Navigating the Fog: Making Sense of Attribution, Demand, and AI

All right, we're back on the show floor here at Forrester B2B Summit, live on the marketplace floor. Day two, it's been buzzing, lots of great conversations, a lot of good energy. We're here right next to the big boot. Everyone's been talking about the boot.

The big boot. We just got our picture with the big boot, which is exciting. Look forward- I've always wanted a picture with the big boot. I've always bucket list checked off, picture with giant, ridiculous 20-foot-tall boot.

Ed Grossman, co-founder of Activate, now co-founder of DemandArc joining us now. Ed, how we doing? Pretty good, Matt. Nice to be here.

Nice to see you, and, be here with all your guests. It's wonderful to be seen. So let's get right into it. It was, oftentimes when people ask me, "How did you get into what you're doing today?"

I, the first thing I think is, "Boy, this has been a giant mistake." How does a music and philosophy major from Boston College end up a serial entrepreneur in the B2B MarTech space? It's really totally by accident, I think. Yeah, unintended.

Exactly. Yeah, For sure. I, had no idea what to do with some useless degrees. So, I got a job as an editor, and, this happened to be at the moment when Netscape… Sorry, not even Netscape, sorry.

I guess it was the early Netscape, first browser was coming out. And, I happened to have a little, ability with technology, so I was all of a sudden the editor who could build your website, or the editor you needed to speak to about getting your stuff online. And it just kinda spiraled out of control from there, I would say. So I still think about those things, about how do we communicate and, how do we do that efficiently online?

How does what we did in print as editors, change? 100 years ago, it was very difficult to get information. You really needed the newspaper. You were dying to hear what was happening elsewhere.

Now, we're the opposite. We're like, too much information. And so I still think about those things, and I think tech buyers think about those things. I think marketers think about those things.

So there's a through line, but it's mostly a big accident. No, there's definitely a through line. I think, I studied journalism and political science, it taught me how to tell stories, and I think that's valuable in B2B. I think, your approach to attribution, I could argue, reflects a version of philosophical pragmatism.

Talk about how that concept helps you think about what is, what attribution is and isn't today. Yeah. So I'm, I am a, I'm a practical person. I like to have simple thoughts, not complex thoughts.

And I always…I make jokes with them, like my business superpower is laziness and simplicity. So I like to think about what can I do to make my life easier or better or not have to complete, mundane tasks over and over again. How can I help marketers decide what to stop spending money on? It's a very simple question, and I think that we lay- we have a kind of a complex and fancy label of attribution, multi-touch, W, curve- all this stuff.

But really what we're trying to help a marketer do with those types of tools is make a decision about what things should I do more of? What things should I…what are wastes of money? I'd like to know what I'm wasting my money on. And I can't tell today, those types of, those issues.

So I'm gonna quote you from… you joined us last year, at Forrester Summit. And you…this is a direct quote from you, "Why don't we just stop doing the things that are clearly not producing revenue?" Yeah. It sounds obvious.

It's obvious. But why doesn't it happen? What politically prevents organizations from just cutting that that doesn't work? Because you would think, the data's very clear about what is and isn't happening, and yet, inertia persists.

So like, how do we help organizations culturally, politically have a more fact-based and pragmatic conversation that can move the needle? It's a great question, and I do think we get caught organizationally, politically, momentum, whatever it is, as we've, you know, talked before, this past year, talking with people about attribution. You'll get someone, a customer say, "Oh, I love that." "Let me bring in three other people to talk about it."

And all of a sudden you've got a conversation which is, "I'm not really sure who's in charge of this. who needs to approve it?" And so attribution, because it's such a collaborative discussion, and you've- we've talked many times about the game of credit- and the Whac-A-Mole. You get very quickly sucked into that.

And as we have evolved and launched DemandArc, NavigateIQ is still an ingredient there, still a product of DemandArc. But one of the things we've decided to do a little bit differently is say, "Can we help you answer some of those questions about what's working or where should I optimize in a way that doesn't require you to get 15 people into a meeting and get a bunch of additional approvals, and then tell your marketing ops team that the project they've been working on for six years is now dead, and you have to get rid of Bizible?"

All those things- let's get rid of that. So what we instead saying is, "Look, if we're doing demand gen for you, and we've got 1,000 leads a quarter going in through multiple campaigns, multiple geos, multiple assets, we can actually apply some of what we learned through NavigateIQ right there." Yeah. "Even as we're giving it to you, as we're giving you demand, or as we're looking at the demand that you're getting from partners, we can show you, here are the leads that are populating at the accounts you care about.

Here are the accounts that are becoming qualified based on buying signals. And we don't need to get a bunch of other people to do that for you." "We don't need to get a bunch of approvals." And so why am I telling you that?

Because I think part of the answer is, if you can remove the political obstacles of having to get permissions and opt-ins and buy-ins and just say, "Look, I can make your life easier." We expect that to be more, palatable, and I think that's one of the reasons we see people loving ChatGPT. You sign up- Yeah … You start asking questions. No one approves that.

Yeah. Maybe your IT department is upset and you're getting, you're getting some pushback on security, but again, you're self-empowering yourself when you're working with an AI tool. You're not having to go out and get a bunch of people to agree. That's gonna remain hard.

I think it's a brilliant pivot. It's been such, it's been so difficult for companies to get traction in the attribution space alone. It's been a challenge. I think everyone talks about attribution.

It has not been a big priority to spend money on, but demand will persist forever. So, to be able to provide demand services and have the analytics built in to help those, help your clients make more confident decisions I think is important. We talked about your, our, backgrounds by mistake, but, after music and philosophy, you spent time in B2B media, InformationWeek, UBM. I'm curious, how do you believe that content and publishing side shaped how you think about buyer, what buyers actually do with marketing content?

So the, great question, and, you've got your journalism background as well. One of the things that when I started in content and in, as an editor was, I would sit down with, as we're writing or, going out to, to, briefings, sit down with CIOs or sit down with VPs of technology. I used to tell a story about having a dinner with the CTO of FedEx and listening to what his experience was of not only us, a publisher, but the billion people trying to get ahold of him with one of the largest IT budgets in the world.

And so I think about that a lot. I love technology. I have bought a lot of technology. I am a technology buyer.

I'm a technology user in many of my roles, and then I've also spent a lot of time with other technology buyers. And, the things that they tell us over and over again is first of all, they really don't care about any vendors. What they really care about is getting some problem solved, getting some objective met, whether it's staying off the front page of a security breach, or saving budget or whatever it might be. And so we, talk about that all the time with our clients in, at DemandArc and previously at Activate.

Help, a marketer needs to help a technology buyer understand not how to use their technology- not what features are great- not how you're different, but- how you're going to help them with the problem they have- Yep … With the issue that they're facing. And that's gonna be typically save money, make money- Yep Change something, change management, detangle something you've got. And so I, I bring that to, all of the programs that we run because I think, like you're saying, some things will remain hard, and one thing that's gonna remain true for technology buyers is they're gonna have needs that they're gonna need to have met, whether the, again, be saving costs or making more money.

And those needs are gonna persist. Whether those needs are met by a live SDR or an AI SDR, the needs of the buyer are gonna persist. On the show floor here at Forrester B2B Summit with Ed Grossman, the co-founder and, it says chief data nerd, for NavigateIQ. But are you still chief data nerd for DemandArc?

I am still the chief data nerd. Wonderful. Yeah. All right.

Definitely. So you talk about things that are hard. You know what else is hard, Ed? Starting a company.

And this is a, I think this is a fascinating and, it's always a fascinating and terrifying time to start a company, and there's so many startups in the marketing and rev ops space, a lot of companies trying to get the attention. You look around this room and, you have a finite number of CMOs and what feels like an infinite number of vendors. You have, you and Martha both have credibility given the work you did at Activate. You've got a great network.

You've got a ton of advantages. What are some of the keys to breaking through the clutter and getting noticed and recognized in what will always be a crowded revenue ops, landscape? Yeah. It's, I think it's interesting being here at Forrester and seeing all the posters up and all the things people are talking about.

I think we are in the singularity. We've just entered, and it is a very hard time to see very far beyond, right? It's like being in dense fog. You can see maybe a few feet, but not very far beyond.

So it is an interesting time to start a company. I think for us, the differentiator, the way to stand out, is to make sure we're very clear on how we're trying to help. That's one piece of it. Yep.

What are your problems? If I can't under… just like we think about tech buyers have problems and marketers wanna help solve them, marketers have problems, and if I can't explain to them how I'm going to help them with their problem or make something in their lives easier, I'm gonna fail as a company. And so we start there. What problem are you facing, marketer?

Can we help you? Second piece is we often think about- are we helping an area that the marketer can act on? And again, I think when we look at demand, that's an area that marketers know how to act on. They have motions, they have budgets, they have, ways to compare vendors, et cetera.

When we think about things like attribution, for many marketers it's less clear- Yeah … how to move forward on that. They like it. Yeah. They're frustrated with the credit game, but who owns the budget?

Yep. How does it interface with the eight other systems we just bought? Those are a little bit less clear, and I think it's one of the reasons you see a lot of people in attribution, have very promising products but have a little trouble capitalizing on the way that we might expect the potential would allow them to. Well, and I think, just talking to you and Martha yesterday and just hearing the dramatic success you've had just in early days of ramping up DemandArc, it speaks to your reputation, it speaks to I think how well the message resonates.

But I think it also reminds me that, as much as we want to automate selling and automate things through AI, and look, plenty of buyers are going to AI first, trust and relationships still matter, right? Definitely. And I think for the foreseeable future, where something comes from and whether we know and trust that source gives you a significant competitive advantage. Talk about what that, how you've been able to manifest and see that in the early rapid growth for DemandArc.

Yeah. I love to see, again, talking about posters up here at Dem- at Forrester, or the other posters, the time for accountability or accountable demand. Yeah. Yep.

Accountable, accountability reset. And I think that is important. There are… You're in the singularity, it's foggy all around you, there's people doing things that you've never heard of, there's all sorts of tools. You have to remain accountable as a marketer to produce whatever your mandate is.

Yep. And I think, therefore providing tools that are trustworthy, that are credible, that have a history of success, is something that is we're seeing marketers crave. "Oh, I know you guys can do a good job. You've got a track record of success.

I'm gonna feel confidence." It's the age-old, nobody got fired for buying IBM. Yeah. It's still important.

People care about their jobs. They don't wanna get in trouble, they don't wanna lose them. So… knowing they can work with trustworthy providers, trustworthy partners, they can trust the data, they're not gonna get scammed, all those things, they still matter. When investors look to invest in a business, many of them say again and again, "We're looking for good ideas, but we're mostly looking for good teams."

'Cause ideas come and go. Ideas, especially right now, you could have an idea six months ago, and all of a sudden the technology changes, ah, no longer a good idea. Do you trust the team to pivot when necessary? Do you trust the team to be able to coalesce and operate together?

And so I think about that a lot, just in terms of, the Ed and Martha machine, pivoting to something new, your track record having done it, but also people looking and saying, "DemandArc may look different in a year than it does now." "But I trust the team building it because of the reputation and heritage they have around that as well." I think you're right, that's a key part of the business. And you must see this, I'm sure you see this in your own business, that some of your best customers are the people you worked with six years ago- who've got a new job, they're at a new place, and they bring you in because they had that good, trusting experience, and that builds.

That's a virtuous circle that we all wanna build. It does. I think we track internally repeat customers as well as repeat executive sponsors. So we separate the contact from the account.

And we see far more repeat executive sponsors from people that move to a different job and bring us in. We also have sales cycles that I guess technically are six to eight years long. Because, you talk to someone that, they just aren't in the right time and place. They don't have the situation, but if you do this long enough, you build a reputation, you build credibility.

They know who you are, they know what you do. And even as our, go-to-market product strategy has evolved over time, you believe in the team. You believe in the people behind it. You believe that they're gonna have your best interests and follow their values and purpose and do the right thing.

I, 100%, and I, remember, many years ago, first, when we were first starting Activate, we were meeting with some other, potential collaborators, investors, and competitors, and I remember meeting somebody who said, "Look, we, we are able to get on marketing buys all the time." "But we never get renewals." Yeah. Because essentially, we're not delivering, we're not helping marketers be successful.

And just that warning flag for me of, don't be that company. Don't be… I'd rather get on half the number of new buys, but, renew all of them, than get lots and lots of tests and have a great outreach and just get no renewals. You'll burn through all the potential customers eventually. Yep.

Ed Grossman, DemandArc, check it out. Love what you guys are doing. Proud to see you guys continue to just, crush it out in the market. So thanks again for joining us here.

Thanks, Matt. Love to be with you. All right, we'll be back. More guests here on the floor of Forrester B2B Summit in a little bit.

See you next time.