The B2B Roundtable (hosted by Brian Carroll)

In a recent Gartner survey, 75% of B2B buyers said they’d prefer a rep-free buying experience. That’s a wake-up call for sales and marketing leaders everywhere. So, is this the end of sales as we know it… or the start of something better? On this episode of the B2B Roundtable Podcast, I sit down with my friend Brent Adamson, co-author of The Challenger Sale and author of the new book The Framemaking Sale. Brent explains why buyer confidence—not more information—is the real barrier to closing big deals today, and how leaders can help their teams become the sellers customers actually want to talk to. Brent Adamson on Framemaking and the Future of Sales Key Takeaways Buyers want confidence, not more information. The real risk isn’t being ignored—it’s being irrelevant. Framemaking is the answer. Instead of persuading, sellers must help buyers frame decisions and build confidence in themselves. Four forces undermine confidence today: decision complexity, information overload, objective misalignment, and outcome uncertainty. Sales and marketing must unite. The mission is to build buyer confidence in themselves—not just in the supplier. AI won’t replace sellers, but it raises the bar. The sellers who thrive will show up as trusted guides and sense-makers. Pull Quotes “It’s not your customer’s confidence in you that matters. It’s their confidence in themselves.” — Brent Adamson “If you could be the one seller your customer actually wants to talk to, that’s an incredible place to be.” — Brent Adamson Guest Bio Brent Adamson is a researcher, speaker, and author best known for co-authoring The Challenger Sale. His new book, The Framemaking Sale, explores how sales professionals can rebuild buyer confidence and create customer interactions that truly add value. Connect with Brent on LinkedIn Get the Book: The Framemaking Sale 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 groundbreaking 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? Brian Carroll: 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 Info, 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 10x 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 = introducing ideas or perspectives they may not have considered. Bounding = 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: Decision Complexity – too many people, too many steps. Information Overload – endless content, conflicting advice, and AI adding even more noise. Objective Misalignment – different stakeholders with competing priorities. 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—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, 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 powerful 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 trusted guide 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 alignment 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. If you found this episode helpful: Subscribe to the B2B Roundtable Podcast wherever you listen.

Customers care more about the values of the companies they buy than ever before. It’s more than your purpose. It’s more than what you sell. They want to know what kind of company you are and what do you care about. Does a company want to do more than drive profits? That’s why I interviewed Dr. Philip Kotler, who is 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 and co-author of Brand Activism: From Purpose to Action. In this interview, you will hear Dr. Kotler describe brand activism, the importance of focusing on a purpose as a company, and the problems encountered when companies do not use brand activism correctly. To start, 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 go and even identify some value or values that the company has and cares about. For example, The Body Shop, when it started under Anita Roddick, she made it her point that she’s not only selling skincare products as a retailer, but she really was also fighting for animal rights, civil rights, fair trade, environmental protection. So, her brand was active. I don’t 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, what does it care about. Our society is saddled with many problems, and does the company care about any of these problems, or does it just think it’s supposed to make money? An increasing number of companies would like an identity that goes beyond just making the product or service. And 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’s a helpful distinction. You recently wrote a book on this topic. I’d love to know the story behind why you wrote the book Brand Activism and why now? Dr. Kotler: I think that, if you look at some barometers, like the Edelman trust barometer, about the level of trust in society today, it’s undoubtedly been falling. Brian: Yes. Dr. Kotler: And as a result, many companies are not going to be trusted either, as part of maybe government not being believed, and other institutions. And companies ought to be the first to fight against bad companies rather than stand near them or be part of them. So, the idea is that, at this time, companies want to be profiled in a certain way. In other words, the reputation a company has could be just whatever happens in its course of actions. Or it could also be something that could be designed better. Consciously better. What are the different branding stages of development? Dr. Kotler: And you see, the whole idea of a brand itself has gone through several stages, and that’s very important. I think brand activism is probably the highest stage, but let me tell you what the stages are in my mind. Brian: That would be great. Evolution of brands from marketing-driven to values-driven Dr. Kotler: Yes. The first stage is when the company simply does its best to feature its product and services. Now that’s normal. 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 the lowest price, Disney is family entertainment, DuPont is the highest quality, and Toyota is long-lasting, reliable performance. So, 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 makes all kinds of equipment for farmers and forestry workers, and construction workers. At this stage, John Deere would describe its quality, its integrity, and its innovation. It’s really positioning, but it’s multi-positioning. Namely saying that it stands high on many traits that most people value. But this could move into a fourth stage where the brand adopts a very specific cause. You know about customer social responsibility, and a lot of companies are into that. So, a company may say that it really 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 of going from customer social responsibility to the company, saying, “here’s one of the things we’re 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 forth some cause that would help all of us.” So that’s the evolution of branding, and brand activism is at one of its latest stages. How have customers changed their expectations? Brian: It’s interesting, as I’m listening to you, as you talked about just the drivers that have been… Some of them have been consumer expectations. The trust that we have towards institutions has fallen, but what has really been driving brand activism, and how have you seen, or from what your research has shown, have customers changed their expectations? Dr. Kotler: I think 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, the problem of gun control, a very high federal budget, very high debt, and education failure. Some people, either they never got a good education to everyone—or the college education, whatever it was worth, saddled them with a lot of debt. So, there are all these social issues, and they become the ground out of which brand activism becomes essential. 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. And that’s the groundwork that inspired brand activism. And what about B2B companies? Brian: As I listen to you, it sounds like all these things that externally happened in the world around us, which affects our daily life, influence brands to pick up some of the slack in terms of being able to connect with customers. Do you see a difference between B2B companies and B2C companies with brand activism? Dr. Kotler: No, I don’t see a difference. I think both companies will want their reputation to go beyond just making their product as good as possible. If you take equipment companies like John Deere, you take consumer companies like McDonald’s or Coca-Cola. If you start doing a count of the companies that have made their brand more active, there’d be many B2B and a lot of B2C companies in that list of brand active companies. Brian: I was just trying to think, some of the brands that come to mind for me would be like Nike, or Patagonia, Ben & Jerry’s, Starbucks, are pretty acknowledged, and I know that you’ve highlighted them in terms of consumer brands. Do you have any names of like B2B examples that people could look to? And it could just be for me. I was thinking perhaps Salesforce.com or Apple. Anyone else? Dr. Kotler: Yeah. By the way, I’m glad you did mention Salesforce.com because its leader is one of the pioneers in this area is Marc Benioff. And as CEO, he says that he wishes he and other companies pay a higher tax because that’s the only way to address these growing problems. He is distraught with homelessness in San Francisco, where he’s located. And affordable housing, which is missing. He personally told 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. So that kind of thing comes from a company which is a B2B company. I would think that B2B companies have been generally slower as marketers. Most of what we know about modern marketing, aside from sales training and thinking, came from the consumer side. It’s not just a sales thing Dr. Kotler: It was P&G and Unilever that created a difference between sales and the concept of marketing. A company might say, “I do marketing because I have a salesforce, and I advertise.” That’s not marketing. That’s just having two resources that could be used within the marketing framework, but it will not be equivalent to creating a sound and effective total strategy that will keep a firm alive and well for years and years to come. So marketing is more than just sales. Now, 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, and I think they will do more with brand activism. Remember, B2B companies are very close to their customers. Consumer companies don’t even know that much about individual customers. They can learn a lot now, more and more than ever, but B2B companies know through the salesforce every buyer and what they are like. And maybe they don’t think their values have to be done through brand activism. Pretty much, any business buying from another business knows a lot about the values of the seller. That’s why they’re buying from that seller. Brian: Right. Dr. Kotler: There’s less need for the B2B companies to get into brand activism because it’s happening anyway. It’s not just a marketing thing, either Brian: Brand activism, though, it’s not a marketing thing, right. In terms of, it goes deeper into the business strategy and purpose. Do I understand that? Dr. Kotler: Absolutely. No marketing CMO, chief marketing officer, will take the brand that he is responsible for protecting and enhancing and suddenly move into brand activism on his own or her own. That is a decision that is corporate level. No one plays around with choosing an issue like gun control or the envi

Why does most marketing stink? According to Michael Brenner, “Most of the marketing that we do that stinks and doesn’t work is that some executive with a big ego asked us to do it.” On top of that, marketers are not in a happy place. According to MarketingProfs 2019 Marketer Happiness Report, “Only 10% of marketers say they were very fulfilled in their work.” The report looked at the dimensions of feeling fulfilled, valued, and energized by the work, that our work is impactful, and engaged. That’s why I interviewed Michael Brenner (@BrennerMichael), the CEO of Marketing Insider Group to talk about his new book Mean People Suck. We need more empathy inside our companies to empathize more with our customers. Michael Brenner states, “The most counter-intuitive secret to success in business and life is empathy.” I’m excited to share his thoughts on empathy with you. In this interview, you’ll learn about asking what’s in it for the customer, rethinking your organizational chart, and making the changes you need to make to be more successful today. Why did you write Mean People Suck? Michael: Again, I must 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 longer, but mainly 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. I found a couple of things, the number one being that marketers were miserable. It’s like that scene from, I think it’s Poltergeist where the obsessed woman has help written on her. Was it Poltergeist? 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. Why are marketers so miserable? Michael: When you get down to it, I’ve found that it’s mainly 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 wrote a book called The Content Formula, All About Content Marketing ROI. And when I went back to folks I sent the book to, but I found 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. Most marketing stinks for this reason Michael: The answer is that I wrote the book is that most of the marketing that we do that stinks and doesn’t work, because some executive with a big ego asked us to do it. Executives love seeing logos on stadiums, and they love seeing Super Bowl ads, and all the things that we make fun of marketing about primarily come from a request from sales or marketing or product people. And 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. Why empathy is more important now Brian:  It’s hard for marketers to care about the customer when they don’t feel cared about too. They don’t feel safe. They’re anxious, or they’re frustrated, or they’re overwhelmed. You also talked about empathy. Why does empathy matter, especially to marketers and does it lead to better results? Michael: 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. The book isn’t talked about much, but the premise is simple. Three or four Harvard business review professors got together, and they said, wait for a second, we’ve seen this correlation between engaged employees are happy employees, happy customers, and higher stock prices more satisfied stock investors. 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 counter-intuitive secret to success  Michael: 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 delighted customers. It’s totally intuitive, and yet it’s counterintuitive. That’s one of the reasons we reconnected. my LinkedIn post’s empathy is the counterintuitive secret to success. The thing is, I think that life has beaten us down and gotten us to believe that we should take what we want, and we should put our elbows out and get to the front of the line. It’s the opposite. It’s counterintuitive that if we help people, we can get what we want. It’s right 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 advertising and propaganda. Empathy really is the key to marketing and business and in life. I kind of wrote the book kind of really trying to straddle all three of those perspectives. I hope your listeners look, and hopefully, they can maybe get back to me and tell me how well I did to try to straddle those three. Brian: Well, I just want to say I’m excited for you. I’m passionate about this book because big-picture empathy or caring for customers or wanting to help people it’s 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. Getting customers to care (begins with caring)   Brian: One of the things you talked about was just the customer journey, and what the experience is for customers, why they don’t care about brands anymore and how the brand doesn’t matter. So why is that? Michael: Well, the first thing is I think it’s essential for marketers and especially brand marketers, corporate marketers, but I also believe those who are in the trenches there need to understand how to explain this to executives. And that is that we just aren’t that important. We’re not as exciting or important as we think we are. My former company, Nielsen, did a survey of brands and found that consumers wouldn’t care, 77% 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 believe we are fascinating. 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 sort of stories that resonate. And so that’s really the trick is if you genuinely 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 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: Well, you’re illustrating the point, and then I’ll come back, that empathy is more comfortable to talk about than it is to do. We’ve got to overcome our own bias, thinking that we have the answer. How to use empathy in your marketing approach Brian: I believe 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? Michael: 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. For example, at SAP, we were selling a cloud computing solution called SAP HANA, which now has a little 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 most excellent 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 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 better than my peers in marketing. And I use search. I said, “Hey, look, when, when I, when I type cloud computing into Google, IBM, and Oracle and Salesforce show up, but SEP 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 too to see that it was the right thing to do. Brian:

Has our devotion to work and hustle turned into the UnAmerican Dream? Some of the hardest working people I know are in sales and marketing. We often read success stories about how hustle and grit drove fantastic success. That said, the relentless pursuit of success can leave behind damaged relationships and personal life carnage in its wake. Take me, for example. Shortly after building up and selling a successful company, my 17-year marriage ended. There’s a reason entrepreneurs have a higher divorce rate. For me. My pursuit of business success left my health and my personal relationships in a severe need of help. I needed to redefine the kind of life I wanted to live, make different choices, and set better boundaries. It wasn’t easy. Now, my health, relationships, and personal and professional happiness are so much better. That’s why I was excited to interviewed Carlos Hidalgo (@cahidalgo), CEO of VisumCX and author of the new book The UnAmerican Dream. In this interview, you’ll hear Carlos’s story about finding personal and professional happiness and establishing work-life boundaries. This is a must-read for sellers, marketers, and entrepreneurs. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about your background? Carlos:  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, 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. The 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. Why did you write The UnAmerican Dream? The UnAmerican Dream   Brian: Can you tell the story about why you wrote this book, The UnAmerican Dream, and why now? Carlos:  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 going. 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 shocked. Wow, this is not just me going through this. So, that’s why. But the why now, is the idea of that book came to me over two years ago. But I needed to work on me first. I had to get some things straight in me, and one of those things that I start with the introduction, I believe, saying 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 right. 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:    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:  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, you really … 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? Getting the courage to make the decision Carlos:  It was a conversation which I’ve told many times, so I want to elaborate in case there’s an overlap with people who have heard this before. But, 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 significant 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:    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. I mean, 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:  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. 70% of the population says, “I don’t have work-life balance.” I was at 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 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, if you’re not connected to your profession on the weekend, the message is that you’re not a top performer. That is a total fallacy because I don’t work weekends anymore. I used to all the time. I don’t any longer. That 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. I think that’s one thing. How social media impacts happiness The other thing that I think that it’s 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. To the point where 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, and as human beings, we’re wired for connection. I think when we put those things ahead of what we’re wired for, our happiness or our ability to choose joy, severely wanes. Brian:    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, and you had been going back to when I was trying to start my company again, as I was starting something new. You talked about setting boundaries instead of trying to get a work-life balance. Why is that? Why Focus on work-life boundaries, not balance I don’t believe in work-life balance because I tried it for … At different parts of my career, I tried it. At other parts, I was like, “I’m completely unbalanced, and I’m good with that.” Now, 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 know the reality is it doesn’t exist. The picture I get is my daughter, who was a gymnast for 14 years. Upon that balance beam and 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. It’s hard to balance 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. It takes work to move if I draw a boundary or install a limit. So, I’ve adopted boundaries, and when I say “I have,” we have because I’ve done it in the community, first and foremost, with my wife. Building boundaries in the community 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 am I balanced. Defining what you value and want to protect What we did was to define 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

Working together as one team in marketing and sales alignment is about the customer. Why? Because today, buyers are in control. For this reason, we can no longer have an artificial divide between marketing and sales. I interviewed Heidi Melin (@heidimelin), CMO at Workfront, on how to get sales and marketing to operate as one revenue team. Brian: Can you tell us a little bit about your background? Heidi: Absolutely. I’m a career CMO. I’ve been in marketing my entire career, having started on the advertising side but primarily focused on fast-growing software businesses. So, I recently joined Workfront and am the CMO at Workfront. How can sales and marketing operate as one team? Well, throughout my career, I’ve had the opportunity to work well with some sales teams, and I’ve also learned my fair share of working with sales teams and marketing teams that don’t align very well. Also, all those lessons learned include ensuring that the goals are aligned and ensuring that the marketing team has the same goals as the sales team. Indeed, the marketing team tends to have a broader view of the marketplace in the long term. But the immediate-term goals must be aligned. So, 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 to improve. So, ensuring you’re working on a standard set of numbers is hard. It sounds straightforward, but it’s hard. One key to success, I think, is ensuring that measurement, all programmatic activities, and the process-oriented partnership between sales and marketing are aligned because it’s one business process. One business process focused on revenue. I think that marketing and sales historically have been thought of as two separate business processes; we talk about it as a critical handoff. But I think about it because it’s one business process, and inside a company, it’s really focused on the revenue of your business. It starts when 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 close 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. And 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. Flip your focus on the customer Heidi: Yeah, and so when you flip that, and you look at the focus on the customer, all of sudden marketing and sales from an outreach, from an engagement perspective, has one unified goal, which is to move a buyer through a buying process. And when you have that change of mindset that becomes important. I’ve worked in businesses where we focus cleanly on that critical handoff, and that handoff is the most vital piece. And frankly, it’s an essential piece, but it’s not the crucial piece. Heidi: Yeah, it should support, and we have the tools to help that entire life cycle. When I first joined Workfront one of the things that 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 that has been enabled by technology and is one that is critical in ensuring that sales and marketing are aligned. Brian: As we talk about this whole idea of alignment, and you brought up measurements sounds easier said than done to get marketing and sales to agree on what common goals and measures are. How to get sales and marketing using the same numbers Heidi: I think it must start a big picture and really understanding targets and targets by sales teams and working backward from there. Because if we realize that as our goal, our goal from a marketing perspective is undoubtedly to raise awareness for the business and drive demand for the business. Our goal is to drive revenue for the business. And so, we can all understand our revenue goals and then the steps that we all need to take to get there. So, to meet our revenue goals, backing out of that, what kind of demand generation volumes do we need to have to achieve those revenue goals. We then agree with the sales team not only on what we are going to use as our qualification criteria, how we are going to evaluate whether or not a lead is indeed a good lead or a bad lead. Also, ensuring that, from a volume perspective, the marketing team is lined up to support the company’s revenue goals. So, backing it out from revenue is critical. And 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 engaging with the sales team. And there may be reasons to shift or change a qualification criterion based on the maturity of a field sales organization or a time during the market, like during market seasonality. There are lots of reasons to make those changes, and you can’t do that in a vacuum. What works to remove barriers of teamwork? Heidi: You must go back to the customer, and you must understand the buying process of a customer. And 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 to move that prospect or customer through a buying cycle but understand how it maps to a sales process, is essential. So, if you can get to a place where you can map out the buying process from the time someone raises their hand or engages in some way through to closing business and revenue. Also, understand how the customer or the buyer operates during that and how that maps to our internal process, you can actually really demonstrate where marketing adds value and where sales is adding value and where both of us add value. Heidi: 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 that you’re using to describe. You must go 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 have you found that works or what advice might you have for someone who would like actually to go back to that beginning? Is it journey mapping? Is it interviewing customers? What are the steps you would recommend? Understanding how your customer buys Source: Journey map based on what they are doing, thinking, feeling via markempa Heidi: I think that 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 that they went through, really listening to what their needs are and starting to look at that; you see commonalities for how customers buy whatever product it is. Then taking that, making some assumptions, standardizing it, and then mapping it to internal processes. I know we just did this recently at Workfront and we learned a lot. One of the most valuable things that we learned is that there were stages that we weren’t touching. We weren’t touching the buyer in the buying cycle, and 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. Spend time listening to how customers buy Just taking the time to step back, and to spend time with customers, listen to how they buy is the place to start. It’s excellent practice for marketing teams to do that work and creates many synergies with the sales team because many times the criticism of a sales team is that they’re on the front lines. They’re the ones on the phone; they’re the ones in person talking to customers. And a common criticism is that the marketing team is sitting in a back room somewhere developing programs and campaigns and not listening and touching customers. So, having and leading that discussion with a sales organization is 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 do find that, to your point, for the most part, marketers often do get isolated, especially in B2B, because salespeople are usually having more conversations or sales development reps are or whomever. And so, what you’re saying is, get this buyer insight and from that marketers will have a different perspective. Marketing must understand the customer perspective Heidi: That’s 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 just a lot of programs that are generating volume and activity but not necessarily moving the ball forward. So, 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. Yes, taking

Do you routinely look for ways to drive innovation with your demand generation approach? Or do you feel behind the curve? According to Circle Research, marketers are split. Half say they’re “old school,” while the other half believe their approach is innovative. Circle Research found that most marketers (93%) who describe themselves as innovative say that it has made their marketing more effective. However, 83% of lagging marketers plan to bring innovation into their approach this year. I interviewed Jeanne Hopkins (@jeannehopkins), CMO at Lola.com, on how marketers can bring more innovation to demand generation. Share a little bit about your background. Jeanne:  Thanks, Brian. My undergraduate degree is in Accounting. Believe it or not, the accounting office where I started told me in my annual review that I probably didn’t have a future in accounting because I was too loud. Everything was balanced andhing was good, but I was too noisy for a nice, cut-and-dry accounting office. That’s when I moved into toys. I worked for Milton Bradley Company’s in-house advertising agency. Then, I moved to LEGO and then to other consulting companies. I got into the software, 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. Maybe somebody would send it again, but it would be like three hours later or three hours before, and that’s because networks were not on the same timing device. So, the whole concept of having timing and having to be secure became something that became critically important to all networks. From there, selling into IT, B2B technology companies, that sort of thing. So that’s my gig. What does Lola do? Jeanne: Lola.com is a corporate travel management solution that allows finance people, office managers, and business travelers themselves to be able to see their full travel details 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 half an hour or hour and, I bet you avoid it, right? It’s like one of those things- Brian: You wait until the last minute to do it, and 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 integrate with Expensify, Concur, a whole bunch of different finance applications, as well as travel. You can book all your travel with us. We have a complete support network that helps you get checked in and makes sure that when disruptions come up (reroute people, get people back sooner or back later) and any other hiccups that business travelers endure. We’re trying to mitigate that for them. Brian: I wanted to highlight you because you’ve done so much, you know, since you and I met, and we could date ourselves a bit here but- Jeanne: That’s okay. Brian: Way back, as we spoke, I think, at a MarketingSherpa Conference. Jeanne: 2006, yeah. Brian: Yeah! I was impressed by you and just how you were bringing innovation and creativity, and out-of-the-box thinking. Also, you’ve continued to do that throughout your career. Driving more innovation with demand generation How did you start thinking differently to drive innovation with demand generation? Jeanne: Well, I can’t claim the credit myself, so I’d say that there would be a couple of different influences. I would say both of my parents are artists of a kind. My dad paints, he plays music, he writes. My mom sings, plays music, and paints. So, when I was in high school, I majored in Art. We had to submit a portfolio, and I enjoy thinking from an artistic view of the world. That’s the left-handed component of me. However, 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. I read constantly. I’m trying to always look for something a little bit different, a little bit ahead of the curve. I don’t want to be an early adopter, but I want to be at the forefront before the competition catches up with us. So, I’m lucky to have a kind of a creative outlook, and I think. Start seeing stories 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. This a story, like just us having a conversation right here, Brian. Jeanne: So, we each have a story, we have a back story that goes back some 13 years now- We know each other. We worked together, you know, you have a family, you know my family, and 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 creative. Don’t you think that’s where people kind of drop the ball? Getting it done Brian: I do. I think it’s like bringing the two pieces together and what I’ve respected about you is that you were always willing to try something new, you know? And you would see it through and wouldn’t let it drop. Jeanne: Are you saying I’m a nag?! Brian: Well, I think a little bit. You want things done well, and you own it. Being creative is great, but being creative or innovative isn’t going to matter much unless you can get it done. Generating revenue Jeanne: A place that I worked at 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 who go the rebranding route, the new logo route, they’re arts and crafts marketers because while that’s important and a brand is essential, it’s not as important as generating revenue. Brian: Yeah. Jeanne: But almost a thousand of them were untouched by sales because we don’t have enough salespeople, so working with an organization to make sure if people are downloading content, you want them to get touched. They may not be ready to buy, but you want to be able to make sure they’re touched. So, I’m trying to come up with a solution to that internally. To go figure out what I can do to help the sales organization achieve the revenue targets that we have as an organization? Seeing the whole business Jeanne: I think that one of the challenges that many marketers have is that they don’t look at the whole business. Because our job is not just as marketers, and this concept of arts and crafts marketer and 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. Generating revenue and building a great relationship with sales You haven’t given anybody anything of value. I feel and have always felt that my job is to generate revenue. And 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, and you’re going to go through this whole process. I understand 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 were the case. My job is to generate leads. I want to have an excellent relationship with sales. I want to make sure that the sales leader that I’m working with is somebody that I like, and respect and we’re joined at the hip to grow the business together. Brian: I want to call attention to something you’ve said that it’s so important that you go beyond the lead. You’re looking at the whole business and focused on revenue. I think it’s just part of being a good marketer is looking at execution. Getting and keeping customers How do we take this person we built a relationship with or start a conversation with and carry it through to helping them become a customer? Jeanne: Yes. Also, stay a customer. The four circles Jeanne: Because when you think about it, I feel like there’s like four circles, if you will. 1. Employees The center ring is employees, and if employees don’t have a sense of what’s going on and they’re not being communicated with, like here are the events that are coming up, here are the PR things that are coming up. What’s the full transparency so that the employees know what’s going on with the product, marketing, sales, team, and everything? 2. Customers The next one is customers; unfortunately, customer marketing as a concept is not something marketers dig. But they don’t think about them until they’re gone. 3. Prospects Then the next level is prospects. Many marketers focus just on prospects.  Then, what’s the conversion rate, visit-to-lead, visits-to-CTA, CTA-to-opportunity, the opportunity-to-customer? 4.Community Oh, that’s all great, but you also have a community, and when I worked at HubSpot as an example, we had a million people that were part of the community. They were not going to become customers, but you know what they did? They amplified content, so we had a new E-book on something, sent it out, the community would leverage it, and that’s what you want. But if you don’t start with employees and customers, the rest are all for naught, and prospects look at reviews and what other people are buying. You must have a solid core of employees and customers, and that’s the holistic view in my mind. Brian: Well, as I talk with CEOs, I hear the metrics they care about looking at customer acquisition costs (CAC) and lifetime value (LTV) because they tie back to the diagram you just shared. How much effort and money do we need to spend to acquire a customer? And how well are we keeping them? What is the most significant trend affecting marketing? Jeanne: I think it’s the immediacy of things. I think we are

Traditional sales and marketing methods have failed to keep pace with how modern B2B buyers purchase goods and services. Meetings, phone calls, and email are still important B2B channels but how can you have immediate conversations? Conversational Marketing is about having direct one-to-one conversations to connect with customers and offer help. By using targeted messaging and intelligent chatbots to engage with leads in real-time (while they’re on your website), you can connect with people in real-time and convert leads faster. That’s why I interviewed Dave Gerhardt (@davegerhardt), VP of Marketing at Drift.com and co-author of the new book Conversational Marketing. Dave is also known as DG. Share a bit of your background and what does Drift do? DG: 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 that Drift connects you now with the people who are ready to buy now. Which is a significant change from how traditional marketing typically works, where most of the traditional marketing and sales systems were kinda 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 you know, there’s just 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 Lyft on my phone, the driver would be there in about one to two minutes, and that’s 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: Right. DG: 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. Brian: Well, that’s awesome! And so, that sets us up actually. Tell us about Conversational Marketing? And what motivated you to write the book? Why now? The reason we wrote the book is that we’ve just heard so much about the power of conversational marketing, 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 of all time in this industry. And it’s not because we have some secret, but our secret has been we’ve used our own product and really made conversations the center of our business. And so, as we created this category of conversational marketing and started to educate more people about it late last year, we were like, “You know what? It’s time to write the book.” We’ve wanted to write a book. We had enough stuff to say, case studies, examples, methodologies, playbooks, blueprints, and all that stuff. And so, you know we said, “Let’s make 2019 the year that we write the book, and really do the best job we can trying to help educate the future of marketing and sales on this next wave.” Brian: Well, it’s really well done. Why do marketers need to rethink their content/lead generation? DG: Because content’s a commodity, right? Everybody has a podcast. Everybody has a blog. Everybody’s into videos. Everybody’s on social media. Content five, ten years ago you could be like, “You know what makes us unique? We are a B2B company, and we have a blog.” And people are like, “Blogging? No way!” Today, all that stuff is a commodity, and nobody’s going to be on their commute home tonight being like, “You know what I wish I had more of? I wish I had more content from a B2B brand. Like, I need another B2B podcast. That’s what I need.” Right? And so, there’s got 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.” Because we’re all kind of starting to ignore that, right? I try to avoid filling out forms if I can. I hate talking on the phone. I never answer numbers that don’t usually call me. I never reply to cold emails. And so, something had to give. And that’s really the shift that we’ve seen in the market. And something that David (who I wrote this book with; he’s the founder and CEO of Drift) the thing he talks about is, he calls it the shift from supply to demand. Right? Customers have all the power today. Ten years ago, they didn’t have any of the power, and so if you sold iced coffee, you could be the only person that sold iced coffee. And you could say, “You know what, Brian? You’re going to have to go through my process, and you want one of my iced coffees? Great! Come back at 5 o’clock tonight. Call me on this number, and I’ll talk to you.” Where now, customers have all the power, right? By the time I’m ready to buy an iced coffee, I’ve already evaluated four or five other companies, and I’m there in your store for a reason. Really, the concept that information is free now, it’s not something that can be a differentiator for you anymore. Brian: I was just thinking you sell to marketers, right? And so, naturally, we’re kind of a snarky bunch. We know how things are played, and so it’s about building trust with people as well. I just wanted to hear the story; I was reading the book, but also, I first heard about it, I think it was a year ago. This whole idea of the #noforms movement. How did the #noforms movement get started and what do you mean? DG: What do I mean by “no forms”? That’s a loaded question. So “no forms” is pretty, what’s the word I’m looking for? Not a rhetorical question, but you know what I’m trying to say, right? Brian: Right. Right. DG: You need no forms because of the whole process that I think marketers got into this world of just abusing forms, right? And I’m not preaching to anybody; I did this too, right? I remember one of the first things I did at Drift. I wanted to write an article about the Growth Marketing influencers you should follow on Twitter. And so, I made a Twitter list, I put it in a Google sheet, and I put a form behind it. And I said, “Hey! You want to get my list of 50 people to follow on Twitter? Put your email in here.” Like, that person’s not a lead. Right? There’s no intent there. I’m just gating this thing that is a commodity, and so we kind of started this whole “no forms” 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 and he’s like, “Hey! You got a second?” And 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 was like, “Hey! I think we need to get rid of all the lead forms on our website and our content.” And I was like, “Okay. And do what?” Like, I’m your first marketing person here. You pay me to generate leads, and you’re taking that away? So, what are you going to measure me on? And he’s like, “No, idiot.” He didn’t say that. But he’s like, “You’re missing the point. If we’re going to build a business around conversations, we need to lead the way, and we need to remove all of our forms and show businesses how to generate demand and drive sales without having to gate content and use lead forms.” And so, it was really like a pivotal moment for us, because it’s like, “Alright. If we’re going to build this thing, we’ve got to live it firsthand.” And it was amazing because it wasn’t just a marketing lesson, right? I remember sitting next to two of our engineers, we shared a little table together and they’re like, “Okay. You’ve got no forms, so what would you do here?” And they’re like, “We’re building this thing as we go on the spot.” It was super transformational for our business because we were able to see how it worked firsthand. But then we got to go and educate the world, right? Because you say “no forms” to marketers, people are going to jump off the side of the boat. But for us, we were like, “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.” And so, it gave us an opportunity to really go out there and educate the market. And the results since then have been amazing. Brian: You know it still stings and feels a bit like heresy, this idea of “no forms.” because every marketing automation provider has been built in forms. We have tons of popups. I have popups on my blog and on my website, and the question is if I get rid of forms, then how do I engage people Engage and capture leads with no forms DG: So, the short answer to that is to have a conversation, right? And that’s really why Drift exists because the way you’re going to capture leads now is by having an actual conversation with somebody. I’ll give you an example. Forms work. And in reality, the best advice I could give you is, don’t replace your forms. That’s what you’re going to do eventually after you’re very successful with conversational marketing. But I want you to use conversational marketing in addition to your forms to start, right? And you’re going to create a second net that’s going to create this fast lane for the best people because if somebody has very high intent and they land on your website, they don’t want to fill out a form. They want to get an answer now. And so, Drift is going to create a fast lane for those best people. So, part one is, use Drift or conversation marketing in addition to what you’re already doing with forms. The other part of that is something we see all the time, right? How do you ask a question to a form? You can’t. You either fill it out or you don’t, right? We see this happen all the time. Engage in real-time conversations on your website Somebody will come in on our website and our sales reps, when a named account comes to the website, they get a no

B2B lead generation has had to reinvent itself over the last decade. Sales have always used an account-based approach. Now,, marketing is adopting account-based marketing. But it’s not an easy road. Here’s why: In B2B, you’re never selling to an individual. He or she is almost always part of a buying team. Moreover, the bigger the potential deal, the more people, departments, and functional areas get involved. For this reason, many B2B marketers using a leads-based approach hit a wall with their account-based marketing efforts. ABM isn’t just about marketing. ABM works best in companies where all revenue-generating areas are closely aligned as one team. So, how can you improve your account-based marketing results? To help, I interviewed Jon Miller (@jonmiller), CEO and Co-Founder of Engagio. Jon and his team just released the Second Edition of The Clear and Complete Guide to Account-Based Marketing. He brings a fantastic perspective on how to complement a leads-based approach and adopt account-based marketing. What inspired you to start Engagio? Jon: Great.  I’m excited to be here and to have a chance to hang out with you again. It’s been a while since we talked. So, my background: I’ve been in marketing technology almost my entire career. My undergraduate degree is actually in physics, and 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 [in order] 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 really trying to use all that data to drive better customer decisions and one to one interactions. You know, very much inspired by the Don Peppers and Martha Rogers book The One to One Future. I worked at Exchange and then as an early employee at 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. And I think that’s arguably, or maybe not even arguably, the leading marketing technology of the last ten years or so. Recently, it was sold to Adobe for just under 5 billion dollars. I had a long career in marketing technology, but one of the trends I think is always true is marketing is changing all the time, and the underlying technologies are changing all the time. I just felt about four years ago that Marketo wasn’t, frankly, moving fast enough to kind of keep up with all the new trends and changes in how marketing was done. I was inspired to start a new company that would be seeking to build out the next generation of marketing products that could really take advantage of all these new trends. One of those significant trends is what’s now known as account-based marketing. And so, that’s where I decided to start, to focus, to have Engagio be a platform for account-based marketing. How do you define account-based marketing? Brian: Well, there’s a lot of definitions out there about account-based marketing, and I’ve talked with CMOs and VPs, and they 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 Complete Guide to Account-Based Marketing and you’re on your second edition, so how would you define it? Jon: Yeah. So, first of all, let me just say, really excited about the book. You know, it is a second edition; I wrote the first one about three years ago. 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. And 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? That you can then do lead nurturing, and lead scoring to kind of run it through the system. But when you’re going after bigger or more strategic accounts, or maybe because 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. And so, to me that’s the simple definition of account-based marketing: it’s spearfishing as opposed to net fishing. A breakout of account-based marketing Jon: 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 just explain what some of those words mean? Brian: Yeah. If you could break that out that would be great. It’s a strategy 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 and marketing and customer success teams work. It’s not a campaign or a tactic. So, you really do need to kind of say, “We use ABM as our go-to-market strategy or at least one of our go-to-market strategies.” Personalized to the right people and accounts Jon: 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 out to the right people at the right companies, somehow you’ve got to break through all that noise and the best way to do that is with relevance, resonance, and empathy, which I know we’ll talk about. ABM is a misnomer because we’re saying it’s account-based marketing but right there, in my definition, I’m talking about marketing and sales. And let’s talk about that a little bit later. Landing and expanding revenue Jon: ABM is about landing and expanding. I think that especially today, so many companies earn revenue through subscription and recurring revenue models. Just focusing on that new business, which is what the net fishing is all about, is a minimal myopic focus, and ABM expands, or changes, the marketer’s mindset to focus on the entire revenue journey: landing/creating new pipeline accelerating existing deals expanding and retaining existing relationships. ABM plays across all that. So, that’s why I chose that definition. From leads-focus to account-focus Source: The Clear & Complete Guide to Account Based Marketing (p. 132) How is ABM is different than demand generation? Brian: Well, it makes sense, and I appreciate what you’re talking about, just the overarching trend. CEOs focus on lifetime value (LTV) and CAC (customer acquisition cost). And so, ABM is providing answers 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 different from demand generation? Because I still think people out there, even though we’ve just talked about the definitions, yet are getting confused. Jon: Yeah. Well, so I always thought it was ironic that we called the category Marketo played in marketing automation. People think marketing automation means that 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. ABM is not just about marketing; it’s about everything So, 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. And frankly, if it’s just marketing, it’s not a strategy; it’s a campaign. At Engagio, a lot of our customers have their strategies, and they’re 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 because otherwise, as I said, it’s just a campaign. Unteaching that it’s about leads Brian: Well, I think that’s a vast distinction, especially as people are considering 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.” And 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. And the technologies that we use, like Marketo for example, they were built to be really lead-based systems. Marketers focus on leads. Salespeople care about accounts. Which, almost by definition, meant they were not on the same page. And 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 really put is merely just marketers, frankly, adopting the language the salespeople use. And just, again, being on the same page. Brian:  Yeah. I think salespeople have practiced, in some ways, the very things that you’re talking about in your book. They may have called it strategic account selling, major account selling, and target account selling. But they did focus on these accounts, and as you talked about, now marketers are coming alongside salespeople and working on these accounts together. So, we’re going to talk about some process steps, but I wanted to step back to something you said earlier. How does customer empathy fit together with ABM? We have more channels, content, and technology to reach customers than ever before, but connecting with customers has

We have more sales and marketing technology and channels to reach our customers, but they’re increasingly tuning us out. In short, we’re getting more disconnected from customers. Something is missing. Even though our tools have become smarter with AI and machine learning, connecting and building B2B relationships has never been harder. The question is: How can we connect better and build relationships with B2B customers? That’s why I interviewed Steve Woods (@stevewoods), Founder & CTO  at Nudge to learn how we can be connecting and building B2B relationships with trust and empathy, What inspired you to start up Nudge? Sure thing. You and I have known each other, obviously, for a long time. A few decades. So, my history before Nudge was Eloqua, in the marketing space, obviously, it’s a space you’re very familiar with, you’re working a lot with marketers. And really, we were able to see this remarkable transition as marketing went from kind of an arts and craft discipline to a very measured lead generation, demand generation-oriented discipline that started to connect with sales. Here are leads that are qualified, that are interested. And that was a remarkable transition to see. But looking over the fence at the world of sales, we realized that the next step was the core of getting those deals done. Building trust and relationships The core was building trust and relationships (and the breadth and depth of those relationships within our organization) that would allow the 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 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 cool, just how you took your story from where you were to what you’re doing right now. Growth lessons: relationships, trust, and empathy are the core I think the thing that we were lucky with, more than anything, in Eloqua was being part of a major change in a space. Marketing going from unmeasured to measured, and all the effects that 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 kind of flow along with that river. I think what we were trying to do with Nudge was to 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?” And looking at sales and looking at relationships, it became very clear that relationships, trust, empathy were the core thing, and it was unmeasurable.  It was intuitive. Dealing with deal slippage Every sales leader, when you’re talking about deal slippage when you’re talking about deal progress, when you’re talking about your forecast, it’s all about the relationships and the trust, but it’s not measurable. It’s self-reported by sales reps that often have kind of “happy ears” on the process. And so, we thought, “If we can do that, if we can figure out how to put a measurement on trust, empathy, and relationships, and then build the tooling on top of that to help people steer the ship in the right direction, then we’re going to be part of a very interesting transition.” And that’s turned out to be true, as you see sort of the evolution of the sales space: an interesting place to find ourselves in the middle of. Brian: Yeah. Before us having our interview, we were talking about some of the changes that have happened in sales, and just what’s been happening for our customer, and how difficult it’s gotten for people to get things done, including buying. And one of the things that got us reconnected is, I read the post you wrote about holding the hustle. What inspired you to write about holding the sales hustle? Absolutely. That, as with many things, stemmed from a rant, which is always a good place to start. And it’s interesting because we’re working in this space of sales, so we spent much time and developed a series called “How I Buy,” that interviews buyers and how they go about buying. Buyer and Seller Differences And then 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 kind of guiding themselves down a journey, selectively bringing in salespeople when they need some deeper points of view, and really wanting them to be thoughtful, co-conspirators on a journey. Then you talk with salespeople and it was automation, it was numbers, it was a thousand emails a day. It was, “Hey, did you get my last email sequences?” It was all hustle, hustle, hustle and it was bizarre to look at these and realize that they were attempting to describe the same animal. It was bizarre. At the same time, you see the effect of this. Maybe the first of these automated sequences, you received them as an executive. “Oh look, it’s diligent follow-up. They’re following up.” Stop customers from experiencing this kind of follow-up And you get those today, and I think my spam folder is filled with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of, “Hey, did you get my last email?” So, the rant of, “Stop. We must 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’s gotten a huge response. I think everyone intuitively got that. And we were able to, luckily, kind of articulate something that many people were feeling of why the tools that they were told to develop, and employ is just not driving at anything that even came close to building trust and empathy. Biggest influence on the buying journey Brian:    Yeah, and as part of my work interviewing customers, it’s surprising how little impact marketing has in their journey, regarding the marketing of the vendor, and how they’re learning in the process. But, what a difference the salesperson makes in the customer experience and in terms of building trust, in terms of the 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. Brian: So, as you’ve done your own outreach, can you share any stories, or any stories of people who’ve held the hustle, and what they’ve seen? If they were doing it one way and any changes you’ve noticed, or what’s been the results? Buyers want you to journey along with them   Steve: If you look at what buyers are looking for, it’s 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. It’s that; 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 go google something, you can 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? And the salespeople who have been able to say, “No. That is my job. My job is to challenge people.” And they go deep on customer problems. They try and understand that aspect of the customer’s world better than the customer, and they focus in on the right question. When you get hit with that question and, “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 world in the way that you just asked about it. And so now the light bulb’s gone off, and I realize that there’s something more for me to learn.” Moving the trust bar forward That’s when that bar of trust starts to move forward, and it’s the sales reps that come at it that way and find those 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 and here’s why and here’s a story, and you’re going to be maybe a little uncomfortable with the story.  However, it’s going to give you some insight that you wouldn’t have got just doing a google search.” Helping customers buy is about helping them change   Brian: I like the word insight, and as I was listening to you I thought that everything you were saying is helping your customer have that insight. 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, is change) change is hard. And 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. So, 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 into, in sales and marketing, how you do outreach today? How do empathy and automation fit together Steve: I think that is the key question and 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, what’s going on right now. And then I need to put those two together and insert a point of view in the conversation. After 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

Growth for B2B is hard. It used to be that you could accelerate growth with huge customer acquisition. Ramping up your sales and marketing is not enough to sustain growth. Today, the best companies are growing through customer success. That’s why I interviewed Kia Puhm (@kiapuhm), CEO at DesiredPath, to talk about customer success. Kia’s got a fantastic perspective on “how do we accelerate and grow our existing customer relationships,” which is something that many companies don’t focus on nearly enough. Can you tell us a little bit more about your background? Kia: Thanks, Brian. Happy to be here. I come to software from an educational background in computer engineering and 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 the organizations I led get customers to adopt software so that they are using it and get value out of it. Moreover, it translates into loyal customers that 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 try to figure out how to drive that adoption equation while doing what I could or what I had available to me and use that most efficiently, if possible, to do it. What’s the most significant trend affecting your work? 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 in 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? Vendor-centric vs. customer-centric Kia: There have been many studies done and much research that shows that companies operating from a customer-centric viewpoint (that deliver amazing customer experience) far outperform their competitors that aren’t customer-centric. So, I think that 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 have good experiences and that 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. 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 could feed that into your organization and continually change and respond to that to continue to drive that value for customers and that loyalty that you need to keep growing your own business. Using journey maps to improve customer success Kia: I know you, and I have had conversations at other times and have completely aligned regarding the type of approach that we use. I use customer journeys to facilitate customer-centric thinking to make sure that an organization understands empathizing and understanding what customers are trying to accomplish when purchasing 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 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. From a vendor-centric to a customer value approach What I see all too often, and it’s so natural for us to do this as vendors, defines the value proposition that our product is meeting in the market. 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, and 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, take that software, and put it within their environment. However, if we start to employ a customer-centric approach and if we understand the following: Why, in general, our customers buy our products? What do their environments typically look like inside? What are some of the common trends and challenges that they have in their work environment? How could that software seamlessly or best fit into that? We can now take a lot of that burden off that customer. Taking the burden off the customer We make it easier. We make it more enjoyable to bring that software into their organization. Moreover, the faster we do that, the more we make it feel seamless and easy 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 had felt easy, and it’s going to meet the objectives that they set out to achieve when they purchase the product, which then translates into loyalty. When you build that loyalty through trusted advisor-type of 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 them, from their perspective because it’s coming from their perspective in the first place. Brian: I like the way you think, Kia. For our regular listeners and readers, you just heard the episode with Brent Adamson from Gartner. Brent said that as much and as for how difficult it is selling B2B today, for our customers, buying is even harder. Applying empathy to develop better customer journeys I think we’re still in the infancy of journey mapping. I mean, some people are quite advanced in it and companies that are advanced, and there’s much information out there on how to conduct journey mapping and how to do that quite effectively. When I talk about infancy, I think we map out the customer’s journey, but we still do it from our perspective. In the work that I do, I haven’t seen that yet. I’m waiting for the day that somebody shows me a journey map that they’ve done that reflects the customer’s viewpoint and their perspective versus a vendor-centric approach. 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 needs to be in place to support that customer journey. Now you’ve got this business model, and then if you’ve got this closed-loop feedback, where you’re getting input from customers, and you’re feeding it back in: this is where the agile comes in. Getting more agile with customer feedback You can then 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. This is where 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 it takes just that 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 “Oh. Wait. I thought I was doing it from the customer’s perspective, but, ah, now I see. I’m not thinking from their perspective,” and then just that training to keep thinking from the customer’s perspective, and then things start to click, so just honing those empathy skills. Brian: What I hear from you is understanding how people think, really. We need to understand how they are thinking about their business now and understand the emotions. What are they feeling at various points of their journey? Do I understand correctly? Capturing emotional moments of truth for customers Kia: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, that’s a component. In the industry, people often refer to the concept of “moments of truth,” right? Moments of truth can make it or break the interactions that customers have with your company as a brand that could decide whether they continue to be your customer. They also tend to be highly emotionally charged at those moments of truth, and then there are other times in the journey that might not be critical moments of truth. I think there are emotional elements there that help to understand that customer perspective. So you need that emotional component and understanding of that because what needs to be done at a certain step in the journey can get delivered in multiple different ways. Well, if you know what the feeling of that customer might be, if they’re feeling angst about using the software, if they’re feeling 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 impact, and so when you have th

Are you applying empathy as part of your sales and marketing approach? Why? Because according to Brent Adamson, “empathy” is the one word that matters most to sales [and marketing] success. It’s tough to buy. B2B customers are overwhelmed with too much information and too many choices, trying to get their colleagues to agree, not to mention second-guessing. This is part two of my interview with Brent Adamson (@brentadamson), Principal Executive Advisor at Gartner, and the co-author of The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer. You’ll learn ways to apply empathy and how to solve buying problems. Writers note: You can view part of our interview here: New research: Boost organic growth from current customers. Does empathy capture everything your book, The Challenger Customer, is about? Brent: The idea that empathy is the core principle of the entire book The Challenger Customer, I admit, is more of a personal opinion based on all of our research. You’ll notice the word doesn’t appear anywhere in the proper book. It’s only in the acknowledgments where I made just a little blurb at the very back (a short note to my daughters). And I used the word empathy there. But in many ways, for me personally, one word captures everything that the book is about. I know this is a topic not only near and dear to your heart. But your expertise here is far deeper than mine. But when I think of empathy, I think of two components to it, but 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 from my perspective, empathy is, at a fundamental level, your ability to place yourself in someone else’s shoes and see the world from their perspective. And that might be logical (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. How customers think For example, whenever we’re talking about Customer Improvement or even the broader work in Challenger, 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 must understand more than anything else? How would you answer that, Brian? Brian: If I were to do that, I’d need to understand their experience and how they see things. Brent: You got it. This is where I have fun talking to you because you get this stuff. And I say this with great, hopefully, empathy and respect for anyone out there. What I find when I ask most leaders, sales, and commercial marketing leaders that question is: “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 10K’s and the annual reports and the financials and all that kind of stuff. We saw in our research 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 must understand is how they think about their business. That’s the thing you’ve got to change. Map customer thinking   We find it can be very productive to draw a “map” on a piece of paper. A map of their thinking. We call this a mental model. Mental mapping is another term for this idea. You can simply draw a couple of boxes and some connecting lines. What are their goals? What are their objectives as an organization?  What do they believe to be the primary challenges or the primary drivers of achieving that goal? What are the secondary challenges or the secondary drivers for each of those? And then you can map it. Mental map example We do this in all our research here. We build mental models for heads of sales and mental models for heads of marketing all the time. It’s how we do our research, but there’s nothing to say that heads of marketing or marketing teams, sales teams couldn’t do the same thing for their customers, which is to put on paper a straightforward diagram. Don’t over-complicate it, a few boxes, a couple of lines of our core objectives as an organization. What they’re trying to achieve? How do they think they’re going to get there? Challenges they believe they’re going to get in the way of the lever they need to pull to make that happen, whichever perspective you want. And then 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 ten boxes according to priority, how would you distribute them?” When you’re all done, what you have on the piece of paper is a picture of how the customer thinks about their business. Change the way customers think. 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. Now 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? And you can begin to look for opportunities to challenge their thinking to help them improve their thinking. To make them smart 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 about 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. Brian, does that count as empathy in 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.” And so, what he argued is, we make emotional decisions rationally, so we need to take both perspectives to understand. Help customers buy Brent: Now, imagine a world where you are talking to one of those stakeholders, and this individual must get a consensus across the other four or five to make that deal happen, and you know this is all implicit. It’s not explicit. In their mind, they kind of have that mental model in their map, right? 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. And one of the things we know from our research, what we also know to be true as just individual professionals, is going down the hall and convincing your colleagues to do anything differently is kind of a pain. Sometimes it’s kind of scary. Sometimes it’s a little intimidating. We find that the larger the buying group, the more individual stakeholders feel, not only their credibility. But in fact, their actual job could be on the line in advocating for a supplier, which gets into the emotional side of empathy. The Thursday morning test So, you 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.” Think about what it feels like. Think about that person sitting at their desk, and 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, and how will that feel? Now I’m thinking about buying your CRM solution.  And it’s Thursday morning, 9:00. I’m thinking about how to get my company to buy that solution, which I really want: I’ve got to talk to someone in IT. I’ve got to talk to someone in procurement. I’ve got to 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. And suddenly what seems to be a slam dunk because [I’m in sales] this person I talked to loves it is 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 inside their own company? What does that feel like? And 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 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 bleep CRM system, but this is too hard – never mind. Be able to place yourself in the shoes of that stakeholder and understand what it feels like for them not to. 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, and it rarely feels good. The new sales imperative Brian: I really appreciate you sharing your perspective because this is tough work, even for us as sellers to look at because 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 the March/April 2017 issu

CEOs and sales leaders have long wondered: how can we drive organic growth and increase sales from existing customers? But it’s elusive. In fact, the traditional approach is no longer working. 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’s why I interviewed Brent Adamson (@brentadamson), Principal Executive Advisor at Gartner, and the co-author of The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer. Writers note: You can view part two of our interview here: New research: Empathy and how to solve buying problems  Can you tell our listeners a little bit about you and your background? Brent Adamson:  I work with an organization formerly known as CEB and has now been acquired by Gartner. I work with the Sales & Service and Marketing & Communications practices here at the company. And it’s sort of our mission in life, at least in the business to business space where I spend most of my time, trying to understand with data, with research, with analytics, what does world-class B2B selling and marketing look like? We get after that, again, 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 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, do a little bit better, in sales, in marketing and ideally in sales and marketing? How can sellers drive account growth?   Well, sure. This is brand new research for us. In some way or another, we always study growth, right? Because that’s what sales and marketing are all about. There’s a certain almost urgency, or we like to call the “Why Now?”, of this growth question, especially in sales, which is especially relevant for us today. And 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, if you will, solutions as opposed to individual products and/or services. The idea that if you can offer your customer broader solutions, that’s going to allow you to stand out, to differentiate yourself, to command price premiums in the marketplace. All good things to do and good reasons to do it. The thing that’s interesting though, Brian, 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 of course directly contingent on your ability to actually sell them, to get your customer actually to buy those incremental capabilities. Not surprisingly, companies all around the world, in their efforts to grow, are looking to existing customers to buy into more of the cart, as we all 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 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. What can sales do better? What can we, as sales organizations, do to do a better job of driving growth with those existing customers? When you dig into it what’s interesting is the amount of frustration with sales organizations around the world in making that happen. There’s only about roughly a quarter of the heads of sales that we surveyed this year who told us that their account teams were 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 dived 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. They were wondering how do they grow organically? 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. Driving organic growth (it’s counterintuitive) Brent: Well, no. You’re right. It was counterintuitive even to us. We always have these hypotheses that we test in all our research, but it’s interesting to see how the data and the research shake out.   What we found is a couple of things here in this world of account managers, if you will, that this is the farming side of the hunting/farming debate. Right? That’s about our farmers, and they must be nurturers and take care of our current customers, and then when they fail to grow, we think, “Oh, they need to be harder, and they need to be tougher, and they need to be more aggressive. We need to get them in there.” What’s interesting is when we 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 an interesting tendency to fall back on DNA or at least on 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 understand really is not only is it the structure of the role. Growing and keeping customers what you need to do differently 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 on the hook, or at least partially you’re involved in the servicing of those accounts as well. You’ve got success or managing, 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 interesting ways that create all sorts of tension. So, if I’m a pure hunter, all I’m tasked to do is to go out and bring out 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’ve won already. That’s the thing we say: the single thing worse than failing to grow an account is failing to keep it all together. What you have now is this interesting tension of an account manager trying to pat your head and rub your tummy at the same time. They’re trying to do very different things simultaneously, which is grow the account but not lose the account. Balancing account growth with retention And the reason why that matters is that what you’re asking the customer to do in this environment is two very different things. To keep the customer you essentially must get the customer to agree to the status quo. So, 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, so that’s a status quo decision. But a growth decision is 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. And 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 hard, right? So, this stuff’s 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. Does over servicing customers drive growth?   We find that the predominant mental model of account managers in this world is, well, 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. So, 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, permission, and if we can get over that permission threshold, then we’ll have won the right to ask them for growth. And somehow, the fact of just by being so happy with the service we provided in the past, will drive growth. And so that brings us full circle to the punchline of a lot of our data. What we found is when you provide a world-class level, even just an above average level of service and success to your customers, they are twice as likely to renew. So, we can find no statistically significant impact on that level of service, and the likelihood of that customer to grow. So, put it all together and what you get is service drives retention, but it doesn’t drive growth. And 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. And we just don’t find that to be the case at all in our research. The zone of wasted effort Bri

Sales enablement is intended to help raise performance, but many efforts have backfired due to departmental silos. And now there’s a growing gap between what salespeople need and what they’re getting to improve performance. For example, Corporate Visions recently surveyed 500 B2B marketers and sales professionals that 20% of organization content creators “just do what they think is best” with no overarching structure at all. And just 27% of organizations are content that focuses squarely on customers and rather than their own story. And all the tools and technologies meant to help boost sales productivity are now are slowing things down. What’s the bottom line? Salespeople are getting overwhelmed and slowed down with increased complexity, just like the customers they’re selling to. That’s why I interviewed Dave Brock (@davidabrock), author of the Sales Manager Survival Guide, also CEO of Partners in EXCELLENCE. Dave’s brilliance is his focus on practical simplification. And I’m excited to bring his thinking on sales enablement and what can be done to raise sales team performance. Can you tell us a little bit about your background? Dave: 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 as a physicist in my career and ended up going to the dark side of selling and sold mainframe computers for IBM for some years. Went up the food chain to more senior management roles, then left to become EVP of sales for a technology company as part of a turnaround, later held VP of Sales or CEO roles in several technology companies. And now run the consulting company – we help our clients solve some of the most challenging problems in sales and marketing and deal with the new buyers. We have a highly collaborative approach in helping really outstanding people solve really, really difficult problems. What is the biggest trend you see affecting your work and sellers today? Well, clearly, it’s the convergence of some things that we see in the marketplace. It’s the new buyer. Everybody’s 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 company is undertaking or just older business models being displaced with new business models. We have some of the classics of Airbnb, turning the hotel and lodging market upside down or Uber turning the taxi and limo business upside down. We see that the new business models occurring are driving real stress on customers. And then the final thing is just overwhelming complexity, just between the rate of change, the amount of information we’re deluged with every day. Most of the people I’m meeting are really struggling with at least one of those three things. I see it impacting virtually everybody. Brian: I can relate to those challenges. I think just in talking about complexity for sellers and marketers, I was having a conversation with someone earlier, and it’s just an overwhelming number of tools an average salesperson uses or a marketer uses. It also creates challenges around collaboration, that internal collaboration. How do you get internal collaboration to improve sales performance? Dave: The easy answer is to break down the silos and start talking to each other. It’s easier said than done. We see a lot of the issues we face regarding internal complexity, and internal collaboration is just people being well-intended doing their jobs. Still, somehow their jobs aren’t aligned with each other, or there are things about their jobs that cause them to 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 talked about the value proposition they create for sales, and sales are the downstream customer of theirs. 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: That’s helpful. And something that’s really come to age recently is sales enablement. What’s the role of sales enablement to help achieve this? I think I’m on the wrong side of some debates on this. I look at sales enablement as more a set of processes in a set of activities than a separate function within the organization. If you look at what sales enablement processes are supposed to do, they’re meant to help maximize the salesperson’s ability to perform. And so, you look at that and say they are a whole collection of things 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 many 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 that stuff? It could be all over the place. It could be marketing that’s doing some of this stuff. 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 the things that we need to do and then look at who in the organization can do those most effectively and most efficiently. Brian: I like how you talk about it because I often think when I speak of 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. Do I understand that correctly? Bringing down the silos that get in the way of sales enablement Exactly. I got engaged in 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 discussions 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 place at the CEO’s table. The CEO’s table’s getting pretty crowded. I think it goes away from the point of what we’re trying to do. And, I believe that it actually starts building more barriers to collaboration and working. We’re building to the degree that we are creating another silo and another set of functions competing for attention and corporate resources. Again, I tend to like to look at these as more processes and workflows and the things that need to be done. And then we look at who can do those most effectively. And if it a sales enablement organization, well, that’s really powerful, but we shouldn’t overlook the other parts of the organization. Brian: We spent time talking about sales enablement. Marketing does have a significant 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 beyond that regarding how they can impact the efficiency and effectiveness of each sales rep. How do you think marketing can help raise the level of performance of sales? We must change our mindset from marketing being the “awareness people,” the “create interest people,” the “leads people,” the “demand gen people,” and so forth, and look at the entire customer buying journey. 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 reject all of them as being bad and tosses them back. But we separate these processes. I think modern sales and modern marketing are 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 the competition and what’s going on with the game. 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? Working as an agile team But I think we have to be very agile in working with each other in saying, “Who’s the person that should be taking the shot right now? Who should be bringing the ball down the court?” I look at marketing and sales, not as the sequential process where marketing gets the leads and gives them to sales, and sales take care of everything throughout, but we work together in the demand gen process, and we cooperate in the buying process. There’s a huge amount that marketing can bring to the party with qualified opportunities. Whether it’s case studies, 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: 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 di

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 f

Do you focus on capturing product stories or customer-hero stories? The answer can make a huge difference in your sales and marketing results. Let me explain. Despite all the time, money, resources spent on improving sales productivity, just 13% of salespeople produce 87% of revenue in a typical organization, according to the Sales Benchmark Index. So, what do the 13% high achievers have that others don’t? They connect emotionally with their buyers. That’s why I interviewed Mike Bosworth. If you don’t know Mike Bosworth already, he is a thought leader in the sales space. And he’s had a profound influence on how we sell and market, especially those in B2B. In this interview, we talk about the power of customer-hero stories to connect emotionally with buyers to facilitate their buying journey. Author’s Note: The transcript was edited for publication. Can you tell us a little bit more about your background? Mike: Well, it’s 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 the cloud, the conversation has to shift from the old “our-solution” marketing: our solution will do this, and our solution will do that. So, 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. I want marketing to think about what we are really doing marketing for– I’m hoping we’re trying to create customers, and sales are 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 customers and facilitating their customer experience because human beings love to buy, and they hate to feel sold. What inspired you to talk about integrating with marketing and sales? For 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 you could get a 10% increase in productivity from that next 50%. Please do the math on that for most companies: it’s a lot of money. Brian: It is. As you’ve been working with companies and clients, there’s 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? In 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, they go into a black hole, and then there’s no follow-up. Sales think that the leads from marketing come from the janitorial staff of the company 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, and so Tim Riester and I, we dove into it, and we’ve 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, and, if you think about it, it gets most people thinking about IT issues. APIs, and what plugs into this and what feeds into that, disable true 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:  I really love the word agreement, and I think that’s the challenge. Without an agreement, we don’t have common ground. I’d love to hear from you, and I think a lot of people have lead definitions. I wrote about the universal lead definition in my book. What’s the definition of a qualified lead that sales and marketing should agree upon? Well, there’s a prerequisite to that, and the prerequisite for even defining the qualified lead is sales and marketing first must agree on: What buyer personas are we selling to? Who do we envision our best customers to be? Where can we help them be a hero? Where can we help them achieve a goal or solve a problem? Back in my Xerox days, we were selling manufacturing productivity improvement software, selling to buyer personas. One buyer persona would be a VP manufacturing who’s missing his shipment schedule. Another one would be a materials manager who had shortages, and 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 buying process they would go through in their organization, when they would start bringing in other people, and how they would share information and all that stuff. Ideally, if we can help our customers buy, they never feel any pressure from us. Facilitating the buying journey My philosophy has always been: we’re trying to facilitate the buying.  A study by Sales Benchmark Index of 1,100 of B2B sales forces came back in 2008, and they found in their case study base that 13% of the salespeople brought in 87% of that revenue. I felt like I’ve been kicked in the stomach because my whole mission was to help the bottom 80% get better, and it had gotten worse, and that caused me to go into a breakdown of a bit. Building emotional connection and trust I started studying the problem, and in most cases, 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, hey said “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 (and my intellectual arrogance caused me to not really study it as well as I should have), it’s that inability to intuitively connect and know when you’ve built enough trust and connection that you can get out your listed discovery questions, and with solution selling, the bottom 80% lack 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: As we’re talking about the definition, I wanted to go back. Recap the best definition of a lead for sales/marketing to agree upon Mike: I went off on a tangent because it was the prerequisite of a qualified lead. Brian: We have to know it. I agree. Mike: A named targeted buyer persona  (John Doe at the ABC company) is curious how we helped a peer job title, another whatever, chief accounting manager at another company, achieve a goal or solve a problem. We have somebody curious how we’ve helped their peer. Brian: In and of itself, for those that are listening that are in marketing, I was talking with a salesperson today, who was struggling trying to build his own pipeline, and he talked about his experience of a lead. 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 them. They weren’t curious. They were someone who had agreed to a meeting, but they didn’t know why. Mike: Agreeing to a meeting. They might have been curious that we didn’t capture that curiosity. Brian: Earlier, you talked a bit about the problem with product marketing, and you brought up customer hero marketing. Why should we in marketing start focusing on making our customer the hero instead of what we’re doing right now, focusing on the product or what we do or what we sell? What are customer-hero stories, and why should we focus on them now? Mike: First of all, will it be its mission to do customer hero selling and customer hero marketing? It really has to come from the top. It’s really a paradigm. Years ago, Gerhard Gschwandtner, the publisher of Selling Power magazine, said that the CEO’s definition of selling is the DNA of the customer’s experience. 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, let us facilitate that buying using storytelling and story tending. Thus, making the story the foundation is because stories allow people with problems to visualize themselves and solve that problem.  What happens is we create a little story in their brain. And the story involves seeing themselves responding to that once-a-month problem they have differently if they just had somebody’s help or technology or capability. The customer is a hero by using the product, and 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: I love the definition and distinction because I know from the customer’s side, they’re curious about someone like me who’s had a problem like me, and I think that is the challenge that we have, bridging that gap of trust. What can marketers and sellers do to apply empathy a

When did you last evaluate the quality of your B2B personas and contact data? If you’re like most marketers, you know the struggle of getting the right content to the right people. Starting in 2014, Salesforce analyzed over 15 million data points from major B2B databases like Data.com and LinkedIn. The goal? To help marketers understand and improve the accuracy of their targeting. I spoke with Mathew Sweezey, Principal of Marketing Insights at Salesforce, about his research and insights from the report, B2B Personas: Targeting Audiences. Here’s what he had to say. Meet Mathew Sweezey Brian: Mathew, can you tell us a little about your background? Mathew Sweezey: Sure! I was one of the early employees at Pardot, which later became part of Salesforce. I’ve been in the thick of B2B marketing, writing the book Marketing Automation for Dummies and sharing insights as the Principal of Marketing Insight at Salesforce. The Spark Behind the Research Brian: What inspired you to dig into this data? Mathew Sweezey: As marketers, we often focus on simple metrics like the number of email addresses we collect. But we rarely ask the bigger question: How effective are we? We needed a way to evaluate audience data and understand its true value. Key Takeaways: The average cost of a B2B email address is around $150. Most B2B email databases hold about 50,000 contacts, meaning the average database is a $7.5 million asset. The only metric we often use to assess email lists is whether the emails bounce—not a great measure of data quality. The B2B Persona project from Mathew Sweezey Surprising Discoveries in Audience Data Brian: What surprised you most during your analysis? Mathew Sweezey: The biggest surprise was the high level of movement within organizations. People change roles frequently, which can make your database quickly outdated. Key Insights: Role Changes: The contact may no longer fit your target persona even if an email is still valid. Database Churn: B2B contact lists churn at a rate of around 15% per year. Without updates, your database could be irrelevant in 4.2 years. Personas Are Fluid: People enter and leave target personas daily based on job changes and company shifts. Tip: Track growth and churn rates in your personas to understand how quickly your audience changes. Why B2B Marketing is Fundamentally Changing Brian: Your report suggests B2B marketing is undergoing a major shift. Can you elaborate? Mathew Sweezey: Traditionally, businesses controlled both the creation and distribution of media. Today, we live in an infinite media environment where anyone can create and share content. The New Reality: No Captive Audience: Consumers now filter content through algorithms and ad blockers. Content Overload: There’s an overwhelming amount of content, and only the most relevant messages will make it through. Insight: The biggest challenge today is cutting through the noise by making content genuinely valuable. Should We Even Be Asking for Email? Brian: Given what you’ve shared, should marketers change how they view email as a channel? Mathew Sweezey: Yes! Email should be treated as just one part of a broader communication strategy. Consider social media handles, which may have a longer shelf life, as a way to keep in touch with contacts who frequently change roles. Best Practices for Email Marketing: Don’t over-email: If someone hasn’t responded after five messages, remove them from your list. Leverage social data: Tools like Full Contact and Data.com can help append social profiles to email contacts, keeping your data fresh. Diversify Channels: Social handles may give more continuity than email alone. Tip: Think about building relationships across multiple platforms to ensure continuity when roles or emails change. Interesting Statistic: Marketer Tenure vs. Gerbil Lifespan Brian: What’s one statistic you wish more people knew? Mathew Sweezey: Did you know the average tenure for a marketer is only 2.4 years? That means a gerbil’s lifespan is longer than the average marketing role! In fact, marketers have the highest churn rate of any profession. Final Thoughts and Tips Mathew’s Key Takeaways for B2B Marketers: Embrace Change: Recognize that your database is fluid. People move roles often, so focus on quality over quantity. Optimize Your Email Strategy: Email is still valuable, but use it wisely. Consider other channels like social media for longer-lasting connections. Focus on Relevance: Only valuable, personalized messages will stand out in an environment flooded with content. Connect with Mathew: Twitter: @msweezey SlideShare: For his latest presentations You May Also Like Download the full report B2B Personas: Targeting Audiences Empathetic Marketing: How To Connect With Your Customers Lead Nurturing: 5 Useful Tactics to Get More Opportunities 5 Reasons Why Your Buyer Persona’s Aren’t Good Enough

Does your purpose currently impact your marketing, revenue growth, and profit? If not, it should. Here’s why: According to research curated by Mack Fogelson, consider the following: 73% of people care about the company, not just the product, when making a purchase. (BBMG) 50% of purchases are made because of word-of-mouth (Brains on Fire) 85% of purpose-led companies showed positive growth (Harvard Business Review/EY) In sum, purpose matters because it impacts your growth, revenue, and profit. That’s why I interviewed Mack Fogelson (@mackfogelson), the CEO of Genuinely, a consulting and training company. I met Mack through a mutual friend, and we’ve developed a friendship too. I’ve learned a lot about marketing with purpose and why it’s important to revenue growth and profit, and I’m excited to share her thinking with you. You’ll also learn four steps to articulate your purpose. Author’s Note: The transcript was edited for publication. Mack, can you tell us a little bit more about your background? Way long ago, I was 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 and SEM to building community and brands and the full, integrated approach to marketing a company. All of those layers have brought us to where we are now, primarily teaching companies how to use these concepts, frameworks, and the processes that we’ve tested and know really work to grow their companies. We do this to ultimately help businesses in the digital age compete, contend, and build really great, meaningful, and sustainable businesses. What inspired you to focus on purpose and humanize marketing? Around the time I started having my family, I just realized that if I was taking that time away from my kids, I really needed to make it count. I’ve built a business around something significant to me and for my employees. We started by helping companies be better. I started getting into the conversation about community many years back. When many marketers were talking about how to rank #1 in Google, I talked a lot about the benefit of the community and businesses building a community to help their companies. 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: helping companies understand how you bring people together through purpose and drive the organization’s growth. You said that it’s not about what you spend on marketing; it’s the purpose that helps you get focused. Why is that? Because there is so much that has changed, the world isn’t the same. Businesses aren’t the same, and the way the business community works. Customers are not the same. So, we cannot expect marketing to be the same. Mainly we’re looking at consumers now. We expect authentic and authentic 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, and certainly, you need to be incredibly stellar at what you sell and what you make, but it’s about who your business is. And really, it’s about the three components of purpose, people, and promise, and having those pieces work together for any given company so that they can reap all the benefits that purpose brings, like, customer acquisition and retention, customer connection, and employee satisfaction. How can we overcome this disconnect and better connect with our customers? Most companies are pushing their product and their services rather than really leading from what their business is here to do and bridging that gap between the purpose of the company and the people in line with that. So, when the conversation is about the product, there isn’t much of a conversation. Let’s say we’re just talking about Dove. They sell soap. But ultimately, they aim to help women feel good about their bodies. So, it’s the intersection of those things (selling soap and helping women feel good about their bodies); the cultural relevancy of attacking an issue like women’s self-image and body image and wanting actually to help solve that problem in our world is what has given Dove such incredible growth in their organization. When the conversation shifts from being about the product to being about the purpose, it becomes something else 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 originates from the connection they have with the shared values and wanting to do something bigger. Not to say that they don’t generate significant profits from this path; it’s just a different way to it. You’ve talked about why building an authentic and human company is necessary. So why should those in B2B marketing care about this? The purpose is becoming more of a trendy topic; you see it everywhere, and I think that’s the biggest disconnect. Companies think that, on the outside, if the market with purpose, they’re good; they’re safe. And maybe many companies are doing that. But if then the experience with your business is not really all the way to the core, then that’s where you’re going to have significant problems (think about recent events with companies like Uber, United, and Pepsi’s commercial fail). Ultimately, in the day-to-day, companies want to know how do we achieve growth and how we continue to acquire customers? How do we keep our customers? When your business is not looking at building a deeper connection with that customer (which 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 organization’s day-to-day and understanding that it’s not just some visionary thing. Still, it’s about identifying your purpose and then making it relevant to your customers. It’s helping your teams understand what purpose is or isn’t. Many companies think it’s a PR approach or it’s a tagline, or it’s a mission or value statement. And that’s all great, but when it comes down to it, the purpose is really what does that mean to your customer who needs your product and wants to connect more 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.” Companies need a purpose. Because they need to keep their employees, they need a purpose to keep their customers, and ultimately there’s something bigger than their businesses are here to do, and it’s not an altruistic path. It’s a road to profit. It’s just, again, a different way of getting there. Does empathy play a role in understanding your purpose and connecting with customers? Definitely, one of the biggest things that we see is that companies lack the customer connection and, apparently, the connection to their purpose and any type of authentic or personal or empathetic connection to their customer.  Because they’re using data to make decisions (which they have a copious amount of), some companies don’t know what to do with it anymore. Success is not just analyzing your customer data or your audience data, or the psychographic data you get. Success is not just analyzing your customer data or your audience data, or the psychographic data you get on your customers. It’s participating in one-to-one interviews to understand their behavior truly and, more accurately, knowing what they’re thinking and feeling. Because when you get that digital data about your customer, it gives 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 say 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. But then, by understanding that thinking and feeling, you can then 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: That’s where we were going to go next. I often talk to marketers who really don’t get to spend face time with the customers they’re looking to influence or reach outside their companies. The takeaway here is that marketers need to spend more time connecting with clients, not just through their channel of their sales team, but actually having these conversations and spending time practicing and using their empathy to do just that. Technology is getting in the way of customer connection. Mack: You and I talk about this a lot with technology, and how everybody thinks that technology is a magic pill; they believe that there must be a tool or piece of technology or software that is going to help them build their customer base faster. The fact of the matter is that technology is part of the root of the problem. Companies need a purpose; they need empathy because they’re trying to solve these much deeper connection issues with their customers by using technology instead of speaking with their clients. Tools and technology can’t help you do that. So, I think the companies that understand how to use technology wisely need to be able to use these tools at a certain level, even to do a bunch of the heavy lifting and dirty work that we couldn’t take part in many years ago. But success is in taking that data and pairing it with the one-to-one participation in the flesh with these people to understand who they are, what they really need, and help them get their roadbloc

Have you made empathetic marketing part of your strategy? If not, you should. Let me explain. I interviewed Michael Brenner (@BrennerMichael), the CEO of MarketingInsiderGroup.com. Michael has received recognition across the Internet for his knowledge and role in shaping content marketing as we know it today. He’s a sought-after keynote speaker and co-author of The Content Formula. I’m excited to bring his thoughts on empathy to you. Author’s Note: The transcript was edited for publication. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and your background? Michael: Yeah, sure. Thanks, Brian. It’s a pleasure to be with you today, and I look forward to talking about empathy, which I think is important in today’s landscape. As we get older,  I’ve needed to summarize my career much more quickly than I used to. But a 20 plus year career in sales and marketing and leadership roles in various kinds of companies, large and small. About ten years ago, I was hired by SAP as their first head of digital marketing.  I became their first VP of Global Content Marketing and mainly helped them modernize the digital marketing approaches that they were taking. Very much taking an empathetic approach like we’re going to discuss. There’s such a need, I think, for brands to understand.  They want to do it, I think but struggle with getting it done and changing the culture inside their organizations. That’s where I’m focused now. I built Marketing Insider Group, primarily, as kind of a one-person 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 cultural challenge that marketers face today. Now I’m dedicating my life to trying to help as many companies, like many brands, as many marketers as I can, to understand how to put themselves in a leadership position by helping their customers. Brian: That’s fantastic. I came across your article on LinkedIn, and several people forwarded it to me and said, “Brian, you should check this out for your book.” What inspired you to start writing and talking about empathy recently? What I’ve found is as I talk to senior executives – I have a good story. We could maybe get to it 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.” Often, I find someone in a position of power (with their arms folded) asking challenging questions like, “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 showing a better return on investment with marketing that focuses on delivering content people want. Even after all those sorts of financial objections are removed, I still found resistance inside many companies. I think we can talk about this in a little more depth, but there’s an instinct inside a business to promote itself. That’s counter-intuitive. That’s why I came to this kind of realization that the missing element, and you’ve been talking about this for a long time, is empathy. It’s missing inside corporate cultures and structures. Empathy is the most counter-intuitive secret to success.  Why is that? For instance, the posts that I put up on Facebook.  I don’t do a lot of business content on there. 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 tend to do in the social world; that we express to the connections we have. It’s our instinct. I think there’s nothing wrong with wanting people to see that you’re happy and healthy and you’re doing fun things. That’s the instinct we carry with us when we walk into the company, with the companies that we work. The instinct of the business person is to want to promote itself and put its best face forward.  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. [clickToTweet tweet=”The most counter-intuitive secret to success in business and life is empathy.” quote=”The most counter-intuitive secret to success in business and life is empathy.”] Brian:  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 spoke of this collective amnesia we have. It seems that we change how we think about our customers as we walk into the building and put on our marketing and sales hat. How can we overcome our collective amnesia and relate to customers? I love the term coined by Noah Fenn, who is head of video sales and strategy at AOL. He talked about how this instinct to self-promote: it’s like collective amnesia. And what he means by that is like I said: that although we’re real people when we walk into our places of work and then forget that we are real people. We forget how to market to people just like us. That’s essentially collective amnesia. We walk in; we want to present and promote the companies and the products that we sell. That’s precisely the kind of thing that we as consumers don’t want. Someone heading 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 group of individuals generally behind those kinds of decisions, and that’s the collective amnesia that we talk about in the article. We make judgments in the business, as people, that often forget that we’re marketing to real people just like us. Brian: It’s funny, and I think it’s interesting. As I talk to marketers, we realize just how cynical we can be too. And I believe that it’s just getting out of our heads. We need to put ourselves in our customers’ shoes and remember we are ones (customers) too. What do you wish marketers and sellers would do more?  I think the counter-intuitive nature of it is 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 defend our self-promotional actions by saying, “Well, that’s the game we’re playing.” As you said, we’re skeptical, and we live in a noisy world. The loudest shouter gets the most attention. That’s precisely what I think the data 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. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t mean we have to let go of the need to drive results. That’s why I love the line that when you help your customers, it’s the best way to help your business. What are some suggestions you have on how we could get better at this? The secret to being effective and efficient with the marketing that we do starts with this understanding that we are real people, trying to market to real people, and the best way to do that is actually to be helpful. It’s to want to help them. It is not just with the products and services you sell, but to help them as people and help society solve its problems. I think it’s a nobler cause, and it’s a much more challenging thing to do inside corporate cultures. Brian:  I’m so glad you’re bringing this up. When I talk to marketers and sellers, I find that they don’t want to feel like they’re impacting the top line and bottom line. They want to feel like what they’re doing is making a real difference beyond the numbers. Michael: There are enough people out there talking about this desire to work for companies with a real purpose or even a kind of social mission. Even at the individual level, as you said, we all want to do work that matters. One of the insights that I’ve found is that being productive in my job was never enough to make me happy. I was only ever happy when I was effective and impacted something that I believed in. It’s the combination of both meaning and impact. We all make an impact. It’s just about whether we make a bearing 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 where you’re solving a problem. Again, I think it just comes back to being empathetic allows us, as employees, as people, to feel like we’re making an impact in a way that matters to somebody. Brian: I liked when you said, “We all make an impact, whether it’s for good or bad. We’re making an impact right now.” Can you share any stories or examples of applying empathy to marketing/sales? Well, I have a positive and a negative story. It’s not negative. It’s a lesson that’s public, and I got a glimpse of it in private. I’m a customer and a huge fan, and I have to say as a caveat to this—big fan of Wells Fargo. 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 actually solving customer problems, and there’s one way to 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

Want to excel in social selling or help your sales team succeed? If you’re not focused on social selling yet, you should be. Here’s why: B2B marketing has evolved to align better with how people buy today. But now it’s time for sales to catch up. As Jill Rowley, social selling pioneer and Chief Evangelist, explains, “We’re long overdue for a transformation, a modernization of the way we sell.” Recently, I sat down with Jill, who brings years of expertise in marketing automation and B2B sales. She shared her insights on social selling and how to do it right. Editor’s note: This transcript has been edited for clarity and length. Brian: Jill, can you tell us a bit about your background? Jill: Sure, Brian. I describe myself as a sales professional trapped in a marketer’s body. I spent 13 years in software sales, and for 10 of those years, I was selling to marketers. This unique experience lets me understand both sides of the equation—sales and marketing. For the past three years, I’ve been helping companies use social media strategically in sales, creating programmatic, organization-wide approaches to social selling. The Shift to Social Selling Brian: What inspired you to start social selling? Jill: Honestly, it was my frustration with traditional sales methods. Cold calling and mass emails weren’t getting my prospects’ attention. Social media offered a way to be where my customers were, be visible, add value, and join the conversations they care about. It was also an invaluable research tool for understanding my buyers. Outdated Sales Tactics: Why They’re Failing Brian: Are salespeople still being pressured to make more calls and send more emails? Jill: Yes, and that’s a huge part of the problem. The mandate for many sales teams is simply to “make more calls, send more emails.” But more isn’t better—more relevant is better. Today, everyone has access to contact data, so prospects are flooded with generic, impersonal messages. Automation tools are only amplifying this with sequences that come across as tone-deaf and absurd by the seventh touchpoint. The result? Prospects are annoyed, not engaged. Key Insight: “More isn’t better. More relevant is better.” – Jill Rowley The Need for a Mindset Shift in Sales Brian: Why does it seem like things are only getting worse? Jill: It’s because technology is enabling bad practices. Sales leaders need to wake up to the fact that buyers have changed dramatically. People buy differently now—they do their own research, trust peers, and value insights over pitches. But too many sales teams are still using outdated methods that don’t align with this new buyer behavior. Takeaway: Buyers have changed. Sales needs to evolve to match how people and companies want to buy today. Common Social Selling Mistakes Brian: What mistakes do you see in social selling? Jill: A big one is taking old-school tactics and applying them in new-school channels. Too many salespeople are using the “me, me, me” approach on social media, where they talk about their product, their company, and what they want, rather than focusing on the prospect. I recently received a generic LinkedIn invite from someone claiming to be a social selling expert. That’s a red flag! If you’re not even personalizing your outreach, you’re missing the point of social selling entirely. Pro Tip: Always personalize your LinkedIn invites—it’s your first impression, so make it matter. Empathy: The Heart of Social Selling Brian: How does empathy play into social selling? Jill: Empathy is critical. Social selling allows you to see through the eyes of your customer. LinkedIn, for example, lets you get insights into someone’s skills, career history, and what others say about them. Use this information to craft a thoughtful approach. Empathy isn’t about pushing a sale—it’s about genuinely understanding what the customer needs and how you can help them achieve their goals. That’s how you build trust and rapport. Takeaway: Empathy in social selling is about understanding and respecting the customer’s needs. It’s the foundation of trust. Tips for Effective Social Selling Brian: What tips would you give to those looking to improve their social selling skills? Jill: First, if you’re ineffective offline, you’ll be even less effective online. Social media amplifies both the good and the bad, so focus on adding value, not just pushing for a quick sale. Social selling also requires ongoing training. Platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook each have their own cultures. Sales teams should invest in training to learn how to use these platforms effectively and align them with their overall sales goals. Pro Tip: Social selling isn’t about rushing to close; it’s about being a facilitator of the buyer’s journey. Real-World Success in Social Selling Brian: Can you share any examples of companies doing social selling well? Jill: ON24 is a great example. They put their sales team through a 10-week training program with Sales For Life, culminating in a certification that requires reps to use social media to source new opportunities. This structured approach ensures that the team is aligned and ready to succeed with social selling. The Future of Sales and Social Selling Brian: What excites you about the future of sales and social selling? Jill: I’m excited about the balance between technology and human connection. AI and other tools can take over administrative tasks, freeing up sales reps to focus on empathy, research, and relationship-building. But remember, technology can’t replace human interaction—it’s there to support it. Key Insight: The future of sales is a balance between technology and the human touch. Use tools to enhance empathy, not replace it. Final Thoughts on Social Selling Jill: In social selling, trust is your greatest asset. To build trust, focus on the buyer, not yourself. Mutual benefit matters. As a mentor once told me, “To be interesting, be interested in something other than yourself.” Takeaway: To be a successful social seller, show you care, share valuable knowledge, and focus on the customer’s needs. Connect with Jill The best way to connect with Jill is on Twitter at @Jill_Rowley or via LinkedIn. (Remember to personalize your invite!) Further Reading Sales-Marketing Alignment: 8 Tactics for Social Selling Success Lead Generation: How Social Selling is Changing the Game

How can you drive fast growth with B2B marketing? In this interview, you’ll hear from Jim Fowler, founder of Owler, on what he’s learned to grow fast. Owler – a free competitive intelligence platform – went from 0 to over 500,000 users. And they’re on pace to exceed a million users by the end of this year. I first met Fowler when he was the co-founder of the cloud-based contact management platform Jigsaw, which he sold to Salesforce.com for $175 million (now Data.com). Writers Note: The transcript has was edited for publication. Brian: Jim, tell us about your organization.  Jim: Sure, Brian. It’s a pleasure to be on the show. Owler is a competitive intelligence platform. All business professionals use it, but our biggest participants are sales and marketing folks that really need to keep their finger on the pulse of their competitive grasps. 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 that people can absorb. That’s the key thing that we’re a tool that helps people outsmart their competition of the competitive intelligence platform. Brian:  Your brand name is derived from your last name, right? Jim: One of my marketers came up to me as we were naming the company, and we were looking at a bunch of different names like Jigsaw.  I love that name. I mean, it’s a simple word putting the pieces of the puzzle together. Yeah, it worked great. That was a high bar to get over. She came to me and went, “Fowler, I’ve got the perfect name for our company: Owler.” I laughed and said, “Yeah, haha. 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. By the way, the Owl’s name is Jim, so Jimf Owler. Any of your listeners are users of Owler, and I imagine there are thousands. They’ll be familiar with our owl that we call Jimpf. After you sold Jigsaw to Salesforce.com, why didn’t you decide to ride off into the sunset?  What inspired you to start Owler? Well, that is a great question. I can tell you they’re a few times along this path that I’ve wondered that same thing. Startups are not easy. I equate a startup with a bag of problems. There’s just a bunch of issues to solve. You know, I was still a pretty young guy. Jigsaw was a great acquisition. It was a $175-million-dollar acquisition at that time. By far and away, the largest Salesforce has 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 many people, but more importantly, build products that people love. I mean, that’s 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 because you want to … 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 love. It’s a big endorphin hit. How did you acquire so many active users so quickly? Yeah. There’re 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 ’13 and ’14, as we struggled a way to get a really engaging product, 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?” If you’re feeling pain, that’s the normal situation. Jigsaw never grew this fast. Jigsaw was more of 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 dial really 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. There’s always an eighty-twenty rule, by the way, for startups. I’m a big believer that you want to focus on the eighty, and then once you become a more mature company, focus on the twenty. This is a classic principle that eighty percent of your return will come with twenty percent of the effort. And then the last twenty percent of your return is going to require eighty percent of the effort. So make sure that you’re hammering that first eighty percent return with twenty 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. What are some of the other lessons you have learned along with the way? 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 slightly different because it takes more time to get users, but I still argue that it’s the same.  … It is that 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. We found this at Jigsaw, and we’re finding it even more now 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 viral grows exponentially. You can only get the hockey stick with some 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 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 compelling product. I recommend a parallel path on SEO and product optimization. What do you see as the future of B2B sales marketing? I would say that the biggest trend I see is when I talked 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 to 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 will get more and more communications. It’s 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 harder 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 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 hundred and forty character limit because all people will read, which makes the job tough. With that in mind, all of our communication is crisp, simple, scannable data. For instance, our descriptions of companies are one sentence long. We only allow a hundred and forty character description of a company because we know people won’t read more than that. I think understanding these trends is critical regarding future success. It’s going to continue to accelerate, is my prediction. What would you say to B2B marketers out there who want to help their sales team sell more effectively today? I’m a big believer that marketing’s number one job is to take away salespeople’s excuses for not making their number. What you don’t want is you don’t want the finger-pointing. Do you know what I mean? 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 salesperson before I founded Jigsaw, I’m just a big believer that it’s all about numbers. Sales are 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 marketing’s job is to take away their excuses. It’s basic funnel management that 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,