Aligned or Blind? Ask Your Customers with John Arnold

John Arnold: Customer obsessed companies are disruptors. You know, that's just how they do it.

John Common: Welcome to Growth Driver. We're the best minds in B2B or redefining growth. Hey, everybody. John Common here. Welcome to Growth Driver. Look, if you're listening to this show, then you probably already know that B2B buyer behavior has changed. You probably already know that most go to market teams can do a better job, honestly, about leveraging technology and data and analytics to drive growth.

Yeah, I bet you already know that you have lots of different go to market motions to choose from as you're designing your end to end growth process. And lastly, if you're listening to Growth Driver, you probably already know that most companies can do a better job of aligning and integrating the efforts of brand and demand and product and CS and partners.

and sales around smarter growth. But in the midst of all of that complexity and urgency, many B2B companies often forget the whole point. It's our customers, right? But here's the thing. Customer obsession is easy to say, but hard to do. And Forrester has been working a ton on this exact topic. How to make customer obsession be a North star for B2B growth.

And that is what we're going to unpack today. We're going to define what a customer obsessed strategy really is. And we're going to unpack how a customer obsessed growth engine can help you align your go to market team. around delivering customer value, but I'm not going to do it alone. I'm going to do it with a true expert in the space.

His name is John Arnold. He is currently and has been a principal analyst at Forrester focused on B2B marketing. Prior to Forrester, he was a fairly dope, if I may say so, go to market and ABX consultant at Adobe at Demandbase. And he even did a tour of duty at Intelligent Demand with me. Uh, he's also worked on the client side as a head of marketing.

And I like that because that means he brings a balance between, uh, academics and pragmatism. He's also just genuinely a smart guy and a great person. John, welcome to growth driver. My friend. What's up, John. So good to see you, man. I love when you and I get a chance to, to talk and now we're finally getting a, uh, doing it in front of a red light and recording 

John Arnold: it.

I know it's been, uh, What, once a year at some coffee shop or bacon, there's always bacon involved, which is good. 

John Common: Yes. That's, that's actually a hidden strategy is you got to have the bacon and yeah, um, Hey, seriously, I, uh, was at Forrester summit, uh, last year and I watched you do a fantastic keynote about customer obsession and a customer obsessed strategy.

It fired me up for real. So, uh, So let's just start right there at the top. What does it mean really to be customer obsessed? Define it for us. 

John Arnold: Yeah. Define it the Forrester way is, you know, customer obsession is a strategy that's at the, at the top of the, of the all strategies at the company. So it's, it's really, you know, simply stated, it's, it's putting the customer at the center of leadership strategy and operations.

And so that's how we kind of think about customer obsession. And customer obsession is, is kind of an unusual term. Like people don't really know what it means to, you know, are you customer focused? Does that mean you're, um, you know, you put the customer at the center of everything. A lot of people say that, um, but we actually divide companies into five different levels.

of, um, their, you know, in their, in their strategy around customers. And it goes all the way from people who are customer naive, you know, like you're not really a growing company. Maybe you don't even care. You make a product, you sell enough of it. You're not trying to grow. Um, you know, you made something that people need.

Uh, you don't really understand your customers. You understand your product. Um, there's not very many companies that are customer naive and get very big, but that's the bottom. And then customers go through this transformation where they become customer aware, they're customer engaged or customer committed, and then customer obsessed is like the top echelon of that.

Um, and you know, again, it's, it's pretty simple stuff here, putting the customer in the center of everything you do, but it's really. Um, at the leadership strategy and operations level, that's what separates the way Forrester talks about it with, you know, other, um, people who say, well, you know, you should just focus on your customers and the customer's always first or the customer's always right.

It has to permeate that strategy level and be part of everything that you do. Um, and you're right. It's hard to do. It's about six to 7 percent of companies. Uh, are defined as customer obsessed by our measurements. And we do a state of customer obsession survey every year. And it's a, it's a big survey. Um, we do all kinds of nerdy weightings on the survey.

We use Baroda analysis and do all kinds of things to figure out, you know, whether people are actually customer obsessed when they say that they do customer led things or their customer led or their customer first, or they think of those things, you know, when they answer those questions. And, uh, we do a deep analysis on that and we compare that to business results over time and all kinds of things to kind of figure out, um, how that strategy translates into growth because that's what it's all about really is, you know, we're running businesses here, you know, you can be customer obsessed and deliver lots of value, which is really what, you know, Customer obsession starts to get you.

It maximizes the value that your business can create for its key customers in order to get that value back from customers to the business. So it's a means to getting to that end, but that end is definitely growth. That's what you want. Um, we're not charities, you know, we be customer obsessed and give everybody lots of value, but you don't get anything back for that.

That's not good. But, um, but it is a better means to get. get there that way versus extracting value from buyers and customers, right? You're always looking for ways to, to get more value from them. And you're forgetting about what it takes to create that value for everybody. You think about the life 

John Common: cycle of a company.

It usually starts with a founder who's obsessed about, uh, solving problems for customers, which is a great place to be, right? That's a fun, exciting time in the life cycle of a company. I guess my question is, um, you know, especially as a company grows and gets out of problem solution fit and gets to product market fit and starts to grow and things get more and more complex.

And now you're mid market. Maybe you're even lucky enough to become a global or enterprise, large enterprise company. Why do we forget about our customers? How does that happen? Because again, I think there's this. It's really when, when, when people like you and I say, you know, you have to center your strategy around customers, it is sort of the most obvious thing in the whole world.

And yet the duality is so many B2B companies forget it. So why do they forget it 

John Arnold: or lose it? Yeah. It seems like the thing, sometimes the things that got you there, you know, when you're talking about a big company, the things that get you to a hundred million or 250 million are generally not the same things that get you from 250 to a billion and like everybody knows that.

Right. Right. But. The, the key is that you can, you know, you can build a pretty sizable company by building a new, a new product. It's something that, um, you know, it has some features that people really like it. It fills a need better than another product, or, you know, it's a new product that nobody knew they needed.

And that fills a need that existed, but then the product, you know, that's a new product. Yeah. We've had that conversation before about what, what are actually needs and how does that work? But you can, you can only go so far with that when you're starting, when you start to get up into, okay, I have a 10 billion company and I need to grow that, um, you know, you're not going to double your revenue.

Right. You're not going to go out and double your revenue. If you're a 10 billion company, um, you're probably going to have to find some ways to get incremental value. And that incremental value comes from your customers and you have to refocus on that. So I think companies forget it cause they do well.

They, they hit a milestone, they, you know, hit a new echelon of growth and they sort of run out of that runway. And then they have to find a new solution. Um, and companies that just keep growing and keep growing and keep growing. And there are many examples of that where, um, you know, I'll just throw out a name, like, you know, a Salesforce people are critical of Salesforce and they're always talking about, you know, how that's gonna, it's gonna end someday, all this growth that they've had.

They just never stopped growing every single year. They just keep on going. Um, you know, Amazon is like that. They're just very, very. Customer assessed and, you know, they continue to create value and get that value back. In fact, at Forrester, we don't even say deliver value or we try not to, you know, you can't really deliver value.

You can't deliver any value. You have to have it received. You know, the, the customer has to receive that 

John Common: value. Tell me, tell me more about that. Deliver value versus what, because that sounds like you're talking about a mind shift could deliver value. Sounds very, let me guess. It has, has, if I say deliver value, that's very John centric, John common centric.

If I say it that way. But when you say receive value, even the saying of that makes me think, oh, wait a minute. 

John Arnold: If you're customer obsessed, you might think to yourself, you know, uh, let's say you're a construction company, you make, you know, drills and drill bits and hammers and stuff. So, you know, if you think about your customers, you say, you know, my customer needs a drill bit because they're, they're trying to drill a hole, right?

Um, so I'm gonna make a drill bit. Well, that's kind of an inside out way of thinking about it, right? Like, I make drill bits, I'm gonna make a drill bit so that they can drill a hole. The customer obsessed way to think about that is, my customer needs a hole, and that hole needs to be a half an inch wide.

What are all the ways that I could make that happen for this customer, right? Because I'm a whole company, that's what I do. I thinking about the hole that my customer needs to, to have in their, in their concrete. Um, well, it's not just drill bits. It could be all kinds. There's all kinds of solutions to that, right?

So. Um, and that's how companies that grow rapidly and get really, really big kind of think about the world, right? They don't think of themselves as a product that solves a problem. They think of themselves as there's a problem that needs a solution and that solution looks like either a new product because one doesn't exist at all.

Um, to solve that problem, or it looks like a better product because the ones that are out there aren't really doing that very well, or it looks like innovation because there's a better way to solve the problem, but it hasn't been invented yet. So we've got to go through a bunch of R and D. So, you know, that, that mindset, right?

It's like a mindset. Um, and companies that never forget that and never get fat and happy or never forget what got them there. If they got there through that customer obsessed mindset, um, they just kind of keep going and there's not very many of them. I mean, that's what we all aspire to be like, 

John Common: right?

Well, I, you know, and again, I don't ever want to come off as unempathetic for our audience or ourselves even cause it's, it's a big job driving sustainable, efficient growth. So I could see how. Just understanding and doing the daily, monthly, quarterly work of running, building and running the machine of go to market can, I could see how incrementally you start sliding down the slippery slope of, of more and more internal focus because there's so much work to be done internally, but I think what I like about, work about in this area is that it's such a strong call.

It's kind of like a, and I remember sitting in the audience, watching you talk at the summit last year and just thinking to myself, yeah. And you walked through some really great examples. And again, I've been doing this for, since I had hair on my head, man, like I get it, but I, we, even I forget it sometimes.

And so 

John Arnold: it was so, yeah. So it does seem really fundamental, but then when you get down into the weeds of it, it's. It's actually not. And, um, you know, like here's a couple of things to throw out there and we can talk about them. But, you know, the first thing is that customer obsession is an amplifier to what you're already doing.

It's not a substitute for that, right? So you're already, you already have a business, you already have your products and your solutions, and you know what your customers will buy, at least if not know what your customers need. Um, or will need in the future, but you know, to add customer obsession to that is the goal, not to rip everything out and become customer obsessed.

That's not how that works. So it's, it's an amplifier to your existing value creation model, whatever that is. And then the other thing to keep in mind is that this is all about these levels of customer obsession are not right for everyone because some companies don't necessarily need to become fully customer obsessed the way that we would define it.

It depends on how empowered your customers are. So if your customers are highly empowered, you know, there's a lot of self service buying and there's a lot of choice in the market and they can do whatever they want. You'd better be customer obsessed because you've got to know every nuance of how they buy, what makes them tick, how they make decisions, how much money they have.

You've got to know everything. So be customer obsessed, but if your customers aren't very empowered, if you have a monopoly and the only way that they're going to get your solution is through you, it might be okay to be customer aware, customer committed, um, as a, as a strategy, 

John Common: right? The power company, the electricity company, uh, I wouldn't say that they're overly customer obsessed with me.

But to your point, maybe 

John Arnold: they don't need to be. Why should they be, right? So they don't have to think about that. Um, I think they should. I mean, wouldn't that be great? But, um, they've gotten this far from that. And, um, you know, it also has to do with competition. So if you have a lot of competition, if there's a lot of choice, or a lot of substitutes, not direct competition, but, you know, they can solve this problem another way with a different solution, or they can do nothing.

Um, because we have a nice to have product instead of a must have product, you know, customer obsession can help you transform. So it gets pretty interesting when you get into the weeds of it. 

John Common: Look, let's go into those, some of those weeds. So at the highest level, you described customer obsession as a business strategy or a mindset that infuses your business strategy.

Um, what advice or examples would you have of, uh, C suites, executives? Um, how can they. Create company strategy that will then guide go to market strategy and marketing sales, et cetera. But to stay at the corporate level, what advice do you have for CEOs, CFOs, COOs for developing and baking customer obsession into their corporate strategy?

John Arnold: Yeah, I'll give you a couple. So, you know, first one is there needs to be a C level executive that's responsible for making sure that the customer is considered first in all the decisions about strategy and operations. So that's, you know, is there a, is there a person who's responsible for that, um, in the organization?

And, and that could be, you know, one of the existing C roles, or that could be a C role that is designated to that task, but, um, has to start at that C level. Um, another thing is, Uh, all the senior leaders have to know how to interpret and make decisions with data because on some level, especially at scale, and if you're talking about big companies, there's an enormous amount of data about customers and what they want and what they believe and what they need and how they feel and what they think and why they exist and all those things, uh, it's going to take a lot of data and that data has to have, uh, Some meaning you can't just be piling on a lot of customer data without any way to turn that into You know actionable Operations and strategies, so you're not a data driven company or you're not a Data innovator.

It's sorry. It's hard to be customer obsessed at scale You've also got to be pretty agile You know, so you can't have a whole lot of bureaucracy and top down planning, you know, everything comes from corporate and then rolls down to the regions and that kind of thing. You've got to be a little more nimble and embrace agile ways of working because, and I say, you know, agile, sometimes that means something very specific, especially to marketing people, you know, an agile marketing team.

But I like to use the word nimble, you know, just be, be nimble. Um, because things change, you know, COVID changed us all and that happened pretty rapidly. You've got to be able to pivot and make changes and change the way you think about customer obsession in that moment. Um, so yeah, you know, lots, lots and lots of things that that, leadership level that need to be in place.

John Common: Imagine you're a CMO, CRO, VP product in that space of the org chart. And you're sifting through, imagine sort of the typical, so not best in class, but the typical mid market or enterprise companies, um, day in the life. Which includes, you know, some amount of data, maybe too much data, maybe not enough insight, but, you know, whatever, whatever they get fed in terms of how they're performing with customers, prospects, et cetera, how, what are some indicators, some classic indicators that those people I just described that look for that would indicate to them we are doing well, or maybe we have some work to do around our approach to customers and understanding them.

John Arnold: I think you can probably take the temperature of. You know, in the strategy realm, you know, is your company willing to forego short term financial goals to achieve a longer term objective? If you're not, if you're short term focused, um, that's a sign that maybe your strategy is not as customer obsessed as it could be.

John Common: Tell me why. What, what is the, I don't want to, I don't want to guess why, what is the relationship between customer obsession and short term or longer term focus? 

John Arnold: Yeah, especially with B2B, if you think about, you know, most B2B companies, sales driven cultures, product driven cultures, finance driven cultures, very hard to get them to be marketing driven or market driven or customer driven, um, and sales, you know, by the nature of that organization is incentivized to get a short term result.

You know, they've got to get their sale closed and one and down and, you know, that's what they're incentivized to do. And sales, if they're leading go to market, um, you know, and a lot of companies that works, but you have to remind yourself if you're in that organization. That sales is short term focused.

And if the customer needs something that's going to take longer, or if there's, you know, a roadmap that's going to get developed and sales is going to be in charge of informing that roadmap for the product team, you know, sales knows what customers will buy, but it's difficult for sales to focus on what customers need now, or in five years or in three years, or, You know, how the competition is developing.

And, um, you know, if you're really listening to your customers, uh, you know, things are going to change and sales has a hard time changing for the longterm and they don't really have, you know, that ability to, to think about the longterm or do things that affect the longterm. 

John Common: So are you, uh, just to take that to the, maybe it's next step, are you suggesting that.

I mean, obviously sales is always welcome into the planning space and the go to market evolution space, but are you suggesting that it's the customer organization or the marketing organization or the product organization that is probably better positioned to champion customer obsession? 

John Arnold: Customer obsession is that leadership strategy operations level.

So you know, yes, it could be the sales leader. You have that. Senior C level sales leader and that senior C level marketing leader, or, you know, some companies are going or a role that kind of combines those together into one C level. Um, some companies have a chief customer officer. Some companies have a chief experience officer.

You know, there's somebody at that C level and that's that C level executive that needs to be responsible for making sure that the customer is considered in all those decisions. If that person is short term focused and says all we really care about right now is getting the pipeline number that we need to get today, um, it just over rotates you into this short term decision making and, you know, you can't really listen to the customer as well because you're trying to extract value.

You're not trying to create value. And value creation can take time. Much more time than that. Um, so, you know, you, you've got to, you've got to have that C level representation. 

John Common: Yeah. Yeah. You know, um, talk to me about the metrics that would guide us in the right direction. I, I feel like, and again, this is my, maybe this is a little obvious, but an organization that focuses, it's, you know, kind of Northstar metrics more around the short term things like bookings.

Or pipeline, which I just described most. B2B go to market teams just then I, I, I'm se seeing and sensing, uh, a maturation in go-to market teams where the leaders are still, obviously you gotta keep your eye on the pipeline ball and the bookings ball, like you gotta do that. But I'm seeing more and more mature go-to market organizations, pay equal and even growing attention to NRR and lifetime value.

And of course, churn and am I right to think that if, if, if you want to make customer value be more and more of the North star for how you go to market, don't we need to evolve the key metrics that C suite and VPs and directors use across the go to market team? And when you hear me talk about lifetime value or NRR, are those the kinds of things you recommend or what or am I missing some other metrics?

John Arnold: Yeah, you could do that. I mean, value is a great word to use. I think there's. You know, different levels of value. There's some research that, um, some of our analysts write about the four types of value, you know, you kind of have the revenue and then there's, you know, intrinsic value, there's value that, uh, manifests itself in organizations in all kinds of different ways.

And you can, you can measure those, you know, um, and that's why that, that C level or that higher level. Um, responsible party needs to be there because sales and marketing and product, um, and finance are all going to have slightly different metrics and they're all, you know, they revolve around revenue or they revolve around that recurring revenue number.

If you're using that, you know, if you're a SAS company or something, but, um, you know, there needs to be some function in the organization that's measuring things like that. Customer satisfaction and, um, you know, loyalty and, and some of those metrics that, you know, are those predictors of revenue?

Absolutely. Are they hard to measure and tie to revenue? Absolutely. Right. So that's where you get really tripped up. If you don't have that C level representation, you can't have somebody way down in the organization, measuring customer loyalty and fighting that battle every day, that loyalty leads to renewals that leads to lifetime value.

Um, and you know, don't give them the resources to, to prove out that case and, you know, measure it correctly and all of that. So you, you kind of have to believe that it's another thing that, you know, it's, I'm going to sound like I'm picking on sales or something like that, but when we, you know, it's again, B2B companies, you know, sales matters, it's, it's important to make sure sales.

Um, is doing a good job and is able to close deals and you're feeding that sales engine. But when the sales engine gets over rotated to extracting value, um, you don't have the capacity to do some of these longer term things and, um, you know, and that's to the benefit of sales later on, uh, which is why, you know, some companies go through tough times, you know, they, they have a great big sales year, you know, they hit all their numbers.

And then the next year they don't and then they do it again and you know, they go back and forth and up and down, 

John Common: right? They got out of balance with short term, long term. They got out of balance internal versus external customers versus products. Yeah, I see it all 

John Arnold: the time. I see it all the time. The same conversation you have with, you know, the brand and demand team and marketing, uh, you know, if, uh, and this happens to me sometimes where I'll get a, A question from somebody that says, you know, we, we can't figure out how brand is driving revenue.

So we're going to shut it down. We're going to shut it off because it's easy to cut the budget, right? Like, cause we're spending all this money on ads and it's not working cause we can't measure it. So we're shutting it down. And. You know, you know, it's going to happen, right? We all know that it works. We just can't measure it.

That's a totally different thing for the first 

John Common: quarter. It looks fan. Look at EBIT. gov for the first, maybe two quarters. And then, and then, you know, what starts to happen. 

John Arnold: Yeah. What usually happens on my side of this is that about a year and a half ago. Later, I get a new seat holder for the service that they bought and it's a different marketing leader.

And they're coming back and say, and they're saying, John, they cut off all of our brand marketing a year ago. They fired the marketing team and I'm bringing it all back and we're going to start over and do it again, but this time we're going to measure it. So how do you, can you help me get that measurement strategy up and running?

Or we did, we measured it this way at my old company. That's why they hired me. I'm bringing in this measurement, you know, because they know it works. They just didn't have a way to. Translate that into value or show the value of that. 

John Common: You probably are already doing this with your team, but, but, but if not, I think it'd be really interesting to see that sort of five stage maturity model that you talked about at the beginning of the episode.

And it'd be interesting to see for each of those five stages of customer obsession, maturity at each of the five stages, what are the typical metrics that the organization that is in that stage uses, uh, to define success relative to their go to market and growth. I think that would be fascinating. You know, as a practitioner, as a consultant myself, I think what go to market executives need from us is, you know, not just preaching and not just frameworks.

I think they deserve incremental ways that can guide them to better. And I found that if you can evolve metrics, even if they're imperfect, right? It, let's say I'm at maturity model two and I need to go to level three and doing so means that I need to start a voice, a customer program that helps me Triangulate in on the relationship between NPS and NRR.

Maybe that's not perfect, but that sure as shit is better than just being like, I don't know, every quarter, do we hit our bookings goal or not? Right. And so I don't know what you, I'm kind of preaching at you now, but, uh, yeah, I think that would be fun to do. You know, 

John Arnold: Yeah, it's cool. And I'm going to give you something cool to think about.

Maybe the people watching this can kind of think about this too, is that, you know, when you get to that customer obsessed Ashlawn, which is sort of an elite place to be as a business, especially a big business, you know, it's kind of this, um, you know, you're the cream of the crop business out there. You're not just the run of the mill business.

You're probably a leader in your market. Um, you know, growing year over year and people can't believe how much you keep growing, you know, that kind of thing. And if you aspire to be like that, I think one of the things you have to realize is that to, to become and remain customer obsessed, you really have to be a disrupter.

If you need to show your company that there's somebody who has already done this so that we can show, You know, that we can do it too. Then you're not really on the cutting edge of innovation, right? You're saying I need somebody else to have done this already, or I'm not able to do it. And by definition, you're going to be behind the people that are innovators that are trying things and breaking things and pushing the envelope and always working on being better.

Um, and, and that's a little bit of the customer obsessed companies. Uh, mindset, you know, they're, they're like, whatever we did last year, we're going to scrap it and do something different if, if it works. And if it keeps working, we're going to keep doing it, but we're always innovating. We're always pushing, always trying to find something new and better and different to do.

Um, and that's a lot of that driven by customers because they always change and their attitudes are different and new, the new generation comes along and they changed the way the world works and the way people think about things. And you know, they're always pushing that envelope. So while, you know, I agree with what you said, the metrics are really important.

You've got to have all those in place. But what you kind of have to forget about is I need to try something that it's already has, you know, been done before, or I need to do something that I know will work because I can't take any risks at my company and I can't really rock the boat here. Because it's not going to, if it doesn't work, then that's going to be a problem.

Well, you know, those customer obsessed companies are disruptors, you know, that's just how they do it. And, uh, some companies just don't have an appetite for that or leaders don't have an appetite for that. 

John Common: Yeah. You're talking about something that is in, um, short supply. And that is corporate courage to, to jump ahead in the, in the process and say, Hey, Either we disrupt ourselves in this area or we are going to get disrupted.

And it's, it's kind of the, you know, you could use the innovators dilemma as a framework for it. You could, you could use, you know, brand versus demand. You could say short term long term, but at the root of it is, it kind of goes back to what you said at the very beginning, I think, which is it's going to take one or more senior people who are willing to risk something to, to, you know, to And if we're talking about mid market and enterprise companies, what makes it even harder to be, to be the person who's being courageous in the corporate environment is most things are going pretty well, right?

Often. And so the big question here, this gets to human philosophy and human behavior change. It's not even corporate America anymore. It's, It's, um, you know, are, are you in a system that requires there to be a catastrophe to force change, or are you in a system that is wise enough and courageous enough and insightful enough to instigate the disruption and even dip in performance that comes from making a change for the benefit of the mid and the long term?

And, um, Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. And sometimes those changes. Go look in the mirror, man. Let's see what you think. 

John Arnold: Big systemic changes. Like we're going to rip something out and replace it or we're going to transform something and it's hard. Yeah. We talked earlier about, you know, what, what got you to 250 million is not going to get you to a billion and you have to make those changes.

The thing that's really hard for organizations in that spot and those leaders is that, you know, if you, if you look at a 250 million company and you look at a billion dollar company and you look at a 10 billion company, they look very different. And, you know, to go from that 250 to the billion, you kind of have to start looking like the billion before you're at the billion.

So that's a big risk to say, Oh, you know, billion dollar companies have this organization this way. And they, you know, they have, This Center of Excellence and that shared service, and they've kind of insourced this and outsourced that. That's kind of different, but if we do that, that's not going to work yet, because we're small.

We don't need that yet. That's a big investment. We don't need it. So, are you willing to plan for success? Are you willing to say, we know we're going to hit these numbers, but we have to do the things that are necessary to get there before we're there? And, you know, that's how leaders, when they don't have support like research and, you know, other people who have been through that before, or an outside perspective from somebody who's talked to a lot of companies, you know, they, they need that, um, to justify it.

And then, then they're lowering the risk because there's always a risk in doing that. You know, you don't know if you're going to be successful or not, but you have to plan for success or you're just going to keep on recycling back through the same things. And. That's when people switch out their leaders, you know, they say, well, these leaders aren't really getting us there.

Right. 

John Common: In these days of efficient growth, throwing siloed tactics at your growth goals is not going to get it done. So what will work? Aligned, go to market strategy. That guides the right integrated growth motions. If you need a partner who understands how to build that strategy and then help you execute it at a very, very high level, go to intelligent demand.

com. Book a meeting with an expert growth consultant. They'd love to talk to you. Let's, let's say for now we have kind of done a really good examination of the corporate strategy of customer obsession. I want to now kind of go into the next sort of. piece of this episode, which is a bit more tactical and practical.

And that is, okay, you've got a customer obsessed, uh, strategy happening, hopefully. What comes next? And I think what I'd like to talk to you about is what is the customer obsessed growth engine? How is it really built? What does it really look like in marketing and sales and SDR? And talk, talk to us about the customer obsessed growth engine layer.

Of a customer obsessed 

John Arnold: strategy. You know, you've got your leadership strategy, operations level, and then really close to that is the growth. We call it the growth engine, right? The customer obsessed growth engine. Um, and as you would imagine the customers in the center of that customer obsessed growth engine or in the B2B side of it, it's the buyer, you know, the business buyer and that business buyer is a group by the way.

So one of the things customer obsessed companies do is they obsess. over the buying group, right? Cause we know that companies make decisions as a group. They, there's not one person generally who makes the decision, especially in enterprise and all of that. But, um, you know, if you forget that, if you just say, well, you know, my marketing technology is based on contacts and leads and that's what sales needs, they need to contact and they need the decision maker.

And so my whole you know, operational rigor is all revolves around something that isn't the buyer reality. So, you know, you have to kind of put that buyer in the center and in the B2B world, it's, it's a group. Um, and then surrounding that is the very tight alignment of marketing product and sales. So that is.

Those, those three functions have to come together, uh, and they're primarily the growth functions, you know, you have, you have other functions in your organization that are important to leadership strategy and operations, but the growth engine is really, you know, In B2B, it's um, marketing, product and sales.

And in some organizations, customer success, right? So like, yeah. So customer success and maybe even partner or no. Yeah. And you know, is that part of sales? Is that part of marketing or is that part of product? Or is it something totally different with a different leader? Okay. 

John Common: So customer in the center and a customer is not, if you're in B2B, it's not one contact or one persona, it's a buying team or whatever you want to call that.

That's in the center. And now a raid around your. The center of your piece of paper that says customer arrayed around it is marketing product. And sales and or maybe partner CS, depending on tomato tomato. Okay. Now what, what comes next? 

John Arnold: Yeah. Technology. So, you know, technology integrates around that whole thing.

So the buyer has some technology that they're using. So that's important, um, to consider. And then you got marketing product and sales and the technology that. That they use, um, coming together. So that's the, that's the very simple. And when we, when we did that research on our customer obsessed growth engine, it was pretty interesting.

We went out to find out what keeps companies growing, what makes them grow. Um, you know, what are the growth companies doing that the non growth companies are, are not doing or vice versa. And what we expected, our hypothesis going out there is that we would find all these super innovative companies that were doing very different, unique things because that's what you, you know, when you read a book about how companies grew and, um, you know, you get these examples like Steve Jobs and you get these examples like guerrilla marketing where the small business became a big business and it was all because they were really smart and innovated and did very clever things that nobody else thought of.

And those are fun reads. But what we found in the research is that, you know, companies, especially B2B companies, when they consistently grow, they do the basics really well. They do the fundamentals. That's what really keeps them going. And we're like, well, that's not super exciting to read, but it's true.

So we're going to publish that. So we, we post a report about the customer obsessed growth engine. And that's what it is. It's buyer in the center, product marketing and sales, tightly aligned technology. Um, effective use of technology. So the companies that can get that to work, which is very hard by the way, um, you know, just talk about sales and marketing alignment or, or the way I like to talk about it is, you know, you can't have sales and marketing alignment until marketing and marketing are aligned.

Because that's a problem in some organizations, you know, marketing and marketing aren't even aligned. How can you get sales and marketing aligned around that and then throw a product into the mix of that? You know, how do you get sales, marketing, and product aligned? Well, you put the customer in the center.

If you put processes in the center or lead scoring in the center or aligned planning or sales kickoff or whatever, you know, those things aren't going to align you, it's the buyer, you know, it's that buying group that'll align those three things. 

John Common: Give us a pragmatic example of maybe make it an acquisition.

Kind of emotion where product and marketing and sales aligned by using technology around their buyer. Like 

John Arnold: what worked better in that sense? All right, so I'll give you, I'll give you an example of a, a very big company that I work with. Um, one part of their company that in the enterprise division, they do everything around use cases.

So product marketing and sales get together and they say, okay, what are all of the things that customers are doing, um, when they interact with us, and what are they trying to solve for? And that could be everything from, well, I came to the website, I'd like to log in and see some information about my account, uh, to I'm trying to decide if I want to put you on the short list, um, because I'm trying to make a purchase decision.

And so all of those use cases become the center of their conversations around what they're going to build, what they're going to. Sell and how they're going to deliver, you know, the messaging around that. So, um, and anyone can bring those use cases together and a lot of times they overlap, right? Product goes out and does their customer discovery and they say, oh, well we found that these customers, you know, need that half inch hole.

And, uh, so we're gonna develop this product feature that gets them that hole. Um. And marketing came to the, to the, uh, the same table and they said, Oh, well, we had a use case. That was kind of like that. We had somebody coming to our website through a search term. That was something like that. And we think they were trying to solve that problem.

So good. There's a connection there and sales says, yeah, I can sell a half inch hole. We, you know, if I had a product for, for doing that. So, you know, just bringing that customer use case to the center of the conversation. Um, and a lot of that, again, is. There's technology that gets used for the insights part of that, right?

Because the customer's contributing some data to that conversation. And you're sort of using that to, uh, to determine the use cases. And then, um, you know, you're using the technology to build the product and to, you know, to do the marketing and do the, doing the selling. So I love that example. I love, I don't know why more companies don't do more customer centric planning like that.

John Common: Yeah, let me, let me compare and contrast it and tell me if I'm picking up what you're putting down. So a lot of companies wake up on a Monday or whatever their Monday, and they think to themselves, huh, I just read my funnel report and we need more leads or we need more opportunities or whatever. Yeah.

And they, they even frame their problem that way, which is an intrinsically internal self focused, how, how do we get more leads? Well, that's a very us centered way of saying it. And what you just said is no customer obsessed or customer, whatever. Customer enlightened organizations. Start with surprise, surprise the customer.

What is the job to be done? What is the problem that the customer is trying to solve? And then you put that in the center and then you gather product marketing and sales around that job to be done that challenge and say, how can we, as a team leveraging our technology or rev ops, solve that particular use case or that particular problem?

Am I, am I, am I getting what you're saying? 

John Arnold: Yeah. Yeah. And you can, you know, some companies start to do that and they, they shrink their audience too much, you know, because they say, well, we, you know, we, we only sell to hospitals that have 110 beds, you know, in their ER. And that's the, that's the sweet spot.

And that some of that is sales talking like, look, You know, we can't, can't sell anybody that has fewer hospital beds than that. So it's too hard. Um, and, uh, you know, you have to be able to challenge each other in those environments and say, well, you know, that might be our ideal customer, but what if instead of giving those leads to sales, we give those leads to self service.

And, um, if they have fewer than a hundred beds, that's still a market for us, but we're going to sell it differently. And then you can't have sales jumping up and down and saying, no, no, no, that's competing with sales. We want that money. We want that deal. You know, no. So you have to be able to do what's right for that customer.

Do what's right for the business. And, you know, when sales marketing product get together, um, there has to be trust and, you know, there has to be some willingness to adjust the business and flex the business without that friction. Um, and sometimes customer obsessed companies are just better than other companies.

At resolving that friction, right? The customer is the loudest voice in the room. And if they trust the data that they have, and they know that that's the right thing to do, there's no sales or marketing or product person. Who's going to say, we're not doing that. 

John Common: Mic drop. That's awesome. Uh, what's a tip for how?

Right. Well, that's my follow up question to that because I, I'm sold what, what's, what's an example of how, and maybe it's something pragmatic and simple, like, uh, get your cross functional gathered no less than every two weeks around progress towards solving use case one or use case seven, maybe that's your advice, but what's, what's a pragmatic piece of advice for helping Companies put their customer in the center and being cross functionally aligned in the solution of that.

John Arnold: Yeah. Yeah. We, we kind of pivoted back to customer obsession. It kind of draws you back, right? It's like the growth engine has to have the customer obsession piece to it, or else it's just another mechanical model of, you know, alignment meetings and metrics and things like that that come together. But in order to get that customer obsessed mindset, you've got to have.

The insights and the data, you know, so, so go back to that leadership. The leadership needs to put aside their opinions when they're faced with customer insights. If that's not happening at your company, then, you know, and if you're not that C level executive, then start doing that in your own leadership position.

So you can definitely manage up, you know, start to get those results at your level. So. You know, my, my service at Forrester, I talked to a lot of demand and maybe ABM and customer and field marketers, you know, the performance side of B2B and, you know, they're, they're closely aligned to sales. They're responsible for pipeline and revenue.

We call them frontline marketers, frontline marketing teams. Those frontline marketing teams can be customer obsessed. Their whole organization doesn't need to be customer obsessed, but they can play their part. They can be customer obsessed. They can start to get insights, you know, focus on data, focus on gathering those up to date insights.

And that's a big change that you can make at a lower level in the organization and prioritize those changes. And in order to do that, you might have to go talk to sales and say, Hey, sales, let's have a real conversation about the leads that we're sending to you. You know, you're not following up on the leads because they're not very good, but you know what?

You tasked marketing with quantity. You told me to get me you as many leads as possible. So I did. And But quantity and quality are trade offs, right? So let's start to talk about quality. And in order to do that, we're going to have to make some changes. We've got to get some data. We might have to go, you know, get some account based platforms to tell us whether the leads are from the target accounts that matter to you.

And we're going to have to go and, um, you know, invest in some data, um, data supply. You know, we're going to have to get some data providers. And, uh, and that's an additional cost that marketing is going to have to endure. Or maybe we need to combine forces on that and get some of our data from the sales engagement platform and some of our data from the marketing engagement platform and have that conversation.

Let's sit down and talk about the data that we have so we can fix this problem instead of blame games and silent friction and finger pointing and, you know, marketing hits their goals and sales doesn't and, you know, that kind of stuff happens. Thanks. Just talk it out, you know, but you got to have the data in the center.

You got to have the customer be that voice. You can't have the sales and the marketing people sit down and say, this is what marketing needs, and this is what sales needs. You got to say, what's this doing about the customer? How's the customer in this conversation? Isn't that a simple thing, man? But like how many, how many times do you think to yourself, man, I got to go get some customer insight so I can go have this meeting with my sales leaders.

John Common: Yeah. I love my job on growth driver. Cause I get to, I'm sitting here hearing you give this advice and I'm rolling through prior. episodes and conversations with other go to market experts like yourself. I interviewed early in growth driver, uh, a CRO, and that was one of his top recommendations is insist.

There's a CRO insist on a single source of truth, gather around. And he said, watch the game tape together, Britain, meaning Nobody is allowed to say, well, this is my version of the truth, and this is different than your version. So one source of truth, gather around, watch the game taped as a cross functional team, uh, made my day.

And also, I just want to go back to something you said about 15 minutes ago. When you, when you said that Forrester, uh, did some research around what makes successful B2B companies grow, and you were expecting, and maybe You wouldn't have been surprised if you had heard some clever growth hacky, whatever stuff, and what came out of your research was the companies that focus on the fundamentals and get better and better and better at go to market fundamentals in a cross functional way, in a customer obsessed way, surprise, surprise, are the ones that are the growth leaders.

I think that is such an important call out. And there's something about our industry, John, and I know you have seen this too, where, um, We want the shiny object. We want the simple answer. We want the fast answer. We want the one, the sexy answer. And oftentimes it's not, it, that's, that's fool's gold. You got to double down on the, on the fundamentals and roll in the new stuff, the innovation, uh, As a as a seasoning to the fundamentals is how I think about it.

John Arnold: Um, one of my colleagues told me one time you'll love this john that he said all CMOs and CROs should be hired on a five year contract because that way they have the latitude to go out and make some changes that they know will benefit them in year five. and keep them in, you know, employed for the next five year contract versus the current reality, which is if I don't show some immediate changes when I take this job within 18 months, I'm going to be packing my bags and looking for the next thing because I have to hit these short term numbers or else I'm not going to be here.

In fact, part of the reason I, part of the way I got this job was my 90 day plan, right? My 90 day plan got me the interview, got me the job. Um, and in 90 days, if I don't have some results, then that's not okay. And I think that's, you know, if, if companies would allow there's their CRO CMO roles to have that broader perspective and just Trust good marketers and good sales leaders to do their jobs.

They would solve part of their growth problem just by giving them that latitude. 

John Common: Yeah. And, and I would add, I agree. And I would add to that, though, what would make, cause I'm a CEO in my business, what would make a CEO? Be more likely to agree with something like that would be trust, but verify, right? So like I, I would not give any CMO or no offense to anybody on who's listening.

I would not give a single CMO or CRO a five year blank check and say, I'll see in five years. I'm sure it's going to work out, but if they came to me. Those milestones. And that's not what you're saying. Exactly. Give me the milestones. Tell me the overarching strategy. Show me. how you're going to build incremental faith building milestones along the way.

Um, and, and I'll, I'll be your teammate on that. I'm more apt to support that kind of a longer term point of view. 

John Arnold: And if you're not ready for that kind of an appetite, and in no way, was I trying to say that you would have a five year contract without a plan, right? Accountability, you know, but, but if you think about it, like, even if you didn't give that CMO that.

That, um, that contract, how about the five year plan? Like, you know, we're always making the quarterly plan, the annual plan, you know, I got to deliver this at sales kickoff cause I need marketing, marketing sales to know what each other are doing. Um, that's all for the year. That's all for the quarter. What about the five year?

What are we, where are we going to be in five years? If you keep on cycling through annual planning cycles. One after another, after another, five years could go by pretty quick. And then you look back and you say, man, we really need to redo our website or man, we didn't even incorporate AI at all. The AI has come so far.

We didn't do anything about it. You know, you didn't think about it, but if you were given. You know, the, the task of creating a five year plan and you had some time to think that through, you'd probably say, Oh, well, you know, we'll probably be using AI in five years. We'll probably be, you know, we'll be a bigger company in five years.

So we'll probably have more resources. Let's plan for that. Like, let's plan for hiring, you know, a different, a BDR team. And we don't have one today. Or let's plan on adding a CDP to our tech stack. And, you know, we don't have that right now. You know, but we're going to make a five year plan and all those things are going to be included in it.

John Common: All right. So we've got, we've got this corporate level company level strategy that is now infused with customer obsession. The top level below that we have the customer obsessed revenue engine, which I know is, is, is, it is thought of and executed in an end to end way. It's not just one function. It's the entire.

Go to market team cross functionally product marketing and sales working together across the growth engine. Call that layer two. Now what I want to do is give us at least three or four minutes on Forrester's and your thinking, take us into the marketing component. And I know there's a, there's a concept, there's a way of thinking about it.

You call it a life cycle revenue marketing. What is life cycle revenue marketing? How does it take guidance from the growth engine strategy? And how does it. Execute its marketing focused role in all the ways that it needs to succeed. Talk to us about that. 

John Arnold: All right. So here's, here's another research story.

Um, you know, starting with, starting with customer session, going to the growth engine, uh, what's under the growth engine. If you lift up the hood of the growth engine, it's marketing, product, sales, and customer and technology. Great. Okay. What's the linchpin in that growth strategy? Like, what are the things that really.

Um, you know, we wanted to look for any places where the weakest link in the chain could kind of ruin the, the growth engine, you know, so, so we started looking through and what we found in B2B companies was that, um, you know, you've got all these sort of siloed functions, customer marketing, demand marketing, account based marketing, growth marketing, digital marketing, field marketing, content marketing, events marketing, and all of those functions.

have some degree of accountability to pipeline and revenue or proximity to sales, you know, and in some organizations, it's very confusing. You know, the, the field marketing team is the ABM team and ABM is a strategy that they use and other organizations. ABM is a team. You know, there's a VP of ABM and that's a totally different model.

Uh, in some companies, everything they do is ABM. In some companies, they only have ABM off on a little island somewhere doing five accounts or 20 accounts. So lots of confusion. Um, and, uh, Forrester started. looking at that maybe five years ago. And, um, I think we made a, a bold call of five years ago or something that the term ABM would go away and, you know, it would just be good marketing, um, because account based was sort of, you know, the way that B2B does business, everything is on some level attached to an account or some kind of firmographics.

So we said, okay, that term is going to go away. It's going to be B2B marketing. And, you know, fast forward to last year, we had to define this. Best in class B2B marketing strategy. And instead of just calling it good B2B marketing, we said, well, let's, what are the components of this best in class marketer, um, or marketing organization?

And those three, there were three things. that came into it. And the first one was the, uh, the unification of what we call frontline marketing. So frontline marketing is all of those functions that are closest to pipeline and revenue. So it's usually demand ABM field marketing. It could be your digital team.

It could be events marketing. It could be, you know, any of those, um, but it depends on whether they're accountable to revenue or not. If they're accountable to revenue, they're kind of on the front lines. They're accountable to orchestrating engagement. Um, they're accountable to sales in some capacity for creating pipeline.

So that's frontline marketing. Um, the other components of that were full life cycle. So best in class marketers are thinking about lifetime value as we were talking about, you know, it's acquisition, but it's also upsell cross sell and retention. Uh, a lot of marketers are responsible for all the go to market motion or routes to market.

So they have the channel. They have, um, you know, the self service buying motion. They've got some B2B e commerce maybe, or you know, they're managing B2B and B2C or B2B2C, um, kind of motions. So it's full lifecycle. And those companies also are all about revenue, right? So the marketing function is not seen as a cost center.

It's not seen as a support function of that supports sales. It's seen as a part of the revenue engine, part of the growth engine. So if you put all that together, 

John Common: that's the third piece. 

John Arnold: Yeah. So you kind of, you put those three things together, you have lifecycle, you have revenue and you have marketing. So we said, well, there's the name it's lifecycle revenue marketing.

So that's, that's the strategy for frontline marketing. So if you're a frontline marketing leader. And if, if that's, you know, you own demand or you own demand and ABM or you own demand, ABM and customer, or you own demand, ABM customer field, digital, you know, whatever that you're a frontline marketing leader, that's what we call you.

And because we needed something besides, you know, head of demand, ABM customer field events, whatever. So frontline marketing, sum it up, uh, the strategy, the best in class strategy for that frontline marketing team is lifecycle revenue marketing. So hopefully that makes sense. And you know, nobody needs another three letter acronym to describe what they do in marketing.

We're sick of that all the time, but, um, so that's our word for it. I don't think, you know, we'll see a lot of people go out and put lifecycle revenue marketing VP on their business card. But, um, that's our definition of what best in class B2B marketing looks like today. 

John Common: I love it. I want to, I want to say it back because I, I think this is really important.

John Arnold backed by the power of Forrester is telling us three principles of great B2B marketing is number one, unify the parts of marketing that are on the hook for driving demand and growth called frontline marketing. Number one. Number two, think and operate and execute through the lens of a full life cycle.

model, not just acquisition, but end to end lifetime value. Number three, don't think of marketing as a cost center. Think of it as a growth and revenue driver. Preach it. I love it. And that's how you got to LRM, lifecycle revenue marketing. Okay. 

John Arnold: That's 

John Common: really 

John Arnold: cool. Um, and, uh, don't forget the M and M you know, the marketing pieces is the unification of the frontline marketing.

That's right. But it's also that marketing and sales Should have the same goals, but they shouldn't, uh, have the same jobs. So, you know, marketing should be distinct, even though there's tight alignment between marketing and sales in the growth engine that we preach, you know, marketing product sales aligned.

You want alignment. Um, you want that tight integration in some cases. But you don't want marketing doing the same job as sales is doing. 

John Common: Oh, that's so, that is so great. That is so well said, John. That bears repeating too, man. Um, marketing and sales should have the same goals, but not the same jobs. Gosh, and I see over the years of my career, I've seen so much ghost sales and ghost marketing.

Everybody's, you know, leaning into each other's work streams and 

John Arnold: yeah. Yeah. And I'll tell you what happens too. Cause you have, um, you know, some companies marketing is there for sales, you know, they're kind of this, they're, they're in service to sales, their lead factories or contact factories for sales.

And, um, and then lo and behold, here comes these sales engagement platforms and now sales can send emails and they have intent data and they're able to, um, you know, put, drop contacts into nurture campaigns and do some of those things that marketers were traditionally doing as their job. Um, And, uh, you know, some companies will conclude, Oh, those, those functions are doing the same thing.

They're both emailing our customers. Let's just put them on one team. You know, they're doing the same job. And, uh, you know, what you find is that the marketing function, that's Seeding demand or, you know, up funnel from that, um, starts to erode and they, they don't have a business case anymore for doing that.

Um, and those, those marketers, usually the digital team, they'll go up funnel even further. They'll say, well, we're the air cover. We're going to go up. We're not going to be accountable to pipeline revenue. We don't want to be close to that. And so you have the performance marketers going down funnel to, you know, basically do the same thing sales was doing.

You have the digital marketing going up funnel in the middle of the funnel gets abandoned. You know, all those, you know, leads and buying groups that are coming through that aren't ready to buy. Nobody's really managing that very well. 

John Common: Okay, um, I could talk to you a lot longer than we have, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna go into the next section here, which is lightning round.

And it's, uh, it's a brutally unfair construct that I'm going to just trust me on this. I'm going to ask you a simple, tight question. Don't overthink it. Give me a simple, tight answer. And it doesn't have to be the definitive end all, be all answer. Just what comes to the top of your mind. So you ready? Here we go.

Okay. All right. All right. Um, through the lens of a customer obsessed strategy, through the lens of a customer obsessed, uh, uh, growth engine, and even through the lens of LRM, life cycle revenue marketing. With that in mind. What's one piece of advice you would give a CEO?

John Arnold: Oh man. How about hire a good marketing team, then trust them to do the job they were hired to do. 

John Common: One piece of advice you would give a CRO or head of sales. Uh, you need marketing more than you think you do. One piece of advice for a head of product.

John Arnold: Um, listen to your sales and marketing team more than you think you should. One piece of advice for a CMO,

try not to get your kids to be a CMO. 

John Common: I love it. 

John Arnold: Okay. Last 

John Common: one. You're doing great. Um, everybody who's listening just cheered when you said that. Um, last one is what's one piece of advice to the entire go to market executive team around how they can improve what I call cut the shit alignment in orchestration.

John Arnold: I would say put aside your opinions when you're faced with customer insights that contradict them.

John Common: Yeah, that's really good. John Arnold. All right. We're going to end our session today. By the way, you did great. I know that's stressful. All right, man. 

John Arnold: Yeah. I thought I was, uh, your, your questions are tough reporter. 

John Common: I warned you. All right. So it's going to end with something kind of more, more fun. Talk to me about, um, Where do you go to learn?

What places and spaces do you go to, to learn, uh, 

John Arnold: in your career? Weirdly, people, you know, I mean, that's the, the thing that, um, we're missing so much in this world, right? Everything has to be a device or a virtual thing. Like here we are, you know, how many 2000 miles apart? doing this conversation and, you know, our time is short and you just don't get to spend enough time with people.

And, uh, and so I just try to do that as much as I can. And I, I miss events and I miss meetings and I miss, you know, all that stuff. Um, so even though I'm a huge introvert, And, uh, you know, I spend a lot of time reading and, and all of that. Um, I get most of my ideas from talking it out, you know, you just talk to people about it, even if it's not somebody in your industry, um, you know, you hear somebody say something of their perspective on the world, everything is related, everything connects.

John Common: Man, John, thank you for just being so generous with your time. And I just appreciate your point of view and your experience and, uh, just kind of also, you're just, you have this really cool vibe, John, uh, and you bring it to everything you do. So I just want to thank you again for, for putting some time.

Thanks for inviting me. 

John Arnold: Appreciate it. It's good to see you again and, uh, we'll have to hang out next time we're in a. In some B2B event somewhere, you're, you're definitely the most interesting thing that happens at a B2B event for me, you know, uh, the, the bar is very low, but no, it's really fun to hang out with you.

So I look forward to actually, when I go to a B2B event, I know you're going to be there. I will look for you every single time. Cause that's fine. So back 

John Common: at you, my friend. All right. Well, Hey, again for being on growth driver. And, uh, you know, uh, I will be talking to you soon. Sounds good, man. Bye, everybody.

Hey, thank you for spending some time with me on Growth Driver. I hope you liked what you heard. And if you do like what we're doing, please follow us, subscribe, share an episode with your team, share an episode with your boss. Imagine doing that. Um, we're all over the place. Uh, you pick your channel and I just want to say thank you for, for, for trusting us with your time.

Growth Driver is brought to you by the talented and kind people at Intelligent Demand. So if you are a B2B, CMO, CRO, or VP of any kind of flavor of go to market, I want you to check us out at intelligentdemand. com. Thanks again and talk to you soon.