Episodios

  • Why 75% of Buyers Don’t Want Reps and How Framemaking Can Win Them Back (with Brent Adamson)

    Why 75% of Buyers Don’t Want Reps and How Framemaking Can Win Them Back (with Brent Adamson)
    Oct 8 2025
    In a recent Gartner survey, 75% of B2B buyers said they’d prefer a rep-free buying experience. That’s a wake-up call for sales and marketing leaders everywhere. So, is this the end of sales as we know it… or the start of something better? On this episode of the B2B Roundtable Podcast, I sit down with my friend Brent Adamson, co-author of The Challenger Sale and author of the new book The Framemaking Sale. Brent explains why buyer confidence—not more information—is the real barrier to closing big deals today, and how leaders can help their teams become the sellers customers actually want to talk to. Brent Adamson on Framemaking and the Future of Sales Key Takeaways Buyers want confidence, not more information. The real risk isn’t being ignored—it’s being irrelevant.Framemaking is the answer. Instead of persuading, sellers must help buyers frame decisions and build confidence in themselves.Four forces undermine confidence today: decision complexity, information overload, objective misalignment, and outcome uncertainty.Sales and marketing must unite. The mission is to build buyer confidence in themselves—not just in the supplier.AI won’t replace sellers, but it raises the bar. The sellers who thrive will show up as trusted guides and sense-makers. Pull Quotes “It’s not your customer’s confidence in you that matters. It’s their confidence in themselves.” — Brent Adamson “If you could be the one seller your customer actually wants to talk to, that’s an incredible place to be.” — Brent Adamson Guest Bio Brent Adamson is a researcher, speaker, and author best known for co-authoring The Challenger Sale. His new book, The Framemaking Sale, explores how sales professionals can rebuild buyer confidence and create customer interactions that truly add value. Connect with Brent on LinkedIn Get the Book: The Framemaking Sale Full Transcript Brian Carroll: Welcome to the B2B Roundtable Podcast, where we bring together ideas, people, and strategies shaping the future of sales and marketing. Today, I’m joined by my friend Brent Adamson, one of the most influential voices in sales. You may know Brent from his groundbreaking book The Challenger Sale, which reshaped how we think about commercial conversations. I’m excited because we’re talking about his new book, The Framemaking Sale. And it couldn’t come at a more urgent time. In a recent survey, 75% of B2B buyers said they’d prefer to purchase without ever talking to a sales rep. Is this the end of sales as we know it—or could it be the start of something better? Brian Carroll: We’re going to talk about why buyers have lost confidence in sales, what’s driving this shift, what it really means to be a framemaker, how leaders like CMOs and VPs of Sales can build teams customers actually want to talk to, and what the future of selling looks like in an AI-driven world. Brent, you open your book with that stat—75% of B2B buyers would prefer a rep-free buying experience. That’s wild. Brent Adamson: First of all, it’s great to see you, Brian. Thanks for the invite. That statistic comes from Gartner research, one of the last pieces I worked on before leaving in 2022. We asked thousands of B2B buyers: “If you could buy a large complex solution without ever talking to a sales rep, would you prefer that?” Seventy-five percent said yes. Now, that doesn’t mean they actually buy without sellers—it means they’d prefer not to. The data shows a big and growing gap between customer preference and customer reality. That gap represents risk for sellers. Brian Carroll: So it’s not the end of sales—it’s the end of salespeople not adding value. Brent Adamson: Exactly. The question at the heart of this book is simple: What would it take to be the one seller—or the one team—that customers actually do want to talk to? If you can be that person—showing up less like a seller and more like a human—you can differentiate not only from competitors but also from the overwhelming flood of information customers already face. Buyers Don’t Want More Info, They Want Confidence Brian Carroll: What are the ways sellers unintentionally undermine buyer confidence? Brent Adamson: One of the biggest findings is around decision confidence. When customers feel highly confident in their decisions, they are up to 10x more likely to make a high-quality, low-regret purchase. But most sales and marketing teams focus on building confidence in the supplier— “trust us, our brand, our product.” What actually matters more is the buyer’s confidence in themselves. The real opportunity is helping customers feel confident in the questions they’re asking, the research they’ve done, their alignment as a team, and their ability to execute. That’s what Framemaking is all about. Brian Carroll: Can you define Framemaking? How is it different from Challenger Selling? Brent Adamson: Framemaking is about creating ...
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    43 m
  • The Power of Brand Activism: How Businesses Can Use It for Good

    The Power of Brand Activism: How Businesses Can Use It for Good
    May 24 2021
    Customers care more about the values of the companies they buy than ever before. It’s more than your purpose. It’s more than what you sell. They want to know what kind of company you are and what do you care about. Does a company want to do more than drive profits? That’s why I interviewed Dr. Philip Kotler, who is known as the “father of modern marketing.” He is the S.C. Johnson & Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and co-author of Brand Activism: From Purpose to Action. In this interview, you will hear Dr. Kotler describe brand activism, the importance of focusing on a purpose as a company, and the problems encountered when companies do not use brand activism correctly. To start, what is brand activism? Dr. Kotler: Brand activism is a movement toward making a brand do more than just tout the virtues of a product or a service, its usual function, and to go and even identify some value or values that the company has and cares about. For example, The Body Shop, when it started under Anita Roddick, she made it her point that she’s not only selling skincare products as a retailer, but she really was also fighting for animal rights, civil rights, fair trade, environmental protection. So, her brand was active. I don’t mean that all other brands are passive because they do a lot of work, but the implication is that companies carry reputations, and they want to carry a good reputation. More and more consumers would like to know what kind of company this is, what does it care about. Our society is saddled with many problems, and does the company care about any of these problems, or does it just think it’s supposed to make money? An increasing number of companies would like an identity that goes beyond just making the product or service. And that is what we are calling brand activism, the brand that connects with some cause or causes. A Lack of Trust in Society Brian: That’s a helpful distinction. You recently wrote a book on this topic. I’d love to know the story behind why you wrote the book Brand Activism and why now? Dr. Kotler: I think that, if you look at some barometers, like the Edelman trust barometer, about the level of trust in society today, it’s undoubtedly been falling. Brian: Yes. Dr. Kotler: And as a result, many companies are not going to be trusted either, as part of maybe government not being believed, and other institutions. And companies ought to be the first to fight against bad companies rather than stand near them or be part of them. So, the idea is that, at this time, companies want to be profiled in a certain way. In other words, the reputation a company has could be just whatever happens in its course of actions. Or it could also be something that could be designed better. Consciously better. What are the different branding stages of development? Dr. Kotler: And you see, the whole idea of a brand itself has gone through several stages, and that’s very important. I think brand activism is probably the highest stage, but let me tell you what the stages are in my mind. Brian: That would be great. Evolution of brands from marketing-driven to values-driven Dr. Kotler: Yes. The first stage is when the company simply does its best to feature its product and services. Now that’s normal. The brand name was an identifier. Then brands moved into trying to define the company’s positioning, but not social positioning. Just their positioning: Walmart is the lowest price, Disney is family entertainment, DuPont is the highest quality, and Toyota is long-lasting, reliable performance. So, in that second stage, the brand became—not just one mentioning a product, but positioning the product. Then the brand moved further to define a set of qualities about the company. For example, John Deere makes all kinds of equipment for farmers and forestry workers, and construction workers. At this stage, John Deere would describe its quality, its integrity, and its innovation. It’s really positioning, but it’s multi-positioning. Namely saying that it stands high on many traits that most people value. But this could move into a fourth stage where the brand adopts a very specific cause. You know about customer social responsibility, and a lot of companies are into that. So, a company may say that it really cares about the climate problem and wants to help move solutions toward keeping a safe climate in the world. Or it could be some other cause. Then brand activism is alive with that development of going from customer social responsibility to the company, saying, “here’s one of the things we’re going to move forward on, to the extent that we can afford to do it. We want to make more useful products, make money doing that, but we also want to push forth some cause that would help all of us.” So that’s the evolution of branding, and brand activism is at one of its latest stages. How ...
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    27 m
  • Mean people suck in marketing and what to do about it with Michael Brenner

    Mean people suck in marketing and what to do about it with Michael Brenner
    Nov 7 2019
    Why does most marketing stink? According to Michael Brenner, “Most of the marketing that we do that stinks and doesn’t work is that some executive with a big ego asked us to do it.” On top of that, marketers are not in a happy place. According to MarketingProfs 2019 Marketer Happiness Report, “Only 10% of marketers say they were very fulfilled in their work.” The report looked at the dimensions of feeling fulfilled, valued, and energized by the work, that our work is impactful, and engaged. That’s why I interviewed Michael Brenner (@BrennerMichael), the CEO of Marketing Insider Group to talk about his new book Mean People Suck. We need more empathy inside our companies to empathize more with our customers. Michael Brenner states, “The most counter-intuitive secret to success in business and life is empathy.” I’m excited to share his thoughts on empathy with you. In this interview, you’ll learn about asking what’s in it for the customer, rethinking your organizational chart, and making the changes you need to make to be more successful today. Why did you write Mean People Suck? Michael: Again, I must give you credit. You were out in front of this empathy topic in marketing. I think long before me. Kudos to you. It just took me a little longer, but mainly as a content marketer and as a former internal corporate marketer, I reached out to folks that I know that are still living and breathing corporate marketing struggles every day. I found a couple of things, the number one being that marketers were miserable. It’s like that scene from, I think it’s Poltergeist where the obsessed woman has help written on her. Was it Poltergeist? Anyway, there was a woman possessed, and the words help showed up on her stomach because I feel like a lot of internal corporate marketers feel that way. They’re miserable. Why are marketers so miserable? Michael: When you get down to it, I’ve found that it’s mainly because they hate their boss. They don’t love the corporate culture. They’re not happy with what they’re being asked to do. They feel they don’t have an impact. When I looked at why content marketing programs aren’t successful, the answer superficially was content ROI. What’s the ROI of content? And if you don’t mind me, I’m not being promotional, but I wrote a book called The Content Formula, All About Content Marketing ROI. And when I went back to folks I sent the book to, but I found that it wasn’t enough. The math isn’t enough to get people over the challenges that we’re facing and how to do marketing that doesn’t suck. Most marketing stinks for this reason Michael: The answer is that I wrote the book is that most of the marketing that we do that stinks and doesn’t work, because some executive with a big ego asked us to do it. Executives love seeing logos on stadiums, and they love seeing Super Bowl ads, and all the things that we make fun of marketing about primarily come from a request from sales or marketing or product people. And the companies where content marketing is successful or marketers are happy are making an impact because there’s a culture of empathy. Their cultures don’t suck. The companies don’t suck. The leaders don’t suck. That’s why I wrote the book. Maybe a long-winded explanation, but that’s why. Why empathy is more important now Brian: It’s hard for marketers to care about the customer when they don’t feel cared about too. They don’t feel safe. They’re anxious, or they’re frustrated, or they’re overwhelmed. You also talked about empathy. Why does empathy matter, especially to marketers and does it lead to better results? Michael: Yeah, One of the stories that I tell in the book, the very first corporate book that I read, and I have to give credit to the former CEO at Nielsen, my first company who made most of us in the company read the book. And I was like, “Oh, here we go. And I read the book. I was like,” Wow, this is actually really pretty cool.” It’s called the Service Profit Chain. I write a lot about it. The book isn’t talked about much, but the premise is simple. Three or four Harvard business review professors got together, and they said, wait for a second, we’ve seen this correlation between engaged employees are happy employees, happy customers, and higher stock prices more satisfied stock investors. They did some actual research and found that where there’s employee engagement, there is customer loyalty. Where there’s customer loyalty, there’s higher spend rates and retention and higher stock prices. The counter-intuitive secret to success Michael: The key to those environments, those cultures, those companies where there were happy employees, was empathy. The company’s purpose was to make their employees happy because they knew happy employees created delighted customers. It’s totally intuitive, and yet it’s counterintuitive. That’s one of the reasons we reconnected. ...
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    19 m
  • How to stop the hustle and establish work-life boundaries

    How to stop the hustle and establish work-life boundaries
    Jun 20 2019
    Has our devotion to work and hustle turned into the UnAmerican Dream? Some of the hardest working people I know are in sales and marketing. We often read success stories about how hustle and grit drove fantastic success. That said, the relentless pursuit of success can leave behind damaged relationships and personal life carnage in its wake. Take me, for example. Shortly after building up and selling a successful company, my 17-year marriage ended. There’s a reason entrepreneurs have a higher divorce rate. For me. My pursuit of business success left my health and my personal relationships in a severe need of help. I needed to redefine the kind of life I wanted to live, make different choices, and set better boundaries. It wasn’t easy. Now, my health, relationships, and personal and professional happiness are so much better. That’s why I was excited to interviewed Carlos Hidalgo (@cahidalgo), CEO of VisumCX and author of the new book The UnAmerican Dream. In this interview, you’ll hear Carlos’s story about finding personal and professional happiness and establishing work-life boundaries. This is a must-read for sellers, marketers, and entrepreneurs. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about your background? Carlos: Yeah. Hey Brian. Always a pleasure to talk to you. I have been in B2B marketing and sales for over 20 years. I think right now it’s about 25 years, which is hard to believe. I’ve been both client-side, and then in 2005, I co-founded an agency. That agency is still running. I left that agency at the end of 2016, beginning of 2017 to start another business. So, could say I’m a bit of an entrepreneur. I love creating things. Now, I work with B2B companies in the whole area of customer experience under the new brand VisumCX, and then just wrote my second book. The first book was on demand generation, so if you ever have insomnia, go for it. You can read that. But this book was the UnAmerican Dream, which is more my story and a whole lot more personal than the first one. Why did you write The UnAmerican Dream? The UnAmerican Dream Brian: Can you tell the story about why you wrote this book, The UnAmerican Dream, and why now? Carlos: Yeah, great question. When I left Annuitas, which was the first company that I had co-founded and started, I put a post on LinkedIn about why I was going. It was more to get back to what I should have been doing in the first place, which was cultivating those meaningful relationships, especially with my children and marriage. I was struck by the number of calls and emails I got from fellow entrepreneurs and fellow business leaders who were saying, “So, how did you do this? What steps did you take because I am at my wit’s end? I’m never seeing my family,” or “My marriage is falling apart,” or insert whatever they were going through. I was shocked. Wow, this is not just me going through this. So, that’s why. But the why now, is the idea of that book came to me over two years ago. But I needed to work on me first. I had to get some things straight in me, and one of those things that I start with the introduction, I believe, saying I first had the idea in 2016. When I told somebody the title, they said, “It sounds like an angry book.” I believe if I had written it then, it would have been an angry book because I had a lot of things that I had to work through and deconstruct some things that I had held to be true which weren’t right. So, I needed to wait. Waiting, I believe, made it a much more authentic book, a much more vulnerable book, but not an angry book in any way. Walking away from the UnAmerican Dream Brian: I’m going to ask the same question you got asked by many people on LinkedIn. How did you walk away from this UnAmerican dream, and what do you mean by that? Carlos: Yeah. Wow. How I did it … From the outside, it probably seemed like, oh, he woke up one day and was like, “I’m done.” It was a 10-month process for me. I really wrestled with the decision. And you know, Brian, you’ve started businesses. You’re an entrepreneur yourself. When you start something from scratch, and you put everything you have into it, you really … The term I hear often is, “This is my baby.” I wanted to make sure that, first and foremost, I had come to a place where I’m like, “I’ve got to do everything I can to get back those relationships that I had neglected for so long.” So, I tried to do that within the context of the first business. That took me 10 months. I kept wrestling with what should I do and how should I do it? Getting the courage to make the decision Carlos: It was a conversation which I’ve told many times, so I want to elaborate in case there’s an overlap with people who have heard this before. But, a conversation with a colleague in the lobby of the Westin who encouraged me. He said, “You know what you need to do. You just need the courage to do it.” I called Suzanne, my wife, at ...
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    24 m
  • How to Get Sales and Marketing Operating as One Team with Heidi Melin, CMO of Workfront

    How to Get Sales and Marketing Operating as One Team with Heidi Melin, CMO of Workfront
    Jun 5 2019
    Working together as one team in marketing and sales alignment is about the customer. Why? Because today, buyers are in control. For this reason, we can no longer have an artificial divide between marketing and sales. I interviewed Heidi Melin (@heidimelin), CMO at Workfront, on how to get sales and marketing to operate as one revenue team. Brian: Can you tell us a little bit about your background? Heidi: Absolutely. I’m a career CMO. I’ve been in marketing my entire career, having started on the advertising side but primarily focused on fast-growing software businesses. So, I recently joined Workfront and am the CMO at Workfront. How can sales and marketing operate as one team? Well, throughout my career, I’ve had the opportunity to work well with some sales teams, and I’ve also learned my fair share of working with sales teams and marketing teams that don’t align very well. Also, all those lessons learned include ensuring that the goals are aligned and ensuring that the marketing team has the same goals as the sales team. Indeed, the marketing team tends to have a broader view of the marketplace in the long term. But the immediate-term goals must be aligned. So, being aligned on lead generation or demand goals with the sales teams is critical. We talk about it inside Workfront as one view of the truth because so many times we’ve all probably sat in meetings with sales and marketing executives, and you spend most of the meeting arguing about whether or not the number is right instead of diagnosing what we need to work on to improve. So, ensuring you’re working on a standard set of numbers is hard. It sounds straightforward, but it’s hard. One key to success, I think, is ensuring that measurement, all programmatic activities, and the process-oriented partnership between sales and marketing are aligned because it’s one business process. One business process focused on revenue. I think that marketing and sales historically have been thought of as two separate business processes; we talk about it as a critical handoff. But I think about it because it’s one business process, and inside a company, it’s really focused on the revenue of your business. It starts when a marketing team targets a specific customer or prospect, and they raise their hand and ask for more information or engage all the way through to close business. So, it’s one business process, not two separate business processes. And, oh, by the way, it’s aligned to something way more important than a sales team or a marketing team: it’s aligned to how a buyer buys your product. And we forget that sometimes, we’re like, “Oh, well, the marketing process does this…” I’m like, oh no, no, no. We’re just trying to facilitate a buying process. Flip your focus on the customer Heidi: Yeah, and so when you flip that, and you look at the focus on the customer, all of sudden marketing and sales from an outreach, from an engagement perspective, has one unified goal, which is to move a buyer through a buying process. And when you have that change of mindset that becomes important. I’ve worked in businesses where we focus cleanly on that critical handoff, and that handoff is the most vital piece. And frankly, it’s an essential piece, but it’s not the crucial piece. Heidi: Yeah, it should support, and we have the tools to help that entire life cycle. When I first joined Workfront one of the things that we did was as soon as we handed off an opportunity to the sales team, it was like, we’re out, we’re done, check, we’re finished. Frankly, there are so many tools in a marketing toolkit that we can align with a selling motion and be more successful in helping to nurture prospects through a buying process. To me, that has been an evolution that has been enabled by technology and is one that is critical in ensuring that sales and marketing are aligned. Brian: As we talk about this whole idea of alignment, and you brought up measurements sounds easier said than done to get marketing and sales to agree on what common goals and measures are. How to get sales and marketing using the same numbers Heidi: I think it must start a big picture and really understanding targets and targets by sales teams and working backward from there. Because if we realize that as our goal, our goal from a marketing perspective is undoubtedly to raise awareness for the business and drive demand for the business. Our goal is to drive revenue for the business. And so, we can all understand our revenue goals and then the steps that we all need to take to get there. So, to meet our revenue goals, backing out of that, what kind of demand generation volumes do we need to have to achieve those revenue goals. We then agree with the sales team not only on what we are going to use as our qualification criteria, how we are going to evaluate whether or not a lead is indeed a good lead or a bad lead. Also, ensuring that, from a volume perspective, the ...
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    24 m
  • Bring more innovation to your demand generation now

    Bring more innovation to your demand generation now
    Mar 26 2019
    Do you routinely look for ways to drive innovation with your demand generation approach? Or do you feel behind the curve? According to Circle Research, marketers are split. Half say they’re “old school,” while the other half believe their approach is innovative. Circle Research found that most marketers (93%) who describe themselves as innovative say that it has made their marketing more effective. However, 83% of lagging marketers plan to bring innovation into their approach this year. I interviewed Jeanne Hopkins (@jeannehopkins), CMO at Lola.com, on how marketers can bring more innovation to demand generation. Share a little bit about your background. Jeanne: Thanks, Brian. My undergraduate degree is in Accounting. Believe it or not, the accounting office where I started told me in my annual review that I probably didn’t have a future in accounting because I was too loud. Everything was balanced andhing was good, but I was too noisy for a nice, cut-and-dry accounting office. That’s when I moved into toys. I worked for Milton Bradley Company’s in-house advertising agency. Then, I moved to LEGO and then to other consulting companies. I got into the software, an internally funded company called Datum E-business Solutions, which delivered a trusted time application. A long time ago, way back in the year 2000, it used to be that you’d send an email. Maybe somebody would send it again, but it would be like three hours later or three hours before, and that’s because networks were not on the same timing device. So, the whole concept of having timing and having to be secure became something that became critically important to all networks. From there, selling into IT, B2B technology companies, that sort of thing. So that’s my gig. What does Lola do? Jeanne: Lola.com is a corporate travel management solution that allows finance people, office managers, and business travelers themselves to be able to see their full travel details and integrate with an expense platform. I know, Brian, you’ve probably done some expenses before- Brian: Yeah. Jeanne: You take a picture of the expense, you watch it go into the cloud, you fill out the form, and it takes half an hour or hour and, I bet you avoid it, right? It’s like one of those things- Brian: You wait until the last minute to do it, and if the reports are due on Monday, you’re doing it Sunday night. Jeanne: Of course, taking away from family time. Brian: Right. Jeanne: We integrate with Expensify, Concur, a whole bunch of different finance applications, as well as travel. You can book all your travel with us. We have a complete support network that helps you get checked in and makes sure that when disruptions come up (reroute people, get people back sooner or back later) and any other hiccups that business travelers endure. We’re trying to mitigate that for them. Brian: I wanted to highlight you because you’ve done so much, you know, since you and I met, and we could date ourselves a bit here but- Jeanne: That’s okay. Brian: Way back, as we spoke, I think, at a MarketingSherpa Conference. Jeanne: 2006, yeah. Brian: Yeah! I was impressed by you and just how you were bringing innovation and creativity, and out-of-the-box thinking. Also, you’ve continued to do that throughout your career. Driving more innovation with demand generation How did you start thinking differently to drive innovation with demand generation? Jeanne: Well, I can’t claim the credit myself, so I’d say that there would be a couple of different influences. I would say both of my parents are artists of a kind. My dad paints, he plays music, he writes. My mom sings, plays music, and paints. So, when I was in high school, I majored in Art. We had to submit a portfolio, and I enjoy thinking from an artistic view of the world. That’s the left-handed component of me. However, then, when I graduated from high school, I went to college for Accounting because I’m ultimately practical, right? I said I could always get a job adding things up. I read constantly. I’m trying to always look for something a little bit different, a little bit ahead of the curve. I don’t want to be an early adopter, but I want to be at the forefront before the competition catches up with us. So, I’m lucky to have a kind of a creative outlook, and I think. Start seeing stories My dad was a newspaperman. He was a managing editor of the newspaper in western Massachusetts, in Springfield, and I can look at things and look at story ideas. This a story, like just us having a conversation right here, Brian. Jeanne: So, we each have a story, we have a back story that goes back some 13 years now- We know each other. We worked together, you know, you have a family, you know my family, and that’s a story. So, I sent a note to my internal content team, and I said, “Hey, I’m doing this podcast. When it gets published, I think we should do a press release and post it on the blog and backlink ...
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    25 m
  • Why Conversational Marketing and New Book with Dave Gerhardt, VP of Marketing at Drift.com

    Why Conversational Marketing and New Book with Dave Gerhardt, VP of Marketing at Drift.com
    Jan 30 2019
    Traditional sales and marketing methods have failed to keep pace with how modern B2B buyers purchase goods and services. Meetings, phone calls, and email are still important B2B channels but how can you have immediate conversations? Conversational Marketing is about having direct one-to-one conversations to connect with customers and offer help. By using targeted messaging and intelligent chatbots to engage with leads in real-time (while they’re on your website), you can connect with people in real-time and convert leads faster. That’s why I interviewed Dave Gerhardt (@davegerhardt), VP of Marketing at Drift.com and co-author of the new book Conversational Marketing. Dave is also known as DG. Share a bit of your background and what does Drift do? DG: So, my background. I don’t even know where to start. I love marketing. I do marketing at Drift. VP of Marketing; been here for three-ish years right since the beginning of the company. The way that I talk about Drift is that Drift connects you now with the people who are ready to buy now. Which is a significant change from how traditional marketing typically works, where most of the traditional marketing and sales systems were kinda built for later? Go to my website, fill out this form, and somebody on the team is going to follow up with you later. But you know, there’s just been a huge shift in the way that we all behave and communicate online, and the now is more important than ever. I think about walking outside this building: if I called Lyft on my phone, the driver would be there in about one to two minutes, and that’s what we expect from everything. Except in the B2B world, where the rules, for some reason don’t apply to how we actually all do things in real life. Brian: Right. DG: So, our mission at Drift is really to transform the way businesses buy from businesses, and the way that we do that is through conversational marketing. Brian: Well, that’s awesome! And so, that sets us up actually. Tell us about Conversational Marketing? And what motivated you to write the book? Why now? The reason we wrote the book is that we’ve just heard so much about the power of conversational marketing, we felt it firsthand. We use conversational marketing and Drift to run our whole business, and we have become one of the fastest-growing companies of all time in this industry. And it’s not because we have some secret, but our secret has been we’ve used our own product and really made conversations the center of our business. And so, as we created this category of conversational marketing and started to educate more people about it late last year, we were like, “You know what? It’s time to write the book.” We’ve wanted to write a book. We had enough stuff to say, case studies, examples, methodologies, playbooks, blueprints, and all that stuff. And so, you know we said, “Let’s make 2019 the year that we write the book, and really do the best job we can trying to help educate the future of marketing and sales on this next wave.” Brian: Well, it’s really well done. Why do marketers need to rethink their content/lead generation? DG: Because content’s a commodity, right? Everybody has a podcast. Everybody has a blog. Everybody’s into videos. Everybody’s on social media. Content five, ten years ago you could be like, “You know what makes us unique? We are a B2B company, and we have a blog.” And people are like, “Blogging? No way!” Today, all that stuff is a commodity, and nobody’s going to be on their commute home tonight being like, “You know what I wish I had more of? I wish I had more content from a B2B brand. Like, I need another B2B podcast. That’s what I need.” Right? And so, there’s got to be some other way to compete. You can’t just write a four-page PDF and slap a form in front of it and say, “Here you go sales team. Here are some leads.” Because we’re all kind of starting to ignore that, right? I try to avoid filling out forms if I can. I hate talking on the phone. I never answer numbers that don’t usually call me. I never reply to cold emails. And so, something had to give. And that’s really the shift that we’ve seen in the market. And something that David (who I wrote this book with; he’s the founder and CEO of Drift) the thing he talks about is, he calls it the shift from supply to demand. Right? Customers have all the power today. Ten years ago, they didn’t have any of the power, and so if you sold iced coffee, you could be the only person that sold iced coffee. And you could say, “You know what, Brian? You’re going to have to go through my process, and you want one of my iced coffees? Great! Come back at 5 o’clock tonight. Call me on this number, and I’ll talk to you.” Where now, customers have all the power, right? By the time I’m ready to buy an iced coffee, I’ve already evaluated four or five other companies, and I’m ...
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    28 m
  • How to improve your account based marketing results an interview with Jon Miller, CEO of Engagio

    How to improve your account based marketing results an interview with Jon Miller, CEO of Engagio
    Jan 9 2019
    B2B lead generation has had to reinvent itself over the last decade. Sales have always used an account-based approach. Now,, marketing is adopting account-based marketing. But it’s not an easy road. Here’s why: In B2B, you’re never selling to an individual. He or she is almost always part of a buying team. Moreover, the bigger the potential deal, the more people, departments, and functional areas get involved. For this reason, many B2B marketers using a leads-based approach hit a wall with their account-based marketing efforts. ABM isn’t just about marketing. ABM works best in companies where all revenue-generating areas are closely aligned as one team. So, how can you improve your account-based marketing results? To help, I interviewed Jon Miller (@jonmiller), CEO and Co-Founder of Engagio. Jon and his team just released the Second Edition of The Clear and Complete Guide to Account-Based Marketing. He brings a fantastic perspective on how to complement a leads-based approach and adopt account-based marketing. What inspired you to start Engagio? Jon: Great. I’m excited to be here and to have a chance to hang out with you again. It’s been a while since we talked. So, my background: I’ve been in marketing technology almost my entire career. My undergraduate degree is actually in physics, and when I was coming out of college, I ended up doing a lot of work with companies that were trying to take advantage of all the customer data they had [in order] to make decisions. Because I came to marketing with that quantitative and analytical background, that led me into a series of marketing technology companies that were basically all about really trying to use all that data to drive better customer decisions and one to one interactions. You know, very much inspired by the Don Peppers and Martha Rogers book The One to One Future. I worked at Exchange and then as an early employee at Epiphany, which was probably the leading marketing technology company of the mid-’90s. After we sold Epiphany, I co-founded Marketo, along with Phil Fernandez. And I think that’s arguably, or maybe not even arguably, the leading marketing technology of the last ten years or so. Recently, it was sold to Adobe for just under 5 billion dollars. I had a long career in marketing technology, but one of the trends I think is always true is marketing is changing all the time, and the underlying technologies are changing all the time. I just felt about four years ago that Marketo wasn’t, frankly, moving fast enough to kind of keep up with all the new trends and changes in how marketing was done. I was inspired to start a new company that would be seeking to build out the next generation of marketing products that could really take advantage of all these new trends. One of those significant trends is what’s now known as account-based marketing. And so, that’s where I decided to start, to focus, to have Engagio be a platform for account-based marketing. How do you define account-based marketing? Brian: Well, there’s a lot of definitions out there about account-based marketing, and I’ve talked with CMOs and VPs, and they see account-based marketing as just good marketing. But I’d love to ask you: you just had this new book come out, The Clear Complete Guide to Account-Based Marketing and you’re on your second edition, so how would you define it? Jon: Yeah. So, first of all, let me just say, really excited about the book. You know, it is a second edition; I wrote the first one about three years ago. I’ve learned a ton more about ABM in the last three years. I’ll start with a colloquial definition of ABM then I’ll give you my formal one. I think the colloquial one I like to use is a comparison back to the kind of marketing that we did with Marketo. And that is the marketing that I like to describe as fishing with nets. When you’re fishing with nets, you run your campaigns, and you don’t care which specific fish you catch. You just care– did I catch enough? That you can then do lead nurturing, and lead scoring to kind of run it through the system. But when you’re going after bigger or more strategic accounts, or maybe because you’re going after your existing customers for expansion, or you’re in a narrow industry. Any time you have a specific list of named accounts, you don’t want to wait around for those big fish to swim into your net. You’re going to find ways to reach out to them proactively. It’s much more like fishing with a spear. And so, to me that’s the simple definition of account-based marketing: it’s spearfishing as opposed to net fishing. A breakout of account-based marketing Jon: My formal definition is that account-based marketing is a go-to-market strategy that will coordinate personalized marketing and sales efforts to land and expand at target accounts. Can I just explain what some of those words mean? Brian: Yeah. If you could break that out that would be great. It...
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    23 m