See the show notes for this episode: S 01 | Ep 53 The Evolution of B2B Content: From Data Sheets to Digital Sales Rooms | Show notes.
0:00:00 - Alex Shevelenko
Welcome to the Experience-focused Leaders! I am delighted to introduce Craig Rosenberg, Chief Platform Officer at Scale Venture Partners where he helps over 50 portfolio companies build go-to-market machines. But one of the things about Craig is that he is a well-known name in all content related to go-to-market. He co-founded and was Chief Analyst at TOPO which really defined the salestech space. That company got acquired by Gartner where he was one of the leaders in the sales practice. And so we are very fortunate to have Craig's perspective on everything salestech, martech, and beyond! Craig, welcome to the pod!
0:00:48 - Craig Rosenberg
I'm excited after that intro! That was perfect. High energy, happy to be here!
0:00:54 - Alex Shevelenko
I'm really happy that you're here because I think you could be described as OG of the content related to our space. We were publishing thought leadership which I think at some point influenced me and validated our hypothesis about why we should go build RELAYTO, which is one of the reasons why we're also doing the podcast to engage the audience. And so I'm really curious to begin by getting your take on how you've seen content evolve in the B2B space as a vehicle for marketing and sales. Our audience will know some of the vendors: we had founders of Eloqua here and Scott Brinker from HubSpot now, but previously all the martech massive diagrams scary things that these build. Don't be afraid to drop the names of companies. We'll have a sophisticated group of folks listening to the vendors.
0:01:57 - Craig Rosenberg
Yeah, you led with a big one. By the way, for fun, my sort of start in thought leadership, I call it. Around 2008-ish, when the marketing automation platform started to take off, I helped co-found a company called Tippett, which was a business media company. And so, as part of that, my CEO and founder, Scott Albro, pulled me downstairs one day and said, “Listen, we have to eat our own dog food. Go start a blog!” And I'm like, “Okay!” So I went to the SEO and the content team. Yeah, it's easy, just go on WordPress and start blogging. And I named it the Funnelholic. It was a good blog which, by the way, I let lapse. If anybody tries to look it up, it's a bummer. But so I started writing and it was doing okay.
And then this thing called marketing automation really started to take off and I started writing about that. And there at the time, those the Marketos and the Eloquas and the HubSpots, the content was their battlefield. So they needed thought leaders because this whole idea of thought leaders was always there. But content gave them a platform to be even bigger than they had ever before. It democratized the ability to take a run at being a thought leader. They were looking for thought leaders and I didn't know that I was going to be one. I was just writing about it. And then I knew the guys at Marketo and Eloqua, but they said, “Oh, you should come to the webinar with us!”
Then I started doing webinars and I spoke at the first Marketo customer conference.
0:03:41 - Alex Shevelenko
They were following the Salesforce playbook to some degree. Salesforce events were a bit of a rock concert in a B2B world, a mix of Disney characters, and so I think that was a playbook that helped build the category of marketing automation.
0:04:04 - Craig Rosenberg
Back then the world was just starting to get flooded with content and they helped flood it. So there was written, visual, all those things. They competed heavily with each other. Though, if you take Dreamforce, for example, and I don't know this for sure, everyone always talks about how the first thing Benioff did was hire his best friend growing up and said, “We're going to have the biggest customer conference of all time and you're going to make it happen this year!” Just from the get-go that was this thing he wanted to make happen — become this, as you said, massive rock concert.
Marketo, Eloqua and HubSpot teams made a customer conference as big as possible, following the Dreamforce playbook. But I think the thing back then that we could take to now was “go big or go home” content. That was not “let's test”. That was not “let's do a little bit here or there and see how it works”. That was like, “No, we're going for broke and we're going to have the best conference!” We're going for broke, we're going to have the most and best content out there.
0:05:16 - Alex Shevelenko
Let's use AI Chat to regurgitate somebody else's post on LinkedIn. Yeah, it's definitely viral.
0:05:25 - Craig Rosenberg
Even if you take non-AI, where everyone's writing three reasons, you do this. And everyone's doing the same content just to put content up and “test the waters”.
No, they were like, “We're going to be known for this and we're going to go do that!” There is a lesson for today's world. Where there's so much content and a machine now that can build and deliver content for you, the key is you have to deliver. You have to think big about your content and how you deliver it today, otherwise, literally, you're barely under table stakes. So, even though it was back then, that was a big learning: they viewed content as one of their key battlefields and they played that way. Whether it was the conference—back then, Marketo had the definitive guides and so did Eloqua, and they were trying to do better than each other—it was a different time in terms of some of the things that work. But the mentality is actually even more relevant today.
0:06:30 - Alex Shevelenko
We can come back to this topic. But since we're in that period when you started, what I liked about the definitive guides is that actually there was substance to what they were putting together. You couldn't just put together a super lightweight blog or Twitter post and get the depth and trustworthiness of that guide. And I feel it was the world that we live in right now, the ability to have trustworthy content that's based on at least lived experience that's relevant. The guides, whatever it is, the books, and long-form podcasts that combined maybe a form factor that's a little bit more modern for the busy minds and busy lives that we live in. A recipe, because otherwise you just get lost in the noise of regurgitated types of things. So you need to go big both on the substance and also now increasing on the form factor to compete against all the noise out there. What's your take on the difference in the landscape back then versus today?
0:07:55 - Craig Rosenberg
That was the key. And then, once again, right now, substance. Your ability to deliver substance matters. Because it's too easy to deliver platitudes and high-level tips. And so I think that actually transfers and the need for it is heightened. But I do have a twist on that which I'll deliver in a second. We'll talk about form factor. Second, because that is important, not just because I'm on with you, but because it matters. So it's funny because we're actually moving against my career here as we look back.
There were a lot of reasons TOPO worked. One of them was Scott Alba who was the founder of Tippett as well. We founded TOPO together and he had this thing which was from the get-go. We had a motto which was “specificity wins”, and he said that's how we're going to differentiate. Everything we do is going to be specific. We have a methodology that calls it the main point, best practices, examples, how-tos, and exercises or training. We just wanted to give, we wanted to deliver actionable insights on everything we did. That was our format and our motto back then. If you take Gartner, TOPO and back to Forrester, we actually are high-paid content producers.
0:09:28 - Alex Shevelenko
People were paying you versus right now it's free. Or email captures most of the time.
0:09:33 - Craig Rosenberg
Yeah, but Gartner and Forrester still exist. My main point was: because of that specificity, that's how valuable it was that people were willing to pay if the definitive guides represented specificity. I think now more than ever it's once again incredibly hard to get specific information. It's easy to get tips I can download. I could go to ChatGPT, get tips and best practices right now. But how you go do that and the specificity around that is a differentiator. And as people think about their content, they should do that. However, if you ask John Miller, my definitive guides weren't working as well, and in his most recent round he said, “The times have changed.” I don't think that means definitive guides don't work. I think one of the keys here is that you can't just definitively guide everything. You have to find the niche that your target market doesn't have enough info about and will excite them and inspire them as well. Now, in this era, there should be lots of opportunities for that. Because times have changed, new playbooks have emerged and new ways and approaches have emerged. But right now, if you do a definitive guide to content, that’s clearly a channel to get people to your content.
LinkedIn, there's been a lot written about it, but I think now we're at the peak of LinkedIn. If you're not playing there and delivering your content there, then you're going to fall behind. That's a game change and most of the stuff out there on LinkedIn is fine. There is some specificity, but it's for salespeople, it's for individuals. But right now, what do you do as a company, as a founder, and how do you play that and how many times do you post? I'm just making up an example of where it's not just about. It's the content and the niche and the value of that specificity matters. Otherwise it's just going to be. It'll happen again. Even if you write a hundred page definitive guide, that thing won't compete because the differentiation of what you're talking about matters. And so, yes, the specificity and substance. Substance is more key now than it's ever been. But that doesn't mean you could just take on the most typical of topics, find the most vexing issues and challenges or new ideas in your target market and deliver those. I watched some of these founders just killing it on LinkedIn. I just brought that up. That's new. I'm sorry, everyone, that's not new because we've been on LinkedIn forever. Like, the numbers are incredible right now and there's founders with zero marketing budget leading people delivering content in LinkedIn on a daily basis. That's allowing them to build followings. That's bringing people to their websites and their content experiences there.
Okay, and then form factor. You don't actually want to bet that one form factor works. One. You always want to deliver delightful experiences because there's too much happening out there for people, for them not to want to spend time at a place that's visually stimulating or visually appealing. Okay, so that's yes. But also, you should take any piece of your content and you should have multiple form factors for that, because you don't know.
Everyone asks me what it looks like, there's the obvious. We're all consumers of content. We're going to gravitate towards great experiences, ease of use and those things. That's table stakes. But a webinar versus a white paper versus a video versus you want to provide everyone both and some will gravitate to one versus the other. For me, I like to read, but I do like visual experiences, things that are more fun to watch. So that's just, and that's me, and I think a lot of people are like that. I think it's working really well, but the main point is you should have a varied portfolio of how you present this substantive content.
0:13:57 - Alex Shevelenko
If I had to summarize the twist, it would be that you need to give people confidence that there's substance underneath it.
But it needs to be more focused because it's a noisy environment. It should be ideally focused on the areas where people care the most about learning more information, where there's the most change, or where there are the biggest opportunities and levers.
And then the form factor is you're saying two things. One is, yes, by default, the more engaging, the better, right. And the second theme is and you don't really know what engages them, right. There's different learning styles that are as old as learning technology and so we want to engage them in different styles. There are different levels of business, levels of interest for the same human being, so they might actually enjoy some media in different formats, even depending on when you catch them, when you catch a stage in the project. So you have to have a multiplier effect on visual engagement or experiential engagement of some kind, and then additional multiplier effect on repurposing that across channels, all again to be trusted, relevant and specific enough to break through the noise. So I think that's a great outline for kind of what the world of content is today. So I think that's a great outline for kind of what the world of content is today.
0:16:33 - Alex Shevelenko
All right. To summarize, we've captured the level of specificity and relevance, but you still need to have the evidence so people trust that this is contextually relevant feedback. And then there's multiple form factors that we need to do to support different usage behaviors right now. And then, on top of it, all of those form factors, you need to maximize the audience engagement level. So one of the things that is really intriguing to us as we look at the reports and presentations that you were publishing back in the TOPO era, like, oftentimes the deliverable was still the PowerPoint and sometimes the research or PDFs.
And when you look at it today, I think there's no dramatic change, right? Some of those maybe somebody like Gartner would have an online, more kind of web-based version and then the downloadable version of the report. Most of the slide decks are still ending up before they go out, being saved as PDF files and so on. So I'm curious what your take is on why some of these form factors stick around? We have a hypothesis that we even covered already, they have maybe a sense of substantiveness. That's implied in the nature of the report, a sense of permanence as opposed to a lightweight blog or webpage. You've published these things. You're training a bunch of folks now and you're helping them build their trusted content. What have you seen stay the same in the form factors and what has changed for trusted content?
0:18:15 - Craig Rosenberg
For trusted content. At TOPO, we created one form factor because the truth is we were never that big. It's the rigmarole that's required to get multiple factors perfected back then was too hard, so we just said what's the one? We do believe people ascribe value to density. That was back then. This is one of those contradictions in the market. We found that shorter, more big font, shorter blog post materials did not do as well as denser information-filled content. We didn't believe that was going to be true. It just was. It just did better. That was back then.
I do believe we were delivering research, which is a different deliverable than what some other people do. So I like PDFs. I get excited, I trust them, but I'd rather watch or look at something more visually pleasing. Now, maybe that's jaded when I tell I work with startups when they're thinking about their content. Right now, it's most important to figure out. What we talked about before is what is substantive, and then let's worry about the form factors. But when you do, I do think you can deliver visually appealing digital content that has the same feel for substantive value as that of what used to be our PowerPoints to PDFs. There is this one thing you brought up which was like we used to do the PDF versions and they were like 50 pages. I lost years of my life creating those things, but we did.
Even now, you still see, everyone wants PowerPoint decks. If you go to a webinar, what you will do is spend the first 10 minutes in the chat dealing with everyone asking for the PowerPoint deck. So that's tried and true, but it's okay. It doesn't prove anything, it's just another form factor. There are so many people now who are looking on their phones or looking with five minutes in their day to try to pick up some insights like that.
I don't have much time, so I'm in between things and I saw something that I wanted to look at. I'm not going to spend the time on a long PDF. It depends on when and who and those other things. You could still see today that longer-form blog posts sometimes still perform well if they're substantive and deep. I think people do look at some of these materials depending on what you're trying to deliver and they equate value to density and length.
0:21:20 - Alex Shevelenko
I think the word that you used is a paradox, which is a pretty relevant word, because we will want to download the PDF as an example, or we'll want to know that it's downloadable but we may not necessarily consume it. We may want to know for psychological safety reasons, that this is part of my little stash of knowledge, that's kind of hand-picked, and we want to do this and I think that it creates. If you over-rely on that old kind of how psychology works, why? Because it's trusted, and credible. It's long, someone took the time to lay out in a logical, structured way, hopefully, that content and then. The challenge is it's trusted, but then to the point maybe people will download it, but will they be able to go and easily say: “Don't check out this PDF, go to page 44 and then to page 59 and then do this and this because of that?”. That's unlikely. Even if it was highly motivated late-in-market buyers, that's a stretch.
From the innovation perspective. We've seen something really interesting that you need to give people easily digestible and actionable things, together with the substance and confidence that this is a comprehensive piece, or, if it's not a PDF, like one thing, it's a hub of content. And in that hub of related things, this is one nugget that's shareable but it has context. In a world where we don't know who to trust or if AI is creating these emails or whatever blogs, the context raises a lot of credibility.
Report on topic A, because I know that's just one topic you covered in depth, but you actually went through the whole value chain of sales, tech or whatever go-to-market research. That context gave me the confidence to say when I'm drilling into this it is the one I'll go to. Then there's a lot of conveniences and I could just deep link to page 54, which has a video inside it. If I'm a video consumer, I could also consume it in a video. In that way, you're hitting the psychology and instant gratification of the Insta era, together with the book. This credible, authoritative format has been honed for millennia at this point as a way to convey trust, and read information.
0:24:10 - Craig Rosenberg
Late-stage content is intriguing because of the form factor, which everyone makes fun of, yet is still requested, and salespeople still deliver the datasheet. However, they don't read it.
Here's the thing: they want the quick. I learned more from explainers' video content about the product than I do about reading about the product because I get bored, senseless. But I would never enter a buying cycle if you didn't give me that data sheet in dense content. You see what I mean. That is where the parrot, the late stage, is where the paradox actually lives in a way that's so unique, which is it's very similar to what you were just saying, which is you need the backup, like you need to deliver. That it's almost like comfort. It will be there as a reference and whatnot.
But for me as a learner, that's not the content. Like a definitive guide on doing something business-wise on top of funnel, even middle of funnel, whatever, I'll read that, but for my product decisions and what I buy, that's going to be different. I'm going to need you to create a sort of dense, really product-specific content. Even if something is really highly technical, I'm not going to read it, that's just the truth. I'm not. And I don't believe salespeople would rely on someone to read a data sheet and they get mad at marketing because it didn't work. That doesn't? That's never been good. That thing is just there for comfort and for reference. So you give them these things or you give them a hub. There's actually comfort in the ability to reference and the fact that in the new hub model, it's always there so I can go back to it.
0:26:03 - Alex Shevelenko
But speaking of a hub, I can screen share for our audience.
That's here one of your masterpieces from Scale Venture Partners, from one of your webinars in which you've actually spoken about the demo approach and how that's required right now to have a different flavor of engagement other than the product, like I say, as a data sheet, as a kind of default entry point, like a table stakes requirement.
What you're describing here is typically it's not a single demo, there's different solutions, and so how do you self-select to the areas that are most relevant to the customer, the challenges, and so one of the things that we've seen and developed a solution for is interactive product tours that allow a sales rep who doesn't need to know every knack and croony of a total demo suite, especially in multi-product companies, to still find something that's relevant to the customer that came up in a conversation and could have instantly get to there, that in a way that addresses their challenges and it's also a micro content and much more visual.
What have you seen in terms of adoption, I think one of the interesting things, you have product-led growth companies in your portfolio. You have enterprise companies that want to add product-led velocity, which is where this type of thing typically comes in. Any observations about what most innovative companies are doing here and what's working in the market beyond the product bore you to tears. Datasheet or a product marketer like myself in my past life putting out some product launch material that would bore most people, but the demo is a more visual example of the product datasheet, the way that it was delivered years ago.
0:28:02 - Craig Rosenberg
So it's the same. The metaphors are the same. Here you have to have a demo, but they're torturous, like just feature spits often, and product tours, I think, and interactive demos and interactive sort of anonymous tested environment. All these new things that are coming out are just catching hold. They will, they're going to work and they work.
For some today it's starting to catch on and that's partly because, A, you can't just show it's the same thing as the product. You can't just show someone a generic horizontal view of the product. You can't read a horizontal view of the product. You want to know the areas where it's relevant to me and to what I'm trying to do and I just, in my personal opinion, I think that's where automation is going to make a big difference in the buyer's life. So, if you take the example I just gave, I use the product datasheet as an example, but I use explainers and product tours to learn everything. I don't use dry stuff. And there are a couple of examples. I'm a big fan of interactive demo product tours.
I think the time is coming and it's going to keep catching, just because of the reality of the buyer, how you engage, the asynchronous buying. There's a whole bunch of reasons for it, but even in the hand, as you said, just giving, even enabling the salesperson to be able to deliver a product in a relevant way, that makes total sense. It is the same as it was 20 years ago, how we deliver it. It needs to get better, and technology will actually help us go do that.
0:29:57 - Alex Shevelenko
So let's dive into that, because I do think there's a fundamental difference in technology. So, for example, you could have found a list of all the datasheets, companies always had, hey, here's our resources section. You could look up all the data sheets and you could find the data sheet that's relevant to you or you think is relevant to you. And then if it's one to two-pager, that's not too big of a deal. But if it's a longer asset, then there's a portion within that's relevant to you. And that typically was a pain to do.
With the demos and the proactive product demos in particular, we're finding something similar where I think this is the way the world-class demo that you've set up there is actually done in person. Hey, typically customers have X, Y or Z problems. Pick the one that you care about and then people select that and then they are taken to that demo environment and they could continue further and further self-select themselves, and that's just so much more relevant, like it's pretty hard to nail that was a product, even the tour people tried to do, it works for simpler products, but I think it's just giving that autonomy to the buyer to find the relevance or, if it's a seller, to enable the seller to be effective is what's actually not been that easy to do. I agree. Custom three-day prep before the demo was SCs building out these hypotheses, which might be relevant. It was an incredibly efficient approach to do the same visual engagement and personalization.
0:31:35 - Craig Rosenberg
Yeah, just to be clear, I agree. What I was saying is that demos have been here for 20 years. That hasn't changed. Even recordings of demos were around years ago. Automation will allow us, for people to choose their own adventure towards use case, relevance and that's gonna not just help the buyer, the sales rep, because the sales reps predisposition the good ones, the top 20% would lead people down the right use case. The other 80 will just try to throw everything out there on the table. It's a terrible experience for the buyer. The automation helps both sides make sure that we're delivering the right view and information, and then the buyer is getting what they need in an economical or efficient way, their view of the product or the solution or the use case that they need.
0:32:40 - Alex Shevelenko
So what's happening as we're discussing this is we're going through the range of formats, right? We're saying, hey look, you can't get rid of the datasheet because it's maybe table stakes or people just expect it to be there. It's comfort and who knows, maybe somebody is very linear and they do want the kind of you never know.
There's just different styles. We've been amazed at looking at what we call the digital body language of our consumers, and some people just really like to go slide by slide, and it depends a little bit on their familiarity with the content and maybe personality traits. And then there are people I put myself in that category that have the attention span of a goldfish on the third cup of coffee and they want to jump to the things that they really like, need to see at this particular moment and then if they feel like, oh my God, this is awesome, they'll go back and maybe go do the linear thing, but they need to validate the depth.
And so we're seeing this range and so we brought up this idea of a content hub. What's your take? Having delivered training and educational content and dealt with all the styles, are we basically going to need to deliver the same content in multiple learning types, give people confidence and also just support the fact that people just want to know that it's there in the format that they prefer? And then, if that's the case, how do we avoid overloading people? Because that's another tricky part of this. I can have all the content that's relevant to you that's been published in topic A or in format B or some combination thereof, but that could be a lot. And there's a trade-off there between, hey, it's simple, here's single research, maybe it's one resource and it just only works one way, or here's a variety. Have you ever found your companies or your past experience of how to adapt to that?
0:34:43 - Craig Rosenberg
Is this a trick question? Because the tech, it's the tech. Technically, it's the reason you want your hubs to be technical and not rely on a salesperson who's like zipping up all those files for like, we can learn from their experiences and start to modify the hub to their liking based on the fact that it is a digital sales room. I don't know, I'm going to throw that back to you because that has been my theory, which is, if we don't know, we can learn. You don't create an overwhelming scenario, but you do give people access. Can we learn enough about the buyer and the way that they engage with content enough to start to use the technology? Can it help us be more I don't know on point with the form factors and the type of content they need? I don't know. I'm going to throw that back to you because when I've looked at digital sales rooms or anything like that, I felt like that was one of the most interesting things that came with that product.
0:35:46 - Alex Shevelenko
What I'm trying to balance is being thorough and then finding the buyer at the level of where they are. And I don't think that's obvious. For me as a product marketer, for example, wearing that hat, I want a repository of all the kinds of relevant content for my portfolio. And then, as a sales rep, who is typically fed by Wisconsin from that product marketer, they have an anxiety in our experience where they would say, look, if I get somebody in the digital saleroom, that's over dense on day one, it's going to be an information overload and they may get distracted. So what we've seen is some sort of a trade-off where people, you start the room and you have like maybe one or two pieces of content in there to begin with and then you build over time. But I don't think that nobody, I don't think anybody has figured this out.
We are in the experience business, so we're already thinking about this much more and have more data about the actual engagement in the content, and I think we're learning. So that's why I'm actually really curious about what was the challenge of information overload while building that trust. And how do you do it? Is it just prioritizing and featuring the more likely wins, or is it like AI personalization, that's going to be the answer? That's done on the fly? Those are open questions, I think, for me.
0:37:22 - Craig Rosenberg
I think you guys will continue to have real data on this. That's why I was throwing it back to you. Mine is just personal experience and I typically recommend what you brought up 45 seconds ago as you were talking, which is I tell them to start small and relevant and as tightly as possible. We can add to it based on what we learn as we go. I know it's hard.
Part of the impulse we're trying to fight is I always joke about this, but I remember years ago one of the sales reps we had, a really old-school guy would dump the whole price list in the body of the email and send them everything and hope something hits, and that actually meant that nothing would hit. So I feel like we have to fight that impulse. It's there and people can have access to this, but you should start with what we know is most going to resonate with them and that could be what we've learned without having met them, and what their typical challenges and what that particular persona or market cares about. All the way through the sales processes we learn more about them. Can we just gather enough information so that it could be as relevant, as tight as possible in the experience that they get, and then we add to it.
So I think that's what you said, that's what I would say normally to people to get to deliver the most value to the buyer and I know it's hard for a lot of people. Their instinct is, oh, what if I miss something?
The quality of the content or whatever it is that you deliver, you should rate it on its relevance and substantive value. And as long as it adds value, even if it's not exactly what the buyer wants, we can figure out what the buyer wants. We just want to maintain that credibility. So if you put three pieces together, I'm making up the number for the buyer. Ultimately, I think they'll consume more. I'm going to learn more from guys like you as you watch real content consumption. But as long as that content reflects the value, then you're going to be okay, delivering less and then providing more based on feedback from them and as we learn more about what they need. We can add to it, but for me tighter is better.
0:40:00 - Alex Shevelenko
Got it. I think that kind of broadly leads into this one somewhat controversial question that I have. That's in my head. There's a category called sales engagement of products. I think the keyword is sales. In the word they are meant, it's not like sales engagement sounds like you create something engaging for when you sell, but it's actually a way for sellers to be more efficient actually, versus really engaging, in my view. But there's probably some combination there, but it's really a sales efficiency.
It should have been called like a bunch of sales efficiency tools, different types, and maybe some insight over time, right? Because if they're good sales efficiency tools, they'll start capturing the actual outcomes of moving to the next level. That's very different in my head than buyer engagement, which is what we've been talking about a little bit earlier. Were there demos that are more experiential and there are benefits, right? You probably need to have some appreciation for sales productivity to try to engage before you get to engage the buyers.
But if you're a very productive spammer, it will not work in today's day and age. As an example, there's short-term tactics that could lead to long-term not doing the types of things that you want to be doing, especially if you're playing the long-term tactics that could lead to long-term games or an unlimited market. And so I'm curious what's your take, right? You've seen these trends, you've pioneered some of these categories yourself and defined them. Is there something that you people just get locked in the category and it's hard to get out and pull back up and say, is this category relevant in this day and age now that we figure out how to send mass pseudo personalized emails? Should we slow down on the sales engagement and move into something else?
And what's the kind of lifetime relevance of these categories, right? Is it just a portfolio that everybody needs to have? And then you start emphasizing, de-emphasizing things over time. Or do you think, hey, sales engagement needs to be there, will always be there, it's foundational, and then on top of it, there's going to be next-level plays that give you a differentiation, or next-level categories that give you differentiation.
0:42:26 - Craig Rosenberg
Yeah, so the category is a complicated beast. I learned a couple of things watching it. There's a fun insider story on the name sales engagement platform that I was part of. I forget the year that was, maybe 2011 or something. I think one thing is the buyers choose and gravitate to the naming convention. I think that's really, really important. So years ago, there was this thing that I was stuck in, which was marketing automation. Eloqua and Marketo and I think the analyst firms—this was pre me being an analyst—tried to make the move from renaming marketing automation to revenue performance management. And, if you think about the name, that's a good name. By the way, that's what Clari is right now.
0:43:26 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah, exactly, revenue intelligence.
0:43:29 - Craig Rosenberg
Yeah, they're using something a little different, and I brought Steve Woods, Joe Chernoff and John Miller together when I was at Gartner to talk about that. What happened? How did that not work? And they were talking about how the buyers didn't want to talk about it, and even John Miller was like, “Marketing automation is not the perfect name.” It's actually not a great name if you think about what we actually did, but the buyers took it and they hold it. That in and of itself is valuable, and so that was a really good learning.
And that's why, since the Play Bigger book came out, people are trying to name categories. Some stick, some don't. Even if some are better than others, some just do, and so that's one thing. But to your point, I think you have two choices. One is you can redefine what that category should be. That is, I think both are hard. For example, Siebel had CRM before Salesforce. They redefined what that category should have and should be. So you can do that. If it's a significant change in everything, then a new name in that category could subsume or knock out the previous category.
Although I live in a world of insiders, I'm in Silicon Valley, so we're always going to gravitate to the cooler thing. But if you look, being at Gartner, there are categories that people have declared boring or dead, that have been around and are still billion-dollar categories and are around still today. Were there new categories around that same topic that developed and became hot? Yes, it depends If the buyers are gravitating towards an area, and it's a tough decision. I couldn't go through how we would figure out the best way to do it today. But redefining it with the new rules, you would take what's happening today, which is what you're bringing up like buying experiences. Their expectations have changed. You can't batter them with emails anymore. That would be the kind of context that would say we either kill sales engagement or reinvent it. In my opinion, because of the proliferation of that wording, convention, and sales engagement platform even though I know it's not perfect anymore, it's still worth taking the name and the momentum of the category and redefining it versus trying to start.
0:46:10 - Alex Shevelenko
Well, this is actually very relevant. So there's an emerging category and we mentioned it, digital sales room, and that was Godard and G2 folks put it out there. It's still not a defined category and I have a personal beef with it because it almost gets us back into the word sales, whereas really for that to work, it's about the buyer. It should be about a digital buyer room or digital client room or something that creates a great experience for the audience and it's a philosophical difference. But the buyers were obviously sales organizations, something that was marketing enabling it. And it's a tricky one, because you probably are like, if I'm in sales, I want to, I can't afford, I probably want to buy something that has sales in the thing to justify the investment. So it's almost the psychology of the buyer that is not necessarily connected to the outcomes, what you're saying of what that category needs to deliver. It could be connected to their role.
0:47:11 - Craig Rosenberg
Yeah, look, it's not clear to me that the terminology digital sales room has taken off. I do think there's still up for grabs whether there's another category name there. But let's pretend it's taken off because Gartner's big on it. They've done really good work on it. You mentioned Godard. There's other folks. I see it being pitched in the Valley and see it in Series A land, so there is some movement there. But if we said, okay, digital sales room is the name, I don't believe it is, but you might, if you do, and despite its flaws and despite being inward-facing, it would be worth attacking the name as a way for a marketing perspective for you guys to differentiate yourself in the market. But the idea there would likely be to pull the digital sales room members of that category behind you.
Yeah, you'd want that still. You would still want people who are actually looking at digital sales rooms to consider you but like from a campaign, marketing and positioning perspective, I think juxtaposing against how inward looking that naming convention is would be really powerful. I do think ultimately the idea would be to it become less about parsing the words in the category and more about what it takes to win in that category, and I would say in that one, it's nuts to not be taking a buyer first point of view there, because, yes, sales gets the benefit of that or the organization does from a content perspective, but that's built fundamentally for the buyer. Emails to them are not what they're supposed to be. This is like their digital place that we are providing. That's theirs.
0:49:15 - Alex Shevelenko
It has to have a customer experience first approach otherwise, but it's not going to work this theory, but the vendors selling it are the same vendors that have sold other sales productivity tools, right? Or asset management tools, and so I think it's an interesting one. I think you brought up Salesforce earlier, right? So I was actually there at the time, like circa 2004, 2005.
And I remember the positioning was on-demand CRM back in the days, because it was easy to understand, right? Yes, we had no software and the whole thing. That was more just to interrupt people, but the category was CRM, and then the word on-demand implied something that's readily available and convenient for the user, and it was, at the time, a precursor to cloud or SaaS, that was the name of that same thing at the time, and it was. It worked. I think it worked and we really could literally clearly position, here's the old way of doing CRM, whether it's an enterprise at Siebel or SMB versions, the acts, and so on. And here's the new way of doing it and it really, I think, resonated with the market to build off of existing momentum versus calling it something else which nobody knew what it was.
0:50:32 - Craig Rosenberg
If you take Kevin Maney, the author of Play Bigger has this thing where he says, look, the category is shelf space in the supermarket. What you want is there to be a ketchup section. Then you want it. So people decide, without your branding yet, that I'm going to go get ketchup, so I'm going to go to the ketchup aisle. And then when they go in there, how do you position yourself?
And, by the way, just yesterday I went to the relish area because my kid wanted relish. I was interested in the relish aisle because my kid wanted relish. In the relish aisle there's spicy relish, a lot of, by the way, spicy relish. I thought that was really interesting.
I know it sounds corny to bring this up, but the spot in the aisle or the aisle in the supermarket metaphor that Kevin Maney always talks about is really important. If there's already space on the aisle and you can compete and out-position what relish really is in that aisle, that's the winning form. Because you want people to go get the relish. Now, if it's not relish, then your goal of category design is to create this new section in the aisle because you want the market to gravitate towards the category in the supermarket and then you want to win in the category. And so in the case of, I don't think digital sales rooms are there yet, but you would know more. In my experience as an analyst, I didn't feel like I still thought it had a lot of explaining that needed to be done there.
But CRM is a good one, there was already a CRM aisle done there. There was a new one called on demand that started to dominate that shelf space and that everyone else had to follow, and the predominant design for that came out of Salesforce. It's an interesting part of your decision-making: do I take on a new category and try to build one, or do I try to redefine the one that already exists and what's worth it and what's not worth it?
0:52:35 - Craig Rosenberg
I'll just say slightly renaming a category I'm not sure works. I don't know. I'd have to find evidence. Maybe someone could give me evidence on that. You're either going radical and recreating a new one or reshaping the definition of a current one. Anyway, sorry, that was my recap of what I was saying. As you were, I didn't mean to interrupt.
0:52:56 - Alex Shevelenko
That's great. Look, I think this has been such a treat to get your take on all things the go-to market and how they're evolving, and even like in the areas that are personally relevant to me. I think it was a great showcase of what you're bringing to the portfolio companies at scale. Maybe, as we wrap up and folks want to follow you and engage with you, can you talk about the category of what you're building? Was the platform at scale in the world where you fit and what kind of folks should be coming your way to learn more and have these types of wonderful conversations that we've been having, where I've learned a lot?
0:53:35 - Craig Rosenberg
Oh, thank you. scalevp.com. We're going to take founder-led go-to-market and help them turn that founder-led success into go-to-market machines. And so we've built our knowledge base, our resources and our internal products in order to help people go do that. And so look, and a lot of our stuff is out there. We publish a ton on LinkedIn. We have blogs. People can, if they can get in, they can reach out to me and then potentially come to some of our events.
But we're trying to be on the cutting edge because now is not the time to play around and whip out playbooks from 20 years ago. You've got 18 to 22 months to turn yourself into a go-to-market machine, and we're always looking for new things and seeing if they're validated in the marketing and then figuring out how we can publish, share, and help people go execute against us. So we have a lot of great ideas on the scalevp.com website and then also on our LinkedIn. We share a lot and give a lot away. Also, I have a podcast myself called The Transaction, not affiliated with Scale. That's mine where I talk about a lot of these things as well.
0:54:47 - Alex Shevelenko
I hope our audience reaches out and connects. I've learned a ton from this discussion and from years of following your content through all those channels, starting from TOPO. So, Craig, thank you so much for being a longtime fan. First time caller here was you, but excited to introduce you to our audience!
0:55:06 - Craig Rosenberg
Awesome, it was great to be on. It was great hanging out and hopefully we can do it again. And when you learn more about what works and what doesn't work in the digital experience realm, I want to hear about it!