Why GTM Orchestration Breaks Without Contact-Level Execution

Hello everybody and welcome to today's webinar. Why go to market orchestration breaks without contact level execution. We're going to give everyone just a few more seconds to file in. And some of you are already engaging in the chat, but would love to hear from you all. Say hey. Tell us where you're dialing in from. U my name is Kayla Clark. I'm joining from Charleston, South Carolina. So would love to know where the audience is joining from. Hello. Hello. All over. Wow, that's so fun. Okay, guys. Let's let's get started. So, we have a pretty packed agenda today. Um, we probably will run the full 60 minutes for today's webinar. Um, the session is being recorded. So, if you are registered and watching this later, thanks for joining us. Those of you who are here, thanks for taking the time and

we'll make sure this recording is sent to you. Um, we are going to answer questions as we go through the webinar today. So, just as you are engaging in the chat, next to that, you should see a Q&A tab. So, as you have questions, please submit them there and we'll make sure we get answers as they're submitted. Okay. So, what are we going to talk about today? First, we are going to start with a panel discussion and I'm super excited to introduce my colleagues here in just a minute. We're going to break down traditional go to market orchestration and where it normally breaks. Then I'm excited to share some new releases from Influ, some exciting enhancements that we built to intentionally address some of these go-to market orchestration obstacles that we'll talk through in our panel discussion. and then we'll close out today with a real playbook. So, leave you with some actual tips and tricks on how to win the market before they're ready to buy. So, I am super excited to be joined by

the best panel today. I again, my name is Kayla Clark and I'm the head of product marketing and life cycle marketing at Influ 2. And today I am joined by Ed Vanderbush, senior manager of ABM at Live Ramp. Devin Reid, CEO and founder of the Rita Reader, sorry, and then Ana Simpl, head of ABM at Influ. Guys, super excited to have you here today. >> Likewise. >> Yeah. Amazing. All right. So I want to kick off this panel discussion and to set the stage I actually just want to ask a really simple question before we dig into any of the content and the question is what is go to market orchestration? What do you think of when I say that term? Is it tech? Is it strategy? Is it both? So my first question is to the audience if you have an answer to that feel free to weigh in in the chat but I want to invite our panelists to share their opinion on this. So Devon I'll start with you. What is go to market orchestration?

>> Yeah, I'm excited to see what people put in the chat because I feel like it could uh could have a lot of answers depending on, you know, kind of your your approach to to go to market and and also like your company stage. So, um I admit when when GTM orchestration kind of first, you know, became a thing and be became kind of mainstream in our world, uh it felt a little intimidating like go-to market orchestration, there's an acronym, it's a lot of syllables. Uh so I always try to kind of like simplify in the most you know easy to understand way for myself and then obviously to to help others and other clients that I work with. So to me it's in its simplest form it's your game plan for winning your market and it has three key parts. The first is set your strategy right. So who are you going after? Why why are we targeting this group? How are we going to help them specifically with our product and with our uh with our with our content and our our marketing activities. Uh two is designing the plays. So how do we build journeys uh at the buyer level, not just targeting

accounts and how do we think about the different messages and content that we're going to create including events. And then the third is just running the play. So how do we actually execute across those channels? Uh the the probably biggest, you know, misstep or or kind of mistake that I see really often in B2B marketing is kind of like skipping through one and two and trying to get to three as quickly as possible. And I think it makes sense because a lot of pressure right uh to to perform. There's not a lot of time. We don't have a lot of large margin of error. So it is kind of tempting sometimes to skip through some of the strategy and design work to get right to the execution. Uh but I believe that orchestration is a strategic discipline first and then technology uh you know kind of comes later around the execution phase. >> Amazing. And Ed, what would you have to add to that? Yeah, I I I I really appreciate what what Devin just articulated, you know, and I think at the core of those steps are are people. Um, and you know, sometimes as marketers, I think we can think about

audiences and we can think about segments and groups of accounts and reports and Salesforce and um, we forget that there's people just like us on the other side. And helping to understand what they're after and what they're trying to solve is really at the core of how we orchestrate the team around providing the right value to each of those uh, to each of those people and what what are they trying to solve? What's driving them? Um, and something else I've been thinking about recently is, you know, we've always said as as accountbased marketers, as marketers, you know, like strategy always drives tech. You know, we don't start with technology. Um but as I've been thinking about the way that the market has changed even in the last few years but c certainly since I've started uh doing EBM about 10 years ago um is knowing what's available to us understanding what the technology is capable of doing is really helping us to unlock what's possible in our strategy. Um things that we're able to do now signals that we're able to see resolution of things that we

couldn't have done even a couple years ago. And I know that's really changing how I think about building strategy and and getting the right messages to the right people. Um, but really I think, you know, to sum it up, I think orchestration is how do we tie the right value to the right people and make sure that their trip through that customer journey is one that adds value to their work. >> Yeah. Amazing. And already from what I'm seeing in the chat, there's mentions that tie into both of your explanations. So that's great. Ana, what about you? Should I just say yeah I agree. Um no but um honestly I think go to market registration is a lot of big words and being the practitioner who actually needs to execute on this um I you know what does it look like? What is it? What are we trying to achieve? And I agree with Devon that the strategy stands at the core because if you skip the strategic part and the planning and the analy analysis then you'll do all of

the execution and then have zero results or you know unsatis you know bad results. But um honestly I think apart from technology in orchestration it involves a lot of human interaction and human interaction I think is the hardest part. marketing, sales, customer success, all of them working together, working from the same data, working with the same people and bringing relevancy at every stage. I think this is the toughest part of the or of orchestration and I think I mean for me personally this is like the main challenge of navigating every stakeholder in this. >> Yeah. Amazing. Thank you all for sharing your unique point of views and I think what's most interesting is they all kind of naturally fit together and I heard a lot of mention about the human element. So that's something that we'll continue to talk through um throughout today's presentation. So I want to pull us out

of the B2B world for a second um to just set some additional context around this example of the buyer's journey. So, in the uh the kingdom where the Mario brothers live, they have decided that they're ready to modernize their kingdom with AI. Okay? And Mario has started doing his research. He is sick of being pixelated and behind the times. So, his priority is speed and he starts researching for fast AI implementation. Then Luigi joins in with a completely different priority in mind, AI safety. As they continue their research, the engagement score for their account goes up. And if this was following standard account scoring, they likely move through standard stages of awareness, consideration, and then finally decision-m.

So as they have done that research, their score has gone up and they've hit that threshold of decision-m. So their account is now being flagged as in market, which now triggers orchestration workflows and sales starts reaching out. So all is good, right? No problems here. The problem that is that by the time those workflows were triggered, by the time sales started reaching out, they had already made their decision way earlier in this timeline. So the moment to actually influence their decision had already happened. Those moments have passed. Plus there was no visibility into who was actually interested in what. So Mario got messages about AI safety and he wasn't really sure why. So he completely tuned them out. And this is totally expected behavior. Eight out of 10 buyers will actually completely ignore messages that are irrelevant to them. And I think what sticks out to me the most with this stat is it's not name

personalization that grabs their attention. That's not what wins our buyers these days. It's messages tied to the topic that they actually care about. So, not only did Mario get messages that were irrelevant to him, but sales even reached out to Princess Peach, who no longer lives at this account anymore. And in a recent survey influ ran with over a 100 B2B marketers, 60% of them said that figuring out what a signal means and who to focus on is actually one of the hardest parts of acting on it. And reaching out to Princess Peach is a great example of why not knowing who engagement comes from can be pretty problematic. So in reality, the buying journey is super complex. people change priorities, buying group shifts, and somehow orchestration has to keep up with this. So now I want to distill this into a core a few core problems and invite our

panelists to weigh in. And I want to kind of go back to the beginning of the story and start with the first problem we saw, which was this critical latency problem. So, when you collapse buyer behavior into an average and rely on an account score to be met, you're waiting to take action and often missing those key moments to engage with buyers while they're still in motion. Someone could have engaged with Mario or Luigi earlier in the process when they were still doing their research. So, I'm going to pause here and Devin, I will start with you. What What do you think of this? Well, one, I love the Super Mario Brothers uh through line and theme today. So, I just want to give that a shout. That makes me that makes me smile. Um, yeah, I think, you know, having been in sales, by the way, you know, I was in sales before I was in marketing. Like, I was on the uh you know, receiving end of uh you know, MQLs and SQLs and all sorts of different things. And I'd kind of learned like um you know, some are some are really qualified and really ready to go and others aren't. But that's kind of just

like having one single value, right? is or is not an MQL, but there's kind of different levels to it. And so, um, you know, it's almost silly to admit, but when I was getting started in marketing and I was like moving over from sales to marketing, I'm like, "All right, so like I I kind of thought MQL was like a universal currency." Like, you know, all the companies agree to what an MQL is. Uh, but really it's more of like kind of like national currencies, right? Like what Influ considers an SQL versus live ramp versus, you know, my last company, Clary or Gong, like those are all quite different things. And so I kind of thought of like, well, you know, no no buyer or no person wakes up any day and like, you know, I feel I feel like an MQL today. I think that's I think that's what I'm feeling like. I'm pretty ready or SQL. And so instead of kind of tracking just MQLs, SQLs, etc., you know, which are internal labels that we create and debate, I I actually prefer um kind of going a little bit old school. I don't know if anyone heard of Eugene Schwarz. He's a direct copywriter from the 1960s and 70s but he um he had a different framework that I find more helpful which is uh kind of the five

stages of awareness. So there is unaware, problem aware, solution aware, product aware and then most aware which is like super ready to buy. And so I always think of that when you shared the example of like Mario, you know, why am I getting AI safety messages is a lot of times I think we, you know, kind of uh, you know, go attack a prospect or or an opportunity with the wrong message and then we get confused as to why deals get stalled or we have low conversion rates at the top of the funnel. >> Yeah, absolutely. And I know you planted a little seed there, so we'll dig more into that framework later in in our conversation. >> I didn't go too deep. Yes. Yes. Ed, what about you? >> Yes. And I I I was thinking as you were going through that, Kayla, you know, thinking through Mario Brothers, I I feel like we maybe we had an opportunity to have glmbbas and Koopa Troopers, if I'm remembering the lingo right. Um those are hidden hidden stakeholders who creep in and like throw the entire buying journey off off course, right? Um but that that's that's so I love I love

how Devon framed that up. Um, you know, and lately I've been I've been talking about this as engagement is really a continuum. You know, there's really not a single stage. There's not like kind of like that moment. I love I love how Deon said like you you you wake up and you're like, "Oh, I'm an MQL." Um, but different things happen across that continuum that are different levels of engagement. And, you know, how do we think about how a person is engaging with us as a brand? And really again around that mutual value like the value that we're trying to create out of those solutions is is so important. Um this has been a really real topic for me especially kicking off we just kicked off our fiscal year. Um I'm just back from our sales kickoff which was last week. Um and there's always discussion around metrics and playbooks and and you know we're talking about you know what about inbound leads and you know where are those right moments to reach out and when when is something impactful for our partners on on the sales side you know and is waiting for someone to do enough things the right move or do we enter the

conversation earlier and I think when we start to think about that um and you know I was I was reminded again our our CMO did a fantastic job laying out uh in in her talk uh at uh our sales kickoff the latest numbers about when buyers are engaging with with a brand and it's after they've done their research. It's after really they've probably hit some of these stages. Um you know if we want to talk about stages as moments in time um you know and they're also bringing this preconceived notion of who they who the preferred vendor is to the table. And so really our moment to to influence our moment to have impact on that journey is is sooner. And I think that changes our mindset from trying to land a meeting and open an opportunity to when is the right time to bring that consultative value to the table to help impact those questions that you know as a buyer. We come to the we come to the table trying to solve a a problem, something that's keeping us up at night, something that we need uh a hurdle we

need to overcome, if you will. And when is the right moment to have someone step into that and say, "Hey, I I know a little bit about this and let me share that knowledge with you. Let me help you in your process." And I think it changes the process of when of how we provide value to um to our particular uh our customers, you know, and I love the line that journeys collapse into averages. Um and this makes me think about the evolution of accountbased um over the last few years. And I I was just thinking about this last week. I wrote about it on LinkedIn on on on Monday. I think you I was we were in the same location for our SKO this year as we were about four years ago. And as I was having the same I was having conversations with some of the same people in the same spaces and it reminded me of four years ago I was probably talking a lot about accountbased signals and sellers at the time were like Ed that that's really interesting but some of these enterprise accounts have 30 teams with the same function and this really does I mean the journeys collapse into averages is so

it's such a such a key way of saying that um but now when we're able to talk about people and the problems that people are trying to solve solve that we're able to really >> Yeah, absolutely. I love those real life examples too, Ed, and thinking about like the evolution you've seen even in the ABM world with being in the same location you were a few years ago. That's great. Anya, what about you? >> I actually want to give a very um practical example that um now an MQL today is not what an MQL was like five or six years ago. Um, I think when we come up with the scoring and those models, we're just trying like it's natural. We're just trying to make sense of human behavior because when you're in marketing, you're like overflown with amount of data or um audience and you're like, how do I make sense of this? How do I build some sort of structure to it? And that's why we came up with the funnels that that's why we try to think

about an account as a as an organism together. But I want to give like a very it's a personal example. I'm being prospected a lot and now right now we have I have a painoint. I want to have a new vendor for our landing pages for ABM and um I have shown some interest and I had web flow reach out to me and by the time so they were very effective with actually capturing my interest. So I had a demo I had a solutions walk through. However, internally because this is like a whole project and the buying group is very big obviously, we're not ready to move forward with it, right? So, from the sales standpoint, it seemed like, you know, are were they successful? If if my um you know, if my plans changed, do we think they wasted their time or do we think they got value out of it? And I personally think that they got a lot of value out of it by capturing my intent

before it was shut down simply because if I have a pain point at some point, I'm probably going to have it again. And once the rest of the buying group is ready, web flow is going to be so ahead of the rest of the competitors because I've already dedicated my time like they have captured my engagement at the right time when it was relevant to me. And even if it loses relevancy, how you know very often like things change so fast in our industry, but um I think that catching that signal without waiting for the rest of the buying group to show interest and go to the website and download stuff um I think they've literally created a champion inside of the account and in the future it's going to really benefit them. like a shout out to web flow rep. >> You showed all your car your cards on you. But this is really um you know when when we're just waiting for people to be interested enough we are a you know it's

completely their responsibility whether they like us or not and what they learn about us right so I think capturing intent capturing the signal when it's there and making sure you're relevant and making sure you're there for them um and interacting with them I think is very very important. Yeah, I completely agree and that's an awesome example of reaching out to a buyer when they're still in motion because had that delay happened, you would have already moved on to other things as you already mentioned. So, I think that's a great example and a good segue into our next core problem that we identified in the story, which is around personalization. And this was kind of back to the idea that if you don't know who engagement is coming from and what each unique buyer cares about, then you can't actually deliver relevant messages that will move them forward. And we saw this when Mario was getting messages about the topic Luigi cared about um and he tuned them out. And we even heard this in some of the examples that you

all shared and Ed, that example of reaching out to a company that has like 30 marketing teams. What do you do with that? Um, so let's let's break this down a little bit and Ed, I'll I'll start with you on this one. >> You know, Kayla, I often talk about when I'm talking about ABM and I'm talking about personalization, I often tell a story about a time when I experienced bad personalization. And I won't tell it now. Um, but it it I had a physical and emotional reaction to it. I was I was I felt almost disgusted about what happened because it was just such a mismatch. And it occurred to me um I was walking back from my mailbox and it occurred to me that this is what I'm supposed to be doing, right? I'm supposed to be de delivering those experiences that delight and that just resonate. Um and to land the right message, you really need to know your audience. You need to know what they care about. You need to remember again that they're people and they're people that are trying to solve something. Um and what is that next logical step? What is that next logical message to cause them to lean in? Um, and just this

morning I was on a call with a seller I've worked with for years. Um, just great collaborator and we were talking through a problem and it really came down to the right level of personalization and really stepped into the account the account journey and the the the thing that we're trying to accomplish. And by adjusting the level of personalization and talking through it, we were really able to align around the right value and really lay out the next couple stages of the sales process because we were aligned around personalization. And those are conversations that wouldn't happen if we weren't talking about how to deliver that story at the right level. >> Yeah, absolutely. Again, another great example of how that visibility into where engagement is coming from not only allows you to deliver those personalized messages, but it gives it gives that seller clarity, right, on how to what they can actually do with it. So, that's a great example, Devin. >> Yes, I have a uh similarish story to to

Daily uh Robinson. Great initials, by the way. Uh where I was I was Yoshi and this got me so excited. Uh K, we know connected a few months ago and you were showing me what Influenc uh is able to do because um you know we had we had just it was a few couple years ago our our team had just launched you know ABM you know a few months prior and I remember that uh you know someone someone hit me up and they were like hey we got like we got a hit at Adobe like someone at you know the the Adobe account one of our like top 100 accounts of the company wanted to close right as we were going up market you know they're they're interacting with us uh and I was like great and they like I think they even kind of told me like one of piece of content that it was or an ad that they you know something like that and um they they had a request for another piece of content. So they wanted me to stop the press right of all the things we had going on and had committed to they're like we need this follow-up asset immediately and I was like okay I get the urgency but like who who specifically are we sending this to just so I I can kind of think of like how to create the best asset like who exactly?

And the call got really quiet because we didn't know who we're sending it to. And so even if it was, you know, there's 30,000 employees uh at Adobe. Even if you're selling to 2,000 person companies, right? That's still so many people. So I was like, are we just going to like email and send an ad to like all the people? Like it just didn't it didn't make sense to me. And that goes back to the the Mario and the safety AI thing where it just it just doesn't make sense to do it that way. Um so I've been Yoshi Daily. Uh I know I know that attempt and uh it just doesn't work. And so that's why I think the contact level is just so so important where it's like oh great we can actually be precise send the right message to the right person which is a huge advantage today when uh to your previous point like how how often are we just inundated with things that just don't matter and aren't relevant to us. >> Yeah. Amazing. I can I can feel that moment you just described of asking the question who are we sending this to and everyone's like uh I think that probably resonates with a lot of people listening in. >> Anya what >> can we get it by Friday? >> Yeah. That's the answer. Can we get it by Friday?

>> Um, I was actually in a different situation where I knew exactly who I needed to send it to and they wouldn't read their email and there was no other way for me to deliver that piece of content to them. So, um, you know, it works both ways. And, um, um, something that I wanted to mention here is that um, when we hear the word personalization, we kind of take it to the personal level. So, it's, you know, we like to add their logo, we like to add their name, we like to add their geo, but if those things don't actually change what you're selling to them and what you're telling to them, you're just giving them information that they already know, like they already know their name, they already know who they work for. And if they click through and they see something irrelevant, which is a possible thing because unless you had a real conversation with them and you know what's going on, you're just assuming first of all, and second of all, it feels like if there is no personalization, it kind of feels like a

waste of time because it like the whole thing looked so personalized and then you know personalized rapper with a very generic message inside and that's also a disappointing experience for a prospect. And um also something on the practical side is because I work for Influ I have this precision and I've been putting logos on ads for a long time to show to demo the precision of Enflu basically and at first it was resonating so well with the audience but now everyone kind of learned that a lot of companies are now able to do that and they're like so I see a very a very um noticeable decline in the CTR unless the message actually resonates. And I see that messages that resonate with the right audience without the logo have a lot higher engagement than those that look personalized. So they need to be actually relevant to feel personalized rather than just have the cute rapper of

personalization. >> Yeah, really solid use case and example of how that plays out. I also love the way you think about personalization, Anya, of like giving them information they already have. Like, yes, I know my name. Thank you. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Um, okay. So, last problem I I kind of want to break down together, and we didn't even really touch on this example in the Mario Brothers storyline. Um, but I think it's one that will really resonate again with many of you listening in. And this is really tied to the idea that if you can't actually see where engagement is coming from or how your actions are driving buyers forward, there's no real way to measure influence. So your reporting kind of becomes a story that you tell your leadership, not always a reflection of what actually happened. And I know that's like the number one pain point for marketers, something that we always have top of mind. Um, and I know how problemat it can be. So Anya, as the AVM leader at Influ, I actually want to start with you on this one. I know you have a good perspective of what it's

like uh both with and without this contact level resolution. So tell us a little bit about how this resonates for you. >> Yeah. Um reporting and marketing was very cool and fun until 2021 when um getting funding became a lot harder. So when you're not getting funding for free, it's kind of okay, what's actually working? And this is when everyone started really looking at reporting, really looking at influence and um you know figuring out what budgets could be cut, what budgets should be increased. And when when you're in marketing and you don't have that level of precision and your reporting is kind of a black box, it's very hard to prove your influence because sales have a very solid case, right? you're working on accounts together and sales have a very solid case to show because they like every email is recorded, every call is recorded, every interaction that they have is recorded in the CRM. While with

the marketing, imagine if I just come up and I say, "Hey, I targeted Adobe for two months." And they're like, "Cool." So um so if you don't have if your reporting is a black box as a marketer you I you know you're forced to create additional decks you're forced to create additional explanations of how this is actually driving value because people don't actually understand how you know a black box is driving value and you're yourself you're like did I influence it because you have no way of actually checking that right so um visibility ility gaps is a huge pain point um if you only have uh access to accountbased reporting especially if you're selling to larger accounts. >> Yeah, 100%. Ed curious your perspective on this one. >> Anna, I I feel that like I Yes. Um thousand%. And I think, you know, especially as ABM, like I I want I want

a t-shirt that says like your attribution model is broken or or something like that. Like other marketers, please like let's let's put those t-shirt slogans in the chat because like we all feel this. We want to measure what matters and we want to prove value back to the organization. Like we want to go to our sales partners and we want to go to our leadership and say look what we've done. Like and this is really driven true value. But we know that the journey is more complex than that. And you know, having recently been on the buying stage or the buying side rather, um, from initial conversation to signing the deal, I've been surprised at how many twists and turns that deal took, even being on being the buyer, right, and understanding kind of the different seeing behind the curtain. Um, and so I love collaborating with sellers across the pursuit team. And it's amazing how often I'm able to bring contact level signals to the table and say, "This person has engaged." and sometimes they're like, I didn't even know that person existed because they're not in the core buying groups that I am currently talking to. And we're able to drive multi-threading through those

signals. So measurement at the end shows impact, but measurement throughout shows progress and helps us to avoid some of those um some of those pitfalls that Mario might fall into. >> Yeah, such a great example. Again, Devin, close us out. What do you think? >> I mean, this speaks to my soul. I have spent years and countless hour like over a span of years and countless hours justifying uh my work uh and the impact of content because there's that gap between you know engagement right like you know uh you know website traffic engagement on you know LinkedIn or email clicks and all those things there's like the sweet engagement that we all like and as marketers we know that engagement will eventually you know convert into pipeline which you know take it takes time and I know there's lots of data around that but the challenge is you know when you're in a high growth startup or just high expectations for marketing. You know, you know, executives don't want to hear just wait, here's engagement metrics, just wait, it'll show up, right? They want to know the pipeline. And so that gap has has been challenging for me uh for for many

a time. I I remember one time I even told my CEO uh you know, we just we had to do a little bit of leap of faith marketing, a little leap of faith. That didn't go super great. He didn't really want to hear that. He wanted to see proof uh you know, and data. And so I definitely feel this. And so the challenge is you know when we don't have that insight when we can't point to something or you know show that through line of our activity and the engagement into leads and pipeline it it isn't just frustrating it can kind of cause like a a credibility uh you know we lack credibility uh as marketers we don't really you know we're not armed with the information that we we need and kind of deserve in my opinion. Uh so yes uh the long long story longer I totally understand the the gap here and I felt it and again one reason why I'm really excited about this product. >> Yeah. Amazing. Uh add the leap of faith marketing onto our list of t-shirt slogans. Right, Ed? So we'll we'll we'll get that going. >> Amazing. Well, thank you all for for weighing in on that. Um I want to know how this resonated with the audience. So I am going to launch a poll. Um so let

me get that going. So, you should see this next to your chat and and Q&A. Um, let us know which orchestration challenge resonated with you and your team the most. Was it latency, personalization, measurement, all of them? Curious to see how this shakes out. Okay, lots of votes on measurement. So yeah, all of those examples of trying to um demonstrate our impact with not the right resolution of data is something that I think keeps a lot of us up at night. Give it another minute. Yeah. Measurement by a long slide, landslide, personalization, latency. Okay, great. So what I want to kind of leave us with um to conclude this discussion is really just summing up the idea that orchestration only really works when it

reflects each buyer's unique context. That's a theme that we saw threaded throughout each of these pain points throughout the Mario example um and even the great examples that our panelists shared. So with that, we are going to transition to talk a little bit about what we've been building at Influ to solve for this. And I'm super excited to unveil our newest features. So I'm going to give you a little bit of a preview and then I will actually jump in and do a quick product demonstration to give you a look. So let's let's start with this idea of uh contact level context. So, we talked about the buyer journey needing to have information about our buyers, who they are, what they care about, and that's where we're kind of starting this unveiling of the new features. The first thing that we're releasing is C crossplatform context sync. And this is built around the concept that there is a lot of great contact level intent signals and engagement signals already

available within Influ. But we recognize that there's also really valuable marketing activity data likely in your HubSpot instance, possibly in Salesforce. So you are now able, starting with HubSpot, able to sync that context into Influ 2 to create a fully unified view of buyer behavior that ensures all of those high intent moments are acted on and taken into account when crafting this goto market, crafting these buyer journeys that we'll look at here in just a second. And if you remember at the beginning, I shared that over 60% of marketers said that just figuring out what a signal means is honestly one of the hardest parts of taking action on it. So we are also introducing signalto topic matching. And what this does is it automatically maps signals to a topline topic of interest. So you can really easily see where buyers are leaning and

use that to trigger the next best action in their journey. So back to our Mario example, there would be a very clear signal to us that Mario is interested in fast AI implementation. There would be no guessing about what Mario cares about and we can use that in his buying journey. Okay. So now that we've covered kind of all the ways that you can gather and unify that contact level context that you need to craft the journey, it all comes together with omni channel orchestration. So influ has always focused on creating dynamic ad journeys that adjust as buyers take action. Now we are introducing the ability to use all of that context contact level context to guide different actions across channels from directly inside influ2 that adjust as buyers actions change. So what does that mean? It means

when your buyer signals that they are interested in a particular topic, you can change the content that you're serving them across ads. You can adjust or enroll them in email sequences, add them to marketing campaign nurtures, all directly within Influed together and intentionally hitting the buyer at the exact right moment with the exact content that they've signal they're interested in. So, I'll be really excited to demo this for you here in just a second. in the omni channel orchestration. This kind of unlocks a newer use case um because now you can use that buying journey to keep your Salesforce campaign member statuses updated in real time. Meaning you have a constant and accurate read on how your campaigns are performing and influencing revenue without any manual work. So, tied back to that measurement problem, there's no extra steps that you will need to take to ensure the campaign member status is

updated. It will update automatically as buyers move through their journey. And I'll show that here again in just a moment. Okay, let's transition into the product and take a look. Okay, amazing. So what we are seeing here is a new business program that I have created in influ. What this means is this is the program that I am using to nurture key decision makers at my target accounts and I am starting them in a warm-up journey. This means that I am simply sharing content to introduce them to my company my overarching value proposition. And as I mentioned before this release, Influ has always centered on the idea that we want you to be able to dynamically adjust ad content automatically based on buyers behavior. And that's essentially what you're already seeing on screen. So let me kind

of talk through this example and I'll show you how to layer in the omni channel orchestration that's new with this release. So in this example, we are showing a general value proposition to our target audience. And we are saying, okay, maybe they'll take action, maybe they'll click on the ad, but what if they what if they don't? We're going to say that if they see this ad 15 times, we're going to change up the content that we're serving them. So, we're going to start showing them a different value proposition, a different ad creative after they've already seen that first one 15 times. Now, I can weave this into other channels and I can say, well, they didn't take action on that ad. So, I actually want to hit them with emails as well. So, from Influ, I can come in and automatically enroll them in a HubSpot list that will add them to my prospect nurture. So to take a look kind of at the back end of how this is controlled, you have

so much control to set the criteria for how buyers move through this journey. And so back to this initial example, once they've seen this first ad 15 times, we're going to move that in them into that second step. We show them a different ad and we enroll them in our HubSpot list. What happens then? We're going to use engagement from that warm-up stage to dictate when they move into what we'll call active outreach. And let me talk through that. So, we might say, okay, if they click on that email in HubSpot, I want to go ahead and move them into this active outreach stage. Or if you remember the topics of interest, the signal to topic matching, what that unlock unlocks for us is when a buyer signals interest in a particular topic. That could be clicking on an ad, but it could also come from Influ's contact level intent signals. That might mean one of our buyers searched for a

particular topic or maybe they were on a third party website consuming relevant content on this topic. They have signaled in some way that they're interested in this topic. So those are going to be our triggers to say it's time for sales to start reaching out to this target. And again, back to the Mario example, this is how you hit a buyer with the right message while they're still in motion. So, in this example, they have taken action. Maybe they've clicked on the email or again, we detected an intent signal that says they're interested in one of my key topics. So, now I want to do a couple of things. I'm going to go ahead and remove them from that nurture because we're going to transition from marketing nurture into active sales outreach. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to add them automatically to a sequence. So these are this is an outreach sequence that my team has already

created and I am determining the exact right moment for when targets are enrolled in this sequence. And the key word here is automatically. Anya will talk a little bit about this spoiler alert in a few minutes. Um but this eliminates any manual handoff. This means you don't have to ping your SDR leader to say, "Hey, these are the top the targets that are ready to be engaged. Pass them to your team." I think we've all been there. It takes a lot of time and that little amount of time or a lot of amount of time can miss that moment to engage with the buyer. So, this this does it handles it automatically. You do have levels of control here. So, I can decide to remove targets if they're enrolled in other sequences or I can ignore them if they're already enrolled. So, lots of elements of control. So, now I'm in active outreach. My STR team is engaging with these targets. We have ads that are providing air cover, kind of introducing them to our STR team. We have a sequence running. All is great. I can also move into, let me go

back to the journey. I can move targets into a new stage based on opportunity status or stage. So let's say an opportunity is actually created. Okay, I'm going to change my content strategy to providing air cover to help move this deal along. So in this example, um maybe I want to go ahead and ensure that my Salesforce campaigns are updated automatically. Again, to ensure that my reporting, my measurement is always up to date automatically. So in this example, I'm going to find my relevant campaign, change the status, and again, as buyers move through, all of these actions are triggered automatically. A few additional things to call out. Um, you always have visibility into how your targets are dispersed throughout the different steps and stages in your journey. And because Influ is always about contact level precision, you will always have visibility into exactly who

you're targeting, if they've seen your ads, if they've clicked, if you've detected any intent signals. So that that pain point that we talked about in the Mario example of just really not knowing who information is coming from, where engagement has sparked, what they're interested in. you have that full level of visibility directly inside influ. Okay, let's come back. >> I'm happy to comment on this. >> One more announcement and then it's all you. Um, let me get this going. Okay. So, uh before we invite the panelists back on, I just want to also use this moment to introduce one more new capability, website visitor identification, which is now in beta for active influ audience scope customers. So, this new signal joins our existing set of contact level intent signals across search, thirdparty content, social posts, and ad engagement. And it gives you clear visibility into who is visiting your

site and what they care about. so you can confidently guide the next step in their journey. Now, there are other tools that do website visitor identification and candidly, our team just really wasn't satis satisfied with the level of false positives that a lot of them can produce. And when you sacrifice signal quality for volume, ultimately that erodess sales trust and that's a trade-off that we're just not willing to make with any of Influ's signals. So, we've built ours to meet that same standard as the rest of the Influ2 platform, prioritizing accuracy, precision, and trust over any type of inflated volume. Okay, panelists, let's let's bring you back. Um, I showed a lot of what's new. I talked through some kind of sample examples of how to use them. Um, but really want to invite your point of view now that we've seen how you can execute with contact level precision and and just get your take. And Ed, I'll I'll

start with you. >> You know, there there's so much here to react to. Um, you know, if you're if you're in the business of selling any kind of complex solution or or or different solutions across the different product lines, signal to topic matching is is so impactful. um understanding, you know, kind of grouping account level intent signals into topics, you know, maybe helps you prioritize accounts or thinking about the initial story, but when you can bring contact level resolution to that, it changes how you personalize around value entirely. So, that that's something I'm really excited about. And having having seen some of these before, there was I wrote a few notes down around some of the omni channel and um I want to connect with a couple team members later around just thinking about some of those nurture sequences. Um and then of course Salesforce reporting um you know I know I think um I work with one of the best MOPS teams ever and I know they're going to be super excited about this as well. So there's there's a lot here to to dive in on for sure. >> Amazing. And Ana, I'm going to jump to

you. I know you had some input to share earlier, so I want to make sure you have a chance to. >> Yeah. Can I show my slide yet? >> Yes. And then Devon, we'll close out with you after. >> Um, so this this was me. This was my my reaction to this update is I think um the new features and like the automatic orchestration that we're introducing is going to help me get off that bike with Katie. Um here's a representation of my daily work with Katie Penner, our VP of sales development because um right now without this to orchestrate the right experience for people based on you know what they're interested in, what is our communication through different channels like how did we interact with them at the event. So we just went to forester events and we have a huge amount of different segments and different relationships that we've built there and I want to make sure that the SDRs are all all aware of that. So right now it involves a lot of back and forth communication and list sharing, micromanagement, excessive meetings, and

um you know the follow-up work after the event is just as hard as the work before the event. So, I'm really excited that now I'll be able to actually um you know just prep the whole flow and let everyone flow through it without any human error and without any uh delays that the execution requires. >> Yeah, I think that's the perfect example and the funniest way to illustrate it. I think like the key takeaway there, right, is is getting rid of not only the manual work, but the delay so that we're ensuring we're actually reaching buyers like right in that moment when they've signaled interest. >> Thank you, Anya. Devin, you want to close this out? >> Well, one, I'm glad I was on mute because when that gift came up, I was laughing way too way too loudly. It would have interrupted. So, that was great and very relatable. I have a lot of notes, but I know we're getting short on time. The thing that I was really excited about I I literally have like a bunch of stuff here. I don't know if you can see with the virtual background was

the the active outreach. So, what I had experienced is like handing over a list like after an event like this, right? You've got a great event, lot of engagement, hundreds of people registered and attending and then you send it over to sales and maybe they get to it the next day. Maybe they get to the same day, but usually not in my experience. Maybe they get to it the next day and sometimes there's two to four days and sometimes never a you know the follow-up action or they're like yeah we're ready to go but what exact email did you want me to send or what were we right so the fact that it's like pre-built and you're like hey look we're just going to take this little tile we're going to move it over here hit our drop down it's like that is like true it sounds so orchestration but it's like control it's like the level of control I think we've always had in our heads like if only we could operate in this way and now there's a now there's a view and a tool obviously to do that like To me, it's just solving all those like sales verse marketing or the handoff, you know, all those handoff challenges that just happen in silos. So, I think it's I think it's really cool. >> Yeah, absolutely. And when you said the

Okay, so I'll follow up with them. What sequence did you want me to use again? It's like, okay, you know, we we there's a lot that can come with that handoff and this can absolutely just automate and and make that a more seamless experience across the board. All right, amazing. Well, panelists, thank you so much for all of your input. Um, we are going to close out with a real playbook and Devin with that I'm going to go ahead and hand it over to you. >> Yeah, absolutely. And then uh are you going to switch slides for me just so I know or am I going to share my screen real quick? >> Um, either one. I can drive happily. >> Okay, go ahead. I'll know we're a little a little shy. Okay, great. So, real quick, last last uh thing here, folks. Um, I want you to put a one in the chat. Just a one. The number one. uh if any of these uh if you've said anything in these speech bubbles or if you've heard any of them uh this year so far. So one uh we're not even in deals. People don't know we're exist we don't we exist so we're missing out on the evaluations. Two our win rate is good but pipeline is

broken. So you know the classic like when we can just get them to see our product we win but getting them to that point is really challenging. Uh if you go a little bit up up the funnel, we generate MQLs. Marketing is doing our job or seems like it, right? But they're not converting. Usually causes some friction with sales and marketing. Uh our competitor has an inferior product but keeps beating us. I hear this a lot. And then our sales cycles are long and painful. Okay, I'm seeing a bunch of ones. Uh I'm sorry that you're seeing it, but hopefully hopefully today has helped and what we're going to cover has helped. And so it feels like these might be isolated problems like pipeline conversion, optimization, all that good stuff, but it's actually the the root cause is that we didn't win mind share early enough. We didn't earn trust. We didn't frame the problem. And so as people are getting into the funnel at the very highest level or through, you know, stage 1, two, three, it's a lot more painful because we're having to do that trust building on the go. And so that is kind of the underlying issue

there. And so I want to provide uh a new way of thinking about this. Um I just like putting people uh having people put numbers in the chat. You can put number two or actually put number five. Put number five if you've heard of the 955 rule. But basically uh this is some research done from I believe the B2B uh marketing institute a couple years back which basically has this concept of you know there's of your whole TAM of everyone you could sell to. You know 5% are in market right now. So they're showing high intent. They're like I need to buy something. I'm talking to Devon the salesperson. Maybe you're in procurement, right? And then you have five 95% of people who are not at all uh in a buying cycle or an evaluation. And the problem that I see is I work with uh you know dozens of of different uh B2B marketing teams is a lot of the activity and their focus is on the 5%. A lot of times it's like hammering the demo CTA talking about why you should pick us when they don't even know that they have a problem. And so that is causing a lot

of those speech bubbles uh and the latency problem as well that we covered earlier today. And so this framework once you start to understand this and say hey we have to have an approach to one understand the signals like what are both groups doing? What signals and interest are they showing? Two what are those signals mean? And three how do we act on them? Right? So that's what we're going to cover really quickly in the next slide here. Next slide. Sorry my fault I jumped the gun. Yeah, because 81% if you saw that that sorry that one stat I did want to talk about is 81% of buyers have a preferred vendor before they talk to sales. So before they go take a demo, they either have a preferred vendor or at least that consideration list. Right? So uh earlier I prefaced the five stages of awareness by Eugene Schwarz. And so the signal is going to tell you where that person is at. Unaware is really interesting to me. It's like one are you aware? Uh you you go uh yeah, go ahead and stay here for a sec. Aware uh that we even exist. Um but a lot of times people will be unaware.

They'll say things like, "Oh, that's just the way it is, right? You might be talking about a problem or a solution. They're like, well, you know, that's just how it is. That's just the way the world works." And you're saying like, "Oh, no, no, no. There's a there's a problem. Actually, you're not that's not the way it is. There's a problem and there's a solution." So, we want to move people through this from unaware to this can be fixed to, hey, there's a whole category of options and then we're the best one. We're the best vendor. uh and that it's safe to commit with us. So, if you hit the next slide, these are kind of some examples of what that might look like. So, Mario's just hanging out at the beach. He is unaware. He's like, he's not on vacation, but life is good because he's like, "Hey, this is the way it is." Um problem aware, you might find it like in a Forbes article or, you know, just some sort of content, you know, uh that's just kind of shaping a problem, introducing a problem in our industry, uh maybe for a specific type of leader. And then later that person, you know, we're going with Mario's on LinkedIn and he's scrolling and he sees a new cont, you know, a new a new product launch. He's like, "Oh, there's there's solutions out there. Company's talking about solutions." Uh maybe he's learning

about why someone's talking about why they move from one to another. So then he goes, "You know what? That's actually interesting. I have that problem. I'm interested in solving it. Let me let me Google search or realistically today probably jump into his favorite LLM." And then moving over to like for example the and flu product page, right? So he's over on a product page. So these are kind of, you know, roughly. I know I made it linear. I know we kind of do this and Mario's a pretty fun game, but that's kind of the path, right? And so once we understand that, if we hit the next slide, now it's like, okay, well, what type of content should we create to uh resonate with where people are today and also to move them aside, right? How do we move them along from unaware to problem aware, for example? So I have I put some examples here. when someone's unaware maybe that we exist maybe of the problem having a strong clear point of view or some contrarian takes is a great way uh to get attention and to get on the map or get on their radar uh because it's a good way uh you know content gets high engagement typically and it also gets shared a lot for the problem aware

that's where it's really important and I always say to coin the problem name the problem focus a lot there you can tell about customer transformation stories again it's not about our software it's about their their transformation the problem they overcame name for solution aware. There's different frameworks and category content. Product aware differentiation is huge here. Don't tell me why you're the best. Tell me why you're different. Tell me why you're unique. Tell me how you do things differently than anybody else and why I should follow you and buy from you. And then most aware is like, okay, we need to we need to make we need to derisk this. We need to seem like the safe obvious choice here. So, I know we're running up on time. I had to go a little bit quickly, but the the action I would say is one is start to just like let this marinate. Maybe take a screenshot of this. I'm sure they'll send the deck out afterward, but really start to think through this and the action you can take is to do a quick audit of the content you have, the the events you have in circulation right now. Where are you heavy in solution aware or maybe are you light in product aware? And note that these are not necessarily uh equal or

don't have to be equal in volume. I actually think that problem or content probably has the most overall uh amount of people that need to like be aware of the problem and reminded of the problem even if they're already a client. Um, and then look at your uh upcoming calendar. Uh, look at your content calendar, your marketing calendar. What are we h what do we have in the queue and how does it fit into these buckets? From there, you get a really good understanding of like, wow, we're really heavy here. We actually just need to distribute this, maybe update and distribute versus, oh, we're really light on problem content. we we've gotten maybe uh what I see sometimes we've fallen a little bit too in love with our product and need to go back to the problem. So uh if anyone has any you know thoughts feel free to put in the chat. I don't know if we'll have time but you can always uh reach out to me afterwards with the influ team to to chat more. >> Amazing. Thank you Devin. Um the buying journey is not linear and neither is my slide driving. So thanks for your patience on that. Um but I I just I want to close out for today and just say thank you so much to our speakers for joining for sharing your valuable points of view for our audience for joining us today and engaging in the chat. Um if

you haven't already, you can visit our website uh either directly or you can scan this QR code. We have a brand new page that showcases all that's new, all of the exciting releases that I highlighted today. So definitely encourage you to take a look. And with that, I will close out for today and we hope to see you all at the next webinar. Thanks everyone.