Here’s something most B2B marketers know but do not always say out loud.

We have gotten very good at measuring things.

Attribution. Pipeline metrics. Sourced revenue. Influenced revenue. Cost per lead.

And yet, a lot of B2B brands are still forgettable.

Not because the marketers are bad.

Because the system keeps pulling them toward what can be tracked, reported, and defended in the next pipeline review or board meeting.

That is the tension at the center of this conversation with Lindsay Cournoyer, Fractional CMO and Brand Marketing Consultant at LC Consulting, and former CMO at Blue J.

Lindsay has led marketing at companies including Axonify, Coconut Software, and Blue J. At Blue J, an AI-powered tax research company, she helped 5x revenue and raise $122 million in Series D funding.

But that is not the main reason I wanted to talk with her.

I wanted to talk with Lindsay because while that growth was happening, she made a brand bet that many B2B marketers would struggle to defend on a dashboard.

She invested in out-of-home advertising.

Billboards. Elevator ads. Radio. Physical media in a B2B SaaS company.

That is not the usual B2B playbook.

But Lindsay believed the company needed something that the usual performance channels were not delivering: awareness, trust, and memory in buyers’ minds before they were ready to enter a sales process.

Her line from LinkedIn captures the problem clearly:

“B2B brands are so obsessed with being measurable that they forget to be memorable.”

That is where this conversation starts.

We talk about why performance marketing can capture demand but cannot create all of it, how Lindsay made the case for out-of-home inside a B2B SaaS company, what she measured before and after the campaign, and why brand work can feel risky when marketing already has to justify itself more than other functions.

If you have ever felt pressure to optimize for a metric instead of an outcome, this episode is for you.

Lindsay Cournoyer is a Fractional CMO and Brand Marketing Consultant at LC Consulting.

She has led marketing at B2B companies including Axonify, Coconut Software, and Blue J, where she most recently served as CMO. At Blue J, she helped the company grow revenue 5x and raise $122 million in Series D funding.

Lindsay works with B2B SaaS founders and leadership teams on brand strategy, messaging, and go-to-market.

Connect with Lindsay Cournoyer on LinkedIn

00:00 Introduction: B2B Brands Are Too Measurable to Be Memorable

Performance marketing has a role, but it mostly captures existing demand. Brand helps create the demand performance later captures.

B2B buyers need to remember you before they are ready to buy. If you are not already planted in their mind, you may never make the shortlist.

Out-of-home can be targeted in B2B when you know where your buyers work, commute, gather, and pay attention.

The marketing tax is real. Many marketing leaders spend too much time justifying their function rather than doing the work that creates long-term value.

A CEO who understands brand changes the entire marketing environment. Without that support, big brand bets are much harder to make.

Brand can be measured, but not always through the same dashboard logic as demand generation. Lindsay used pre- and post-campaign surveys to measure awareness, perceptions, consideration, and likelihood of purchase.

A brand campaign can move more than awareness. In Lindsay’s case, they saw an increase in awareness and purchase consideration.

Sometimes the best thing a marketer can do is accept the reality of where they are, protect their sense of worth, and look for a better environment where marketing is understood.

If a CEO does not understand brand, use examples from their own life. Show them how brands earn memory before the buying moment.

Sometimes you have to earn the right to make a brand investment by first showing how marketing contributes to pipeline and revenue.

“B2B brands are so obsessed with being measurable that they forget to be memorable.” — Lindsay Cournoyer

“Marketing’s true job is to carve out that place in your buyers’ brains.” — Lindsay Cournoyer

“We have to build brand awareness and trust and credibility before you really step on the gas of performance marketing.” — Lindsay Cournoyer

“There are companies out there who actually get it. They are very hard to find, but they are out there.” — Lindsay Cournoyer

“Sales have to be there. And then you may get the shot.” — Lindsay Cournoyer

The B2B Roundtable episode with Jon Miller on what comes after the MQL

Growth Isn’t a Headcount Problem. It’s a Precision Problem, with DeAnna Ransom

Subscribe to The B2B Roundtable wherever you listen to podcasts.

Brian Carroll: Here’s something most B2B marketers know but don’t say out loud.

We’ve gotten very good at measuring things: attribution, pipeline metrics, sourced revenue, influenced revenue, cost per lead. And yet, a lot of B2B brands are forgettable.

And it’s not because the B2B marketers are bad. It’s because the system keeps pulling them from what they know is the right thing to do, and they’re forced to do things that are tracked, measured, and can be reported at the next board meeting.

It’s harder to attribute when you focus on brand. It’s harder to justify in a pipeline review, so it often gets pushed aside.

Welcome to The B2B Roundtable. I’m Brian Carroll. And in this podcast, we talk about the things that dashboards miss.

My guest today is Lindsay Cournoyer. She’s been a marketing leader at companies including Axonify, Coconut Software, and most recently served as the CMO at Blue J, which is an AI-powered tax research company where she helped 5x revenue and raise $122 million in Series D funding.

That’s impressive, but that’s not the main reason I wanted to talk to her.

I wanted to talk to Lindsay because while this growth was happening, she made a significant investment in out-of-home advertising. And this included billboards, physical media in a B2B SaaS company. It was the kind of bet that’s hard to defend with a dashboard.

And she did it anyway.

So today we’re going to talk about why. And if you’ve ever felt pressure to optimize for a metric instead of an outcome, this conversation is for you.

And Lindsay has a line that names the problem really well. She wrote this in a recent LinkedIn post: B2B brands are so obsessed with being measurable that they forget to be memorable.

And that’s where we’re starting today.

So Lindsay, what were you seeing that made that feel true?

Lindsay Cournoyer: Yeah, it’s a great question. And I will say the obsession is real among executives and board members.

I think back to what Jon Miller talks about all the time, that people want marketing to be a gumball machine and act like a gumball machine. You put a dollar in and you get three out. And it’s supposed to be this really predictable thing that you can just game the system and get to the revenue that you want.

But that’s just simply untrue.

Performance marketing has its place. Its role is to capture the demand that’s been created for your brand. But if you just lean into performance marketing and focus on that, you’re missing the whole front part.

Really, what I believe is marketing’s true job is to carve out that place in your buyers’ brains and be the solution that comes to mind first when a buyer thinks of your category.

And if you don’t focus on building your brand and trust and reputation before you get into performance marketing, you’re really missing the whole point of what I think marketing is here to do.

Brian Carroll: You made this significant out-of-home investment, which is unusual in B2B. That’s not something people typically do. And it was a big bet.

What was the problem you were trying to solve that the usual marketing metrics and channels weren’t solving?

Lindsay Cournoyer: Yeah, it’s another great story.

Really, the reason I took the role is because the problem to solve was named by the CEO in my interview process. And it was, not enough people know about us and the awesomeness that is our software.

It’s like, we have this great product, but the CEO knew that if everyone in the market didn’t know about it, the company was not going to get where they wanted to go.

So he inherently understood the need for brand.

I was winning already out of the gate. And like I said, that’s really why I took the job in the first place, because of that understanding of the need to build brand awareness and trust and credibility before you really step on the gas of performance marketing.

Brian Carroll: It sounds like your CEO was enlightened thinking about this idea of brand, because that is not the experience that a lot of B2B marketers have.

Lindsay Cournoyer: Yes.

I think we undergo a lot of scrutiny in marketing that other departments just don’t feel. We’re continuously having to justify ourselves and our decisions and our plans and our budget and our headcount.

And there’s just this kind of skepticism around marketing that exists. It’s pretty pervasive. It’s not in every company, but I’d say it might be in most.

It’s really tough to operate in that kind of environment and carry that kind of tax.

I have experienced it, and it really does just tire you out and take you away from the really important work that you should be doing when you have to be doing PR for your team all the time.

This was a brand new product. It didn’t exist. It was AI for tax research, essentially a ChatGPT-like experience where you go in and ask your tax question and up pops the answer with all the verifiable sources.

It didn’t exist before. And it was a much cleaner and more enjoyable way to do tax research than what accountants have dealt with in the past, with hours of painstaking research and judgment calls and asking the partner.

It just didn’t exist.

So the CEO really knew this is brand new to the market. We need to go introduce it to the market.

I am grateful for that, but I realize it’s not the case in every company.

So I do think, unfortunately, we do have to do some explaining about brand and why awareness matters and why building trust and credibility with buyers matters.

Really, I think CEOs should be curious about brand. If they’re not, that’s a mistake. They should take it upon themselves to go and talk to their marketing leader and really start to do their own research and understand why awareness building and credibility and trust is so important.

That shouldn’t always be on us.

So I would encourage any CEOs out there listening who don’t know a lot about brand or marketing and kind of see it as this black box, to really make an effort to understand the craft and the strategy behind it.

I think in certain cases, there are just CEOs or executive teams or boards out there who aren’t going to do that. And if you find yourself in one of those companies or situations, unfortunately, sometimes you just can’t get through and win, and you will just carry the tax ongoing.

Brian Carroll: That’s the double burden. You have your job to do, and then there’s the need to justify the very existence of the function or your team, and you’re constantly doing PR.

Lindsay Cournoyer: Yes. Yes. Yes.

Brian Carroll: How did you get there? How did you make that case?

Lindsay Cournoyer: I really did something that we all do a lot of. I had to essentially act kind of like a professor on brand.

I created a really detailed brand strategy deck that I presented at an executive offsite planning meeting. And I explained that we have to carve out a place in people’s minds as the category leader and a new solution that they can trust, and that we are already leading the category and are really the horse that they want to bet on.

So I went through quite an extensive educational exercise with the team, and the response was really positive.

These are people who really didn’t know that much about marketing, and they leaned in and they were super excited.

At the end of that presentation, I went through all of the things you need to do to build brand and credibility and trust and get that place in people’s brains.

And the culmination of that work was an out-of-home campaign and a big multi-channel brand campaign that was tremendously successful.

So I had the support of the internal team, which was amazing. But I will tell you that there were skeptics.

One of our board members was not happy with my campaign idea and expressed their displeasure. And, of course, our CEO was a little like, “Are we doing the right thing?”

And I just stayed steadfast. Yes, we are doing the right thing.

Their argument was that this was too broad, it’s not targeted. But actually, out of home can be very targeted.

For example, where are the offices of the firms you want located? They’re in specific cities or specific areas or specific neighborhoods. Go buy out of home and put a billboard right out front of their office or in the elevator that they ride up and down every day.

It’s really about getting their attention through an untraditional channel, but I think it’s a myth that it can’t be a targeted play.

Brian Carroll: It’s really interesting.

I was just thinking about when we had Jon Miller on our podcast earlier. We talked about the problem of the MQL, that it’s the last 5% of people who actually express interest.

But what about the 95% who don’t, who aren’t yet in consideration, who don’t quite even know the problem?

And as you talked about, you’re introducing something new, a new category, something that didn’t exist.

After it launched, how did you know it was working? What did you measure? What changed? And what did you have to admit you couldn’t measure? And so you needed to build that trust with the internal team to say, “Yeah, we’re still doing it because it’s the right thing.”

Lindsay Cournoyer: Yeah. Well, there actually is a very clear way to measure awareness. And it’s not cheap. You have to put some money behind it.

But what we did is we developed a survey, which we took to market through a third-party partner. And it basically asked people, have you heard about us? What do you think about us? Who do you see as the category leader?

Are you going to consider buying software like ours in the next year? Which product are you leaning toward?

So we asked a lot of what I think were smart questions just to understand current awareness and perception levels in the key markets that we wanted to win.

What came back was really interesting. Our awareness was actually quite high. We had done a really good job spreading the message and the product through events and partnerships. So we were starting from a strong place already, which I think was surprising to some of us.

But we came out strong, and we did a three-month campaign in four key markets where we used out of home and radio, which is another underutilized channel.

Accountants love radio. They listen to sports talk, and we did SiriusXM. It was a great channel to reach them.

Then we let the campaign go. And afterwards we went back and surveyed again.

The goal that we were going for was a four-point lift in awareness, which is statistically significant. We could say, okay, this campaign worked.

And we got much more than that out of the campaign in the results that came back.

And then, interestingly, this was amazing. Not only did the awareness lift in a big way, but consideration also moved.

So people who had seen three to four versions of the creative reported a much higher likelihood of buying us.

That was all I needed.

We worked so hard on this. And to be honest, I was scared shitless running this campaign. It was a big bet. I was freaking out. My agency had to calm me down several times because I’m like, this has to work. This is really important.

And they assured me, “Lindsay, it’s going to work. It’s going to work.”

And it did.

The outcome was so amazing that, since I have left to work for myself again, they’re going to keep going with the brand investment because it’s something that worked and it needs to be sustained.

Brian Carroll: I think a lot of marketers are dealing with similar feelings. They’re overwhelmed. There’s anxiety because they constantly have to justify their job. There’s constant input given from peers.

You wouldn’t tell the CFO, “Hey, have you thought of this ratio versus that ratio?”

Lindsay Cournoyer: Exactly. Yes.

Brian Carroll: What are some of the things you’ve needed to do to help yourself stay steady when every day people are wondering, why do we have marketing?

Lindsay Cournoyer: You know what? I honestly felt like this campaign was big enough and high profile enough that my job was on the line.

If it didn’t go well, there’s a high likelihood that I may be exited because it was a lot of money and a big swing and a big bet.

Like I said before, I was terrified. But I know this kind of investment is so important, and I believe in brand marketing through and through.

So I really had this internal dialogue in my head of, “You know what, Lindsay? This is the right thing to do. Don’t go down the death spiral. Just keep positive that it’s going to work.”

And the creative was really strong, super resonant.

Somehow I stayed positive and I believed in the campaign. And to be honest, if I lost my job over it, I would have been fine with that.

Brian Carroll: And so I’m just wondering if you were talking to someone else who is a CMO right now, as a peer or someone who wants to ascend to that role, what advice would you give them to be able to stay steady as they’re making these big bets and doing things that don’t show up in the dashboard right away, like you just did?

Lindsay Cournoyer: My advice is if you find yourself in a situation where you have a CEO who understands the value of brand, they’re going to let you take a swing like this. And they’re going to support you as they should.

If you’re in a company where the CEO doesn’t get brand or why it’s important, you’re likely never going to get the go-ahead to do something like this ever.

So I would say, when you’re interviewing for a role, and if you believe in brand and want to take a big shot like this, you really have to do your due diligence and go deep on the CEO you’re working for and the board and how they perceive marketing and whether or not their portfolio companies are doing stuff like this.

Because if you see that they’re not and all they care about is performance marketing, I think that’s a really clear telling sign.

Brian Carroll: I think there’s a lot of people who are listening who are like, that sounds great, but I’m where I’m at right now.

And maybe because there is this anxiety in the field of marketing, especially technology marketing right now with the rise of AI, with the questions about how buying is changing right now, and how we no longer can put forms up and do content marketing the way that we used to.

So I’m just wondering, for that person listening right now who wants to influence their team and they’re stuck in this tactical role of seeing marketing as the demand gen function only, what advice or suggestions would you give?

Because maybe some people are where they are and they’re saying, “How do I influence or even try to make a difference in my organization?”

Lindsay Cournoyer: The first thing we have to acknowledge is just sometimes you can’t make a difference.

And it’s up to you.

The truth is a lot of us just need jobs and income to support our families. I had this conversation on LinkedIn. Lisa Adams posted this exact comment on the post about the tax. Sometimes we don’t have a choice. We have to work in these companies that don’t get it.

I think you can either just accept it and do your job and earn your paycheck, but you can’t let it suck your soul.

You have to be able to say, this is the situation, and detach yourself from it to continue to work in the company.

But if you can detach and just do the best job and collect your paycheck, it sucks, but a lot of people do operate that way because we have to. We don’t have a choice.

At the same time, I would start looking at the brands who are doing out of home and who are doing brand activations. Start to network with their marketing team people. Follow them on LinkedIn and engage with their content.

You can work your way into a better situation eventually.

Brian Carroll: I think for some people, just that encouragement you gave could give us license to say, accept the reality where you are, but also open your eyes and don’t let that determine what your worth is.

Don’t let that steal or take you down that downward spiral.

Because I think a lot of people are in situations where they don’t feel that marketing is valued. And therefore then they are like, “Well, then I’m not valued.”

And what you’re saying is, no, there is a way out.

Lindsay Cournoyer: There is a way out.

There are companies out there who actually get it. They are very hard to find.

I’m working with a client right now where the CMO actually started in marketing. His first business was marketing services for a particular industry. And he gets it.

He’s taking these big brand swings. He just gave away a Tesla at a conference to draw people into the booth. It was amazing.

He’s leaning in and he’s super interested and he wants to input on strategy and jam on brand and marketing.

He’s like a unicorn. And they’re hard to find, but they are out there.

And when you find one, marketing becomes fun again.

I am having more fun working with him than I’ve had in quite some time. He just gets it.

So they do exist.

Brian Carroll: I like that phrase, fun. How can we get marketing back to fun? And what drew us to it?

A lot of people, I don’t know about you, but I didn’t go to school aspiring to move into B2B marketing. It was something I fell into, and then I just loved it because I love the complexity. I love the learning. I loved that there’s a variety of things.

Yes, you can get specialized, super specialized, but at the same time you have to have a bigger, more strategic view of things.

What are your thoughts on this?

Lindsay Cournoyer: I also didn’t know I wanted to be in B2B marketing, but I love it for all the same reasons that you do.

And it’s interesting. Again, in the post that I just wrote about this tax that marketers face, Chris Walker actually commented on it and said, this exists in tech, PE, VC-backed companies. And if you go work in a different industry, it’s a totally different game.

So that really got me thinking.

We all want to be in tech and we all want to be in SaaS. It pays well and it’s fast-paced. It can be fun. It can be brutal.

But what about thinking about other industries?

I was just contacted by a potential client whose business is in rocket science. And I was just like, my God, this is fascinating. How cool would it be to work on something like that?

Totally different.

So maybe another part of it is going to work in a different industry.

Brian Carroll: I wanted to ask to close, if a CMO or VP of marketing, a marketing leader, has an hour with their CEO this week to make the case for brand investment, what should they say? What advice would you give them?

Lindsay Cournoyer: I always like to bring it back to an example that they themselves will see themselves in.

Think about buying a new car. You want an electric vehicle. You’re going to look at Tesla, Polestar, I don’t know, all the other brands that now make electric vehicles. But when you think of electric vehicles, you think of Tesla first.

They own the category.

There you go. There’s the example of how they’ve done well because they are planted in people’s brains.

If you’re buying an EV, you’re buying a Tesla. Now there are more options, and we won’t get into the Tesla thing, but bring it back to an example and a scenario that they themselves have been in.

I think I’ve seen then the light bulb go on.

Brian Carroll: And if they’re proposing an idea or a bet, any thoughts you have on perhaps the smallest version of a bet if someone wants to move in this direction, but they haven’t won the credibility or trust yet to make that big bet?

Lindsay Cournoyer: I hate to say it, but sometimes you have to show results from performance marketing.

Be able to tie your activity to pipeline generation and revenue. And I feel like once you can clearly make the tie of how marketing is impacting on the revenue front, that really sometimes opens up the territory of brand.

Brian Carroll: Really good.

I think for people, we still need the big picture of what’s the impact we’re making on revenue, pipeline contribution, and using that as the basis to make the investment for things that aren’t going to show up in the dashboard.

What you’re saying is you’ve got to start with the dashboard, right?

Lindsay Cournoyer: Yes. Sales have to be there. And then you may get the shot.

And that’s what happened with me. I feel very grateful that I got to do a campaign like that.

Brian Carroll: Well, Lindsay, this is exactly the conversation I hoped it would be.

And for our listeners, if you have more questions or follow-up for Lindsay, Lindsay is doing work right now as a fractional CMO and brand consultant with LC Consulting. She works with B2B SaaS founders and leadership teams on brand strategy, messaging, and go-to-market.

If this episode was useful, please subscribe to The B2B Roundtable wherever you listen to podcasts.

Thanks again, Lindsay, for this great conversation.

Lindsay Cournoyer: Thanks so much, Brian. It was awesome to chat with you.

DeAnna Ransom explains why more reps, more tools, and more activity aren’t fixing pipeline, and why modern GTM teams need more precision, stronger retention, and deeper customer understanding.

Most B2B growth teams are doing more than ever.

More reps. More tools. More signals. More outbound. More dashboards.

And yet, for many teams, the pipeline still doesn’t follow.

That’s the tension at the center of this conversation with DeAnna Ransom, Chief Growth Officer at Betterbot.

DeAnna is rebuilding a GTM motion in real time from the inside. She’s not talking about this from the sidelines. She’s in the seat, doing the work, and seeing firsthand where the old growth math is breaking.

Her argument is clear: growth in 2026 is not a headcount problem. It’s a precision problem.

When teams add people to a motion that isn’t precise, they don’t fix the problem. They scale imprecision.

We get into why AI didn’t break outbound but held it up to a mirror, why teams often have data about people without actually knowing them, why visibility has to come before scale, and why retention is no longer just a customer success issue. It’s a growth strategy.

We also talk about the CMO tax, what it takes for marketing leaders to be seen as business leaders, and why the modern growth leader has to build a system precise enough to scale and human enough to trust.

If your team is doing more but getting less back, this conversation is worth sitting with.

DeAnna Ransom is the Chief Growth Officer at Betterbot, an AI platform serving the multifamily industry.

She has more than 20 years of growth and leadership experience across B2B and nonprofit sectors. Her background spans sales, marketing, and customer experience, which gives her a different view of the revenue motion.

Instead of treating marketing, sales, and customer experience as separate functions, DeAnna looks at them as one growth system designed around the customer.

00:00 Introduction: Growth Is a Precision Problem

Growth teams don’t have an activity shortage. They have a precision problem.

Adding people to a motion that isn’t working can make the problem worse because it scales imprecision.

AI is not the core problem. It exposes whether your outbound motion is relevant or just louder.

Having data about a buyer is not the same as knowing the buyer.

Before you scale, you need visibility: attribution, forecasting, lead to cash, handoffs, leaks, stalls, and where relationships are weak.

Retention is not just a customer success metric. It’s one of the most capital-efficient growth levers a company has.

The best customers should teach you who to pursue next.

A quiet customer is not always a happy customer.

Marketing leaders need to come in as business leaders, not just campaign leaders.

The modern growth leader has to be both systems architect and translator.

“When you add people to a motion that isn’t precise, it isn’t working. You’re scaling imprecision.” — DeAnna Ransom

“AI didn’t break outbound. It held it up to a mirror.” — DeAnna Ransom

“You can’t scale what you can’t see.” — DeAnna Ransom

“A quiet customer does not automatically equate a happy customer.” — DeAnna Ransom

“Your customers are your business.” — DeAnna Ransom

“The modern growth leader’s job is to build a system that is precise enough to scale, yet human enough to trust.” — DeAnna Ransom

Betterbot

DeAnna Ransom on LinkedIn

Brian Carroll: Hello everyone, welcome to The B2B Roundtable. I’m Brian Carroll. Excited to be with all of you today.

What I keep hearing from leaders right now is this: they hired the SDR team, added the signals, added the technology, and their budget went up, but the pipeline doesn’t follow.

And so they hired more and they switched tools and they started a new initiative and the results still didn’t move. I’ve come to believe that this problem isn’t capacity, it’s precision. And most teams have more activity than ever, but they have less signal from real buyers.

My guest today said AI didn’t break outbound, it held it up to a mirror. And DeAnna Ransom is the Chief Growth Officer at Betterbot. She’s rebuilding the GTM motion in real time from the inside.

Now, if you’re a CMO, growth leader, or GTM operator who’s felt the squeeze between AI noise and being able to connect with your buyers, this conversation’s for you.

So, DeAnna, you said that growth in 2026 isn’t a headcount problem. It’s a precision problem. What are you seeing that makes you say that?

DeAnna Ransom: Yeah, thank you, Brian. First of all, thank you for having me today. Here’s what I’ve been seeing over the course of time. So there’s pre-pandemic, pandemic, and where we are today.

Over the course of time, what typically happened has been more reps, more spend, more activity. But that math in 2026 is completely broken. Capital has gotten super expensive.

Reaching people has gotten tremendously difficult. And when you add people to a motion that isn’t precise, it isn’t working, you’re scaling imprecision.

And so as you start hiring more and more people, people are a very expensive resource to bring in. And when you do that and you have not gotten precise, you have not done the fundamentals underneath it so that you can accurately target, understand, and connect, not just engage, connect.

The moment you see it and you’re adding these bodies, you’re going to stop because there’s no precision in it.

So I’m watching folks acquire more tools and do more outbound than ever before. They’re hiring more and more folks.

And you’re doing more, but what you’re actually getting back in the door is significantly less. I’m watching cold reply rates drop. They’ve dropped by almost half, I would say, in recent years. I think it’s gone from something like 6.8% in 2023 to something today around 3.4%.

So you have AI flooding inboxes, and you have outreach that is getting completely ignored. And it’s not ignored because the volume isn’t there or maybe the timing isn’t right. It’s because it’s not relevant. It is truly, truly noise.

And because of that, of course, if you are being ignored and you’re not relevant, you’re not going to get the result.

And that’s what I’m seeing. I am seeing the scale of noise versus the precision that creates relationship and relevance.

Brian Carroll: As I’m listening to you, I was just thinking about something you said: that teams have data about people without actually knowing them. So I wanted to hear from you, what’s the difference?

DeAnna Ransom: So the difference is when folks have a tendency to build an ICP. They start with an industry, they start with a title, and they go, great, this is what this person does, and they talk at that person.

Not with. They’re not starting a dialogue. They’re not understanding the human being.

People used to buy lists. Now you can do data append. People are using Clay. They’re enriching the data. You’re doing all the things to know about the person, but not knowing the person.

And I think that has become a major disconnect, especially in the rise of the pandemic when everyone went remote, one-to-one and real-life events went down.

So I really am seeing now that relationship building, really wanting to know the person, their pain, what they need, and understanding them on a human level before you even try to sell them, has just gone down.

We’ve got to fix that. There is the business piece, which is how we can use tools to connect, but it will never replace the human connection, which is the trust factor.

Brian Carroll: As you’re building this GTM motion in real time, and you’re building really from the studs up, what did you look at first?

DeAnna Ransom: Yeah, and I will be honest, before I think at all about a campaign or a hire, I look at what we can see. So the first thing that I wanted to fix was because you can’t fix what you can’t measure.

You can’t scale what you can’t see.

So what I did in very deliberate order was trying to get us to visibility first and a single source of truth. Attribution, forecasting, lead to cash. If leadership and the dashboard disagree, what are we doing?

I also wanted to dig in and do some ICP precision. Again, I’m not talking about what’s their title, what company do they work for from an industry, but who are our best-fit, highest-retaining customers?

Really from data and evidence and not from anecdote and aspiration. This is real work that, as an operator, you have to do before you start trying to send anything out the door.

And then the other thing is to look at where the motion itself leaks. Where does it stall? Where do the handoffs break off? Where are we single-threaded? Which means that it’s a weak relationship to begin with.

And for me, retention became where I focused a little more than acquisition. It was really plugging that back door.

Before we’re trying to go in and bring in more, because if you bring in more on the top of the funnel or in the front door, but you haven’t fixed and really understood and built a moat and a grounding and a relationship with your existing customers, all that’s going to happen is you’re going to churn out the backside.

And to me, that’s how you scale precision. That’s how you find who you really serve. And then you bring in AI as a layer, and then potentially only headcount if the system proves that it’s needed. That’s operational efficiency.

Brian Carroll: I really liked how you were talking about first focusing on visibility. And also I liked how you were focusing on who exactly is your ICP, not just total addressable market.

Not just focusing on acquisition. So much of marketing is spent on acquiring customers, but I like that you go beyond that and focus on the full funnel of retention and improving retention, potentially expansion.

So you’re using that as the template to understand who are your best customers and feeding that back into the system moving forward. Is that what I’m understanding correctly?

DeAnna Ransom: You are understanding that correctly, because then we know how to go and find more of those customers because we’re going to serve them well and they’re going to serve us well.

I believe that there has to be a mutually beneficial relationship to it.

And if you think about it, existing customers in this new dynamic, they are generating about 40% of your new ARR. That is a huge portion of your money.

And then if you think about what it costs to get a net new logo. Now, net new logos are celebrated. They’re the ones that get the confetti. But retention’s quiet. It’s also stable.

It’s also grounding.

And so I believe that when we expand, for me, I took over marketing, sales, and customer experience and created it as one motion, because that’s where you’re truly going to have growth.

So to me, my growth levers focus very strongly on how we are taking care of the customers we have, who are those best customers, and how can we continue to serve and expand within them.

And that is one type of growth lever. But then and only then are we looking at the net new, because that tells us who to go after and where to go to find them.

Brian Carroll: Really unique how you were able to tie all the pieces together from marketing, sales, customer success as part of your responsibility. How did you earn that credibility?

And maybe just as part of this, talk about quickly what Betterbot does. And then how do we overcome this tax as marketers, which is having to justify why do marketing in the first place?

No other function seems to have to do this. Finance doesn’t need to justify its existence. Sales doesn’t. I’d love to hear your perspective on this.

DeAnna Ransom: Yeah, I want to make sure I get all of the parts of what you asked.

So number one, over the course of my career I started off selling. Moved into marketing. I was in customer experience and led teams there. And so I probably have a very different perspective of how that works together as one unified revenue team motion.

I look at it that way because if you look at the dynamics of even the amount of time that a prospect spends with marketing now, it has shifted significantly.

At one point, they were spending about 60% of their time on the marketing side before they ever even wanted to speak with a sales rep. So as people were doing their own research and digging more deeply, marketing was owning more and more of a motion that they were always a part of, and that’s the sales motion.

And then you realize that there’s only one motion, and that is acquire and sell. It’s one motion with one team. So that’s kind of how I came to be in this as a leader and why I probably think about it as a unified, take-care-of-the-customer and create-this-virtuous-motion approach.

What does Betterbot do? Betterbot is an AI platform that serves in the multifamily industry. We literally power everything from the first touch of a resident’s journey all the way through to the retention side within the multifamily industry.

So again, we’re thinking end-to-end. Think of someone who is looking for their home and where they’re going to live, how they are taken care of as a resident, from booking the tour to signing the lease to living in the property, so maintenance and all those things, and all the way through to the other side, which is retention, or unfortunately, if they should move out.

If you’re with us, we’re hoping we’re getting some more retention. But we do that with an agentic AI platform. So we’re on the cutting edge of using agentic AI, and I have been able to take that and build that into our workflows for our revenue team.

And then you’re mentioning a little bit about how companies are taxing marketing.

Brian Carroll: How have you addressed it? Or, if you were coming into an organization as a new marketing leader, what might you do differently?

DeAnna Ransom: Well, when I come in as a marketing leader, I’ll start there, but I’m going to go back to the tax.

When I come in as a marketing leader, number one, I don’t come in looking only at my function. As an executive leader, in order for us to work together cohesively and solve the real business challenges and truly move a business forward, it’s not just about a function.

At that point, we are looking at it as a business leader, understanding the fundamentals of the business, the unit economics, the marketplace.

I don’t come in and look at campaigns and tactics and branding strategy. I can do that and it will get to that at some point. And I can have teams that can run that. But I come in as a business leader.

And it’s important that as marketers we come in remembering what our contribution to the business is, not just the function of marketing.

We come in behind the eight ball when we allow ourselves to be pigeonholed into a functional element. And so it becomes very important to have honest conversations about what the business really wants to achieve overall and to not speak in terms of just the function.

The function becomes how you can serve the business, but it is your business expertise and understanding of it that will allow you to craft the marketing elements.

That is hugely important. That is a distinguishing factor that I think we have to come in as marketing leaders with, understanding beyond a promotion or a campaign.

I want to sit down and understand what’s our three-, five-, ten-year plan. I want to talk about what are the levers we want to pull to truly drive growth in the business. Are we considering not just new verticals, but are we also looking at partnership economics? Are we thinking about ways that we can use our technologies to serve other industries? Do we have a force-for-good multiplier?

There are things that we can really start to do from a business perspective.

The tax piece is a challenge that’s been around for an extremely long time. When I was Chief Marketing Officer at Televerde, we talked about this constantly.

And there is not another function of the business that tends to have to prove itself again and again and again. And many times we talk with folks who everyone tends to think they’re a marketer. I feel like I found my tribe, so I’m hoping this is resonating.

Brian Carroll: Right.

DeAnna Ransom: A campaign is not marketing. It is a marketing tactic.

And so it is incumbent on us, whether we like it or not, to step back and go, hey, if you’re looking for someone that’s just going to run campaigns, that’s probably more of a marketing manager function that you can hire for.

I’m here to serve the greater good of the business and to look at how we are going to interlock and evolve the business overall and be able to drive growth.

And that’s a business conversation. That’s a P&L conversation. It’s very different than a marketing budget conversation. So we have to up-level that.

Brian Carroll: I like it. What you’re saying is we cannot be pigeonholed into thinking marketing is a demand generation function. If that’s all you think of as marketing, then you’re getting pigeonholed, because when you’re a strategic marketing leader, you’re looking at the long term of the business, as you talked about, the five-, ten-year plan.

Looking at the growth, looking at how the business is going to evolve, looking at new markets. And these all require a long-term point of view.

I wanted to ask you: you’ve been writing about this back door of retention, and I think it’s really a different point of view because so much emphasis is put on acquisition. And you’re talking about retention, expansion of your customer base.

So why do you think growth teams overfocus on new logos when durable growth often lives with the customers you’ve already won?

DeAnna Ransom: I can answer it very simply, which is it isn’t sexy. I believe I said it before, but new logos are visible. And they’re celebrated.

Retention is super quiet. Teams pour resources at the front door, building SDR teams, outbound motions, and the revenue is leaking out of the back door. The math has flipped.

In 2026, the most durable and capital-efficient growth lives with the customers that you have already won. And retention is the same discipline as good acquisition. It’s a continuation of getting to know the customer continuously and not just billing them.

Net revenue retention is the defining metric for me for 2026. A business at 120% NRR grows a $10 million base to $25 million in five years just on expansion. Let’s just sit with that.

Brian Carroll: So NRR, this is net revenue retention. Am I understanding that correctly?

DeAnna Ransom: You are correct. And it’s an important metric because if you’re thinking about budgets going down, you need to do things in the most operationally efficient way possible.

And we know that you talked about folks wanting a dollar for a dollar. That’s not how the math works in net new. It just does not. It’s about two dollars or more for a net new logo acquisition.

When you’re thinking about expansion, you are roughly at that dollar for dollar. So why would you not, when you’re thinking business and true efficient growth and not on a functional tactic, why would you not focus on your back door and take the best care of your customers and continue to grow and expand with them?

Brian Carroll: What you’re saying is, if we increase our net revenue retention, you’re reducing your customer acquisition cost because it is more spend a dollar, get a dollar versus whatever the ratio is, a two-to-one CAC or whatever that turns out to be. What you’re saying is, it just makes economic sense.

DeAnna Ransom: Yes. It is like I keep saying it, I’m going to hammer that. It’s capital efficient.

You don’t have to go and start from the beginning. You have them as a customer. And so you’re having your cost there. Your cost of sale actually goes down tremendously because you’re just expanding within them.

You’re continuing a conversation and you’re not using the same resource.

I’m going to say this again because if you’re looking at it from a P&L perspective, when you are having your customer experience team and they understand from an account management perspective how to care for the customer and continue to expand within the customer, that’s a different line than having a costly sales executive going out and hunting and bringing in a net new customer.

So you’re actually multiplying the savings in who’s taking care of that customer and being able to expand within it. It’s twofold.

Brian Carroll: Well, I’m thinking about it from the point of view of a listener today who maybe hasn’t explored looking at net revenue retention, looking at this as a growth driver. What would you suggest to someone to get started to explore this? What would be that next best step?

DeAnna Ransom: One of the things that I did as a first step, just to make sure before we could even get to any type of ICP, was an audit of our customers.

And I’m not talking about just who are our customers, what are the logos, but I dug in a little deeper to understand who they are, segmenting them, how many of them are reporting tickets versus how many of them are excited, how many of them have participated in our NPS and what scores they have given us.

Really wanting to understand how we’ve been serving them, what feedback have they been giving us, what are the things that they’ve been coming with.

I highly recommend starting with an audit of your customers so that you really understand who they are, which ones are at risk.

Because a quiet customer does not automatically equate to a happy customer.

You need to understand, we’re talking signals, Brian. You need to dig in and understand what are the signals. What are the trend lines of, hey, I’ve had about three customers get quiet and then six months later they dropped. You might want to pay attention to that.

Dig in and understand who you already have. How do I care for them? Who’s at risk? Who’s truly happy? How do I amplify the happy? Expand within the happy? Understand the unit economics.

Are these good customers in the sense that they are profitable? And here’s what I mean by that. Some customers, are you continuing to have to pour so many resources into it that they’re actually not a profitable customer?

How many folks are taking the time to really understand the business and the shape of the business from that perspective? That can tell you a lot about where to go forward.

So I highly suggest that deeper audit and understanding of your existing customer base so that you can, A, work with at-risk customers, B, work through the expansion economics of being able to grow without more capital, and then C, know where to point your outbound resources.

Brian Carroll: This is something I know a lot of marketing teams aren’t doing enough, which is going in and really investigating who our customers are.

For whatever reason, after the sale happens, that’s the responsibility of customer success, or that’s the responsibility of sales, or that’s the responsibility of the account manager. But what I love you’re saying is, no, start by understanding your customer first.

Is there anything else you’d add to that?

DeAnna Ransom: Well, the only piece I’d add is that you want to understand it because your customers are your business. As a business leader, they are your business.

And so understanding them will then help you to understand more about your business, where it’s weak, where it’s performing well, so you know where to pour gas and what to fix.

Brian Carroll: I’d love to talk about what the modern CMO or chief revenue officer or growth leader needs to become now, especially as AI is changing our work and buyer behavior is changing as well.

What do you think a CMO or revenue leader needs to become today to meet these challenges?

DeAnna Ransom: Yeah. I think about it all the time. If you go back to the tax that we are hit with that we’ve been chatting about, and the systems and where we are in the marketplace, the modern growth leader’s job to me is to build a system that is precise enough to scale, yet human enough to trust.

I think that is where we have to come from.

It’s two things at once. It’s a systems architect and a translator.

The architect piece, because marketing, sales, and customer experience, I don’t believe, this is my personal perspective, I don’t think that we can any longer operate as these three separate functions. We have to have shared metrics. We have to operate as one growth system that’s really designed around the buyer.

The translator piece for today’s marketing leader is because now you have to be fluent in AI operations, in revenue operations. I mentioned unit economics, but you still have to be the most empathetic person in the room.

You still have to be the one that is championing and advocating for the customers and the business.

And so I think in this world, in this moment, the title matters a little bit less than the scope. Owning the whole motion as one system and wanting to own it from a business perspective is what I think today’s modern leader is going to need to do.

Brian Carroll: Do we know these people or do we just have their data?

And I think that’s the question every growth team needs to be asking or sitting with right now.

It’s going to put you in place for something that actually works.

And you’ve heard DeAnna Ransom today. She is the Chief Growth Officer at Betterbot. And you can find DeAnna on LinkedIn. I recommend you follow her.

And if you found this episode helpful, you can subscribe. We’ll also be providing the links and resources and transcript in the show notes.

DeAnna, once again, thanks for joining us.

DeAnna Ransom: Thank you so much for having me.

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

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

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

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

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

00:00 Introduction to Jon Miller and his journey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Carroll (05:46) That’s right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Carroll (14:13) That’s right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Carroll (20:19) That’s right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Connect with Brent on LinkedIn

Get the book: The Framemaking Sale

00:00 Why buyers prefer rep-free buying

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 book The Challenger Sale, which reshaped how we think about commercial conversations.

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

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

Brent Adamson:

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 by 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 useful 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 person 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:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

00:00 What is brand activism?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consciously better.

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

Brian: That would be great.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is the groundwork that inspired brand activism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is not marketing.

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

Marketing is more than just sales.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is your purpose as a company?

“Well, I make cars.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Kotler: Every brand gets tired over time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Purpose matters to marketing

Get the book: Brand Activism: From Purpose to Action

Why does so much marketing stink?

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

That line gets to the heart of this conversation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Connect with Michael:

00:00 Introduction to Michael Brenner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Carroll:

Michael Brenner:

Brian Carroll:

Michael Brenner:

Brian Carroll:

Michael Brenner:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Carroll:

Michael Brenner:

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

Brian Carroll:

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

Michael Brenner:

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

Brian Carroll:

Michael Brenner:

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Carroll:

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

Michael Brenner:

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Carroll:

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

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

Michael Brenner:

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Carroll:

Michael Brenner:

Brian Carroll:

Michael Brenner:

Brian Carroll:

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

Michael Brenner:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Carroll:

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

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

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

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

Michael Brenner:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Carroll:

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

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

Michael Brenner:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Carroll:

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

Michael Brenner:

Brian Carroll:

Michael Brenner:

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

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

But there is another side to that story.

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

I know because I lived some of that story myself.

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

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

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

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

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

The question is not whether work matters.

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

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

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

Connect with Carlos:

00:00 Introduction to Carlos Hidalgo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Carroll:

Carlos Hidalgo:

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

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

Brian Carroll:

Carlos Hidalgo:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Carroll:

Carlos Hidalgo:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Carroll:

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

Carlos Hidalgo:

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

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

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

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

Carlos Hidalgo:

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

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

Carlos Hidalgo:

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

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

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

Brian Carroll:

Carlos Hidalgo:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carlos Hidalgo:

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

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

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

Those are the types of things that I protect.

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

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

Brian Carroll:

Carlos Hidalgo:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Carroll:

How would someone start the conversation about this?

Carlos Hidalgo:

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

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

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

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

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

Carlos Hidalgo:

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

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

Brian Carroll:

Carlos Hidalgo:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Carroll:

Carlos Hidalgo:

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

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

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

Carlos Hidalgo:

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.

Carlos Hidalgo:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Carroll:

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

Carlos Hidalgo:

Brian Carroll:

Carlos Hidalgo:

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

Brian Carroll:

Carlos Hidalgo:

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

It is about the customer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

00:00 Introduction to Heidi Melin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian: So the focus is the customer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Backing it out that way is really critical.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It gives you a lot of visibility.

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

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

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

Heidi: And then you refine it over time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is one thing I feel really strongly about.

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

There’s no excuse for that anymore.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian: Thank you so much.

Heidi: Thanks, Brian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Connect with Jeanne:

00:00 Introduction to Jeanne Hopkins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian: Yeah.

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

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

Jeanne: Of course, taking away from family time.

Brian: Right.

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

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

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

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

Jeanne: 2006, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian: Yes.

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

Brian: Right.

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

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

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

Brian: Right.

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

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

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

Jeanne: Are you saying I’m a nag?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian: Yeah. That’s great.

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

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

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

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

Brian: Yeah.

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

You haven’t given anybody anything of value.

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

Brian: Right.

Jeanne: That becomes challenging for many marketers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeanne: Yes. And stay a customer.

Brian: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeanne: Right.

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

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

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

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

Brian: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s just a black hole.

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

What a wasted opportunity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian: Yeah.

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

Brian: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeanne: Yes. They want to be business class.

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

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

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

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

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

So what is your best judgment?

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

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

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

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

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

Jeanne: Absolutely.

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

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

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

Brian: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do you do?

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

Brian: Right.

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

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

Jeanne: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

Brian: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That would be the advice I would share.

Brian: I really appreciate your advice.

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

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

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

That’s pretty much it, or you can email me at [email protected], and I’ll be glad to help out in any way that I can.

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

Jeanne: Thanks a lot, Brian.

Brian: All right.

Most B2B buyers do not want to wait.

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

That is the problem conversational marketing was built to address.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Connect with Dave:

00:00 Introduction to Dave Gerhardt and Drift

“Drift connects you now with the people who are ready to buy now.” — Dave Gerhardt

“Most of the traditional marketing and sales systems were built for later.” — Dave Gerhardt

“You can’t just write a four-page PDF and slap a form in front of it and say, ‘Here you go sales team. Here are some leads.’” — Dave Gerhardt

“How do you ask a question to a form? You can’t.” — Dave Gerhardt

“We don’t use bots to replace a human. We use bots to handle the digital paperwork.” — Dave Gerhardt

“Nobody is just browsing a B2B website for fun.” — Dave Gerhardt

“Think about how you buy, and start thinking about how you can reverse engineer your buying process to match what you would like.” — Dave Gerhardt

“The reason they do bad things is because they’re not incentivized to do the good things.” — Dave Gerhardt

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

Brian Carroll:

Dave Gerhardt:

The way that I talk about Drift is Drift connects you now with the people who are ready to buy now, which is a big change from how traditional marketing typically works, where most of the traditional marketing and sales systems were built for later.

Go to my website, fill out this form, and somebody on the team is going to follow up with you later.

But there has been a huge shift in the way that we all behave and communicate online, and the now is more important than ever.

I think about walking outside this building. If I called a Lyft on my phone, the driver would be there in about one to two minutes, and that is what we expect from everything.

Except in the B2B world, where the rules, for some reason, don’t apply to how we actually all do things in real life.

Brian Carroll:

Dave Gerhardt:

Brian Carroll:

Dave Gerhardt:

We use conversational marketing and Drift to run our whole business, and we have become one of the fastest-growing companies in this industry. It’s not because we have some secret. Our secret has been that we’ve used our own product and really made conversations the center of our business.

As we created this category of conversational marketing and started to educate more people about it, we were like, “You know what? It’s time to write the book.”

We had enough stuff to say and enough case studies, examples, methodologies, playbooks, and blueprints.

We said, “Let’s make 2019 the year that we write the book and do the best job we can trying to help educate the future of marketing and sales on this next wave.”

Brian Carroll:

Dave Gerhardt:

Everybody has a podcast. Everybody has a blog. Everybody is in video. Everybody is on social media.

Five or ten years ago, you could say, “You know what makes us unique? We are a B2B company, and we have a blog.” And people were like, “Blogging? No way!”

Today, all that stuff is a commodity.

Nobody is going to be on their commute home tonight thinking, “You know what I wish I had more of? I wish I had more content from a B2B brand. I need another B2B podcast.”

There has to be some other way to compete.

You can’t just write a four-page PDF and slap a form in front of it and say, “Here you go sales team. Here are some leads.” We are all starting to ignore that.

I try to avoid filling out forms if I can. I hate talking on the phone. I never answer numbers that don’t normally call me. I never reply to cold emails.

Something had to give. That is the shift we have seen in the market.

David Cancel, who I wrote this book with, calls it the shift from supply to demand.

Customers have all the power today. Ten years ago, they didn’t have any of the power.

If you sold iced coffee, you could be the only person who sold iced coffee. You could say, “Brian, you have to go through my process. You want one of my iced coffees? Come back at 5 o’clock tonight, call me on this number, and I’ll talk to you.”

Now customers have all the power. By the time I’m ready to buy an iced coffee, I have already evaluated four or five other companies, and I’m there in your store for a reason.

It’s about adapting to the way people behave and want to interact online. Information is free now. It’s not something that can be a differentiator for you anymore.

Brian Carroll:

Dave Gerhardt:

One of the first things I did at Drift was write an article about the growth marketing influencers you should follow on Twitter. I made a Twitter list, put it in a Google Sheet, and put a form behind it.

I said, “Hey, you want to get my list of 50 people to follow on Twitter? Put your email in here.”

That person is not a lead. There is no intent there. I’m just gating something that is a commodity.

We started the #noforms movement to challenge marketers to rethink how they do demand gen and how they capture leads.

It started because about three years ago David Cancel called me one morning on my way into work. He said, “Hey, you got a second?”

I knew something was wrong because he never talks on the phone. He only texts. He only sends IMs, Slack, WhatsApp, and text messages.

So when he called me, I was like, “I’m getting fired. Here we go.”

It was actually worse than getting fired.

He said, “I think we need to get rid of all the lead forms on our website and our content.”

I was like, “Okay. And do what? I’m your first marketing person here. You pay me to generate leads, and you’re taking that away? What are you going to measure me on?”

He said, “You’re missing the point. If we’re going to build a business around conversations, we need to lead the way. We need to remove our forms and show businesses how to generate demand and drive sales without having to gate content and use lead forms.”

It was a major moment for us. If we were going to build this thing, we had to live it firsthand.

It wasn’t just a marketing lesson. I remember sitting next to two of our engineers. We shared a little table together, and they said, “Okay, you’ve got no forms, so what would you do here?”

We were building it as we went.

It was transformational for our business because we got to see how it worked firsthand. Then we got to go and educate the world.

You say “no forms” to marketers and people are going to jump off the side of the boat.

But for us, it was, “Hold on. Let me show you how you would do a webinar registration without a form. Let me show you how you would do this on your pricing page without a form.”

That gave us an opportunity to educate the market.

Brian Carroll:

Dave Gerhardt:

That is why Drift exists. The way you capture leads now is by having an actual conversation with somebody.

Forms work. The best advice I could give you is, don’t actually replace your forms at first. That is what you do eventually after you are successful with conversational marketing.

Use conversational marketing in addition to your forms to start.

You create a second net that creates a fast lane for the best people. If somebody has high intent and lands on your website, they don’t want to fill out a form. They want to get an answer now.

Drift creates a fast lane for those best people.

And how do you ask a question to a form? You can’t. You either fill it out or you don’t.

Dave Gerhardt:

We had an example like this. The CMO at Starbucks comes to the website and says, “I was interested in doing this, but it looks like you don’t integrate with Slack, so we’re not a good fit.”

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

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

How does that happen in the world of a form? It doesn’t.

The only opportunity is you either fill out the form or you don’t. There is no conversation, and that is the heart of conversational marketing.

Dave Gerhardt:

No. That is where we use bots and AI.

We don’t use bots to replace a human, and we don’t want to put anybody out of a job. We use bots to handle the digital paperwork, the stuff that was normally used for a form.

A bot can ask the same questions a form can ask in two seconds instead of adding the friction of someone filling out a form.

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

That is the kind of relationship conversational marketing can help create.

Brian Carroll:

Do you have any stories of brands applying this?

Dave Gerhardt:

We have a customer who uses it not to book sales meetings, but to sell tickets to their event. Every person that lands on that website gets a message: “Hey Brian, nice to see you here. Did you know that right now we’re running two-for-one tickets? Do you want to get one?”

That is a conversation to sell event tickets.

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

A lot of people use conversational marketing with content: “Hey, you just finished reading this article about thing X. I bet you’d also like part two, which is about thing Y. Do you want to go check that out?”

The bot leads them to another piece of content.

Dave Gerhardt:

You would say, “No. I just want to read this article.”

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

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

Imagine you had a store. If every person who walked in was asked, “Do you want to buy something? Do you want to buy something now? Can I show you where to buy something?” you would scare them away.

But that is how most B2B companies operate on their website.

Brian Carroll:

Dave Gerhardt:

Like they did no research and just stumbled on your website in the middle of the desert and said, “What does this cybersecurity company do?”

It doesn’t happen that way.

Nobody is just browsing a B2B website for fun. You are not lying in bed on a Saturday morning going through B2B company websites.

Step one is to understand that the people who are there are there for a reason. They probably listen to your podcasts, watch your videos, read your blog, got on your email list, or heard from a friend.

If someone comes to the Drift website and does not find what they want, they are going to Google “Drift alternative” and find one of our competitors.

It is all about empathy. It is understanding who somebody is and why they are on your website.

My wife and I bought a new car about a month ago. We walked into the dealership and already had everything narrowed down. We just wanted a test drive.

That is how we behave as people. That is how we all buy.

But then something happens in our brains when we go to work in sales and marketing. We say, “I have to make sure we don’t tell them anything about this unless they talk to us.”

The old sales rep tactic was, “You want to know the price? Let’s get on a call.”

No. Just tell me the price over email.

It starts with empathy and understanding that the goal should be to have a conversation with somebody who is in your store. Your store as a B2B company is your website.

If I had a store, I’d have somebody in front and somebody in the aisles saying, “I’m here if you need anything. Let me know if you have any questions.” That is how we think about conversational marketing.

Brian Carroll:

Dave Gerhardt:

The easiest way to be empathetic is to think about what type of marketing you react to.

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

Hold on. We are all the same. I’m not B2B Dave at work and then Dave the dad at home. I am the same person in all walks of life.

We live in a world where I can order Starbucks on my phone. I can order a car on my phone. I can order four boxes of diapers and have them sent to my house tomorrow.

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

To break into empathy, you do not have to only think about what somebody else feels. Think about how you buy. Think about the last thing you bought, and start reverse engineering your buying process to match what you would like.

Brian Carroll:

Dave Gerhardt:

When I saw a highly designed HTML banner email, I was like, “This is a promotion from a company.”

We wanted all of our emails to look and feel like they were being sent from a friend.

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

The subject line would be “Tomorrow?”

“Hey mom, I’m just making sure we’re still on for tomorrow. We’ll be there at 1 o’clock. Do you need anything from me?”

Why do our marketing emails have to be different than that? That is how we talk. That is how we communicate.

So we started thinking: what if we ditched the banners, ditched the design, and started sending plain text emails written like they were from a friend?

Brian Carroll:

Dave Gerhardt:

Wait a second. Doesn’t that say something about the state of the industry?

B2B marketing is not supposed to sound like a real person?

No. That is exactly why we are doing it. I want it to sound like a real person.

When you subscribed to our blog, you would get an email from me that said, “Hey, I just want to get this out of the way. My name is Dave, and I’m VP of Marketing at Drift. Even though this is an automated email, I wanted to let you know I’m a real person, I’m really here, and I actually wrote this. If you ever get spammed or feel like your inbox is being disrespected, just email me directly.”

That email disarms people because it says: I’m a real person. Nobody is trying to spam you. We’re real. We’re human.

That little piece of humanity helped us build a relationship with those early subscribers.

Brian Carroll:

When I first started, before it was called business development reps, my VP of Sales said to me, “Just be people with people.”

I was 23. I was an intern trying to sound important because I was calling executives. When I embraced the fact that I was 23, didn’t have a lot of experience, and was just who I was, there was authenticity.

Dave Gerhardt:

No 23-year-old BDR is going to know more about marketing than me. That’s not a knock. You just graduated college and are in an entry-level sales job.

If you reach out and try to tell me that you can triple my conversion, there’s no way.

So how can you be human? How can you show who you really are?

“Hey, look, I’m at this company. I’m not a marketing person, but we have this product that has seen great results for customers like you. Can I show you how it works?”

That little change makes such a difference.

Brian Carroll:

Dave Gerhardt:

The reason sales, marketing, or BDR teams do bad things is because they are not incentivized to do the good things.

If you say, “Brian, you’re a 23-year-old BDR. You have to make 200 calls today. That’s all I care about,” what are you going to do? You’re going to make 200 calls.

Or, “You have to send 300 emails today.” Then you’re going to send a bunch of automated, terrible emails.

If you incentivize behavior like that, then of course that will be the result.

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

There are two ways to do that.

You could send 300 emails and hope you get two replies, which probably means you have to blast people.

Or you could reach out to six perfect dream customers and book two meetings from that. That means you spend half your day doing research.

It’s the same process for sales and marketing that we have to bring back.

Brian Carroll:

Dave Gerhardt:

The biggest mistake people make is, “I bought Drift. It’s everywhere. Let’s see what happens.”

No. What is your plan?

Most websites have a contact-us button or request-demo page, and that pops out a 13-field, 15-field, or 20-field form. That is easy. We could replace that.

Start with that one page. Have a contained experiment on that one page. Prove out success and then start to expand.

Then put it on the pricing page. Then put it on the homepage. Then put it on the blog.

You need a motion that you are trying to improve. Maybe you think you can double the conversion rate on your homepage by doing this.

Start with one or two familiar patterns, whether it is your blog or your request-demo button, and learn.

You will learn more than you thought you would. Some people say, “I only want to book sales demos.” Then they start using Drift and say, “I haven’t booked a demo yet, but I’ve had five conversations this morning that blew my mind, and now I need to change my homepage.”

That is the stuff you cannot quantify until you get out there and have real conversations with people.

Brian Carroll:

Dave Gerhardt:

Brian Carroll:

Dave Gerhardt: