speaker-0: Somewhere in the mid-2000s, a metric was born, the marketing qualified lead, or MQL for short. And arguably it made sense at the time. Forms were the gate, attention was scarce, and downloading a white paper actually meant something. Just two decades later, that one metric has given birth to an entire industry. We have software categories, job titles, comp plans, board reports, agencies, certifications, an entire economic infrastructure built on a proxy that no longer resembles the realities of B2B buying. Kerry Cunningham calls this the MQL Industrial Complex, and quite frankly he should know, because he helped write the original playbook at Serious Decisions. Then he spent the next twenty years, first at Forrester and now at Sixth Cents, mapping what B2B buyers actually do. His team just surveyed four thousand of them. And frankly, the truth might be quite uncomfortable. Buyers buy in groups of thirteen and they avoid sellers until it's almost over. And the MQL is measuring the wrong person at the wrong moment. This is real seekers after truth.

speaker-1: Are you having great sales cycles where right now you're not getting those results? Probably because the six to nine months before that, you weren't doing a good job in marketing.

speaker-0: Right. Kerry, great to see you. Welcome to Real Seekers After Truth. Wonderful to have you.

speaker-1: Yeah, great to be here. A little intimidated by the the title, but yes. ⁓ glad to be here.

speaker-0: Don't be intimidated. Don't be intimidated. It's going to be great fun. so look, you and I have spoken a lot recently about a whole load of different topics. And I think hopefully over the next sort of ⁓ few minutes we can we can dive into a few of those. But I thought ⁓ as good a place to start of it as any would be buying groups, which is ⁓ the phrase, the topic on everyone's ⁓ lips at the moment. I think Barely a customer meeting goes by when buying groups ⁓ doesn't come up as a prominent topic, people looking to understand them. But the thing that was amazing to me, as was pointed out to me on LinkedIn ⁓ a little while ago, is that actually we've known about this the the way that enterprises buy and the concept of buying groups for quite a long time, right? I think it goes back even to sort of the nineteen sixties.

speaker-1: For sure. ⁓ you know, I always say, you know, think about what it would have looked like when somebody was buying an early IBM mainframe, or for that matter, any other big thing for their business. It certainly wasn't one guy sitting in a room ⁓ you know, smoking cigarettes going, I think I'll get that one. ⁓ no, it's it's always been ⁓ a group of people and it's ⁓ for a variety of reasons. One, you probably need people from different parts of the organization and their expertise. ⁓ but then when you're making and we can we can talk about the importance of this, but when you're making a decision that's really important and and certainly somewhat risky for the organization, there's always a desire to make sure that anybody who might point fingers later is part of the process now. ⁓ and so there are multiple reasons that there would always be multiple people involved in the buying process, but it's always been this way.

speaker-0: Yeah. So it's interesting. There's this sort of that collective responsibility and also the need for specialism and skill. And as you say, we we've known that for a long time. But then I think it's in the early two thousands that serious decisions produces their ⁓ you know, ⁓ demand waterfall. And ⁓ in my mind, and you you'll know better than me, but that's really when the lead, the MQL, the the the marketing qualified lead, really becomes front and center i i in the whole way that marketing thinks. about the way that it goes about its work. Like is that is that accurate? Like why why do you think that ⁓ took my

speaker-1: Mostly yeah, mostly I think there's more to it. So, you know, I talk about the MQL industrial complex, right? So there's there's a a number of different elements that came together to create the this machinery ⁓ that's built around the MQL. So probably the first pieces were ⁓ Eloqua and Marketo, right? So ⁓ marketing automation platforms that that's what they can do. They they identify individuals who fill in forms, whatever they track that and allow you to communicate with them. So you've got this machine. that is focused on the individual. And that's ported over from a kind of a B2C context, brought into B2B. ⁓ and then that's reified in everybody's minds when you put process around that and when you build a model that describes it and now you have This canon of best practices that was produced by my old firm Serious Decisions and others, but Serious Decisions had the demand waterfall for ⁓ leads and the definitions of MQL and SAL and SQL and all of those things. And when you get all of that together, when you get the machinery and now you've got a canon of best practices and you begin to have benchmarks and things, people start stop asking altogether whether this is the right thing to do. And instead are just Talking about how do I do it better, or how do I hit the benchmark? How do I do those things? And so you create this little universe in which ⁓ everybody operates and nobody's really questioning whether we're in the right universe to begin with, or if there's a way out. ⁓ and it's been that way for a long time now.

speaker-0: It has been. I I think we're gonna dig in and talk a bit more about that MQL industrial complex in just a bit. But just to finish the timeline, so if we've got sort of ⁓ you know, from from the sixties when we've understood buying groups through to the early two thousands with the lead-centric view of the world, MQL industrial complex. And then it's in twenty s twenty seventeen that you and and Terry Flauty ⁓ with your ⁓ demand unit waterfall talk at serious decisions, funnily enough, and proposed going back to, I suppose, buying groups or or a reinvention of buying groups. What what were you seeing at the time that made you in twenty seventeen decide now is the moment when we need to rediscover this way of thinking about the world?

speaker-1: Yeah, so ⁓ Terry before me for about a year and a half and then once I joined, our job was to work with our clients to help ⁓ perfect the process of creating and managing and and converting MQLs. And ⁓ I suppose Terry is much more patient than I am in a lot of respects, but ⁓ it didn't take all that long before we got to the point where we're like, Okay, this just doesn't work. You know, like ⁓ you take people with these When you look at the numbers and it's like one percent MQL conversion from top to the bottom ⁓ of the waterfall, if we could get everybody in an organization to do exactly the right thing and implement the best practices, you can get that to two per two and a half percent. But that was your victory was doubling the MQL productivity throughout the waterfall. And it's like y as we were talking about this one day, I think we're just like, you know, that that can't be the right answer.

speaker-0: Mm-hmm.

speaker-1: Right. This this can't be how it works. And you know, we're also in this place where there are are a lot of other, you know, really smart people looking at how we do various other parts of things. So when we talk to some of the other analysts at Serious Decisions, they're talking about buyer personas and there were already people talking about buying groups, but just from the perspective of how do we create content for them and how do we, you know, do all of these other things. And it's like, well, wait a minute. So that part of the process, like creating Content for multiple buyer personas is completely disconnected from what the the end part of the process is looking at. And you know, we start to ask the question: so, you know, if that works, if your multi-persona campaign works, what would that look like in your data? And what it would look like is you'd have multiple leads, right? You would expect to have leads from multiple parts of the organization. ⁓ okay. ⁓ let's go look around and see if anybody is seeing that. And you know, we start asking those questions and the answer is no, ⁓ nobody is seeing that. And not only that, I mean this may be going in a little deep now, not only are they not seeing it, but it is happening. Like you know, w when you look at the data, do you see, ⁓ okay, you know what? You had multiple leads from a hundred organizations last quarter. What did you do with them? Well, for the most part what we do is we disqualify the second lead. ⁓ that comes in or third lead or the fourth weed. We mark it as a bad lead. Well we already have one from that company and the BDR can't get ⁓ their incentive money for qualifying that second one. ⁓ so we're just gonna get rid of it. And so you've got one part of the organization working really hard to do the right thing and create content and whatever from multiple buyer personas and the other one absolutely negating. Any possible benefit from having done that. You know, it's like, ⁓ my God, are we really doing this? Is this really what's happening?

speaker-0: I love it. I love it. And and the thing that's so funny about this for me from my experience is that, you know, there was a t there was a time when we worked according to trying to squeeze an extra percent or two out of each stage in that serious decisions funnel. I I remember the graphic, right? And and we also have been guilty in the past, not not recently, I hasten to add, of ⁓ discarding duplicate leads for all the reasons that you say it becomes best practice and fundamentally it's because i it's not the way that the measurement system is set up. And and so you kind of become beholden to a measurement system that actually is is is mad.

speaker-1: Yeah, yeah, totally. It's it's all incentives in the wrong place. ⁓ the only reason you get rid of the lead is because the BDR, when they come onto it, they can't get paid for it. They get paid for creating meetings with new accounts. You've already got one in this account. Well, we can't can't get one here. Let's get rid of that. Without that part of the f that function understanding what that additional signal means. They just see it as duplicates.

speaker-0: But it it becomes so pervasive. I'm I'm realizing as we're talking like some of the conversations that we've we've had with people in the past in in our own business, where it's like we'll we'll get an opportunity with, I don't know, IBM, right? And ⁓ we'll we'll and again, this is many years ago, and we'll close down the opportunity, close lost, whatever wasn't the right time. And then we'll sort of talk to the sales rep and we'll say, Well, ⁓ you know, how did it go with IBM? Are we still prospecting into them? And and they'll be sort of like, Well, no, no, no, we had an opportunity, but it's closed lost, so we're moving on to another account. And it's like, well, what are you doing? But to to me as I'm thinking, as we're talking, like that's another indication of that lead centric view, which is IBM is one is one lead, right? It it it becomes pervasive in all the thinking.

speaker-1: Yeah, a hundred percent. Right. So you yeah. ⁓ so the better you do your job, the worse the stats are gonna look in that old measurement system. Right. So if you actually do succeed, you end up crushing your lead conversion rates. ⁓ and and you know, the what you're pointing to is you're probably really missing a significant number of opportunities ⁓ that are knocking on your door. I mean that's the real Like what set my hair on fire about this is it's it's not just that there are opportunities out there you're not seeing. These are ones that actually came knocking, right? These are ones or you got them there, right, and you you've ignored them. Now, I mean in in the way that I understand buying to work now, I think probably those accounts if you were a a normal brand that people knew and you were part of the

speaker-0: And you turn them away.

speaker-1: you know, the set of ⁓ of accounts that's getting or the companies that's getting some market share anyway, you know, th they're not gonna not buy from you because you don't call them back or because you don't chase them down. But you're not doing anything to improve your chances. and you're missing the accounting for how it came to be, right? That's the for me the biggest thing, right? Is is if you paid to market to three different people inside an organization. You did that for six months. And you got, let's say you got three or four leads, which is not unusual if you're marketing to a big account. Only one of those ever gets qualified and counted. All right, so you've got a 25% conversion rate on your leads from this account. Now that may turn into pipeline and opportunity and revenue. Your marketing has done its job and it's worked effectively. You know, you you've gotten that account in. But one, you weren't able to recognize that it was happening. And so the fact that it happened is it's up to the buyer completely. It's almost always that way anyway, but that's you know, you don't want to leave things to chance like that. But the worst thing is you got a twenty-five percent conversion rate on that account leads when it should be a hundred, right? You you know, you absolutely crushed it with that account and it's hurting your conversion rates. That's and and so when you go to look at what worked, what didn't, and all of that stuff. What you're gonna come away with are the wrong ⁓ ideas about what worked and what didn't, and you make the wrong decisions and I think that's been going on for twenty years.

speaker-0: Yeah. And and it also then gets propagated through the whole rest of the business, right? So what we see quite a lot of is is people wanting to move away from that way of thinking, but the whole rest of the company has been educated to ask them about MQLs and to measure their value in terms of MQLs. And so marketing, you know, in some of the businesses that I speak to has almost become become a prisoner ⁓ to MQLs because the rest of the business has built this whole architecture aro around the idea, ⁓ which is the lens through which they see the whole function.

speaker-1: Yeah, that's it. And so, you know, even today, ⁓ and even here at Sixth Sense, I you know, everything seems to focus on that moment where something is handed to a person in the sales organization or even if the BDR is in marketing. But everything's focused on that moment, as if that's the moment that matters, because it's it has seemed very much like that's the moment that matters. But that moment only matters if you've done a lot of work that that leads up to that moment. And so that's the thing that we've we've really missed as a function, as an industry whenever over the last fifteen years is the the really important stuff is happening long before that moment. By the time that moment comes, it's a feta complete, right? You're this it is what it is, you're not gonna change the outcomes very much.

speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. And so why do you think you know, recently, as I say, pretty much every customer meeting that I'm in, we're talking about buying groups in some way, shape or form. Why do you think now? What what's changed recently?

speaker-1: You know, I think ⁓ a couple of people who ⁓ are prominent really prominent in B2B marketing circles, like John Miller for instance, ⁓ who is ⁓ a founder of Marketo and one of the chief architects of the MQL industrial complex, is has come out and is making ⁓ a lot of noise about you know moving past that and that's not the right thing and and ⁓ all of that. So I think there have been a number of things like that. We've been at it now for nine years also. You know, talking about this. So I think, you know, these things ⁓ that you you pick up ⁓ a few people and a few percentage points of people every year where they're ⁓ talking about this and recognizing the problem. Then I think the other thing is that ⁓ you know, there are a couple of other ⁓ movements or or things that have happened in the industry. So, you know, account based marketing is a thing for a long time. Account based marketing and lead based marketing ⁓ are really ⁓ oil and water and can't exist in the same place very well. They have existed in the same place, but where they do, neither one works particularly well. ⁓ so I think, you know, people have recognized that to some extent. People have recognized, you know, my ABM isn't working, I've got this lead-based thing underneath. They finally see some things out on ⁓ you know, the internet or at conferences or wherever it is about well, there's this other approach where we're looking at buying groups, and so that comes in. ⁓ so I think we've, you know, we've finally had enough people talking about it for a long enough period of time and enough failure. Just abject failure. ⁓ I think that's actually, if if I were to say that probably is the biggest factor, is that you know for a long time, ⁓ BDB companies were able to grow, print money, ⁓ in a lot of cases, at least print it ⁓ on on the VC's printers. and it was easy to attribute that success, at least in part, to your MQL-based processes, because everybody had them going. ⁓ But when market growth slows down, ⁓ when your product market fit is not enough to have you continue to grow, then you start looking at the processes that you've had ⁓ in place. And I think people have done that. They've had to look at the processes, and when they look at them what they see is that actually isn't working the way that we had hoped and ⁓ or the way that we thought. So I think there's a combination of these things that have kind of kind of come to pass. But I think the economics is probably the biggest factor. People are just looking at it now and going, Yeah, that doesn't work. And then when you look at the logic of it, no, it doesn't make sense at all. You combine those things and you go, Okay, you know, what's the what's the real unit of demand? And that's how we ended up talking about it back in the day.

speaker-0: Yeah, makes a ton of sense and and like we we see a lot of this day in, day out. So it's all it's all it's all true, ⁓ from from where I'm sitting, right, at at that point. But coming back to the MQL ⁓ industrial complex, like sort of digging in on that, I think It's really interesting how these things come about, right? And how they how they turn in and and they get their own momentum. And there's a wonderful Einstein quote, which is that not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that counts ⁓ no sorry, not everything that is counted counts, right? You know, which is attributed to Einstein whether it was or not, I don't know. But listening to your talk there around like that desire to have that idea of a funnel and conversion rates and units and best practice and everything that gets wrapped up in that, for me it feels like that's a huge factor, is that that human desire. to be able to count something and look at it and and apportion it.

speaker-1: It is, yeah, and I think of that as a ⁓ you know, we we really like deterministic processes, things that we can look at and say, if I do this, then that will happen. What we really don't like is if I do that, then that increases the likelihood of the thing I want to happen by twenty percent. ⁓ that is anathema in B2B. It has been, it still really is. You if you're applying for The job of CMO in a company over the last 15 or 20 years in B2B. And the CEO says, So what do you do about increasing pipeline? And say, Well, I run these programs and we increase the likelihood that accounts are going to convert by X percent. If you say that, and then somebody comes in the room next and says, ⁓ yeah, I run these programs and I drive pipeline, and it goes, you know, you are not going to get the job if you're talking about increasing the probabilities of things happening. You know, you're just not. ⁓ You're the one who's thinking about it the right way, ⁓ you know, but you're not gonna get the job. ⁓ and you probably yeah. So anyway, that that I think is a big part of it. It's you know, ⁓ to to use ⁓ John Miller as an example here again, I mean he talks about the the gumball machine ⁓ model of B2B. Put a you know, drop a quarter in and get your gumball out and that's what you expect and what you want. but unfortunately it just doesn't work that way. ⁓ It is a probabilistic thing, right? We do this, there's a chance that it's gonna produce something between this and this, and you know, we're gonna find out, right? Now if you're doing that, if you're running those little experiments, those probabilistic ones, and you're looking at what actually does work and what doesn't work, then you can improve over time and increase the odds and all of those things. But that isn't what we've been doing.

speaker-0: Yeah, yeah. I think that the point you make around sort of that desire to have to have certainty is really interesting. And I know we've we've spoken about ⁓ Martin Heidegger previously. Right. He has this idea all the way back in the twenties. And I I I always wonder like how these philosophers can see stuff so far in the future. But his contention was that like in in the modern world, thinking forward decades at his time, everything just gets reduced down to resources to be counted and to be ⁓ used and to be managed in that way. ⁓ and all of the meaning is stripped. And and I think again, that's sort of where we've ended up a little bit with this with this path, right?

speaker-1: It is, yeah. Yeah, I think that's it. Yeah.

speaker-0: Yeah. And and ⁓ just sort of sticking sticking with sort of twentieth century thinkers, the idea that first we shape our tools, then our tools shape us, ⁓ which is a a Marshall McCu ⁓ Marshall McLuhan quote. And I think again with this, when we think about, you know, ⁓ you made the point around Marketto coming in and Alcro and all of these things, and obviously those tools were built and procured and used and it's shaped a whole generation of of B2B marketers, right? From from the tools.

speaker-1: Yeah, so and I and I think that's actually a really, really big part of what's happening today and the difficulty we face. So, you know, I I have used this term MQL industrial complex because it it it communicates this idea that there's a lot more than just a a bunch of technologies or some practices or some ideas. It's really all of these things together that are built up that that create ⁓ an economy, if you will, that create an ecosystem. ⁓ probably a better word of the way that we operate. And ⁓ the weight of that ecosystem is enormous. You know, and and I mean if you're a B2B marketer today and you say, okay, ⁓ let's start from scratch and we're not going to just use and do any of the old things. I mean what are you gonna do? It's hard, right? ⁓ and you probably again you're not gonna get the job if you tell the CEO that you know we're not gonna do anything like anybody's ever done before. ⁓ we think it's all nonsense. You you're probably not gonna get a job. ⁓ you know that's that's not gonna work. And so I think being able to recognize that ⁓ well ⁓ going back to the that point I think if you look at ⁓ the last say fifteen or so it's almost twenty years now with Marketo and Elequa and marketing automation leads and then the serious decisions, waterfalls and all of that, like all of the people who are in charge of B to B organizations today grew up in in business in that period of time. And so the people who are running things today are people who built their success in their careers either from that stuff directly if they're marketing people, or at least in that environment if they're salespeople or or whatever else. That was the model ⁓ that was everywhere and that was running and that's what you know. So if you're a a company leader today, you're on boards today, that's the world that you grew up in. And you have ample ⁓ and this is where my concept of folklore debt comes in here. You have ample sets of stories and narratives that you can tell about why that is what makes you successful. You built your career ⁓ on the back of companies that had great MQL-based processes. You built your career on the MQL-bas-based process if you were a marketer, right? ⁓ that's what you did well, or you had people who did that well, you knew how to set them up and get them fixed, you know how to get them running, all of those things, right? And that's what got you to the place you are today. So one, just as a human being, you're not gonna get to that place for the most part. Very few people are gonna go, all right, well here I am now, and you know what? But that was probably all a fiction. that probably wasn't really what was happening before. ⁓ and now I'm gonna rethink everything. That's not really how we operate.

speaker-0: It requires you to totally reevaluate e everything that's got you up until this point. And I know marketers who've who've ⁓ exactly as you say have spent a brilliant marketers, intelligent individuals, motivated, who've probably been in in that space for sort of fifteen years, twenty years. It's their whole professional career. It's how they see themselves, you know, I MQL, therefore I am. I think I might get that printed on a t shirt. and it's like it's like how they it's how they fund their life. It's it's like this is my career, this is my trajectory. And it's very, very difficult to give that up. But the thing that's really interesting talking to people in that position that that I find, I don't know if you see the same, i is they don't always recognize all all of the sort of ⁓ transferable skills that they've got, all the ways of thinking, all the analysis techniques. You just need to take all of that and apply it to a different surface area. But but it's still really hard to make that shift, right?

speaker-1: Yeah, it i it is really hard. It's a big part ⁓ ego. ⁓ it's it's also big because you know, the rest of the what you're gonna do next is not nearly as well defined. ⁓ you're not walking into an arena where everything is determined, now we know what to do next. ⁓ there's a lot more of that than people think. Like it's it's not all up for grabs. And there's a good deal you can say about like if you are really good at producing leads and you you produce leads, multiple leads from a company and multiple buyer personas, like you're already there. Right? You're producing you're producing the result, but what we need to be able to do is use that result differently inside and then account for it differently. So there are things about it that seem enormously different, ⁓ but probably a lot of what you really were good at, the stuff that really was working, is w we can retain that. We can we can hang on to a lot of the stuff that really worked, but there's this back end of it, you know, how we work the leads and all and accounted for that, that part's gotta go.

speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we've ended up in a place now I c I can't remember the exact stat, but I remember it's eighty four percent. But ⁓ propolis, right? Recently eighty four percent of CE COs cannot properly understand the value of marketing beyond the lead or something like that. We've ended up in a place where it's got that extreme. I don't know if you saw that report.

speaker-1: I didn't know, but yeah, I'm not surprised by the

speaker-0: It's it's pretty staggering. And I think there's there's ⁓ there's other similar stats in there. So it's it's got pretty extreme. ⁓ moving on from sort of how we got there. ⁓ I have it on on good authority that ⁓ within this whole mixture of stuff, ⁓ anonymous web traffic is something that particularly gets your goat, right? What's the what's the story with anonymous web traffic?

speaker-1: So ⁓ you know, I just encountered I started encountering this stat ⁓ back you know twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen when we started talking about buying groups and we started looking around for like what you know, okay, wait a minute. We're you know, it's it's kind of started with this realization, wait a minute, we're marketing to multiple buyer personas, but we're not accounting for whether we get leads from them. And then just within the umbrella of like, okay, so what does actually get accounted for and how do we look at things? I started looking at numbers of like how many what percentage of people actually fill in forms when they get to a B2B website? And you know, the extent number then I think was three percent. ⁓ and when you dig into it, ⁓ so one, that's pretty awful, and for a little while it's like, ⁓ my god, wait, wait a minute. So we're spending money and three percent of it results in ⁓ in in this thing that we're counting in like all of marketing's value is attached to the three percent and that's it. Now, when you dig into it a little bit, you find out, well, that it's not really that, because about half of B2B web traffic somewhere in there is bots and other stuff. So, you know, of the things that are real human beings coming to your website, maybe five or six or seven percent of those people who are real people fill informs. ⁓ when we went out and asked people via survey, do you feel informed when you're in market ⁓ for solutions? It comes back at about 30%. of people who are part of an active buying group will fill in a form. but what that tells you is still most people don't. And if the only way you're accounting for the results of your marketing is by looking at people who filled in forms, you are missing almost all of it. Like approximately all of it. Right if you want to understand that influence. And the rest of it's in anonymous traffic, right? ⁓ That would that was the that was the that was Actually, what ultimately got me to six cents, I was covering the ⁓ the predictive analytics space at the time. And that's what not just six sense set set six cents, but some of the others were talking about. And it's like, okay, we've got to we can identify where that anonymous traffic is coming from, what it counts. And so, you know, we we started saying, well, if you have two leads from an account, that's certainly a much, much stronger ⁓ signal than if you have one, if you have three that's stronger than two. But if you have any of those things and you know that there are people on your website anonymously from those accounts, then that sheds a completely new light on the leads, doesn't it? I mean ⁓ I might not care. I shouldn't care if I've got one person from an account ⁓ who's filled in a form and and I'm talking about a you Fortune 1000 account or something like that. But if twenty other people have come to my website anonymously at the same time, now I actually should care. I should care a lot, right, about what's going on in that account. So we just started doing that logic, like, okay, wait a wait a minute, you know, we're just marketing is really, really doing a terrible job of accounting for the influence that it's already having. ⁓ and it's almost all coming through either these second or third leads or anonymous traffic.

speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah. It's really it's really crazy, like when you think about the amount of money that people spend building websites, driving traffic to websites through advertising, all the rest of it, and it's all squeezed through that last little bit, the three percent, as you say, that actually go and fill in the form. Whereas I guess I think the way you explained it to me previously was that, you know, what would you expect to see if a buying group was forming? You'd expect to see exactly as you say, multiple people on the website, different functions, different parts, maybe a couple of them fill in a form, right? But we we look at it completely different.

speaker-1: Yeah, yeah, we look at it a completely different way. And not only that, the thing that we just talked about a minute ago ⁓ is really important to understand, and that is that ⁓ if you see somebody filling in a form, ⁓ it's either going to be somebody who's not in a buying process at all, but they're the right kinds of people. And we we should talk about this a little bit too, because I think a big part of the MQL industrial complex became content marketing. ⁓ and so In the early days of all of this of of Marketo and of web pages and forms, if somebody came to your website and they filled out a form in two thousand seven or eight or nine, that person really wanted ⁓ something from you, right? They were almost certainly a really good prospect because there was nothing else on your website. and so they were coming to find out about your solutions because they were a potential. And then we asked ourselves, so how do we get more of those people to come to our website? Well, let's create content they're interested in. I mean, it's a brilliant idea. And it works really well. The the issue is when you get a lot more people coming to your website, you're not necessarily creating more actual in-market buyers. What you're doing is getting more of the people who are the right people to come to your website and and look at you and be influenced by you. And that's absolutely brilliant. The thing is you have to adjust your expectations of what it means that somebody is now coming to your website. And nobody did that. Right? That that's the thing that nobody did. ⁓ and you know, in high I didn't do it either. In hindsight, you look at it and you go, ⁓ duh, that's like the most obvious thing in the world. But that's not the way we looked at it. We just thought, how can we get more of this proximate result? We we just we're just trying to get more form fills. How do we get more form fills? Well, I can get more form fills without changing anything about whether accounts are in market or we get more deals. And that's exactly what we did.

speaker-0: It's putting the the the the cart before the horse or however you however you want to say it, right? It's it's focusing on totally the wrong thing, trying to optimize the the ⁓ the the sort of lagging indicator rather than focusing on what's the lead, what's actually gonna move this. And and you know, there is a role, you know, obviously we we we help businesses an awful lot with with content and obviously there's a role for it in thought leadership and driving that sort of brand awareness. But we've seen a massive drop off of people gating content ⁓ for I think it part of Partly for the reason that you flagged there and and also with the influence of like AI and L L Ms and all of this kind of stuff, making that general information far more available.

speaker-1: We started talking about not you know, I mean kind of it it's one of those things that follows directly in the logic is ⁓ w if if you know that people are not going to fill out forms, you can either ⁓ try to get them to fill out forms, try try to get better at getting those people to fill out forms, or you can say, We're not going to get better at it, ⁓ or there isn't a better that you can get. And so what we're going to do is try to understand more about whether those people are on our website and being influenced without having them fill in a form. And so I think, you know, for ten years or so we tried to get better at getting people to fill in the forms. ⁓ and ⁓ you you can't. Like the very oldest number I saw was like two thousand twelve, I think it was a three percent ⁓ form fill rate, and it's about three percent today. ⁓ you know, it's just that's it. Almost nobody's going to fill in a form. I do have some, I do have some data I can share from the the ⁓ survey that we're collecting on right now. ⁓ so we asked people directly when you were in market, did you do anything to conceal your identity from the companies that you were evaluating? And ⁓ the answer is ⁓ 60% said they actively ⁓ concealed their. identity by using different names, different emails, those kinds of things, or having somebody else fill in a form. About ten percent said they didn't encounter any forms, and I think that's great. So that means more people are doing what you're talking about, which is not putting forms there. And only about thirty three percent or so ⁓ said that no, I've I just used my name. So again that number matches almost exactly the number of people say they fill in forms. It's just You know, a very small minority of the people that you want to influence are ever going to fill in a form and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. Now we burned that bridge down. When we started chasing people down with BDRs and and hounding them with emails and phone calls, we very quickly educated people about not filling in forms. And ⁓ th the other piece of this is that and the thing that for me is amusing slash frustrating is

speaker-0: Yes, I

speaker-1: If I talk to a room full of marketers about this and I just ask them, do you fill in forms for solutions, vendors, and the answer is no, ⁓ at exactly the same rate as for every other audience I've ever talked to. Of course they don't. But their goals, their success is predicated on other people doing it at a rate that they never would. And I think you just gotta, you know, it's like, okay, we can point this point this out to you once, but Really one should be enough, right? You know?

speaker-0: Yeah. But it's it's a great technique, and and I I've I'm very much part of that 60%, right? I always use fake names, fake email addresses because I know what's going to happen. My phone, I mean, it rings enough anyway, as it is. You know, I get enough of those things anyway. I don't want more. ⁓ but the but the you've you've mentioned that to me previously, this idea of getting people to talk about how they buy. And you know, the last time you made a purchase, take take me through the process. How did that work? And they talk about it and then you sort of hold up hold it up to the light in terms of how they market today is incredibly effective, right? It it's very difficult to hold those two mental models in your mind at the same time and not feel like something needs to change. It is

speaker-1: Is, yeah, it's it's ⁓ it's astounding to me and and once it's if I just sit and look at it sort of ⁓ intellectually, I think, you know, ⁓ how is it possible for people to be going through entire careers basing their potential success on having people do stuff that they know they would never do. You know, and operating this. And then I think, yeah, you know, but we all do that all the time and all over the place. You know, we compartmentalize. We're very, very good at that. But that's a place where we just have to be able to see that now and just stop doing it. You know, ask yourself the the the self-reflective question, would I ever respond to something like I'm I need these people to do? And if the answer is no, just don't do it. You've got to find another one.

speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, I I I borrowed that with ⁓ I did a talk at B2B Ignite and I got everyone to put up their hand if they've made a purchase in the last like twenty four months and I got hands to go to go down, like if you filled in a form, if you did whatever. And so we we kind of tried that as a bit of an experiment. There were still a few people with their hands left at the end where they like fill in forms, use their right details. But as you say, the overwhelming majority of the hand goes down. So yes, that was a that was a fun experiment.

speaker-1: Yeah. Yeah. No, it's perfect.

speaker-0: And so when we're thinking about that that other way of looking ⁓ at buying, sort of flipping from that that moment that that you know so much value is ascribed to the moment when someone fills in a form, we we know from your research, ⁓ everyone should know, ⁓ that, you know, ⁓ shortlists, right, rank shortlist comes in about sixty one percent of the way through the buying journey ⁓ and the vendor at the top wins in eighty percent of cases, right? So you you're certainly not winning generally at the point where a form gets filled in. You're not even winning ⁓ necessarily at the point where the buying group moves to the validation phase. You're winning even earlier than that. Right. It it happens so early. Yeah.

speaker-1: And and and f so we we have to ⁓ kind of ground this in the in in the bigger picture of ⁓ what your your audience, your ICP, your your the set of accounts that you care about looks like. And then you as a company, how long have you been in business doing things in you know with with that audience? And there's a really good chance that almost anybody hearing this podcast, their company and their They're the companies that they're selling to have all been around for between 10 and 20 years, if not longer. ⁓ even if they're a s you're a SaaS company, chances are it's ten to twenty years that you've been in business. Now there's also a really good chance that it's not a lot longer than that. and so back twenty years ago, if you're certainly if you're a SaaS company, twenty years ago you you probably didn't exist. Fifteen years ago you were new, your potential prospects didn't know about you, didn't understand what you did, had you they had to be educated. ⁓ the only way to find them was to prospect to them all of that. But that hasn't been true for a long time. And the people who are now the people who are making decisions about whether to buy you or somebody else, they've been in that same position evaluating you many times over their the course of their career. And your solutions and all of that might change a lot. And so when we talk about when did they make decisions, we just asked questions in our new survey that said, you know, ⁓ do you keep up on ⁓ the solutions and the categories of interest to you in between buying journeys? The answer is yes, 96% of the time, because of course it is. And if you asked a room full of marketers to raise their hands on that, they'd all raise their hands, right? ⁓ did your opinion of the vendors change between the last time you bought and the time you went into market this time? Not the time you bought, but the time you went in? The answer is yes, 35-40% of the time. Right? So there's real movement happening in between, right? So we can't ignore. the audience that we care about when they're not in market. But then they go into market and they're in market for six months on average, six, seven months, before they're willing to talk to us, even though they know us, they've evaluated us, and maybe because they know us and they've evaluated us, they don't want vendor voices in the room as internally they're working on understanding what they're going to do. They want to do that with trusted third parties and some others. They don't want the vendors in the room. One other one other ⁓ question from our new survey this is unpublished and preliminary data, the numbers will change before we ⁓ publish it. We also asked people on day one of your buying journey, how many opinions were there about what the organization should do in this value and say, ⁓ no, we should buy. ⁓ it was two or more 75% of the time. So like the your a buying group is entering 75% of buying journeys. With multiple opinions already in place about what the organization should do. So we've had this mental model of a buying process as this objective journey of discovery. You know, let's let's lock arms and walk down and see what's out there for us. That's complete BS. You know, ⁓ everybody involved in that buying process already knows what's out there because they've already used them, evaluated them, they have their favorites, they have their biases. And the buying journey is really about ironing those out. And that's where you want a trusted third-party voice, but you don't want ⁓ vendor voices in everybody's ear creating chaos in that buying process. And that's how buyers view that.

speaker-0: Got it. And so when you talk about seventy five percent of the time, I think you said, you know, there's there's ⁓ a plurality of different views ⁓ around what what should be done. Do you think that gives rise to this ⁓ to the stat I think it's something like ⁓ sixty percent of buying groups fall apart before they actually get to market because they can't agree? Is that is that what we're seeing there? They come in a and and they never actually get to a resolution where there's a single path forward.

speaker-1: Yeah, there's ⁓ so that the number I quote is from ⁓ LinkedIn B2B Institute. And it's forty percent of buying processes that fail specifically because the buying group can't agree. So we know that there's massive attrition across the buying journey. Like, you know, they're in the early stages there's about a third of your audience is in market, and then about two percent actually end up buying. So there's just massive buying group attrition across the buying journey. And you know, roughly half of it, forty or so percent, is just because the buying group can't agree on what to do. ⁓ and lots of other things come up, ⁓ and you probably can't change all forty of those percent, but you could certainly impact that that's forty percent. And like if if the buying group can't agree, you need to go out and find out why your buying group might not be able to agree. ⁓ and like What do the finance people think about your solution, or what do the manufacturing people think about your solution that's different from the finance people? How do they think about that and how can you mitigate that difference in your audience? And if you can do that, you're going to help buying groups move further through their buying process. And I think that's that's really important.

speaker-0: That's a really interesting thing. So let let's unpack that, right? Because I I agree. I I think there's like a really interesting role there because i if misalignment, you know, causes so many buying groups to fall apart, surely there's a role for for ⁓ vendors, for providers to help those buying groups align. ⁓ surely there's you know, finance is seeing it this way. So so that that potentially is a place where marketing really c can have a definite impact by understanding where the divergence is and helping people to sort of see the same problem and and and move forward.

speaker-1: And that's you know, that's what marketing ⁓ is built to be good at. That's what marketing should care about is understanding your buyers and understanding what it is that ⁓ that they need. Now the thing is we've we've been laser focused on our primary buyer persona. and everything that we do is built for our primary buyer persona and the specific issues that our primary buyer persona has that we treat with our solutions. ⁓ and where where we need to understand you can think about it two ways. One is, well, the biggest probably the biggest problem that our primary buyer persona has is other people who have opinions about what they should do ⁓ in their organization. So how do you help your buyer persona with those other people's opinions? Right? So if if I think of finance all the time, we got a marketing solution, finance doesn't understand it. So finance is always looking for ways to minimize the spend on marketing, which it sees as a cost center Really and nothing else. So, how does how do you help your buyers talk to their finance organization, the purchasing organization, etc., in a way that will help allay their fears and understand what the value of the solution is? Do you do anything to actively help your buyers do that before you get to the sellers? Because sellers are are built to do that. But as we know, by the time you get to that sales process, It's probably too late. Right? So your content, your influencers, however you do this, they've got that's got to help them do that. And then of course, do you have if if you get somebody from the finance office coming to your website, are they going to find anything that's in language that they understand that they care about? ⁓ and the answer I think is going to be no, ⁓ for for almost everybody. You know, and not just I use finance as an example, but whoever those supporting functions are that have a voice in whether you get ⁓ bought or not. ⁓ I think that's a a really important frontier for us.

speaker-0: Yeah. So stitching these ideas together, like are we talking about a a situation where you know you perhaps you you you you know you're obviously producing the right content for different personas, different ⁓ members of the buying group, generally for general consumption, but you start to see ⁓ a spike of anonymous web track traffic that you're tracking through and you're working out, look, we've got fifteen people from company A, large enterprise A, and then potentially digging in and trying to understand, well, do we potentially have a finance persona here who typically shows up in our buying groups based on what's being read? If not, what do we do about it? ⁓ are we seeing a I don't know, a CMO persona based on reading activity? If not, what do we do about that? For me, that's where it gets really interesting is trying to uncover the buying group and has everyone been served with the right inform ⁓ information ⁓ in order to make sure that they've got ⁓ got the best probability of aligning and and you know, not falling out and moving forward? Yeah.

speaker-1: I think what you're pointing to is exactly the right place to go. So imagine that you're on your website for, you know, you you you you whoever you are probably have multiple solutions for this solution. You have content that's aimed at your primary buyer persona, that's aimed at a finance, a purchasing person, maybe a legal or a CISO or whoever it is, whoever those key buyer personas are, you've got content aimed at all of them. And now you're looking not just at people who come and see a webinar, so give you their name, but you're also looking at the anonymous traffic on your website. Now, if you've got a bunch of anonymous traffic and it's been coming and checking you out for a couple of months, but nobody has gone to the procurement page where you talk about that, or nobody has gone to the accounting, you will you know you've got an issue there. ⁓ and one, that that buying group may not be very far along in their process yet. ⁓ they or It may be that those ⁓ f people inside that organization in those functions ⁓ have some sort of bias against you and are are not interested in you. ⁓ or whatever it might be, but you've got an issue that you need to take care of ⁓ or at least need to try to take care of. And being able to see it at that level, I don't it's not science fiction, you know, like this is this is entirely doable. In the past, so R what we're doing with AI right now, Gen AI and content, is we're just building more content, more of the same stuff for the same people in those organizations. I think the big shift's gotta be, okay, now it's trying it's time to help that person talk to the other people, but then let's if we build content out in areas of our website so that people from those other functions can come and see and now we can start to look to see whether we're actually getting traffic. ⁓ and if we're getting traffic, does that does that port ten better results later on?

speaker-0: Yeah, yeah. And I think that idea of of sort of equipping n certainly known stakeholders, but also unknown ones, I suppose, ⁓ to go and talk to other people in the org who otherwise probably would never come to your website because, you know, why would they? ⁓ and the importance of that, and I I'm sure you'll know the stats better than me, but the the preponderance or or the number of ⁓ hidden members of the buying group. who often hold incredible veto power. And I don't remember the stat, but it's something like, you know, that they can kill a buying group in not literally, ⁓ in fifty percent of cases because they don't like it or they've had a bad experience. It tends to be people in sort of IT or in whatever, where it's like they've got that ultimate ability to have a veto. And if we don't equip the people who do want to move forwards to go and convince those people, y again, you're you're suffering potentially a fifty percent ⁓ loss rate just because those those people aren't are never going to get on board, right?

speaker-1: And I think one of the that's exactly right. And I think one of the questions everybody's got to ask themselves and and give themselves an honest answer here is for your solution, the category of s your solution, do your buyers have to buy it or is it a discretionary spend? And it may be important, it may be a big discretionary spend, but do they have to? Can they operate without it? If they can operate without it, ⁓ well let's say the ⁓ do the other case first. If they can't operate without it, ⁓ then those Secondary buyer personas or support buyer personas almost certainly really understand the category and the value of the category well. ⁓ and educating them on the category and you know is probably less what you need to do, but you still need to make the case about why you're the best choice within that category. But if you are in the discretionary category where your audience doesn't absolutely have to buy you, then there's a really good chance that those support functions are not entirely bought in. on the value of the not you as a vendor, the category. And so we we asked, this is this is more kind of sneak preview data, but we asked buyers this time, what was more difficult for your buying group in this buying process, justifying the category or deciding which vendor within the category? And it's 50-50. Right? ⁓ yeah, so I think that that's it's a huge issue.

speaker-0: Yeah. But but this this is the great thing and I I think I think we've spoken about this previously as well, is the idea that, you know, through all of the all of the ⁓ the content that you're producing, all of the materials, all the education that you're doing, fundamentally it is trying to get people to align on the category, not to align on you as a vendor as like we're the ones, you you should pick us, but instead sort of selling them on the idea, on the problem, on the benefits of doing all of this. And the way that I see it in my in my world, and I have absolutely no proof for this, but it makes logical sense. Is that if you do that and you're the one that helps the buying group align, who else is going to be at the top of the short list? You you don't need to sell yourself. You already did it because you were helpful.

speaker-1: That's right. I think, you know, you're you're auditioning as a business partner. ⁓ and if you're helping them come to a decision, ⁓ then I think they're gonna like you for it. There's another there's a little piece of evidence that that supports this idea. So you know, we ask people who are the what were the most important resources for you in making your decision. And somewhat strangely, people say that ⁓ sales reps are really important. And I say strangely because they also tell us they've already made their decision. preliminary decision before they get to that stage. But the number of people who say that sales reps were really important in in helping them get to their decision and the number number of people who buy exactly what they plan to buy beforehand is very similar. And so I think what's happening is a buying group absolutely loves a sales rep from the company that they preferred who gets them over the line with no trouble. Like who who can say, All right, so you know You're a top vendor. Let's get through this process with no hanky panky, no changing vendors, none of this other stuff. If you do a great job as a sales rep, they're absolutely gonna love you for it, right? Yeah, you you got them what they wanted. They they entered the process wanting to buy from you and you made it easy. And and buyers love that. They do not want. Once they get to that point, they don't want to change their mind. They don't wanna have to backtrack. ⁓ a lot of the reasons that

speaker-0: Because you made them look good. Yeah.

speaker-1: organizations would change. You know, if if they enter the sales process favoring vendor A, the primary reason they would end up buying from vendor B is that vendor A wouldn't come down on their price where they thought they would. And the second one is there's a capability in that solution that isn't what they thought it was. So if you get to if you get to the point where you're talking to sellers and you f favor vendor A, ⁓ and then vendor A works with you on the price shows you how the product works the way it is and gets everybody comfortable with it. They absolutely love you. Absolutely love you and you're the most important person, right? Not because you helped them decide, because you ratified the decision they already made. And everybody, yeah, we all love that, right? You you know I tell you something and you tell me that I'm right. Well Yeah.

speaker-0: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. We we we we love to have our prejudices reconfirmed. And particularly when it's a group prejudice, right? I mean, one of my favorite stats from the report last year, and I'm gonna do round numbers 'cause I can never remember the specifics, but that the buying group actually through the validation phase changes their mind in about forty percent of cases. Keep keeping me honest on here. Yeah. That only changes the outcome. in half of the so what's happening there, sorry I should finish that sentence, people who don't know that that stat. So forty percent of the time the buying group reorders their short list essentially and says, ⁓ the the one that we thought was number one is actually number three and number five as it turns out is number one. But that only changes the actual outcome in half of those times. So half the time the buying group agrees that they got it wrong but still goes ahead, which I think is fascinating and speaks to that point. Like everyone just wants an easy ride from that point. Let's just go ahead, let's just do what we agreed we were going to do.

speaker-1: Yeah. And and you know, this is one of those other things that when you say this to a a room full of marketers, they understand this 'cause everybody's been through these buying processes where it's really hard to get everybody to agree. And you know, think seventy five percent of these buying processes, everybody's you got two or more opinions starting and it took you six months to get that ironed out and get to the point where you got agreement, you know what you're gonna do. Any change to that going after that is is unwanted and unwelcome.

speaker-0: Got to go all the way back. It reminds me of like manufacturing processes for some reason, right? Where you you you know you get through design, you get through prototyping, and if you get to the end and you decide that you want to move a screw in the design, you have to go all the way. No one wants to do that because it's all the cost and people have moved on. And so we know that this is how this is how these things work. And going back to the point on on sales and and you know good sales reps and all the rest of it, I I agree that you know the sales rep that helps the preferred vendor get over the line and what have you is great. But the way I think about it as well is even if you don't win, right? Say you were number two or number three on the list and so the odds were stacked against you from day one. The way I see it is that if you do a wonderful job as a salesperson, you know, you listen, you understand, you're helpful, all the rest of it, that's gotta help your position on the short list next time. Right? Yeah. ⁓

speaker-1: Yeah, so I a hundred percent. I mean, if you're changing forty percent of hearts and minds ⁓ during that process, that means that now you've got to say so we also know ⁓ buyers are gonna you know, about a third of buyers are gonna change their opinions between buying cycles, but you've got forty percent of the people that you're engaging in sales cycles who now are changing their mind and they like vendor B better or whatever. So you are changing a lot of hearts and minds and as long as one you continue to to maintain that relationship. ⁓ over time. You've got something to build on and put yourself in pole position next time around. ⁓ we're not good at taking even that long of a a future view in B to B, but ⁓ we we absolutely must, right? ⁓ our buyers do, and we have to.

speaker-0: And it's really difficult though, isn't it, just generally zooming out because, you know, businesses you know run month to month, quarter to quarter annually. It's like if if you if you go to the CFO and you say, Look, good news, ⁓ you know, our win rate was appalling this quarter, it was dreadful. But we did a really nice job in the sales funnel. So in two years, when those contracts come up, we're gonna be quids in. This is like it it forget it. You know, it's just not a compelling message. But Yeah, exactly. And I I think that's that's sort of the the overall challenge that we've come back to a few times, which is which is just like the the Patience for results.

speaker-1: I think there is a there's a measure so a hundred percent agree on that. There is a measurable thing here. ⁓ and the measurable thing is you can do MPS scores essentially on your sales process and you should. Right. So you should be measuring the extent to which your buyers think that that sales process was handled really well. Win or lose. ⁓ you should do that. And I know plenty of companies ⁓ from my experience in the past that do that. ⁓ so you can understand it's kind of ⁓ you know, in in in the US in baseball you have hitters who have a very low success rate. But you can look at underlying metrics and understand whether their current low success rate is kind of a matter of luck and there's a lot of it. ⁓ and whether you can expect better things coming down the road or not. And we need to do that here as well. You know, are you having great sales cycles where right now you're not getting those results? Probably because the six to nine months before that you weren't doing a good job in marketing or you had some product issues or whatever it might have been. ⁓ the the results you're getting today are a result of what was happening then. But you can measure what's happening now and how good that is. And that can help you understand whether, you know, okay, you know, we're not getting sales results and that's because the sales process sucks and is broken. You know, or you know, we're we're taking we we were vendor A and we're probably ending up vendor B much more than would be our share. Like you would expect to win a quarter of those deals where you enter the process on the top, but if you're only winning fifteen percent of those deals, ⁓ you should know that, right? ⁓ you know, you you you might look at that your your win rate and say, well it's okay when it could be great. You're entering that process as the front runner much more often than you're exiting it. and so those are things that you can know and then you can start to really diagnose where are where's the process loss ⁓ you know in this whole thing.

speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah. Just yeah, I I totally agree. Just thinking as as it relates to time frames, ⁓ it r it reminds me of the Jeff Bezos thing where says it when they have a really good quarter, or I guess they always have a good quarter right now at Amazon. But back in the day when they had a really good quarter, ⁓ everyone would say, ⁓ you know, what did we do? What did we do in in Q one? You know, what what did we do jam fed March that made it so good? And Bezos said he he always got ⁓ people to take a step back and say, No, what did we do nine months ago? What was it we did nine, twelve months ago that really drove it? So, you know, some fairly ⁓ fairly successful people have ⁓ have loved to play this longer game, right? And ⁓ that's great.

speaker-1: I didn't know that about him, but that's exactly what we need to be doing in B2B because that's how it works.

speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. ⁓ if we change change gear a little bit and talk about AI and AEO, which again is something that we've discussed in the past. ⁓ there's this really interesting idea around optimizing ⁓ content so that LLMs will recommend you. ⁓ effectively sort of ⁓ trying to do the same job on on LLMs that we've been trying to do on on individual buyers. ⁓ what do you make of all of that? Is that an enlightened thing to do? Should we be approaching this differently?

speaker-1: Yeah, I think it's probably not as enlightened as it seems, ⁓ I would say. ⁓ although I think w you know, ⁓ there's a lot more that we don't know than we do. But for me what it it looks very much like is that we we can't think about the LLM as a ⁓ as a ⁓ a a monolithic thing that we can just influence. Like ⁓ you know, and you can't even think Well, maybe Claude likes these things and ChatGPT likes these things. ⁓ what you have to think is I think you have to go back to your buyer personas because what an LLM says to any one of your potential buyers is going to be what that person has trained their LLM to say to them. ⁓ and so the finance person who uses Claude all the time. If that finance person goes and says, Hey, what do you think about SixSense? They're going to get an answer that is completely different from what the CMO would get and is focused only on the things that that CFO cares about. ⁓ And maybe a word or two about, ⁓ your your CMO probably likes it, but you know, kind of things. So if that CFO is a very skeptical, you know, bottom line kind of person. They're the view that they get from the LLM is going to be only that. ⁓ and so you're not you're not programming ⁓ an LLM to say something about you. You're just not. now y you can support them, I think, in saying the right things about Yeah, i i if you're doing the things that we talked about earlier, you have content for ⁓ finance, you have content for procurement, all of those things. Now the LLM has more to draw on to deliver content to the people who have those buyer personas. But that's the thing that's the way I think we need to think about it, not just this monolithic I'm doing AEO and ⁓ you know I'm gonna I'm gonna put an FAQ back on my website, you know.

speaker-0: Right.

speaker-1: But that's not gonna have the impact that you think, you know.

speaker-0: No. And I I think for me the the point that you make around everyone's LLM is is sh is shaped, it's really a mirror, like a reflection of your own preferences, your own biases, and it talks to you in the way that it's lear learned that you like you like to be talking to ⁓ spoken to. And so really the the the the trick, again, for me is you're back to trying to influence the person on the other side of the screen at the keyboard and influence the way that they prompt the LLM, the framing that they use for the problems and their considerations. And again, you're back in that place where That is something that you can influence, but you're not going to do it by training the LLM. You've got to do it sort of winning the hearts and minds. And so we're kind back there for me again around alignment and perspective and framing and sort of the the the the mental load, ⁓ not in a negative way, that you know, the different members of the buying group are bringing to the problem in the first place.

speaker-1: Yeah. Yeah, that's absolutely right. And I think one of the things that we we touched on a minute ago, like the talking about the the category value, the solution category value and not just your category of your your solution is brand. If you think about what your supporting buying group roles probably care about, it's probably more category than vendor. The your primary buyer persona understands the categories and is deeply embedded in them and and wants them to have value and all of those things. They want to have the toys probably. They want to do all of that stuff. It's the folks outside who question the value of the categories. ⁓ and so where your content is thin there. the LLM and and if everybody's content is thin there and everybody's content is thin there because we're going out and and looking for it now and not finding it, then the LLMs are gonna have nothing to draw on. ⁓ and so when that finance person says so Moon, you know, what's what's the ROI for this category of solution, they're gonna come back with nothing. ⁓ and you know, that's not good. All right. That's not gonna help you get a deal.

speaker-0: Yeah, and and and that it also represents a huge opportunity because you know, by producing that information for that CFO, not only can you answer that and be referenced, but you can also become become the de facto framing for the way to think about the value of the category and that can be framed according to the way that you best deliver value versus your competitors. So it again it's like a huge it's a huge framing advantage. But it but but but the point is is that it's not about ⁓ tricking the L L ⁓ into reference you. It's about being strategic and ⁓ Yeah, it's ⁓ it's more complicated.

speaker-1: Yeah.

speaker-0: Great. Well I I think we've ⁓ I think we've done GEO right. I think we've we've put that to bed. That's a that's a good thing. ⁓ I'm just trying to think what else what else we had. We feel like we've we've covered most everything. ⁓ was there anything else, Kerry, from com the the numerous conversations that we've had over recent months that we haven't touched on? I feel like we've we've we've covered a lot of ground.

speaker-1: we've covered you know we've covered a lot of ground. you know I think it's this is an exciting time because I for the reasons that you talked about earlier I think the the tide has turned and marketing organizations are almost uniformly recognizing the importance of buying groups and understanding buying groups ⁓ what I'd say is we know for sure that they're not recognizing yet the importance and value of anonymous traffic, and we see that in a recent survey we did. That's actually the the value of that is dropped. The value of the perceived value of intent data has dropped also ⁓ year over year. That should be going the other way. ⁓ why should it be going the other way? Because there are signals about which accounts and which buying groups are in market and you have to see them. We have to think about this differently. And we we have talked about this, but I would emphasize this point. Marketing cannot think of itself as the function that delivers, that just delivers a prospect to a BDR sales rep for action. You have to think about what condition that prospect is going to be in in the moment that that happens. And so all of the work that goes in for six, nine, twelve months ⁓ prior to that happens against that set of accounts is what shapes whether that moment is a good moment for you or not. ⁓ If you're a big brand in your space, you're probably going to be on all of the short lists and you're going to be on that list. You'll get a conversation with that buying group. What you don't know and what you're not doing anything about is where are you going to be on that list when that happens? Are you going to have confirmation bias working on your behalf or are you fighting against it? and you know one one way that I think of marketing's job now is to be a confirmation bias engineer. How do you get that on your side? How do you get people through brand to want to believe what you say and to want to do business with you and to see what you're saying in the best possible light? ⁓ and how do you help them, you know, like another important thing, this goes to what we were talking about earlier. Like, if you're let's say that you're the more expensive brand in your category, you're the you're the premium vendor in your category, your primary buyer personas love you. ⁓ you have all the bells and whistles. You're the sophisticated one they want to hang out with. But when it gets to finance procurement, they're like they don't care about any of the fancy stuff. They don't like it. You know, they don't want to pay for it. They don't understand it. So one, you gotta create content that helps them understand why that's important. But two, you have to motivate your primary buyer persona to put up a hell of a fight. You know, that's the thing that also, I mean, it is you know, we don't think about that. But That that might be the single most important thing you could do is motivate your primary buyer persona to actually be a champion ch on your behalf, to actually go to war for you in their organizations to buy from you and not somebody else. And to not just roll over when the CFO says, Yeah, you know, ⁓ you know, I've been to three other companies where we use this other guy and they're less expensive, so why don't we just do that? You know? ⁓ if your primary buyer persona says, Well, it's not what I want, but okay.

speaker-0: Yeah, you lose good enough. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But you needn't you needn't lose, right? If you equip people with the right materials and you know you you can make a difference. And I I think it's that winning over hearts and minds. I like the way you put it, sort of ⁓ how did you put it actually? Like engineering that ⁓ confirmation like I think I think that's I think that's super interesting. And do you do you think that if marketing can crack that, that

speaker-1: Right.

speaker-0: it well when it cracks it, let's be let's be optimistic. When when that is cracked, that it will get marketing will get that proper seat at at that sort of top table that I think at the moment often it it doesn't have.

speaker-1: I think a lot of other things have to happen also. You know, so the big parts of that MQL industrial complex that hold it in in place, ⁓ parts of that are measurement. And so ⁓ winning so I think we've got everybody focused on the buying group. Like and and the really important thing about everybody, everybody, the about the industry, you know, gradually really coming to understand that the buying group is important is once you understand that, you know that the the lead-based measurement processes can't be the right answer, right? And once you understand that the buying journey is this long, and this is where they make decisions really back in the beginning of it, then you can then you know that your last touch attribution and those things cannot be the right answer. So I I'm you know not as naive as I used to be, and I understand this is gonna take some time, but I think we've got the the wedges in the door. And when people understand that buying groups are the real unit of demand, that's that that's enough. Pretty quickly make sure the door doesn't close back behind us and to start to allow some of these other concepts to come in. So marketing's got to do that and gotta engineer that confirmation bias. But that is still going to require that people say, okay, so that but that means we have to be able to understand the time series of events between what we were doing six months ago and the outcomes today. ⁓ and that argument today is difficult to make in most B2B organizations, but it will get easier over time as all of those people in senior positions begin to understand, okay, it's buying groups, it's long term buying journey, all of that. ⁓ so it's gonna take some time, but I think we are I I'm much more hopeful now than I would have been two years ago, where you know, I felt like the a voice in the wilderness

speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, pushing water uphill. A thought occurs to me as you're talking there, which is the ⁓ the means by which we need to help to educate the rest of the ⁓ C suite, let's say, around how marketing needs to work is very analogous to the buying groups piece because they're really going and they're going and buying marketers. They're going and buying someone to sit in that seat and drive that. And we need to make sure that they're looking at the right category and that they're looking at the buying group marketer and not the MQL and so probably it will take a little while to wash through, but there's a meta point here around the need for someone somehow to help to educate the C suite and and ⁓ get them to converge and have that ⁓ y again, your n your nice phrase, confirmation bias around the ⁓ the buying group.

speaker-1: Yeah, yeah, that's absolutely right. Again, today I would say ⁓ if you have two people ⁓ who are going for a CMO job and one says, I'm a revenue marketer, I'll drive your pipeline next quarter, and the other one says, Well, ⁓ it's gonna take about a year and here's what's gonna happen. The one on the the revenue market or one who says I'll do it this quarter is gonna get the job and what they do is gonna impact stuff a year from now. And the person who just got fired, what they did is their this new person's gonna get credit for it. ⁓ and and that's been going on you know it's been going on for many years now.

speaker-0: For twenty. The wheel turns, the wheel turns. Well look, I mean, it's been wonderful as always speaking. Thank you so much for the time. Always enjoy it to wrap up. Great, me too. imagine you're a CMO, right? And and the budget has been set around MQL targets. Say you're in you're in that category still. It's not moved. you've got your team is organized around lead gen, the board expects the funnel report, ⁓ but you've just listened to this conversation and heard these these stats and and these perspectives. What do you do?

speaker-1: So ⁓ two things. One is go for your last six months and then going forward, or maybe the last year and going forward, go into your leads data ⁓ and identify accounts where you had multiple leads. And then go look in Salesforce or whatever your CRM is and see what happened with those accounts. So what we need to begin to understand is is are buying groups in your data already driving results that you don't know right now that that are happening, that aren't associated with that. Chances are what you're gonna see is Pretty messy, but you will see that for any account where you closed a deal, you almost certainly had multiple leads in the period of a time of a buying process before that. So you'll begin to see evidence just in your own leads data that that's what's happening, that you've got buying groups, they show up in your data. You're not now ⁓ doing anything proactively about it, and you're absolutely not getting any credit for it. And the credit isn't just I want my credit, the credit is I know what worked and I didn't. I didn't I kept doing the thing that worked and I stopped doing the thing that didn't, the right thing. So that's that. But also then the anonymous traffic. And so whether it's with Six Sense or somebody else, start to understand which accounts are on your website anonymously. And you want to look back historically at that. Now if you do a sales cycle with Six Sense, we'll do that as part of that, right? So you know, you need to understand who's been on your website and then go look at the relationship between that, the leads that you have, and the outcomes that you've gotten. And what it will show you is all right, it looks like we've been marketing to organizations. We have buying groups that show up. When we have buying groups that show up, it's likely, more likely, that those accounts are going to become customers or at least deep in the opportunities. And where you only have one off leads, those don't those accounts don't go anywhere. ⁓ and once you start to see that, socialize that. You're just gonna have to socialize that. Take our research and socialize it with it. Our research is not enough by itself. Nobody's gonna change the practice because third party research. They'll change the practice, third party research starts to look like what you see in your own data, and then you know, the C levels and the boards will pay attention.

speaker-0: Yeah, it's great advice. And the thing I love about that is that it's genuinely actionable. Anyone can choose to start doing that tomorrow. That doesn't require to be a ton of setup. Final thing, Kerry, the the show is called Real Seekers After Truth, right? ⁓ what's one thing in your view that every real seeker after truth in B2B marketing should start doing ⁓ today?

speaker-1: You know, probably the thing that ⁓ we just talked about, ⁓ which is go find out what what does demand look like in your data today? ⁓ it doesn't look like the thing you've been looking at. It doesn't look like that at all. Right? ⁓ and then it so there's one, let look at your data and see what that looks like. But then ⁓ the other real thing is go talk to your buyers ⁓ and understand what their buying process is from their perspective and what it will look like is A lot like what your buying process would be ⁓ in something that you buy for your organization and then write it up and take it to the people who aren't letting you do things differently and say, look, this is what it looks like. How do we how do we organize ourselves so that we are aligned to how the buyer buys?

speaker-0: Yeah, that is genius. I I mentioned to you that book, ⁓ Obvious Adams, right? Which is this idea that there's always these wonderful obvious and that is one of them. Like if if you're wondering how your buyers buy, go and ask them. And then if you go and tell the business and they don't want to listen, you're possibly in the wrong place.

speaker-1: Right. I think that that's true, yeah.

speaker-0: Awesome, awesome. Well look, Carrie, this was wonderful. I enjoyed every minute. Thank you so much. And ⁓ yeah, thank you for thank you for the conversation.

speaker-1: It's my pleasure.