Mark is an influential communicator, relationship builder and team leader with hands-on experience researching markets and decision-makers, navigating competitive positioning, and executing Go-To-Market strategies that leverage creative content for Demand Generation, Lead Generation, and Revenue Growth through Account-Based Marketing, Sales, and Customer Advocacy programs.
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Introduction to the episode
(00:00-01:24)
AS: Welcome to another exciting episode of the Experience-focused Leaders podcast! I'm excited to introduce you to Mark Osborne. Mark is named by Ad Age magazine as a “Marketing Technology Trailblazer”. He's the author of the #1-selling B2B Marketing book “Are Your Leads Killing Your Business?” He is now at Kantar as VP of Growth and Strategy | Analytics. And on top of all this, Mark also runs Modern Revenue Strategies. Mark, welcome to the pod.
We have so many great people here. I think most of the audience is going to be intrigued by the title of your book. Because people globally don't think of leads as something that's going to kill their business. They think of something that's going to fuel their business. We'd love to hear the thesis and the insight that provoked such an interesting take.
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The Impact of Leads on Business
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What's happening is the companies that have adapted are pulling the best opportunities out of the marketplace right away. Businesses that haven't adapted are really left with the worst opportunities in the marketplace, and they're then expending a significant portion of their resources chasing those opportunities, which really creates the death spiral.
(01:24-06:08)
MO: There's a couple of things at play there. Part of what prompted me to write the book was the lockdowns that came with the COVID-19 pandemic. It changed the landscape a lot in the B2B space. Companies put everything on pause or maybe turned up the volume on those things that they could do or had been doing before. And then, once people started traveling again and once they were back in the office, they returned to business as usual.
There's a phrase from, I think it was McKinsey who said, “The pandemic lockdowns accelerated a lot of trends by 10 years in 10 months.” We've definitely seen that in the B2B marketing and sales landscape. These companies that went on pause are now 10 years behind their competitors that adapted to these trends. The trends were already in place, but they really accelerated during the lockdown.
Those trends really relate to the way that buyers buy in the modern B2B landscape. It really changed dramatically in moving towards the ability to interact without salespeople. Now 70% of the customer journey for enterprise, especially software and technology or services, is related to that. 70% of that journey is done before they ever engage with a vendor, whereas in the old days, it used to be that a company would reach out to one of the top three or five vendors, or maybe a couple of them, and say, “Hey, let's talk about what I'm looking for. See if your option is a good one for me, or maybe you can help me in some good directions.”
That just doesn't exist anymore. Likewise, there's this antiquated concept in the marketplace, “Anyone who downloads our white paper is obviously a qualified lead. And so they should get the same attention as any other lead that we're talking to in the process.”
What's happening is the companies that have adapted are pulling the best opportunities out of the marketplace right away. Businesses that haven't adapted are really left with the worst opportunities in the marketplace, and they're then expending a significant portion of their resources chasing those opportunities, which really creates the death spiral.
AS: So because you're no longer able to go to, for example, as frequently as you used to, to events where you meet, let's say, high-quality leads. You have a lot of digital stuff, and there's a lot of fluff in the digital. So then you have to build out this mega sales development organization that's processing these leads, or you're investing sales resources and folks that may not be ready for the market. Because you're just doing this old-school undifferentiated digital stuff.
That's near and dear to my heart wearing my other hat as RELAYTO. Because what’s naive is to think, “Oh yeah, I downloaded this white paper, and therefore I'm interested. Then I get happy to keep sending me stuff.” Versus “I'm viewing the white paper. I'm not going through some friction, I'm engaging. I'm deeply engaging.” That is mimicking information and insight about an engaged user that is actually right now going through the potential equivalent of a sales interaction but is going through digital. If I'm able to identify these folks and then put my sales superstars to engage in the answer, the questions that are not found in the e-book or not found in the case study. That's where the opposite of killing your business. Is that?
Sales Qualification and Engagement Importance
You probably know better than I how few companies are even tracking engagement with content. There’s the ability to know through tools like RELAYTO if the people are engaging with certain parts of the content that might be more related to buying decisions versus upper funnel researching content which is more informational. Companies that have a monolithic approach to the marketplace and aren't using data and technology to inform that wind up really being left behind.
When you're only fighting for the scraps, you wind up with customers that distract you from your core business proposition. They require a lot of custom work. They don't want the same things that the marketplace generally wants. They aren't aligned with your content buying. So when you push further and further behind the competition, it creates the death spiral which I've seen many times kill businesses.
(06:08-14:34)
MO: Very close. The only nuance that I would interject there, and you probably have better statistics on this than I do, but the number of companies treat every engagement as fully engaged. There's no scoring of the quality of a lead or the ripeness of an opportunity. Basically, if they download a single white paper, they're as qualified as the person who is downloading really lower funnel type of content and engaging with that lower funnel content.
You probably know better than I how few companies are even tracking engagement with content. There’s the ability to know through tools like RELAYTO if the people are engaging with certain parts of the content that might be more related to buying decisions versus upper funnel researching content which is more informational. Companies that have a monolithic approach to the marketplace and aren't using data and technology to inform that wind up really being left behind.
Because they're competitors that are using data and technology to inform the qualification, the readiness of the target that is using data and technology to build scores of qualification. Or to then put them into more of a nurturing cycle until they are ready. And then, once they are ready, really give them that one-to-one.
When you're only fighting for the scraps, you wind up with customers that distract you from your core business proposition. They require a lot of custom work. They don't want the same things that the marketplace generally wants. They aren't aligned with your content buying. So when you push further and further behind the competition, it creates the death spiral which I've seen many times kill businesses.
AS: You could have been in the marketing and analytics world and supporting very large deals as well. Content is a proxy for interaction. Then, how do you push it through all the way to sales outcomes? It does feel that while people talk the talk, there's very little attribution between people designing the content or even writing the copy to revenue. And then the marketers are still very happy with, “Look, we got you a number. We hit our number, right? Great!”
How they come up with that number is that it is all connected to, let's hope, SQLs, at least. But even the sales team, like you said, supports the wrong type of customers. Because they're desperate, that's right. You're not converting that into the quality revenue that you're looking for. I think part of the challenge that we've seen is that the designers don't speak the same language as the marketers or sellers. They use different tools. It takes a very determined CMO or chief revenue officer to connect the dots.
I think that's been part of the struggle. The tools are different. You would never get a sales rep in their right mind to figure out how Marketo works. If you want your sales reps to start designing PowerPoint-type things, you'll get old heaps of trouble, especially in regulated industries.
You need to be able to empower professional-grade content for sales teams to bring to customers who do the talk when the sales team is not in the room. What do you think, is that part of the problem that teams are misaligned?
MO: That's a big part of the problem. In the book, we lay out a five-step process for creating a system of solutions that work. Part of that is getting this upper funnel alignment. The way that you do that is by getting marketing, sales, and even customer success on a shared scorecard. So they have shared KPIs.
What we see is some of the best businesses have different weightings. People on the marketing team are weighted more towards certain KPIs. The renewal rate, the upsell rate — that's still part of what they look at and what they're measured on as bringing in a bunch of high leads that aren't then renewing or expanding their relationship. That's going to kill your business.
So instead of just measuring customer success on a renewal or an upsell rate, having marketing involved with that, too, can be really valuable.
For starters, it's understood as a complete revenue system that begins with attracting the right prospects. Then it moves into accelerating those opportunities and then into revenue, activating clients for renewals, upsells, and referrals. In fact, we will do a diagnostic with companies to help them understand those three areas, where's the biggest opportunity to make an immediate impact on your business. We'll do some diagnostics and use some real benchmarks against other similar companies in the space to say, “Well, where are your metrics today?” And then, we can build this scorecard that drives the optimization and the teamwork to build together.
Customer success oftentimes has insights about what customers actually love about the product. Marketing understands tools, approaches, and the ability to build really beautiful things that sales may not be knowledgeable about. Sales know the objections that come up that we need to anticipate in advance so that we're really setting up the conversation well.
One of the ways that we see as really successful is when you have a customer journey map. You are then understanding the next stage of the journey from awareness to intent to engagement. All the way to that second moment of truth of “Should I buy again, should I advocate in the marketplace?” You understand the customer journey, the content, and the questions that they need to answer at every stage.
Then you start to understand, “Well, what's the content that would influence each stage of that? What's the data that we can use to measure have moved from that stage or not?”
Having that precise understanding of where your customers are in the process by bringing in data that aligns with that customer journey, you know when they're ready for the full-court press from sales. And because you're not accepting every MQL as the same quality of lead, you're freeing up time for the sales team to really focus on that one-to-one engagement for those opportunities that matter, that are ripe.
Likewise, you can use those same sources of data to understand when customers are at risk of churning at that opportunity, that inflection point, to expand or grow your relationship with them. There are some sales and marketing capabilities that customer success isn't always expert at. When you bring that team together, you really create that alignment.
The Complexity of Product-Led Growth
The business wants to grow after they close that first deal. It's not thinking about it through the lens of the customer. What we have seen be really successful is using data, building an understanding of where they are, moving through the process, and recognizing that there are going to be recurrent loops.
(14:34-21:37)
AS: I would add in a software world, there's almost a third, a fourth, I guess, group that's engaged. And so there's a movement toward product-led growth.
MO: That's right.
AS: The people who are signing up to try out your product are definitely not the types of people who would be ready for full-court sales engagement right there. Sometimes you get a CEO signing up. I think, typically, it would be somebody who is innovative but may not have been in a position of authority. But they could be influencers. The customer journey and the content are becoming complicated. Some of the touch points could be a product or a product tour.
One thing that I do find challenging for people is that, while we all like that funnel visual, it is a kind of bow tie. If you're doing services, it's obviously a bit messier than that because you have different people with different objectives. Coming into that journey, and given obviously your background was Kantar, you're analytically driven as an organization. Typically, that starts at the top of the funnel. And supported heavily at the bottom of the funnel movement.
How do you continue that? You could see scenarios where in a B2B or some sort of complex sale, you could be engaging people in your target account to try and pilot the solution. So, tell us a little bit about that mixed-up notion that no longer works from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel.
MO: I love the bow tie analogy. But that's what's really thinking through it from the business.
The business wants to grow after they close that first deal. It's not thinking about it through the lens of the customer. What we have seen be really successful is using data, building an understanding of where they are, moving through the process, and recognizing that there are going to be recurrent loops.
If you think about the process that people go through and make decisions, what is data that would indicate they have decided to prioritize it? They're reading certain types of content, they're engaging with certain people.
You can get intent data out there. Are they reading reviews on G2? Or it might be for your industry. There are lots of ways.
If you're creating the content and then measuring the people who are consuming it, you start to understand, “Okay, they're at that stage of the funnel. If they're at that stage of the customer journey, all of your content should be focused on just getting them to the next stage.” You shouldn't be advocating why your way of doing it is the best way to do it.
I talk about enterprise companies. There are 10 smart things they could do in the next 12 months. They really only have the bandwidth to do three. Helping them prioritize is one of the three that they should do by building a business case around just solving this type of problem. Many companies forget to do that, partly because it's not a very direct response in nature. That content doesn't have an immediate payoff. But if there's no market leader owning the marketplace to grow that demand, then everyone else suffers.
What we see are the best solutions in the marketplace. Advocate because it has the business benefit. If you get around to solving it, this is why a certain approach is the best approach. You're leading to the next question. That next question is, “I have decided to solve it. There are three different approaches in the marketplace. Which approach is the one that I should take?” I'll be focused on your content. You should pick this approach, not us, versus a competitor that does the same approach. This approach, and then the next. Once you've decided that that's the right approach for you — “This is why I'll continue to live with that approach.”
You're shaping that reality. That comes back to defining that product and buying vision. Then you are attracting the right prospects. You're attracting prospects that align with your worldview. You have built a better way to solve this problem based on where you think the market is headed and based on underlying factors in the marketplace. Your differentiation is based on those beliefs. If you're shaping the beliefs that customers have on why this problem is worth solving, why this is the right way to solve it, then once they decide, “Yes, it's worth solving. Yes, I wanna solve it in this particular way. Now let me look at vendors that do it that way.” It's an easier choice.
AS: By that point, you've built trust. Because you've taken them on a journey. You're not manipulating anybody. You're helping people uncover that problem and just putting it in perspective, having thought about it for quite some time. This is very thoughtful. I really like this approach. How do you build the category-defining solutions that solve an underlying set of problems for customers? You always gotta start with the customers. Is this something that you apply? Is this what you help your clients at Modern Revenue Strategies go and figure out?
Marketing Strategies for Scaling Companies
You'd be surprised how many companies, even in that million-a-year place, are still holding their marketing, sales, and customer success together with bubblegum and bailing wire. So we can come in and create a 90-day marketing plan for them that we generally see has a 10x ROI on that investment of time and that investment of money of working with us.
(21:37-28:37)
MO: At Modern Revenue Strategies, my work was a little different than what I've done at Kantar and other enterprise companies. Because I'm generally working with companies that are at this inflection point, they've achieved product market fit. They've gotten to that first million, maybe two million in revenues. But to get from there to 20 or a hundred million, that's pretty tough. It's oftentimes tough for them to bring in a full-time CMO. Because those people are expensive, they want equity, they bring politics to it. There's a lot of overhead involved, whereas if they can get some outside marketing leadership, that can really propel them to that next stage.
One of the ways we make that easy for companies to do is companies that have a marketing plan in place have success over their competitors that don't.
You'd be surprised how many companies, even in that million-a-year place, are still holding their marketing, sales, and customer success together with bubblegum and bailing wire. So we can come in and create a 90-day marketing plan for them that we generally see has a 10x ROI on that investment of time and that investment of money of working with us. They see the benefits of that, and that really propels them to that next level.
AS: That makes a lot of sense. You typically don't want to have your first marketing team members be CMO type of folks. You want somebody super execution-oriented, a jack of all trades. More of a demand generation focus or demand capture focus than some of the other kinds of strategic disciplines. Such as the category definition that you were talking about earlier or the plan building.
MO: Yeah, and the thing that we can do is really bring in systems that are best in class.
We have a phrase around here, “System sets you free”. Because when you've got a system in place, then you're managing the system, and so the CEO doesn't have to come wag his finger at the marketing director and be like, “Why don't we have the MQLs we need? Why don't we have the SQLs we need?” Instead, you can say, “Well, are you following the system, yes or no? If not, is there something broken with the system that's causing you not to be able to follow it?”
You can collaborate together. It creates a lot more harmony within companies, and it's a lot more enjoyable. Gives you a lot more confidence in where your revenues are going to come from. You're not chasing growth hacks or being held hostage by an agency that's just spending more money than getting more leads. Instead, you're really focusing on a system that then builds your own internal capability and gets your own revenue flywheel running. You're not being held hostage by some external provider.
AS: This is really fascinating because you have these two hats. Where you're working was early stage, not super early, but at least one to 10 versus zero to one company. Then, at the same time, you're working with some of the largest brands in the world through Kantar. Both engaging with topics around marketing and typically the big spend areas for both organizations. Relatively speaking, what have you found that you brought into your work?
I think it's typically the other way around. You could bring some large company expertise into small. But I'm curious, how has this perspective changed? How do you communicate and propose to your enterprise clients?
MO: It’'s some of both. You rightly identify that I've had the benefit of working with some of the best marketers in the world. I've built analytics systems for Hulu, Nike, General Motors, and the largest retailer in Australia and spent a lot of time there. I work with Meta and Google on analytics projects. So it's really amazing to work with those companies and see the horsepower between their ears, as we say, and the type of analytical projects that we take on.
Oftentimes, with really large enterprises, it's just hard to make things move fast enough.
Probably a lot of your listeners work at large organizations, global organizations, where just getting things done is its own challenge. In that environment, sometimes it's easy to lose sight of what we are even trying to do. You can get bogged down in the bureaucracy or the getting it done and lose sight of what's the real thing we're trying to do here.
Whereas working with earlier stage companies, there's a lot of focus on what's the thing that matters. What's the thing that's going to give us a 10x impact in the next 12 months?
Small companies really were these early-stage companies. They look to double every year in terms of overall revenues, whereas that's pretty tough to do at a large enterprise that's global.
But because they're focused on chasing double growth, there's an Occam's razor effect of what is the most impactful thing that's going to really move the needle. Oftentimes that would give you a focus on what's the simplest thing, what's the simplest answer.
Bringing that back into an enterprise is oftentimes very refreshing to stop going down a rabbit hole of saying, “All right, this sounds interesting and all. But we're not here, for we're not an academic exercise, we're a commercial enterprise. So what is the point of doing this?” Well, it's to increase revenues. We build a lot of really robust analytical frameworks that can be built on years of data at a daily level. That's a huge amount of data. But to understand how this is going to be used, how is this going to help us grow the business, it can be a really interesting insight that working with more early-stage companies helps keep that in sharp relief.
Focus on Growth in Large Enterprises
From a B2B branding perspective, we think of trust as a two-sided coin. The two sides of that coin are sincerity and competence. Sincerity means you do what you say, and competence means you have the ability to do what you say. Without both halves of that, you really can't achieve trust.
(28:37-31:20)
AS: Well, as somebody who does work at an early-stage company, help me be a guinea pig on what are a couple of things that I could start doing today at RELAYTO. It's not that I want to grab the lame line, but it's probably a good illustration of how you could help other folks and just a tiny bit about us. I don't know what you need to do, but let's do a role-play of sorts to see how I can apply your ideas. And then how our audience, more importantly, could apply your ideas in their context as I'm doing this.
MO: We've had a wide-ranging conversation today. When you and I were prepping for this call, we talked about your business. You said the most important thing is to build trust. Then, once they trust you, you want them to believe that you are the fastest path to speed interactivity and that it's easy. That really speaks to bringing in new customers. So it would be in what we call attraction systems: your ability to attract those right prospects through having demand while generating awareness.
There are a few things to unpack there. First, you talked about trust.
From a B2B branding perspective, we think of trust as a two-sided coin. The two sides of that coin are sincerity and competence. Sincerity means you do what you say, and competence means you have the ability to do what you say. Without both halves of that, you really can't achieve trust.
The way that you build sincerity is by demonstrating transparency and not making claims about things you can solve that are outside of your core capabilities. Being very real.
AS: If I put a word on it, the best sales reps are not salesy, they're just helping people solve problems. Being authentic, this is what we do, where we can help. If we can't help, we still want to help you fight. You know you have a problem. That's sincerity.
The Power of Consistent Customer Journey
People spend a lot of money on advertising because it creates frequency. They're always there. We're hearing this message over and over, so that gives the sensation of reliability.
(31:20-36:32)
MO: It's about reliability and showing your success. But a lot of it is continuity and saying the same thing over and over. One of the things that really increases competence perspectives.
People spend a lot of money on advertising because it creates frequency. They're always there. We're hearing this message over and over, so that gives the sensation of reliability.
But one of the ways that we have seen is to accomplish the same thing without spending a lot of money on ads.
Have a consistent storyline. Is this a problem to solve? What are the ways that we should solve it? Is this one of the ones?
What are the vendors that provide a consistent storyline that aligns with your product and buying vision? That talks about how you're different from competitors. How your long-term product and buying vision are different than other solutions in the marketplace? That consistency is much more powerful than just the consistency of a frequency of ads.
The way that you achieve that is by coming back to this customer journey map and really understanding what are all of the things that prompt them. What's the context in their environment that causes them to think, “Is this a problem I should even solve?” What's the context in their environment that goes, “Oh, so now I should prioritize it to one of the three things I can do this year.” You know the different ways to solve this.
So what is the context? What's that buying journey?
You can have that consistent messaging throughout and then a really deep understanding of your ideal customer profile. The buying personas of your champion and your decision-maker are part of that buying committee. You can know where to reach them in lots of gorilla ways that give you the opportunity to have real, authentic competence and sincere interactions. That's what really builds trust in a much more powerful way than ads.
Ads build trust too. They're just much more expensive and much less sophisticated. But when you really understand that customer journey, you can find all of these little, much less expensive opportunities.
AS: You're using customer journeys to try to inject the right, relevant stories that connect the dots to the broader narrative.
MO: Exactly. The other thing that you talked about was this speed to interactivity or ease. One of the exercises that we do is a competitive analysis. You know, on measures of speed, what are your competitors talking about? We're going to assume that you've rightly identified that's what your audience cares about, which is a whole other exercise. But let's assume that's true. Let's look at what are the reasons to believe they're the fastest way to get interactivity. Then rank those and look at which of them are differentiated, which of them are the same.
I spent a little bit of time looking at you and your competitors. A lot of you have very similar badges from very similar places. So that just becomes market parity. There's no differentiation there. If you've all got a G2 badge of some kind, then that just says, “Well, we're all the same.” So you can lose by not having parity with the market. You only win by being differentiated from your competitors.
If you have to line up this speed to interactivity, what are the proof points? And then this other dimension of how easy it is or what proof points you have. What are the proof points you have that are different? What we oftentimes will do is build a two-by-two matrix where we'll take five competitors and rank them all in terms of speed, interactivity, and ease of accomplishing. We'll look at the reasons to believe that marketing materials and plot them based on the strength of those reasons, points of parity or differentiation in the marketplace. Then oftentimes, you start to see some white space. So we'll do multiple plots. We think about it like a four-by-two.
Marketing Without Mentioning Competitors
(36:32-38:19)
AS: Let's deep dive into that. So the reason I said that is we were actually shocked that when we looked at some of the peers that build advanced interactive content, they all have to book a meeting with a sales rep. From there, maybe have a second meeting, and then maybe they send you up for a page paid trial for a month, and we're like, “Hey, hold on. This the way the business was done 20 years ago.”
This is obvious. And we started saying, “Well, we're always been relatively easier.” Plus, we have a different take on the market. We started changing our price plan. It’s easy to sign up without talking to anyone. So we're doing these things, but how do you market that to the world without talking about competitors? Because, ultimately, it's not right. We're ultimately not really obsessed about competitors, we're obsessed about delivering value to the customer, seeing that's the right fit. But it is sometimes not a competitive context. Especially if they are already in the buying journey. They're comparing certain things.
So what's your advice? I think the badges are still important.
The Impact of Brand Positioning
In brand strategy, the way that your brand connects to the marketplace through your product itself is the real authenticity. That's how you really show sincerity and trust.
(38:19-44:52)
MO: They're not going to let you win. They're just going to keep you from losing. So you hit on something really smart.
In brand strategy, the way that your brand connects to the marketplace through your product itself is the real authenticity. That's how you really show sincerity and trust.
Your customer is going through this experience with competitors. They've got to schedule this meeting. That's not easy. And so if that competitor is saying, “We're easy”, but they're making them jump through all these hoops, there's a disconnect between their messaging in the marketplace and the experience of working with them. That disconnect builds mistrust or it erodes trust. Whereas if you say we're easy, then you make the experience of working with you easy. I believe them when they say they're easy, but they can't exactly say why.
But there's an authenticity about the way that you are going to market. Now I'll give you an alternative. If your positioning is “We're thorough, or we're stable”, then maybe all of these hoops and meetings and lots of interaction, maybe that supports your brand positioning. But if your positioning is easy, then all of those things are fast to connect in the mind of the customer, even if they don't name it out loud.
This is how you do it in marketing. Call their attention to say you're looking at other vendors, how easy is it to work with them? Then, how easy do you think their software is? So that really starts to underpin this core positioning that you've put into the marketplace of “We are easy to work with. Our software is easy to use.” Then it creates this continuity and consistency that really compels them.
AS: This is brilliant. I was gonna weigh in because you trigger another idea. This is really fascinating, the dichotomy between people saying they are something to the market and how they are perceived. I find it ridiculous. I think some of our pioneering customers are realizing that people are selling digital transformation on a piece of paper.
They are like, “We're data-driven”. And they have no idea what happens with their content. For example, in the most important content, the stuff where they are actually closest to revenue. So we're like, “Okay, so are we really data-driven, or are we creative? We have a PDF built-in 1980-style visuals. Or we're excited, and it's really easy to be dismissive, and it's not meant like that at all. Because I was probably committing these sins.
People that I love are intellectually honest with themselves, and that has an innovation potential. They're seeing, “Hey, we're totally incongruent. We're like, “I'm excited to see you.” Doesn't work. And they know you don't do it in a meeting. But in digital, you somehow think you can get away with it. Like, “We love videos. Here's a PDF with no video inside it.”
MO: The future of marketing is video. We don't have a single video on our website.
AS: Would people prefer to be congruent? I think so. Who doesn't want to be?
But then there are the tools, the difficulty, the complexity, and doing things right. So it's a journey of change.
MO: Well, because they haven't thought through the medium as well as the message. In marketing, that's as important as anything, particularly in the modern age where there are so many options for mediums.
Whether it's paid channels or earned pay, you have so many options. There's so much technology, broadband is everywhere. You have every option at your fingertips. So if you're not making choices that are congruent, you're undermining trust because you're not showing sincerity, what your statement is. But at the same time, it's not wrong for everyone. It comes down to really understanding your differentiated positioning. If your position is you don't want to work with some upstart company that might not be here in six months because you're a large enterprise, you need someone who can handle your global business. I'm making these things up. If that's your positioning, that is differentiated and really helps you capture a certain niche within the marketplace. Then being recalcitrant, slow or looking like you were made 10 years ago actually aligns with that brand positioning. So fast and innovative is not for everyone.
Simplifying Complexity in Sales and Transformation
If you look just like your competitors, there's no differentiation, no reason to buy.
(44:52-50:19)
AS: I think that's actually a really interesting insight. I think what we see is reality. There's probably one universal thing that we see, especially in complex content, that everybody is a bit overwhelmed. It's a complex industry, a complex sales or complex transformation journey. How do you keep things simple while not losing the evidence or not losing the supporting materials?
Sometimes it's not about, “Hey, here's a shiny video that shows that we're hippos.” It may help in some businesses, but not everyone. But it's almost always like we are easy to work with, we are organized, and so we're going to present to you the types of experiences that help you get stuff done. We're excited, but we're definitely in safe hands. How do we show that we're safe hands? “Hey, here's a journey that you need to go on. Here's how we organize, here's how we make it easy for you to get on that journey.”
I think those are pretty much universal in B2B. They may not be that relevant in the consumer universe, but I don't know what's your take. You're seeing some universals there, and you've obviously helped companies look their best in front of their current customers and their future customers. How do you find that trade-off between organized and yet exciting? They're like a perfect medium somewhere?
MO: It starts with the customer. Because you're starting with the customer, there's a different answer for every business.
If you look just like your competitors, there's no differentiation, no reason to buy.
You have to really understand what your customer is looking for. Every customer wants ease. It's really a differentiation for a different customer group. Some customers want it to be easy to try because they like innovation, they like to try new things, and they're in the early part of this adoption curve.
If you're competing on ideas, you need to make that idea easy to try. However, other companies want ease of getting through their legal process or contract. That's a different type of ease. You signal that you're going to be easy by showing, “Hey, we've already got a 30-page contract. We've already got a legal team that's going to help us navigate that.” That gets in the way of ease of trialability. But it facilitates someone who wants ease of having a sort of larger corporate process.
It's about understanding the customer and which aspect they care about. And then leaning all in how your company is specifically designed. Your buying vision and your product vision are specifically aligned with their vision. That's how you attract the right customers or prospects. So that your leads grow your business instead of killing your business.
AS: Great way to wrap up right where we started, at your book. That's right, Mark, super helpful. Thank you for helping me apply this process.
MO: That's fun, this is my universe.
AS: Hopefully, this was full of nuggets for our audience. Where can people find you and engage with you best?
MO: I'm actually going to give an offer to the first 50 people on your podcast who want a copy of the book. The full book, as well as some calculators, templates, and training videos that go deeper into some of the concepts, is available on Modern Revenue. The first 50 folks will get a copy of the book as well as the calculators and sort of email boot camp. They can also follow the company on LinkedIn.
AS: Amazing, Mark! Thank you so much for the offer. We'll have a few folks from RELAYTO signing up for this! Thank you so much for sharing your insights and bringing so many disciplines together, from enterprise to consumer and data-driven investment in marketing and advertising. This has really been a great chat, thank you!
MO: Yeah, I really enjoyed it. Alex! Thanks so much!
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