Building a Powerhouse B2B Software Brand Without the Big Budget

Welcome back PROs!

Unlock the competitive edge your B2B Software and Services company wants, even operating under the 50 million revenue mark. This week, Andy and Gary delve into the strategies that will set your product apart in a fiercely contested market. Discover how a standout website, engaging demos, credible third-party reviews, and an active social media presence can be the linchpin to controlling the narrative and convincing potential customers that your solution is not just an option, but the only choice for their needs.

On this episode, we chat through the nuances of enabling the buyer's journey long before the sales cycle sparks to life. We provide answers to the questions: How do you share comprehensive product information without overwhelming prospects? How do you ensure your email campaigns reach their targets amidst advanced AI email filters? Join us for a discussion on these must-know tactics for building brand recall and nurturing genuine, value-driven connections, securing your spot in the competitive B2B landscape.

Spark for discussion was Peep's post on the content on which Buyer's rely to make a decision.
Podcast referenced in the discussion - Tito from Koala

Transcript

Gary: 0:05

Welcome to the GTM Pro Podcast, your essential audio resource for mastering go-to-market discussions in the boardroom. Here we share insights for revenue leaders at B2B Software and Services companies, especially those with less than 50 million in revenue. Why? Because the challenges faced by companies of this size are unique. They are too big to be small and too small to be big. This dynamic pushes revenue leaders into executive leadership without a lot of help or support. We are here to provide that support.

Gary: 0:37

Your journey to boardroom excellence starts now. Okay, welcome back, pros. So we have to probably apologize in advance because this won't be as nearly dynamic a discussion since our beloved Tiana is not with us here today. She's actually in flight internationally, we might say. So we're wishing you well on your travels, tiana, so you just have to bear with little old Andy and me as we dive into this today. So all right, but you'll be back next week. So all right, let's dive in here.

Gary: 1:21

Andy and I were actually just chatting about this earlier, and this has come up a lot in the last several. Well, it's been pervasive, but last several weeks especially and in a very timely posts are a friend pep at winter at a great post regarding the recognition that your buyer is looking at alternatives as they get into your process. So you need to embrace that and think about what that might look like. Andy, I think you've said before that you have to assume that if they're looking at you, even if you've initiated that spark or interest, you have kicked off a competitive process and you just need to accept that and embrace that. That is especially true in the lower middle market where most of the time, if not all of the time, we are dealing in a very mature market with a hundreds of competitors and probably even more potential alternatives not even direct competitors to solve that problem. So let me just kind of quickly summarize this. We will share this in the show notes as well.

Gary: 2:36

Regarding the number of alternatives, the average on answer is three. We have seen over and over again In fact we just did a post yesterday on LinkedIn that we see it be that it's three to five and less than three is extreme. I think it's 89% is three to five. That means that it's like five or 6% is less than three and very few more than five, which stands to reason. My father props to him, who's a farm boy, raised mechanical engineer, always said get three quotes, because therein you will find the truth. Not five, not one, not two, three. It seems to stand a reason here. So thank you, dad.

Gary: 3:21

But there were a couple of things here. First of all, because that can be overwhelming. To go over three, there's just not enough time, and in some cases up to five if the process is there. So he points out a couple of things in terms of how buyers are buying. Number one everybody goes to your website, so that's critically important. We'll get to that.

Gary: 3:45

Two interactive demos, which is interesting, and I don't. I think it's easy to take that literally, but the idea is an interactive demo is a tool that gives them what they need, which is we want to get under the hood on how this is going to work for us without having to go through a process of talking to a sales person. The vendor that provides that access, whatever that looks like, is in a much better position than the ones that don't. Third is third party reviews. They make a difference, but we don't need thousands of them, we just need 10 solid ones. I would. We'll talk about that in a second actually. And then number four is social media Just what you're saying and reinforcing on that site, and I think it goes back to any time. Anybody's making a decision, especially in this era of efficiency, everybody is picking just one, everybody's looking at alternatives, and so that's that's an important piece there. So let's, andy, I'll pause there your observations, and then let's dive in on how we, how we can tackle this for the lower middle market.

Andy: 4:58

Yeah, I mean thank you for the call out on congratulations. You've just kicked off a competitive process as soon as somebody fills out your form, but that has to be guaranteed to happen right, and so from that very moment, you have to be biasing the playing field. Ideally, you've biased it ahead of time and so by bias it is, you do something really well for a group of people in the world, right, and this is where the voice of the customer comes in, and this is where understanding you know moments of value for your ideal customer comes in is you want to bias that from the very get go Soon. As they meet you, they know what you're about, what you do really well.

Andy: 5:49

It speaks to all the things that you can show here in the form of collateral and so on, in the form of interactive whatever you could call it point of view demo video. It's a product video. It's doing its thing and it's bringing people to a moment of value. You want to bias that right away so that those that fit that use case job to be done, paying the problem you solve. All of that needs to be very tight, because that's what you do it best for anyway, so you might as well, show it in that light, and then the people who that resonates with are the ones that are going to be like you know what you're who I'm going with, unless somebody convinces me otherwise. And they're less likely to convince somebody otherwise, even if they look at two or three other competitors, because you kind of establish yourself as this is who we are and this is what we do.

Andy: 6:49

Really well, I probably just tried to say way too much there in terms of the whole concept, but that's to me like kind of the genesis of that and then how we get to those answers and how we get to biasing that up front is there's a lot that goes into that as well.

Gary: 7:10

And I would probably choose a different word than biasing and just say informing the narrative or controlling the narrative.

Andy: 7:17

It doesn't have to be bad.

Gary: 7:20

That's true, yeah, so let's go. Let's start with number one on the website and, just picking up on what you were saying, everybody knows that you hear a lot about. The website is your store front, so on and so forth. But then when you get down to the execution of that, in many ways, especially in the lower to middle market, the website can very quickly become decision by committee and it says a lot to a lot of people and therefore it says nothing to the people that you want.

Gary: 7:50

The most common thing we see is the friction between the need to have positioning and messaging that feels uncomfortably small, because in order for you to break through the clutter, you have to be so specific in whom you serve and how you serve them. And sometimes, often, that runs afoul of what we may be communicating to future investors or the board of directors about the promise of the company and the platform and what it can do. And we don't want to be perceived by those providing us capital as being just this thing or just this point solution or sets of solutions. But the reality is, if you write your website for the benefit of some future investment thesis, you will lose in the market Period.

Andy: 8:47

How many times have we sat through a pitch, a product pitch for a really really stage startup right and the founder who's making the pitch? It's always the same person. They ask the question. The people in the audience ask the question who's your target market? Everyone, everyone can buy this right.

Andy: 9:12

That's the obvious extreme example of that and that's what a founder wants. That's why they're building a product. They want everybody to see the light and get the value from what they built for everyone and honestly add features as they go. That hypothetically expands that audience so that you're able to serve this really huge market. But that's not who you serve. Well, and the more you do that, the more you get people from all over. The harder it is to create that consolidated message and say this is who we do something really well for. But just to caveat that, that doesn't mean because you are uncomfortably narrow initially and you get your messaging right, you get your positioning right, you do all these things as far as your storefront and collateral and so on right for that audience. It doesn't mean you can't grow and expand beyond that.

Andy: 10:10

This is the concept of the bowling pins right that we've been talking a lot about is know who you are today, know who you serve the best and know the next one or two things which are the next bowling pins from a segment and a job to be done perspective that you can attack and know those and then keep going down the line. So it's just getting really good at that, and that doesn't mean you can't expand beyond that. So I just want to be very clear one doesn't mean you can't do the other. It's just don't try and boil the ocean.

Gary: 10:47

Yeah well, it is that level of specificity that creates the momentum right. The entire organization is focused on serving that well. And it's that thing with limited resources that creates that forward progress, gets the flywheel turning. And then to your point once that flywheel is turning, now we can begin to direct what is the next segment that is tangential to the one that we serve and not and? Or what is the next job that the existing segment can serve, not both at the same time.

Andy: 11:23

Well, right, and so bringing it back to the competitive landscape, right is, if you're trying to do it in you know five situations, you've got five bowling pins you're trying to attack, that's all the more competitors and competitive landscape and inertia and everything else you have to overcome, like because, right, one of the biggest competitors is not doing anything, right? So if you're too deluded out in the world, all those things compound on each other and it's that much harder to cut through. I mean, let's not even talk about like outbound and what's going on with that, which we have talked about separately, but all of those things just compound on one another to say your voice is totally lost, your message is totally lost, it's deluded and it's spread out among messages channels and you know it just gets flat out lost.

Gary: 12:24

Yep, the yes, and so, related to that too, we don't want to spend the whole time on the website, though, is just a caveat. There is the benefit of narrowing your focus on the job to be done, and the buyer and the situation would have you is. It also enables you to think and deliver a better experience as it relates to consuming content, and the other challenge that we have in this world of abundance is that we believe that we've put up all this great content that helps explain everything. The challenge is we haven't made it consumable, we haven't connected it, and that takes a lot of work. So, the idea of the website being your storefront well, if we literally take an e-commerce approach, where their entire livelihood is based on how well that experience operates, they've been very thoughtful about how they stitch these things together and they create recommendations on if you're looking here, you may like these things. Whatever that may be, we need to be thinking similarly from a content perspective and starting simple what are the, what are the? And, Andy, I think you described this as we have to assume when we go to create a piece of content, a body of work, some information that is helpful to the buyer, that it sits in context to other pieces of content that are about the next obvious question that they're going to ask. So it's the, it's the providing a complete answer to the solution. But the complete answer is just too long, so we break it into pieces. We have to assume that somebody's coming to that piece of content without any context of what's to the left or to the right, and so we need to provide that context so that we can make it easy for them to learn about the completeness of the solution. And that that takes work and a really thoughtful plan, which we'll get to in a second with the zones, because what's common to do is we got this response back or we have this objection, so we need to write a piece, and so we write the piece and we publish it. You know, we got this competitor comparison that we need to do, so we go away, we publish that and we stick it on the site, but we don't, we don't provide any context, we don't provide any, any table of an index to be able to make it easy to consume that and anticipate the next obvious question. That's important, Okay.

Gary: 15:01

So the second one is the interactive demo. So I love that he brings it up. My concern is that we immediately go off into the land of the interactive demo without thinking why that's important. Obviously, it's to get under the hood and see it, but I think a lot of what we're doing and can actually help the buyer even more so is anticipating what is it that they seek from the interactive demo. And because one of the most challenging we heard about this with a free trial or you know, sandbox environment Revvers great, here's a free trial, just get in and try it.

Gary: 15:37

The problem with that, of course, is that it puts all the work on the buyer. They have to import their data, they have to go through all these. There's a lot of work associated with that and they just don't want to do that. They just they're just trying to get to this some understanding on for their particular use case. How does this tool address solving that problem and does that work for me? So, if we start there, the interactive demo may or may not be the solution, but the point of it is making available to the buyer more detail, more transparency on how the product works, how you solve this problem, but you have to be careful that it's just not. You know, the analogy we provide is you open the door into a white warehouse. You know it's well lit and it's completely empty and you're like make yourself at home. Look around like where am I, what am I doing here?

Andy: 16:33

The yeah, you don't. You go into an empty house and there's no real estate agent to show you anything. It's feature vomit, right, like. On one hand, that's the extreme, which is, like here's all the features this product has and it's and there's no context for how you use them together for what you're trying to solve. And this is where I really love the podcast we just we just listened to with Tito from Koala, who, who talked about following customers around. He, he talked about it from the perspective of, from the perspective of adding to his product, right. So so he's, he's following people around and finding, finding, like, the best use cases for people that are very advanced users of his product and he's actually building that into the product.

Andy: 17:31

I take that down pretty serious level and just try and figure out for the vast majority of your customers what's a MVP for a moment of value, like, and this is the you know, this is the aha moment.

Andy: 17:46

This is where, like, people say, you know what this is really helping me. And again, around the context, and this is all easier said than done because this is all a process of your ideal customer. So, the people, the people, the profile, the situation of, of the folks, not not just firmographics, but their situation also, where they often get to the moment of value. So it's the situation, the job to be done in the segment, right. And if you, if you are able to kind of create that scenario and it may be to Gary's point, you know, it might be a video, it might be something like that. It might have to be human assisted to do it right, it might have to be a combination of those things, but that's what you want to be able to get in front of people to, to show, to show that you know, wow, this is me and I can see how my life's different with this product.

Gary: 18:47

Absolutely, and I'm just, I'm just connecting the dots so that we, when we put out the show notes, we actually provide it's the long game.

Andy: 18:56

I apologize for not naming no. No, that's right, I got it in here.

Gary: 18:59

It'll be in the show notes. Yes, thank you to David at the long and team at the long game podcast. Some good stuff there, all right. So number three is third party reviews, and again I think this is valuable. We don't need thousands of them. But again I would say, you know, we absolutely need to have a thoughtful, structured approach to the marketplace slash review sites. It is 100% part of the process. However, I think we so often we because, because we know that's part of the playbook, everybody's doing it If we just there's a huge dose of cynicism in all of those, because every buyer, any reasonable buyer, knows that we're going to cherry pick the best reviews and put them up there. So I go back to what speaking winner.

Gary: 19:55

One of the things that the PEP has said in the past is, in assessing B2B homepage website, website home pages, is that having logos doesn't really help you. Not having them will hurt you. So it's just kind of one of those things you have to have and so we need to have those reviews. But I think and we have to have a whole program around that, but I think the way that we, if we take it from the frame step excuse me take it from the point of view that how can I help my buyer buy, and less about what do I need to do to convince them to buy. It would be connecting those reviews to use cases.

Gary: 20:42

Right, because a lot of times when we do this with logos, we do this with testimonials, we do this with reviews. It's like look at all this great stuff we have, take a look and see if you find a logo that you like, that maybe it's in your same industry or whatever, and see that, andy at yield, some said some nice things about it, and I'm another boutique advisory firm, so that must be capable for me as well. Well, that's not necessarily true, and so, however, I'm coming in with a point of view on. I have these dynamics in my business. Therefore, I have these challenges. I want to find other organizations that look like me, that have had these same challenges and how they have had success using this tool, and it could be across a bunch of different industries, right. So now, if I can take my reviews and I can connect them to some of those core use cases, that is way more powerful, because I'm enabling them to see a pattern in how it's being used, even if it's not in the same industry.

Andy: 21:41

And I'm not sure if it's an intent thing, or even I don't know even how it works with the G2 crowds of the world and so on, but a trap I would say to fall into is actually being categorized too many ways, right? So one example is that I can and this is dating me back a little bit is when there really weren't I mean, cdps were just starting to be a thing and everybody who had a tag manager wanted to be categorized as a CDP. Like somehow, like if I did that, then I'm this, like I'm identifying people, so like I'm a CDP, like come on, it's that's not. And to your point, that like you can't even put that in a use case where somebody did that successfully and certainly activated that data. Like that didn't happen, that never happened for anyone. So why are you even categorized that way? You can imagine all the situation, like if you're categorized in 10 different categories on those sites, you're not solving much for several of those.

Gary: 22:45

And I think related to that too in the review sites is, you know, yes, there is work there and you need to be cognizant of it for a variety of reasons which we have a whole other podcast on, but the other side is also take it with a grain of salt. An example I provide is, coincidentally, speaking, of CDPs. We were chatting last week with Eric at Rutter Stack, and so if you go under Rutter Stack and you look at G2, they actually don't show up in the CDP. To my knowledge, they're in data routing or something that affect. That's where G2 has decided to put them, and I don't know if Eric has all been out of shape on that or not, but my hypothesis is that it's less important to their audience because they sell to the data stack. They have a highly technical buyer and so they may be influenced by G2, but probably much less so than other segments because they're under the hood looking at very technical, detailed requirements. And so where is your time better spent? So I think, yes, the review sites are important. You can't ignore them.

Gary: 23:59

Just a side note. We would argue I think it was two or three weeks ago we did a podcast on the competitive playbook. Is that one of the healthiest things to do when you think about review sites is that consider it a lens through which your buyer views the market of alternatives Not necessarily competitors, but their perspective on the market and the alternatives. The problem and how it is defined, the ways to solve it, are all being influenced by your competitors. So that's actually the more powerful reason to follow that and know that. Let's see. Number four social media goes without saying. Right, that easier said than done here. But this again goes back to evangelizing your point of view, which means that you are better to define, all the more reason to very meticulously define whom you serve, what they experience, what that dynamic looks like, and your point of view on how to do that with or without your tool. And then you're actually seen as helpful because now you're speaking very directly to that segment, versus in broad statements about narratives or only talking about your product.

Andy: 25:20

Well, that's one Chris Walker from Refine Labs would say is probably under counted here. He's a big believer in dark social and that's completely untrackable in traditional digital realms. You just simply can't, can't track that. He goes so far as to actually put a question on forms for himself and his clients that actually asked that question overtly. Where did you first hear about us?

Gary: 25:54

Well, that's a free text field.

Andy: 25:56

Free text field. Yeah, so it's even harder to kind of get to the root of it on mass and so and the reason I bring it up in that context is he sees it over and over that that's one of the first places. You know people. You know people put that as an answer to a lot of that, oftentimes where you would never see it in traditional measurement, so that you know, according to this that might be even under counted.

Gary: 26:26

Yep. Well, that's actually a great segue then to and this is a work in process in full disclosure but this idea of what we call the GTM zones One of the challenges that we have seen firsthand is that there is so marketing in particular, touches every single aspect of the revenue engine and, in some cases, solely responsible for pieces of it. In other cases is supporting others that are taking the lead, whether it be sales, cs, even product Regardless. They're involved in everything, and so it becomes very, very difficult to prioritize where to spend your time, because you need to spend it everywhere, especially with smaller teams. And so, as we think about this, this very process, we would describe this as a zone that is enabling the buyer to buy. So, and we'll put a link to this and share more about it actually in the email that follows this newsletter. So I get quick promo subscribe at GTM proco to get the details, but it really kind of left to write. If you think about it from the buyer journey perspective, there's an overlay of where the buyer is and what they need, so ignorantly symptomatic to problem definition or what have you. But, but so think of that as the overlay, but it really is.

Gary: 27:51

Our first goal is to start the relationship Right and take you from this unknown or known. We know who you are by virtue of data and data services and intent data and all that kind of stuff that allows us to know who you are, but we don't necessarily have a relationship with you. So one of our primary goals is to start that relationship, and that's exactly what you just pointed out, andy. Sometimes that relationship, often that relationship, starts on platforms that we don't control, right. So LinkedIn, twitter, youtube, whatever, wherever that is, we can't see it, we can't measure it, but that's where our buyer lives, that's where they go for information, and so we need to meet them there. But we also have opportunities to create more and more You're seeing this a first party relationship, which is, man, if I could actually give you something of value that you that you know brought information to your week or your month, that was helpful, that wasn't trying to sell you something. Now you've earned the right to have a relationship with me and you're in my inbox every month or every week, and so that's that.

Gary: 28:59

There's the whole thought process around. What does that look like? Then we want to deepen that relationship. How do we do that? There's again, there's on platform ways and off platform ways to do that, and so we need to be thinking about it as a relationship which gives us the opportunity to begin to see. You know, 90% of our buyer universe is not in a sales cycle, so if we wait until they are in a sales cycle to create some form of a relationship with them and out of hundreds of alternatives they're only going to look at three or five we already have two hands tied behind our back.

Gary: 29:38

So that's that is a massive, massive shift in that's accelerated the last several years is as we think about investments in marketing. It's gotten much harder because we have to invest a lot of time and effort in places that are less linearly connected to ultimate revenue and much harder to measure. But if you don't do them, you're you're at a major disadvantage. Then we get to enable the buyer to buy right. So now we're starting to this, and this is where we connect problem to product, and it is in this zone that peps post is really targeting. How can I enable you all the things that you used to have to do to go through a sales rep to get an understanding of, how do I make it available to you with credibility to get down to your specific use case such that you have confidence that congratulations, I am. I am. You have made the list of three in which I will invest additional time. That is a massive, massive win out of hundreds that are there and not enough time and energy is spent there. So then we get into the requested demo experience of what that looks like and there's other zones down from there, but it is around this enabled.

Gary: 30:55

That is the place that in the lower middle market, we consistently see the, the, the biggest shortcoming we put surface level information, ambiguous information. We really, for whatever reason, we don't want to. We don't want to open the kimono. We don't want to, we don't want to expose, we don't want to share and make it available for them, because we're afraid that if we don't get a chance to talk to them, we won't be able to position our product as the solution for their needs and we'll miss out on the sale. We don't want that risk, we don't want to take that risk. And the reality is you're only hurting yourself by not doing that, because you're being excluded, by not providing that, because others are starting to do it more and more and you, if somebody comes through and it's genuinely not a fit. Now you're expending resources again that, only to find out that they're not a fit. Worse, you go through the whole process of booking them, onboarding them, paying commissions on it, only to have them churn a year later.

Andy: 31:58

Yeah, and we never. We don't have a brand. So just looking at it on that level too, so you don't like, and it's actually even you have to be a really big company to just generally have a brand in a pretty specific SaaS space, but you're almost assuredly not that right. So in order to have that kind of recall, you have to have started that much earlier. To your point. Most of the time what we see is somebody right where that yellow arrow is.

Gary: 32:32

It's between enable the buyer to buy and the demo, a pre-demo experience. Request a demo.

Andy: 32:37

That's where we see people trying to magically insert themselves using very large lists, reaching out to people and just saying, hey, get on my calendar like I'm nobody you've ever heard of. That's becoming increasingly hard to you know, even get that email open, let's say, or get that phone call answered or returned, it's just about forget about it anymore, right? But people in magically be you know be able to intercept that person right at the moment that they're gathering their three to five people that they're gonna actually go ahead and get a demo with and explore a solution with, and so on, and to get that message across enough so that I'm gonna include you in my three to five. It's just increasingly becoming a more difficult proposition to magically insert yourself at that point without having done any of the stuff up front of that. Also, just to throw this in there, if you do that with a bunch of leads and you do it over and over and they tune you out or they unsubscribe they never subscribed in the first place, but they block you you know again, for that tiny fraction of a percent that you were hoping to get in the first place, you're burning through all these leads.

Andy: 34:02

It becomes that much more difficult to start that relationship in the first place, if you ever wanna do that. So you're really boxing yourself in and creating a very difficult situation. And if those 10,000 leads that you went and burned through are indeed your ICP, that's even more sad, because they're the ones you really wanna talk to and they're now more and more tuned out or you're blocked from them and you're never gonna be able to talk to them.

Gary: 34:31

So that is such a good point, this idea that I think you know we've said this before email is not free and that every message that you send is giving or is, you know, earning political capital or losing capital, relationship capital, I should say right. And so if all you do is see it as a vast sea and you're just trying to, you know, shake the tree aggressively and pluck stuff off, at some point the tree ends up blocking you entirely and just ignoring you. And then, even when you have changed your ways, you have repented and you have come back and you have changed your ways, there's an enormous dose of skepticism. Right, trust is earned over time and it's going to take time to bring that trust back, especially when you've broken it. So you know. It reminded me too, andy.

Gary: 35:24

This is a tangent to that and I need to explore this a little bit further. But a person whom you and I both know well, who's spent a long time in the email space, especially around deliverability, told me that there are more and more. The advent of AI has made email, corporate email protection systems that much smarter, and they have actually started to target the pixels of the sales automation platforms and blocking those emails from even getting in the door. Regardless of what it says, regardless of what's in it, if it's coming from a sales automation platform, they're just like no, thank you.

Andy: 36:10

Simplest version of that. I mean this is a lot less sophisticated than that, but it's been going on for a while. If you have a UTM parameter on a link in an email, it gets spammed a lot of times now. So that was like kind of an early sort of crude version of that. Now you're talking about like they're getting way more sophisticated. They can actually detect the platform. You just. You know it speaks to everything we say, which is just be tighter and more deliberate, because, if nothing else, if you don't do it with 10,000 leads, if you're testing something with a hundred, you can do less damage. Yeah right.

Gary: 36:56

Well, I was just gonna say the unintended benefit of being blocked by with sales automation tools and again, don't quote me on that. I can look in that, but I wouldn't surprise me at all. Based on all the email changes, there's just a global recognition that there have been a lot of bad actors and the platforms are all across the board are locking that down. Is that you at least don't get the opportunity to destroy your relationship capital, because the message never gets through.

Andy: 37:26

So that's the upside of that and the whole. When you talked about that, I thought about everybody doing it. Everybody's sending to these 10,000 leads, like how many people are doing that? From all different angles. Simply put, that's poisoning the well right.

Gary: 37:42

Yes.

Andy: 37:43

That person who's like getting more and more, like I just wanna be a hermit now and I don't wanna hear any of this stuff. It's happening because of everyone. So I honestly welcome that, because if we are going through these first couple of steps very thoughtfully, then there's less of that crap happening. All it's another way to think about competitive forces. There's actually gonna be less competition for doing it right, because people are still.

Andy: 38:14

they're trying this old way. They're using these other domains. That's another trick we talked about recently, which is I'm just gonna create another domain, I'm gonna warm up the IP against that domain. That's gonna be my spam email domain. Don't do that. Like it's been brought up even recently, like let's do this If it feels wrong, it's probably wrong. Like, if you have to do that, if you have to go through those iterations to even make it happen, you're probably doing it.

Gary: 38:50

It's fine. We talked about this today with some friends. It's kinda like when you have to look left or right before you go do something, you're probably not doing something you should be doing.

Andy: 39:00

Are you on camera Right? Are you doing this?

Gary: 39:03

Don't do that Just go in there, all right. Well, let's lay on this plane, as I like to say. So, I think. But to your point, going back to exactly what we just walked through, which is you are in a competitive environment. You have to know that. And how is the buyer buying today? What do they need? That's the whole. Enable the buyer to buyer, piece.

Gary: 39:22

The great thing about that is that it's not as if it is inconsistent with what we talked about in terms of developing the relationship, developing and deepening the relationship.

Gary: 39:31

If you're doing these things, you're genuinely helping the buyer to buy, giving them what they need.

Gary: 39:37

You are creating credibility by the way, that's brand and you're creating the relationship, you're deepening that relationship right. So that's, if there's for no other reason than for that, and to your point, this is one of those things that, unlike all the tactics, all the campaigns, all the ideas that are super easy to replicate, if you have honed in on your core customer, what life is like in their business, the unique challenges that are presented to them, and are building a product around that solution, and then you can communicate that well. That is very, very hard to imitate. There are lots of ways to develop a feature, but if you've thought about the set of features that you deliver specifically for that and you were able to communicate that and show that and you've made it easy for them to come in and understand that connection, then you are light years ahead of your competition. As Andy likes to say, you don't need to outrun the bear, you just need to outrun the three or five that are ahead of behind you.

Andy: 40:47

Yeah, there's those people I mean, you just mentioned brand just one more little bow tie around. That is credibility is brand. I really emphasize that and that if you're doing this in small batches, one to one, ideally you're talking to this person and you're doing the background research on them to be able to say I'm pretty confident this is the right solution for you. For these reasons, you may not be ready to buy, so I'm going to give you stuff that's helpful to you. Today, you don't need to buy my product and I'm just going to kind of keep in front of you Because won't be whole. When, when the time comes, you know your, your biweekly email or whatever it is that's giving value. You're like, oh yep, definitely, they're on my list, okay, next, and they're going to gather there, but you're there and you're, you know you're not blocked, right, you're well received and you have a brand for them and that's all that matters. Your brand can be that big, but if it's the right, if it's the right group, that's all you care about right now.

Gary: 41:54

You've earned the relationship Yep, awesome. Well, we will cover more on the zones. I smell a future deep dive on this because I think it's something that could be very helpful, so go into that. But hopefully this was helpful. Have a fantastic week and until next week, bye. Thank you for tuning in to GTM Pro, where you become the pro. We're here to foster your growth as revenue leader, offering the insights you need to thrive. For further guidance, visit GTM Pro dot co and continue your path to becoming board ready with us. Share this journey, subscribe, engage and elevate your go to market skills. Until next time, go be a pro.