Episode 175: How to grow in 2026 with long sales cycles, tighter budgets and limited marketing capacity with Matt Heinz

This is the Full Funnel bt B Marketing podcast, brought to you by Full Funnel Doto. Let's start. Everyone, and welcome to the new episode of Full Final Life. As I mentioned in the last.

Episode, this this starting this week over during the speakers of our seven's virtual Full Final Final. I didn't we didn't announce it officially yet, but anyhow you can meet one of the speakers who were really excited to have on board times. One of the probably the most event the. Marketers, who is still with us and linked and sharing his wisdom and practical advice for how many seventeen years you've been running hands marketing right.

Yeah, seventeen and a half years. Spend long time, indeed, And today we have a topic that you guys voted about and asked us to cover. It's all about how to grow in twenty twenty six when you have long sale cycles, tighter budgets and limited marketing capacity. As always, you're very welcome to share your questions in the chat.

And by the way, thanks everybody for submit and some questions upfront. It helped us to kind of prepare the narrative and the questions for this episode. But anyhow, feel free to drop your questions in the chat, will make sure to cover them. And the first question to all of you who join us live, let us know in the chat where you guys are all journeying us from.

Not value based. I'm in the Pacific Northwest in the United States. Great we are broadcasting again from warm and sunny Spain. Let us know, guys in the chat where you all join us from.

And while you are typing, I would love just to kick off this episode with just a short anecdot which is relevant to one of the recent posts you wrote about the revenue marketing. So last what I mean like what Q twenty twenty five we have ran our the state of full funnel marketing research and we spoke when interviewed and serve it around one hundred fifty plus b two b cmos and basically the top three challenges that they have mentioned were proven marketing impact on revenue alignment for sales and lack of run and long term PREN programs to create awareness and build trust with the target accounts.

And obviously all SEA challenges are coming with a pressure to hit the revenue targets implement AI do always less right the kind of probably something that everybody is experience experience, and right now, from our experience, there are several root reasons from this. But what I would love to ask you, Matt, and we can start this episode, was this from your experience of work and was multiple bitter B companies? How bitter B cmos handle these challenges? What conversations do they have with the CFOs and CEOs.

Yeah, I mean you list three very big challenges that are you know, not easy to solve, and quite frankly, with a lot of cmos, it's kind of a journey, not a destination to try to figure it out. Right, There's there's stages of improving that. For example, on the sales and marketing alignment side, it's not binary. It's not you're not doing it or you're doing it.

There's some data I saw a couple of years ago showing h it was some research that showed the correlation between the degrees to which sales and marketing teams were integrated in the likelihood that they were actually hitting their revenue targets. And you might expect the more integrated they were, the more likely they were hitting their revenue targets. What was more interesting to me in that data was the data points they were measuring. It didn't go from no integration to minimal to moderate to advance.

It went from no integration, ineffective integration, then minimal modern advance. And it was still improving. So if you're trying to get sales and marketing work together and you don't feel like it's working, you likely are still making progress. You likely are still improving your likelihood of hitting your number.

You know, for a lot of companies we work with and it sounds like you as well. You know, we've got these long, complex buying processes. There's a lot of people involved on the buying and the selling side, so orchestrating that effort inside and outside your organization is incredibly difficult, and it's difficult to do that in a sustainable, repeatable, predictable way. It's also fraught with errors.

Right, we've got humans, I mean increasingly we've got AAA agent's doing some of this, but we've got humans executing some of this. And every day, every company, every prospect is a little different. So I think we expect greater simplicity, we expect more perfection than is realistic, and when we don't see that, we think it's not working, and sometimes we regress to what we know, what we're comfortable with. You know, this is as much a program issue as it is a culture issue for companies going through this, and I think the more companies and cmos recognize and lean into that, the more likely they can create some sustainable change in their favor to address and hearten and sort of you know, harness a little bit.

The complexity that we see in the market. So very human actually condition I think may see reality of it when you see it working in these difficult conditions with a complex along sales cycles, buying cycles in fact, right, what do you see enables the growth of those companies? What do they do differently? They focus?

I think a lot of comp I mean literally fundamentally, it's just having a greater focus on a narrower set of targets. It may sound counterintuitive, but the more narrowly you focus in the market, the more opportunity you create for yourself. The mistake I see so many companies make fundamentally is saying, well, anyone in healthcare can buy from us, right, or anyone who has a finance function can buy from us. Like that may technically be true, but you cannot possibly target that wide.

There's a difference between your addressable market and your serviceable obtainable market. It's really important to think about the subset of the subset of the market that you are best adopted, you are best able to address, and then to think critically about who the people are in those organizations that have a vested interest in solving that problem. That level of discipline, I mean, we're just talking about product marketing fundamentals at this point, but that level of discipline eludes a lot of companies who are afraid of that level of focus, who are afraid of saying, instead of going after one hundred thousand companies, I'm going to go after fourteen thousand companies that I think I'm I'm the best in the world that solving the problems they have.

That feels limiting, but what it does allows you to more directly narrow your message, more directly address the problems those companies have. Your conversion rate in your sales velocity increases. With that audience. When you do that, well, it's a scary thing to do if you haven't done it before.

And look, I'm you know, I think you said, Adrea, like seventeen years in business, Like someone write a check, I want to say yes. But when I can. Focus more narrowly on companies, you know they're in my serviceable obtainable market, I'm more successful as well. So the practical question and I allowed one of a and this mentioned this, I would love to get practical here.

So how to have this conversation with your leadership and the seals probably right, because it's not only the CMO who can decide. Okay, guys, let's narrow down the our target right, and by targets as we speak, it's all about the clusters of accounts with a similar use case, right, so you can solve them better with the same message and with the personally with the true personalization. I don't mean the kind of dynamic liquid texts where you put the title of some challenges that chuge pet discover it right when the sales reference and a country search.

How to have these conversations, how to get buy in from the leadership and maybe as a follow up question to this, it also requires solving the attribution issue right, because in many companies, attribution is a huge problem. Companies. Basically companies build the go to market around market and sourced and sales sourceding the streams right, So how to solve this basically to things Uh, well. There's a few things there, So we got we got sort of how to have that sort of narrowing conversation internally, how to prove the data, and then you know, it only took us nine minutes in to get talk about attribution, which is everybody's you know, bugaboo.

It's just it's the. Eternal challenge that as we get more complex, as the complexity of our go to market motions as well as the decision making goes, it's even more and more ridiculous to assume that like that that you know, search ad click generated the deal like first test and last touch is kind of dumb when you're doing this level of complexity. And I realized that's. Not it's it's a it's a it's an inconvenient truth for CFOs that want a simpler message.

But you don't operate in a simple market. So I'm sorry, your answer can't be that simple. You have to think about a body of work it takes to get those deals done. I also think attribution often is chasing the wrong answer too often when we're doing attribution exercises.

We're trying to assign proof and we're trying to assign credit to something that happened. It becomes a political exercise. Attribution works best when it's all focused on the future. How do I repeatably reliably achieve the same outcome again with a certain sequence of events.

That's it. That's what it's trying to address. What happened in the past is done right. I only care about the past if I can see that it actually is generating results.

I want you know, you asked, really, how do you sort of get an organization to be able to narrowly focus on those segments of the market that work best. Look at your data. Unless you are brand new in the market, you have data. It may not be very organized or clean, but look at your data and try to figure out what's the best way to get there.

We had a client once that was selling into is. They had a CRM system for small business and they were selling widely. They were at that point where they were like, we can any small business too where salesforce is too complex, we can help them. I'm like, okay, sure, but like, you know, where are you winning the most?

And so we looked at their data, and we found that home services companies, roofers, painters loved their product like there was subcamera what it was. There was something about some of the features they had that made those companies love them, and they were like had three times the lifetime value of the average customer. And so not only did it give us evidence to go and double down in those markets, it actually allowed us to spend more money to acquire them because now I wasn't just looking at customer acquisition costs.

I had evidence that they were going to be more profitable long term clients that had upsell opportunities as well, and that became a catalyst for the company to eventually get to a successful exit because they were able to increase the trajectory. Of their growth by more narrowly focusing where they sold. So you're you mentioned several times things like, you know, you need to have coarsation about narrowing down. You might need to have a corsation with your CFO about attribution the complexity of it, which reminded me of a pose that you shared.

We commented earlier about out a shift from demand gent or revenue marketing, and I think, like a lot of people when we look at the comments. You would really like to understand. You know, I'm a CMO, I'm leading a marketing team. I'm stuck with defending mqls.

I'm stuck with the attribution. What is the actual path, like, what are the steps that I need to take to get from where I am right now chasing these targets that I know this playbook is broken, it's not going to it's not working on the long term. So to revenue marketing to what you're describing more narrow, multi touch, not just the last touch in the first touch, and the complexity that's required to actually generate revenue. As a marketing team.

A couple of things I think you know, One is if you were in an organization that sort of worships at the altar of the MQL, You've got a long road, right because I think you know, we have you know, we have trained organizations and leadership teams and boards to just want and up into the right number more leads, more leads, more leads. And I think too, if you're it's not going to be a quick and easy task to sort of to fight against that. But I think you're gonna start, you know, just poking holes in the balloon, right.

You know, if you can identify, if you can show that lead volume isn't that important, but lead quality is more important if you can show Like I remember one of my very first clients seventeen half years ago. They were getting a ton of leads from paid search, and. Then I went in front of the sales team and says, I'm turning ninety percent of those leads off. And before they threw me out the window, I showed them the data.

They said that they were better, they were they were more productive when they were cold calling. Then they were following up with these very bad leads, right, And so I think pointing. That out gives you credibility. I think too often, you know, as marketers, like we want you know, we're fighting for credit.

We're fighting to show that we're doing the best that we can. And so when we do our reporting and we go in front of the board or front of the leadership team, we do what I call sometimes success theater. Right. We find the metrics we like and we point those out right, or we justify what we're doing in some different way and put yourself in the seat of the CFO.

Right, who's like they're not trying to pull money for marketing. They're just trying to hit their number, and they're trying to understand these these acronyms that marketing has made up, MQL, SQL, ABX, right, So we're speaking a whole different language, and they're asking questions not because they're trying to prove you wrong. They're just trying to figure you out. You know, if you go into the room and you point out what is and isn't working, if you say these leads suck and this isn't happening, or you know what, we're seeing good lead volume, the right companies, that the right the right people, the right companies are coming in.

But instead of like asking them sort of qualifying questions, we're shoehorning them into a demo, and so our conversion rate DO Opportunities goes into the tank. Like it's not about pointing fingers, it's about finding where the problems are and fixing those. And so I think if you start to point out what's not working, if you start to pull back on things that aren't working, if you start to talk in terms of ROI on pipeline not just ROI on clicks and opens, you start to get some credibility now.

For example, like if you were to say, like, I'm not going to do an event unless I can get ten x return on pipeline, right, that's a big bar. I'mna spend one hundred thousand dollars on an event. I need a million dollars in pipeline. But if I start that and say the CFO, if I brought you ten X in pipeline, say well, you got to still close those Is that a good number to hit?

Right? Some events you're gonna hit it, Some events you might not hit. Me say if I can't hit that number, we're not going to do that event again. Right now, there's a level of accountability and responsibility the CFO is hearing from marketing, not just success theater, not saying oh, we got to be everywhere, saying here's what I expect to get from this.

There's a level of confidence that will start to build in your programs and your thinking and your strategy, and that will help change the culture to understand that marketing is not just focused on the metrics of more, but really focus on the numbers you can buy a beer with. I remember, probably when you were a guest another podcast seven years ago, I just explicitly remember the quote you have said, like that with the vanity metrics you can buy a beer or. Something like this was one of my fail usual.

Yeah, and the truth to be said, what you just mentioned yesterday we had a chat was what as we're almost there was our first book about full funnel marketing, and we were just edited on some parts of it that was exactly about this, and apparently we came with years of being in business, we came to the conclusion that aside from what you have mentioned accountability for the metrics, right, there are three important changes that ever CMO needs to ignite internally. One is about the first one is just explaining the problem with the with the attribution, and it's only possible when you do the good analysis.

Right. The good analysis requires sitting together with sales analyzing the deals, bringing all the possible insights from all the threads marketing and automation, thought party in ten data, et cetera. So you can just highlight the multiple touch points, right and like literally, if you have this visible analysis, if you present this to CFO and to CEO for example, obviously, if you have the chance, right, the simple logical question among this variety of touch points marketing and sales across this long sales cycle, which one should get the credit?

And if you are making the decision right now, where you would double down right over, there is no right answer. And then the next logical question who should get who should get the credit for this marketing on sales right? The answer is not. And like you said, let's click attribution is complete nonsense in the loan sales cycles and marketing and sales market and versus sales sources as well, nonsense because you always have a variety of touch points on the marketing side and on the sales side.

So these are two important prerequisites. And without fixing this literally, you won't be able to achieve the cross functional alignment. Because, like you said, we can become accountable for let's say, I can work. I can become accountable for this target, for let's say, for the event, or for any for any program that we are currently running.

But through to the set, we need to work with sales, we need to work with products, we need to work. With subject matter experts. It's not that me as a silent fund, as a silent market and function, I will be able with my team make ten x pipeline. No way, it's just us working together.

How can we make this event appeala if we just sticking to the event, right, how can we make it appealing to our narrow set of target accounts, how sales and what sales will be doing in terms of multi strado and buying commit a nurger and to bring these accounts right, how can we uncover what is really important to our strategic stakeholders so we can ask our SM to cover this on stage right, Virtual of site doesn't really matter. So these are important things. And it leads us to the last metric that we've been promoted for a couple of years in terms of GTM efficiency for the long sales cycles.

And I'm curious to hear your thoughts on it. Its account to pipeline ratio, which which is really simple. How many accounts that we as marketing and sales actively targeted become qualified sales opportunities? Right?

This is the shift that you mentioned going from volume this is my big target addressable market to this is the set of accounts that we are focusing on, and how many of them are actually becoming qualified sales appart? It does, so what I thoughts on all of. This and what do you add sound sent to it or change? Yeah?

I love it. I mean saying like how many accounts? How many target accounts do I get into the pipeline? Right?

And if any I'm not I'm not as worried about credit as much as I am looking for sort of effectiveness. Like I'm saying, just like I gotta, I gotta. I got a brand and an awareness effort. I've got a demand find creation effort.

I've got a BDR team that is converting leads into opportunities, and I've got a sales team that's bringing at home. Right, you got a team of aes and seas and whatnot? Okay, like you need all of those to make the sale, right, but like are they being affected? Like are we seeing when we invest in brand brand awareness in the market?

What how do I measure that? Not just based on clicks and likes and reach? But like, am I increasing the efficiency at which people are responding to my demand programs? Right?

Your sales team doesn't need leads, they need a market that demands what you are selling. A lead is a manifestation of that, Right, But if you can create conditions where the market understands that there is a problem, and it sees a high level of need to solve that problem. Like, now, all of a sudden, they're answering your sales team's phone calls, they're answering your sales team's emails. Right, But if your sales team calls and doesn't have a qualitative like value added conversation, if they're just like selling features, their conversion rate to opportunity will decrease as well.

Right, So how. Effective are they taking that same narrative and moving that into like what would this look like if you solve this in your organization? Can we get to a commitment to change? So you'll explore options for how to solve for this.

Right, So there's a chain of events that happens here with those target accounts. And so it's again like I can't look and say like, oh, is this white paper enough or this click enough? It's a body of work, But you can absolutely break that body of work down into jobs to be done. And what is my expectation of those jobs to be done?

If I give my bder team one hundred leads from the right people at the right company, what's my expectation of how many they're going to convert into opportunities in the next month, quarter, whatever you want to measure it, knowing that some of those prospects just might not be ready to buy today. So what's the right engagement rate, what's the right yield over time? And how do I hold them to that standard? And how do I start to recognize huh that number is not improving?

Why is it not improving? Like you got to get into the details and do the diagnostic and figure out what to fix. But again, like there are a ton. Of moving parts, the outcome at the end of the day of getting that deal closed is what I care about.

But you can still have accountability on each of those jobs to be done. Again not looking at who you fire, not looking at who messed up, but saying, like we individuals in the organization own those jobs to be done, but you as a collective, as a leadership team, own the whole process. Right, individuals accountability sort of group responsibility for finding solutions when things aren't working. How you connected it all like from the beginning, narrowing down, like you use that example where you said, look, not only that it's easier to close close those what was it service companies you give the example, but they actually stay longer, so you have a fewer accounts to generate disproportionately more revenue.

So our effectiveness essentially, you're, like you said, like your total addressable market. That doesn't matter what is actually the serviceable market. But you can actually those companies you can win right now, and especially if those companies make you more money, if it's kind of an eighty twenty ratio, then this accounts to pipeline. So how many of that smaller market you can cover, how effective your marketing is becomes even more important.

Effective you're marketing and sales together, working together on those accounts. Now, this like connects. It makes sense. But you mentioned some thing that I really like to make a little bit more practical for people, which is there is a lot of things that happen on the way.

Each of the different functions such as the BDR and the marketing demand have you know different way in which they're influencing those buyers, And we need to be able to know to kind of measure Also, although the buying cycles are long and we care about the revenue at the end, we need to also be able to know whether we are getting there in other words, like what are the things that we should be measuring on the way to know that we are going in the right direction, Especially if I'm just transitioning from an MQL world.

I want to prove to the leadership that you know this is working. I know that I have long sales cycle. I know that there is you know these multiple touch points. Are there any things in the meantime that I can measure and demonstrate that will be meaningful and useful for us as go to the market team.

Yeah, I mean I think that. Someone once told me that the harder a metric is defined, the more likely it is to be a metric you should be focused on. So I think sometimes we have goals that don't necessarily have metrics behind them, right, And that's probably a whole other topic of impact some other time. I think the if I'm looking and saying, like, listen, what can I impact this week, I'm going to be looking at very tactical, kind of superficial numbers that aren't that are important in context.

But if that's all we focus on, we could be really screwing things up. Right. So if I'm like, Okay, I've got campaigns that are going out today of this week. What's my click rate, what's my open rate, what's my conversion rate?

How well is my landing page doing? And on my chatbots on my website? Like you know, I convert x percent today? How do I get that number a little bit higher?

So if I'm trying to create incremental improvements today, I have to be looking at that at a very tactical level. But I think it's important that you do that by looking at and quality. Right, I can get more people responding to emails if I send more emails, but if I put more emails in there that are from the wrong accounts, then that's counterproductive, Right, So I think you have to create that measurement sort of very carefully. I want increased conversion rate, but I only want that from the accounts I care about, Right, I want more people engaging on our website, but I really only want to do that with the people that have the titles of the companies that I care about as well.

And what you might need to do even if if you can't, like if you can't if your chatbot can't differentiate when you look at the data on the back end when it gets enreched with your CRM data or others like, you got to separate out those you care the most about, because what you could find is that, like maybe the people that you don't care as much about are engaging at a higher rate, the people you do care about aren't engaging at all. That's a real problem, right, And if you don't separate those audiences, you won't know that you have a problem you got to go fix.

So I think you know, looking at those tactical sort of point changes to your efficiency and co of your go to market motions is fine, but you've got to have the same targeting discipline, the same serviceable, obtainable focus to make sure you're impacting the right people in the in the in the deals that will matter. And you and I would love to ask you a couple of questions about for a casting and plan and marketing. But before well continue, I would love to share with you guys that in one month or in one months and the half, we're going to host our sevens annual Virtual full Final summat AF.

You have a hosted for our community. It's free to attend, and so it's free to attend during the summat uh Matt will be one of our speakers. So I have just dropped the link in the chat. We didn't officially announce it, but you can be the first to sign up.

Share is your team crab the free tickets and we would love to see and assignment as well. So that was just a short teaser and coming back I mentioned, uh, I would love to ask you about forecasting and plan and marketing. The problem and the challenges that we have discussed right, extend and sell cycles, undersourced marketing teams, the budget cuts right, all of that stuff has happening simultaneously. So what's your best advice, so maybe again your best practice of working with different companies right now?

How to how to handle this, how to do the right forecasting and defend the budget and also plan the marketing with the limited resources. What's working right now? Let's put it like this, Yeah, I mean for forecasting is always a challenge. I think the more data you have, the more likely you're going to be able to be successful doing that.

I think, you know, making sure that you are incorporating as much you know, historical data as possible, and also just making sure you don't fall into the trap of a spreadsheet can say anything right. This is again where I think we come up with success theater, where if we adjust this number and make this well, if we're a little over here, a little over here, and if we push this a little bit now, all of a sudden you're getting into unrealistic land, even though it points out says, oh, we can hit this number.

So I think that there is there's a difference between planning and forecasting. What's real and sort of what's real might be a sort of a story that your CFO doesn't want to hear, that your cro isn't excited about. But if you're sitting there facing a lack of resources, you can't just invent whatever. If you say, well, I'm hit I'm gonna give this amount of pipeline to the sales team this year, and they're like, I cut your budget fifty percent, They're like, I'm still going to deliver this amount of pipeline to the sales team.

Why not take you to zero? Why not take your pro I mean like, if I'm a CFO, I'm like, how little money can I give you? And you're still telling you going to hit your number? Right?

And so I think you have to have that realistic conversation about what does what can and can't happen there. I also think, especially over the last couple of years, the most successful, most efficient marketing teams are investing in two things. One, they're investing in sort of marketing orchestration, right, They're investing in doubling down on building workflows and taxonomies that help them get the work done more efficiently. It isn't always the most sexy work, right, But if you break down what's happening the jobs to be done, you get fewer people involved in different things, You get the right people involved in.

Steps of the process. You increase speed to market, increase efficiency, increase the output of your team. And that's accept now with AI. If you take doing a webinar, right, if you're doing are and like how many people actually need to be involved in each step of doing that webinar?

What components can AI do for you? Where can you build an army of agents that have jobs to be done, to do the tactical work, to do the tedious work that humans don't really want to do anyway, and allow your people to focus on the things that are more uniquely human. So I think you know, even though it takes time to sort of learn and develop some of those worksloads and agents. The teams that are doing that are getting more done with less.

They're increasingly efficiency and the speed and the cost effectiveness of what they're doing. And they have happier employees too, that are really focusing on the on the work. That they love. Well.

What I like about it as well, is that something that I see repeatedly in teams, and it's just consistent execution, being able to consistently deliver. You know, whether you mentioned like a webar not at an event or something like a lot of teams might have an idea, might have been very creative, have lots of ideas, but not to execute it may be completely not be as consistent as they can be. And sometimes it is about the small things that can make a big difference. Like you know, we have organized a weban our.

Well, now we have to make sure which are the target accounts that attended the ybin our, Which are the buyers there? What was the historical engagement? How can we feed that into sales and follow up in a meaningful way? Where should we focus and I should we not focused?

If you don't do that, that kind of a wasted partly wasted effort, right, So I like that a lot. But if you turn it around and let's say you just enter the team, somebody can afford and hires Matt Heinz to be the CMO, and you know, you find yourself, like a lot of cmos by themselves right at a situation where maybe you have sixteen eight to eighteen months on average, right to do something meaningful before get fired. Not that you would. The budgets are kind of like cut like you do your best to defend it, but still it's not as high as you would like.

You don't the teams are kind of overwhelmed, so obviously fix everything at once. Where would you start? What would you focus on Let's say the first quote the second quoter, how would you how would you think about it? Where would you focus on from the beginning, and how would you roll it out?

That is a really big question, you know, I think, I think honestly, if I'm starting from scratch, it comes down to the people, right Like I as a leader, no matter what kind of budget I have, if I've got a big number, I'm not going to do it myself. I'm going to need to count on the people around me, The people on my team, the people on the sales team, the people in the rev ops and marketing ops teams. So I need them working at their best, most efficient capacity. And so to do that, I have to create a place in an environment and a culture that allows them to to be okay that not everything is going to be perfect, to admit the things that aren't working, to find the places where they can be most successful.

So I think I start by just learning, like what's working and what's not. I'd make it really clear that it is from this day forward, like you have amnesty, right, Like I don't care what didner didn't work in the past. I'm not here to litigate what didner didn't work. I'm here to learn what we do moving forward together, right, And we're going to do this together and we're going to figure it out.

And so I think to really give your employees and your teams a safe place to do that and a place in an environment where they can be successful and grow and try new things. I mean, honestly, I think you know. We can get into the weeds of like looking at the programs and figuring everything out, Like you coming in new as a CMO, like you can't assume that the people haven't done that. So if all of a sudden you start, you know, throwing digging into the reports and saying this isn't working, this isn't working, you're going to have a scared team that is afraid to bring bad ideas to you.

You have to have the opposite of that. Let your people admit what isn't working. Let them point out in a safe place, this isn't working, this isn't working. Have them help solve that problem.

Now you've got a whole team of people inspire and rallied around a common goal to help you be successful. So you know, I think, like a lot of places like it's about the people around you and enabling empowering them to do the work that they want to do, need to do in many cases, love to do. Perfect. Thank you so much.

I think we have a lot of time to cover the questions from our community. We'll pick up a few questions that we didn't cover during this chat, and I think all of them are really good to talk about. And you guys who are listening to us, I feel free to drop your questions in the chat as well. We're going to answer them.

So the first question that I would love to pick up is coming from Dave summit. How marketing can support sales more closely in creation or nurture and the large deals, other and support and with the digital air cover. So many ways. You know, I think, you know, I think that there's most marketing teams we work with today aren't splitting the funnel horizontally, meaning like you know, marketing owns brand and demand and then sales takes it from there.

Most teams now are splitting them more vertically with a diagonal bent. So you think about the jobs to be done. If I'm mid to late stage, you know, it's not just a sales job to sort of build confidence in the decision, to help justify the decision. Marketing has a role there as well.

Where's the evidence, where's examples of other customers being successful? How do you show prospects that they're not in this on their own, that others have been down this path and done it successfully as well? Right, So how do you create that content, create that confidence? Like I think that you know, if marketing owns understanding the buying journey, there's a responsibility there to continue to support and enable the sales team with.

That kind of information. As well. So, you know, I look at the entire buying process from the you know, I'm starting to be I'm starting to identify evidence that I might have a problem to now I recognize and quantify the problem. So now I am committed to solving that problem and committing to change.

And eventually then I go down the path of like, how do I do that? Who can help me do that? Selecting someone help me do that, and then buying, Like, it's not that there's a marketing part of that and a sales part of that, there's a buying part of that. And so I think if you break down additional here's who's involved at different stages, and just think about the jobs to be done along that, your buyer doesn't care if they're talking to a salesperson or a marketing person.

They just they're trying to increase confidence in making the right decision. And so I think that's where you can sort of break down these walls and say, can I get involved earlier if I've got the right person at the right organization, can I have marketing involved later to continue to provide narrative around that sort of the building customer confidence in solving the right problem. This is where you also have BDRs or should they be in marketing and you mean in sales. I don't care as long as the job is done the right way.

So I think that's maybe a broader way of answering your question. But I think. I would, you know, as much as possible, sort of eliminate sort of traditional walls between these functions and put the pivot not on departments internally, but pivot on account needs and buying processes externally. All right, let's pick another one and I'll try to see if I can share it.

Can you share this message that I sent Andrey so that. We yeah, just sack until let's publish this. Yes, this is from Petro Carson and she'd like to get practical what tools and systems they actually use their ound revenue marketing. And I think any tools and systems that you use, I think practically would be interesting for the community.

And she's specifically also asking about a three VI. How do how you've built attribution inside the CRM to create the real transparency across GTM teams? Yeah, I mean tools and systems. There're thousands of them, now, right, I mean I think you know, I think about the tools that I use just you know something you know small, you know, consulting firm.

But I'm still in a sales role here, and what our sales team uses. We're we're heavy users of outreach, of lead IQ, of of LinkedIn sales Navigator. I love a company called user Gems in terms of identifying signals of you know, who's changing. We're increasingly using tools like Tiga AI and Clay to do automated sequencing and enrichment of data.

You know, the tools that you use really depends on sort of again, what process you're enabling. Strategy first technology started, strategy first process, second technology third the tools need to support the strategy, not the other way around, right, And so I find that, you know, when when you really sort of lean into sort of what is that journey and what do I need to enable allows you to create more specific set of tools did allow you to run your business day to day. I'm not doing a lot on paid search, for example, so paid search tools are not important to me.

We have clients that are selling into small medium sized businesses where search is still a critical tool, and so they have tools that they're using to manage that. On the attribution side, the campaign data in CRM is really really important, right, I would just, you know, make sure you are really tightly leveraging the campaign and the campaign hierarchy, especially if you're using a salesforce. It will allow you to see not just individual programs, but components of programs.

For example, we have our hierarchy, we have events, and then underneath the events we have CMO breakfasts, and underneath CMO breakfast we have specific breakfasts that we run, right, and so I can see, you know, if someone attended to breakfast and then all of a sudden velocity of the deal increased. I can see that. Simple regression analysis on data in CRM. It's amazing how often that's still.

I mean, I remember again very first client. We didn't have complicated attribution tools, but we took the campaign data we had and we ran it and said, what's more likely to show up. On deals that close? Right?

And how do we double down on Thatation is never going to be perfect, but if you can give you direction, now we're going somewhere. Attribution is going to be very difficult to tell you a full picture of how a twelve month sales cycle worked, but in terms of points in time to go take someone from you know, uninterested to engage, to take someone from engaged to committed in that period of time, which campaigns accelerated. That that's data you can look at from a time point standpoint and from it.

So if I'm looking at like this stage of an opportunity to this stage of an opportunity and then looking within that at the campaigns that happened and look at the time stamps that. Happened, just looking at that data can help tell some interesting stories. Awesome, thank you. I have an interesting question from Stephanie if I'm correct, stephaniels A Zulak, Sorry if I don't pronounce your last name correctly.

So question from Stephanie, how should we think about influencers and communities in terms of attribution obviously, and in terms of impact and B t B revenue marketing? I know, maybe the sense of the context of this question right, because when you work with influencers, when you engage with the communities, there is no direct attribution at all, right, and you can see the immediate impact. So I think that it's kind of two way. Question.

One is how to leverage how to engage with the community and influencers properly right, and how to demonstrate its impact on revenue. I mean you can measure some of that, right, I mean I did a if if if you have people that are registered for this event here today, you can tie that to you know, your webinar or your webinar program, or your podcasts or like you know, tie it directly to one episode with b I did an event last week with Zoom where we had you know, a ton of attendees.

Some of them were qualified for who they were trying to sell to. But you can have a campaign for that again, like you know, you know, campaigns don't have to be in salesforce. Oh we're doing paid search. No, it could be like last Thursday with Matt, Like, have a hierarchy where you're able to see some of those things.

You know it to your point, some things you're not going to be able to directly measure. Just because you can't measure it, just because you can't track it, doesn't mean it's not worth doing. And I think this is a place where influencer engagement is becoming a more important part of the playbook for B to B companies. You know, you've got people that the market already trusts and respects and to have them not endorse you, but sometimes just to endorse the concept.

Again an influencer. The good influencers in those that have an audience are not going to sell for you, They're not going to shill for you. But if you think about, like what is in their best interest. I'm not interested in selling in sort of talking about that company.

But the concept of buyer enablement, Now that's interesting, right, Like my audience cares about what does that mean? Is I mean we've done doing enablement forever? Why is this a new thing? Well, what we've talked about asynchronous selling, Like, what are the components of that that actually sort of put more power in the hands of the buyer?

And why should sellers not be afraid of that? Why should sellers welcome that that actually helps them increase the effect of the efficiency of the time they're selling. Right, there's all kinds of really interesting topics to unpack there. Now, if you're selling a tool that provides asynchronous selling solutions, what you don't want me to do or what I am not willing to do as an influencer is just pitch you.

But I'm happy to talk about that as a topic because my audience cares about it as well. So the same way you would you should be doing this in PR Like don't go to a reporter and say, here's my press release, talk about us, but go to a reporter and say, I've noticed that you've been covering this certain topic of sort of pretty regularly over the last four months. Here's an addition to that trend that I think is interesting for you. Like, that's what they want, and they may pick that up more likely to pick that up and run with it and maybe talk about you.

In the context as well. Right, And so I think engaging influencers is kind of a similar opportunity. Yeah. I think also like it could like even backfire, like somebody very blatantly promoting somebody.

Everybody can read through that these are smart people. I think it's even more trustworthy and helping for people to connect the dots between when when the influencer is talking about the concept and it's talking about you know why you should consider like buyer enabling what it means, et cetera. Putting in the context. Oh and by the way, there is a tool, you know, there is a solution that needs to be here.

I'm okay, I'm okay monetizing my influence. What I'm not okay with is selling my influence, because as soon as I start seeing it, then my influence is going to wait. If people in the pocket of companies just to help them sell something, that's not going to help at all. Right, And so I think you really have to be careful.

If you have built a reputation in an audience as an influencer, you have to sort of think about how do I grow that versus how do I sell out? And so I would encourage for those. Companies that are thinking about engaging influencers, just know that that has to be a symbiotic relationship for it to work in all three audiences, with the influencer, with you as a seller, and with the buyers that you're trying to engage in influence. I love it.

We have one question and the chats let's bring at life question from Gabriella on the outbound side. The big challenge now is how buyers are followed with outreach all the time, which is pretty predictable because we'll all have access now to automation and personalization at scale. Right, It's just you are just a few clicks away from creating research and clay en reaching buyers and then sending it to the outreach right or the automated outreach software. So how to make show we have at least a slightly high success rate?

I already have market and plus sales working together on this content and strategy. But still hard work. Good question. Uh, Still hard work is the key part of that question, Gabriel.

I think a couple of things. One, this is not something you're going to solve tomorrow, right, Like, just because you write a better email doesn't mean that email is going to get open tomorrow because everyone else is sending emails. I mean, and you mentioned my inbox is freaking flooded with emails that are clearly AI generated that are. Coming from clay or whatever.

And you know you can the format, you can tell, the writing style, you can tell. And what's worse is that just because they were happy, but they were done faster, easier, cheaper, doesn't make them better. In many cases, they're worse. It's just still noise.

Right. And so you know, faster, easier, cheaper. With an AI tool, it doesn't solve a buyer or a seller problem, right. It's just making things worse I think.

I mean, this is another thing like yonder you mentioned my you know metrics you can buy a beer with, Like this is also something I say a lot? Is it? Sometimes like when we're doing selling, you know, doing when we're doing. Prospect prospecting, it's kind of like we're driving by someone's house at thirty five miles an hour and trying to throw something in the mailbox.

And you're gonna drive buy a lot, You're gonna throw things, and it's a lot that's gonna miss, and everyone smiles. Something's gonna get in there. Sometimes I'll look at it something I don't and but you guys like, so I'm I'm doing this from home because it's early here and on the west coast of the US, and so you have to walk about one hundred feet down at gravel Driveway to get to my mailbox. And so when I go get a meal from the mailbox on the way back up, I'm already looking what's in there, And between me and the door is a recycle bin.

And so if I get half a second on something like no cycle band, I'm not even gonna taking this into the house. Right If you are consistently creating good content for people. If what you are putting in front of them is valuable to them, you're still gonna miss, You're still gonna get put in the recycle bin. But you have to be consistent doing that over time.

Not only consistent of doing that over time, but consistent with a diverse set of channels. Don't just send mail right be in their social feeds, be you know the one of my favorite features in LinkedIn now is sort of the if you're a first connection, you can leave someone a voicemail in LinkedIn. Did you know that you're much higher response rate. On a voicemail on linked than a voicemail on a phone number, even if you can find it right.

So, if you can diversify your channels, if you can commit to a disciplined, you know, program over time, if you can be valuable if they finally look at that message, is that something that makes them better? Is that something that taught them? Something like that is a high bar to reach on a consistent basis. But I think when I asked this question, the offense said that what's the what's the subject line trick?

Or like, what's the you know, talking about that? What's the crumpled letter strategy, like okay, fine, but like if it's a bait and switch message, if it's like I tricked you into opening this email, and now I'm going to try to sell you something that's going to backfire quickly, and then the next time they send something I want the reputation of, Like when I see them drive by my mailbox, I know that there's something good in my mailbox today, right, And I don't mean that in a stocker way, but I just mean that that's part of the reputation in brand you want to have.

I'm proud of the fact that we get more Our business gets more referrals from prospects than from customers. We get more referrals from people that have never bought from us because they recognize that through our content and reputation, we have something interesting to say. Now that's taken seventeen and a half years to earn, and I got to continue to earn that every day, and I can kill that very quickly. But I think the inconvenient answer to that question is like, Okay.

Gabrielle, you're gonna have to do the hard work right and you're gonna have to earn that over time. Now, if you do that, you will have a competitive mode around you, right, you will be you. That reputation can be easily killed, but if you sustain it and feed it, that will be a competitive commitative differentiator for you. So when those prospects have a need, you are the incumbent already a.

Lot of it. I I f on mind Leeds, and you have another question to asked. I just wanted to share I think relevant to create anecdotes that basically supports everth and that match just shared. It was us.

I remember two years ago we were talking to one Bak software development company and basically the marketing team came to us with the initiative a launch and ABM, but let's say sales well and executives were pretty much sales led. Let's put it like this, and it was all about how can we do outbound better, how can we send better emails, et cetera. And we prepared the business case, we did the hard work of bringing the data, et cetera. But it wasn't kind of there were not enough arguments to change their minds.

So one of the things I remember, it's a fantastic anecdote. What we did is just invited the cito because they're selling to citos. And well, the question, ah, if a sales rap is going like, you don't know this wrap and you don't know this company, right, and a sales rap is sending your messages on linked and sending your emails, right, what can attract your attention or what can mativate you to reply to this rap? And he has said, Look, I'm managing a big team and honestly, I don't have time to read all the emails that are coming to my inbox, even from my team.

So it's the email could be super personal, life, super relevant, even just highlighting the top priority challenges I'm facing right now. But if I don't know that person, I'll just both delete and I will never see it. As simple as that. And the main takeaway from that story is that if you want to get a reply, you need to be known by these people.

I mean, just just just the harsh reality of it. My other takeaway is based on what you described that as, is like, well, maybe I shouldn't be sending him messages. Maybe I should create a way so that people on his team are sending him messages. I want them to hear because even if he's not looking at all those, He's probably looking at those at a higher rate.

So to reach the CFO, how do. I get content and messages in front of her direct reports so that they're bringing that message, they're bringing that priority, they're bringing that research report to them. One of my other favorite tactics is like what we often think about as the gatekeeper. If you think about it as a gatekeeper, like you're thinking about someone who's trying to keep information from your prospect.

What if you think about what if you think about the admin as someone who's an accelerant. Treat them as a member of the buying committee, like they know where this, they know what their boss's priorities are. Part of their job is to make sure that the boss gets the most relevant information. So create relevant information and use that as a way to sort of get in love it.

Thank you so much. I will sorry, I just wanted to say, I will need to drop off, but I will live a lot at Matt to cover the last question, so I wanted to say big thank you Matt for joining us today and for also joining all assignment, and also thanks everybody from Fantastic Engagement and Questions. It always helps us to prepare the narrative and just like Matt said, coming with the relevant information right for the ongoing needs. Thanks all and see the next episode and timate cheers.

Yeah, I promise I won't keep you on along, Mat. I know it's early. I hope you had your coffee by the way, not yet, you have to fix it for the summit. Definitely get to you.

So I think it raised very interesting remark there, first with the influencers, then with the colleagues or the team right the So think about think about channels, but also think about people. People are in a way channels to right people who your buyers already trust and uh, in a way when you when you even think about marketing, marketing is it's about communicating to the market. And market is not only the decision makers, it's it's the whole ecosystem around and how can we as marketers influence this.

This is just philosophical a little bit, but you made me think about it. Open your mind because everybody is doing the cold email with you know, Clay and everything. How can you be how can you become that? How do you say the ones who drive by who you are looking forward to and notice by doing things in a different way.

There was a very interesting question that I like to share here because it's it's again about building trust. It's about what we just talked about, but a very practical one. If you want to involve your C level people, be an influencer, be a thought leader, how can you how can you make them less or feed shy and create content, participate in the conversation, share their thought leadership and expertise. That's a great question.

A couple of things I'd say on this one. Just because they're a member of the C suite doesn't mean they're going to be a subject matter expert. Just because they have a sea title doesn't mean they should be, you know, in front of your prospects. Some people just don't have the energy or the skill set for that.

I would, you know, I would look at people inside your organization that might have some energy, some passion around this that might sort of be you know, less camera shy, and willing to give it a shot. I worked at a real estate technology company and we had someone on our training team. She heard her entire job was just to do training in front of real estate agents and broker She was a former real estate broker, herself, so she had credibility, so we made her part of the part of the content stream.

She was she was, she wasn't camera shy, she just didn't have a lot of confidence in her ability to do it. But people were really receptive to what they saw as a peer engaging in some of that content. Had a client that was selling a compensation database access and so they had a PhD in statistics who was writing and managing the algorithm that that that that product was built on. And again this is this is comp data.

So like, what should your salary be based on your role and based on your experience, based on everything else. And so we took this guy who was a PhD in statistics and had mostly worked behind the screen the whole time, and we made him doctor Salary. So we would create events like this where it was like, come ask doctor Salary any question you have now. In his case, we had to teach him not to tell people how the watch, the history of the watch, and how the watch was made when they're asking what time it was, because he would try to describe to an HR manager.

I'm like, I don't need all that information, right, But people love talking to doctor Salary and he was a little quirky and he was kind of fun. So I think, you know, it's it's less about the C suite and more about like, how do you create content that creates credibility in your market. Maybe there's someone in the C suite to do it. I'm thinking about a CMO of a tech company that we worked with for years, and she's dynamic, she's amazing on stage, like she's a great she's a great ambassador for that company.

Not everyone's going to have that skill set, right, So find the people that are more likely to lean into it. Find the people that have some resonance with your audience. Start there. Awesome.

I think I'm the only person now between you and your coffee and your first coffee, and that's not there. We're coming on the hour anyhow. Just wanted to thank you really for a fantastic session, really good warm up what we are going to hear from you on our summit. And I wanted to also thank our audience for great engagement, fantastic questions.

I know it was actually quite a broad topic. We covered a lot, didn't get into all the details as much as maybe people wanted us to, but that's why we have the follow up on the summit. Thanks everybody, Thank you, especially Matt. Have a great morning and the rest of the day and see you soon.

Thanks guys, thank you.