← AI-Driven Marketer: Master Practical AI Marketing Skills
AI-Driven Marketer: Master Practical AI Marketing Skills
AI Can Find Your Buyers. Only You Can Earn Their Trust
00:38:15
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- [00:00]
A
AI is changing the landscape when it comes to B2B marketing. But even if you're in B2C marketing, you might want to pay attention to this episode because it has ramifications for everybody in the marketing landscape. In this interview, I actually got brought out to the Breakthrough conference by Sixth Sense to interview a few key people. And this one, I got to interview their head of research and thought leadership, Kerry Cunningham, to talk about the research he's done about the B2B buying cycle, how AI is impacting it, and what we can do to actually get way ahead of the competition when it comes to buyers entering the pipeline. So if you're in B2C, I promise this interview is packed with all kinds of information. One, you might be in B2B someday, but even if not, there's always lessons we can take from one industry to apply to another. So I highly recommend checking out this episode. I thought it was fascinating. Kerry and his research has answered so many questions that I've had about how companies and the people in them actually research and evaluate large sources, services, or products, but Even how a B2B buyer thinks about things as they go throughout their journey. A lot of the evidence from this report is shocking, and he dropped some of the best nuggets as far as what companies could be doing now to set themselves up for success five years from now. That's unintuitive. And a lot of people don't even know exists, but AI is making possible. So if you want to get ahead on the future of marketing, listen to this full interview, especially the last five minutes. Carrie, you just did a lot of research and you just announced it from stage, all these different things. And I was excited because this is research that I swear I was looking for just a few years ago. And I was like, where is it? I know everybody keeps claiming that only 5% of the market is ready to buy at a time in a B2B setting, but I could never find the research.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Now I find that I'm like, oh, there it is. Finally someone actually did the digging, actually did it. Proper research. And even the way you talked about it, I'm like, oh, Carrie knows how to talk about this, Carries. This is your thing.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And you've been doing this a couple of years, right, With Sixth Sense, so I'd love to learn more. Give me, like, an overview of the research that you did. And then I'd love to dive into the buying cycle stages specifically.
- [02:17]
B
Yep. So we've been doing. This is the third year of. For this specific Study, we call it the buyer experience study, looking at how buyers buy in B2B. It's actually A, it's, it's my version of correcting what my old company serious Decisions did. So they, they still do a study, but I didn't think it got quite at things that we needed to do. So I was an analyst for about eight years before starting the research stuff at six Sense. So this being the third year, we found out something really interesting the first year around. We could talk about what that was the second year in research, you really have to replicate something to know that it's true. We replicated a second year, replicated again a third year. But one of the things I talked about was that something really big changed in the way things happened this year. And it was a lot of fun figuring out what changed. It was kind of harrowing finding out that something changed and then figuring it out was fun. And the main thing that we really want to understand is just what does that buying process look like? When did decisions get made? How much role do sales people play in the process? How much is marketing? How much is neither one of those things buyer experience. So that's kind of what we get into.
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A
It's the big stuff. It's the big questions that everybody wants to know. One of the standout things was actually breaking down the research of the buying cycle stages.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And the things you talked about was that you had it broken down into kind of your target awareness, consideration, decision and purchase, your typical funnel. And you had it broken down into 60% of buyers being in the target stage, 17% in awareness, 17% in consideration, 4% decision and 2% and purchase.
- [04:05]
B
Yep.
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A
To get some clarity on this, you said from the stage that this was kind of a snapshot of where your buyers are any given time. But is there a time period we're talking about here? Because technically, like a purchase is like a one time event. It's not a, it's not a stage to be in. It's like a, it's a, it's a threshold you cross over.
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B
Yeah.
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A
So are you defining this by quarter or by month? How are you defining it?
- [04:27]
B
If you were to, if you were to just say take any thousand accounts, if you looked at. So if we back up a little bit, like the reason we know these stages is that what six Sense is doing for all of our customers is we're looking at all of the buying signals. We build a predictive model that says, all right, well, based on what we know about how your buyers buy historically here's where we think each account that you care about, where they are in their buying journey and those buying stage is actually based on a literal percentage. It's a prediction. How likely is that thing to become that account to become a opportunity for you? And so we're predicting these stages for millions of accounts. We looked at 19 million accounts across a thousand or so customers. So if you just go in across a bunch of six sense customers and take a snapshot and say, okay, here's a million accounts that we're monitoring on behalf of customers. How are they distributed across those stages? Right now?
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A
Yeah.
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B
And then you go in tomorrow and you do another one and you look at another one. You just keep taking snapshots. The average of those snapshots is what you saw on that screen. Does that make sense that that's what that is? So at any given time, like if your business is cyclical, let's say that you're in education and you sell stuff to higher ed, you, you can probably tell me that, you know, all of your deals are in purchase from September to November or whatever that cycle is, but for most businesses, it's not like that. And so that's what tells us that out of any given 1,000 accounts, you have 600 of them. They market now. And the rest you've got to figure out how to deal with.
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A
Now this is an insightful data to me because I can look at this and make a number of, have a number of insights. One, there's only so many at the very bottom actually into the decision stage and the purchase stage. But by the time they're in the purchase stage, like if you're not in the conversation, you're definitely.
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B
Yeah, there's nothing you can do.
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A
So it's really like there's. But if you look at as a whole, you just take consideration. Decision, purchase, well, that's 25%. That's a lot. That's a lot. But that's when you come in with the killer stat, which was like, yeah, but by the time they're reaching your sales team, they already have a short list of 5 vendors or 5 solutions to pick from. And if you're not in those, if you're not in that short list, what would you say it was like a 23% chance that they're going to pick you. If you're not in the short list.
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B
It'S kind of worse than that. So they put that short list together on day one of their buying journey. So that average buying journey is 10 months long. So before they get to awareness, like on the day they arrive.
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A
Oh, gosh. So it's even farther back.
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B
Yeah, it's farther back. So if you're going to get revenue from them, you know, so if they're going to buy something In October, on January 1, they put four of the five vendors are going to evaluate on the short list. They add the other one sometime soon after that. All of that, what we, what we've said for years, like buyers go into market and they look around and all of that, all of that's about just figuring out who's going to be the fifth vendor who has almost zero chance of winning the deal. So those first four have it. The buyer, the, the purchase is going to come from those first four they put on the list 95% of the time. So if you're not on that list, that four out of the five, you're done. There's still, I'll say we can talk about this later, but there's still a really, really good reason to get on that list then. So you've got to work your ass off to be the fifth vendor, even if you know you're not going to win.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Because that's the only way you still a chance. No, it's the only. Yeah, there really isn't a chance.
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A
But.
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B
But if you want to be one of the four next time, that's how you get to be one of the four next time. And so there's, There are a bunch of stats we didn't talk about because I just didn't have time. But yeah, so that's what it is. And then the 23% thing that you said, so, so they go into market. Day one, they put four of the five vendors on the list. Now on average, six months later, that buying group has finally decided what order those five vendors go in. And the one on the top of that list at that point is the one who's going to win the deal 77% of the time.
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A
Just the one of the top five.
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B
The one on the top.
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A
I was just about to follow up. I'm like, the 8020 principle tells me that the top one or two are probably taking the lion's share of even the top five.
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B
Probably, yeah. So probably, you know, of the 23% that remains where the deal changes after that, it's probably number two. So, you know, it's conceivable a lot of buying groups arrive at consensus on the order of the short list, but 1 and 2 are very close, and those are probably the ones that flip but only 23% flip. Now there's a fascinating number. I didn't get a chance to talk about it here, but it's in the reports. We asked buyers specifically, did your preferred vendor change after you started talking to sellers? That's a different question than did your decision change? We asked if your decision changed. Also preferred vendor changed 42% of the time. Decision changed 23% of the time. So even when buyers get to the sales process and they realize, oh crap, I like this other vendor better half the time, they still don't change their decision. It took six months to get the group to agree on this one. And I'm not going to go back and re litigate that. Just, you know, and maybe again I prefer this other one, but the difference isn't that big. I'm not going to change my decision. So to me that's fascinating. It also speaks to the fact that your sales reps are having a big influence on those buyers. But only about half of that influence has any impact on changing the deal. This one. And that's why I say it's super important to get your ass on that list and be even be the fifth vendor with zero chance of winning the deal because you may flip their preference during that validation phase. They're not going to win the deal as a result. But it'll get you to the list next time. So to me that's, it's fascinating. It's a window on how the world actually works. No sales rep in the world wants to hear that.
- [10:52]
A
I think a lot of marketing knew that. I think sales was probably hard to convince of that.
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B
Yeah.
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A
But I think as marketers have probably felt that before. I've even been the champion on many software upgrades or just overhauls or whatever within my own companies before. And because I'm the one championing the change, I almost always had a preferred vendor. But naturally you can't do that. You always have to show your due diligence. But let's be honest, I was so biased that there was just no way I was gonna. I'd already done it in my head and then I was doing the Excel sheet and even went and met with stakeholders to get their things. I'd always almost reverse engineer what they needed into the.
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B
Yeah.
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A
So every time.
- [11:34]
B
So I think if you know that's, that's a self realization that I think if more marketers would just sit down and think that through, they would find that of course that's what I do and if I'm doing it, of course that's what our buyers are doing. You know, in psychology the term for that is motivated reasoning. I like, I, I like this vendor, that's the one I want. And I'm going to see everything that they do, like it's a version of confirmation bias. Everything that they do and say, I'm going to interpret that in the way that is most favorable to that brand I like and less favorable to the other ones. Every buying process is, is that it.
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A
Puts a lot of emphasis on marketing before they even enter the awareness stage, the awareness that they need help with whatever solution is that you provide.
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B
Right.
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A
And so my next question is like, now that we know that, now that it's like we've all had a feeling about that, but now that you've kind of proved it empirically with fantastic data from Sixth Sense, what do we do about it?
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B
Yeah, well, I think, you know, so my recommendation to, to the audience today and in the reports is we know that there's roughly a third of your ICP at any given time is early in a buying journey where they're persuadable. And that's where we need to focus our resources, our best resources and attention on that set. So right today, most B2B organizations are spreading their marketing budgets across 100% of their ICP or even more than that. You know, they're even outside that. So, you know, we think we're doing a good job by just focusing our demand gen on all of our ICP and only the ICP. But 60% of your ICP could care less about your demand gen right now, even if you're a perfect fit because they're not in market. You know, if you think in software in particular, 50%, you know, everybody's on two year contracts, 50% of your audience is in year one of a two year contract. So they're not interested. Right, that's. This is not what, this is not a time they're not looking at anybody. And if you try to attract them with your, with your demand gen activities, they're not paying attention to that. Now what they do is, you know, it's their job to keep track of vendors and what they're doing and know if there's something better happening. And so they are going to be looking at those things occasionally, but they're not going to respond to your demand gen. They're not going to become leads. If they like this thing that you published or whatever and they go to your website and fill out a form, they're never going to respond to your BDRs or SDRs, it's not why they looked at the thing. They're not in market. And so the most important thing we can do is focus on the 30% or 30, whatever right around there that are in market now. And even, you know, we saw that it's just about 6% that are down at that really sharp end of the buying process. So, you know, we have to realize 30% are in market. But somewhere between being in market early on and actually making a decision to purchase, most of them drop out there, most of them don't make it that far. So we spend all our time competing for the 2%, that tiny little slice of the pie. What we really need to do is shift our attention back to the 30%, figure out why in our market for or our solutions, whatever they are, why do buying processes fail? Why do they stop? Why do they say, oh, you know what, we're not going to go through with this? LinkedIn has some great research on it. They did some research on buyers and asked them, if your buying process didn't end up buying something, if it just stopped, why 40% of the reason is that the buying group could not come to consensus. They couldn't agree. Right. That's tragic. So this is an organization that says, yeah, we want to go out and buy something. But, you know, I talked in my presentation about the fact that your buying group is filled with people who have a lot of experience in whatever it is that they're looking at right now. They know the vendors, they know sales reps in those vendors. So if you've got four of the five vendors on the short list on day one, it's because people in the buying group know four of those five vendors. And you probably have within the 10 people in the buying group four opinions on day one about what they should do. That whole next six months is about ironing out those disagreements about which is best. And it, it fails as often as it succeeds. And, and so they end up just sticking with what they have or doing nothing. Yeah, that's tragic. Right? You get it. You get a group of people who've agreed, they put budget aside and all of that stuff, and then they end up not doing, doing it because they can't agree what to do.
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A
I mean, that's interesting. So that's, there's a lot to do. Even if you're coming in ranked stack number one, it's not a guaranteed win. No, half the time it's failing. So sales really has to work on keeping the ones even. Even if you have a favorable disposition.
- [16:30]
B
But it's really, marketing is going to have to do that because marketing is the one who's still really communicating with that vendor and enabling that buyer. So I think, you know, one of the, one of the things that we have to do much better is focus our attention on that small set of accounts that are in market and persuadable and enable them such that the people who are on your side in that buying group have all the ammunition they need to convince the people who aren't. Right. And we don't know which ones those are in any given buying group. But that means, you know, if, if, if we know from our, our research that the ones who like us best are the primary decision makers, but maybe the IT guys or the finance people are the ones where we have some trouble. We have to develop messages, we have to do things that are going to help those people get over the hump, whatever that is for your business. You got to know that and you've got to do that. So enlarging the slice of the pie of companies that actually get down to make a decision to buy something is the first best thing we can do. And I haven't answered your question about what, you know, what to do about getting on that short list. So one, you got to do a much better job there because in B2B, unfortunately nobody's going to say, you know what, let's just spend a bunch more on brand and reputation marketing. I mean, you know, that would be great, but that's not what people are going to do. So we have to get more efficient at getting the persuadable accounts to buy from us.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And then use some of that savings to go back and do a lot of branded reputation, a lot better branded reputation marketing.
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A
You said about 1/3 are in the early stages. And is this 1/3 of what you defined as the target target accounts?
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B
Yeah, that's it.
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A
So it's roughly 20%.
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B
It's, it's that 17/17 awareness and consideration stage.
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A
Okay, so this is the ones that are early on.
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B
Yep.
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A
That are persuadable.
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B
Yep.
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A
So I mean, that's, you're right, it's a little over a third. But it's about a third.
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B
Yeah, just about a third. And you know, so these numbers are all going to be plus or minus a certain amount at any given time. So that's the set that they're persuadable. They're in market by the time they get to the decision stage and they're down to 4% those folks have largely made up their minds. You know, marketing's done.
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A
So now that we have clarity and where we need to pay attention, where, where we still need to fight, even if we're the top ranked one, how does AI change all the different things that we need to do as marketers now that we have access to it?
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B
So the thing I said today is I feel very strongly and that. So the best, highest use of AI right now is to make sense of all of the buying signals. So there's. We process a trillion signals a day. So making sense of that means making predictions about which accounts are in market. That's the single most important thing that we should be using AI for. And it's by far the most mature use of AI. 6Sense has been doing it for 12 years. So that's the single most important thing. And I think every B2B organization should focus on that first. Then, like one of the things I talked about today, the very first thing I talked about is we're doing a really bad job of supporting the actual decision makers that we want to sell to because we don't understand who they are, the people that we sell to. We, even if we sell, you sell ERP solutions, you sell CRM, you sell things that have been around forever. The people who are buying those things, they know those things backwards and forwards. They know everything about them. They've been to all of the conferences going back decades. And none of the content that we have on our websites or that we send them in our nurture streams or anything is telling them anything they didn't know already 10 years ago. It's just not helpful for them. It's fluff and spin. And even if you're a relatively new category, it's very unlikely that you are going to be reaching an audience that needs your most basic explanation of what you do. That is not what they need. You know what they need? A real estate. They need to really understand how you might impact their business. And then we need that for not just the primary decision maker, like the person who runs that department who would buy it, but the finance person, the IT person, whoever those people are who are also involved in that decision. We need real content that's going to speak to them about why they should take a chance on you. And that's going to help them agree to go through and buy this thing. And so there's another great use of AI Gen AI this time to get that content built. Our excuse for not having it has always been it's too expensive. We can't manage it, that excuse is gone. We got to do that now.
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A
So when you're marketing to the one third that isn't yet in market or is starting to approach it, they're in the early stages. To me, this is like, based on that, this would be the program that I might test out to put in place to try to solve that. Generally, you're probably going to lead that initiative with top of the funnel type content, things that address their problems, their pains. Maybe not with your solution yet, but your. You're starting to talk to them about maybe your philosophy, your approach to their problems without even mentioning the solution. It's through podcasts, could be through webinars, could be through your LinkedIn posts, whatever it might be. You're creating content around it that's helpful to them, that starts to help them truly identify the problem that they're feeling already so that they become aware. And then your solution, of course stands out, but you're educating them. You're truly trying to show up and be helpful. A number of different ways to do that, a number of different channels to do that in. But the strategic part becomes like, okay, well that's general and it's available to the whole ICP because you're publishing it, you're not gating it, you're putting it out there. But what becomes strategic is if you can know like which accounts are actually in early market, you could be boosting it. Your sales team could be out, like spending time reaching out to them, inviting them in, like one to one to come to the webinar. And you could be invited to be a guest on your podcast to build relationships with them because you only have so much time and scope for that on your podcast. Right.
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B
Yeah.
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A
You could be spending a little bit more ads promoting that early level thought leadership just to those accounts instead of spraying everybody and hoping for the best.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And of course, different accounts are rotating in, so over time you're actually probably getting everybody as everybody rotates in eventually. Yeah, but you're spending the time, the effort and the more variable cost in a more strategic way. Am I, am I kind of getting that right?
- [23:08]
B
Sure. Yeah. So I mean, the, that use of AI just talked about understanding where your buyers are in the journey. The first, most important thing is, is knowing that here's a bunch that just went into market now we can. I don't even like the term personalized because frankly, I. Nobody needs their name on a piece of content coming at them or whatever. What they need is for it to be in context and that's exactly what you're talking about. The context is, all right, this is what we're thinking about. We're weighing our options. Maybe there's a couple of different ways we could solve this business problem. One involves buying technology, one involves something else. So the con providing stuff that's right for the context. But I think the, and one second use of the signals then is all these signals that tell us they're in market. And are there signals there that can tell us how they're thinking or what they're thinking so that we can deliver the right piece of content or make sure that they know about it? Right. I mean, and I think that that's, that that's a really great additional use of the same signals. Right. Is to identify what to do. And then I think, you know, everything that we can do to make our content and the experiences we have available, make them just maximally available. Because the truth is the world is super messy. Our buyers are, you know, you may have one member of a buying group who has been studying something for months, knows exactly what he or she wants to do or just got hired into this company after buying this thing at the last company they were at. That happens all the time. Right. Everybody else in that buying group is months behind this person's way ahead. So that person needs the very best, most advanced, specific content you have about why they should do that for this company now while everybody else may need stuff at a different level. And so it's just got to all be available for everybody all the time. And you know, and then use the signals to sense how to get it there.
- [25:03]
A
So we've talked about how AI can help along the process. I'd love to know is there any. Is anything in the research indicate or maybe even from your personal experience in talking to people, people. What leads a company to being rank stacked one.
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B
Yeah.
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A
What are the behaviors they're doing? What are the types of content they're putting out that that leads to that.
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B
I would love to say that there's a good answer there. And we've asked the question in, in many surveys and the answer is always as boring as it could possibly be. Which is.
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A
It depends.
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B
Buyers. Yeah, I mean, it depends. And, and buyers say that they kind of like everything and they kind of think everything's okay. You know, they're not blown away. And the reason for that is the channel is much less important than the content. The delivery device is much less important than what's in the content and what it says and whether it says to me. And we spend way too much of, I think of our time and energy thinking about the channels and those kinds and not so much about what are we actually saying because that's, it's actually a much harder problem to solve. Right. But it's why people don't care about our content. I said this today that we're not losing people's attention to ChatGPT. You know, that is a cheap out if you ask me. We're losing their attention because you're not saying anything interesting or useful. That's why they're not coming to your website if you are saying or providing an experience. Chat GPT is never going to pride a virtual experience experience of what it's like to be a customer of your company, but you aren't either. You know, as soon as you do, people will come to your website again. But, you know, so I think it's, it's way too cheap and easy of an excuse to say, oh, chat GPT stole my web traffic. Yeah, you don't have any reason to come to your website.
- [26:51]
A
That's why I find. One of the case studies I go back to over and over again of people who did pretty good building demand on the front end through just being helpful was HubSpot. Right back when they launched Inbound, they kind of Inbound was interesting because it was an approach. Obviously HubSpot became the premier solution to doing inbound. Right. But you could do inbound with just about any system. Of course they, they made it so their system would do it better than everyone and they would make that case. But they were giving certifications away. They're helping you. They, they help people transition from the traditional approach to, to digital. They were the best advocates for it.
- [27:27]
B
They were, they were the kings of content marketing and getting, you know, they provided things that were really useful and interesting. The other one that did that is a very similar kind of company Marketo. So early days, all of those, you know, Ultimate Guides Tour or whatever they call them were super useful. But here's the problem that we ran into with all of that and the whole problem with inbound marketing to begin with, you know, back in the day, in the early days of that, when buyers came to your website and found your content, if they had to work hard to get there and your stuff wasn't that great, they were there because they really wanted to be and they had a reason to be. But the better and better your content gets, the less likely it is that they're in market and the more likely it is they're just there because you have great content. Now, that's not bad because you're building brand equity, and that matters over time, a lot. You should absolutely do that. But it is absolutely going to crush your lead quality. Your lead quality will be terrible. That's not why people are there. People are there because they're learning. Right. And it's an amazing place to be, to be the source of learning for your audience. But you cannot continue to look at those people as leads the way you did when the only reason they got to your website is because they worked really hard to get there. And there wasn't anything other than, can you call me? Because I want a sales rep to talk to me. Right.
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A
So.
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B
And we're in the danger of doing that all the time where we see, oh, here's a channel. The channel's really great. Let's do more of that. And then you pump up all of the things that got people interested in that channel. But now the people who are responding to that are no longer really buyers. They're people who just like what you're doing. You know, we put on great webinars. Okay, great. Now people are coming to your webinars because they're entertaining, not because they're in market. And that's something we always have to be careful that we're not. You know, and again, I think you should be doing it like this is. It is the way to build an audience and to build a market, and.
- [29:34]
A
You have to build a bridge between essentially your. I find that good, good people who do content marketing well are essentially becoming mini media companies.
- [29:42]
B
Yeah.
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A
In and of themselves. I mean, like, I mean, HubSpot's really, again, led. Led the charge in this. I don't, I don't know about their new positioning that they've led away from inbound. I forgot what they called it, but they just launched something new and I can't remember what it is, but obviously they. They went and bought the Hustle and they're building a little podcast network or a big podcast network. But they're trying to own the media.
- [30:02]
B
Yeah.
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A
And then they inject little signals back. And I find that would probably be pretty helpful to have a newsletter. It becomes first party data. You could build intent signals into it based on a certain kind of click that indicates that, oh, they're starting to feel this pain if they clicked on this link. Right. So that might be somewhat info.
- [30:17]
B
It can be. But you have to recognize that the signal that existed when it was this little thing in the beginning, it's not the same signal anymore. And so along the way, it could mean lots of different things and there are different ways that you need to interpret it. But that's what we didn't do in B2B, but we built great mechanisms. It's like, you know, I won't have a great analogy now, but it's like where we found out that the kids like chocolate and we're just giving them more chocolate. And you know that. All right. They love chocolate, but, you know, that doesn't get us anywhere else except maybe rotten teeth.
- [30:58]
A
So it's interesting. We gotta do those things. But be very careful to build bridges back to where we can actually consider them a lead. Because a contact isn't a lead. A lead is somebody who's showing intent, purchase intent. But a contact is.
- [31:14]
B
Well, it's just a contact and you've got it. So, one again, if you know, if you're looking at the accounts and you're scoring the accounts based on intent, and you use sixth sense to know which ones are in market now, you can look at all of the millions of people filling out your forms or listening to your podcast and say, these are the ones who are actually in market. Yeah. What you'll find, the better you get at it is the percentage that are in market will go down because you've got all of these people who are not in market now consuming your content. I mean, again, that's a really, really good thing. You want that. But it's going to make your lead quality look bad. Your lead quality should stop being a thing that you think about. What you should be thinking about is you're building a great audience. And you have to know, like, if. If you go from 100 people coming to your website to a million people, are there a million people who are part of active buying groups anymore? I don't think so. You know, it's like, it can't be that. That's not the answer. The answer is some small fraction of those are in market now. The ones who aren't in market now, that's how we get on the short list, is everybody's going to put us on the short list because they've been coming getting value from us for two years. Yeah, Right. And now they're ready. Now they're in market now they can't wait to buy from us. That's what this event that we're at today is. Right. There's a lot of people here who are going to walk away with the impression, like, I want to be a customer of this, and I want to be a part of this. And it may not be the right time, and that'll be frustrating for our sales reps, but this is going to cause a lot of people to say, I want to be part of this. And, you know, that's how it works over time.
- [32:54]
A
So would you say that people who opt in to hearing from you, to learn more from you is probably one of the best early indicators of you being ranked stacked?
- [33:04]
B
Well, it's an indicator that when the time comes, you will be.
- [33:08]
A
You'll at least make the top five, maybe the top one, depending how helpful your resources were.
- [33:13]
B
It's a good indicator of you'll get on the short list. And then once you're on the short list, you have to become that, you know, I mean, you actually have to show up and, and, and the product.
- [33:21]
A
Has to be good.
- [33:22]
B
Yeah. There are going to be other people in that organization who probably didn't watch your podcast or didn't read your content, and they're going to have to say yes, too. Yep. And are you. Do you have the, the ability to get them on board as well? Ah, yes.
- [33:36]
A
And that's where the AI really starts to come in play.
- [33:38]
B
Yeah.
- [33:39]
A
I mean, you could do that manually, too. And just once, once you, once they come and you're on the short list, you could be like, okay, well, let's go look up the people that we know are in the buying group on LinkedIn and start seeing if we can manually reach out to them and stuff. But if you can automate the process, all of a sudden, you can scale it, and AI can customize your value proposition for each of the different types of buyers within that organization.
- [34:00]
B
Exactly right. So think about, you've got, let's say that, you know, your, your inbound marketing blows up and you've got people coming to your website, people reading your blog, people coming to your podcast. All of that stuff is happening a lot. Now the next thing you need to do is start producing content for that buyer Persona. Who's doing that that says, here's how to talk to your CFO about why you should buy us. Here's how to talk to the CSIO about why you should buy us. Right. That content that supports them in getting those other people on board. They're already sold. Right. They're getting value from you. They love you already. But if you. All you do is pour more on top of them without supporting them having this other conversation, you're going to miss opportunities.
- [34:45]
A
So my last question for you is, you're thinking a lot about this stuff. You're steeped in it. You're thinking about AI, you're working at Sixth Sense, so you're seeing a picture of what the future is going to be. Sometimes I like to think about, like, the people that are going to be the headlines, the companies are going to be crushing IT and their CMOs are going to be speaking on stage and see stuff. What are those people doing now aggressively that's maybe not everybody's paying attention to so much. What are they doing now that five years from now everyone's like, man, we should have been doing that. It was, we could have known, but it wasn't obvious then.
- [35:19]
B
Yeah. I think part of it is building that the content and experiences for the people that are part of the buying group, but not our primary target. You know, that's what I become more convinced of the more I study buying groups. Those people, they care very much. You know, the head of finance cares very much about marketing automation and knows a lot about it because he's been involved in nine purchase cycles for it over his career. Right. We don't think about that. Right. It matters a lot to that guy. He takes his job seriously. Same thing with the head of it. Same thing with all the other people who'll be involved in that purchase. And yet we don't do anything to support those folks. So I think the people who are seeing the opportunity to use AI to start building that content and then figure out how to make it as frictionless and easy as possible to get it in front of those people when they need to see it, I think those are the ones. And then the other thing that we find out is relationships still matter a lot. And there's one of the things I think that that's the heaviest weight on this industry is just the expectation that, you know, a sales rep, their job is to take a buyer who may or may not want to buy from us and convert them into one who buys from us in the next three months. And that's just not realistic and it's not how it works. And so, you know, your, your sales reps can flip some buyers where you're not on the top of the short list when they start, but not that many. But what they can do is build relationships that last over many cycles.
- [36:54]
A
Yes.
- [36:55]
B
And that's what buyers say in their service. You know, they all say, hey, I know sales reps at those accounts. And those relationships are what gets you onto the short list, what helps motivate those buyers to find the reasons to buy from you instead of somebody else. So those relationships, I think, are still really important, but we have to think different, differently about when they have their effect. And it's a longer term effect. You know, we think only quarter to quarter, especially in sales. Quarter to quarter to quarter. You know, did you make your number or you suck, Right? Well, maybe you didn't make your number this quarter, but you built a lot of relationships. We got to figure out how to see that, manage it, incent it. I think those organizations who figure that out kind of, oddly enough, are going to have a huge advantage, and that it might be AI that helps us figure that out. But that's. I think that's something that the research is pointing to. It's like super, super important, but not in the way that we thought.
- [37:56]
A
I'm really excited about what you just said. I'm like, oh, my gosh, this is actually gold right here. And so I hope everybody else picks it up. I'll probably have to do a whole other episode unpacking that, but awesome. It's fantastic. Carrie, thank you so much for your time.
- [38:10]
B
Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you.