Master B2B Buyer Mayhem

 

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers. If this is your first time, welcome, and if you’re a regular listener, welcome back. You’re about to listen to a bonus huddle where experts share their insights into topics of critical importance to our flocking awesome community. CMO Huddles’ Dave Frankland, Forrester’s VP of Research Director, joins us to share how you can master buyer mayhem, the theme of this year’s Forrester B2B Summit in Phoenix from March 31 to April 3. I’m going to be there. I’m super excited. We’re also excited to share a special discount code for our community. If you need one of those, just ping me. 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. All right, 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. I’m excited to introduce you to Dave Frankland, Forrester’s VP, Research Director, who is joining us today to provide a sneak peek at Forrester’s 2025 B2B Summit. The theme of the summit is Mastering Buyer Mayhem, a concept of deep interest to the CMO Huddles community. We are delighted to note that Huddlers will receive a 10% discount on the event, and we will include a code in chat for you all attending here, and if you are listening to this later on, you’ll just have to hit us up for that. All right. With that, hello, Dave. How are you and where are you this fine day?

Dave: I am in New York City, where it’s not a fine day, but good to see you.

Drew: Well, we are in the same spot, and in fact, yeah, it’s kind of a second day of drizzly, but it’s ridiculously warm. So anyway, all right, one of the things we do around here is ask this question to every guest, which is in case our audience has to leave early, or we need to convince them to stay: Can you provide three things that marketers misunderstand about B2B buyers right now?

Dave: Sure, and I’m glad you gave me a heads up on this. Otherwise, I’d be scrambling. So what I would say real quick, I know we’ll spend some time talking about buying groups, and I know that’s not a brand new concept, but the mistake or misunderstanding that I would say is that even firms that have made a shift to buying groups, many of them are not doing it right. Most are looking at it far too simplistically. Two, even more succinct and somewhat provocative, is that even your newest customers are unhappy with you. Most firms, despite all of the hype, are underestimating the role of Gen AI in the buying and relationship process.

Drew: Oh gosh, those are all so meaty. Let’s go through them one at a time. All right, so I didn’t even have to talk about these. Now we got to talk about that. So buying groups. Where are you? Now, in terms of size of buyer groups, I keep hearing numbers between 10 and 15, and I’m sure it depends on the industry and so forth, but what is it that marketers are not doing right when it comes to buyers groups?

Dave: So, to answer both of those questions – really quickly as it relates to buying groups, I mean, we’ve been talking about the kind of death of the MQL and moving to buying groups for quite a long time. Not claiming this is a new conversation or topic. Specifics on our 2014 buyers journey data, which is a survey we do with about 18,000 respondents who have made a major purchasing decision in the previous 12 months. To answer your question on size, I’m going to answer this in two ways. The average was 13 people internally within organizations. One of the things that we called out this year is the greater role of external influencers – nine external influences on those purchases too. That can be ecosystem partners, personal contacts that you have in the industry, peers, folks you’ve worked with before, as well as things like review sites, industry experts, that type of thing as external.

So 22 people then by the time you add that up – that’s a lot of conversations or research. It’s a lot of people to reach and engage. So knowing that we have 22 people, what is it that we’re not doing right? Two things: One is not recognizing the scale and size of that, still thinking of the quote-unquote “lead” as a person rather than the group. The other side of this is the changing buyer. We identified this, we called this out last year, and we’ve seen the trend continue, for obvious reasons, but younger buyers are taking a more front seat in that purchase. Those folks are often more networked, more tech-savvy, more willing to engage in AI-assisted buying. They appear to be more heavily influenced by their personal buying experiences. We want the IT to be as easy as Amazon or Apple or whomever your example is. If they can do it, why can’t you? As well as the peers partners, more likely to bring in bots. So we’re talking about 22 people – add a few chairs there around the table for bots, both on the buying side and the selling side.

The other major thing is the sheer complexity – thinking of it way too simplistically, still either as a lead or a small group, identifying the two or three, saying who’s the economic buyer, who’s the user, and there’s our group, versus thinking about this way bigger than that. And then there’s the desire for autonomy. You want to call it self-serve, the desire for control within these buying groups. Our numbers bear out – 70% of buyers said they made their initial purchase directly through a provider. Less than half of those were placed with a provider’s enterprise account. So doing that on websites, in marketplaces, through an existing product if it’s an upsell – it just adds to that complexity. We’re not always in the conversation as early as we’d like to be. We’re certainly not in control of that, which we’ve known for a while. But it’s just accelerating and getting increasingly complex.

Drew: I want to stay on this because, first of all, that was a lot to unpack. Recognizing that we have a new buyer group, that they’re younger, they’re digitally savvy, they’re different, and there are a lot of them. What does this mean? I know a lot of marketers are spending dollars working with companies that are helping them build out the buyer groups with that data set, and then trying to do surround sound against the entire group, if they know, in fact, they’re in the market. But what is the playbook for dealing with this? I mean large group inside, lots of influencers outside, and then this desire for self-serve.

Dave: We talk about it as a revenue process transformation initiative. This is not a flip the switch and this is just going to happen overnight. This is a transformation. It requires a lot of work, a lot of investment, a lot of people coming together internally. So last year at Summit, we actually rolled out what we call the revenue process transformation model. Essentially what we did was we looked at three existing models. We had the revenue waterfall, which is the marketing side of things. We have a buyer-aligned sales process, which was how our B2B sales team research team recommends companies go to market. And then we have the post-sale customer lifecycle for customer success, customer marketing, customer experience, all thinking about the post-sale element.

So what we did was we both brought those together, and we flipped it and looked underneath and said, “How do you knit these?” So we have both the customer lens and the company lens, thinking about those things and how they align. Then you have to change the focus of what you do and the vision for what you’re trying to do. In order to do all of that, you’ve got to change the work you do, the workflows, the processes, how you capture things, thinking about opportunities and signals. And that’s more than just a change of language. It’s a lot of stuff to do, and then it’s a change of culture. The biggest thing we talk about within that is switching from “how do we target a buyer” to “how do we help your buyer buy?” Again, it can sound trite and overly simplistic, but there’s a crazy amount of research and work with frameworks and models that sit behind that to help companies do it.

Drew: Before we sort of get off this one, this thing about self-serve – I mean, a lot of PLG, I guess you could say has been self-serve for a long time. We’re used to buying things self-serve on an individual basis. And as you pointed out, younger folks are doing that. When we’re dealing with a complex enterprise sale, what does self-serve mean in that scenario? Because at some point in time, they’re going to want to talk to, as you and I talked about, a product expert, they’re going to want to talk to somebody. So it’s not like I’m going to spend $100,000 without talking to a human.

Dave: Yeah, we do see people spending that sort of money. As I say, sort of the – those 70% of buyers said they made an initial purchase directly through the provider, but less than half replaced it with the provider’s enterprise rep. That was from this year’s survey. So there is – and I have to go and look at the exact numbers – but we also break out in many of our reports when we’re reporting on this data: million dollar plus versus sub-million dollar plus purchases as well. So we can sort of parse that apart as well.

But self-serve, I think again – there’s the push to button to buy something is only one stage of that lifecycle, right? So self-serve is now completely across the lifecycle. So it’s how I find the information I want as a buyer and not engaging. Like I’m already a decent percent of the way through the research process before, you know, I’m in market in many ways, right? So that’s self-service, right? That’s understanding who are the potential providers that I might want to consider, what are their respective strengths and weaknesses, who else do they work with, what do they charge? And then what we often find is – and again, this is especially true of younger buyers, but it’s true across the board – we just see a statistical significance. What they really look to engage with is a product expert; that is often the first engagement. So I sort of have a sense of what I’m looking for. I may have even got to my shortlist, and then I want to dig into: Does this work with my existing stack? How does it do the things they claim it does? And getting into the product detail, as opposed to the “Hi, it’s nice to meet you. Tell me about your three biggest challenges you’re dealing with right now” kind of conversations up front.

Drew: Radical transformation in this case would be alright – if they’re not talking to enterprise sales reps, we could cut our enterprise sales reps in half and put all that money in marketing to engage and so forth. So I played to your audience here. Yes, exactly. That’s not happening though. We know that’s not happening. We’re seeing the opposite in a lot of cases, where they’re throwing more reps at the problem when they’re not getting the goal. But it feels like there’s a disconnect in the marketplace right now, in that if everything that you’re saying is true – they’re doing the journey on their own, they’re doing the research, they’re even ready to buy or almost ready to buy, and they want to talk to a product rep – it really changes the way we should be thinking about marketing and sales and go-to-market radically, right? 100% but it’s not happening.

Dave: That’s why we’re here, right? You’re asking me what people are getting wrong – that’s what we think people are getting wrong. Is not and, as I said, sort of we start with change the focus. Too many people jump to “let’s go out and install the new thing,” but what is it you’re trying to achieve? Are you aligning all of those internal go-to-market functions to be on the same page? Right? You can’t do this as, like I say – we sort of brought together our quote-unquote marketing, our ABM, demand-side waterfall with the selling process, with the post-sale customer lifecycle process to sort of think about the customer. The customer doesn’t break these things apart, right? They just want a solution that solves their need. It may be you need fewer enterprise reps, it may be you need more enterprise reps. You have to go through that process of evaluating, but that requires a change in focus, asking and answering different questions, and then deciding if we’re going to make this transformation, then we need to do that in a different way.

So we see, we work with clients to help them with a revenue – quote-unquote revenue council we call it – so bringing components together from different parts of the business to think about these things together. And so it’s not sort of each of us thinks our department is the sun, and all those other departments are the moons that rotate around us. It’s the customer that is the sun. How do we rotate around the customer? And what do we need to do that most effectively?

Drew: Am I hearing in this – so, you know, one of the side, and I can’t tell if it’s a trend or not, but this notion of, I’ll call it a CRO for lack – but that the go-to-market strategy is this consolidated view of the customer, from sales to marketing to Customer Success. Is that, in a sense, what you’re prescribing here is that, if you don’t look at those things in combination, and there is probably an individual who is, in fact, responsible for quote revenue, you’re probably not going to get that right? I mean, am I just connecting two dots that probably are unnecessarily, or is that the future of this piece of the solution here?

Dave: So I don’t think there’s ever one solution to these types of things. For some organizations, that may be the answer. Unfortunately, I think we often see the Chief Revenue Officer title is just a new title for the chief sales officer, the head of sales. That’s when it’s sort of like we’re sticking a Band-Aid on this. We’re not really addressing what the challenge is – we’re going to jump from “we’ve identified a problem” to “here’s the solution” without thinking it through fully. And what does this mean for our org? I think it also sort of ignores the components of marketing that don’t fit neatly under the revenue monitor. And yes, I mean obviously all of our brand work is in service of driving business success, but it doesn’t fit into the kind of revenue workstreams, necessarily.

So there’s a case to be made for a Chief Revenue Officer, a Chief Marketing Officer, and a Chief Customer Officer being the head of that – you know, being co-heads of a revenue council because each has a major role to play in it. But in some organizations, it might be we’re going to put that under one leader, and we’re going to have sub-leaders that do each of those things, and that’s in some cases going to force the alignment. So that might not be the worst thing, but I really hesitate to say this is the answer because it’s going to vary.

Drew: Well, right? Especially when it’s just the salesperson who doesn’t have perspective on the other things, and it’s just “close the deal, close the deal, close the deal.”

Dave: I had a conversation with a leader of an agency. They’re bringing together a series of agencies to focus on sales, marketing, and customer success. And what they said was, “We’re doing this to service the real chief customer revenue officer when we find them.”

Drew: Right. Yeah, exactly the real ones. So okay, so I think we’ve sort of gone through the buyer groups and what folks – we’ve identified who they are, we have identified that there’s this mismatch between what the marketer’s doing and how the customer wants to buy and goes through buying. Great. Now, we’ve been lucky enough to close the sale, but you’re saying that your newest customers are unhappy. Can we talk about that and what that means?

Dave: Sure. And as I did say when I caveated that, I mean a little bit provocative in the statement. But in that, in our buyers’ journey survey this year, 86% of global business buyers said their most recent purchase stalled during the process at some point, and most of them – 81%, so four-fifths – expressed dissatisfaction in at least one area with the provider they chose at the end of a successful purchase process. So it’s not “we’re unhappy with everything,” it’s “we’re unhappy with something,” and that may be they made the best choice and there’s no perfect choice, but there is definite dissatisfaction. And again, it’s another area where we see statistical significance between younger buyers and those of us that are more seasoned – that went between from 87% of the younger buyers to 73% of older buyers. And I’ve used that term a few times, so just so everyone knows, we’re counting Millennial and Gen Z – so those born after 1981 as younger, and those of us that were born before that as older – have that context.

Drew: Yes. So knowing that 81% were dissatisfied with some aspect of the purchase process or the product itself, we don’t necessarily know what is the fix here. What’s what is it that we want marketers to be thinking about? You know, it’s great, it’s a problem, but what’s the solution?

Dave: As a seasoned person, I will agree with you – the dissatisfaction we hear, so top of that list is price. We almost put that to the side, right? We always would love to get it for less, but there are other things on there. Some of it’s tech, technology industry domain expertise, understanding my business flexibility. And again, I think many of these things sort of exhibit in we’re sort of inside out rather than outside in, in terms of what the customer needs and how do we build around it? Rather than “this is what we have” – the sort of “you can have it any color you like, as long as it’s black” type attitude.

There’s reality to that too, right? We’re not going to split code and build something for – and I’m talking tech, obviously – for every customer. But even just flexibility in how we deal with them, all those sorts of things bubble up as what folks are dissatisfied with. And as I say, some of it is we may have made the best choice – we would have been more dissatisfied with somebody else. But I think it’s recognizing dissatisfaction. We tend to assume the new customer has chosen us, everything’s rosy, we’ve got a year to really solidify this order before we renew, or two years depending on how we work with folks.

From our point of view, you know, dissatisfaction – for example, our entire change management change model at Forrester begins from a dissatisfaction point of view, recognizing dissatisfaction and sort of understanding what lies behind it, fixing those. So I think it’s a huge opportunity, especially for any of you that run customer marketing teams, advocacy teams, whatever it might be, to get into a new customer. And not as – you know, we tend to do the “Why did you pick us?” and we want to hear the positive – but “What concerns you about us? What were you dissatisfied about?” and focus in on that as opportunity for the next 12-24 months, whatever it might be, to put some fixes in place because they’re all going to be different. So I think that’s the big opportunity. You’ve got these people who, while they may be dissatisfied with an element, are new on board, are probably excited to be on board, are spending money, need to justify internally it was a good choice. How do we make that more successful for them as a choice, and in a year’s time, turn them into the hero?

Drew: You know, that’s an aha moment for me, and I’m going to spend a little time just sort of suggesting why we’re so excited when we close a deal at any company, right, particularly in B2B these days. That we, just as you said – I’m restating your language a little bit – that we’re ringing the bell. We’re excited, we’re running around. We’re like, “Yes, we did it!” We got this new customer, and we assume – big mistake – that we’re even if not up here, and instead, we’re a splinter in their toes. They can’t get rid of us. They’ve accepted it. They’re putting a shoe on it, they’re walking around with it, but we’re a splinter, and unless you think about how you’re going to remove that splinter and make that experience better, you’re not going to have an instant testimonial, you’re not going to have brand advocates. You’re starting at a deficit. And I think that’s just so important, particularly since a lot of the CMOs in our community are getting customer experience as their responsibility as well. Marketing and customer experience officer – I think it’s fantastic. There were any number of reasons.

Dave: And I’ll add to that, Drew, partnering really closely with customer success, right? So customer success, what customer success teams have done, what good customer success teams are doing, is sort of coming at this point of view of understanding the customer’s desired outcomes, tracking those, measuring those, being evaluated on those, but then taking that to an aggregate level in a way. So we know that customers that onboard within a certain length of time, or do these three activities within the first month, two months, three months, whatever it might be, are far more likely to remain. They’re not going to churn, or they’re more likely – there’s a greater opportunity for expansion. All those then become internal metrics that we measure on. How do we make sure this person is onboarded using the right features, functions, hitting their goals? We build a joint customer success plan. How do we know what they need to hit in what timeframes? But working with marketing along the way so that when somebody is hitting all those and is happy, you’re sort of serving up advocates on a platter to a large degree, right? It’s kind of, here’s the folks that you can go build your testimonial with. This is a person who you might want to put on stage at our next annual conference, whatever it might be, because they’ve done all of those things. They’re going to tell the story in the right way. And so coming back to that alignment of partnership, it’s really pretty well done.

Drew: And it’s so interesting because we’re at this moment where taking this data and tracking it – I mean, it’s so funny because it feels like the original term, CRM, customer relationship management, the original term, and having the data to understand that if they get a certain number of – we just – every action is points at a certain point in time. They either get to those points and therefore are happy, or not. All of that now with generative AI, you could look at it retro, could put your data through there, or you could certainly add value to that and start to think through, “Well, they didn’t hit this milestone, they didn’t hit this one. What’s the next best course of action?” on an individual level.

Dave: Customer Success is also thinking about self-serve, right, or digital-led Customer Success is what they’ll typically call it, but they’re sort of starting to split customer success as there’s the digital-led, there’s low touch and high touch. High touch is where you have a named person – they may be dedicated to your account, all that good stuff. The medium touch is where one person has X number of accounts, right? And they’re working with – they know the individuals, but they’ll build a joint customer success plan together, all that sort of thing. And then the digital-led is taking everything we’ve learned from that to your point and building it into some sort of a digital experience portal, website, community platform, whatever it might be, but allowing you to put in those milestones, build out your own success plan and track and then flag so somebody can intervene if somebody isn’t hitting those milestones. But the customer that wants to be in control of their own journey, their post-sale journey, can be, but the company can also monitor and then jump in as appropriate.

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Drew: We talked a little bit about this in our prep call – we might as well go a little bit deeper into this notion of customer service as either a revenue center, but certainly a satisfaction center. You talked about self-serve, low touch, and high touch, and obviously a really high-value customer. But what’s interesting is, depending on the buyer, they may only want low touch, right? They’re just happy with that. Like for me, every time I go to a website where Zendesk is the option, I want to cancel my subscription every single time – no offense Zendesk – but it’s just a horrible experience, and I want an answer. I can’t find it. Now hopefully those bots and generative AI will help that get better. Talk a little bit about customer experience and what that means in terms of support and your notion of – maybe this is a new way of thinking about it.

Dave: Yeah, so again, I would sort of stick with customer success language on this one because I think customer service means something very specific, right? And customer support, I think of as break-fix. When they get called in for customer success – and thinking about each of those – we have a lot of clients talking to us right now about whether they should be charging for customer success. And it’s sort of the notion that they’re not looking to charge everybody. Again, you have these options, and you can sort of look after your own journey, track towards your milestones yourself in that digital experience. There are typically going to be educational components to that, right? So there’s training videos, there’s peer-to-peer support, but not in the customer support sense. But you know, “How do I do this? Has anyone ever done this? Has anyone ever experienced this? What are any best practices for that?” So all of that built into some form of digital experience.

One of my colleagues, Laura Ramos, actually built out a Forrester total economic impact model for consolidating various activities into a customer success function. We saw 109% – I might be off by one or 2%, forgive me – return on investment, basically total economic impact for just consolidating those functions into a customer success team. Layer on a digital experience and start to do things like peer-to-peer networking, education, solving challenges in there, and it grew exponentially – 267% with just adding on those three use cases in that same timeframe. So huge opportunity to let people service themselves. Invest in that as a digital platform. It reduces your cost. So part of that return is because it reduced the cost – I don’t need to have people doing that. But then the people have greater expertise, right? And less concentrated.

So at the highest level, getting sort of that white-glove experience – I really understand your business, I know where your favorite restaurant is, we know where your kids are in school, all that good tech conversation – but it’s really all about understanding what are you trying to achieve? Why did you buy from us? What are you trying to achieve? And it’s not what are you trying to achieve with our products or solution, it’s what are you trying to achieve as a business and in your function, and then what’s everything we’re doing to help you get there, breaking down the internal barriers, making sure folks understand why and what is going on with each individual client, etc. And in the middle is sort of, like I said earlier, maybe one person managing or engaging with several clients doing some of that, but not as in-depth, just because there isn’t the time to do that.

Dave: Obviously you would charge for the white glove; the digital is typically going to be cost of business, right? But like I say, there’s actually a huge return on that for the business. And then whatever your model might be in between. What’s interesting is how these companies are typically doing it – it’s like you look at your high-end automotive cars, right? And what we put into our top of the line eventually trickles down later on to the other lines. It’s similar, right? So what we find ourselves doing with our let’s call them white-glove clients, as we recognize patterns, and we can build it into the DX, that becomes something at a self-service level, but that becomes available to everybody, right?

So if it’s tracking outcomes, that’s something that those teams have been doing now for many years. How do we build that in? How do we make that something that people recognize the value of for themselves in order to maximize the value they’re going to get from their purchase? And so it’s sort of taking the best of what the highest-end people are getting and continue to build that into the quote-unquote digital service. Ideally, we’re always going to have people unhappy, right? There’s possibly also, and I don’t have any data on this, but there’s possibly also an element of those folks – they may be paying everything they can afford just to get the product. There’s no way they’re going to upsell because they’ve got everything that they need. So there may be some self-selection in those too, right? Our biggest, gnarliest, most complex enterprise customers, almost by default, are going to a) be able to afford, but also potentially need that higher level of service.

Drew: I remember something from that we talked about in a prep call. And there was a phrase you used – aligning promise makers with promise keepers. Can you talk about that? I just love the notion of it. I’m not sure what that looks like.

Dave: Yeah, and I have to give credit – that’s a Sherry Shrevnik term, not my term. For the same reason, I absolutely love it. I use it all the time. She’s written a few reports about this fairly recently. There’s some brand new research building on it that’s about to come out as well. But essentially, aligning the “promise maker” (the sales team) and “promise keepers” (the customer success team) is key. The whole idea here is making sure what a customer was promised during the sales process is delivered on by the company.

There’s a sort of very practical or tactical element to all of this. The report I’m just mentioning is a transition report – how do you successfully hand over a client? We deliberately avoid the term “handoff.” It’s a transition from that pre- to post-sale experience. What can be done by the two teams working together that doesn’t need to involve the customer? The salesperson or sales team has learned a ton in the process. They know those 13 people in the buying group and potentially some of the nine people in the external world. They know what those roles are, what each of their needs were, what their questions were. They know what some of the outcomes are. Hopefully, if they’ve done a good job of selling, they know what the customer is trying to achieve.

Ideally, the customer success person has met during the sales process. That’s one of those best practices that we recommend – again, as the relationship is there before the sale. Customer success can talk to the customer, at that point the prospect. We see companies like you or people asking these types of questions, do ABC, and they’ve got much more real-world examples to provide that prospect than a salesperson does. So they support the salesperson.

The flip side of that is, as we transition over to customer success, the salesperson is making sure they have all that knowledge. When the customer success person then sits down with the newly minted, semi-happy customer, they’re saying, “Here’s what I understand some of your objectives are – do I have this right? Is there anything you would add to it? Here’s what I understand your milestones and timeframes are. Which of these would you prioritize in real terms?”

So I’m coming to with maybe 50-60% of that joint success plan that I write with my customer. I’m coming to that with a lot of thinking. Another of Sherry’s reports was actually called “Retention Starts at Onboarding.” That onboarding experience we’ve extrapolated out actually impacts retention, so having that great experience upfront, capturing all that, having that conversation, allows the customer success team to ensure that the company’s promises are kept.

Drew: It’s so interesting, and you know, people behave based on how they’re rewarded. A salesperson is rewarded for closing the sale. Maybe they’re rewarded at the back end for keeping it in renewals. But in that contract to close the sale, it did not say complete a transfer of knowledge such that we can achieve long-term success here. So you are talking about a massive behavior change in the way people work.

Dave: And Sherry can point you to examples of customers that have done exactly that – you don’t get paid out until this is done.

Drew: So you have to change the structure of it, and also have to have, whether it’s Salesforce or some other thing, a new way of building this group, getting to understand this group, and tracking this knowledge and sharing the knowledge. And then you have to have a customer support team, if you will, a CX team that actually looks at that information, is prepared, and delivers.

Dave: I’m smiling because the next thing that Sherry is about to roll into is compensation, and she’s talking to our sales ops teams, our B2B sales team, about what our recommendation is and how you practically build this to ensure that everyone is compensated on that alignment around the customer. Because it all starts from that notion of doing the right thing by the customer. But there are a few things to unlearn there for organizations before they can succeed.

Drew: And it’s a lot more than aligning, because you know the promise – we’re going to make a promise, and we’re going to be able to keep a promise, but there is a knowledge transfer process that…

Dave: Workflows have to change, as you say. Tech has to be updated. It doesn’t mean you have to go and buy new tech, but you may have to build new processes within it. It starts again with that focus change – what are we trying to achieve? And then we can start to think about: How do we do this differently? How do we compensate? How do we track? How do we measure? How do we celebrate? What do we celebrate as an organization? Is that aligned with what we claim is important?

Drew: Interesting. And then for the CMO in their role of recognizing this and sort of trying to get in the middle of it, I would think is an important part. Well, you mentioned, and we’ve talked theoretically a lot so far – I would love it if you could give an example, a case history of somebody who’s doing some of this right. We talked about problems a lot, but let’s talk about maybe somebody you could share who’s doing some or all of these things right.

Dave: I’ll give you two examples at different scales. One is Siemens, which, as you probably know, is a 60-ish billion dollar company. When we’re talking enterprise, they’re up there. They’ve been on a journey for a couple of years around this notion of revenue process transformation and really shifting their focus and alignment to the customer. They are a good example of a company that has built a revenue council that meets. They meet physically quarterly for what I think is a two-day meeting where they get together, and it’s all about the customer – from the big picture strategy stuff down to the very tactical and practical: what are we measuring, how are we attributing things, what do we need to re-engineer?

Then they go away and work on things. They’re constantly going away, working on the component parts, coming back together to sort of keep themselves oriented in the right direction. And basically, this is from the CMO down. The CMO has a direct report, Dave Taylor is his name, who says everything we do starts with the customer, and if we can’t say how a decision benefits the customer, we start rethinking it. That goes back to the change in focus that I talked about. If that is genuinely the focus, you have to keep yourself honest. You have to stop every now and then and ask, “What does this do for our customer?” And if we can’t answer that, let’s circle back up. What are we trying to do for the customer? And therefore, what should we do?

They’re bringing together strategy, marketing, and then the execution across the board. Marketing is in the driving seat – again, in total alignment. But this was a marketing-led initiative, I should say, rather than driving seat. They were the first ones in the door, building off the waterfall, and then thinking about how we can’t just be doing this in isolation. We have to bring together all of the relative parts.

Drew: And just my bias, of course, is I think the marketer is uniquely equipped to do this role in that they have empathy, and it’s an important part of their job. They have a view of the customer, or certainly can have, and they’re used to looking at a broader framework of the market, as opposed to, say, a head of sales who was focused on closing the deal.

Dave: As opposed to customer success, which is kicking in after the deal is closed. In fact, if you look at when we created the opportunity lifecycle diagram to show how waterfall, buyer land sales process, and wholesale customer lifecycle knit together, we sort of have areas where marketing is in the primary seat, if you think of it in RACI terms – they would be in the R or the A category. Then there are other areas where the sales team are, and then other areas where customer success are, but the one team that goes across the entire thing is marketing.

Drew: And just for folks that may not use the term RACI all the time, what does this stand for?

Dave: There’s a variety of ways that people build it out, but essentially it’s creating a grid where you list initiatives, topics, responsibilities, whatever it might be. RACI stands for who’s Responsible for it, who’s Accountable for it. Sometimes you’ll see Support – who’s supporting it, who’s Consulted, who’s Informed. So RACI is the one we typically fall to, which is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed.

At an identifying opportunity level, you can imagine that marketing/RDR, wherever that organization sits, is in a primary seat for a first sale. Customer success might be in a major seat for expansion opportunity. Versus in negotiation to potentially close deals, sales is obviously the responsible and accountable party. R and A often is the same, but not always the same. You might be responsible for something but not accountable for it. And again, the bigger the initiative, that’s when things get more complex as you build that out.

Drew: Interesting. There also feels like there’s feedback if, in fact, when the customer success team is taking over, and we already know we’re at a deficit, then there’s got to be learning from that that needs to be pushed back to product, to sales, to marketing, so that you know to the extent that you can start without a splinter in your toe.

Dave: Yes, 100%. Now we actually include product when we talk about the go-to-market team. We include product in that – it’s sales, marketing, customer success, and product.

Drew: Right. Okay, you said you had another case history?

Dave: Reltio – I don’t know how many of you know Reltio, a master data management company. Again, another one that sort of, you know, this notion that I repeat myself, but I’m not gonna apologize for it, in a way, right? It starts from that customer-focused culture again. So total shift. They transformed their vision as part of this initiative; they actually presented with Terry Flaherty at our summit last year. Terry featured them in a breakout track. And so they talked about sort of the whole rethinking of their purpose, and that then driving and reinforcing sort of what are the goals, what are the metrics, what are the new behaviors? And they track the behavioral change to your earlier point, right? This is a change initiative. And they talked about going from this sort of siloed marketing and sales to what they call ABX – account-based anything kind of thing. It’s account-based everything or anything, but that unified go-to-market team we were just talking about.

So they put all that in place, and then they sort of build from there. And that phrase we’ve all been throwing around for 25 years of the “right message, right customer, right time, right experience” – you know, from their point of view, that all bubbles up from a really consistent view of the customer across each of those. So they put a lot – some of it was eating or drinking their own champagne. I said drinking our own Guinness, but we’ll leave that one aside for a minute. So for them, it made sense, right? But it was, how do we think about interactions, and what are the signals, and do we interpret those the same way? Do we have the same nomenclature? Do we have the same goals for each of those? Do we understand how they ladder up to growth efficiency, etc.?

Drew: Okay, alright. Well, let’s wrap up with two do’s and one don’t for CMOs seeking to master buyer mayhem.

Dave: I don’t know if you see there, Jackie just put a note in that she was the CMO at Reltio. So hopefully I accurately described that, Jackie. Sorry, Drew, I was reading that while you asked. Would you mind repeating?

Drew: Oh, that’s no problem. I was gonna circle back with Jackie about that later on. Awesome. Okay, we have confirmation that was good. Let’s wrap up with two do’s and one don’t for CMOs seeking to master buyer mayhem.

Dave: I mean, if it’s not obvious by now, I think changing the mindset would be one of my do’s, right? If your mindset needs changing, congratulations. If it doesn’t – but sort of changing from that “how can we sell to, how do we target, how do we sell more” to “how do we help our buyer buy?” And it’s a subtle change, right? It’s obviously we want to continue to sell, but it’s a mind shift. If we’re thinking in terms of this person is interacting with, on average, 13 people internally and nine people externally, they’re leveraging Gen AI. They want access to product expertise, and not just to go to a golf outing. They want this, they want that understanding. What do they need? Who are they trying to convince? Who’s in that network of theirs that they need information to sell internally, to convince to understand the differences? Being honest about here’s where we think we’re stronger than that competition, here’s where we’re in catch-up mode, and we’re investing heavily, and all those types of things. Sort of doing that mind shift. And then the hard work starts – like that’s hard, but then the real hard work starts, right? Because then you have to orient that entire go-to-market function around that facilitate, you know, build confidence, align all those processes, build out the workflows. Then, like I say, that’s the roll-up-your-sleeves and get stuff done part of it, right, to get that done. So that would be my first thing – is an honest assessment of whether we have the customer at the center of what we’re doing, and do we need to shift our mindset to can we say that we help the customer or the buyer buy? Or are we in target mode, right?

Drew: Right. Okay, then let’s just go with one ‘don’t’ for CMOs.

Dave: Okay. I’m gonna say don’t dismiss Gen AI. It might sound obvious, but I think we’re heading into the eye roll. This thing hasn’t lived up to the hype phase of Gen AI. There’s a lot of people saying, “Yep, we’ve done that,” and it is having a massive impact. I know you’re going to be speaking to Lisa next month, and you’ll get into this in much more depth, but even from a buying point of view, Gen AI has popped up into a top three source of information at each of the three pre-sale stages, both for self-service and facilitated purchasing in our buyer’s journey. So I would urge you to continue to embrace it, learn it, and do not dismiss it. When some stuff starts to go wrong, when all these things – you know, like I say, we’re sort of, I feel like every now and then we’re getting the “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,” right? Lean in. Continue to lean in. If you think you’re running fast at it, run faster, because it’s about to overtake us all.

Drew: Well, thank you, Dave. I look forward to seeing your keynote at the Forrester B2B Summit in Phoenix starting March 31, 2025. I was at your B2B Summit two years ago. How will this summit be different from previous ones?

Dave: There’s a few things I would say. Well, let me start with some things that stay the same. It is a place where we deliberately – this is a B2B Summit, and you could add go-to-market on there if you wanted to, right? So we’re focused not just on marketing, but it’s a chance to get together with marketing peers, but also with those other functions, right, with sales, with customer focus groups, and with product. We’ll feature case studies. We’ll feature our award winners on both the main stage, what we call our Return on Integration Award. And that’s going to be a panel this year. And then we will have up to eight, depending on how many winners we have, Program of the Year awards. So if anyone is interested in applying, it’s open right now. You can apply for these awards. It’s open until, I think, January 10 on our website. We go through with a pretty strict, as you can imagine, process for picking what we think of as best in class, and then those folks are sort of interviewed and present with an analyst in a track.

So those are the same. I think what’s different from the one you were at two years ago, we’ve significantly increased the interactivity. We actually have more round tables and workshops than we do presentations. We’ve broken those into very different topics, and in some cases, they’re sort of a cascade. So it’s main stage to track to workshops. So roll up your sleeves and leave here with a plan on a page or an assessment to see how strong am I in this and know where I need to go and focus – that type of thing. And in other cases, especially with round tables, some of those are we don’t necessarily have the answer. We know this is really important, or we have a perspective, but we know there’s a broad range, and so come and discuss with peers and the analyst’s role in that is sort of to facilitate the discussion and drive the conversation.

I think a lot of what you do, Drew, we will be doing in a live setting, as well, as we always do one-on-ones with analysts. And we have an executive leadership exchange that is an invite-only, but you can request an invitation. So that is for the C-levels within an organization that are attending. We do team shares, where we will facilitate some stuff for your internal teams, all that good stuff. I think the other thing I’d say this year that we’ve spent a lot of time thinking through is sort of having a multi-tiered approach to this. So as I mentioned, sort of that main stage to track to practical like leaving with something tangible, whether that’s knowing where I’m starting, having the plan drafted, but sort of trying to get the balance between the vision stuff – the let’s look around the corner and see where the world is going, read the tea leaves stuff – and then not just do that, because nobody wants to come and hear all of that and then not know what to do about it. So we’re trying to marry that with “and here’s what to do,” and then “here’s how to do it” in the practical side, so we spend a lot of time trying to think through all. Also, new location – we’re in Phoenix.

Drew: That’s right! Dave, thank you so much. You really appreciate your insights, and again, I look forward to seeing you at the summit.

Dave: Thanks for a great discussion. Appreciate it!

Drew: 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!