So first things first, let's level set, if you wouldn't mind, because I've been noticing you've been having this discussion in different pieces across various social channels with a lot of influential tech marketers. Why are you focusing right now and helping people bring their attention to the bottom of the funnel and revenue attribution and MQL to SQL conversion? Why are you talking about that right now?

Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for the question. So I do a really good job of coloring my hair, but I do have a lot of gray. I've been around the block a couple of times. This isn't my first bare market, if you will, right? And so I think we see there's clouds on the horizon. We don't know if winter's coming or not at this point. But it's important for us to prepare, right? And so as somebody who's been an executive and been in companies with executives during these times, I've seen what the playbook looks like. And the playbook normally looks like a session of, hey, let's start tightening our belts. Let's reduce budgets. Then it moves into, let's start considering excess headcount, right? And so then the layoffs start happening.

And so it's really super important. And the message I'm trying to get out there, it's really super important for marketing people to know, get yourself as closely aligned to revenue as you possibly can. Because without that, it looks like you're just fluff, right? If you can't measure, how are you contributing to revenue? How are you helping us make the money? How are you helping us make sure that our financials look right? Then you look like an expense, not an asset. And so my advice to people who haven't been through this storm is to continually make sure that everything that you're doing is measurable. And I know there's some banter out there on social about like, hey, it's just about brand and it's about your voice and social. That's great.

And maybe it flips to, instead of being 50-50 to 80-20 or even 10-90, you got to keep doing those things. But here's the risk. Like if you can't measure that and show the correlation back to revenue, you're at risk. So the comment that I made on social, and maybe this is a Gen X thing is, you remember Oregon trails, you can't get to the Prairie if you get dysentery on the way. Don't get dysentery. Don't be part of the team that gets laid off as part of the journey. So keep everything that you do, highly metric oriented, aligned to how it's driving revenue. That's my best advice for not losing your job during a storm.

I love the analogy, especially because I am in Oregon. I am where we ended up on the pioneer trails. And you're right. The only way to get there is river to river. If you don't make it to the next river, you're wiped out. And for us as tech marketers, that's every major conversion point. If you don't have that MQL to SQL conversion, you're not an investment, you're an expense. I love it, Wendy. Thank you. Now, most people have used or know PeerSpot, but they may not be aware of the massive amount of intent data that you guys deal with. Could you lay the framework a little bit before I get into those specific data types?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. For those of you who don't know PeerSpot, we actually used to be a company called IT Central Station. And we've been around for 10 years. We recently rebranded in January as PeerSpot. We think the name is more reflective of truly what we're trying to do is bring peers together to make better business decisions. And so, yeah, I mean, the core of what PeerSpot is, is it's a platform for technology professionals to essentially, it's buying intelligence for technology professionals to make better buying decisions about complex enterprise technology. What does that mean for marketing people?

Well, when you have a platform where people can come in and read reviews, they can join communities, they can ask questions, they're obviously actively in a late stage buying cycle because they're trying to figure out, should I buy this or should I buy this? They've made the short list, now they're just doing the due diligence. So for marketing people, that means that content coming in is not only amazing late stage intent data, but we also have lead programs for those folks. So if you're a technology person and you've just compared product A and product B, we ask those folks, would you like a buyer's guide that summarizes all of this?

And as part of that, we collect their information. So now not only are they late stage intent data, like an account, but they're physically an actual lead that you can call the person, right? So I've been a customer multiple times of PeerSpot in my career. I truly believe this is one of the best ways for enterprise technologies to get late stage pipeline. And I've seen it over and over, whether it was at ServiceNow or HP or any of the other companies I've worked at. So I'm a huge believer in it, which is why I joined. Yeah, no, and I love that. And I could totally see that it was such an organic move.

I love that you're driving their marketing. I mean, when I step back, it's like a Reddit for tech buyers, which makes so much sense that I'm surprised you guys built it before anybody else had it. Now that you sort of laid that out, that's a lot of data, right? Those conversations, those reviews, it's very qualitative, coming straight from the mouth of the buyer, right? Help us understand, Wendy, fundamentally, what content do tech buyers look at before they want to reach out to sales?

Yeah, well, I mean, there's all sorts of data out there, right? I've seen data points from Gartner and other publications that show more than two thirds of the buying cycle is done on your own. And it's probably even more than that, quite honestly, especially with us being so self-sufficient and buying online and SaaS and what have you today. And so there's still the classic buying cycle that I think we've all been educated on. Like you got to create awareness and then you got to, excuse me, give them some sort of content and create intent in the middle. And then obviously, there's the bottom of the funnel. And so again, what we see is like maybe if you're at the top of the funnel, you might be looking for a piece of content or a piece of advice around, should I be moving into this space? Should I be thinking about, maybe let's take an example like ABM.

Should I be thinking about doing ABM? Like what is it? How is it different? And so there's a lot of platforms out there that give you essentially like the industry insight and maybe some best practices and just you're kind of moving into, do I want to do this or do I not want to do this? And then as you move down the funnel, you get to this place where, okay, yeah, I know I want to do this, but like, who should I use? Like what are people, how are people setting it up and what are some of the best practices and that's kind of middle of the funnel. And then when you get to the very end, now you're like, I've got a short list. I'm either going to use six cents or I'm going to use demand-based. Like now, which one should I use?

Which one's harder? Which one's, does it have an API connection? There's all of these things that the vendor isn't explicitly telling you on their website. That you wish you had a network that you could go and ask, but not everybody has a network. And even if you have a network, like if I were to go to ask my friends at ServiceNow, they're in a big company. I'm in a small company. Like there's a lot of differences. And so moving into an area like PeerSpot where it's a buying intelligence platform, you can go find people who are companies like your size, right? You can go see what did, what were their challenges. Like the reviews that we have are done over the telephone. So it's a transcribed conversation as opposed to having them type it. So you get a lot more fluid discussion, right?

So they tell you like, oh, the API was really hard to implement or what have you. So it's really true candid feedback so that somebody can look at it and be like, oh, like, oh, I didn't think I was going to have to do that. Like I better go ask my IT people, like how hard this is going to be. So we want to make sure that when people make the buying decision, they're happy with the buying decision they made. I don't know about you, but I personally have bought things in my life where I'm like, why did I buy this? This totally isn't living up to the expectation that they put out there. And so the more you talk to people and the more research you do, hopefully the more aligned reality is with your expectations.

I love it. Thank you, Wendy. Thank you for that whole journey. Again, it needs someone with that experience that you have across industries, across verticals in tech to help people understand that whole journey and what people are looking at. Now there is, do you remember these trends? We had mobile, then we had social, then we had big data, then we had blockchain, I guess we still have blockchain, and then now we've got intent data, right? So I'm going to demystify this between the two of us, having done at least five cycles right there, right? Intent data. We could talk for hours about all the good sources for intent data, but Wendy. help us break down. What are bad sources for intent data? Where should we be a little bit careful or do a little verification before we jump to a conclusion?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so there's just a lot of data out there, right? And so I don't know if there's really good and bad. It's all depends on what your purpose is, right? So kind of as I was mentioning before, there's intent data out there that is top of the funnel. Like a good example of that is TechTarget has a thing called Priority Engine, right? That's great top of the funnel because again, when people are going to the TechTarget ecosystem, usually they're going to research like, should I move into this space? Like what are the things that I should think about? So they're at the top of the funnel, right? And so there's a purpose for that.

That's not going to convert to pipeline right away because again, they're not ready to buy. They're researching still. So I think the key is understanding where the people are that are being served your intent data in the buying cycle and knowing what to do with them. Like there's a great stat that shows the intent data is growing at like 50% year over year. People want to get into ABM and do intent data, but 67% of those people have no idea what to do with it, right? So it's like, great. Now I have this platform. Now what do I do with it? So I think that's truly the struggle that a lot of companies are facing especially now.

Like I just saw a stat actually in a report that you guys put out, more than 80% of marketing people today are aligned to a pipeline goal. Okay, great. That's great. But what are you going to do? How are you going to take your intent data and do something with your pipeline with it? And again, it really depends on if you're just going to be bringing in a bunch of account insight. Okay, so now you've got to go map it and figure out like, who do we know at that account? And then, okay, now you're going to probably put them into a nurture and that's going to take some time, right? So the further down, like intent data off of your own website, that's awesome.

They came to your website, you know, they're looking, you know that you're on the short list because they're looking at your site. So how would you treat that differently than somebody who's researching, should I even be doing this? Or somebody, again, like Pier Spot where they're actually standing in the store going, should I buy this one or should I buy this one? So I think the key is not whether it's bad or good, it's knowing where it is in the buying cycle and knowing what to do with it.

Yeah, no, I love that. And also the way that you sort of funnel that down from the broad interest or intent data, you know, category down to solution, right? Down to options, right? Straight up competitors down to you, right? Like when it finally becomes first-party data and it's like, wait, they're on our website, they've been on our website and they're hitting the pages that, wait, our buyers hit, right? So I think one really salient point you covered there, Wendy, it's really worth repeating is that if your intent data doesn't carry through from the contact, through the account, through the opportunity, to the deal, it's probably not that relevant or valuable to you.

You know what I mean? You might be losing it along the way because we've been doing this long enough to know that the stuff that matters will go through the purchase cycle. It’ll be there right at the end, which brings me to, this is sort of a difficult question, but again, I'm asking an expert, okay? So I'm going to raise the expectation on you. There's a pretty sophisticated argument amongst, you know, sort of senior and seasoned tech marketers, right, that have seen changes over the last 20 years, that the only real bant now in the subscription economy is need.

The argument behind this is that, well, if you're signing up for a trial and it's SaaS, how much budget do you really need and whose authority are you waiting on? Most professionals can sign up for a subscription, a B2B subscription that they need to start using the product pretty easily, right? What do you think about this? Do you think Bant in its entirety is still the way to define an MQL or do you think that really we could lead with the bulk of this being need?

Yeah. So I really think it depends on what your business is, right? So yeah, sure. If I were buying a, like the other day I bought myself a subscription to Loom to make videos on my own. I can buy that myself. Like it's not a big deal. I can even try it for a while, right? There's a lot of, you know, try before you buy it. So I think that if you're buying something for yourself, it's easy. Maybe it is only need, right? Because your budget is your budget. When you start to get into enterprise sales, I think we all know that's not realistic, right?

Bant is still definitely a validation because not only do you, again, do you need the right budget, you need the right authority, you know, you need to make sure that you're talking to the right people who are going to make that decision. And in an enterprise sale, it's never one person, right? It's always teams of people, right? And so what one person is interested in, another person isn't interested in. And so that's what makes enterprise sales so complicated and so long is it's not one person and it's not just need. There's a, it's far more complex.

If you could just, if I could just have you say that once a week, you know, on our marketing platforms and our discussion, it would be so helpful because I do think that, you know, because of the media spend and, you know, the VC dollars behind the smaller, quickly scalable SaaS like Loom or Canva or, you know, or DocuSign, right? There is this misconception that something that's an annual thousand dollar spend is being bought the same way as something that's a hundred thousand or a million dollars spent, right? Which it's not, right?

If I'm comparing Azure, Google Cloud and AWS, it's not just that I could start with any of them. The integration speaks to authority. Am I really the person to make that decision, right? I love it. Thank you so much. So there's a related question just popped in. When we're really talking enterprise B2B deals, right? Do you think it makes sense to limit the number of buyers or people you're looking at on a potential buying committee? Because like a lot of folks will buy, you know, like a demand gen program, they'll be like, oh, I need three to five names and then we're good to go. Do you think that's really the way that things are being bought or do you think those committees are bigger?

So I'll give you an actual example. So my last job that I had was at VMware and I worked in product marketing and I wanted to bring on a new vendor. And let me just tell you the process to bring on a new vendor at VMware. So I had decided I really like this vendor, right? Like after I'd gone through all of my own analysis and talked to my own friends, right? I was like, I really feel like we need this for our organization. And so as part of that, I needed to validate with security and privacy that they were the right vendor. I needed to validate with all my stakeholders, sales, other parts of marketing, the demand gen teams, that it was going to integrate or work with everything else. So, you know, you already have right there, what, five people, five different organizations.

Then on top of that, I needed to work with our IT teams to make sure that it was going to integrate with our single sign on. So now I have an IT team that I need to work with to make sure that this is the right solution. And for some reason, IT always says to me, you know, or says to probably all of us in this position, well, we could just build it ourselves. Like why are we going to buy this? So then you have to go back and justify why you want to buy something versus build something. So that's the complexity of what a marketer is thinking about when selling an enterprise solution is I'm not just selling them on what you want and solving your pain.

I now need to help you justify across massive levels of organization, why you should buy this, why you should implement it, why you should integrate it with other systems throughout the processes, throughout the organization, how it makes sure that, you know, it's secure and it's not doing something with your data. Like there's lots of people involved in saying yes to this and any of them can say no, and then it stops. So that's the thing is, yes, you might get over the goal line of Wendy wanted it and now I'm going to be the champion for it, but now I need to support Wendy in getting it through all of these extra hurdles. So you know, that makes it super complex.

Thank you so much, Wendy. That's such a good analogy, right? Especially because I don't think most people realize, right, in the inbound 80 plus percent B2B self-buying journey, all of what you described is being supported by marketing, by non-commissioned individuals who are not working one-on-one with that individual, facilitating your journey, but there wasn't an account rep, right, helping you jump through all those hurdles because you hadn't started the sales process. This was your own due diligence. I think this is really important.

I think a lot of folks don't realize that on the B2B enterprise marketing side is that you are supporting so much of making that sale happen, not just making that sale easy. So we can fit in two more questions, Wendy, I told you we always run out of time. I apologize, right? Only 25 minutes. So I'm going to pick two here. Because your platform looks at all these really quality reviews and opinions of tech buyers who may or may not buy that platform they're reviewing, but they're going to buy something. That's why they're spending their time on it. What would you say is sort of, are there certain testimonials? Are there certain reviews that have a quality or some aspect of them that makes them more credible or more attractive to people that want to make a decision versus all the other Reviews?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, again, you know, the the way that we think about doing reviews is we do them through a telephone conversation. A lot of other platforms will, you know, send put out like, hey, we'll give you twenty five to twenty five dollar gift card if you type in stuff. So, you know, like you might go look at those reviews and they'll be like, I really liked it. It was great. Right. Like, OK, that's super not useful. What am I going to do with that information? So. So, you know, one of the things that PeerSpot prides itself on is our reviews are super comprehensive. You know, they're anywhere from six hundred to two thousand words.

And so, you know, you're going to find the insight that you want there. And there's not just one. Right. But there's lots of reviews so that you can look for them from companies that are like you or people that are like you or had similar situations. And so, you know, again, in the absence of having your own network that you can go ask who's in the same exact situation. This is this is a great platform for you to be able to because there's also a community and there's a Q&A forum. So you can go ask a question like, hey, I'm thinking about buying six cents. Like what is the integration I need to think about in my MarTech stack?

Right. Like you can go ask those questions so that the community can help you answer them. And so, you know, I think I think it's invaluable people helping people, especially today. Right. Like the days of, you know, looking at a Gartner MQ and being like, well, I'm going to pick one of these. Yeah, that's nice. But I'd rather like I want to know from people who are using it every day, like, did it work the way that it was supposed to work? Like, you know, like, did you get a good price on it? Like, you know, were there any things that I should ask before, you know, before I buy? So, you know, your your peers are your best source of the true like dirt, right? Like you they're going to tell you the truth.

Just like you make any other major life decision. Right. Right. Before you buy in a neighborhood. Right. You talk to people that live there or know people who live there, who thought about buying Like it just makes so much sense, right? Because you're committing the next few years to this decision to work out. This will be the last question we can take. I wish we could. I love my job, Wendy, because I get to talk to smart marketers like you, but I don't get to do it enough. OK, so I apologize. We're going to run out of time. My last question. And there's only a few people like you I can ask. OK. We work so hard. Like you said, we are now often carry what would have been the sales process before with a champion all the way to that sales engagement to demo, you know, to actual purchase. What is the tech marketers role after a customer buys?

Oh, that's a good question. Well, I mean, obviously, the the you know, the stats show that the I don't want to say the cheapest, but the least expensive way to drive your business is to grow your cut. You like have your customers buy more. Right. So bringing on a new customer costs significantly more than just asking your existing customers to buy more, to buy new products, right. Cross sell upsell type things like that. And so it's critical for companies to make sure that their customers are happy.

I mean, it's one of the reasons why, you know, customer success is so important in companies and now customer advocacy, which seems to be this new, you know, kind of job title that's just taking off is how do you go and make sure that customers feel like they are being taken care of? Right. That they are special. I'm sure you all have airline points, right? When you get to that airline, you're like, yeah, I'm a, you know, United member. Like I want to make sure I feel like I'm treated special because I've got the you know, the status and it's no different. I mean, people are people, even though they're buying for enterprise, they still have emotions.

They're still people. They still want to feel like the decision that they made is you know, is, is respected by their peers, but also that the company appreciates them, that they made that decision that like I just said, that they went through all those hoops for you and made sure that IT didn't build it themselves and security didn't shut it down. Right. Like they put their neck out to make this possible. They're just asking for you to, you know, to to make them feel special. And then, you know, obviously just kind of bringing it back to PeerSpot, you know, one of the things that we ask is get your customers to go out and tell that story, right? Get them onto the platform to say how happy they are or how, you know, what are some of the things that, that you, that could have been done better. And so you know, go use them as a voice in the market to go tell your story. Because again, the best people to sell your product are people using your product.

Oh, that's a good question. Well, I mean, obviously, the the you know, the stats show that the I don't want to say the cheapest, but the least expensive way to drive your business is to grow your cut. You like have your customers buy more. Right. So bringing on a new customer costs significantly more than just asking your existing customers to buy more, to buy new products, right. Cross sell upsell type things like that. And so it's critical for companies to make sure that their customers are happy.

I mean, it's one of the reasons why, you know, customer success is so important in companies and now customer advocacy, which seems to be this new, you know, kind of job title that's just taking off is how do you go and make sure that customers feel like they are being taken care of? Right. That they are special. I'm sure you all have airline points, right? When you get to that airline, you're like, yeah, I'm a, you know, United member. Like I want to make sure I feel like I'm treated special because I've got the you know, the status and it's no different. I mean, people are people, even though they're buying for enterprise, they still have emotions.

They're still people. They still want to feel like the decision that they made is you know, is, is respected by their peers, but also that the company appreciates them, that they made that decision that like I just said, that they went through all those hoops for you and made sure that IT didn't build it themselves and security didn't shut it down. Right. Like they put their neck out to make this possible. They're just asking for you to, you know, to to make them feel special. And then, you know, obviously just kind of bringing it back to PeerSpot, you know, one of the things that we ask is get your customers to go out and tell that story, right? Get them onto the platform to say how happy they are or how, you know, what are some of the things that, that you, that could have been done better. And so you know, go use them as a voice in the market to go tell your story. Because again, the best people to sell your product are people using your product.

Yeah. I mean, who else would I trust? Right. Other than the people who've been using it, especially those who've been using it for six, 12, 18, 24 months, they've seen those post-purchase bumps, right? Oh my gosh, Wendy, I'm so grateful. This is so valuable. I'm going to see if we can coordinate schedules, get you back in a few months, but if winter is coming as you started, right, I really do think that, you know, as a marketer, I sincerely appreciate the advice that you are giving to marketers to align themselves with revenue, right? To direct bottom and top of, you know, the line metrics on the balance sheet so that what they're doing is an investment and not viewed as an expense. I really, really appreciate that. Thank you.

Yeah, you bet. Thanks for having me. It was fun.

I appreciate it. Anytime. Thanks everybody. We did run out of time, but I'll follow up on the questions that we couldn't get to. And we'll see you for the next one. Take care everyone. Thank you. Bye.