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.

Does your purpose currently impact your marketing, revenue growth, and profit?

Mack Fogelson has a direct answer: “This is about growth. And in this day and age, this is the approach to growth.”

That line gets to the heart of this conversation.

Purpose can sound soft. It can sound like a tagline, a mission statement, a values poster, or a nice idea that sits somewhere on the company website.

But Mack argues that purpose is much more practical than that.

Purpose helps companies connect with customers, focus their marketing, align employees, build trust, and create growth that is more durable than another campaign or tool.

In this episode of the B2B Roundtable Podcast, I talk with Mack Fogelson, CEO of Genuinely, about why purpose matters to marketing, revenue growth, and profit.

Mack explains why companies need to move beyond product-first messaging, why authentic purpose has to show up inside the business before it can work outside the business, and why customer empathy is essential if marketing is going to connect with real people.

We also talk about why technology can get in the way of customer connection, why marketers need more one-to-one conversations with customers, and how teams can start small instead of treating purpose as a massive organizational overhaul.

If your marketing feels disconnected from what customers actually care about, this conversation is worth your time.

Mack Fogelson is the CEO of Genuinely, a consulting and training company that helps organizations build more meaningful, human, and sustainable businesses.

Before founding Genuinely, Mack worked across the marketing space, including website development, search engine optimization, community building, branding, and integrated marketing strategy.

Her work focuses on helping companies use purpose, people, and promise to build stronger customer connections and healthier organizations.

Connect with Mack:

00:00 Introduction to Mack Fogelson

“It’s not about what your company sells or solves anymore. It’s about who your company is.” — Mack Fogelson

“When the conversation shifts from being about product to being about purpose, it becomes something else entirely that drives growth.” — Mack Fogelson

“It doesn’t tell you what they’re afraid of.” — Mack Fogelson

“Technology is part of the root of the problem.” — Mack Fogelson

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

Brian Carroll: Hi everyone, this is Brian Carroll. I’d like to welcome you to today’s B2B Leads Podcast.

I have Mack Fogelson today. I’m super excited to bring her ideas and thoughts to you. Mack is CEO of Genuinely, and they are a consulting and training company.

Why I wanted to talk with Mack is I got introduced to Mack through a mutual friend of ours. We’ve developed this friendship, and I’ve learned a lot about purpose and how important that is with marketing.

As a lot of you listeners know, I’ve talked about empathy, and Mack has really brought this extra dimension of talking about purpose and how it’s so important.

Mack, I just want to welcome you and thank you for joining us today.

Mack Fogelson: Thank you Brian so much for having me and for your kind words. I’m excited to have a conversation today.

Brian Carroll: Well, can you tell us a little bit more about your background?

Mack Fogelson: Sure. Way, way long ago, in another dimension, I was actually a teacher and did that for a while.

Then over the last fourteen years I’ve been in the marketing space, so everything from building and coding websites to optimizing with search engine optimization to building community and brands and the full, integrated approach to marketing a company.

All of those layers and those many, many layers have brought us to where we are now, which is essentially teaching companies how to use the concepts that we’ve pioneered or created, or created an amalgam of all the things we’ve learned over the years, and just really paying forward the frameworks and the processes that ultimately help companies in the digital age compete, contend, and build really great, meaningful, sustainable businesses.

Brian Carroll: I was going to ask you, as you’re on this journey and as you’re working, what inspired you to focus on purpose and humanizing marketing?

Mack Fogelson: Yeah, you know that’s a loaded question possibly, but I think it’s because around the time I started having my family, almost a decade ago, I just realized that in my work on a daily basis, if I was taking that time away from my family, I really needed to make it count.

Ultimately, I’ve always really built a business around something that has been very meaningful to me and certainly wanting to make that very meaningful for my employees.

Then we really just got into the mode of wanting to help companies be better.

I started in the conversation about community many years back. I was on the stage for search engine marketing, talking a lot about the benefit of community and companies building a community in order to help their businesses.

What I didn’t realize at the time but unfolded many years later was that purpose was really at the heart of all of that. Purpose, connection, people, and really helping companies to understand how you bring people together through purpose, and certainly to drive their growth.

Brian Carroll: That is really cool.

I think the challenge that a lot of B2B marketers face, and our listeners and readers, is that I talk to a lot of B2B marketers and they feel that, one, they’re working with budgets that aren’t huge, and they feel like there’s a lot more noise.

You’ve said that it’s not about what you spend on marketing. It’s how you put your energy or how purpose helps you get focused. Why is that?

Mack Fogelson: Because there is so much that has changed.

The world isn’t the same. Businesses are not the same, and the way the business world works, customers are not the same. So we cannot expect marketing to be the same.

Essentially, we’re looking at consumers now, which we are consumers just as we are marketers, but we expect authentic and very real and human experiences. And not only that, but employees are looking for more meaning in their work just like I was many years ago.

It really comes down to the fact that it’s not about what your company sells or solves anymore. Certainly you need to be extremely stellar at what you sell and what you make, but it’s about who your company is.

Really, it’s about the three components of purpose, people, and promise, and having those pieces work together for any given company so they can reap all the benefits that purpose brings, like customer acquisition and retention, customer connections, and employee satisfaction.

Brian Carroll: It’s really important, and I know that you’ve talked about this a bit, but there has been this disconnect.

How can we overcome this disconnect and better connect with our customers, our future customers?

Mack Fogelson: I think the biggest thing to realize is that most companies are pushing their product and they’re trying to push their services rather than really leading from what their company is here to do and bridging that gap between the purpose of the company and the people that are in line with that.

When the conversation is about product, there isn’t much of a conversation to be had.

Let’s say we’re just talking about Dove, which is a very popular example of purpose in the sense that they sell soap. But ultimately their purpose is to help women feel good about their bodies.

It’s the intersection of those things and the cultural relevancy of attacking an issue like women’s self-image and their body image and wanting to really help solve that problem in our world that has given them such incredible growth in their organization.

When the conversation shifts from being about product to being about purpose, it becomes something else entirely that drives growth, because it’s the word of mouth that companies are looking for.

And that doesn’t come through talking about a product. It comes from the connection that they have through the shared values and wanting to do something bigger.

Not to say that they don’t generate great profits from this path. It’s just a different way to it.

Brian Carroll: As I’m listening to you, part of me was like, there are times where I, and I’m sure some of our listeners may be saying, “Oh I wish I could sell something as simple as Dove,” in a lot of ways where you have a complex sale.

You’ve talked about why building a human and authentic company is necessary. So why should those in B2B marketing care about this?

When they have something that’s complex and lots of people, why should we care, and hasn’t this work been done already?

Mack Fogelson: That’s the thing. Purpose is a big conversation and it has been for a lot of years. It’s becoming more of a trendy topic and you see it everywhere, and I think that’s the biggest disconnect.

Companies think that on the outside, if they market for purpose, they’re good, they’re safe. And maybe many companies are doing that.

But if the experience with your company is not true all the way to the core, then that’s where you’re going to have your big problems.

In kind of a roundabout way to answer your question, in terms of why companies should care and why they need this, this isn’t really a clarify-your-purpose-as-an-organization and then great, check that off, stencil some words on your wall, and just call it good and maintain the strong culture.

It’s more than that.

It’s understanding how that is communicated in your sales, in your marketing, because ultimately in the day-to-day companies want to know how do we achieve growth and how do we continue to acquire customers? How do we keep our customers?

When your company is not looking at how to build a deeper connection with that customer, which by the way comes from purpose and empathy as we’ve talked about, there is no connection.

When you have no connection, you have no customers.

It’s really in applying the purpose to the day-to-day of the organization and understanding how that’s not just some visionary thing about identifying a purpose and then making it relevant to your customers.

It’s helping your teams internally understand what purpose is or isn’t, because many companies think it’s a PR approach or it’s a tagline, or it’s a mission or value statement. Or it’s even making a bunch of money over here to give money over there.

That’s all great, but when it comes down to it, purpose is really what does that mean to your customer who needs your product and wants to connect deeply with your company?

Think about Patagonia. They’re selling a stellar product, but they’re also going deeper to say, “We are going to pioneer technology to make better clothing. And we’re going to reduce the impact of that on the environment. Then we’re going to give this technology to our competitors because if they have it, then we’re making a larger impact altogether.”

Certainly that appears to be going very, very far with the concept of purpose.

But you look at a company like Chipotle and they ultimately have been working on “food with integrity” as their purpose for many, many years. They have completely, exponentially outperformed the competition and all because they have centered their entire company around this thought that food can be better made, even in an industry where food is fast food and you have to do it for cutting your margins.

Now they’re on this path of figuring out, even with their food safety issues, how are they going to get back to their purpose and still deliver food with integrity and keep their customers while staying true to their profit.

I think to answer your question, companies need purpose because they need to keep their employees, they need it to keep their customers, and ultimately there’s something bigger that their businesses are here to do.

And it’s not an altruistic path. It’s a path to profit. It’s just, again, a different way of getting there.

Brian Carroll: I appreciate that you talked about all the dimensions and also with some examples.

A little bit later, I want to ask you for some tips that we in marketing can use to take steps to understand our purpose and articulate that, but also start having that conversation internally.

I also loved that you talked about empathy in the beginning. I talk about that a lot too. What do you wish marketers and sellers would do more in this respect? I’d love to learn from you and hear your thoughts.

Mack Fogelson: In regards to empathy?

Brian Carroll: Yeah. Does empathy play a role in understanding your purpose and connecting with customers? Or what do you wish marketers and sellers did more in this respect?

Mack Fogelson: Definitely.

This might be a little bit of a spoiler alert to maybe your tips toward the end, but one of the biggest things that we see is that companies lack the customer connection and obviously the connection to their purpose and any type of authentic or personal or empathetic connection to customers because they’re using data to make decisions, which they have a copious amount of data.

Some companies just don’t know what to do with it anymore. But it’s not in just analyzing your customer data or your audience data or the psychographic data that you get on your customers.

It’s participating in one-to-one interviews with them to truly understand their behavior and more specifically understanding what they’re thinking and feeling.

Because when you get that data about your customer, that’s great that it gets you some very quantitative benchmarks about the profile of these people. But it doesn’t tell you what they’re afraid of. It doesn’t tell you what they’re struggling with right now at this point in their lives.

Connecting with your customers on that one-to-one basis obviously opens up a huge conversation for understanding and empathizing with where they’re coming from.

Then, by understanding that thinking and feeling, you can shape your entire content strategy based on removing those roadblocks.

And that is something I think ties into many things in addition to purpose and empathy.

Brian Carroll: I’m really glad you brought up tips, and that’s actually where we were going to go.

I think you’re spot on. I’ve talked to marketers who really don’t get to spend face time with the customers they’re looking to influence or reach outside their companies.

So I think the takeaway here is that marketers need to spend more time connecting with customers and not just through their channel of their sales team, but actually having these conversations and spending time doing that, and practicing and using their empathy to do just that.

Mack Fogelson: You and I talk about this a lot with technology and how everybody thinks that technology is a magic pill.

They think there must be a tool or piece of technology or software that is going to help us build our customer base faster. Or some magic trick.

The fact of the matter is that that’s part of the root of the problem in which companies need purpose, they need empathy.

Because they’re trying to solve these much deeper connection issues with their customers by using technology in lieu of speaking with their customers.

And those tools can’t help you do that.

So I think definitely the companies that understand how to use technology wisely, obviously they need to be able to use that at a certain level, even just to do a bunch of the heavy lifting and dirty work that we couldn’t take part in many years ago.

But it’s been taking that data and pairing it with the one-to-one participation in the flesh with these people to really understand who they are, what they need, and help them get their roadblocks removed.

Brian Carroll: I agree with you, and as we’ve talked about the things that I realized has come up is the very thing that’s supposed to help us, this technology, connect with our customers more efficiently and effectively, is getting in the way of doing that.

And so to counteract that, or the counterpoint, is humanizing and actually putting more energy into that human connection so that when we do apply the technology, we’re using it well and we’re using it in a way that can help facilitate conversations and connections that we’ve already established.

Mack Fogelson: Definitely.

Brian Carroll: Can you share any other tips or examples that our listeners can use to articulate and apply their purpose so that it’s not outside in but it’s inside out?

Mack Fogelson: Yeah, and actually I can share four steps that would really help them understand how do we even approach this conversation.

Using purpose in your organization and certainly having that be a cornerstone of your growth, and specifically we’re focusing on how that is communicated in sales, marketing, and customer experience. But certainly it’s not the only piece to the success of your organization.

There are so many things that have to be in line: strategy, leadership, and obviously your product or service. But purpose greatly enhances the opportunity for success, especially in the digital age and especially in terms of competitive advantages.

So just know if you’re going to go down this road that you don’t have to start all over. You don’t have to overhaul your entire organization.

In fact, many companies that we work with just need an outside perspective to help them understand their systems and processes that they use to market and sell just need a little tweaking here and there.

And a reminder of, “Hey, at this place is when you integrate purpose. At this place is when you really bring it back to the goals of the organization, wrapped with purpose. Or you need to get to the customer in this place a little bit earlier.”

Let me just walk through these tips and I’ll try to make it as quick as possible.

The first of these four steps is basically clarifying the purpose of the organization.

We talked a little bit about Dove. Their purpose is not to sell soap. Their purpose is to help women feel better about their bodies. So that’s the big difference there.

Same with Chipotle. Their purpose is not to sell burritos. Their purpose is to make food with integrity and ultimately to pioneer food safety systems and help other fast-food organizations to know that they can make great food and still make it healthy and good for our earth.

It’s understanding the difference between just a mission and the product that you’re selling and really making the conversation about purpose. So start there.

If you’re at a loss as to how to do that, there are lots of resources online. We are partial to the Ogilvy and Mather tool that is really effective in helping companies understand the cultural tension that they’re trying to address in the world, as well as what they do as their best self.

And that is how you find your purpose.

It’s not easy to do, but it’s certainly a place that will make you extremely relevant in your customers’ lives. So starting with clarifying the purpose of your organization, that’s number one.

The second step is deconstructing your customer’s journeys.

So now I’m getting more specific to sales, marketing, customer experience, and those teams in your organization, and understanding how to do this by actually talking to your customers.

Just as I mentioned earlier, you definitely want to be looking at the customer data that you can collect digitally. Understand the audience data, the demographic data, psychographic data that you get.

But that is normally where companies stop. They build these personas and then they don’t go any deeper into actually spending face-to-face time with the customer.

And that’s where all the good stuff is.

That’s where you’re going to find connections, and that’s where you’re going to understand what your customers are thinking and feeling at every stage in your funnel, so that you can generate resources, content, experiences that help to remove those roadblocks.

That’s the second part, deconstructing that customer journey so that you can make that bridge between your purpose and your people.

The third step in getting purpose really well integrated in your organization is connecting your team’s purpose to your organization’s purpose.

Ultimately, you have to know the purpose of your organization in its entirety to really understand what your organization as a whole exists to achieve beyond profit.

The second part of that is then, with your team, understand what role they play in achieving that purpose so they can really apply that more specifically to their day-to-day.

That can go a really long way for efficiency and output and morale, especially when your team is pushing hard and days are getting long. The meaning side of that really matters to them.

The fourth and final step after connecting your team’s purpose to your organization’s purpose is really adjusting the communication of your purpose externally.

This very much directly applies to your sales and marketing and customer experience teams. They’re the most outwardly facing, so they are the ones that have the biggest responsibility in making sure that what is happening inside of your organization is also being effectively communicated outside.

So companies know you’re not a façade, that purpose is not a veneer, that it’s truly how you operate inside and out.

Essentially you want to teach your sales and marketing team to understand the difference between having a product conversation and having a purpose conversation.

When you make that shift to not just pushing your product, but then to helping those teams understand the bigger purpose of your organization and how that connects to your customers, then ultimately you’re opening an opportunity to connect with exponentially more people, more organizations, more influencers, more people in the media, more communities, who are either already your ideal customers, or they know somebody who could be.

And that’s probably the biggest factor there.

Brian Carroll: Mack, that was fantastic. Thank you.

You did a good job distilling down to four points, and I feel like this will be tangible for our listeners.

We’ll also supply some resources and links for people to dig into these areas as well.

I have just one more question. I wanted to ask what advice you would give to those who want to apply what you’ve just talked about and bring this idea to other leaders inside their company.

What if someone who might be doing marketing communications or frontline sales is inspired by this idea and feels like they ought to do this? How can they get the conversation started inside their company?

Mack Fogelson: That’s a great question.

I think it’s starting small.

Like I said, purpose as a concept seems very intimidating, especially to leaders, because they feel like, “Oh my gosh, you’re talking about an entire organization overhaul, and we can’t even keep up with what we’re doing every day.”

So I don’t think about that, because we’ve already touched on that it’s not really starting over. It’s just optimizing what you have and better connecting it and communicating it so that your employees and your customers can understand it so that they want to support your growth.

I think it’s just starting small.

We typically start with a very small purpose workshop. We’re talking maybe 45 to 60 minutes of helping companies understand what purpose is and what purpose isn’t.

I can supply some of the research and the resources that have informed those workshops that we do if that would help people. So certainly they can pull information out of that.

Then once they start the conversation, I think it’s also to understand that purpose seems kind of fluffy, maybe, when you’re trying to hit your ROI and your metrics and the goals that you have financially for your team and for the organization.

But this is about growth.

It actually doesn’t have anything to do with purpose. This is about growth.

And in this day and age, this is the approach to growth, understanding how to come at it from this place.

When you’re selling it to your leadership, it’s really understanding that we’re going to teach our sales, marketing, and customer experience teams how to remove roadblocks for our customers by connecting that purpose.

And that ultimately is going to drive sales, it’s going to drive retention, it’s going to drive connections, and ultimately it’s going to drive our growth.

Brian Carroll: Terrific. What’s the best way for readers and listeners to get in touch with you?

Mack Fogelson: Obviously they can come to our website, genuinely.co. Co is our domain.

But certainly they can reach out to me via email, [email protected], or just come find me online. I’m on Twitter most every day, happy to chat there. And also LinkedIn.

Love to have these conversations, so please feel free to reach out, even with the smallest of questions.

Brian Carroll: Well thanks again for coming on and sharing.

I’ve learned a lot from our conversation today, and we’ve talked many times, so I’m sure our listeners have as well.

Thanks again, Mack.

Mack Fogelson: Thank you so much for having me.

Have you made empathetic marketing part of your strategy?

Michael Brenner has a simple way to explain why it matters: “When you help your customers, that’s the best way to help your business.”

That line gets to the heart of this conversation.

Most companies naturally want to promote themselves. Their products. Their services. Their features. Their wins. Their best face to the world.

Michael argues that this instinct is exactly what makes empathy so counter-intuitive.

It feels strange to believe you can sell more by talking less about what you sell. But that is where better marketing starts.

In this episode of the B2B Roundtable Podcast, I talk with Michael Brenner, CEO of Marketing Insider Group at the time of this interview, about why empathy is one of the most practical ideas in marketing, sales, leadership, and culture.

Michael previously led digital and content marketing at SAP, where he became their first head of digital marketing and later VP of Global Content Marketing. His work has focused on helping companies modernize marketing by creating content customers actually want and by helping marketers lead with usefulness instead of self-promotion.

We get into why brands struggle to stop promoting themselves, why marketers often forget what it feels like to be a customer, how empathy helps teams do work that matters, and why helping customers is not separate from business results.

If your marketing still starts with what your company wants to say instead of what your customers need, this conversation is worth your time.

Michael Brenner was CEO of Marketing Insider Group at the time of this interview. Before that, he led digital and content marketing at SAP, where he became their first head of digital marketing and later VP of Global Content Marketing.

Michael is a keynote speaker, author, and marketing leader known for his work in content marketing, empathetic marketing, customer-focused content, and helping companies create marketing that serves customers instead of just promoting the business.

Connect with Michael:

00:00 Introduction to Michael Brenner

“When you help your customers, that’s the best way to help your business.” — Michael Brenner

“It’s counter-intuitive to think that you can sell more stuff by not talking about the stuff you sell.” — Michael Brenner

“We forget how to market to people just like us.” — Michael Brenner

“It starts by helping, not selling.” — Michael Brenner

“Culture is really just a codification of what’s valued by the organization.” — Michael Brenner

“We all have great ideas, but ideas are worthless unless someone supports them.” — Michael Brenner

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

Brian Carroll: Hello. This is Brian Carroll, and I’d like to welcome you all to today’s B2B Lead Podcast.

I’m really excited to have Michael Brenner with us today. Michael is someone that I’ve followed for a long while. In fact, as we were just talking before this interview, we’ve both been mutual fans of one another.

Michael has received recognition across the internet for his knowledge in shaping content marketing. He’s a keynote speaker, an author. He’s also CEO of Marketing Insider Group, and so I’m really excited to bring his thoughts on empathy.

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

Michael Brenner: Yeah, sure. Thanks Brian. It’s really a pleasure to be with you today, and looking forward to talking about empathy, which I think is so important in today’s landscape.

To make a long story short, as we get older I find that I need to summarize my career much more quickly than I used to have to, but I have a 20-plus year career in sales and marketing, and leadership roles in various kinds of companies, large and small.

Most recently, about 10 years ago, I was hired by SAP as their first head of digital marketing. I became their first VP of Global Content Marketing and essentially helped them modernize the digital marketing approaches that they were taking.

Very much taking an empathetic approach like we’re going to talk about.

What I found is that there was just such a need as I got out in the marketplace and started speaking and writing. There’s such a need, I think, for brands to understand. They want to do it, I think, but really struggle with how to get it done and how to change the culture inside their organizations.

That’s what I’ve been focused on. I built Marketing Insider Group essentially as kind of a one-man agency for now, but with the point that I’ve been there, I’ve done that, I’ve been inside corporate marketing departments.

I understand the politics and the culture challenges that marketers face today, and I’m really dedicating my life to trying to help as many companies, as many brands, as many marketers as I can to understand how to put themselves in a leadership position by helping their customers.

Brian Carroll: Well, that’s fantastic.

I came across the article from LinkedIn, and actually several people forwarded it to me and said, “Brian, you should check this out.”

I wanted to ask, what inspired you to start writing and talking about empathy recently?

Michael Brenner: Yeah, well, as you know it’s not something I’ve been doing for a long time. I’ve been kind of talking around it.

What I’ve found is as I talk to senior executives, and maybe we’ll get to a really good story a little bit later on, but a typical conversation for me might involve, “Hey, this digital world and content marketing, and creating content for customers, we think we get it. Now we need to figure out how to do it.”

In the course of the conversation, what I end up finding is that there’s an executive usually, or someone in a position of power, who has their arms folded asking the challenging questions, “Well how’s this going to help us sell more stuff?”

I co-authored a book called The Content Formula to specifically address this sort of results-based question, which was how do you show ROI from this approach?

In the book, I talk about how you can actually show a better return on investment with marketing that focuses on delivering content people actually want.

Even after all of those financial objections were removed, I still found that there was resistance inside a lot of companies.

What I realized is that there’s this cultural underpinning, and it’s really a natural instinct. There’s a natural instinct inside a business to want to promote itself.

Yet that’s counter-intuitive.

That’s why I came to this realization that the missing element, and you’ve been talking about this for a long time and I really look to you for the leadership on this topic, is empathy.

It’s empathy that’s missing, and a value on empathy inside corporate cultures and structures. It was kind of a rant in a way, but that’s why I put that out there.

Brian Carroll: Well, you described it as this counter-intuitive secret to success. Why is that?

Michael Brenner: Yeah, so like I said, the natural instinct, this is true for all of us. It’s human nature.

The example I love to give is the posts that I put up on Facebook. I don’t do a lot of business content on Facebook. It’s mostly pictures of my kids and the trips we take, and it’s essentially me putting my best face forward to the world.

That’s what I think we all generally tend to do in the social world that we live in to the connections that we have. It’s our natural instinct.

I think there’s really nothing wrong with wanting people to see that you’re happy and you’re healthy, and you’re doing fun things.

That’s the natural instinct we carry with us when we walk inside the companies that we work for.

The natural instinct of the business person is to want to promote itself and put the best face forward. That’s why I think it’s counter-intuitive.

It’s counter-intuitive to think that you can sell more stuff by not talking about the stuff you sell.

That’s why I think empathy is so counter-intuitive.

Brian Carroll: I know it’s something that I struggle with and I think everyone does when we’re focusing on getting our needs met, whether that’s hitting a number, as you talked about achieving ROI.

It’s a challenge, and I think you talked about this collective amnesia we have. Why is it we change as we walk into the building, that we start thinking differently when we put on our marketing and sales hat?

How can we overcome this amnesia to better relate to our customers?

Michael Brenner: Yeah, and I mean it’s really interesting. I love the term.

It was actually coined by Noah Fenn, who is head of video sales and strategy at AOL. He talked about how this natural instinct to self-promote is collective amnesia.

What he means by that is that although we’re real people, when we walk inside the buildings that we work in, we kind of forget that we are real people.

We forget how to market to people just like us.

That’s essentially the collective amnesia.

We walk in, we want to present and promote the companies and the products that we sell. Yet that’s exactly the kind of thing that we as consumers don’t want.

A head of marketing who makes an ad buy is doing that with the knowledge that he might, or she might, hate ads. That’s the collective amnesia.

When you’re watching a TV show, you don’t need to see an ad for Chevy 15 times over the course of the 45-minute show. But the ad buyer for Chevy is making that decision.

There’s a person, there’s a group of people generally behind those kinds of decisions, and that’s the collective amnesia that we talk about in the article.

We make decisions in the business as people that often forget that we’re marketing to real people just like us.

Brian Carroll: It’s funny, and I think it’s interesting.

As I talk to marketers, we just realize how cynical we can be too, because we feel it’s a game or we know it’s a game.

I think really just getting out of our heads and, it sounds like what you’re saying, is we need to put ourselves in the shoes of our customers and remember we are too.

What do you wish marketers and sellers would do in this respect? What are some suggestions you have on how we could get better at this?

Michael Brenner: Yeah, well I think the counter-intuitive nature of it is this insight that when you help your customers, and I use this line in the article, when you help your customers, that’s the best way to help your business.

I think we often sort of defend our actions, our self-promotional actions by saying, “Well that’s the game we’re playing.”

Like you said, we’re kind of skeptical and we live in a noisy world. The loudest shouter kind of gets the most attention.

Yet that’s exactly the thing that I think the data that we now have in the digital marketing landscape is proving isn’t working.

As people, we know it’s not what we want. We have to resist that sort of notion, and put our customers first.

It starts by helping, not selling.

What that doesn’t mean is that we have to let go of the need to drive results.

That’s why I really love the line that when you help your customers, it’s the best way to help your business, as opposed to when you promote your business is the best way to promote and sell more of your business services and products.

That’s what I wish every marketer would get.

It’s really why I ranted in the article about the secret to success. The secret to being effective and efficient with the marketing that we do starts with this understanding that we are real people, we’re trying to market to real people, and the best way to do that is to actually be helpful.

It’s to want to really help them. Not just with the products and services you sell, but to help them as people and help the society at large solve its problems.

I think it’s a nobler cause, and it’s a much more challenging thing to do inside corporate cultures.

Brian Carroll: Well, I’m so glad you’re bringing this up.

You’ve probably experienced this as you’ve talked to your clients and marketers out there, but my experience when I talk to marketers and sellers is that they don’t want to just feel like they’re making an impact on the top line and bottom line.

They actually want to feel like they’re making a real impact or real difference, that what they do materially matters, and they feel good about it.

I think what you’re talking about can help us do just that.

Michael Brenner: Yeah. This is really the direction that I’m kind of going on the content and thought leadership perspective.

We all understand and we’ve seen there’s enough people out there talking about this desire to work for companies that have a real purpose or even a kind of social mission.

Even at the individual level, like you said, we all want to do work that matters.

One of the insights that I’ve found is that being effective in my job was never enough to make me happy. I was only ever happy when I was effective and making an impact with something that I believed in.

It’s the combination of both meaning and impact.

If you go to my Twitter account, I think you’ll see I have a line in there that says, “Life is short. Do work that matters.”

We all make an impact. It’s just about whether we make an impact in the right direction for the right cause, for the right purpose.

It can be a corporate purpose. It can be a financial purpose, but there has to be a customer at the end of that financial decision that’s being made where you’re actually solving a problem.

Again, I think it just comes back to being empathetic. It allows us as employees, as people, to really feel like we’re making an impact in a way that really matters to somebody.

Brian Carroll: I love it, and I loved what you said when you said, “We all make an impact, whether it’s for good or bad. We’re making an impact right now.”

I’m really glad you’re bringing up this point.

I think earlier in our interview you mentioned that you had a story this year, and I wanted to see if you had any examples or tips of how applying empathy has made a difference or impact.

Michael Brenner: Yeah. I have a positive story and a negative story.

Maybe I’ll start with, which one should I start with? Should we start with bad news first?

Brian Carroll: Well, let’s start with the bad. Let’s start negative. I like to resume positively if we could.

Michael Brenner: It’s not negative. It’s a lesson that’s become public, and I sort of got a glimpse of it in private.

The company, I’m actually a customer and a huge fan, and I have to say as a caveat to this, huge fan of Wells Fargo. In fact, I was on the phone with them this morning on a mortgage refinance I’m trying to work through. I’m still a happy, satisfied customer with them.

I had an opportunity to present to their marketing team about six months ago before the scandal broke. Maybe it was nine months ago, before them trying to sort of force accounts on people.

The conversation we were having was very much like this one.

It was about how content marketing requires a focus on really solving customer problems, and there’s one way to really know if you’re doing that. That’s with engagement.

You can measure engagement in the form of time on site and in the form of social shares, and in the form of whether people subscribe to your content.

Those are all deep measures of not just are you reaching people, but are they voting? Are they giving you a vote of confidence in the content you’re creating?

One of the senior marketers on the team spoke up and was resistant to this idea.

This person said that, “Here at Wells Fargo we are just buying reach and frequency, the kind of classic TV ad buying model. We are measured on reach and frequency.”

I said to the person that, “You have a choice in the world, the noisy world that we live in, because everybody can buy reach and frequency. Anybody can do that.

The brands that set themselves apart are the ones that are really looking to engage the right people.”

The example I used was, “You can shout into the wind, or you can speak one on one to the people that you can really help.”

That’s the choice you have as a brand.

I don’t think that analogy went over very well.

It was really only a few weeks later that the story broke, and I think we’ve all seen what’s happened there.

I’m optimistic that they’ve learned a lesson. I think that they have such an amazing corporate history and a culture, and I think that there were just a few of the wrong people in leadership positions who were forcing a value in pushing the business over the needs of the customer.

It’s exactly, I think, the wrong way to approach this whole idea of help your customers and you help your business.

It’s the opposite.

That’s kind of my negative story.

Brian Carroll: Yeah, well I think it’s just, I’ve written about this, I think when we focus on the wrong thing, we can almost become sociopathic trying to get our needs met at the expense of others.

In this case, clearly Wells Fargo customers didn’t get the benefit as Wells Fargo was getting its needs met of revenue.

I think they’ll turn it around as you talked about as well, and they’re working on addressing that.

Let’s switch to a positive example or a story that you could share.

Michael Brenner: Well I think the main lesson for Wells Fargo, and it’s kind of like it’s in their mission statement, is they really want to help customers.

The problem was, I talk about this when I do speeches on leadership. Culture, people talk about we need to change the culture.

Well, culture is really just a codification of what’s valued by the organization. Leadership is just a personal expression of values.

I think what Wells Fargo learned was that they had the values in place. They had named them. They had documented them.

They just weren’t actually putting value behind them. They weren’t promoting people. They weren’t making a good example of the people that were actually promoting the right values for their business.

I’m going to go back to my former company, SAP.

I don’t know who does the study, but there’s a study done every year. I read an article in Harvard Business Review a couple of months ago, Top 10 Empathetic Companies. SAP is number 10 on the list, and I’m really proud to see them make that kind of recognition.

Their CEO, a guy named Bill McDermott, was really instrumental in my career and essentially almost personally mentored and created an opportunity for me to do what I was able to do at SAP.

He had a life-changing experience. He had an accident about a year, maybe a year and a half ago.

He came back transformed from that experience and decided that it wasn’t just about making the numbers.

This is a hard-charging sales guy. Really super successful individual. One of the most charismatic leaders I’ve ever met.

He was really good at motivating SAP to hit the number, hit the number.

He came back, I think, really transformed as the first American CEO of this German company.

There’s an article I think out on Forbes, or Fast Company, about this journey that he’s taken, and he’s making empathy a valued, rewarded, recognized value inside the organization.

They’re starting to see they’ve turned the ship.

They’ve changed their culture, not because they tried to change their culture. They’ve changed their culture because they focused on putting a value behind this very touchy-feely, hippy-dippy sort of emotion called empathy.

I think it’s a great example.

You can see it in their advertising. They don’t talk about their latest product. They talk about how they help their customers run better.

Their whole tagline is a customer focus, so even when they do advertising, it’s at least customer-focused messaging.

You can see it was the reason I was able to implement the content marketing program I did, and the reason why I think they’re a leader in the technology marketing space for sure.

Brian Carroll: Well, and for our listeners, I’ll put a link to this article that Michael mentioned so you can check it out.

I agree, and I’ve also read stories about how Bill McDermott is using empathy to build more powerful teams.

I think what you brought up as the example is it’s hard for us to be empathetic outside unless we first have that transformation inside, in how we relate to others, how we relate to our teams.

It really, from what I’ve seen, does take leadership to do this. Even self-leadership.

What advice do you have for those who want to sell the idea of empathy to leaders or to others inside their company?

Michael Brenner: Yeah, it’s a great question.

It’s specifically the topic that I’m looking to address in a lot of my outreach and content, and keynote speeches this year.

It’s essentially this notion of what I call champion leadership.

It’s easy if you’re Bill McDermott. You’re the CEO. You can decree that empathy is now important.

But what do you do if you’re like most of us? You’re down the pole a little bit and you’re looking up, and maybe you don’t feel that it’s valued across your organization.

I think the best way to do this, it’s something I’ve learned in the course of my career, is you need to be empathetic by putting that recognition on others inside your organization that are pushing these ideas.

What do I mean by that?

If you see someone who is fighting to create a customer-focused piece of content versus a self-promotional ad, support that person.

We all have great ideas, but ideas are worthless unless someone supports them.

If you’re not getting support from the top, the concept I’d like to encourage people to think about is we’re all leaders, but do we champion other people’s great ideas?

It starts with, I think, just being again, almost self-sacrificing to begin with, which can be just as hard in a hard-charging corporate culture as empathy can be.

I think just starting with that concept of who can you help inside your organization to promote the great customer-focused ideas, the empathetic ideas that they have?

Brian Carroll: That’s really great advice.

It is also challenging too because I find in my own experience that it’s easy in a split second to switch from thinking of others to thinking of myself. That’s just a continual thing.

As you’re talking about it, it really is setting that intention to value others, to value their ideas. Again, the whole spirit is helping.

This has been a really great interview. I’ve come away with some great insights from you, Michael. Thank you so much.

What’s the best way for our readers and listeners to get in touch with you, and to get exposed to more of your thinking?

Michael Brenner: Yeah, sure. I appreciate that.

MarketingInsiderGroup.com is my website, which I’ve kind of modeled after this whole empathetic approach. Instead of really pushing products and services, it’s essentially more of a blog where I’m sharing content that I think is helpful, with a little bit of an explanation of what we do.

You can also follow me on Twitter @BrennerMichael or connect with me on LinkedIn and Facebook. I’m happy to connect with the audience there as well.

Brian Carroll: Awesome.

Again, for our listeners, I’ll have links to all these resources.

Michael, thank you again. It’s been wonderful talking with you.

Michael Brenner: Yeah, thanks Brian. I think it’s an important topic. I appreciate the opportunity to speak about it.

Do you want your sales team to get better at social selling?

Jill Rowley puts the problem plainly: “More isn’t better. More relevant is better.”

That line gets to the heart of this conversation.

Most sales teams are still being told to make more calls, send more emails, add more touches, and create more activity. But buyers are already drowning in generic outreach.

More volume does not create more trust.

Jill argues that B2B sales is overdue for modernization. Marketing has already had to change because buyers changed. Now sales has to catch up.

In this episode of the B2B Roundtable Podcast, I talk with Jill Rowley, Chief Evangelist and startup advisor for social selling, about how salespeople can use social channels to become more visible, valuable, relevant, and human to their buyers.

Jill has spent years helping companies think about social selling from a programmatic, organizational level. Her view is not that phone and email are dead. It is that social is an additional channel where salespeople can find buyers, listen to them, understand them, engage with them, and build real relationships.

We get into why old-school tactics do not work in new-school channels, why generic LinkedIn invites damage first impressions, how empathy applies to social selling, why salespeople need training on social networks, and how technology can help sellers spend more time on the human work of building trust.

If your sales team is doing more but not getting more relevant, this conversation is worth your time.

Jill Rowley is a Chief Evangelist and startup advisor focused on social selling. She has spent more than a decade in software sales, much of it selling into marketing organizations.

Jill describes herself as a sales professional trapped in a marketer’s body. Her work focuses on helping sales teams modernize how they sell by using social channels to listen, learn, connect, engage, and build trust with buyers.

Connect with Jill:

00:00 Introduction to Jill Rowley

“The phone’s not dead. Email’s not going away any time soon.” — Jill Rowley

“More isn’t better. More relevant is better.” — Jill Rowley

“The buyer has changed more in the past 10 years than the past 100.” — Jill Rowley

“The biggest mistake is taking old-school tactics and putting them in new-school channels.” — Jill Rowley

“Empathy is so important. You have to look at things through the eyes of your customer.” — Jill Rowley

“If you suck offline, you’re going to suck more online.” — Jill Rowley

“To be interesting, be interested in something other than yourself.” — Jill Rowley

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

Brian Carroll: Hello, welcome to the B2B Lead Roundtable Show. My name is Brian Carroll. I’m really excited to have Jill Rowley from Social Selling with us today.

Jill Rowley is Chief Evangelist and a startup advisor. I’ve known Jill for years, and she really grew up with marketing automation and is a modern marketing expert.

I’m really excited to bring her thoughts and ideas to you. We’re going to talk about social selling.

Jill, can you just tell us a little bit more about your background?

Jill Rowley: Sure, Brian. Thanks for having me today. I’m excited for the discussion.

I say I’m a sales professional trapped in a marketer’s body. The reason is, of the 13 years that I was in software sales, I sold into marketing for 10 of those years.

My buyer was marketing, and the best salespeople know their buyers. They understand their buyers at an individual human level. They understand their role in the buying process and their role in the buying committee. They understand them at a company level. They understand them at an industry level. They understand the outcomes that that buyer is trying to achieve.

Because my buyer was marketing for a decade, I really feel like I am trapped in a marketer’s body.

Now, for the past three-plus years, I have been helping big and small companies think about social as a channel, and how they embed social into their selling.

This is additive. It’s incremental. The phone’s not dead. Email’s not going away any time soon. Social is an additional channel where salespeople can find their buyers, listen and relate to their buyers, connect and engage with their buyers, and ultimately amplify their buyers’ advocacy, amplify their buyers’ message.

I work with big and small companies on how to approach social selling from an organizational, programmatic level.

Brian Carroll: It makes sense, and it’s really cool how you were able to really put yourself in your buyers’ shoes.

We’re going to talk a bit about that later.

I was just going to ask, what inspired you to start social selling yourself?

Jill Rowley: Wow. I think it was just frustration from the lack of results of other channels, in terms of being able to get the attention of my customers.

I think even before that it was because social was new to marketing, and marketing was trying to figure it out.

Because I wanted to help my customers, my buyers, with their marketing initiatives, I needed to understand what social marketing was.

In doing that, in understanding social marketing, I saw the potential for social and how it would help me, as an individual salesperson, be where my customers are, be visible and valuable to my customers, to be part of the customer conversation.

I definitely saw it as a research tool.

My background before software sales was consulting, and so I’m always digging, and looking for answers, and filtering through, and synthesizing from large data sets.

I think they’re really twofold: one, I had to know about social media for my customers, but I saw how social networks could help me, as an individual salesperson, with building relationships with my customers.

Brian Carroll: As you’re talking, I’m picturing salespeople still are being asked, and we talked about this a bit before our own call, to hit the phones, to send out more emails.

You were just seeing that that was declining.

Jill Rowley: Yeah, absolutely.

The mandate for most sales organizations is make more calls, send more emails. They’re hiring more people to do those things, and actually they’re hiring more junior people who have no business acumen, who have no sales experience, and they’re just doing more.

More isn’t better. I know it’s not grammatically correct, but more relevant is better.

If you look at it, everyone now has the ability. Contact data has gone to zero. I can get pretty much anybody’s phone number and anybody’s email address.

Because I can get anybody’s phone number and email address, and I can send anyone an email, and call anybody, everybody’s doing it.

Now as a buyer, you’re receiving tons of generic, not-relevant emails. You’re receiving a whole series of them, because now there are these automation tools that will automate a cadence, or a series, of emails.

By the seventh touch, the seventh one is, “Have I offended you?” or, “Are you stuck under an elephant? Has a rhinoceros eaten you?”

That’s just ridiculous. These are tactics that are totally ridiculous.

Brian Carroll: I’m laughing because I’ve received these, and it’s painful. It just seems like it’s getting worse.

Jill Rowley: It’s getting worse because the technology is now getting in the hands of the salespeople, and they’re being measured on more.

I think sales leadership really needs to step up, and sales leadership needs to realize and recognize that the buyer has changed more in the past 10 years than the past 100. Probably more in the past five years than the past 50.

The way that people buy, and go about getting information, has dramatically changed, and the way that we’re selling hasn’t.

Really, we’re long overdue for transformation, modernization of the way we sell, to map to how people and companies want to buy.

Brian Carroll: I wanted to ask you, what are some of the social selling mistakes that you see marketers and salespeople repeating over and over again?

Jill Rowley: I literally just had this question, being interviewed for a Forrester research report on social selling.

The biggest mistake is taking old-school tactics and putting them in new-school channels.

That whole “more” approach, and “all about leads” approach, “my company, my product, my customers,” as a salesperson. Not “you, your company, your business objectives.”

The “me, me, me” approach is now in social and is being amplified. It’s frightening.

There’s a woman who is an aspiring social seller, and I got an invite to connect with her on LinkedIn, and it was generic. She’s an aspiring social seller and she sends me a generic invite to connect on LinkedIn.

I write her back. I reply. I don’t accept the invite. I reply and I give her a link to The Art of a LinkedIn Invite.

Essentially, you have to personalize your invites to connect.

She did respond and thanked me for the tip, but unfortunately my guess is her behavior won’t change.

Because she’s in the “more.” She’s in the “just do more, connect with more people, send more tweets, share more content,” and not thinking about more relevant. More helpful, more human, more handy.

Brian Carroll: You know I talk a lot about empathetic marketing.

How do you see empathy applying to social selling?

Jill Rowley: Empathy is so important.

You have to look at things through the eyes of your customer. You have to appreciate their point of view.

From a social selling perspective, I’m in such a more capable position as a salesperson to get that information, to get that insight.

It’s a gift really, I think, being able to look up someone on LinkedIn and see where they went to university, see what skills people are endorsing them for.

For you, Brian, lead generation, B2B marketing, strategy, CRM. Now I get who you are and what you’re good at.

I read recommendations that people write about you. If I’m thinking about where I invest my time, if you’ve got glowing recommendations I want to work with you.

There’s this ability for both salespeople to learn more about their buyers, but at the same time too, there’s this ability for buyers to learn more about the salespeople.

They make decisions whether to engage or not based on whether they think that that salesperson actually can help them solve their business problems.

Brian Carroll: That makes a lot of sense.

As I’m listening to you, it sounds like it really applies in helping people connect better with their customers. The empathy gives them the ability to build a rapport, to allow for that connection to happen.

Jill Rowley: That’s exactly right.

An example is, I’m helping someone out at AT&T. He runs sales in their federal group, and he’s been asked by the leader of the public sector team to present to their 4,000 public sector employees on how B2B buying has changed.

In doing my research, not just on that broad topic about how B2B buying has changed, I’m looking for indicators of how AT&T’s already changing.

I spent some time on AT&T’s website and on their blog site, and lo and behold, I found a video interview and a blog post of his boss, Kay Kapoor. She’s the president of public sector at AT&T.

I found this blog post and this video interview of her, and I shared it.

It was all about women in tech, which is something I authentically care about.

That’s another thing. If I didn’t authentically care about women in tech, I would never have shared that piece of content. But I authentically care about it, so I shared that interview and blog post of Kay on LinkedIn, and I tagged her.

Because I want her to see that I’m getting to know her. Ultimately, I want to have the conversation with her about how we can take a programmatic approach to social selling within her public sector team, and how I’m the person that she wants to work with if they’re going to invest in social selling.

Brian Carroll: That’s really great.

A lot of us in marketing and sales want to feel like we’re making a bigger impact or difference, but we want to do it with things that matter to us.

What I’m hearing is connecting with that authenticity.

I think this is something people sometimes feel they struggle with in terms of, how do I connect? How do I proactively build relationships with people and do it in a way that’s who I am, and honoring who they are?

Is that what you find as you’re talking to people out and about in social selling, and applying it, and doing it well?

Jill Rowley: Yeah. I differentiate marketing and social media.

Media is more about the reach, and you use social media and marketing for brand and demand, and it really is about reach.

Social networking, same thing, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, but I call them networks when I talk to salespeople, because the intended use of those networks is about relationships.

Reach versus relationships.

Ultimately you could argue that marketing should be about relationships, and that they should be about engagement and not reach, but let’s just talk reality.

From a sales perspective, these networks are very valuable, and just a way to really better understand who and how and why you can help someone.

Brian Carroll: This is great, Jill.

Are there any success stories, or tips and advice, you have for our listeners who want to get better at social selling and connecting with their customers?

Jill Rowley: Yeah.

This is going to sound harsh, but I always say if you suck offline, you’re going to suck more online.

Online and social amplifies both the good and the bad.

If you don’t have the right mindset in sales today, that your job isn’t to rush anyone to signature, to go for the kill, to hunt and farm your customers.

If the mindset doesn’t come from more of, you’re a facilitator of a journey, that your job is to help the customer solve the problem, achieve the goal, and if it’s your problem or solution that they need, your job is to facilitate that purchase process.

The mindset has to start there.

Then, from a skillset, and then an enabling toolkit, this absolutely requires training.

There’s no question in my mind, regardless of whether you’re a millennial who has grown up with digital devices and access to social networks, or you’re a baby boomer who is a digital immigrant.

I think that these networks, each one has their own culture. Twitter is much more conversational. LinkedIn is all business.

Please, no death announcements on LinkedIn. I’m seeing a lot of that lately. I’m seeing a lot of Facebook-type content being shared on LinkedIn, and I don’t think we should go there.

I think then, how do I actually find good quality insightful content, as a rep, that I could share in my networks that isn’t just all of my company branded content?

There are these things that require new skills, and that to me means there needs to be an investment in training.

I think about it from the individual seller, but also at an organization level.

The organization should take a much more prescriptive and programmatic approach to deciding how they’re going to train their salespeople and what they’re going to train their salespeople on, and tying it to the overall governance in social media policies, et cetera.

Training is something that you absolutely need to invest in.

Brian Carroll: Are there any stories that you’d like to share of people who’ve followed your approach, and how it’s helped them? Or any other tips or tools you wanted to pass along to our listeners?

Jill Rowley: Yeah, for sure.

There are definitely individuals and companies doing this well. I would say that we’re still fairly early days in figuring all of this out.

ON24 is doing a really nice job of training their salespeople. They’re working with a partner company of mine, Sales for Life, and they put all of their reps through the Sales for Life 10-week training program.

There’s a certification process at the end of it where they have to demonstrate that they’ve used social to source a new opportunity, so a real certification.

It’s good for that salesperson too, because now that’s a skill and something that can be helpful in getting another job. Not just getting their next customer, but potentially their next job.

Their leadership is bought in at that sales director level. Shout out to them.

One of the things that I love to do, I go to LinkedIn’s annual conference, and they always post their video content on YouTube.

There are presentations available. Just this last one was in New York, and IBM, Genesys, Qualtrics, TiVo, now called Rovi.

There’s a bunch of presentations from real companies doing real social selling work, and so I recommend that as a resource as well.

Brian Carroll: Thank you.

We have time for a few more questions.

What excites you right now about the future of sales and marketing? Or what are you feeling particularly passionate about right now?

Jill Rowley: I feel like I’m pulled in two different directions, because one, what excites me is what I see coming to the sales industry that I saw develop in marketing over a 10-year period.

An explosion of new technologies to help automate, to help segment, to help personalize, to help measure, to help improve conversion rates.

You’ve seen this massive explosion of tools and technologies in marketing that are helping marketers be more scientific in their marketing efforts, be more measured.

We’re seeing the same thing start to happen in sales, and there are some great tools that are being developed and available for salespeople.

Artificial intelligence, I’ve published a number of blog posts recently on LinkedIn about how I think AI is going to change sales.

I see some great potential in AI in terms of all of the research that I do on individuals and companies and industries today that I do manually. There are tools that are going to aggregate and synthesize and proactively send me relevant information that I otherwise would have to go find manually.

There’s some really exciting stuff happening in AI around how that’s going to make the best reps even better, allowing me to do less of that administrative work, and freeing me up to spend more time thinking about the human side, which is how do I be more empathetic?

To be more empathetic, I need to know more about my customer.

Now I have more time to research them. I can listen to their CEO on their investor presentations. I can speak with more people within their organization. I’m able to spend more time on the strategic and human aspects.

On one side I’m talking about technology, and on the other side I’m talking about being more human.

It’s the balance between those that excites me the most, striking the right balance between tech and human.

Brian Carroll: That makes so much sense.

I think as I’m listening to you, we’re going to have this technology to help us augment and apply our empathy, which really gives us the intuition to know how to best connect.

These tools won’t automate trust, but they’re going to enable us to be able to spend more time making choices and doing things to help us build trust.

Jill Rowley: There you go. It is about building trust and credibility.

To earn your trust, it needs to be about you, not about me. Mutuality matters, so there needs to be mutual benefit.

But one of the expressions that I loved, that I learned from the president at Eloqua, was, “To be interesting, be interested in something other than yourself.”

To be interesting to you, Brian, I need to be interested in you. I need you to me; I shouldn’t lead with me.

I like Tim Sanders’ book, which basically says that the best salespeople share their knowledge, they share their network, and they show they care.

I think that’s really where a lot more of the emphasis needs to be placed, in both sales and marketing and even in product design, thinking about it through the eyes of the user.

Of the product, and customer success, and knowing and understanding how to bring your customer along on a journey based on their current state and their desired future state.

Brian Carroll: It’s great.

Jill, I’ve really enjoyed listening to you, learning from you. I’m sure our listeners and readers will as well.

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

Jill Rowley: The absolute easiest and fastest way to get my attention is on Twitter.

My Twitter handle is @Jill_Rowley, R-O-W-L-E-Y. That’s a great way to get my attention.

How you do it matters, so I’ll leave it to you to think about how exactly you would want to get my attention on Twitter.

Then LinkedIn, if you want to invite me to connect on LinkedIn, send a personalized invite.

If you’re doing it from the mobile app, up in the top right-hand corner of the mobile app there are three little dots, and if you hit those three little dots there’s an option to hit personal invite.

If you hit connect it’ll send you the generic invite.

I say generic invites are #socialstupid or #justplainlazy, #firstimpressionsmatter, #everyimpressionmatters.

Never, ever, ever, ever send a generic invite to connect to anybody. Personalize it.

Those are the two best ways to reach me.

Brian Carroll: Jill, thanks again, and we look forward to sharing more of your insights in the future.

Jill Rowley: Thanks Brian. It was great catching up with you.

How can you drive fast growth with B2B marketing?

Jim Fowler has a clear answer: “Your product is your marketing.”

That line gets to the heart of this conversation.

Most companies try to grow by adding more campaigns, more paid traffic, more tools, and more activity. Jim argues that growth starts with something simpler and harder: building a product people love.

In this episode of the B2B Roundtable Podcast, I talk with Jim Fowler, founder of Owler, about what he learned building fast-growth B2B companies.

I first met Jim when he was co-founder of Jigsaw, the cloud-based contact data platform that was acquired by Salesforce.com and later became Data.com. With Owler, Jim took those lessons into competitive intelligence, growing from zero to more than 500,000 users and building toward one million users.

We get into why SEO matters, why product love drives viral growth, why salespeople need to become better marketers, why marketers need to help remove sales excuses, and how sales and marketing can work together around simple, human outreach.

If your team is trying to grow revenue by doing more instead of finding what actually works, this conversation is worth your time.

Jim Fowler is the founder of Owler, a competitive intelligence platform that helps business professionals keep up with competitors, customers, prospects, partners, and market changes.

Before founding Owler, Jim co-founded Jigsaw, a cloud-based contact management platform that was acquired by Salesforce.com for $175 million and later became Data.com.

Jim has spent his career building data-driven B2B companies and thinking about how sales and marketing teams can use better information, stronger products, and sharper execution to grow faster.

Connect with Jim:

00:00 Introduction to Jim Fowler and Owler

“A startup is a bag of problems.” — Jim Fowler

“You don’t really do it for the money, especially once you’ve had an exit.” — Jim Fowler

“You want to create a product or products that people love.” — Jim Fowler

“Your product is your marketing.” — Jim Fowler

“SEO doesn’t grow exponentially. It grows linearly, whereas viral grows exponentially.” — Jim Fowler

“Salespeople are going to continue to have to become better marketers.” — Jim Fowler

“Marketing’s number one job is to take away salespeople’s excuses for not making their number.” — Jim Fowler

“Do less, not more.” — Jim Fowler

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

Brian Carroll: Hello, everyone. I want to welcome you today to today’s B2B Roundtable Podcast.

I’m excited to bring to you Jim Fowler. We’re going to be talking to Jim about trends and things that he’s seen being a longtime participant in B2B sales.

Jim is a legend. He’s the founder of Jigsaw, which was sold to Salesforce.com and is now Data.com. Jim has a new venture called Owler, and I got exposed to Owler about ten months ago. I’ve been using the tool daily.

I think what they’re doing is really interesting, but I think Jim also has some really cool things to share with you about what’s working and the things that he’s seen that are impacting B2B marketers and B2B sellers.

Jim, why don’t you describe your organization a bit in your own words and the goal?

Jim Fowler: Sure, Brian. It’s a pleasure to be on the show.

Owler is a competitive intelligence platform. It’s used by all business professionals, but our biggest participants are sales and marketing folks that really need to keep their finger on the pulse of their competitive graphs.

That means their competitors, their customers, their prospects, their partners, etc.

The general trend here is there’s just so much information out there. Our goal with Owler is to become a must-use tool that gives a lot of very crisp information in a way that people can absorb it.

That’s the key thing, that we’re a tool that helps people outsmart their competition. It’s a competitive intelligence platform.

Brian Carroll: Well, I’d like to ask what inspired you to start Owler?

It’s a funny play on words. I think your brand name is derived from your last name, right?

Jim Fowler: One of my marketers came up to me as we were naming the company, and we were looking at a bunch of different names.

Jigsaw was, I love that name. I mean, it’s a simple word, putting the pieces of the puzzle together. It worked great. That was a high bar to get over.

She came to me and goes, everyone calls me by my last name, by the way, “Fowler, I’ve got the perfect name for our company: Owler.”

I laughed and said, “Yeah, ha ha. Funny.” I thought she was joking.

She’s like, “No, I’m serious. First of all, it’s five letters. Number two is that owl, wisdom, and people will be able to spell it. Most people aren’t going to associate it with your last name, which is true.”

You’re more astute than most, Brian.

I was embarrassed by it at first, but now I love it.

Of course, we have a cool little owl. The funny thing is, by the way, the owl’s name is Jimph, so Jimph Owler.

Any of your listeners who are users of Owler, and I imagine there’s thousands, they’ll be familiar with our owl that we call Jimph.

Brian Carroll: That’s great.

If you were thinking of what’s next, and it was a pretty high bar when you sold to Salesforce at that time, you were the single largest acquisition. Why didn’t you decide to ride off into the sunset? What inspired you to start Owler?

Jim Fowler: Well, that is a great question.

I can tell you there’s been a few times along this path that I’ve wondered that same thing.

Startups are not easy.

I kind of equate a startup with a bag of problems. There’s just a bunch of issues to solve.

I was still a pretty young guy. Jigsaw was a great acquisition. It was a $175 million acquisition at that time. By far and away, the largest Salesforce had ever done. Now, that’s pocket change for those guys. They’re doing massive stuff.

I think that you realize that you don’t really do it for the money, especially once you’ve had an exit.

You realize that the creation, the ability to go out and make something out of nothing and create a company that employs a lot of people, but more importantly, build products that people love. I mean, that’s really what gives me a charge.

I’m really pleased. At Owler, we’ve doubled our user base over the last ninety days to 500,000 active users. We’re going to blow past a million active users on those things by the end of the year.

We’re starting to look at ten million, which is about one tenth the size of LinkedIn. That becomes a globally important company.

I think that’s what really drives founders. It’s like being a chef. You want to cook food that people love, and when you found a company you want to create a product or products that people just love. It’s a big endorphin hit.

Brian Carroll: That’s awesome.

You guys are blowing past the half million users. Two or three months ago you were at like 250,000. How do you acquire so many active users?

Jim Fowler: Yeah. There are a couple of things that I’ve learned both at Jigsaw and Owler.

The first answer for all your listeners out there is it’s never easy.

That sounds great, but what you need to understand is back in 2013 and 2014, as we struggled with a way to get a product that was really engaging, there were many days where, when you first asked why didn’t you ride out into the sunset, there were many days during that time where I just went, “Why am I doing this?”

It’s really fun and sexy to listen to, but there’s a lot of upfront work that goes there.

If you’re feeling pain, that’s the normal situation.

Jigsaw never grew this fast. Jigsaw was more of a linear growth. This is really hockey sticking, which is super fun.

The on-the-ground advice I will give is the first order of business is to really dial in SEO.

SEO is something that everyone hears and understands, search engine optimization, but that’s the free traffic that you get.

Really getting your SEO strategy down is critical.

At Jigsaw, we spent a lot of time and effort on paid SEM, search engine marketing, and different types of paid traffic. It’s not only expensive, it just isn’t as effective in our experience as SEO.

To me, the first pillar of it is that if you are not, there’s always an 80/20 rule, by the way, for startups.

I’m a big believer that you want to focus on the 80 and then once you become a more mature company focus on the 20.

This is a classic principle that 80 percent of your return is going to come with 20 percent of the effort, and then the last 20 percent of your return is going to require 80 percent of the effort.

So make sure that you’re hammering that first 80 percent return with 20 percent of the effort and really focusing on that.

I find it’s with all of the traffic driving things that you do.

That’s number one, but to me that’s the one that you cannot disregard. You have to pay attention to SEO.

Brian Carroll: That’s great. What else would you say? What are some of the other lessons you’ve learned along the way?

Jim Fowler: These are things that most of your listeners probably already heard, but I will reemphasize them, because they’re trite and true.

I’m a real believer that your product is your marketing.

Obviously, if you’re an expensive enterprise product that’s a little bit different because it takes more time to get users, but I still argue that it’s the same.

You can sit there and beat on all of these different ways to get traffic and users, but when you have a product that people love, that is your best marketing, because that’s when it starts getting viral.

For us, we found this at Jigsaw, and we’re finding it even more now, is that SEO gets people exposed to your product. Then once they do, it’s a viral impact, and now the viral side of Owler is what’s making it grow so fast.

SEO doesn’t grow exponentially. It grows linearly, whereas virality grows exponentially.

You can only get the hockey stick with some sort of viral component.

Yes, you can spend a bunch of time with different software that helps get the word out and all that, but I’m kind of old school in that way, that you know it when you see it.

When the virality is there, you know it. And when it’s not, it takes time and you need to keep working on just making sure you have a product that is compelling.

Brian Carroll: That’s awesome.

For our listeners, the main thing is it’s super expensive to try to optimize your marketing. You can’t fix a bad product with marketing. It’s way expensive.

So what Jim says is first optimize your product. Then from there optimize your marketing.

Jim Fowler: Right.

I would say, to clarify a little bit, I would parallel the SEO, because at the end of the day the SEO is something that you’re going to, you need to come up with some really interesting ways to increase our SEO.

I’ll give you an example. We’re kind of like LinkedIn in that we have email that lets you know what’s going on, and it brings you to the website where you can interact with the data. That’s what makes it more valuable.

One of our products that people open every day is what we call a daily snapshot. These are news and alerts and blog posts from your competitive graph. It’s very specific to you.

When someone clicks on one of those, we came up with this concept called an events page.

Instead of just clicking and reading an article, we take you to a page that has a whole bunch of other data on it around asking you questions about the articles, letting you read it.

You can always read the whole article, but that’s not what most people want to do. They like to scan now. They want to scan headlines. They want to read the first few lines.

Those events pages exploded our SEO because each one of them is a unique page that Google searches, but it has unique content on it.

It’s finding things like that in parallel with your product.

I just think that you need to be able to execute on both of those at the same time, because once you optimize your product you still need a way to expose it to everyone.

I recommend a parallel path on SEO and product optimization.

Brian Carroll: Awesome.

What do you see as you look to the future and what you’re doing with Owler? What do you see is the future of B2B sales marketing?

Jim Fowler: I would say that the biggest trend that I see, I used to talk about this at Jigsaw, and I’ll continue to talk about it now.

Salespeople are going to continue to have to become better marketers.

With Jigsaw, we provided a set of contact data so that you could communicate with people directly with phone numbers and business email addresses.

I said at the time, what this means is that the people on the receiving end of these communications are going to get more and more communications.

It’s kind of a funny thing. Sales and marketing, their job is to communicate with people that don’t really want to be communicated with, but they need to be, because they need to buy stuff.

I think that we’re going to continue to see the buyers or the receivers of these communications get more and more of it, and it’s become more and more difficult to rise above the noise.

What it means is salespeople are going to have to become better marketers. They’re going to have to work hand in hand with marketers in order to get them.

Marketers, frankly, are going to have to become gods, because their job is just getting harder and harder.

I mean, people have no attention.

We’re in the age of a 140-character limit is all people will read, and this makes the job really difficult.

With that in mind, all of our communication is around crisp, simple, scannable data.

For instance, our descriptions of companies are one sentence long. We only allow a 140-character description of a company because we know people won’t read more than that.

I just think understanding these trends is critical in terms of future success.

It’s going to continue to accelerate, is my prediction.

Brian Carroll: That’s great.

Building on this, I’ve heard you consider yourself a sales guy. What would you say to B2B marketers out there who want to help their sales team sell more effectively today?

Jim Fowler: I’m a big believer that marketing’s number one job is to take away salespeople’s excuses for not making their number.

Brian Carroll: That’s great.

Jim Fowler: What you don’t want is you don’t want the finger-pointing.

Marketing’s typical, “Hey, I’ve got this budget I spent on it, and sales are so lazy they’re not even following up the leads that I’m driving them,” and sales will sit there and say, “Marketing, you’re sending me crap leads.”

As a CEO and knowing both sides of this and having come up through the ranks as a VP of sales and a salesperson before I founded Jigsaw, I’m just a big believer that it’s all about numbers.

Sales is the most measurable department in your organization after finance.

What mind boggles me is how rarely people really measure sales all across the board.

They’re getting better, by the way. Data is becoming more available everywhere, but to me that’s marketing’s job is to take away their excuses.

It’s basic funnel management. You need a certain number of leads cranking in.

There’s always going to be a little bit of fight around the quality of those leads, but to me that’s just all it really is, marketing providing the air cover, being able to bring those leads in whatever is the most cost-effective way.

To me it’s that simple to where you’re just going, “This is a sales issue. This is not a marketing issue.”

I always look at, by the way, is the further part of that. I think the way you want to manage sales is expect nothing from marketing. Anything you get from marketing is a bonus, and then of course it’s the CEO’s job to go hammer marketing to make sure that they’re meeting sales.

I think when you approach it with those two ways you have a very healthy look at how it’s supposed to work instead of making it adversarial.

Brian Carroll: That’s great.

As you practice this and you’ve done this, are there any success stories that you could share of instances where you’ve overcome issues around this, either in your own experience or things you’ve worked with companies in your past where you’ve experienced this?

Jim Fowler: Yeah. Jigsaw, we did this really, really well.

There was a real healthy tension between marketing and sales, where marketing was really pushing.

I would say that the best way to do it is just have a way to manage the leads.

There’s so much software out there now for marketing. All that marketing automation solutions have come so, so far since we did it.

In terms of feeding sales, I don’t have any magic pills.

There was a sales methodology and is today one that I still recommend that I think your listeners will find interesting.

It’s what I call an email sandwich that was very effective as a specific example.

Brian Carroll: Yeah, tell us more about it.

Jim Fowler: Yeah. From a sales or marketing perspective, it depends on which function it’s going to align and where in the pipes you are.

When you’re out there trying to push new business, you’re trying to take a company from what I call a suspect. We believe that these folks should be buying our products, to a prospect, which is we know that they have need and budgets.

There’s a lot of communication that goes there.

I’m, again, you’ve heard me use the word old school a little bit. I’m a big believer in this concept of email sandwich.

Email, phone call, email. Email, phone call, email.

There are folks out there that love to just email, and there’s folks out there that go, “Oh, email. No, you got to call them.”

I’m a big believer in using both of those in a sandwich way.

This is where marketing and sales really need to work together, because marketing is usually expert at A/B testing messaging to get people to respond to something.

Sales are the point of the spear. They’re the ones that are really learning what works and what doesn’t work and have really good communication between these.

That’s what we did well at Jigsaw. When we start really getting into sales at Owler, we’ll do it as well.

I found that this really helps sales and marketing get in sync, of sales doing kind of the test bed of what works and then marketing finding ways to automate that to marketing automation.

To get that first email out, making sure to leave the voicemail so they can hear your voice. That’s another key thing from a sales perspective is it humanizes the experience.

It’s harder and harder to leave voice messages now. Phone systems have changed dramatically even since Jigsaw was sold, but there’s still ways to get your voice in front of people that humanizes it.

Again, this is building on what I talked about earlier about salespeople becoming better marketers.

Then, of course, following with email.

I just found these email sandwiches are a simple concept to understand.

You test the heck out of them in terms of what works with different audiences, but I find that that brings sales and marketing really closely together, and it’s a structure that everyone understands and can focus on.

Brian Carroll: It’s a great suggestion.

I think in the age where we’ve overemphasized, or the pendulum has swung too far inbound marketing, what you’re advocating is humanizing your brand by having human beings and a human touch connect with your customer.

There’s a real person behind the company that the email is coming from, a real person.

You have that insight from the sales team who’s connecting with customers, connect with marketing about what do they need, what’s really working.

I think this is something people can begin testing if they aren’t already in their groups to augment instead of just emphasizing.

We’ve got time probably for one more question. Do you have any tips or advice you give to sales or marketing leaders who want to rapidly grow revenue?

Jim Fowler: I would say that my biggest tip on this one is be absolutely aggressive about your time.

The number one mistake that I think I’ve seen marketing and salespeople do is they spend time on the long side of the Pareto principle.

They’re not really sitting down from the very beginning going, “Okay, what is the 20 percent of our effort that produces 80 percent of the return?”

It’s always different for every company in terms of what are the things that are going to move it.

To me, I know it sounds formulaic, but I really believe this is the problem.

What I push as a CEO is what is the 20 percent that’s moving the needle of your effort and then put 80 percent of your time into those programs.

Do less, not more.

Figure out what works, and don’t go out there and try to put too many balls in the air.

I think that’s the number one mistake that I see that hampers driving revenue.

Brian Carroll: That’s fantastic.

I agree. At least in my experience, I talk mostly to marketing leaders, occasionally to CEOs, and what I hear over and over again is just how crazy busy people are.

They’re focused on the next campaign, the next outreach. There isn’t that time to sit back and think strategically about where can I put my effort that’s going to have the highest outcome, the best resulting experience.

I think your advice to people is to get clarity around that focus and isolate what are those 20 percent of things I can do that will give us the highest return is awesome.

Jim, how can people find out more about Owler or get in touch with you?

Jim Fowler: Well, the easiest way is go to www.owler.com.

For me, my email is [email protected], and that will always get to me as well.

We would welcome any interaction from your listeners and very much have enjoyed chatting with you about this. I hope that everyone has found it valuable.

Brian Carroll: I have, and I’m sure our listeners will, too.

Well, have a wonderful rest of your day. Thanks again for joining us. We’ll keep in touch and hear more about your progress.

Jim Fowler: All right. Well, thanks Brian. It’s been a pleasure.