adamson, Principal Executive Advisor at Gartner, and co-author of The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer.

In this conversation, Brent explains how empathy helps sellers and marketers understand the customer’s world, map how customers think, reduce buying friction, and help customers solve the real problem: buying.

Writer’s note: This is part two of my interview with Brent Adamson. You can view part one here: New research: Boost organic growth from current customers.

About Brent Adamson

Brent Adamson is a Principal Executive Advisor at Gartner. He works with sales, service, marketing, and communications leaders to understand what world-class B2B selling and marketing looks like.

Brent is also the co-author of The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to customer empathy in B2B
01:08 Why empathy matters in The Challenger Customer
03:12 Understanding how customers think
04:46 How to map customer thinking
09:18 The emotional side of empathy
15:16 The new sales imperative
21:02 Becoming a buying sherpa
24:48 The B2B digital buying journey

Quick answer: How does empathy help B2B sales and marketing?

Empathy helps sales and marketing teams understand what buying feels like from the customer’s perspective.

That means understanding not only the customer’s business, but how the customer thinks about their business, what internal risks they face, what questions they cannot answer, and what friction makes buying feel difficult.

When sellers and marketers understand that, they can stop solving only for selling and start solving for buying.

A few things worth taking away

• Empathy means seeing the world from the customer’s perspective, both logically and emotionally.
• If you want to change how customers think about their business, you first need to understand how they already think about their business.
• Mental models can help sales and marketing teams map customer thinking.
• Buying groups create emotional risk for individual stakeholders.
• The person who likes your solution still has to convince IT, procurement, finance, the CEO, and other stakeholders.
• The hard part is often not selling the solution. It is helping the customer buy it.
• Great sales and marketing can act like a buying sherpa, guiding customers through the journey.
• Digital does not stop when sales enters the conversation.
• Late-stage buyers still use digital channels to seek reassurance.
• Your website, content, and sales conversations need to tell a consistent story.
• B2B buying is omnichannel, which means sales and marketing alignment matters more than ever.
• The best marketing and selling feels like helping because it actually is helping.

A few lines that stuck with me

“Empathy is, at a very basic level, your ability to place yourself in someone else’s shoes and see the world from their perspective.” — Brent Adamson

“If you’re going to change the way a customer thinks about their business, the first thing you have to understand is how they think about their business.” — Brent Adamson

“Think about what it feels like to buy one of your solutions, and it rarely feels good.” — Brent Adamson

“What we have here is not a selling problem at all. What we have is a buying problem.” — Brent Adamson

“You can effectively become the coach to your customer, not on what to buy, but on how to buy.” — Brent Adamson

“The best marketing and selling feels like helping because it really is.” — Brian Carroll

Resources mentioned

• Gartner
• The Challenger Sale
• The Challenger Customer
• The New Sales Imperative
• How Empathy Will Grow Your Sales and Marketing Pipeline

You may also like

• New research: Boost organic growth from current customers
• Why customer advocacy should be at the heart of your marketing
• How customer-hero stories help you connect better
• How to Attract B2B Buyers with Amazing Content

Listen and subscribe

If you found this episode helpful, subscribe to the B2B Roundtable Podcast wherever you listen.

Mental map example

The B2B digital buying journey

Provide digital reassurance for the late buying stage

Full transcript

Brian: I think you just provided a super helpful distinction for people, and even for me, to know the difference.

This company, they’re a SaaS company, so of course they were talking about it in terms of that backward-looking concept.

So how can people see things from the customer’s point of view?

In your book The Challenger Customer, you talked about the most powerful principle sitting at the core of the book is empathy. I wanted to ask you about that because we spent some time talking together a few months ago.

Why is that? Why is empathy the most important principle sitting at the core?

Brent: The idea that empathy is the core principle of the entire book The Challenger Customer, I admit, is more of a personal opinion than based on all of our research.

You’ll notice, I think I told you this, Brian, the word doesn’t actually appear anywhere in the proper book. It’s only in the acknowledgments where I made just a little blurb at the very back, a little note to my daughters, and I used the word empathy there.

But in fact, in many ways for me personally, that one word captures everything that the book is about.

I know this is a topic not only near and dear to your heart, but something your expertise is far deeper than mine.

When I think of empathy, I think of two components to it. It would be interesting, Brian, to get your thoughts on this. It’s almost a right-brain, left-brain, or the rational versus the emotional. I don’t know what the right way to think about it is.

But empathy, from my perspective, is at a very basic level your ability to place yourself in someone else’s shoes and see the world from their perspective.

That might be logically how they view the world from their perspective, or it might be emotionally what the world feels like from their perspective.

I find both of those attributes of empathy to be potentially hugely powerful for anyone in sales or marketing.

Just to give you a couple of examples, whenever we’re talking about customer improvement or even the broader work in Challenger, in fact I wrote a whole chapter in The Challenger Customer on this idea, is this idea of mental modeling.

The whole idea being, if you’re going to change the way a customer thinks about their business, what’s the first thing you have to understand more than anything else?

How would you answer that, Brian?

Brian: If I were to do that, I’d need to understand what their experience is and how they see things.

Brent: You got it.

This is where I have fun talking to you because you get this stuff.

I say this with great, hopefully, empathy and respect for anyone out there. What I find when I ask most leaders, sales leaders and commercial marketing leaders, that question — “If you’re going to change the way a customer thinks about their business, what’s the first thing you have to understand?” — virtually everyone will say, “Their business.”

So then they start reading 10-Ks and the annual reports and the financials and all that kind of stuff.

What we found in our research is actually closer to where you are, which is, if you’re going to change the way a customer thinks about their business, the first thing you have to understand is how they think about their business.

Because that’s the thing you’ve got to change.

To get there, we find it can be very productive to draw a map, if you will, on a piece of paper. A map to their thinking. We call this a mental model. Mental mapping is another term for this idea.

The idea is that you can simply draw, in a couple of boxes and some connecting lines, what their goals are, what their objectives are as an organization, what they believe to be the primary challenges or primary drivers of achieving that goal, and what the secondary challenges or secondary drivers are for each of those.

You can map it out. You can actually draw it on a piece of paper.

We do this in all of our research here. We build mental models for heads of sales and mental models for heads of marketing all the time. It’s actually how we do our research.

But there’s nothing to say that heads of marketing, marketing teams, or sales teams couldn’t do the same thing for their customers, which is to put on paper a very simple diagram.

Don’t overcomplicate it. A few boxes, a couple lines: here are their core objectives as an organization, what they’re trying to achieve, how they think they’re going to get there, the challenges they think are going to get in the way, or the levers they need to pull to make that happen, whichever perspective you want.

Once you’ve got that mental model, you can put it in front of a customer and say, “Did I get it right? What would you add? What would you take away? If I gave you 100 pennies to distribute across these 10 boxes according to priority, how would you distribute them?”

When you’re all done, what you have on that piece of paper is a picture of how the customer thinks about their business.

Now, if you’re going to change the way a customer thinks about their business, the first thing you need to understand is how they think about their business. Now you’ve got it on a piece of paper.

What you can do is step back and look at it and say, what did they miss? Which box should be bigger? Which one should be smaller? Which one’s not here at all but needs to be? Which connective arrow needs to go from this box to that one instead of this one to only that one?

You can begin to look for opportunities to challenge their thinking, to help them improve their thinking, to make them smarter about what they’re doing.

But that only works by having that mental model to begin with, which I would argue, at least from a logical perspective, is at least a form of empathy.

Because that’s what that model is. It’s a picture of the world from their perspective. It’s seeing the world from your customer’s perspective.

That doesn’t have the emotional component that some aspects of empathy have, which we should be talking about as well.

Let me just stop and ask you, Brian, does that count as empathy from your perspective, or is that outside the bounds of how you define the term?

Brian: Oh, it does.

I think it’s the two levels you just touched on. It’s the perspective-taking, so understanding how they see their business, and then the second thing is the emotional side.

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio said, “We aren’t thinking machines that feel, we’re feeling machines that think.”

What he argued is we make emotional decisions rationally, so we need to take both perspectives to understand.

Brent: What’s really interesting too is that you can build in the emotional side of this in all sorts of interesting ways.

People ask us all the time about this mental model: do I need one for each of the many different stakeholders involved in a purchase? Do I have one per company, one per person? How does that work?

Practically speaking, just to make this a little bit easier to do, you can have just one mental model for a company.

What you’re going to find over time is that these mental models are highly scalable. In fact, one mental model can apply to an entire industry vertical, sometimes an entire customer base, depending on how you go to market and where you do that.

But nonetheless, what you will find is that different customer stakeholders inside a customer organization are going to prioritize different boxes on the mental model in different ways.

Some of them are going to think, if you give them 100 pennies and ask them to distribute them according to priority, they’re going to potentially distribute them in different ways.

Now imagine a world where you are talking to one of those stakeholders, and this individual has to get consensus across the other four or five to make that deal happen.

This is all implicit. It’s not explicit.

In their mind, they kind of have that mental model in their map. “Well, I care about this box. He cares about that box.” They may not be thinking about boxes per se, but it’s all sort of there.

One of the things we know from our research, and what we also know to be true as individual professionals, is going down the hall and convincing your colleagues to do anything differently is kind of a pain.

Sometimes it’s a real pain. Sometimes it’s kind of scary. Sometimes it’s a little intimidating.

What we find is that the larger the buying group, the more individual stakeholders feel not only that their credibility, but in fact their actual job, could be on the line in going and advocating for a particular supplier.

That gets into the emotional side of empathy.

Think about it from a supplier’s perspective. “Well, why can’t they all just get on board? It’s like herding cats. I can’t get these people to align.”

Well, you can’t get them to align because think about what it feels like.

Think about that person sitting at their desk. I call this the Thursday Morning 9:00 Test.

It’s Thursday morning, 9:00, and you’ve got to do what? What are you going to do? How are you going to do it? How is that going to feel?

Now I’m thinking about buying your cool CRM solution, and it’s Thursday morning, 9:00. I’m thinking, “In order to get my company to buy that solution, which I really want, I’ve got to go talk to someone in IT. I’ve got to go talk to someone in procurement. I’ve got to go talk to my CEO.”

You know what? I feel kind of sick to my stomach. I don’t want to do that. That’s a pain in my neck.

All of a sudden, what seems to be a slam dunk because this person I talked to loves it is completely in danger because that person doesn’t feel like going to talk to his other people.

So that becomes a hugely important part of empathy too.

What am I asking this senior decision maker, my contact person, to go do inside their own company?

What does that feel like?

Chances are pretty good it doesn’t feel very good.

It’s hard work. It’s credibility. It’s business case building. They’re going to ask me questions.

All those questions your sales reps have all the time: what if they ask me questions I can’t answer? What if they ask for data that I don’t know how to provide?

You know what? Your stakeholders you’re selling to have the exact same questions when they think about their own colleagues.

What if my head of IT wants to have a business case? I don’t know where I’m going to get that. Then he’s going to ask me a bunch of questions I don’t know the answer to.

Look, I just want this bleeping CRM system, but this is too hard. Never mind.

Being able to place yourself in the shoes of that stakeholder and understand what it feels like for them matters.

We always think about what it feels like to sell our solutions, but think about what it feels like to buy one of your solutions.

It rarely feels good.

Brian: I really appreciate you just sharing your perspective because this is really hard work even for us as sellers to look at.

We spend so much time focused on, “How are we going to get the deal done?” instead of understanding from our customers, how do we help them get the deal done and navigate all the things they need to do to mobilize the support to make it happen?

Brent: We have an article in Harvard Business Review in the March issue of 2017. It’s called “The New Sales Imperative.”

The idea behind it is exactly what you’re talking about. By the way, it’s called “The New Sales Imperative” because they find if they put the word sales in the title, it sells more issues, so they like that.

But it could be called “The New Marketing Imperative” as well. That was somewhat tongue in cheek, but it’s actually true.

As a supplier, what we find is that the single hardest thing about solutions is not selling them. It is, in fact, buying them.

If you go out and you talk to people, and I talk to literally thousands at the retreats and meetings and conferences we do, I did this with 1,200 people at our Vegas conference last year.

I simply asked them to take their selling hat off and put their buying hat on and think about their own organization.

Think about a recent big complex solution that you purchased with your colleagues at your company in the last 18 months, whether it’s a CRM system or some sort of lead management system or IT system or a consulting engagement, whatever it is.

Think of all the people involved, all the decisions you had to make, all the hoops you had to jump through.

Now if you had to pick one word, one adjective to describe that entire buying journey, what would that be?

Like I said, I’ve done this with thousands of people around the world, and inevitably, what do you think the words are, Brian? Take a guess.

Brian: I’m just thinking about what the words would be. I’m not even sure.

Brent: It would be things like long, hard, awful, frustrating.

Actually, it’s really interesting. When you ask people to place themselves in their own purchase journey and just ask them to share one word, they get kind of angry.

You can see their tension. The cuss words start coming out in ways that are not really appropriate for meetings that I was conducting.

I’ll never forget, someone in Chicago, the head of marketing, said, “I never want to do that again.” It was one word because I asked for one word: “Ineverwanttodothatagain.”

Someone in DC said “landmine.” And I said, “That’s not an adjective.” And he said, “landmine-ish,” which became my word for the year.

The point of all this being, if you put yourself in the shoes of your customers and ask them what it feels like to buy a solution, I literally have heard, out of the thousands of people I’ve asked, three positive words out of thousands and thousands of people I’ve talked to.

It’s all negative.

Then you ask them a second question, which is really interesting.

You ask them, “All right, so how much of that pain, how much of that time, how much of that frustration was the result of the supplier selling to you? And how much was just a result of your own company getting in its own way?”

Nine times out of 10, 10 times out of 10, people will say, “It had nothing to do with the supplier selling to me. It’s just my own company.”

Because we’re already convinced our own company is the worst company in the world. We either get in our own way, we’re too complicated, we have too many meetings, and on and on.

What’s really interesting is, what we have here is not a selling problem at all. What we have is a buying problem.

Buying is really bleeping hard with all the committees and all the information and all the options, and it all just becomes completely overwhelming.

Again, back to the point about empathy: if you can understand this as a seller, as a marketer, it doesn’t matter which, and you can understand just how hard it is to buy not just your solution but any solution.

To sift through all the information and pick out which information matters most, to sift through all the options and determine which options matter most, to wrangle all the different people and figure out all the different questions they’re going to have — and you can anticipate — this is empathy.

If you know what that feels like and then logically you can anticipate what those problems are going to be and which information is going to matter most, you can effectively become the coach to your customer.

Not on what to buy, but on how to buy.

You can take them by the hand, and you can guide them through that buying journey and become that buying Sherpa. Not solve for selling, but solve for buying.

That’s what a lot of our more recent work has been about, adopting what we’ve come to call a prescriptive approach to selling.

Again, we’ve seen marketing organizations do this really well through content that the customer can self-serve on.

My Google search will take me to a white paper that a company has written, which can take me step by step: “Looking to buy a CRM? Here’s the 10-step process. First do this. Talk to these people. Here’s the information that matters. This question doesn’t matter.”

From a customer’s perspective, the reaction is not, “I see you’re trying to trick me into buying your stuff,” but rather, “Wow, this was really helpful. You just made it so much easier.”

You can only do that, in my mind, effectively as a supplier if you come at this whole idea with empathy, being able to understand what it feels like to buy, because it doesn’t feel very good.

Brian: What you shared is that a lot of us treat the journey, and we’re going to talk a bit about your marketing research in a moment, as this beautiful-looking linear model that moves from left to right.

It’s a nice flow, but it’s really like climbing a mountain to our customer.

Brent: Yeah.

Brian: So I love the word picture of being a Sherpa because Sherpas are there to help people climb and help them along the journey.

That’s really, I think, the whole idea of empathy. It’s applied empathy because our goal is really to help people on their journey.

Brent: I totally agree.

Now let’s not forget that at the end of the day, we’re all in the business of doing one thing, which is selling more stuff.

Brian: Yes.

Brent: So empathy is all well and good, and it’s so powerful that the cynic in someone listening today might say, “Well, this is just empathy for the sake of selling more stuff.”

And to some degree, you know what, that’s true because that’s what we’re solving for in the world of sales and marketing.

But that doesn’t mean it’s any less powerful, any less honorable.

It’s helping customers find ways to generate greater value for their business that they haven’t appreciated on their own, and then helping them navigate themselves to a place where they can actually realize that value.

I think in many ways it’s not only an honorable thing to do for your customer. What we find is it’s a very profitable thing for you to do as a supplier as well.

Brian: I 100% agree.

At the base level, practicing this way, marketing and sales can and should be a force for good.

As you’re talking about this, I wanted to shift to the marketing research because you had such interesting findings around the journey of a customer.

What surprised you about the B2B buyer journey findings, the customer buying journey, and also the most important channels customers are using?

Brent: There’s more to come on this.

In fact, I’m just working on the keynote for our Vegas conference in October, where we bring all of our sales and marketing members together at our CEB, now Gartner, Sales Marketing Summit.

It’s awkward to say CEB now Gartner, but you all get the idea.

One of the things we are studying this year in our marketing practice is simply digital. We get a little more specific than that, but you can imagine, particularly B2B marketing.

Now B2C marketing digital has been a huge part, if not the primary part, of buying for a long time now.

It has become equally important in B2B very rapidly over the last several years.

Not surprisingly, we’re getting questions around the world from the CMOs that we work with, the hundreds of them, around, “How do we move to become a more digitally proficient marketing organization? What does that even mean? What would be the characteristics or hallmarks?”

So we set out to understand at least some of this world of digital buying in the B2B space with more detail this year, so we can provide our members with greater, more actionable advice.

One of the ways we started was just trying to understand what the digital buying journey looks like in B2B.

What we are really trying to understand is what the buying journey looks like in B2B, and then effectively along that buying journey, which parts are most likely to be digital?

Along the way, we found something that was actually really interesting.

What you find with most marketers, and I mean this with deep respect, this is just the result of the way we all came up and the way that digital came into our world, and the way that marketing’s always operated.

We tend to think of digital in marketing as a tool for demand generation, that is largely upper-funnel to maybe mid-funnel capability.

The idea is that we use digital, whether it be websites, online conferences, discussion boards, advertising, SEO, you name it, largely as a way to create or identify opportunities and customers that we then vet through maybe digitally based lead nurturing campaigns.

At some point, we give them that marketing-qualified stamp of approval. We pass them over to sales and say, “All right, go get them, guys.”

At that point forward, it becomes largely an in-person sales rep calling, over the phone or in person, trying to close that deal.

From our perspective in marketing, it’s like, okay, we got them that far. It’s all you guys. Go get them.

What we’ve come to understand from our research this year, and when you research customers what you find, perhaps not surprisingly, is that just because a customer’s in-person buying journey has begun, just because at some point during the purchase journey they will pick up the phone or fire off the email and reach out to an actual sales rep and have in-person communication, doesn’t mean that their digital buying journey has come to an end.

It’s not like digital in the up-funnel and in-person in the down-funnel.

Rather, the two coexist.

The thing that I think is especially interesting and new for us this year is how much buying behavior is still in digital channels even late in a purchase.

Often long after we in the marketing organization have handed it off and said, “Go get them, sales,” our customers are still online learning.

There’s still late-stage digital buying activity, and that’s got a number of really interesting implications from our perspective.

Are we even thinking about that?

From a marketing perspective, is it largely demand gen and then digital is done? Well, if it’s late-stage, what’s actually happening?

As we dug into our research, what we find is, for example, one of the things that your customers are really looking for through digital channels later in the purchase process is reassurance.

I’m talking to Brent the sales rep, and Brent’s making all sorts of promises, and he’s convinced me to buy this multi-million-dollar solution, which is great. I trust him. He’s not a crook, right?

But nonetheless, one way or another, this thing’s big, it’s disruptive, it’s expensive. I’d kind of like to get some reassurance.

I’d like to maybe see what other customers have experienced in buying this solution.

Irrespective of my ongoing in-person conversations with that sales rep, I’m going to go out and corroborate what I’m learning there and maybe add to it through digital channels.

One of the things we found in surveying customers this year is the most likely place for them to go to get that late-stage digital reassurance is the supplier’s own website.

Which I found kind of ironic, like, “I’m not sure if I completely trust the sales rep, so I’ll go to the company’s website to get reassurance.”

But nonetheless, that’s what happens.

Which begs a really interesting question: when they go to your website to get reassurance on what they’re hearing from your rep, are they even going to find that reassurance? And is that reassurance going to be consistent with what the rep has said in person?

Because if they’re not aligned, you are going to raise all sorts of red flags for that customer.

Let me take a breath there. The implications here are fascinating, but I would imagine that rings true so far. Does that make sense?

Brian: It does.

As I was listening to you, something you touched on is marketing. We’ve always had this traditional handoff from a marketing qualified lead to sales.

What you’re saying is we need to actually go beyond handoff and think about the whole journey.

So what can marketers do differently based on your research? Because there is this gap right now, and buyers are going back to the website to get this reassurance. Marketers have this gap that they aren’t filling right now from what your research is showing.

Brent: It’s funny. I tell people the cool thing about doing research is every time you do a large-scale research project, you inevitably find two things.

You find answers, which is great, but you always get more questions, which is actually good because it keeps you in business.

There are all sorts of questions here.

If digital doesn’t work as a handoff but rather as an ongoing effort, to your point, Brian, that raises all sorts of questions.

What should not just marketing do, but sales do and commercial leaders do?

What you have here now, at least what we can really see clearly in our data for the first time, is sort of what we’ve watched happen, certainly in the business-to-consumer world for five or 10 years.

Effectively what you have here is a very clear picture of omnichannel buying.

Your customers are gathering information. They’re engaging the purchase process through multiple channels simultaneously, whether it’s digital, website, SEO, in person through sales reps.

All that’s happening simultaneously.

So it isn’t just early on digital, later on person, but rather all the time always-on digital, person, and lots of other different channels.

What it means is we’ve got to coordinate across these channels in a much more effective manner than we have in the past.

Omnichannel in B2C is interesting enough, right?

How do I get all of my digital teams in marketing to collaborate more effectively? I’ve got social. I’ve got search. I’ve got TV advertising. That would be the consumer world.

I’ve got to get my TV team and my agency partner, my online people, my social team, my Facebook team, they all have to coordinate.

What’s interesting is once you move omnichannel buying from the B2C world to the B2B world, it gets 1,000 times more complicated.

Because now omnichannel means that we don’t just have to span teams within the marketing function, but rather we have to span functions altogether.

The alignment isn’t just this team and this team in marketing, but it’s actually the entire marketing function has to be aligned with the sales function in some way that frankly we just never really fully appreciated before.

Because we were always solving for marketing or selling as opposed to solving for buying.

Some of the questions this raises for us would be things like, how does one just do this? How do you overcome decades of institutional inertia?

We’ve all been complaining about the lack of sales and marketing integration for years. I’ve been doing this for 15 years, and one of the first things I heard on my first day of work when I joined CEB many years ago was, “Why can’t sales and marketing just figure out how to collaborate?”

Now when you solve for buying, you find the urgency has gone up dramatically.

If I’m hearing one thing from my sales rep and I’m finding a different thing on your website, that’s going to at the very least raise questions in a world where you’re trying to get me to change behavior, which as you remember is risky.

If I see anything that makes me a little bit more nervous, at the very least it’s going to slow me down, if not shut me down.

So now you’ve got to get all of these different pieces inside a marketing and sales organization aligned so that you’ve got one message to the customer, and it’s always consistent.

Your customer can go on whatever buying journey they want, whether it’s digital and different kinds of digital, whether it’s in person, and no matter which path I choose, I’m going to get a consistent message.

Because if they’re not aligned, it’s going to slow things down, and that to me is really fascinating.

We’re trying to figure out right now, practically and tactically, what does that mean? What has to be aligned? How do I do that?

I think the answer here for us is TBD. That’s what we’re on right now. We need to figure this kind of stuff out.

It raises all sorts of interesting questions even structurally.

Would it be better if sales and marketing reported into a single person?

I think what we’re finding already, even very anecdotally, is that those organizations where sales and marketing report up to a single person are just more likely to succeed in this environment for all the reasons I’ve just mentioned.

Brian: I’d like to try something out on you.

I’m actually writing a post about this. I’ve thought about this idea of empathy and how do we support the journey.

I think it’s really moving from this campaign mindset to from campaigns to conversations.

Since we’re thinking about this, how can we have a more congruent conversation with our customer as they go through their journey?

In effect, we’re helping them.

I think the best marketing and selling feels like helping because it really is.

I like this idea. You talked about one message. It’s a conversation that’s bi-directional.

What I’m saying is when we’re more congruent, it changes the conversation, so it can be more reciprocal with our potential customer.

Brent: More reciprocal and also more efficient.

One of the things we find about sales cycle times is, of course, they’ve gone up dramatically. It just takes longer to sell, partly because it takes longer for customers to buy.

Again, to your point, if they’re finding incongruent signals across the different channels from which they are gathering information, that’s going to slow things down that much more.

The challenge here is, again we’re still trying to figure this out, but the word you use I like, Brian, is the word conversation.

But in this context, you have to look at it not literally but metaphorically.

Because a conversation is human interaction. It’s people talking to people and conversing with one another.

That takes us right back to 10 years ago where I’ve got to have a sales rep involved. I’ve got to train my sales reps to have better conversations.

That is absolutely true, but this is more conversation in a metaphorical sense, which is not only an actual real conversation between these two human beings, but it’s also a “conversation” between our company’s website and that customer, or through the third-party influencers and our customer.

That broader view of the overall conversation and managing that becomes the bogey we’ve got to focus on, as opposed to just this actual literal conversation, which is only going to be a small part of it.

But nonetheless, if you ask any head of sales, they’ll tell you that’s it, it’s all that, we have to solve for that. That’s not the case anymore. It’s a way too limited perspective, I think.

Brian: Yeah.

As I was thinking and listening to you, our customers see our websites personified. They put a human context to the brand, to the company, even the language that’s being used.

I think the metaphor, that’s really what I’m talking about, and I’m glad you articulated it that way.

It is this metaphor of a conversation instead of the traditional campaign, which is more monologue, and what I’m saying is be more bi-directional.

Brent: I think that’s right.

By the way, going back to our empathy point, now you can start asking really interesting questions with the metaphor of the conversation.

Imagine you go to a party and you’re involved in a conversation. What makes for a good conversation? What makes for a bad conversation?

How does it feel to be involved in a bad conversation?

You go to a party and you’re in a bad conversation for whatever reason, and you just feel awkward. You just want to go crawl under a rock or you want to go away.

Honestly, you just want it to end.

That’s what it feels like from a customer’s perspective when they’re engaged with a conversation with your company that isn’t going according to expectations or is sending mixed messages.

Ask yourself: are we doing that to our customer?

How do we make our customers feel as a conversation partner?

It would be a really interesting thing to explore.

Brian: Research on how to improve being a good conversationalist says instead of trying to be interesting, be interested in the person you’re talking with.

That in and of itself is so much of what we do as marketers and sellers. It’s all about us, and we need to spend more time where it’s really all about them.

Brent: The best piece of advice I’ve ever gotten about conversation was, “Keep the other person talking about themselves.”

Brian: Totally.

Brent: That’s way too simplistic, but it is in the ballpark of what you’re talking about, which is so much better articulated.

I think that’s actually right.

This stuff is so interesting when you start solving for buying problems as opposed to selling or marketing problems.

Again, I think that’s where this idea of empathy at a very high level comes in.

Take your selling hat off, take your marketing hat off, and just ask yourself: what does it feel like to buy? How hard is it? What’s hard about it?

Why would I not do it? Why would I choose to opt out of it? What would have to happen for me to think it was easier? What would have to happen for me to feel more urgency or more excitement around it?

Solve for buying as opposed to solve for selling or marketing, and I think you’re going to be significantly better off relative to your competition.

Brian: Brent, I think that’s a perfect wrap to our conversation today.

As I was just thinking about what we can do, I think you just gave us the questions on what we can do to improve our focus and our efforts.

I’m excited for your next round of research, and I can’t wait to read about it and hear about it coming up in October.

What’s the best way for readers or listeners to get in touch with you and keep up with your research?

Brent: There are a couple different channels.

We post some of our videos and things on YouTube. Sometimes just searching my name, Brent Adamson, will come up with a couple there.

Most importantly, where we’d love to have anyone interested in our work, there are a couple different ways you can find us.

Probably the most logical place to go would be cebglobal.com. That’s our main website. It will take you into not just the CEB world but now the Gartner world too, which is very cool, and lots of new capabilities.

So cebglobal.com.

We have a website for each book, and that will tell you more about the research behind the book, tell you where to find it, and also channel you back to us.

There’s challengersale.com and challengercustomer.com, or if you like thechallengersale.com and thechallengercustomer.com. Either one will work.

There are a couple of ways to find us.

Me personally, I’m on LinkedIn, and we all have our phones tattooed onto our arms or wherever that is.

You can find me on LinkedIn. I’m pretty responsive because I sleep with my phone under my pillow. I’m that guy.

We’re always happy to talk to commercial leaders because we all learn together.

I think that’s the honest-to-goodness truth of what’s kept me doing this at this company for so many years, Brian, is that it is truly a collaborative learning exercise, a learning journey that we’re all going on where we get smarter together.

I think that’s pretty cool.

Brian: Well, I feel the same about our conversation. I’m sure listeners will as well.

Thanks for joining us today, Brent. I really appreciate you coming on.

Brent: Absolutely, Brian. Cheers, and let’s do it again soon.

Brian: Thank you.

CEOs and sales leaders have long wondered: how can we drive organic growth and increase sales from existing customers?

But for many B2B companies, that growth is elusive.

The traditional answer has usually been: serve customers better, delight them, go the extra mile, and earn the right to ask for more business.

But the data tells a more complicated story.

According to CEB, now Gartner, only 28% of sales leaders report that account management channels regularly meet their cross-selling and account growth targets.

That is why I interviewed Brent Adamson, Principal Executive Advisor at Gartner, and co-author of The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer.

In this first part of our conversation, Brent explains why service drives retention but does not necessarily drive growth, why over-serving customers can create a “zone of wasted effort,” and why account growth requires a different motion: customer improvement.

Writer’s note: This is part one of my interview with Brent Adamson. You can view part two here: New research: Empathy and how to solve buying problems.

About Brent Adamson

Brent Adamson is a Principal Executive Advisor at Gartner. He works with sales, service, marketing, and communications leaders to understand what world-class B2B selling and marketing looks like.

Brent is also the co-author of The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Brent Adamson
01:17 How sellers can drive account growth
03:57 Why existing customer growth is so hard
05:14 Why over-serving customers does not drive growth
09:32 Service drives retention, not growth
11:20 The zone of wasted effort
16:47 What customer improvement means
19:37 Customer success versus customer improvement

How do you drive growth from existing customers?

You drive growth from existing customers by helping them change their business, not simply by serving them better.

Great service helps customers renew. But growth requires something different. It requires helping customers see new ways to improve their business, make money, save money, reduce risk, or change behavior in a way they may not have fully appreciated on their own.

A few things worth taking away

• Most companies struggle to grow revenue from existing accounts.
• Sales leaders often blame account managers when growth stalls, but the problem is often the role design and the strategy.
• Account managers are asked to do two different things at once: protect the existing business and drive growth.
• Retention asks customers to maintain the status quo. Growth asks customers to change.
• Great service increases the likelihood of renewal, but it does not necessarily increase the likelihood of growth.
• Over-serving customers can create a “zone of wasted effort.”
• Customer expectations should be clearly set so teams do not over-deliver in ways that add cost without creating growth.
• Customer improvement is different from customer success.
• Customer success is often backward-looking: helping customers get value from what they already bought.
• Customer improvement is forward-looking: helping customers change their business in ways that create new value.

A few lines that stuck with me

“Service drives retention, but it doesn’t drive growth.” — Brent Adamson

“The single thing worse than failing to grow an account is failing to keep it altogether.” — Brent Adamson

“To get them to grow, you actually need to get them to embrace change.” — Brent Adamson

“You’ve got to make the business case not for buying your solution, but for changing their behavior.” — Brent Adamson

“Customer improvement is not backward-looking, but forward-looking.” — Brent Adamson

Resources mentioned

• Gartner
• The Challenger Sale
• The Challenger Customer
• Why Changing Behavior Is Your Biggest Sales Challenge

You may also like

• New research: Empathy and how to solve buying problems
• Why customer advocacy should be at the heart of your marketing
• How customer-hero stories help you connect better
• How to Attract B2B Buyers with Amazing Content

Listen and subscribe

If you found this episode helpful, subscribe to the B2B Roundtable Podcast wherever you listen.

Full transcript

Brian: Hello everyone, and welcome to today’s B2B Lead Roundtable Podcast. I am excited to have Brent Adamson. He’s the Principal Executive Advisor at CEB, now Gartner, and he’s also co-author of The Challenger Sale and co-author of The Challenger Customer.

Both these books are bestsellers. I’m sure many of you have heard of them and read them. I was just glancing through both books in preparation for our conversation today.

Brent, welcome to our show. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about you and your background?

Brent: Hey Brian, absolutely. Thank you so much for the invite. It’s great to be with you and everyone today.

I work with an organization formerly known as the Corporate Executive Board, which became CEB and has now been acquired by Gartner. I sit in the sales marketing practice here at the company.

It’s sort of our mission in life, at least in the business-to-business space where I spend most of my time, to understand with data, research, and analytics as best as we possibly can, what does world-class B2B selling and marketing look like?

We get after that with all sorts of analysis and research. It’s funny, we’re actually industry agnostic. We work across industries, go-to-market models, geographies, and try to understand across all of the diversity that we have, across all of the different kinds of companies out there, what do we all have in common?

What’s the recipe for success that’s going to help us all move the dial and do a little bit better in sales, in marketing, and ideally in sales and marketing?

Brian: Well, I’m glad to have you with us, and we’re going to touch on both the sales and marketing research, some of which I got exposed to about two months ago when you had a group of us at your thought leader roundtable.

Why don’t we just start with how can we better enable sellers to drive account growth? I know that was part of the new research you completed. What can marketing do in this process?

Brent: Sure. This is brand new research for us.

In some way or another, we always study growth because that’s what sales and marketing are all about.

There’s a certain urgency, or we like to call it the “why now?” of this growth question, especially in sales, which is especially relevant for us today.

That is simply the journey that we’ve all been on over the last five years, five months, 10 years, 20 years of building out broader capabilities across our organization to offer our customers solutions as opposed to individual products and/or services.

The idea is that if you can offer your customer broader solutions, that’s going to allow you to stand out, differentiate yourself, and command price premiums in the marketplace. All good things to do and good reasons to do it.

The thing that’s interesting though, Brian, is as you add all those capabilities to your portfolio that you can now bring to your customer to add that additional value, the actual value they create for you as a supplier is directly contingent on your ability to sell them, to get your customer to buy those incremental capabilities.

Not surprisingly, companies all around the world, in their efforts to grow, are looking to existing customers to buy more of the cart, as we like to say, to penetrate that account more deeply and get them to buy into more of the value that we can offer.

It turns out this is actually a huge challenge for B2B organizations around the world, which is simply put: to get existing customers to buy more of what we have to sell. To essentially drive growth with existing customers.

That is the challenge, or the terrain as we like to say, that we dove into this year.

Specifically in this world of account management or existing customers, what is it that sales organizations can do to do a better job of driving growth with those existing customers?

When you dig into it, what’s really interesting is the amount of frustration with sales organizations around the world in making that happen.

There’s only about roughly a quarter, somewhere around 25% or 26% of the heads of sales that we surveyed this year, who told us that their account teams were actually meeting, let alone exceeding, cross-sales or up-sales across portfolio goals.

Whether you call it up-sales, cross-sales, land and expand, whatever you might call it, we’re all struggling to get that incremental revenue from our customers.

Let me take a breath there, but that’s sort of the terrain that we dove into to try and understand what’s going on. I would imagine, Brian, that’s something you hear a lot about too across your listenership.

Brian: Yeah. I was just talking with a CEO and his team, and that’s really a struggle.

This brings us to the question I wanted to ask you about. They were looking at how they grow organic growth. They talked about customer success, and they talked about how they could service their account above and beyond, but that just didn’t seem to be enough.

Servicing accounts above and beyond has been something that sellers have focused on, but what’s counterintuitive about your research is something that it doesn’t seem to be helping, does it?

Brent: Well, no. You’re right. It was counterintuitive even to us.

We always have these hypotheses that we test in all of our research, but it’s always interesting to see how the data and the research shakes out.

What we found is a couple of things here in this particular world of account managers, if you will, that this is the farming side of the hunting-farming debate.

That’s about our farmers, and they have to be nurturers and take care of our current customers. Then when they fail to grow, we think, “Oh, they need to be harder. They need to be tougher. They need to be more aggressive. We need to get them in there.”

What’s interesting is when they fail to drive growth with current customers, we often blame the people.

We need more hunter-oriented sales professionals in our account management ranks, or we need someone that is going to ask for the business or be more aggressive as opposed to being so nurturing.

There’s a really interesting tendency to fall back on DNA, or at least individual traits, and assume that the lack of growth is the result of the wrong people.

Then you get the CEO saying, “We need better people. We need different people.”

What we’ve come to really understand is not only is it a structure of the role. In an account management role, yes, you’re on the hook for driving growth in existing accounts, but let’s not forget you’re also on the hook for not losing the business that you’ve already won.

At the same time, you’re partly involved in the servicing of those accounts as well. You’ve got service. You’ve got success, or making sure they get value from that which they’ve already bought, and then driving incremental growth.

What happens in the account management role, unlike a pure hunting role, is that when you’re sitting over or at least involved in all three of those categories simultaneously, not only your time but your attention and focus gets split in some really interesting ways that create all sorts of tension.

If I’m a pure hunter, all I’m tasked to do is go out and bring in new logos or new customers altogether.

But if I’m a farmer, if I’m someone in an account management role, yes, I’ve got to bring in incremental business, but never at the cost of losing the business that we won already.

That’s the thing we say: the single thing worse than failing to grow an account is failing to keep it altogether.

What you have now is this really interesting tension of an account manager trying to pat your head and rub your tummy at the same time. They’re trying to do two very different things simultaneously, which is grow the account but not lose the account.

The reason why that matters is because what you’re asking the customer to do in this environment is actually two very different things.

To keep the customer, you essentially have to get the customer to agree to the status quo. Keep doing what you’re doing. Sign up for it again. Renew that contract. Buy the same amount. Renew that business if it was a renewal-based business. That’s a status quo decision.

But a growth decision is actually to do something different: to buy more, to expand to more seats, to go to a new geography, to incorporate this new service or new technology.

From an account management perspective, I’ve got two tensions simultaneously.

One tension is to try to get them to grow without losing what I’ve got already. The one thing worse than failing to grow an account is failing to keep it altogether.

Simultaneously, I’m trying to get my customer to change and not change their behavior at the same time, and this turns out to be really hard.

This stuff is really fascinating from a social science perspective. You think about, how do I play that card? What’s the strategy for winning and driving growth in that environment?

So full circle back to your question, Brian. We find that the predominant mental model of account managers in this world is, first things first, before I get the growth, I’ve got to get the maintain. I’ve got to get the retain.

Let’s make sure that they’re happy. Let’s make sure they’re taken care of. Let’s make sure they’re satisfied. In fact, let’s make sure they’re delighted with whatever we sold in the past.

Let’s over-serve them. Let’s provide world-class service, and if we do that we’re going to at some point achieve a threshold, a permission. If we can get over that permission threshold, then we’ll have won the right to ask them for growth.

Somehow, just by being so happy with the service we provided in the past, that will drive growth.

That brings us full circle to the punchline of a lot of our data, which is what we found is while providing a world-class level, in fact even just an above-average level of service and success to your customer, that is making sure they’re happy with that which they’ve bought already, makes your customers significantly more likely to renew that business, to retain that business.

They’re twice as likely to renew.

But we can find no statistically significant impact between that level of service and the likelihood of that customer to actually grow.

So put it all together and what you get is service drives retention, but it doesn’t drive growth.

That’s a really interesting thing to find in a world where the mental model, essentially the working hypothesis of not only account managers but all the way up to the CEO, is let’s serve our customers. Let’s create these world-class moments of delight, and that will earn us the permission for growth.

We just don’t find that to be the case at all in our research.

Brian: When I first saw that, I was blown away because the rationale and logic has always been go the extra mile, delight.

Everyone’s measuring based on Net Promoter and some of these other things to look at, are we doing well?

What your data is showing us is that there is a point of over-serving our customers. What’s the phrase that you use? It’s not diminishing returns, but there’s this term you used in your research.

Brent: We gave it a provocative name.

If you draw this out in a set of curves, and we’ve got graphics to go along with this, the idea is if you think more service equals higher likelihood to grow, it almost looks like a 45-degree angle going up and to the right.

Service is on the horizontal axis. Likelihood to grow is on the vertical. The more service I provide, the farther I go to the right, the higher I get on the vertical, because service leads to growth.

What we find is, in fact, that the line doesn’t go up and to the right endlessly. It shanks to the right. It levels off and ends to your point in terms of diminishing returns.

At some point, no matter how much more service you provide or pour into that account, the chances of driving growth do not go up because service doesn’t equal growth.

What happens is that in reality, you keep providing more and more service with absolutely no incremental impact on growth likelihood.

It creates this huge gap between the amount of service actually provided and the amount of service that you needed to provide simply to get retention.

We call that gap the Zone of Wasted Effort, which is somewhat provocative.

But the Zone of Wasted Effort is in fact that. It is effort that you’ve expended in serving the customer and delighting the customer in hopes of getting growth that will never actually get you growth because it doesn’t lead to growth.

At the very least, in that Zone of Wasted Effort, there are all sorts of questions. One of them is simply, what are the opportunity costs of our time?

How much time, money, effort, and people are we pouring into a customer to provide world-class service when, in fact, your customer’s going to renew or retain anyway?

By talking to heads of sales about this, I’ve learned a lot in the last couple of months.

Just in Atlanta two weeks ago, one head of sales said, “We do this all the time.”

The real price is not just the opportunity cost of time that you pay, but the fact that you are now raising expectations for your customer way above anything that you ever originally promised, and you’re recalibrating or resetting their expectations for the next deal.

So yes, it gets you retention, which you were going to get anyway. It doesn’t get you growth because it can’t get you growth.

What it does do though is make the next deal you do with the customer even that much more expensive because you’ve recalibrated their expectations way higher than you ever needed to do originally just to keep the account.

Brian: This is a problem that’s affecting nearly every B2B company: how do we drive organic growth?

How can companies use the findings of your research to move from this retention model to actually driving growth? What are some of the strategies, the things you found, that sellers can do differently?

Brent: A couple thoughts on this.

One is, to get back to the previous point, it becomes really important in this world to set very clear expectations.

The thing that heads of sales ask us all the time is, “Okay, I get it, or I kind of get it. I’m on board. I see the data makes sense. I understand that at some point there’s diminishing returns to providing greater and greater service, but how do I know how much service is enough? How do I know when I’ve reached that threshold? I’ve maximized the benefit for retention, knowing that there is no benefit for growth. How do I figure out what that moment is?”

The answer is simply: it’s in meeting the expectations that you’ve established with your customer in advance.

Whether it’s formally through something like service level agreements, or more informally through quarterly reviews, business reviews, or account planning processes. One way or another, set those expectations very clearly, probably in writing with not only your customers but your own team, so that you don’t perform way above them because all that does is add cost with no real return.

That’s point one. Setting expectations is super important.

That is more of a cost mitigation strategy. It’s not really a growth strategy, as you asked for.

So, Brian, the flip side is now how do I actually drive the growth?

What our data has led us to understand is there is a completely different strategy altogether, which is something that we’ve come to call customer improvement.

For any of the listeners on the podcast who are familiar with our work that we’ve done in The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer, this idea will sound very familiar.

Effectively, it’s a subset of behaviors or attributes that are all completely consistent with the Challenger body of work.

We tested a whole bunch of different attributes in our data across about 750 B2B customers, individual stakeholders involved in a big B2B purchase.

What we found is that for those suppliers who were perceived by those customers as providing a set of interactions that we’ve labeled customer improvement, they were significantly more likely to buy incremental services, additional geographies, additional features, and additional products from that supplier.

Customer improvement very specifically is the ability of a supplier to help critically assess the customer’s business in a way the customer hasn’t fully appreciated on their own, and help them identify new ways to grow, make money, save money, or lay out the ROI of taking a step in that direction.

It goes back to that tension I was mentioning before.

Brian: Yes.

Brent: If your goal is retention or renewal, what you’re trying to do there is just get your customers to embrace the status quo, to keep doing what they’ve already decided to do in the past.

But to get them to grow, you actually need to get them to embrace change. To do something different. To buy something different.

If you want your customers to do something different, that’s change. Change is perceived as risky.

If I’m going to do anything risky, if I’m going to do anything involving change, you’ve got to make the business case not for buying your solution. You’ve got to make the business case for changing their behavior.

That’s what customer improvement is all about.

It’s building and articulating a business case to your customers for why they need not to buy your solution, but why they need to change their behavior in a way that’s going to improve their business.

It’s a really powerful lesson completely consistent with what we found in the past.

But what’s so stark about it in this context is that for existing accounts, while service and success do not drive growth, customer improvement does, dramatically so in fact.

Brian: What you’re sharing reminds me of this conversation I brought up earlier.

It sounds like what you’re saying is we need to move from being more reactive and looking at how do we deliver and retain, to proactive and forward-looking.

I was thinking of this conversation I had with this CEO and his team. They have this customer success strategy, and it was really helping their customers become like gold medalist athletes, performing what they do, which is productivity task management.

The problem is the customers weren’t wanting to be gold medalists. What they wanted was to simply get their job done more effectively.

There wasn’t that vision.

So what I’m hearing is, you need to help someone, if they want to embrace that level, to know where they want to go and how you can help take them there. Is that what you’re saying?

Brent: A little bit, yeah, it is.

I would use slightly different language, only in the sense that the term customer success, at least in the world of software service, for example, the big cloud providers and that sort of world, has taken on a very specific definition or framework.

A success team there is generally designed to make sure the customer gets as much value from that which they’ve bought from you in the past as possible.

This is a proactive team that would reach out to the customer and say, “Hey, you’ve got this subscription from us,” for example, or, “You’ve bought this product or service from us. Did you know it has this capability you can take advantage of? Or did you know there are these ways we can help you based on the contract we already have in place?”

It’s a proactive call.

It’s not reactive in the sense that a customer calls you when they’re upset because something doesn’t work. You’re proactively calling them and helping them get value from that which they’ve already bought.

So it’s proactive but backward-looking.

It’s focused on what you bought from us as a supplier in the past and making sure you get as much success from that as possible.

Now the customer improvement concept, or the approach, is not backward-looking, but forward-looking.

And it’s not about your capabilities, but the customer.

In fact, it’s completely supplier agnostic in a way that will just drive you crazy.

It’s weird to try to get your customer to buy something without talking about your capabilities, which you will eventually, but not at the beginning of the conversation. At the end.

I think, Brian, you’d agree that everything in life can be boiled down to a four-square, right?

You can do that here.

If you think about a four-square where the vertical dimension is supplier across the bottom, customer across the top, and then left-right is backward-looking on the left and forward-looking on the right.

When you think about the top right box in that four-square, what you have is customer-oriented and forward-looking.

Success teams tend to be in the bottom left box. They tend to be backward-looking around the supplier’s capability. So let’s make sure you get as much value from that which you bought already.

It’s a proactive push, but around that which you’ve bought already.

The customer improvement story up in the top right is not about you at all. It’s about the customer and how they can change the way they think about their business in a way that’s going to help them reap greater returns in the future going forward.

So back to your point about the customer doesn’t want to be a gold medalist.

In this world, what you need to do is figure out what your customer is ultimately trying to achieve. Who are they trying to be?

If not a gold medalist, then is it a silver medalist? Is it not a medalist at all?

What are their ultimate goals as a commercial organization?

You can ask yourself: if that’s looking forward to the future, their strategy, what they’re trying to achieve, what is it about that strategy that is incomplete or perhaps even misplaced?

How are they going to get there and what have they missed?

If that’s what’s important to them, how can I help them get there better than they ultimately are planning on getting there on their own?

If you wanted to raise it up a notch in altitude, you could go in and argue with, “That’s not even a good place for you to be starting within the first place.”

That is a higher-level argument, which is sometimes harder to have with your customer. I would never use the word argument per se, but debate, if you will.

One way or another, you will find that your customers are always going to be oriented toward the status quo because change is expensive, disruptive, scary, and risky.

If you’re going to get your customers to change their behavior, the first thing you’ve got to do is convince them that the change is even worth it in the first place.

Maybe it is worth it to become a gold medalist. Or if they only want to be a silver medalist, that’s fine, but let me show you how the path you’re on toward silver medal isn’t going to get you there nearly as fast or as effectively as you thought it would.

The zone of wasted effort

Sales enablement is supposed to help sellers perform better. But too often, it becomes another silo.

Another function. Another internal process. Another team competing for attention, budget, and a seat at the table.

That is the problem Dave Brock names in this conversation. Dave is the author of The Sales Manager Survival Guide and CEO of Partners in EXCELLENCE. His view is simple and direct: sales enablement works best when it is treated less like a department and more like a set of shared processes that help salespeople perform at their highest level.

That changes the conversation.

Instead of asking whether sales enablement deserves a bigger seat at the table, Dave asks a better question: what do sellers actually need to create better customer conversations, and who in the organization is best equipped to help?

Sometimes that help comes from sales managers. Sometimes it comes from marketing. Sometimes it comes from HR, sales operations, training, content, tools, or leadership. The point is not to build another function. The point is to remove friction so sellers can do the work customers need them to do.

We also talk about why marketing needs to move beyond being seen as the “leads people,” why sales and marketing should operate more like a basketball team than a handoff process, and why many SDR models create a bad first impression with senior buyers.

Dave also brings the conversation back to empathy. Not empathy as a soft idea. Empathy as caring enough to understand the customer’s world. Their problems. Their pressures. Their goals. Their buying process. Their reality.

If your sales enablement work is adding complexity instead of reducing it, this conversation is worth revisiting.

About Dave Brock

Dave Brock is the author of The Sales Manager Survival Guide and CEO of Partners in EXCELLENCE. He works with sales and marketing leaders to solve difficult problems, improve sales performance, and adapt to the way modern buyers actually buy.

What we cover

In this episode, Dave and I talk about:

• Why sales enablement often becomes another silo
• How internal complexity slows down sales performance
• Why enablement should be viewed as a set of processes, not just a department
• The role of frontline sales managers in improving seller performance
• How marketing can help sales beyond demand generation and lead handoff
• Why sales and marketing should work more like a basketball team
• What is broken in many SDR and prospecting models
• Why entry-level SDRs often struggle with senior executive conversations
• Why empathy, caring, and curiosity matter in sales and marketing
• How to start with the customer and work backward

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Dave Brock
01:10 Dave’s background
02:20 The new buyer and complexity
04:00 Breaking down internal silos
05:45 Sales enablement as a process
09:50 Marketing beyond lead generation
14:00 What’s broken in prospecting
19:35 Empathy, caring, and curiosity
24:00 Start with the customer

Key takeaway

The best sales enablement work does not start with the company’s internal structure. It starts with the customer.

Who are they? How do they work? What do they care about? What pressures are they facing? How do they learn? How do they buy? What would actually help them move forward?

Then you work backward.

That is where sales enablement becomes useful. Not as another layer of internal complexity, but as a way to help sellers and marketers meet buyers where they are.

Resources mentioned

• Partners in EXCELLENCE
• The Sales Manager Survival Guide
• Dave Brock on X/Twitter

You may also like

• How to do lead management that improves conversion
• How customer-hero stories help you connect better
• Lead Nurturing: 5 Useful Tactics to Get More Opportunities
• The Biggest Contributor to B2B Revenue

Transcript

Brian Carroll: Hello everyone. I’d like to welcome you to today’s B2B Lead Roundtable Podcast. This is Brian Carroll. I’m pleased to have Dave Brock with us today.

If you don’t know Dave already, Dave is the author of The Sales Manager Survival Guide and CEO of Partners in EXCELLENCE. Dave and I had a lively conversation a few weeks ago while we were out in the D.C. area. I really enjoyed his perspective and viewpoint and learning from him. I wanted to bring his thinking to you.

Dave, welcome. Can you tell us a little bit about your background?

Dave Brock: Brian, thanks so much. I really appreciate the chance to continue the conversation we started in Washington, and I appreciate you inviting me to this.

By background, I actually started out as a physicist in my career and ended up going to the dark side of selling. I sold mainframe computers for IBM for a number of years, went up the food chain, went to EVP of sales, and became CEO of a number of technology companies.

And now I run the consulting company. We really help our clients solve some of the most difficult problems in sales and marketing and deal with the new buyers that there are. We have a collaborative approach in helping really outstanding people solve really, really difficult problems.

Brian Carroll: I’d love to hear your perspective. What right now do you feel is the biggest trend you see affecting your work in sellers today?

Dave Brock: Well, clearly, it’s the convergence of a number of things that we see in the marketplace.

It’s the new buyer. Everybody is changing the way they buy, and learning how we engage these new buyers through marketing, sales, and customer experience is critical.

At the same time, we see tremendous transformations in business and business models, whether it’s the digital transformation that virtually every business is undertaking or just all business models being displaced with new business models.

We have some of the classics of Airbnb turning the hotel and lodging business upside down, Uber turning the taxi and limo business upside down. We see these new business models occurring, driving real stress on customers.

And then the final thing is just overwhelming complexity, between the rate of change and the amount of information we’re [inaudible] with every day. Most of the people I’m meeting are really struggling with at least one of those three things. I see it really impacting virtually everybody.

Brian Carroll: I can relate to those challenges. I think just talking about complexity for sellers and marketers, I was having a conversation with someone earlier and it’s just overwhelming, the amount of tools an average salesperson uses or a marketer uses.

It also creates challenges around collaboration, that internal collaboration. I wanted to ask, how do you get internal collaboration working to address these problems, these challenges, and help improve sales performance?

Dave Brock: The easy answer is break down the silos and start talking to each other. It’s easier said than done.

The thing that we see is a lot of the issues we face in terms of internal complexity and internal collaboration are just people being well-intended, doing their jobs, but somehow their jobs aren’t aligned with each other, or there are things about their jobs that cause them to be in conflict with other people.

Simple things like aligning roles and responsibilities, aligning metrics, some classic value stream types of analysis.

I just had a conversation earlier today with a marketing executive and his top management team. We were talking about what’s the value proposition they create for sales, and sales is the downstream customer of theirs.

I think again, we have to rethink our working relationship, rethink the classic business process re-engineering of our workflows, our roles and responsibilities, and really get some alignment in metrics so that we realize we’re all on the same team, with the same end goal.

Brian Carroll: That’s helpful. And something that’s really come to age recently is sales enablement. I just wanted to ask, what’s the role of sales enablement to help achieve this?

Dave Brock: I think I’m on the wrong side of some debates on this. I look at sales enablement as more a set of processes and a set of activities than I do a function within the organization.

If you look at what sales enablement processes are supposed to do, they’re supposed to help maximize the salesperson’s ability to perform. And so you look at that and say there are a whole collection of things that we can do to do that.

The first is the frontline sales manager and their role in coaching and developing everybody on their team to perform at maximum capability.

But then these frontline sales managers need a lot of support in a lot of areas, whether it’s tools and technology, whether it’s new programs, whether it’s people selection and performance management, whether it’s training, whether it’s content, and so on.

So you start looking at seeing all these things contribute to enabling the salesperson to perform at the highest level possible.

Now, who does those things? It could be all over the place. It could be marketing that’s doing some of these things. It could be HR that’s working on a lot of the talent management types of things. It could be sales operations, or it could be people in the sales function.

So I think the discussion around sales enablement is more powerful when we look at what are the things that we need to do, and then look at who in the organization can do those most effectively and most efficiently.

Brian Carroll: I like how you talk about it, because I think often, when I talk about enablement, I often am looking at marketing and sales.

But as you’re talking, it’s bringing in the finance team, the human resources team. So it’s a collective effort, not just one single group or department. That’s the whole point you were saying earlier, about bringing down the silos. Am I understanding that correctly?

Dave Brock: Exactly. Exactly.

I got engaged in a debate not long ago about how sales enablement earns a spot at the CEO’s table. To me, that was one of the most ridiculous debates I’ve ever seen.

We now have sales enablement executives that not only want to have a spot at the chief sales officer’s table, but now they believe they should have a spot at the CEO’s table. The CEO’s table is getting pretty crowded with a lot of people who want a spot there.

I think it gets away from the point of what we’re trying to do. And I think it actually starts building more barriers to collaboration and working. We’re building another silo and another set of functions competing for attention and corporate resources.

Again, I tend to like to look at [inaudible] as more processes and workflows, and what are the things that need to be done. And then we look at who can do those most effectively.

And if it’s a sales enablement organization, well, that’s really powerful, but we shouldn’t overlook the other parts of the organization.

Brian Carroll: I wanted to ask, we spent time talking about sales enablement. Marketing does have a really important role in helping raise the level of performance for the sales team.

As you and I were in D.C., we talked about how often marketing is looked to as the leads people. We need to think more beyond that, in terms of how they can impact efficiency and effectiveness of each person.

How do you think marketing can help raise the level of performance of sales?

Dave Brock: I think we have to change our mindset from marketing being the awareness people, the create-interest people, the leads people, the demand gen people, and so on and so forth, and look at the entire customer buying journey.

And look at what that is, and who can contribute to that.

We have the traditional feeling that marketing does demand gen and lead gen and tosses those over the wall to sales. And sales immediately rejects all of them as being bad and tosses them back. But we separate these processes.

I think modern sales and modern marketing is very different. I like to look at modern marketing and sales as kind of like a basketball team.

On a basketball team, every person has their defined roles. You have a couple of guards, you have a couple of forwards, you have a center, and you practice plays, and everybody tries and plays those roles. You get really expert at that.

But then in the game, you’re very agile and nimble and adapt to what’s happening with competition and what’s happening with the game.

I think we need to look at marketing and sales more like a basketball team. What are our roles? What are our responsibilities? What are the plays that we execute? Who executes those?

But I think we have to be very agile in working with each other and saying, “Who’s the person that should be taking the shot right now? Who’s the person that should be bringing the ball down the court?”

I look at marketing and sales as not the sequential process where marketing gets the leads and gives them to sales, and sales takes care of everything throughout.

But we work together in the demand gen process, and we work together in the buying process.

There’s a huge amount marketing can bring to the party with qualified opportunities, whether it’s case studies, whether it’s proofs, whether it’s tools, whether it’s content relevant to where the person is towards the end of the buying journey, and those kinds of things.

We really need to look at it as an interrelated and integrated set of processes.

Brian Carroll: It makes a lot of sense, what you’re talking about.

I think the challenge is that marketing and sales often are doing the same things. They might have different words for it. For example, marketing may call it lead generation, or inbound sales might call it prospecting, social selling, etc. They’re doing the same things.

As I’ve talked to salespeople, they often are feeling they’re succeeding despite marketing, not because of it. I was talking to someone trying to build his own pipeline. He was getting leads from marketing. They weren’t helping. He was prospecting, trying to figure out how to cold-call, etc.

Let’s talk about how salespeople are prospecting today. Do you think we’re getting it wrong? How should we be thinking about the customer first impression and why?

Dave Brock: I do think we’re getting a lot wrong about prospecting.

One is I don’t think enough salespeople are prospecting. Most everybody I talk to is opportunity-starved, but we have a lot of these mindsets and mentalities that say, “Well, it’s marketing’s job to get those leads. And if they aren’t getting the leads, then there’s nothing I can do. Or it’s the SDR’s role to take those leads and qualify them, or do something with them. And then my job is just to take those great leads that the SDR gives to me.”

I think the first thing we do is we have to change salespeople’s mentality and say, “Marketing is going to do everything they can to get you the right kind of leads and the right kinds of opportunities. SDRs are going to do everything they can. But if the volume isn’t sufficient, you have to go out and start finding business yourself. You have to prospect. You have to generate new business.”

You might go to marketing and ask them for help in doing that, maybe giving you a specific program that you can execute as well.

The other thing too is I sometimes think we get our prospecting models, and particularly the SDR-driven type models, a little bit backwards.

I think we do a disservice to SDRs.

Most organizations, the SDR is an entry-level job to selling. They do something that most salespeople would refuse to do, which is to call people they’ve never spoken to before and prospect them.

It’s a really tough job.

But one of the disconnects we have is we have these poor SDRs often calling on C-level people.

I get SDRs calling me every day. I feel really sorry for them, because they’ll call me and say, “We believe we can help you improve your business.” And I say, “Cool. What am I doing wrong? How should I be improving my business?” And they’re floored. They don’t know how to carry on that conversation.

They shouldn’t be expected to.

If they’re brand new to selling, why are they calling me, a C-level executive, albeit of a small company, but a C-level executive?

We’re matching the wrong people up with the target audience. As a result, we’re creating terrible first impressions.

If somebody calls me and they can’t have that powerful, engaging first conversation, I’m going to have a negative impression both of that individual and of their company.

I think we’re missing huge amounts of opportunities by not having the right people.

I wrote an article about a year ago saying, “Maybe we need to get some of our most talented senior-level salespeople being SDRs.” If they’re creating that first impression, and if our target persona is this C-level person, then those are the people that have the best capability of creating a very, very positive first impression and opening up far more opportunities than a brand-new SDR without that experience base.

Brian Carroll: I love that suggestion.

It reminds me, before I was called an SDR, that’s what I started as at 23. I was on the phone. I was calling C-level people, 23 years old. There was very little training, advice, coaching. It was on the job.

Later, I started a company helping people do that. I worked for a company where I was CEO. I made calls with the team who was on the phone, and the whole point was to learn, to see what they were experiencing, to understand.

I think what you’re talking about is really a great transition into talking about this idea of empathy.

That’s the hard part. How can somebody who doesn’t have experience connect with someone else and understand their perspective and feeling?

I wanted to ask you, how can sellers be more empathy-based with their approach to customers?

Dave Brock: I think there are a number of things.

First of all, what empathy is about is caring.

You’ve got to really care about your customers, whoever those customers are. If you’re only in business to say, “How can I get an order?” you’re never going to be successful at all.

You’ve got to care about your customers. You’ve got to care about their success in achieving their goals.

If you’re driven by that, it changes your whole orientation and your process for engaging the customer in the conversations you have.

That shouldn’t be a do-good or [inaudible] kind of mentality. The only people I’m going to engage are people who I know have the problems that I can solve.

I’m not wasting my time calling on people, engaging them, and caring about them and their success if they don’t have the problems that I can help them solve.

It is very focused on calling the right people that we can do some things with. And then it’s understanding who they are. It’s kind of sitting behind their desk or being able to walk in their shoes.

There are a whole number of ways you can do that.

I used to joke, I used to sell to the large money center banks in New York City. To learn about banking, you hang out where the bankers hung out, and they hung out at Harry’s at Hanover Square.

I’d learn a lot by just talking to them over a beer about what their businesses were, what their dreams were, where their problems were, which enabled me to connect much more effectively with those people in business.

Here we’ve got to start hanging out where our customers hang out, whether it’s discussion groups, whether it’s trade shows. It’s really learning about where they live and what they worry about every day.

It’s asking questions. It’s getting engaged in those conversations.

I think along with caring is curiosity. If you have those two attributes, you’re going to figure out what the customer is about. You’re going to figure out how to engage the customer. You’re going to figure out how your products and solutions might serve the customer and help them.

Two fundamental attributes: caring and curiosity.

Brian Carroll: That is terrific.

I really liked how you brought it together in terms of meeting those elements, then immersing yourself in the world of your customer, going where they are.

It’s interesting, as I was listening to you, I don’t know that the marketers who are reaching out or making that initial impression have actually been able to get in the world of the people they’re hoping to influence and help, to drive change, to work with them through their journey.

I would say that what you shared you did as a salesperson, we need to do that in marketing too: get in the world of the customer and observe.

From that, we’re going to have the empathy, or to put it another way, we’ll have the intuition.

Our empathy is our marketing and sales intuition to know how to best move forward and what some of those opportunities are.

Dave Brock: It’s really funny how some of these cycles go, but I remember maybe 10 or 15 years ago, when there were a lot of initiatives around voice of the customer and understanding voice of the customer.

When you looked at the way a lot of those initiatives were implemented, marketers would go out and live with the customers. Some of them literally would live for several weeks with the customers and sit and observe them in their jobs and all.

Getting marketers out and treating the customers less as an intellectual exercise or an analytic exercise, but getting them out and actually visiting the customers.

Spending a few days watching them work, talking to them not about what we sell and whether they like these things that we sell, but talking to them about what they do, what they feel, and how they think.

And then bringing that back in and saying, “Now we know the customer, and we’ve seen where they live. How do we take that information and best leverage it to engage them where they’re at?”

Brian Carroll: Fantastic.

We have time just for a few more questions. I was just going to ask you, do you have any other actionable advice around this for those who want to either help improve sales enablement or their sales team’s ability to ultimately improve their own performance?

Dave Brock: I think it’s a little bit counterintuitive. It may sound simplistic, but we don’t do it.

So many of our initiatives, so much of our thinking is driven inward-out rather than outward-in.

We have our products and we have our services. We think about what we want to do and how we want to bring those to market, and so we develop all our launch programs, all our marketing programs, all our sales programs from an internally based orientation about what’s most effective and what’s most efficient for us.

Usually when we execute those, we find we’ve missed one thing: we’ve forgotten about the customer in that whole thing.

What we do that may be most effective and efficient for us may not be effective or efficient for the customer.

So generally I find the fastest way to the best and most effective solution is to always start with the customer and work your way back in.

Who are they?

Where are they?

How do they work?

What drives them?

What do they care about?

What are their dreams?

And then when they get into buying motions, how do they buy?

How do they self-educate?

How do they learn about things?

Trace those things back in to design the process that meets them where they’re at, rather than trying to force them to find us and meet us where we’re at.

Brian Carroll: Dave, thank you so much.

What’s the best way for our readers and listeners to get in touch with you or to find out more about your work and get access to other resources?

Dave Brock: Well, thanks for asking that.

They can follow me at my blog. It’s partnersinexcellenceblog.com. I publish virtually every business day. I tend to try and have a proactive point of view.

I’m very active on LinkedIn. People can reach out and follow some of my content on LinkedIn or reach out and connect with me, or connect with me over Twitter, davidabrock.

Brian Carroll: Thank you again, Dave, for being with us today.

For our listeners, we’re going to have all these links for you, including the link back to Dave’s site on the B2B Lead Blog. Check back for additional updates.

We thank you all for listening. I hope you found this helpful.

Dave, I always learn when I speak with you. I know our readers did too. Thanks again.

Dave Brock: Thanks so much, Brian. It’s a real privilege.

Brian Carroll: All right. Thank you.

What if your happiest customers are your most powerful hidden sales force?

Mark Organ puts it simply: “The future belongs to companies who do a better job of discovering, nurturing, and mobilizing their customers to do the marketing for them.”

That line gets to the heart of this conversation.

Most companies still think of marketing as something they do to the market. Campaigns. Emails. Content. Nurture tracks. Product messages. Follow-up.

But Mark argues that the best companies are learning to market with their customers, not just at their customers.

In this episode of the B2B Roundtable Podcast, I talk with Mark Organ, founder and CEO of Influitive and co-founder of Eloqua, about why customer advocacy should sit at the heart of your marketing.

Mark has spent years studying what motivates people to advocate. His view is that delighted customers are not just proof points. They are a growth engine. They create referrals, share stories, speak on your behalf, influence new buyers, and help others trust you faster than your own sales and marketing ever could.

We get into why customer advocacy works, what motivates advocates, why employees may be your first customer, how advocacy and empathy connect, and why the future of marketing may depend less on direct promotion and more on getting trusted people to carry your message for you.

If your team is trying to build more trust with buyers, this conversation is worth your time.

About Mark Organ

Mark Organ is the founder and CEO of Influitive, an advocate marketing software company. He previously co-founded Eloqua and has been a longtime innovator in sales and marketing technology.

Before building companies, Mark was a Ph.D. candidate in neuroscience at Northwestern University, studying how the brain works and the biological basis of behavior. That background continues to shape how he thinks about motivation, advocacy, customer experience, and marketing.

Connect with Mark:

• @markorgan on X/Twitter
• Influitive

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Mark Organ
01:10 Why Mark started Influitive
04:20 Putting customers at the center
06:20 What motivates customer advocates
10:45 Why advocacy drives growth
14:50 Empathy and customer advocacy
19:15 How to support advocates
24:20 The future of marketing

A few things worth taking away

• Customer advocacy works because buyers trust other customers more than they trust vendor messages.
• Delighted customers can become a hidden sales force through referrals, references, stories, and peer influence.
• Advocates are more active when they feel like part of an exclusive tribe.
• You cannot manufacture advocacy if the customer experience is weak.
• Employee experience matters because employees create the customer experience.
• Empathy and advocacy connect because both start with understanding what the buyer wants to feel.
• One simple way to begin is to gather a small group of your best customers and listen to them.
• Centralizing advocacy with one person can create more value and a better advocate experience.
• The future of marketing may depend more on trusted proxies carrying your message than on more campaigns from your company.

A few lines that stuck with me

“The future belongs to companies who do a better job of discovering, nurturing, and mobilizing their customers to do the marketing for them.” — Mark Organ

“None of us can build a successful business without having our customers doing that sales and marketing for us.” — Mark Organ

“People advocate more when they feel like they’re part of an exclusive tribe.” — Mark Organ

“Advocacy is kind of like a beneficial virus.” — Mark Organ

“Instead of thinking about how do I bombard people in order to get my way, it’s how do I find the right people who are relevant and trusted and get them to carry our message for me?” — Mark Organ

Resources mentioned

• Influitive
• Mark Organ on X/Twitter
• What the heck is advocacy marketing?

You may also like

• Lead Nurturing: 4 Steps to Walking the Buying Path with Your Customers
• How Customer-Hero Stories Help You Connect Better
• How Sales Hustle and Automation Can Hurt Customer Experience

Listen and subscribe

If you found this episode helpful, subscribe to the B2B Roundtable Podcast wherever you listen.

Transcript

Brian Carroll: Hello and welcome to today’s B2B Roundtable Podcast. This is Brian Carroll. I’m really excited to bring our guest to you today. His name is Mark Organ.

I’ve known Mark, I think we first met shortly after you started your company, Eloqua. Mark is the founder and CEO of Influitive. I met Mark 17 or so years ago, or maybe 16 years ago, when he founded Eloqua.

He’s been a thought leader in the space of sales and marketing technology, a real innovator. I’m really excited to bring his thinking to you.

Mark, could you just tell us a little bit about your background and what inspired you to start Influitive?

Mark Organ: Yeah, thanks. I’m really excited to be here, Brian. I think this is an amazing podcast and I’m excited to share my story.

I’ve lived a number of lives already. One of them, before I started Eloqua in 2000, was as a research scientist. I was actually a Ph.D. candidate in neuroscience at Northwestern University in Chicago.

I was really fascinated then by how the brain works and what were the biological basis of behavior. It was very interesting for me. Although research, while fascinating, has a number of challenges with respect to it, especially getting paid well.

I also wanted to be together with my now wife again, so I left the research world to get into business and joined Bain & Company as a management consultant. From there, I started Eloqua.

The other big thread in my life other than being a scientist was being an entrepreneur. I started companies even as a teenager, as far back as being 13. I’ve always been really fascinated with working for myself and satisfying customers.

Really, I think now I’m bringing both of those together in my company, where I still feel like I’m a scientist. I still feel like I’m trying to discover what makes human beings really work and tick, but also being an entrepreneur and building software for marketers, leveraging the understanding of people and what drives them.

In terms of what motivated me to start Influitive, Influitive is an advocate marketing software company. We believe that the future belongs to companies who, as opposed to marketing directly, do a better job of discovering and nurturing and mobilizing their customers to do the marketing for them.

We think the future is for companies to get their customers to do the sales and marketing for them. We built some software for discovering, nurturing, and mobilizing advocates.

I got the idea while I was at Eloqua. It was actually 2005, and a great VC convinced me to spend a couple of weeks out in the field to understand how and why people bought my software.

What I learned was when we sold software efficiently, it was because there was tons of this advocacy involved. There were multiple referrals on the way in. There were lots of relevant case studies on the website, the best references, and those prospects moved very quickly.

At the time, Eloqua was a bootstrap startup, so selling things quickly was super, super important. I got real excited about this idea of advocacy, but it turns out it was way harder than I thought to generate consistent advocacy.

That’s because we didn’t truly understand what motivated the advocates. I really wanted to understand what motivated the advocates. Through some interviews and lots of other things like that, I began to understand what drove advocacy.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t work on that at the time I was at Eloqua, but when I had a chance to transition out, I had an opportunity to work on it at Influitive.

Brian Carroll: That’s really cool just hearing how you brought together the two worlds, from being the scientist to understand what motivates people, and then putting it in a way that you are able to help people.

I’d love to hear some of the lessons you’ve learned about building a company where really from the beginning the customer is at the heart of your business model.

Mark Organ: Yeah, so I’ve learned a lot just about how to build a company.

In terms of putting customers at the heart of your business model, one of the things I learned the hard way coming from Eloqua was how important the employee experience is.

I think one of the big differences between the two companies is that while I was at Eloqua, I was very obsessed with what we called our True North, which was measurable value to the customer. That’s a pretty good thing to obsess about.

If you are making your customer money every day, you’re likely to have some success. But one big change that I made at Influitive was really treating my employees as my primary customer, making sure that I was providing the best possible experience for them and a lot of fundamental value for them.

That’s one of the things that I learned. More than ever, honestly, if you think about it, there is so much capital out there. There is so much money that’s available for companies if you generate the growth and if you can generate an efficient business model.

The people who generate that efficient business model and that growth are our people. Talent is a scarce resource today.

That’s a big fundamental shift for me, and honestly, I think it mirrors a fundamental shift even in the marketplace. Today, if companies don’t treat their employees as their primary customer, I think the future is not going to look too bright for them. That’s one key thing that I learned in terms of building a company.

In terms of the stuff that I learned that has informed the way we build our software, the kinds of knowledge that I gained from interviewing literally hundreds of super advocates, understanding people who might generate several referrals a quarter and be available for references on demand and love to speak on stage for you, all those active advocates that all of us really depend on.

None of us can build a successful business without having our customers doing that sales and marketing for us. Our lifetime value of the customer and the cost of customer acquisition would be completely out of whack if we didn’t have that working in our favor.

There were some things that I’ve learned about that. On the macro level, there are three things that I’ve learned that are really important.

The first was that people advocate more when they feel like they’re part of an exclusive tribe, like when they belong to something that’s bigger than themselves. That’s when you see a lot more advocacy.

For example, you can see that at a sporting event. When you go to your local stadium, you’ll find people whose faces are painted in the colors of the team. Why do they do that? Well, they do that because they want to belong to something bigger. They want to be part of an exclusive tribe.

That’s what we found. When companies do advocacy programs, if they can give it the right name and the right feel and the right brand, and really make people feel like they are special and exclusive, you get a lot more advocacy. That’s the first thing.

The second thing that we learned is that people want to be able to experience the impact that they made on a company.

I learned this firsthand. As part of foundational learning for starting my company, one of the things that I was excited to do was learning Chinese. I learned to speak Mandarin Chinese. I thought it would be a cool thing to do.

Unlike the four years of university Italian I took, which really didn’t amount to much in terms of my ability to speak Italian, I learned to speak enough Chinese with this amazing product that after six months I was able to have a meeting in China without an interpreter. It was a pretty amazing experience.

I used this product called ChinesePod.com, amazing, and what I found was that, you can see now I’m still advocating for it, but my advocacy really waned over time. It was because I wasn’t really feeling the impact I was making on the company. I didn’t know what the results were of the referrals that I made, as an example.

One of the things that we’ve learned is feedback. If you give people feedback, they respond better, and the same is true with advocates.

If you let people know the impact of those referrals that they’ve made, if you let people know if they’ve written a guest blog post or they’ve been on a podcast, just like this, how many hits did that podcast get? Did they get thumbs up?

Those sorts of things generate a lot more advocacy because people are getting that feedback.

The third thing is social capital. If people are experiencing benefits in their life, their career as a result of the advocacy they are making, they are going to do a lot more of that.

Those are three sort of social psychological things that I learned were really important in generating a lot of advocacy.

Then, there are the micro-level things, making it easy, making it fun, making it more rewarding. All the things that, for example, a lot of games do, they build things to make it more addictive. All work.

We’ve bottled all that, and we’ve put that into our product so that you’ve got that exclusive tribe, the people are getting feedback, they’re getting social capital, and they make it gamified and fun, so that people want to come back in again and again. It really works.

We’ve now got to the point where I think that we’re building something that’s going to become a new standard for how companies go to market by putting their customers at the heart of the way they go to market.

Brian Carroll: That’s really cool.

As I’m listening, just in terms of your own experience but also from the research, how important are customer advocates and why should we either create or be more involved in their community?

Mark Organ: Yeah, well, here’s one of the things that I’ve seen, especially lately, maybe it’s because I’m running a company that’s all about advocacy, but the industry leaders in almost every sector are also the advocacy leaders.

For example, Tesla in cars. Tesla’s market cap is equivalent to, I think, almost all the other car companies combined at this point or very close to it. I’m like, why is that? They are also an advocacy leader.

They don’t have any commissioned salespeople. They don’t do traditional marketing. All their marketing is done really through their own customers.

The impact of that is just incredible, because you’ve got this large unpaid sales force that’s way more effective than any sales force that you hired could be.

Brian Carroll: Right.

Mark Organ: You don’t have to pay them anything, and they’re more effective, but that’s just the beginning, right?

The other thing that we’ve learned is that advocacy is kind of like a positive, beneficial virus. A company that’s built with advocacy, that has a lot of advocacy, those customers that become a new customer because an advocate recommended them, they themselves are much more likely to advocate.

Essentially, there is a culture of advocacy around these companies.

These companies rocket up to being industry leaders. They are so much more efficient in terms of their sales and marketing, and they’ve got the culture that keeps this sort of positive feedback loop happening, which I think is really exciting.

We see that with a lot of our customers. They are industry leaders, whether they are startups that have gone public or industry leaders like Oracle or Salesforce or IBM. I think why they do well, again, is because of this financial power of having a large unpaid army of advocates.

The other thing I’ll say is that it feels great to work for a company, going back to my first comment on employees. It feels amazing to work for companies that have a lot of customer advocacy.

It gives you that sense of purpose, like, I know why I’m here. We’re adding real value. Look at all these customers we’re delighting, and they are helping us grow.

It’s such an empowering, exciting thing to be a part of. Actually, I think it’s the most important thing for entrepreneurs to do. I think the most important thing for entrepreneurs is to build advocates and mobilize them.

Now, also having an amazing product and terrific service. We don’t actually get involved in that area. We really only work with companies that have a great product, and that’s because we’ve learned the hard way that our product works really well for companies that are already delighting customers.

Brian Carroll: Right.

Mark Organ: Early in our history, we had a couple of customers who frankly were not doing a great job, but they might have had a handful of happy customers.

What they wanted us to do was to help give them a megaphone, essentially to make it look like they had that kind of advocacy even if they didn’t.

Honestly, we’ve learned that’s not a good business skill. That doesn’t work very well.

We tend to work with companies that already do a great job with delighting customers, and we make sure they win. It feels like we are really doing good for the world because we’re helping the good guys win.

Brian Carroll: I appreciate you saying that.

As you talked about the importance of employees, this is going to segue us into talking a little bit about empathy, because I think a lot of time we spend is trying to go, often in marketing and sales that had been outside in, and what I’m hearing from you is, no, it’s from the inside out. It needs to be authentic. You connect with your employees.

As you know, I’ve been doing some work in empathy-based marketing and selling and how it can help us connect with our customers and create better results.

I just wanted to ask you, how can empathy and what you’re talking about, advocacy-based marketing, how do they connect from your perspective and where do you see empathy really helping empower companies who are customer-centric and are really looking to do better?

Mark Organ: I love this work you are doing on empathy.

With every year that goes by as an entrepreneur, I realize more that it’s the number one skill, I think, that business leaders need to develop in order to win.

I think often it’s thought of in an employee context, and for sure, I’ve worked with a coach for the last three or four years mainly on developing my skills as a leader, which include being more empathetic, meaning truly and deeply understanding my employees in particular, and feeling what they are feeling.

But it extends way deeper than employees. That is why I love the work you are doing about being empathetic for companies and understanding their experience.

In fact, this whole business that I’m doing came from a place of empathy in the beginning, because it was all about understanding what is the most desirable buying process for someone to go through.

Brian Carroll: Yes.

Mark Organ: If you think about the last amazing buying experience you’ve had for something that wasn’t just a commodity, but something you had to really think about, chances are that process you went through had a number of trusted people.

Whether those were other customers you trusted or that salesperson you worked with did such a good job that you truly and deeply trusted that person. You trusted that person had your best interest in their heart.

Chances are that trust and that transparency were just completely interwoven in that buying process that you had.

That’s what I learned when I was at Eloqua and trying to figure out what was going on that some of these prospects bought in four days instead of four months. That experience had tons of advocacy all over it.

People talk about customer experience all the time, right? I’m not sure some people even know what it means.

To me, customer experience is all about feelings. It’s all about the way people feel at different parts of their journey with you.

So if we want to make people feel great, if we want to make people feel like there’s trust, then you’ve got to infuse that buying process with the power of authenticity, like authentic other customers.

There’s an immediate intersection right there.

If you care about your buyer, if you care about your experience and you want them to feel great when they are working with you, then you should probably talk less as a salesperson and a marketer. You should probably have more of their trusted, relevant peers do the talking for you.

Not just because it’s more effective, but because they like it. That’s the experience that they really want more than anything.

I think there is a massive overlap between the ideas of empathy and advocacy.

Brian Carroll: I love that, and I agree with this as I’ve done research in understanding this perspective and thinking of customers and how they’re feeling.

They want to know how you’ve helped people like me. What has worked for others in my field, and how can I get better doing what I’m doing?

Because there is that authentic someone who’s been in my space or experience. I was talking to someone earlier who talked about their people who had worked in the field of the people they’re helping.

Right now, there’s so much more we could probably impact in this area.

I just wanted to talk about some actionable tips you might have for our listeners today who feel inspired. They realize they have advocates right now. They may not have even used that term. I love the term advocate and what it means.

How can marketers start identifying and better supporting their customer advocates and/or building or connecting with their advocate community?

Mark Organ: That’s a great question.

We’ve produced an interesting piece of software to help mobilize advocates at scale, but it doesn’t mean you have to do that.

Really, every company in the world should be doing advocate marketing, and it may be as simple as just having a meal a couple of times a year with some of your best customers.

There’s really no agenda there other than to get people together and to ask how to improve and maybe share a little bit about where you’re going as a company. That alone can cost very little.

We have these dinners all the time, and they cost $1,000 to get eight people together at a nice restaurant and have a little boutique meal. Wow, it just makes a big impact.

Because those people are your best customers, they want to impact your company, right? They want to help shape your company.

In some cases, they may already feel like they are more a part of your company than their company because they believe so passionately in your idea.

By giving them an exclusive tribe and saying, hey, this dinner is not just for any one of our customers. It’s for our most special customers. Not because you buy a lot from us either, by the way. It’s not about purchasing.

It’s because you get it. It’s because you believe, and we think that your ideas are leading edge and are going to be ones that everyone else is going to subscribe to, so we want to spend more time listening to you. We want to take care of you.

That message will always be well received. It’s very inexpensive and it’s got a very high ROI. Just starting there is a great place to start.

For companies who are already doing that, and I know a lot of companies are already doing that before we start talking to them, and they have people who believe in advocacy, the next step is to centralize your advocacy with one person.

A lot of the companies that we work with, before we started working with them, they had four or five different people in their organization who were all doing little bits and pieces of advocacy in their own way.

You might have one person in charge of referrals, another person in charge of talking to customers.

The problem there is you’re really missing out on a lot of potential advocacy. That same person that can be a reference for you is also willing to speak on stage.

If you have one person, a point person, who is in charge of advocacy for your company, you’ll get a lot more, three or four times as much, without spending any more money.

In fact, you could actually end up saving a lot of time, money, and frustration because you centralize that process.

Again, that’s actually a very empathetic thing, right? Because what you’re saying is, you know what I care about more than the types of things that advocates do? We care about the advocates themselves. We actually care about people. We care about their experience. We want their experience to be great.

By having one person in your company in charge of that, I think that is showing a lot of respect and appreciation for these very important people.

If you just do those two things alone without buying any fancy software, you’ll get a lot more of this very valuable advocacy for your company, and it will be quite transformational.

Then maybe you’ll be ready to have a really scaled-up advocacy program, and that’s what we do at Influitive.

We create communities where these are some virtual places on the internet and on mobile where you can invite more advocates in and make them feel like a million bucks and let them know how they can help you, get them to interact with each other.

We have about 300 great companies that are doing that. They are enjoying the experience, but there again, you don’t have to do anything fancy. Just get people together and show some appreciation. You’ll get a lot of value out of it.

Brian Carroll: That’s terrific, Mark, and thank you for the action points.

I was going to ask you one last question before we close, and I just want to ask you what’s the question I should’ve asked but hadn’t?

Mark Organ: Maybe something about the future? That’s often a good one, to bring out the crystal ball and see what we see in the future in marketing and that sort of thing.

Brian Carroll: That would be great. So what do you see in the future right now? It could either be marketing or selling as far as macro trends.

Mark Organ: Yeah, a few things to comment on.

One, which I’ve sort of alluded to in this conversation, was around the whys of customer experience and the role that marketing is going to play in customer experience.

One of the things that you’ll notice, some of the best companies that we have, particularly in the West, are ones that are obsessed about customer experience.

I think as you have more buyers that are inundated with emails and websites and all sorts of stuff like that, which I was partially responsible for while I was at Eloqua, marketers are going to need to have some control over the customer experience in the future.

That is going to be the main source of where their best leads are going to come from and their ability to convert those leads.

We see with our customers, which tend to be on the leading edge of the curve, where marketing and customer success are starting to merge a little bit.

It’s very analogous to how sales and marketing came together in my Eloqua days under the idea of the common definition of a lead.

Brian Carroll: Yes.

Mark Organ: I have done sales and marketing stuff together, and you’ve done a lot of writing on that. I’ve learned much from you over the years on that.

There is an analogous thing that is happening now. Customer success and marketing and product are coming together to define what the optimal customer experience is, and that is a big, big move.

Marketers who are able to get on that and understand this new language of customer experience and be able to drive it are going to do very well over the next few years. I think that’s one big trend.

I do think that this idea of marketing by proxy is huge.

It’s a huge thing, and these are skills that most marketers do not have today.

Marketers now are good at running these cross-functional, multimodal, nurturing-style campaigns to drive leads and that sort of thing. The ability to do that has been really dominant over the last 10 years.

That’s changing as buyers are becoming inundated with that stuff. Yet the ability to get others to do the marketing for you and learning those skills is going to be pretty important.

Because there is such little knowledge in this area, we actually have quite an education effort out there. You can go to Influitive.com and check out our resources page and lots of educational materials, as we are trying to train this next generation of marketers in how to think this way.

Instead of thinking about how do I bombard people in order to get my way, it’s how do I find the right people who are relevant and trusted and get them to carry our message for me?

I think that’s going to be a big deal.

And thirdly, everyone is talking about machine learning and all that these days, and I think it’s probably going to create just as big an impact.

I think AI and machine learning is probably at the very top of the hype curve right now.

Brian Carroll: Right.

Mark Organ: Three years from now, everyone is going to say, well, I don’t know what that was all about, I guess that was all hyped up. But then in ten years from now, people go, wow, that actually really was a huge change.

I think it’s definitely worth tracking what’s going on in that technology, and we’re certainly spending quite a bit of time playing around with it here.

Some of the things I see for marketers, and actually I understand there are a lot of sales professionals who listen to your podcasts, I think empathy is just as important, if not more so, for sellers. So is advocacy, so is mobilizing your proxies if you are in the sales profession as well. I think there are a lot of parallels.

Brian Carroll: Well, thanks for coming on again, Mark. I always learn every time we talk or interact.

What’s the best way for readers or listeners to get in touch with you?

Mark Organ: Sure, there are a number of ways.

I’m on Twitter all the time, so it’s @markorgan.

I’m also available on email. I’m Mark@Influitive.com. And our website is www.Influitive.com. It’s like intuitive but with an F in it, Influitive.

It would be great to have people stop by and check out our educational resources. Would love to see what we can do to help people along in their journey toward empathy and advocacy.

Brian Carroll: Well, fantastic. Thanks again for coming on.

And for our listeners, I’ll be posting links to some of the things that Mark shared today here at the B2B Lead Blog, and you can check again as we have more updates.

Thanks again.

Are you connecting with and empowering your customer advocates? If not, you should. Here’s why.

Customer advocacy marketing programs help you increase revenue by improving customer acquisition and retention (and they’re also your best source of leads).

How? Because you’re helping to motivate happy customers to speak about you positively to others. And delighted customers are your most powerful hidden sales force.

For example, in 2016, IDC research found that only 10% B2B companies surveyed had a customer advocacy program in place. This year, “The Role of Marketing in Customer Advocacy” report found that has increased to 67%, which is a 570% increase.

That’s why I interviewed Mark Organ (@markorgan). Mark is the Founder and CEO of Influitive, and he’s been a thought leader in the space of sales and marketing technology, a real innovator. I’m excited to bring his thinking to you on customer advocacy.

Tell us a little bit about your background and what inspired you to start Influitive?

Mark: Yeah, thanks. I’m really excited to be here, Brian. I think this is an amazing podcast, and I’m excited to share my story. I’ve lived several lives already. One of them, before I started Eloqua in 2000, was as a research scientist. I was actually a Ph.D. candidate in neuroscience at Northwestern University in Chicago.

I was really fascinated by how the brain works and what were the biological bases of behavior. It was fascinating for me. Although research, while fascinating, has some challenges concerning it, especially getting paid well. I also wanted to spend more time with my wife, so I left the research world to get into the business world and joined Bain & Company as a management consultant; from there, I started Eloqua.

The other big thread in my life other than being a scientist was being an entrepreneur. I started companies even as a teenager, as far back as age 13. I’ve always been really fascinated with working for myself and satisfying customers.

Really, I think now I’m bringing both of those together in my company where I still feel like I’m a scientist. I still feel like I’m trying to discover what makes human beings really work and tick, but also being an entrepreneur, building software for marketers, and leveraging the understanding of people and what drives them.

Regarding what motivated me to start Influitive – we’re an advocate marketing software company. So we believe that the future belongs to companies who, as opposed to marketing directly, do a better job of discovering and nurturing, and mobilizing their customers to do the marketing for them.

We think the future is for companies to get their customers to do the sales and marketing. We built some software for discovering, nurturing, and mobilizing advocates.

I got the idea while I was at Eloqua. It was 2005, and great VC convinced me to spend a couple of weeks out in the field to understand how and why people bought my software. What I learned was when we sold software efficiently, it was because there was tons of this advocacy involved. There were multiple referrals on the way in. Many case studies were relevant on the website, the best references, and those prospects went very quickly.

At the time, Eloqua was a bootstrap startup, so selling our software quickly was super important. I got really excited about this idea of advocacy, but it turns it was way harder than I thought to generate consistent advocacy. That’s because we didn’t actually understand what motivated the advocates.

I really wanted to understand better what motivated the advocates. Through some interviews and lots of other things like that, I began to figure out what drove advocacy. Unfortunately, I couldn’t work on that when I was at Eloqua, but when I had a chance to transition out, I had an opportunity to work on it at Influitive.

What are some of the lessons you’ve learned about building a company with the customer at the heart of your business?

Brian: That’s really cool just hearing how you brought together the two worlds as the scientist to understand what motivates people and then putting in a way that you’re able to help people. I’d love to hear some of the lessons you’ve learned about building a company where from the beginning, the customer is at the heart of your business model.

Mark: I’ve learned a lot just about how to build a company. Regarding putting customers at the heart of your business model, one of the things I learned the hard way, coming from Eloqua, was how important the employee experience is.

One of the big differences between the two companies is that while I was at Eloqua, I was very obsessed with what we called our True North, which was measurable value to the customer, and that’s a pretty good thing to obsess about.

If you are making your customer money every day, you’re likely to have some success. Still, one big change that I made at Influitive was really treating my employees as my primary customer, making sure that I was providing the best possible experience for them.

There is so much money available for companies to generate growth and generate an efficient business model. The people who create that efficient business model and that growth are our people. Talent is a scarce resource today.

That’s a big fundamental shift for me, and honestly, I think it mirrors a significant shift even in the marketplace. If companies today don’t treat their employees as their primary customers, the future will not look too bright for them. That’s one key thing that I learned regarding building a company.

We built our software came from the knowledge that I gained from interviewing hundreds of super advocates. Literally, understanding people who might generate several referrals a quarter and be available for references on demand and love to speak on stage for you…all those active advocates that all of us really depend on.

None of us can build a successful business without our customers doing that sales and marketing for us. Our lifetime value of the customer and customer acquisition cost would be entirely out of whack if we didn’t have that working in our favor. There were some things that I’ve learned about that.

Three important things about customer advocacy

On the macro level, there are three things that I’ve learned that are really important.

The first was that people advocate more when they feel like their part of an exclusive tribe, like when they belong to something bigger than themselves, then that’s when you see a lot more advocacy.

For example, you can see that at a sporting event. When you go to your local stadium, you’ll find people whose faces are painted in the team’s colors. Why do they do that? Well, they do that because they want to belong to something bigger. They want to be part of an exclusive tribe.

That’s what we found. When companies do advocacy programs, if they can give it the right name and the right feel and the right brand and really make people feel special and exclusive, you get a lot more advocacy. That’s the first thing.

Second, we learned that people want to be able to experience the impact they made on a company. I learned this firsthand. As part of foundational learning for starting my company, one of the things that I was excited to do was learn Mandarin Chinese. I thought it would be a cool thing to do.

I learned to speak enough Chinese with this amazing product that, after six months, I was able to have a meeting in China without an interpreter. It was a pretty amazing experience. I used this product called ChinesePod.com and what I found was that (you can see now, I’m still advocating for it) my advocacy really waned over time, and it was because I wasn’t really feeling the impact I was making on the company.

I didn’t know what the results were of the referrals that I made as an example.

We’ve learned that if you give advocates feedback, they respond better.

If you let people know the impact of those referrals that they’ve made if you let people know if they’ve written a guest blog post or been on a podcast, just like this, how many hits did that podcast get?

Did they get a thumbs up?

Those sorts of things generate a lot more advocacy because people are getting that feedback.

The third is social capital. If people are experiencing benefits in their life, their career as a result of the advocacy they are making, they are going to do a lot more of that.

Those are three sorts of social/psychological things that I learned were really important in generating a lot of advocacy. Then, the micro-level makes it easy, making it fun, making it more rewarding.

For example, a lot of games do that. They build things to make it more addictive, all work. We’ve bottled all that, and we’ve put that into our product so that you’ve got that exclusive tribe, the people are getting feedback, they’re getting social capital, and they make it “game-ified” and fun, so that people want to come back in again and again. It really works.

We’ve now come to the point where I think that we’re building something that will become a new standard for how companies go to market by putting their customers at the heart of the way they go to market.

Brian: That’s really cool.

How important are customer advocates, and why should we create or be involved in their community?

Mark: Here’s one of the things that I’ve seen, especially lately. Maybe it’s because I’m running a company that’s all about advocacy, but the industry leaders in almost every sector are also the advocacy leaders.

Like for example, Tesla in cars. Tesla’s market cap is equivalent to, I think, nearly all the other car companies combined at this point or very close to it. I’m thinking, why is that? They are also an advocacy leader. They don’t have any commissioned salespeople. They don’t do traditional marketing. All their marketing is done really through their own customers.

The impact of that is just incredible because you’ve got this massive unpaid sales force that’s way more efficient than any sales force that you hired could be.

Brian: Right.

Mark: The other thing that we’ve learned is that advocacy is kind of like a beneficial virus. For example, a company built with advocacy, which has a lot of advocacy, and those who become a new customer because an advocate recommended them, they, themselves, are much more likely to advocate. Essentially, there is a culture of advocacy around these companies.

These companies rocket up to being industry leaders. They are so much more efficient regarding their sales and marketing, and they’ve got the culture that keeps this sort of positive feedback group happening, which I think is really exciting. We see that with a lot of our customers, they’re industry leaders.

So many of our startup customers have gone public (i.e., MuleSoft), or there are so many of them that have gone public, or they’re industry leaders like Oracle or SalesForce, IBM. I think they do well because of this financial power of having a large unpaid army of advocates.

It feels amazing to work for companies that have a lot of customer advocacy. It gives you that sense of purpose, like, I know why I’m here. We’re adding real value. Look at all these customers we’re delighting, but they are helping us grow.

It’s such an empowering, exciting thing to be a part of. I think the most important thing entrepreneurs can do to build advocates and mobilize them. Now, also have a fantastic product and terrific service, but we don’t actually get involved in that area. We actually only work with companies that have a great product, and that’s because we’ve learned the hard way that our product works really well for companies that are already delighting customers.

Early in our history, we had a couple of customers who, frankly, we’re not doing a great job, but they might have had a handful of happy customers. And they wanted us to help give them a megaphone to mostly make it look like they had that kind of advocacy even if they didn’t.

Honestly, we’ve learned that’s not a good business skill. We tend to work with companies that already do an excellent job delighting customers, making sure they win. It feels like we are really doing good for the world because we’re helping the good guys win.

[responsive_video type=’youtube’ hide_related=’1′ hide_logo=’0′ hide_controls=’0′ hide_title=’1′ hide_fullscreen=’0′ autoplay=’0′]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK_FWihgnKk&feature=youtu.be[/responsive_video]

Brian: I appreciate you saying that. This is going to segue us into talking a little bit about empathy. Often in marketing and sales, it had been outside-in, and what I hear from you is, no, it’s from the inside out. It needs to be authentic. You connect with your employees.

As you know, I’ve been doing some work in empathy-based marketing and selling and how it can help us connect with our customers and create better results.

How can empathy and advocacy based-marketing connect and help empower companies?

Mark: I love this work you are doing on empathy. As an entrepreneur, with every year that goes by, I realize that it’s the number one skill, I think, that business leaders need to develop to win.

Often it’s thought of in an employee context for sure. For example, I’ve worked with a coach for the last three or four years, namely developing my skills as a leader, which includes being more empathetic. Meaning truly and deeply understanding my employees and, in particular, feeling what they are feeling, but it extends way beyond employees.

That is why I love the work you are doing about being empathetic for companies and understanding their experience. In fact, this whole business that I’m doing came from empathy in the beginning because it was all about understanding the most desirable buying process for someone to go through.

Brian: Yes.

Mark: If you think about the last amazing buying experience you’ve had for something that wasn’t just a commodity, but something you had to think about, really. The chances are that process you went through had some trusted people, whether those were other customers you trusted or that salesperson you worked with did such a good job that you truly and deeply trusted that person. You trusted this individual had your best interest in their heart.

The chances are that trust and that transparency were just completely interwoven in that buying process you had.

That’s what I learned when I was at Eloqua and trying to figure what was going on that some of these prospects bought in four days instead of four months?

That experience had tons of advocacy all over it. People talk about customer experience all the time. I’m not sure some people even know what it means.

To me, customer experience is all about feelings. It’s all about the way people feel at different parts of their journey with you. So if we want to make people feel great, if we want to make people feel like there’s trust, then you’ve got to infuse that buying process with the power of authenticity, authentic other customers. There’s an intersection right there.

If you care about your buyer, if you care about their experience and want them to feel great when working with you, you should probably talk less as a salesperson and as a marketer. And have more of their trusted, relevant peers do the talking for you, not because it’s more effective, but because they like it. That’s the experience that they really want more than anything. I think there is a massive overlap between the ideas of empathy and advocacy.

Brian: I love that, and I agree with this as I’ve researched understanding this perspective and thinking of customers and how they are feeling. Do they want to know how you’ve helped people like me? What has worked for others in my field, and how can I get better doing what I’m doing? Because there is that authentic someone who’s been in my space or experience.

I just wanted to talk about some actual tips you might have for our listeners today who feel inspired. They realize they have advocates right now. They may not have even used that term. I love the word advocate and what it means.

How can marketers start identifying and better supporting their customer advocates?  

Mark: That’s a great question. We’ve produced an interesting piece of software to help mobilize advocates at scale, but it doesn’t mean you have to do that. Really, every company in the world should be doing advocate marketing, and it may be as simple as just having a meal a couple of times a year with some of your best customers. There’s really no agenda there other than to get people together and to ask how to improve and maybe share a little bit about where you’re going as a company. That alone can cost very little.

We have these dinners all the time, and they cost $1,000 to get eight people together at a nice restaurant and have a small boutique meal, and wow, it just makes a big impact. Because those people are your best customers, they want to affect your company, right?

They want to help shape your company. In some cases, they may already feel like they are more a part of your business than their company because they believe so passionately in your idea. Giving them an exclusive tribe and saying, hey, this dinner is not just for any one of our customers.

It’s for our most special customers. Not because you buy a lot from us either, by the way. It’s not about purchasing. It’s because you get it. It’s because you believe, and we think that your ideas are leading edge and will be ones that everyone else is going to subscribe to, so we want to spend more time listening to you. We want to take care of you. That message will always be well received. It’s very inexpensive, and it’s got a very high ROI. Just beginning there is a great place to start.

I know many companies are already doing that before we start talking to them, and they have people believe in advocacy, and it appeals to them.

The next step is to centralize your advocacy with a single person doing the talking. Many of the companies we work with before we started working with them had four or five different people in their organization who are all doing little bits and pieces of advocacy in their own way.

You might have one person in charge of referrals, another person in charge of talking to customers. The problem there is you’re really missing out on a lot of potential advocacy. That same person that can be a reference for you is also willing to speak on stage.

If you have a point person in charge of advocacy for your company, you’ll get a lot more, three or four times as much, without spending any more money. In fact, you could actually end up saving a lot of time, money, and frustration because you centralize that process.

Again, that’s actually a very empathetic thing, right? Because what you’re saying is: you know what I care about more than the types of things that advocates do? We care about the advocates themselves. We actually care about people. We care about their experience. We want their experience to be great.

By having a single person in your company in charge of that, I think that shows a lot of respect and appreciation for these very important people. If you just do those two things alone without buying any fancy software, you’ll get a lot more of this very valuable advocacy for your company, and it could be quite transformational. Then, maybe you’ll be ready to have a really scaled-up advocacy program, and that’s what we do at Influitive.

We create communities where there are some virtual places on the internet and on mobile where you can invite your advocates in, make them feel like a million bucks, let them know how they can help you, and get them to interact with each other. We have about 300 great companies that are doing that. They are enjoying the experience, but there again, you don’t have to do anything fancy. Just get people together and show some appreciation. You’ll get a lot of value out of it.

Brian: That’s terrific, Mark, and thank you for the action points. I was going to ask you one last question before we close. What’s the question you wished I asked but haven’t yet?

Mark: Maybe something about the future? Often a good one is to bring out the crystal ball and see what we see in the future of marketing and that sort of thing.

Brian: That would be great.

What do you see in the future for B2B marketing or selling macro trends?

Mark: Something that I’ve alluded to in this conversation was around the “whys” of customer experience, and the role marketing will have played in customer experience. One of the things you’ll notice, some of the best companies we have, particularly in the west, are obsessed with customer experience.

I think you have more buyers inundated with emails and websites and all sorts of stuff. Marketers will need to have some control over the customer experience in the future because that is going to be the main source of where their best leads are going to come from and their ability to convert those leads.

We see with our customers, which tend to be on the leading edge of the curve, where marketing and customer success are starting to merge a little bit. It’s very analogous to how sales and marketing began to come together in my Eloqua days, under the idea of the standard definition of a lead.

Brian: Yes.

Mark: I have done sales and marketing stuff together, and you’ve done a lot of writing on that. I’ve learned much from you over the years on that. There is a similar thing that is happening now. The customer success and marketing and product are coming together to define the optimal customer experience, and that is a big, big move.

Marketers who can get on that and understand this new language of customer experience and drive it will do very well over the next few years. I think that’s one big trend.

I do think that this idea of marketing by proxy is tremendous. It’s a huge thing, and these are skills that most marketers do not have today. Marketers now are good at running these cross-functional, multimodal, nurturing-style campaigns to drive leads and this sort of thing. The ability to do that has been really dominant over the last 10 years.

That’s changing as buyers are becoming inundated with that stuff, yet the ability to get others to do the marketing for you and learn those skills will be pretty significant. Because there is such little knowledge in this area, we actually have quite an education effort.

You can go to Influitive.com and check out our resources page, and there are lots of educational materials, as we are trying to train this next generation of marketers to think this way. Instead of thinking about how do, I bombard people to get my way? It’s how to find the right individuals who are relevant and trusted, and how do I get them to carry our message for me? I think that’s going to be a big deal.

And thirdly, everyone is talking about machine learning and all that these days, and I think it’s probably going to create just as big an impact. I think AI machine learning is probably at the very top of the high curve right now.

Brian: Right.

Mark: Three years from now, everyone will say, well, I don’t know what that was all about, I guess that was all hyped up, but then in ten years from now, people go wow, that really was a huge change.

So I think it’s definitely worth tracking what’s going on in that technology, and we’re certainly spending quite a bit of time playing around with it here. Some of the things I see for marketers, (and actually, there are a lot of sales professionals who listen to your podcast) I think empathy is just as important if not more so for sellers and so is advocacy, so is mobilizing your proxies if you are in the sales profession as well. I think there are a lot of parallels.

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How customer-hero stories help you connect better

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Do you focus on product stories or customer-hero stories?

Mike Bosworth has a simple way to frame the difference: “People love to buy, and they hate to feel sold.”

That line gets to the heart of this conversation.

Most B2B marketing still makes the product the hero. The product does this. The platform does that. The solution improves this metric, reduces that cost, and helps your company do more with less.

But buyers do not usually see themselves in product claims.

They see themselves in other people like them.

That is why Mike argues for customer-hero stories. Not stories where the vendor saves the day. Stories where the customer becomes the hero by solving a real problem, achieving a meaningful goal, and creating a better future inside their own organization.

In this episode of the B2B Roundtable Podcast, I talk with Mike Bosworth, longtime sales thought leader and creator of customer-hero selling, about why stories work, why sales and marketing need agreement more than integration, and why a qualified lead should be based on curiosity, not just activity.

Mike also explains why many salespeople struggle with discovery. It is not always because the questions are bad. It is often because the seller asks them before the buyer feels enough trust.

We get into customer-hero marketing, peer stories, emotional connection, the trust gap between younger sellers and senior buyers, and why the best sales and marketing helps buyers picture themselves solving a problem.

If your team is still leading with product claims instead of customer proof, this conversation is worth your time.

About Mike Bosworth

Mike Bosworth is a longtime sales thought leader, speaker, author, and creator of customer-hero selling.

His work has influenced generations of B2B sales teams through solution selling, customer-centric selling, storytelling, and by helping sellers facilitate the buying journey rather than pressuring buyers through a selling process.

Connect with Mike:

• Customer Hero Selling

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Mike Bosworth
01:00 Customer-hero marketing
03:20 Lifting the bottom 80 percent
04:25 Sales and marketing agreement
06:15 Defining a qualified lead
14:00 Making the customer the hero
20:00 A customer-hero story example
26:45 How to capture customer stories

A few things worth taking away

• Product stories talk about what the company does. Customer-hero stories show how buyers win.
• People love to buy, but they hate to feel sold.
• Sales and marketing do not just need integration. They need agreement.
• If the buyer is not curious, they may be a contact or a meeting, but they are not really a qualified lead.
• Many sellers move into discovery before the buyer trusts them enough to answer honestly.
• Customer-hero stories help bridge the trust gap, especially when younger sellers are calling on more senior buyers.
• The product should not be the hero of the story. The customer should be.
• A strong peer story helps the buyer picture themselves solving a real problem.
• The goal is not to pressure the buyer. The goal is to facilitate the buying journey.

A few lines that stuck with me

“People love to buy, and they hate to feel sold.” — Mike Bosworth

“If sales and marketing can agree on a finite number of things, great things can happen.” — Mike Bosworth

“If they’re not curious, they’re not really a lead.” — Mike Bosworth

“Let’s not market the product as the hero. Let’s market our past customers as the hero.” — Mike Bosworth

“The key to bridging that 20 years is a story.” — Mike Bosworth

Resources mentioned

• Customer Hero Selling
• MikeBosworth.com
• Universal Lead Definition

You may also like

• Universal Lead Definition: Why “lead quality” arguments never die
• How to Do Lead Management That Improves Conversion
• A Minimal Outbound Nurture System
• Why Purpose Matters to Marketing: Growth, Revenue, and Profit
• Email Lead Nurturing That Actually Works

Listen and subscribe

If you found this episode helpful, subscribe to the B2B Roundtable Podcast wherever you listen.

Transcript

Brian Carroll: Hi, everyone. I want to welcome you to today’s B2B Lead Podcast. My name is Brian Carroll, and I’m excited to have Mike Bosworth with us today.

Mike is someone that I’ve followed for a long time. We got to be together a few weeks ago. I loved his comments and the work he’s doing.

If you don’t know Mike Bosworth already, he is a thought leader in the sales space. I’ve followed his work, and he’s had a profound influence on how we sell and market, especially those who are in B2B.

Mike, I want to thank you for being with us today. Can you tell us a little bit more about your background?

Mike Bosworth: Well, it’s really interesting because I think today it’s incredible how cloud technology is forcing companies to be more empathic in their sales and marketing. It’s forcing them to.

Because with cloud, the conversation has to shift from the old “our solution” marketing. Our solution will do this, and our solution will do that.

Making that shift from that to how the customer uses our stuff marketing. Customer usage marketing, or what we in Story Seekers call customer hero marketing.

If we think about what are we really doing marketing for, well, I’m hoping we’re trying to create customers, and sales is also trying to create customers.

If we’re going to sell empathically, then ideally we won’t even be “selling.” We’ll be facilitating the buying journey of our customer and facilitating their customer experience because human beings love to buy, and they hate to feel sold.

Brian Carroll: You’ve been doing this and studying and being in the field a long time. What inspired you to start writing and talking about story and integrating with marketing and sales?

Mike Bosworth: Well, through my whole career as a sales productivity consultant and sales trainer, my stated mission was to help my client lift the bottom 80% of their sales force.

The top 20%, the ones who bring in 80% of the revenue, they’ve been doing well for years and continue to.

I figured I want to help my customers bump up at least the next 50%, because if you could get a 10% increase in productivity from that next 50%, do the math on that for most companies, it’s a lot of money.

Brian Carroll: It is.

As you’ve been working with companies and clients, something that’s existed longer than probably both of us have been doing our work: tell us the things most important for marketing and sales to agree on.

There’s a lot of talk about alignment. There’s a lot of talk about collaboration. But you use this word agreement. Especially, what are the things a CMO and CSO need to agree upon?

Mike Bosworth: Yeah. Well, it occurred to me just a couple of weeks ago because the AMA hired me and Tim Riester years and years ago to do integrating sales with marketing seminars.

And I tell you, I don’t think we’ve made much progress in doing that over the years.

Most companies I deal with, they’re really two different silos and they’re pointing fingers at each other.

Marketing thinks they’re sending these great leads to sales, and sales thinks they go into a black hole and there’s no follow-up. Sales thinks the leads from marketing are coming from the janitorial staff of the company that they’re selling to.

Quite a while ago, it occurred to me that if we can find the touchpoint in integrating sales and marketing, we could really help things out.

So Tim Riester and I dove into it, and we made the touchpoint the definition of a lead.

If both the chief sales officer and the chief marketing officer can specifically agree on the definition of a qualified lead, then the “integration” really starts getting a lot easier.

That word integration is messing people up in this day and age. If you think about it, it gets most people thinking about IT issues. APIs, and what plugs into this and what feeds into that. That’s disabling the integration.

A couple of weeks ago, I just swapped out the word integration for agreement. Golly, does it seem to simplify things.

If sales and marketing can agree on a finite number of things, great things can happen.

Brian Carroll: I really love the word agreement, and I think that’s the challenge. Without agreement, we don’t have common ground.

I’d love to hear from you. I think a lot of people have lead definitions. I wrote about universal lead definition in my book. People have leads going.

What have you found as the best definition of a qualified lead that sales and marketing should agree upon?

Mike Bosworth: Well, there’s a prerequisite to that.

The prerequisite for even defining the qualified lead is sales and marketing first have to agree on what buyer personas are we selling to.

Who do we envision our best customers to be where we can help them be a hero, where we can help them achieve a goal or solve a problem?

Back in my Xerox days, we were selling manufacturing productivity-improving software, so we were selling to buyer personas.

One buyer persona would be a VP of manufacturing who’s missing his shipment schedule. Another one would be a materials manager who had shortages. Another one would be a CSO who’s missing his sales forecast.

Once you have those buyer personas targeted, now we go in and think what psychological process would they go through in their organization, and when would they start bringing in other people, and how would they share information and all that stuff.

We actually want to ideally help our customer buy so they never feel any pressure from us.

My philosophy has always been, all the way back through solution selling, is we’re trying to facilitate the buying.

I missed a couple of big things in solution selling and customer-centric selling.

Now in 2008, I discovered that over the past 30-some years, where solution selling and customer-centric selling and Miller Heiman and Power Base and Sandler and all these methodologies were out in the marketplace, all this technology started coming, all these sales force automation systems evolving into CRM systems and stuff like that.

All that money spent on training and technology, and the 80/20 rule got worse.

A study by Sales Benchmark Index of 1,100 B2B sales forces came back in 2008, and they found in their case study base that 13% of the salespeople brought in 87% of the revenue.

I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach because my whole mission was to help the bottom 80% get better, and it had gotten worse.

That caused me to go into a breakdown of a bit, and I had to figure out, all right, I’m not as smart as I thought I was, and I haven’t really figured this thing out yet.

I started studying the problem, and the problem in most cases is that 80% of the people in sales aren’t very good at building an emotional connection and building trust with a stranger in a short amount of time.

They’re just not very good at it.

They end up diving into their solution or their technology or their knowledge or their discovery questions before the buyer trusts them enough to allow themselves to be questioned.

Over the years, the number one complaint I have from solution selling and customer-centric selling clients of mine would be the VP of Sales would say, “Mike, the top 20% love solution selling, but the bottom 80% quit using it within two weeks of the workshop.”

If you think about why they quit using it, my intellectual arrogance caused me to not really study it as well as I should have.

But it’s that inability to intuitively connect and know when you’ve built enough trust and connection that you can get out your list of discovery questions.

With solution selling, the bottom 80% lacked the intuition. They went to their discovery questions too soon, prematurely, and the buyer said, “You don’t know me well enough to ask me all these questions,” and pushed them away.

And so if you’re pushed away for two weeks, you quit using it.

Brian Carroll: As we’re talking about the definition, this brings us into talking a little bit about empathy and what you want sellers and marketers to do more in this respect.

I wanted to go back just real quickly. In your words, what would be the best definition of a lead?

Mike Bosworth: I went off on a tangent because it was the prerequisite of a qualified lead.

Brian Carroll: We have to know it. I agree.

Mike Bosworth: My definition of a qualified lead: a named John Doe at the ABC company, targeted buyer persona, is curious how we helped a peer job title at another company achieve a goal or solve a problem.

If we have somebody curious how we helped their peer, that’s a qualified lead.

Brian Carroll: In and of itself, for those listening that are in marketing, I was just talking with a salesperson today who was struggling trying to build his own pipeline.

He talked about his experience of a lead, and Mike, I tested your definition with him, and he said yes, I would love that.

He reiterated his experience of getting a lead of someone who didn’t actually want to talk with him. They weren’t curious. They were someone who had agreed to a meeting, but they didn’t know why.

Mike Bosworth: Agreeing to a meeting, they might have been curious, but we didn’t capture that curiosity.

Brian Carroll: Yeah, exactly.

You earlier talked a bit about the problem with product marketing, and you brought up hero marketing.

Why should we in marketing start focusing on making our customer the hero instead of what we’re doing right now, which is the product or what we do or what we sell?

What is hero marketing and why should we focus on it now?

Mike Bosworth: First of all, is it going to be the mission of the company to do customer hero selling and customer hero marketing? Because it really has to come from the top. It’s really a paradigm.

Gerhard Gschwandtner, the publisher of Selling Power magazine, said years ago that the CEO’s definition of selling is the DNA of the customer’s experience.

It’s still a small number of companies that once you figure out how, if you really believe in your heart that people love to buy and hate to be sold, then why wouldn’t we make it our mission as a company to facilitate, to architect our customer’s experience?

To really think about how they would go through a natural buying process and feel comfortable and let us facilitate that buying, using storytelling and story tending and writing them good letters.

Making story the foundation, because stories allow people with problems to visualize seeing themselves solve that problem.

What happens is we create a little story in their brain, and the story involves themselves seeing themselves responding to that painful once-a-month problem they have differently, if they had somebody’s help or technology or capability.

The customer is a hero by using the product.

So let’s not market the product as the hero. Let’s market our past customers as the hero, and we’re looking to help new prospects become heroes via customer hero selling.

If we really agreed on the definition of a qualified lead, now customer hero marketing feeds right into the customer hero selling.

Brian Carroll: I love the definition and distinction because from the customer’s side, they’re curious about someone like me who’s had a problem like me.

I think that is the challenge we have, bridging that gap of trust, to know someone like me is dealing with this and to see themselves in that.

Mike Bosworth: The other issue is the millennial selling to someone 20 years their senior.

Brian Carroll: Yeah.

Mike Bosworth: I remember going out as a 28-year-old salesperson for Xerox, and I was calling on 48-year-old materials managers.

When we’d meet for the first time, and the materials manager realizes he’s booked a little bit of his time for this guy who’s wet behind the ears, you can kind of tell the look on their face.

The key to bridging that 20 years is a story, because a story allows the 28-year-old salesperson to tell his 48-year-old prospect a story about the prospect’s 50-year-old peer who’s already been smart enough to solve a problem or achieve a goal.

That peer curiosity, the better the story is, melts into peer envy.

And if you can develop some peer envy in a buyer, they go diving into that buying process pretty quickly.

Brian Carroll: You have an example. I’d love to just help it be tangible for listeners out there. What might an example of customer hero marketing or selling look like?

Mike Bosworth: How about a 90-second story that I used to use as a 28-year-old at Xerox selling to 48-year-olds that allowed me to sell more in my first five months on quota than anybody in the history of the company sold in the full year?

Brian Carroll: That’d be perfect.

Mike Bosworth: I had this story in my pocket, and it was a true story.

Back then, Xerox wanted us to cold call by walking into buildings. Now they cold call on the phone.

So I’d walk into a lobby of a $15 million manufacturing company, 28-year-old salesperson. I’d go up to the receptionist and say, “My name is Mike Bosworth, and I’m with Xerox Computer Services, and I’d like to speak with your materials manager.”

Eighty percent of the time, the materials manager would come out. I don’t think we have the time to talk about all those curious reasons, but when they would come out, I’d look at their eyes and they’d give me the disdainful look that said, gosh, I’ve just committed some of my valuable time to this young kid.

So I’d shake hands. I’d confirm. I’d say, “So you’re the materials manager here?” He’d say yes.

And I’d say, “Can I share a quick story with you about another materials manager who’s less than a mile from here who I’ve been working with for the last 18 months?”

Guess how many times that story got turned down?

Brian Carroll: Very few times, because I’m sure people…

Mike Bosworth: Zero.

I never had someone turn it down. In 10 seconds, you offer somebody a story about their peer.

So now instead of some 28-year-old telling this guy how my solution will fix his manufacturing plant, think about that versus telling him a story about how his peer, Ed Blackman, who’s a materials manager at a specific company less than a mile from him, has already figured out how to solve his shortage problem.

Do you want to hear the story, just how I delivered it?

Brian Carroll: I would.

Mike Bosworth: I’ll give you the 30-second version of it quickly.

I’d say, first of all, the setting, the green card: “Ed Blackman is the materials manager over at OPEC Electronics. You know where it is, it’s less than a mile from here.

I met Ed almost two years ago at an Orange County APICS meeting, American Production Inventory Control Society, and Ed was the new president. Ed was obsessive about educating himself about material requirements planning, MRP.

He wanted to be a leader, and the reason he wanted to be a leader is materials manager was a really difficult job.

Ed Blackman, his boss, the VP of Manufacturing, was mad at him because he was missing his shipment schedule because Ed had shortages.

He had the VP of Finance mad at him because he was carrying too much inventory because he needed all the safety stock to try to not have the shortages impact schedule.

Eighteen months ago, Ed discovered that Xerox now had a way to replan his entire manufacturing plant overnight. Instead of a three-week process, it was an overnight process.

He decided 18 months ago to be an innovator and to be our first customer here in Orange County.

Over 18 months, his $8 million inventory is now $2.1 million. Their on-time shipments are now 97.5%. Ed is about to be promoted to be the new VP of Manufacturing.

But enough about me, what’s going on here?”

Brian Carroll: I love the story. If I were on that materials side, I’m sure it would compel me because I can relate.

Mike Bosworth: You can relate.

He’s dying. He has the same problem. His CFO is mad at him. His VP of Manufacturing is mad at him. The odds were so high.

And so now even though I’m 28, I told him a story about a 48-year-old guy or a 50-year-old guy.

The insight that I wanted to pass to him, or if I’m a challenger salesperson, I want to give him an insight, which means something he hadn’t thought about before.

But you can’t do that without a little credibility. And when you’re 28, you don’t have that credibility.

So the insight comes from the peer story instead of the looks of the salesperson talking about his solution.

Brian Carroll: You and I have talked about empathy. We were together out at CEB, now Gartner.

Mike Bosworth: Yeah.

Brian Carroll: What do you wish marketers and sellers would do more in this respect of applying their empathy and being able to connect with their customers?

Mike Bosworth: It’s such a paradigm shift, this product marketing business.

Technology has been wondrous over the last 40, 50 years, no doubt about it.

Always, I believe the best way to sell it was to help somebody have the vision of how he would use it.

The vision, this new prospect I had at Xerox, the vision I wanted him to come to was how he could be a hero in his company by fixing the shortages, just like Ed Blackman did at his company.

Brian Carroll: You’re helping.

Mike Bosworth: That’s a buying vision.

What we’re trying to do is teach salespeople to create a big, juicy buying vision. A customer hero vision where this guy sees himself as a hero in his own company, saving money, making money, solving a problem, achieving a goal that he hasn’t been able to do before.

If it’s too good to be true, certainly if there’s a 10- or 20-year gap between the seller and the buyer, I’ll tell you, when I was 28, after I told that story, they’d usually invite me in.

I’d get the next 45 minutes now to ask my discovery questions because my story covered that initial connection and trust.

Now I could go to my solution selling pain sheet if he lets me in the door. Now I can go to the list of discovery questions that my company has given me for a materials manager who’s got shortages.

You can go to it if he likes the story.

How do you know if he likes the story? After 90 seconds max, you say, “Enough about me, what’s going on here?”

And they’re going to do one of two things. They’re going to say, “Well, what do you want to know?” and they’re going to cross their arms, or they’re going to open up and start talking freely.

The better your story, the better the odds that after 90 seconds you say, “Enough about me, tell me about what’s going on here,” and they start talking freely.

That’s the purpose of the story.

The next piece, we’re doing our workshops and it’s off of this, but we teach people how to do connective listening.

Once the buyer starts talking freely, we teach the salespeople how to tend the buyer story and then send that buyer a written version of his customer hero story.

Are you with me?

After I tend your story, the new materials manager that I just met, and he admits that he’s got terrible shortages, and he takes me through the plant, then I start telling him the things that Ed was doing on a daily, weekly, bi-weekly basis to use our system to eliminate the shortages.

He still wanted proof.

I was 28, he was 48. The vision was fantastic. He would have loved to be able to work off of one bill of material and not have to have all that safety stock and replan his whole plant overnight.

It sounded too good to be true, and I was 28 and he was 48, so he wanted proof.

The bigger the gap of age or experience between the seller and the buyer, the more we encourage the young sellers to say to the buyer, “I know this sounds too good to be true, so don’t take my word for it. Make me prove it.”

That’s another little piece that boosts the trust of the seller. They offer proof.

Brian Carroll: As I’m listening to you, it sounds like you’re building a relationship by helping someone else relate to the story, see themselves in it, and then also starting to bridge the trust gap because you’re connecting with something that they can identify with and how they’re likely feeling. Is that what I’m hearing?

Mike Bosworth: Well, if you had a problem that was causing you to work 40 hours a week, Brian, and then some young guy came in and over the course of 30 to 45 minutes caused you to have a vision of finally having a way to fix that big irritating problem, what’s your state of mind going to be?

It’s going to be, you’re going to want to know more. You’re going to be curious.

Brian Carroll: I’ll be curious and I might even have some hope that things could get better.

Mike Bosworth: Let’s see. The curiosity isn’t about me. My curiosity isn’t about your solution. My curiosity is how I can make my shortages go away.

Brian Carroll: Right.

Mike Bosworth: It’s the usage.

That’s why customer hero stories bridge the cloud gap now too.

The cloud is forcing all these technology companies that have all these high-powered product marketing talent, and most of the product collateral ends up being IT-based or our solution-based.

It will do this. It will do that. Or our solution will do this or our solution will do that.

That’s making the product hero.

It’s disabling the buying process because now the buyer is going to feel the pressure of somebody wanting to sell them some piece of technology.

Brian Carroll: As I’m listening, I’m just wondering if you could share any tips or advice with those that want to start learning how they can apply and work on customer hero selling and marketing.

Mike Bosworth: There is a win-win way a good customer of mine tried.

They were struggling with hiring these young millennial people to come in and gain enough expertise that their customers would take them seriously.

The old way of putting them through six weeks of technical training and all these features, advantages, and benefits of all the technology, it’s a huge learning curve.

Instead, we want them to learn how the customers use our product.

The idea was they had some customers that this company spent a lot of money on because these customers were always willing to open up their shops and let other prospective customers come in. There were these premier customers.

They said, “Will you help us train some of our new people?” They agreed.

So the new people were trained to go out and learn the story of the premier customer’s use of the product.

We had to teach those young people how to go out and tend that story with a happy, willing customer.

They would say, “My company wants me to come out and document how you guys are using our product. Tell me what you’re doing with it, and how you use it, and when you use it.”

Get them talking about their usage of the product.

We’re starting off in a positive way. This is the piece of a story: how they use it.

After a little bit of time there, we say, “Well, I think I understand how you use it now. What did you use to do before you had it?”

Now we take them back thinking about how much more difficult it used to be without the product than it is now with the product.

If we send our young people out on that information-gathering mission with a willing customer, they come back and they not only write up a customer hero story that the whole organization can use, but equally important to them is they can now go out face to face or be on the telephone and tell customer hero stories and see how well they work.

Brian Carroll: I love it. And so with that, I know you have resources and tools. What is the best way for readers and listeners to get in touch with you and find out more about this?

Mike Bosworth: Go to MikeBosworth.com and read some of the stuff we have out there. Listen to some of the testimonials, and if you have any questions, call me.

Brian Carroll: Mike, thank you again. I’ve enjoyed our conversation.

And for all of you listening, I hope you found value today. I know that I found a lot.

Thank you again, Mike, for joining us.

Mike Bosworth: Thank you, Brian. I enjoyed it too.

When was the last time you looked at the quality and accuracy of your B2B persona data?

Mathew Sweezey has a blunt way to frame the problem: “The only measure that we have of the health of our email database is, did the email bounce? Horrible metric.”

That line gets to the heart of this conversation.

Most B2B marketers think about database quality in terms of deliverability. Did the email go through? Did it bounce? Is the address still valid?

But that does not tell you whether the person is still in your target persona.

Someone can stay at the same company, keep the same email address, move into a different role, and no longer be the right person for your message. The email still works. The targeting does not.

In this episode of the B2B Roundtable Podcast, I talk with Mathew Sweezey, Principal of Marketing Insights at Salesforce, about new B2B persona research from Salesforce and LinkedIn.

The research analyzed more than 15 million data points across two major B2B databases to better understand audience size, growth, churn, and movement inside organizations.

Mat argues that marketers need to think differently about their databases. Your data is not just a list. It represents your relationships. And those relationships are constantly changing.

We get into why email databases decay, why personas are fluid, why marketers need to think beyond bounce rates, and how the shift from limited media to infinite media is changing B2B marketing.

If your team is still measuring database health by whether an email address works, this conversation is worth your time.

About Mathew Sweezey

Mathew Sweezey is was formerly, Principal of Marketing Insights at Salesforce. He was one of the early employees at Pardot, a marketing automation platform that was later acquired by ExactTarget and then Salesforce.

He is the author of Marketing Automation for Dummies and has written for multiple marketing and business publications. His work focuses on forward-looking marketing ideas, B2B buyer behavior, marketing automation, data, and the changing media environment.

Connect with Mathew:

• @msweezey on X/Twitter

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Mathew Sweezey
01:10 Mat’s background at Pardot and Salesforce
02:00 Why Salesforce studied B2B personas
04:20 Why email data is a major marketing asset
05:40 Why bounce rate is a bad health metric
07:10 Persona movement, growth, and churn
10:00 Why B2B marketing is changing
14:30 What marketers should rethink about email

A few things worth taking away

• Your email database may be the largest asset marketing owns, but most teams do not manage it that way.
• Mat estimates that the average B2B business spends about $150 to obtain an email address.
• A valid email address does not mean someone is still in your target persona.
• People move horizontally and vertically inside companies, and that movement changes whether they are still relevant to your message.
• Database health cannot be measured only by whether an email bounced.
• Personas are not fixed groups. They grow, shrink, and churn over time.
• If your database churns at 15% per year and you do not update it, it becomes increasingly irrelevant.
• Social handles may have a longer shelf life than work email addresses because they follow people across jobs.
• Your data represents your relationships, and relationships move when people change roles or companies.
• Marketers need to think multidimensionally about contact data, not just “grow the email list.”

A few lines that stuck with me

“The only measure that we have of the health of our email database is, did the email bounce? Horrible metric.” — Mathew Sweezey

“It’s not a what did you get, it’s a how effective were you.” — Mathew Sweezey

“Their email address is still valid, yet that person is no longer in your persona.” — Mathew Sweezey

“If your database churns at an average rate of 15 percent per year, that means your database is irrelevant if you don’t continually update it in 4.2 years.” — Mathew Sweezey

“A gerbil will live longer than a marketer will stay in their current position.” — Mathew Sweezey

Resources mentioned

• B2B Personas: Targeting Audiences report from Salesforce and LinkedIn
• Marketing Automation for Dummies by Mathew Sweezey
• The Cluetrain Manifesto
• Gallup Trust in Professions poll

You may also like

• Empathetic Marketing: How to Connect With Your Customers
• Lead Nurturing: 5 Useful Tactics to Get More Opportunities
• 5 Reasons Why Your Buyer Personas Aren’t Good Enough

Listen and subscribe

If you found this episode helpful, subscribe to the B2B Roundtable Podcast wherever you listen.

Transcript

Brian Carroll: Our data represents our relationships. Have you looked at your own data?

This is Brian Carroll. I want to welcome you to today’s B2B Lead Blog Podcast.

There are some questions that I want to ask you. What’s the annual growth rate of the personas in your database? Do you know how many of them have churned? What’s the size of your audience, and are you sure about that?

I’m super excited to have Matt Sweezey. He goes by Sweezey to me. Matthew Sweezey works with Salesforce. He’s the Principal of Marketing Insights.

Salesforce, along with LinkedIn, just released a new research study. As I understand it, it started in 2014, Matt, but this is the B2B persona report.

I wanted to talk with Matt to bring this very important information to B2B marketers.

Matt, welcome. I’m really glad to have you. Can you tell us more about your background?

Mathew Sweezey: Yeah, thanks Brian for having me. I love being on here.

My background’s kind of interesting. I think what’s relevant to this conversation is I was one of the really early employees at a small startup back in the day called Pardot, which is a marketing automation platform.

From there, we grew that, sold that to ExactTarget. I became a Salesforce employee, and along that road I wrote a book called Marketing Automation for Dummies, write for lots of different publications, and now I head up the forward-looking marketing ideas and theories as Principal of Marketing Insight at Salesforce.

Brian Carroll: Cool. So tell me about this study. What motivated you or inspired you to do this research?

Mathew Sweezey: What inspired me is what I think is funny. To me, these are fundamental marketing questions.

What bothers me is the fact that no one else was trying to ask these questions, or whether or not they really knew they should even be asking these questions in the first place.

Let me explain.

As a marketer, we have metrics. We’re like, all right, so we got 10,000 email addresses this year. That would be a metric that we may give to somebody to validate our efforts.

But that’s like saying, I’ve got 10. Ten out of how many? That’s the question.

It’s not a what did you get. It’s a how effective were you.

These were effectiveness measures. Without really detailed information into our audiences, and exactly their size, their growth, their churn, we really have no way to answer any of those questions, which should be key fundamental questions that we should be able to answer about our job.

That’s what really sparked this.

This idea started a couple of years ago, when I started to get more into, just really, I wanted to understand the value of email better, and how do we value our email addresses.

Just think about this real quick. Once again, these are some generic numbers that I calculated by looking at all the measures that are out there and aggregating them together into one number.

When you look at about the average number that it costs a B2B business to obtain an email address, that is about $150.

Brian Carroll: $150.

Mathew Sweezey: $150 to obtain an email address.

And when you then look at the average size of a B2B email database, the average size is 50,000 names. That’s what a marketer has. Not their addressable market, let me be clear on that.

So if you multiply those two things together, the marketer has a seven and a half million dollar asset under their control, which is their email database.

And to be clear, that is the largest asset that a marketer owns, point blank.

Now when you then say, that’s the largest asset, then you start to ask some basic questions on how do we evaluate it? How often does it churn? Anything like that.

And there is no data that we can give you.

The only measure that we have of the health of our email database is did the email bounce, yes or no? Horrible metric.

So that’s what led me down this path.

Brian Carroll: Wow. So as you look at all this information, I’m still processing the cost of an email address, and then along with that the size of the data, and thinking about this is something marketers don’t think about, from my own experience.

What surprised you most as you analyzed the data from this research, and why?

Mathew Sweezey: I think what surprised me most was, in the combination of the work that we did with LinkedIn, the fact that people don’t realize the amount of movement inside of an organization.

What I mean by movement is that a person has both horizontal and vertical changes within a company.

So if we’re only looking at the measure of, is this email address any good for us, and we’re only looking at the bounce, all that says is, does this person still work at that company?

Which as a marketer is not enough information for us to know if they are still in our persona or not.

Because if the email address is still good but the person took a horizontal shift, such as they were the manager of business development and now they are a manager of support, it happens pretty frequently inside of organizations where people take horizontal shifts into completely different departments.

Their email address is still valid, yet that person is no longer in your persona, and you should no longer be targeting or talking to that person.

But because that email address doesn’t bounce, we still do.

The fact of horizontal and vertical movement is pretty powerful.

The second thing that I thought was really fascinating was the idea of growth and the idea of churn.

One of the things that we often don’t really think about is that our personas are actually a fluid set of people. It’s different day to day.

Meaning that there are people that leave that persona completely. Hence, they were in this managerial role and now they’re in a different department. They have just left our persona.

And then there are people that enter that marketplace completely. That’s the reverse, such as they were in support, and now they moved over into sales, hence making them a part of our persona.

So when you start looking at these growth and churn rates, what you see are some pretty large numbers, and they’re all double digit.

What I want people to realize is the power of math.

If your database churns at an average rate of 15 percent per year, that means your database is irrelevant if you don’t continually update it in 4.2 years.

That’s the decay rate. That’s how quickly your email addresses become completely invalid.

If you think about this, how many of us have just had these databases forever, and we’re like, yeah, we have 50,000 emails?

But that doesn’t mean anything if, on average, you’re churning at 15 percent per year. Each year it’s declining in value by 15 percent.

We forget that it’s a fluid set. This data helps us determine just how fluid it is and then gives us a good measure to be able to say, all right, we lost 15 percent of our database this year, but we gained 30,000 email addresses, which we know is 15 percent of all the new people that entered the marketplace.

So it gives us a much better way to evaluate our efforts and to actually understand this most valuable asset that we have.

Brian Carroll: As I’m listening to you, the first things you were sharing blew my mind from a marketing standpoint, because you’re right. We generally look at the health of our data based on, do emails go through or not?

So many marketers are concerned about deliverability, but then let’s check our own experience.

Those of you in our listening audience, how many of you have had your job responsibilities change in the same company you’re working with? And that doesn’t include the other companies.

So Matt, I’m thinking a lot about that, just even in my own data, and how I do marketing, because that is a whole other dimension. Vertical, horizontal, and then the other thing is, I’m thinking about, okay, what do I do?

We’ll get to that in a little bit. But I wanted to ask you, your report said that B2B marketing as we know it is fundamentally changing. Why is that?

Mathew Sweezey: There’s a lot of reasons, but the main reason, and I don’t want to go too far down this rabbit hole for two reasons: one, it can get pretty complicated pretty quick to explain in a few seconds, and two, I’ve got a new book coming out that’s being published by Harvard Business Press that really answers that question in complete detail.

But to give you the answer in short, what you need to understand is the idea that we have of marketing was created in a limited media environment.

Think about this. The idea of marketing has been around for a very long time.

If you look at media, and the media environment, really media has three fundamental aspects: creation, distribution, and consumption.

Now in the limited media era, there was only so much media that could be created, and it was only able to be created by those who had the capital to do so, which means businesses.

Then there was the distribution of media, which had to go through a preexisting distribution network, which meant you had to pay for it. So once again, distribution was limited to those with the capital, or businesses.

That then funnels down to how much media exists in the marketplace, because you only had businesses who can create it and distribute it. So hence the entire media environment is pretty much a captive marketplace by businesses.

You then take one step to the right, which essentially I prove that in my book when that step happens, and now we live in an infinite media environment where there is no longer a barrier to the creation or the distribution of content, equaling an infinite amount of content in the environment.

So what that means is all of the ideas that we have of marketing are created with a captive audience in mind.

We no longer live in an environment where businesses are the sole creators and distributors of media. In fact, what we’ve entered is a world where they are the extreme minority, rather than the predominant majority.

Because of that, because we have an entirely new media environment, just because you write a piece of content does not mean that someone will find it.

Now we have so much content, we’re using algorithms to connect people to content. Consumers are using algorithms to filter their content, and those algorithms are filtering out all of the crap that we used to make, because there never was a demand for that content.

It’s just what we could produce, and because there was a captive audience with no recourse, it was accepted.

But now there is a recourse and better options. The consumers are taking those better options.

That’s the underlying foundational reason why marketing is changing.

Brian Carroll: Wow.

As I was listening to you, I was reminded of a question. It sounds like if we took away our marketing and our advertising, would our customers miss it?

Mathew Sweezey: No, they wouldn’t at all. They hate it.

Ask yourself. Here’s the thing that blows my mind. If you read any report that looks at the marketing industry, Gallup put out the trust in professions poll, and they’ve done so for decades.

Advertising professionals are one of the least trusted professions. The only professions that are more distrusted than advertisers are congressmen, lawyers, and insurance salespeople.

We are only one percentage point more trusted than insurance salespeople as a profession.

Brian Carroll: That’s depressing.

Mathew Sweezey: If you think about it that way, you’re like, why do we still do these things?

Well, we still do these things because we have such a long and vested interest in the idea that it works, when it really doesn’t work. It just worked because we were shooting fish in a barrel. They had no other recourse.

And now that they do, we can see, here’s one of my favorite things. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with one of my favorite marketing books, which is called The Cluetrain Manifesto. Doc is a coauthor with a bunch of other brilliant minds.

Brian Carroll: I’ve read it. It’s a terrific read.

Mathew Sweezey: In that book, Doc says that there is no demand for messages.

I was chatting with Doc the other day, and he said it’s not only that there is no demand, there never was a demand for messages.

And he takes it a step further and says, just think about this. If you look at ad blocking, there are over 600 million devices with ad blocking.

If you think about it this way, that is the largest boycott in human history, and it is boycotting our idea of advertising and marketing.

Think about that.

Brian Carroll: I can’t wait to read your book.

There’s the now, and so I would love to talk with you. There are five areas that I saw brought up in the study. First of all, email. Every marketer touches email, and those who email are impacted by this research.

So what can marketers do?

Mathew Sweezey: A couple of things.

This doesn’t really give a lot of tactics on what you do with email. Rather, it puts into question when should you ask for email, or what is the value of email in your organization.

So we have to take two steps back and think about telephone numbers.

Any marketer that uses email marketing now asks for an email address before a telephone number. So progression of communication channels.

Now we have other communication channels such as social, so maybe we should hold off on asking for email until a little bit later, because we know that email is much more finite than a social handle.

A social handle is usually a personal handle, which gives us personal access to somebody, rather than email, which is another level of communication.

So maybe it suggests that we should invest in social as much as, if not more, as a communication channel, just because it has a longer shelf life.

That’s an idea.

The other ideas are really just to help people understand the effectiveness that they have with obtaining email addresses and the fact that we need to realize standard best practices.

If you email somebody five times and they don’t respond, stop emailing them. Churn them out of your database.

Just because you have that email address doesn’t mean anything. You don’t own them.

At one time they thought you were relevant, but apparently you’ve proven not to be relevant in their lives, so take the hint and stop it.

Those are some tactics and ideas.

If you want to look at this in terms of a tactical approach, and you take this into the future, what you will see is, and this is just my assumption, but LinkedIn now being owned by Microsoft, LinkedIn has a massively powerful database.

To marketers, it is, I think, one of the most powerful databases for B2B marketers specifically, because it gives us employment data.

If you have ever been in any type of software sales scenario, or really any type of services sale, you know two major things.

You know that the moment your champion leaves a company, if you have a product that that champion bought, it’s now currently on the chopping block, because the next person that comes in is most likely to wipe out all the predecessor’s tools and choices and vendors and put in place their own.

Inversely, you know if that champion goes to a new place, that’s your greatest shot at selling them again at a new employment.

So just those two basic scenarios, employment has a lot to do in terms of an indicator of a sale or an indicator of churn of a previous sale.

Brian Carroll: When people switch roles or they leave a company, especially if they’re C-level, or as you talked about, a high-level decision maker, when they leave, change happens.

Mathew Sweezey: Yeah, every time.

In all the software companies I’ve worked at, that’s the number one trigger event for us losing a client. Number one.

Brian Carroll: Yes, I’d agree 100 percent, and I think what I’m hearing from you, and intuitively I’ve sensed this with my own email list, for example, and for our listeners, there are third-party providers that can help you append social data to the email addresses you currently have.

I personally use one called FullContact, and that is useful. There are others out there through Data.com, etc.

But when you have someone’s LinkedIn profile, or their Twitter, as people are mobile and they’re moving around, your data represents your relationships.

It’s very hard to start relationships over and over if people move from company to company.

So what I’m hearing from you, Sweezey, is that we need to think multidimensionally instead of right now, it’s like get email, grow our email list, and that’s not enough.

So how can marketers improve either their campaign or their data management? Any thoughts on that? We talked about a few ideas.

Or I’ll put it another way: what can marketers do to apply these insights and get better today?

Mathew Sweezey: That’s a harder question, just because this data didn’t specifically look at that, but I think just the basic things that I’ve mentioned.

First off, realize the amount of churn in your database and be aware that you’re reporting a metric to your bosses that really isn’t accurate.

So if you say that I’m basing my performance on a three percent engagement rate with my email address, you really have a much higher engagement rate with your core demographic than you probably think, because most of those people in your email database probably aren’t in that demographic or that persona anymore.

That’s one way to think about it: by scrubbing out all these people you actually can show your effectiveness a lot better, which is kind of crazy to think.

The others are just, realize that email is a very specific type of communication, and it’s applicable. Don’t discount this fact.

It is the number one communication method for business, and it is the number one communication method that business is done through.

But that means when business is applicable. As if you just have people in your audience, and they’re not actively in a sales cycle, email can help you keep up with them, but don’t discount all the other avenues that you can keep up with them.

So that’s just a couple of things.

Brian Carroll: That’s awesome.

As you look at this research, what are some questions you wished you could have dug deeper into, or maybe future research ideas related to this?

Mathew Sweezey: The amount of work to get this data, I will never ever want to continue this research.

It honestly was, due to the size of this data, we’re looking at 15 million data points over a span of six years, running some pretty heavy analysis, combining multiple data sets.

I don’t ever want to rerun this.

I think the numbers are here, and the main points are, in our given environment, I don’t expect people to switch jobs, or that process to change too dramatically.

So I think these churn rates, and I think these growth rates will stay pretty consistent for a pretty significant point of time.

The total database sizes, those are pretty accurate, and I imagine they will change, but we’ve got the growth rate and the churn rates to kind of be able to mathematically predict with pretty high degree of accuracy what they will be at any point in time.

I don’t ever really want to rerun this data, but in terms of future data, oh my god, there’s so many other things I want to look at.

But in terms of just mapping out size of personas, and the churn and the growth, I’m pretty sure this is probably the best that we’ll ever see.

I don’t really see any of the players that created this data wanting to actively rerun it. It’s pretty much what we’re going to get.

Brian Carroll: Well, I can appreciate that for all the reasons, and you just have a really cool gig, Sweezey.

I want to give our listeners a way to keep up with you and stay in contact, but before I do that, what’s the question that I missed asking you or that you wished I would have asked?

Mathew Sweezey: How about this one?

We’re all marketers that listen to this podcast, right?

Brian Carroll: Exactly. Tell us about ourselves.

Mathew Sweezey: Let’s talk about ourselves.

Here’s one of my favorite, most fascinating statistics that came out of this. Check this out. You got kids, Brian?

Brian Carroll: Yes.

Mathew Sweezey: Did you ever have hamsters?

Brian Carroll: Yes, we did. For a period of time, my daughters did.

Mathew Sweezey: And gerbils, right? Same thing.

A gerbil will live longer than a marketer will stay in their current position. That’s right.

A marketer’s tenure on average is 2.4 years. The average life cycle of a gerbil or a hamster or whatever is three years.

So if you buy a gerbil and put it on your desk, it will live longer than you will keep your job.

Brian Carroll: Crazy.

Mathew Sweezey: And by the way, in comparison, we have the highest churn rate of any profession. Marketers. Salespeople are second. Marketers are first.

Think about that.

Brian Carroll: Again, we’ve always known that it’s tough. It’s hard. This is why I do what I do, is I want to help marketers do better.

And if we’re moving, that we’re moving for positive reasons. It is a challenging job, but also I love it because we get to learn so much, and ongoing learning.

But man, just hearing about that churn, I think for all of us out there, we’ve got to get used to dealing with change, because change will happen to us, including at our jobs, right?

Mathew Sweezey: Yep.

Brian Carroll: So what’s the best way for people to stay in touch with you, or to keep up with your research?

Mathew Sweezey: Funny enough, I’m easy to find.

I took my first name, which is Matthew, and that first letter M and threw it on my last name, which is Sweezey, so I am @msweezey on Twitter.

If you read that real quickly, I am Miss Weezey for eternity on Twitter.

I also do a lot on SlideShare. Those are primarily the two places. I put most all of my research up on SlideShare, and I tweet every now and then. I’m not super active, but those are the two best places to catch me.

And then I speak all over, so you’re likely to go to a conference and see me, or read some stuff I’m writing. I started writing for Forbes recently and some other places.

Brian Carroll: Fantastic.

Well, I always love talking with you, and I learn a lot. I’m sure our listeners and readers have as well. Thanks again for joining us.

Mathew Sweezey: No worries, man. Thanks for having me.

Does your purpose currently impact your marketing, revenue growth, and profit?

Mack Fogelson has a direct answer: “This is about growth. And in this day and age, this is the approach to growth.”

That line gets to the heart of this conversation.

Purpose can sound soft. It can sound like a tagline, a mission statement, a values poster, or a nice idea that sits somewhere on the company website.

But Mack argues that purpose is much more practical than that.

Purpose helps companies connect with customers, focus their marketing, align employees, build trust, and create growth that is more durable than another campaign or tool.

In this episode of the B2B Roundtable Podcast, I talk with Mack Fogelson, CEO of Genuinely, about why purpose matters to marketing, revenue growth, and profit.

Mack explains why companies need to move beyond product-first messaging, why authentic purpose has to show up inside the business before it can work outside the business, and why customer empathy is essential if marketing is going to connect with real people.

We also talk about why technology can get in the way of customer connection, why marketers need more one-to-one conversations with customers, and how teams can start small instead of treating purpose as a massive organizational overhaul.

If your marketing feels disconnected from what customers actually care about, this conversation is worth your time.

About Mack Fogelson

Mack Fogelson is the CEO of Genuinely, a consulting and training company that helps organizations build more meaningful, human, and sustainable businesses.

Before founding Genuinely, Mack worked across the marketing space, including website development, search engine optimization, community building, branding, and integrated marketing strategy.

Her work focuses on helping companies use purpose, people, and promise to build stronger customer connections and healthier organizations.

Connect with Mack:

• Genuinely
• @mackfogelson on X/Twitter
• Mack Fogelson on LinkedIn

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Mack Fogelson
01:20 Mack’s background in marketing and teaching
02:40 Why purpose matters in marketing
05:20 Moving from product to purpose
08:20 Why B2B companies need purpose
13:25 How empathy connects purpose to customers
17:15 Four steps to articulate your purpose
25:10 Starting small with purpose

A few things worth taking away

• Purpose is not just a tagline, mission statement, or PR angle.
• Purpose matters because it can affect growth, customer connection, retention, and employee satisfaction.
• Companies need to be excellent at what they sell, but customers also care about who the company is.
• Purpose works when it connects what the company exists to do with what customers actually care about.
• Product-first marketing often creates a thin conversation. Purpose creates a larger conversation people can connect with.
• Empathy helps marketers understand what customers are thinking, feeling, fearing, and struggling with.
• Data helps, but it does not replace one-to-one conversations with customers.
• Technology can help with scale, but it cannot replace human connection.
• Teams can begin with small purpose workshops instead of treating purpose as a full organizational overhaul.

A few lines that stuck with me

“It’s not about what your company sells or solves anymore. It’s about who your company is.” — Mack Fogelson

“When the conversation shifts from being about product to being about purpose, it becomes something else entirely that drives growth.” — Mack Fogelson

“It doesn’t tell you what they’re afraid of.” — Mack Fogelson

“Technology is part of the root of the problem.” — Mack Fogelson

Resources mentioned

• Genuinely
• Why Your Organization Is Getting Sales and Marketing Wrong
• Evolve or Die: How Authenticity and Purpose are the Future of Brands.
• How Purpose and Authenticity are the Future of Brands
• Winning with Purpose – EY
• Purpose at Work – LinkedIn/Imperative
• The Business Case for Purpose – Harvard Business Review [PDF]

You may also like

• How Empathy Will Grow Your Sales and Marketing Pipeline
• 4 Ways You Can Humanize Marketing and Build Relationships
• Lead Nurturing: 4 Steps to Walking the Buying Path with Your Customers
• How Sales Hustle and Automation Can Hurt Customer Experience
• Stuck on Words: How Can Marketing Connect With Customers Better?

Listen and subscribe

If you found this episode helpful, subscribe to the B2B Roundtable Podcast wherever you listen.

Transcript

Brian Carroll: Hi everyone, this is Brian Carroll. I’d like to welcome you to today’s B2B Leads Podcast.

I have Mack Fogelson today. I’m super excited to bring her ideas and thoughts to you. Mack is CEO of Genuinely, and they are a consulting and training company.

Why I wanted to talk with Mack is I got introduced to Mack through a mutual friend of ours. We’ve developed this friendship, and I’ve learned a lot about purpose and how important that is with marketing.

As a lot of you listeners know, I’ve talked about empathy, and Mack has really brought this extra dimension of talking about purpose and how it’s so important.

Mack, I just want to welcome you and thank you for joining us today.

Mack Fogelson: Thank you Brian so much for having me and for your kind words. I’m excited to have a conversation today.

Brian Carroll: Well, can you tell us a little bit more about your background?

Mack Fogelson: Sure. Way, way long ago, in another dimension, I was actually a teacher and did that for a while.

Then over the last fourteen years I’ve been in the marketing space, so everything from building and coding websites to optimizing with search engine optimization to building community and brands and the full, integrated approach to marketing a company.

All of those layers and those many, many layers have brought us to where we are now, which is essentially teaching companies how to use the concepts that we’ve pioneered or created, or created an amalgam of all the things we’ve learned over the years, and just really paying forward the frameworks and the processes that ultimately help companies in the digital age compete, contend, and build really great, meaningful, sustainable businesses.

Brian Carroll: I was going to ask you, as you’re on this journey and as you’re working, what inspired you to focus on purpose and humanizing marketing?

Mack Fogelson: Yeah, you know that’s a loaded question possibly, but I think it’s because around the time I started having my family, almost a decade ago, I just realized that in my work on a daily basis, if I was taking that time away from my family, I really needed to make it count.

Ultimately, I’ve always really built a business around something that has been very meaningful to me and certainly wanting to make that very meaningful for my employees.

Then we really just got into the mode of wanting to help companies be better.

I started in the conversation about community many years back. I was on the stage for search engine marketing, talking a lot about the benefit of community and companies building a community in order to help their businesses.

What I didn’t realize at the time but unfolded many years later was that purpose was really at the heart of all of that. Purpose, connection, people, and really helping companies to understand how you bring people together through purpose, and certainly to drive their growth.

Brian Carroll: That is really cool.

I think the challenge that a lot of B2B marketers face, and our listeners and readers, is that I talk to a lot of B2B marketers and they feel that, one, they’re working with budgets that aren’t huge, and they feel like there’s a lot more noise.

You’ve said that it’s not about what you spend on marketing. It’s how you put your energy or how purpose helps you get focused. Why is that?

Mack Fogelson: Because there is so much that has changed.

The world isn’t the same. Businesses are not the same, and the way the business world works, customers are not the same. So we cannot expect marketing to be the same.

Essentially, we’re looking at consumers now, which we are consumers just as we are marketers, but we expect authentic and very real and human experiences. And not only that, but employees are looking for more meaning in their work just like I was many years ago.

It really comes down to the fact that it’s not about what your company sells or solves anymore. Certainly you need to be extremely stellar at what you sell and what you make, but it’s about who your company is.

Really, it’s about the three components of purpose, people, and promise, and having those pieces work together for any given company so they can reap all the benefits that purpose brings, like customer acquisition and retention, customer connections, and employee satisfaction.

Brian Carroll: It’s really important, and I know that you’ve talked about this a bit, but there has been this disconnect.

How can we overcome this disconnect and better connect with our customers, our future customers?

Mack Fogelson: I think the biggest thing to realize is that most companies are pushing their product and they’re trying to push their services rather than really leading from what their company is here to do and bridging that gap between the purpose of the company and the people that are in line with that.

When the conversation is about product, there isn’t much of a conversation to be had.

Let’s say we’re just talking about Dove, which is a very popular example of purpose in the sense that they sell soap. But ultimately their purpose is to help women feel good about their bodies.

It’s the intersection of those things and the cultural relevancy of attacking an issue like women’s self-image and their body image and wanting to really help solve that problem in our world that has given them such incredible growth in their organization.

When the conversation shifts from being about product to being about purpose, it becomes something else entirely that drives growth, because it’s the word of mouth that companies are looking for.

And that doesn’t come through talking about a product. It comes from the connection that they have through the shared values and wanting to do something bigger.

Not to say that they don’t generate great profits from this path. It’s just a different way to it.

Brian Carroll: As I’m listening to you, part of me was like, there are times where I, and I’m sure some of our listeners may be saying, “Oh I wish I could sell something as simple as Dove,” in a lot of ways where you have a complex sale.

You’ve talked about why building a human and authentic company is necessary. So why should those in B2B marketing care about this?

When they have something that’s complex and lots of people, why should we care, and hasn’t this work been done already?

Mack Fogelson: That’s the thing. Purpose is a big conversation and it has been for a lot of years. It’s becoming more of a trendy topic and you see it everywhere, and I think that’s the biggest disconnect.

Companies think that on the outside, if they market for purpose, they’re good, they’re safe. And maybe many companies are doing that.

But if the experience with your company is not true all the way to the core, then that’s where you’re going to have your big problems.

In kind of a roundabout way to answer your question, in terms of why companies should care and why they need this, this isn’t really a clarify-your-purpose-as-an-organization and then great, check that off, stencil some words on your wall, and just call it good and maintain the strong culture.

It’s more than that.

It’s understanding how that is communicated in your sales, in your marketing, because ultimately in the day-to-day companies want to know how do we achieve growth and how do we continue to acquire customers? How do we keep our customers?

When your company is not looking at how to build a deeper connection with that customer, which by the way comes from purpose and empathy as we’ve talked about, there is no connection.

When you have no connection, you have no customers.

It’s really in applying the purpose to the day-to-day of the organization and understanding how that’s not just some visionary thing about identifying a purpose and then making it relevant to your customers.

It’s helping your teams internally understand what purpose is or isn’t, because many companies think it’s a PR approach or it’s a tagline, or it’s a mission or value statement. Or it’s even making a bunch of money over here to give money over there.

That’s all great, but when it comes down to it, purpose is really what does that mean to your customer who needs your product and wants to connect deeply with your company?

Think about Patagonia. They’re selling a stellar product, but they’re also going deeper to say, “We are going to pioneer technology to make better clothing. And we’re going to reduce the impact of that on the environment. Then we’re going to give this technology to our competitors because if they have it, then we’re making a larger impact altogether.”

Certainly that appears to be going very, very far with the concept of purpose.

But you look at a company like Chipotle and they ultimately have been working on “food with integrity” as their purpose for many, many years. They have completely, exponentially outperformed the competition and all because they have centered their entire company around this thought that food can be better made, even in an industry where food is fast food and you have to do it for cutting your margins.

Now they’re on this path of figuring out, even with their food safety issues, how are they going to get back to their purpose and still deliver food with integrity and keep their customers while staying true to their profit.

I think to answer your question, companies need purpose because they need to keep their employees, they need it to keep their customers, and ultimately there’s something bigger that their businesses are here to do.

And it’s not an altruistic path. It’s a path to profit. It’s just, again, a different way of getting there.

Brian Carroll: I appreciate that you talked about all the dimensions and also with some examples.

A little bit later, I want to ask you for some tips that we in marketing can use to take steps to understand our purpose and articulate that, but also start having that conversation internally.

I also loved that you talked about empathy in the beginning. I talk about that a lot too. What do you wish marketers and sellers would do more in this respect? I’d love to learn from you and hear your thoughts.

Mack Fogelson: In regards to empathy?

Brian Carroll: Yeah. Does empathy play a role in understanding your purpose and connecting with customers? Or what do you wish marketers and sellers did more in this respect?

Mack Fogelson: Definitely.

This might be a little bit of a spoiler alert to maybe your tips toward the end, but one of the biggest things that we see is that companies lack the customer connection and obviously the connection to their purpose and any type of authentic or personal or empathetic connection to customers because they’re using data to make decisions, which they have a copious amount of data.

Some companies just don’t know what to do with it anymore. But it’s not in just analyzing your customer data or your audience data or the psychographic data that you get on your customers.

It’s participating in one-to-one interviews with them to truly understand their behavior and more specifically understanding what they’re thinking and feeling.

Because when you get that data about your customer, that’s great that it gets you some very quantitative benchmarks about the profile of these people. But it doesn’t tell you what they’re afraid of. It doesn’t tell you what they’re struggling with right now at this point in their lives.

Connecting with your customers on that one-to-one basis obviously opens up a huge conversation for understanding and empathizing with where they’re coming from.

Then, by understanding that thinking and feeling, you can shape your entire content strategy based on removing those roadblocks.

And that is something I think ties into many things in addition to purpose and empathy.

Brian Carroll: I’m really glad you brought up tips, and that’s actually where we were going to go.

I think you’re spot on. I’ve talked to marketers who really don’t get to spend face time with the customers they’re looking to influence or reach outside their companies.

So I think the takeaway here is that marketers need to spend more time connecting with customers and not just through their channel of their sales team, but actually having these conversations and spending time doing that, and practicing and using their empathy to do just that.

Mack Fogelson: You and I talk about this a lot with technology and how everybody thinks that technology is a magic pill.

They think there must be a tool or piece of technology or software that is going to help us build our customer base faster. Or some magic trick.

The fact of the matter is that that’s part of the root of the problem in which companies need purpose, they need empathy.

Because they’re trying to solve these much deeper connection issues with their customers by using technology in lieu of speaking with their customers.

And those tools can’t help you do that.

So I think definitely the companies that understand how to use technology wisely, obviously they need to be able to use that at a certain level, even just to do a bunch of the heavy lifting and dirty work that we couldn’t take part in many years ago.

But it’s been taking that data and pairing it with the one-to-one participation in the flesh with these people to really understand who they are, what they need, and help them get their roadblocks removed.

Brian Carroll: I agree with you, and as we’ve talked about the things that I realized has come up is the very thing that’s supposed to help us, this technology, connect with our customers more efficiently and effectively, is getting in the way of doing that.

And so to counteract that, or the counterpoint, is humanizing and actually putting more energy into that human connection so that when we do apply the technology, we’re using it well and we’re using it in a way that can help facilitate conversations and connections that we’ve already established.

Mack Fogelson: Definitely.

Brian Carroll: Can you share any other tips or examples that our listeners can use to articulate and apply their purpose so that it’s not outside in but it’s inside out?

Mack Fogelson: Yeah, and actually I can share four steps that would really help them understand how do we even approach this conversation.

Using purpose in your organization and certainly having that be a cornerstone of your growth, and specifically we’re focusing on how that is communicated in sales, marketing, and customer experience. But certainly it’s not the only piece to the success of your organization.

There are so many things that have to be in line: strategy, leadership, and obviously your product or service. But purpose greatly enhances the opportunity for success, especially in the digital age and especially in terms of competitive advantages.

So just know if you’re going to go down this road that you don’t have to start all over. You don’t have to overhaul your entire organization.

In fact, many companies that we work with just need an outside perspective to help them understand their systems and processes that they use to market and sell just need a little tweaking here and there.

And a reminder of, “Hey, at this place is when you integrate purpose. At this place is when you really bring it back to the goals of the organization, wrapped with purpose. Or you need to get to the customer in this place a little bit earlier.”

Let me just walk through these tips and I’ll try to make it as quick as possible.

The first of these four steps is basically clarifying the purpose of the organization.

We talked a little bit about Dove. Their purpose is not to sell soap. Their purpose is to help women feel better about their bodies. So that’s the big difference there.

Same with Chipotle. Their purpose is not to sell burritos. Their purpose is to make food with integrity and ultimately to pioneer food safety systems and help other fast-food organizations to know that they can make great food and still make it healthy and good for our earth.

It’s understanding the difference between just a mission and the product that you’re selling and really making the conversation about purpose. So start there.

If you’re at a loss as to how to do that, there are lots of resources online. We are partial to the Ogilvy and Mather tool that is really effective in helping companies understand the cultural tension that they’re trying to address in the world, as well as what they do as their best self.

And that is how you find your purpose.

It’s not easy to do, but it’s certainly a place that will make you extremely relevant in your customers’ lives. So starting with clarifying the purpose of your organization, that’s number one.

The second step is deconstructing your customer’s journeys.

So now I’m getting more specific to sales, marketing, customer experience, and those teams in your organization, and understanding how to do this by actually talking to your customers.

Just as I mentioned earlier, you definitely want to be looking at the customer data that you can collect digitally. Understand the audience data, the demographic data, psychographic data that you get.

But that is normally where companies stop. They build these personas and then they don’t go any deeper into actually spending face-to-face time with the customer.

And that’s where all the good stuff is.

That’s where you’re going to find connections, and that’s where you’re going to understand what your customers are thinking and feeling at every stage in your funnel, so that you can generate resources, content, experiences that help to remove those roadblocks.

That’s the second part, deconstructing that customer journey so that you can make that bridge between your purpose and your people.

The third step in getting purpose really well integrated in your organization is connecting your team’s purpose to your organization’s purpose.

Ultimately, you have to know the purpose of your organization in its entirety to really understand what your organization as a whole exists to achieve beyond profit.

The second part of that is then, with your team, understand what role they play in achieving that purpose so they can really apply that more specifically to their day-to-day.

That can go a really long way for efficiency and output and morale, especially when your team is pushing hard and days are getting long. The meaning side of that really matters to them.

The fourth and final step after connecting your team’s purpose to your organization’s purpose is really adjusting the communication of your purpose externally.

This very much directly applies to your sales and marketing and customer experience teams. They’re the most outwardly facing, so they are the ones that have the biggest responsibility in making sure that what is happening inside of your organization is also being effectively communicated outside.

So companies know you’re not a façade, that purpose is not a veneer, that it’s truly how you operate inside and out.

Essentially you want to teach your sales and marketing team to understand the difference between having a product conversation and having a purpose conversation.

When you make that shift to not just pushing your product, but then to helping those teams understand the bigger purpose of your organization and how that connects to your customers, then ultimately you’re opening an opportunity to connect with exponentially more people, more organizations, more influencers, more people in the media, more communities, who are either already your ideal customers, or they know somebody who could be.

And that’s probably the biggest factor there.

Brian Carroll: Mack, that was fantastic. Thank you.

You did a good job distilling down to four points, and I feel like this will be tangible for our listeners.

We’ll also supply some resources and links for people to dig into these areas as well.

I have just one more question. I wanted to ask what advice you would give to those who want to apply what you’ve just talked about and bring this idea to other leaders inside their company.

What if someone who might be doing marketing communications or frontline sales is inspired by this idea and feels like they ought to do this? How can they get the conversation started inside their company?

Mack Fogelson: That’s a great question.

I think it’s starting small.

Like I said, purpose as a concept seems very intimidating, especially to leaders, because they feel like, “Oh my gosh, you’re talking about an entire organization overhaul, and we can’t even keep up with what we’re doing every day.”

So I don’t think about that, because we’ve already touched on that it’s not really starting over. It’s just optimizing what you have and better connecting it and communicating it so that your employees and your customers can understand it so that they want to support your growth.

I think it’s just starting small.

We typically start with a very small purpose workshop. We’re talking maybe 45 to 60 minutes of helping companies understand what purpose is and what purpose isn’t.

I can supply some of the research and the resources that have informed those workshops that we do if that would help people. So certainly they can pull information out of that.

Then once they start the conversation, I think it’s also to understand that purpose seems kind of fluffy, maybe, when you’re trying to hit your ROI and your metrics and the goals that you have financially for your team and for the organization.

But this is about growth.

It actually doesn’t have anything to do with purpose. This is about growth.

And in this day and age, this is the approach to growth, understanding how to come at it from this place.

When you’re selling it to your leadership, it’s really understanding that we’re going to teach our sales, marketing, and customer experience teams how to remove roadblocks for our customers by connecting that purpose.

And that ultimately is going to drive sales, it’s going to drive retention, it’s going to drive connections, and ultimately it’s going to drive our growth.

Brian Carroll: Terrific. What’s the best way for readers and listeners to get in touch with you?

Mack Fogelson: Obviously they can come to our website, genuinely.co. Co is our domain.

But certainly they can reach out to me via email, mack@genuinely.co, or just come find me online. I’m on Twitter most every day, happy to chat there. And also LinkedIn.

Love to have these conversations, so please feel free to reach out, even with the smallest of questions.

Brian Carroll: Well thanks again for coming on and sharing.

I’ve learned a lot from our conversation today, and we’ve talked many times, so I’m sure our listeners have as well.

Thanks again, Mack.

Mack Fogelson: Thank you so much for having me.

Have you made empathetic marketing part of your strategy?

Michael Brenner has a simple way to explain why it matters: “When you help your customers, that’s the best way to help your business.”

That line gets to the heart of this conversation.

Most companies naturally want to promote themselves. Their products. Their services. Their features. Their wins. Their best face to the world.

Michael argues that this instinct is exactly what makes empathy so counter-intuitive.

It feels strange to believe you can sell more by talking less about what you sell. But that is where better marketing starts.

In this episode of the B2B Roundtable Podcast, I talk with Michael Brenner, CEO of Marketing Insider Group at the time of this interview, about why empathy is one of the most practical ideas in marketing, sales, leadership, and culture.

Michael previously led digital and content marketing at SAP, where he became their first head of digital marketing and later VP of Global Content Marketing. His work has focused on helping companies modernize marketing by creating content customers actually want and by helping marketers lead with usefulness instead of self-promotion.

We get into why brands struggle to stop promoting themselves, why marketers often forget what it feels like to be a customer, how empathy helps teams do work that matters, and why helping customers is not separate from business results.

If your marketing still starts with what your company wants to say instead of what your customers need, this conversation is worth your time.

About Michael Brenner

Michael Brenner was CEO of Marketing Insider Group at the time of this interview. Before that, he led digital and content marketing at SAP, where he became their first head of digital marketing and later VP of Global Content Marketing.

Michael is a keynote speaker, author, and marketing leader known for his work in content marketing, empathetic marketing, customer-focused content, and helping companies create marketing that serves customers instead of just promoting the business.

Connect with Michael:

• Marketing Insider Group
• @BrennerMichael on X/Twitter
• Michael Brenner on LinkedIn

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Michael Brenner
01:20 Why empathy matters in marketing
03:20 Why empathy is counter-intuitive
05:15 Overcoming collective amnesia
07:35 Helping customers, not selling
10:25 Doing work that matters
12:15 Empathy stories from Wells Fargo and SAP
18:45 Championing empathy inside your company

A few things worth taking away

• Empathetic marketing starts with helping customers, not promoting the company.
• Most companies naturally want to put their best face forward, which makes empathy feel counter-intuitive.
• Marketing often suffers from “collective amnesia” when marketers forget they are also customers.
• The best marketing does not just reach people. It helps people.
• Helping customers is not separate from business results. It is one of the best ways to create them.
• People want their work to matter beyond the top line and bottom line.
• Culture changes when leaders put real value behind the behaviors they say matter.
• Empathy outside the company usually starts with empathy inside the company.
• You do not need to be the CEO to lead with empathy. You can champion customer-focused ideas from where you are.

A few lines that stuck with me

“When you help your customers, that’s the best way to help your business.” — Michael Brenner

“It’s counter-intuitive to think that you can sell more stuff by not talking about the stuff you sell.” — Michael Brenner

“We forget how to market to people just like us.” — Michael Brenner

“It starts by helping, not selling.” — Michael Brenner

“Culture is really just a codification of what’s valued by the organization.” — Michael Brenner

“We all have great ideas, but ideas are worthless unless someone supports them.” — Michael Brenner

Resources mentioned

• Marketing Insider Group
• Why Empathy Is the Counter-Intuitive Secret to Success
• The Content Formula by Michael Brenner
• Noah Fenn on empathy in marketing
• How SAP’s CEO Bill McDermott Is Using Empathy to Build More Powerful Teams

You may also like

• How Empathy Will Grow Your Sales and Marketing Pipeline
• 4 Ways You Can Humanize Marketing and Build Relationships
• Why Marketers Fail at Customer Empathy and How to Fix It
• Growing B2B Sales with Trust and Empathy

Listen and subscribe

If you found this episode helpful, subscribe to the B2B Roundtable Podcast wherever you listen.

Transcript

Brian Carroll: Hello. This is Brian Carroll, and I’d like to welcome you all to today’s B2B Lead Podcast.

I’m really excited to have Michael Brenner with us today. Michael is someone that I’ve followed for a long while. In fact, as we were just talking before this interview, we’ve both been mutual fans of one another.

Michael has received recognition across the internet for his knowledge in shaping content marketing. He’s a keynote speaker, an author. He’s also CEO of Marketing Insider Group, and so I’m really excited to bring his thoughts on empathy.

Michael, thank you for joining us. Can you tell us a little bit more about you and your background?

Michael Brenner: Yeah, sure. Thanks Brian. It’s really a pleasure to be with you today, and looking forward to talking about empathy, which I think is so important in today’s landscape.

To make a long story short, as we get older I find that I need to summarize my career much more quickly than I used to have to, but I have a 20-plus year career in sales and marketing, and leadership roles in various kinds of companies, large and small.

Most recently, about 10 years ago, I was hired by SAP as their first head of digital marketing. I became their first VP of Global Content Marketing and essentially helped them modernize the digital marketing approaches that they were taking.

Very much taking an empathetic approach like we’re going to talk about.

What I found is that there was just such a need as I got out in the marketplace and started speaking and writing. There’s such a need, I think, for brands to understand. They want to do it, I think, but really struggle with how to get it done and how to change the culture inside their organizations.

That’s what I’ve been focused on. I built Marketing Insider Group essentially as kind of a one-man agency for now, but with the point that I’ve been there, I’ve done that, I’ve been inside corporate marketing departments.

I understand the politics and the culture challenges that marketers face today, and I’m really dedicating my life to trying to help as many companies, as many brands, as many marketers as I can to understand how to put themselves in a leadership position by helping their customers.

Brian Carroll: Well, that’s fantastic.

I came across the article from LinkedIn, and actually several people forwarded it to me and said, “Brian, you should check this out.”

I wanted to ask, what inspired you to start writing and talking about empathy recently?

Michael Brenner: Yeah, well, as you know it’s not something I’ve been doing for a long time. I’ve been kind of talking around it.

What I’ve found is as I talk to senior executives, and maybe we’ll get to a really good story a little bit later on, but a typical conversation for me might involve, “Hey, this digital world and content marketing, and creating content for customers, we think we get it. Now we need to figure out how to do it.”

In the course of the conversation, what I end up finding is that there’s an executive usually, or someone in a position of power, who has their arms folded asking the challenging questions, “Well how’s this going to help us sell more stuff?”

I co-authored a book called The Content Formula to specifically address this sort of results-based question, which was how do you show ROI from this approach?

In the book, I talk about how you can actually show a better return on investment with marketing that focuses on delivering content people actually want.

Even after all of those financial objections were removed, I still found that there was resistance inside a lot of companies.

What I realized is that there’s this cultural underpinning, and it’s really a natural instinct. There’s a natural instinct inside a business to want to promote itself.

Yet that’s counter-intuitive.

That’s why I came to this realization that the missing element, and you’ve been talking about this for a long time and I really look to you for the leadership on this topic, is empathy.

It’s empathy that’s missing, and a value on empathy inside corporate cultures and structures. It was kind of a rant in a way, but that’s why I put that out there.

Brian Carroll: Well, you described it as this counter-intuitive secret to success. Why is that?

Michael Brenner: Yeah, so like I said, the natural instinct, this is true for all of us. It’s human nature.

The example I love to give is the posts that I put up on Facebook. I don’t do a lot of business content on Facebook. It’s mostly pictures of my kids and the trips we take, and it’s essentially me putting my best face forward to the world.

That’s what I think we all generally tend to do in the social world that we live in to the connections that we have. It’s our natural instinct.

I think there’s really nothing wrong with wanting people to see that you’re happy and you’re healthy, and you’re doing fun things.

That’s the natural instinct we carry with us when we walk inside the companies that we work for.

The natural instinct of the business person is to want to promote itself and put the best face forward. That’s why I think it’s counter-intuitive.

It’s counter-intuitive to think that you can sell more stuff by not talking about the stuff you sell.

That’s why I think empathy is so counter-intuitive.

Brian Carroll: I know it’s something that I struggle with and I think everyone does when we’re focusing on getting our needs met, whether that’s hitting a number, as you talked about achieving ROI.

It’s a challenge, and I think you talked about this collective amnesia we have. Why is it we change as we walk into the building, that we start thinking differently when we put on our marketing and sales hat?

How can we overcome this amnesia to better relate to our customers?

Michael Brenner: Yeah, and I mean it’s really interesting. I love the term.

It was actually coined by Noah Fenn, who is head of video sales and strategy at AOL. He talked about how this natural instinct to self-promote is collective amnesia.

What he means by that is that although we’re real people, when we walk inside the buildings that we work in, we kind of forget that we are real people.

We forget how to market to people just like us.

That’s essentially the collective amnesia.

We walk in, we want to present and promote the companies and the products that we sell. Yet that’s exactly the kind of thing that we as consumers don’t want.

A head of marketing who makes an ad buy is doing that with the knowledge that he might, or she might, hate ads. That’s the collective amnesia.

When you’re watching a TV show, you don’t need to see an ad for Chevy 15 times over the course of the 45-minute show. But the ad buyer for Chevy is making that decision.

There’s a person, there’s a group of people generally behind those kinds of decisions, and that’s the collective amnesia that we talk about in the article.

We make decisions in the business as people that often forget that we’re marketing to real people just like us.

Brian Carroll: It’s funny, and I think it’s interesting.

As I talk to marketers, we just realize how cynical we can be too, because we feel it’s a game or we know it’s a game.

I think really just getting out of our heads and, it sounds like what you’re saying, is we need to put ourselves in the shoes of our customers and remember we are too.

What do you wish marketers and sellers would do in this respect? What are some suggestions you have on how we could get better at this?

Michael Brenner: Yeah, well I think the counter-intuitive nature of it is this insight that when you help your customers, and I use this line in the article, when you help your customers, that’s the best way to help your business.

I think we often sort of defend our actions, our self-promotional actions by saying, “Well that’s the game we’re playing.”

Like you said, we’re kind of skeptical and we live in a noisy world. The loudest shouter kind of gets the most attention.

Yet that’s exactly the thing that I think the data that we now have in the digital marketing landscape is proving isn’t working.

As people, we know it’s not what we want. We have to resist that sort of notion, and put our customers first.

It starts by helping, not selling.

What that doesn’t mean is that we have to let go of the need to drive results.

That’s why I really love the line that when you help your customers, it’s the best way to help your business, as opposed to when you promote your business is the best way to promote and sell more of your business services and products.

That’s what I wish every marketer would get.

It’s really why I ranted in the article about the secret to success. The secret to being effective and efficient with the marketing that we do starts with this understanding that we are real people, we’re trying to market to real people, and the best way to do that is to actually be helpful.

It’s to want to really help them. Not just with the products and services you sell, but to help them as people and help the society at large solve its problems.

I think it’s a nobler cause, and it’s a much more challenging thing to do inside corporate cultures.

Brian Carroll: Well, I’m so glad you’re bringing this up.

You’ve probably experienced this as you’ve talked to your clients and marketers out there, but my experience when I talk to marketers and sellers is that they don’t want to just feel like they’re making an impact on the top line and bottom line.

They actually want to feel like they’re making a real impact or real difference, that what they do materially matters, and they feel good about it.

I think what you’re talking about can help us do just that.

Michael Brenner: Yeah. This is really the direction that I’m kind of going on the content and thought leadership perspective.

We all understand and we’ve seen there’s enough people out there talking about this desire to work for companies that have a real purpose or even a kind of social mission.

Even at the individual level, like you said, we all want to do work that matters.

One of the insights that I’ve found is that being effective in my job was never enough to make me happy. I was only ever happy when I was effective and making an impact with something that I believed in.

It’s the combination of both meaning and impact.

If you go to my Twitter account, I think you’ll see I have a line in there that says, “Life is short. Do work that matters.”

We all make an impact. It’s just about whether we make an impact in the right direction for the right cause, for the right purpose.

It can be a corporate purpose. It can be a financial purpose, but there has to be a customer at the end of that financial decision that’s being made where you’re actually solving a problem.

Again, I think it just comes back to being empathetic. It allows us as employees, as people, to really feel like we’re making an impact in a way that really matters to somebody.

Brian Carroll: I love it, and I loved what you said when you said, “We all make an impact, whether it’s for good or bad. We’re making an impact right now.”

I’m really glad you’re bringing up this point.

I think earlier in our interview you mentioned that you had a story this year, and I wanted to see if you had any examples or tips of how applying empathy has made a difference or impact.

Michael Brenner: Yeah. I have a positive story and a negative story.

Maybe I’ll start with, which one should I start with? Should we start with bad news first?

Brian Carroll: Well, let’s start with the bad. Let’s start negative. I like to resume positively if we could.

Michael Brenner: It’s not negative. It’s a lesson that’s become public, and I sort of got a glimpse of it in private.

The company, I’m actually a customer and a huge fan, and I have to say as a caveat to this, huge fan of Wells Fargo. In fact, I was on the phone with them this morning on a mortgage refinance I’m trying to work through. I’m still a happy, satisfied customer with them.

I had an opportunity to present to their marketing team about six months ago before the scandal broke. Maybe it was nine months ago, before them trying to sort of force accounts on people.

The conversation we were having was very much like this one.

It was about how content marketing requires a focus on really solving customer problems, and there’s one way to really know if you’re doing that. That’s with engagement.

You can measure engagement in the form of time on site and in the form of social shares, and in the form of whether people subscribe to your content.

Those are all deep measures of not just are you reaching people, but are they voting? Are they giving you a vote of confidence in the content you’re creating?

One of the senior marketers on the team spoke up and was resistant to this idea.

This person said that, “Here at Wells Fargo we are just buying reach and frequency, the kind of classic TV ad buying model. We are measured on reach and frequency.”

I said to the person that, “You have a choice in the world, the noisy world that we live in, because everybody can buy reach and frequency. Anybody can do that.

The brands that set themselves apart are the ones that are really looking to engage the right people.”

The example I used was, “You can shout into the wind, or you can speak one on one to the people that you can really help.”

That’s the choice you have as a brand.

I don’t think that analogy went over very well.

It was really only a few weeks later that the story broke, and I think we’ve all seen what’s happened there.

I’m optimistic that they’ve learned a lesson. I think that they have such an amazing corporate history and a culture, and I think that there were just a few of the wrong people in leadership positions who were forcing a value in pushing the business over the needs of the customer.

It’s exactly, I think, the wrong way to approach this whole idea of help your customers and you help your business.

It’s the opposite.

That’s kind of my negative story.

Brian Carroll: Yeah, well I think it’s just, I’ve written about this, I think when we focus on the wrong thing, we can almost become sociopathic trying to get our needs met at the expense of others.

In this case, clearly Wells Fargo customers didn’t get the benefit as Wells Fargo was getting its needs met of revenue.

I think they’ll turn it around as you talked about as well, and they’re working on addressing that.

Let’s switch to a positive example or a story that you could share.

Michael Brenner: Well I think the main lesson for Wells Fargo, and it’s kind of like it’s in their mission statement, is they really want to help customers.

The problem was, I talk about this when I do speeches on leadership. Culture, people talk about we need to change the culture.

Well, culture is really just a codification of what’s valued by the organization. Leadership is just a personal expression of values.

I think what Wells Fargo learned was that they had the values in place. They had named them. They had documented them.

They just weren’t actually putting value behind them. They weren’t promoting people. They weren’t making a good example of the people that were actually promoting the right values for their business.

I’m going to go back to my former company, SAP.

I don’t know who does the study, but there’s a study done every year. I read an article in Harvard Business Review a couple of months ago, Top 10 Empathetic Companies. SAP is number 10 on the list, and I’m really proud to see them make that kind of recognition.

Their CEO, a guy named Bill McDermott, was really instrumental in my career and essentially almost personally mentored and created an opportunity for me to do what I was able to do at SAP.

He had a life-changing experience. He had an accident about a year, maybe a year and a half ago.

He came back transformed from that experience and decided that it wasn’t just about making the numbers.

This is a hard-charging sales guy. Really super successful individual. One of the most charismatic leaders I’ve ever met.

He was really good at motivating SAP to hit the number, hit the number.

He came back, I think, really transformed as the first American CEO of this German company.

There’s an article I think out on Forbes, or Fast Company, about this journey that he’s taken, and he’s making empathy a valued, rewarded, recognized value inside the organization.

They’re starting to see they’ve turned the ship.

They’ve changed their culture, not because they tried to change their culture. They’ve changed their culture because they focused on putting a value behind this very touchy-feely, hippy-dippy sort of emotion called empathy.

I think it’s a great example.

You can see it in their advertising. They don’t talk about their latest product. They talk about how they help their customers run better.

Their whole tagline is a customer focus, so even when they do advertising, it’s at least customer-focused messaging.

You can see it was the reason I was able to implement the content marketing program I did, and the reason why I think they’re a leader in the technology marketing space for sure.

Brian Carroll: Well, and for our listeners, I’ll put a link to this article that Michael mentioned so you can check it out.

I agree, and I’ve also read stories about how Bill McDermott is using empathy to build more powerful teams.

I think what you brought up as the example is it’s hard for us to be empathetic outside unless we first have that transformation inside, in how we relate to others, how we relate to our teams.

It really, from what I’ve seen, does take leadership to do this. Even self-leadership.

What advice do you have for those who want to sell the idea of empathy to leaders or to others inside their company?

Michael Brenner: Yeah, it’s a great question.

It’s specifically the topic that I’m looking to address in a lot of my outreach and content, and keynote speeches this year.

It’s essentially this notion of what I call champion leadership.

It’s easy if you’re Bill McDermott. You’re the CEO. You can decree that empathy is now important.

But what do you do if you’re like most of us? You’re down the pole a little bit and you’re looking up, and maybe you don’t feel that it’s valued across your organization.

I think the best way to do this, it’s something I’ve learned in the course of my career, is you need to be empathetic by putting that recognition on others inside your organization that are pushing these ideas.

What do I mean by that?

If you see someone who is fighting to create a customer-focused piece of content versus a self-promotional ad, support that person.

We all have great ideas, but ideas are worthless unless someone supports them.

If you’re not getting support from the top, the concept I’d like to encourage people to think about is we’re all leaders, but do we champion other people’s great ideas?

It starts with, I think, just being again, almost self-sacrificing to begin with, which can be just as hard in a hard-charging corporate culture as empathy can be.

I think just starting with that concept of who can you help inside your organization to promote the great customer-focused ideas, the empathetic ideas that they have?

Brian Carroll: That’s really great advice.

It is also challenging too because I find in my own experience that it’s easy in a split second to switch from thinking of others to thinking of myself. That’s just a continual thing.

As you’re talking about it, it really is setting that intention to value others, to value their ideas. Again, the whole spirit is helping.

This has been a really great interview. I’ve come away with some great insights from you, Michael. Thank you so much.

What’s the best way for our readers and listeners to get in touch with you, and to get exposed to more of your thinking?

Michael Brenner: Yeah, sure. I appreciate that.

MarketingInsiderGroup.com is my website, which I’ve kind of modeled after this whole empathetic approach. Instead of really pushing products and services, it’s essentially more of a blog where I’m sharing content that I think is helpful, with a little bit of an explanation of what we do.

You can also follow me on Twitter @BrennerMichael or connect with me on LinkedIn and Facebook. I’m happy to connect with the audience there as well.

Brian Carroll: Awesome.

Again, for our listeners, I’ll have links to all these resources.

Michael, thank you again. It’s been wonderful talking with you.

Michael Brenner: Yeah, thanks Brian. I think it’s an important topic. I appreciate the opportunity to speak about it.

Do you want your sales team to get better at social selling?

Jill Rowley puts the problem plainly: “More isn’t better. More relevant is better.”

That line gets to the heart of this conversation.

Most sales teams are still being told to make more calls, send more emails, add more touches, and create more activity. But buyers are already drowning in generic outreach.

More volume does not create more trust.

Jill argues that B2B sales is overdue for modernization. Marketing has already had to change because buyers changed. Now sales has to catch up.

In this episode of the B2B Roundtable Podcast, I talk with Jill Rowley, Chief Evangelist and startup advisor for social selling, about how salespeople can use social channels to become more visible, valuable, relevant, and human to their buyers.

Jill has spent years helping companies think about social selling from a programmatic, organizational level. Her view is not that phone and email are dead. It is that social is an additional channel where salespeople can find buyers, listen to them, understand them, engage with them, and build real relationships.

We get into why old-school tactics do not work in new-school channels, why generic LinkedIn invites damage first impressions, how empathy applies to social selling, why salespeople need training on social networks, and how technology can help sellers spend more time on the human work of building trust.

If your sales team is doing more but not getting more relevant, this conversation is worth your time.

About Jill Rowley

Jill Rowley is a Chief Evangelist and startup advisor focused on social selling. She has spent more than a decade in software sales, much of it selling into marketing organizations.

Jill describes herself as a sales professional trapped in a marketer’s body. Her work focuses on helping sales teams modernize how they sell by using social channels to listen, learn, connect, engage, and build trust with buyers.

Connect with Jill:

• @Jill_Rowley on X/Twitter
• Jill Rowley on LinkedIn

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Jill Rowley
01:15 Jill’s background in sales and marketing
03:05 Why social selling matters now
05:10 Why more activity is not better
07:20 Social selling mistakes to avoid
10:15 How empathy applies to social selling
15:45 How to get better at social selling
20:50 Technology, trust, and the future of sales

A few things worth taking away

• Sales teams are often measured on more activity, but more activity does not create better customer conversations.
• More relevant is better than more volume.
• The buyer has changed dramatically, but many sales motions have not caught up.
• One of the biggest social selling mistakes is taking old-school sales tactics into new-school channels.
• Generic LinkedIn invites create weak first impressions.
• Empathy matters because sellers need to look at the world through the customer’s eyes.
• If you are not helpful offline, social will amplify that online.
• Technology and AI can help sellers spend less time on administrative work and more time understanding customers.
• Tools will not automate trust, but they can give sellers more time to do the work that builds trust.

A few lines that stuck with me

“The phone’s not dead. Email’s not going away any time soon.” — Jill Rowley

“More isn’t better. More relevant is better.” — Jill Rowley

“The buyer has changed more in the past 10 years than the past 100.” — Jill Rowley

“The biggest mistake is taking old-school tactics and putting them in new-school channels.” — Jill Rowley

“Empathy is so important. You have to look at things through the eyes of your customer.” — Jill Rowley

“If you suck offline, you’re going to suck more online.” — Jill Rowley

“To be interesting, be interested in something other than yourself.” — Jill Rowley

Resources mentioned

• Jill Rowley on X/Twitter
• The Art of a LinkedIn Invite
• LinkedIn Sales Connect highlights
• LinkedIn Sales Solutions videos on YouTube
• Sales for Life
• Tim Sanders’ book on sharing knowledge, network, and care

You may also like

• How Empathy Will Grow Your Sales and Marketing Pipeline
• 4 Ways You Can Humanize Marketing and Build Relationships
• Growing B2B Sales with Trust and Empathy

Listen and subscribe

If you found this episode helpful, subscribe to the B2B Roundtable Podcast wherever you listen.

Transcript

Brian Carroll: Hello, welcome to the B2B Lead Roundtable Show. My name is Brian Carroll. I’m really excited to have Jill Rowley from Social Selling with us today.

Jill Rowley is Chief Evangelist and a startup advisor. I’ve known Jill for years, and she really grew up with marketing automation and is a modern marketing expert.

I’m really excited to bring her thoughts and ideas to you. We’re going to talk about social selling.

Jill, can you just tell us a little bit more about your background?

Jill Rowley: Sure, Brian. Thanks for having me today. I’m excited for the discussion.

I say I’m a sales professional trapped in a marketer’s body. The reason is, of the 13 years that I was in software sales, I sold into marketing for 10 of those years.

My buyer was marketing, and the best salespeople know their buyers. They understand their buyers at an individual human level. They understand their role in the buying process and their role in the buying committee. They understand them at a company level. They understand them at an industry level. They understand the outcomes that that buyer is trying to achieve.

Because my buyer was marketing for a decade, I really feel like I am trapped in a marketer’s body.

Now, for the past three-plus years, I have been helping big and small companies think about social as a channel, and how they embed social into their selling.

This is additive. It’s incremental. The phone’s not dead. Email’s not going away any time soon. Social is an additional channel where salespeople can find their buyers, listen and relate to their buyers, connect and engage with their buyers, and ultimately amplify their buyers’ advocacy, amplify their buyers’ message.

I work with big and small companies on how to approach social selling from an organizational, programmatic level.

Brian Carroll: It makes sense, and it’s really cool how you were able to really put yourself in your buyers’ shoes.

We’re going to talk a bit about that later.

I was just going to ask, what inspired you to start social selling yourself?

Jill Rowley: Wow. I think it was just frustration from the lack of results of other channels, in terms of being able to get the attention of my customers.

I think even before that it was because social was new to marketing, and marketing was trying to figure it out.

Because I wanted to help my customers, my buyers, with their marketing initiatives, I needed to understand what social marketing was.

In doing that, in understanding social marketing, I saw the potential for social and how it would help me, as an individual salesperson, be where my customers are, be visible and valuable to my customers, to be part of the customer conversation.

I definitely saw it as a research tool.

My background before software sales was consulting, and so I’m always digging, and looking for answers, and filtering through, and synthesizing from large data sets.

I think they’re really twofold: one, I had to know about social media for my customers, but I saw how social networks could help me, as an individual salesperson, with building relationships with my customers.

Brian Carroll: As you’re talking, I’m picturing salespeople still are being asked, and we talked about this a bit before our own call, to hit the phones, to send out more emails.

You were just seeing that that was declining.

Jill Rowley: Yeah, absolutely.

The mandate for most sales organizations is make more calls, send more emails. They’re hiring more people to do those things, and actually they’re hiring more junior people who have no business acumen, who have no sales experience, and they’re just doing more.

More isn’t better. I know it’s not grammatically correct, but more relevant is better.

If you look at it, everyone now has the ability. Contact data has gone to zero. I can get pretty much anybody’s phone number and anybody’s email address.

Because I can get anybody’s phone number and email address, and I can send anyone an email, and call anybody, everybody’s doing it.

Now as a buyer, you’re receiving tons of generic, not-relevant emails. You’re receiving a whole series of them, because now there are these automation tools that will automate a cadence, or a series, of emails.

By the seventh touch, the seventh one is, “Have I offended you?” or, “Are you stuck under an elephant? Has a rhinoceros eaten you?”

That’s just ridiculous. These are tactics that are totally ridiculous.

Brian Carroll: I’m laughing because I’ve received these, and it’s painful. It just seems like it’s getting worse.

Jill Rowley: It’s getting worse because the technology is now getting in the hands of the salespeople, and they’re being measured on more.

I think sales leadership really needs to step up, and sales leadership needs to realize and recognize that the buyer has changed more in the past 10 years than the past 100. Probably more in the past five years than the past 50.

The way that people buy, and go about getting information, has dramatically changed, and the way that we’re selling hasn’t.

Really, we’re long overdue for transformation, modernization of the way we sell, to map to how people and companies want to buy.

Brian Carroll: I wanted to ask you, what are some of the social selling mistakes that you see marketers and salespeople repeating over and over again?

Jill Rowley: I literally just had this question, being interviewed for a Forrester research report on social selling.

The biggest mistake is taking old-school tactics and putting them in new-school channels.

That whole “more” approach, and “all about leads” approach, “my company, my product, my customers,” as a salesperson. Not “you, your company, your business objectives.”

The “me, me, me” approach is now in social and is being amplified. It’s frightening.

There’s a woman who is an aspiring social seller, and I got an invite to connect with her on LinkedIn, and it was generic. She’s an aspiring social seller and she sends me a generic invite to connect on LinkedIn.

I write her back. I reply. I don’t accept the invite. I reply and I give her a link to The Art of a LinkedIn Invite.

Essentially, you have to personalize your invites to connect.

She did respond and thanked me for the tip, but unfortunately my guess is her behavior won’t change.

Because she’s in the “more.” She’s in the “just do more, connect with more people, send more tweets, share more content,” and not thinking about more relevant. More helpful, more human, more handy.

Brian Carroll: You know I talk a lot about empathetic marketing.

How do you see empathy applying to social selling?

Jill Rowley: Empathy is so important.

You have to look at things through the eyes of your customer. You have to appreciate their point of view.

From a social selling perspective, I’m in such a more capable position as a salesperson to get that information, to get that insight.

It’s a gift really, I think, being able to look up someone on LinkedIn and see where they went to university, see what skills people are endorsing them for.

For you, Brian, lead generation, B2B marketing, strategy, CRM. Now I get who you are and what you’re good at.

I read recommendations that people write about you. If I’m thinking about where I invest my time, if you’ve got glowing recommendations I want to work with you.

There’s this ability for both salespeople to learn more about their buyers, but at the same time too, there’s this ability for buyers to learn more about the salespeople.

They make decisions whether to engage or not based on whether they think that that salesperson actually can help them solve their business problems.

Brian Carroll: That makes a lot of sense.

As I’m listening to you, it sounds like it really applies in helping people connect better with their customers. The empathy gives them the ability to build a rapport, to allow for that connection to happen.

Jill Rowley: That’s exactly right.

An example is, I’m helping someone out at AT&T. He runs sales in their federal group, and he’s been asked by the leader of the public sector team to present to their 4,000 public sector employees on how B2B buying has changed.

In doing my research, not just on that broad topic about how B2B buying has changed, I’m looking for indicators of how AT&T’s already changing.

I spent some time on AT&T’s website and on their blog site, and lo and behold, I found a video interview and a blog post of his boss, Kay Kapoor. She’s the president of public sector at AT&T.

I found this blog post and this video interview of her, and I shared it.

It was all about women in tech, which is something I authentically care about.

That’s another thing. If I didn’t authentically care about women in tech, I would never have shared that piece of content. But I authentically care about it, so I shared that interview and blog post of Kay on LinkedIn, and I tagged her.

Because I want her to see that I’m getting to know her. Ultimately, I want to have the conversation with her about how we can take a programmatic approach to social selling within her public sector team, and how I’m the person that she wants to work with if they’re going to invest in social selling.

Brian Carroll: That’s really great.

A lot of us in marketing and sales want to feel like we’re making a bigger impact or difference, but we want to do it with things that matter to us.

What I’m hearing is connecting with that authenticity.

I think this is something people sometimes feel they struggle with in terms of, how do I connect? How do I proactively build relationships with people and do it in a way that’s who I am, and honoring who they are?

Is that what you find as you’re talking to people out and about in social selling, and applying it, and doing it well?

Jill Rowley: Yeah. I differentiate marketing and social media.

Media is more about the reach, and you use social media and marketing for brand and demand, and it really is about reach.

Social networking, same thing, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, but I call them networks when I talk to salespeople, because the intended use of those networks is about relationships.

Reach versus relationships.

Ultimately you could argue that marketing should be about relationships, and that they should be about engagement and not reach, but let’s just talk reality.

From a sales perspective, these networks are very valuable, and just a way to really better understand who and how and why you can help someone.

Brian Carroll: This is great, Jill.

Are there any success stories, or tips and advice, you have for our listeners who want to get better at social selling and connecting with their customers?

Jill Rowley: Yeah.

This is going to sound harsh, but I always say if you suck offline, you’re going to suck more online.

Online and social amplifies both the good and the bad.

If you don’t have the right mindset in sales today, that your job isn’t to rush anyone to signature, to go for the kill, to hunt and farm your customers.

If the mindset doesn’t come from more of, you’re a facilitator of a journey, that your job is to help the customer solve the problem, achieve the goal, and if it’s your problem or solution that they need, your job is to facilitate that purchase process.

The mindset has to start there.

Then, from a skillset, and then an enabling toolkit, this absolutely requires training.

There’s no question in my mind, regardless of whether you’re a millennial who has grown up with digital devices and access to social networks, or you’re a baby boomer who is a digital immigrant.

I think that these networks, each one has their own culture. Twitter is much more conversational. LinkedIn is all business.

Please, no death announcements on LinkedIn. I’m seeing a lot of that lately. I’m seeing a lot of Facebook-type content being shared on LinkedIn, and I don’t think we should go there.

I think then, how do I actually find good quality insightful content, as a rep, that I could share in my networks that isn’t just all of my company branded content?

There are these things that require new skills, and that to me means there needs to be an investment in training.

I think about it from the individual seller, but also at an organization level.

The organization should take a much more prescriptive and programmatic approach to deciding how they’re going to train their salespeople and what they’re going to train their salespeople on, and tying it to the overall governance in social media policies, et cetera.

Training is something that you absolutely need to invest in.

Brian Carroll: Are there any stories that you’d like to share of people who’ve followed your approach, and how it’s helped them? Or any other tips or tools you wanted to pass along to our listeners?

Jill Rowley: Yeah, for sure.

There are definitely individuals and companies doing this well. I would say that we’re still fairly early days in figuring all of this out.

ON24 is doing a really nice job of training their salespeople. They’re working with a partner company of mine, Sales for Life, and they put all of their reps through the Sales for Life 10-week training program.

There’s a certification process at the end of it where they have to demonstrate that they’ve used social to source a new opportunity, so a real certification.

It’s good for that salesperson too, because now that’s a skill and something that can be helpful in getting another job. Not just getting their next customer, but potentially their next job.

Their leadership is bought in at that sales director level. Shout out to them.

One of the things that I love to do, I go to LinkedIn’s annual conference, and they always post their video content on YouTube.

There are presentations available. Just this last one was in New York, and IBM, Genesys, Qualtrics, TiVo, now called Rovi.

There’s a bunch of presentations from real companies doing real social selling work, and so I recommend that as a resource as well.

Brian Carroll: Thank you.

We have time for a few more questions.

What excites you right now about the future of sales and marketing? Or what are you feeling particularly passionate about right now?

Jill Rowley: I feel like I’m pulled in two different directions, because one, what excites me is what I see coming to the sales industry that I saw develop in marketing over a 10-year period.

An explosion of new technologies to help automate, to help segment, to help personalize, to help measure, to help improve conversion rates.

You’ve seen this massive explosion of tools and technologies in marketing that are helping marketers be more scientific in their marketing efforts, be more measured.

We’re seeing the same thing start to happen in sales, and there are some great tools that are being developed and available for salespeople.

Artificial intelligence, I’ve published a number of blog posts recently on LinkedIn about how I think AI is going to change sales.

I see some great potential in AI in terms of all of the research that I do on individuals and companies and industries today that I do manually. There are tools that are going to aggregate and synthesize and proactively send me relevant information that I otherwise would have to go find manually.

There’s some really exciting stuff happening in AI around how that’s going to make the best reps even better, allowing me to do less of that administrative work, and freeing me up to spend more time thinking about the human side, which is how do I be more empathetic?

To be more empathetic, I need to know more about my customer.

Now I have more time to research them. I can listen to their CEO on their investor presentations. I can speak with more people within their organization. I’m able to spend more time on the strategic and human aspects.

On one side I’m talking about technology, and on the other side I’m talking about being more human.

It’s the balance between those that excites me the most, striking the right balance between tech and human.

Brian Carroll: That makes so much sense.

I think as I’m listening to you, we’re going to have this technology to help us augment and apply our empathy, which really gives us the intuition to know how to best connect.

These tools won’t automate trust, but they’re going to enable us to be able to spend more time making choices and doing things to help us build trust.

Jill Rowley: There you go. It is about building trust and credibility.

To earn your trust, it needs to be about you, not about me. Mutuality matters, so there needs to be mutual benefit.

But one of the expressions that I loved, that I learned from the president at Eloqua, was, “To be interesting, be interested in something other than yourself.”

To be interesting to you, Brian, I need to be interested in you. I need you to me; I shouldn’t lead with me.

I like Tim Sanders’ book, which basically says that the best salespeople share their knowledge, they share their network, and they show they care.

I think that’s really where a lot more of the emphasis needs to be placed, in both sales and marketing and even in product design, thinking about it through the eyes of the user.

Of the product, and customer success, and knowing and understanding how to bring your customer along on a journey based on their current state and their desired future state.

Brian Carroll: It’s great.

Jill, I’ve really enjoyed listening to you, learning from you. I’m sure our listeners and readers will as well.

What’s the best way for our readers and listeners to get in touch with you?

Jill Rowley: The absolute easiest and fastest way to get my attention is on Twitter.

My Twitter handle is @Jill_Rowley, R-O-W-L-E-Y. That’s a great way to get my attention.

How you do it matters, so I’ll leave it to you to think about how exactly you would want to get my attention on Twitter.

Then LinkedIn, if you want to invite me to connect on LinkedIn, send a personalized invite.

If you’re doing it from the mobile app, up in the top right-hand corner of the mobile app there are three little dots, and if you hit those three little dots there’s an option to hit personal invite.

If you hit connect it’ll send you the generic invite.

I say generic invites are #socialstupid or #justplainlazy, #firstimpressionsmatter, #everyimpressionmatters.

Never, ever, ever, ever send a generic invite to connect to anybody. Personalize it.

Those are the two best ways to reach me.

Brian Carroll: Jill, thanks again, and we look forward to sharing more of your insights in the future.

Jill Rowley: Thanks Brian. It was great catching up with you.

How can you drive fast growth with B2B marketing?

Jim Fowler has a clear answer: “Your product is your marketing.”

That line gets to the heart of this conversation.

Most companies try to grow by adding more campaigns, more paid traffic, more tools, and more activity. Jim argues that growth starts with something simpler and harder: building a product people love.

In this episode of the B2B Roundtable Podcast, I talk with Jim Fowler, founder of Owler, about what he learned building fast-growth B2B companies.

I first met Jim when he was co-founder of Jigsaw, the cloud-based contact data platform that was acquired by Salesforce.com and later became Data.com. With Owler, Jim took those lessons into competitive intelligence, growing from zero to more than 500,000 users and building toward one million users.

We get into why SEO matters, why product love drives viral growth, why salespeople need to become better marketers, why marketers need to help remove sales excuses, and how sales and marketing can work together around simple, human outreach.

If your team is trying to grow revenue by doing more instead of finding what actually works, this conversation is worth your time.

About Jim Fowler

Jim Fowler is the founder of Owler, a competitive intelligence platform that helps business professionals keep up with competitors, customers, prospects, partners, and market changes.

Before founding Owler, Jim co-founded Jigsaw, a cloud-based contact management platform that was acquired by Salesforce.com for $175 million and later became Data.com.

Jim has spent his career building data-driven B2B companies and thinking about how sales and marketing teams can use better information, stronger products, and sharper execution to grow faster.

Connect with Jim:

• Owler

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Jim Fowler and Owler
01:05 What Owler does
02:30 Why Jim started Owler
04:45 How Owler grew fast
07:15 Why your product is your marketing
10:45 Salespeople need to become better marketers
13:20 Marketing should remove sales excuses
18:05 Focus on what drives revenue

A few things worth taking away

• Fast growth is not easy. Startups are often “a bag of problems” to solve.
• Your product is your marketing when people love it enough to talk about it and share it.
• SEO can create linear growth, but viral product adoption can create exponential growth.
• You cannot create a hockey stick without some kind of viral component.
• Salespeople will need to become better marketers because buyers are receiving more communication than ever.
• Marketing’s job is to help remove salespeople’s excuses for missing the number.
• Sales and marketing work better when there is healthy tension, clear measurement, and shared learning.
• The email sandwich — email, phone call, email — can help humanize outreach and bring sales and marketing closer together.
• To grow faster, do less, not more. Find the 20 percent of effort that drives 80 percent of the return.

A few lines that stuck with me

“A startup is a bag of problems.” — Jim Fowler

“You don’t really do it for the money, especially once you’ve had an exit.” — Jim Fowler

“You want to create a product or products that people love.” — Jim Fowler

“Your product is your marketing.” — Jim Fowler

“SEO doesn’t grow exponentially. It grows linearly, whereas viral grows exponentially.” — Jim Fowler

“Salespeople are going to continue to have to become better marketers.” — Jim Fowler

“Marketing’s number one job is to take away salespeople’s excuses for not making their number.” — Jim Fowler

“Do less, not more.” — Jim Fowler

Resources mentioned

• Owler
• Jigsaw
• Salesforce Data.com
• Search engine optimization
• Search engine marketing
• The Pareto principle

You may also like

• 3 Good Questions to Align B2B Marketing, Sales, and Strategy
• How to Do Lead Management That Improves Conversion
• Four Steps to Convince CEOs That Demand Generation Should Be a Marketing, Not a Sales, Function
• Why Customer Advocacy Should Be at the Heart of Your Marketing

Listen and subscribe

If you found this episode helpful, subscribe to the B2B Roundtable Podcast wherever you listen.

Transcript

Brian Carroll: Hello, everyone. I want to welcome you today to today’s B2B Roundtable Podcast.

I’m excited to bring to you Jim Fowler. We’re going to be talking to Jim about trends and things that he’s seen being a longtime participant in B2B sales.

Jim is a legend. He’s the founder of Jigsaw, which was sold to Salesforce.com and is now Data.com. Jim has a new venture called Owler, and I got exposed to Owler about ten months ago. I’ve been using the tool daily.

I think what they’re doing is really interesting, but I think Jim also has some really cool things to share with you about what’s working and the things that he’s seen that are impacting B2B marketers and B2B sellers.

Jim, why don’t you describe your organization a bit in your own words and the goal?

Jim Fowler: Sure, Brian. It’s a pleasure to be on the show.

Owler is a competitive intelligence platform. It’s used by all business professionals, but our biggest participants are sales and marketing folks that really need to keep their finger on the pulse of their competitive graphs.

That means their competitors, their customers, their prospects, their partners, etc.

The general trend here is there’s just so much information out there. Our goal with Owler is to become a must-use tool that gives a lot of very crisp information in a way that people can absorb it.

That’s the key thing, that we’re a tool that helps people outsmart their competition. It’s a competitive intelligence platform.

Brian Carroll: Well, I’d like to ask what inspired you to start Owler?

It’s a funny play on words. I think your brand name is derived from your last name, right?

Jim Fowler: One of my marketers came up to me as we were naming the company, and we were looking at a bunch of different names.

Jigsaw was, I love that name. I mean, it’s a simple word, putting the pieces of the puzzle together. It worked great. That was a high bar to get over.

She came to me and goes, everyone calls me by my last name, by the way, “Fowler, I’ve got the perfect name for our company: Owler.”

I laughed and said, “Yeah, ha ha. Funny.” I thought she was joking.

She’s like, “No, I’m serious. First of all, it’s five letters. Number two is that owl, wisdom, and people will be able to spell it. Most people aren’t going to associate it with your last name, which is true.”

You’re more astute than most, Brian.

I was embarrassed by it at first, but now I love it.

Of course, we have a cool little owl. The funny thing is, by the way, the owl’s name is Jimph, so Jimph Owler.

Any of your listeners who are users of Owler, and I imagine there’s thousands, they’ll be familiar with our owl that we call Jimph.

Brian Carroll: That’s great.

If you were thinking of what’s next, and it was a pretty high bar when you sold to Salesforce at that time, you were the single largest acquisition. Why didn’t you decide to ride off into the sunset? What inspired you to start Owler?

Jim Fowler: Well, that is a great question.

I can tell you there’s been a few times along this path that I’ve wondered that same thing.

Startups are not easy.

I kind of equate a startup with a bag of problems. There’s just a bunch of issues to solve.

I was still a pretty young guy. Jigsaw was a great acquisition. It was a $175 million acquisition at that time. By far and away, the largest Salesforce had ever done. Now, that’s pocket change for those guys. They’re doing massive stuff.

I think that you realize that you don’t really do it for the money, especially once you’ve had an exit.

You realize that the creation, the ability to go out and make something out of nothing and create a company that employs a lot of people, but more importantly, build products that people love. I mean, that’s really what gives me a charge.

I’m really pleased. At Owler, we’ve doubled our user base over the last ninety days to 500,000 active users. We’re going to blow past a million active users on those things by the end of the year.

We’re starting to look at ten million, which is about one tenth the size of LinkedIn. That becomes a globally important company.

I think that’s what really drives founders. It’s like being a chef. You want to cook food that people love, and when you found a company you want to create a product or products that people just love. It’s a big endorphin hit.

Brian Carroll: That’s awesome.

You guys are blowing past the half million users. Two or three months ago you were at like 250,000. How do you acquire so many active users?

Jim Fowler: Yeah. There are a couple of things that I’ve learned both at Jigsaw and Owler.

The first answer for all your listeners out there is it’s never easy.

That sounds great, but what you need to understand is back in 2013 and 2014, as we struggled with a way to get a product that was really engaging, there were many days where, when you first asked why didn’t you ride out into the sunset, there were many days during that time where I just went, “Why am I doing this?”

It’s really fun and sexy to listen to, but there’s a lot of upfront work that goes there.

If you’re feeling pain, that’s the normal situation.

Jigsaw never grew this fast. Jigsaw was more of a linear growth. This is really hockey sticking, which is super fun.

The on-the-ground advice I will give is the first order of business is to really dial in SEO.

SEO is something that everyone hears and understands, search engine optimization, but that’s the free traffic that you get.

Really getting your SEO strategy down is critical.

At Jigsaw, we spent a lot of time and effort on paid SEM, search engine marketing, and different types of paid traffic. It’s not only expensive, it just isn’t as effective in our experience as SEO.

To me, the first pillar of it is that if you are not, there’s always an 80/20 rule, by the way, for startups.

I’m a big believer that you want to focus on the 80 and then once you become a more mature company focus on the 20.

This is a classic principle that 80 percent of your return is going to come with 20 percent of the effort, and then the last 20 percent of your return is going to require 80 percent of the effort.

So make sure that you’re hammering that first 80 percent return with 20 percent of the effort and really focusing on that.

I find it’s with all of the traffic driving things that you do.

That’s number one, but to me that’s the one that you cannot disregard. You have to pay attention to SEO.

Brian Carroll: That’s great. What else would you say? What are some of the other lessons you’ve learned along the way?

Jim Fowler: These are things that most of your listeners probably already heard, but I will reemphasize them, because they’re trite and true.

I’m a real believer that your product is your marketing.

Obviously, if you’re an expensive enterprise product that’s a little bit different because it takes more time to get users, but I still argue that it’s the same.

You can sit there and beat on all of these different ways to get traffic and users, but when you have a product that people love, that is your best marketing, because that’s when it starts getting viral.

For us, we found this at Jigsaw, and we’re finding it even more now, is that SEO gets people exposed to your product. Then once they do, it’s a viral impact, and now the viral side of Owler is what’s making it grow so fast.

SEO doesn’t grow exponentially. It grows linearly, whereas virality grows exponentially.

You can only get the hockey stick with some sort of viral component.

Yes, you can spend a bunch of time with different software that helps get the word out and all that, but I’m kind of old school in that way, that you know it when you see it.

When the virality is there, you know it. And when it’s not, it takes time and you need to keep working on just making sure you have a product that is compelling.

Brian Carroll: That’s awesome.

For our listeners, the main thing is it’s super expensive to try to optimize your marketing. You can’t fix a bad product with marketing. It’s way expensive.

So what Jim says is first optimize your product. Then from there optimize your marketing.

Jim Fowler: Right.

I would say, to clarify a little bit, I would parallel the SEO, because at the end of the day the SEO is something that you’re going to, you need to come up with some really interesting ways to increase our SEO.

I’ll give you an example. We’re kind of like LinkedIn in that we have email that lets you know what’s going on, and it brings you to the website where you can interact with the data. That’s what makes it more valuable.

One of our products that people open every day is what we call a daily snapshot. These are news and alerts and blog posts from your competitive graph. It’s very specific to you.

When someone clicks on one of those, we came up with this concept called an events page.

Instead of just clicking and reading an article, we take you to a page that has a whole bunch of other data on it around asking you questions about the articles, letting you read it.

You can always read the whole article, but that’s not what most people want to do. They like to scan now. They want to scan headlines. They want to read the first few lines.

Those events pages exploded our SEO because each one of them is a unique page that Google searches, but it has unique content on it.

It’s finding things like that in parallel with your product.

I just think that you need to be able to execute on both of those at the same time, because once you optimize your product you still need a way to expose it to everyone.

I recommend a parallel path on SEO and product optimization.

Brian Carroll: Awesome.

What do you see as you look to the future and what you’re doing with Owler? What do you see is the future of B2B sales marketing?

Jim Fowler: I would say that the biggest trend that I see, I used to talk about this at Jigsaw, and I’ll continue to talk about it now.

Salespeople are going to continue to have to become better marketers.

With Jigsaw, we provided a set of contact data so that you could communicate with people directly with phone numbers and business email addresses.

I said at the time, what this means is that the people on the receiving end of these communications are going to get more and more communications.

It’s kind of a funny thing. Sales and marketing, their job is to communicate with people that don’t really want to be communicated with, but they need to be, because they need to buy stuff.

I think that we’re going to continue to see the buyers or the receivers of these communications get more and more of it, and it’s become more and more difficult to rise above the noise.

What it means is salespeople are going to have to become better marketers. They’re going to have to work hand in hand with marketers in order to get them.

Marketers, frankly, are going to have to become gods, because their job is just getting harder and harder.

I mean, people have no attention.

We’re in the age of a 140-character limit is all people will read, and this makes the job really difficult.

With that in mind, all of our communication is around crisp, simple, scannable data.

For instance, our descriptions of companies are one sentence long. We only allow a 140-character description of a company because we know people won’t read more than that.

I just think understanding these trends is critical in terms of future success.

It’s going to continue to accelerate, is my prediction.

Brian Carroll: That’s great.

Building on this, I’ve heard you consider yourself a sales guy. What would you say to B2B marketers out there who want to help their sales team sell more effectively today?

Jim Fowler: I’m a big believer that marketing’s number one job is to take away salespeople’s excuses for not making their number.

Brian Carroll: That’s great.

Jim Fowler: What you don’t want is you don’t want the finger-pointing.

Marketing’s typical, “Hey, I’ve got this budget I spent on it, and sales are so lazy they’re not even following up the leads that I’m driving them,” and sales will sit there and say, “Marketing, you’re sending me crap leads.”

As a CEO and knowing both sides of this and having come up through the ranks as a VP of sales and a salesperson before I founded Jigsaw, I’m just a big believer that it’s all about numbers.

Sales is the most measurable department in your organization after finance.

What mind boggles me is how rarely people really measure sales all across the board.

They’re getting better, by the way. Data is becoming more available everywhere, but to me that’s marketing’s job is to take away their excuses.

It’s basic funnel management. You need a certain number of leads cranking in.

There’s always going to be a little bit of fight around the quality of those leads, but to me that’s just all it really is, marketing providing the air cover, being able to bring those leads in whatever is the most cost-effective way.

To me it’s that simple to where you’re just going, “This is a sales issue. This is not a marketing issue.”

I always look at, by the way, is the further part of that. I think the way you want to manage sales is expect nothing from marketing. Anything you get from marketing is a bonus, and then of course it’s the CEO’s job to go hammer marketing to make sure that they’re meeting sales.

I think when you approach it with those two ways you have a very healthy look at how it’s supposed to work instead of making it adversarial.

Brian Carroll: That’s great.

As you practice this and you’ve done this, are there any success stories that you could share of instances where you’ve overcome issues around this, either in your own experience or things you’ve worked with companies in your past where you’ve experienced this?

Jim Fowler: Yeah. Jigsaw, we did this really, really well.

There was a real healthy tension between marketing and sales, where marketing was really pushing.

I would say that the best way to do it is just have a way to manage the leads.

There’s so much software out there now for marketing. All that marketing automation solutions have come so, so far since we did it.

In terms of feeding sales, I don’t have any magic pills.

There was a sales methodology and is today one that I still recommend that I think your listeners will find interesting.

It’s what I call an email sandwich that was very effective as a specific example.

Brian Carroll: Yeah, tell us more about it.

Jim Fowler: Yeah. From a sales or marketing perspective, it depends on which function it’s going to align and where in the pipes you are.

When you’re out there trying to push new business, you’re trying to take a company from what I call a suspect. We believe that these folks should be buying our products, to a prospect, which is we know that they have need and budgets.

There’s a lot of communication that goes there.

I’m, again, you’ve heard me use the word old school a little bit. I’m a big believer in this concept of email sandwich.

Email, phone call, email. Email, phone call, email.

There are folks out there that love to just email, and there’s folks out there that go, “Oh, email. No, you got to call them.”

I’m a big believer in using both of those in a sandwich way.

This is where marketing and sales really need to work together, because marketing is usually expert at A/B testing messaging to get people to respond to something.

Sales are the point of the spear. They’re the ones that are really learning what works and what doesn’t work and have really good communication between these.

That’s what we did well at Jigsaw. When we start really getting into sales at Owler, we’ll do it as well.

I found that this really helps sales and marketing get in sync, of sales doing kind of the test bed of what works and then marketing finding ways to automate that to marketing automation.

To get that first email out, making sure to leave the voicemail so they can hear your voice. That’s another key thing from a sales perspective is it humanizes the experience.

It’s harder and harder to leave voice messages now. Phone systems have changed dramatically even since Jigsaw was sold, but there’s still ways to get your voice in front of people that humanizes it.

Again, this is building on what I talked about earlier about salespeople becoming better marketers.

Then, of course, following with email.

I just found these email sandwiches are a simple concept to understand.

You test the heck out of them in terms of what works with different audiences, but I find that that brings sales and marketing really closely together, and it’s a structure that everyone understands and can focus on.

Brian Carroll: It’s a great suggestion.

I think in the age where we’ve overemphasized, or the pendulum has swung too far inbound marketing, what you’re advocating is humanizing your brand by having human beings and a human touch connect with your customer.

There’s a real person behind the company that the email is coming from, a real person.

You have that insight from the sales team who’s connecting with customers, connect with marketing about what do they need, what’s really working.

I think this is something people can begin testing if they aren’t already in their groups to augment instead of just emphasizing.

We’ve got time probably for one more question. Do you have any tips or advice you give to sales or marketing leaders who want to rapidly grow revenue?

Jim Fowler: I would say that my biggest tip on this one is be absolutely aggressive about your time.

The number one mistake that I think I’ve seen marketing and salespeople do is they spend time on the long side of the Pareto principle.

They’re not really sitting down from the very beginning going, “Okay, what is the 20 percent of our effort that produces 80 percent of the return?”

It’s always different for every company in terms of what are the things that are going to move it.

To me, I know it sounds formulaic, but I really believe this is the problem.

What I push as a CEO is what is the 20 percent that’s moving the needle of your effort and then put 80 percent of your time into those programs.

Do less, not more.

Figure out what works, and don’t go out there and try to put too many balls in the air.

I think that’s the number one mistake that I see that hampers driving revenue.

Brian Carroll: That’s fantastic.

I agree. At least in my experience, I talk mostly to marketing leaders, occasionally to CEOs, and what I hear over and over again is just how crazy busy people are.

They’re focused on the next campaign, the next outreach. There isn’t that time to sit back and think strategically about where can I put my effort that’s going to have the highest outcome, the best resulting experience.

I think your advice to people is to get clarity around that focus and isolate what are those 20 percent of things I can do that will give us the highest return is awesome.

Jim, how can people find out more about Owler or get in touch with you?

Jim Fowler: Well, the easiest way is go to www.owler.com.

For me, my email is fowler@owler.com, and that will always get to me as well.

We would welcome any interaction from your listeners and very much have enjoyed chatting with you about this. I hope that everyone has found it valuable.

Brian Carroll: I have, and I’m sure our listeners will, too.

Well, have a wonderful rest of your day. Thanks again for joining us. We’ll keep in touch and hear more about your progress.

Jim Fowler: All right. Well, thanks Brian. It’s been a pleasure.