Marketing is Not a Gumball Machine

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers! If this is your first time listening, welcome, and if you’re a regular listener, welcome back. Before I present this episode, I’m thrilled to announce the first-ever in-person CMO Super Huddle that we’re hosting in Palo Alto on November 8, 2024. The theme is “Daring Greatness in 2025” and we’re rocking a full slate of inspiring speakers with ample time for networking. Tickets are on sale now, so grab yours at cmohuddles.com. It’s gonna be flocking amazing!

You’re about to hear a Bonus Huddle where experts share their insights into topics of critical importance to our B2B CMO community, CMO Huddles. The expert in this particular huddle is Jon Miller, a long-time friend of the show, here to share his take on the new B2B marketing playbook. We cover a ton in this episode, from why CMOs need to refocus on strategy, to why marketing is not a gumball machine, to how AI is going to change marketing as we know it. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. You’ll be supporting our quest to be the number one B2B marketing podcast. Alright, let’s dive in.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through. Proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here’s your host and Chief Marketing Renegade, Drew Neisser.

Drew: Hello, Huddlers. Given how hard it has become for marketing leaders to drive pipeline growth, one might wonder if the old model is broken. And if it is broken, how the heck do we fix it? The answer may well come from one of the creators of the old model, Jon Miller, who was the co-founder of Marketo and Engagio, which Demandbase gobbled up. And many of you will recognize him because Jon is a longtime huddler, with us when he was CMO of Demandbase. I think Jon can take as much credit as anyone for building the modern tech stack, and now he’s eager to help marketers rip out what’s broken and replace it with a new go-to-market playbook. So with that, please welcome Jon Miller. Hello, Jon. How are you, and where are you this fine day?

Jon: I’m great. I’m working from home today in Burlingame, California.

Drew: And just before we get into any of that, you are planning another startup, right?

Jon: Yeah, I am. It’s very early. I’m still kind of in stealthy stage. But I did, you know, close my seed funding on Friday. So that was a fun little celebration.

Drew: There we go. Alright. Well, I certainly would not be one to bet against you. Really excited about this conversation, because I know you’ve invested a lot in looking at this. Now, one of the things that, having listened to and read Smart Brevity, I like to get something really valuable into the conversation right away. So let’s talk about three things marketers could do right now to fix their broken playbooks.

Jon: Sure. Well, I’ll caveat by saying, I mean, I think this is the right advice, but the first two are going to end up sounding pretty obvious, nothing new. But as we’re going to talk about, I think the reality is we’ve lost our way over some of the sort of fundamentals of marketing over the last 15 years. And so in some cases, what we need to do to fix our playbook is go back to the fundamentals. So you know, number one thing to do is recognize that you got to focus on the core of what marketing should be about, which is things like product-market fit, positioning, and reputation, because those things are going to dominate over anything you might be doing in demand.

Drew: Let’s just stop on that one for a second, because there’s so much there. And I want to think about – you’re at Demandbase after you sort of do the product-market fit, positioning, and reputation. You do that in a concentrated period of time. Are you spending time on that after that? Is it like it just sort of goes into hibernation?

Jon: Happy to dive into it, although I think you’re breaking your own rule about, you know, starting with the brevity up top.

Drew: Fine. Keep going. Thank you for keeping me on track. Okay, number two.

Jon: So number two is also, again, seems obvious, but we’ve somewhat lost our way, but it’s like always do right by the customer. You know, there’s so many short-term pressures in marketing, whether it’s MQL goals or pipeline or you name it, I think we often find ourselves doing things to make the number and not what’s right for the customer. The third one is hopefully a little bit less obvious, but also again, like should be ‘duh’ once I say it, which is, you got to be thinking much more deeply than you probably are about how AI is going to change your marketing. You know that is probably the biggest change that’s going to happen to marketing in our lifetimes, and we need to be prepared.

Drew: Now I can go back. Thank you for keeping us on track. So, alright. So the theory is, we’re not spending enough time aligning the big things, positioning, go-to-market fit, reputation, those things, and we just get on to execution and, you know, so forth. I think that’s the problem. So talk a little bit about that and how it manifests itself, in terms of where CMOs are spending their time. And how do we correct that?

Jon: I see it all the time. I mean, like, yeah, where business results aren’t good for whatever reason, right? And then we all go through these, you know, exercises of trying to figure out, like, well, what’s wrong, you know, or even worse, like, who are we going to blame? What are we going to blame? And the reality is, you know, these are very complex dynamic systems, like pipeline generation, revenue stream is a very complex dynamic system. If something’s not working, it’s rarely a simple narrative. It’s rarely, “Oh, this one thing is broken, and if I just fix that, everything will be good.” I think there’s this tendency that we try to treat the symptoms and not the root causes of what’s going on. And so, yeah, we miss pipeline. So then everybody gets dragged down in the tactics of marketing, right? And we start scrutinizing cost per lead, or squabbling over what’s marketing versus sales-sourced pipeline, or, gosh, even worse, like start, you know, copy editing headlines and press releases, and that’s treating symptoms, not the problem, right? The problem? Usually, if you’re not making your revenue numbers, your pipeline numbers, comes down to fundamentals of the business, like product-market fit, like your core positioning and your core reputation. You know, back to the question you asked me before, like, don’t you just do that when you join and then you’re done? And like, it doesn’t work that way. First of all, you know, there are a lot of businesses that you know, CMOs are joining that may not have perfect product-market fit, even companies that do have product-market fit that’s constantly changing. Just think of a company like Drift that was like the hottest thing ever for a while, and then some things evolved and they fell out of product-market fit. You got to stay on top of that. Your competitors are constantly moving and changing, so your positioning, you know, I don’t think can always be the same, you know, and then reputation, as we’ll talk about is, I think, just a better name for brand. What people think about you and how they feel about your company, is something that is never a once and done, you know, exercise.

Drew: Right. In theory, you’re constantly putting sort of deposits in the goodwill bank of your reputation, right?

Jon: Right. If you don’t have the right product-market fit, if your positioning isn’t in the right place, or your reputation is wrong, no marketing team, no matter how heroic you are, are gonna deliver the results the business is looking for. The flip side is true also, like if you’ve got those things nailed, then even an average marketing team is gonna look like heroes.

Drew: Seems like we should spend a lot of time on product-market fit and positioning.

Jon: And reputation. 

Drew: And reputation. So in thinking about the broken part is you’re not spending enough time on it. You’re not getting those things right, and you’re not adjusting to changes in the marketplace quick enough, right? Is that sort of the problem? So is it as simple as spending time on it, or is there something else involved here in your mind, in terms of thinking about product-market fit or thinking about positioning?

Jon: Well, we have to recognize that these are not things that are solely in the scope of a traditional CMO. There’s obviously, there’s been a lot of talk out there about the CMO role needing to move away from being chief marketing officer to the chief market officer, because otherwise, CMOs are the only executive function that’s named after a process as opposed to more of an outcome. I think if you sort of whether you change your title or not thinking about that part of your job is influencing the rest of the leadership team around these more fundamental factors is, I think, a pretty important framing for CMOs. And we’ll talk more about like it’s not so easy.

Drew: That’s the first thing I was thinking about. Is the numbers aren’t – because we hear this in huddles all the time. We didn’t hit our numbers. The CEO was in Salesforce and Marketo, looking at the response rates to things, or the PE firm was in, you know, looking at the Google AdWords to try to figure out what was wrong there. And I’m just – obviously the CMO wants to push them back out of there, out of the weeds, and thinking about the bigger picture. But easier said than done.

Jon: I wish I had more advice besides, yeah, it’s hard. Arguably the CMOs who were sort of the analytical ones, who were really good at, you know, measuring cost per MQL and optimizing business processes. Arguably, those are the CMOs that sort of nailed it over the last 15 years. And I would say the CMOs who are the most effective at collaborating with their peers and kind of helping to lead these dialogs around these sort of business fundamentals will be the ones that are most successful in the next 15 years.

Drew: Okay, so in your list of things that folks could do, it was sort of brand and demand and getting to be more customer-centric, I think was sort of.

Jon: Do right by the customer.

Drew: Do right by the customer. Okay, and so is there more? Anything more we should talk about there? What does that mean? What does that look like?

Jon: So when I was thinking about trying to take everything I wanted to talk about and synthesizing it down, I looked back at the post I wrote about my 2024 predictions about how marketing is going to change. And I wrote about things like the need for sort of better content and more quality email, less quantity, and changes in how the SDR function. And what I realized is all that stuff comes down to doing right by the customer and remembering that at the end of the day, we are trying to influence humans, actual people, not personas, not MQLs, not accounts, but actual people. Velocity Partners is an agency I work with. When they talk about when we get addicted to the sugar rush of MQLs, is when we sort of go off track again. I think focusing on doing what’s right for the buyer, I really do believe, is easy to say, maybe not so easy to do, but is what’s going to pay off in the long run.

Drew: And it’s funny, because doing right by the buyer immediately sends us one place. Doing right by the customer, it makes me think about CX and customer success and all of that.

Jon: Yeah, I’m not talking about the Ritz Carlton or the like, always give the customer what they want. I’m talking about resist the temptation to have AI create a bunch of mediocre content, or to send more emails because you’re low on your MQL leads, or gating content that shouldn’t be gated just because you’re trying to hit some metric, or asking people for demos when they’re not even in the market. Those are all bad buyer experiences. And again, if you always think, “Is this a good buyer experience?” that’s probably going to pay off.

Drew: So simple litmus test: good buyer experience stays, bad buyer experience goes. Okay. There are a lot of ways of thinking about that because if you really do know the customer, I like to talk about this notion of speed to hero. If you know what will make them look good and what they need to sell internally and what they need to succeed, or as some say, “the jobs to be done,” you can make those and present those at the right time during their process, not necessarily day one. “Hey, want a demo?” So the last one, AI, which could take up the rest of the time. But let’s go talk about why this is the biggest change in our lifetime.

Jon: One of my predictions I made for the year, which I still think is true, is that, in general, we are overestimating and over-hyping the impact AI is going to have in the short term, but then we’re underestimating the long term. So in the short term, it’s all about Gen AI, and we’ve all got excited about creating images and blog posts and all that kind of stuff. The advice I have on the short term is there’s this thing called the jagged frontier, which you can research, which is basically saying that what the models are capable of is constantly moving. Even with the release of GPT-4 two weeks ago, all of a sudden what they can do well or not do well has changed. And I think it’s really important that every CMO is making sure their team is using these tools not to just generate content, but using them to help them and learning where that jagged frontier is, and learning about modern prompting techniques like end-shot prompts and chain of thought prompting. And if you don’t know what those two terms mean, go Google them, because they’re really important in sort of the near-term world of AI.

But my main point here is that there’s a much bigger change that’s coming our way, and that’s sort of what I call as we transition from Gen AI to synth AI. Instead of generating, we’re synthesizing that. We had a big splash of that, what was it, just about a week ago or so, I guess, when Google sort of announced that they’re releasing AI summaries for a bunch of web searches. The logical implication of this is we’re going to see dramatic, it’s what they call zero-click search where people, we’re going to see just dramatic drops in traffic to our websites from search, because people are getting their summaries, their answers on the site, as opposed to clicking through. I think search is actually just the beginning. What happens when we log into our email client, and instead of seeing all of our emails, instead we’re getting summaries of what we need to know about from our emails and the AI is sort of just prompting us on the stuff that we need to know about? When that starts happening, drops in web traffic are going to look like a drop in the bucket compared to drops in email open rates and click rates and things like that.

So we’ve got to be thinking about these things coming. And what does it mean? So one of the things I think it means is pretty dramatic changes in how we think about content and marketing. Chris Penn has, I think, a great line, which is, you need to focus on what machines can’t summarize, which is experiences like the actual and what gets into the feeling that people have which ties back to the brand. Like you want to visit Disneyland, you don’t want to read a summary about a trip to Disneyland, and then the content you create has to be so relevant that an AI summary can’t ignore it. And that’s going to get into some topics we’ll talk about, like creating our own original research and data, and building audiences and experiences and things like that. And last but not least, near and dear to my heart is this is going to create a whole new set of platforms and technologies that we need to be thinking about.

Drew: I mean, I think there’s God, I’m starting at the end, but there’s so many thoughts that I want to sort of put punctuation points on. One is more and more talk about it’s the applications that sit on top of the LLMs that are going to be the big winners here. That’s part one. I think I want to go back real quick to yes, CMOs need to get their team to be using these tools. My problem is that the conversations that I keep having are it feels like the imagination is limited by the understanding of what these things can do. And the reality is, the place to start is to ask the question, “I’m thinking about doing this. How do I do it?” Because what I see is way too much time on content, images, and words, and not enough time on – you talked about doing right by the buyer. There’s a million things that these LLMs could do to build tools that you never could have afforded before that would enable the journey. Because you could do all that analysis and say, what are the gaps? What don’t they know? And then you could develop a tool for them to do it. That’s not where the time is going to this, Jon, right now it’s going to content, because that’s low-hanging fruit.

Jon: You gotta use it and learn what it does well and what it doesn’t learn well and move beyond the sort of that basic use case. Absolutely.

Drew: Love the comment about experiences. Love that. I write these Saturday posts. Several of them have gone viral. I do not let machines touch those posts.

Jon: Except the images. 

Drew: Except for the images. Each of the images are created that way. But by contrast, it’s also because I couldn’t do penguins. It’s important to me that it has flaws. It’s important to me that people take challenges with the words and you know. And so I think that there is a counter-trend here, that human-made will matter and human experiences will matter. But no doubt, all of this is going to change everything.

Drew: Alright, one of the quotes that caught my eye, “Marketing is not a gumball machine.” Can you talk about this issue and why demand creation as a mindset is so problematic?

Jon: First off, I’ll say, every time I put that in a LinkedIn post, the post goes viral. There’s something about that phrase and LinkedIn’s algorithm, it just likes to show it. But the idea is, I mean, I think as marketers, we—I know I’ll take some blame for this part of the old Marketo playbook—I think we sort of almost taught CFOs that marketing is a gumball machine. You give me this much budget, I will generate this many leads, and it’ll be this much pipeline. And the reality is, marketing doesn’t work that way. And maybe it worked that way a little bit 15 years ago, but it certainly doesn’t today. It’s, again back, as I said earlier, a much more complex, dynamic system. I think the biggest problem, and I know we’re going to talk about brand some more, that gumball machine mindset, I think, caused us to kind of over-rotate into marketing that is highly measurable and focused on trying to kind of capture the existing demand and under-invested in marketing that is about building brand and awareness for future demand, if you will. As a result, you know, for the last 15 years, our budgets have probably over-indexed on this demand gen, demand creation side. That’s back to one of my fundamentals of the business: when your reputation isn’t where it needs to be, demand isn’t going to perform, right? So I want to really hit that point home. Like, when I’m talking about brand, I am not talking about your colors or your logo, or your website design. So many CMOs, right? They join a new company, and the first thing they do is make a new website, right? But brand is, what do people think and feel about you when you’re not in the room? And that is a much more subtle, nuanced thing, that, frankly, I think, if you spent your time and energy on that and didn’t touch the website, to the extent that unless the website clearly is misaligned with the feeling, you might be in better shape. But we’re talking about emotions, not logic. We’re talking about the reptilian brain. We’re starting to see some themes that are connecting here, right? We need to do right by the buyer. We need to create experiences that can’t be summarized. We need to create things that are so valuable, they’re going to be used, kind of no matter what. This is about communities and audiences. It’s about relationships and all these so they sort of all connect together, but, again, I think the highest point is it starts with marketing’s not a gumball machine. We need to make these investments, and we need to do things that aren’t going to directly tie into look, I generated this many MQLs.

Drew: 95-5 rule, is it a myth?

Jon: Yeah, you’ll notice I didn’t say those words even as I was talking about marketing to people who are in market and not in market. First of all, I’m a big fan of what I’m gonna call the 95-5 heuristic, which is, we need to recognize that the reality is, most of our target market is not in market looking to buy our stuff today. Let’s just say it’s 95%. Most of your demand gen is everybody fighting over that same 5% and the reality is, we should be thinking a lot more about, how are we creating emotional connections to all those people who aren’t in market? So you know, the 95-5 rule, I think, is absolutely a true heuristic. Most people aren’t in market. The rule that it’s always 95-5 is clearly wrong, and frankly, it’s based upon not even like a study or research. It’s based on literally just some basic math that says, if your market purchases once every five years, then any year, only 20% are in market, which means in any quarter, only 5% are in market, if you happen to have quarter-long sales cycles, right? So let’s embrace the “Hey, most of these people aren’t in market,” and that means it has profound implications for our marketing. And maybe just not worry so much about the fact that it’s exactly 95 and 5.

Drew: It’s a notion directionally accurate, but it could be 70-30, it could be 50-50, you don’t know. It depends on your category, and you need to understand that.

Jon: By the way, it might be 99-1, which is probably way more likely than 50-50.

Drew: Interesting. 99-1 at any given time. Wow.

Jon: How many people are in market right now today to replace their ERP system?

Drew: Wow, less than 1%. So yeah, you better have upsell opportunities for those folks and have a strong brand that you can keep them.

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Drew: So there are some things in your notes and lists of like rethinking email and how we can personalize at scale and nurture via educational concept so talk a little bit about that and what’s going on in your mind.

Jon: Yeah, let’s talk about, I think marketing emails separate from sales emails, because I think they are kind of distinct. And I guess the first thing I want to say is, I don’t think email is going away, despite what I said earlier around email AI summaries and all that kind of thing. I mean, the reality is, I think we’ve been using email as a marketing tool for over 40 years, and it feels like people have been predicting its death for like half the time. Yet email hasn’t gone away. It’s resilient, right? And it’s resilient for a couple of reasons. Actually, buyers say that they actually like receiving offers over email, if the offers are relevant and valuable. And then for marketers, email has quote-unquote features that are actually important. They aren’t there in text messaging and Slack and other things like clickable links, URLs that have UTM parameters, the ability to reply, the ability to have attachments and so on. So the ability to have a brand impression are all, you know, I think parts of where email can be, but we’ve got to recognize as a rule of thumb, marketers and salespeople will use any tactic so much to the point of abuse, right? You know, and where it starts to become less valuable. And emails certainly suffered from that. I mean, buyers are certainly complaining that there are too many emails and too much junk, and the good stuff gets lost, and so on and so forth. So, you know, ultimately, where this needs to go, especially in a world where the AI is going to be summarizing emails is, how do we, frankly, create emails that aren’t going to get summarized, that are more engaging, more than the email itself. That’s the underlying value of the content. But even in the email itself, I think there is value in personalization. 

What we have to recognize, though, is, I don’t think any marketers today are ready to trust the AI to go write 10,000 emails for 10,000 different customers without some level of review, and like you can’t review 10,000 emails. So there are some interesting, I just think, process and technical challenges on really scaling personalized email for marketing. But the other thing I think we’re gonna see for email, which starts to maybe get into some of the other things that we can do, besides just the personalization at scale: one, I’ve always been a big fan of the human touch in email, where the emails actually come from real people, ideally, people that they know, right. That’s going to be more effective, less likely to get summarized. And then think about how your emails can become experiences, telling stories, having a visual identity, having a creative value that sort of speaks to the reptilian brain, like all these things that are good old-fashioned Mad Men marketing, but are gonna actually not get summarized and make people sort of want and value the emails. So email is not going away, but it’s definitely going to change.

Drew: Right. So I have one sort of pull quote for the “if it’s relevant, it’s not spam.” And I think that in sort of in summarizing, as you were doing, and I’m thinking in back the days when you know, talking about going back to original one, I worked at J. Walter Thompson, it’s like every great ad has surprise, emotion, and relevance and if you have all three of those things you were talking about, the surprises, the creative things, and the relevance and some kind of interesting experience. So once again, our creativity is going to be tested as marketers. Wouldn’t that be nice?

So I hear from a lot of CMOs, in fact, a few in the huddles committee who’ve said, “You know what, our SDRs weren’t performing. I killed the program.” So I’m curious if you think automation and AI could be the solution here.

Jon: I mean, there’s no doubt we’re seeing declines in SDR productivity for all the reasons we expect. Right? I mean, buyers don’t want SDRs emailing them, especially when they’re not in market with like, “Hey, do you want to take a demo?” So I think in the near term, we are—it’s just inevitable. We’re gonna see a lot more use of automation in the SDRs, because it’s exactly the symptom of what I just said. People are gonna abuse any tactic, right? So if I have declining response rates from my SDR emails, but I’ve noticed personalization can help, then sure. Why wouldn’t I throw a robot at kind of scaling up, you know, the research, the person, you know, the customization, the personalization. So we’re gonna absolutely see like a new role basically emerge. You know, the example I was thinking about is when the spinning jenny came out, we went from a world where we had humans that were just weaving cloth by hand to where one human could manage eight machines, right? That was a different skill set. It required 1/8 the number of workers. We’re going to see that same thing happen in the world of SDRs, where, like one human is sending out the quantity of emails of 10 SDRs, and at the same time, I think another thing that we’ll see there’s some fraction of SDR time that gets spent on marketing communications, like, if you’re doing a dinner and you’re trying to invite people to a dinner, like a lot of times, marketers will have the SDRs do the invitations that, frankly, AI can deliver that level of personalization, you know, at scale, but, but as I said, I think this is all kind of near term, just kind of just driving more content, more emails, that aren’t necessarily solving the fundamental problem. I think what’s really going to happen goes back to what we’ve been talking about. If we can build our brand and our reputation, we can have ways for buyers to learn and educate themselves and basically raise their hand when they are ready. That’s going to be the most effective. It’s the best buyer experience. It’s the most aligned to doing what’s right for them. And in that world, SDRs do more inbound. Again, we need fewer of them, but they’re doing more inbound. They’re doing some signal-based prospecting to just reach out to those people right at that magic moment when they’re ready to be the hand raiser. We’ll probably see phone come back into more usage, you know, as a way to have human connection. So like email, dramatic change coming.

Drew: You’ve used the term emotional connection several times, and it’s a thread, because we want to have a better create a buyer experience, more connection to that buyer. But I don’t hear in the C-suite, the CMO saying to the CEO and the CFO, “Well, we’re doing a great job building an emotional connection with our buyer.” In fact, it’s hard for me to imagine that conversation, even though that’s exactly what we’re prescribing that they do. What are the words that they could use? Because you get to this point where, what are you talking about, emotional connection, they’re buying a piece of software to help their company grow their business from here to there. What’s emotional about that?

Jon: I mean, because we’re selling to humans B2B, decisions are complex by nature, and as humans, we use what are known as heuristics to simplify complex decision-making, right? We evolved this way, right? I mean heuristic of “see a lion and run,” it’s wired using heuristics, is wired into our DNA. There’s a ton of research that has gone into the fact that, basically, emotions dominate heuristic development. So all that’s a bunch of fancy psycho-speak to basically just explain that when we think we’re doing a rational B2B purchasing decision, the reality is, nine times out of 10 we’ve probably emotionally already decided the answer, and much of the rational decision process, whether we are conscious of it or not, is back-justifying that original emotional decision. I bet everybody’s listening like, “Well, I’m not that way,” or “My buyers don’t act that way.” And yet, there’s just a ton of neuropsychology research that basically says this is actually happening. Again, I really do believe this matters. And as we sort of talked about, it’s how well can you as a marketing executive kind of convince the CEO that this matters, right?

Drew: Probably have to help them, walk them through personal buying decisions, whether it was a car or whatever some things, so they can realize that, “Oh, yeah, oh wait, I am subject, I am human, and I am emotionally driven on so many things, even big purchases.”

Jon: I think that can help. And I think framing the discussion can really help, whether it’s as I said, like, don’t talk about brand, right? Talk about reputation, or, even better, in some cases, talk about competitive positioning. Your competitive positioning is how do your buyers feel about you and how do they feel about the competition? Right? That’s a conversation the CEO probably wants to engage in, and that leads you into these other discussions around, what is the emotional connection? And because you’re using the word, how do they feel? Not, how do they think?

Drew: It is a complex thing. Because I do think that sometimes you need to put the rational vocabulary in there. I’m thinking of a brand like Wasabi, where you know their initial positioning was six times faster and 80% cheaper than Amazon. Very good, rational, but their name was Wasabi, and they promised this thing called hot cloud storage. So they had this sort of funky brand thing going on that surrounded this very rational thing, and they brought both. It feels like we don’t live in a world where you can get away with simply, we know that just doing, you know, Pepsi and Coca-Cola advertising would not get the job done. Or do we?

Jon: It’s product-market fit, it’s positioning, and its reputation. So, like, what I basically heard you say about Wasabi, is they got the positioning right too. And I think that that really matters.

Drew: One of the things that we’ve talked a lot about in huddles over time is product-led growth being able to create a self-service buying experience. And we know that that’s hard for a lot of companies, particularly enterprises, long sales cycles and so forth, but it is on your playbook of a new way approaching so what? What are we talking about here in terms of creating a more self-service buying experience?

Jon: I think the key to recognize is that, like, this is not just for product-led growth companies. This is the right buyer experience. Gartner reports, 75% of B2B buyers want to be able to buy without interacting with a salesperson, and we’re seeing more and more millennial and Gen Z buyers. So that means it’s probably just accelerating. I think what you got to do is like, how can you create the content and the tools that let buyers, enable buyers to make informed decisions independently, two places where that tends to be the hardest is transparent pricing and personalized product experiences.

Drew: It’s funny because you and I were talking about this 15 years ago when you were getting Marketo off the ground, it was the same thing.

Jon: Yeah and it’s hard because of all the reasons that the short-termism wins, right? I have MQL goals, you know, I need to gate my product demos. But I think if you think hard enough about it, you can find some answers so and. As an example, when I was CMO at Demandbase, well, first of all, we invested in a lot of non-gated Product Tours, because I think that was important. More interestingly, I really wanted to publish pricing, and we actually interviewed a bunch of our buyers. And what we learned was, when they want pricing information, they don’t want an exact quote, they want to know what ballpark am I talking about here, like I’m putting together my budget for next year. How much do I need to put in the line item? And they want those kinds of answers without talking to somebody. So what we did is we put together a pricing calculator, which is like a little wizard. It went through and asked them six or seven questions around their needs and the requirements, and it basically said, based on what you’re saying, it’s probably in this ballpark, and nine times out of 10, that’s what they needed. So the point is, I think you can figure out ways to enable buyers with the information you want and give them the right buying experience without kind of, necessarily, quote, unquote, screwing everything up.

Drew: Just to circle back to something we were talking about earlier today, if you needed to create a wizard, you would go on to ChatGPT and say, I want to create a pricing wizard. Along this kind of line, tell me what the steps are to do it. Then you could probably get it to program and do it and take you about 1/10 of the time. Those are things that you couldn’t have done before. Right before you’d have to hire a programmer, you’d have to set up the database, all those things. That’s a big change that we’re looking at.

Okay, time for the hardest part. I think in all of this about metrics, you banish MQLs in favor of brand engagement, retention, expansion, and what you call a team-based pipeline. We’ve got PE and VC operators here with us right now. Sell them on this.

Jon: I mean, it’s a lot of some of the things that we have talked about in terms of positioning things appropriately. So, first off, wherever possible, if you can actually take some of these quote, unquote softer metrics like engagement and show actual lift, that makes it a lot more quantitative. There’s some research that show that people are 40% more likely to visit a website if they’ve seen display ads from that advertiser. So if you can do test and control, for example, some people see certain brand impressions or certain things, other ones don’t, and then show relative changes in pipeline or even, or engagement or even pipeline, that tends to be pretty rigorous, so I’m gonna talk about the team-based pipeline concept. Way too much time and energy gets spent on trying to attribute this is a marketing source, or this is a sales-sourced deal. And the reality is that’s almost always, I think, a false narrative. Every marketer I know has taken some deal that sales said this is sales-sourced and gone and like said, “Well, look at all the marketing touches that kind of happened along the way.” And the flip side is true also, like marketing claims credit for some opportunity sourced from a trade show, but it was a salesperson who was actually speaking to that person at the event, perhaps not even in the booth. And even then, that’s the stuff that we can track. What about all the dark touches, like word of mouth, you know, that we can’t track or the influence of our analyst and AR investments, or, God forbid, everything we talked about brand and reputation. You know, word of mouth, like, the reality is the reason a deal is a deal is very complicated, and trying to attribute it down to, well, it was this sales touch, or it was this marketing touch is never going to give you correct answers. So if you can accept that it’s never right, then you can also then accept the fact that if you try to assign credit, you’re actually hurting the collaboration that you want between sales and marketing, and you’re encouraging finger-pointing. So that’s why I think the right answer is to have everybody focus on the shared metrics, which is usually the total pipeline that is created. Was enough pipeline created to meet our collective goals, and secondarily, then revenue? Did we create enough revenue? Now this is not to say you don’t measure individual performance. Let’s use a sports analogy, right? What we care about is, did the team score enough points to win? There’s one scoreboard, not two scoreboards. That doesn’t mean the coach isn’t filming the players and running game tape and doing individual coaching to improve individual performance. It doesn’t mean that there’s not, you know, to go to football an offensive coordinator and a defensive coordinator who’s individually trying to optimize the performance of these individual teams, but it does mean there’s still one shared metric and goal, and people pay, get paid or not paid on the shared team performance.

Now, how do you convince a PE firm to kind of embrace this stuff? These are real issues. I mean, part of the reason I spend as much time talking about this stuff as I do, because I’m trying to help communicate a change and a new movement to give air cover to other CMOs who are talking about it. But it’s not going to be just me. It’s going to be all of us as CMOs repeating this drum over and over until effectively, kind of we get we get heard. That’s going to require, as I said earlier, CMOs spending more time building relationships with their peers and their boards, and, frankly, marketing, their marketing, helping these other executives understand the new buying dynamics, and then maybe engaging them in a constructive conversation, saying, “Okay, if we can all agree this is the way buyers buy. And we know it’s complex, and we know all these things, factors, what metrics should we be tracking?” And bring them into the conversation. And you’ll probably end up in a better place.

Drew: I wonder how many folks that are listening right now are ready to banish MQLs and banish marketing source opportunities, and I do think that it is problematic. I’ve written about it. I write about it. I’m with you. I’m on this because it’s not a winning formula to focus on sourcing and so forth. The key in my mind, on this one, is that you’ve got to have short-term and long-term metrics. And you know, pipeline and revenue are lagging metrics. That’s the problem, right? So, as you described it, is the scoreboard at the end of the game. It is not how you got there, and it is not predictive of the next one. So it is a problem. Why you need all these other things of brand or reputation, engagement, retention, expansion, all those other things.

Drew: Okay, talk about a new playbook with new tools. What do you have in mind?

Jon: Well, certainly something I’ve been thinking about for a while now. I mean, what I know is the traditional marketing automation platforms were built for the old playbook. I mean, Marketo was built to generate MQLs for net new business pipeline, single-touch attribution. I mean, everything we just sort of said is sort of old, right? I think we’re gonna need a new generation of AI-powered B2B marketing platforms, and these are going to be different, right? I mean, think about like, if you’re trying to do a dinner as a marketer, right in the in the current tools, what do you do? You go in and you start dragging filters, or your MOPs person starts dragging filters. Like, I need people whose title contains this and who live in one of these six different places and have not been emailed this number time, blah, blah, blah, right? But why can’t AI do that? Right? If AI can generate content, it can also generate lists for our programs. You think about traditional marketing automation. It’s very static. It’s like a nurture: send email one, wait a week. Send email two, wait a week. Send Email three but that’s not how buyers buy, right. Buyers are moving in and out of different stages of their journey and engaging different content and looking at different things. And not just that person, it’s people from their company and their buying group, different things. Instead, we should move to a model where, oh, hey, I’ve got Drew. How often should I speak to Drew and what should I say? That’s a much smarter, more dynamic journey than the static flows of existing platforms today. So this is stuff I’m excited about, kind of like how marketing tech is going to evolve, not just for using AI, but really AI to embrace, sort of the new buyer journey and that kind of thing.

Drew: And ultimately, will help the buyer, because they’ll have a better experience. They’ll be able to get to it. It’s so funny, so much of the research that I remember Brent Adamson had talked about is the buying experience is so painful. By the end of it, they hate you, even though they bought you. And so you really, if it’s a better buying experience in theory because it was dynamic, not static. In theory, they’ll start strong too.

Okay, let’s wrap up. Please provide two do’s and one don’t when it comes to rethinking your marketing playbook in 2024 and 2025.

Jon: Yeah, I think just summarizing the themes we talked about, you know, don’t let short-termism win. Do as we talked about, focus on the fundamentals, like product-market fit, positioning, reputation, doing right by the customer, and then do spend time and energy as a CMO to be building credibility and relationships with your peers and boards so that they understand the new marketing and how the metrics are going to be different.

Drew: Awesome. Well. Jon Miller, thank you very much. How can listeners keep up with you and the progress on the new company?

Jon: Well, as I said, we’re still stealth. You’re gonna have to kind of stay tuned for about probably another year or so on the new company. But follow me on LinkedIn. I’m definitely talking about all this kind of stuff and dropping clues about what I’m up to along the way.

Drew: I appreciate it. Well, thank you so much, and thank you all for staying with us. 

If you’re a B2B CMO and you want to hear more conversations like this one, find out if you qualify to join our community of sharing, caring, and daring CMOs at CMOhuddles.com.

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that’s me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I’m your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!