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#38: Content From a Sales POV - Featuring Jen Allen-Knuth
Learn how to build resilient GTM sales strategies with our special guest, Jen Allen-Knuth. Discover how understanding your customer's world and addressing their problems, rather than showcasing solutions, can revolutionize your sales approach. Jen's experiences highlight the power of delivering a compelling sales experience without relying on product demos, making this episode a must-listen for revenue leaders at B2B software and services companies.
In this episode we explore:
- The two pivotal moments that transformed Jen's approach: the realization that 53% of B2B purchasing decisions are influenced by the sales experience and the importance of focusing on customers' worlds during initial calls.
- The need of customer-centric training for new sales reps, ensuring they grasp the buyer's environment and status quo options before pitching solutions.
- Specificity and relevance in sales messaging.
- Integrating content creation with sales strategies to create a robust go-to-market engine.
- The bridge to the gap between sales and marketing, ensuring alignment and fostering better performance.
I think in many ways, where the problem starts is even when it comes down to onboarding. There are plenty of sellers I've spoken to who have been honest and just said I know what we do. I have no idea what my customer does. I know how we can come in and make life better, but I don't know what it's like on the other end of the fence. And so one of the first things I think is really important is solutions only matter if the customer agrees they have a problem. So we in sales often jump to solution in the hope it makes someone realize they have a problem. I didn't really see that play out like that that often. What I'd love to see is organizations before you drown someone in. Here's our solution and here's why it's awesome. Start with. Here's the world of our buyer and here's all the other status quo options. They have to solve this problem, Some in our category, some out.
Gary: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. Your journey to boardroom excellence starts now Exactly. It is a new Allen Knuth.
Jen:Yep, Thank you for asking. I've always loved the face that people make when they realize they forgot to ask. And then they're trying to say it and I'm like come on Welcome Jen. Allen Not Welcome, Jen Allen. Can you introduce yourself? Yes, exactly, I'm like you got it Jen.
Tiana:Allen.
Gary:We got it. We got it. Let's justze right through that, all right. Well, we are super excited on the GTM Pro Podcast to have Jen Allen Knuth join us, and I am not going to do a good job with your background, but I would love if you could as we talked about before we hit record give us the arc of your story. There's a lot that we find that goes into these compound experiences we have over time where we suddenly wake up and realize, wow, it's 10, 15, 20 years of experience that actually inform where I am today, so you don't have to go back to your birth for 20 years necessarily.
Andy:When I was a little girl, I dreamed of carrying a quote I dreamed of b2b enterprise software life goals my life goal is what that dog's doing, I mean dude, this dog has got it figured out like watch.
Jen:If I'm boring, just watch this dog. This dog will understand everybody. Um, so I started my sales career in 2004. I think a lot of people were like me where you don't intend to go into sales, you just sort of end up there and then the money's good, it's fun, and so you just kind of stick with it. And so I ended up working for a company called Corporate Executive Board and the thing I will call out is Corporate Executive Board has since been acquired by Gartner.
Jen:But effectively what they were selling were best practice research and advisory subscriptions to C-level executives at Fortune 500 companies. So the solution was like you buy this membership and then you and your entire team gets access to all these case studies and ideas and templates and tools and meetings and hours with advisory consultants. And there was nothing meetings and hours with you know advisory consultants and there was nothing physical that you could like really that anyone would want to demo. Right, like, no one's like demoing an online portal. And in many ways, I think that looking back was probably a big advantage to me, because it taught me I can't rely on having a product to be like look how cool this product is is. It taught me pretty early on that the conversation I had or the sales experience I delivered was probably going to be the thing that made or break or broke my ability to be successful. So that's been like a consistent theme throughout my career.
Jen:I would love to sit here and say I was really awesome at sales from the get and I knew everything and you know what sales was easy. It wasn't. I think many, for many reasons. The reason I stayed as an individual contributor for 18 years which is not very common. Most people want to move up into a leadership role is because sales was really hard to me and every year there was something that was changing about the buyers I was selling into or the market or the competition, and I just looked at it that every year is wow, there's something else now I need to go and get good at.
Jen:So I just found the career to be really intellectually challenging. So I did 18 years of that, moved from account management where I was just doing renewals, then moved into expansion account management, then moved into net new logo hunting, then big game kind of like seven, eight figure or or not eight figure, seven figure, net new logo hunting. And then my last year at Challenger, I created this role of chief evangelist, which you could argue is probably more of a marketing role, but I kept it under sales because I love sales. And then moved into tech and did a true marketing role in community marketing for just under a year at Lavender before founding DemandGen last year. So that's my TLDR on my career.
Gary:Well, I would say too. I mean you're being very modest about just an individual contributor, because I think there's a big difference between selling more I don't want to call it a transactional sale, but something's a sub $50,000 ACV to the incredibly complex seven-figure deal where you're multi-threading and to your point about it's not like it's a physical product that you can march in and show people and tie directly to business outcomes necessarily. So give yourself a little credit, jen.
Jen:All right, I'll pat myself on the back.
Andy:thank you very much, gary yes you're welcome and there's and there are people that already like are experts in this craft, or at least a percentage of them are really already good at this. So you're like with challenger anyway, like you're actually like.
Jen:You have to be that much better to sell sales to salespeople I I will tell you it's funny you mentioned that because I remember when I was in my early 20s was the first time I ever did an in-person meeting and it was for a division of GE, and I cannot tell you how freaked out I was. Walking to that room thinking what is any of these people going to care what this 23-year-old has to say about marketing? I was selling a marketing advisory membership to them at the time and I think that did mess with me for a very long time of. I'm too young to have an opinion or a point of view. I need more time in my career before I'm like eligible to get C-level executives at these types of companies, which now looking back, was totally flawed, but at the time it certainly screwed with my head.
Gary:Yeah Well, I think we all suffer even today with imposter syndrome. Right, it's like who's going to listen to me? But I think what we actually will, as we're working with teams and sellers, remind them that they're young sellers and they're talking to very senior people in organizations, and we say, look, the one advantage that you have over them is that you have so many more touch points and points of view than they will ever have, because this is your job, and so you have to remember that there's real value that you can bring, that it's beyond, because they will have spent 10 years at a particular company and that's all they know.
Jen:So that's it, and especially today. Right, If you look at what a lot of executives spend their time doing, in my opinion it's going out there and saying what is everyone else doing and how are other people solving this problem? That is what we, as salespeople, hear all day long. It's just, I think oftentimes we don't assign value to that type of insight. We think our value is in our ability to articulate our product value proposition. It's like I would say those things are flip-flopped completely.
Gary:Yeah, yeah, this is. I can't help but share this. So early in my career I started too in sales and just didn't know it.
Gary:It was in investment banking which is a fancy way to say enterprise salesperson. Yeah, and so it was that exact. The role of the job was to talk to CFOs and CEOs about what they were thinking about and capital structure and all those kinds of things, and you immediately absorb that and then you go talk to the next person. You're like well, this is what I understand that this segment of the market is doing. I'm like I'm just packaging what I heard right, but there's real value in that 100%.
Jen:There's a graph or a stat that came out from Gartner back in 2020 that talks about how executives and buying groups spend their time, and 83% of the time that they spend is actually not talking to salespeople. It's doing research online, like we would if we were going to buy a car. It's talking to each other in the buying group and it's doing research offline, like going to events and different communities and having these conversations around. What have you seen and what have you tried? And so I love that call out because that, for me, was a big eye opener that, wow, I do that all day. That's my entire job as a salesperson, but I wasn't often thinking about how do I package that up, as you described, and share that back as insightful, before showing up and just talking about what we have to offer.
Gary:So I love that example insightful before showing up and just talking about what we have to offer. So I love that example and that is such a fantastic segue to our topic, which is around, and specifically your point of view on everything you just talked about in terms of where executives and how they're spending their time is. It really is about not what product do I buy, but how do I define this problem and what are the solution alternatives that I have? And if you had to do it over again, what would you have done differently? All of those things and that's a lot of what you talk about in terms of this fighting inertia.
Gary:Right, it's not that, yeah, we're just going to sit here and do nothing. We're perfectly happy. It's all of that other stuff. So would love to get how you you obviously I'm sure at the Challenger organization that that was a big part of it with you know Brent Adamson and and you know everything because of that and we love his article sense man. You know, I think it just is such so spot-on. But Talk a little bit about how those experiences led to the perspective you have now and how you've maybe seen that change, or just how it's become more clear for you.
Jen:Yeah, so I think there's two big moments that I can recall in my career that were sort of like mental shifts for me. So the first one was 2008, which y'all were selling back then like it was the worst time to sell.
Jen:You think you're a good salesperson and then a day goes by and you're like, wow, I'm terrible at sales apparently, and so I remember sitting in the room when Brent presented the findings back about the initial sort of underlying research of Challenger not the Challenger sales rep stuff, but the what makes customers buy from you, buy more from you and advocate for you as a supplier.
Jen:And in that research, what it showed was 53% of what makes companies buy from you in B2B is actually about the sales experience you deliver, meaning, do you show up with that kind of point of view on their industry, their market, what you see them doing, potential gaps, or do you show up and talk about your stuff?
Jen:And so the mental shift there for me was wow, 53% of what makes them buy has to do with what I decide to show up and talk about. Like one, that's empowering as hell. But two, then I started looking at what I was showing up and talking about and I'm like I'm talking about our product and, of course, people in a recession are not going to be fighting tooth and nail to protect an online portal of case studies and tools Like that's going to be the first thing to go. That was like in a big way, that opened my eyes to the fact that I have to equip myself to have a different in kind conversation so I don't sound like every other sales rep who's desperately trying to save their pipeline. So that was number one.
Jen:Number two there was an exercise I started doing at the end of every quarter where I would look back at all the deals that I won, lost and then no decision outcomes, where it just like kind of fluttered away and one of the big patterns I saw in my own behavior was when I would do a first call, do some little discovery, hear the buzzwords I wanted to hear and then dive into the solution and then rush to get that done by the end of the 30 minutes. Wanted to hear and then dive into the solution and then rush to get that done by the end of the 30 minutes. I almost never converted that into a second call because all I did is say here's what we do. Do you want to think about it more? You want to check it out more and like that's a high effort experience for the person on the other end of the phone. So all of those calls, almost all of them, ended with let me think about this and get back to you.
Jen:And sure enough, like no one ever did, let me think about this and get back to you and, sure enough, like no one ever did, yeah. And so it taught me specifically, not just broadly in my sales experience, but what I was doing in that first call had to be less about what we do and more about holding up a mirror to what I could anticipate that prospect might be doing. So we were having a conversation about them, not us. So those are two big like mental shifts I think I made in my career that caused me to realize I was in the own way of my success. It wasn't any environmental factor.
Gary:I've heard those two stats many times the 87% of the buying journey is done before we actually talk to a salesperson and the 53% impact. But when you combine the two and you consider that 13% of the time right, that's of the total buying time has 53 percent of that impact, that just magnifies it even more. Right that you really have to have that together and they're looking for you, looking to you for guidance. How so, when we start thinking about for organizations, when they start thinking about you know, for organizations, when they start thinking about you know it's moving from training the individual rep and even training the sales team on how to think, how to explore those questions that help paint what we call the mental map of the organization and the dynamics between the departments and what their business goals. All that stuff that has really the story behind the story, as we said earlier. How do you then think about making institutionalizing that right? Is there a certain set of ingredients that are needed to make that work or what success factors have you seen there?
Jen:Yeah, so and granted, like when I say this, I'm not going to say like every company does this, but the experience I think many sales reps have when they go into an organization is you go in, you get your laptop, you find out who your manager is and then you go into probably a week or two weeks of what is effectively product training or some sales process training, which makes sales out to be this super linear thing where you do this and then you do this, and then everybody signs and everything's great.
Gary:It's like that easy.
Jen:Wish it was that easy. I'd be making a lot more money. And so I think largely the issue is when you have that experience as a salesperson. Now, when you're given an activity number, of course, the first thing you're going to do is pick up the phone and start telling everybody what you know, which is your product. And so I think in many ways, where the problem starts is even when it comes down to onboarding.
Jen:There are plenty of sellers I've spoken to who have been honest and just said I know what we do. I have no idea what my customer does Like. I know how we can come in and make life better, but I don't know what it's like on the other end of the fence. And so one of the first things I think is really important is solutions only matter if the customer agrees they have a problem. So we in sales often jump to solution in the hope it makes someone realize they have a problem. I didn't really see that play out like that. That often. What I'd love to see is organizations before you drown someone in.
Jen:Here's our solution and here's why it's awesome. Start with here's the world of our buyer and here's all the other status quo options they have to solve this problem Some in our category, some out. So when I was selling Challenger, for example, I was selling a sales methodology. Well, sales methodologies are not the only lever to pull. If you have a growth problem, you could buy Gong, you could buy some other sales tech, you could hire more salespeople. But I was so narrow on just proving we were the best sales methodology that that's all I ever talked about, because I actually didn't know why someone would choose to invest in a Gong over a sales methodology. And so, in my opinion, I think it starts with how we onboard sellers Sellers will be much more effective at selling a solution if they can talk effectively about how a problem is actually playing out and what are some of the pros and cons of different options for solving them. So that's probably piece one in my mind.
Gary:Yeah and I. That's fantastic. And so now you start to peel back the layers of the onion here, and so let's talk about how we would deliver that, or, more importantly, the source of the information to, in order to create that. That then becomes not just a sales function, but it's a CEO slash, founder function and a product leader function, and everybody's got an opinion about that right, about the problem that we're solving and how we get together. So what have you seen, or who are the people in the room that need to be able to do that, and what is the process by which they get there?
Jen:Yeah, and I'll tell you it's changed right. So back when I was at Challenger, the whole idea was like don't bother your salespeople with this. Get your best product marketers, your best sales leaders, your CEO in a room and then you guys figure out the message and hand it off. But what I've seen is just like sellers actually need to be part of that process, like I fundamentally need to understand why do I say this versus what I used to say? And I think why we see organ rejection is because we hand things off to sellers and we give them a script and then they're like I sound weird when I say that I'm not going to do this. So instead, what I prefer to do is you come in and you say look, we all have at least a target account that we would really like to win, and I don't care what the circumstances Maybe it was a former client that we have and they moved to a different company, it doesn't really matter but I have a target account I want to win.
Jen:I, as a salesperson, am probably going to think in the language of why our product would be helpful, but that's not the right fight right language of why our product would be helpful, but that's not the right fight. Right, what I have to fight is why should this problem that we solve be prioritized over every other problem that they have in their business? And so, very tactically, one of the exercises that I work on with companies is I'll say let's first take like five customers who recently bought from you, and then I want you to go back to the call recordings of that initial discovery call or go back to the notes that the rep took. If you ain't sophisticated, you don't have the fancy call recording tech, and I want you to hear how that person talked about the reason why they made this call to you today, and I want you to listen in the language of how they're speaking about the problem, not how the rep is speaking about the solution. And then, if you start to then bubble that out, what you end up hearing is a lot of problem voice from the customer that tells them here's what I tried beforehand and here's why it didn't work.
Jen:And so I think in many ways, we have to encourage sellers to be a little bit more like, take a little bit more of their own initiative to do that kind of work, because then what you get is a multitude of perspectives from different salespeople with different experiences, versus just one point of view being, you know, rain down from corporate and then once everybody can start to understand the language of, what did customers used to do before they started working with us, what was the problem that they had before they decided to do something about it and what were the triggers that made it intolerable. Now we can all start thinking about how do we map those things back to things that we, uniquely, can outperform our competitors around. But I just find we tend to start with like what makes our solution great and then we try to shove that down people's throats and then it just it. I don't know. I've never really found that to be an effective way of trying to get someone to change.
Gary:Yeah, no, it's well, it's. It's such a great point. It's like it reminds me of you know, start with why, why right that's? And bringing them under the hood on how you got to that, why it's not just here's what's happening, here's the narrative, and give them an opportunity to punch some holes in and ask some questions and like, well, what happens if a client says this, and the amount of time and rigor with which that process is done. Is is pretty poor most of the time.
Andy:Well, that's what I just would love to get a little bit tactical here, because you just described what I would call a grain unified theory in this, which is starting with why, figuring out that problem. What is it? I call it an incentive moment. Right, and you're right. There's all these, this landscape of alternatives, and so they have all these choices and noise going on in their heads. So, tactically, because I think part of the problem we see and I'm a huge believer in listen to as many calls as you can, synthesize them, use AI with them to get to the gist, if you can is asking that question in the first place. That gets that customer talking about that incentive moment. What are some effective ways you've teased that out or heard it teased out specifically?
Jen:Yeah, so I think for me personally, I don't like to ask prospects that in a first call, because I feel like it's a like give me the answers to the test type of question where I think sometimes people put their guard up. This is just my personal.
Jen:You're using it against them. Right, right, like, tell me the answer to the test so I can ace it and then I'll tell you. This is exactly how I can help. So what I like to do is to go back to what that company what I can see on the outside seems to be trying to achieve. So, like it used to be the case 10 years ago, if you didn't have a public company, like good luck doing any pre-call research, because there's nothing out there now, like you know, you can Google, you can go to chat TPT and say what's the last written or spoken interview this founder or CEO has done. And because of, like, the move now is to build in public.
Jen:I think it's much more common to see people talking outwardly about their business, and so I'll go in and I'll listen, for what does that founder talk about? Or I'll just put the transcript in chat GPT and just ask it questions Are they talking about hiring? Are they talking about hiring more salespeople? Just questions, I think might get me to good nuggets. And then I'll think about who else do?
Jen:I know that I've sold to or tried to sell to who's trying to do something similar, and in those conversations what came up is their status quo alternative. So what was I being measured against? So the question I always ask in calls that allows me to do that is it's very rare that a prospect will come and have a conversation like this with me and only be considering one way to solve the problem. What are the two or three other ways that you're looking at potentially solving this problem? And then that way, what I'm slowly doing and this is like completely unsophisticated and not technical, but like I'm literally just creating a list and then I'm putting a check mark every time I hear it.
Jen:So then over time, if I'm a new seller, then I probably have a higher confidence level saying I might be totally off here, but often when I hear people saying they're trying to achieve this, the way that they get after it is by doing this. But I don't work there, so correct me where I'm wrong. And I just find that the human tendency to correct is a very powerful way to get someone to say no, no, no, you're wrong, and it's here. And I'm like great, I'm happy to be wrong if it means I get better insight from you. So I don't know if that was like a good train of thought, but that's how.
Gary:I did it. Yeah, that's great. Well, because you're establishing credibility immediately, right? Because you're saying I have this pattern Back to what we were sharing with earlier, right, I have seen a lot of of things here and so this is what I'm seeing out in the market. So, in a way, just that statement alone is value added to them, because they're understanding wait, maybe maybe I need to be thinking about those other things or we've evaluated that, but we're doing it this way.
Andy:Yeah, I think that tendency to correct is a great. That's one that hadn't really occurred to me. It's definitely also, I think, being as specific as possible you'll get cred for that right. Like even if you're wrong, you're going to like. You at least really tried here, right?
Jen:Yes, and that's the thing I think a lot of us don't appreciate as salespeople is so many sellers, so many sellers just go in and they're like let me talk to you about me. If you just you don't have to be perfect, you just I love the word you you just have to be specific, like I don't need the narration of how many pages of the annual report you read, but just saying something like as an outsider, I saw this which looked like maybe it was because of this and, as a result, I'm not sure if you're looking to do this. Where am I off? Like I do think that is such. You save yourself, first of all, five minutes or more in the call of having that open-ended back and forth, but it also gets them talking in a more comfortable way because, again, people like to be right. So, if I can correct you, I'm gonna be much more likely to like lean into that, and I think in many ways that's the hardest part of most sales conversations.
Gary:It's just those first five minutes of staying out of weird small talk land or uh, or breaking up the the scroll of scripted questions that are like I need you to answer a few questions first I'm gonna ban you make sure you're worth my time I've never heard it as a verb. That's great Club.
Andy:Bam bam. You sound like you're hitting them right.
Gary:That's a good one, so okay. So let's one thing we'd like to do because we work with companies across the spectrum take what you just described and now bring it down to a seller that maybe this is not an enterprise sale, where maybe there's time limitations and they have to get from zero to a hundred very quickly just by sheer nature of the ACV. I guess what I'm looking for is almost a rubric by which you can think about the level of depth where you can get the 80-20, right, I can get to that level of depth without what I would otherwise do if it were a multi-stage, multi-threaded sale.
Jen:Yeah, and I'll be honest, a lot of people don't like this answer, so it's okay if you don't and if listeners don't either, but my personal opinion here is you need to start specific and then scale, like what I see is a lot of people start to try to scale and then hope that it gets specific enough, and I just think it's hard to write a specific message for like 100 contacts.
Jen:But if I go to my manager and I say, okay, I've got a territory and let's say it's like all different industries who might have this problem that our solution solves, Help me understand. What is the industry that we have the most success with, or what is the size of organization or whatever the you know the consideration factor is. So I know where to spend my time. Then I'm going to go back and I'm going to look at companies in my territory in those industries, and then I'm going to say, let me see what I can find that they seem to be trying to achieve. And then I'm going to look for common patterns. And then I'm going to step back and say, now, how can I spider web these together? So how can I talk about a common problem that I see is mapping back to a common objective?
Jen:And then I feel like I can then start to scale, as opposed to let me start with something like a mistake I made all the time is I would look at a company that was growing and like, looks like you're trying to drive growth, so you must be interested in improving the performance of your sales team and like no one's responding to that. But if I get really specific and I say looks like you've recently introduced an AI offering, but from what I can tell as an outsider, it seems like everything else you've sold has been primarily a physical product. It got me kind of curious are your sellers having a harder time selling an intangible solution versus a physical solution that they can show and hold and people can see and touch? I might be totally off, but I was working with another company over here and that was something that was preventing them from hitting that new product launch target. Like I can use that same message for any company who went from selling a physical good to an intangible.
Jen:But I need to look at it through the lens of one first, in my opinion, to be able to source that type of insight, so that I can then go back broader and scale it.
Gary:Yes, you're preaching here. Preach, preach. Yeah, we're with you. I mean, andy said this before. Right, it's like the specific, especially today, we call it we're not, we didn't coin this term, but the attention deficit era. Right In this era, the specificity with which you need to message and the relevance is so high and just keeps getting. The bar just keeps going up that the minute you try to find, you just keep watering it down so you can get to a scale and size.
Gary:It's literally like it might as well not have sent it because it's dead on arrival.
Andy:Yeah, oh, you know what I'm going to coin something here too. That's like mental value proposition land and expand. You're basically coming in with something you know, you know is going to resonate, and then you can, you know, blow that out a little bit more. But starting there, I mean, like Gary said, you're speaking our language.
Jen:Glad some people are like no, we want scale from the beginning. I'm like I don't know how to help you.
Gary:That's called the easy button, and it doesn't exist. It's a fictional character. Okay, so what we love about that too, is that, in our opinion, much of marketing, given this need for intense specificity and by marketing we're meaning here more those that are, you know, we have this concept of open to learn Not ours actually. Tito Bortz shared this with us and we've totally latched on to it because we love it but simplifies it for everybody.
Gary:It's like you've got a whole, whole audience out there. Half of them, literally, are closed door, don't want to learn, don't want to hear from you, leave me alone, and and we don't necessarily know who they are. And then there's another half that are actually open to learn, like they're trying to get better, they want to know what's going on, and if you can spark that curiosity, then they'll come in, as long as what you're providing them helps them learn. And then from that, there's a subset that is open to change, where they pretty quickly recognize that there's something, a problem going on, but they haven't actually taken the step to go really explore solutions. And then, of course, there's that very small group that is actually in market exploring solutions.
Jen:Yep.
Gary:So what you described there is now. How do we take that that we're counseling a team of sellers to go, do and now make that, you know, call it, productize or operationalize it, so that the whole go-to-market organization is thinking that way? You have some examples of where they've been able to connect those dots.
Jen:Yeah. So I think one of the things that frustrated me as a salesperson it was like I felt like I was screaming into the void. I'm like I need problem stories, I need before stories and then you just keep getting back like so-and-so bought us and then got a hundred percent ROI and I'm like this is not no one's buying this, and so one of the ways that I personally tried to solve for it was when I was back at Challenger. I was a seller, obviously, and I started realizing from that, 83% of where your customers spend your time is without you, because they're out there learning. I was like we're not really present in any of those places where our customers are going to learn. So the first thing I did is I said I've got to get smart on where at the time I was selling to CROs like where do great enterprise CROs go to learn? Because if I'm not there, how the hell am I going to get their attention? It's not through their inbox and it ain't through their phone. Like.
Jen:I've got to go where they are.
Jen:So step number one was I realized there's a lot of communities, events, things that we had no presence at, where I didn't want to jump to like, okay, let's get a booth or let's do a sponsorship. What I first said is let's just, like you know, go become part of these groups and start to listen to what they are naturally asking about and talking about, because before we start saying anything, we have to make it sound like we belong in that conversation and we can't show up and say we've got the perfect solution to that problem. And so I started doing that as a salesperson, and then what I did on the back end of it is I then started then writing content that was problem content, and now I was lucky, my ICP was living on LinkedIn, so I started writing problem content where they went to learn, and then I started seeing a lot of inbound interest from C-level executives who never liked or commented on anything, but they were like, wow, the way you articulated that problem is, weirdly, the exact way we articulated that problem.
Gary:Oh, imagine that.
Jen:Right. I'm like, yeah, because I'm listening. And so then what happened is I was finding that people were drawn not to the way I talked about the solution, but the way that I talked about the problem, because they said you seem to get it before we've even had a conversation. So I kept doing that till I got to the point where I was like hold on a second. We have geographic territories. I'm handing off these leads to everybody.
Jen:Is there a way I could structure a role where that was the primary motion, and that was the idea behind the chief evangelist is marketing was talking about our product, which this is going to sound catty. I don't mean it to be, but it's just like I don't have time as a salesperson to wait for a marketing organization to go through the journey of figuring out. We can't talk so much about ourselves. I need leads now. And so I was like let's stop fighting that fight. Let them do what they do, Like they're great at product marketing. Let them do that. Salespeople are going to talk about our solution too.
Jen:No one was really talking effectively about the problem. So that was the idea of the chief evangelist role is get someone who is credible, who has great storytelling abilities, to go out there and really socialize the problem so that people feel safe reaching out to you to say I don't even know if I wanna buy this thing yet, but I really do wanna understand what you know that I don't, because you seem to talk to a lot of other companies. That is my favorite motion, because there's almost always some sort of SME in the business who has a career trajectory where they're like I don't know where I want to go next and we just don't tap them for something like this.
Gary:Yeah, that was my favorite oh, I love that and so like. Mike, have a nice day. So we have this concept and it'll sound very familiar called the investigative journalist.
Gary:And the idea is exactly that, which is, if you think about the way a investigative journalist comes into a problem. They don't necessarily have subject matter expertise on the thing that they're researching to write the article about, but the way that they approach the research is as if you were writing a documentary and trying to seeking to understand what were all the things that happened, that created the event, that got you there and then, most importantly, what had you pause? If the ROI is so clear, why was it so hard to buy? Like what? What are all the things that are standing in the way of that?
Gary:And and being able to, I think in a lot of ways it's almost therapeutic where you are helping them understand what was happening. By the way, you're asking their questions and you're revealing things that they knew but didn't really put words to. And now you have that empathy that you were just talking about. And if we believe we have yet to see a company really do this, well, it happens in pockets product marketing, content marketing, what have you? But if you literally had somebody who owned that, yes, and then fed the entire go to market in uh, engine that information, it's like you. If somebody's doing that, please let us know, because I guarantee you're having a lot of success.
Jen:First of all, that's a mic drop moment. I love that you can assign a visual to that which I think is really important whenever you're talking about change is I can imagine what an investigative journalist would do. I think one of the benefits of doing that as well is you think about how we structure sales organizations. We're like hey, a 22 year old that just graduated college five seconds ago. Can you go out and like knock on the doors of all these people who have job you've never done and we've not given you anything to help you do it? Like that's, in my opinion, has always been the hardest part of the sales process, and we give it to the people with the least experience and then we hammer them that they're not good at their job and their role is dying, and it's like none of this makes any sense to me.
Jen:So, I think if you can have someone right now where we are recognizing what y'all talked about, like the attention economy, you can have your best people working on the front end of your engine. To me that makes a lot more sense than having a bunch of closers who are just sitting here twiddling our thumbs because we don't have any calls or meetings or pipeline to work yeah, I think in many ways it's become kind of backwards yes, yes, amen, another mic drop dropping mike's going for the place here.
Gary:It's literally yes, yes, um, so yes, I love that and and yes, I love that. And so let's talk about enablement, just because it came to mind. So the process of and again our mindset is lower middle market companies, who likely do not have a specific stepping into that role, how have you seen that solved best? And you can see how it could be product marketing, which is where it typically falls, but the ability to involve seller or sellers in that or other marketing roles, or even CS, what have you seen work well?
Jen:Yeah, I'll start with. What I don't think works well is when you put an enablement person in a room with a bunch of like hard-ass salespeople and then they talk at those salespeople like I feel for the people that have to do that.
Jen:I'm like please stop putting them in that position yeah um, what I'm a big fan of and this is probably due to how I was managed and coach as a rep I'm a big fan of knowing what to expect when it comes to enablement. So specifically what I mean, I had a manager who said, listen, jen, if you ever try to show up to a deal strategy, call a QBR, anything like that, and talk about an opportunity, and you can't answer for me what this company does or what this company sells, how they sell it, who they sell it to and how they make money. You are not permitted to talk about this deal. And I was the first time. I was like okay, sure.
Jen:And then I get to the deal review and in front of all my peers he goes what's the? You know what do they sell? And I was like they're EdTech. He was like that's not my question, what do they sell? And I had no freaking idea because I thought that would be a good enough answer. So he booted me out of the deal review session and I was like dang.
Gary:He meant it.
Jen:He meant it. We didn't have an enablement person at the time, so it was like this was falling on him, which, in many ways, I actually I will always ride or die that managers should play a part in enablement, and so, whether you're an enablement or whether you're a manager, I think one of the things that helped me most was what are the core business acumen elements you need every seller to know. That will help them arrive at their own conclusion. So for me it was if I looked at a company and I just had a surface level understanding of what they sold, who they sold it to, how they sell it and how they make money.
Jen:It was almost impossible for me to critically look at their business and identify potential status quo flaws. But if I could step back and say, all right, they sell through an indirect channel and they sell direct. It looks like now this partnership is no longer exclusive, which means now that channel partner is going to be selling to other people. All of a sudden it became much easier for me to look at their business and find all this connective tissue to the problem that we solve, and so sometimes I think we overcomplicate it and we're like how do we do all these things when we don't have the basics nailed down. So for any company that's kind of like on lower, you know, middle end of mid market, who does not have enablement, you don't have a fully structured team, like by no means don't put the cart before the horse, like don't be talking about mutual action plans and all this stuff, and we don't even actually know how to assess what our customers and prospects do.
Jen:So, I'm a big fundamentals person for that.
Gary:Yeah, I love that and, as you said that, just thinking about ways that those learnings can compound themselves for the benefit of the team. So, as you just described, that very situation where they're direct, indirect, new channel partners, different, exclusive, non-exclusive to connect those dots requires an understanding of the underlying business fundamentals that get there, which means that you either have to have done it, seen it and taught it, whatever. And so I think to your point, and I'll throw this out. There is, if you think about film review or deal review or things like that that you do as a motion to train and educate, it's like reinforcing that level. So it's not just, well, you didn't ask this question and you didn't do this, you didn't do that, but do you actually understand what they do? And let's and let's take a moment, let me connect the dots for you, because I have the benefit of experience, for the benefit of all the sellers, to say, okay, they said these things, and so let's think about what the business implications are.
Jen:That's creating the challenge that needs solved yes, so much yes to that like, and even if it's and this was the way that this manager I'm talking about, kevin worked like every Friday we'd have a different deal review session and he'd put two or three sellers on the hook for it. And so we knew, coming in we better have those answers or we're going to look embarrassed and most salespeople have egos and we want to look embarrassed. So, like we knew we had to do it. But even if it wasn't my week, when someone else was talking about, let's say, a financial services company, it was so helpful for me as a seller who didn't have that deal then, to understand what they learned about that financial services company.
Jen:So when I got one in my territory, I didn't have to start from scratch. I could be like, oh, you know what Jane did that, so I can go back to what Jane taught me. And now I have a starting point. And that's where I mean we love to talk about scale, but like I think that's where you can get scale is it doesn't have to be every single person doing this on their own every single time. Right, pick different opportunities that you know are reflective of ICP. You know opportunities for your business. Then you're learning by watching too.
Gary:Yeah.
Jen:I really like that kind of motion.
Gary:And you'll see patterns and themes right it's. It's not like every situation is completely bespoke, it's like oh, that sounds a lot like this one over here I had last week.
Jen:Yes, and that to me, that's when you know people are learning. When you hear exactly what you just said, it's like, wow, that sounded a lot like what Mark brought two weeks ago. And it's like that's one of those really click moments where you're like, yes, and now you're seeing the pattern and once you can start to pattern recognize, that's when you can be really dangerous, I think, as a salesperson.
Gary:Yeah, yep, agreed. Well, circling all the way back to where we started, which is yeah bearing is caring. Excellent, well, I have. I have hogged the mic for questions because it just keeps throwing them in my head.
Tiana:But Tiana, andy anything you want to dig into.
Tiana:Actually, it's pretty great. I did not even want to interrupt, I don't want to take it away, but well, as I said before, we hit on record and how you're a content creator and all this definitely influences and impacts how you work with the companies. Like, how have you seen the content impact all the strategies that you have proposed and everything that has gone around that? Uh, because, well, as well, what drove me to this question was the fact that I teach a lot about cold emailing and I know you don't strictly have to have a specific piece of content to cold email, but in some way you have to create, as you were saying before in the podcast, like a story, something that they are hooked onto, and I feel like all of this in some way impacts all the content that the company's producing in other ways, and this is something that these type of content should be, something that is also shareable for the sales team and everyone around it. So, like around these motions of I don't know if I explained myself correctly, but what do you think?
Jen:Yeah, I think. First of all, I think it's a lot of people think I'm weird that I have had so much tenure as a seller and I choose to spend so much time talking about cold email. But they're like don't you have better things to talk about? In my opinion, I think, like how you open a deal is how you win it. Like I think in sales we celebrate closing a deal, but closing is an outcome of being a great opener. Right, it's not like you can do a terrible job opening and have great chances of closing a deal. Those are few and far between.
Jen:And so, in my opinion, figuring out cold email or whatever your messages that you're using I don't care if it's email calling, content, whatever is so important, because that's what makes or break you even having an opportunity to take a swing. And so the reason I lean really far forward into cold email is because cold email is often a great indicator of what do prospects and customers want to hear about us. So if we do a problem-focused story in a cold email and we see a massive reply rate to that, that's about as easy of an indicator as we can get to saying wow, it seems like there might be more of an appetite for this problem that we talked about here. So let's go back marketing and let's see what other customers have we worked with who had that problem, what did they do instead of us, what was the moment that led them to us? And then we can start telling that story.
Jen:So then you build almost this like circular effect where the sellers are the ones that are giving marketing an indicator of here's what's working topically. Marketing then creates content gap, like off the back of the gap, and then they're putting that back in the hands of salespeople. Where I think it's more common is like marketing creates content over here, sales like looks at it and like that's not relevant, nobody uses it. And then everybody goes to chat GPT and just asks it to write terrible emails and then we sit here and wonder why we have no pipeline. So I think in a world where, like, there's this movement towards more content, more content, getting fewer pieces of content, going deeper on those topical areas for me was the thing that really worked when I was doing that chief evangelist motion. So I would construct the story then and then hand it off to the salespeople so they could then spend their time figuring out like who would be the right person to hear it?
Gary:This visual just hit me and I'm gonna drop it on you because I want so think you know, concentric circles, bullseye. And going back to you, I loved your line of you know the close is a function of a great open. And then combine that with what we talked about, really understanding the dynamics that create the problem in the first place, right? So that's, that's really the bullseye. And and you also talked about really the integration of the GTM engine, and we would suggest that that is why so many companies are struggling today is that what you just described is marketing does marketing stuff, and sales does sales stuff.
Gary:And the magic happens in the middle and nobody owns the middle, right? And so that bullseye is that middle that helps us understand when does a problem become pervasive and urgent enough that somebody is willing to give up their time to go explore it, and what are all the dynamics that have to exist around that attributes? And then how do we then take that out in both directions, like making sales better and making marketing better, and eventually, honestly, I think it can go really far, all the way to top of funnel, because it's problem focused, right? Anyway, that visual of if you're going to spend any time anywhere. Start at the bullseye, because that's where all the magic happens, and then you can start worrying about well, what are the email sequences we're sending out, what are the campaigns, what are the blog posts? It's like if you don't have the bullseye figured out, then everybody's just running.
Jen:And that's why I think and not to beat this dead horse, but that's why I think the chief evangelist idea of like you sit in between marketing and sales In many cases. There were so many times where I was like I feel like a divorce attorney, like I feel like I'm just trying to tell everybody, like you're not right and you're not wrong, like we're all wrong. Can we just admit we're all wrong and start from there?
Jen:And I think sometimes it's like it, particularly right now, and I mean I say this jokingly, but I do empathize with it. I think there's so many people who feel so much pressure about losing their jobs because their performance isn't great, and so then it's just like we go into these meetings and we're just trying to protect our backs, like my dashboard is green and sales is like that would never be the dashboard I would want you to have, but it's like but it is. And so I think that's largely unproductive and you either need a CEO who's willing to step in and be the person that's like we're all wrong, it's not your wrong or you're wrong or you need a role like a chief evangelist, where you've got the customer voice but you also have the credibility of marketing saying like we trust you, like we trust you're not going to come in here and steamroll us. So I think it's interesting, like, as you talk about, a lot of this stuff becomes largely political and it's in the way of actual good work being done.
Gary:Yeah, and I think you pointed with the CEO. I think it does take a frankly unique CEO that has either confidence in previous go-to-market experience or confidence to just intellectual curiosity to go explore kind of first principles thinking. But not that there aren't a lot of smart CEOs out there, but they come with like we all do. We come with a certain background and that is the like. We as an industry over the last 10 years haven't really helped them either because we've given them well, this is what your marketing org needs to look like, and we pre-describe these roles and we put terms like demand gen on them and others are like well, what does that mean exactly? Wave a magic wand and generate demand.
Jen:How awesome, shouldn't we all?
Gary:be doing that and and, and you know what this, what's your sales methodology and all of the stuff that they think is go to market, when it's like you're just trying to solve a customer's problems, like so how do we do that? How do we message that?
Jen:Well, what even are those problems? Like it always was funny to me when I go into companies and be like what are what do we universally agree? Are our customers problems? And it was like no one wanted to speak up because the word universally agree no one was confident that they had a universally agreed point of view.
Tiana:And like.
Jen:to me, it's so much better to just recognize that pause and say let's just figure that out first, before we start writing a thousand blogs about a thousand problems in the hope that a bullet hits a bullet, like let's just figure out what are the problems and then we can go. And I think that's true for most things in sales and marketing is just slow the hell down before you try to speed up and scale.
Gary:Yeah, yeah, amen, amen. All right, well, we man we burned through that time. We're not going to keep you longer than we promised. So then, this was awesome, thank you.
Jen:Thank you. I love speaking to people that like speak my language, like I feel like we're all singing from the same songbook.
Gary:So, yes, Amen, amen to that. So thank you for the time. Stick around a minute, but so we'll we'll. This will be out later this week on GTM pro podcast. You can check it out also on GTM proco and also check out the newsletter which we'll send out next week, which is short summary of the hot takes from Jen's discussion with us today. So, jen, thanks again and stick around for a minute To everybody else. We'll see you next week. Bye, Thank you for tuning in to GTM Pro, where you become the pro. We're here to foster your growth as a revenue leader, offering the insights you need to thrive. For further guidance, visit gtmproco 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.