Christian Klepp  00:00

Many marketing and sales teams out there miss the mark with potential prospects because they focus on products and features instead of the customer’s pain points and key challenges, both teams need to be more aligned in terms of how they can help transform the customer’s business by addressing their pain points. So how can understanding your B2B buyers drive true business growth. Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers on a Mission podcast, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today, I’ll be talking to Braedi DeLong, who will be answering this question. She’s the CEO of The Sales Collective who helps companies build successful sales teams. Tune in to find out more about what her mission is. Off we go. I’m gonna say Braedi DeLong, welcome to the show. 

Braedi DeLong  00:47

Thank you for having me. 

Christian Klepp  00:49

So great to have you on, Braedi. We had such an amazing pre interview conversation in spite of some hiccups, right? I’m just gonna leave it at that. But I’m really looking forward to this conversation, because folks are going to ask me this, or they usually do. They’re like, Wait, hang on a second. Christian, isn’t your show about B2B marketers, so why do you have a sales person on the show? Well, I think that for at least in my opinion, and from my experience, it makes perfect sense to get sales people involved in B2B marketing, but we’re gonna dive right in, and I’m really looking forward to discussing this with you.

Braedi DeLong  01:27

Same and we both hold such a belief about the core value of aligning sales and marketing because they are part of the revenue team.

Christian Klepp  01:35

Absolutely, absolutely okay, so Braedi, you’re on a mission, I’m gonna say, to help B2B companies to build scalable, winning sales teams. So for this conversation, I’d like to focus on the following topic, which I think is really important. It’s how understanding your B2B buyers can drive true business growth. So I’d like to kick off this conversation with two questions, and I’m happy to repeat them. So the first question is, why do you think it’s so important for B2B marketers to understand who the organization’s customers and buyers are? And number two, where do you see most marketing teams struggle regarding the above?

Braedi DeLong  02:14

Yeah, it’s a great question. So when it comes to understanding your buyers, there’s so many marketers and sales organizations alike that deploy what is known as the spray and pray strategy, where if we just get really high awareness, the customers will kind of come and trickle down out of that really high awareness. And there’s it’s a bit of a fallacy in both organizations that if you just gain a considerable awareness that the business will generate, that it creates an excessive cost of customer acquisition, the amount of work and effort it takes to get that awareness machine, and it doesn’t help you create a actual dialed in, scalable structure or system. So a lot of times, we’re really wasting resources and efforts across the full spectrum of the revenue machine, because we just haven’t dialed in. Who are our buyers, who are our ideal customers? What do they look like from a company perspective, who are the actual buying personas that can purchase our stuff. Where do they come from? From a campaign level? So as we think about like creating sustainable business growth, understanding who your buyers are is really at the core of creating a healthy business model. And I know I said a lot in that statement with very few words. But there’s one of the biggest fallacies in the revenue engine, is understanding how that creates sustainable business.

Christian Klepp  03:51

Absolutely, absolutely. And I couldn’t agree more. I mean this, this spray and pray. It’s interesting that you still see day in, day out, whether it’s on LinkedIn or in your inbox, people that still subscribe to this school of thought, and I can’t claim credit for this, because many people have mentioned it on LinkedIn. You don’t even see SDRs (Sales Development Representative) or BDRs (Business Development Representatives) like reaching out to you in a passive, aggressive way. They reach out to you in an active, aggressive way. And let me give you an example. If they send you an email saying, hey, Braedi, you know, your profile caught my attention. And love what you’re doing at the sales collective, although they have no idea what it is, you actually do, cue sales pitch, then you ignore that email. Then they send a follow up, bumping this, bumping this to the top of your inbox. And I think by the third or the fourth round, then they say something like, are you actually the person that I should be talking to, or could you direct me to the person who’s in charge? I’m like, wow. And you know, we can sit here and joke about it, but the reality of it is, it’s actually pretty shocking that there are sales people out there that think that that will help them get in the door. So what are your thoughts on that? Like, Why is this still happening in 2025?

Braedi DeLong  05:13

So I think it’s getting worse in 2025 to be fair, like as more and more people move to AI (Artificial Intelligence) and leveraging AI. AI is really limited to just cloning what it’s been trained on. So it’s actually these ineffective strategies are becoming bigger very the spray and pray is actually growing because of the accessibility of the tooling and it, you know, it’s, I had a, actually, it was my, yeah, last night I got a LinkedIn prospecting. And I gave the person a shot. They sent me a connection request with a very thoughtful note in the connection request. And I was like, Okay, I’m going to accept this one. So I accept it, and I thank him for his thoughtful note. I was like, I recognize you as a BDR, I know I’m getting to get some sort of pitch. I know I’m being prospected. But he did the thoughtful work, and I wanted to reward it. But then his next message to me was, what are the business priorities for you right now? And because he sent me the thoughtful note, I decided. I was like, Okay, I’m gonna give him a moment of my time, effort and energy. I’m not just gonna go ahead and, like, move on with my life. 

Braedi DeLong  06:28

And I was like, I want you to think about what you just did, and I want you to think about it in this different social context. Imagine you met a married couple at a social event, and you just introduced yourself and learned their names. I’m like, Are you with me? And he’s like, yeah. It’s like, I want you to imagine your next question to them after you met Beth and Jeff, that you g