Michael Webb:                 Hello everyone. This is Michael Webb with the Sales Process Excellence Podcast. I am excited to introduce you today to someone I have followed for a long time. Her name is Ardath Albee. And she is the author of two revolutionary books in marketing. The first one, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale. And the second one is a book called Digital Relevance: Developing Marketing Content and Strategies That Drive Results. So Ardath, welcome to the podcast. I really am glad you're here.

Ardath Albee:                    Thank you, Michael. It's a pleasure to join you.

Michael Webb:                 And I think it would really be helpful for my audience if you could spend a few minutes and just tell us where you've been in your career and how you got into doing what you're doing now.

Ardath Albee:                    Sure. So I come at this from, not a marketing background, so I ran companies in a past life, mainly hotels and country clubs, so on the B2C side. And then one day my sister called and asked me to move to Minneapolis and help her build a software company. And I kind of laughed and told her to go get funding, thinking that she would go away. And she got funding. And so I moved to Minneapolis and we built the company. So this is back in the year 2000. So think, the first-ever iteration of marketing automation software designed to also run your website that marketers could use without IT. And back then, of course, it was a big heavy lift, a custom install, because we didn't have SAS. And corporations at that time had basically taken their brochures and put them online and turned them into websites, remember? Back in 2000.

Michael Webb:                 Oh yeah, right.

Ardath Albee:                    So they've moved that content into the new technology and then they'd say, Well, nothing changed, nothing happened. And so I started going out and looking at their websites and thinking, no wonder, who wants to read this. And so my background is, I'm a writer, I always have been, have a degree in English as well as a degree in business. And so I started helping them rewrite their websites, and focus on their customers more so than their products, which was a fight kicking and screaming a lot of times. And they started seeing change and they started asking for more and more help. So in 2007 when I realized I could make a living doing something I love, I jumped and became a consultant, and that's how this all got started.

Michael Webb:                 Interesting. So there's a pretty famous study that's been going on by CSO Insights. You might be familiar with that. For the last seven years in a row, the percentage of B2B salespeople making their quotas has declined, seven years in a row, in a time of recovery in the economy.

Ardath Albee:                    Yeah. I think even more frightening than that is that what's the percentage right now? 50, right around 50% of sales reps are to make quota.

Michael Webb:                 Yeah. That same company said it proved that a CEO of a company might be better off taking the capital they invest in their sales and marketing organizations, especially with sales organization, and putting it on the craps table in Vegas because the odds are better.

Ardath Albee:                    That's just terrible.

Michael Webb:                 Why? But why is that happening in your view?

Ardath Albee:                    Well, I'll tell you what I see and I've been doing work on both the marketing and the sales side, but what one of the things that I thought was really interesting was something that I heard a lot about at the Gartner conferences this year.

And one of those things is that buyers used to say nothing's relevant to them. We're not producing content that speaks to them. It's all about our products or whatever. Now they're saying, Hey, 85 of them are saying, we go out and we find quality content, but you know what? It's still not relevant to us. And then they say, and it's confusing us because there are no apples to apples comparison between what all the different vendors say. And as buying groups get bigger, every one of them goes out and does their own research, and they all bring back this information that conflicts with each other. And so these buying groups are now struggling to deconflict all this information.

In fact, Gartner says it adds another 20% of time to their buying process if they even decide to buy at all. And as many deals are ending in no-decision as companies or vendors are losing to the competition, which is frightening because buyers can't figure out how to even move forward. And so-

Michael Webb:                 Wow-

Ardath Albee:                    It's difficult. It's changed a lot. Buyer expectations have increased exponentially, just because they're business to business doesn't mean they forget about their consumer experiences when they're going into the office, right? So they have expectations of instant information and being able to find things that are relevant to them. And we're not, as B2B companies, really following through with that. But the other thing that I find really interesting is a lot of what I hear is go forth and provide value, but nobody ever defines, what exactly does that mean. What's considered valuable, right? And so what I find is that companies really still don't know their buyers. They don't keep up with them.

In fact, a lot of times they do the research or some of it creates a persona and say, okay, great, check the box. And they put it in a folder. And they don't use those insights or that information to inform their strategies, their go-to-market strategy, their marketing strategy, their sales engagement strategy. They just say, okay, we did that work, file it away. And they don't understand how to use it. And so what we get is content that yes, arguably is high value, but it's not doing anything to help orchestrate the buying process. And your buyers don't care whether they're getting stuff from marketing or from sales, they just care that it's relevant to them, that it matches their context, that it provides some kind of valuable insight they can actually use.

Michael Webb:                 There's a wonderful quote from one of your blog posts. It was, "We need to start looking at the buying process as a continuous experience that sometimes plays to the strengths of marketing and other times to those of the sales team." So are you saying that the prospects are looking for conversation? Help us understand how that issue of figuring out, how to give into relative chats applying to this desire for conversation if it does?

Ardath Albee:                    Yeah, absolutely. I think it does. And one of the things that I find really interesting, it's one of my favorite parts of building personas, is understanding all of the questions that they have to get answered i...