Episode 184: How to create awareness among strategic accounts with Andrei, Vladimir, Kerry & Matty

This is the Full Funnel B t B Marketing podcast, brought to you by full Funnel dot io. Let's start good evening, our good money and everyone, depending on where you are and welcome to our panel discussion. We were thinking about thousand full Final Life, but we finally decided the host one more episode and the format of panel discussion inviting our friends Carry Canyon gam who is leading such leadership and re solch had six hands at at times, who was at our time at least and who was another podcast as well.

Our goal today is the number one challenge that BC most was Sharon was us this Yeah, it's all about out of the awareness amongst strategic accounts. First of all, I would love to pay thanks to everybody who was submitting the questions, who are sharing the questions as on LinkedIn, as we collected lots of them, tell from our community and basically that would be the setup for our discussion. And as always as you are welcome to drop your questions in the chat or you can join the call as well.

You can just don't know chan and join us and ask your question live and does that being said, let us knowles in the chat where you're all joining us from uh. We'd love to see how our audience is located today. I'm proadcasting was flat from Malaga for Malaga from Valensa. But Keravy your bay.

I'm based in tom Springs, California, but I'm actually in Austin, Texas today. Great and Matt, where you are. I'm based in Kirkling, Washington, currently in the basement of said kirk from Washington House. Nice.

We have Best from San Jose. We have Jenny from Waldorf, Germany, Bill from Boston, Alina Moldova, Lou from Crystal Nice. So again have an international audience that's cool and guys from Europe. Thanks a lot for Jenny and us late evening.

I hope you'll have a good time with us. Again. You're very welcome to ask any questions and I think we can kick it off. What I know you're structured the questions well, but I went to Malaga, so and passing Mike to you just to start the discussion.

Thank you, Welcome everybody, Carrie, Matt, thank you so much for joining. I'd like to kick it off just with some general observations from you know. I don't care. You did a lot of studies.

Matt you've day to day working with clients you are in for your own company as well, let's say in the trenches obviously Andrew as well. Just observations in terms of what has changed in twenty twenty six or i'd say recently in the buyer behavior and how does that impact our awareness creation programs, the importance of creating awareness with strategic accounts, especially when we're talking about you know, enterprise buyers, long sale cycles, complex buying groups, et cetera.

So I'm just going to call out to avoid so it's clear who we can start talking. Maybe Kerry, if you want to start, sure, And. So I'll provide a couple of the data points from the research I think really inform what's at stake here. So, first of all, you know, the research that we do shows pretty clearly that you know something like sixty percent and in many cases more of your ideal customer profile accounts.

Their strategic accounts are just not in market now and are not actively pursuing solutions. They have something in place and they're not looking for something else right now. But the minute they go into market, they put four of the five vendors that they're eventually going to evaluate on the short list on day one, and they buy from one of those four ninety five percent of the time, which tells us that one they must already have been aware of four of the five vendors before they went into market, and that especially if we're talking about a strategic account and enterprise kind of solution that we're selling.

These are important, important decisions for that buying group. And even if they're not aware of you before that buying journey, they may put you on the short list, but you have near zero chance. Our research but B to B Institute at LinkedIn also a lot of research showing that one of the single most important things in determining who's going to win a deal is how familiar that company is to all of the people in the buying group. So that means the people in purchasing and the people in legal and all of the other folks who might be involved in that decision.

If they're not familiar with you before that buying journey starts, you're probably not going to be selling something to them this time around. But I'll add this and then I'll stop when even if you have no chance or very little chance of selling something this time around, the best kind of awareness that you could possibly have is the awareness that a buying group has because they just evaluated you. So if you even if you can't win now, getting on the evow list and going through that process with that organization is the way that they get to know you best.

And one of the stats that we have really telling. During the last phase of the buying cycle, we call it the validation phase, buyers only change their decision about twenty three percent of the time, So seventy seven percent of the time they made up who they want before that starts and they don't change their mind. But forty two percent of the time buyers will say that their preference changes during that period of time during that sales cycle. So even when the buyer says, you know what this was, these guys really did a great job.

I like them, I like the solution, I like the brand. But we've already picked this up as other vendor, as the top vendor, and we're not going to go back and reltigate six or eight or nine months evaluation. But next time around, that new vendor starts off near the top. So that's how important this awareness issue is.

And it's not it's you don't get it by haranguing buyers with BDR calls and emails during a buying process. That's not the thing that's going to get you onto the short list. So I'll pause there. Thank you.

Carrie. Just got a nice compliment for you, Matt, just wanting to say you're awesome in here, so very nice way to start in your contribution. I would love to hear from you. Also, what do you see changing maybe also what may be worked before that's not working as well these days.

Yeah, I mean I quote Carrie's research all the time, right, So the fact that you know you don't most people are not in the buying process. They don't want to hear from you. I mean, that's all true. The buying groups are getting bigger, the buying journeys are getting longer.

The thing, the two things I think we don't talk about as much is the importance of confidence and trust. Confidence. What that means is buyer confidence in themselves and trust in you. One of the biggest issues happening right now, I think amongst buyers, and one part of the reason sales cycles are getting longer and indecision is getting greater.

I think confidence, internal confidence and decision making is at an all time low. We've got people that don't feel like they have all the information. They feel like they are inundated with insights and perspectives that conflict with each other. They're unsure, and they don't have enough data to decide which of the internal problems they should be solving and when.

And anytime there's any of that static, in any of that noise in the conversation, it's easy to say, you know what, we're just gonna move on to something else. So it's not. Confidence in you. I think this is where a lot of vendors sort of get this wrong.

It's not about how confident they are in you being able to achieve. Something that comes later. I'm talking about their confidence in themselves, self confidence that we're making the right decisions, self confidence that we're addressing the right problems. You as a vendor, can help.

With that right, give them decision making guides, give them data. You know, for six cents to invest in Carrie and his research is brilliant because it's helping to create eight data that shows and implies confidence that we're addressing problems. That need to be solved. And I think you can do that in concert with helping them trust you.

If you are a vendor that is providing insights, if you're a vendor that is providing guidance, that's providing information that helps them make better decisions, you become someone they can trust. And people that get are trusted are brought to the table earlier. So if if, and I think so, I would encourage everyone in your sales process, in your BDR motions, in your content self buy, your self confidence and trust in sellers. Think about how you translate that into your motions.

Love it. I would love to ask you a gentleman to follow up questions. I've been chatting with Sam Kinley, who is with pof marketing at Luck sub and bus Work and Firefying Labs for quite a long time, and he actually wrote a nice article on substack recently about lost potentially lost pipeline or negatively created pipeline, if you will, And the entire point was, we have let's say the old school playbox we all know, right, let's say gated content mkl's hand over the sales, sales outbound, et cetera.

And here is the solid point. Have we're all we're all like a bit two B organization organizations. We are measuring created pipeline, right, but nobody is measuring how much of pipeline we are losing with let's say old school playbooks, right, What is the negative impact of running this obsolete playbox? So I know, Kerry, you are running a research on let's say, the impact of experience with selles wraps and the purchase decision.

So if you maybe I shad some subts how buyer's experience with the sales perhaps influenced they purchase this season, would love to hear from you. Sure, yeah, that's good. I think what you're just talking about in the sense debtails with what Matt was also just talking about part of a significant part of the attrition that happens across a buying journey. So what we know from our data is that only a couple percent of an ICP ever makes it to the final end of the buying journey where they actually go to buy something.

You might have thirty to forty percent of your ICP in market at any given point in time, but most of those accounts stop their buying process without buying anything for some of the reasons that Matt was just talking about. One of those is is not just that they don't know whether you're the vendor. They don't know whether the category is the right category. And if you're you're the category of solution is not a must have if it's not CRM or even marketing automation or ERP and A manufacturing.

If it's not one of those things, then you have to worry about whether the people who are not your primary buyer PERSONA understand the value of the category. Because the other people in that organization purchasing and the finance people who are not the primary user, they're not thinking about this all day every day. They are the ones who will say no because they don't understand not the vendor, they don't understand the category, they don't understand why you would need to spend so much money on this thing.

And so getting to the question of what sales reps can do effectively that's very hard to do early on, is to help other members of that buying group understand that, primarily by working through that primary contact and the champion or the ultimate decision maker and enabling that person to have the right kinds of conversations internally that keep a buying process alive and I think being ultimately as useful as possible in that respect for the people who are your primary contacts is really important.

But that's hard and it's a big gap, and there's almost no content on B to B websites that is devoted to either one what's the value of the category? Or two how should people who are in purchasing or finance or legal or something think about that value. If you're in one of those functions and you go to the website of a B to B vendor, you're not going to find anything that answers the questions that you have about why this kind of solution is something I should care about and we should spend money on.

I think what really good sales reps do during that what we call the validation phase during the sales cycle, is they help answer all of those questions, primarily working through that primary contact, and they get all that done and they become the most useful. I'll just say one more thing about it. You know, buyers say that they absolutely value sales reps a lot, and in fact often will say that the AE conversations were the most important conversations that they had. But what we suspect is the reason they say that is because they helped them validate a decision they've already made and everybody loves that.

So it took us six or nine months to get to a point where we came to agreement. And what you're really hoping is that ultimate decision maker and that last part of the buying process is that it doesn't get screwed up. It took you six months to get here, and all you want is to not have to go back and re litigate that. And the sales reps who do the best job of understanding what the buyer is trying to buy and what's at stake inside their organization, what the other objectives are from other people in the organiza the one to understand that best and feed it so that they get that deal done.

They're the ones that buyers walk away saying, I love this, I love this guy, I love this company, I love this. They helped us get that done and that's what I really wanted. I love it. And Matt, I would love to ask you a follow up question on this topic.

I would literally read a message now from LinkedIn I was chatting yesterday was one CMO. It's it's a big enterprise organization, which kind of surprised me a lot about relationship between marketing and sales, So I would love to hear yes such so cited him. He says, on ABM and awareness on strategic accounts, my company and our sales process is way too far below the level we want to be to even be talking about creating awareness. My question to Matt and Carry would be something like, how can I, as a CMO help our sales leadership kick start a level of process change for them?

They will start caring about awareness among strategic accounts, which is kind that it's of a product. Dos right? Where discuss on the importance of creating this because otherwise not like we have miserable chances to even to create the pipeline even to be selected. But on another hand, we have sales leadership who believes, I think that it's not important.

What other thoughts on this? It's a great question. I don't It's not that it's not important, I guess in my mind, I'm wondering, is that really the sales team's job? Right?

If I've got prospects that are not ready to buy, if I've got prospects that don't want to talk to us, it don't want to talk to, don't want to get talked to anyone in a selling organization, is it the salesperson's job to build that relationship? I would end to build that awareness, and to build that trust and to build that confidence. I could argue that there's value there. I mean, my dad sold Caterpillar tractors for thirty five years and he didn't have SUCCE sense, he didn't have some of.

The sophisticated tools that we have today. He was building relationships with people that we're gonna buy tractors from him years later, right, And that was. Part of his job as a seller. I would argue that the modern go to market team can provide infrastructure that can help arm someone like my dad with insights and information to provide to customers.

But really, I think a marketing organization has to have the responsibility of sort of creating and building those trusts and insights. It doesn't replace the human relationship. But if I'm a sales rep, if I'm a cro and I've got a CMO coming and saying hey, I need your people to start working on building relationships that'll buy from a sales several sales cycles down the road, I'm like okay, and then you're gonna beat me up when I'm not hitting my current quarter sales number because I focused on building awareness for all these other times.

Right, So I think operationally you got to be careful who has what job, especially when we're treading on you know, sales reps who already don't have enough active selling time and they are following up with leads that they shouldn't. So I would I think the job to be done is important. I question whether or not that's the sales team's job to. Do, all right.

I think you both brought something that we'd never really talk about a lot, which is attrition and the fact that people get confused, that there is indecision, that there is lack of confidence in their own ability to make the choice and to make the decision why we should invest in this and the category even in the category in this type of solution, given all the other priorities that they're dealing with. Now we've got an interesting question, a follow up question from lu here, and I'm going to share it here on the screen, and it's about AI.

So what I'd like to do is to kind of address directly the question, but then also go a little bit into a broader topic of how AI is impacting the buying behavior and preferences. So the first question here very direct to what Matt you were sharing and the decision paralysis? Is AI making that worse? Are the managers taking less responsibility because of the push to use AI?

And if there's any evidence that this might be happening. I have some I have some recent data that top that covers this a little bit. So one we we just surveyed a bunch of BDRs and virtually every BDR has some sort of AI tools that they're using. The organization is in many cases prioritizing accounts or they have a tool that prioritizes accounts.

So we ask BDRs, what's the primary reason for you getting a rejection or a failure when you were trying to reach out to a prospect. The far and away the most significant number is or reason is bad timing that a prospect will say this is just not the right time. That's seventy eight percent of the rejections that a BDR gets. I mean, if you fix that a little bit, you fix everything a lot.

Now, we asked those BDRs also if they had tools that prioritized accounts for them to follow up on. And if they had that tool, then that the rate of rejection from bad timing goes down to sixty five percent, which is a nice increase, but it's you know, it's less than you might hope. But we also asked are you are you incentivized? Do you have some sort of incentive in place to actually work the accounts that are prioritized or do you just do whatever you want to do?

And if they have an incentive in place to you the prioritize prioritization to actually follow up on those accounts, it goes down to forty four percent, so it cuts nearly in half the number of accounts, which is exactly what prioritization is supposed to do. So you've eliminated nearly half of the reasons that BDRs get rejected simply by using prioritization tools. And we're talking about AI prioritization tools here. So the issue today is not that organizations are relying on those things and not thinking.

The issue is they have those things and they're not using them. And that's typical in new technology adoptions, and these things are are this is a very important part of what but these folks do for a living, and so they don't like to experiment with it. And this feels, I think for a lot of BDRs and sellers like an experiment. But it's an experiment that works.

It's as well experiment and we need to get on it and use it. And you know that's so that's an important point there. I'll stop on that for a second. Yeah.

There, there was a great follow up that we received previously here that I would like to just paste in the name of Camille who asked this, which is on the other end. So the use of AI by our buyers, right, So if they're now using AI to research vendors and before even visiting the website, how should we actually rethink our awareness demand generation strategies? Now, do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, go ahead, let's.

Let's hear from But because we actually just you know, we just studied this too. So uh one, buyers are using l l ms, but they're not using l l ms to discover your solutions. For the most part, your buyers already know that you exist. Now, if you're a brand new company, then they don't.

But the number of people in this audience who are brand new companies is certainly less than twenty percent everybody else. Your buyers already know you, they knew, they've evaluated you, they've used you before. So we need to this idea that buyers are discovering us through llms. You need to just get rid of that idea.

It's an old school of day. It comes from twenty years ago when your company was new, or fifteen years ago or ten years ago. But it's very unlikely that it's true today. What's likely true today is that your buyers already knew you.

They're not using lllms to discover you. Our data says they use llms more in the middle of their buying process than in the beginning of the buying process. There's also a lot of chatter that intent data is diminished and it's not as important anymore. The idea there being that people are just doing their research through lllms.

But I think we also won that's not based on a thing that's happening. That's based on a fear of something that might happen, and it hasn't happened, and the biggest part of the reason it hasn't happened, and we have evidence for it. So the biggest part of the reason is that when we ask buyers how many times do you engage with vendor content during your buying journey? That number has not changed since twenty twenty three.

It's the same. They're adding lllms over the top of that, but they're still going to buy vendor websites when they're in market. Right if there, if a buyer is in market for your thing and your thing costs one hundred thousand or two hundred thousand or three hundred thousand, is it even remotely possible that they would do all of their research through an LLLM and not go to your website before deciding whether they want to buy from you. Now, it's absurd, I mean, it really is absurd.

Of course they're going to your website. Now. The issue we could talk about later in terms of awareness is if they're not in market and they're just casual information consumers and then they're not going to your website. That's a different question, all right, rant over, but I thought that was important.

Matt, passon Mike to you. All right, So I mean, well seriously, because I'm happy to sit back and listen to carry this whole time, because everything he says, and everything is right, and it's almost always backed up by evidence and research. So it's it's wonderful. Back to the question that that Camille had, AI is not making up its insights.

It's not a separate source of information. It's doing the same thing that search engines do and just like condensing and synthesizing stuff that's. Already out there. Right, So if you don't publish insights, if you don't publish content that helps customers build trust in you and confidence in themselves.

Someone else is and the lms are just going to reference that. Right. The other thing I bring up around this is, I mean, I think that the way we do this is important, and the way we build confidence is important. But sometimes we have this idea that more information generates more confidence, and I think the opposite actually happens.

And I'm gonna give you an example. And I don't have the research that Kerry has on this, but I've got anecdotal feedback or in evidence on this that I think passes the sniff test, just the credibility test of I'm not gonna talk about enterprise sales for a second. I want to talk about Jim Shorts, like just. The shorts you would buy just to go work out or to go for a walk, or go to the gym right, or play basketball whatever.

So Jim shorts is kind of a commodity. But if you go to Amazon and you go search for Jim shorts, you're gonna get a billion responses, You're gonna get different price points, you're gonna get different brands, and then you're gonna look at all the ratings and it's gonna be like, well, this got pretty good ratings, but this guy gave it a one. In staid it wasn't very good. And so you know, you have access to tons of information, you have access to every possible brand and type of gym, and you're still gonna sit there and.

Go like, what the hell do I do? Versus if I happen to reference to Vladimir that I'm in the market for some Jim shorts, He's like, Oh, you got to go with this one. I love it. They they handle well, they whip this whatever, whatever whatever you say about it.

I'm like, oh, I trust Vladimir, and if he says they're good, that's good enough for me. Now, the risk factor of me buying Jim shorts versus like eight figure enterprise software is different. But I trust Vladimir based on all of based on evidence, based on history, and so if he says to go buy this, screw all the information in the LLM, screw all the information on Amazon, probably gonna shortcut my decision. And because that's based on a level of confidence and trusts right, So I think those same variables apply.

And if you are already a trusted vendor, if you're a trusted source of information, what comes from you is going to be weighted more heavily than anonymous information from sources I don't know and don't necessarily trust. I one hundred percent agree with that could and if you don't mind, can I build on one other point about the buying journey, because one that is absolutely true, and it's what buyers say constantly. It's it's everything that we hear about how you make decisions.

Not only that, but if you just look within right, if you just you know, think about your experience as a buyer, because almost everybody who would be caring about this conversation has experience as a buyer. And B to B also, that's what you care about. What Match just said is what you care about. Right, We're you're not marketing and selling to a completely alien kind of human being who thinks a different way.

They're in different functions and they're not The things they care about may be different, but as human beings they're very similar. But then, so if we go back and talk about what's the importance of awareness, So you get on the short list on day one or you don't get bought. That's basically it. Four of the five vendors are put on the short list on day one, and that tells you that on average, buying groups already know most of the vendors in the categories that they're going to they care about.

Right, How else would they put four of the five vendors there on day one? Right, So they already know those vendors and so that, and yet they spend the next six to nine months before they talk to sellers figuring out what the order of that short list should be and who goes on top of it. So think about what that means about the buying journey. We think of the buying journey as being this objective pursuit of truth.

What's the best possible solution for us if they start with four already, what I think is the case is that it's very likely that there are several opinions on day one about what the best solution will be or how to decide what the best solution will be on day one of that buying journey, and that buying journey, and again I just invite everybody to look your own experience. That buying journey is not about objective discovery of information. It's about the people who really care about this solution in their organization trying to find the information that is going to bolster their case most effectively.

Right. What they want is information that they can put in the columns on the spreadsheet or in the readout from chat GPT that's going to back up their case and get their solution, their favorite one over the line as the winner. That's what the buying journey is. It's not this objective discovery.

It's subjective person people trying to get their way across this buying journey right, and not in a super selfish way, like you know, the ultimate decision maker's got something in mind they think is going to really help their part of the organization. Let's say that theirs is the Rolls Royce of Solutions in the category. But then the head of finance in that organization has used category of solutions six or seven times or eight times in their career, is evaluated in a bunch of times, is very familiar with the Hyundai version of that solution and thinks that it's perfectly adequate for their needs.

Right. So you've got the ultimate decision maker over here saying I want the Rolls Royce and I've got my reasons for it. You got the finance person saying, nope, Hyundai is pretty good good enough for me, And they spend six or nine months trying to figure out how to win the argument about which one it's going to be, or it ends up somewhere in between, or as Matt was saying earlier, they don't do anything because they can't get to agreement on that. Ultimate decisions maker says, nope, Hondai is not going to help me.

Let's we'll revisit next year, right, And that's what's happening in those buying processes all along. So that goes back to the fact that we have to be very very good at helping the people who are prefer us and helping them win that case internally. But the idea that AI is somehow helping that. Not really not unless you've already put the answers into your content that they need.

They're going out and looking for the answers that are going to help them win the argument, and if they're not there, they're going to struggle to do it. Love it. So I think we kind of late a good foundation for other topics that we're going to discuss. We have the next sety minutes, and we have three big topics, the playbooks, basically what works today, then how to colaborate the sales, and lastly how to measure awareness?

Right. So I would love basically to allocate ten minutes to a topic to make sure that we cover each of them, because we have lots of good questions and I think we can kick off with the playbox right. First of all, we have discussed the traditional marketing and sales playbooks. We all know that the performance is going down.

But aside from this, even let's say I won't call it advanced playbooks, but let's say the soubt leadership programs, even creating and distributing good content today is performing worse because of the changes on linked in. Right, everybody is aware of the changes, how defeat how LinkedIn algorithm now prioritizes the content distributes it. The rich is going down for everyone, right, So everybody now is wondering what works. I would love to ask you, gentlemen, basically to show what do you hear what works for creating awareness amongst strategic accounts, What you what's working for your companies, what you are hearing from from clients, from peers.

So let's start, Matt. Let's start with you. We'll love to hear your such what that is actually working? Yeah, I mean I think it's it's all still working.

You know. I think it's really easy to say, well, you know, cold calling doesn't work, no answers, they're phoning anymore. That's not true. I can call people and they'll answer their phone.

I've got sales, I've got sales teams we work with where there's in the phone and they're getting people live on conversations. We say email doesn't work because it's clogged. Not email works great. I mean, I don't know, if I show a hands, how many on this call I use email?

You know, we all use email. We all get email from people. We don't know. We all get email from people we don't trust.

We all get email from that we didn't expect, but we also get email from people we trust, and so like I think too often, like we're looking for something that's. Going to work tomorrow. Right, Hey, I'm aw I saw someone made a comment earlier like I'm a newer company and I'm trying to get enterprise people to respond to me. How do I get that first meeting?

Well, there isn't one thing you're going to do this afternoon that is immediately going to do that. The inconvenient truth is that you're going to have to put in the work to build some trust and credibility. Now you can pay to borrow attention and borrow trust from someone else to fast forward that. If you want to go have a booth at an industry conference so that people see you so there's an association of you with that industry, great.

If you want to build out a partner channel where partners that already have your customers trusted attention or introducing you into that into that conversation, great, You're going to pay a percent of deal to them too, right, And those are things you might want to do where you are borrowing trust from others to get that conversation. Going to fast track that. There's a cost to that, but. Over time, you want to own that trust, you want to have that direct relationship.

It's just not going to happen quickly. And even if you are known in the industry, the Carry's point, if you're not brand new and people already know who you are, but they don't know why they should be considering you or don't know why you should be on. The short list, the same thing applies. Right.

People that have the trust and attention can help you fast track that. But the way that you start to build insights and credibility through the topics of editorial calendar and formats that Carry's been talking about, Like, that's that's the strategy that works. It's inconvenient because it's a lot of work and it takes time. Absolutely works, no silver bullet, they're really there, really is you know.

One thing to consider this said a little framework we're worked on with some friends of ours. There's really two main vectors you have to think about when you're thinking about how to approach this. One is how mature is the category that you're in, right, So you're almost certainly in a category that exists and your solution has competitors, and that's really one of the ways to know you know, do you have a bunch of competitors? Okay, you're in an established category, but that's an important question to understand.

Then the other one is how well known is your brand? And you know market share is a good indication of that, but you know, there are lots of other good ways to understand that, and you probably have a pretty good sense of it. So if you think of that as a matrix and just ask yourself the question where are we in this? If there are four boxes, where are we in that?

If you're in if you're in an established category and you're a well known brand, chances are you're already your awareness is already very high, and you're not going to be left off too many shortless, you're going to be evaluated. Then the question that you have to deal with is what do they think about us? And is it good? Is it consistent with what we are today?

Is it how we want them to think about us? And that's one set of problems. Now that's a nice set of problems to have. Actually, that's a very high class set of problems for a lot of organizations.

But you might be a newer organization in an established category and you're always at risk of being left off day one shortless. And you might be being left off day one shortless all the time. You have to get known, right, and you're going to have to spend some money. There's not really another way to do it.

You're going to have to spend some money to get known, and chances are you have to get buyers in that category that think that they need to solve the problem different lead them the way that they were planning to. That's not easy, but that's what you have to do if you're in a new category. And then you could be an established vendor in a new category. Right, you're a big company, but you've got a new product and it's in this new category.

Now, you've probably got some muscle in some way to put behind building the category, and that's what you're going to have to do. And building the category there is probably more important than selling your company or your product, because people have to understand why this category and they'd want to spend some money. And if you can get that done, you might be the only game in town. Right.

And then if you're a brand new company in a brand new category. You better hope that you have something incredibly compelling that people have to pay attention to and that you can get you know, people like Matt talking about, get analysts talking about, get others talking about. So, because you're going to need other people to do you're selling for you. So we have this.

We call it the Category brand Matrix, And I think if you find yourself in that first, it's going to help you understand what you need to do. And you need to look at that at a solution level. You can't just say our company, if you've got multiple solutions, you got to look at them one of the time. So I think very helpful to prioritize and even where they start.

And I'd like to follow up with a very practical question we got from somebody in the audience here, she's leading an ABM across APEC, doesn't have access to paid social channels, So to get practical what can Sarah do? What would your advice be? I mean, those are two of countless channels you know that you can have access to. I mean I think, yeah, I mean you know you don't mention you've got email, you've got phone, you've got partner channels, you've got other advertising, you've got industry associations, you've got existing customers that have may have relationships with them, and we forget about the triangulation were going in enterprise deals.

I mean I do this all the time. Let's say there's someone on trying to get a hold of, like go to LinkedIn and see, like, where where is someone that might already have a relationship with them that can make a warm intro. Right just this morning, someone did it to me to get into our CMO community. Say like, oh, here's someone I think should get in.

Can you get them in? Like we have a process for that, or you can fast track it and have someone that they already know that I already know make the warm intro. So like, literally every channel is open to you. I do think sometimes we want it to be easier, say like I just want to sit at my desk and press some buttons and make the digital channels work or wide up the social stuff because it's fast and easy.

Fast and easy isn't always effective because everyone has access to it, right, I mean, email has gotten worse because everyone's having you know, Cloud and Chat and everybody else like write their email campaigns for them. Well, that didn't solve anyone's problems. Just because you can write an email sequence faster, cheap, or easier, that doesn't solve a buyer problem. It makes the buyer problem worse.

I have had I've had. Cmos show me their inbox and some have actually done the math and said, like, the volume of unsolicited email they're getting has grown exponentially as more companies are just using the eye to create crap that's going in their inbox. And so when they don't get responded to, what I hear from people is like, well, email doesn't work. It's like, no, email doesn't work.

Crappy emails don't work. Emails that were mailed in that you didn't really spend the time and effort to sort of not only create a more compelling message for that person, but coordinate and integrate that message across your other channels. That doesn't work either, right, And so if you're trying to get the attention of an enterprise buyer, it's really I mean, you can hear me get fired up on this because I think when we say, like, well, which. Channel do I use?

Yes, And it's and that's another inconvenient truth. It's going to not just take time and money. To Carrie's point, it's going to take a body of work that is coordinated across multiple channels. You can absolutely get in front of your buyers, you can absolutely get their attention, but attention is the first step.

If you blow your chance of building credibility when you get their attention in one of those channels, it's going to be more difficult the next time you want to get their attention, because they're going to remember that you wasted a. Fraction of their time the last time. So it's it takes a lot of thought and a lot of hard work, and that's why a lot of companies don't get there. Yeah, just to qualify before you carry you share your thoughts.

What I think would be interesting for Sarah, maybe for our listeners or or people who are watching this live is think about also like what could what could let's say, a minimal viable program look like, or somebody who is maybe like Sarah Straton resources and trying to start a new program in UH in her region. Yeah, so I think you know all of the things that Matt said, plus all of the things that Matt does. So if you if you just look at Matt's business life. He is doing what you need to be doing.

Matt is is a deeply integral part of the marketing community in b to b UH and ultimately that's what I think every brand would love to be, or at least should love to be. And if you're new to a market and nobody knows you, you've got to do your research and understand where where does that market hang out? Is there a place, are there people that that people in that market follow? There is there a Matt Hines for you, for your users, for your buyers, and you've got to do everything in your power to get to know such people and to make your case so you know, rather than trying to go to the thousands of people you want to sell to directly first, if it's a new market, you've got to go to the people that they trust, and you've got to go to the places where they are, whether they're digital places or live places.

Those are the things you have to do and become a familiar entity in that space. So it doesn't have to be digital. Digital is cheap in scales, but digital is also ef I'm role, and it isn't the thing that produces trust necessarily, So that's what I would suggest. I would love to elaborate and never said that.

You guys said as recently, we have had two good anecdotes that basically prove what you just mentioned. One is coming from our friend ken Road, and he was discussing basically the same topic with one of the cmos and she said, like, first of all, I try to go offline because I can't trust anymore anything that I see online. I just don't know if it's an AI hallascination, if it's true, or if it's a personal opinion. All let's say a certain position right, a point of view of a specific vendor.

And another CMO mentioned to me in the chat, like a decade ago, we were going online to escape offline because we were looking for information, we were looking for peers right, to build a relationship, to engage, to learn, And today I just do the opposite. I want to go offline because I want to have real interactions with people. And with that being said, a couple of things that we're absorming that works not on the fast but also for the clients. A couple of things that you mentioned.

These are the field events or in person events. But if you. Don't have that let's say that brend that people would be willing to join your event, right, you need to borrow the expertise from somebody like you said, find the Matt Heins and your industry, right, and probably it's one of the easiest solutions. You create a field event, you pay a gift for that person, and then you use it as an opportunity to invite people, right, and you connect and that obviously you need to have a good playbook and just not mess the attendance with the buying intent, because I think this is why it immediately cracks, right, Okay, everybody, just game next day, follow up and pitching the product.

That's the first thing. The second one what we're seeing is the direct collaboration with people, or if you will, the user generated or buyer generated content, right, co creations what we call it. Whatever you like. You can obviously you can have your point of you, right, you can have you can share your proprietary data and experience, et cetera.

But whenever you have an opportunity, let's say in our case, to co create anything with CMO, So take any space, right, you just take any industry, right, you co create with your buyers and then you share the experience. This is what fiscinates as well, because people trust more that appears exactly what you guys were mentioning. Right, if I would recommended a certain brand, I would be listening to my peer. The same is the same as with the content.

Right, Okay, my peer from this company is sharing this, so I would love I would love to hear more the sorts of that person. Then let's say AI content or vendor content. So basically I feel these are too big changes in the way how we need to think about our go to market and what we should prioritize. And plusly, maybe just one point how to make it work.

Obviously, in some cases we can just run let's say we can play safe and this is what most companies are doing and just run the standard playbook, organize nice field event, et cetera. Right, but it's not something that creates let's say, recognizable moments. Right, the last two moments. What I feel is important is coming back to market and basics, we need to build this on differentiation.

Right. We need if and there is immediately let's say push back from some companies, but nobody is our in our industry is doing this, and whenever you have an idea and nobody is doing this. From my humble opinion, this is what you need to do because this is literally a way to stand out. Right.

Nobody is invite and let's say such leaders and hosting these events do this right. Nobody is sharing let's say, found their stories. Do this. Nobody is sending direct mails do this right.

Nobody is coming let's say with the camera to the officers or the let's say production facilities. Have your customers do this right. So there are tons of things, like you met said, literally every activity could be done properly, even called outreach, I mean without maybe taking it to serious. But there are guys I remember I forgot his last name, John Buke, and I think from the UK, and this guy was all about creating called out each e mails using a lot of humor in this right.

And he said just the entire point of why I'm doing this Because I was sending tones of like super personalized, nicely written emails. I was not getting the replies. People don't know me. So I just realized, I like, if people don't want to reply right because they see the standard bard and let's say pitch, why not making them smile right, and so at least they would just time to time, they would just see the semele read and smile and maybe just forward the cemil to their colleagues because of fun.

Because nobody of doing this right. So this a kind of the three sorts that I feel should be should be helping us in a way of how we need to think about creating print awareness flood. But yeah, something else. No, I was actually looking at the time, and I think there is such an important topic that we should address, and I think you really summarize it also nicely.

There is We could spend probably several episodes talking about the how tools and sharing the stories, but I really want to take the advantage of having carrying met here and addressing one of the biggest questions that we are getting is like, how do you measure actually impact over awareness? How do you measure awareness? How do you prove that it's working. Most of the models are defined to show the let's say more the kind of the last attribution or the demand capture, But how do you measure it in a way that you can also then share the results with your leadership that you can basically get the buying, get the approval for programs that are more long term, that are not with the immediate ROI in the sense that maybe some leaders expect.

And I mean, I'm floating the question because I'm expecting carry to say, hey, we have some research or otherwise experience here is. Well completely well, I will I will start with something, but this is a very very difficult topic. Let's start there. And I would say you cannot begin in your organization just by saying, hey, I want to measure something that we're doing today that's not really going to have the impact that you're interested in for another year.

You know that that conversation as such doesn't go anywhere in B to B. It should, like in an ideal world, it should because that's actually how it works. But you know, a big part of the reason that we do the research is to help people understand what it looks like when buyers are buying, because that's the first most important thing everybody has to understand. And so in B to B what it looks like is it takes about a year from the beginning of a buying process to the end of one.

And now we also know that the beginning of that buying process, very important decisions are made to determine whether you're even in the running or not. And so your senior leadership has to understand that because you telling them we need to do awareness without them understanding that is not going to make any difference. Is there is not going to make it mark. But if they understand, look our thing, it takes about a year for our buyers to buy it, and they put four or five vendors that are going to evaluate on the short list on day one.

Those are very very clear markers that say we have to be in our buyer's minds all the time. Friends of ours at two X and I put together this idea called brand gravity, like you have to have some gravity with your brand that causes your buyers to continue to engage with you even when they're not in market. What I do for a living all day every day, That's what that's for, right, And so that is really really important for the senior leadership to understand, or your board if you're in a smaller company, they've got to understand that you can't bully your way into regularly.

If what you're doing is entering them late after the thing is done, you just can't do it. And so we publish the research for that purpose, and we've got a lot of it that says here's how that works across the industry. But what you have to be able to do is take that and then go look at your own data, talk to your own customers, and find out what it looks like exactly. It's not going to look very different, it's going to look kind of like that, but find exactly what that looks like.

So what you've got then is all right, here's here's what the research says it looks like across B to B and in the industry, and here's what it looks like for our customers, right, both right, And then when you take that, people are not going to say, oh, well, I don't believe any of that. I just want leads, you know, you know, nobody's that dumb. You know, people want to understand. When you bring that, they're going to understand that.

And so then you say, well, so what we need to do is we need to have programs that make sure that our buyers are aware of us and get us on the day one short list. And that's what these awareness programs are going to be. And then how do you measure that? Well, it depends a little bit on the maturity of your category and your brand.

But if you use if you have intent data, and you have intent data that says looks like there's three hundred and fifty accounts that are in market for the thing that we sell right now, a question you can ask is and how many of them are on our website right now or in the last week, right Because if they're in market and the intent data says they seem to be in market and they're not on your website, you have a problem. And that's a very clear problem. And you could fix that problem through traditional means that we're talking about, right.

So there are a number of things that you can do, but you've got to figure out what your problem is first, and then you've got to have people understand what the bigger issue is. To start with, I'd love to give an analogy and then a metric that we use internally to actually try to measure this and it's not perfect, but it works for us. We're talking about this body of work you have to do and these using multiple channels and using over time, and I mean the reality is sometimes trying to get the attention of your enterprise buyer, trying to get their attention, build their trust.

Is like trying to drive by someone's house at thirty five miles an hour and throwing something in the mailbox. Every time you drive by, you're gonna miss a lot, and sometimes something's gonna get in there. And sometimes they may check the mail. But I don't know about you.

But like between me between for my house, between the mailbox and the house is a recycling pin. And I am going through that mail and figuring out how little of it I have to actually take inside, right And so I don't care what's in there, but if I can tell it's direct mail, or if I can tell it's junk, and if it's not from someone that I know where a trust or need right now, it's not even getting into the house. But if they see. Something from you and they're like, oh, I recognize that brand, or I recognize that name, or I know that whenever I open an email for Matt, it's usually got something interesting in it.

Maybe I'll take that in the house. Maybe i'll read it today, maybe i'll read it tomorrow, but maybe I. Won't read it at all. But there's another positive impression made about whoever that is right, And so if you can do that across channels, across the diversity of channels.

Over time you start to make the short list, you start to get in the house one hundred percent of the time, or at least majority of the time. Right to carry's point about like getting in front of the right people. We have a metric we use internally called target accounts engaged, and it's in our weekly scorecard, and what it measures is we know who the people are that we want to engage at the ICP accounts that we care about most. And I can sell stuff to people outside of my ICP, but that's reactive.

Right. If you find us and you meet enough criteria and you can afford us, then great, we'll sell something to you. But here's the companies we want to sell to. I have a minimum number of people at target accounts I want to see engaged with us every week, and engage with us is measured in MARKETO looking at our emails, it's measured in our podcast, it's measured in our videos, it's measured on my sub stack.

So we've got a bunch of different places where we are engaging prospects, where we are saying are the right people at the right companies coming to us most often, that is not going to help me hit my number this quarter. It is not going to help me hit my number next quarter. Right, So I've got in my pipeline. I've also got like, what's my sales number for this quarter?

What's my pipeline created number. We have a weighted pipeline number that is one hundred and ten percent of the number we need to hit next quarter. So if I wait here, we are at the end of Q two, if my weighted pipeline number is above one hundred and ten percent, I have a fair degree of confidence I'm going to hit my number next quarter. I've got a pipeline created goal.

That is telling me I actually over the next quarter or two, have some confidence I might do it that that engaged account number is three plus quarters away. Right. Our sales cycle is typically sixteen to ninety days, and so those prospects that are not in a buying motion. But if I can actually get and earn their attention, if they're paying attention to me, then when they are in an active buying motion, I'm much more likely to be on the short list.

I'm much more likely to actually hear from them. I'm much more likely to convert that into opportunities. It's not perfect, it's not exhaustive. There's probably all kinds of signals things that like I may have people in my target account that are watching this, right, I don't have this in my metrics, right.

So there's still a lot of sort of sort of sort of dank and dark funnel stuff happening. But I like that we have a metric that encourages us to focus on driving engagement. It almost inherently encourages multi threading. So instead of just saying I got this one person at that one target account, now man put six people in there.

Make sure you've got relevant content for them. But now I'm actively early engaging more members of that buying committee, so that I'm sort of preceding that consensus building and confidence as they get closer. To being ready to buy. Love It.

And I have literally the similar approach like you mentioned, just looking at the accumulative starts from across multiple platforms just to identify who is engaging with us, right, Because then another important metric, like you said, as account penetration, which means not how many contacts you have on LinkedIn, but how many contacts are actually engageing you in one way or another. Right, So you can say that more or as we have some relationship with these people, or I can say for sure that these people know us.

And I think the best way kind of to establish or to set up this criteria is just having a conversation with your sales leadership, right, if you are doing this with your company, Because we can as marketers, we can define or let's say, set up the methrics that we believe are the most important ones. Right. But then we come to cells and they say, hey, I don't care. Let's say about market cliques or whatever whatever you have.

Now we ask, okay, how would you then, let's say define engaged accounts what behavior they should demonstrate? Right? How would how would you guys say that these people know us from what touch points and this is a good start, so they could give you the criteria. Right.

Quite often you might hear, okay, the best relationships are happening during the field events, which you know, it's kind of also a signal to what programs you need to prioritize and think about. And then also you can because we had a good question from Emma on how to get buying from sales or basically support for execution, because when you hear the feedback, we build this relationship, we create awareness during the field events. You then use it as a core argument for the joint promotion of this event.

Okay, guys, we're doing this. You mentioned that this is the best possible activity to create awareness and to build a relationship. Let's now create a joint plan, clear timeline, clear KPIs, milestones and expectations. And then this is what we are going to do on the marketing side, and this is what you are going to do.

Right So let's agree that we'll bring as many strategic buyers right now going to the contact level as possible to that event. And basically this is the philosop of a behind any joint playbook that market and else should go create. So I think we are coming to the end of the promised hours, and it's very difficult to stop because there's just so much to uncover. It's a big topic.

I just wanted to ask the audiences they haven't locked in yet on the hour, to give us feedback what you think of the panel. If you still have some questions, you feel free to reach out to us. We are LinkedIn or otherwise, and also wanted to thank you Carrie and Matt so much for coming here. I mean, you're kind of proving your own point.

You're out out here, you know, as subject matter expert, sharing your thoughts and educating the market, creating the awareness. You're also I think proving the point that us, maybe as a less known brand, we can also get it advantage of working together with you on this one, So collaborating with you and getting the halo from each other's brand and and helping each other increase the awareness. So in itself, I think this event is also an interesting proof point. So thank you so much for coming.

Thank you, thank you all so much. Thanks everybody, Jackson. Man, have a good fast of the week, and guys, well share the record of everybody so you can tune me in across your colleagues. Have a kay fast of the week.

Thank you about it.