Good day everybody, and thank you for joining me. Ardath, how are you?

I'm good. Thanks for having me.

Oh, we are excited. I've read about you, I've seen your other talks, and this is a topic that everybody is focused on right now, especially heading into a down market and heading into who knows what in 2023 is sales enablement? How do we close that gap? How are we really helping our sales teams actually through the deal process, past nurture, into that close and into revenue recognition? So I'm going to start. I have a number of questions for you, Ardath. Our marketers have been busy getting these questions in, but I want to start, if you wouldn't mind, how would you define in 2022 sales enablement for ABM marketers?

Well, I'm not so sure it's different whether it's ABM or regular marketing, but sales enablement is changed in my opinion, mostly because marketing has changed in my opinion. And the reason why is because you see buyers becoming more self-reliant, buyers pushing vendors back, buyers doing their own research. And there's some pros to that, some cons to that. But the thing is that, and I've written about this in my last book I wrote about it, we need to approach the continuum. The entire buying cycle through the customer life cycle, we need to really embrace the whole thing. Not just let's generate a lead and toss it over the wall. And so, sales enablement is really about how do we help our salespeople step into the story the buyer is already engaged with? How do we help them continue that story and build momentum by helping buyers advance?

And so, it really, I think marketers have to provide air cover through the whole thing. And we have to tell that continuous story. And it's one of the reasons why anybody who knows me knows I'm pepped up about personas and buyer intelligence and really understanding your buyers because otherwise, how do you build a continuous story all the way across what I call the continuum? So essentially sales enablement is really about buyer enablement. So how do you help your sellers enable your buyers? And it's no longer good enough to pass a lead and have sales start over, start from wherever they want to or wherever they feel comfortable because who cares? It's like when you call customer service and they pass you on to another rep and they say, "Okay. Tell me about your problem. What happened?" And you're like, "I just spent 20 minutes explaining this to the last guy."

Then they say, "Oh, we have to get a manager." The manager gets on. "Could you tell me your problem?" You start over. You know what I'm saying? And that's how sales is treating things. And until we can get this coordination together, I think, and especially in down markets where there's even more risk and more reason for them to say, "Wait. We're going to stay where we are because at least we know the devil we're dealing with", I think it is really imperative that we get this handled and coordinate between sales and marketing. And I think in a big way marketers carry a lot of responsibility for that.

And I love what you covered there. I'm actually going to take one follow up and then I'll move to the next question we got in here. And a reminder to the audience, our 25 minutes with Ardath will go really fast. If you have questions about sales enablement, please get them in or don't blame us if we run out of time. So I'm going to pick up on something you said there, Ardath, but it's even harder for tech marketers. You brought up a really good analogy, which is customer service and talking to somebody for 20 minutes, then doing it again, then doing it again, to the point you're like, "Am I even getting help or am I helping them?" For our B2B tech buyers, especially complex, let's say cloud enablement or cybersecurity buyers, it's much more than 20 minutes. It's 20 touches before they're even considering engaging with the first salesperson, let alone the six month buying cycle.

So each customer in these scenarios when they're larger accounts, when they're strategic, their stories can be different. As you said, the buyer's story is what the salesperson needs to step right into. How do we scale that across our regional global sales teams, when our buyers have different stories, they have different pain points for which they're using our product?

Well, yes and no. Of course there's different use cases, so you need to understand what story goes with each use case. But I just as a matter of fact, wrote an article for CustomerThink, I'm an advisor for them this year. And I wrote about using needs and wants. You need to use both. And a lot of times marketers treat that as the same thing. Needs and wants, same thing. They're not. So as a quick example, a need would be, I need a roof over my head. A want would be, I want a cabin with a canoe by the dock on the lake. So you can see the different pictures. I need a roof over my head, I need shelter, but here's what I want. So we have to help them paint those pictures. We have to assure them they're getting what they need to get to whatever the outcome is they want, but we also have to help them see themselves in it.

Buying is still emotional. We're still humans even if we're buying for our businesses. And so there's a lot of ways to use emotion in B2B that I don't think we all think about. We think about it in B2C, where we make people laugh or we make them happy or we make them sad. Well, in B2B, how risky does this feel to you? How is your professional status going to change in the company if you make this decision? These are all emotional things that we need to use and to our advantage, but it's one reason why we really need to understand our buyers, because all of this feeds back into them. But back to your original question, how you scale is, you need to look at, I think one of the problems that companies have is that they don't lock into their ICP. So it's like, "Okay, you're a live bot, let's sell something to you."

Well, then you're going to get that wild and a slinging range of stuff going on. But if you really dial into your ICP, what you find, and if you talk to your customers again and again, you find these commonalities about how they're looking at things. The same size company with the same type of hierarchy, we have the same buying committee structure, the same points of view about different things if they're in especially the same industry. So there's some ways you can extrapolate out to scale. And then of course when sales gets involved, they can dial in and fine tune. But as a marketer, what we have to do is look at what are all the points of commonality, which is what you get from personas.

Once you can see the points of commonality, your ability to engage goes up because something's going to be relevant in that story you're telling to everybody in that group of people. And so that's why it's so important to look at segmentation, to look at ICPs, to look at your buying personas and formulating all of this with real customer input, so you can understand their perspective. It's easy to get to the need, but it's harder to get to the want. And if you don't talk to customers and understand the phrases they use, their perspective, the way they look at something, that's where you get that secret sauce kind of stuff in your content is when you can apply that.

So there's two things here I've got to clarify, because this is really helpful. You just touched on them both. Our sales teams are inherently talking to the customers all the time. That's what they do. Our sellers are also really well-tuned. Tech sellers into emotion. Buyer emotion, working on FOMO, the fear of missing out and working on the person's personal story. So if our sales team has a lot of those boxes checked, like you just said, they are talking to customers, they understand the use case and the proximity to the ICP, they're dialed into the emotional language of why the buyer would want this solution, how it changes their life, not just their budget. Then why is marketing doing this? We got a lot of other things to do. Do we really need to do this or can sales take care of it?

No, sales can't take care of it. First of all, your company needs to create demand. We [inaudible 00:08:59] through awareness and building trust and those kinds of things, but without marketing, you don't get any of that. Especially when buyers are pushing vendors back. Now, sellers don't have a great rep with buyers. Buyers are like, "Salespeople aren't really helpful to me." And so we need to help them be more helpful. But here's the thing. Sellers know the customers they talk to, but sellers also have a big bias because their universe of customers they talk to is much smaller than the universe of people marketers talk to when we now get data about. And so I'll just give you a quick example. I presented personas to a client and we had sales in the room because we had involved them and used some of their insights and what have you and marketers in the room.

And the head of sales stood up and said, "That persona will never work because I talked to Mark this morning", who was one of their customers, "And he's nothing like that." And Mark, the company that Mark worked for was an outlier. He wasn't part of their ICP. But see, buyers will latch on to biases that they get from specific customers, especially if they're customers they really like and they spend a lot of time with. But it doesn't scale because it doesn't apply to anybody else. It's like choosing to take a B2C example saying that your persona drives a Volvo. Period. Do you know? And everybody else drives Corvettes. Well, how are the stories going to differ if you're focused on that? And so, I think the benefit that marketing brings is we take a broader perspective because we have to. We need to create awareness and interest and engagement across the broader PAM, our total addressable market, and try to bring them in, creating demands that then sales can capture and close hopefully.

But the thing is, it's like we need to make adjustments. I'm working on a piece now talking about when do you redo your personas? When do you need to shift? And it's like, look at the market right now. We've got inflation, we've got threats of becoming recession. You're seeing layoffs like crazy. Budgets are ratcheting down, tightening up. People are uncertain about the future, but they still have to buy stuff. They still have to do business. And so instead of fear of missing out, how are we addressing fear of risk? What if this doesn't work for me in this market? Why should I invest now instead of holding onto my cash and just limping through? And so, helping people understand why it's important to still continue doing business and pursuing growth even in a down economy, because so many companies don't do that. They're going to come out way far ahead on the other end. And research has proved this over time. How do we tell that story?

So it's a different story than fear of missing out. Well, that feeds in too if you're going to give up growth. But do you know what I'm saying? The essence of your stories has to change because your personas, your customers change. They change with the market, they change with new technology, they change with whatever's going on. And so it's not a one and done thing. Just when you think you know your customers, everything changes.

Yeah. No, absolutely. I think you've brought up a really good point is we're dealing with what could almost be considered layered risk profiles right now. Beyond the regular risk of making a mistake switching providers or making a mistake in the timing of when I switched providers for better features. Both of those are real risks for a SaaS buyer. "Not just that I bought the wrong solution, because I made assumptions or our team made assumptions, but I bought it at the wrong time. Dang it. I should have bought it sooner or later. We've got other risks right now of will the payoff or ROI happen at the time that my company really needs that, versus other priorities I'm balancing with a shrinking budget, and is this the right time when my own company might be going through a reorg. Not shrinkage, but my role might be changing." So how are marketers handling that kind of risk right now when they're working with sales and strategic accounts? What are you seeing, Ardath?

Well, let me tie it into something that Gartner's been talking a lot about, which is high regret sales. And part of it is being caused by the buyers themselves, because they're pushing vendors back. Now how many times, and a lot of my clients are selling big, complex, high priced stuff that it has a long sales cycle, it's a big investment, and so they're more prone to get high regret outcomes. But part of it, and what the research is finding and what I'm seeing with my own customers is that, because buyers are self-educating and taking this on themselves, they don't buy these kinds of solutions every day of the week. And even if they bought it in the past, chances are the technology is now different. So it's going to be a different product. And so they don't know what they don't know. Our job as marketers and sellers is to help them understand all of the potential implications and help them understand what they don't know they don't know.

In fact sellers that can help them do this, become highly trusted and usually end up getting the deal because here's the kicker, you have to build enough confidence in the buying committee to get them go, "Yes. We want to do this deal. This is going to be good for us. We can visualize the future, now that we can do whatever the solution will enable us to do." And so that's our job is how do we help our buyers and everybody else involved understand what they don't know? Because buying has changed, risk has changed. The things you can accomplish with solutions, they may not even know all the possibilities. They may not know what things they need to watch out for when they try to go to implementation. What steps or risks do they need to avoid in doing user onboarding? All of these kinds of things help them make the decision to move forward and have a clear and certain vision of the future.

Like you were talking about earlier, we should have bought it sooner, we should have bought it later, we shouldn't have spent the money. This is what causes regret. And so how do we help them truly evaluate based on their problem and what outcome they need? We don't focus enough on outcomes. We focus on our products. Salespeople know the product inside and out, so they want to keep talking about the product. The buyer doesn't care. The buyer cares about the outcome they get from the product. And so the main decision makers usually care more about the business outcome and the details of change management within their organizations. How are they going to get adoption for this thing? How long is it going to take to get ROI? All of those kinds of things. What could get in the way of that? What happens if implementation doesn't happen in two months?

And now I've got another two months and I've got to rearrange all my onboarding and I've got to, who's going to help me get through that? And there's so many things that we need to help them understand. And so there needs to be, like I said, this ongoing story that marketers start and they help buyers step into at the right time. And I think it's one of the things that's interesting to me and some of the work that I'm doing is buyers are willing to step in earlier if sales can add value earlier, instead of pushing them back to the far end, after their 20 interactions. And then they go, "Okay. Now we can talk to a vendor." So I think it's imperative that we learn to read the signs, and a lot of that is now helped with intent data and the ways you use that to evaluate what's going on with your buyers or your accounts. And so I think it's just got to be handled in lockstep between marketing and sales.

And I've been talking about, or dealing with this misalignment between marketing sales for 20 years now, and I'm like, "Aren't we over this yet? Are we not over this yet? What's the problem?" And I think we're getting closer. I think ABM helps us. I think marketers taking on revenue responsibility helps, having revenue quotas and that kind of thing, because then it starts putting us all on the same page. All on the same playing field.

Well, can I actually dig into that for just a minute, and then I'm going to come back to intent data. There's actually two questions I'll combine when we come back to intent data, because it's just key right now to understanding what stage or stages our buyer or buying committee might be in based on the data that we're seeing. Because again, you're really well known. You research and you consult on bio-driven journeys. So we'll come back to that. But I'm going to just touch on one piece here that you mentioned. Which is that, let's say we have, because I can't read the brands that are here, it's confidential, but there are award-winning marketers listening to you right now. They sell six figures and high six figures on a regular basis. That's what their customers buy. And I think this is a real problem for them is that they have done the research, they've got a really good, well-rounded and dynamic ICP. They are focusing on outcomes. And like you said, they've worked in some emotional storytelling into how people are buying their product.

But, they can't get their sales teams to use their assets. They can't get them to use the sales enablement. This divide is still very real. So before we go to intent data, Ardath, you've done this longer than most of us. What's your advice?

Well, I'll tell you that I think the most effective way I've learned how to do it is I took a position during COVID for one of my clients. They needed an interim VP of marketing. So I took on that role for them and they promised it would be a few months, it ended up being a year. But one of the things was, they sold a sales enablement platform. And so along with all of that, I needed to enable our sales team, and it's during COVID, so everything's changing. And granted, Modus was a rather small company compared to a lot of the other bigger companies I usually work for. But what I found effective was actually attending their sales meetings, providing updates from marketing and those kinds of things, but getting them in a room or talking to them one-on-one, to involve them in the work marketing was doing to get their input, get their buy-in is what I wanted.

And as I helped them improve their email sequences or my team did, and we helped set up stuff in sales law for them, for example, we explained them how to use intent data. We gave them messaging, we give them a dossier on opportunities that we transitioned so they knew where to pick up the story. They started seeing success with that. They started having better conversations. We actually blew through our revenue quota during COVID because sales was attuned, but it took a lot of work and a lot of explanation. One of the things I think we don't understand is, salespeople have no idea what marketing does. They really don't. They think we're the fluff and art department still. Even today. Even with all of the technology we have and all the work we do and whatever, they have no clue what we do.

And so the more we can help them understand that, I found as the sales team started really getting a grasp on what we were doing, the programs we were running, the information we could provide to them that helped them, the more they wanted and the more it was like, "Okay. Get off my Zoom call, go away. I'm busy. I got other things to do. No, help me." And so that was really rewarding to have that come together. And yes, they were a smaller team, but I think the big thing was they really had no idea what marketing did. They thought we just ran the website.

And to your point, that awareness isn't going to come from large PowerPoints on a QVR or a monthly update. It's going to come when we're working with them. And I think I myself have seen this work when you're actually working with selective salespeople and you actually produce with them, that applies to a lot of other salespeople that now gives you credibility. I can't go further into this. We're going to run out of time. I apologize to our attendees if we didn't get to your question, I will try to follow up with Ardath. She doesn't have a lot of time either, but I will follow up and see if I can get some general questions, maybe do a recap tomorrow of the things we couldn't cover, if that's okay, Ardath? If I get a couple over to you by email? Okay. Thank you. The last question that is going to be a combination in the time we have around intent data.

I could not ask a better expert right now of you've been doing research throughout COVID, you've done it in your career, buyer driven journeys. Buyers are letting off a lot of data, a lot of signals when they're getting closer and closer to not only convincing themselves, but to pulling their whole buying committee towards the point of making a decision or a formal RFP upon which then a decision will be made. How are you seeing from the best examples you've seen, how are you seeing marketers partnering with sales to use that intent data in the middle and bottom of the funnel?

Well, the interesting thing about intent data, and let me just speak to 6sense. Because I did a lot of work with the 6sense platform. The thing about it is, as intent scores increment, you're buying your buyers, your accounts increase their engagement through your website and your company properties, company specific name searches, all those things. So when the intent score is low, basically they don't know who you are. They're not coming to your website, they're not. And as things go up, their engagement with you increases. And so what you need to look at is, how is that matching up? And so what I want to see is, an increasing number of intent events happening with an account while I'm seeing an increasing number or amounts of engagement across that account and it's no longer about, "Oh, look. We got this one buyer who's reading everything." No, I want, how many more are there?

How do we get that engagement up across the account? But I want to watch intent data align with that. There's more people in the company may be doing searches, maybe more of them are searching for our company and looking at [inaudible 00:24:09] even if not formally involved in the buying process. And so when you marry these intent data with the website data... [inaudible 00:24:18] knock it off. Sorry, dog. But when you marry the intent data with the websites, then you also get a different picture of what's going on with your accounts. So I just think there's a lot you can learn from it. That one thing I did learn with intent data though is that, even when the intent data shows they are in purchase mode decision, top of the intent chart, it can still take up to 90 days for them to become an opportunity. It took me a long time to figure out why their stages didn't line up with our stages as we're tracking buyers through.

So you have to, no matter which intent data provider you're working with, you have to figure out how do their algorithms really calculate this stuff, so that you're doing apples to apples instead of misinterpreting the data. And so that's one of the biggest challenges. But when you put the two together, it's very powerful and you can actually see which do you have the right buyers or the right people on the buying committee in your database, because you can see whether they're engaging or not. And if you have your marketing automation integrated with your Salesforce and whatever, you can see everything start matching up. And if you don't have the right people, like you've got five people from the account in your database, but only two are interacting, who are you missing? You can go out and do research on those intent data platforms and try to figure out who you need to get in, and they give you hints like location and some different things, but you don't see the actual personalized information until you have the contact in your database.

And that is completely aligned with what we do. That's exactly what we do. That's why the tech clients are here. That's why the marketers are here. That's exactly what we do, is we fill out that buying committee to your point, because it's not just the champion. And even after they get in purchase mode, and even as buyers, Ardath, you and I have seen this, we'll close with this is some empathy for our buyer driven journey. We're not just sellers. We're buyers too is yes. When you have a solid business case, we really need to buy this solution and we need to solve this problem, it then will shift in most cases, depending on the size of the organization, especially ABM accounts over to a technical consideration.

Okay. We got it. You've approved the budget, we do want to do this. Now let us vet everything again, because that's our domain expertise and legal. And risk, we'll look at it. So it can take an extra 90 days in purchase mode. You do want to purchase, but an entire expansion of your buying committee is now involved in the deal, and that's the only way it's going to happen at a lot of these companies.

Well, true. And as the buying committee expands, do you have the right content and information that can either be passed along to them if your seller isn't directly engaging or whatever? Because remember, different perspectives need different versions of the story. So what do they care about and how does whatever you're selling them impact their perspective? You got to have that content for all those people. That information.

You brought us right back to where we started, which was sales enablement all the way through the deal. Ardath, thank you so much. I'm sorry we couldn't get through all the questions, but I will follow up and would love to have you back. This is really, really helpful to all of us that are marketing.

Oh, I'm so happy. I enjoyed it. Thank you. And I can talk about this forever.

Awesome. Thank you so much. You take care. Bye everybody.