S2:E4 - 6sense Breakthrough Unleashed - Part 3 with Saima Rashid, Kevin Ryan, Dina Otero, and Jonathan Burg - Generative AI world, personalization, from leads to accounts, holistic customer journeys

Speaker A: Welcome back to the Demand Gen Made simple show. This is part three of the six Sense Breakthrough interviews. For those of you who may be tuning in for the very first time. Six Sense actually sponsored me as one of, uh, two podcast hosts selected to perform on site interviews at their annual Breakthrough event in Las Vegas. I performed 13 interviews in two days. So I wanted to make sure you all, as followers and subscribers to my show, got access to the amazing conversations that were held in part three's lineup. We have Saima Rashid, SVP of marketing and revenue analytics at $0.06, Kevin Ryan, head of Revenue at Ibis World, Dina Otero, VP of Demand Gen at, uh, Mission Cloud, and Jonathan Berg, SVP of Revenue at New Breed. I hope you enjoy. We're live back here at ah, six Sense Breakthrough. I'm speaking with Saima Rashid, you are the SVP of marketing and Revenue analytics here at six Sense.

Speaker B: Hi. Hi.

Speaker C: I know, it's very meta. I'm so excited that you're here at Breakthrough. Um, how are you enjoying it?

Speaker A: I'm loving it so far. Meeting so many great people, having so many great conversations like yourself. This has been an absolute phenomenal experience and I'm really grateful to be here.

Speaker C: Well, that is literally the point of Breakthrough. Um, we, we're so passionate about our customers and our community and facilitating learning and making sure that, you know, everyone who is on this forefront of the RevTech revolution, these difference makers that are optimizing the way they're going to market, what better way than, you know, to get all of them together in one place, have them learn from each other, have them share what's working and, you know, have a whole lot of fun doing it.

Speaker A: Yeah. And this is literally like your event. I mean, you spearhead the whole team and department that puts this together. I know you have people that are into the logistics and the details, but like, holy crap, this is amazing.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's a big event. I mean, uh, it's grown exponentially year over year. We spend a lot of time curating the content, the tracks, um, you know, the submissions process for speakers. We get so many submissions, which is a fantastic place to be in. And so we really try and curate an agenda that will work for sellers, marketers, operations professionals, BDR leaders. I mean, it is all about, you know, going deep where it makes sense, but then also up leveling kind of some of those strategic initiatives that everyone should be thinking about.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I've always been a huge fan girl of 6 sense. I've used the platform multiple times with my clients And I know you're also, you were a fan girl because you were a customer of 6Sense prior to actually joining at the company. Talk to me about your experience before you joined and all those great insights that made you want to join Sixth Sense.

Speaker C: Yeah, I have, I was a customer and I still have been a customer longer than I've been at six Sense. So my whole goal of um, bringing six cents on board to my previous employer was I am actually a data analytics and operations person. Uh, my entire career I've let data inform what we're doing. I've built and led analytics teams. I owned data science at this previous company and we just recognized that the way we were going to market in terms of trying to get and create pipeline converted into revenue, the old playbook wasn't working but goals were increasing.

Speaker A: MHM.

Speaker C: Marketing was being asked to source more and more pipeline and we knew we needed a different way and so of course the data had to inform it. And I evaluated all the vendors out there. 6Sense's data first approach and the fact that it was not an advertising platform or you know something, it was a platform that was built on data and AI. The predictions, the scores were data led. They were rooted in your patterns of success. Your close won opportunities were what we're driving. You know we, where it was prioritizing accounts that spoke to me. Um, and I had a hugely successful implementation. We won Forrester's program of the year in 2020 for just you know, the way we were able to stand up the program and impact revenue and pipeline. And so about five years of doing that I was like I just need to go and work for them because I'm such a believer in what the product is and what the platform does.

Speaker A: I love uh, that uh, what was the first thing you did when you joined Six Sense? I mean every leader has kind of like a 30, 60, 90 vision. What were some of the top priorities for you?

Speaker C: Ye, yeah, um, I was actually hired interestingly to build out ah, the revenue analytics team. And so my goal was um, because of that being able to run six Sense for six Sense. So taking some of the learnings I had but also as being that target Persona informing the product roadmap on where I felt as a customer we needed to be going. So that was actually some of my initial um, first conversations. This is the type of reporting we need. This is the type of you could edit the ui if you could allow for certain things to be exported, it would make our life so much easier. Um, that was a really Fun part. And then about a year and a half into the role, I was given all of marketing as well. And so that's been an interesting transition, particularly as somebody who comes from the data and analytics world to be leading marketing. There's things that I'm really good at and there's things that I, um, you know, I haven't had the experience running before, and so those sorts of things really excite me. I like jumping into something that might be new for me. And I have an incredible team, uh, that, you know, supports me in all of it.

Speaker A: That's really awesome. When you've been advocating and champion six Sense for six Sense, where do you guys go specifically to look at the type of revenue analytics? Do you look in six Sense platform, maybe in like a Salesforce? I mean, let's get nitty gritty with that.

Speaker C: Yeah, all of the above. Um, I use, um, we have a pretty standard framework. There's source of truth for pipeline and revenue is our CRM. I think that's the case with most companies. If it isn't in Salesforce, it doesn't exist. And I would hate for marketing to have a different set of metrics than sales, for example. Right. Our goal is not marketing source, pipeline versus sales. It is the pipeline goal. And as the head of marketing, I own all pipeline, whether it's from marketing or not. And so CRM is the source of truth for that. But there's so many leading indicators that we need to be looking at in terms of what's working to drive pipeline. What type of programs should we be investing in? Where should we move our budget and dollars? Because let's be honest, everyone's budget is finite and we have to be optimizing it. And sixth Sense reporting really helps with those leading indicators. Um, which campaigns are helping accounts progress into higher intense stages, which advertising campaigns or copy or, or types of ads or which mix of, you know, physical events versus digital events. There's segment performance reports in six Sense that basically you can take your ICP and see where they are in their intent stages today and how they're progressing and then specifically which tactics have helped them progress. And so that's really, really important for us as we look at the leading indicators. And then on the flip side, you know, after deals are closed, won, we still go back into six Sense and say, what were all the things that helped push those deals to a successful outcome? What keywords were our most recent, um, booked deals? Researching what web pages were resonating, which campaigns worked. It's a really great Way for us to understand the waiting patterns and then go back and implement more of them.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: So if I can ask for an exclusive insight, what are some of the campaigns you guys are running? Leveraging the success platform.

Speaker C: So we do ABM at scale and so we have existing always on campaigns that their goal is to ensure we are getting in front of our icp even when they're just starting to do their um, you know, research, ah, early, early stages. We have campaigns ah, that are always on but we have touch points throughout that journey. So an interesting place where we're investing is accelerator campaigns. Um, they continuously are one of our top performing campaigns where existing open opportunities that might be stalled or might not be progressing as quickly as we'd like. Marketing should be doing air cover over them. Right. And that's, you know, Persona based air cover and we can execute those through the Sixth Sense platform.

Speaker A: I wholeheartedly agree. I've run some of those pipeline accelerator campaigns, 6th Sense and a couple other channels too. But that is very easy, low hanging fruit that marketing could just pick up and really just continue. Yeah, journey.

Speaker C: And you know, again I look at a lot of data and it is getting harder and harder to create pipeline and then progress. It uh, you're having to influence more people than ever before. They are expected, they're uh, expecting a personalized experience. They are requiring more touch points than ever before. And so how do you scale without scaling your headcount or your budget? You do that through automating additional, you know, touch points in campaigns. And marketing has a huge role to play.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I actually interviewed Kerry Cunningham right before this and he was talking about how the theme of the buyer's experience report was buyers will call you and don't call me.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: And I thought that was so interesting.

Speaker C: And it's kind of again, taking that research and putting it into a practical, you know, outcome that means you can't just be running plays further down funnel. You have to be thinking of the whole brand to demand experience. It has to start from the very top, uh, um, identifying your ICP and making sure that whatever point they are in the journey, they know about you. And so that's why I said, you know, we start our funnel with those very top of funnel awareness accounts because we have, we want to make sure we're always in front of them. And so if you're only thinking of either uh, top of funnel or bottom funnel, I think you're missing, you know, that overall journey and everyone really should be thinking about the overall brand to Demand experience.

Speaker A: Yeah, full funnel holistic marketing, generating campaigns, demand gen, whatever you want to call it. Right. Because that's a whole nother top topic. Um, but the key theme that I'm hearing from you right now that you're implementing with your team is all about experiences and really understanding the touch points of those experience from the very beginning of somebody never have heard of or just starting the research process with you all all the way down pipeline as well as the customer side of, of the journey. So I think that's really interesting. A common ah, question, um, right now is, is demand gen turning into a one to many for abm and what's the interchangeable acronyms or jargon from ABM to abx? What are your two cents?

Speaker C: Yeah, I think uh, ABM to abx. I think the ABM tag, I know it's stuck but um, it is not telling the full story.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: It's the saying that only marketing is doing um, the account based approach. You need sales to be bought in, you need that inside sales team, the BDR team to be bought in. And frankly you also need CS to be bought in especially if you want to land and expand those. So, so ABX I feel is a more holistic um, term and I prefer it but you know, we'll say ABM too.

Speaker A: Um, and so, so they're not interchangeable, not to cut you off but like

Speaker C: let's make a point. Yeah, I feel like they are not. I think we're not telling the whole story when we, when we um, just limit ourselves to abm. But yeah, I think demand gen programs need to be running across the board. I own customer marketing as well at six Sense and we should have an upsell goal. We should be influencing upsell pipeline. Right. And so we should be running campaigns throughout that lifecycle. And you know we haven't hit on this yet, which is shocking. But AI, you know is, is really the one way we've been able to help scale the demands of the market frankly to be, you know they're getting a personalized experience in their day to day lives on the B2C side of things. Right. They're demanding that on the B2B side as well. And so AI has really helped us scale those programs.

Speaker A: Well let's talk about that. In what ways?

Speaker C: Well, we have um, you know Six Sense is a company built on AI. Uh 11 years ago we started with our predictive analytics um, platform and then you know we've expanded that to prescriptive, descriptive. And then three years ago we launched our Generative AI product conversational email. That's been a game changer for us this past quarter. 25% of our new biz pipeline was generated autonomously using AI. Uh, if you had told me that six months ago, even I wouldn't have believed it. So it's, it's kind of impossible to overstate how um, how important that is in, in our mix. And so whether it's something like augmenting what the BDRs are doing, right. Making sure that even an inbound that comes in is worked in a timely fashion. You know, Carrie mentioned this. When buyers are ready to reach out to you, they demand that you get in front of them immediately. Uh, AI can help with that, right? Let's take the repetitive tasks off of the plates of the BDRs. Things like follow up to webinars, things like doing that initial outreach and let's get the BDR selling more. And so augmenting, I think AI plus the human touch is really what's helped us have those great results.

Speaker A: Yeah, I absolutely agree. I've seen that actually in the field with the clients that I've worked with, how that can help alleviate a lot of the repetitive tasks. And in season one of Demand Gen Made Simple, I actually had Latny on the podcast talking. She was fangirling and raving about generative AI and the capabilities that you guys recently launched and how that was helping to get time back for the BDRs. And I thought that was absolutely phenomenal. So just seeing the evolution from three years ago like you mentioned when you guys were first creating it, all the way through the um, having it being adopted into the industry and further integrated with your guys own tech stack as well as in the market. I've enjoyed seeing that evolution.

Speaker C: Yeah. And I think you know, not all AI is created equal. And in, in today's generative AI world, context matters, right? Everyone's pulling from the same LLMs. And so all of a sudden all the outreach, all the blog posts are kind of starting to sound the same. By using AI on top of what the data is that 6sense provides that gives you the context of this account is early stage versus late stage. This account is researching those keywords. This account has anonymously been on your website. That's what really then powers the right type of automation that makes it hyper personalized.

Speaker A: Now I'm going to take a step back for a little bit because this is Demand Gen Made simple and I'm on a mission to break down all jargon and acronyms. So you mentioned LLM. Um, can we define that?

Speaker C: Yeah, it's the large language models that a lot of the AI tools today are pulling from. OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, things like that.

Speaker A: Yeah. Just want to make sure for the audience of like we're stripping away all acronyms, we're getting tactical, we're talking about things as it is.

Speaker C: So I love it, love it.

Speaker A: Um, what are some. As we are approaching 2025, we're in the planning, budget, all that Great conversations. What are some like top campaigns that you would recommend for companies to deploy if they're not already. Um, as they look to onboard to get started with Six Sense.

Speaker C: Yeah, I like to go right back to the basics. I think depending on what works for you and your industry in your, you know, in your day to day reality, I think we need to drive focus and that is really what ABM or ABX is. At the end of the day, whatever acronym you use, it is about having the entire go to market team focus on the most winnable accounts. That's it. And so regardless of whether you're doing a top of funnel campaign, a commercial accelerator like we just spoke about, start with your icp. Let's not waste budget we don't have on accounts that aren't going to be great customers. And so I always start with honing in and refining your icp, not just with that initial land criteria of, you know, these types of companies are great buyers, we want great customers. And so use that retention data to also inform your icp. Right. What are the best customers you have? What do they look like? Then let's make sure we go out and find more of them and we go after them both on the awareness consideration phase as well as progressing them through the funnel and then even on the customer marketing side. So I think the mix is very dependent on what works for you. But always start with that focused approach.

Speaker A: I love that. Uh, let's pivot a little bit more because you obviously lead a marketing team and I just want to pick your brain more on some leadership qualities that you have. Um, I've enjoyed this conversation. I'm like a huge fan girl, you know that. What are some ways.

Speaker C: As am I.

Speaker A: No, don't say that. Appreciate you. Um, what are some ways that you continue motivating your team on a day in and day out?

Speaker C: Yeah, um, I think you have to foster a culture of innovation. If we've done something once, you know, let's lean in if it's continuing to work. But we can't rest on our laurels We've got to always be pushing it. And I think some of that comes from the fact that we run Sixth Sense for six Sense. We are helping. We're the Persona that we sell to. So we know what the market needs, what the Persona needs. We inform form the product roadmap and so we get access to the earliest alpha, uh, features. And my goal with the team is always, what next? How do we make it better? How do we even beat our goals from last quarter? And I think that's a culture that we foster. And it's not like we're putting unrealistic goals out there, by the way. It really is about allowing for a culture of experimentation. That's not to say that we're going to throw a ton of money on something just to test it out, but let's do informed experimentation. Let's push the boundaries. Even as we talked about our, um, evolution, uh, with AI, we didn't start out with putting everything through our conversational email tool. We started off with one use case. We built up that confidence. Okay, here's another one. And so it's an iterative approach. I think because of my analytics background. It's always about experimentation, but with measurement in place. So that when you are finding something that works or doesn't work, you're able to quickly pivot.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's such a great point. We're running out of time together. So I have one final question for you. What is the final thought that you want to leave for demand gender marketers and go to market leaders for 2025?

Speaker C: The best marketers and the best, I think just whether you're in any place in go to market, be a difference maker, innovate, push yourself, challenge the status quo. What is working today, I promise you, is not what's going to work tomorrow. And so the best, uh, leaders on my team, the best employees, the best team members are the ones that are just always looking for what's next. Um, companies don't grow and innovate without those difference makers. And so lean into it. And hopefully, you know, most other marketing teams are fostering that culture. I'm a huge believer in it. Give people the, um, give them the permission to think beyond what is their role, maybe the box that the role is in today. And it has always yielded great results.

Speaker A: I love that. Uh, Simon, this has been an absolute pleasure having this conversation with you. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Speaker C: Thank you.

Speaker A: I have the pleasure of speaking with Kevin Ryan. He's the head of revenue at IBI's World. Hi, Kevin. Thank you so much for joining me.

Speaker D: Yeah, right on. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, I'm so excited to get in. So for those who may be unfamiliar with you, your background or your line of work, can you just, you know, start kind of from the tippity top for us?

Speaker D: Yeah. So, uh, for IbisWorld, we are a world's leader in industry research and company data. So we focus on helping our clients get an understanding of their markets, they play in the industry's risks and trends to help execute their strategies at scale. Um, so We're a global B2B organization. Uh, and I lead revenue operations for IBISWorld. Uh, and so my whole job is to think about how do we engage with our customer as early as, you know, never understanding who IBISWorld is and effectively move them through our funnel and keep and retain them and grow them for life. And so it's all about finding, uh, that right mix and that right motion. And, you know, we keep going.

Speaker A: I love that you're actually doing a talk here at six Sense, and your topic is Rebuilding your go to market strategy. How intent data fuels progress. Holy shit. That's an important conversation. Can we dive into some of the key insights? Any, like, tactical takeaways that you have from that space specific session?

Speaker D: Yeah, so I, uh, think for us it was all about kind of understanding what the value of intent data is and how to best operationalize it. And I think that's the big thing that kind of ticked over for us in this journey is, you know, when you, when you onboard any resource, especially like Sixth Sense, it's not a light switch. You know, when you flip it on and off, it doesn't just operate on its own. It's about understanding the data, understanding what it means for you, and then figuring out exactly how that fits in your workflow and process. And so for us, the journey was really about rethinking where we wanted our reps to focus, where we would have the best outcomes, and what did it mean to meaningfully, you know, adjust and overhaul our process to generate the best result. And so it's really interesting to see our evolution over the course of the last year because, you know, we've gone on this journey of rethinking what did our ICP look like, what did we, what did we care about? How did we want to speak to our clients? Who were they, you know, where were they on their buyer journey? And so getting really into the nitty gritty of understanding how our buyers wanted to buy and how we could best support them in that evolution and that education journey. So it's been a really interesting and awesome and challenging environment to work through. Um, but that's been kind of our journey. And at the, at this conference, I just shared what our experience has been. The good, the bad, the ugly. Because it's a road filled with friction. It's a, uh, road filled with awesome outcomes and opportunities and exciting things to cover. But, uh, it's one everybody's going through.

Speaker A: What are some of the opportunities that demand gen marketers and go to market leaders can be excited for as we approach 2025?

Speaker D: I think it's a personalization, this idea about, you know, cutting through the CSA and figuring out how do you really meaningfully engage with your buyers at the right level, at the right stage, saying the right thing? I think you can, you can walk around here today and, and that seems to be like such a consistent through line. And how do we work together as a community to figure out what's really meaningful and how can we push that meaningful content in context to our buyers at any given time that then, you know, quality in, quality out. Um, and that's what I think as I walk around here and I see kind of where we're going. That idea around personalization to the buyer and to that human is a really exciting journey to go on.

Speaker A: Quality in, quality out. I'm gonna use that for the title of this episode.

Speaker D: Yeah, Yeah, I love that.

Speaker A: Yeah, because it's fun.

Speaker D: Because that's, that's really what it's all about. And it's like, you know, how many times are you gonna get, you know, hit with the same message, same way, the same time? And your inbox is probably just as scary as mine is and everybody else's is. But it's like, I have no doubt that whatever or whoever's trying to reach out to me actually has value for me in my role. But it's like, I'm a human. I'm not a, I'm not a title on LinkedIn. And so it's like, how do we really make that a core part of our DNA as marketers, as revenue leaders? And I'll call us, we need a name for it because we tend to say marketing and revenue. We are one team and one journey in this. And so we really need to think about, you know, as demand gen leaders and, and what have you. But yeah, those are the things that I think will be really exciting to see continue to evolve over the next year or so.

Speaker A: I love that. How does one master personalization? Is that just like research the hell out of something or is that you need to buy tech? I know it's a mixture of both but like what other insights do you have? Like if that's the key topic, if that's what we need to be planning for 2025. Tactically, how does a demand gen marketer become an expert in personalization?

Speaker D: I think first it's about experiencing the buyer journey for yourself, right? When's the last time you know, you bought a solution like yours that you're selling? Because if you're never on the other side of that fence, you'll never be able to put yourself in the shoes of that individual. Um, and then I think it's really about sure the research journey and leading into like Gen AI that can help deliver that personalization. But I still think with the surge of Geni, that human oversight and input is so important because you have to be able to have that conversation like we are sitting here right now and having this. And so I don't necessarily think, I know I don't have the answer to that. But in some way, shape or form we have to figure out how to use the best parts of Gen AI to scale and drive efficiency and integrate that human oversight, to contextualize, to empathize. And, and if we can do that and put ourselves in our buyer's shoes, I think that could be really powerful and move the needle quite a bit.

Speaker A: Yeah, I totally agree. There's another P word that we're uh, going to dive into that you have an extensive amount of experience in and that is predictability. The hot topic right now is building a well oiled demand gen engine that is forecastable and predictable. How does one do that?

Speaker D: You might need to let me know when you figure it out. Um, I think what it's really about is being very specific and clear about what you want your outcomes to be, defining and understanding your terms so you understand and know where every single buyer is in the stage of their journey and then track, measure, iterate and when you start to do those things and that, and that's kind of what took us probably a little bit. You know, we've been a six sense customer for a couple years and um, it took us a little while to kind of get to that phase which is really understanding what it, what intent means, how do you use it and in what meaningful ways can your team access all the rich insight and context in there to push it back to the buyer. And so I think really what you have to do is you have to start at the very basics and standardizing your process, your terms, your defined outcomes, building the motion that supports it. And then you're constantly going back and iterating it and then you use that insight and data to contextualize it back top of the funnel to continue to push everything through. And, and so it becomes this constant feedback loop for you. Right. You can kind of see where the leaks in your bucket are. You can kind of see what's making a lot of progress and a lot of positive gains and then you just keep iterating on that back. And I think if you can achieve that, I think the sky's the limit because you have the foundation to really build something cool and special.

Speaker A: I love that. Let's dive into some of the roles and responses. So you're obviously head of revenue, so you have a team and sometimes the team is the one that handles the tactical and the strategic leader is the one that's outlining the goals and the motions and the team there goes out and execute. How do we ensure communication from the top line strategy down to the executional tactics of the team and the management and go to market? Like any tips and tricks?

Speaker D: Yeah. So something that we've actually implemented that's worked really well for us. And this is a product development framework, but it's called 1050, 99. And so we use it to communicate large projects throughout the, you know, executive stakeholders and leaders of any project. So at that 10% stage, you're really early in the vision creation of an idea and a concept. So you check off all those questions you want to ask about what is the impact, what are we trying to achieve, etc. Etc. You come back at the 50% stage with, you know, we have a model built, we understand roi, when's the, whatever those key benchmarks are. Does this achieve what we originally, uh, set out to achieve? Yes. No. Maybe adjust, iterate. And then at 99 is kind of that final percent stage where you're like, all right, we've hit all the check marks, let's go and execute it. And so we've used that to sit back and say at every stage we're always talking about the original goal, the progress we made and where we are. And that makes it really easy to communicate up, down, left, right. And I think that's become a really solid part of our DNA and how we kind of try to eliminate some of that friction early. But you know, you know, that's not easier said than done.

Speaker A: Totally. Have you ever had somebody disagree with an approach, of course. How do you handle that?

Speaker D: How have I handled it or how should I have handled it?

Speaker A: Both, if you're willing.

Speaker D: Um, well, I think this is one of the really interesting things about this journey around sales and marketing alignment. And, you know, how do we get to this place where it doesn't matter whose win it is because it's everybody's. And so I think in the past, you know, I've had such a, like honed in focus on the result and the outcome that, you know, I wanted all those wins and that credit and that success. And it took me a long time to kind of beat that out of me and realize that we are all on the same team working together. And there was a really fantastic presentation the other day from Orem. Um, the revenue funnel is not a relay race where marketing hands off to sales, who hands off to product hands off to customer success. It's more like a rugby team. You're all moving down the field together. And so I think when you have that open and honest line of communication, you can break some of those molds. And so, you know, I'd say earlier, you know, when people disagree, you know, you get your back up, you feel a little bit defensive, but you know, now it's kind of about, uh, okay, same thing as I said earlier about our buyers. Let me sit on your side and let's understand that. So it's a level of seeking to understand, it's a level of vulnerability and openness. And if you've established that relationship as a team together, to realize we are looking to achieve the same thing, you can make a lot of headway, um, but you'll never fully remove friction, right? Because a little friction is a good thing.

Speaker A: It's good. Always challenge the status quo. That's what I like to say. I love that analogy of the rugby team. I think that is so cool. I'm gonna like use that. I'll quote you like, I'm not gonna

Speaker D: like steal it from you, but that was shout out orym.

Speaker A: That was me.

Speaker D: Um, so I, I can't take credit for it either, but, uh, we'll give

Speaker A: credit where credit is due. I love that. But oh my goodness, that is awesome. So one of the ways that I've, I don't know, this is kind of my hack for getting buy in for something that may be a new idea, new strategy, whatever you want to call it, is to kind of back the way into what I'm proposing. So for example, I'd have a conversation with you, I would Pick your brain on what you felt was important, align on the strategy and get your two cents almost. If, like I were to quote you verbatim and use that to then come back and say, well, this is how it's going to get us here and essentially back into the buy in and then have a conversation on agree, disagree, tacticals, anything thereafter. And I find that positioning myself less of the hero and positioning you more of the hero and how I'm, I call myself like a sidekick. Like I'm here to sidekick the, and champion the hero. I find that that helps individuals who kind of have an ego, you know, I mean, we all have an ego. Right. But like, if you're dealing with somebody who is of senior leadership, um, and you're a little bit intimidated and you need to go in and get that buy in from them to kind of, you know, pulse check the ego a little bit and, you know, feed it to them back and then say, here's how I think we can be really great partners and here's the plan and the strategy. What do you think about that?

Speaker D: I think that's fantastic. And I think, um, going in and you have this like, initial sense of if I'm picking this up. Right. Like curiosity to solve a problem.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker D: Of like, hey, how would you do this? Here's what I'm seeing. What could we do? What do you think about this? And I actually think that's just like a generally great way to go about it, regardless of like level title, seniority, is that, um, we all don't have the answers regardless of all of those things.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker D: And so I, I think that's a good thing for all of us to sit back and be like, sure, I might have some preconceived ideas and notions about what the solution would be, but I'm not the foremost expert on any of this or anything anywhere all at once. And so I actually think that's probably the best way in which we should go about this because you can get a different perspective. You can also stress test your ideas in a more open environment. You know, you remove that, uh, friction early and that makes for a really valuable conversation. Um, so, yeah, I'm all about that.

Speaker A: Cool. Well, phew. I always tell everybody, if you don't get your ass chewed out at least once, are you even growing?

Speaker D: Sure. Not maybe a couple more times.

Speaker A: A couple more times, absolutely. I feel like it's crucial though. And actually when I was early starting off my career, this is my advice to other demand gen marketers early in their life. I've preached this since day one is to openly ask to be chewed out, openly ask for that type of hit it to me straight feedback, come into the presentation and say, I am trying to learn, I'm trying to grow, I'm trying to get a seat at the table. This is my limited knowledge. Pick me to pieces. And the amount of people that are willing to do that in, in a way to encourage you and to, to grow your skill set and not just, you know, to just be a jerk. Um, but I find that having that level, level of curiosity, having that little, uh, level of type of grit, if you will, to like seek that next step, I have found to be very, very valuable. You encounter individuals like yourself, like this awesome conversation, or if I were to go to you and be like, hey, I'm trying to learn how to do X, Y and Z, can you teach me? Would you not be like, oh my gosh, absolutely. I'm flattered. Right.

Speaker D: But you know, it's interesting. I mean, for those that aren't necessarily, you know, uh, open to that, like, how do you force yourself to do that? Right? Like, because there's, there's a certain subset of, of individuals that would be like, oh, that's like way too terrifying for me to do. So, you know, what would your advice be back to them to say, like, is it just like a hey, dive in or like, what, what could you do differently thing?

Speaker A: It is a thousand percent terrifying and it will never not be terrifying because it's a level of insecurity that we have when we don't know something and we're asking for that sense of growth. Um, but the way that I have been able to get over that is actually had a mentor tell me and champion me individually and coach me before I had in that big conversation. So that's my advice, is to find somebody who is still a little bit like title wise above you, um, who you can like send that to have that conversation, have them kind of, you know, coach you through that. And then if they need to, sometimes they can broker that introduction if you're not quite there, you know, down the chain of the org chart and stuff, depending on how all that's set up. And they can champion that this person is trying to learn, whatever, but absolutely, it's gonna be terrifying. And sometimes you can ask for that coach to be in the room with you if you just need that emotional support. Um, but I always tell everybody, you will feel so much better afterward knowing that you did it.

Speaker D: Yeah, I think you've nailed it. The, the uh, relationship and mentorship is such a massive underutilized thing in this, in this world, in this space. It's like, look at, look at us out here, look at this community. There's so many people that you can engage with. They don't have, they don't have to be in your org, they don't have to be in the same space as you. Yeah, but there's so many people that are willing to come together to help each other. It's like that's, that's what makes this really special. And us leaning into that I think is really, you know, a rising tide lifts all boats. Right. And so if we can really continue to buy into that, find yourself a mentor, find yourself someone that you can learn from that you can stress test these ideas that you can build that relationship with that you can take that hard feedback and multiply that. And then all of a sudden we become a really powerful group together. So like spot on.

Speaker A: I appreciate that. Um, one more question for us today as we are in Q4 planning budget strategies, what is something that you would say are one do and one don't for demand gen marketers and go to market leaders as we approach 2025, have

Speaker D: a gen AI strategy. It's here, it's coming. What does it mean for you? Whether that's in how you effectively create content, how you integrate it into your seller's motions, how it benefits your client base. Have that. Um, that would be my do. Um, and I would, I'm not sitting here saying that even I have that ready to go. I'm just, that's kind of like Kev, you gotta do that. Um, the don't would be, uh, don't confuse scale with effectiveness.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker D: And I think, you know, kind of parlaying off the gen AI thing is that we've all tried to achieve this mass amount of scale and it's diminished quality. I think that kind of brings us back to the very first question about personalization. Um, don't confuse the two. Um, as someone who 100% has and done, and I'm sure a lot of us have, um, really thinking about that and its effectiveness and its impact will be the biggest thing.

Speaker A: Quality in, quality out. That's where we're going to. There you go.

Speaker D: Quality and quality out.

Speaker A: That's what we're going to go with for today's conversation. Kevin, this has been an absolute pleasure to have this conversation with you. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Speaker D: Thank you. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

Speaker A: I Have the pleasure of speaking with Dina Otero. She is the VP of Demand Gen over at Mission. Hi, Dina.

Speaker B: Hi, Janelle. Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker A: I'm so excited to dive into this conversation. It's been a long time coming.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. We've been talking on LinkedIn and slacking back and forth through all of the communities that we're both a part of, and it's. It's about time to meet in real life. So I'm glad. Yes, yeah, yes. Very overdue.

Speaker A: We're fangirling all over LinkedIn. I appreciate it. So let's start off. For anybody who's unfamiliar with you or with Mission, can you just give us, like, kind of a quick rundown of you, your role? Mission?

Speaker B: Sure. So, as Janelle mentioned, I am the vice president of DemandGen at Mission. We are an AWS premier tier partner, so we are fully experts in all things aws. So cloud, services, migration, modernization, and more recently, obviously, I. I, uh, need to

Speaker A: dive into that topic.

Speaker B: I'm sure we will.

Speaker A: What are some of the key responsibilities you have over there?

Speaker B: So my team and myself are all responsible for growing our company's pipeline, uh, regarding all things just marketing, attribution. Uh, so that's from our field events, our conferences that we sponsor, digital marketing, um, and content syndication and webinars. All of these what I'm calling tactics at the moment, um, into a more strategic omnichannel. Go to market strategy.

Speaker A: The topic of attribution.

Speaker B: Yes, exactly.

Speaker A: So before this, we were kind of sinking on some topics to really dive into the weeds for, for this podcast. And one of the things that you mentioned you're currently going through over at Mission is transitioning from a lead model to an account model. Let's talk more about that strategy and how you're thinking about attribution as you go about that.

Speaker B: Yeah, so it's been a very interesting journey. So I joined Mission, uh, just a little over a year ago at this point point. And for cloud, which is obviously a very modern, um, and important part of, like this tech industry that is continuously innovating, a lot of the companies that support cloud is not keeping up the way that, say, SaaS companies do. So a lot of the ways that we were marketing, or I should say reporting on our marketing was quite antiquated. And so we are still sitting on a lead model at the moment, um, tracking, you know, leads generated, looking at first touch, like lead sources. It's just, it's. I kind of want to roll my eyes a little bit, but it's the reality of the situation.

Speaker A: Um, but for a lot of companies, honestly, yeah.

Speaker B: Um, so it's been great though because it's been a humbling experience to be like, okay, well you know, Mission was a startup. They're not anymore. Um, we are growing quite rapidly and it was this growing pain where it worked five, six, seven years ago. It's not working anymore. And now, you know, that was one of the main reasons I was brought in was how do we look at um, not just our reporting and our funnel numbers and our funnel metrics and our KPIs, but our entire marketing go to market strategy as a whole. And one of the things that I was trying to fix from an efficiency and operational standpoint was, was making sure that we are able to track the entire customer life cycle, not just the quote, quote handoff from marketing to sales. And while we still have some work to do, we've made a lot of progress in the last year. Uh, but I feel like now we're at a place where we can really elevate the marketing side and move from lead to accounts. I love that.

Speaker A: Thank you for that background. How did you go about doing that conversation with the rest of the, the executive team? Were they already bought in? Did you have to do some buy in presentations? Was everybody just ready to make that transition?

Speaker B: It's actually, it's still a work in progress but everyone seems to be bought in. And the reason I mention that is we already speak about customers and our prospects at the account level. We're not talking about John Smith at ABC Company we're talking about ABC Company and the people that we already have a relationship with at ABC Company and other divisions with an ABC company we could potentially be growing into. So from a um, naturally it's actually already happening. It's just on paper we weren't tracking it that way.

Speaker A: How have you advised your team on the targeting standpoint? Transitioning from lead to more account focused?

Speaker B: So 6sense actually is a big component of that. So we've had the platform before I joined but we've been um, just working with the base platform. So um, the keyword, uh, tracking some of the um, basic intent signals. Um, but most recently we've implemented the um, excuse me, the predictive model. And that's going to basically really jumpstart our account movement because now we can track six QAs instead of just leads generated. Um, so basically swapping out the leads generated and MQLs with um, contacts within accounts that are more uh, engaged. And so looking at the Account level and all the different like activities and engagement, uh, that might be happening across the account. So it's not just, you know, Janelle at this company joined our webinar. It's well, Jeanette Janelle joined, but also her colleagues were, met our team at a conference and there were six other people who engaged in some way. So it was really looking at all of the attribution across the different engagements, um, not just the one person doing the one thing that makes sense.

Speaker A: Curious. Do you guys have an SDR or BDR team?

Speaker B: We do. We call them cloud advisors.

Speaker A: Okay, Cloud advisors.

Speaker B: They roll up to my team as well. Um, and that was actually another really good example of where we've been seeing a little bit of the disconnect, which is why lead model just does not work. So our cloud advisors are really diligent about following up with any potential prospect that you know, again from our traditional lead scoring model has been flagged, whether it's inbound, um, or they're working target accounts. And in a lot of cases our sales team are also working those target accounts. And then they would have a meeting scheduled with somebody, but it would not be the exact person that our cloud advisors were targeting. And so while the win is there, we still wanted, um, you know, our foot in the door in that account. We wanted a meeting scheduled that will ultimately turn into like a qualified opportunity. That's a win. But marketing's, um, contribution to that account is getting lost because the person that the salesperson, the ae, excuse me, booked a meeting with was not the same. So now it just becomes a sales lead, which, which is not a big deal from like, it's not about taking credit. It's more about just showing the, how complex these sales cycles truly are. And it's never just any one person in a buying committee making a decision. It's literally a decision by committee.

Speaker A: Yeah, I absolutely love that. So you're cloud advisors. How do you guys go about um, the different roles and responsibilities? So obviously you're talking about moving from lead to an account based, um, model. And with that, uh, you start with the target account list. And most companies correct me if this is incorrect at your company, take the target account list and divide some of the activities. Marketing air cover, you know, sales sdr, cloud advisors, um, doing more on the outreach and prospecting type of things. How have you defined those roles? Or have you yet? Because you're kind of like in the process of this.

Speaker B: Yes, uh, we do, we do have uh, marketing air cover on all of our account lists. Especially if we know that they're current AWS users. Um, because that will help us identify what kind of, um, approach or messaging we're going to go with. So, from a company, I should have mentioned this in the beginning. You know, we're a managed service provider, um, and we have a lot of like, project based services, like professional services. So we support a lot of our AWS customers with say, m migration plays. But there's also, um, all sorts of other, like, ad hoc projects, um, and other initiatives. So if we know they're a current AWS partner or, excuse me, AWS customer, that changes the message that we go out with. It's not migration, they're already a customer. It's how do we then help them invest in their AWS infrastructure to ensure that they're meeting business objectives and they're staying in budget and they can run their workloads more efficiently and getting the analytics that they need and the security is there. So it's all of these additional features and functionality that's super critical, um, that helps grow their reliance on AWS and also like their support internally on like operating at a company that is secure.

Speaker A: Yeah. And that makes total sense to ensure that you're still supporting that journey even while they're a customer. Um, and making sure that you're actually thinking, thinking about that part of the funnel. Because some companies, depending on how fast they want to scale, right. Sometimes they forget about those. They just want to do the net new business and they don't always look at like the churn rates or the retention rates. And so I think that's a really important strategy, not only obviously for you, but like everybody else and the listeners for this podcast, is to just make sure that we're truly thinking full funnel. And that means all the way down to acquiring a customer and keeping a customer. And I think, you know, you're obviously doing it right there over at Mission Pivoting. She said. Yeah, she said, uh, uh-huh.

Speaker C: Huh.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. If I say so myself.

Speaker A: Yeah, you know, well, that's what this podcast is all about, is to just have some great guests that just fangirl over. So I really love it. Let's pivot a little bit more into 2025. We're in Q4, planning, budgeting, all those great conversations. What are some of the favorite strategies that you're going to roll over into 2025?

Speaker B: So like I mentioned, the account based movement is still very much a work in progress. So, um, ultimately finishing that, um, realistically, we probably won't get that fully rolled out until Q1. So that's going to be uh, a big factor into what our execution and plan is going to look like for the rest of the year. Beyond that, um, increasing our personalization. And so this is something that I'm really excited about after this week because while we are already using conversational email, um, okay, I'm going to have to like do a little humble brag here for a moment, but Mission Cloud, um, has been named a finalist for Efficiency Experts. It's a breakthrough award. Yeah. So, and it was because of our use of conversational email, but we are still just scratching the surface with it, quite frankly. We're using it right now for all of our event follow up. We haven't really been using it for our outbound prospecting. I mean I mentioned that we just launched our predictive model. So the 6QA data is still really new and fresh. So executing on all of the outbound Prospecting for new 6QAs is something that I absolutely, uh, want to get off the ground really early in the year or probably hopefully sooner than that. Um, and then more importantly we are, we close out every single year with our biggest event of the year. So while it's not our hosted event, we m are a big sponsor of AWS Re Invent and it is the first week of December, but we also do um, a lot of uh, ancillary events throughout that conference. So we have our huge Ignite party, um, where we are hosting a Women in Tech luncheon. And it's the biggest generator of prospects, um, for us and it's the biggest line item in our budget, um, but we get the ROI back on it. And so it's really about being very diligent and very strategic with the follow up, um, to ensure that not only is it timely, but making sure that the response and the follow up is in line with what people were talking about at that conference. It's not just a spray and pray email and be like, hey, let's have a meeting, let's have a meeting, let's have a meeting. No, it's hey, you met with James at our booth and you guys were talking about some potential, um, data processing genai use cases. Like let's hear some resources that we have on um, data processing or intelligent data processing and some customers that have had really good success with it. And then so using that personalized outreach to then get the meeting booked to then qualify that opportunity to then bring in that customer and ultimately meet our ROI goals.

Speaker A: Yeah, that sounds like a Super sophisticated and smart strategy. So I absolutely love that. Thank you for sharing that with me. What are some challenges that you face so far, transitioning from a lead model over to the account based?

Speaker B: Um, we are a small team so it's really about challenge. It's the shifting of priorities. So I always like to uh, use my analogy of we need to keep the plane flying while fixing it. Um, so it's getting all of our operations, our workflows, our infrastructure in place while still doing our day to day job. Like we still have targets that we have to hit. We um, have a big Q4 that needs um, to be closed and closed strong. And ultimately it's how do we balance all of the actual tactics that need to happen to and do the rollout and the enablement and ensure that there's adoption and understanding of how reporting will shift, um, during the rollout of an account model, uh, while still showcasing that, you know, we have our always on campaigns that are still performing, um, that we are still hitting our pipeline goals. Um, the cloud advisors are still able to get into the accounts and connect with people that they need to be connecting with. So it's making sure that things are not breaking in the midst of everyone still doing their job but also try to make progress as quickly as possible.

Speaker A: Yeah, I love that. Building the plane while fixing it. I've heard building the plane while flying it, but this time we're fixing it.

Speaker B: Um, oh, did I say that? I meant to say fixing the plane while flying it.

Speaker A: Building the plane, fixing the plane, fixing the plane, fixing the plane.

Speaker B: It's at least flying. We're above ground.

Speaker A: We departed and we're up. Um, so with the conversations with executives, you mentioned that you guys still have goals to meet. Um, so you're trying to balance the priorities with your team on prioritizing the movement from leads to accounts, but also still actively working on hitting these goals. What kind of conversations? Let's do like an insights unleashed little like mini series here. Um, what kind of conversations were you having with executives about how you're still hitting these KPIs while doing this big movement?

Speaker B: Yeah, um, ultimately they just luckily executives all want one thing. It's are we hitting our revenue targets? And if not, what is the, do we have the pipeline to meet it? Um, and so marketing is very big on measuring pipeline and measuring pipeline contribution. So that's something that will never change. Um, you know, we're still going to be measuring that. It's obviously how we continue to uh, attribute that revenue. So before it was literally just opportunities sourced where now it's going to be a combination of sourced and influenced. Um, so the numbers are just going to be increasing because we, we were excluding all of the influenced opportunities before beforehand. So showcasing that we are still seeing like increases month over month, week over week to hit those pipeline goals so then sales can ultimately hit their revenue or booking deals. Um, but also explaining that it's not that we're just trying to make it seem like we're doing more, it's showing as to why the business is changing and how the buying process is changing and, and why this change makes sense for where we are today. Um, we never want to make it seem like we're just trying to fluff up the numbers to make ourselves look good. So everything that we do showcase, we can always go back and pinpoint exactly what and where, um, an account or a specific person did to show that this is in fact, um, attributed or contributed by marketing in some way.

Speaker A: Is that through a model or do you guys go through and like manually track that?

Speaker B: It's manual. Yeah. So right now it's, it's very manual. Um, but we, again, because a lot of our contacts are tied to lists and because it's a contact, we can tie it back to the account. It's not an ideal way at the moment, but it is trackable. So it is a, ah, you know, we are able to go back and look. The other thing which I'm very grateful for is especially with events, our sales team are so in like are so intrigued with events. They love working events. They see the value, we get the ROI on them. Um, and they know that those are always coming out of marketing budget. So those are very like cut and dry way that even if they met specific folks at an event, whether it was something that we hosted or like a trade, um, show that we sponsored, um, even if they then get introduced to other individuals within that company and they know that that company, the only reason they have meetings with that company is because it came from the event. They will always tie the opportunity back to the event.

Speaker A: Sorry, go ahead.

Speaker B: No, so it's okay. And we've had a ton of customers grow that way. And so, um, you know, as of right now, the event channels actually are best performing. And so it's. And I think that kind of goes back to the fact that the Raes are so in tune with how events work and um, the budget that they're coming from that they're always willing to attribute the opportunity and the revenue back to, back to Events. That's awesome.

Speaker A: Um, because not all companies have that level of accountability with the sales team. So that's really awesome. And you know, even though it's manual, it's important nonetheless. So I can always appreciate the manual of rolling up the sleeves, like getting it done type of mentality. So I love that. I think it's so important. And I take that similar approach to on my end of the business where if we need to, we'll extract it from a manual standpoint and literally like map out in a blank piece of paper what that buyer's journey is and how many touch points and the buying committee. Because all of that, as we know, is not linear. It's not a one touch, it's right. So like, just kudos to you for already being ahead of that and uh, advocating to your team to be pulling type of metrics and advocating for that on the executive side of things.

Speaker B: I appreciate it. It's also so important from a budget perspective. I mean, we, we get questioned just like anybody else, um, all the time on, you know, are we spending money in the right places? And while I don't necessarily love doing the manual reporting, I am also very, very data driven. And so I want to make sure that I am allocating my budget to the right channels. And I also want to make sure that where we're spending our time is actually going to give us some kind of return. I mentioned this before, we're not a huge team. So I want to make sure that we are investing in the things that are going to matter. And the, and if that means I have to do it on a manual basis for now, I'm willing to do it because it's going to give me a better, um, I'm more confident with my decisions versus just kind of throwing a dart at the board and be like, sure, let's just try this, why not? And then we lose a whole quarter and you know, $30,000, like that's not, that's just not an option at the moment.

Speaker A: I love that we have time for one more question. So I want to stick your brain on something.

Speaker B: Okay, go for it.

Speaker A: What is your one do and your one don't for demand and marketers and go to market leaders as we approach 2025.

Speaker B: I think I just said my, don't, don't throw a dart at the board. Do not, whatever you do, um, challenge the status quo. So I have been with many organizations who are like, events don't work. Why are we doing events? Don't do events. Events don't work and, and maybe the way that events have been done traditionally don't work anymore. But that doesn't mean the entire channel is dead. It just means you have to rethink how events and event budget is going to be allocated. And what I mean by that is we don't sponsor 50 conferences throughout the year anymore. Ten years ago, yeah, that like my entire event budget was literally conferences across the entire, like, globe, basically all the sales regions that we supported. That's just not our reality anymore. Um, not only is, you know, did Covid change that, um, the way buyers meet, people, um, have changed. People are just more in tune with what they want. Um, so that entire process is a little bit different. I think it's more about the experience. So smaller regional events with ten people, um, you bring in your executives, you bring in, um, your key prospects, your key customers. You have very specific, um, objectives of what you want that event to be. It's intimate and depending on who your customers are, you know, the. It's an experiential event that maybe they're all golfers, maybe they all love nascar. I don't know. We sell to a lot of men, so these tend to be like the way our events go. But that's not always the case, obviously. So you work with what works with your customer base, but don't eliminate an entire channel just because somebody thinks it doesn't work. Challenge the question and then think of different ways, um, to make it work. Um, one thing to do is, I also kind of spoke about this too, is, um, it's okay to roll up your sleeves and get in there and have numbers and reports and data to make yourself more confident with your decisions. Um, and if you don't have the numbers in front of you, um, you know, work with the people who do. Like, reach out to your customer, to customer success managers and ask them, you know, what are your customers complaining about? Like, if we don't have, um, again, I'm kind of jumping. But like, this kind of all ties together is, um, you know, if we don't have messaging on specific ideas like ask, you know, customer success, what are your customers complaining about? And then try to create a lot of messaging that, um, is like objective messaging to. That to kind of re educate the space so it doesn't get to a point where a customer could potentially churn. Um, it's not always just about numbers. It's about looking at gaps. And sometimes it's numbers, sometimes it's content, sometimes it's brand. So, yeah, look for the gaps Absolutely.

Speaker E: I love that.

Speaker A: Thank you Dina so much for joining me.

Speaker B: My pleasure. Thank you.

Speaker A: I am chatting with Jonathan Berg who is the SVP of Revenue over at New Breed. Hey Jonathan, thank you so much for taking time to chat with me.

Speaker E: Thank you. Thank you for having me. Really grateful to be here.

Speaker A: Yeah, I'm really excited to dive into some of the topics. Um, for those who may be unfamiliar with you or with New Breed, can you just do a brief overview of your background as well as for New Breed?

Speaker E: Yeah. Uh, so I am uh, really a revenue leader who started my career in demand gen and operations and uh, so very early days when Intent, Data and, and cloud, CRM and marketing automation was really coming onto the scene and I just absolutely fell in love with um, understanding how to use technology, how to use data and processes and automation to deliver inspirational and really solid content to the right people at the right time. That was sort of like the foundation of my career and I was really lucky. I got mentored by some of the best in the business, um, people who literally founded Serious Decisions now, Forrester, um, and some of the most um, sort of celebrated B2B technology marketers in the space. And um, that sort of accelerated my career. I ended up um, I think because of that ended up moving into the CMO ranks and now recently, uh, probably about four years ago now transitioned into a CRO role. So um, every day I wake up and I think about how can I not optimize the customer life cycle to deliver value and create value for not only the organizations that I work with but for the community in which we serve, um, as well. So New Breed, um, I was once a customer of New Breeds. They helped me do some fantastic work on HubSpot as well as um, some demand generation and revenue operations work. And one thing led to another and stars align and that I ended up joining the organization as the SVP of revenue. And new breed is HubSpot's number one uh, solutions partner. So we deliver tech enabled services that help build a really strong infrastructure um, around HubSpot. So we work for the HubSpot ecosystem. So HubSpot at the core and then um, apps and um, extended capabilities like six Sense and other solutions solutions um, that we help support and then we apply services on top of that, tech enabled services on top of that to drive growth and help organizations to unlock meaningful growth. And that's really our mission is to unlock meaningful growth for our customers.

Speaker A: I love that. And you're actually doing a talk here at six Sense talking about the Go to Market foundations for account based marketing. Can we get in the weeds and talk about that journey? Because we're in the conversations right now. Q4, 4 planning, Q4 budgets. What are some of the tips and tricks as we talk about go to market foundations for ABM M that demand gen marketers and go to market leaders should be thinking of as ah, we're planning for 2025.

Speaker E: Yeah, it's a, it's a great, great time for uh. Sure. I just came off of uh, the back of Inbound where I was uh, had the opportunity to deliver a couple of different presentations. One of those was around revenue planning boot camp and one of the biggest call to actions that I had was is start now. Right. Create a project plan, bring a cross functional team together. Make sure that you're really thinking holistically around the customer life cycle. Um, I'm going to be hosting that session uh, digitally in a few weeks but um, really critical to really take these uh, investments into consideration as you're moving into Q4 and 25. Um, so one of the things that we're seeing right now is there's a bit of a shift in the market and I think it's really positive that organizations are really thinking through how to gain go to market fit. Um, you know in years past particularly in the HubSpot ecosystem, I think everybody really anchored themselves on everything was inbound. Right. Like inbound was one of the most primary um, go to market models that we saw. So this year we actually asked um, our survey participants um, what their primary go to market model is Is and only 10% said that inbound was their primary go to market model.

Speaker A: Interesting.

Speaker E: Um, but we also found that organizations most likely were pairing inbound with another go to market motion with outbound target account customer led growth and account based uh, motions as some of the top in the list. Um, and so I think it's this disruption around tech capabilities, how buyers are buying and what it takes to actually engage um, your audience that is driving to this, to this shift. Um, so as we look at sort of that transition and we're looking at more organizations understanding that we need alignment around the metrics that matter. It's not necessarily MQL's right. It's around what we found in the state of HubSpot. It's around profitability, it's around net revenue retention. Um, it's around um, engaging the appropriate um, accounts to drive opportunity creation. Um, and really organizations now are using the technology and the data actually to engage those end users. So um, that's a little bit about what we're seeing as it comes to taking an account based approach. There's sort of like two secret ingredients that I like to think about and applying those to three key areas. So one is around alignment and integration. So making sure that you're creating alignment across not just the marketing team and the demand gen and marketing ops team around marketing, sales, customer success, product and finance as well. So making sure that you have the whole organization aligned around that go to market motion and then the metrics that matter associated with it. Um, and then making sure that you've got integration around people, around process and around technology. Right. So if you have aligned and integrated approach to your ABM and your go to market motion and you're applying that to your ideal customer profile, your target account and your buying groups as well as your technology and your data and then thirdly you're activating against that through AI and personalized approaches. Um, that's really where you can create ABM success.

Speaker A: I love that. Those are really great insights. You were talking about the results from the State of HubSpot report and one thing you touched on was the different go to market motions about integrating inbound with others such as outbound or like account based. How would a company decide which one is the right go to market motions for them?

Speaker E: Yeah, um, so I, I've followed the research of ah, a couple of different groups that I take very serious. One of them is Winning by designs. Yeah, um, really really cool, uh, organization that publishes a lot and they offer some courses. Um, one of the courses that they offer is revenue Architecture. If you don't know it, uh, go check it out. It's a good, good resource. Um, and there's this um, there's this dynamic around risk to the buyer and risk to the company in sort of any type of transaction transaction. And when the risk to the buyer is really really low and the sales cycle is really really short and they're able to try and use that solution quickly and there's higher volume associated um, with that sort of with that buying process. Right. You're likely going to be more in a plg, uh a prosumer, more of a very heavy inbound type of motion. And when that risk to the buyer uh, is quite high. Right. And that's characterized by larger investments, larger sales cycles, larger time to impact and implementation cycles. Um, you're likely going to have a more defined and um, smaller group that you're going to be able to engage with in order to drive to that, to that customer base. And that's going to be more defined by a known audience and more account based approaches can happen. Now I think as we're in this world where we have a lot of, of data at our fingertips and we also understand the different types of buying signals associated with organizations, that's converging a bit. And I think we're seeing that even this week here at Sixth Sense where regardless of how um, transactional and or enterprise that um, buying cycle and that sales cycle is your ability to identify buying groups and your ability to identify um, people at the organization. Showing interest in your solutions can be applied to various different go to market models. But those are some of the elements that I um, think organizations should consider. The other really interesting thing and I see a lot is that um, many companies actually have too many go to market models in their environment. Right. So it's like oh yeah, we are going to do PLG and we've got an account based approach. Well those two different models actually require different sets of metrics, different types of funnels.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker E: Different types of resources, different types of skill sets, different types of capabilities. And if you're over investing in multiple go to market motions within your organization at the same time and you don't have the people, the resource, the time and the capabilities to get it done, you're going to pull yourself very, very thin and that is where you're going to lose. Go to market fit. Coming back to the first part of the conversation in why I even highlighted some of the stats that I did.

Speaker A: Brilliant. This whole conversation I'm learning so much. I want to backtrack a little bit. You were talking about creating holistic customer lifecycle journeys and I want to get in the ways a little bit. Um, because as we think about you're mentioning the two points, activation and integration. What are some tactical plays? Like how do if we take this theory and put it into action, what are some tacticals that some demand gen marketers can take away?

Speaker E: Oh my gosh, there's so many. All right, what part of the uh, what part of the life cycle would you like me to hit on top of funnel, Middle of funnel? Customer marketing. Um, actually you know what, let's take customer marketing. And the reason why I'm going to take customer marketing is because um, I think we could all guess the number one investment that we found in the state of HubSpot. So the number one investment of revenue leaders across all groups, so sales marketing, customer success, revenue operations across 1600 people is how many people we uh, surveyed at the Gold standard of market research was AI and that was 10% higher than the next investment. But guess what? The next investment was Customers customer marketing. Like oh my gosh, how awesome is that? Right? So, so revenue leaders are focused on. So the metrics that matter, they ranked profitability, net revenue retention, sales opportunity creation. Right? As like their top metrics, customer marketing was number two. Guess what the top metric was by marketers. So that like what I just rattled off was sales, customer success and revenue ops, uh, was profitability, net revenue retention and sales opportunity creation. Guess what the number one metric marketers ranked. Guess.

Speaker A: I don't know.

Speaker E: Come on, give me a guess.

Speaker B: Oh,

Speaker A: something about retention.

Speaker E: MQLs.

Speaker A: Oh no.

Speaker E: Come on.

Speaker C: Marketers.

Speaker A: Oh no.

Speaker B: Like let's go.

Speaker E: We need alignment around our go to markets and we need alignment around the metrics that matter. All right, so that brings me back. So the whole point of telling this is like number two investment, customer marketing. And generally apart from our MQL friends, Kerry, um, Cunningham is somewhere in this building like uh, his ears twitch just now. Um, but generally speaking are focused on net revenue retention and profitability and sort of the characteristics of durable growth. Right? Okay, so let's take customer marketing for example. Um, let's say you have a cross seller upsell or an expansion motion at your company. Um, how can you not identify certain behaviors within that account? Right. Certain behaviors within their usage of the product or certain behaviors in which they're having conversations with the customer success team that you can operationalize in your CRM, Right. Or that you can feed through into your CRM and then is there certain types of um, customer marketing programs and activities that you just naturally have that are going to bring people back to your site? Right. And how can you use that activity and that behavior combined, combined with right. Third party intent and other signals to identify that those groups within your customer base might be interested in the solutions and the capabilities that some of your other product sets offer. Right. Okay, so now you've got a target account group within your customer base. Okay, so then how can we not create um, uh, workshops that are very specific to that capability and how can we not create really strong one to one invitations to these workshops where we can connect our customers together and then fuel the conversation so that they can actually learn from each other and then ultimately hopefully be inspired by to invest further so that you can deliver more value to them. Right, so that's just one, that's just one specific example where you're taking CRM data, you're taking um, account based Approaches to bubble up a certain cohort of customers. And then, and this is where I think this is really important in the age of AI. How can you bring those people together to form a community that allow them to, to see how they can use, um, the capabilities at their disposal to allow them to achieve their goals? Um, and I've seen this work in various different forms. Um, some organizations try to facilitate that through customer advisory boards, user groups, ongoing workshops. Um, and it can just be an ongoing customer newsletter that's really good and written to deliver value to your customer base, but you're doing so in a way that's itemized and personalized and tailored to the signals in which those customers are showing.

Speaker A: Yeah, I love that approach. Thank you for sharing that and getting into the weeds. Um, we have time for one more question, and this one's going to be a little more on the light funny side, if you will.

Speaker E: Oh, boy.

Speaker A: There is a trend right now on LinkedIn about demand gen being dead. Is it the latest trend of the bubble that's being popped? Curious on your two cents. I wish you guys could see his eyes. Right now. Everyone's saying that demand gen was a trend and it's fizzling out and it's no longer. Now the people that I have spoken to are like, oh, those just marketers trying to rename something, because if demand gen goes away, all of us essentially don't have a job. Um, so I just, I want, I want to take this opportunity, since I'm meeting with so many more smarter people than me, um, to just pulse check and just ask, do you think that's true? Do you think it was a shiny object and the bubble is popping? Do you think it's just our way of renaming something for the sake of staying relevant? Give it to me straight. All right.

Speaker E: By the way, you just asked the person who stood in front of probably 2,500 people a week and a half ago and asked the rhetorical question, is inbound dead? Which, by the way, it's probably more alive than ever. It's just the tactics and the strategies that we are applying to it have changed because of the tech capabilities that we have. AI, the, you know, the whole, the whole, the whole gamut. Can I just. Can I ask one question before I answer?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker E: How do we define demand gen in that context of it being dead?

Speaker A: Here we go. So really, if you ask 20 different people, I feel like you'll get 20 different definitions. And there's multiple people who have defined demand generation. Right. Essentially, it's an Omnichannel approach, taking the customer first and reverse engineering a account strategy that, um, is friction free and a holistic approach that is aligned with business goals.

Speaker E: Okay. All right, so I think you could call it demand gen. You can call it, uh, performance marketing. You could call it. Oh, my gosh, let's just talk about the term growth marketing for a second, right? Like, I don't. Like, we could spend the next hour talking about, like, unpicking that trend. Um, you know, call it whatever you want. I think the, the thing that I wake up doing. And by the way, I'm, I'm, you know, I'm, I'm a CRO, right? And you can kind of tell I bleed demand gen. And this is like what I think about all day long. Um, but if you are a human that literally wakes up every day and you are thinking about, how can I align the people, the process, the data, the technology, and how can I partner with really smart people in my organization to understand what is the pain, what is the challenges of our customers? What can we do with our products and our solutions to help them get a raise? Like, save them time so they could spend more time with their families and like, invest in their hobbies? Like, you know, what can we do to educate and inspire? Do people question a status quo that might not make them the most engaged at work so that they actually like, like waking up and going to work and like, working with either technologies or tools or whatever your product develops in order to create joy for that end customer? And then you're working to create the right messaging, the right content that inspires and educates and entertains, and then getting that into the channels and the watering holes in which they go to learn, right? Like, know your audience, like, know where they go to do their research. Um, is it LinkedIn? Is it Reddit? Is it a publication that they go to? Is it a Slack channel that they actually all share? And you know, there's like 1500 people in there conversating every day and you don't even know about it, right? Like, where do they go to learn and get that inspirational, that inspiring content there for those people and then work to listen and nurture and help them to question the status quo so that they can take advantage of all of those things I just talked about, if you're doing that every single day, like, uh, I don't care what you call it, but then, like, then what's the point, right? Like, that's what we're all in demand gen for. That's what we're all in marketing for. And, um, I think that's the beauty of what we do. Like, like, yeah, we use, we use different tools and tactics and, and sometimes we create personalization and we show up in places and people are like, oh my gosh, like, how'd they use cookie data in order to do that? Etc, Right at the end of the day. But if, but if you genuinely are taking the approach that I just just described, um, then likely you're genuinely helping that human. I think another thing is like B2B versus B2C versus ABM versus PLG, like throw the acronym at it. At the end of the day, we are helping humans to do work. Right. And if you're creating the assets, you're getting it in front of them and you're helping them learn, regardless of whether they buy your product or not, you're doing good stuff. So in that context, no, demand gen's not dead. It will never die. Um, and I think every demand gen marketer out there should be proud of what they're doing.

Speaker A: Amen.

Speaker E: And should understand that they're helping their community to achieve their respective goals.

Speaker A: I love that mic drop. That's a great, a great way to end this episode. Jonathan, thank you much so, so much for taking the time to chat with me. This has been an absolutely phenomenal conversation.

Speaker E: Thank you so much. Yeah, I had a lot of fun.

Speaker A: Thank you so much for tuning in to the demand gen made simple show. If you found value in today's episode, please consider leaving a review as it really helps me reach more people just like you. And make sure to subscribe so you can be notified when the next episode drops. Thank you and see you next time.