Bizcast: R. Scott Gillum on his book, “The Hidden Buyer Journey”, in conversation with Subhanjan Sarkar

Speaker A: Welcome to Bits About Books, the home for conversations with authors of breakthrough books on sales, marketing and business. I am your host, Shubhanjan Sarkar, founder of PitchLink, the next generation buyer seller engagement platform, where our mission is to make buying easy. Our guest today is Scott Gillam, author of the new book the Hidden Buyer Journey. How personality culture and hidden stakeholders decide your deals. In this episode, I discuss with Scott Gillum how understanding buyer personalities, behaviors and the evolving role of AI can transform

Speaker B: sales and and marketing strategies.

Speaker A: Discover insights on buyer psychology, the impact of technology and how to adapt for future success. Stay with us.

Speaker C: We worked for a client and they, uh, were subscription based and they had these 10 areas that they believed they were at highest value and they did a lot of really good research that said, if you're in one of these 10 scenarios, our services are highly valued based on our research, right? Here's what you do with them. So we said, uh, let's go research your buyers to ask them how they feel in those really important moments. They call it the moments of the matter, right? One of which was merger and acquisition. So we took their researcher, researched the buyers, and what was really interesting is people gave a professional response first, very excited about the merger acquisitions, great opportunity for the organization. Then we ask them, how do you feel about it? And then suddenly all these words burst out and I use a word cloud, right? It's anxious, right? It's guilty, uh, because I know I gotta have to let people go. It's all these things that are sitting underneath the surface that influence our behavior, that we never pay attention to.

Speaker A: R. Scott Gillum has spent his career studying one variable. Most sales and marketing strategies ignore the human being on the other side of the conversation. As a buyer behaviorist and the founder and CEO of Carbon Design, Scott helps B2B organizations close the gap between how they communicate and how their buyers actually make decisions. His work draws on decades at the intersection of behavioral science, marketing strategy and enterprise sales, giving him a perspective that that is equal parts analytical and deeply human. Before founding Carbon Design, Scott served as an office president at Gyro now then SU, one of the world's leading B2B agencies. Prior to that, he spent more than a decade as a senior partner at MarketBridge advising some of the most recognized brands in technology and professional services. Scott is a contributing editor for Martech and serves as a senior fellow at the School of Professional Sales at the Navin Jindal School of Management and AH at UT Dallas where he helps shape the next generation of sales and marketing professionals. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his wife Jennifer, and dog, Leo. Now onto this insightful session with Scott Gillam. Scott, I'm super excited to talk to you about your new book. Not, um, only because this is an area of interest for me, but I think it's a fundamental that, as you mentioned just now, we have been, uh, cyclically ignoring every decade, and it is that time when we need to revisit it.

Speaker C: Ah.

Speaker A: And that makes it so special. Uh, welcome. Welcome to the show.

Speaker C: Thank you. I appreciate you having me on.

Speaker A: What made you actually write the book now?

Speaker C: Yeah, it's a good question. And I honestly, if anybody's out there thinking about writing a book, um, it's hard. And it's really hard. You really have to be committed to it. This book took seven years, um, to produce. It took us seven years to get enough data that we can analyze to provide the inspiration and the insights in the book. It took me three and a half years of writing. Um, I got stuck. I wrote the first. Wrote the introduction, the first two chapters, and then I got stuck. Um, and then I sat on it and I really tried to figure out what this book was going to be about. I've been writing, uh, for publications for almost 20 years. Um, I was a sprinter. I could write, you know, 1200 words no problem. But putting together a book with 40,000 words was another challenge. And, um, I really had. I had to reach out to get help. I put a book outline together, and it was on the wall behind me. I had it up there, um, mapped out. I got advice from another friend. Again, if you're thinking about writing a book, get advice from people who've already written books. And your podcast is a perfect example. And I love that you're going into the creative process. So, book outline, really trying to organize your thoughts, put it up on a wall or on the floor, and then think about how things flow, moving chapters around. I, uh, wish I could remember the tool that I use, Script. I think it is that you can write new chapters around. Um, I then talked to Forbes Publishing, and, um, you can part of their services that they'll evaluate your book chapters or your book outline. So I gave them the book outline, they evaluated, came back with recommendations, and then I made a little progress. And then I got stuck again. And, um, so that was the process. I then, uh, found someone who could help me get past a couple of chapters. She was a writer herself. She became my editor and was very helpful to move the book along. The reason why we wrote it now is we Found these insights through our work with clients. And for me, the best way to get that out to the broader audience was to put a book together with what we discovered along the way. Um, I just couldn't go from company to company. And what we discovered was both impactful for sales and marketing, um, because we were studying organizational behavior and buyer behavior. So we were talking about buyers and they crossed over. So, um, it took. It took a while. We ended up profiling 10,000 buyers, uh, across 15 industries. So the research just took time. And this was not survey research, this was observational research. Um, and so it just took time to build it and put it together. Also trying to figure out what the book was going to be about.

Speaker A: Right. So it was a very painstaking process. Uh, I did one interview. I'll not mention the author or the book, but they got a lot of data from sales call recordings during COVID Right. So it was like a lot of information which was provided which could be now analyzed and one could work on which. Which sounds very, very different from your process.

Speaker C: Actually, it's not. Um, we. So the book title, by the way, is called the Hidden Buyer Journey. Um, and we were able to get client data. We got. I mentioned in chapter 10, there's 10 sources of data that we were able to analyze. I think one of which was the most interesting was reading sales emails between the reps and the buyers through the process of the. Of the purchase decision. And that provided some incredible insights. Um, and it was really fascinating to be able to do that. We would profile the personality of the rep and the personality of the buyers on the other side and look at how that m. That matches or didn't match and the rep not changing their style. Um, so it was a interesting journey for sure.

Speaker A: Right. So why were you getting stuck? You said you. It took you like seven years and three years of writing.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: What was actually stopping you was it. I'm sure it was not analysis, but it was possibly data. What was it?

Speaker C: I knew what I wanted to say at the beginning of the book and I knew what I wanted to say at the end of the book. It was the middle in connecting those two I hadn't figured out. And it's funny, by the time I was done finishing the book, finished writing the book in April, um, the two ends didn't match anymore, so I had to go back and rewrite the beginning of the book. And I think that's probably very common. And plus, you know, a three year lag. So I had to go back and change it. And connect it. And I think there's another interesting thing for people to hear. I finished a book in April. We weren't done with all the edits until the beginning of June. So when you're done writing a book, you're not finished writing a book, you're finished with a manuscript. And then you need to get that out to people that you trust that give you feedback and it goes through the review process. But, um, you know, you thought you were ready and that book would be ready to be published the next day. It is not. It's a long journey from there.

Speaker A: Right, right. How open were buyers in sharing this information with you? Was this data coming from the sales organization or the buyer organization?

Speaker C: It was coming from both. It was coming from both. Um, so we used a AI, um, profiling tool. So an AI personality profiling tool was actually used for hr, originally started to be used for sales. There's three of these tools that we've used. And we would profile, so clients would give us accounts with all the contacts. These are their targeted accounts. Or they would give us opportunities and funnels and give us all the accounts. And then we would profile those buyers and then we would look for their behaviors in the data. So if you're familiar with disk, it's dominant, influencing, steady and conscientious. It's like a Myers Briggs test. If people have used Myers Briggs or if you used oceans, these are personality tests.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: So we would profile the buyers and then we would go look for their behavior in the data. And so what's interesting is there's intent data that's sending signals out. And one of the reasons, and this is really important for your audience, understand the reason we study personalities. There are three key reasons for studying personality. It tells you about someone's behavior, it tells you about their motivations, and it tells you about their preferences. And that's what we would go look for. So if someone attended a webinar, why did they attend? If someone agreed to have, uh, a demo of a product, why did they do that? If someone. And I think the other Interesting. So that's motivations on behaviors. What's really interesting is in the consumer world, if you ask someone to make a purchase decision, that's very simple. It's them, their budget, their needs, right?

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: When you take that person and you put them into a role, and you take that person in a role and put them in a buying group, and you put that buying group inside of an organization, you put that organization inside of an industry, getting that person to Be able to make a decision becomes much more complicated. And so that's why we would study, uh, behaviors. How do they act in those situations?

Speaker A: Yeah. So like, uh, that's very interesting because one perception that a lot of time we talk about is that the buyer in his personal role behaves in a certain way. And it's likely that he's going to behave the same way when he's in the B2B mode.

Speaker C: Yeah. No. No two purchase decisions are the same. And think about how we go about selling. We treat it all as the same process. It is not at all. Um, reading these emails and watching how the process goes to a close or goes to a no decision. No two paths. We studied over 50 opportunities across five companies. No two opportunities could I point to that went the same path. It just doesn't happen. But we treat it that way. That's how our tools treat it. That's how our methodologies treat it. It's how our process treat it. Is everybody's the same. All buyers are same. A CFO is a CFO is a cfo. Um, and it's just not true.

Speaker A: I'm very tempted to ask one question over here, which is not something I was thinking about. Um, does this get amplified by use of AI or will it get moderated? Because what you are telling me is telling me why sales will remain human for a very long time. Because you can make that nuanced difference. Right. The distinction.

Speaker C: Okay, so now you're at the heart of the book. So the book begins that we are now in four selling approaches and this is the way the world works. And we don't think of this. The human to human cells approach has been around forever and it is the most important. But then there's now human to machine. There's machine to human and there's machine to machine. And all three of those areas are growing. In fact, I show the investment going into sales technology versus sales training as a proxy of saying the machines are getting fed and the humans aren't. We are now feeding the machines five times as much as we are feeding humans.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker C: Also in the book is research around why people the purchase drivers. We had a chance to do a big survey understanding what purchase drivers are and the importance of those purchase drivers. The top three reason why people make a purchase decision. And this is for a product. This isn't for a service. This is for a product. Reliability, value and, um, uh, functionality. Right. Those three things you don't realize until after you've made a purchase. So that tells you you're then buying something else when this is happening. And what you're buying is trust, credibility. Right. These things that are human. Right. That's what's being conveyed. And I, and I think that's really important. This is why that human element is really important. And it's also the reason why AI, if we can continue to make the human experience better and better by enabling our salespeople through these technologies, not replacing them, uh, and it's all going to come down to trust. If the tools get to a point where they are able to take a complex considered purchase and make that buyer feel like they can trust the machine, machines will start doing it.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean it's a hard concept to wrap your brain around because we are really talking of the future. Um, also depends upon how much of machine to machine buying will happen. I mean I can imagine that a large organization buying toilet papers can leave that purchase decision to the, to the AI and they can negotiate between the two. And that can happen because it can keep track of how much paper is getting used, how much is getting wasted, and so on and so forth. That's pretty straightforward. Right. Uh, but the moment it becomes a critical component, you're setting up a plant to manufacture two wheelers or four wheelers or what have you. And then it becomes very complex. And that's where uh, possibly you wanted to say something?

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. Um, AI tools right now are being trained on poor performance. If you think about the performance of marketing, if you, you're lucky to get a 3% response rate, you're lucky to get a 1% click through in sales. Half decisions don't go, you know, half opportunities don't go to decisions. If you're able to get a close rate anywhere between 25, 30%, that's outstanding. Right. Um, that means the tools are Learning on poor performance. 70 failure rate. 97 failure rate. Right. And the reason for that, and this is one of the reasons I'm very optimistic that human selling will continue as long as we invest in it. Is that scenario when I said you take a person who has different personalities and you put them into a role and then they start to play, they play a role, they have a work Persona, uh, and you put them in a buying group that has group dynamics that are influencing the way people behave. Then you have corporate culture that's influencing the way people are behaving. And then you have industry, industries are regulated. There are compliance issues, there are macro trends that are impacting industries. In order to get a machine to learn all those three Those four steps and those dimensions that are impacting the way people behave in decision making, that's going to take a very long time. Very long time.

Speaker A: We'll go back to your writing process, uh, because it's exciting, right? So it's very easy to get sucked into this discussion because it's so, so interesting. Uh, when you are writing, did you have a fixed time? Were you, like, writing in the weekends, or how did you manage your writing process?

Speaker C: The first half of the book was, uh, ad hoc. When I got inspired and I knew what I wanted to say, I. I would start to write right from chapter six through chapter 16. It was just every day I was, I was trying to build, trying to get a first draft, getting something down on paper that I could refine. So from. It went very fast. When I got from chapter six to 16, that writing process went really well because that was the back end of the book. And I knew I wanted to say. And that went really very quickly. And that became something I was doing every day. The first half of the book was not that. And it was tough. Um, I write for Martech, for example. I write a monthly column for MarTech. I'm a runner and I write all my blog posts running because I have alone time in my head and I come up with an idea and I write in my head and I come down and I do it. Yeah, running didn't work for a book to run a marathon. So it was just a different creative process.

Speaker A: That's interesting. Uh, so the structure that you had back of your. In the wall, is this the same structure that the book has come out as?

Speaker C: Uh, close. Um, a chapter got eliminated. Again, this is something that I think if anybody's gone through this process and, or thinking about it, um, things are going to get cut. And, you know, you put a lot of time and effort in it. And for the good of the book, you're gonna have to cut some things out. Um, I. So chapters got moved around. Chapters got moved around. Um, my original thought was the book would be in three sections. It would be the history. How do we get to this point, current day? What is the problems? And then the solutions. Yeah, and in some ways it still works that way, but it doesn't. I was going to run a thread. So, like, chapter one would be on the history of selling. And then chapter six, for example, would be, where are we today with selling? And then chapter nine would be, what's the future of selling? That was the idea. And I would do that for marketing, and I would do that for buying, and I would do that for the enablers. It didn't work out that way, but that's the way it was originally structured.

Speaker A: Right, right, right.

Speaker C: You know, one of the things that I was thinking about in terms of that, the book process is, um, having a supportive editorial team of friends that are willing to give you really critical feedback. Um, you'll get people who say, oh, the book is good, but you want the book to be great. And you need these people to be able to give you that information that they're seeing that you probably don't want to hear. Um, because it means rewrites and it means moving things around, but they have your best interest at heart. They want this book to be really good. And as a creator, oftentimes it's very hard to take that feedback in because there's nothing more personal. Right, than creating something like that. Um, but they're critical. They. They help me refine, they help me with my tonality. I, uh, have a tendency to be actually very certain at times and when I probably shouldn't be so certain. Um, some people told me, there's three books in here. Um, you know, tie it, tighten it up, make it link together, create a thread that really fits, that pulls everything together. And I think, um, that's a really important stage. And don't skip it because you don't want to hear feedback and you just want to be done because you can definitely get there. Right. Um, it's really important for you to be able to get a test of, uh, what you've written and get people to be honest with you.

Speaker A: Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, especially people you respect. You know that they have your best interest in their heart. Um, I think, um, and they know the subject, they know what they're talking about.

Speaker C: I also say the tools. Um, Clyde is incredibly important as an editor. Um, and you can tell it to be highly critical as well. Um, and I think that was, for me, really important as well. I mean, I remember getting feedback from it saying, you know, you've got to rewrite the whole first part of this chapter. Oh, I kind of don't feel like doing that. But I. And it told me how long it was going to take. And I'm like, I don't want to really want to do that. But having. I mean, having a lot of editorial steps, having. We probably. This book was probably reviewed 100 times. I'm not kidding. Um, Gemini Clyde chat GPT. Uh, people, people, people, people. Um, including my wife, who was a former editor. She was the Final. We were still finding things. It's remarkable. Do Not Trust tools, AI tools 100%. They will miss things. And so human, even in this environment. Right. The human is really important to make sure that the book is right.

Speaker A: And tell me one thing, when you are writing these chapters, um, you already distinguished. These are not ideas of blog posts that you think about as you run, uh, and you come back and sort of put it down on paper. How are you correlating the data part of it. So to back up the ideas that you are going to put down in the respective chapters, how did you organize your research data to correlate and sort of draw upon as you're writing these?

Speaker C: Yeah, so I wanted each chapter to be self contained so you could put the book down, pick it up, read a chapter and get everything you needed to know in that chapter. And so I would write the chapter out with the story that I wanted to tell or the point that I wanted to make. And then I had some research and data already assembled because it was from client work and we could use that others. I had to go back into the data and then do the research, analyze what was, what was in the data and then bring it forward to say, okay, and by the way, after the book is done, I'm still doing that. I just posted something yesterday about how buyers enter in to the buyer journey that I'm like, I should have put this in the book. I have a version of that in the book. But the opportunity to continue to play with the data, you start to see new things. And um, so I went back and I also went back to the very first chapter after the book was done and I realized I needed some data points and so I went back in and looked at research to try to add that. So I, I wanted everything to be supported with data.

Speaker A: Uh, do you imagine that you will maybe you're already doing that to have a sort of a parallel, uh, connected website where you will put in some updated data as people?

Speaker C: Uh, I do. There is a book website. Yes.

Speaker A: Okay. Okay. I mean I was sure it was. Um, so let's go to the book. Let's go to the history. And we touched upon a bit of it, um, that we have been talking about the buyer being in control. I don't know. By the way, if you follow Todd Capone, um, uh, he has written four books on transparency. And, um, he has been on my show four times. He has written four books. He has been back every time. Um, so Todd is a sales nerd and he researches literally collects books from the 1800s and 19, early 1900s on sales.

Speaker C: Right, yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: And, and, and he comes up with these ideas that, which sounds so recent, but he will say, oh, well, this was told in 1912 by such and such person in this article. You know, so, so sort of, uh, interesting, uh, correlation. But more seriously, when we go, go back to the 1980s, late 80s, early 90s, we saw this whole discussion being sales is not sales anymore. The buyer, uh, is sort of really controlling that process. Right. Um, one of the things I love to tell people that no sale has ever been concluded by a sales guy because the buyer has to sign and he signs and he closes the damn sale and not you. Uh, anyway, um, so talking of the history, why is it that we sort of at some point like now, get focused on the customer, focused on the buyer, and then sort of forget about them over the next seven, ten years?

Speaker C: Yeah, um, I start the book with the history of sales and I start with telling the story of John Patterson, who was the founder of national, ah, Cash Register. And he's the father of modern day selling. Um, and the reason why is he bought a company and found out no one wanted a cash register and they tried to sell it back and the previous owner said, I wouldn't take it back for a dollar. Um, so he stuck with Cash Register. So he first knew technology that needed to be sold and as a result he developed the sales guy. Uh, it was called the pamphlet and it was sales. He developed sales training, sells territories, um, the whole process that we're under right now. And I tell that story as it goes from John Patterson to then Tom Watson, who was an NCR rep who then went on to a company that changed his name, he changed IBM and grew IBM using the same principles of John Patterson. Even back then. If you look at the ads, also, John Patterson's the father of modern day direct mail, um, and spam. Um, he had a very human approach. The selling point for the cash rush was literally keeping your clerk, store clerk's hand out of the till. If you've ever heard that expression, they've got a hand in the till. It was to keep your, your employees from stealing from you. Because on a ledger you can make up, you know, sales transactions. His was really around. This cash register is going to make sure that at the end of the day the receipts are right. So, um, we've known for a very long time that this human, human connection is really important. Um, what's happened through the course of time is that we've leaned on the rational elements, the linear part. I mean, John Patterson developed a sales process the same time he was developing a manufacturing process. Um, and so as I say in the book, this is almost 150 year old sales model that we're using that may no longer apply in the AI world. Maybe this is where we really start to think about this has got to be something different. And I think buyers have been telling this, telling us that for a very long time. Uh, if you look at research that the Gartner puts out around, you know, buyers want rep, 60% of buyers want a referee. Uh, experience maybe higher than that now.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: Um, inspires saying, you know, we're going to rely on the machines for certain things because it is more efficient and we can get what we need.

Speaker A: It also about, I mean, so, so the same process which was developed then sort of, I would say disintegrated into uh, a format which actually tampered with the basics, which is trust. Right. I mean, if you remember early days, we all used to live in the same town most of our lives and we practically were selling to our friends we went to school with.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker A: So the trust was not, uh, not only built across the table, but it was also built across many years of knowing people.

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker A: Um, and similarly traveling salesmen used to travel the same route many, many, many, many years. I mean, nobody changed, uh, territory from one to the other very flexibly so to say. So what I think happened is that in the process of forcing quota, forcing uh, a certain requirement of sales, we sacrifice trust. And, and many a times there's so many things wrong with the B2B process now. I mean, you put your youngest, most new, uh, team member to do the first very vital call to a very senior person who is actually going to decide, look at the irony of the whole thing. Right.

Speaker C: I know.

Speaker A: What sort of data do you see around this? I mean, do you see that the buyers see this disconnect or why is it that we are not getting that?

Speaker C: Yeah, I think a data point always sticks in my head. And it was research that LinkedIn did that only 5% of your buyers are ever active in the marketplace. And that means there's 95% that are not. And so we set up our technologies to detect the least little signal. We believe there's interest. Right. So, um, someone hits a website, someone downloads. We believe that there's interest in the product or service. And that's not necessarily true unless you understand the motivations of the people that are making those actions. And that's, I think Buyers do a lot of things with companies and their information that aren't necessarily related to making a purchase decision.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: You know, they're scanning the horizon. Um, there are two personalities in particular that do that all the time. Influencers are constantly seeking information to share with others, and studies are constantly seeking information for their own purposes. And so we assume everything is going to lead to a buy. And that's not the case. I mean, right. Buyers, one, they're not one person. They're not singular. In B2B, there's three or four that drive that deal. And so, um, we make a lot of assumptions because we don't gather more information. We just assume that we're on a path or purchase.

Speaker A: Right. That's a very interesting point because that brings me to the title of your book and one question I had the moment I saw the title. Do you agree with the premise or the thought process that a buyer's journey is very different from a seller's journey?

Speaker C: Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Um, it's not linear. I think we've all gotten to the point it's not linear. Right. Um, I think for salespeople, they have to really help them understand how this journey goes. If they can really understand one, that person's role inside the organization, what do they do? What, who do they answer to? Who are their stakeholders? Right. So understanding that role and understanding how am I going to help that person navigate through that? And there's some really good books around that. Um, I think the second thing is companies have a lot of needs, and you got to figure out how you make whatever you're trying to sell a priority on that list. And you've got to do your homework. One of the things that I've said in the past is buyers do a lot of homework on vendors, their products, their services, their needs, themselves. How much homework do you do on the buyer? How much time do you spend understanding that buyer inside that role, inside that company, and then understanding. And there's a lot of technologies now that allow us to be able to scrape and get good information about what's going on in organization. But as a sales rep, you still need to do your homework and understand what's going on with that person.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. One of the things that I had discussed some time back with, uh, one of the authors is that a buyer's journey starts, like you said, much earlier than when a vendor or a supplier is considered. A lot of thing is going on within the organization before a, uh, vendor is brought into the picture. And we sort of think and that's sort of if it is a 10, 12, 13 step process, this is possibly the 8th or 9th step before a vendor basically features in this whole process. Uh, do you see that being uh, the case or uh, do you see something else?

Speaker C: Yeah. So one of the things that we do for clients is trying to um, diagnose deals that get stuck. And why do they get stuck. Um, and what you find is that there are a whole world of things going on inside of that organization that the reps can't see and don't see that are impacting the progress that they're going to make on a purchase decision. I think the other thing is corporate culture is really really important. One of the things that we discover is corporate culture dictates the speed of purchase decisions faster than any other variable. If you had to look at just one thing and one of the examples we show is Netflix. Netflix is, has a dominant personality. Culture and dominance are drivers. They're get things done. More than half of the organization Netflix is has that personality type. They did 113 projects in 2025, this project being films and series and everything else. They decentralize decision making to be able to move fast. They have to decentralize and give a lot of power to people at uh, relatively junior levels because they hire really talented people and they trust them and they let them go. If you knew that organization operated like that but taking the time to understand its culture, you could say I can get a fast decision but I have to be directly in line what that project is. I have to be line of sight. I have to say my tool, my product, my service can help you move faster to accomplishing your goal. Then you'll get attention. Right. If it's not directly related to those 113 projects, they're M not going to pay attention to it. And then you can look at other organizations that uh, are science based. Have heavy R D organizations take a very long time to make a purchase decision because of the culture.

Speaker A: Right. That's a very interesting point because I think that's very unique in terms of the literature that is available currently. I think people do not pay enough attention and that can be a huge pointer as to how you should move with the organization. Right. It's time for a short break. Stay with us after the break.

Speaker C: I don't remember who the guru was that said all good strategic thinking eventually turns into software. May have been Tom Peters, I don't know. But anyway, um, the perfect example of that is abm. Right. Account based marketing was A strategy before it became a technology. And that strategy was in our biggest, most important accounts. We need to have a good strategy of understanding the buying group, understanding how we align with their, uh, their priorities, how we deliver value in a way that they appreciate, etc. It was a thoughtful strategy. It became technology. At first ABM was aimed at uh, the most important accounts.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: But then it became let's go after the mid market and now let's just go after everybody. So ABM turned into acquisition based marketing.

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Speaker A: Welcome back. I'm Shubhanjan Sarkar, your host for bits about books and founder of PitchLink, the buyer seller engagement platform. Let's dive right back into the episode where we left it, Scott. Let's talk about the third chapter. Uh, it's a very interesting one and uh, I request you to elaborate a bit on how the enablers have possibly gone too far.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: What is this chapter about? Let's talk about this.

Speaker C: Yeah, so I don't remember who the guru was that said all good strategic thinking eventually turns into software. May have been Tom Peters, I don't know. Anyway, um, the perfect example of that is abm. Account based marketing was a strategy before it became a technology and that strategy was in our biggest, most important accounts. We need to have a good strategy of understanding the buying group, understanding how we align with their, uh, their priorities, how we deliver value in a way that they appreciate, etc. It was a thoughtful strategy. It became technology. At first ABM was aimed at, uh, the most important accounts. But then it became let's go after the mid market and now it's, let's just go after everybody. So ABM turned into acquisition based marketing. Um, and that's not what the intent was and that is what's happening on. What is happening with our enablers is we're continuing to rely more and more on the tools and those tools need to be fed and we constantly need to satisfy this tool so we can reload and shoot. It's a volume game. Right now and what was happening. If you think about a marginal yield curve, we are at the very top of that, uh, with technology, the yields that you'll get out, uh, and these technologies by the way are only built for efficiency and scale. They're not built for effectiveness.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: And they're very siloed in what their features do. So you cannot take a buying group and move that buying group through a process and measure with your technology. It just doesn't exist. Can't do it with Salesforce. Can't build data lakes at this point, be able to pull that data, move it across. And so, uh, we find that especially junior marketers in my experience are very tool driven. They've lost some of the ability to actually come up with a value proposition. Like how do you build a value proposition? They've lost the ability to really understand a buyer on the other side who works in an industry, who's in a certain role. We're working for the machines versus the machines working for us often.

Speaker A: Uh, yeah, yeah. And we saw that, like you mentioned Salesforce, we saw that happening to CRM, but we didn't really pick up the signals from that.

Speaker C: Right, right, right.

Speaker A: I mean what you just explained about ABM pretty much happened to CRM the same way. And it has become a huge data, um, you know, crunching, eating monster and you don't see what's coming out of it. Uh, you are just sort of engaged in feeding that. Right.

Speaker C: Yeah. Scott Brinker, um, creates a map of marketing technologies and it has grown over the years. I don't know how many tens of thousands of, of technologies are on that map now. Same thing's happening with sales. But sales, no. 1 people don't pay attention as much to sales as they do to Martech Stack. But sales is growing in the same way. And so we are over reliant on tools that are only built for scale and efficiency.

Speaker A: Yeah, I, I agree, I agree. So coming to the present and this whole new hype which started in 2023 around AI and caught some steam, uh, 2020, late 2024, 2025 going on now, do you see that actually making any difference to the selling effectiveness or is it that we are creating another set of machines to feed data to?

Speaker C: It's a mixed bag. Um, there are some companies where they are using the technologies to make better salespeople and in other areas they are the tools are becoming the salespeople. And I think that really depends on your organization how you look at this. There is a great opportunity and this is One of the reasons why the book is timely now is we've always known there is a person behind a role and that person makes decisions emotionally and then they justify them rationally. Um, and that's, that was very true in the consumer world. It's true in the B2B world as well. The difference now, you know, that cycle, we were talking about it like every 10 years, we discovered that there's a human making a first decision in business. We have technologies to help us understand those people so we can understand your personality type before I talk to you. We have technologies that can help you as a rep adjust your style to meet the style of that buyer. And we have technologies that we show in the book that you can train ChatGPT or you can train Claude to be able to write in the personality styles of those individuals. And, and it can take your email for example, and adapt it in the style of that personality that you're sending it to. And so we have known this now and now we have the technologies to be able to take advantage of it. So we should become better at true personalization, which is to bring it down to an individual level, one to one. We can do that now and we can do it at scale.

Speaker A: So I have two questions at this point and we'll talk about uh, one of the chapters in the second, uh, second part of the book. Uh, primarily, if you think it's okay, we can talk about marketing's blind spot or any of the other chapters that you'd like to talk about. But first this question is how feasible is it to actually understand the buying committee right now?

Speaker C: It's not good at all. It's terrible. Um, demand Base six Sense have come out with some new technology and all it is is a correlation of people within an account who have bursting activities at the same time. They assume that's a buying group. It's not at all, um, what we found in the research and this is by tracking the buyers who are entering into the buying process through the emails, the reps, 85% of the people who making purchase decisions are not in a database. CRM working, doesn't matter. Any database. Mhm. And the reason for that is they enter late into the process. And so at the trial stage, at the demo stage, at the presentation, we are finding these new buyers showing up or new influencers. They're more influencers than they are actually buyers, but they do influence the purchase decision at that time when they show up, the reps are very busy at trying to get the deal closed. And so they're filling out the MSA and they're filling out the tech specs to be able to do a trial. And they're the, they're distracted with all these other things. They don't put the information in of these new buyers into a database. And if they can, then you can pick up intent signals. And that's one of the things that we found that was really interesting is if you are able to put these people into a database and then they start hitting your website, which they do, they burst activity at the very end to catch up with the rest of the group because they haven't been involved and they're so very active. They'll hit forms, they'll download case studies, they'll download, you know, on demand webinars and you can track their behaviors. And I uh, give an example. This is a SaaS company selling an ERP solution. And the CEO was going to be in the final presentation. It was down to two vendors the last two weeks. He was bursting his intent signal. He was searching on cash flow 35 times.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: We took that information, went to the account team and said, why is he searching on cash flow? And they said because they want a new tool that gives them real time project profitability. They can't see that. We said okay, change your presentation to totally that. And they won the deal. And it was a competitive win and it was against a competitor they had lost 10 straight deals to. So it can provide this insight on what's really important. As I said, people are playing roles. They may or may not tell you what they're really what the need is. You can start to gather that through digital channels.

Speaker A: Yeah. And as they say, I mean if there are people in the buying committee whom you have not sort of factored in, uh, we forget that uh, maybe one person will never be able to decide on a buy, but one person can put a veto. Yeah.

Speaker C: One of the things that we do that's super interesting and this is something we started doing, is that we will prep your team for that final presentation, all the way down to creating a seating chart and we will take your, you know, seven or eight people are going to final presentation with their seven or eight people are going to be in the room and we'll organize you based on your personalities to put you in the right position to be able to influence that person that you need to. And we'll give you scripting on how to do that. And that meaning inside that room having a pre game, having a lot of prep time. Super important because not only do new buyers enter in at that very last presentation, but on the sales side, you have new executives are coming in who haven't been involved in the buying process, and they're as cold as the buyers are. Someone needs to prepare them. Uh, they know the technology, they know the solution, they know the service. They don't know the buyers in that room.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And it also sort of gives the. Gives the buyer a new person and a new perspective to tackle if necessary. Right. Which is not okay. I know this guy. I know what his spiel is. I know what he's going to say. But here's this new guy who is possibly head of technology or whatever, who has potentially worked with my competitor directly and can bring in some more dynamic information. I mean, possibly that also gives them a bit of, uh, uh, bit of reason to engage better.

Speaker C: Yeah. I mean, you're sitting in that room and you said this earlier. In that room that day. Those people are looking at the vendor and they're saying, do I trust them? Do I trust this person who's saying this thing? Right. Having those people in there that give that level of trust, that comfort, that confidence, that credibility is super important. And it doesn't necessarily come from your product or your service or the presentation. It comes from the people sitting in the room that day.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Do you foresee that in the future, near future, perhaps sales will go from this individual performance to a team performance? I mean, will it become a team sport from individual sport?

Speaker C: Yeah. Uh, it's a super interesting question. I think it would have to. What would enable that is if organizations had a way to facilitate that and to measure it. Um, and it's one of the reasons why they have. This is an individualistic pursuit, is that you can put ownership on one person. Putting ownership on a team and making them accountable, I think is a little

Speaker A: bit more challenging, but it can become more efficient, technically.

Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. And it would be interesting to see the mix of the teams and how they perform as the way you put the teams together.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So talking about your second part of the book, which is about building a better way, shall we talk about selling to people, not just professionals, or, uh, marketing's blind spot? I mean, we can talk about both.

Speaker C: It's kind of. I'll talk kind of about both of that. Um, sales marketers, just like salespeople, are not trained to pick up on human signals. And I give an example. In that chapter of research that was done on buyers for a new marketing campaign, they were looking for messaging through the research, they had this very human insight that they could use for messaging that they didn't even see. So they went to the feature functionality, what we call business value language and totally missed the personal value language. That happens all the time. And in that book I cite David Aker, who's a professor, who's founder of Profit, in his framing of uh, how you create value in value messaging. There's business value, which is very much feature functionality. And that's what organizations talk about a lot. Good research from Google and Gartner around the fact if you use business value language, your buyers can't differentiate you from another company. It all sounds the same. Speeds and feeds. Right. Then there's professional value, which is how does this solution help me in my role inside the organization? And then there's personal value or as David Aer calls it, self expressive, uh, value. What does it do for me? How does it make me feel? Does it make me feel secure? Right. Does it make me feel confident? That kind of language connects and differentiates and buyers, marketing and sales are not trained to pick up on that.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: What you do find intuitively is good salespeople know that they know how to appeal to you personally so that you become an advocate for them. And that's good. Salespeople are always like that. And I give an example of a person that we ran into, his name was Ben and he was like the future of selling, um, and what he did and how he, how he was able to convey this very personal value to his buyers. Um, so that's, that's the, you know, kind of the mask that we don't go through. We, we sound very professional. Sales puts a lot of pressure, Product puts a lot of pressure on marketing to talk about speeds and feeds, feature functionality. Marketing needs to adjust that for the marketplace and for the buyers. And they often don't get a chance to do that because everything is so fast. Got to get it into market.

Speaker A: So does it work for uh, influencers? So as a salesperson I may or may not be talking to the buyer directly in the beginning. Right. So I might be sort of, I've gotten through uh, influencer, who is part of that buying committee, uh, for the lack of a better definition, uh, but he may not be the direct buyer. So does it also work in a scenario like that or you need to navigate to the actual buyer or the user of the product? I mean in many cases in B2B the user and the buyer are two separate. I mean, yeah, so that, that makes it, that, that's what adds the complexity. Right?

Speaker C: It does, it does.

Speaker A: Where, where does this work? I mean, does it have to be like, I mean I'm sort of asking you from, from what you have seen, does it need to be that you need to understand what's the personal stake, so to say for this person, whether he's influencer, whether he's a actual buyer who's going to sign or the end user, you need to identify his actual role and then sort of showcase what would be value for him. Uh, like in the case of the CEO, real time feedback on projects and so on.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's a really good point. And the answer is yes. Um, it's one of the reasons why you need to know personalities, because you need to know what motivates them. Part of that motivation is why would they recommend you? And so a lot of times those first calls will be with an influencer or a user. Those are the ones who are out searching for information. Now you have to motivate them to want to tell you who else we should be talking to. Right. And the question is, why would they do that? Influencers want to look good, uh, at finding things. That's what motivates them. Find new things that they think someone else will like. And so they'll recommend that, uh, the users, depending on their personalities, it depends on what, like if it's a conscientious person, which is a skeptic, they'll say this, this organization is very credible. They have a lot of third party endorsements, they have a lot of data. Uh, and conscientious people are very driven by word of mouth and I've heard of them from my peers, so I trust them. Right. That will get you to those other meanings. And so we undervalue, especially with conscientious, the importance of our brand and our reputation. Those are really important for certain, uh, types of buyers. And we often don't do anything to, to leverage that or use that.

Speaker A: That's a very interesting point because, uh, one of the, one of the things that I think about is how marketing has got this new KPI, which is linked to sales but not linked to brand, which builds trust. If you think of the traditional role of marketing, it was to build the brand and the trust in the brand and not trying to be aligned with how many units were sold.

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker A: Uh, so do you think that this focus that everything has to be towards revenue is sort of getting reversed to the original roles that marketing and sales played? With marketing being entrusted more with not only uh, influencing the, the set of people who are likely to be the buyers, but also build the brand and, and, and ensure that stories are circulated which, which, which increases the trust in the brand.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's a really good point. There is a separation like there was before. It's like we're all selling now. We're all selling. Right. Um, and I think it's because of the dominance of sales inside of organization that's causing it. Uh, I have been in numerous situations where talking about brand is a bad thing. They think that's wasted dollars. Um, and in fact, I built models in the past to show you, like, here's what the impact of a change in your brand awareness can do to the bottom line. Like, you have to connect all these things through the funnel. But going from brand awareness into consideration, these steps happen. They happen. And whether you like it or not, and we want to just focus at the bottom of the funnel. You're missing the opportunity at the very highest level. Right. So you're going to sell to a very narrow part of the market. If, uh, you only focus on the bottom part of the funnel. Do you want to go after a broader market? You have to go higher. You got to talk about brand. You got to talk about your value propositions. You got to talk about how they differentiate in industry. Um, and that's an art that we're losing because of the technologies also pushing us, uh, all to selling.

Speaker A: Let's touch upon your ninth chapter, which is fixing Personas to uncover the hidden human. Because this is sort of linked to what we are discussing now. Um, what, what are we talking about there?

Speaker C: We're talking about these work Personas that we take on. Yeah. Um, so I share some really interesting research. We work for a client and they, um, were subscription based and they had these 10 areas that they believed they were at highest value. And they did a lot of really good research. That said, if you're in one of these 10 scenarios, our services are highly valued based on our research. Right. Here's what you do with them. So we said, uh, let's go research your buyers to ask them how they feel on those really important moments. They call it the moments of the matter. Right. One of which was merger and acquisition. So we took their researcher, researched the buyers, and what was really interesting is people gave a professional response first. Very excited about the merger, acquisitions, great opportunity for the organization. Then we ask them, how do you feel about it? And then suddenly all these words burst out. And I use a word cloud, right? It's anxious. Right. It's, uh, guilty. Because I know I got to have to let people go. It's all these things that are sitting underneath the surface that influence our behavior that we never pay attention to. And they there and they're there. And I spent a lot of time talking about there are role there, there are emotions in B2B, they exist. You can't remove the person from the role. Um, but you can get to it. Not only are we playing a role as buyers, salespeople are playing a role. They've been trained to act a certain way. They've been scripted. Right. They're not the true selves either. So you have two people playing roles and trying to make a very important decision without really understanding the human elements of both sides.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's very powerful. That, that's, that's extremely powerful. I think we can move to the third, third section of Making it Happen which sort of talks about the future. Um, I think uh, the, the, the first one which is chapter 10 and, and chapter 14, both look very, very interesting to me. And, and, and by the way, you can choose to talk about anything else. Uh, one is about how we found what nobody was looking for. That was your chapter 10 and chapter 14 is the buyers you can't see but should. So both are connected in some way. But uh, it would be interesting to hear what uh, you found.

Speaker C: Yeah. So chapter 10 explains how we did, um, talks about how we uncovered these personal moment in purchase decision, um, where we got the data, ah, how we used AI profiling tools. And it really explains the last half of that book about how do we know what we know when we take you through the rest of the book. I think one of the interesting things, um, and I'm not sure it's called the two thirds rule. I can't remember what chapter that is. Um, is that birds of a feather flock together. This is the fascinating thing about personality types. When we first started doing this, we did it because we had a client who got 17 different Personas. And the go to market team is like how are we going to act on 17 different Personas? And what they really were were just selling scenarios. So it's like we know who your audience is. We're going to profile. And we said here's uh, your personalities and here are the two dominant personalities in that target audience, which is data scientists. You need the message this way, right over time, this is the seven years building up, uh, in the 15 industries. What we found is in every industry, depending on what functional area you're targeting, there's always two personalities that will make up uh, 65 to 75% of your audience. And in some industries it's higher than that. So you can do scale personalization because of this trend and is that there is a logical explanation. And I use the airline, uh, industry. Airline industry runs on efficiency. The personality that is most aligned to data efficiency, detail is a conscientious. So you take operations in the airline industry. Half everybody that works in the airline industry works in operations. 70% of those people in those roles are conscientious. And then when you look at their backgrounds and their uh, degrees in education, aerospace engineering, aviation, aeronautics, those, those degrees are most likely to be those personalities.

Speaker D: Mhm.

Speaker C: So all the way. Your personality not only affects the way you make purchase decisions, it affects your educational and career path.

Speaker A: Right

Speaker C: now you know that at scale it becomes very easy to be able to target people with highly customized. So that gets to the third part. Motivations, behaviors, preferences. So now from the data we know based on your personality type, what you prefer in terms of your language, your content, how that content spiritually displayed and you can become really highly customized. Um, it's a trick. It's not a trick. It's like this is like a hack, right? This is a super easy thing. If you take the time to do that you need a profile, probably about 100, 150 people in the roles across that segment and you'll come up with it and it's, you know, it cracks the code.

Speaker A: Right, that's very interesting. Um, and this is where possibly using the tools to better understand is more effective than trying to say that it can do my job as in doing the sales for me. Talking about the buyers you can't see but should. Are these also certain types of individuals in terms of roles or does this vary across industries and accounts?

Speaker C: It's that part of they aren't in the database that I was talking about

Speaker A: earlier

Speaker C: late stage people who are being added. But I will say when we see new buyers enter at the presentation, final presentation for example, they often come from finance and procurement. That's where they're coming from. Um, at the demo uh, stage, that's users that you haven't identified that may be in other geographic locations. We see that a lot. Um, you'll bring in buyers from other countries if it's a global purchase or enterprise, um, purchase and um, there's relatively no information on them and, and there's no time um, for the rep to be able to do that. I will say that there are ways to create AI agents. Now that can help you identify them and then do research on behalf of the rep. So agentic is an opportunity for, there for that.

Speaker A: So where do you see this headed? Uh, uh, Scott, um, are we going to sort of go into that progression of forgetting or do you see some change in leadership in the, in the, in the leadership, not only sales leadership, but in the leadership of organizations who actually understand that it's uh, time that we paid serious attention to this. Otherwise we'll, we'll be stuck with 50% quota achieved and, and never, never meeting our sales targets.

Speaker C: Yeah, so that's one of the things I worry about. So I am aiming um, at in the U.S. now we have schools that teach professional selling. Um, and I am involved in those schools. I'm a fellow at one of them. Um, so one, I want to start it at the very beginning. I think this is the way that we'll get it to be institutionalized is to get it into the education system. So that reps start out with understanding the value of psychographic data. If we can get them from the very beginning then hopefully that will continue on. Um, I've also been surprised by a number of sales managers that I've met that understand the power of psychographic data. Now whether or not they're incorporating, I think that's one of the reasons why identifying the tools that you can use to help will also help uh, institutionalize and operationalize that. Um, I think that's the key there. And then I hope the book makes the case. There's good reason to do this. This isn't like the softer side of selling or the fuzziness that a lot of people don't like because it's not data driven. There's a lot of data in here and there's a lot of logic that says this makes a good case for paying attention to this.

Speaker D: Bits About Books is brought to you by PitchLink, the buyer seller engagement platform. Pitchlink makes buying easy by enabling high quality engagement between buyers and sellers through its presentation and discussion modules. Sellers create customized sales narratives using sales collaterals and personal videos and reach out to prospects through a non intrusive buyer qualified engagement. Pitchlink requires no installation or download and holds the entire repository of sales collaterals and buyer seller conversations. Talk to us to know more about how you can engage with customers without intuition. Call us on 990-216-3132.

Speaker A: This has been fascinating actually and I'm so excited to finish this conversation and go and actually read the book. Uh, as you can see that I do have genuine interest in how buyers behave and what one can do to make that easy in terms of buyer collaboration, um, because that's critical for any sale to happen. Uh, our ability to facilitate that is critical. I do think that sales leadership is mostly focused on the wrong KPIs, which is driven a lot by the kind of technologies and systems that we have developed over the last 20, 30 years, uh, CRM included, ABM included, and so on and so forth. So, so everything sort of goes into the scaling mode and then suddenly they lose their efficacy of why they were actually created in the first place. I, uh, think lot of sales leaders are also, like you said, cognizant of this problem and they're trying to fix it. And that's where you see successes, uh, where people are able to see it. And I also hope that this book gives people the data and the information, how the correct use of this actually is changing the way, uh, their companies and their future is getting shaped. Scott Gillam, thank you so much for being on the show. I really appreciate your taking the time and talking to us.

Speaker C: Thank you.

Speaker A: We have a fantastic lineup over the next couple of episodes with great conversations on breakthrough Books. Subscribe in your favorite podcast app so

Speaker B: you do not miss single episode.

Speaker A: Thanks for listening.

Speaker B: Thank you for being with us today on Bits About Books, where we talk to authors about breakthrough books on sales, marketing and business. We hope this conversation helped inform and motivate as we all navigate, uh, a rapidly changing business environment for us. These are enlightening conversations, enriched with knowledge and expertise. We encourage you to go out and buy the book to learn firsthand and implement some of the great ideas we discussed today. We hope to have you with us again in the next exciting episode of Bits About Books. If you liked what you heard, subscribe to the show in your favorite podcast platforms like itunes, Google Play, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcast from. And give us a rating while you are at it.

Speaker D: This bizcast original podcast is produced for pitchlink, the next generation buyer seller, uh, engagement platform where the mission is to make buying easy. Hosted by Subhanjan Sarkar and uh, produced by Rajiv Aditya. See you next time and have a wonderful day.