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:

B2B lead generation has had to reinvent itself over the last decade.

Sales teams have always taken an account-based view. They think in terms of target accounts, buying committees, opportunities, and relationships.

Marketing, though, has often been trained to think in terms of leads.

That creates a problem.

In B2B, you are almost never selling to one individual. You are selling into a buying team. And the bigger the deal, the more people, departments, and functional areas get involved.

That is why many B2B marketers eventually hit a wall with a purely lead-based approach.

Account-based marketing is not just a campaign. It is not just advertising to a list of target accounts. And it is not just marketing.

ABM works best when sales, marketing, customer success, and other revenue-generating teams operate together around the accounts that matter most.

That is why I interviewed Jon Miller, then CEO and co-founder of Engagio. Jon and his team had just released the second edition of The Clear and Complete Guide to Account-Based Marketing.

In this conversation, Jon explains how account-based marketing differs from traditional demand generation, why marketers need to adopt the language of accounts, and how empathy, relevance, and measurement all fit into a stronger ABM strategy.

Jon Miller has spent his career building marketing technology companies. He co-founded Marketo with Phil Fernandez and later co-founded Engagio, an account-based marketing platform.

Jon brings a deep perspective on marketing automation, account-based marketing, revenue teams, customer data, and how B2B companies can move beyond lead-based thinking.

00:00 Introduction to Jon Miller and Engagio

“Account-based marketing is spearfishing as opposed to net fishing.” — Jon Miller

“ABM is a way of running your go-to-market.” — Jon Miller

“If it’s just marketing, it’s not a strategy; it’s a campaign.” — Jon Miller

“We taught marketers to talk about leads.” — Jon Miller

“Empathy and relevance are really just two sides of a coin.” — Jon Miller

“It’s not about counting the people you reach. It’s about reaching the people that count.” — Jon Miller

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

Brian: Well Jon, welcome. Why don’t you start by telling us a little bit about your background and what inspired you to start Engagio?

Jon: Sure, great. I’m excited to be here and have a chance to hang out with you again. It’s been a while since we talked.

My background: I’ve been in marketing technology almost my entire career. My undergraduate degree is actually in physics. When I was coming out of college, I ended up doing a lot of work with companies that were trying to take advantage of all the customer data they had to make decisions.

Because I came to marketing with that quantitative and analytical background, that led me into a series of marketing technology companies that were basically all about trying to use all that data to drive better customer decisions and one-to-one interactions. I was very much inspired by the Don Peppers and Martha Rogers book The One to One Future.

I worked at a company called Exchange, and then I was an early employee at a company called Epiphany, which was probably the leading marketing technology company of the mid-90s.

After we sold Epiphany, I co-founded Marketo along with Phil Fernandez. I think that’s arguably, or maybe not even arguably, the leading marketing technology company of the last 10 years or so. It recently sold to Adobe for just under $5 billion.

So I had this long career in marketing technology, but one of the trends I think is always true is that marketing is changing all the time, as well as the underlying technologies. I felt about four years ago that Marketo wasn’t, frankly, moving fast enough to keep up with all the new trends and changes in how marketing was done.

So I was inspired to start a new company that would really be seeking to build out the next generation of marketing products that could take advantage of all these new trends. One of those big trends is what’s now known as account-based marketing. That is where I really decided to start and focus, to have Engagio be a platform for account-based marketing.

Brian: Well, there are a lot of definitions out there about account-based marketing, and I’ve talked with CMOs and VPs who see account-based marketing as just good marketing.

But I’d love to ask you, you just had this new book come out, The Clear and Complete Guide to Account-Based Marketing, and you’re on your second edition. How would you define it?

Jon: First of all, let me just say I’m really excited about the book. It is a second edition. I wrote the first one about three years ago, and I’ve learned a ton more about ABM in the last three years.

I’ll start with a colloquial definition of ABM, then I’ll give you my formal one.

I think the colloquial one I like to use is a comparison back to the kind of marketing that we did with Marketo. That is the marketing that I like to describe as fishing with nets.

When you’re fishing with nets, you run your campaigns and you don’t care which specific fish you catch. You just care: did I catch enough? Then you can do lead nurturing and lead scoring to run it through the system.

But when you’re going after bigger or more strategic accounts, or maybe you’re going after your existing customers for expansion, or you’re in a narrow industry, any time you have a specific list of named accounts, you don’t want to wait around for those big fish to swim into your net. You’re going to find ways to reach out to them proactively.

It’s much more like fishing with a spear.

To me, that’s the simple definition of account-based marketing: it’s spearfishing as opposed to net fishing.

My formal definition is that account-based marketing is a go-to-market strategy that will coordinate personalized marketing and sales efforts to land and expand at target accounts. Can I explain what some of those words mean?

Brian: Yeah. If you could break that out, that would be great.

Jon: First of all, I’m very precisely calling it a strategy. ABM is a way of running your go-to-market and how your sales, marketing, and customer success teams work. It’s not a campaign or a tactic.

So you really do need to say, “We use ABM as our go-to-market strategy, or at least one of our go-to-market strategies.”

Second, ABM is really all about being personalized. There’s so much noise in the market today. If you’re spearfishing and you’re trying to reach the right people at the right companies, somehow you’ve got to break through all that noise. The best way to do that is with relevance, resonance, and empathy, which I know we’ll talk about.

ABM is actually a misnomer because we’re saying it’s account-based marketing, but right there in my definition I’m talking about marketing and sales. I think we should talk about that a little bit more later.

ABM is about landing and expanding. Especially today, so many companies earn revenue through subscription models and recurring revenue models. Just focusing on new business, which is what net fishing is all about, is really a limited, myopic focus.

ABM expands, or changes, the marketer’s mindset to focus on the entire revenue journey: landing, creating new pipeline, accelerating existing deals, and expanding and retaining existing relationships.

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

Brian: Well, it makes sense, and I appreciate what you’re talking about: the overarching trend. CEOs are focused on lifetime value, LTV, and CAC, customer acquisition cost. ABM is providing an answer to that.

There still is so much confusion out there, and you say ABM isn’t just about marketing. How do you mean? How is it really different from demand generation? Because I still think people out there, even though we’ve just talked about the definitions, are still getting confused.

Jon: I always thought it was ironic that we called the category Marketo played in “marketing automation.” People thought marketing automation meant you have fewer humans doing less work.

The reality is the exact opposite. When you buy a tool like Marketo, or any marketing automation platform, it requires work. People have to do stuff.

In many ways, marketing automation is a misnomer in the same way that ABM is a misnomer because ABM is not just about marketing.

If you’re focused on the entire revenue journey — creating new pipeline, accelerating existing deals, expanding and retaining relationships — that can’t just be marketing. It has to be an orchestrated business initiative between the different functions.

Frankly, if it’s just marketing, it’s not a strategy; it’s a campaign.

At Engagio, and with a lot of our customers, their strategies are not called ABM. They call it something like account-based everything, or the account-first initiative, or something as simple as account-based sales and marketing.

I’ve seen all of those at play, and I think it really is the right way to think about it. Otherwise, as I said, it’s just a campaign.

Brian: I think that’s a huge distinction, especially as people are thinking toward the future.

I liked in your book, as I was reading it, you have a quote: “Salespeople never talk about how many leads they close. They talk about how many accounts they closed.”

Do you find that marketers see this differently, and why?

Jon: Well, yeah. I mean, this is my fault and a little bit your fault.

Brian: Sure.

Jon: We taught marketers to talk about leads.

Brian: Right.

Jon: Literally, we called it lead nurturing and so on. The technologies that we use, like Marketo, for example, were built to be lead-based systems. You can’t even log into Marketo and look at an account, for example.

So we created this world where marketers talked about leads and salespeople talked about accounts, which almost by definition meant they were not on the same page.

That’s not the only reason marketing and sales have trouble getting along, but it certainly didn’t help.

I think a big part of ABM, put simply, is marketers adopting the language the salespeople use and being on the same page.

Brian: Yeah. I think salespeople have practiced, in some ways, the very things you’re talking about in your book. They may have called it strategic account selling, major account selling, or target account selling.

But they did focus on these accounts. As you talked about, now marketers are coming alongside salespeople and working on these accounts together.

We’re going to talk about some process steps, but I wanted to step back to something you said earlier: there’s so much noise out there. We have more channels, more content, and more technology to reach customers than ever before. But connecting with them has never been harder.

I am, of course, a big proponent and fan of empathy. How do you see building empathy for our customers to bridge that gap of connection and trust and account-based marketing fitting together?

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

It’s such a crowded, noisy market, and people love to ignore unwanted marketing and unwanted messaging.

I think at the core, if you want to cut through the noise, you have to find a way to delight your prospects, educate them, and add value to them.

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

If you understand their pains, you’re going to be in a much better position to teach them something about their specific economic motivators and their specific pains. That is how we stand out.

I think it’s very much like The Challenger Sale, which is so popular on the sales side of the equation. That’s what the best salespeople do. They teach, and they tailor, and they do that by having empathy with their customer.

So very much these things go hand in hand. I’m sure you have additional thoughts on that because you’re the empathy expert.

Brian: I certainly do. For our listeners, we had Brent Adamson, who is co-author of The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer, so we got Brent’s thoughts about this.

I’ll share my perspective. At a deeper level, you talked about pains. Neuroscientists have shown that we rationalize our decisions, but all our decisions are based in emotion.

So what we need to do is connect to, as you talked about, the pains, but also the results people want.

We have to think about when they’re making a purchase, where it’s a complex sale, and ABM is oriented to that. Multiple people are involved.

What causes us to change is that we see something in it for us. What causes us to stay stuck is like trying to climb a mountain.

If I want to climb and I have to take other people with me, some of them don’t want to go. Or I’m concerned about how they feel about doing this. How will my team see me?

I’m going to be concerned about whether this is going to add 10 extra hours to my week when I’m already maxed out.

There’s this personal stuff happening inside your customer because we’re all customers. We all make decisions emotionally.

What we need to realize is that just because it’s B2B, we think it’s less emotional. But the reality is the stakes are higher. It’s more emotional.

That’s the thing I find: we’ve got to tune into every stage of the journey and what’s happening.

Jon: That’s a great point.

The only thing I’d also add is I think the emotions in B2B tend to be more about avoiding negative emotions, whereas B2C might be about seeking aspirational emotions.

Because in B2B, there’s such a disconnect between the fact that if you make a good purchase, your company is a little bit better off. If you make a bad purchase, you can lose your job.

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

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

For that person, they’re really saying, “Do I want to do this? Is it really going to be worth it?”

As you talked about the pain, changing is painful. There’s so much there.

I loved that you laid out a process based on what you’ve seen as a proven approach: these seven ABM process steps. We probably don’t have time to go through all of them, but where do you see marketers getting stuck or needing to put more attention in those seven ABM process steps?

Jon: For the listeners, I’ll summarize the seven steps down and keep it simple. It’s really about who, what, where, and measurement.

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

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

Where is how you actually get that message in front of them. What channels? How do you orchestrate those interactions?

Then the last piece is measurement of the whole thing.

In terms of your question, where do people get stuck, it’s really a maturity curve.

Obviously, to start, you need to pick your accounts. That is a process that has to go hand in hand with sales. The companies that are less mature can get wrapped around the axle right there. They just can’t find a good process for how marketing and sales actually collaborate around an account selection process.

Once they’re past that stage, the next area I see people get stuck is that they pick too many accounts to really be able to deliver the level of personalization and relevance that’s truly required to be successful with ABM.

I’ve seen people pick 200 tier-one accounts. Having 200 tier-one accounts means you are not creating a bespoke, customized interaction with deep account-relevant research at every one of those 200 accounts.

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

Then the third challenge that the most mature companies run into is scaling the whole thing.

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

Now, how do you start to automate some of those steps to bring it to the next level and make sure that any time a target account is doing something interesting, your sales team knows about it and you’re following up appropriately?

It has to become a machine and not a whole series of one-act heroics.

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

Brian: That’s really good, Jon.

Along these lines, I wanted to ask, for someone out there who’s listening and thinking of beginning ABM, or someone who’s started it, do you have any tips or actionable advice you would give to someone over coffee if they said, “Hey, how do I do better?”

Jon: Yeah, a couple tips.

I think the first is that I see a lot of companies start their ABM journey with display advertising. I think they do that because it’s really easy. It’s an easy button. You just have to spend some money, give them your account list, and hey, you get to say you’re doing ABM.

But I’ve also seen that lead to disillusionment with ABM quite frequently because the reality is, I don’t care if you’re doing account targeting or not. Ads are ads.

Brian: Right.

Jon: I don’t click on ads. I don’t even notice ads. I’m sure that’s probably true with a lot of other executives.

So my first tip is don’t get seduced into thinking that you can really just start with ads. I think of ads as a nice thing you layer on top of an existing program, but not your first step. That’s my first piece of advice.

My next piece of advice is that you really have to think about your technology infrastructure.

At Marketo, I started trying to do ABM with Marketo and Salesforce and the systems that I had. It was hard because those are lead-based systems, and the data in those systems doesn’t wrap into your account.

I made my marketing operations team crazy just trying to set up the processes so I could even measure whether or not we were having an impact at the account level.

If you’re looking to start, I think it’s worth thinking about: what is your account foundation? How do you look at data at an account-based level?

It’s kind of obvious when you say it that way. You can’t be account-based if you can’t look at your accounts. But I see a lot of people missing that as a place to start.

Brian: That’s very good.

As I was looking through the book, this is a book you’re offering for free to people for providing information. You put a lot of effort and energy into it. It’s very well done.

What’s your favorite chapter in your book, and why?

Jon: My favorite chapter? Sophie’s choice. I’m not going to pick one. I’m going to pick two here.

Brian: Okay, sounds good.

Jon: First, I really like the whole part two of the guide, which is all about the different styles of ABM.

The concept of ABM entitlements is totally new in the second edition. I like it a lot because when I go and talk to our customers about how they take their ABM program to the next level, this concept always comes up: the different styles and the entitlements.

It’s related directly back to the problem I talked about earlier, which is that people tend to pick too many accounts and therefore aren’t able to deliver enough wood behind the arrow.

So I think part two about the styles of ABM entitlements is one of my favorites.

The other one I like a lot is this whole section on ABM metrics and measurements, partly because I’m a quantitative, measurement, numbers guy.

But it’s really struck me how different the metrics in ABM are from the metrics in traditional demand generation.

In a nutshell, the metrics in traditional marketing primarily focus on quantity. Back to net fishing, it’s all about how many leads did I generate? How many opportunities did I generate? How many people attended my webinar? How many people showed up at my event? And so on.

It totally misses out on the much more fundamental questions around quality.

First of all, are these the right people from the right accounts? It’s not about counting the people you reach. It’s about reaching the people that count. Are you measuring that?

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

Most salespeople would rather have meaningful engagement from a decision maker at a target account than 100 random leads. ABM metrics really embrace that concept.

Brian: Totally. That’s great.

Is there anything you wanted to add? Otherwise, I was going to ask what’s the best way for readers and listeners to get in touch with you.

Jon: We’ve been talking a lot about the book. The big thing I want to add is go grab it. It’s 175 pages. It’s easy to read, with lots of charts and tables, but it’s packed with actionable, useful information.

You can grab it on our website at Engagio.com/guide. Just Engagio.com/guide.

That’s a great way. If you want to see a demo of Engagio, you can check a box there as well, and we’ll get in touch with you.

If you want to reach me personally, probably the best way is over Twitter, where I’m just @JonMiller. J-O-N M-I-L-L-E-R.

Brian: Perfect. Well Jon, thanks again for joining us and sharing your insights. I’m really glad we got to reconnect after so long.

Jon: Yeah, it’s been great. Thank you.

Brian: Thank you.

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

And buyers are tuning them out harder than ever.

Not because buyers hate marketing.

Because they hate being treated like a target.

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

That is why trust and empathy are not “soft skills.” They are conversion infrastructure.

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

We talk about why automated sequences are losing effectiveness, why buyers want a guide instead of a pursuer, how trust affects deal progress, and how sales and marketing teams can use automation to support human connection instead of replacing it.

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

Steve Woods is the founder and CTO of Nudge. Before Nudge, Steve co-founded Eloqua, one of the early leaders in marketing automation.

Steve has spent his career thinking about how sales and marketing teams use data, relationships, trust, and timing to help buyers move forward.

00:00 Introduction to Steve Woods and Nudge

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

That means maintaining context, offering useful next steps, and trading self-promotion for perspective. Automation can support the research, timing, and relationship tracking. It cannot replace the human work of building trust.

“The core was getting the trust and the relationships.” — Steve Woods

“Buyers are all about developing an understanding and guiding themselves down a journey.” — Steve Woods

“You can’t automate empathy. You can’t automate trust.” — Steve Woods

“You haven’t asked first. You’ve given first.” — Steve Woods

“That’s not a give. That’s an ask.” — Steve Woods

It is tempting to blame channels.

But the real issue is behavioral.

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

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

Trust becomes the differentiator because it reduces buyer risk:

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

How to become safe to engage.

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

Brian: So, Steve, tell us a little bit about your background and what inspired you to start Nudge.

Steve: Sure thing. You and I have known each other, obviously, for a long time. A few decades.

My history prior to Nudge was Eloqua in the marketing space. Obviously, that’s a space you’re very familiar with. You work a lot with marketers.

At Eloqua, we were able to see this wonderful transition as marketing went from kind of an arts-and-crafts discipline to a very measured lead generation and demand generation discipline that started to connect with sales.

Here are leads that are qualified. Here are leads that are interested. That was a wonderful transition to see.

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

The core was getting the trust and the relationships, and the breadth and depth of relationships in our organization, that would then allow that deal to move forward, the trust and the empathy to be developed, and ultimately the deal to be closed based on those relationships.

As the Eloqua story was winding down, Paul and I decided to jump in and tackle relationship intelligence, and use relationship intelligence as a way to understand where empathy is being built, where trust is being built, and how you can make a sales team more effective by focusing their efforts on the right initiatives.

Brian: That’s really cool, just how you took your story from where you were to what you’re doing right now.

What are some of the lessons you’ve learned about building a company now versus when you were building Eloqua, and thinking about what you’ve learned over the past decade?

Steve: I think the thing that we were lucky with more than anything at Eloqua was being part of a major change in a space.

Marketing went from unmeasured to measured, and there were all the effects that had on the people and the processes and the technology and the understanding.

We were lucky to be a core part of that, and that helped us flow along with that river.

What we were trying to do with Nudge was be a little bit more proactive and say, “What’s going on at a macro level that is going to be a dominant theme of a space for the next decade?”

Looking at sales and looking at relationships, it became very clear that relationships, trust, and empathy were the core thing, and it was unmeasurable. It was intuitive.

Every sales leader, when you’re talking about deal slippage, deal progress, or your forecast, it’s all about the relationships and the trust. But it’s not measurable. It’s self-reported by sales reps who often have happy ears on the process.

So we thought, “If we can figure out how to put measurement around trust, empathy, and relationships, and then build the tooling on top of that to help people drive the ship in the right direction based on that, then we’re going to be part of a very interesting transition.”

That’s turned out to be true, as you’re seeing the evolution of the sales space. It’s a really interesting place to find ourselves in the middle of.

Brian: Prior to us having our interview, we were just talking about some of the changes that have happened in sales, what’s been happening for our customer, and how difficult it’s gotten for people to get things done, including buying.

One of the things that got us reconnected is that I read the post you wrote about holding the hustle. What inspired you to think about hold the hustle, and how has it influenced how you do your own outreach at Nudge?

Steve: Absolutely. That, as with many things, sort of stemmed from a rant, which is always a good place to start.

It’s interesting because we’re really working in this space of sales. We spent a lot of time and developed a series called “How I Buy,” which interviews buyers on how they actually go about buying.

On the other side, we spent a lot of time talking with salespeople on how they sell.

It was Mars and Venus.

Buyers are all about developing an understanding and guiding themselves down a journey. They selectively bring in salespeople when they need some deeper points of view, and they really want them to be thoughtful co-conspirators on a journey.

Then you talk with salespeople, and it was automation, numbers, a thousand emails a day, and “Hey, did you get my last email?” sequences.

It was all hustle, hustle, hustle.

It was bizarre to look at these and realize they were attempting to describe the same animal.

At the same time, you’re seeing the effect of this. Maybe the first of these automated sequences you received as an executive felt like diligent follow-up. “Oh look, they’re following up.”

But you get those today, and I think my spam folder is filled with hundreds and hundreds of “Hey, did you get my last email?” messages.

So the rant was, “Stop. We just have to stop this in sales. It’s not working. It is not going to work. It’s going downhill, and it’s going to have to continue to go downhill.”

That developed into the Hold the Hustle thesis, and that got a huge response.

I think everyone intuitively got that, and we were able, luckily, to articulate something that a lot of people were feeling: why the tooling they were told to develop and employ is just not driving anything that even came close to building trust and empathy.

Brian: As part of my work interviewing customers, it’s surprising how little impact marketing has in their own journey, in terms of the marketing of the vendor and how they’re learning in the process.

But what was particularly insightful is what a difference the salesperson makes in the customer experience, in terms of building trust. Customers want to know the sales rep is their advocate. They want to know they’re talking to them straight. They’re not pitching to them.

As you’ve done your own outreach, can you share any stories of people who’ve held the hustle and what they’ve seen? If they were doing it one way and changed, what have you noticed? What’s been the result?

Steve: Absolutely.

If you look at what buyers are looking for, it is that person to go along with them on a journey and challenge them, educate them, make them squint, turn their head sideways, and look at a problem in a new light.

That’s what people want.

The facts and information are all out there. What you’re looking for as a buyer is not that. You can get that. You can Google something and find any facts and information.

What you want is the “so what?”

What does it mean? What are the challenges? Where is it going to work? Where is it not going to work?

The salespeople who have been able to say, “No, that is my job. My job is to challenge people,” go deep on customer problems.

They try to understand that aspect of the customer’s world better than the customer. They focus on the right question.

When you get hit with that question of, “Huh, I didn’t think about it that way. Okay, now I’m listening,” now there’s an opportunity for us to talk because I didn’t think about my own world in the way that you just asked about it.

Now the light bulb has gone off, and I realize that there’s something more for me to learn.

That’s when that bar of trust starts to move forward.

It’s the sales reps who come at it that way and find opportunities to say, “Is something going on in your world, Brian? You’re probably thinking about it this way, and I’m going to push you to think about it that way. Here’s why. Here’s a story, and you’re maybe going to be a little uncomfortable with the story.”

But it’s going to give you some insight that you wouldn’t have gotten just doing a Google search.

Brian: I like the word insight. As I was listening to you, I thought that everything you were saying is helping your customer have that insight and find that aha.

Because if we’re going to drive change, and that’s what people are doing when they decide to solve a problem or buy something, change is hard.

Not only that, helping other people experience change is even harder.

So how do we do that?

It sounds like a lot of the work you’ve been doing has been connecting the dots, helping people understand the relationships, and helping them go through that journey.

As you think of automation, and you’ve been a part of this space for a long time, how do you see empathy and automation fitting together in how sales and marketing do outreach today?

Steve: I think that is the key question.

I think the answer is a little bit easier than it would seem, because the simple version of the answer is: you can’t automate empathy. You can’t automate trust.

But there’s a lot of background work that goes into finding the opportunities to say, “Oh, there’s a chance here that I can add a little bit of value to your world that you wouldn’t have expected.”

To do that, I need to understand my world. I need to understand you, your history, your business, and what’s going on right now.

Then I need to put those two together and insert a point of view in the conversation.

Doing all that background research to say, “What’s happening right now with you, your journey at large, and your journey with my business specifically?” and then mapping that out to a point of view can be done through a lot of automation and AI.

The conversation — “Hey Brian, saw this, thought that, here’s what’s going on, here’s how you might want to think about it” — that’s a very human thing to do.

Automation can put enough of it on a silver platter to say, “Here’s where Brian’s at, and these next steps on the journey might make sense based on all of this history and where he’s at right now today.”

That can be facilitated by automation. It’s a lot of research and grunt work, and it can be optimized a lot better to tee up those silver platter moments.

Brian: I think that really is the tricky thing, right?

It’s pulling together the right data and then also having empathy, which gives you that intuition or insight to ultimately say, “Okay, emotionally, I’ve got more emotional intelligence of what the situation needs, what this person is looking for, and what they’re experiencing.”

How are they going to have that next conversation? What would be useful to share with them at this point in time?

Let’s get really practical. Can you talk about any actionable tips or advice you’ve learned through your own experience that could help sellers do better outreach right now?

Steve: Absolutely.

I think the easiest step for anyone who’s trying to build relationships is, quite simply, to look at those relationships and ask, “Where am I losing touch?”

Most people don’t do that.

You have the first conversation. If it goes to a deal, great. Ninety percent of them don’t, and they just drop off.

The best reps used to do this manually with Excel spreadsheets.

One of the things we focus on with Nudge is where you can say, “Look, just make sure I’m in touch with these people every three months. That’s it. I just need to reach out.”

That puts a floor on your relationship building.

But then the next point is, okay, I now need to develop this logical next step for where that person is on the journey they’re mapping out.

So I need to understand what’s going on in their world.

What’s happening with their company? What are the new recent events that have happened? Have there been any executive changes? Where are they on their journey with my organization?

This is sort of an advancement of the digital body language concept that you and I chatted about over the last decade.

Where are they? What have they done? What have they looked at? Have they used a free trial? Did they get value out of it? Where are they on that journey?

Given all of those things, what can I nudge them to do next?

Can I say, “You’re probably here, and you’re probably thinking this. But if you just did this one little thing, thought about it in a different way, or looked at a data set I’m going to send over to you, your perspective would evolve.”

It’s not a sales pitch. It’s not, “Hey, let’s do a one-hour sales call.”

It’s, “Let me show you a new perspective that you might appreciate.”

If you can do that and you can guide them along this journey, what you’re doing is pushing them forward on a journey, but you’re also building trust.

You haven’t asked first. You’ve given first.

In doing so, you’ve built those little tiny nuggets of trust that eventually will guide you to be able to say, “Hey, let’s do something here. I think you’ve gone down this journey, and your next step on the journey actually is to become a customer of ours. Here’s what that would look like. We’ve built all this trust. Let’s make this happen.”

Brian: I love that. If our audience were just to take those insights and apply them, I think it would make a difference.

As I was listening to you, there are two ways of building relationship. One is like we’re doing: having a conversation, dialoguing together.

The second way is reciprocal altruism. What it really means is we give something of value to someone without expecting anything in return. It doesn’t feel like there’s something attached to it.

That really is the trick: to know it isn’t about being tricky. It’s focusing on, “My intention is to help this person. To do that, I need to understand. To do that, I need to understand where we are in our relationship.”

As you talked about, where they’re at in their journey, what are the questions they’re dealing with? What might they be thinking about? What might they be feeling at this moment?

So that I can actually help them and present what would be useful at that point in time.

Steve: Yeah. It’s interesting because if you extend that train of thought, you get this really interesting challenge for the rest of the world, the world of marketing.

Marketing, for the last decade, has not focused as much as it could on those value-added nuggets that I as a salesperson can give to you when the moment is right.

When you’re at that point on the journey, what is my give?

If a sales team doesn’t have those gives, then they’re kind of stuck with, “Hey, let’s set up a 60-minute sales call.”

Well, that’s not a give. That’s an ask. That’s a big ask. So the answer is no.

The evolution of marketing that we’re seeing today in some of the top organizations is to be able to come up with those things that are actual gives.

They’re useful information. They’re useful data sets. They’re useful documents, trials, or experiences.

They’re not traps.

They’re not a half thing where you need to take a sales call to get the other half thing.

They’re actual gives that build trust and move a buyer along the relationship.

It’s a really interesting challenge for marketing, and some marketers are getting into it with quite a bit of gusto.

Brian: I think that is difficult unless someone is able to think beyond, “My role as a marketer is to generate a lead or get an MQL.”

Some people have called it full-funnel marketing. Other people have called it revenue marketing. I think it’s really about customer marketing and customer experience.

It starts with the first touch and continues throughout.

It’s having marketers see beyond that, because a lot of the trust building is happening through that human being — the sales rep or the sales development rep.

What can I do to equip them so that every touch they have with that customer is a positive experience and is helpful?

That’s really the best brand building.

All the other things that we want to have in marketing — brand, conversion, more opportunities, more pipeline — it all starts with adding value.

To do that, it requires us to maybe take the pedal off trying to focus on conversion all the time.

Steve: Yeah. I think the focus on conversion kind of made sense in the world that we were in 10 years ago, where a deal, if I can overgeneralize, was a big moment in time.

Brian: Yeah.

Steve: A customer went from not a customer to a big three-year contract, multiple hundred thousand, now they are a customer. Over the wall to customer success, out of the world of sales.

That’s not the reality now.

Most buying journeys look more like a ramp than a step function.

You come in, maybe you’re on a trial product, maybe you’ve got one team, maybe you’ve got a month-to-month license, and then your experience grows and evolves and builds from there as you achieve success and go down that journey’s pathway.

You ultimately become a very successful, large enterprise client.

But it’s not a step function. It’s a growth process.

If you, as a marketing team, are thinking forward like that, you’re giving your sales teams — whether you call them sales teams, account farmers, customer success reps that have revenue responsibility, whatever they look like, whatever business card they hold — the tooling to help guide buyers along that journey to become more and more deeply ingrained with your organization, more trusting, and more successful.

Brian: Well Steve, thank you. This has been fun. What’s the best way for readers and listeners to get in touch with you?

Steve: I exist on all forms online. [email protected]. You should be able to find me on LinkedIn or Twitter. And nudge.ai is our website. So if you can’t find me, you’re not trying hard enough.

Brian: Thanks again.

Steve: Thank you, Brian.

Growth for B2B companies is hard.

It used to be that you could accelerate growth mainly through customer acquisition. Ramp up sales. Ramp up marketing. Fill the funnel. Close more deals.

But that is not enough to sustain growth anymore.

The best companies are learning how to grow through customer success.

That is why I interviewed Kia Puhm, CEO at DesiredPath, about how companies can transform the customer success journey and drive revenue from existing customer relationships.

Kia brings a practical and deeply customer-centered perspective on how companies can help customers adopt software, get value faster, build loyalty, and grow over time.

We talk about disruption, customer-centric thinking, journey mapping, customer empathy, moments of truth, and why customer success is not just about making customers happy. It is about operationalizing a better experience so customers can succeed, stay, and grow.

Kia Puhm is CEO at DesiredPath. She has more than 20 years of experience in the software industry and has built post-sales functions across rapidly growing software companies.

Her work focuses on helping organizations improve customer success, customer experience, adoption, retention, and revenue growth through more customer-centric operating models.

00:00 Introduction to Kia Puhm and customer success

You improve customer success by helping customers adopt your product, get value from it, and experience less friction along the way.

That requires more than onboarding checklists or support tickets. It requires understanding the customer’s journey from their point of view, identifying emotional moments of truth, and aligning your organization around helping the customer succeed.

“Customers stay loyal when they’re having good experiences and the product is delivering on the promises that it says it’s going to deliver.” — Kia Puhm

“We put the onus on them to understand how to operationalize, how to take that software and put it within their environment.” — Kia Puhm

“We make it easier. We make it feel easier. We make it more enjoyable to bring that software into their organization.” — Kia Puhm

“How can you understand someone’s point of view if you’re not thinking from their perspective?” — Kia Puhm

“You don’t have to have it absolutely right and perfect at the beginning.” — Kia Puhm

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

Automated: This call is being recorded.

Brian: Hi everyone. I’d like to welcome you to today’s B2B Lead Roundtable Podcast. This is Brian Carroll, and I’m really excited to have Kia Puhm with us today.

She is going to be our guest, and we’re going to be talking specifically around the areas of customer success.

Kia is an entrepreneur. She’s an executive. She’s held a number of positions at companies, from Oracle Eloqua, Day Software, and now Adobe.

What she’s done over the past years is launch an advisory firm helping customers accelerate growth through innovation in the area of customer experience.

I’m wanting to bring Kia here to talk with all of you because as you think about how you develop your business and your revenue, Kia’s got an amazing perspective on how we accelerate and grow our existing customer relationships, which is something that many companies don’t focus on nearly enough.

Kia, thank you for joining us. Can you tell us a little bit more about your background?

Kia: Thanks, Brian. Happy to be here. Sure, absolutely.

I come from an educational background in computer engineering and from a practical experience background of 22 years in the industry, working at rapidly growing, very dynamic software companies.

I guess I’ve built every post-sales function, and always the common denominator has been: how do the organizations I lead get customers to adopt software so that they are using it and getting value out of it?

That then translates into loyal customers, which can translate into additional revenue at some point in time.

I had to do that with a finite, limited amount of budget and resources, so I always tried to figure out how to drive that adoption equation while doing what I could with what I had available to me and using that in the most efficient manner possible.

Brian: Right now, as you look at the work and the type of things you’re doing, what’s the most significant trend that’s affecting your work today?

Kia: Great question. I’m going to have to say disruption.

With all the changes happening out there to businesses, with technology and data and information we have, and artificial intelligence, and just the way the world is changing, it’s changing how we operate.

So the biggest trend in the work that I do with my customers, and helping them understand their customers and how to support that, is how do you do that in a continually disruptive environment where things are always changing?

Brian: Right now, as you see this disruption happening, how are companies responding?

I’ve read your work. We’ve had conversations about this. It seems that in this time of disruption, companies are still pretty vendor-centric.

How can they move from this vendor-centric approach or product-focused approach to being more customer-centric?

Kia: Absolutely. I think that is the key in terms of disruption-proofing an organization.

There have been a lot of studies done and a lot of research that shows companies that are operating from a customer-centric viewpoint and really deliver amazing customer experience far outperform their competitors that aren’t customer-centric.

So I do think that is where companies are moving toward, and that is how we adapt to all these changes that are continually happening.

The reason I think that’s important is not only the obvious — customers stay loyal when they’re having good experiences and the product is delivering on the promises that it says it’s going to deliver — but also as our customers keep evolving and changing, so too are the ways that we operationalize that and support those customers.

If you are customer-centric, it means you are observing that evolution that’s happening to your customer base, and you’re able to be very agile and nimble in responding to that as a business.

If you keep using that information, that observation of a customer, either passively or through active engagement with them to find out that information, you can feed that into your organization and continually change and respond to that to continue to drive value for customers and the loyalty that you need to keep growing your own business.

Brian: As I was listening to you, this is something I spend a lot of time helping companies on the front side with: acquiring customer relationships.

Bringing this operationalizing approach, or as you talked about, this evolution, is something I think you’ve been working a lot around with customer journeys to help companies understand that.

Tell us about how you use customer journeys to help improve how companies grow customer relationships and improve customer success.

Kia: Absolutely.

I know you and I have had conversations at other times and are completely aligned in terms of the approach that we look at.

I use customer journeys to facilitate customer-centric thinking to make sure that an organization understands empathizing with and understanding what customers are trying to accomplish when they purchase your products.

When you understand it from the customer viewpoint, specifically as it relates to software, how you support and deliver the various services that you need to in order to help that customer adopt that software fully and continue to drive ongoing value from that software can dramatically change when you look at it from the customer’s standpoint.

What I see all too often, and it’s so natural for us to do this as vendors, is we define the value proposition that our product is meeting in the market, and we organize ourselves for how we’re going to deliver on that value proposition, and then we tell customers all about that.

It’s a very vendor-centric approach.

While we don’t walk in their shoes, we’re trying to push the product in an environment that we’re not necessarily familiar with.

I think problems with retention and why customers have difficulties adopting software are not because they don’t necessarily understand the value or can’t learn the software or understand it.

It’s because we put the onus on them to understand how to operationalize it, how to take that software and put it within their environment.

If we start to employ a customer-centric approach and if we understand why, in general, our customers buy our products, what their environments typically look like, what some of the common trends and challenges are within their work environment, and how that software could seamlessly or best fit into that, we now take a lot of that burden off that customer.

We make it easier. We make it feel easier. We make it more enjoyable to bring that software into their organization.

The faster we do that, the more we make it feel seamless and easier and have a better experience with that, the better they’re going to adopt it.

Then they’re going to recognize the value because it felt easy, and it’s going to meet the objectives that they set out to achieve when they purchased the product, which then translates into loyalty.

When you build that loyalty through trusted-advisor-type relationships, that’s where you can start to talk to them about doing more, which is that ultimate nirvana of expansion and driving more revenue out of that install base.

I use those journeys as the beginning step of understanding, walking in the customer’s shoes, seeing what that looks like, so that then we can figure out how to align organizationally to that journey and translate that into something that makes sense from their perspective because it’s coming from their perspective in the first place.

Brian: I really like your thinking there.

For our regular listeners and readers, you just heard the episode with Brent Adamson from CEB, now Gartner. Brent said that as difficult as selling B2B is today, for our customers, buying is even harder.

I wanted to ask you, from your perspective, how are companies developing journeys, and how does empathy help organizations develop journeys that are really aligned and really helpful?

Kia: Great question.

I think we’re still in the infancy of journey mapping. There are definitely people and companies that are quite advanced in it, and there’s a lot of information out there on how to conduct journey mapping and do that effectively.

When I talk about the infancy, I think we map out the customer’s journey, but we still do it from our perspective.

Brian: Right.

Kia: In the work that I do, I actually haven’t seen it yet.

I’m waiting for the day somebody shows me a journey map that they’ve done that reflects the customer’s viewpoint and their perspective versus a vendor-centric approach.

To answer your question about how they’re going about doing it, I think the process of creating a journey map has a lot of information available.

Where it becomes interesting, and this is the work that I do with my clients, and where it starts to create this agile business model, is when you look at it from that customer’s perspective, as I mentioned previously, and then you start to align the operations.

I refer to this concept of an agile business model.

If you’ve got that journey, then you start to add on what is in place. What is that methodology?

Not just processes, but the role alignment and systems alignment and technology that need to be in place to support that customer journey.

Now you’ve got this business model.

And if you’ve got this closed-loop feedback, where you’re getting input from customers and feeding it back in, this is where the agile comes in.

You can respond to that and continually improve your operations as you’re getting that feedback from customers, as they’re evolving, so that you’ve got this agile, optimized business model.

That’s where I think journey mapping is not just the mapping per se. It’s how do you operationalize all that and create that agile business model, which I think is the next stage in evolution.

To your point about empathy, it’s just common sense. How can you understand someone’s point of view if you’re not thinking from their perspective?

I think that takes the skill set of empathy to be able to understand that.

That’s the interesting work that I quite enjoy doing with clients. It’s getting those aha moments where they say, “Oh. Wait. I thought I was doing it from the customer’s perspective, but now I see I’m not thinking from their perspective.”

Then it’s just that training to keep thinking from the customer’s perspective, and then things start to click. It’s honing those empathy skills.

Brian: I appreciate what you said.

The challenge we have is companies are really good at our company-level value proposition, department level, and maybe even at a persona level.

But what I’m hearing from you is that to really understand how people think, we need to understand how they are thinking about their business now and also understand the emotions.

What are they feeling at various points of their journey? Am I understanding correctly?

Kia: Yeah, absolutely. That’s definitely a component.

In the industry, people often refer to the concept of moments of truth.

Moments of truth can be make-or-break interactions that customers have with your company as a brand that could be deciding factors of whether they continue to be your customer or not.

They also tend to be highly emotionally charged at those moments of truth.

Then there are other times in the journey that might not be critical moments of truth, and they’re less emotionally charged.

I think there are emotional elements there that help you understand that customer perspective.

You need that emotional component and understanding because what needs to be accomplished at a certain step in the journey can be delivered in multiple different ways.

If you know what the feeling of that customer might be, if they’re feeling angst about using the software, if they’re feeling really excited about it, if they’re feeling bored about it, you might approach the discussion with the customer differently.

You might approach how you’re instructing them differently or how you’re working together with them.

Those things all have an impact.

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

Brian: As I was thinking while you’re talking about it, our listeners are probably saying, “This sounds really good,” but how would they go about doing this?

What types of actionable advice or practical advice do you have for those who want to improve customer success or improve how they’re currently building their customer journeys right now?

Kia: That’s a great question.

Sometimes it can feel overwhelming or abstract. People often confuse customer success or customer experience with just making somebody happy or feel good.

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

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

The advice there is definitely journey map and understand what that would look like from the customer’s perspective.

Then start to see how your organization is aligned in each stage of the journey to support that journey and those emotional points in that journey or those critical moments of truth.

That makes it feel more organic and not like this huge monolithic initiative that needs to be done where you can’t get started until you’re absolutely sure it’s perfect before you launch it.

This is where this concept of agility is so empowering and why I employ it with my customers and why I think it’s so powerful.

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

You don’t have to have it absolutely right and perfect at the beginning.

In fact, you might have it completely wrong.

But if you map something out and you start to observe it and validate whether things are right or wrong, and start to use customer feedback to inform how you should tweak operations or what you’ve got in place to provide a better customer experience, that’s where you’re going to continually optimize that approach.

It should continually be dynamic forever.

None of us have static customers. They’re just as dynamic as we are in our business operations.

So let’s make sure that we’re continuing to observe them and see how they’re improving or what they need help with and build that into our model.

So the actionable advice is: journey map. Build some initial model, observe it, and then keep honing it.

It’s not just a one-time effort.

Brian: That is terrific.

I think a lot of people, often, as they do their journey map, it’s like, “Ha. I’m done.”

I think, as you’re sharing, it’s ongoing. We’re going to continually learn as we dialogue with our customers, as we interact, and as we evolve and so do they.

I really appreciate all the thoughts and ideas you shared with us today.

What’s the best way for our readers and listeners to get in touch with you?

Kia: Absolutely. The best way is through my LinkedIn account. It’s Kia Puhm, P-U-H-M, and Kia, K-I-A.

Or contact me directly. I’m also on Twitter and LinkedIn. If you want to reach out to me directly via email, it’s [email protected].

Happy to answer questions or connect with folks who are looking to learn more, or just peers who are passionate about this space and want to talk about it as much as I do. I would love to connect.

Brian: Well, thank you again for joining us, sharing your ideas and your experience, and I look forward to us continuing to talk more.

I know our listeners got a lot of value. We’ll also share some links from Kia for our listeners and readers that you can visit at the B2B Lead Blog.

Kia: Thanks, Brian.

Are you applying empathy as part of your sales and marketing approach?

Why? Because according to Brent Adamson, empathy may be the one word that matters most to sales and marketing success.

It is tough to buy.

B2B customers are overwhelmed with too much information, too many choices, too many internal stakeholders, and too much risk. They are trying to get their colleagues to agree. They are second-guessing. They are worrying about what happens if they make the wrong decision.

This is part two of my interview with Brent Adamson, Principal Executive Advisor at Gartner, and co-author of The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer.

In this conversation, Brent explains how empathy helps sellers and marketers understand the customer’s world, map how customers think, reduce buying friction, and help customers solve the real problem: buying.

Writer’s note: This is part two of my interview with Brent Adamson. You can view part one here: New research: Boost organic growth from current customers.

Brent Adamson is a Principal Executive Advisor at Gartner. He works with sales, service, marketing, and communications leaders to understand what world-class B2B selling and marketing looks like.

Brent is also the co-author of The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer.

00:00 Introduction to customer empathy in B2B

Empathy helps sales and marketing teams understand what buying feels like from the customer’s perspective.

That means understanding not only the customer’s business, but how the customer thinks about their business, what internal risks they face, what questions they cannot answer, and what friction makes buying feel difficult.

When sellers and marketers understand that, they can stop solving only for selling and start solving for buying.

“Empathy is, at a very basic level, your ability to place yourself in someone else’s shoes and see the world from their perspective.” — Brent Adamson

“If you’re going to change the way a customer thinks about their business, the first thing you have to understand is how they think about their business.” — Brent Adamson

“Think about what it feels like to buy one of your solutions, and it rarely feels good.” — Brent Adamson

“What we have here is not a selling problem at all. What we have is a buying problem.” — Brent Adamson

“You can effectively become the coach to your customer, not on what to buy, but on how to buy.” — Brent Adamson

“The best marketing and selling feels like helping because it really is.” — Brian Carroll

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

Brian: I think you just provided a super helpful distinction for people, and even for me, to know the difference.

This company, they’re a SaaS company, so of course they were talking about it in terms of that backward-looking concept.

So how can people see things from the customer’s point of view?

In your book The Challenger Customer, you talked about the most powerful principle sitting at the core of the book is empathy. I wanted to ask you about that because we spent some time talking together a few months ago.

Why is that? Why is empathy the most important principle sitting at the core?

Brent: The idea that empathy is the core principle of the entire book The Challenger Customer, I admit, is more of a personal opinion than based on all of our research.

You’ll notice, I think I told you this, Brian, the word doesn’t actually appear anywhere in the proper book. It’s only in the acknowledgments where I made just a little blurb at the very back, a little note to my daughters, and I used the word empathy there.

But in fact, in many ways for me personally, that one word captures everything that the book is about.

I know this is a topic not only near and dear to your heart, but something your expertise is far deeper than mine.

When I think of empathy, I think of two components to it. It would be interesting, Brian, to get your thoughts on this. It’s almost a right-brain, left-brain, or the rational versus the emotional. I don’t know what the right way to think about it is.

But empathy, from my perspective, is at a very basic level your ability to place yourself in someone else’s shoes and see the world from their perspective.

That might be logically how they view the world from their perspective, or it might be emotionally what the world feels like from their perspective.

I find both of those attributes of empathy to be potentially hugely powerful for anyone in sales or marketing.

Just to give you a couple of examples, whenever we’re talking about customer improvement or even the broader work in Challenger, in fact I wrote a whole chapter in The Challenger Customer on this idea, is this idea of mental modeling.

The whole idea being, if you’re going to change the way a customer thinks about their business, what’s the first thing you have to understand more than anything else?

How would you answer that, Brian?

Brian: If I were to do that, I’d need to understand what their experience is and how they see things.

Brent: You got it.

This is where I have fun talking to you because you get this stuff.

I say this with great, hopefully, empathy and respect for anyone out there. What I find when I ask most leaders, sales leaders and commercial marketing leaders, that question — “If you’re going to change the way a customer thinks about their business, what’s the first thing you have to understand?” — virtually everyone will say, “Their business.”

So then they start reading 10-Ks and the annual reports and the financials and all that kind of stuff.

What we found in our research is actually closer to where you are, which is, if you’re going to change the way a customer thinks about their business, the first thing you have to understand is how they think about their business.

Because that’s the thing you’ve got to change.

To get there, we find it can be very productive to draw a map, if you will, on a piece of paper. A map to their thinking. We call this a mental model. Mental mapping is another term for this idea.

The idea is that you can simply draw, in a couple of boxes and some connecting lines, what their goals are, what their objectives are as an organization, what they believe to be the primary challenges or primary drivers of achieving that goal, and what the secondary challenges or secondary drivers are for each of those.

You can map it out. You can actually draw it on a piece of paper.

We do this in all of our research here. We build mental models for heads of sales and mental models for heads of marketing all the time. It’s actually how we do our research.

But there’s nothing to say that heads of marketing, marketing teams, or sales teams couldn’t do the same thing for their customers, which is to put on paper a very simple diagram.

Don’t overcomplicate it. A few boxes, a couple lines: here are their core objectives as an organization, what they’re trying to achieve, how they think they’re going to get there, the challenges they think are going to get in the way, or the levers they need to pull to make that happen, whichever perspective you want.

Once you’ve got that mental model, you can put it in front of a customer and say, “Did I get it right? What would you add? What would you take away? If I gave you 100 pennies to distribute across these 10 boxes according to priority, how would you distribute them?”

When you’re all done, what you have on that piece of paper is a picture of how the customer thinks about their business.

Now, if you’re going to change the way a customer thinks about their business, the first thing you need to understand is how they think about their business. Now you’ve got it on a piece of paper.

What you can do is step back and look at it and say, what did they miss? Which box should be bigger? Which one should be smaller? Which one’s not here at all but needs to be? Which connective arrow needs to go from this box to that one instead of this one to only that one?

You can begin to look for opportunities to challenge their thinking, to help them improve their thinking, to make them smarter about what they’re doing.

But that only works by having that mental model to begin with, which I would argue, at least from a logical perspective, is at least a form of empathy.

Because that’s what that model is. It’s a picture of the world from their perspective. It’s seeing the world from your customer’s perspective.

That doesn’t have the emotional component that some aspects of empathy have, which we should be talking about as well.

Let me just stop and ask you, Brian, does that count as empathy from your perspective, or is that outside the bounds of how you define the term?

Brian: Oh, it does.

I think it’s the two levels you just touched on. It’s the perspective-taking, so understanding how they see their business, and then the second thing is the emotional side.

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio said, “We aren’t thinking machines that feel, we’re feeling machines that think.”

What he argued is we make emotional decisions rationally, so we need to take both perspectives to understand.

Brent: What’s really interesting too is that you can build in the emotional side of this in all sorts of interesting ways.

People ask us all the time about this mental model: do I need one for each of the many different stakeholders involved in a purchase? Do I have one per company, one per person? How does that work?

Practically speaking, just to make this a little bit easier to do, you can have just one mental model for a company.

What you’re going to find over time is that these mental models are highly scalable. In fact, one mental model can apply to an entire industry vertical, sometimes an entire customer base, depending on how you go to market and where you do that.

But nonetheless, what you will find is that different customer stakeholders inside a customer organization are going to prioritize different boxes on the mental model in different ways.

Some of them are going to think, if you give them 100 pennies and ask them to distribute them according to priority, they’re going to potentially distribute them in different ways.

Now imagine a world where you are talking to one of those stakeholders, and this individual has to get consensus across the other four or five to make that deal happen.

This is all implicit. It’s not explicit.

In their mind, they kind of have that mental model in their map. “Well, I care about this box. He cares about that box.” They may not be thinking about boxes per se, but it’s all sort of there.

One of the things we know from our research, and what we also know to be true as individual professionals, is going down the hall and convincing your colleagues to do anything differently is kind of a pain.

Sometimes it’s a real pain. Sometimes it’s kind of scary. Sometimes it’s a little intimidating.

What we find is that the larger the buying group, the more individual stakeholders feel not only that their credibility, but in fact their actual job, could be on the line in going and advocating for a particular supplier.

That gets into the emotional side of empathy.

Think about it from a supplier’s perspective. “Well, why can’t they all just get on board? It’s like herding cats. I can’t get these people to align.”

Well, you can’t get them to align because think about what it feels like.

Think about that person sitting at their desk. I call this the Thursday Morning 9:00 Test.

It’s Thursday morning, 9:00, and you’ve got to do what? What are you going to do? How are you going to do it? How is that going to feel?

Now I’m thinking about buying your cool CRM solution, and it’s Thursday morning, 9:00. I’m thinking, “In order to get my company to buy that solution, which I really want, I’ve got to go talk to someone in IT. I’ve got to go talk to someone in procurement. I’ve got to go talk to my CEO.”

You know what? I feel kind of sick to my stomach. I don’t want to do that. That’s a pain in my neck.

All of a sudden, what seems to be a slam dunk because this person I talked to loves it is completely in danger because that person doesn’t feel like going to talk to his other people.

So that becomes a hugely important part of empathy too.

What am I asking this senior decision maker, my contact person, to go do inside their own company?

What does that feel like?

Chances are pretty good it doesn’t feel very good.

It’s hard work. It’s credibility. It’s business case building. They’re going to ask me questions.

All those questions your sales reps have all the time: what if they ask me questions I can’t answer? What if they ask for data that I don’t know how to provide?

You know what? Your stakeholders you’re selling to have the exact same questions when they think about their own colleagues.

What if my head of IT wants to have a business case? I don’t know where I’m going to get that. Then he’s going to ask me a bunch of questions I don’t know the answer to.

Look, I just want this bleeping CRM system, but this is too hard. Never mind.

Being able to place yourself in the shoes of that stakeholder and understand what it feels like for them matters.

We always think about what it feels like to sell our solutions, but think about what it feels like to buy one of your solutions.

It rarely feels good.

Brian: I really appreciate you just sharing your perspective because this is really hard work even for us as sellers to look at.

We spend so much time focused on, “How are we going to get the deal done?” instead of understanding from our customers, how do we help them get the deal done and navigate all the things they need to do to mobilize the support to make it happen?

Brent: We have an article in Harvard Business Review in the March issue of 2017. It’s called “The New Sales Imperative.”

The idea behind it is exactly what you’re talking about. By the way, it’s called “The New Sales Imperative” because they find if they put the word sales in the title, it sells more issues, so they like that.

But it could be called “The New Marketing Imperative” as well. That was somewhat tongue in cheek, but it’s actually true.

As a supplier, what we find is that the single hardest thing about solutions is not selling them. It is, in fact, buying them.

If you go out and you talk to people, and I talk to literally thousands at the retreats and meetings and conferences we do, I did this with 1,200 people at our Vegas conference last year.

I simply asked them to take their selling hat off and put their buying hat on and think about their own organization.

Think about a recent big complex solution that you purchased with your colleagues at your company in the last 18 months, whether it’s a CRM system or some sort of lead management system or IT system or a consulting engagement, whatever it is.

Think of all the people involved, all the decisions you had to make, all the hoops you had to jump through.

Now if you had to pick one word, one adjective to describe that entire buying journey, what would that be?

Like I said, I’ve done this with thousands of people around the world, and inevitably, what do you think the words are, Brian? Take a guess.

Brian: I’m just thinking about what the words would be. I’m not even sure.

Brent: It would be things like long, hard, awful, frustrating.

Actually, it’s really interesting. When you ask people to place themselves in their own purchase journey and just ask them to share one word, they get kind of angry.

You can see their tension. The cuss words start coming out in ways that are not really appropriate for meetings that I was conducting.

I’ll never forget, someone in Chicago, the head of marketing, said, “I never want to do that again.” It was one word because I asked for one word: “Ineverwanttodothatagain.”

Someone in DC said “landmine.” And I said, “That’s not an adjective.” And he said, “landmine-ish,” which became my word for the year.

The point of all this being, if you put yourself in the shoes of your customers and ask them what it feels like to buy a solution, I literally have heard, out of the thousands of people I’ve asked, three positive words out of thousands and thousands of people I’ve talked to.

It’s all negative.

Then you ask them a second question, which is really interesting.

You ask them, “All right, so how much of that pain, how much of that time, how much of that frustration was the result of the supplier selling to you? And how much was just a result of your own company getting in its own way?”

Nine times out of 10, 10 times out of 10, people will say, “It had nothing to do with the supplier selling to me. It’s just my own company.”

Because we’re already convinced our own company is the worst company in the world. We either get in our own way, we’re too complicated, we have too many meetings, and on and on.

What’s really interesting is, what we have here is not a selling problem at all. What we have is a buying problem.

Buying is really bleeping hard with all the committees and all the information and all the options, and it all just becomes completely overwhelming.

Again, back to the point about empathy: if you can understand this as a seller, as a marketer, it doesn’t matter which, and you can understand just how hard it is to buy not just your solution but any solution.

To sift through all the information and pick out which information matters most, to sift through all the options and determine which options matter most, to wrangle all the different people and figure out all the different questions they’re going to have — and you can anticipate — this is empathy.

If you know what that feels like and then logically you can anticipate what those problems are going to be and which information is going to matter most, you can effectively become the coach to your customer.

Not on what to buy, but on how to buy.

You can take them by the hand, and you can guide them through that buying journey and become that buying Sherpa. Not solve for selling, but solve for buying.

That’s what a lot of our more recent work has been about, adopting what we’ve come to call a prescriptive approach to selling.

Again, we’ve seen marketing organizations do this really well through content that the customer can self-serve on.

My Google search will take me to a white paper that a company has written, which can take me step by step: “Looking to buy a CRM? Here’s the 10-step process. First do this. Talk to these people. Here’s the information that matters. This question doesn’t matter.”

From a customer’s perspective, the reaction is not, “I see you’re trying to trick me into buying your stuff,” but rather, “Wow, this was really helpful. You just made it so much easier.”

You can only do that, in my mind, effectively as a supplier if you come at this whole idea with empathy, being able to understand what it feels like to buy, because it doesn’t feel very good.

Brian: What you shared is that a lot of us treat the journey, and we’re going to talk a bit about your marketing research in a moment, as this beautiful-looking linear model that moves from left to right.

It’s a nice flow, but it’s really like climbing a mountain to our customer.

Brent: Yeah.

Brian: So I love the word picture of being a Sherpa because Sherpas are there to help people climb and help them along the journey.

That’s really, I think, the whole idea of empathy. It’s applied empathy because our goal is really to help people on their journey.

Brent: I totally agree.

Now let’s not forget that at the end of the day, we’re all in the business of doing one thing, which is selling more stuff.

Brian: Yes.

Brent: So empathy is all well and good, and it’s so powerful that the cynic in someone listening today might say, “Well, this is just empathy for the sake of selling more stuff.”

And to some degree, you know what, that’s true because that’s what we’re solving for in the world of sales and marketing.

But that doesn’t mean it’s any less powerful, any less honorable.

It’s helping customers find ways to generate greater value for their business that they haven’t appreciated on their own, and then helping them navigate themselves to a place where they can actually realize that value.

I think in many ways it’s not only an honorable thing to do for your customer. What we find is it’s a very profitable thing for you to do as a supplier as well.

Brian: I 100% agree.

At the base level, practicing this way, marketing and sales can and should be a force for good.

As you’re talking about this, I wanted to shift to the marketing research because you had such interesting findings around the journey of a customer.

What surprised you about the B2B buyer journey findings, the customer buying journey, and also the most important channels customers are using?

Brent: There’s more to come on this.

In fact, I’m just working on the keynote for our Vegas conference in October, where we bring all of our sales and marketing members together at our CEB, now Gartner, Sales Marketing Summit.

It’s awkward to say CEB now Gartner, but you all get the idea.

One of the things we are studying this year in our marketing practice is simply digital. We get a little more specific than that, but you can imagine, particularly B2B marketing.

Now B2C marketing digital has been a huge part, if not the primary part, of buying for a long time now.

It has become equally important in B2B very rapidly over the last several years.

Not surprisingly, we’re getting questions around the world from the CMOs that we work with, the hundreds of them, around, “How do we move to become a more digitally proficient marketing organization? What does that even mean? What would be the characteristics or hallmarks?”

So we set out to understand at least some of this world of digital buying in the B2B space with more detail this year, so we can provide our members with greater, more actionable advice.

One of the ways we started was just trying to understand what the digital buying journey looks like in B2B.

What we are really trying to understand is what the buying journey looks like in B2B, and then effectively along that buying journey, which parts are most likely to be digital?

Along the way, we found something that was actually really interesting.

What you find with most marketers, and I mean this with deep respect, this is just the result of the way we all came up and the way that digital came into our world, and the way that marketing’s always operated.

We tend to think of digital in marketing as a tool for demand generation, that is largely upper-funnel to maybe mid-funnel capability.

The idea is that we use digital, whether it be websites, online conferences, discussion boards, advertising, SEO, you name it, largely as a way to create or identify opportunities and customers that we then vet through maybe digitally based lead nurturing campaigns.

At some point, we give them that marketing-qualified stamp of approval. We pass them over to sales and say, “All right, go get them, guys.”

At that point forward, it becomes largely an in-person sales rep calling, over the phone or in person, trying to close that deal.

From our perspective in marketing, it’s like, okay, we got them that far. It’s all you guys. Go get them.

What we’ve come to understand from our research this year, and when you research customers what you find, perhaps not surprisingly, is that just because a customer’s in-person buying journey has begun, just because at some point during the purchase journey they will pick up the phone or fire off the email and reach out to an actual sales rep and have in-person communication, doesn’t mean that their digital buying journey has come to an end.

It’s not like digital in the up-funnel and in-person in the down-funnel.

Rather, the two coexist.

The thing that I think is especially interesting and new for us this year is how much buying behavior is still in digital channels even late in a purchase.

Often long after we in the marketing organization have handed it off and said, “Go get them, sales,” our customers are still online learning.

There’s still late-stage digital buying activity, and that’s got a number of really interesting implications from our perspective.

Are we even thinking about that?

From a marketing perspective, is it largely demand gen and then digital is done? Well, if it’s late-stage, what’s actually happening?

As we dug into our research, what we find is, for example, one of the things that your customers are really looking for through digital channels later in the purchase process is reassurance.

I’m talking to Brent the sales rep, and Brent’s making all sorts of promises, and he’s convinced me to buy this multi-million-dollar solution, which is great. I trust him. He’s not a crook, right?

But nonetheless, one way or another, this thing’s big, it’s disruptive, it’s expensive. I’d kind of like to get some reassurance.

I’d like to maybe see what other customers have experienced in buying this solution.

Irrespective of my ongoing in-person conversations with that sales rep, I’m going to go out and corroborate what I’m learning there and maybe add to it through digital channels.

One of the things we found in surveying customers this year is the most likely place for them to go to get that late-stage digital reassurance is the supplier’s own website.

Which I found kind of ironic, like, “I’m not sure if I completely trust the sales rep, so I’ll go to the company’s website to get reassurance.”

But nonetheless, that’s what happens.

Which begs a really interesting question: when they go to your website to get reassurance on what they’re hearing from your rep, are they even going to find that reassurance? And is that reassurance going to be consistent with what the rep has said in person?

Because if they’re not aligned, you are going to raise all sorts of red flags for that customer.

Let me take a breath there. The implications here are fascinating, but I would imagine that rings true so far. Does that make sense?

Brian: It does.

As I was listening to you, something you touched on is marketing. We’ve always had this traditional handoff from a marketing qualified lead to sales.

What you’re saying is we need to actually go beyond handoff and think about the whole journey.

So what can marketers do differently based on your research? Because there is this gap right now, and buyers are going back to the website to get this reassurance. Marketers have this gap that they aren’t filling right now from what your research is showing.

Brent: It’s funny. I tell people the cool thing about doing research is every time you do a large-scale research project, you inevitably find two things.

You find answers, which is great, but you always get more questions, which is actually good because it keeps you in business.

There are all sorts of questions here.

If digital doesn’t work as a handoff but rather as an ongoing effort, to your point, Brian, that raises all sorts of questions.

What should not just marketing do, but sales do and commercial leaders do?

What you have here now, at least what we can really see clearly in our data for the first time, is sort of what we’ve watched happen, certainly in the business-to-consumer world for five or 10 years.

Effectively what you have here is a very clear picture of omnichannel buying.

Your customers are gathering information. They’re engaging the purchase process through multiple channels simultaneously, whether it’s digital, website, SEO, in person through sales reps.

All that’s happening simultaneously.

So it isn’t just early on digital, later on person, but rather all the time always-on digital, person, and lots of other different channels.

What it means is we’ve got to coordinate across these channels in a much more effective manner than we have in the past.

Omnichannel in B2C is interesting enough, right?

How do I get all of my digital teams in marketing to collaborate more effectively? I’ve got social. I’ve got search. I’ve got TV advertising. That would be the consumer world.

I’ve got to get my TV team and my agency partner, my online people, my social team, my Facebook team, they all have to coordinate.

What’s interesting is once you move omnichannel buying from the B2C world to the B2B world, it gets 1,000 times more complicated.

Because now omnichannel means that we don’t just have to span teams within the marketing function, but rather we have to span functions altogether.

The alignment isn’t just this team and this team in marketing, but it’s actually the entire marketing function has to be aligned with the sales function in some way that frankly we just never really fully appreciated before.

Because we were always solving for marketing or selling as opposed to solving for buying.

Some of the questions this raises for us would be things like, how does one just do this? How do you overcome decades of institutional inertia?

We’ve all been complaining about the lack of sales and marketing integration for years. I’ve been doing this for 15 years, and one of the first things I heard on my first day of work when I joined CEB many years ago was, “Why can’t sales and marketing just figure out how to collaborate?”

Now when you solve for buying, you find the urgency has gone up dramatically.

If I’m hearing one thing from my sales rep and I’m finding a different thing on your website, that’s going to at the very least raise questions in a world where you’re trying to get me to change behavior, which as you remember is risky.

If I see anything that makes me a little bit more nervous, at the very least it’s going to slow me down, if not shut me down.

So now you’ve got to get all of these different pieces inside a marketing and sales organization aligned so that you’ve got one message to the customer, and it’s always consistent.

Your customer can go on whatever buying journey they want, whether it’s digital and different kinds of digital, whether it’s in person, and no matter which path I choose, I’m going to get a consistent message.

Because if they’re not aligned, it’s going to slow things down, and that to me is really fascinating.

We’re trying to figure out right now, practically and tactically, what does that mean? What has to be aligned? How do I do that?

I think the answer here for us is TBD. That’s what we’re on right now. We need to figure this kind of stuff out.

It raises all sorts of interesting questions even structurally.

Would it be better if sales and marketing reported into a single person?

I think what we’re finding already, even very anecdotally, is that those organizations where sales and marketing report up to a single person are just more likely to succeed in this environment for all the reasons I’ve just mentioned.

Brian: I’d like to try something out on you.

I’m actually writing a post about this. I’ve thought about this idea of empathy and how do we support the journey.

I think it’s really moving from this campaign mindset to from campaigns to conversations.

Since we’re thinking about this, how can we have a more congruent conversation with our customer as they go through their journey?

In effect, we’re helping them.

I think the best marketing and selling feels like helping because it really is.

I like this idea. You talked about one message. It’s a conversation that’s bi-directional.

What I’m saying is when we’re more congruent, it changes the conversation, so it can be more reciprocal with our potential customer.

Brent: More reciprocal and also more efficient.

One of the things we find about sales cycle times is, of course, they’ve gone up dramatically. It just takes longer to sell, partly because it takes longer for customers to buy.

Again, to your point, if they’re finding incongruent signals across the different channels from which they are gathering information, that’s going to slow things down that much more.

The challenge here is, again we’re still trying to figure this out, but the word you use I like, Brian, is the word conversation.

But in this context, you have to look at it not literally but metaphorically.

Because a conversation is human interaction. It’s people talking to people and conversing with one another.

That takes us right back to 10 years ago where I’ve got to have a sales rep involved. I’ve got to train my sales reps to have better conversations.

That is absolutely true, but this is more conversation in a metaphorical sense, which is not only an actual real conversation between these two human beings, but it’s also a “conversation” between our company’s website and that customer, or through the third-party influencers and our customer.

That broader view of the overall conversation and managing that becomes the bogey we’ve got to focus on, as opposed to just this actual literal conversation, which is only going to be a small part of it.

But nonetheless, if you ask any head of sales, they’ll tell you that’s it, it’s all that, we have to solve for that. That’s not the case anymore. It’s a way too limited perspective, I think.

Brian: Yeah.

As I was thinking and listening to you, our customers see our websites personified. They put a human context to the brand, to the company, even the language that’s being used.

I think the metaphor, that’s really what I’m talking about, and I’m glad you articulated it that way.

It is this metaphor of a conversation instead of the traditional campaign, which is more monologue, and what I’m saying is be more bi-directional.

Brent: I think that’s right.

By the way, going back to our empathy point, now you can start asking really interesting questions with the metaphor of the conversation.

Imagine you go to a party and you’re involved in a conversation. What makes for a good conversation? What makes for a bad conversation?

How does it feel to be involved in a bad conversation?

You go to a party and you’re in a bad conversation for whatever reason, and you just feel awkward. You just want to go crawl under a rock or you want to go away.

Honestly, you just want it to end.

That’s what it feels like from a customer’s perspective when they’re engaged with a conversation with your company that isn’t going according to expectations or is sending mixed messages.

Ask yourself: are we doing that to our customer?

How do we make our customers feel as a conversation partner?

It would be a really interesting thing to explore.

Brian: Research on how to improve being a good conversationalist says instead of trying to be interesting, be interested in the person you’re talking with.

That in and of itself is so much of what we do as marketers and sellers. It’s all about us, and we need to spend more time where it’s really all about them.

Brent: The best piece of advice I’ve ever gotten about conversation was, “Keep the other person talking about themselves.”

Brian: Totally.

Brent: That’s way too simplistic, but it is in the ballpark of what you’re talking about, which is so much better articulated.

I think that’s actually right.

This stuff is so interesting when you start solving for buying problems as opposed to selling or marketing problems.

Again, I think that’s where this idea of empathy at a very high level comes in.

Take your selling hat off, take your marketing hat off, and just ask yourself: what does it feel like to buy? How hard is it? What’s hard about it?

Why would I not do it? Why would I choose to opt out of it? What would have to happen for me to think it was easier? What would have to happen for me to feel more urgency or more excitement around it?

Solve for buying as opposed to solve for selling or marketing, and I think you’re going to be significantly better off relative to your competition.

Brian: Brent, I think that’s a perfect wrap to our conversation today.

As I was just thinking about what we can do, I think you just gave us the questions on what we can do to improve our focus and our efforts.

I’m excited for your next round of research, and I can’t wait to read about it and hear about it coming up in October.

What’s the best way for readers or listeners to get in touch with you and keep up with your research?

Brent: There are a couple different channels.

We post some of our videos and things on YouTube. Sometimes just searching my name, Brent Adamson, will come up with a couple there.

Most importantly, where we’d love to have anyone interested in our work, there are a couple different ways you can find us.

Probably the most logical place to go would be cebglobal.com. That’s our main website. It will take you into not just the CEB world but now the Gartner world too, which is very cool, and lots of new capabilities.

So cebglobal.com.

We have a website for each book, and that will tell you more about the research behind the book, tell you where to find it, and also channel you back to us.

There’s challengersale.com and challengercustomer.com, or if you like thechallengersale.com and thechallengercustomer.com. Either one will work.

There are a couple of ways to find us.

Me personally, I’m on LinkedIn, and we all have our phones tattooed onto our arms or wherever that is.

You can find me on LinkedIn. I’m pretty responsive because I sleep with my phone under my pillow. I’m that guy.

We’re always happy to talk to commercial leaders because we all learn together.

I think that’s the honest-to-goodness truth of what’s kept me doing this at this company for so many years, Brian, is that it is truly a collaborative learning exercise, a learning journey that we’re all going on where we get smarter together.

I think that’s pretty cool.

Brian: Well, I feel the same about our conversation. I’m sure listeners will as well.

Thanks for joining us today, Brent. I really appreciate you coming on.

Brent: Absolutely, Brian. Cheers, and let’s do it again soon.

Brian: Thank you.

CEOs and sales leaders have long wondered: how can we drive organic growth and increase sales from existing customers?

But for many B2B companies, that growth is elusive.

The traditional answer has usually been: serve customers better, delight them, go the extra mile, and earn the right to ask for more business.

But the data tells a more complicated story.

According to CEB, now Gartner, only 28% of sales leaders report that account management channels regularly meet their cross-selling and account growth targets.

That is why I interviewed Brent Adamson, Principal Executive Advisor at Gartner, and co-author of The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer.

In this first part of our conversation, Brent explains why service drives retention but does not necessarily drive growth, why over-serving customers can create a “zone of wasted effort,” and why account growth requires a different motion: customer improvement.

Writer’s note: This is part one of my interview with Brent Adamson. You can view part two here: New research: Empathy and how to solve buying problems.

Brent Adamson is a Principal Executive Advisor at Gartner. He works with sales, service, marketing, and communications leaders to understand what world-class B2B selling and marketing looks like.

Brent is also the co-author of The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer.

00:00 Introduction to Brent Adamson

You drive growth from existing customers by helping them change their business, not simply by serving them better.

Great service helps customers renew. But growth requires something different. It requires helping customers see new ways to improve their business, make money, save money, reduce risk, or change behavior in a way they may not have fully appreciated on their own.

“Service drives retention, but it doesn’t drive growth.” — Brent Adamson

“The single thing worse than failing to grow an account is failing to keep it altogether.” — Brent Adamson

“To get them to grow, you actually need to get them to embrace change.” — Brent Adamson

“You’ve got to make the business case not for buying your solution, but for changing their behavior.” — Brent Adamson

“Customer improvement is not backward-looking, but forward-looking.” — Brent Adamson

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

Brian: Hello everyone, and welcome to today’s B2B Lead Roundtable Podcast. I am excited to have Brent Adamson. He’s the Principal Executive Advisor at CEB, now Gartner, and he’s also co-author of The Challenger Sale and co-author of The Challenger Customer.

Both these books are bestsellers. I’m sure many of you have heard of them and read them. I was just glancing through both books in preparation for our conversation today.

Brent, welcome to our show. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about you and your background?

Brent: Hey Brian, absolutely. Thank you so much for the invite. It’s great to be with you and everyone today.

I work with an organization formerly known as the Corporate Executive Board, which became CEB and has now been acquired by Gartner. I sit in the sales marketing practice here at the company.

It’s sort of our mission in life, at least in the business-to-business space where I spend most of my time, to understand with data, research, and analytics as best as we possibly can, what does world-class B2B selling and marketing look like?

We get after that with all sorts of analysis and research. It’s funny, we’re actually industry agnostic. We work across industries, go-to-market models, geographies, and try to understand across all of the diversity that we have, across all of the different kinds of companies out there, what do we all have in common?

What’s the recipe for success that’s going to help us all move the dial and do a little bit better in sales, in marketing, and ideally in sales and marketing?

Brian: Well, I’m glad to have you with us, and we’re going to touch on both the sales and marketing research, some of which I got exposed to about two months ago when you had a group of us at your thought leader roundtable.

Why don’t we just start with how can we better enable sellers to drive account growth? I know that was part of the new research you completed. What can marketing do in this process?

Brent: Sure. This is brand new research for us.

In some way or another, we always study growth because that’s what sales and marketing are all about.

There’s a certain urgency, or we like to call it the “why now?” of this growth question, especially in sales, which is especially relevant for us today.

That is simply the journey that we’ve all been on over the last five years, five months, 10 years, 20 years of building out broader capabilities across our organization to offer our customers solutions as opposed to individual products and/or services.

The idea is that if you can offer your customer broader solutions, that’s going to allow you to stand out, differentiate yourself, and command price premiums in the marketplace. All good things to do and good reasons to do it.

The thing that’s interesting though, Brian, is as you add all those capabilities to your portfolio that you can now bring to your customer to add that additional value, the actual value they create for you as a supplier is directly contingent on your ability to sell them, to get your customer to buy those incremental capabilities.

Not surprisingly, companies all around the world, in their efforts to grow, are looking to existing customers to buy more of the cart, as we like to say, to penetrate that account more deeply and get them to buy into more of the value that we can offer.

It turns out this is actually a huge challenge for B2B organizations around the world, which is simply put: to get existing customers to buy more of what we have to sell. To essentially drive growth with existing customers.

That is the challenge, or the terrain as we like to say, that we dove into this year.

Specifically in this world of account management or existing customers, what is it that sales organizations can do to do a better job of driving growth with those existing customers?

When you dig into it, what’s really interesting is the amount of frustration with sales organizations around the world in making that happen.

There’s only about roughly a quarter, somewhere around 25% or 26% of the heads of sales that we surveyed this year, who told us that their account teams were actually meeting, let alone exceeding, cross-sales or up-sales across portfolio goals.

Whether you call it up-sales, cross-sales, land and expand, whatever you might call it, we’re all struggling to get that incremental revenue from our customers.

Let me take a breath there, but that’s sort of the terrain that we dove into to try and understand what’s going on. I would imagine, Brian, that’s something you hear a lot about too across your listenership.

Brian: Yeah. I was just talking with a CEO and his team, and that’s really a struggle.

This brings us to the question I wanted to ask you about. They were looking at how they grow organic growth. They talked about customer success, and they talked about how they could service their account above and beyond, but that just didn’t seem to be enough.

Servicing accounts above and beyond has been something that sellers have focused on, but what’s counterintuitive about your research is something that it doesn’t seem to be helping, does it?

Brent: Well, no. You’re right. It was counterintuitive even to us.

We always have these hypotheses that we test in all of our research, but it’s always interesting to see how the data and the research shakes out.

What we found is a couple of things here in this particular world of account managers, if you will, that this is the farming side of the hunting-farming debate.

That’s about our farmers, and they have to be nurturers and take care of our current customers. Then when they fail to grow, we think, “Oh, they need to be harder. They need to be tougher. They need to be more aggressive. We need to get them in there.”

What’s interesting is when they fail to drive growth with current customers, we often blame the people.

We need more hunter-oriented sales professionals in our account management ranks, or we need someone that is going to ask for the business or be more aggressive as opposed to being so nurturing.

There’s a really interesting tendency to fall back on DNA, or at least individual traits, and assume that the lack of growth is the result of the wrong people.

Then you get the CEO saying, “We need better people. We need different people.”

What we’ve come to really understand is not only is it a structure of the role. In an account management role, yes, you’re on the hook for driving growth in existing accounts, but let’s not forget you’re also on the hook for not losing the business that you’ve already won.

At the same time, you’re partly involved in the servicing of those accounts as well. You’ve got service. You’ve got success, or making sure they get value from that which they’ve already bought, and then driving incremental growth.

What happens in the account management role, unlike a pure hunting role, is that when you’re sitting over or at least involved in all three of those categories simultaneously, not only your time but your attention and focus gets split in some really interesting ways that create all sorts of tension.

If I’m a pure hunter, all I’m tasked to do is go out and bring in new logos or new customers altogether.

But if I’m a farmer, if I’m someone in an account management role, yes, I’ve got to bring in incremental business, but never at the cost of losing the business that we won already.

That’s the thing we say: the single thing worse than failing to grow an account is failing to keep it altogether.

What you have now is this really interesting tension of an account manager trying to pat your head and rub your tummy at the same time. They’re trying to do two very different things simultaneously, which is grow the account but not lose the account.

The reason why that matters is because what you’re asking the customer to do in this environment is actually two very different things.

To keep the customer, you essentially have to get the customer to agree to the status quo. Keep doing what you’re doing. Sign up for it again. Renew that contract. Buy the same amount. Renew that business if it was a renewal-based business. That’s a status quo decision.

But a growth decision is actually to do something different: to buy more, to expand to more seats, to go to a new geography, to incorporate this new service or new technology.

From an account management perspective, I’ve got two tensions simultaneously.

One tension is to try to get them to grow without losing what I’ve got already. The one thing worse than failing to grow an account is failing to keep it altogether.

Simultaneously, I’m trying to get my customer to change and not change their behavior at the same time, and this turns out to be really hard.

This stuff is really fascinating from a social science perspective. You think about, how do I play that card? What’s the strategy for winning and driving growth in that environment?

So full circle back to your question, Brian. We find that the predominant mental model of account managers in this world is, first things first, before I get the growth, I’ve got to get the maintain. I’ve got to get the retain.

Let’s make sure that they’re happy. Let’s make sure they’re taken care of. Let’s make sure they’re satisfied. In fact, let’s make sure they’re delighted with whatever we sold in the past.

Let’s over-serve them. Let’s provide world-class service, and if we do that we’re going to at some point achieve a threshold, a permission. If we can get over that permission threshold, then we’ll have won the right to ask them for growth.

Somehow, just by being so happy with the service we provided in the past, that will drive growth.

That brings us full circle to the punchline of a lot of our data, which is what we found is while providing a world-class level, in fact even just an above-average level of service and success to your customer, that is making sure they’re happy with that which they’ve bought already, makes your customers significantly more likely to renew that business, to retain that business.

They’re twice as likely to renew.

But we can find no statistically significant impact between that level of service and the likelihood of that customer to actually grow.

So put it all together and what you get is service drives retention, but it doesn’t drive growth.

That’s a really interesting thing to find in a world where the mental model, essentially the working hypothesis of not only account managers but all the way up to the CEO, is let’s serve our customers. Let’s create these world-class moments of delight, and that will earn us the permission for growth.

We just don’t find that to be the case at all in our research.

Brian: When I first saw that, I was blown away because the rationale and logic has always been go the extra mile, delight.

Everyone’s measuring based on Net Promoter and some of these other things to look at, are we doing well?

What your data is showing us is that there is a point of over-serving our customers. What’s the phrase that you use? It’s not diminishing returns, but there’s this term you used in your research.

Brent: We gave it a provocative name.

If you draw this out in a set of curves, and we’ve got graphics to go along with this, the idea is if you think more service equals higher likelihood to grow, it almost looks like a 45-degree angle going up and to the right.

Service is on the horizontal axis. Likelihood to grow is on the vertical. The more service I provide, the farther I go to the right, the higher I get on the vertical, because service leads to growth.

What we find is, in fact, that the line doesn’t go up and to the right endlessly. It shanks to the right. It levels off and ends to your point in terms of diminishing returns.

At some point, no matter how much more service you provide or pour into that account, the chances of driving growth do not go up because service doesn’t equal growth.

What happens is that in reality, you keep providing more and more service with absolutely no incremental impact on growth likelihood.

It creates this huge gap between the amount of service actually provided and the amount of service that you needed to provide simply to get retention.

We call that gap the Zone of Wasted Effort, which is somewhat provocative.

But the Zone of Wasted Effort is in fact that. It is effort that you’ve expended in serving the customer and delighting the customer in hopes of getting growth that will never actually get you growth because it doesn’t lead to growth.

At the very least, in that Zone of Wasted Effort, there are all sorts of questions. One of them is simply, what are the opportunity costs of our time?

How much time, money, effort, and people are we pouring into a customer to provide world-class service when, in fact, your customer’s going to renew or retain anyway?

By talking to heads of sales about this, I’ve learned a lot in the last couple of months.

Just in Atlanta two weeks ago, one head of sales said, “We do this all the time.”

The real price is not just the opportunity cost of time that you pay, but the fact that you are now raising expectations for your customer way above anything that you ever originally promised, and you’re recalibrating or resetting their expectations for the next deal.

So yes, it gets you retention, which you were going to get anyway. It doesn’t get you growth because it can’t get you growth.

What it does do though is make the next deal you do with the customer even that much more expensive because you’ve recalibrated their expectations way higher than you ever needed to do originally just to keep the account.

Brian: This is a problem that’s affecting nearly every B2B company: how do we drive organic growth?

How can companies use the findings of your research to move from this retention model to actually driving growth? What are some of the strategies, the things you found, that sellers can do differently?

Brent: A couple thoughts on this.

One is, to get back to the previous point, it becomes really important in this world to set very clear expectations.

The thing that heads of sales ask us all the time is, “Okay, I get it, or I kind of get it. I’m on board. I see the data makes sense. I understand that at some point there’s diminishing returns to providing greater and greater service, but how do I know how much service is enough? How do I know when I’ve reached that threshold? I’ve maximized the benefit for retention, knowing that there is no benefit for growth. How do I figure out what that moment is?”

The answer is simply: it’s in meeting the expectations that you’ve established with your customer in advance.

Whether it’s formally through something like service level agreements, or more informally through quarterly reviews, business reviews, or account planning processes. One way or another, set those expectations very clearly, probably in writing with not only your customers but your own team, so that you don’t perform way above them because all that does is add cost with no real return.

That’s point one. Setting expectations is super important.

That is more of a cost mitigation strategy. It’s not really a growth strategy, as you asked for.

So, Brian, the flip side is now how do I actually drive the growth?

What our data has led us to understand is there is a completely different strategy altogether, which is something that we’ve come to call customer improvement.

For any of the listeners on the podcast who are familiar with our work that we’ve done in The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer, this idea will sound very familiar.

Effectively, it’s a subset of behaviors or attributes that are all completely consistent with the Challenger body of work.

We tested a whole bunch of different attributes in our data across about 750 B2B customers, individual stakeholders involved in a big B2B purchase.

What we found is that for those suppliers who were perceived by those customers as providing a set of interactions that we’ve labeled customer improvement, they were significantly more likely to buy incremental services, additional geographies, additional features, and additional products from that supplier.

Customer improvement very specifically is the ability of a supplier to help critically assess the customer’s business in a way the customer hasn’t fully appreciated on their own, and help them identify new ways to grow, make money, save money, or lay out the ROI of taking a step in that direction.

It goes back to that tension I was mentioning before.

Brian: Yes.

Brent: If your goal is retention or renewal, what you’re trying to do there is just get your customers to embrace the status quo, to keep doing what they’ve already decided to do in the past.

But to get them to grow, you actually need to get them to embrace change. To do something different. To buy something different.

If you want your customers to do something different, that’s change. Change is perceived as risky.

If I’m going to do anything risky, if I’m going to do anything involving change, you’ve got to make the business case not for buying your solution. You’ve got to make the business case for changing their behavior.

That’s what customer improvement is all about.

It’s building and articulating a business case to your customers for why they need not to buy your solution, but why they need to change their behavior in a way that’s going to improve their business.

It’s a really powerful lesson completely consistent with what we found in the past.

But what’s so stark about it in this context is that for existing accounts, while service and success do not drive growth, customer improvement does, dramatically so in fact.

Brian: What you’re sharing reminds me of this conversation I brought up earlier.

It sounds like what you’re saying is we need to move from being more reactive and looking at how do we deliver and retain, to proactive and forward-looking.

I was thinking of this conversation I had with this CEO and his team. They have this customer success strategy, and it was really helping their customers become like gold medalist athletes, performing what they do, which is productivity task management.

The problem is the customers weren’t wanting to be gold medalists. What they wanted was to simply get their job done more effectively.

There wasn’t that vision.

So what I’m hearing is, you need to help someone, if they want to embrace that level, to know where they want to go and how you can help take them there. Is that what you’re saying?

Brent: A little bit, yeah, it is.

I would use slightly different language, only in the sense that the term customer success, at least in the world of software service, for example, the big cloud providers and that sort of world, has taken on a very specific definition or framework.

A success team there is generally designed to make sure the customer gets as much value from that which they’ve bought from you in the past as possible.

This is a proactive team that would reach out to the customer and say, “Hey, you’ve got this subscription from us,” for example, or, “You’ve bought this product or service from us. Did you know it has this capability you can take advantage of? Or did you know there are these ways we can help you based on the contract we already have in place?”

It’s a proactive call.

It’s not reactive in the sense that a customer calls you when they’re upset because something doesn’t work. You’re proactively calling them and helping them get value from that which they’ve already bought.

So it’s proactive but backward-looking.

It’s focused on what you bought from us as a supplier in the past and making sure you get as much success from that as possible.

Now the customer improvement concept, or the approach, is not backward-looking, but forward-looking.

And it’s not about your capabilities, but the customer.

In fact, it’s completely supplier agnostic in a way that will just drive you crazy.

It’s weird to try to get your customer to buy something without talking about your capabilities, which you will eventually, but not at the beginning of the conversation. At the end.

I think, Brian, you’d agree that everything in life can be boiled down to a four-square, right?

You can do that here.

If you think about a four-square where the vertical dimension is supplier across the bottom, customer across the top, and then left-right is backward-looking on the left and forward-looking on the right.

When you think about the top right box in that four-square, what you have is customer-oriented and forward-looking.

Success teams tend to be in the bottom left box. They tend to be backward-looking around the supplier’s capability. So let’s make sure you get as much value from that which you bought already.

It’s a proactive push, but around that which you’ve bought already.

The customer improvement story up in the top right is not about you at all. It’s about the customer and how they can change the way they think about their business in a way that’s going to help them reap greater returns in the future going forward.

So back to your point about the customer doesn’t want to be a gold medalist.

In this world, what you need to do is figure out what your customer is ultimately trying to achieve. Who are they trying to be?

If not a gold medalist, then is it a silver medalist? Is it not a medalist at all?

What are their ultimate goals as a commercial organization?

You can ask yourself: if that’s looking forward to the future, their strategy, what they’re trying to achieve, what is it about that strategy that is incomplete or perhaps even misplaced?

How are they going to get there and what have they missed?

If that’s what’s important to them, how can I help them get there better than they ultimately are planning on getting there on their own?

If you wanted to raise it up a notch in altitude, you could go in and argue with, “That’s not even a good place for you to be starting within the first place.”

That is a higher-level argument, which is sometimes harder to have with your customer. I would never use the word argument per se, but debate, if you will.

One way or another, you will find that your customers are always going to be oriented toward the status quo because change is expensive, disruptive, scary, and risky.

If you’re going to get your customers to change their behavior, the first thing you’ve got to do is convince them that the change is even worth it in the first place.

Maybe it is worth it to become a gold medalist. Or if they only want to be a silver medalist, that’s fine, but let me show you how the path you’re on toward silver medal isn’t going to get you there nearly as fast or as effectively as you thought it would.

Sales enablement is supposed to help sellers perform better. But too often, it becomes another silo.

Another function. Another internal process. Another team competing for attention, budget, and a seat at the table.

That is the problem Dave Brock names in this conversation. Dave is the author of The Sales Manager Survival Guide and CEO of Partners in EXCELLENCE. His view is simple and direct: sales enablement works best when it is treated less like a department and more like a set of shared processes that help salespeople perform at their highest level.

That changes the conversation.

Instead of asking whether sales enablement deserves a bigger seat at the table, Dave asks a better question: what do sellers actually need to create better customer conversations, and who in the organization is best equipped to help?

Sometimes that help comes from sales managers. Sometimes it comes from marketing. Sometimes it comes from HR, sales operations, training, content, tools, or leadership. The point is not to build another function. The point is to remove friction so sellers can do the work customers need them to do.

We also talk about why marketing needs to move beyond being seen as the “leads people,” why sales and marketing should operate more like a basketball team than a handoff process, and why many SDR models create a bad first impression with senior buyers.

Dave also brings the conversation back to empathy. Not empathy as a soft idea. Empathy as caring enough to understand the customer’s world. Their problems. Their pressures. Their goals. Their buying process. Their reality.

If your sales enablement work is adding complexity instead of reducing it, this conversation is worth revisiting.

Dave Brock is the author of The Sales Manager Survival Guide and CEO of Partners in EXCELLENCE. He works with sales and marketing leaders to solve difficult problems, improve sales performance, and adapt to the way modern buyers actually buy.

In this episode, Dave and I talk about:

00:00 Introduction to Dave Brock

The best sales enablement work does not start with the company’s internal structure. It starts with the customer.

Who are they? How do they work? What do they care about? What pressures are they facing? How do they learn? How do they buy? What would actually help them move forward?

Then you work backward.

That is where sales enablement becomes useful. Not as another layer of internal complexity, but as a way to help sellers and marketers meet buyers where they are.

Brian Carroll: Hello everyone. I’d like to welcome you to today’s B2B Lead Roundtable Podcast. This is Brian Carroll. I’m pleased to have Dave Brock with us today.

If you don’t know Dave already, Dave is the author of The Sales Manager Survival Guide and CEO of Partners in EXCELLENCE. Dave and I had a lively conversation a few weeks ago while we were out in the D.C. area. I really enjoyed his perspective and viewpoint and learning from him. I wanted to bring his thinking to you.

Dave, welcome. Can you tell us a little bit about your background?

Dave Brock: Brian, thanks so much. I really appreciate the chance to continue the conversation we started in Washington, and I appreciate you inviting me to this.

By background, I actually started out as a physicist in my career and ended up going to the dark side of selling. I sold mainframe computers for IBM for a number of years, went up the food chain, went to EVP of sales, and became CEO of a number of technology companies.

And now I run the consulting company. We really help our clients solve some of the most difficult problems in sales and marketing and deal with the new buyers that there are. We have a collaborative approach in helping really outstanding people solve really, really difficult problems.

Brian Carroll: I’d love to hear your perspective. What right now do you feel is the biggest trend you see affecting your work in sellers today?

Dave Brock: Well, clearly, it’s the convergence of a number of things that we see in the marketplace.

It’s the new buyer. Everybody is changing the way they buy, and learning how we engage these new buyers through marketing, sales, and customer experience is critical.

At the same time, we see tremendous transformations in business and business models, whether it’s the digital transformation that virtually every business is undertaking or just all business models being displaced with new business models.

We have some of the classics of Airbnb turning the hotel and lodging business upside down, Uber turning the taxi and limo business upside down. We see these new business models occurring, driving real stress on customers.

And then the final thing is just overwhelming complexity, between the rate of change and the amount of information we’re [inaudible] with every day. Most of the people I’m meeting are really struggling with at least one of those three things. I see it really impacting virtually everybody.

Brian Carroll: I can relate to those challenges. I think just talking about complexity for sellers and marketers, I was having a conversation with someone earlier and it’s just overwhelming, the amount of tools an average salesperson uses or a marketer uses.

It also creates challenges around collaboration, that internal collaboration. I wanted to ask, how do you get internal collaboration working to address these problems, these challenges, and help improve sales performance?

Dave Brock: The easy answer is break down the silos and start talking to each other. It’s easier said than done.

The thing that we see is a lot of the issues we face in terms of internal complexity and internal collaboration are just people being well-intended, doing their jobs, but somehow their jobs aren’t aligned with each other, or there are things about their jobs that cause them to be in conflict with other people.

Simple things like aligning roles and responsibilities, aligning metrics, some classic value stream types of analysis.

I just had a conversation earlier today with a marketing executive and his top management team. We were talking about what’s the value proposition they create for sales, and sales is the downstream customer of theirs.

I think again, we have to rethink our working relationship, rethink the classic business process re-engineering of our workflows, our roles and responsibilities, and really get some alignment in metrics so that we realize we’re all on the same team, with the same end goal.

Brian Carroll: That’s helpful. And something that’s really come to age recently is sales enablement. I just wanted to ask, what’s the role of sales enablement to help achieve this?

Dave Brock: I think I’m on the wrong side of some debates on this. I look at sales enablement as more a set of processes and a set of activities than I do a function within the organization.

If you look at what sales enablement processes are supposed to do, they’re supposed to help maximize the salesperson’s ability to perform. And so you look at that and say there are a whole collection of things that we can do to do that.

The first is the frontline sales manager and their role in coaching and developing everybody on their team to perform at maximum capability.

But then these frontline sales managers need a lot of support in a lot of areas, whether it’s tools and technology, whether it’s new programs, whether it’s people selection and performance management, whether it’s training, whether it’s content, and so on.

So you start looking at seeing all these things contribute to enabling the salesperson to perform at the highest level possible.

Now, who does those things? It could be all over the place. It could be marketing that’s doing some of these things. It could be HR that’s working on a lot of the talent management types of things. It could be sales operations, or it could be people in the sales function.

So I think the discussion around sales enablement is more powerful when we look at what are the things that we need to do, and then look at who in the organization can do those most effectively and most efficiently.

Brian Carroll: I like how you talk about it, because I think often, when I talk about enablement, I often am looking at marketing and sales.

But as you’re talking, it’s bringing in the finance team, the human resources team. So it’s a collective effort, not just one single group or department. That’s the whole point you were saying earlier, about bringing down the silos. Am I understanding that correctly?

Dave Brock: Exactly. Exactly.

I got engaged in a debate not long ago about how sales enablement earns a spot at the CEO’s table. To me, that was one of the most ridiculous debates I’ve ever seen.

We now have sales enablement executives that not only want to have a spot at the chief sales officer’s table, but now they believe they should have a spot at the CEO’s table. The CEO’s table is getting pretty crowded with a lot of people who want a spot there.

I think it gets away from the point of what we’re trying to do. And I think it actually starts building more barriers to collaboration and working. We’re building another silo and another set of functions competing for attention and corporate resources.

Again, I tend to like to look at [inaudible] as more processes and workflows, and what are the things that need to be done. And then we look at who can do those most effectively.

And if it’s a sales enablement organization, well, that’s really powerful, but we shouldn’t overlook the other parts of the organization.

Brian Carroll: I wanted to ask, we spent time talking about sales enablement. Marketing does have a really important role in helping raise the level of performance for the sales team.

As you and I were in D.C., we talked about how often marketing is looked to as the leads people. We need to think more beyond that, in terms of how they can impact efficiency and effectiveness of each person.

How do you think marketing can help raise the level of performance of sales?

Dave Brock: I think we have to change our mindset from marketing being the awareness people, the create-interest people, the leads people, the demand gen people, and so on and so forth, and look at the entire customer buying journey.

And look at what that is, and who can contribute to that.

We have the traditional feeling that marketing does demand gen and lead gen and tosses those over the wall to sales. And sales immediately rejects all of them as being bad and tosses them back. But we separate these processes.

I think modern sales and modern marketing is very different. I like to look at modern marketing and sales as kind of like a basketball team.

On a basketball team, every person has their defined roles. You have a couple of guards, you have a couple of forwards, you have a center, and you practice plays, and everybody tries and plays those roles. You get really expert at that.

But then in the game, you’re very agile and nimble and adapt to what’s happening with competition and what’s happening with the game.

I think we need to look at marketing and sales more like a basketball team. What are our roles? What are our responsibilities? What are the plays that we execute? Who executes those?

But I think we have to be very agile in working with each other and saying, “Who’s the person that should be taking the shot right now? Who’s the person that should be bringing the ball down the court?”

I look at marketing and sales as not the sequential process where marketing gets the leads and gives them to sales, and sales takes care of everything throughout.

But we work together in the demand gen process, and we work together in the buying process.

There’s a huge amount marketing can bring to the party with qualified opportunities, whether it’s case studies, whether it’s proofs, whether it’s tools, whether it’s content relevant to where the person is towards the end of the buying journey, and those kinds of things.

We really need to look at it as an interrelated and integrated set of processes.

Brian Carroll: It makes a lot of sense, what you’re talking about.

I think the challenge is that marketing and sales often are doing the same things. They might have different words for it. For example, marketing may call it lead generation, or inbound sales might call it prospecting, social selling, etc. They’re doing the same things.

As I’ve talked to salespeople, they often are feeling they’re succeeding despite marketing, not because of it. I was talking to someone trying to build his own pipeline. He was getting leads from marketing. They weren’t helping. He was prospecting, trying to figure out how to cold-call, etc.

Let’s talk about how salespeople are prospecting today. Do you think we’re getting it wrong? How should we be thinking about the customer first impression and why?

Dave Brock: I do think we’re getting a lot wrong about prospecting.

One is I don’t think enough salespeople are prospecting. Most everybody I talk to is opportunity-starved, but we have a lot of these mindsets and mentalities that say, “Well, it’s marketing’s job to get those leads. And if they aren’t getting the leads, then there’s nothing I can do. Or it’s the SDR’s role to take those leads and qualify them, or do something with them. And then my job is just to take those great leads that the SDR gives to me.”

I think the first thing we do is we have to change salespeople’s mentality and say, “Marketing is going to do everything they can to get you the right kind of leads and the right kinds of opportunities. SDRs are going to do everything they can. But if the volume isn’t sufficient, you have to go out and start finding business yourself. You have to prospect. You have to generate new business.”

You might go to marketing and ask them for help in doing that, maybe giving you a specific program that you can execute as well.

The other thing too is I sometimes think we get our prospecting models, and particularly the SDR-driven type models, a little bit backwards.

I think we do a disservice to SDRs.

Most organizations, the SDR is an entry-level job to selling. They do something that most salespeople would refuse to do, which is to call people they’ve never spoken to before and prospect them.

It’s a really tough job.

But one of the disconnects we have is we have these poor SDRs often calling on C-level people.

I get SDRs calling me every day. I feel really sorry for them, because they’ll call me and say, “We believe we can help you improve your business.” And I say, “Cool. What am I doing wrong? How should I be improving my business?” And they’re floored. They don’t know how to carry on that conversation.

They shouldn’t be expected to.

If they’re brand new to selling, why are they calling me, a C-level executive, albeit of a small company, but a C-level executive?

We’re matching the wrong people up with the target audience. As a result, we’re creating terrible first impressions.

If somebody calls me and they can’t have that powerful, engaging first conversation, I’m going to have a negative impression both of that individual and of their company.

I think we’re missing huge amounts of opportunities by not having the right people.

I wrote an article about a year ago saying, “Maybe we need to get some of our most talented senior-level salespeople being SDRs.” If they’re creating that first impression, and if our target persona is this C-level person, then those are the people that have the best capability of creating a very, very positive first impression and opening up far more opportunities than a brand-new SDR without that experience base.

Brian Carroll: I love that suggestion.

It reminds me, before I was called an SDR, that’s what I started as at 23. I was on the phone. I was calling C-level people, 23 years old. There was very little training, advice, coaching. It was on the job.

Later, I started a company helping people do that. I worked for a company where I was CEO. I made calls with the team who was on the phone, and the whole point was to learn, to see what they were experiencing, to understand.

I think what you’re talking about is really a great transition into talking about this idea of empathy.

That’s the hard part. How can somebody who doesn’t have experience connect with someone else and understand their perspective and feeling?

I wanted to ask you, how can sellers be more empathy-based with their approach to customers?

Dave Brock: I think there are a number of things.

First of all, what empathy is about is caring.

You’ve got to really care about your customers, whoever those customers are. If you’re only in business to say, “How can I get an order?” you’re never going to be successful at all.

You’ve got to care about your customers. You’ve got to care about their success in achieving their goals.

If you’re driven by that, it changes your whole orientation and your process for engaging the customer in the conversations you have.

That shouldn’t be a do-good or [inaudible] kind of mentality. The only people I’m going to engage are people who I know have the problems that I can solve.

I’m not wasting my time calling on people, engaging them, and caring about them and their success if they don’t have the problems that I can help them solve.

It is very focused on calling the right people that we can do some things with. And then it’s understanding who they are. It’s kind of sitting behind their desk or being able to walk in their shoes.

There are a whole number of ways you can do that.

I used to joke, I used to sell to the large money center banks in New York City. To learn about banking, you hang out where the bankers hung out, and they hung out at Harry’s at Hanover Square.

I’d learn a lot by just talking to them over a beer about what their businesses were, what their dreams were, where their problems were, which enabled me to connect much more effectively with those people in business.

Here we’ve got to start hanging out where our customers hang out, whether it’s discussion groups, whether it’s trade shows. It’s really learning about where they live and what they worry about every day.

It’s asking questions. It’s getting engaged in those conversations.

I think along with caring is curiosity. If you have those two attributes, you’re going to figure out what the customer is about. You’re going to figure out how to engage the customer. You’re going to figure out how your products and solutions might serve the customer and help them.

Two fundamental attributes: caring and curiosity.

Brian Carroll: That is terrific.

I really liked how you brought it together in terms of meeting those elements, then immersing yourself in the world of your customer, going where they are.

It’s interesting, as I was listening to you, I don’t know that the marketers who are reaching out or making that initial impression have actually been able to get in the world of the people they’re hoping to influence and help, to drive change, to work with them through their journey.

I would say that what you shared you did as a salesperson, we need to do that in marketing too: get in the world of the customer and observe.

From that, we’re going to have the empathy, or to put it another way, we’ll have the intuition.

Our empathy is our marketing and sales intuition to know how to best move forward and what some of those opportunities are.

Dave Brock: It’s really funny how some of these cycles go, but I remember maybe 10 or 15 years ago, when there were a lot of initiatives around voice of the customer and understanding voice of the customer.

When you looked at the way a lot of those initiatives were implemented, marketers would go out and live with the customers. Some of them literally would live for several weeks with the customers and sit and observe them in their jobs and all.

Getting marketers out and treating the customers less as an intellectual exercise or an analytic exercise, but getting them out and actually visiting the customers.

Spending a few days watching them work, talking to them not about what we sell and whether they like these things that we sell, but talking to them about what they do, what they feel, and how they think.

And then bringing that back in and saying, “Now we know the customer, and we’ve seen where they live. How do we take that information and best leverage it to engage them where they’re at?”

Brian Carroll: Fantastic.

We have time just for a few more questions. I was just going to ask you, do you have any other actionable advice around this for those who want to either help improve sales enablement or their sales team’s ability to ultimately improve their own performance?

Dave Brock: I think it’s a little bit counterintuitive. It may sound simplistic, but we don’t do it.

So many of our initiatives, so much of our thinking is driven inward-out rather than outward-in.

We have our products and we have our services. We think about what we want to do and how we want to bring those to market, and so we develop all our launch programs, all our marketing programs, all our sales programs from an internally based orientation about what’s most effective and what’s most efficient for us.

Usually when we execute those, we find we’ve missed one thing: we’ve forgotten about the customer in that whole thing.

What we do that may be most effective and efficient for us may not be effective or efficient for the customer.

So generally I find the fastest way to the best and most effective solution is to always start with the customer and work your way back in.

Who are they?

Where are they?

How do they work?

What drives them?

What do they care about?

What are their dreams?

And then when they get into buying motions, how do they buy?

How do they self-educate?

How do they learn about things?

Trace those things back in to design the process that meets them where they’re at, rather than trying to force them to find us and meet us where we’re at.

Brian Carroll: Dave, thank you so much.

What’s the best way for our readers and listeners to get in touch with you or to find out more about your work and get access to other resources?

Dave Brock: Well, thanks for asking that.

They can follow me at my blog. It’s partnersinexcellenceblog.com. I publish virtually every business day. I tend to try and have a proactive point of view.

I’m very active on LinkedIn. People can reach out and follow some of my content on LinkedIn or reach out and connect with me, or connect with me over Twitter, davidabrock.

Brian Carroll: Thank you again, Dave, for being with us today.

For our listeners, we’re going to have all these links for you, including the link back to Dave’s site on the B2B Lead Blog. Check back for additional updates.

We thank you all for listening. I hope you found this helpful.

Dave, I always learn when I speak with you. I know our readers did too. Thanks again.

Dave Brock: Thanks so much, Brian. It’s a real privilege.

Brian Carroll: All right. Thank you.

What if your happiest customers are your most powerful hidden sales force?

Mark Organ puts it simply: “The future belongs to companies who do a better job of discovering, nurturing, and mobilizing their customers to do the marketing for them.”

That line gets to the heart of this conversation.

Most companies still think of marketing as something they do to the market. Campaigns. Emails. Content. Nurture tracks. Product messages. Follow-up.

But Mark argues that the best companies are learning to market with their customers, not just at their customers.

In this episode of the B2B Roundtable Podcast, I talk with Mark Organ, founder and CEO of Influitive and co-founder of Eloqua, about why customer advocacy should sit at the heart of your marketing.

Mark has spent years studying what motivates people to advocate. His view is that delighted customers are not just proof points. They are a growth engine. They create referrals, share stories, speak on your behalf, influence new buyers, and help others trust you faster than your own sales and marketing ever could.

We get into why customer advocacy works, what motivates advocates, why employees may be your first customer, how advocacy and empathy connect, and why the future of marketing may depend less on direct promotion and more on getting trusted people to carry your message for you.

If your team is trying to build more trust with buyers, this conversation is worth your time.

Mark Organ is the founder and CEO of Influitive, an advocate marketing software company. He previously co-founded Eloqua and has been a longtime innovator in sales and marketing technology.

Before building companies, Mark was a Ph.D. candidate in neuroscience at Northwestern University, studying how the brain works and the biological basis of behavior. That background continues to shape how he thinks about motivation, advocacy, customer experience, and marketing.

Connect with Mark:

00:00 Introduction to Mark Organ

“The future belongs to companies who do a better job of discovering, nurturing, and mobilizing their customers to do the marketing for them.” — Mark Organ

“None of us can build a successful business without having our customers doing that sales and marketing for us.” — Mark Organ

“People advocate more when they feel like they’re part of an exclusive tribe.” — Mark Organ

“Advocacy is kind of like a beneficial virus.” — Mark Organ

“Instead of thinking about how do I bombard people in order to get my way, it’s how do I find the right people who are relevant and trusted and get them to carry our message for me?” — Mark Organ

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

Brian Carroll: Hello and welcome to today’s B2B Roundtable Podcast. This is Brian Carroll. I’m really excited to bring our guest to you today. His name is Mark Organ.

I’ve known Mark, I think we first met shortly after you started your company, Eloqua. Mark is the founder and CEO of Influitive. I met Mark 17 or so years ago, or maybe 16 years ago, when he founded Eloqua.

He’s been a thought leader in the space of sales and marketing technology, a real innovator. I’m really excited to bring his thinking to you.

Mark, could you just tell us a little bit about your background and what inspired you to start Influitive?

Mark Organ: Yeah, thanks. I’m really excited to be here, Brian. I think this is an amazing podcast and I’m excited to share my story.

I’ve lived a number of lives already. One of them, before I started Eloqua in 2000, was as a research scientist. I was actually a Ph.D. candidate in neuroscience at Northwestern University in Chicago.

I was really fascinated then by how the brain works and what were the biological basis of behavior. It was very interesting for me. Although research, while fascinating, has a number of challenges with respect to it, especially getting paid well.

I also wanted to be together with my now wife again, so I left the research world to get into business and joined Bain & Company as a management consultant. From there, I started Eloqua.

The other big thread in my life other than being a scientist was being an entrepreneur. I started companies even as a teenager, as far back as being 13. I’ve always been really fascinated with working for myself and satisfying customers.

Really, I think now I’m bringing both of those together in my company, where I still feel like I’m a scientist. I still feel like I’m trying to discover what makes human beings really work and tick, but also being an entrepreneur and building software for marketers, leveraging the understanding of people and what drives them.

In terms of what motivated me to start Influitive, Influitive is an advocate marketing software company. We believe that the future belongs to companies who, as opposed to marketing directly, do a better job of discovering and nurturing and mobilizing their customers to do the marketing for them.

We think the future is for companies to get their customers to do the sales and marketing for them. We built some software for discovering, nurturing, and mobilizing advocates.

I got the idea while I was at Eloqua. It was actually 2005, and a great VC convinced me to spend a couple of weeks out in the field to understand how and why people bought my software.

What I learned was when we sold software efficiently, it was because there was tons of this advocacy involved. There were multiple referrals on the way in. There were lots of relevant case studies on the website, the best references, and those prospects moved very quickly.

At the time, Eloqua was a bootstrap startup, so selling things quickly was super, super important. I got real excited about this idea of advocacy, but it turns out it was way harder than I thought to generate consistent advocacy.

That’s because we didn’t truly understand what motivated the advocates. I really wanted to understand what motivated the advocates. Through some interviews and lots of other things like that, I began to understand what drove advocacy.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t work on that at the time I was at Eloqua, but when I had a chance to transition out, I had an opportunity to work on it at Influitive.

Brian Carroll: That’s really cool just hearing how you brought together the two worlds, from being the scientist to understand what motivates people, and then putting it in a way that you are able to help people.

I’d love to hear some of the lessons you’ve learned about building a company where really from the beginning the customer is at the heart of your business model.

Mark Organ: Yeah, so I’ve learned a lot just about how to build a company.

In terms of putting customers at the heart of your business model, one of the things I learned the hard way coming from Eloqua was how important the employee experience is.

I think one of the big differences between the two companies is that while I was at Eloqua, I was very obsessed with what we called our True North, which was measurable value to the customer. That’s a pretty good thing to obsess about.

If you are making your customer money every day, you’re likely to have some success. But one big change that I made at Influitive was really treating my employees as my primary customer, making sure that I was providing the best possible experience for them and a lot of fundamental value for them.

That’s one of the things that I learned. More than ever, honestly, if you think about it, there is so much capital out there. There is so much money that’s available for companies if you generate the growth and if you can generate an efficient business model.

The people who generate that efficient business model and that growth are our people. Talent is a scarce resource today.

That’s a big fundamental shift for me, and honestly, I think it mirrors a fundamental shift even in the marketplace. Today, if companies don’t treat their employees as their primary customer, I think the future is not going to look too bright for them. That’s one key thing that I learned in terms of building a company.

In terms of the stuff that I learned that has informed the way we build our software, the kinds of knowledge that I gained from interviewing literally hundreds of super advocates, understanding people who might generate several referrals a quarter and be available for references on demand and love to speak on stage for you, all those active advocates that all of us really depend on.

None of us can build a successful business without having our customers doing that sales and marketing for us. Our lifetime value of the customer and the cost of customer acquisition would be completely out of whack if we didn’t have that working in our favor.

There were some things that I’ve learned about that. On the macro level, there are three things that I’ve learned that are really important.

The first was that people advocate more when they feel like they’re part of an exclusive tribe, like when they belong to something that’s bigger than themselves. That’s when you see a lot more advocacy.

For example, you can see that at a sporting event. When you go to your local stadium, you’ll find people whose faces are painted in the colors of the team. Why do they do that? Well, they do that because they want to belong to something bigger. They want to be part of an exclusive tribe.

That’s what we found. When companies do advocacy programs, if they can give it the right name and the right feel and the right brand, and really make people feel like they are special and exclusive, you get a lot more advocacy. That’s the first thing.

The second thing that we learned is that people want to be able to experience the impact that they made on a company.

I learned this firsthand. As part of foundational learning for starting my company, one of the things that I was excited to do was learning Chinese. I learned to speak Mandarin Chinese. I thought it would be a cool thing to do.

Unlike the four years of university Italian I took, which really didn’t amount to much in terms of my ability to speak Italian, I learned to speak enough Chinese with this amazing product that after six months I was able to have a meeting in China without an interpreter. It was a pretty amazing experience.

I used this product called ChinesePod.com, amazing, and what I found was that, you can see now I’m still advocating for it, but my advocacy really waned over time. It was because I wasn’t really feeling the impact I was making on the company. I didn’t know what the results were of the referrals that I made, as an example.

One of the things that we’ve learned is feedback. If you give people feedback, they respond better, and the same is true with advocates.

If you let people know the impact of those referrals that they’ve made, if you let people know if they’ve written a guest blog post or they’ve been on a podcast, just like this, how many hits did that podcast get? Did they get thumbs up?

Those sorts of things generate a lot more advocacy because people are getting that feedback.

The third thing is social capital. If people are experiencing benefits in their life, their career as a result of the advocacy they are making, they are going to do a lot more of that.

Those are three sort of social psychological things that I learned were really important in generating a lot of advocacy.

Then, there are the micro-level things, making it easy, making it fun, making it more rewarding. All the things that, for example, a lot of games do, they build things to make it more addictive. All work.

We’ve bottled all that, and we’ve put that into our product so that you’ve got that exclusive tribe, the people are getting feedback, they’re getting social capital, and they make it gamified and fun, so that people want to come back in again and again. It really works.

We’ve now got to the point where I think that we’re building something that’s going to become a new standard for how companies go to market by putting their customers at the heart of the way they go to market.

Brian Carroll: That’s really cool.

As I’m listening, just in terms of your own experience but also from the research, how important are customer advocates and why should we either create or be more involved in their community?

Mark Organ: Yeah, well, here’s one of the things that I’ve seen, especially lately, maybe it’s because I’m running a company that’s all about advocacy, but the industry leaders in almost every sector are also the advocacy leaders.

For example, Tesla in cars. Tesla’s market cap is equivalent to, I think, almost all the other car companies combined at this point or very close to it. I’m like, why is that? They are also an advocacy leader.

They don’t have any commissioned salespeople. They don’t do traditional marketing. All their marketing is done really through their own customers.

The impact of that is just incredible, because you’ve got this large unpaid sales force that’s way more effective than any sales force that you hired could be.

Brian Carroll: Right.

Mark Organ: You don’t have to pay them anything, and they’re more effective, but that’s just the beginning, right?

The other thing that we’ve learned is that advocacy is kind of like a positive, beneficial virus. A company that’s built with advocacy, that has a lot of advocacy, those customers that become a new customer because an advocate recommended them, they themselves are much more likely to advocate.

Essentially, there is a culture of advocacy around these companies.

These companies rocket up to being industry leaders. They are so much more efficient in terms of their sales and marketing, and they’ve got the culture that keeps this sort of positive feedback loop happening, which I think is really exciting.

We see that with a lot of our customers. They are industry leaders, whether they are startups that have gone public or industry leaders like Oracle or Salesforce or IBM. I think why they do well, again, is because of this financial power of having a large unpaid army of advocates.

The other thing I’ll say is that it feels great to work for a company, going back to my first comment on employees. It feels amazing to work for companies that have a lot of customer advocacy.

It gives you that sense of purpose, like, I know why I’m here. We’re adding real value. Look at all these customers we’re delighting, and they are helping us grow.

It’s such an empowering, exciting thing to be a part of. Actually, I think it’s the most important thing for entrepreneurs to do. I think the most important thing for entrepreneurs is to build advocates and mobilize them.

Now, also having an amazing product and terrific service. We don’t actually get involved in that area. We really only work with companies that have a great product, and that’s because we’ve learned the hard way that our product works really well for companies that are already delighting customers.

Brian Carroll: Right.

Mark Organ: Early in our history, we had a couple of customers who frankly were not doing a great job, but they might have had a handful of happy customers.

What they wanted us to do was to help give them a megaphone, essentially to make it look like they had that kind of advocacy even if they didn’t.

Honestly, we’ve learned that’s not a good business skill. That doesn’t work very well.

We tend to work with companies that already do a great job with delighting customers, and we make sure they win. It feels like we are really doing good for the world because we’re helping the good guys win.

Brian Carroll: I appreciate you saying that.

As you talked about the importance of employees, this is going to segue us into talking a little bit about empathy, because I think a lot of time we spend is trying to go, often in marketing and sales that had been outside in, and what I’m hearing from you is, no, it’s from the inside out. It needs to be authentic. You connect with your employees.

As you know, I’ve been doing some work in empathy-based marketing and selling and how it can help us connect with our customers and create better results.

I just wanted to ask you, how can empathy and what you’re talking about, advocacy-based marketing, how do they connect from your perspective and where do you see empathy really helping empower companies who are customer-centric and are really looking to do better?

Mark Organ: I love this work you are doing on empathy.

With every year that goes by as an entrepreneur, I realize more that it’s the number one skill, I think, that business leaders need to develop in order to win.

I think often it’s thought of in an employee context, and for sure, I’ve worked with a coach for the last three or four years mainly on developing my skills as a leader, which include being more empathetic, meaning truly and deeply understanding my employees in particular, and feeling what they are feeling.

But it extends way deeper than employees. That is why I love the work you are doing about being empathetic for companies and understanding their experience.

In fact, this whole business that I’m doing came from a place of empathy in the beginning, because it was all about understanding what is the most desirable buying process for someone to go through.

Brian Carroll: Yes.

Mark Organ: If you think about the last amazing buying experience you’ve had for something that wasn’t just a commodity, but something you had to really think about, chances are that process you went through had a number of trusted people.

Whether those were other customers you trusted or that salesperson you worked with did such a good job that you truly and deeply trusted that person. You trusted that person had your best interest in their heart.

Chances are that trust and that transparency were just completely interwoven in that buying process that you had.

That’s what I learned when I was at Eloqua and trying to figure out what was going on that some of these prospects bought in four days instead of four months. That experience had tons of advocacy all over it.

People talk about customer experience all the time, right? I’m not sure some people even know what it means.

To me, customer experience is all about feelings. It’s all about the way people feel at different parts of their journey with you.

So if we want to make people feel great, if we want to make people feel like there’s trust, then you’ve got to infuse that buying process with the power of authenticity, like authentic other customers.

There’s an immediate intersection right there.

If you care about your buyer, if you care about your experience and you want them to feel great when they are working with you, then you should probably talk less as a salesperson and a marketer. You should probably have more of their trusted, relevant peers do the talking for you.

Not just because it’s more effective, but because they like it. That’s the experience that they really want more than anything.

I think there is a massive overlap between the ideas of empathy and advocacy.

Brian Carroll: I love that, and I agree with this as I’ve done research in understanding this perspective and thinking of customers and how they’re feeling.

They want to know how you’ve helped people like me. What has worked for others in my field, and how can I get better doing what I’m doing?

Because there is that authentic someone who’s been in my space or experience. I was talking to someone earlier who talked about their people who had worked in the field of the people they’re helping.

Right now, there’s so much more we could probably impact in this area.

I just wanted to talk about some actionable tips you might have for our listeners today who feel inspired. They realize they have advocates right now. They may not have even used that term. I love the term advocate and what it means.

How can marketers start identifying and better supporting their customer advocates and/or building or connecting with their advocate community?

Mark Organ: That’s a great question.

We’ve produced an interesting piece of software to help mobilize advocates at scale, but it doesn’t mean you have to do that.

Really, every company in the world should be doing advocate marketing, and it may be as simple as just having a meal a couple of times a year with some of your best customers.

There’s really no agenda there other than to get people together and to ask how to improve and maybe share a little bit about where you’re going as a company. That alone can cost very little.

We have these dinners all the time, and they cost $1,000 to get eight people together at a nice restaurant and have a little boutique meal. Wow, it just makes a big impact.

Because those people are your best customers, they want to impact your company, right? They want to help shape your company.

In some cases, they may already feel like they are more a part of your company than their company because they believe so passionately in your idea.

By giving them an exclusive tribe and saying, hey, this dinner is not just for any one of our customers. It’s for our most special customers. Not because you buy a lot from us either, by the way. It’s not about purchasing.

It’s because you get it. It’s because you believe, and we think that your ideas are leading edge and are going to be ones that everyone else is going to subscribe to, so we want to spend more time listening to you. We want to take care of you.

That message will always be well received. It’s very inexpensive and it’s got a very high ROI. Just starting there is a great place to start.

For companies who are already doing that, and I know a lot of companies are already doing that before we start talking to them, and they have people who believe in advocacy, the next step is to centralize your advocacy with one person.

A lot of the companies that we work with, before we started working with them, they had four or five different people in their organization who were all doing little bits and pieces of advocacy in their own way.

You might have one person in charge of referrals, another person in charge of talking to customers.

The problem there is you’re really missing out on a lot of potential advocacy. That same person that can be a reference for you is also willing to speak on stage.

If you have one person, a point person, who is in charge of advocacy for your company, you’ll get a lot more, three or four times as much, without spending any more money.

In fact, you could actually end up saving a lot of time, money, and frustration because you centralize that process.

Again, that’s actually a very empathetic thing, right? Because what you’re saying is, you know what I care about more than the types of things that advocates do? We care about the advocates themselves. We actually care about people. We care about their experience. We want their experience to be great.

By having one person in your company in charge of that, I think that is showing a lot of respect and appreciation for these very important people.

If you just do those two things alone without buying any fancy software, you’ll get a lot more of this very valuable advocacy for your company, and it will be quite transformational.

Then maybe you’ll be ready to have a really scaled-up advocacy program, and that’s what we do at Influitive.

We create communities where these are some virtual places on the internet and on mobile where you can invite more advocates in and make them feel like a million bucks and let them know how they can help you, get them to interact with each other.

We have about 300 great companies that are doing that. They are enjoying the experience, but there again, you don’t have to do anything fancy. Just get people together and show some appreciation. You’ll get a lot of value out of it.

Brian Carroll: That’s terrific, Mark, and thank you for the action points.

I was going to ask you one last question before we close, and I just want to ask you what’s the question I should’ve asked but hadn’t?

Mark Organ: Maybe something about the future? That’s often a good one, to bring out the crystal ball and see what we see in the future in marketing and that sort of thing.

Brian Carroll: That would be great. So what do you see in the future right now? It could either be marketing or selling as far as macro trends.

Mark Organ: Yeah, a few things to comment on.

One, which I’ve sort of alluded to in this conversation, was around the whys of customer experience and the role that marketing is going to play in customer experience.

One of the things that you’ll notice, some of the best companies that we have, particularly in the West, are ones that are obsessed about customer experience.

I think as you have more buyers that are inundated with emails and websites and all sorts of stuff like that, which I was partially responsible for while I was at Eloqua, marketers are going to need to have some control over the customer experience in the future.

That is going to be the main source of where their best leads are going to come from and their ability to convert those leads.

We see with our customers, which tend to be on the leading edge of the curve, where marketing and customer success are starting to merge a little bit.

It’s very analogous to how sales and marketing came together in my Eloqua days under the idea of the common definition of a lead.

Brian Carroll: Yes.

Mark Organ: I have done sales and marketing stuff together, and you’ve done a lot of writing on that. I’ve learned much from you over the years on that.

There is an analogous thing that is happening now. Customer success and marketing and product are coming together to define what the optimal customer experience is, and that is a big, big move.

Marketers who are able to get on that and understand this new language of customer experience and be able to drive it are going to do very well over the next few years. I think that’s one big trend.

I do think that this idea of marketing by proxy is huge.

It’s a huge thing, and these are skills that most marketers do not have today.

Marketers now are good at running these cross-functional, multimodal, nurturing-style campaigns to drive leads and that sort of thing. The ability to do that has been really dominant over the last 10 years.

That’s changing as buyers are becoming inundated with that stuff. Yet the ability to get others to do the marketing for you and learning those skills is going to be pretty important.

Because there is such little knowledge in this area, we actually have quite an education effort out there. You can go to Influitive.com and check out our resources page and lots of educational materials, as we are trying to train this next generation of marketers in how to think this way.

Instead of thinking about how do I bombard people in order to get my way, it’s how do I find the right people who are relevant and trusted and get them to carry our message for me?

I think that’s going to be a big deal.

And thirdly, everyone is talking about machine learning and all that these days, and I think it’s probably going to create just as big an impact.

I think AI and machine learning is probably at the very top of the hype curve right now.

Brian Carroll: Right.

Mark Organ: Three years from now, everyone is going to say, well, I don’t know what that was all about, I guess that was all hyped up. But then in ten years from now, people go, wow, that actually really was a huge change.

I think it’s definitely worth tracking what’s going on in that technology, and we’re certainly spending quite a bit of time playing around with it here.

Some of the things I see for marketers, and actually I understand there are a lot of sales professionals who listen to your podcasts, I think empathy is just as important, if not more so, for sellers. So is advocacy, so is mobilizing your proxies if you are in the sales profession as well. I think there are a lot of parallels.

Brian Carroll: Well, thanks for coming on again, Mark. I always learn every time we talk or interact.

What’s the best way for readers or listeners to get in touch with you?

Mark Organ: Sure, there are a number of ways.

I’m on Twitter all the time, so it’s @markorgan.

I’m also available on email. I’m [email protected]. And our website is www.Influitive.com. It’s like intuitive but with an F in it, Influitive.

It would be great to have people stop by and check out our educational resources. Would love to see what we can do to help people along in their journey toward empathy and advocacy.

Brian Carroll: Well, fantastic. Thanks again for coming on.

And for our listeners, I’ll be posting links to some of the things that Mark shared today here at the B2B Lead Blog, and you can check again as we have more updates.

Thanks again.

Are you connecting with and empowering your customer advocates? If not, you should. Here’s why.

Customer advocacy marketing programs help you increase revenue by improving customer acquisition and retention (and they’re also your best source of leads).

How? Because you’re helping to motivate happy customers to speak about you positively to others. And delighted customers are your most powerful hidden sales force.

For example, in 2016, IDC research found that only 10% B2B companies surveyed had a customer advocacy program in place. This year, “The Role of Marketing in Customer Advocacy” report found that has increased to 67%, which is a 570% increase.

That’s why I interviewed Mark Organ (@markorgan). Mark is the Founder and CEO of Influitive, and he’s been a thought leader in the space of sales and marketing technology, a real innovator. I’m excited to bring his thinking to you on customer advocacy.

Mark: Yeah, thanks. I’m really excited to be here, Brian. I think this is an amazing podcast, and I’m excited to share my story. I’ve lived several lives already. One of them, before I started Eloqua in 2000, was as a research scientist. I was actually a Ph.D. candidate in neuroscience at Northwestern University in Chicago.

I was really fascinated by how the brain works and what were the biological bases of behavior. It was fascinating for me. Although research, while fascinating, has some challenges concerning it, especially getting paid well. I also wanted to spend more time with my wife, so I left the research world to get into the business world and joined Bain & Company as a management consultant; from there, I started Eloqua.

The other big thread in my life other than being a scientist was being an entrepreneur. I started companies even as a teenager, as far back as age 13. I’ve always been really fascinated with working for myself and satisfying customers.

Really, I think now I’m bringing both of those together in my company where I still feel like I’m a scientist. I still feel like I’m trying to discover what makes human beings really work and tick, but also being an entrepreneur, building software for marketers, and leveraging the understanding of people and what drives them.

Regarding what motivated me to start Influitive – we’re an advocate marketing software company. So we believe that the future belongs to companies who, as opposed to marketing directly, do a better job of discovering and nurturing, and mobilizing their customers to do the marketing for them.

We think the future is for companies to get their customers to do the sales and marketing. We built some software for discovering, nurturing, and mobilizing advocates.

I got the idea while I was at Eloqua. It was 2005, and great VC convinced me to spend a couple of weeks out in the field to understand how and why people bought my software. What I learned was when we sold software efficiently, it was because there was tons of this advocacy involved. There were multiple referrals on the way in. Many case studies were relevant on the website, the best references, and those prospects went very quickly.

At the time, Eloqua was a bootstrap startup, so selling our software quickly was super important. I got really excited about this idea of advocacy, but it turns it was way harder than I thought to generate consistent advocacy. That’s because we didn’t actually understand what motivated the advocates.

I really wanted to understand better what motivated the advocates. Through some interviews and lots of other things like that, I began to figure out what drove advocacy. Unfortunately, I couldn’t work on that when I was at Eloqua, but when I had a chance to transition out, I had an opportunity to work on it at Influitive.

Brian: That’s really cool just hearing how you brought together the two worlds as the scientist to understand what motivates people and then putting in a way that you’re able to help people. I’d love to hear some of the lessons you’ve learned about building a company where from the beginning, the customer is at the heart of your business model.

Mark: I’ve learned a lot just about how to build a company. Regarding putting customers at the heart of your business model, one of the things I learned the hard way, coming from Eloqua, was how important the employee experience is.

One of the big differences between the two companies is that while I was at Eloqua, I was very obsessed with what we called our True North, which was measurable value to the customer, and that’s a pretty good thing to obsess about.

If you are making your customer money every day, you’re likely to have some success. Still, one big change that I made at Influitive was really treating my employees as my primary customer, making sure that I was providing the best possible experience for them.

There is so much money available for companies to generate growth and generate an efficient business model. The people who create that efficient business model and that growth are our people. Talent is a scarce resource today.

That’s a big fundamental shift for me, and honestly, I think it mirrors a significant shift even in the marketplace. If companies today don’t treat their employees as their primary customers, the future will not look too bright for them. That’s one key thing that I learned regarding building a company.

We built our software came from the knowledge that I gained from interviewing hundreds of super advocates. Literally, understanding people who might generate several referrals a quarter and be available for references on demand and love to speak on stage for you…all those active advocates that all of us really depend on.

None of us can build a successful business without our customers doing that sales and marketing for us. Our lifetime value of the customer and customer acquisition cost would be entirely out of whack if we didn’t have that working in our favor. There were some things that I’ve learned about that.

On the macro level, there are three things that I’ve learned that are really important.

The first was that people advocate more when they feel like their part of an exclusive tribe, like when they belong to something bigger than themselves, then that’s when you see a lot more advocacy.

For example, you can see that at a sporting event. When you go to your local stadium, you’ll find people whose faces are painted in the team’s colors. Why do they do that? Well, they do that because they want to belong to something bigger. They want to be part of an exclusive tribe.

That’s what we found. When companies do advocacy programs, if they can give it the right name and the right feel and the right brand and really make people feel special and exclusive, you get a lot more advocacy. That’s the first thing.

Second, we learned that people want to be able to experience the impact they made on a company. I learned this firsthand. As part of foundational learning for starting my company, one of the things that I was excited to do was learn Mandarin Chinese. I thought it would be a cool thing to do.

I learned to speak enough Chinese with this amazing product that, after six months, I was able to have a meeting in China without an interpreter. It was a pretty amazing experience. I used this product called ChinesePod.com and what I found was that (you can see now, I’m still advocating for it) my advocacy really waned over time, and it was because I wasn’t really feeling the impact I was making on the company.

I didn’t know what the results were of the referrals that I made as an example.

We’ve learned that if you give advocates feedback, they respond better.

If you let people know the impact of those referrals that they’ve made if you let people know if they’ve written a guest blog post or been on a podcast, just like this, how many hits did that podcast get?

Did they get a thumbs up?

Those sorts of things generate a lot more advocacy because people are getting that feedback.

The third is social capital. If people are experiencing benefits in their life, their career as a result of the advocacy they are making, they are going to do a lot more of that.

Those are three sorts of social/psychological things that I learned were really important in generating a lot of advocacy. Then, the micro-level makes it easy, making it fun, making it more rewarding.

For example, a lot of games do that. They build things to make it more addictive, all work. We’ve bottled all that, and we’ve put that into our product so that you’ve got that exclusive tribe, the people are getting feedback, they’re getting social capital, and they make it “game-ified” and fun, so that people want to come back in again and again. It really works.

We’ve now come to the point where I think that we’re building something that will become a new standard for how companies go to market by putting their customers at the heart of the way they go to market.

Brian: That’s really cool.

Mark: Here’s one of the things that I’ve seen, especially lately. Maybe it’s because I’m running a company that’s all about advocacy, but the industry leaders in almost every sector are also the advocacy leaders.

Like for example, Tesla in cars. Tesla’s market cap is equivalent to, I think, nearly all the other car companies combined at this point or very close to it. I’m thinking, why is that? They are also an advocacy leader. They don’t have any commissioned salespeople. They don’t do traditional marketing. All their marketing is done really through their own customers.

The impact of that is just incredible because you’ve got this massive unpaid sales force that’s way more efficient than any sales force that you hired could be.

Brian: Right.

Mark: The other thing that we’ve learned is that advocacy is kind of like a beneficial virus. For example, a company built with advocacy, which has a lot of advocacy, and those who become a new customer because an advocate recommended them, they, themselves, are much more likely to advocate. Essentially, there is a culture of advocacy around these companies.

These companies rocket up to being industry leaders. They are so much more efficient regarding their sales and marketing, and they’ve got the culture that keeps this sort of positive feedback group happening, which I think is really exciting. We see that with a lot of our customers, they’re industry leaders.

So many of our startup customers have gone public (i.e., MuleSoft), or there are so many of them that have gone public, or they’re industry leaders like Oracle or SalesForce, IBM. I think they do well because of this financial power of having a large unpaid army of advocates.

It feels amazing to work for companies that have a lot of customer advocacy. It gives you that sense of purpose, like, I know why I’m here. We’re adding real value. Look at all these customers we’re delighting, but they are helping us grow.

It’s such an empowering, exciting thing to be a part of. I think the most important thing entrepreneurs can do to build advocates and mobilize them. Now, also have a fantastic product and terrific service, but we don’t actually get involved in that area. We actually only work with companies that have a great product, and that’s because we’ve learned the hard way that our product works really well for companies that are already delighting customers.

Early in our history, we had a couple of customers who, frankly, we’re not doing a great job, but they might have had a handful of happy customers. And they wanted us to help give them a megaphone to mostly make it look like they had that kind of advocacy even if they didn’t.

Honestly, we’ve learned that’s not a good business skill. We tend to work with companies that already do an excellent job delighting customers, making sure they win. It feels like we are really doing good for the world because we’re helping the good guys win.

[responsive_video type=’youtube’ hide_related=’1′ hide_logo=’0′ hide_controls=’0′ hide_title=’1′ hide_fullscreen=’0′ autoplay=’0′]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK_FWihgnKk&feature=youtu.be[/responsive_video]

Brian: I appreciate you saying that. This is going to segue us into talking a little bit about empathy. Often in marketing and sales, it had been outside-in, and what I hear from you is, no, it’s from the inside out. It needs to be authentic. You connect with your employees.

As you know, I’ve been doing some work in empathy-based marketing and selling and how it can help us connect with our customers and create better results.

Mark: I love this work you are doing on empathy. As an entrepreneur, with every year that goes by, I realize that it’s the number one skill, I think, that business leaders need to develop to win.

Often it’s thought of in an employee context for sure. For example, I’ve worked with a coach for the last three or four years, namely developing my skills as a leader, which includes being more empathetic. Meaning truly and deeply understanding my employees and, in particular, feeling what they are feeling, but it extends way beyond employees.

That is why I love the work you are doing about being empathetic for companies and understanding their experience. In fact, this whole business that I’m doing came from empathy in the beginning because it was all about understanding the most desirable buying process for someone to go through.

Brian: Yes.

Mark: If you think about the last amazing buying experience you’ve had for something that wasn’t just a commodity, but something you had to think about, really. The chances are that process you went through had some trusted people, whether those were other customers you trusted or that salesperson you worked with did such a good job that you truly and deeply trusted that person. You trusted this individual had your best interest in their heart.

The chances are that trust and that transparency were just completely interwoven in that buying process you had.

That’s what I learned when I was at Eloqua and trying to figure what was going on that some of these prospects bought in four days instead of four months?

That experience had tons of advocacy all over it. People talk about customer experience all the time. I’m not sure some people even know what it means.

To me, customer experience is all about feelings. It’s all about the way people feel at different parts of their journey with you. So if we want to make people feel great, if we want to make people feel like there’s trust, then you’ve got to infuse that buying process with the power of authenticity, authentic other customers. There’s an intersection right there.

If you care about your buyer, if you care about their experience and want them to feel great when working with you, you should probably talk less as a salesperson and as a marketer. And have more of their trusted, relevant peers do the talking for you, not because it’s more effective, but because they like it. That’s the experience that they really want more than anything. I think there is a massive overlap between the ideas of empathy and advocacy.

Brian: I love that, and I agree with this as I’ve researched understanding this perspective and thinking of customers and how they are feeling. Do they want to know how you’ve helped people like me? What has worked for others in my field, and how can I get better doing what I’m doing? Because there is that authentic someone who’s been in my space or experience.

I just wanted to talk about some actual tips you might have for our listeners today who feel inspired. They realize they have advocates right now. They may not have even used that term. I love the word advocate and what it means.

Mark: That’s a great question. We’ve produced an interesting piece of software to help mobilize advocates at scale, but it doesn’t mean you have to do that. Really, every company in the world should be doing advocate marketing, and it may be as simple as just having a meal a couple of times a year with some of your best customers. There’s really no agenda there other than to get people together and to ask how to improve and maybe share a little bit about where you’re going as a company. That alone can cost very little.

We have these dinners all the time, and they cost $1,000 to get eight people together at a nice restaurant and have a small boutique meal, and wow, it just makes a big impact. Because those people are your best customers, they want to affect your company, right?

They want to help shape your company. In some cases, they may already feel like they are more a part of your business than their company because they believe so passionately in your idea. Giving them an exclusive tribe and saying, hey, this dinner is not just for any one of our customers.

It’s for our most special customers. Not because you buy a lot from us either, by the way. It’s not about purchasing. It’s because you get it. It’s because you believe, and we think that your ideas are leading edge and will be ones that everyone else is going to subscribe to, so we want to spend more time listening to you. We want to take care of you. That message will always be well received. It’s very inexpensive, and it’s got a very high ROI. Just beginning there is a great place to start.

I know many companies are already doing that before we start talking to them, and they have people believe in advocacy, and it appeals to them.

The next step is to centralize your advocacy with a single person doing the talking. Many of the companies we work with before we started working with them had four or five different people in their organization who are all doing little bits and pieces of advocacy in their own way.

You might have one person in charge of referrals, another person in charge of talking to customers. The problem there is you’re really missing out on a lot of potential advocacy. That same person that can be a reference for you is also willing to speak on stage.

If you have a point person in charge of advocacy for your company, you’ll get a lot more, three or four times as much, without spending any more money. In fact, you could actually end up saving a lot of time, money, and frustration because you centralize that process.

Again, that’s actually a very empathetic thing, right? Because what you’re saying is: you know what I care about more than the types of things that advocates do? We care about the advocates themselves. We actually care about people. We care about their experience. We want their experience to be great.

By having a single person in your company in charge of that, I think that shows a lot of respect and appreciation for these very important people. If you just do those two things alone without buying any fancy software, you’ll get a lot more of this very valuable advocacy for your company, and it could be quite transformational. Then, maybe you’ll be ready to have a really scaled-up advocacy program, and that’s what we do at Influitive.

We create communities where there are some virtual places on the internet and on mobile where you can invite your advocates in, make them feel like a million bucks, let them know how they can help you, and get them to interact with each other. We have about 300 great companies that are doing that. They are enjoying the experience, but there again, you don’t have to do anything fancy. Just get people together and show some appreciation. You’ll get a lot of value out of it.

Brian: That’s terrific, Mark, and thank you for the action points. I was going to ask you one last question before we close. What’s the question you wished I asked but haven’t yet?

Mark: Maybe something about the future? Often a good one is to bring out the crystal ball and see what we see in the future of marketing and that sort of thing.

Brian: That would be great.

Mark: Something that I’ve alluded to in this conversation was around the “whys” of customer experience, and the role marketing will have played in customer experience. One of the things you’ll notice, some of the best companies we have, particularly in the west, are obsessed with customer experience.

I think you have more buyers inundated with emails and websites and all sorts of stuff. Marketers will need to have some control over the customer experience in the future because that is going to be the main source of where their best leads are going to come from and their ability to convert those leads.

We see with our customers, which tend to be on the leading edge of the curve, where marketing and customer success are starting to merge a little bit. It’s very analogous to how sales and marketing began to come together in my Eloqua days, under the idea of the standard definition of a lead.

Brian: Yes.

Mark: I have done sales and marketing stuff together, and you’ve done a lot of writing on that. I’ve learned much from you over the years on that. There is a similar thing that is happening now. The customer success and marketing and product are coming together to define the optimal customer experience, and that is a big, big move.

Marketers who can get on that and understand this new language of customer experience and drive it will do very well over the next few years. I think that’s one big trend.

I do think that this idea of marketing by proxy is tremendous. It’s a huge thing, and these are skills that most marketers do not have today. Marketers now are good at running these cross-functional, multimodal, nurturing-style campaigns to drive leads and this sort of thing. The ability to do that has been really dominant over the last 10 years.

That’s changing as buyers are becoming inundated with that stuff, yet the ability to get others to do the marketing for you and learn those skills will be pretty significant. Because there is such little knowledge in this area, we actually have quite an education effort.

You can go to Influitive.com and check out our resources page, and there are lots of educational materials, as we are trying to train this next generation of marketers to think this way. Instead of thinking about how do, I bombard people to get my way? It’s how to find the right individuals who are relevant and trusted, and how do I get them to carry our message for me? I think that’s going to be a big deal.

And thirdly, everyone is talking about machine learning and all that these days, and I think it’s probably going to create just as big an impact. I think AI machine learning is probably at the very top of the high curve right now.

Brian: Right.

Mark: Three years from now, everyone will say, well, I don’t know what that was all about, I guess that was all hyped up, but then in ten years from now, people go wow, that really was a huge change.

So I think it’s definitely worth tracking what’s going on in that technology, and we’re certainly spending quite a bit of time playing around with it here. Some of the things I see for marketers, (and actually, there are a lot of sales professionals who listen to your podcast) I think empathy is just as important if not more so for sellers and so is advocacy, so is mobilizing your proxies if you are in the sales profession as well. I think there are a lot of parallels.

Advocate marketing blog: What the heck is advocacy marketing?

Lead Nurturing: 4 Steps to walking the buying path with your customers

How customer-hero stories help you connect better

How Sales Hustle and Automation Can Hurt Customer Experience

Do you focus on product stories or customer-hero stories?

Mike Bosworth has a simple way to frame the difference: “People love to buy, and they hate to feel sold.”

That line gets to the heart of this conversation.

Most B2B marketing still makes the product the hero. The product does this. The platform does that. The solution improves this metric, reduces that cost, and helps your company do more with less.

But buyers do not usually see themselves in product claims.

They see themselves in other people like them.

That is why Mike argues for customer-hero stories. Not stories where the vendor saves the day. Stories where the customer becomes the hero by solving a real problem, achieving a meaningful goal, and creating a better future inside their own organization.

In this episode of the B2B Roundtable Podcast, I talk with Mike Bosworth, longtime sales thought leader and creator of customer-hero selling, about why stories work, why sales and marketing need agreement more than integration, and why a qualified lead should be based on curiosity, not just activity.

Mike also explains why many salespeople struggle with discovery. It is not always because the questions are bad. It is often because the seller asks them before the buyer feels enough trust.

We get into customer-hero marketing, peer stories, emotional connection, the trust gap between younger sellers and senior buyers, and why the best sales and marketing helps buyers picture themselves solving a problem.

If your team is still leading with product claims instead of customer proof, this conversation is worth your time.

Mike Bosworth is a longtime sales thought leader, speaker, author, and creator of customer-hero selling.

His work has influenced generations of B2B sales teams through solution selling, customer-centric selling, storytelling, and by helping sellers facilitate the buying journey rather than pressuring buyers through a selling process.

Connect with Mike:

00:00 Introduction to Mike Bosworth

“People love to buy, and they hate to feel sold.” — Mike Bosworth

“If sales and marketing can agree on a finite number of things, great things can happen.” — Mike Bosworth

“If they’re not curious, they’re not really a lead.” — Mike Bosworth

“Let’s not market the product as the hero. Let’s market our past customers as the hero.” — Mike Bosworth

“The key to bridging that 20 years is a story.” — Mike Bosworth

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

Brian Carroll: Hi, everyone. I want to welcome you to today’s B2B Lead Podcast. My name is Brian Carroll, and I’m excited to have Mike Bosworth with us today.

Mike is someone that I’ve followed for a long time. We got to be together a few weeks ago. I loved his comments and the work he’s doing.

If you don’t know Mike Bosworth already, he is a thought leader in the sales space. I’ve followed his work, and he’s had a profound influence on how we sell and market, especially those who are in B2B.

Mike, I want to thank you for being with us today. Can you tell us a little bit more about your background?

Mike Bosworth: Well, it’s really interesting because I think today it’s incredible how cloud technology is forcing companies to be more empathic in their sales and marketing. It’s forcing them to.

Because with cloud, the conversation has to shift from the old “our solution” marketing. Our solution will do this, and our solution will do that.

Making that shift from that to how the customer uses our stuff marketing. Customer usage marketing, or what we in Story Seekers call customer hero marketing.

If we think about what are we really doing marketing for, well, I’m hoping we’re trying to create customers, and sales is also trying to create customers.

If we’re going to sell empathically, then ideally we won’t even be “selling.” We’ll be facilitating the buying journey of our customer and facilitating their customer experience because human beings love to buy, and they hate to feel sold.

Brian Carroll: You’ve been doing this and studying and being in the field a long time. What inspired you to start writing and talking about story and integrating with marketing and sales?

Mike Bosworth: Well, through my whole career as a sales productivity consultant and sales trainer, my stated mission was to help my client lift the bottom 80% of their sales force.

The top 20%, the ones who bring in 80% of the revenue, they’ve been doing well for years and continue to.

I figured I want to help my customers bump up at least the next 50%, because if you could get a 10% increase in productivity from that next 50%, do the math on that for most companies, it’s a lot of money.

Brian Carroll: It is.

As you’ve been working with companies and clients, something that’s existed longer than probably both of us have been doing our work: tell us the things most important for marketing and sales to agree on.

There’s a lot of talk about alignment. There’s a lot of talk about collaboration. But you use this word agreement. Especially, what are the things a CMO and CSO need to agree upon?

Mike Bosworth: Yeah. Well, it occurred to me just a couple of weeks ago because the AMA hired me and Tim Riester years and years ago to do integrating sales with marketing seminars.

And I tell you, I don’t think we’ve made much progress in doing that over the years.

Most companies I deal with, they’re really two different silos and they’re pointing fingers at each other.

Marketing thinks they’re sending these great leads to sales, and sales thinks they go into a black hole and there’s no follow-up. Sales thinks the leads from marketing are coming from the janitorial staff of the company that they’re selling to.

Quite a while ago, it occurred to me that if we can find the touchpoint in integrating sales and marketing, we could really help things out.

So Tim Riester and I dove into it, and we made the touchpoint the definition of a lead.

If both the chief sales officer and the chief marketing officer can specifically agree on the definition of a qualified lead, then the “integration” really starts getting a lot easier.

That word integration is messing people up in this day and age. If you think about it, it gets most people thinking about IT issues. APIs, and what plugs into this and what feeds into that. That’s disabling the integration.

A couple of weeks ago, I just swapped out the word integration for agreement. Golly, does it seem to simplify things.

If sales and marketing can agree on a finite number of things, great things can happen.

Brian Carroll: I really love the word agreement, and I think that’s the challenge. Without agreement, we don’t have common ground.

I’d love to hear from you. I think a lot of people have lead definitions. I wrote about universal lead definition in my book. People have leads going.

What have you found as the best definition of a qualified lead that sales and marketing should agree upon?

Mike Bosworth: Well, there’s a prerequisite to that.

The prerequisite for even defining the qualified lead is sales and marketing first have to agree on what buyer personas are we selling to.

Who do we envision our best customers to be where we can help them be a hero, where we can help them achieve a goal or solve a problem?

Back in my Xerox days, we were selling manufacturing productivity-improving software, so we were selling to buyer personas.

One buyer persona would be a VP of manufacturing who’s missing his shipment schedule. Another one would be a materials manager who had shortages. Another one would be a CSO who’s missing his sales forecast.

Once you have those buyer personas targeted, now we go in and think what psychological process would they go through in their organization, and when would they start bringing in other people, and how would they share information and all that stuff.

We actually want to ideally help our customer buy so they never feel any pressure from us.

My philosophy has always been, all the way back through solution selling, is we’re trying to facilitate the buying.

I missed a couple of big things in solution selling and customer-centric selling.

Now in 2008, I discovered that over the past 30-some years, where solution selling and customer-centric selling and Miller Heiman and Power Base and Sandler and all these methodologies were out in the marketplace, all this technology started coming, all these sales force automation systems evolving into CRM systems and stuff like that.

All that money spent on training and technology, and the 80/20 rule got worse.

A study by Sales Benchmark Index of 1,100 B2B sales forces came back in 2008, and they found in their case study base that 13% of the salespeople brought in 87% of the revenue.

I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach because my whole mission was to help the bottom 80% get better, and it had gotten worse.

That caused me to go into a breakdown of a bit, and I had to figure out, all right, I’m not as smart as I thought I was, and I haven’t really figured this thing out yet.

I started studying the problem, and the problem in most cases is that 80% of the people in sales aren’t very good at building an emotional connection and building trust with a stranger in a short amount of time.

They’re just not very good at it.

They end up diving into their solution or their technology or their knowledge or their discovery questions before the buyer trusts them enough to allow themselves to be questioned.

Over the years, the number one complaint I have from solution selling and customer-centric selling clients of mine would be the VP of Sales would say, “Mike, the top 20% love solution selling, but the bottom 80% quit using it within two weeks of the workshop.”

If you think about why they quit using it, my intellectual arrogance caused me to not really study it as well as I should have.

But it’s that inability to intuitively connect and know when you’ve built enough trust and connection that you can get out your list of discovery questions.

With solution selling, the bottom 80% lacked the intuition. They went to their discovery questions too soon, prematurely, and the buyer said, “You don’t know me well enough to ask me all these questions,” and pushed them away.

And so if you’re pushed away for two weeks, you quit using it.

Brian Carroll: As we’re talking about the definition, this brings us into talking a little bit about empathy and what you want sellers and marketers to do more in this respect.

I wanted to go back just real quickly. In your words, what would be the best definition of a lead?

Mike Bosworth: I went off on a tangent because it was the prerequisite of a qualified lead.

Brian Carroll: We have to know it. I agree.

Mike Bosworth: My definition of a qualified lead: a named John Doe at the ABC company, targeted buyer persona, is curious how we helped a peer job title at another company achieve a goal or solve a problem.

If we have somebody curious how we helped their peer, that’s a qualified lead.

Brian Carroll: In and of itself, for those listening that are in marketing, I was just talking with a salesperson today who was struggling trying to build his own pipeline.

He talked about his experience of a lead, and Mike, I tested your definition with him, and he said yes, I would love that.

He reiterated his experience of getting a lead of someone who didn’t actually want to talk with him. They weren’t curious. They were someone who had agreed to a meeting, but they didn’t know why.

Mike Bosworth: Agreeing to a meeting, they might have been curious, but we didn’t capture that curiosity.

Brian Carroll: Yeah, exactly.

You earlier talked a bit about the problem with product marketing, and you brought up hero marketing.

Why should we in marketing start focusing on making our customer the hero instead of what we’re doing right now, which is the product or what we do or what we sell?

What is hero marketing and why should we focus on it now?

Mike Bosworth: First of all, is it going to be the mission of the company to do customer hero selling and customer hero marketing? Because it really has to come from the top. It’s really a paradigm.

Gerhard Gschwandtner, the publisher of Selling Power magazine, said years ago that the CEO’s definition of selling is the DNA of the customer’s experience.

It’s still a small number of companies that once you figure out how, if you really believe in your heart that people love to buy and hate to be sold, then why wouldn’t we make it our mission as a company to facilitate, to architect our customer’s experience?

To really think about how they would go through a natural buying process and feel comfortable and let us facilitate that buying, using storytelling and story tending and writing them good letters.

Making story the foundation, because stories allow people with problems to visualize seeing themselves solve that problem.

What happens is we create a little story in their brain, and the story involves themselves seeing themselves responding to that painful once-a-month problem they have differently, if they had somebody’s help or technology or capability.

The customer is a hero by using the product.

So let’s not market the product as the hero. Let’s market our past customers as the hero, and we’re looking to help new prospects become heroes via customer hero selling.

If we really agreed on the definition of a qualified lead, now customer hero marketing feeds right into the customer hero selling.

Brian Carroll: I love the definition and distinction because from the customer’s side, they’re curious about someone like me who’s had a problem like me.

I think that is the challenge we have, bridging that gap of trust, to know someone like me is dealing with this and to see themselves in that.

Mike Bosworth: The other issue is the millennial selling to someone 20 years their senior.

Brian Carroll: Yeah.

Mike Bosworth: I remember going out as a 28-year-old salesperson for Xerox, and I was calling on 48-year-old materials managers.

When we’d meet for the first time, and the materials manager realizes he’s booked a little bit of his time for this guy who’s wet behind the ears, you can kind of tell the look on their face.

The key to bridging that 20 years is a story, because a story allows the 28-year-old salesperson to tell his 48-year-old prospect a story about the prospect’s 50-year-old peer who’s already been smart enough to solve a problem or achieve a goal.

That peer curiosity, the better the story is, melts into peer envy.

And if you can develop some peer envy in a buyer, they go diving into that buying process pretty quickly.

Brian Carroll: You have an example. I’d love to just help it be tangible for listeners out there. What might an example of customer hero marketing or selling look like?

Mike Bosworth: How about a 90-second story that I used to use as a 28-year-old at Xerox selling to 48-year-olds that allowed me to sell more in my first five months on quota than anybody in the history of the company sold in the full year?

Brian Carroll: That’d be perfect.

Mike Bosworth: I had this story in my pocket, and it was a true story.

Back then, Xerox wanted us to cold call by walking into buildings. Now they cold call on the phone.

So I’d walk into a lobby of a $15 million manufacturing company, 28-year-old salesperson. I’d go up to the receptionist and say, “My name is Mike Bosworth, and I’m with Xerox Computer Services, and I’d like to speak with your materials manager.”

Eighty percent of the time, the materials manager would come out. I don’t think we have the time to talk about all those curious reasons, but when they would come out, I’d look at their eyes and they’d give me the disdainful look that said, gosh, I’ve just committed some of my valuable time to this young kid.

So I’d shake hands. I’d confirm. I’d say, “So you’re the materials manager here?” He’d say yes.

And I’d say, “Can I share a quick story with you about another materials manager who’s less than a mile from here who I’ve been working with for the last 18 months?”

Guess how many times that story got turned down?

Brian Carroll: Very few times, because I’m sure people…

Mike Bosworth: Zero.

I never had someone turn it down. In 10 seconds, you offer somebody a story about their peer.

So now instead of some 28-year-old telling this guy how my solution will fix his manufacturing plant, think about that versus telling him a story about how his peer, Ed Blackman, who’s a materials manager at a specific company less than a mile from him, has already figured out how to solve his shortage problem.

Do you want to hear the story, just how I delivered it?

Brian Carroll: I would.

Mike Bosworth: I’ll give you the 30-second version of it quickly.

I’d say, first of all, the setting, the green card: “Ed Blackman is the materials manager over at OPEC Electronics. You know where it is, it’s less than a mile from here.

I met Ed almost two years ago at an Orange County APICS meeting, American Production Inventory Control Society, and Ed was the new president. Ed was obsessive about educating himself about material requirements planning, MRP.

He wanted to be a leader, and the reason he wanted to be a leader is materials manager was a really difficult job.

Ed Blackman, his boss, the VP of Manufacturing, was mad at him because he was missing his shipment schedule because Ed had shortages.

He had the VP of Finance mad at him because he was carrying too much inventory because he needed all the safety stock to try to not have the shortages impact schedule.

Eighteen months ago, Ed discovered that Xerox now had a way to replan his entire manufacturing plant overnight. Instead of a three-week process, it was an overnight process.

He decided 18 months ago to be an innovator and to be our first customer here in Orange County.

Over 18 months, his $8 million inventory is now $2.1 million. Their on-time shipments are now 97.5%. Ed is about to be promoted to be the new VP of Manufacturing.

But enough about me, what’s going on here?”

Brian Carroll: I love the story. If I were on that materials side, I’m sure it would compel me because I can relate.

Mike Bosworth: You can relate.

He’s dying. He has the same problem. His CFO is mad at him. His VP of Manufacturing is mad at him. The odds were so high.

And so now even though I’m 28, I told him a story about a 48-year-old guy or a 50-year-old guy.

The insight that I wanted to pass to him, or if I’m a challenger salesperson, I want to give him an insight, which means something he hadn’t thought about before.

But you can’t do that without a little credibility. And when you’re 28, you don’t have that credibility.

So the insight comes from the peer story instead of the looks of the salesperson talking about his solution.

Brian Carroll: You and I have talked about empathy. We were together out at CEB, now Gartner.

Mike Bosworth: Yeah.

Brian Carroll: What do you wish marketers and sellers would do more in this respect of applying their empathy and being able to connect with their customers?

Mike Bosworth: It’s such a paradigm shift, this product marketing business.

Technology has been wondrous over the last 40, 50 years, no doubt about it.

Always, I believe the best way to sell it was to help somebody have the vision of how he would use it.

The vision, this new prospect I had at Xerox, the vision I wanted him to come to was how he could be a hero in his company by fixing the shortages, just like Ed Blackman did at his company.

Brian Carroll: You’re helping.

Mike Bosworth: That’s a buying vision.

What we’re trying to do is teach salespeople to create a big, juicy buying vision. A customer hero vision where this guy sees himself as a hero in his own company, saving money, making money, solving a problem, achieving a goal that he hasn’t been able to do before.

If it’s too good to be true, certainly if there’s a 10- or 20-year gap between the seller and the buyer, I’ll tell you, when I was 28, after I told that story, they’d usually invite me in.

I’d get the next 45 minutes now to ask my discovery questions because my story covered that initial connection and trust.

Now I could go to my solution selling pain sheet if he lets me in the door. Now I can go to the list of discovery questions that my company has given me for a materials manager who’s got shortages.

You can go to it if he likes the story.

How do you know if he likes the story? After 90 seconds max, you say, “Enough about me, what’s going on here?”

And they’re going to do one of two things. They’re going to say, “Well, what do you want to know?” and they’re going to cross their arms, or they’re going to open up and start talking freely.

The better your story, the better the odds that after 90 seconds you say, “Enough about me, tell me about what’s going on here,” and they start talking freely.

That’s the purpose of the story.

The next piece, we’re doing our workshops and it’s off of this, but we teach people how to do connective listening.

Once the buyer starts talking freely, we teach the salespeople how to tend the buyer story and then send that buyer a written version of his customer hero story.

Are you with me?

After I tend your story, the new materials manager that I just met, and he admits that he’s got terrible shortages, and he takes me through the plant, then I start telling him the things that Ed was doing on a daily, weekly, bi-weekly basis to use our system to eliminate the shortages.

He still wanted proof.

I was 28, he was 48. The vision was fantastic. He would have loved to be able to work off of one bill of material and not have to have all that safety stock and replan his whole plant overnight.

It sounded too good to be true, and I was 28 and he was 48, so he wanted proof.

The bigger the gap of age or experience between the seller and the buyer, the more we encourage the young sellers to say to the buyer, “I know this sounds too good to be true, so don’t take my word for it. Make me prove it.”

That’s another little piece that boosts the trust of the seller. They offer proof.

Brian Carroll: As I’m listening to you, it sounds like you’re building a relationship by helping someone else relate to the story, see themselves in it, and then also starting to bridge the trust gap because you’re connecting with something that they can identify with and how they’re likely feeling. Is that what I’m hearing?

Mike Bosworth: Well, if you had a problem that was causing you to work 40 hours a week, Brian, and then some young guy came in and over the course of 30 to 45 minutes caused you to have a vision of finally having a way to fix that big irritating problem, what’s your state of mind going to be?

It’s going to be, you’re going to want to know more. You’re going to be curious.

Brian Carroll: I’ll be curious and I might even have some hope that things could get better.

Mike Bosworth: Let’s see. The curiosity isn’t about me. My curiosity isn’t about your solution. My curiosity is how I can make my shortages go away.

Brian Carroll: Right.

Mike Bosworth: It’s the usage.

That’s why customer hero stories bridge the cloud gap now too.

The cloud is forcing all these technology companies that have all these high-powered product marketing talent, and most of the product collateral ends up being IT-based or our solution-based.

It will do this. It will do that. Or our solution will do this or our solution will do that.

That’s making the product hero.

It’s disabling the buying process because now the buyer is going to feel the pressure of somebody wanting to sell them some piece of technology.

Brian Carroll: As I’m listening, I’m just wondering if you could share any tips or advice with those that want to start learning how they can apply and work on customer hero selling and marketing.

Mike Bosworth: There is a win-win way a good customer of mine tried.

They were struggling with hiring these young millennial people to come in and gain enough expertise that their customers would take them seriously.

The old way of putting them through six weeks of technical training and all these features, advantages, and benefits of all the technology, it’s a huge learning curve.

Instead, we want them to learn how the customers use our product.

The idea was they had some customers that this company spent a lot of money on because these customers were always willing to open up their shops and let other prospective customers come in. There were these premier customers.

They said, “Will you help us train some of our new people?” They agreed.

So the new people were trained to go out and learn the story of the premier customer’s use of the product.

We had to teach those young people how to go out and tend that story with a happy, willing customer.

They would say, “My company wants me to come out and document how you guys are using our product. Tell me what you’re doing with it, and how you use it, and when you use it.”

Get them talking about their usage of the product.

We’re starting off in a positive way. This is the piece of a story: how they use it.

After a little bit of time there, we say, “Well, I think I understand how you use it now. What did you use to do before you had it?”

Now we take them back thinking about how much more difficult it used to be without the product than it is now with the product.

If we send our young people out on that information-gathering mission with a willing customer, they come back and they not only write up a customer hero story that the whole organization can use, but equally important to them is they can now go out face to face or be on the telephone and tell customer hero stories and see how well they work.

Brian Carroll: I love it. And so with that, I know you have resources and tools. What is the best way for readers and listeners to get in touch with you and find out more about this?

Mike Bosworth: Go to MikeBosworth.com and read some of the stuff we have out there. Listen to some of the testimonials, and if you have any questions, call me.

Brian Carroll: Mike, thank you again. I’ve enjoyed our conversation.

And for all of you listening, I hope you found value today. I know that I found a lot.

Thank you again, Mike, for joining us.

Mike Bosworth: Thank you, Brian. I enjoyed it too.

When was the last time you looked at the quality and accuracy of your B2B persona data?

Mathew Sweezey has a blunt way to frame the problem: “The only measure that we have of the health of our email database is, did the email bounce? Horrible metric.”

That line gets to the heart of this conversation.

Most B2B marketers think about database quality in terms of deliverability. Did the email go through? Did it bounce? Is the address still valid?

But that does not tell you whether the person is still in your target persona.

Someone can stay at the same company, keep the same email address, move into a different role, and no longer be the right person for your message. The email still works. The targeting does not.

In this episode of the B2B Roundtable Podcast, I talk with Mathew Sweezey, Principal of Marketing Insights at Salesforce, about new B2B persona research from Salesforce and LinkedIn.

The research analyzed more than 15 million data points across two major B2B databases to better understand audience size, growth, churn, and movement inside organizations.

Mat argues that marketers need to think differently about their databases. Your data is not just a list. It represents your relationships. And those relationships are constantly changing.

We get into why email databases decay, why personas are fluid, why marketers need to think beyond bounce rates, and how the shift from limited media to infinite media is changing B2B marketing.

If your team is still measuring database health by whether an email address works, this conversation is worth your time.

Mathew Sweezey is was formerly, Principal of Marketing Insights at Salesforce. He was one of the early employees at Pardot, a marketing automation platform that was later acquired by ExactTarget and then Salesforce.

He is the author of Marketing Automation for Dummies and has written for multiple marketing and business publications. His work focuses on forward-looking marketing ideas, B2B buyer behavior, marketing automation, data, and the changing media environment.

Connect with Mathew:

00:00 Introduction to Mathew Sweezey

“The only measure that we have of the health of our email database is, did the email bounce? Horrible metric.” — Mathew Sweezey

“It’s not a what did you get, it’s a how effective were you.” — Mathew Sweezey

“Their email address is still valid, yet that person is no longer in your persona.” — Mathew Sweezey

“If your database churns at an average rate of 15 percent per year, that means your database is irrelevant if you don’t continually update it in 4.2 years.” — Mathew Sweezey

“A gerbil will live longer than a marketer will stay in their current position.” — Mathew Sweezey

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

Brian Carroll: Our data represents our relationships. Have you looked at your own data?

This is Brian Carroll. I want to welcome you to today’s B2B Lead Blog Podcast.

There are some questions that I want to ask you. What’s the annual growth rate of the personas in your database? Do you know how many of them have churned? What’s the size of your audience, and are you sure about that?

I’m super excited to have Matt Sweezey. He goes by Sweezey to me. Matthew Sweezey works with Salesforce. He’s the Principal of Marketing Insights.

Salesforce, along with LinkedIn, just released a new research study. As I understand it, it started in 2014, Matt, but this is the B2B persona report.

I wanted to talk with Matt to bring this very important information to B2B marketers.

Matt, welcome. I’m really glad to have you. Can you tell us more about your background?

Mathew Sweezey: Yeah, thanks Brian for having me. I love being on here.

My background’s kind of interesting. I think what’s relevant to this conversation is I was one of the really early employees at a small startup back in the day called Pardot, which is a marketing automation platform.

From there, we grew that, sold that to ExactTarget. I became a Salesforce employee, and along that road I wrote a book called Marketing Automation for Dummies, write for lots of different publications, and now I head up the forward-looking marketing ideas and theories as Principal of Marketing Insight at Salesforce.

Brian Carroll: Cool. So tell me about this study. What motivated you or inspired you to do this research?

Mathew Sweezey: What inspired me is what I think is funny. To me, these are fundamental marketing questions.

What bothers me is the fact that no one else was trying to ask these questions, or whether or not they really knew they should even be asking these questions in the first place.

Let me explain.

As a marketer, we have metrics. We’re like, all right, so we got 10,000 email addresses this year. That would be a metric that we may give to somebody to validate our efforts.

But that’s like saying, I’ve got 10. Ten out of how many? That’s the question.

It’s not a what did you get. It’s a how effective were you.

These were effectiveness measures. Without really detailed information into our audiences, and exactly their size, their growth, their churn, we really have no way to answer any of those questions, which should be key fundamental questions that we should be able to answer about our job.

That’s what really sparked this.

This idea started a couple of years ago, when I started to get more into, just really, I wanted to understand the value of email better, and how do we value our email addresses.

Just think about this real quick. Once again, these are some generic numbers that I calculated by looking at all the measures that are out there and aggregating them together into one number.

When you look at about the average number that it costs a B2B business to obtain an email address, that is about $150.

Brian Carroll: $150.

Mathew Sweezey: $150 to obtain an email address.

And when you then look at the average size of a B2B email database, the average size is 50,000 names. That’s what a marketer has. Not their addressable market, let me be clear on that.

So if you multiply those two things together, the marketer has a seven and a half million dollar asset under their control, which is their email database.

And to be clear, that is the largest asset that a marketer owns, point blank.

Now when you then say, that’s the largest asset, then you start to ask some basic questions on how do we evaluate it? How often does it churn? Anything like that.

And there is no data that we can give you.

The only measure that we have of the health of our email database is did the email bounce, yes or no? Horrible metric.

So that’s what led me down this path.

Brian Carroll: Wow. So as you look at all this information, I’m still processing the cost of an email address, and then along with that the size of the data, and thinking about this is something marketers don’t think about, from my own experience.

What surprised you most as you analyzed the data from this research, and why?

Mathew Sweezey: I think what surprised me most was, in the combination of the work that we did with LinkedIn, the fact that people don’t realize the amount of movement inside of an organization.

What I mean by movement is that a person has both horizontal and vertical changes within a company.

So if we’re only looking at the measure of, is this email address any good for us, and we’re only looking at the bounce, all that says is, does this person still work at that company?

Which as a marketer is not enough information for us to know if they are still in our persona or not.

Because if the email address is still good but the person took a horizontal shift, such as they were the manager of business development and now they are a manager of support, it happens pretty frequently inside of organizations where people take horizontal shifts into completely different departments.

Their email address is still valid, yet that person is no longer in your persona, and you should no longer be targeting or talking to that person.

But because that email address doesn’t bounce, we still do.

The fact of horizontal and vertical movement is pretty powerful.

The second thing that I thought was really fascinating was the idea of growth and the idea of churn.

One of the things that we often don’t really think about is that our personas are actually a fluid set of people. It’s different day to day.

Meaning that there are people that leave that persona completely. Hence, they were in this managerial role and now they’re in a different department. They have just left our persona.

And then there are people that enter that marketplace completely. That’s the reverse, such as they were in support, and now they moved over into sales, hence making them a part of our persona.

So when you start looking at these growth and churn rates, what you see are some pretty large numbers, and they’re all double digit.

What I want people to realize is the power of math.

If your database churns at an average rate of 15 percent per year, that means your database is irrelevant if you don’t continually update it in 4.2 years.

That’s the decay rate. That’s how quickly your email addresses become completely invalid.

If you think about this, how many of us have just had these databases forever, and we’re like, yeah, we have 50,000 emails?

But that doesn’t mean anything if, on average, you’re churning at 15 percent per year. Each year it’s declining in value by 15 percent.

We forget that it’s a fluid set. This data helps us determine just how fluid it is and then gives us a good measure to be able to say, all right, we lost 15 percent of our database this year, but we gained 30,000 email addresses, which we know is 15 percent of all the new people that entered the marketplace.

So it gives us a much better way to evaluate our efforts and to actually understand this most valuable asset that we have.

Brian Carroll: As I’m listening to you, the first things you were sharing blew my mind from a marketing standpoint, because you’re right. We generally look at the health of our data based on, do emails go through or not?

So many marketers are concerned about deliverability, but then let’s check our own experience.

Those of you in our listening audience, how many of you have had your job responsibilities change in the same company you’re working with? And that doesn’t include the other companies.

So Matt, I’m thinking a lot about that, just even in my own data, and how I do marketing, because that is a whole other dimension. Vertical, horizontal, and then the other thing is, I’m thinking about, okay, what do I do?

We’ll get to that in a little bit. But I wanted to ask you, your report said that B2B marketing as we know it is fundamentally changing. Why is that?

Mathew Sweezey: There’s a lot of reasons, but the main reason, and I don’t want to go too far down this rabbit hole for two reasons: one, it can get pretty complicated pretty quick to explain in a few seconds, and two, I’ve got a new book coming out that’s being published by Harvard Business Press that really answers that question in complete detail.

But to give you the answer in short, what you need to understand is the idea that we have of marketing was created in a limited media environment.

Think about this. The idea of marketing has been around for a very long time.

If you look at media, and the media environment, really media has three fundamental aspects: creation, distribution, and consumption.

Now in the limited media era, there was only so much media that could be created, and it was only able to be created by those who had the capital to do so, which means businesses.

Then there was the distribution of media, which had to go through a preexisting distribution network, which meant you had to pay for it. So once again, distribution was limited to those with the capital, or businesses.

That then funnels down to how much media exists in the marketplace, because you only had businesses who can create it and distribute it. So hence the entire media environment is pretty much a captive marketplace by businesses.

You then take one step to the right, which essentially I prove that in my book when that step happens, and now we live in an infinite media environment where there is no longer a barrier to the creation or the distribution of content, equaling an infinite amount of content in the environment.

So what that means is all of the ideas that we have of marketing are created with a captive audience in mind.

We no longer live in an environment where businesses are the sole creators and distributors of media. In fact, what we’ve entered is a world where they are the extreme minority, rather than the predominant majority.

Because of that, because we have an entirely new media environment, just because you write a piece of content does not mean that someone will find it.

Now we have so much content, we’re using algorithms to connect people to content. Consumers are using algorithms to filter their content, and those algorithms are filtering out all of the crap that we used to make, because there never was a demand for that content.

It’s just what we could produce, and because there was a captive audience with no recourse, it was accepted.

But now there is a recourse and better options. The consumers are taking those better options.

That’s the underlying foundational reason why marketing is changing.

Brian Carroll: Wow.

As I was listening to you, I was reminded of a question. It sounds like if we took away our marketing and our advertising, would our customers miss it?

Mathew Sweezey: No, they wouldn’t at all. They hate it.

Ask yourself. Here’s the thing that blows my mind. If you read any report that looks at the marketing industry, Gallup put out the trust in professions poll, and they’ve done so for decades.

Advertising professionals are one of the least trusted professions. The only professions that are more distrusted than advertisers are congressmen, lawyers, and insurance salespeople.

We are only one percentage point more trusted than insurance salespeople as a profession.

Brian Carroll: That’s depressing.

Mathew Sweezey: If you think about it that way, you’re like, why do we still do these things?

Well, we still do these things because we have such a long and vested interest in the idea that it works, when it really doesn’t work. It just worked because we were shooting fish in a barrel. They had no other recourse.

And now that they do, we can see, here’s one of my favorite things. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with one of my favorite marketing books, which is called The Cluetrain Manifesto. Doc is a coauthor with a bunch of other brilliant minds.

Brian Carroll: I’ve read it. It’s a terrific read.

Mathew Sweezey: In that book, Doc says that there is no demand for messages.

I was chatting with Doc the other day, and he said it’s not only that there is no demand, there never was a demand for messages.

And he takes it a step further and says, just think about this. If you look at ad blocking, there are over 600 million devices with ad blocking.

If you think about it this way, that is the largest boycott in human history, and it is boycotting our idea of advertising and marketing.

Think about that.

Brian Carroll: I can’t wait to read your book.

There’s the now, and so I would love to talk with you. There are five areas that I saw brought up in the study. First of all, email. Every marketer touches email, and those who email are impacted by this research.

So what can marketers do?

Mathew Sweezey: A couple of things.

This doesn’t really give a lot of tactics on what you do with email. Rather, it puts into question when should you ask for email, or what is the value of email in your organization.

So we have to take two steps back and think about telephone numbers.

Any marketer that uses email marketing now asks for an email address before a telephone number. So progression of communication channels.

Now we have other communication channels such as social, so maybe we should hold off on asking for email until a little bit later, because we know that email is much more finite than a social handle.

A social handle is usually a personal handle, which gives us personal access to somebody, rather than email, which is another level of communication.

So maybe it suggests that we should invest in social as much as, if not more, as a communication channel, just because it has a longer shelf life.

That’s an idea.

The other ideas are really just to help people understand the effectiveness that they have with obtaining email addresses and the fact that we need to realize standard best practices.

If you email somebody five times and they don’t respond, stop emailing them. Churn them out of your database.

Just because you have that email address doesn’t mean anything. You don’t own them.

At one time they thought you were relevant, but apparently you’ve proven not to be relevant in their lives, so take the hint and stop it.

Those are some tactics and ideas.

If you want to look at this in terms of a tactical approach, and you take this into the future, what you will see is, and this is just my assumption, but LinkedIn now being owned by Microsoft, LinkedIn has a massively powerful database.

To marketers, it is, I think, one of the most powerful databases for B2B marketers specifically, because it gives us employment data.

If you have ever been in any type of software sales scenario, or really any type of services sale, you know two major things.

You know that the moment your champion leaves a company, if you have a product that that champion bought, it’s now currently on the chopping block, because the next person that comes in is most likely to wipe out all the predecessor’s tools and choices and vendors and put in place their own.

Inversely, you know if that champion goes to a new place, that’s your greatest shot at selling them again at a new employment.

So just those two basic scenarios, employment has a lot to do in terms of an indicator of a sale or an indicator of churn of a previous sale.

Brian Carroll: When people switch roles or they leave a company, especially if they’re C-level, or as you talked about, a high-level decision maker, when they leave, change happens.

Mathew Sweezey: Yeah, every time.

In all the software companies I’ve worked at, that’s the number one trigger event for us losing a client. Number one.

Brian Carroll: Yes, I’d agree 100 percent, and I think what I’m hearing from you, and intuitively I’ve sensed this with my own email list, for example, and for our listeners, there are third-party providers that can help you append social data to the email addresses you currently have.

I personally use one called FullContact, and that is useful. There are others out there through Data.com, etc.

But when you have someone’s LinkedIn profile, or their Twitter, as people are mobile and they’re moving around, your data represents your relationships.

It’s very hard to start relationships over and over if people move from company to company.

So what I’m hearing from you, Sweezey, is that we need to think multidimensionally instead of right now, it’s like get email, grow our email list, and that’s not enough.

So how can marketers improve either their campaign or their data management? Any thoughts on that? We talked about a few ideas.

Or I’ll put it another way: what can marketers do to apply these insights and get better today?

Mathew Sweezey: That’s a harder question, just because this data didn’t specifically look at that, but I think just the basic things that I’ve mentioned.

First off, realize the amount of churn in your database and be aware that you’re reporting a metric to your bosses that really isn’t accurate.

So if you say that I’m basing my performance on a three percent engagement rate with my email address, you really have a much higher engagement rate with your core demographic than you probably think, because most of those people in your email database probably aren’t in that demographic or that persona anymore.

That’s one way to think about it: by scrubbing out all these people you actually can show your effectiveness a lot better, which is kind of crazy to think.

The others are just, realize that email is a very specific type of communication, and it’s applicable. Don’t discount this fact.

It is the number one communication method for business, and it is the number one communication method that business is done through.

But that means when business is applicable. As if you just have people in your audience, and they’re not actively in a sales cycle, email can help you keep up with them, but don’t discount all the other avenues that you can keep up with them.

So that’s just a couple of things.

Brian Carroll: That’s awesome.

As you look at this research, what are some questions you wished you could have dug deeper into, or maybe future research ideas related to this?

Mathew Sweezey: The amount of work to get this data, I will never ever want to continue this research.

It honestly was, due to the size of this data, we’re looking at 15 million data points over a span of six years, running some pretty heavy analysis, combining multiple data sets.

I don’t ever want to rerun this.

I think the numbers are here, and the main points are, in our given environment, I don’t expect people to switch jobs, or that process to change too dramatically.

So I think these churn rates, and I think these growth rates will stay pretty consistent for a pretty significant point of time.

The total database sizes, those are pretty accurate, and I imagine they will change, but we’ve got the growth rate and the churn rates to kind of be able to mathematically predict with pretty high degree of accuracy what they will be at any point in time.

I don’t ever really want to rerun this data, but in terms of future data, oh my god, there’s so many other things I want to look at.

But in terms of just mapping out size of personas, and the churn and the growth, I’m pretty sure this is probably the best that we’ll ever see.

I don’t really see any of the players that created this data wanting to actively rerun it. It’s pretty much what we’re going to get.

Brian Carroll: Well, I can appreciate that for all the reasons, and you just have a really cool gig, Sweezey.

I want to give our listeners a way to keep up with you and stay in contact, but before I do that, what’s the question that I missed asking you or that you wished I would have asked?

Mathew Sweezey: How about this one?

We’re all marketers that listen to this podcast, right?

Brian Carroll: Exactly. Tell us about ourselves.

Mathew Sweezey: Let’s talk about ourselves.

Here’s one of my favorite, most fascinating statistics that came out of this. Check this out. You got kids, Brian?

Brian Carroll: Yes.

Mathew Sweezey: Did you ever have hamsters?

Brian Carroll: Yes, we did. For a period of time, my daughters did.

Mathew Sweezey: And gerbils, right? Same thing.

A gerbil will live longer than a marketer will stay in their current position. That’s right.

A marketer’s tenure on average is 2.4 years. The average life cycle of a gerbil or a hamster or whatever is three years.

So if you buy a gerbil and put it on your desk, it will live longer than you will keep your job.

Brian Carroll: Crazy.

Mathew Sweezey: And by the way, in comparison, we have the highest churn rate of any profession. Marketers. Salespeople are second. Marketers are first.

Think about that.

Brian Carroll: Again, we’ve always known that it’s tough. It’s hard. This is why I do what I do, is I want to help marketers do better.

And if we’re moving, that we’re moving for positive reasons. It is a challenging job, but also I love it because we get to learn so much, and ongoing learning.

But man, just hearing about that churn, I think for all of us out there, we’ve got to get used to dealing with change, because change will happen to us, including at our jobs, right?

Mathew Sweezey: Yep.

Brian Carroll: So what’s the best way for people to stay in touch with you, or to keep up with your research?

Mathew Sweezey: Funny enough, I’m easy to find.

I took my first name, which is Matthew, and that first letter M and threw it on my last name, which is Sweezey, so I am @msweezey on Twitter.

If you read that real quickly, I am Miss Weezey for eternity on Twitter.

I also do a lot on SlideShare. Those are primarily the two places. I put most all of my research up on SlideShare, and I tweet every now and then. I’m not super active, but those are the two best places to catch me.

And then I speak all over, so you’re likely to go to a conference and see me, or read some stuff I’m writing. I started writing for Forbes recently and some other places.

Brian Carroll: Fantastic.

Well, I always love talking with you, and I learn a lot. I’m sure our listeners and readers have as well. Thanks again for joining us.

Mathew Sweezey: No worries, man. Thanks for having me.