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

“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

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

Brian Carroll:

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:

Brent Adamson:

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:

Brent Adamson:

Brian Carroll:

Brent Adamson:

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:

Brent Adamson:

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

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.

Brent Adamson:

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

Brian Carroll:

Brent Adamson:

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:

Brent Adamson:

Brent Adamson:

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.

Brian Carroll:

Brent Adamson:

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.

Brian Carroll:

Brent Adamson:

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.

Brian Carroll:

Brent Adamson:

Brian Carroll:

Brent, thanks as always for joining me.

Brent Adamson:

If you found this episode helpful:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 environment or our overcrowded prisons and just does it through the marketing department.

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

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

What is your purpose as a company?

“Well, I make cars.”

That’s fine, but fundamentally, what are you contributing?

How are you justifying your company in terms of making life better in society?

Dr. Kotler: Brand activism must come down from the top. It should be in the discussions on several levels of the company.

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

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

So that’s probably a motivation for the CEO and the executive suite people to say we really want to get into choosing our values carefully, and putting them into our brand framework, because it will help not only those customers we now have, but to attract more customers, and also to excite our own employees about our purpose.

Brian: I get that marketers can’t do this on their own. It really needs to be top-down from the CEO, the board, looking at the whole executive team, so what can marketers do? Are there things they can do to support brand activism?

Dr. Kotler: Well, if the impulse is going to come from the CMO, chief marketing officer, here’s what can be done…

Let’s say you’re in a company that is not doing brand activism. There’s no display of their values or the issues they care about.

One could ask (the CMO or the marketing department), “wouldn’t it help if we start worrying about the future of water and whether there’ll be enough to make our Coca-Cola?”

The water problem will be a massive issue in the future.

Maybe they should bring that to the executive suite. Putting into their brand work some mention of doing what can conserve water and protect good water.

So, it is stimulated initially by someone in marketing that sees that it would be an excellent move to refresh the brand.

You know, every brand gets tired over time.

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

So, the brand manager who begins to care a lot doesn’t have to be quiet about it and may successfully get the company at the top level to endorse this thing.

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

If there’s any level of real risk, brand activism probably won’t be adopted.

So, I really believe that brand activism is something to be brought to the attention of the company’s senior management by the CMO, or another way, to consider taking some action on that.

Brian: As I’m listening to you, I hear the idea that marketers really need to start with a plan, and as I understand, you put together a framework so that people can put brand activism into their organization.

Can you just describe the framework you put together for brand activism?

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

The models that we distinguish are, first, it could be social activism.

That would mean taking a stand on gender, LGBT, race problems, aging problems, education, or healthcare. That would be to identify your company as being concerned about social issues.

The second would be workplace activism. Instead, the company might want to address issues of corporate organization, CEO pay, worker compensation, or labor and union relations. So, the brand may really be addressing workplace issues.

The third possibility is that the brand addresses political issues, so we call that political activism complaining about lobbying, voter rights, or gerrymandering.

Or the fourth form might be environmental activism, where there’s concern about air and water pollution, emissions, and conservation.

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

Finally, you may go toward legal activism and discuss policies that impact corporations, such as tax policies, citizenship policies, or employment laws.

So that’s the framework, and we provide a system of maps and canvases and scoring systems that could help a company that gets serious about adopting brand activism. By a scoring system, it would be a system to see how the company is viewed before it went into brand activism, what it is expected to accomplish in the minds of its customers and the public about being active in that set of issues, and what is their score.

How impactful has been their adoption of that issue. And on what? On sales growth, on profit levels, market shares, etc.?

So, we do need some scoring system to know if we should increase our brand activism on that issue, or just stay where we are, or if it’s not working for us at all.

Brian: The thing that I’m hearing is that we need to decide our purpose or reason for being beyond money. That’s part of the purpose, the overarching goal, and from there, then the framework helps me show where I am at today and how I can improve. How do you see empathy fitting into this for the customer?

From a customer standpoint, for example. I’ve heard some critique for women’s issues, and companies “pink it up.” Meaning they put pink on things for women’s issues, but it’s not authentic, and we’ve seen some other brands do that. Do you have some thoughts on this?

Dr. Kotler: This can get lost in what we might call very superficial talk by the company. That there’s no real commitment.

We would say to the company; you’re active about being against pollution; what have you done with that position?

If the only thing you’ve done is talk against pollution, but no action, then we’re not as impressed with that.

There’s a term you may remember, green grassing. It’s about appearing to be a green company, but just through talk and not doing much about it.

I believe there should be researching customers and figuring out what their questions would be; For example, “do you know whether company X cares about some social issue” and if you find out that hardly any customer of yours noticed that you took a stand on that issue, then it’s not working.

Probably because you’re just talking it up and not committing, so, we need scoring.

When it works well, we believe it enhances the firm’s value in the minds of existing customers and the employees and potential customers. It may even be an entry point that discussing pollution opens your company to many people who don’t know much about your company, but they know a lot about pollution. They’re happy to see another ally in the fight against pollution.

The word empathy suggests that will customers really be empathetic with the company, feeling that the company is sincere and caring genuinely about that issue, or will they not believe it’s authentic?

Additional Resources:

The Case for Brand Activism – A Discussion with Philip Kotler and Christian Sarkar

Purpose matters to marketing

Get the book: Brand Activism: From Purpose to Action

Why does 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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: The point you made is you went to the people who we’re talking to the customer. They had that insight. And ironically, we’re in marketing, we’re supposed to influence messages of customers, but we are not in the building.

Brian: You have a lot of great stories in your book. Do you have a favorite story? And if so, which one?

Michael: Yeah. One of the things I talk about how to create empathy inside the organization is to rethink the org chart. I talk about how org charts are boxes and lines, and they show who’s above and below us.

Basically, they highlight who directs orders down to the minions who do the stuff, do the work. I talk about the org charts miss the most important person, and that’s the customer. I’m not suggesting every company should recreate the org chart, but if we rethink the org chart, it will look more like a bullseye, right?

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

One is Amanda Todorovich from Cleveland Clinic. She has a viral empathy video. If you Google Cleveland Clinic empathy video, you’ll see an internal… It was initially an internally created video to try to get the executives inside Cleveland Clinic to see that Cleveland Clinic is more than just a business. It’s more than a hospital operation.

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

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

It’s kind of empathy writ large in a way to a corporate mission in many cases all the way down to the content that Amanda and her team create every day, which serves patient needs. And so that’s one of my favorite stories from an empathy perspective.

There are probably 15 stories. I could keep going. I’ll stop myself because I love talking about the people, I call champions, the champion leaders, the people that celebrated others, and achieved success because of that. That’s the counterintuitive nature of empathy. It’s helping others, live your life in service of others, and you get what you want. And that’s really at the heart of the book.

Brian: Well, in my experience, I 100% agree. I’ve always had the best marketing selling feels like helping because it is. But I had a Jerry Maguire moment where I realized I wasn’t living that. My team was more focused on trying to convert people instead of connecting and help.  We asked hey, what do customers care about? How can I help them get it? Ironically when we stopped trying to get leads, we got 303% more opportunities because we were really helping people.

Do you have tips for developing more empathy customers that you could share with our listeners?

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

For example, your sales leader comes over and says, I’d like a brochure for this niche industry event we’re going to. It’s going to cost you $4,000, and it’s a couple of designers and a printer to get created. Just ask, “What’s in it for the customer?” Do people really read our brochures? Are they going to throw it right in the trash? You might think it’s essential to stuff that inside the conference bag, but I’ve never read a brochure myself from a conference.

If we ask what’s in it for the customer as opposed to thinking of our jobs as just doing what the sales team or the product team or our boss tells us to do, the answer, I think, is sometimes surprising.

We wouldn’t do half of what we do if we asked what’s in it for the customer.

I offer three deeper level questions that there’s a couple of examples of people who have done this. I call it the push back. It just goes a bit deeper.

Who is this for?

Why is it important?

How are we going to measure the impact?

And if you ask those three, those are three deeper level questions from them what’s in it for the customer sort of overview.

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

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

Any other things you wish I would’ve asked about before we just close?

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

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

I don’t think I’m smarter than other people. If it works for me, I think it’s the secret for many of us to live a life that’s maybe a little more meaningful, a little more impactful. I just talk to so many people. I talk about this crisis of engagement and empathy. The world feels like a meaner place these days.

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

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

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

Be you is because the people that are, I think, living their fullest life, but they know what their purpose is, and they’re working in support of that, and it’s often in service of others.

Download the Mean People Suck Companion Guide PDF courtesy of Michael Brenner

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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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

So, the message there is if you’re not connected to your profession on the weekend, you’re not a top performer.

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.

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 work-life balance. Why is that?

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.

If I draw a boundary or install a limit, it takes work to move. So, I’ve adopted boundaries, and when I say “I have,” we have because I’ve done it in community, first and foremost, with my wife.

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

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

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, mental, emotional, and spiritual is essential.

So, I go to the gym regularly. I meditate.

I take time just to stop and think and shut off my phone and close my computer.

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

So, it’s those types of things that I protect.

The counter to that is I’m so much wildly more productive in my work because there is a boundary around the time that I’m working. I’m not engaging in friendly conversation or texting or meeting a buddy for lunch. I am absolutely focused in on what I’m doing for a living.

So, my clients get the best of me as well as my relationships.

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

Carlos: Yeah, you’re right. It’s not easy to do.

I’m the first to say I don’t have this all figured out.

I’m on the journey with everybody else. I may be a few steps ahead, but I also know people who are so much far ahead than I am. It’s something I’ve been doing for two years. I shared with Suzanne the other day, I hate when people say, “Well, they’ve really done their work.” Like we’ve all arrived, we should all be experiencing.

Three weeks ago, I picked up my phone and wanted to check my email at 8:00 at night, and Suzanne’s like, “So, what are we doing because this is two nights in a row?”

And it was utterly appropriate, total gentle, not any kind of like … But that’s what I wanted.

Carlos: Anyway, back to the question. I think, first and foremost, you have to do it in the community with your closest of relationships.

If that’s a spouse, that’s a boyfriend, girlfriend, close friend, close co-worker, even your boss, right?

Say, “I want to give the best of myself in all aspects of my life, professionally, personally, whatever else.”

Whether it’s work, if you’re going to the gym by yourself, I want to give the best while I’m there.

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

I was talking to somebody the other day who was talking to me how much they value their physical fitness.

Then literally, almost in the same breath, it was like, “Well, I don’t have time to go to the gym.”

Okay, so you don’t really value your physical fitness.

When I say to them even go for a run outside because if you’re shunning that, or if you’re shunning the annual checkup or whatever that is, you don’t value … You may say you do, but your actions say you don’t.

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

When you do that in a community, you’re going to get a much different perspective than if we just do it in isolation.

Because often the people we surround ourselves with, that we are close with, can kind of point out our blind spots which are of massive value to us and should be embraced.

I would say those are a couple of things that I would highly recommend.

Brian: That’s really good. I can identify with the blind spots and the need to have a feedback loop. There are things every person has that we can’t see how we’re living our life or how we’re showing up.

We won’t know unless we ask people, “What do you see that I’m missing?” It sounds like to get to that place you got to have an intention or purpose, too.

How would someone start the conversation about this?

Carlos: I think it’s starting with being really honest, first and foremost, about here’s where I’m at. I’m not here to judge people who are going to work 14 hours a day.

If that’s what you and your community have decided is good and works for everybody, who am I to say you’re wrong?

That’s not my place.

I think just asking the question, “How are we doing?”

Asking the question, “Hey, here’s what I want to be doing.”

I value family time, I value fitness, I value fun, which can be a value. It may be something you like.

Ask “What do you see that I’m doing that’s getting in the way of that?”

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

Part of the work I had to do was to sit down and hear some pretty unpleasant things.

I didn’t want to hear about things I had done, the choices I had made, the decisions I had made.

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

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

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

I’m like, “Yeah, you’re right.”

Even if I see it, I’m not going to respond to it.

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

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

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

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

Daymond John’s, “Rise and grind.” We’re not real entrepreneurs unless we do this. I think those voices are so loud, and it’s this idea … I couple that with if I’m the scarce resource to my organization, which means I’m working long hours. I’m always available, we make that part of our identity, it is a perfect storm.

Carlos: The reason it is destructive is we only have a certain amount of time each and every day. 24 hours a day, 86,400 seconds.

If I’m devoting the majority of that time to my work, something has to suffer. Either I suffer which, if I do, I can’t give the best of myself to my relationships.

So, either way, my relationships take a hit.

When I go back to fundamentally as human beings we were wired for a connection, then we have to start to think about, so, what does that mean?

When we begin to move against what we’re wired for fundamentally, we begin to see anxiety, we begin to see anger, we start to see sleeplessness, we begin to see loneliness.

Carlos: I was doing research on that this morning. It is off the charts.

Over half of Americans are saying they have feelings of loneliness even though we’re so connected.

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

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

That’s why I had Suzanne write a chapter because there is a story on the other side of every hustle story.

I lived that hustle lifestyle for far too long. It’s not sustainable. It did damage to us as a family and to me personally.

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

Carlos: Oh, it is. I work with marketers on a day to day basis. I see more and more.

When you say, “So, how’s it going?”, they’re like, “Oh, my word. I’m slammed. I’m overwhelmed. I have so much to do. There are not enough hours in the day.”

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

I go to conferences. At the last conference I was at, I asked a bunch of marketers, “How many of you feel there’s not enough time to accomplish what you want to do in a meaningful way?”

Virtually every hand out of 200+ went up.

I definitely see this on the marketing and sales front.

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

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

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

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

That’s number one as a business leader.

Number two, there’s a corporate profile in the book of a lady named Claire Potter who is in a sales role.

Claire works for a multi-billion dollar organization.

What she did was,

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

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

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

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

Another profile in the book, Elle Woulfe, who is the CMO at PathFactory.

One of my favorite lines in the book, she closes with, “Life is short. I want to make sure I’m here for it.”

Elle had an opportunity to get a very high profile job with a great company.

She decided for her family and for her own sake, she was going to take a role which is still a significant role with PathFactory, but it didn’t pay as much.

But it enabled her to live the life she wanted. Define what kind of life you want, and then go design your career, your job, your business around that and what that looks like.

We talk about that as well in the book.

The UnAmerican Dream book website

New research: Empathy and solving buying problems

Growing B2B Sales with Trust and Empathy

Why customer advocacy should be at the heart of your marketing

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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 responsibility for that portion of it, but our job doesn’t stop there.

And so really stepping back to from the customer perspective is a way to do that.

I think the first step is really to sit down and map it out together, and you must start somewhere.

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

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

Review and refine the customer lifecycle as a team

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

You start to understand where the disconnects are.

Sometimes when you do that, there are insights that you uncover that you thought, “Oh my gosh, they thought we were doing this, and we thought they were doing this and no one’s doing it. We have this big gap.” And it gives you much visibility.

To me, that is an extremely valuable exercise, and it doesn’t have to be perfect either.

People talk about journey mapping, and they spend months and months and sometimes years on mapping that journey.

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

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

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

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

We go through a standard set of metrics. We have one view of the truth, and then we also go through and tackle challenges that we may have, for example, we see this in our pipeline: how do we tackle that issue? What’s the right way to do that? And that combination of people; we’re all addressing the problem.

It’s not a marketing problem; it’s not a sales problem; it’s not a finance problem: it’s a revenue team problem. So, shared ownership issues.

I think the strength of sales enablement programs is tremendous. So, as you look at developing marketing campaigns, ensuring the inclusiveness of those campaigns with the BDR, ADM, inside sales function, as well as with the sales and sales leadership teams and ensuring engagement and alignment.

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

And ensuring that it isn’t just about developing a campaign to identify a lead and a qualified sales opportunity and stopping there. Instead, developing the campaign and enabling the field representatives, whether they be on the phone or in person, to carry those same messages forward and giving them the tools to do that.

That is one thing that I feel strongly about. One of the areas that can be frustrating is when a sales and marketing team isn’t working as well together.

If the sales team is like, “I don’t understand or know the campaigns that you’re running in my territory…”

There’s no excuse for that anymore.

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

So, to me, that’s a really important part that marketing has responsibility for is ensuring that campaign development is not only informed but also supported through the buying process.

Brian: That’s great. And what I was wondering is, we talked about sales enablement, what other advice might you have to marketers and listeners out there who want to improve operating as one team?

Heidi: I would say aligned and shared goals.

That is certainly something that a common set of key metrics that the entire team is looking at and that it’s not metrics by team or by channel. It’s metrics for the marketing organization that we all play a role in.

That, to me, is extremely important.

Also, ensuring that there’s visibility to the work that’s going on in the business.

Not to be self-serving, but that’s one of the places that Workfront actually helps us a lot is that we can see what everyone else is working on.

And that is a really valuable tool to ensure alignment and also ensure better use of our investment dollars, so we’re not overlapping with each other, or working against each other. And so, the visibility into the programs that we’re investing in at a very detailed level is an essential part of working together as an organization with a common goal.

Well, marketing has changed so much.

That’s such a loaded question because you look at over my tenure, not just at Workfront, but over my career, the technology that we have at our fingertips today as a marketer is overwhelming.

So, one of the skills that I think it is really important for marketing leaders across marketing organizations regardless of B2B, B2C, doesn’t matter, is to understand technology and the impact that technology has on your business process and understanding where technology can help you solve problems, and look at technology to support business process, not to drive it.

The reason why I say that is because I’ve worked in many organizations where there are so many tools out there that will solve problems.

It’s really easy to say, “We have this problem, let’s go get this tool.”

I call this “that-tool-itis,” and we’ve had our fair share of it.

I’ve seen that certainly Workfront as well as at other companies that I’ve worked for but understanding at a deeper level how the technology can support your business and your business goals is a critical skill.

That speaks to digital transformation. You think about marketing as one of the organizations in an enterprise that has been digitally transformed.

We do marketing so differently, today than we did ten years ago, so digital transformation has really driven lots of change, not just in marketing, but in departments, in large enterprises. They’re always changing and having to adapt the way they work.

To me, that is sort of the most significant change that’s going on in the industry today is, as companies, no company on the planet would say, “We’re not going to transform digitally.”

Companies must keep up today.

However, it happens department by department, marketing being on the early end, but it’s changing the way knowledge-workers work in any organization, and to me, that’s the hardest thing to keep up with.

Brian:  I think many listeners are nodding as you’re speaking to this right now that we deal with every day. So, with all this technology, how do you see empathy or customer empathy fitting in?

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

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

So, we’ve forgotten that there’s a customer on the receiving end and that it isn’t just about the numbers.

It’s about tying to the emotions and how a customer feels as they go through a buying process and being deliberate about ensuring that messaging is targeting people is hard.

It’s one of those things that I think many companies have forgotten in this age of digital transformation, this age of an overwhelming amount of data.

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

I think both are critically important because of the concept that it’s people, even in a B2B setting.

You’re not selling to companies, you’re selling to people.

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

So, I think it’s gotten lost as marketing’s gone from almost 100% art to really science-based.

We’ve forgotten the people component, and that’s something that we must layer back in.

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

4 ways to adopt human-centered marketing and get better results

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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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Jeanne: Because when you think about it, I feel like there’s like four circles, if you will.

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?

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.

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?

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?

Jeanne: I think it’s the immediacy of things. I think we are all suffering; I mean, you’ve read the attention span of a goldfish and all that kind of stuff.

We use Drift on our website because people want to get information right away. At my previous company Ipswitch, we implemented Drift.

As a global company, we expanded the hours for the third-party company to monitor all of our Drift interactions.

They acted as kind of a tier zero to funnel people to the community, be able to answer in Spanish, and do different things with our Drift implementation.

Over these eight months, we generated $3.6 million worth of pipeline because people got answers right away. They will set up a demo and make sure you get to the right salesperson. I think that there’s such a flood of information, people want answers right away.

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

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

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

It’s just a black hole. You wonder, as a marketer, have you ever filled out one of those forms for your company? Do you know if anybody’s ever going to get back to you? So what a wasted opportunity.

Brian: It’s such a great tip. Be a secret shopper of your own web experience and your 800 experience, and your Drift experience. Ask yourself, how does it feel?

Jeanne: Right.

Brian: And seeing things from the customer’s point of view, you spend time talking about connecting with salespeople.

Jeanne: I think most marketing people would benefit from some sales experience.

I’m lucky enough to have, in the course of my career, worked in sales. I carried a bag, carried a quota. I like marketing people to feel that they’re tied to sales and their ability to hit their numbers.

It’s not just, “here, I generated a thousand leads and throw them over the fence; you deal with them.” But have you ever called any of those leads?

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

Jeanne: And if salespeople, out of every ten leads they get eight of those, “I don’t know who you are, I don’t know why you’re calling me. I don’t know this.” They’re going to start to avoid the leads that you’re sending them.

Even though you tell salespeople you’re going to have a hundred “nos” before you get a yes. Selling is hard. It’s very, very difficult.

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

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

But my advice would be walking a mile in their (sales) shoes, and you’ll build some empathy for how hard it is.

Jeanne: I think empathy’s a tough thing, Brian, right? You talk about the emotional quotient like such as intelligence quotient like that your EQ.

I’m lucky enough in my career, I’ve always had a good relationship with finance people because if I want more money, for whatever reason, I want to be able to say, “give me 100 thousand dollars and I’ll get you 500 thousand, and this is how I’m going to do it.”

I’ve done it before. That sort of thing because most marketers with finance people are over budget and don’t understand how to talk to a finance person.

So, finance people, let’s talk about them in travel. Finance people are the bad guys. They are always the bad guys. They’re the ones that kickback your expense reports. And they say, “this isn’t going to get covered, or they may say, “you need to get your invoices in the next five days,” or your expense reports or whatever.

It’s always the bad cop, bad cop, bad cop, and you know, these people don’t travel, so what do you think their viewpoint is of a salesperson that is travels or maybe overspending? How do you think they feel?

Brian: Well, they feel they are probably irresponsible or not looking out in the best interest of the company or, you know, feel like they’re entitled and want the white table cloth treatment.

Jeanne: Yes. You know, they want to be business class. So, we’ve been doing this series of webinars on implementing a travel policy like “how to sell your travel policy within an organization,”  “How to take the pain out of creating a travel policy” because, in our consult, we can put parameters like nobody takes a first-class trip.

They can bypass it, but if you have set up a travel policy and somebody books first-class to go to Austin or something, it gets triggered, and then they know that when they were doing it like this, it’s out of policy, and that’s very intentional.

It’s like video cameras at Wal-Mart or something. You’re looking at it is going, “oh well, okay,” you’re being watched a little bit.

So that provides a level of transparency and clarity to the employee where most employers have policies that are “use your best judgment,” so what is your best judgment?

Your best judgment. I need to stay at the Intercontinental for $400.00 a night, and you’re like, “oh, no! The La Quinta’s perfectly fine for 99 bucks a night.”

So, what’s reasonable? Is La Quinta 20 miles away from your meeting, and you must rent a car for $150.00 to go back? It’s trying to rationalize what works and what doesn’t work for an organization and take the emotion out of it.

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

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

Jeanne: Absolutely.

Brian: So, it just sounds like you were trying to see from their experience how do you make it better, and then you focus on helping them solve it. Is that what I’m hearing?

Jeanne: Well, and another example is another persona that is a user is, say, the office manager or whoever’s responsible in the office for booking.

You’re responsible for booking people to go from office A to office B regularly. If you could see this all in one place rather than worrying about this person’s travel itinerary and that person’s travel itinerary-

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

You could go to Marriott, or JetBlue, or Delta. You’re trying to map out your itinerary.

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

However, if you had a choice, this becomes problematic for people, and then you, as an individual, are talking to Donna at the front desk. You’re going back and forth, back and forth, the flight is gone, this is that, and if you could manage it all and you could save time, and you could save productivity, that’s good for the company.

It’s good for you as the traveler and that poor office manager that’s like a rock-hard wall.

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

The busiest travel times that we see, people start booking Sunday night, and they’re booking Mondays and Tuesdays for travel, and it might be traveling out two weeks or something, but they’re thinking about their schedule.

Also, another thing that happens is people don’t think about the changes. Think about the business trips you’ve been on, and I’m pretty sure that one out three of your business trips changes. You book it out two weeks in advance and then suddenly, somebody wants to meet you here.

They can’t meet you at this time; they’re gone. So, you end up trying to travel, change your travel, and your flights are not refundable, and your hotel is pre-paid. What do you do? Those are some costs because you can’t get your money back.

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

Brian: You’re looking from the customer’s experience, seeing it, and you said earlier for the sales team, walking in their shoes. Going from frustration, annoyance, anger to feel calm.

Jeanne: I would say the most important thing that they need to learn is how to speak. They need to know how to talk in front of a group without using all those crutch words.

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

Jeanne: And I would suggest that people that want to be able to move forward in their careers join a group like Toastmasters, Or Start a group like Toastmasters so you have the practice of being able to do this so you can have conversations on webinars, on podcasts, and be able to present in front of your company.

As you know, speaking in front of people is hugely intimidating. How do you get over that hump where the people in the audience are feeling just as scared, if you will, and can present your company, offer your point of view.

If you get called into a board meeting (and every CMO is in the board meeting every single board meeting), you must present your information in a way that makes sense to the board and build that level of internal confidence. So, that would be the advice that I would share.

What is empathy-based marketing?

Why Marketers Fail at Customer Empathy and How to Fix it

Getting sales enablement right to increase results

Traditional sales and marketing methods have failed to keep pace with the way 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.

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.

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 and enough case studies and examples and methodologies and playbooks and 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.

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. And so, it’s all about adapting to the way that people behave and want to interact online.

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.

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

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.

Somebody will come in on our website and our sales reps, when a named account comes to the website, they get a notification on their phone that says, “Hey! The VP of Marketing at DropBox is on the website right now.”

We had a real example like this, and I’ll just make up the companies.

The CMO at Starbucks, she comes to the website, and she says, “Oh, I was interested-” and the bot says, “Hey! What brought you to Drift?” And she says, “Well, I was interested in doing this, but it looks like you don’t integrate with Slack and so we’re actually not a good fit.”

At that moment, the sales rep pops in and says, “Whoa! Hold on a second. We do integrate with Slack. Can I show you? Here’s a help doc.” And she’s like, “Oh, interesting.”

Long story short, they have a 40-minute conversation. That turns into a demo. That deal closes a month later.

How does that happen in the world of a form? It doesn’t. Because the only opportunity is you either fill out the form or you don’t, right? There is no conversation, and that’s the heart of conversational marketing.

Now, the next question people ask is, “Okay. So, does that mean that I have to have my team sit there on chat waiting for new messages 24/7?” No. That’s where we use bots and AI.

We don’t use bots to replace a human, and we don’t want to put anybody out of a job, right? But we use bots to do that stuff, so people can go on with their day, right?

We want bots to handle the digital paperwork; the stuff that was normally used for a form, right?

A bot can ask the same questions that a form can ask in two seconds versus having to add the friction of somebody filling out a form.

That way, as a marketer, I can do what I’m good at, which is getting people to talk about Drift and coming to our website. And a salesperson, all they have to do is take calls all day, right?

That’s the kind of relationship that conversational marketing can help.

Brian: What I think as I’m listening to you, I think of two ways of building a relationship.

And one, which you’ve touched on, is if you get rid of forms, you’re making things available to people, and you’re helping them. And so, it’s like reciprocal altruism. You’re giving something of value.

And two, it’s through conversation. That’s how we build relationships.

DG: I mean, there’s so many. I don’t have one specific brand example, because there are so many different ones. I’ve seen some creative ways people have used conversational marketing.

We have a customer who uses it not to book sales meetings, but to sell tickets to their event. So they have this high-end event, and it’s in March.

Every person that lands on that website get a, “Hey, Brian. Nice to see you here. Did you know that right now we’re running two for one ticket? Do you want to get one? Click yes.” Okay. Have a conversation to do event tickets.

We have customers who use conversational marketing instead of forms to do webinar registration, and it makes webinar registration one click. So, basically, it can double the number of conversions by simplifying the webinar registration.

A lot of people actually use conversational marketing with content, which is, “Hey! You just finished reading this article about thing X. I bet you’d also like part two, which is about thing Y. Do you want to go check that out?” And the bot basically leads them to another piece of content

It would be annoying if every time you visited our blog, a bot said, “Hey! Do you want a demo of Drift?” You think, “No. I just want to read this article.”

But what if on the fifth time you come to our blog, we then ask you for the demo? And the message is like, “Hey! Alright, let’s be honest. You kind of come here a lot, right? Can I show you what the Drift product is all about?” Right?

That’s such a different ask, and it’s just about being a little bit more patient and doing it when the time is right.

We think about this a lot. If you had a brick and mortar store and to every person that walked in you say, “Hey! Do you wanna buy something? Do you wanna buy something? Do you wanna buy something now? Can I show you where to buy something?”

You would scare them away. But that’s how most B2B companies operate, and that’s how they do business on their website.

Brian:

Yeah. And we know how that feels in the retail setting. We don’t want to be there. We don’t want to have that experience.

As I was listening to you share the experience of what it’s like to be in a store, for example, and how that would feel, it leads me to think about empathy and how we think about the experience of the customer.

DG: Totally. So, I think of it as, not to simplify this, most B2B marketers, we treat the people on our website like they’re dumb, right?

Like they did no research, they just happened to stumble upon your website in the middle of the desert and go, “Huh…what does this cybersecurity company do?” Right? It doesn’t happen that way.

Nobody is just browsing a B2B website for fun. You’re not lying in bed on a Saturday morning going through B2B company’s websites. So, step one is, understand that the people who are there are there for a reason.

They probably listen to your podcasts, they watch your videos, they read your blog, they got on your email list, a friend told them.

And so, even if they kinda stumble upon your website, like I said earlier, information is free now, right?

If somebody comes to the Drift website and they don’t find what they want, guess what they’re going to do?

They’re going to go over to Google, and they’re going to type “Drift alternative,” and they’re going to find one of our competitors and they’re going to use their product. And so, I think it is all about empathy.

It’s understanding who somebody is, why they are on your website. There’s a good chance they don’t have all the answers, and they’re here for a reason.

My wife and I bought a new car about a month ago, and it was amazing. We walked into the dealership, and we already had basically everything narrowed down. We just wanted to go for a test drive.

And you’re nodding, and everybody that you say this to is nodding because that’s how we all behave like people. As humans. That’s how we all buy.

But then something happens in our brains when we go to our jobs in sales and marketing.

We’re like, “Alright. I’ve got to make sure we don’t tell them anything about this unless they talk to us.” Where the old sales rep tactic of, “Oh, you want to know the price? Yeah, let’s get on a call.”

No! Just tell me the freakin’ price over email.

That’s not what the decision-maker is going to be, and so it all starts with empathy and understanding that the goal should be to have a conversation with somebody who is in your store.

If you change your mindset to that, then your “store” as a B2B company is your website. If I’m a B2B company, I want to have conversations with the people who are in my store, which is my website.

If I had a store, I’d have somebody in front and somebody on the aisles being like, “Hey! I’m here if you need anything. Let me know if you have any questions.” Right? That’s how we think about conversational marketing as a layer for all this.

Brian: And as you bring it up, I mean we’re all customers, and yet at the same time when you’re a marketer you’re not your customer.

So, you need to think about that experience, as you just talked about, and from that place, how can you help them?

Otherwise, we just have this bias. We love our product. We love our website so much, and we really need to put the customer first is what I hear you say.

DG: Totally. The customer has to be first, and I think here’s the easiest way to be empathetic about it. Think about what type of marketing you react to, right?

We don’t ever think like this. We think of, “Oh, I’m just going to send this email for the fourth time in three days.”

Hold on. We’re all the same, right? There’s no more like I’m not “B2B Dave” and then I go home and I’m like “Dave the dad,” and “B2C Dave.” No. I am just the same person in all walks of life now.

That’s because of our experience as consumers, we live in a world where I can order a Starbucks on my phone. I can order a car on my phone. I can order four boxes of diapers and have them sent to my house tomorrow and spend $300 in two minutes on my phone.

And then when you go to a B2B website, we want things to work the same, but they don’t.

To really break into empathy, you actually don’t have to think about what somebody else feels.

DG: Think about how you buy and think about the last thing you bought and start thinking about how you can reverse engineer your buying process to match what you would like.

Brian: Yeah. I would probably also add, if I think of that and then also at the same time realize if I now start believing I understand what a customer’s thinking, then I have a bias. You know?

So, I’ve really got to understand them too and what they want. You need to spend time with the customer to understand what it’s like, what their experience is too.

Brian: There’s so much I wanted to ask you about, but one thing is that in the book you talked about the power of plain text emails and I wanted to ask you about it because, why plain text emails? Can you share more on that?

DG: Yes! So, plain text emails. This is something that we first started doing about three years ago, and we did plain text emails because I think people just started to get “banner blindness” in the email.

When I saw a highly designed HTML big banner type of email, I was like, “Oh, this is a promotion from a company.” We wanted all of our emails to look and feel like they were being sent from a friend.

So, our whole email marketing strategy was like, “Alright. I’m going to a wedding with my family in New York. How would I email? I’m meeting my mom and dad at the train tomorrow. How would I email my mom to make sure we’re going to be there on time?”

Subject line would be like, “Tomorrow?” “Hey, mom! I’m just making sure we’re still on for tomorrow. We’ll be there at 1 o’clock. Do you need anything from me?” Why do our marketing emails have to be different than that? That’s how we talk.

That’s how we would communicate. And so, we started thinking about what if we just ditched the banners, ditched the design and we started sending plain text emails that were always written like they were from a friend?

Brian: Yeah. It was written as if it came from a real person because it did, is what I’m hearing.

DG: Yeah! The thing that was so frustrating for me was that I got a bunch of responses from people like, “Ugh. You’re trying to be too sneaky. I don’t like this. It felt like a real person.”

And I’m thinking, wait a second, doesn’t that just reveal the state of the industry that we’re in?

So, B2B marketing is not supposed to sound like a real person. And I was like, “No, that’s exactly why we’re doing it.” I want it to sound like a real person.

And we even had an email that when you would subscribe to our blog, you would get an email from me and it would say, “Hey!” You know like the welcome email you get after you sign up for something, right?

And it would say,

“Hey! I just want to get this out of the way. My name is DG, and I’m VP of marketing at Drift. Even though this is an automated email, I just wanted to let you know that I’m a real person and I’m really here, and I actually really did write this. And if you ever get spammed or if you ever feel like your inbox is being disrespected, just email me directly.”

And that one email just disarms so many people, because it’s like look, I’m a real person. I had a video of me saying that. Nobody’s trying to get you upset. Nobody’s trying to spam you. We’re real. We’re human.

This is what we’re doing. That little piece of humanity in that email was such a disarming thing, and it helped us really build a relationship with those early subscribers that we had.

Brian: Well, it seems like as you read in the book the way I would describe it is, you’re treating people as people, not as leads. Not as objects to convert.

You’re just relating to them as other people, and you’re a person.

Brian: When I first started 20 years ago, before it was called business development reps, my VP of sales said to me, “Just be people with people.”

And you know, I was 23. I was an intern, and I was trying to sound important because I was calling executives.

And I think when I embraced the fact that I was 23 and didn’t have a lot of experience and just was who I was, there’s that authenticity and it just is.

DG: I love that, because of look, and this is not to be disrespectful. I don’t have the most experience in the world, but I’ve been doing what I’ve been doing now for like the last eight, ten years.

No 23-year-old BDR is going to know more about marketing than me, right?

Brian: Yeah.

DG: And that’s not a knock. You had just graduated college and are in an entry level sales job so if you tried to reach out or call or LinkedIn or whatever, and tried to tell me that I could triple my conversion…whatever, right?

I mean, there’s no way.

So, I think, how can you be human? How can you show who you really are? “Hey! Look, I’m at this company. I’m not a marketing person, but man, we have this product that has seen crazy results for so many customers just like you. Can I show you how it works?”

Right? That little change makes such a difference.

Brian: I love the section you actually wrote about BDRs and personally, I get questions about BDR reps.

For example, how do we help them do better? You talk about the problem is the process, not the people. How do you mean?

DG: Yeah, it’s probably not a people problem.

I think the process is more like, most BDRs, most any sales, marketing, whoever, the reason they do bad things is that they’re not incentivized to do the right things.

Which is, “Hey! 23-year-old Brian, you’re a BDR. Look, you’ve got to make 200 calls today. That’s all I care about. Make 200 calls.” Of course! What are you going to do? You’re going to make 200 calls.

Or, “You’ve got to send 300 emails today.” Then you’re going to send a bunch of automated, terrible emails and you’re going to be like, “Alright. It’s 2 o’clock. I’m going to go home.” So, I think if you have people who are incentivizing behavior like that, then, of course, that’s going to be the result, right?

Whereas if you said, “Look, you need to get two meetings a day. I don’t care about how many activities, inputs, outputs, whatever. Two meetings a day.”

There are two ways to go about getting two meetings a day.

You could send 300 emails and hope you get two emails, and how are you going to send 300 emails in eight hours? Well, either you’ve got to blast people, or you could reach out to six of the perfect, dream customers, right?

And you’re going to book two meetings from it. And so, that means you’re going to spend half your day doing research. Is it the George Washington or Abe Lincoln quote that talks about chopping down a tree?

Brian: Yeah. If I had an hour to chop down a tree, I’d spend 50 minutes to sharpen my ax. Or something like that. (here’s the quote)

DG: That’s exactly right. So, it’s the same process for sales and marketing that I think we’ve got to help bring back to the world.

Brian: That makes sense. We have time probably for one more question, but I’d love to ask you a lot more. If we have a coffee together and I said, “DG, how do I get into conversational marketing? Where can I start?” What tips would you recommend for me to get started today?

DG: Number one is to go and buy the book. Pre-order it. Because we’ve taken everything we’ve learned over the last two and a half, three years and put it into this book to help you get started. And obviously, we have a ton of great content at Drift designed to help you do that.

But let’s assume that you’ve signed up and you’re going to use conversational marketing.

For me, it would be, pick one to two things, one to two places that you can be successful right away. The biggest mistake I think people make is, “Alright. I bought Drift. It’s everywhere. Let’s see what happens.” We’re like, “No. What is your plan?” They’re like, “Oh, well…”

So, here’s a better example. Most websites have a “contact us” button, or “request a demo,” And that pops out a 13, 15 field, 20-field form, whatever. You fill it out. I’d be like, “Oh, that’s easy. We could replace that easily.”

So, start with that one page. Have a contained experiment on that one page. Prove out success and then start to expand. Then put it on the pricing page. Then put it on the homepage. Then put it on the blog. You’ve got to have a motion that you’re going to try to improve.

Well, we think we could double the conversion rate on our homepage by doing this, right? So, that’s where I would start is pick one or two familiar patterns, whether it’s your blog, whether it’s your “request a demo” button, and start there. And really learn.

You’re going to learn a lot more than you thought you would. I think a lot of people say, “I only want to book sales demos.” And then they start using Drift, and they’re like, “I haven’t booked a demo yet, but I’ve had five conversations this morning that blew my mind and, oh my God, I need to change my homepage.”

That’s the stuff that you can’t quantify until you actually get out there and have real conversations with people.

You can listen/subscribe to the B2B Roundtable Podcast via iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, or Google Podcasts. You can leave a review of the podcast here.

Also, connect with Brian and Dave (DG) on Twitter @brianjcarroll and @davegerhardt

Conversational Marketing — Drift.com/book

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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:

ABM plays across all that. So, that’s why I chose that definition.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We have more channels, content, and technology to reach customers than ever before, but connecting with customers has never been harder.

I am of course a big proponent and fan of customer empathy.

How do you see building empathy for our customers to bridge that gap of connection and trust and account-based marketing fitting together?

Jon: Yeah, in ABM, once you identified the accounts you want to go after, and the people at those accounts you want to reach, you’ve got to kind of find a way to reach out to them and engage them.

It’s such a crowded, noisy market and people love to ignore unwanted marketing and unwanted messaging. I think at the core if you want to cut through the noise you have to find a way to delight your prospects, educate them, add value to them.

I think empathy and relevance are just two sides of a coin. If you empathize with your prospects, the people you’re trying to reach, it means you understand their pains.

And if you understand their pains, you’re going to be in a much better position to teach them something about their business and create content for their specific economic motivators, their particular pains and that is how we stand out.

Jon: I think it’s just very much like The Challenger Sale, which is so popular on the sales side of the equation, that’s what the best salespeople do: they teach, and they tailor, and they do that by having empathy with their customer. So, very much these things go hand in hand. I’m sure you have additional thoughts on that because you’re the empathy expert.

Brian:  Well, I certainly do, and for our listeners, we had Brent Adamson who is a co-author of The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer, so we got Brent’s thoughts about this on empathy and sales, and I’ll share my perspective.

At a deeper level, neuroscientists have shown is that all our decisions are based on emotion. So, what we need to do is connect to, as you talked about Jon, the pains. But also what are the results people want?

Brian: And we have to think about when they’re making a purchase where it’s a complex sale and ABM is oriented to that what causes us to change is that we see something in it for us and what causes us to stay stuck–it’s like trying to climb a mountain.

Read more on this: Putting Empathy in Account Based Marketing

If I want to climb and I’ve got to take other people with me, some of them don’t want to go.

Or I’m concerned about how do they feel about doing this?

How will my team see me?

Am I’m going to be concerned about–is this going to add ten extra hours to my week, and I’m already maxed out?

So, there’s this personal stuff that’s happening inside your customer because we’re all customers; we all make decisions emotionally.

We think B2B buying is less about emotion, but the stakes are higher, so it’s even more emotional. So, I find that we’ve got to tune into every stage of the journey and what’s happening.

Jon: That’s a great point. The only thing I’d also add is I think the emotions in B2B tend to be more about avoiding negative emotions.

Whereas B2C might be about kind of seeking aspirational emotions. Because in B2B there’s such a disconnect between the–if you make a good purchase your company is a little bit better off. You make a bad purchase, you can lose your job.

Brian:  Yeah, and often people start journeys by, “Hey I’m learning about…and I feel inspired and hopeful we could actually do something.”

And pretty quickly after that, it goes to despair. Like “Oh my gosh is this even worth it? I want to try to get this into our company; it’s so hard.”

For that person, they’re really saying, “Do I want to do this? Is it really going to be worth it?” And as you talked about the pain, just changing is painful and there’s so much there.

We probably don’t have time to go through all of them, but I was just going to ask, where do you see marketers getting stuck, or need to put more attention in those seven ABM process steps?

Jon: Sure. So, just for the listeners, I’ll summarize the seven steps down and keep it simple, which is it’s only really about who, what and where and then measurement.

Who do you want to go after? Which accounts? Which people?

What are you going to say to those accounts that are actually going to be empathetic and relevant?

Where is how do you actually get that message in front of them?

What channels? And how do you orchestrate those interactions?

And then the last piece is the measurement of the whole thing.

Jon: So, regarding your question, where do people get stuck?

It’s really a maturity curve. Obviously, to start, you need to pick your accounts. That is a process that has to go hand in hand with sales.

The companies that are less mature can get wrapped up right around the axle right there. They just can’t find a good process for how do marketing and sales actually collaborate around an account selection process.

Once they’re past that stage, I guess the best way to describe it is sort of the next area I see people get stuck is; frankly, they pick too many accounts to really be able to deliver the level of personalization and relevance that’s indeed required to be successful with ABM.

I’ve seen people pick, they have 200 tier one accounts. And having 200 tier one accounts means that you are not creating a bespoke customized interaction with in-depth account-relevant research at every one of those 200 accounts.

So, there’s a set of interconnected challenges there. But it starts with recognizing that you’ve got to be able to break through the noise and stand out. That requires being more relevant, and you have to right-size the number of accounts you pick to your actual abilities to be able to be relevant.

Jon: And then the third challenge that the most mature companies run into is then scaling the whole thing.

So, great, you’ve identified some accounts, and you’ve identified things that you can do that are going to really help you stand out and it worked great in your pilot.

Now, how do you really start to automate some of those steps to bring it to the next level and make sure that any time a target account’s doing something interesting, your sales team knows about it, you’re following up appropriately? It’s really started to become a machine and not a whole series of one-act heroics.

I’d say those are probably the three if you look across the who, what, where, the three areas where people kind of get into trouble.

Brian:  That’s really good, Jon. do you have any tips or actionable advice that you would give to someone just, like, over coffee, and they said, “Hey, how do I do better?”

Jon: Yeah, a couple tips. I think the first is that I see a lot of companies start their ABM journey with display advertising.

And I think they do that because it’s really easy; it’s an easy button. You just have to spend some money, give them your account list, and hey, you get to say you’re doing ABM. But I’ve also seen that lead to disillusionment with ABM quite frequently because the reality is, I don’t care if you’re doing account targeting or not. Ads are ads.

I don’t click on ads. I don’t even notice ads, and I’m sure that’s probably true with a lot of other executives. So my first tip is don’t get seduced into thinking that you can really just start with ads. I think of advertisements as a nice thing you layer on top of an existing program. But, not your first step. That’s my first piece of advice.

Jon: I think my next piece of advice is that you really have to think about your technology infrastructure.

At Marketo, I started trying to do ABM with Marketo and Sales Force and the systems that I had, and it was hard. It was hard because those are lead-based systems. The data in those systems don’t roll up into your account. I made my market operation team crazy just trying to kind of set up the processes so I could even measure whether we’re also having an impact at the account level.

So, again, if you’re looking to start, I really think it’s worth considering what is your account foundation? And how do you look at data at an account-based level?

It’s kind of obvious when you say it that way.

Brian:  That’s very good. As I was looking through the book, this is a 175-page book that you’re offering for free to people for providing information. You put a lot of effort and energy into it, it’s very well done. What’s your favorite chapter in your book and why?

Jon: I’m not going to pick one, I’m going to pick two here.

Brian:  Okay, sounds good.

Jon: So, I think first, the whole part two of the guide, which is all about the different styles of ABM, and the concept of ABM Entitlements is entirely new in the second edition.

I think I like it a lot because when I go and talk to our customers about how they take their ABM program to the next level, this concept always comes up.

The different styles and the entitlements. And it’s related directly back to the problem I talked about earlier which is people tend to have picked too many accounts, and therefore aren’t really able to deliver enough wood behind the arrow. So, I think part two about the styles of ABM entitlements is one of my favorites.

Jon: And then probably the other one I like a lot is this whole section on ABM metrics and measurements, partly because I’m a quantitative measurement numbers guy. But it’s really struck me how different the metrics in ABM are from those in traditional demand generation.

In a nutshell, the metrics in traditional marketing primarily focus on quantity, and back to the net fishing, it’s all about how many leads did I generate? How many opportunities did I produce? How many people attended my webinar? How many people showed up at my event? And so on. It entirely misses out on the much more fundamental questions around quality.

First, are these the right people from the right accounts? It’s not about counting the people you reach; it’s about reaching the people that count. And so, are you measuring that?

And even furthermore, it’s about understanding the depth and the quality of the relationship. How engaged are these people with you?

Most salespeople would rather have meaningful engagement from a decision maker at a target account than a hundred random leads and ABM metrics really kind of embraced that concept.

[Engagio] Download The Clear and Complete Guide to Account Based Marketing Second Edition

Growing B2B Sales with Trust and Empathy

Why Customer Advocacy Should Be The Heart of Your Marketing

Putting Empathy in Account Based Marketing(ABM)

5 Ways to Immediately Boost Account Based Marketing (ABM)

Getting Sales Enablement Right to Increase Results

Empathetic Marketing: How To Connect With Your Customers

B2B teams have more channels, more tools, and more “signals” than ever.

And buyers are tuning them out harder than ever.

Not because buyers hate marketing.

Because they hate being treated like a target.

This is the core problem: modern GTM systems are optimized for activity (touches, sequences, attribution) while buyers are trying to do something else entirely: reduce risk and make a safe decision.

That’s why trust and empathy aren’t “soft skills.” They’re conversion infrastructure.

In this conversation, I interviewed Steve Woods (@stevewoods), Founder & CTO at Nudge, about what it takes to build real B2B relationships in a world full of automation, hustle culture, and buyer skepticism.

Author’s note: This transcript is edited for clarity and readability.

You build trust and empathy by helping buyers make progress before asking them to buy.

That means: maintain context, give useful “next steps,” and trade self-promotion for perspective. Automation can support the research and timing. It cannot replace the human work of building trust.

It’s tempting to blame channels.

But the real issue is behavioral.

Buyers have learned to protect themselves from noise. They’ve been trained by years of spammy follow-up, vague “checking in,” and fake personalization.

So they do what rational people do. They ignore you until they need something specific.

Trust becomes the differentiator because it reduces buyer risk:

That’s the frame for everything below. Not “how to nurture.” Not “how to get replies.”

How to become safe to engage.

Steve: You and I have known each other for a long time. A few decades. My history before Nudge was Eloqua in the marketing space.

We saw marketing transition from an arts-and-crafts discipline into a measured lead generation and demand generation engine that started to connect with sales.

That was remarkable.

But looking over the fence at sales, we realized the next step was the core of getting deals done.

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.

Trust and empathy had to be developed, and ultimately the deal would be closed based on those relationships.

So we decided to tackle relationship intelligence: understanding where trust is being built, where empathy is being built, and how you make a sales team more effective by focusing efforts on the right initiatives.

Steve: We were lucky to be part of a major change. Marketing went from unmeasured to measured.

With Nudge, we tried to be proactive: what dominant theme will shape sales for the next decade?

It became clear that relationships, trust, empathy were the core thing. And it was unmeasurable. It was intuitive.

Every sales leader, when you talk about deal progress and forecast and slippage, it’s about relationships and trust. But it’s not measurable. It’s self-reported by sales reps who often have happy ears.

We thought: if we can put measurement around trust, empathy, and relationships, then build tooling to steer effort, we can be part of a meaningful transition.

Steve: It stemmed from a rant.

We spent time interviewing buyers about how they buy, and salespeople about how they sell. It was Mars and Venus.

Buyers want thoughtful co-conspirators on a journey. They selectively bring in sales when they need deeper points of view.

Salespeople talked about automation, numbers, a thousand emails a day, “Did you get my last email?”

It was bizarre to realize they were describing the same animal.

Early sequences felt like diligence. Now they feel like spam.

So the rant was: “Stop. We must stop this in sales. It’s not working. It’s going downhill.”

That became the #HoldTheHustle thesis.

The salesperson often matters more than marketing in the buyer’s lived experience.

Buyers want to know the rep is their advocate, talking straight, not pitching.

Buyers want someone to go along with them on a journey and challenge them, educate them, and help them see the problem differently.

The facts are out there. Buyers can Google facts.

What they want is:

When a rep asks a question that makes the buyer pause and think, trust starts moving forward.

“You’re probably thinking about it this way. I’m going to push you to think about it that way. Here’s why. Here’s a story. It might make you uncomfortable. But it’ll give you insight you wouldn’t get from a search.”

Steve: You can’t automate empathy. You can’t automate trust.

But you can automate the background work that makes empathy possible: understanding your world, understanding the buyer’s world, and teeing up the moments where a human can add value.

The human part is the conversation:

“Saw this, thought this, here’s a perspective you might want to consider.”

Automation can put enough on a silver platter to guide those “right moment” conversations.

Steve: Look at your relationships and ask, “Where am I losing touch?” Most people don’t do this.

You have a first conversation. If it becomes a deal, great. But 90% don’t, and they drop off.

The best reps used to manage this manually in spreadsheets.

At minimum, put a floor under relationship building: stay in touch on a simple rhythm (for example, every 90 days) with people who matter.

Now you develop the logical next step based on where they are.

You need context:

This is the evolved version of “digital body language,” but grounded in reality, not vanity engagement.

The next step is a nudge: “You’re probably here. You might be thinking this. If you considered this dataset, this perspective, this story, your view would evolve.”

Not a sales pitch.

Not “Let’s do a one-hour call.”

A give that builds trust first. Then, later, you’ve earned the right to ask.

Steve: If sales doesn’t have real gives, they’re stuck with big asks: “Let’s schedule a 60-minute call.”

That’s not a give. That’s a tax.

The best orgs build actual gives:

Not traps. Not half-assets that require a call to unlock the other half.

Real gives create real trust.

Buyers don’t hate follow-up.

They hate follow-up that has no point.

They hate being chased with zero context.

They hate “personalization” that’s just a variable token stuffed into a template.

Trust is built when your system helps buyers think, not when it tries to make them act.

If your GTM motion is built on hustle, your buyers will experience you as risk.

And rational buyers don’t buy risk.

Empathy is not soft. It’s operational.

If your system can’t preserve context, equip humans with useful gives, and support buyer progress, your “optimization” will just create more noise faster.

Stop trying to out-automate buyer skepticism.

Build trust like it’s a revenue system. Because it is.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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 that visibility into that, you can be much more targeted and effective with how you are moving that customer through that journey.

Kia: That’s a great question. Sometimes, it can feel overwhelming or very abstract. People often confuse customer success or customer experience with just making somebody happy or feel good.

I look at it very much as a disciplined way of operationalizing how you’re going to engineer an amazing experience for customers, not only in the business outcomes they get but also in that emotional experience, to become a very consistent repeatable methodology and approach.

It can feel overwhelming, like, “Where do I get started?”

Journey map and understand what that would look like from the customer’s perspective. You will start to see how your organization is aligned in each stage of the journey to support that journey and those emotional points in that journey or those critical moments of truth.

This is where this concept of agility is what I think is so empowering and why I employ it with my customers and why I think it’s so powerful is that mapping these things out.

Maybe you don’t get it right, but if you start to have this concept of closed-loop feedback, where you’re reading and understanding the customer more and more, then you can start to make that continuous improvement and really create that agile business model that keeps getting honed and refined as you learn more about it.

You don’t have to have it right and perfect at the beginning. You might have it completely wrong, but if you map something out, you start to observe it and validate whether things are right or wrong and start to use customer feedback to inform how you should tweak operations.

Alternatively, what you’ve got in place to provide a better customer experience, that’s where you’re going to optimize that approach, and it should continually be dynamic forever.

None of us have static customers. They’re just as dynamic as we are in our business operations, so let’s ensure that we’re continuing to observe them and see how they’re improving or what they need help with and build that into our model. Actionable advice is a journey map. Build some initial model, observe it, and then keep honing it. It’s not just a one-time effort.

Customer Success Plan: Key for Adoption and Expansion

Is Your Organization Driving Revenue Effectively?

How Empathy Will Grow Your Sales and Marketing Pipeline

How sales hustle and automation can hurt customer experience