Trust is Human-Led & 11 Other Forrester B2B Summit Takeaways

 

Drew Neisser: Hey, it’s Drew. And I’m guessing that as a podcast listener, you will also enjoy audiobooks. Well in that case, did you know the audio version of Renegade Marketing: 12 Steps to Building Unbeatable B2B Brands, was recently ranked the number one new B2B audio book by Book Authority. Kind of cool, right? Anyway, you can find my book on Audible or your favorite audio book platform.

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Okay, let’s get on with today’s episode.

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 Neisser: Hello, Renegade Marketers! Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite the top rated podcast for B2B CMOs and other marketing-obsessed individuals.

 

Hey there, Drew Neisser. Here with another Drew on Drew episode, I’m really excited about episode 350. Holy cow. That’s like seven years worth of episodes. Anyway, the reason we have a virtual background here is I’m actually looking out over Austin, Texas after three days at the Forrester B2B summit. And I wanted to record this right away because I wanted to get fresh insights that I picked up while I could still remember them. And overall, I have to say it was really an inspiring conference, you’re going to hear me at the end say, “Yeah, I plan on being here next year.” The quality of the attendees, you can hear it in the quality of the questions, you really get to see the Forrester analysts in action and the wisdom that they’ve gained from both talking to clients and the quantitative research that they’ve done that supports their arguments. And, of course, I’m going to admit right away to confirmation bias, in that I tend to hear the things that confirm what I believe, but I am going to point out along the way, a few of the things that really either reinforced it or challenge some of the things that I’ve talked about in my book. So first, as you might expect, if you’ve listened to any Drew on Drew episodes, yes, I’m going to use the CATS framework as a way of pulling together 12 takeaways from the Forrester Summit.

 

So the first three takeaways are yes, gonna be in the courageous category. In the book, I talked about how focus is your friend and why it’s so important. But the case study than they were an award winner that blew me away at this conference was IBM. And I don’t really expect to be blown away by IBM. And here’s the story that they told, they used to have 24 can’t go to market campaigns on a global level. Going into 2022, they had a goal of a 5% growth, which is an ambitious for a accompany that is now six and a half billion. So here’s the deal, they reduced 24 campaigns to five—24 to five. Now, I know most of you are thinking you don’t have 24 campaigns, you only have one campaign, but I guarantee you have 24 things that you’re doing right now, that are probably could be reduced to a much smaller number. So first, let me give you the results. So they reduced the 24 campaigns to five big campaigns, and sales grew 12, the pipeline to close ratio improved. So what does that mean? That the quality of the pipeline, which of course people use to describe what are those opportunities that sales can close, improved as well. So again, we’re not interested in more leads, we’re interested in better opportunities, and they were able to go from 24 to five. So the question for you is, what are the things that you can reduce to help you be more effective, and I was just literally blown away when you hear that a $60 billion company grew 12%, you have to stop and pause for that. Okay, so that was sort of takeaway number one. Focus is definitely your friend and there’s a business case almost no matter how big you are, there are ways that you can focus your organization. Oh, and one last thing about that, before I forget, in a second conversation with the IBM folk, they revealed that employee satisfaction—particularly in the marketing department—employee satisfaction went up five points. Now, it’s easy to think about why, because everybody had focus, every single person in the marketing department, something like 80% of the marketing department, was focused on those five campaigns. And then finance aligned behind those five campaigns and is reporting on it. So suddenly, the five campaigns in effect became almost a way the marketing—they didn’t admit to this—but it’s almost like the company reorganized around these five, what ended up being practice areas. Okay, so focus, that was big tip number one, not a new tip. But when a big elephant can do it, I have no doubt that you can do it too.

 

Okay, takeaway number two, this is in the courageous category. George Colony kicked off the event, talking about generative AI, and he described the evolution of why this was such a significant moment, he used the metaphor of when laptops came around, suddenly, it was the operating system, Dawson, that made them usable. When the smartphone came around, it was really the apps that made them usable. And of course, ChatGPT is to generative AI the same kind of thing that’s enabling this revolution. I’m not getting to the ballpark here yet, but I will. He also defined what generative AI is. And I thought this was really important. Generative AI is when you converge a big pile of data, and create the ability to transform it into something else. So right now, these large learning models, if you will take your query and turn it into something else. Now, he was really looking to inspire the folks there to think about this not about using ChatGPT, but to think about it as a way of taking all the data that you might have, and transform it into something else and create the ability to transform it into something else. So now here’s where the courage part of it came in, he predicted that Google search would die. And that websites as we not know, it would go away. Now, this was a rather bold choice, a prediction. And it became a running inspiration of humor throughout the conference about exactly when was this going to happen. But nonetheless, I admired the courage of the statement, and then he followed it up with an example. So right now, let’s say you have an insurance policy, you might have to call your agent, or you go to your website, and you try to find your policy and you look at the policy, and then you try to find, do I have the right beneficiaries or not? And what’s the cash value of this and what will be in 10 years? Well, that data all exists, it may exist in all sorts of different places. But the world that George Colony was imagining is when you go onto Prudential, and you check on your insurance policy, there will be a chatbot and just say, “Hey, I’m going to confirm my identity. And then I’d like to talk to my insurance policy. And I’d like to ask you a few questions.” And then suddenly, “You know what, I’d like to change my beneficiaries.” So the important part of this bold prediction was not thinking about generative AI as the tool that you use to create content for your website, but bigger as a framework for rethinking about all the data that you have, and how that your organization will ultimately be able to repurpose that and make it accessible to your customers in service of your customers. That was a big theme of the conference. It was, of course, everything in service of your customers. Now, I have to say we’ve done this, with CMO Huddles, and our data, we’ve taken 200 pages of recaps—that was with the help of Noah Brier from brand.AI—where we took all that data, put it on top of ChatGPT and so now BECCA exists as a bot as a B2B CMO. And you can ask BECCA, for advice and counsel on anything B2B related. And it’s informed by 300 pages of that data. Now, I wish we had 30,000 pages of CMO Huddles data, but we will and we continue to add to it. So we’re still in this world of courageousness.

 

So takeaway number three was just a reminder of the need to cut through. One of the speakers spoke about the sea of sameness. And that’s most brands in many categories. But the metaphor that she used was colleges as it happened. She has a son named Drew, oh, convenient, I’m Drew. And she talked about how they visited 17 different schools, and 16 of them gave exactly the same tour with the same points and talked about all the things they did. And it was very, very difficult to decide. Well, in one of the cases, in this micro story, if you will, on the college tour Drew  said, “I’m a little concerned about residential life, I’ve never lived it look away from home. What’s that experience like?” And rather than answer it, the tour guide said, “Well come see me after the event.” He took the time to walk through through three different dorms to get them comfortable with experience. Of course, that’s the school that he ended up choosing. So how do you stand out in a sea of sameness? And the answer is built into this overall idea of customer centricity and how you deliver customer centricity. And I’m going to get at some of these things in the next points. Okay, so courage. We’ve covered focus is your friend, being bold, and overcoming the sea of sameness through customer centricity. Okay, so the next part, artful, CATS—courage, artful, thoughtful, and scientific.

 

So, point number three, nomenclature matters. And this is specifically for the CMOs, any of you CMOs who have performance marketing departments, Dara Treseder of Autodesk has a note for you, has advice for you. And she said, one of the first things she did when she got to Autodesk was to rename the performance marketing group. Why? Because if you have a group named performance marketing, that means that all other marketing doesn’t perform. And that’s a pretty bad implication. Now, there’s a certain irony here because Dara did Rename the group to growth marketing. And of course, I paused being the smart aleck that I am and thought, “Well, does that mean that all other marketing is not growth marketing?” But anyway, it’s a step forward, I think the insight is critical. How you name your departments—and if all marketing is in fact—in the interest of growing the organization, then we ought to think about how we name our departments. Okay, so that was point number four nomenclature, how you name your departments matters.

 

Number five, you always feel the power of storytelling in its absence. And then when you hear a really good story, point number five here is that storytelling matters. And it matters with big audiences, small audiences, and one on ones. And we all know this, but it was so great to have a reminder of some of the elements of what a good story brings to the conversation. So in one of the opening keynotes, a gentleman from Forrester Analysts shared a story. Firstly, he introduced us to Sam. Sam was a five year old boy who had a rare blood disease, who made a wish to the Make a Wish Foundation, he was a big F1 fan, he was ultimately granted that wish, and of course, the weekend that he was supposed to go to F1 it was raining like crazy for three days non stop. But anyway, it all works out in the sense that Sam gets to go to a race driver, Sebastian Vettel, who’s one of the best drivers in the world. Sebastian actually made some time and let him be in the car. It’s a great story. And it was a heartwarming story. But there was a bigger story involved in that was two parts. One, Sebastian Vettel, leaving one team to go to Ferrari. And he talked about just his personal passion for Ferrari. And this was another part of the story that the Forrester Analyst was sharing was that the Ferrari brand has done so much to build customer engagement and customer loyalty and fans, even though very few people actually buy Ferraris. But they sure are buying a lot of Ferrari gear interestingly, okay. There’s a bigger story here that it wraps up, which is that F1 as a business was not doing very well. It was starting to stall and then the pandemic hit and it tanked. And then it came back with a fury and it came back because of certain amount of customer centricity. And he tells his story, and of course, Sam stays in it. What was so powerful was, there’s the tear jerking story about Sam, there’s the business story about F1, and he brought all of those things together, and it turned out the Sam was Sam Buck who was the son of Nick Buck of Forrester analysts. So it was extremely personal. Just like the story about the college was also extremely personal. So just a reminder, find your personal stories use those. Because the great thing about the F1 story, it was a big story and a metaphor that could house a number of areas. And this came back in one of the last presentations I saw where the gentleman presenting was able to use animals as a metaphor and had a lot of fun with it. And it happened that it was his dogs at the very beginning. And he had fun with that. So again, it was personal. It had a touch a humor, and it helped as a metaphor, okay, so storytelling matters.

 

I need to take a break here. But I’m not going to because I’m going to get to number six, which is a way of rethinking. This is in the artfulness as we’re thinking about buyers. And one of the more profound things that I heard today was that buying when you’re B2B, buying when you’re the buyer is a risk to the individual, not the company. So think about this, yes, the company may end up losing share or momentum or something because they bought the wrong technology, but an individual is going to be blamed. And if the company is a little more successful, as a result of it, will that individual become a hero? Well, that kind of depends. But this really made me think about more of this concept—I’ve talked about in some writing—is the notion of speed to hero. If in fact buying is a risk to the individual, and they do make the purchase, then you have to figure out how do you help this individual who bought it look good internally. Give them the metrics, they need to defend the purchase and justify it. So buying is a risk. And we want to make it easier for this individual to share why this was not a risk, but a really smart decision and help them look good.

 

Then you get to this next area—this is sort of six and a half—which is how trust is built. And in all this conversation about AI and generative AI and how this is going to assist in so many different ways, one of the more interesting facts that is imbedded in all of this is, trust is human led. Conversations are the things that will help build relationships. And if you look at what the number one source of trust is across in any buying decision, who do I trust the most, it’s your peers. And then it’s customers of the vendors. And then it’s analysts. Now, when you get to analysts, you’re probably talking about Forrester or a Gartner. But before that, you’re talking about individuals, your peers saying it’s okay. So trust is built through humans. By the way, at the very bottom of this trust meter, I mean, like 3%, trust salespeople. So ultimately, when we look at this human thing, and we think about generative AI, one of the metaphors that was used is that in an ideal world salespeople become like Iron Man, and they’re AI enabled, so that they can build trust faster, because they know more, they have this little screen, they know more about the customer, and so forth. Okay, I think that’s enough on that. One last note, this fits in here, by the time they show up as leads in your funnel, it’s too late. And that’s such an interesting notion. And by that, it’s too late to build trust. So one thought to think about is how are you building trust? And there’s a reason that bigger brands tend to, because I’ve heard of you. Okay, so that’s one thing off the table. If I’ve never heard of you, how can I trust you? I’ve heard of you. And I know that if you’re the leader in the category, I trust you because other people have already trusted you. So there is something to be said for that. And if you’re not a leader, the question that you have to ask yourself is, how is your organization building trust with both current customers and prospective customers. And I think that’s a perfect setup to get us to the next point here.

  

Takeaway number seven, and now we’re into the thoughtful, we started with courage and moved through artful. Now we’re thoughtful, and this will shock you, because you’ve heard me talk about employees first, but you can’t have a customer centric transformation if we decide that we’re going to put all our energy in the customer before you can do that. You have to get your people and your culture aligned, and you have to get them believing in the transformation. And it’s so interesting when we go back to the IBM case, and we say, “Oh, how did they get from 24 to five? And then how did that end up improving employee satisfaction?” Well, because everybody understood what they were doing. You were on one of five teams, and for an organization with hundreds of 1000s of employees, for even the marketing department, which has hundreds of, suddenly, no, I’m on this team. And our job is to do this, the people came first. Okay, so yes, and as I recall, and I already mentioned, employee satisfaction grew in the IBM example. So we had a focused idea, which is a big change in how we’re going to market. So first people and culture before transformation, and whether we’re talking technical transformation, or customer centric transformation. Okay, so that’s employees first. That’s not a new news thing for you who have listened to the show, but one thing that I did take away of this, and I hadn’t really thought about the dimensions.

 

And so this will be tip number eight, rethinking customer value. So we’re talking about customers here. Because for most companies, if you could keep your current customers, and maybe upsell and cross sell them, there’s a really good chance you’re gonna hit your goals, period, end of story. So if in fact, customers are responsible for your growth in 2023, then you say, oh, okay, well, what does customer value look like? And here’s the interesting thing, so much of our recession conversation has been on economic value, right? Return on investment, and speed of return on investment. And even I was trying to get you to think about speed to hero, which is a little bit different, but economic value is almost where most start and at the beginning of a purchase, that is important there’s no doubt. But there’s others, there’s three others economic, functional, like what function does it serve. And that’s important, those two, economic and functional. I need in the ABM products so that I can monitor the intent data and do a better job of aligning, getting better opportunities. Again, we’re focused, and we’re doing a better job, because we know we can identify tire kickers from real opportunities. Okay, so we have economic, functional, symbolic, and experiential. Symbolic is this notion of what does it mean to be part of this, I’m thinking right away of Tableau. And Tableauians remember years ago, I had on the show Alyssa think of Tableau. And she talked about how they built this community and what it meant to be part of that community. And I think that was symbolic value of being associated with Tableau. The fourth way of getting to customer value is experiential. And this is the one I want to really emphasize and put it up on a pedestal because we’re rethinking customer value, you already have the customer. So in theory, they’re getting economic value, or they’re getting functional value. But are they getting experiential value? And this is the thing I want to think about. And even in terms of CMO Huddles, I want to go through every aspect of our experience when I get back from this conference, and look at it and make sure that we’re removing friction, and we’re adding experiential value wherever we can. And to emphasize the importance of experiential value. One of the Forrester Analysts talked about HubSpot, making their chief customer officer, their CEO. That’s an unusual and bold move. But it really says, customers are at the center of our organization so much so that the CEO who used to be responsible for that is now the CCO is now the CEO and made the notion that the customer advisory boards are called hugs. So it’s a little bit of the flavor for the experience. But so we’re just thinking about these four things, economic, functional, symbolic, and experiential. And no doubt, I’m going to have to go deeper on this another time, as we think about customers and retaining customers, and everything that we can do. And that’s probably the biggest theme of this conference and certainly apropos of 2023 is, how are you delivering value on these four dimensions? And how are you making sure that your customers understand the economic value, the functional value, that there is a symbolic value, and that there’s experiential value. Okay, I think I’ve delivered on that one.

 

So I think I’ve already talked a little bit about prospects. And first we’re gonna say that most of our growth in 2023 is going to come from current customers, okay? Or certainly keeping existing customers and then adding if you want, but now we can move on to prospects. And I’ve talked a little bit about buying is a risk to the individual, not the company. So how do we take this same customer centricity to our prospects? And that was really interesting. How do we make it easier, as Brent Adamson would say, how do we make it easier for them to buy? You hear a lot about sales enablement, or buyer enablement. And I’m gonna talk about value enablement. And here we’re thinking about a prospect. By the time they raise their hand and say, “I’m interested in your product or service. And by the way, my associates have already blessed you as well.” By the time they’ve raised their hand, I think they’re so far down the path that they may have already made the decision. But one of the things that they’re saying more and more is, serve me, help me, know me at every stage of the journey. So if I’m a CFO coming in, I know this is a cliche, but if I’m a CMO coming into your website, and I can’t find the ROI calculator, or I can’t find the speed to value documents, or the Forrester full business valuation thing, or some other way of helping me feel good about this purchase decision, and you didn’t make it easy for me to find it. In an ideal world, that person was from finance, they come back to the website, you’ve cookied them. In their landing page is all the information that they need, know me, and serve me, and help me. And this is where technology can be incredibly helpful. And this is where this vision that George Colony talked about the beginning, this is where generative AI could be transformative, in fact, and we’re already starting to see that even with conversation bots, how those can be so helpful.

 

Okay, last licks here. Scientific, okay. Yes, my man, Ben Franklin, on the cover of that chapter. So interestingly, one of the sessions that I attended today was the death of the MQL. And I’m going to put this in the overall takeaway of the wrong metrics. And so the gentleman who was running the session, asked folks who still report on MQLs to raise their hand, I’m gonna say it was at least a third and probably another half of the group was too shy, because they knew they were going to be called out on the carpet for it. But MQL is marketing qualified leads. And he made a passionate case of why this was so problematic, and why leads in itself are problematic. And he went through four of the objections like, “Oh, we can’t change or this is the way we’ve always done it. And our system doesn’t support it.” And this is interesting, because there are certain systems where every single lead that goes in is considered as a different instance. And so there’s some goofy things like three leads that come in from the same organization, suddenly, that individual, if he only closes one of them his close rate, or turns it into an opportunity, is one out of three, instead of pulling those together. There’s a lot of silliness out there in the world of MQLs. And again, you may, as a marketer decide I’m going to keep calculating them. But if it is a number that you’re reporting on to your board, you have a problem. And in fact, at the very end of this presentation, the Forrester Analysts said, MQLs equals job insecurity for the CMO. I’m pausing on that MQLs equals insecurity for the your job. And the reason is that MQLs simply do not matter. What matters is to think about how marketing can a increase the win rate, so of the number of opportunities—instead of winning one out of four—you start to win one out of three. Part of that is maybe you have fewer opportunities because they’re better qualified. Well, that’s okay. Because what matters is the wins not that you have 7x coverage on your salespeople. Number two, how can marketing affect deal size? And then number three, how can marketing impact the speed to close? We can improve the win rate because the quality of the opportunities are so good because we have so many different signals. We’ve got a buying group, they’ve got a budget, they’ve done the demo, the CFO has checked out the thing, you checked so many of the boxes, and you’re much more likely to win. Part two is deal size. If the right opportunities are coming in there, and we’re processing them in the right way, maybe we’re gonna win some more deals and marketing can have an impact on that, I’m not going to tell you how to do that right now. But lastly, marketing can definitely have an impact to speed to close by delivering the information and value that the prospect is looking for when they’re looking for it. Okay, now we can go back to another reason why MQLs are such a problematic metric. 75% of revenue growth, for most enterprise organizations, is going to come from current customers. That’s not an MQL, that’s a current customer. That has to do with retention rate, that has to do with interactions, and that has to do with brand and how marketing is helping to deliver value to the existing customers. So if the marketing person is only being measured on demand generation, we have a problem. That was a big point there. So what the conclusion of this analyst was, we need to think about marketing lift across the entire business. And here’s another way to think about it, there’s only two problems: growth, and all others. So if we say that problem number one is growth, and growth is going to come from existing customers and prospects, why are we obsessed with MQLs when we need to have metrics that express current customers and prospects? Finally, one other thought that came into this thing, stop passing leads start passing intelligence. And that notion, if we want to increase the win rate, and we want to increase the deal size, and we want to increase the speed to close, the more intelligence that marketing can deliver in that opportunity, the more likely those things will happen.

 

Okay, we’re getting to the end here, folks. Big point in this thing. And this is number 11. Too much tech. 30% of the B2B marketers surveyed by Forrester were spending 15% or more on technology, which in their minds was way too much. And the bigger question is, how much of this technology is in the service of customers? Think about that for a moment, how much of the technology that you’re buying is in the service of customers? Most of it isn’t because marketing is so focused on Demand Gen. And then we get to the specific things even in the MARtech stack, you might have three different email providers embedded in your marketing technology. Well, that’s problematic. So it’s really time to do another audit of your technology, and is it integrated? This is an interesting metaphor that Caitlin Furdue, who was a presenter on the last day, she told the story of these architects and designers who were building a wonderful new park for kids, I don’t know if this was in Austin or Boston. And they said, well, steel and steel slides, those are really durable. And she shows a picture of a kid sitting on it screaming out, because in the summer that metal got as hot as 127 degrees. Bad architecture, bad design, bad intelligence, not being aware of the customer, and the user. So if we want technology to help us grow faster, the tech needs to be aligned on the value that it is delivering for the customers all through the lifecycle, not just the purchase journey. So if we can reorient technology around the customer value, then perhaps there’s a chance that maybe, one, it will be more productive. Then think about technology as outcome focused, not what it can do, but what will be the result of this? Will customers have a better experience? Am more likely to know the prospect so they’ll have a better experience? And so we’re going to think about the audit on a much broader basis.

 

Okay, we’ve reached the end and tip number 12. There’s not enough experimentation. This came up and our presenters presentation, 85% of your budget needs to go to things that you know have been effective in the past and will continue to work. 15% of the budget gets to go into the play stack, where we’re going to make little bets that can become big pets, and one of the analysts called it have a portfolio of ideas. And then Dara said, be clear that you don’t know which of these tests is going to work, you don’t know what’s going to happen, don’t over promise them. And again, if you think about as a portfolio manager, you have 10 of these experiments, but one of them could deliver 20x, even if the other fail. That’s where your big leaps are gonna go. And if I could just say, one thing to all of this is, where are your big leaps going to come from? Is all of this little incremental stuff that you’re doing going to generate it? Or are you going to reduce, as we started with from 24 to five, where you’re just going to have a lot more impact. So on the data and in experimentation and she talked about how intuition drives idea, and data drives decisions. So if you’re going to take your portfolio of ideas, have some intuition about it, and you can source that from all sorts of places, and then find a way to get those into the market, test them, get your results, and support the winners. All right, that’s a lot. But I just wanted to say, I found the Forrester conference amazing, both in terms of reminding me of things that I knew we needed to do but giving frameworks and roadmaps to help me sort of rethink some things that I thought I already knew that how to do them better. I know that come hell or high water on May fifth to eighth 2024, I know where I want to be. It’s in Austin, Texas at the next Forrester conference. I hope you’ll be there. There was over 11 Huddlers at the conference and hopefully more will be there next year. With that, those are your 12 takeaways from the Forrester B2B Summit, I’m Drew Neisser, peace out.

 

For more interviews with innovative marketers visit renegade.com/podcasts and hit that subscribe button. Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser, hey, that’s me. This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey Laura Parkyn and our B2B podcast partner Share Your Genius. 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.

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 our B2B podcast partners Share Your Genius. 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!