#Bii22 | Meeting your buyer where, when & how they want

hello everyone welcome back to our 2022 buyer insights and intelligence series this session is titled discussion meeting your buyers where when and how they want my name is claudia tarico and i'm the editor of demand gen report um and i will be half of your moderator for this presentation i'm just gonna introduce everyone and then kick things over to our fabulous panel who's gonna have an awesome discussion today um but before we begin i'm just gonna run through a few housekeeping slides and then we'll kick things off so uh for those of you who are new to demand gen report welcome we are an online media company publishing everything from daily news original research special reports a weekly email newsletter and a rich menu of additional resources so if you haven't done so already please subscribe to demandgenreport.com today and then of course uh find us on social media uh you could follow along and share your

thoughts and feedback with us on twitter and even linkedin and you could also use the hashtag bii2 all of our links and handles are right here on your screen and we look forward to connecting with you on social i also want to take this time to announce that we are going back to boston for our b2b sales and marketing exchange uh we are so excited to see our entire b2b community in person um and i really hope you can join us this august uh for more information and to check out our agenda um visit the b2b ms smx website it's b2b sales marketing dot exchange all right and then for today's presentation we're using the on 24 platform so during this session you could access pretty much everything that you need right here on this toolbar that we have mapped out on this slide first and foremost we encourage you to ask our presenters questions today

to do so simply click the q a widget at the top right corner of your screen the session is going to run about 30 to 35 minutes um and then we'll have a few extra minutes following the session uh so you could submit your questions getting that widget at any time and then if we don't have time uh to answer your question live do not worry ask them anyway and we will follow up via email and then if you want to see what else we have in store for the series this year you could access all of the bii sessions on uh the right of your screen right under that q a widget and then right below that you'll find some additional resources that we've made available to you and today's session is of course being recorded and everyone will receive an archive link to go back and review and share with colleagues and finally in addition to joining the conversation online and submitting your questions please let us know how we're doing we've put together a very brief survey that

will automatically launch when the session ends you could even pull up complete and submit the survey at any time during the session by clicking on the survey icon at the bottom of the toolbar we actually have it circled on the slide right there so uh you can't miss it so please before signing off today uh take a moment to complete this quick questionnaire all right well now i'm so excited to introduce our esteemed panel today we have peter schroeder of circle karina owens of gong stephen know of paddle and narosha mathananda of 2 who will be your other moderator for the session right after i finish introducing everyone so uh peter leads integrated campaigns at circle the creator of the popular stablecoin usdc with a focus on driving pipeline and revenue for their product portfolio collaborating cross-functionally both within marketing as well as with product and revenue teams he collaborates with his team to

create personalized buying experiences for a mutually identified set of high value accounts carina is an award-winning abm and growth marketer driving revenue for high growth b2b sas organizations with integrated and multi-channel marketing strategies no stranger to building and scaling demand gen and abm functions from the ground up karina is skilled at streamlining omni-channel marketing programs and campaigns designed to drive results that directly impact the bottom line she thrives in customer centric organizations and is obsessed with creating meaningful meaningful experiences and communities for gong's target audiences stephen is currently head of product marketing at paddle where he conducts customer and persona research previously he was head of growth at profitwell where he ran a demand generation rev-ops and business development teams uh profitwell was since acquired by paddle

in april 2022 and he of course is experienced in using data and insights to drive marketing strategy across a variety of functions and of course last but not least um always driven by a strong urge to always be learning uh narosha is a proud marketing generalist with a career spanning close to 15 years across many marketing disciplines and industries she recently joined in flu 2 as its vp of marketing and is taking on the challenge to build out what the evolution of abm looks like in her most recent role narosha was responsible for creating bombura's distinctive brand and establishing it as the lead leading global provider of b2b intent data and prior to that narosha led marketing for pwc australia's tech consulting practice dabbled in a little pr and journalism at power retail and gained an interest in digital and data at experian hit wise so obviously we are

in great hands today this is going to be a really exciting uh conversation so with that i'm going to stop talking and pass things over to narosha narosha all yours thank you thanks claudia for the intro um and welcome to everyone today who's joining us and to do all of our esteemed uh panel as well i'm really excited for the conversation and since we got such a great introduction you know like we can jump straight in um you know really today is about understanding um how karina peter and stephen are approaching meeting their buyers where when and how they want um and being able to meet the goals of their program so you know uh i'm just going to jump straight in with our first question we had a couple of questions that we outlined um you know what what guys are the best way the best ways to understand your buy and and how are you doing that i can jump in um i think that

all of us will have a similar initial answer which is uh talking to your customer understanding your customer understanding your prospective customer but but beyond that um i think a lot of success that i've seen has come down to market research and really strong market research not only serving the customers we have today but the customers we want to have tomorrow right now i work at circle which is a company that's going through this back process to become a publicly traded company but i've also worked at smaller startups series a startups that are still trying to find product market fit and i think that depending on how much traction you have should depend on how much weight you put on what your customers are saying today versus what you want to create for the market because sometimes you're working for a company that wants to create something new for the market you're building demand that's not there yet your customers don't necessarily always know exactly what they want i think it's henry ford that famously said if he would have talked to

just his customers he would have built a faster horse not a car and so uh i think that i think that it always comes down to a mix of both because being a strong brand uh and being an innovative company means creating things that don't quite exist but understanding your customers needs understanding what they want to do and what they want to accomplish what value means for them and creating the lowest friction way for them to be able to do that yeah and piggyback off what you said it's uh 95 of buyers are uh not in market at any given time so it's really crucial that you do focus on how can i engage with those people that are not ready to buy yet and so what i found to be really successful is to just figure out where are those virtual watering holes where your prospects or your future customers are already living where are they consuming content it can be a little bit of a unscalable process but i think sometimes you have to do the unscalable before you can

scale so i often frequent linkedin that's where my current audience lives the most but i also go to different forums like quora reddit and you'll be amazed at what questions you will see in these different threads and forms and just coming and showing up and providing value not necessarily taking them off the forum so give taking them to like a gated content as an example but taking what already exists in your marketing materials and offering a solution to the question that they posed so i think it's really important that you guys um that everybody at b2b today really focuses on where is the audience living right now and how can i show up and provide value right away yeah and how is how is that diversified do you think you know there were there were so few channels and now there's so many um and people are migrating all over the place so how do you how do you determine where where the best place is to engage with your with your buyer and with it with your prospects

yeah i think for me it's really listening to the customer um so a lot of times we will do what i like to call win surveys so determining um after you've closed one an account you know where where did they go to find information when they were sourcing uh their project where are they consuming content their own thought leadership so i think earlier to peter's point you really need to make sure that you're always listening to your customer and so that can be through direct questions and surveying them live um or doing your own market research but incredibly important that you are always having that feedback loop on with your customers and those are really key questions that i always ask uh especially uh once we do a look back on how we close one that account right i think one thing just to add to just almost like step back to is the this is really hard to understand your buyer especially at the complex sas solutions that we're selling like it's almost never one-to-one where we're

only talking to one audience or one person about one product like a lot of i think everyone here today has a suite of product offerings that we're talking to different buyers um and circle for example uh we have a b2c product we have a b2bc product we have a b2b product uh we're also in the crypto space and so we're dealing with uh educating people on the crypto space because there's not mainstream adoption yet and so like also when we're talking about all of these things and like what we're trying i just want to say like all of this is really hard there's a lot of like segmentation that needs to happen speaking directly to your buyers across different verticals across different industries across different personas it's all really difficult to do and so that's just like one thing i just wanted to say to stepping back is like me personally i think that this conversation is really helpful because i don't i don't have all of the answers and i think that uh just talking to people talking to other industry professionals seeing what everyone is doing uh it's always

helpful to be doing more for your customer doing more for your buyer but at the end of the day like this is hard stuff yeah and speaking of segmentation you know the in b2b you know customers often are companies but it's really people who represent buyers but often when you have multiple people on a buying decision then you have multiple people each of whom have different things they care about have different influencing new organization who go to different watering holes as well and so you have to be so personas are obviously super important um in everything but also like knowing which persona goes to which watering hole is also super important for getting that market research as well yep yeah well i mean you it set it up perfectly for me for the next question um so you know the question i want to ask one thing that we've been uh you know at influ2 really um really developing out and really advocating foreign market is um around buying groups and really and uh really focusing in on the buying groups at your accounts and understanding who they are uh you know what how you need to engage

them and so on and so forth and i guess it's a litmus test for me um to the three of you do you know do buying groups matter uh you know when you have so many things to do and as peter said it's it's very it's very complex and challenging you know how do they matter and how how and if they do how are you using them currently i i think for me segmentation can be as easy or difficult as you make it i i think like to directly answer your question like yes bind groups are important but how you segment it is important because you can segment by audience you can segment by vertical you can segment by industry you can segment by persona you can segment by buying stage and once you start to do multiple of those like your audiences multiply and it starts to get out of control pretty quickly i'm sure that steven being closer to product and product marketing can attest that

like you you never want to go too deep with building out 10 12 20 different personas for a suite of different products because it just gets impossible to manage and so i think it starts with like curbing expectation and then understanding what's important to you so for us we start with like a base level uh audience segmentation then we kind of have an engagement score segmentation and then we also have bind stage segmentation where we're scraping uh third-party market data to be able to understand buying intent um i think it's always improving i think that we're very lucky at circle that we have a data science team that we can work with that we can build some of these segmentation solutions in-house we can work with other vendors and pull from their apis to build custom data sets and serve custom audiences but it's an ever evolving process and i always come back to like keep it simple like you can never go wrong keeping it simple and keeping it about the customer absolutely and in the interest of kind

of simplifying one thing we have to do about buying groups is we've often found that you know even when there's a large buying committee involved in something there's very often one two three champions we would call them who are pushing forward a discussion you know committees obviously like you know it's hard to make a decision for more people who are in a room so very often it's like a few people who are really pushing the velocity of a deal forward who you really need to get on your site and i think kind of once you really get the personas right for who tend to be your champions that does a lot of the work and helps you really to simplify a lot of the process of getting to that champion so i love what you call that out too oh sorry i was just going to say that another way to that i think about personas is actually matching the personas of your account once those are identified within your own organization as well so anytime that there's a marketer coming into the deal currently here at gong you know i'm often coming into those calls as well to just echo how i use our own solution and how it makes my day-to-day easier so i would say

never shy away from identifying who are those different personas that you know you're targeting or going after who are they also in your own organization that peer-to-peer matching can go a long way with really building stickiness of the account so it's not just dependent on uh you know a cae or an ae at any given time but you're really surrounding the whole account with people that match and look like them within your own organization as well right yeah that's that's a interesting approach that i've i you know i've heard a couple of organizations doing is that something that you're all broadly you're broadly doing or is that something specific to karina just i'm really curious to hear if anyone else is doing that i've heard of companies where you know they they sort of take who's coming in from a prospect perspective and depending on where this what their seniority is they match whoever responds uh back in in the organization so if you're you know a cmo then you're you're getting a response back from the cmo if you're a vp you're getting a response back from the et cetera um you know is any

stephen peter are you guys adopting that that sort of approach as well uh i think we are to a limited extent i think like for example in our space um you know the profile ceo patrick campbell kind of knows a ton of people especially in kind of a tech space so we are very often will kind of leverage his relationships with other execs in order to push a lot of these forward i and even outside of that a lot of the time even if for example i'm trying to get to know what they say vp of marketing is caring about very often i'll go i'll go to my head of marketing um myself and kind of chat with them like what do you care about if you were buying this product then um what kind of objections or things would you care about so it's a useful market research tool not just on kind of a transactional trying to get specific deals for it right i would say we do a good job from a product routing perspective i wouldn't say we necessarily mirror like seniority and job function right from a response perspective i think that's a really interesting idea the one thing we do

do is the marketing team is in gong listen to calls every day every week and so i i will mirror uh create a sentiment there that uh listening to calls too it's actually i think that the marketing team should also have like seats in gong listening to those calls listening to what customers are saying that kind of comes back to like how you get closer to your customer is that listening to those calls yeah well i mean i think one of the things that i i've been doing a lot more in market conversations um you know than i than i was in my previous role um part of that is being you know having a new brand and and being on the ground as well um but i i guess my you know follow-up question is do you think that the you know typically it's with sales who are in those conversations and driving them forward and seeding them and so on and so forth do you think that that's sort of shifting and moving you know in terms of buyer expectations and in terms of their behavior

i certainly do i mean i think 2020 really accelerated what we're now calling digital selling right so it's the entire account is exposed to the buying process more often than not um or at least the main buying committee members so they have all they need to start the research process well before they you know make that form submission to try and talk to you from party reviews to different communities to online forums um you can't expect that the buyer is incredibly incredibly educated much more so than maybe they would have been a couple of years ago where we were much more dependent on in-person interactions or maybe third-party analyst research firms so um i've loved this trend of having you know more opportunities to expose the account to different members of the committee uh so yeah i think the digital selling is just going to continue and the broad we're going to keep continuing to broaden what that buying community looks like and how much an account knows about your company

okay stephen peterson yeah i i would agree with that i think that to karina's point like gom does an amazing job from an awareness perspective and so typically i'm sure when people come inbound to gong uh they have a good understanding of of what gong does who they are how they can leverage gong um i think the challenge that complex software solutions with the pretty niche buyer groups have is that same awareness level and kind of understanding what buying stage maybe a more technical buyer might be i'm not saying that the gone buyers aren't technical but um when i think where i'm getting at is the tools today give us more insight into like what buying stage people are in and so are they even aware of your product have they ever heard of your product are they considering a similar solution within your space are they actually going through the procurement or buying process for a solution that's like yours these these signals help influence activities

that can maybe you can't get in front of everyone in the world and maybe you can't have the biggest social media presence in the world but maybe you can understand what buying stage some people are at maybe you can get to the people who understand similar products to you products in the space and then maybe you can serve them up relevant messaging based on the the segmentation that they have but um that's that's at least how we think about it for some of our products but at the same time we have a b2c product uh usdc which is the the fourth largest cryptocurrency in the world where we want everyone in the world to know about it too and so we have to we have to segment our different product offerings we have to think about the goals for each of our products and we have to serve uh the potential buyers the relevant message uh based on where they are in the buying stage and so there's a lot of like back end process and technology and thought process that that kind of goes into all of that for each segmented group yeah and you know i would definitely say

that i agreed with everything on gong like you know with tools like gong there's few and through excuses to not have you know to not have all these silos that exist within the organization even especially kind of um coms facing functions like marketing um the other thing i would point out also is that you know like um customers don't really you know care that you know there's a distinction between like your sales and your marketing team it's all an interaction with your brand um so if i might use like consumer for example for example if like i need to call an airline's customer support and give me a terrible experience i don't care about like you know that's a different department from say the company that's running the flights it's all just one bad consumer experience for me and the same thing man is as much in b2b if not more because in b2b quality of experience and knowing my like specific needs and wants are so much more important yeah yeah 100 i mean i think um you know that that what you just said about you know people don't care whether you're in sales or marketing or what where you sit i think

sometimes it can be a little bit cerebral for us of like okay cool we need to send this for marketing and then sales does this and then someone does this and like and it becomes so scientific and at the end of the day like you know you're looking for it to be seamless and you know that that takes me into the next question around we've had a little bit of med we've had some mention of personas and um you know how important they are in terms of understanding needs and um really being able to meet people where they are which which is what the what the title of the session is um you know with with the personas where where and how are you using insights to be able to map them um you know peter you mentioned that you have a couple of different state life stages you know how are you using that and you know what what differentiates uh you know a prospect who um you know is at top of a top of funnel or the first stage of awareness and education versus someone who is further down in the funnel and and looking at um

you know closing a deal you know at the bottom of funnel can you talk to that a little bit yeah yeah first i just wanted to call it stephen the answer that a bad customer experience is a customer experience and so that was that was just such a great answer it doesn't matter if someone wants to come in to circle to buy usdc or leverage our apis uh to implement in their product like serving them a good customer experience uh takes a company's effort uh it takes everyone really because every everyone at the company is gonna have some customer interaction at some point so that that was just a great answer steven um but as for uh customer journey and kind of customer life cycle we we think that compiling the right data sets is really important and i already mentioned this and and again we're very lucky to have a custom data science team but we kind of bucket it into three buckets it's one it's compiling all of the right data and all of the relevant data that's both first party that we're collecting from

our website our forms our product um anywhere else we can collect first party data and then also collecting third party data and so leveraging uh technographic data sets uh tech leveraging things like zoom info leveraging uh really any data sources we can to compile all of the right data sets then from there that's when we're sort of starting to craft our different personas our different verticals and then map them to our different product offerings that we have and on top of that we start to layer buying stages and where people are in the bind stage and that's when we have to push all of that data to all of our systems so we can serve them the right ads the right buying experience the right content and then bringing it full circle we need to report on all that data we need to report on the actions that we take and we need that reporting to kind of come full circle life cycle back into the segmentation that we have so we have actual data based on actual action feeding the data sets that that we kind of compile

internally this is you know this isn't something that everyone has the luxury to be able to do because we're using all the softwares we can and we're using people to compile these custom data sets but when you get it right like we like to call it one click marketing where you get action reports you get insights you get detailed summaries of what's happening um and you kind of make like the one click recommendation that's kind of served up to you i think that one click marketing is an ideal state that's kind of like unachievable it's like nirvana marketing but that's kind of the the state that we aim for and how we try to structure everything yeah i think for us um it's super important to double down on our raving fans so we remain absolutely obsessed with the customer experience um and one of the new like shiny new intent signals that my sales team is just absolutely obsessed with is something that user gems actually provides for us which it allows us to identify uh

previous raving fans and when they're making movement to a new company so we're very much still in the great reshuffle so any time we're able to identify a raving fan whether that's a power user whether that's a stakeholder that's moved companies it's been incredibly helpful for us to accelerate the kind of conversations we're having with our in-cycle opportunities so i would say anytime you can find something like that that's just hitting the nail on the head with your sales team just make sure that you're rallying behind that and providing more opportunities to surface those data data points i always say that marketers the very successful ones are often stewards of their data so something like this right surfacing that up at a critical moment um can be really powerful as well yeah yeah so with paddle we've made a pretty hefty investment in content marketing and one thing we found is that you know like kind of going along with funnel idea is that certain piece of content generate that kind of traffic for us but the one piece of content that actually generate interest in our products are actually very different and so what

we'll kind of do and that is like not only published by content but also use that data to actually figure out okay what are the benchmarks what are the uh you know pieces of information and actionable pieces of information that really kind of drive interest in how do i solve this problem so i think for us it's almost like we use content not just to drive traffic but also as a way of figuring out like oh what is the best way to position our product um for different elements of a funnel um and we tend to find that you really useful because we're learning not just from talking to existing customers but also to people who are kind of still learning other about the problem or you know just learning about what exists in the market yeah yeah i i mean uh we've obviously stephen we we've uh you've we've worked together on case study and i i'm always impressed at the way that um you take and use and work with your sales team to create very good content uh and very relevant content uh and and be able to to use that to its fullest extent so

um very familiar with what you're doing um you know the next question was a little bit of a um a little bit of a my sarcasm coming through um it's you know is insert the current marketing tactic that's currently cancelled actually did so i i'm going to start with you karina because i know you and i share pretty strong views on on this on on things that are getting uh announced as dead within within marketing are they actually dead is email dead is i don't know whatever the latest the latest thing that everyone says yes now it's something i'm super passionate about as well i think that there's no true one-size-fits-all marketing approach for any organization and anytime that we start to find uh you know winning templates so take you know sending a video uh to a prospect uh versus just sending an email right i think many people would say that approach is dead now too um but i guess

i would say that it really depends on your business uh the second something is working for one company thousands others are going to start to apply a similar template and then that also becomes uh oversaturated as well um so i think that whoever has the loudest microphone right now to say that a tactic is dead there's probably something a little bit self-serving on the other end of that and why they're saying that but just look at your own business particularly for abm i talk to so many marketers that are trying to implement an abm strategy and it's definitely a long-haul approach you have to really consider the unique needs of your business your sales cycle also how are you just set up to support any kind of initiative or strategy you may not have a full marketing operations team as an example so you may need to take that into consideration if you're looking to onboard some new technology uh you may not have a inside sales team that is ready to support you know a very large outbound campaign that you might be looking to run so

i would definitely say that anytime you see that just take a step back and always know that you are best suited to serve your company and make the decisions that make most sense for you i i completely agree i think that like some examples like the direct mail was dead for like 10 years and now all of a sudden there's like alice and sandozo and like huge direct mail companies popping up uh billboards have been dead before now like every software company like buys billboards and posts pictures of their billboards and how creative they've been and so um i think that i think that channels and different like marketing fads are kind of like fashion like things come back and they circle back and there's cycles um but like i don't think any channel's dead until unless it's dead unless it's like vine or something or it's like literally not there anymore you can't use it yeah i mean vines back is tick tock right anyway right so yeah so it's maybe it's not that ear and i i

mean i completely agree like nothing really ever dies i think my own kind of possibly spicy theory of this is that kind of it's not that the channel ever dies it's that you have the early people who innovate in the channel then you have a bunch of late adopters who just copy the playbook that everyone else is using and those are the tactics that tend to be dead or arrival so the channel themselves itself never dies but it's just copying the thing that everyone else is doing that is dead right right yeah and i think that's a really good way to look at it because you know you can where i sort of put it is you can have a ferrari but if you don't know how to drive it um you know it's it it's useless right it's it's like you can create the best content but if you if no one is using it if no one is reading it does it it you know does the tree fall if it's in the forest i do hear it full it's like that that'll sort of probably better but cool okay uh just gonna wrap up on our last question content you know what is working what's not there are a

lot of there's a lot of diversity of channels there's a lot of diversity of mediums um you know i'm a big fan of tick tock i've been seeing so many things about the metaverse and you know where we're going with that any any final thoughts around around around that in uh in each of your respective businesses and and just across the industry broadly oh god you go ahead i was just gonna say i think for me it is um content distribution internally so i think that it's so fun to explore tiktok as an avenue and uh maybe another social media trend but i think more often than not um a lot of companies are just missing how do i internally distribute our content so how do i make sure that sales knows where to find this new really amazing piece of third-party validation or this news uh report that we just released and then do they know how to use it and are they using it effectively so i'll

even set up trackers and gong myself to see hey did this land with my sales rep are they communicating the value of this content when they're live with the prospect are we hitting the mark is it resonating with them when we hear it when they hear how we pitch it um so it's not as uh sexy as a channel or as fun to explore but it's so crucial and marketers that focus on an effective internal just content distribution strategy are far away going to win um in many ways i i completely agree i just have i have two things to add to that one measuring content being used i think it really just comes down to like is the content being used one because content just gets overwhelmed with so many requests and two so often that content just doesn't gets used it gets shelved it was just like a random idea and so one using tools like gong or seismic or anything to be able to measure if the content is being used and if it's being performed the the second thing and uh this is like one of my favorite sayings

for content marketing is like content marketing is 20 creation like 80 distribution like not just distribution internally but distribution externally like making sure your content uh gets the legs that it needs make sure that it's getting broken up into smaller bites so people can digest it and click through if they like want to learn more like really understanding full scope the content you're creating how to distribute it how to get people there and then what the goal for that content is um i time and time again i just see content like getting created getting created with no purpose not getting distributed and not getting used and i think that that's a sad thing when when content marketing is actually a really powerful channel when it's leveraged right um as you can see at gong who does it you know better than anyone yeah i completely agree that you know internal and external distribution are important i would just advise also that um you really get your sales teams input on a lot of this because they tend to be pretty hard-nosed about whether or not

something's going to be valuable marketers we often fall into the trap of creating content for ourselves and not for customers but sales really falls into that trap yeah well i was going to say i i said i think karina's found a raving fan in peter which is great during during this session um and also i'm going to hearken back and and challenge that challenge uh you know that you to use peter you're the henry ford example you know if you asked if he asked people what what they needed at the time they would have said faster horses not not cars so is it the same with sales you know if you ask them what they need are they going to tell you what they need now versus and this comes full circle back to what you were saying at the start in terms of understanding what your buyer needs now and being able to you know almost be able to predict and meet them for the future as well so is that you know i i don't know any any dis

agreement a disagreement what are your thoughts i i think there's two thoughts like my knee-jerk reaction is like if you just ask sales at a surface level what they want you're gonna be creating a lot of one pagers but i think at the same time like i see integrated marketing account based marketing revenue marketing like an extension of the revenue team like we're we're really there to to help each other and serve each other so at the same time it really takes intentional forging of deep relationships with the sales team like getting invited to their sales calls getting invited to their forecasting calls like really being in the trenches with them to actually understand their actual needs and have an opinion on what they do need because at the same time the end of the day we're marketers we're not selling they're sellers they're not marketing and so we need to understand each other to really create exactly what they need and what will like provide value to them at the end of the day yeah i agree and i think what we're all kind of saying stephen peter

and is that it matters to get their input it's important to build that relationship so you do have that foundation of trust and it's important that they then trust you to also make the right decision on what is that content what is what am i putting inside of it so um yeah i think that those are all really important notes and at the end of the day if they can trust you as a marketing organization to make the right decision um you know you've really done a really great job of establishing that relationship and sense of trust well steven any final votes yeah i would just say um you know the the point of the one pages uh that peter made is absolutely correct if you ask your sales team what they want they're going to be whatever i can close this quarter um but you know kind of taking the first more first principles approach you know if you were if you're afforded you'd be asking you know am i selling fast horses or am i still in transportation which is actually how those companies are repositioning themselves now so it so taking a first principle approach to what problem is my customer actually asking me to solve as opposed to what

product am i trying to sell um tends to be a much more resonant approach it's a good disqualifier too right if you really have a good different differentiation standpoint i mean maybe you find out that that's not not really a good fit and then they can go find another solution that is a better fit for them so i think it's always good to know hey this is what they might come back with but stay firm in your positioning too if you're not a great fit then cut the ties move on right yeah their fair point fair point i think that it's a strong company that's able to do that we often get stuck in that trap cool yes yes yes we do and then uh yeah you have to service the nightmare on the end anyway we are we have a quick quick time for some questions claudia i'm gonna throw back to you to see what we've got from the from the audience yeah we definitely did get some awesome questions in um before i get to those thank you all so much that was an awesome conversation really really great insights um and i hope the audience enjoyed it

and got a lot of notes there um and then one more thing before i get to those questions um please take our survey um it'll launch once the uh session ends or you could click that survey icon and fill it out uh really quick during our q a right now so please before you sign off today uh take this quick questionnaire and a final reminder if we do not get to your questions live do not worry we will definitely follow up with all the answers via email as well all right uh first question uh what's the best way to set up process and operations i think that that's all that's that's a loaded question because it's uh it's so unique to teams the resources that they have at their disposal um i i i hate to give the answer like it depends but i mean it really depends it depends on

the team you have the tech you have in place the budget you have the audience that you're going after it's so uh subjective and uh also sorry if you could hear my dog in the background but yeah that's my that's my uh not great answer is like it it really depends but i think asking those questions taking inventory uh of all the resources you have at disposal at your disposal and thinking about your goals um and then also like a lens that i like to kind of view it from is you have uh you have descriptive diagnostic predictive and prescriptive and this is kind of how we work towards that like one click marketing that i kind of talked about and so it kind of starts with descriptive you're getting a lot of qualitative feedback and then you move to more like diagnostics and predictive where you're starting to get quantitative feedback and you're able to implement that into your process and then you're starting to get to a predictive state of marketing um from like a general framework perspective that's how i like to think about it but at the end of the day

every company is so unique in how they set it up someone might have a better answer than that i took it in two ways i think if you're looking at technology i think most companies aren't taking a holistic approach to how should i implement this so i think i'm always pushing on my team to say hey if you're looking to do something for your objective take into account what are the other objectives of people that might also down the line want to use this software as well it's going to really help you to fine-tune um not only how to pick the right solution for your company but also how am i going to roll this out and adopt this later it can really help you to get some initial champions too when you think about roll out you know additionally i think for abm in particular i really uh harp on slas as it relates to the specific campaigns and programs we're launching and in order to launch those service level agreements i survey anybody that's going to take part in that which very often is inside sales uh it can be product it can be customer success team

and i make sure that we're all aligned to hey when we invest this much or when we launch this this is how we're going to follow up and we're going to do so in this time frame and this is the report that we're all going to be using this really helps the entire organization to rally around any kind of initiative and ensure that you have one voice across your organization uh so this um this is another way i took that question as well one of the sorry let's just add to that oh sorry pete sorry stephen um just really quickly i was going to said for me process operation starts with data and having a clean data set and i think that is a very very big underestimated aha an important part of any anything um in a business so that's that's my two cents worth stephen yeah um i was gonna so this may be a very marking ups rev upsy answer um but it does apply to not just data but also say content strategy for example which is that um the thing to be worried about

is kind of letting the process become the end point as opposed to letting the experiences you're trying to create the um answers you're trying to get become the end point the actual and kind of deliverable um so number one is always keep that in mind and don't be afraid to kind of do this iteratively as is because a lot of the time what i've seen is that like you know you might be confident that like oh i know exactly what the perfect solution looks like and i can deliver that perfect solution first time around that never actually happens there are always problems you never thought about there's additional things you need to think about so what i usually recommend as far as like process and tech and even like kind of um say positioning for example is finding a way to like kind of test quickly and iterate because you'll find that like you actually get a better sense of what the best solution looks like from that all right um all right i think we have time for for one more um i'm combining two so it might be a little long but do you have any tips for downturn

and do you have any tips to keep customers engaged during the downturn fear or education yeah i would just say that um be careful to not sound like everybody else i think that we're potentially heading down the road of copying our 2020 playbook and how we do outreach and how we pitch the product et cetera so be careful to make sure that what you're communicating to your prospective buyers is unique to you and otherwise i think it could just get very easily lost in the noise um and then finally i think just be empathetic i think that is a really big bonus to what we've experienced over the past couple of years is that the word empathy is no longer something i'm having in my private personal conversations it's something that the b2b community is having at large uh so just remember to be empathetic and then i would say over communicate internally um we've got probably all of us here on this line have aggressive goals and we're going to be faced with increased challenges so just remember to

over communicate and uh voice your your thoughts and feedback often yeah building building on that i think the communication is key internally and externally for us being in the crypto space which is highly volatile uh it it all comes down to integrity like integrity is everything to us like we've we've built our reputation on integrity and so during the down cycle uh that however long it continues uh if it continues we will continue to be as transparent as possible kind of lead the industry uh in integrity take the high road um and that's kind of the approach that we've taken from the beginning as a company and that's kind of what's gotten circled to the place it is today in a in the industry where uh you know you have you have a little bit of everything and so that that's really like what i would harp on and then the other

thing would be just like keep building and keep delivering value like down cycles are a great time to be innovative they're a great time to kind of put your head down and build things that you might not have been able to when you have to keep up with all your other competitors and when you have to compete with a lot of people that are rising in the industry it's kind of like one of the rare quiet like slow times where you can really put your head down be innovative and try different things yeah and you know obviously let us build its point like empathy is extremely important like people are going through some rough times right now and kind of acknowledging and connecting with that is super important one thing i will say also is that um you know we have a lot of benchmarking data on like the sas space and an interesting thing we're kind of seeing is that like sales for the industry as a whole are not necessarily going down but we're seeing churn and churn go up a lot um and that to me communicates that there's a lot of reevaluation of like what parts of like say a tech stack or what solutions are actually driving value for

people so really re-evaluating you already are we extended are we actually driving valley for people are we actually justifying people continuing to work with us is something that's going to become a very hard very necessary question yeah just to close out you know i think empathy integrity uh and value okay i will speak directly to the fear and education i think for me personally uh you know i think we all there's enough going on in the world to create fear and uncertainty and i think when i get marketed to in that way from that perspective like i don't want to hear any more of that i want to hear how you're going to help me or you're going to make my life easier um and that's probably what i'm going to respond to rather than you telling me uh you know it's uh you know the world is ending and the sky's falling and so on and so forth and i need your solution right now that is not helpful in the slightest so

final final two cents for me claudia awesome i love it really great answers everyone and just an awesome conversation i i love presentations like this so i really hope um the audience enjoyed it as well uh so yeah thank you all for for joining us today and taking the time to to to chat with our audience and of course thank you to our audience for for tuning in um you can check out the next session it's actually coming up in just a few minutes so grab some coffee um you know take a do a little stretch or something and then join us at 1pm eastern for feedback is fuel use insights to supercharge your marketing strategy uh that's a wrap on us so thank you again everyone and take care

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