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- [00:00]
Margaret Safford
The beautiful thing about this framework is it works inside and out. So you could start really with a deep understanding of your customer. So sometimes I find that people want to dive in immediately to kind of like a new shiny object, but without really understanding who is their customer. What is it about them? Why are they buying from you? What are the different segments? Where's the growth? Just really doing that deep dive on your customer and then going out to all of the other Cs across the framework and asking some questions.
- [00:33]
Claudia Tirico
The B2B Marketing Exchange brings together B2B marketing and sales practitioners from across the country to get the latest tools and tips they need to succeed. Now we're bringing the insights from the stage to your ears. I'm Claudia Tirico. And I'm Kelly Lindenow. And this is the B2B Marketing Exchange podcast. Hello everyone and welcome back to the B2BMX podcast. We're getting so close to the finale of our 11th season, and that just means B2BMX is right around the corner. If you still haven't registered yet, don't worry, it's not too late. Check the show notes for a registration link and a discount code. We are kicking it back to B2BMX east in Alpharetta, Georgia today with a session replay from Sophia Agostina and Margaret Safford. This top rated session was titled Demystifying youg Go To Market Strategy. In this presentation, Margaret and Sophia share their 9C's framework, a go to market strategy that places the customer at the center. They'll provide actionable insights around each of the Cs identified in the framework and demonstrate how improvements in these areas can drive customer value and revenue growth. Tune in to gain an understanding of the nine critical inputs to the framework and how they work together. Insights into the greatest gaps identified through their own assessment and workshops and how to spot them within your organization. And get a closer look into three critical inputs where gaps are commonly observed. Content, campaign, and collaboration. It's all going down in 3, 2, 1.
- [02:10]
Margaret Safford
Welcome everyone. We're really excited to be here to talk about demystifying your go to Market strategy. My name is Margaret Safford. I'm here with Sophia Augustina and we're really, really excited to kick off the GTM track this morning. So, going to the next slide, you have the question.
- [02:27]
Sophia Agostina
Oh, I do.
- [02:29]
Margaret Safford
What do you want me to. Okay, fantastic. So, just wanted to give a quick overview of who we are and why we're up here talking about this today. So, as I said, my name is Margaret Safford. I am the president and co founder of Gain Relationship and we are a customer centricity consultancy. I also do some advisory work with Goldman Sachs and I've spent the majority of my career on the B2C side with some brands and retailers like Colgate, Palmolive and Macy's and CVS for example, and also some startups launching on Amazon and other D2C platforms. And I'm pleased to be here with Sophia Augustina. She is the CEO and co founder of Gain Relationship as well as global ambassador for this and advisor for the CMO Council. And she's held a variety of roles across companies such as IBM and Iron Mountain and Veracode.
- [03:18]
Sophia Agostina
So I did buy her coffee this morning to say those things.
- [03:20]
Margaret Safford
Yes. Yeah. So, so that's a little bit about us. But without further ado, we'll jump right into the session today. So as we all know, given the current landscape, everything is so cluttered, technology, AI, everything coming at the speed of light, so much competing for your customer's attention. So how do you really break through the clutter and how do you really cut through in order to really reach your customer in a meaningful way? That's what we're gonna dive into more today during our talk. And so just to share the agenda, which is the next slide Sophia is going to talk through about why customer centricity across GTM matters. So we'll dive into that in some detail. Then what we're going to introduce is our framework, which is our 9C's customer centricity framework that will really help kind of ask some key questions to get closer to your customer. And then we'll showcase a few of the Cs in more detail and how you can make them work for you and your teams and take action directly within your businesses. And then we're going to share our customer centricity assessment. It's a 10 question, five minute assessment that will really help diagnose some areas where you can immediately put together an action plan with your team. So that's really the goal of today's session. If there's nothing else you take away is really just diagnose where you are in your journey and some immediate steps that you can take think get closer to your customer. So with that I'll hand it over to Sophia.
- [04:48]
Sophia Agostina
Thanks Margaret. So thank you everyone for coming. It's really a pleasure to be here. It's my first time as well. I think they move it from Boston. If some of you have been to the BMX at Boston past couple of Years, past few years. But like Margaret says, it's all about the customer today, right? I mean, every day is about the customer. Especially today when the market landscape has changed. How many of you here this morning or when you're at home, when you go to Starbucks, whether it's because of the pandemic, when we now do a lot of delivery for our groceries or our orders, how many of you actually order first online than picking it up at Starbucks versus just going to Starbucks as we used to 10 years ago, queuing up in a long line, chatting with the people in front of you. How many of you here, you don't have to raise your hand, but I'm guilty of it. I would order on the app and then pick it up, run to it and get into my car. So they really, all of our customers, whether it's B2B, B2C, we all want that personalized, that quick delivery, that streamlined process where it's all about what I need, what we need today, whether we like it or not, we are selfish human being, especially when we are at work in our B2B world, when we are at. We want to make sure that we do our job well. We want to make sure that the clients that we serve is truly, truly converting to what we want. At the end of the day, why are we here in this conference is to make sure that in this market, how do we accelerate and get rid of those stall leads, stalled pipeline. It comes down to this. I've worked with many, many B2B companies. Actually, Jeff Padowitz, I'm sure you guys were at his workshop yesterday. Sorry, Jeff, I didn't tell you, I'm gonna mention you. He was our eloqua implementation at iron Mountain about 2007. So you do the math. That was a long time ago, but that was the beginning of B2B. I would say I came from B2C companies as well before that. But that was the beginning, almost the beginning of B2B companies when we start to engage our customer in a different way. We do a lot of multi touch experiences. We personalize some of the experiences we have through eloqu. At the time, I don't think Marketo was there yet. And the list goes on, right? And especially today. And so the value that we give to the customer, whatever it is that makes your pipeline accelerate faster or they really create that moment for your customer to say, oh yeah, you got a solution for me. That value that they get, that I mentioned earlier in the slide, especially today with AI coming in, you know, like Your Martech will change. I mean, it's here. The change in the marketing landscape is here. We can't like deny it anymore. You know, maybe two weeks ago we say, you know, is AI really here? No, not even two weeks, frankly. Two weeks ago I was at Inbound. I'm ashamed to say this because I know I'm speaking here at the go to market opening track Claudia has entrusted me with, but I was at inbound two weeks ago and I would say about 40% of the Bartek there. I haven't heard before all these new companies popping up to support the technology that came out two years ago, November 2020 to the moment when ChatGPT came out. So it's here. And with that, with your Martech changes, with even your team, I didn't mention it here, but companies have to go through so much hardship today to do things that we don't want to see. But it's because the team structure has to change. The knowledge, the talent, everything has to change. I've been in B2B, as I mentioned, about 15, 20 years. It has evolved every single year. I have to go to conferences, I have to always be at the front of what's happening in the B2B as well as in the consumer world. But also with that, your buying groups, how many of you, I think serious decision probably implemented that probably eight to 10 years ago. How many of you just implemented buying groups maybe in the past couple of years? I was at IBM and we just implemented buying groups last year. So we have to really quicken our go to market strategy. Our buying groups has changed too. Now with AI, do we need to influence the data officer for our clients? Do we need to influence, influence the AI technologies? How are we going to speak to the content analyst, the content person within your buying group, if you're a marketer, selling to a content person. So with that we want to introduce to you all this go to market has changed. We have PLG now we have community led growth as well. And ABM still rings through. And now people will say, oh, it's not really account based marketing, it's abm. Motion is abm. You can say any motions you want, we can say any place we want. But at the end of the day, everybody here in this room, and we are all here in this business, including myself, is to delight the customer. Right? This is a slide that I just actually added. And with that, we are not the only one who said it. I'm just going to, I just read this and I can send you if you LinkedIn with me, I'll send you this a new report that came out last week. So they did a research. 75% of the customers that they researched said that their retention expansion, there's a lot of churn now happening, despite the fact that they actually invested 60% more in their spending. These are software companies. And then what they found, and it's a really great paper, is that there's such a disconnect between what the vendor provide on your onboarding, on the client's onboarding, versus what the customer really value and want. So the customer really want how to, how to use the software, how to implement it, how to create adoption. But the companies that sell the vendor is like complete opposite. I'll send you the chart. They provide them with success, best practices, success stories. It's not personalized to the client's needs. So there's this disconnect. As I mentioned in the beginning of the slide, personalization and really personalized delivery is really, really key. So customer is the one that never changed. Despite what your go to market strategy is. Abm, PLG communities, sales led, even you knock door to door back to basic, it's still the customer. So we want to introduce you our framework. It is based on the basic, the customer. But Margaret will share more about how we built this and what it means for companies today.
- [12:05]
Margaret Safford
Yeah, absolutely. So that was great, Sophia. So as obviously a key takeaway from everything that she just said, it's imperative to make an impact and build these lasting relationships. So what we want to talk about today and give a good solid overview of is our new approach to the customer centricity journey. And with that we can go to the next slide. So this is our 9C's framework. And so you can see the customer is always in the middle. And so what we do with this framework is we've taken some existing frameworks in the market. So everyone's Familiar with the four Ps of marketing, the three Cs analysis of company, competitor and customer, and we've taken those and kind of reimagined it in today's modern landscape. So thinking about taking a big step back from all of this technology and all of these changes going so fast, like Sophia said, all these new companies popping up just two weeks ago at inbound to address all of these modern challenges, but really taking that big step back and addressing all of these Cs, we call it in the framework and diving in deep to each of them to diagnose what are some actions you can take across each of them to make a real impact in your results and in your marketing. So the beautiful thing about this framework is it works inside and out so you can start really with a deep understanding of your customer. So sometimes I find that people want to dive in immediately to kind of like a new, a new shiny object, but without really understanding who is their customer, what is it about them, why are they buying from you, what are the different segments, where's the growth? Just really doing that deep dive on your customer and then going out to all of the other Cs across the framework and asking some questions. Or it could be kind of taking a bigger look at your company. For example, is that really set up and have a customer led approach? Are your employees set up to be ambassadors? What's your customer service response on different social channels? So thinking about taking each of these Cs together, apart, in and out in a new way can really help work. And also it's a great tool. It can really help work with your teams to figure out where pain points are that can be kind of discussed and maybe put an action plan towards. So it's all about connecting the dots to drive that customer value. So we'll dive into more details around a few of the Cs as examples. But if there's one key thing from here it's taking a step back and really making sure across all of these dimensions that you really know, you really answer all the different questions that can get you closer to your customer.
- [14:42]
Sophia Agostina
And each. We won't go through it here, but tomorrow we'll share. If you guys saw there's a workshop, one to three will go deep into each one as a KPI as well. So it's all about the customer value and what's in it for your business. Right. For your business outcomes.
- [15:00]
Margaret Safford
Yeah. So ultimately the C's are a guide. Right. So it's really just a method to be able to make sure that you take a step across all of the different Cs of the dimension. So it's about customer value. It's also like Sophia just said, with our KPIs and driving business outcomes. So you want to be seen, you want to create that emotional connection, engage your customer and then really expand. I think it's all about customer expansion. And so when we work with a lot of our different clients, what we've seen is that by taking this framework and working, whether it's with a team or whether it's through a one on one, you're really able to exceed in some cases up to 5x the industry average in terms of business outcomes. So it's a really useful tool and we're excited to share a little bit more here today and then we have the workshop tomorrow to dive deeper. So today, as we promised, we're going to share a little bit more on three of the Cs, and then we're going to show how you can kind of dive in and figure out where you stand across these and put an action plan together. So I'm going to talk a little bit about content, then Sophia is going to share a campaign example and then we'll talk about the importance of collaborators. Sorry. Okay, so this is just a high level example of some of the questions behind each of the Cs within the framework. So content, right. So now everyone's creating content. There's so many tools available for people to create it very quickly, put it out there very, very quickly and just getting easier and easier as time goes by with logo generators, ChatGPT, image, et cetera. So thinking it through in terms of what is the value that each piece of content is putting out, is it personalized? So Sophia and I were talking earlier this morning about just going through some of these questions you might be having. Say you have a video that you're about to put out and you realize, maybe if I make it personalized, what's the potential increase in engagement? Could it go from 2 to 3% to 20 plus percent? So that's one simple example. The second one is, does it make your customer feel something? So Sophia mentioned Starbucks, but when you go and they have your order ready, maybe that makes you feel efficient, happy, Maybe you have a relationship with the person you see all the time. You know, I think this statistic changes, but why they should spend a minute reading about you, I think it keeps getting going down in terms of the number of seconds that you actually get people's attention in today's cluttered market. But why, why should they spend their time and then, you know, does it. Do you create that like feeling that the customer feels that you understand them, their pain points and so they want to engage more with you. So this is just an example of how you can take that time to dive into each one and come up a lot of times collaborating with your team or stakeholders to think about how this might impact what you're putting out into the market. So we've just put together here a checklist. So as you were about to put content out, provocative and credible. So I think it's just really important you want to make sure that it's grounded in trust and validation. So I often tear this example. But when I was working at CVS launching a vitamin campaign, we wanted to talk about authenticity, but we also wanted to get attention. But we just had to make sure because it's not a regulated environment that it was actually validated and substantiated impactful. So making things easier or better, improving someone's lives and then memorable. So obviously if you have that one minute or 30 seconds or is it going to stay with the person that reads it, what's their mental availability when they see it? And will it cause them to take an action that's a little bit about content? And we'll dive deeper into that tomorrow as well.
- [19:05]
Sophia Agostina
Also, this can be applied across the buying journey. The way that you think about your top of funnel, for example, and mapping into these three criteria would be different when you think about how impactful is it, how memorable it is for people, say in a mid funnel where they're trying to consider your solution as well as when your sellers are working with them, how do you create that sales enablement content so that it maps across the buying journey, but you still map this differently as you think about what content do I want to engage them full funnel. But tomorrow we'll go through that. Tomorrow we have I think two hours, but I'm going to try to make it one and a half hours so that you guys can have some cocktails after. But so I'm going to go through a campaign. This is near and dear to my heart. I just love campaigning. I don't know, like every morning I wake up like, let's campaign today. I'm just kidding. But basically, like I mentioned, some of you just got here, but I started my B2B career back in 2007 when I met Jeff for the first time. Jeff was our marketing automation vendor in 2007. So this is basically my journey, I would say across the 15 years. Like how I've mapped out my campaign framework from 2007. We're all doing lead gen, right? We're sending out webinars, we're sending out white paper, ebook, all that. But even today, like I mentioned, at companies that I work for, they're still doing things that we did in 2007. So as you go through this framework, this is basically an evolution of how B2B marketing has evolved over time. And my prediction beyond with all the technology and marketing landscape changing. But as you go through the look into this criteria, try to map where you are in your campaign framework. Campaign includes Creative your martech solution as well. Like how do you use your intent data? How do you create your channel? Strategy, distribution strategy. Your Persona definition like I mentioned, buying groups have changed. Do you need to take out some put it back. It's like a chest, right? Who are those Persona do you need to refresh work with your product marketing team to refresh it with you know, to refresh your Persona. She Margot is a Persona development like in back in the previous so you can also work with her. But in a nutshell, if you map out your campaign framework now especially on abm, you can see the more right and I've done this over 15 years, the more programs and tactics you implement most right you get 2x3x5x like at IBM I was even able to drive 8x ROI on our tomorrow again tomorrow we only have 25. Tomorrow I'll showcase our campaign at IBM with us open how it spreads across the full funnel from brand to demand. But yeah, so take a screenshot. We'll also share this but just map out your campaign through this and then tomorrow we'll share the real life example. And as I mentioned, you don't do this alone, especially in your companies. I don't know how big is your company, but every time you run a campaign you have probably eight teams helping you execute. You have your paid media team, you have your email marketing team, your martech and all that. So really identifying based on the goals, who are your stakeholders within the company to help you elevate your campaigns based on whatever goals you have for your campaign as well as going externally. I don't know for some reason this week I'm tagged a lot with all the people here as well as so they're my influencer. I didn't even ask them to tag me and they did. And I might tag some of you later, but those are some people that can advocate for you. If you go back to the last slide, we actually will share it too. My prediction is B2B companies will have to be like a B2C company. We're actually doing another framework B2B B2C because like Margaret mentioned, you know, like this is what I learned in my executive program is that how you do one thing is how you do everything. Similarly, how you feel about something, you also feel the same thing whether it's at work or at home, right? So for example, let's say you know, you have a TV, a 60 inch TV and you're trying to buy a table for it and then the person is trying to sell You a table that's like that fits 40 inch. But they keep telling you to buy it, they keep convincing you bought it. And then guess what, you cannot fit it. And you have to put all kinds of things so that it can fit. And then you go to same thing with your Martech solution. Now with AI changing people may tell you, oh, buy this, buy that, buy that right? And then you buy this wrong platform and it doesn't work properly. It's not compatible with each other. And the way you feel even in your job and the way you feel about your tv, I can guarantee you no matter what Godfather say about it's not personal, it's business. You'll feel the same feel cognitive distance. You'll feel like, oh my God, you cheat, you didn't give me what I want like what I mentioned to you. But so as the customer want. So what I'm trying to say there is basically really understanding who your influencers are to make sure that it elevates your business as well your clients business. So really identifying your collaborators is really, really key across the external and the internal players. Like Margaret mentioned, we do have an assessment that if you want to take, I think we also the 75 people that signed up, we actually send a note to see if you want to take the assessment because it can map out basically it gives you a score of. This is the assessment. Basically you can take a QR code of it. You don't have to do it here. But Margot will explain more about the details of the assessment itself.
- [25:32]
Margaret Safford
Yeah, absolutely. As an immediate next step coming out of here, I think you can take this five minute assessment. It's ten questions. They map to the nine C's that we have spoken about. Two of the questions are actually about customer. So that's why there's 10 and there's nine Cs. But in any case, 10 questions and you'll get a score. And that will help you identify where you are across different tiers. It will also help identify where some of your biggest strengths and maybe some areas where you could take an immediate action with your team to move the needle. And then starting tomorrow with the workshop and then longer term as well, we can help you collaborate to create an action plan. Sophia mentioned for each of the Cs we have a number of KPIs that we, we map back to it. And some of the questions we started to share would be the types of things that we'd go through in detail and then put the KPIs and timelines and goals For So it really does help. And here gives you a sense of the results. So if you've taken it or when you do take it, you'll be able to kind of identify where you place across. So 85% to 100 is a fan. So customer fan. What?
- [26:49]
Sophia Agostina
Customer fan.
- [26:50]
Margaret Safford
Customer fan, Customer fan. So that means you're doing a great job and people will highly fan. Right. Someone's really talking about you in a real excited way. But there's always ways to continue to kind of improve across some of the dimensions. But that's usually the top tier. Then we see 70 to 84 is a friend. So they like you. They'll say positive things. But there's a lot of areas where if you move that needle to get to the fan, you could start to drive bigger outcomes. And then 0 to 69, we're calling a follower. So that means they'll be curious, they'll follow along with you, but they're not necessarily feeling a positive, a positive emotional connection as we talked about in some of the earlier slides. Then tomorrow during the workshop, we'll go through this in more detail and share some other results we've had from all of the aggregate test takers that we've had. Assessment takers, we've had.
- [27:42]
Sophia Agostina
Yeah, the average is about 73. So, you know, and there are a few at the bottom and few at the top as well. But, you know, the middle one is typically you have about three or four Cs that are lower score. So if you take the assessment, you will see it's up to 100. But each question you will see ranking, you know, it's 2 to over 10 or 4 over 10. And so I would take right now, it's not automated yet. So like if you, after you take your assessment, if you take a screenshot of the results, then we will send you more information on that tomorrow. But also we have a card that you can take to put your information and then we can do a debrief on your results. But typically for the middle section, it's about three to four of your C's that we can help optimize. Or you could go back to your team and figure out a map out to the Cs that we mentioned to you. And tomorrow we'll have more Cs and then see how you can tweak a little bit so that you can get that customer move your, your tier from are you a customer fan or are you a customer friend? So it's basically how you are to your customers, how personalized is your delivery to your customer? How do you know your customer? How well do you know your customer? Are you a friend to them?
- [29:05]
Margaret Safford
And I think we're mostly at time, but I just wanted to mention one thing that we found really useful is when multiple people from teams within the same organization take the assessment and yet different scores. It's a great way to open up dialogue and conversation and figure out how to move the needle collectively as part of your team and your goals. So I think with that, we're at time, but thank you very, very much for participating and listening. And yeah, any questions, definitely come see us and hopefully we'll see you at the workshop tomor.
- [29:43]
Claudia Tirico
All right, that's a wrap on Margaret and Sophia. With so many new technologies, tools and KPIs to track and measure, it can be really difficult to maintain focus on the main goals. And these ladies did a wonderful job breaking it down to help marketers make an impact and build lasting customer relationships. Thank you all so much for tuning in today. Again, I really hope to see you in Scottsdale in just a few weeks. We are already prepping for season 12 of the podcast as well, so be sure to subscribe so you don't miss out. Take care, everyone.