Happy Friday PROs!
Struggling to align your marketing priorities with your company's growth goals? Uncover the insights to revolutionizing your lower middle-market company's approach to the buyer's journey.
Presenting our one and only buyer journey zones map, a game-changer for businesses tackling marketing myths and revealing how essential it is for your entire organization to sing the same tune when it comes to sales enablement and messaging.
Forget about random marketing tactics; we're talking high-intent targeted outbound efforts that are the true north for growing your business. By pinpointing bottlenecks and taking a deep dive into customer needs, we'll guide you through designing strategies that not only capture attention but also build solid foundations for sustainable business relationships.
Join us for this journey towards mastering the Buyer Journey maze and building lasting customer relationships.
Some of our inspiration: #119: B2B Positioning Strategy, Understanding How People Buy and Building Wynter (with Peep Laja)
Happy Friday PROs!
Struggling to align your marketing priorities with your company's growth goals? Uncover the insights to revolutionizing your lower middle-market company's approach to the buyer's journey.
Presenting our one and only buyer journey zones map, a game-changer for businesses tackling marketing myths and revealing how essential it is for your entire organization to sing the same tune when it comes to sales enablement and messaging.
Forget about random marketing tactics; we're talking high-intent targeted outbound efforts that are the true north for growing your business. By pinpointing bottlenecks and taking a deep dive into customer needs, we'll guide you through designing strategies that not only capture attention but also build solid foundations for sustainable business relationships.
Join us for this journey towards mastering the Buyer Journey maze and building lasting customer relationships.
Some of our inspiration: #119: B2B Positioning Strategy, Understanding How People Buy and Building Wynter (with Peep Laja)
I realized it was poo time, so just like set it up for him to eat Yesterday. I wonder if you said food time.
Speaker 2:I thought you said poo time.
Speaker 1:No, I don't know how to regulate that I have really have no idea.
Speaker 3:They get programmed about food, but not as much the other.
Speaker 1:Since he's one month old, I can't really like take him to a yard because he's too young for that, so I don't know how to teach him where to poop or where not to poop, like I have no idea.
Speaker 3:Well, if you take him out and he does anything along those lines, you go crazy. You tell him what a great dog they are Like you go praise them like crazy and they get programmed. They figure out that that's the right thing and the other isn't the right thing Crazy humans get so excited about poo yeah you're so weird, but I'll still do it.
Speaker 2:It's like I don't get it. It's like and why don't you do that inside? I do it inside you really agree.
Speaker 1:So I come outside and it's like they start to pattern that I mean, they all do it.
Speaker 3:They pattern, that that's what they do. They're like oh, that's, that's the good, that's the good way.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 2:Your journey to boardroom excellence starts now. All right, well, let's get started. We're going to be talking today about something that we are calling the buyer journey zones or buyer journey zone map, and that name may change because, in full transparency, this is under development quite frankly, has been for a couple of years, so let's provide a little evolution of how we got here. So one of the biggest challenges that we see in the lower middle market is that companies are, 100% of the time, under invested in marketing. It's a very small and lean team.
Speaker 2:Marketing is the only function that touches every aspect of the buyer journey and it is therefore very easy to get spun up into a random acts of marketing, because there are so many people that we need to serve. There are the initiatives that marketing needs to do that the organization traditionally marketing. There are, of course, the insatiable demands of sales, which often come as requests versus problems to solve. We have the same with customer success as it relates to life cycle marketing. Sometimes that's frankly owned by customer success that marketing is responsible for feeding that. Sometimes it's responsible for actually running it. There's product as it relates to feature launches and things like that.
Speaker 2:So marketing is in a really tough spot when your marketing team is for people and so a lot of what we are doing is helping an organization create structure for how they're going to do this prioritization, because the more initiatives we try to cover, the more ground we try to cover, frankly, the worst we do. So how do you? We can't just get marketing to focus, because marketing frankly has to communicate that focus to the organization. It has to be an organizational focus that everybody is in agreement and alignment that, yes, marketing's priorities are here, here and here, which means that other initiatives are just going to have to wait, and that's really hard.
Speaker 3:Well, that's fundamentally the issue you just mentioned, gary, with marketing as well, is that the company thinks marketing should conjure things in a vacuum, that the oh, I need this sales enablement collateral, for example, make that for me, and marketing's like well, what do you need me to make for you?
Speaker 3:Actually, marketing often won't even ask that. They'll just try and do it, when in fact that input should come from sales, it should come from CS, it should come from the entire organization, because you should be singing from the same book across the board on all of that, and marketing then is figuring out the best way to convey that. But the core message and core material should be a company thing, and that's also why marketing gets stretched so thin a lot of times as well is because marketing should just do this when in fact the company should do that and marketing just figures out the best way to convey that. But that's more of a fundamental thing we run into as well, I think, which is like we try to get marketing to do everything. They're already stretched super thin, they're already small, they've already got all these problems to cover and we're going to take that even a layer deeper with talking about this, but like that's fundamentally something we run into.
Speaker 2:Yep, yeah, good point, Andy. And so let's just talk about the evolution here. And Tiana, you asked about the evolution of this, so we'll kind of run through it quickly. But we started early on and it seems to be less and less popular. But maybe a year, maybe 18 months ago was this whole concept of demand creation, demand capture, demand conversion, activation, expansion, and so we were laying out the buyer journey. Really, it's not the buyer journey, it's what we are trying to do, but trying to weave the buyer journey into that. And there are certain goals associated with what we're trying to do.
Speaker 2:As we talk about creating demand which I personally abhor the term because this almost manifests a false expectation, and I think a side note is I in many ways, I think marketing is its own worst enemy because it it Allows itself to be pulled into terminology and these terms get polluted that it sets unrealistic and false expectations for those that aren't in marketing, and to me, classic examples are Demand creation, demand generation, like these terms, that.
Speaker 2:What does that really mean? And so Then we get to demand capture, which starts to become you know, we understand what that means conversion, activation, and then what's happening with the functions and what information do we need and what are the channels across we deliver it. And it's things, like you know, in the demand capture space. There are things that we can do on our own site and there are things that we should be doing off of our site, like review sites and marketplaces. You know we talk about integrated landing experience and this is where the product starts to come into play. Do we have, or should we have, a Freemium or a free trial or a pilot or what are other ways that we can do that? So that's where we start to get more tactical and pragmatic about what's happening in each one of these functions. But when you start to Try to take it up a level, to the company level and say, okay, what are the priorities of the go-to-market engine, it's very hard to do that because you end up with these functions that you can't really allocate that.
Speaker 3:So About this model sorry, gary, is it's. It's often conceptualized very linearly, linearly. Is that do I say that right where they should all happen in some kind of sequence that you get a buyer, you know a prospect if you will into the demand creation bucket, and then the natural Order is they're gonna then, you know, be captured as demand and then it's gonna be converted. It's all gonna happen in order and in a proper sequence. But that doesn't happen that way either. So thinking of each thing discreetly that it's its own Situation is the another genesis for why we're thinking about it through this. Call it deeper dimension.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is completely random, but I have to throw it out there. When you said linear Lee which is it not an easy word to say we were at Disney and we heard someone refer to the Millennium Falcon as the linear Falcon.
Speaker 2:The linear so I can't I cannot chuckle when I hear, linearly now so Sound bite, yes Tales from Disney World. Okay, so that that you know that is the first step of that. We'll put these visuals. Actually, if you're listening and you want to go deeper on this, this is a great time to check out GTM pro code, because we often will follow up these conversations with what we call GTM shorts, which are providing some of this additional color, visuals and texture to that, so that you know you can apply this In your day-to-day. So and we'd love to hear from you, so send us a note.
Speaker 2:Okay, so the next step is this is this has become core to what we do as well, which is again in in Lower middle market companies. It becomes of all, about prioritization, because there's only so much that we can do, and the reality is when you, when, especially when there's been a capital raise or something, everything needs to be fixed yesterday, and so if we set out to do that, we're gonna flounder, and not only that, but Rarely is success driven by the big swings for the fences, which is Very counter to what you're here in the hyperscale world. It's all about these. What are your big bets? What are your big bets. Well, when you're trying to grow 200 percent in the next 12 months, and then another hundred to 200 percent after that and another hundred and ten, you have no choice but to swing for the fences. By the way, you also have a lot of resources to go do that in Lower middle market companies that are often Bootstrapped private equity back, or what have you. It's about cash on cash returns, it's about capital efficiency, it's about smart growth, and so that comes by Prioritizing your efforts for compound impact, and so that's the idea behind starting from the middle out, which is, if you think about back to demand, capture, activate, conversion.
Speaker 2:Activation. It's really in that, when a when a buyer is Problem aware and starts to become solution aware through the activation process, there's a lot that we can do there. That actually informs both what we can and should do at the top of the funnel and then also Back to product strategy. And so this is your more classic. We have discovery, which we call ignorantly symptomatic Education, which is where this is where I get into problem inception, exploration, research and evaluate solutions, requirements, buyer group, expansion, selection, negotiating the agreement. Activation is this is where I get into time to value, and then expansion, which is value realized by the customer and value Captured by us, which frankly, comes down to product strategy, and this was really helpful.
Speaker 2:Now We've more tightly aligned what's going on across the go-to-market engine to the buyer's journey, but again we end up with this amorphous like how do we measure this? And ultimately, that's what we're trying to do is, what are the? But this isn't a attribution discussion, but we should have leading indicators or portfolio metrics or something that tells us what our buyer is doing through this process and where they're getting stuck. If we're thinking about this as enabling the buyer to buy, then we should be able to see places where they're getting stuck, and this just didn't capture that very well. But it helps you prioritize okay well, to do this exploration requirements, selection, activation well.
Speaker 2:Some of the things that we're going to need are high intent, paid, targeted, outbound, remarketing, landing experiences, product on ramps again, discovery, demo process and buyer or seller sales enablement really buyer enablement marketplaces and review sites. So we can now bring it down to a tactical level, but again, it crosses so many things. Now how do we prioritize that? So that's anything to add. Andy, I know we obviously have done a lot of discussion on the.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's the thing.
Speaker 3:This could go so many directions. I like just reinforcing that. The middle out is very important because it's something you can act on very quickly, it's something you can get results on very quickly and I think it's a fairly short cycle in terms of where you can inform it and then where you can enact it. Like you can see things like sometimes it's pretty obvious, especially when you start to measure it you start to say this is just a bigger falloff than it should be. Wherever that is, you can just see that. You know it, and then when you start to iterate and test on that, if you will, you can get quick gains and those then compound. You know we have this compounding equation, right, but short cycle, fairly, you know fairly good gains to be made and a quicker impact.
Speaker 3:Another thing, just as a backdrop and this is a separate concept is the notion of what you're really trying to accomplish here, right? So growth hacking is I'm doing random acts, I'm doing things that you know don't scale real well, they're really hard to replicate, they, you know they're one piece of the top of funnel, and so on. If one of your goals is to increase the value of your company and that's beyond just the dollars and cents of you know, near-term growth and I'm getting, you know, better revenue and better profit. I'm actually trying to grow the value of the company and grow the value of the company for a future investor. You need to need to do things, call it more thoughtfully and in a way that scales and in a way that you can convey that there's a longer-term strategy here and a trajectory too. So that's kind of the backdrop to why we're looking at it this way as well.
Speaker 3:Is growth hacking? You know, honestly, it's kind of run its course, and I think it's run its course for those reasons, as one is marketing stretched too thin and then everybody took a step back and breathed and said, like this isn't really helping the value of the company long-term. So I just wanted to throw that out there as like kind of a different layer of the thought around this as well. This is going to help with the longer-term value.
Speaker 2:Well, it's actually a really good point, eddie, because at the root of what we are trying to do is help a company think about how to deploy resources, how to allocate capital across marketing, sales, customer success, product, what have you. And the hacking part of it isn't really the issue, because we would applaud people who are willing to and desire and have built an organization around testing and getting something out into the world quickly to create a feedback loop and then iterate on that, like that aspect of hacking is really valuable. However, I think the biggest problem with the hacking is it became all about the tactic and not about how. What does our buyer need from us to be in a better position to buy right? It was all about oh well, this company is doing this thing and so if we do that, then we can do that, and I like in it too. Yeah, it will work like this.
Speaker 2:Everything falls to the law of you have to beep this out the law of s*** click-throughs, the law of crappy click-throughs, because any tactic, when it is successful, will get executed to the point where it no longer works.
Speaker 2:That's just.
Speaker 2:It happens in sales, outbound marketing, everything, but it doesn't mean that the tactic is bad and they will all work if it is in service to getting in front of the buyer with the right information.
Speaker 2:And so the biggest problem with hacking, especially in capital efficient organizations, is it works and and, but it's almost like built on sand because it's a hacky. So the reality is that that particular tactic gets less and less effective at the margin, and so we go a year and we get some growth from that hack, and then next year's goal is counting on that hack plus a new hack or some other hack, and what happens is kind of like churn in your business the, the, the, the. The impact or outputs from that hack get less and less reliable, and so now the hole just got bigger. To your point, eddie, we haven't built anything sustainable. It just happened to work for a time and we haven't identified that. And that's what we are trying to avoid, like the plague that so many organizations get sucked into our random act on top of random act on top of random act that work for a season and then they no longer work and they haven't done anything to really build the value to be it for people.
Speaker 1:Like really to both of your points. It's as you said you, you think it's linear, right, or people think it's linear. Like a, it conducts to be, it conducts to see, and you like, what are you baiting all of that on? Like? Is it substantiated and what, what? What are you like? What are your fundamental opinions that back everything that you're doing Like? What's the real reason you're doing things for? Is it only like for the hack, because you learn that it's a hack and it's working for other companies, or is it because you really think it serves your customer in some way? And I think that's also the problem. They think like it's A to B to C and it works, and then we continue, and then we do something on top of that that follows like the same line of strategy but at the same time, does not backed out of anything any, anything like tangible that really tells you that it's serving your customer and continuing in that line.
Speaker 1:So, like to both of your points. It's exactly about that.
Speaker 2:No, that's a good good call out Tiana. So that leads us now to the buyer zones, and interestingly, this is back to the experience that our buyer has through our system, and probably what's missing in this right now, in the next evolution of this, would be what is it that the buyer needs when they're in each of these zones to enable them to buy? Then that's where we start to layer on the phases of exploration, right? Am I at this phase or that phase? In fact, your point about it being linear, the hardest thing for and this is why I prefer this versus the stages is that, to your point, if you go back to the stages and we say, oh, I'm in exploration and I go to requirements building, right, well, that presumes that I just left the exploration room and walked into the requirements room and the door behind me is shut and I'm not going backwards Like I'm good there. But the reality is, as I go through requirements building, I am learning from the vendors about what's needed, which may very well trigger oh crap. You know, I don't think I've defined this problem. I haven't even thought about this whole new avenue. So guess what I'm going back through? I actually skipped the three previous rooms and go all the way back to have. I actually just solved this problem and I haven't even thought about the fact that these stakeholders are going to need to be involved. Or it's touching this other technology, or we have this whole other initiative going on that I now realize could be a solution for this thing. So it is absolutely nonlinear, and I think that's the problem that we had in using this as a vehicle to help organizations plan their activities is that it presumes a linear buyer journey and it's not so. That's a good call out. So the zones however, we still need to understand where they are in this process, but we need to be in a lot of ways we can use that as an opportunity to extract are you here or are you here in one of the ways that we've done that. So let's just talk through those zones.
Speaker 2:Well, first, the very first zone that we don't really cover here on the graphic is what we call the buyer universe, and we live in a world today, unlike even five, 10 years ago, where in a lot of cases we can know the companies and even the people at those companies that are theoretically our target market, through all of the data providers out. There is a whole bunch of ways to do that, but that's just a raw record, that's not even a lead, it's just a record, but at the same time. So we call that the known unknown universe. So we know them, but they don't know us. Then there is the unknown.
Speaker 2:Unknown universe, which is those that frankly, don't show up, in that the titles are wrong. They're different companies, buyers, whatever, and that's more of the speaking to the ponds where those buyers gather to pull them in. So that's the very first piece. But the first objective is we need to start a relationship. Right, if I, if we understand that out of that buyer universe, 10% or less at any one time and that, by the way, I think is a completely made up number, but it just feels right 10% or less of that buyer universe is actually going to be in a buying cycle, then we do ourselves a massive disservice if we're not trying to find a way to start a relationship with the other 90%. And to me that is the outcome or outcropping of why you hear build a media company and community led growth and all these things is that that's how we start a relationship, that's how we get into your decision matrix and get on your day, one list, and all of which become very important in categories where there's hundreds of options.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you take a page from the creators and ironically, or maybe not surprisingly, the creators in the go to market space are the ones certainly weak you off of, but they're doing this to your point here. You could call them influencers, creators, but they're they're. They know their space. That's the starting point you in in part of what came up in some recent conversations is you're a subject matter expert. You know kind of, whether, whether you realize it or not, it kind of creeps up on you. Typically in your industry you end up being that. So the starting point there is why don't you share that? Why don't you share some really good insights about what you do? And if, if, if a buyer or a would be buyer is out there that has you know that problem or or some you know they, they want to know something you know, yeah, and it's often the case and if you can share that, that's a way to start the relationship.
Speaker 2:Which is the the. The wonderful thing that we think about thinking about it in terms of that zone is that activities, content, what have you in that zone are for that purpose, which means it's not hey, let's schedule a call and talk. We're not trying to, we haven't. We're trying to just start the relationship. The analogy that just came to me is we all have friends that have at times been in like multi level marketing. You know situations and the relationship starts with you know, hey, I'm having my elbows been killing me lately. I did something and working out or playing tennis or whatever, and they start to provide some valuable insights to oh well, it could be this, this and this, and then, oh, that's really. And then immediately go to hey, well, you might want to buy this thing and here's, you've signed up for a script. They immediately go for the jugular right and they immediately lose credibility because we haven't really started that. Friends is probably a bad word, but just in terms of starting a relationship. But you get. You get the analogy.
Speaker 1:Like a to be to see like you lose all credibility. Because, like if I would be the one with the pain, I would think like, oh, this whole time he only wanted to sell me something like it wasn't really about helping me, it was really all about the cell. Like how do I now know that that's the best solution for my pain?
Speaker 2:because they just try to sell me something like yeah, it would have offered me different options, could have talked about a little bit, could have gotten to know me, but he did it without even frankly, without having Having evaluated or confirmed that I'm trying to sell you something when you're still ignorantly symptomatic, like you don't even actually know you have a problem. I need to get you to that point, so that's the point of starting a relationship. Then there's deepening the relationship and there's we're going to kind of bypass over that because there's a lot of ways that we can think about that, but it's all based on both proactively, based on signals and offering making it easy for people, way for people to raise their hands to want to deepen that relationship. Now we get into enabling the buyer to buy, and this is an area that we believe the next three areas, frankly, are the biggest chasms that we see over and over again, and the idea behind enabling the buyer to buy is taking everything that typically happens inside of the pre call, call and immediately post call experience and even into the customer success, the moment of value experience, and bringing all of that up to be able to consume done demand, which is a lot. It's a tall task and there's a whole bunch of unintended consequences of doing that poorly, but that's the world in which we live.
Speaker 2:People want to be in a situation where they can quickly ascertain. Is this for me or is it not? And there's a, there's a that we have. We have multiple podcasts on what. Can you know how we should approach that? Then there is okay. Now I'm ready to move from the on demand experience I really want to guide, so I'm going to request a demo and because now I've gotten that information, but now I have some really specific questions I want to get into. Well, that in and of itself is a tire experience. When I come to the page, what does that experience when I, what is the form when I submit Prior to the call, what does that look? The even? Then you get into the pre call experience. Then we have, you know, call it the discovery slash demo experience. Now, this can be multiple calls, it can be over time depends on the product, but the the core of it is around what's happening during that call and have we connected all the previous dots and do we send them in a good spot?
Speaker 3:Throw out. Just the common thing you get in that situation is his feature vomit, right. The old way, if you will, is I'm just going to go through all the things that product does and then will, and it goes to the pre call experience quite a bit too. I mean, that's, that's the. The gap we've seen quite a bit is in order to know what you should really walk through with a customer, which is going to be a subset of features, but really it's going to be a vignette of what the product does for people having success in a situation just like yours. So you're coming in with a specific problem.
Speaker 3:Ideally, we've uncovered that in the pre call scenario. We've we've somehow either enriched our data enough so that we have a pretty good idea of what somebody situation is, or we've even asked that. And then you come to the call and we're not just saying we do all this stuff and it's like well, geez, I'm like I'm woozy now because you just threw everything at me. I didn't, as opposed to, I'm going to take a position on where you might be at. I might be wrong and that's a risk, but if I'm right, I just nailed it right. I just I just walked through a scenario.
Speaker 3:And then there's also the possibility that there's a common scenario for most everyone who gets value from your product they end up, you know, using the product. You can see that in the product usage data. They pay you every year. They keep re upping every year. So you know they're getting value and you've you've been able to determine that situation and you're able to then convey that in the demo in a pretty effective way, as opposed to going through a bunch of features and just confusing people.
Speaker 2:Right well, and said something about this on LinkedIn earlier is so many companies take their very expensive and least scalable resource sales the sales team and have them do a basic product demo every single time. Let me show you what the product does there. That is not a good use of that time Buy for us or for the for the buyer and that what we really want to dive into is understanding the the frankly, helping them explore their business problems. That we can tie in match what we do really well to that. And you know, before and even after having the more basic product walkthrough components.
Speaker 3:I love what you just said because it reminded me of one more thing. To dive in a little bit deeper if, if you were to do a basic product demo every single time, why wouldn't you replace that with a video of somebody doing that exact same thing and then further in a pre call situation? Why wouldn't you take the two common scenarios? So you're taking a basic product demo and you're breaking it into the two common situations you see all the time, with customers showing them a video of both of those situations and then asking what would you like to dive into more on the call scenario or scenario B? I just think that's like conceptually and it's much harder to reduce that to practice, obviously, because there's a lot that goes into that from an input perspective. But would that be a better experience?
Speaker 2:Right, well, and then let's finish it up here. So we've got that call experience, but then one of the other massive drop offs we see is we leave the call and now our champion? Typically maybe they're the economic buyer, maybe they're the user, but nonetheless there are two things that we know for certain. One they are looking at others. It is a competitive process guaranteed, and even if they say they aren't, then you just kicked off that process. Secondly, there are other people involved in a decision and you, but you may never get a chance. You most likely will never get a chance to talk to them.
Speaker 2:So if we don't do everything we can to arm our champion with what they need to tell our narrative the way we want it told, then we are leaving so much to chance. And so it's this zone we have called is the stakeholder experience. When that person leaves, how do we equip them so that they can have success? A lot of the time it is. I'll send you the recording of the call and the deck, and maybe there's some product demo or what have you. And so what we're arming them with is here. Send this to the stakeholders who now need to sit through an hour, call 30 minutes or 45 minutes, have done a one and a half speed and a deck that has no context. That's not helpful.
Speaker 3:I was just gonna say if you really you just described mapping the current state, this and actually on the pre-call experience and the only reason I harp on the pre-call experience is because there's a lot that can be done that typically isn't just from a inform yourself about who that prospect might be like you can enrich data. But on the stakeholder experience, map that out. What do you actually send to that? You just created a junior sales rep and you gave them nothing to use to sell your thing internally. Map that process out. I bet you're horrified.
Speaker 2:Yes, and then you can move to contract experience. So, as Andy just alluded to, the idea is to go through the zones now and map that current state. What does that experience look like? The beauty of this is that this isn't a marketing exercise, this isn't a sales exercise. This is a buyer slash, go-to-market exercise. Then we can actually look at the metrics associated with those zones, Like what are the visit rates? What are the conversion rates? How long does it take people to go through here? What are the outcomes of that in terms of the dollar amounts? How many people are involved? What kinds of resources are we sending? We really can get now a metric driven view of the buyer journey. Then we can start to plot the future state, which the other aspect of this is okay.
Speaker 2:We need to focus in not on individual broken parts of zones, but ideally we go in and we tackle a specific zone and say we are gonna get, for example, the call experience done right and there can be and should be a V1 version of that. But it doesn't necessarily and won't mean that this is a marketing exercise, because it will be. We need to approach discovery a little bit differently, which means we need a little bit different deck, which means we need to have a different demo approach, which means we need to think about different questions that we are providing. We need to arm our team with information about competitors that can be shared during and after the call, with certain use cases, with certain references and experiences. We need to make sure that we are really nailing this piece.
Speaker 2:And the other side of it is we've realized we actually need to better train our sales team. We have left them out on an island. We haven't properly equipped them with knowledge about what's actually going on out there. We have all these pockets of knowledge across the organization, so this isn't about marketing. This is now being thoughtful as an organization. Where are we gonna apply resources that open up this bottleneck so that we can? We'll have identified that as a choke point and then we can move on to other pieces. That the beauty of that is what we will find often is that when we do that, the work that we put into solving one or several of these zones, that same information that we have identified that the buyer needs to be successful, can feed the other zones.
Speaker 3:We can build a test and wire and repurpose it. It's all about the buyer, right? If you orient yourself through the buyer's perspective on that, it does change. I mean not to pick on sales but, as you were just talking about the demo experience, right, in retraining sales, in some respects the best way to retrain sales I think I've seen is to orient yourself through the buyer's perspective, which is it's not I'm like again, go ahead harping back on the feature vomit thing, but like that's what I want you to see. That's certainly what my founder wants you to see, because he built it and it's really cool.
Speaker 3:They want to show you everything it does, but the buyer may only care about a subset of that, certainly. For starters, how do I get good use out of this right away? And that's how I want to orient myself in that sales call, in that demo call, I should say, to convey that which is this is great for you because this is not great for me, because I can get you to buy all these things and I might be able to get a bigger contract, because you need this deeper feature which you may not need right away, and so on. It's about you and it's about the experience you have, and that's true with mapping everything right, mapping everything through that perspective, and that's why, when you do have that breakthrough in one of the zones, it does translate to the other zones because you're like, oh wait, I need to, I need to turn that on. It's here a little bit too, because it's so not oriented toward the buyer Right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like changing some things from further in the process can actually change some things like back in the process. So that's what we mean. It's not a linear talk.
Speaker 2:Just thinking, yeah, no great point. It's like all of a sudden we've made changes to not to pick on the call experience, but the call experience and that process actually now changes what we need in the pre-call demo and enable the buyer to buy process. So it's. And as we then take those changes and start to make them further up the buyer experience journey, then that's gonna necessitate further changes downstream. So that you know, I think, last point on this, because we could go on forever.
Speaker 3:They are closed systems, though, so the reason I like this is you can look at them as a defined section.
Speaker 2:So like I wouldn't call it a closed system. I think it's a module or a sub-assembly within an operating system.
Speaker 3:Yeah, closed is a terrible word. Yeah, I apologize, it is. It's something you can address and, to your point earlier, gary, you should address it as top to bottom as you can to solve for that, because that's when you get the most benefit. Looking at those other things in light of that, so if you're looking upstream, it's because you've reoriented that in that appropriate way. But it's something you can see because it literally is a process. It literally is something a buyer will go through. So you can address it in that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the point I was gonna make too that is probably an entirely different podcast, but related to the same thing is that this then becomes the way that marketing presents, it, builds and presents its plan to the board. Because now, instead of what we see all the time, or even the sales right, what we now see is what we're running these webinars, these campaigns, these white papers, we've got this SEO project going on, blah, blah, blah. It's impossible for me to see. Well, what is the purpose of that? How is it driving together? And, understandably, some of that is there aren't direct.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna do X and therefore the vending machine is gonna spit out Y, but everybody understands this holistically. And now we're saying here are the metrics that tell us that this experience is broken and here's how we believe we can fix it, based on our research of what our buyers are telling us. Here is how we're gonna deploy those resources to do that, here's when it's gonna get done and here's how we believe it will reveal itself in the market. And, by the way, that means all the other stuff that you've put on our plate we aren't doing because this is the priority. And look what it does to the revenue of the organization. Suddenly, everybody's okay, it's huge.
Speaker 3:I mean that is huge, right? Because if you don't present something in this way, it does defer people's mindsets, defer your marketing. Well, you should be thinking about the top of the funnel. It defers to vending machine for leads, which, unfortunately, is why that ends up being a function People seek in job descriptions all the time for a marketing person. Hey, I need to. You know you need to create, you know demand for the funnel, like you see that in a job description all the time. If you're a marketer and you approach it in this way, absolutely the board will thank you for it because they will see it is a great vehicle for communicating that bigger picture. It's great collateral for that.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, yes, okay. Well, there's lots more to come on that. I think this is ultimately gonna be one of the resources, so we'll expand on that. As we said in full disclosure, this is something that we are using actively with our clients as we speak and it's getting battle tested. So you're getting it hot off the press and in the next week we'll be putting out our GTM short on this. So excited about that and more to cover. So until next week, bye, bye, go, be a pro.