How B2B Buyer Behavior Has Changed with Kerry Cunningham

Kerry Cunningham: You can chase them all you want, but until they get to the point in their buying journey, where they're ready to talk to you. You will just be chasing them and not getting any results.

John Common: Welcome to Growth Driver, where the best minds in B2B are redefining growth. Hello everybody, John Common here. Look, if you're listening to Growth Driver, you probably already know that the way B2B buyers actually buy has changed dramatically over the past five years. Maybe even longer than five years.

John Common: But the truth is, the way most B2B companies go to market is still sometimes wildly out of sync with those buyers. So, obviously, what do you do? Well, companies have to update their go to market strategy and improve and up level their growth engines. But how do you educate and convince Your C suite and your go to market executives that it's actually time to make a change.

John Common: What guiding principles should you use to manage that change? Where should you prioritize and focus to make that change? All of that is what today's episode is all about. So by the end of this episode you're gonna really understand and be able to explain how and why B2B buying has changed and you're going to walk away with some specific steps.

John Common: You'll be able to execute to improve revenue performance in light of this new B2B buyer reality. And we're going to be doing it with a longtime friend of mine, Kerry Cunningham. He's a research director, analyst, thought leader with over 25 years of experience. in all aspects of B2B. You probably know Kerry's work from Forrester and Serious Decisions where he authored numerous B2B frameworks, including one of my favorites, Kerry, the Revenue Waterfall Model.

John Common: Takes a geek to love a thing like that. And then, uh, Kerry is also, uh, most recently at Sixth Sense. where he's been leading research and insights, including the just released B2B Buyer Experience Report. Uh, shout out to Sixth Sense. We're going to be putting that in the show notes, a link to that. Kerry, you are exactly the kind of B2B growth geek that I like to hang out with, man.

John Common: Welcome to Growth Driver. 

Kerry Cunningham: Thank you. It's an honor. It's great to be here. I'm glad to be able to, uh, to do this with you finally. 

John Common: Oh, good. Well, look, we're going to dive directly in because I have a feeling we're going to try to put 10 pounds of growth in a five pound bag, as I say. Um, so let's start right off with this really fantastic research that I think you released with Sixth Sense, uh, just about a month ago.

John Common: Walk us through the four or five most important insights from, uh, the recent B2B buyer research that you, uh, that you did. Talk to us about it. Walk us through those. Yeah. 

Kerry Cunningham: Appreciate that. Um, so there, there are a few key numbers that kind of go in order and the first one's not. Not a particularly new number.

Kerry Cunningham: So, and this is something that when you, when you find a, a, a data point in research that you're doing and it confirms everything that you've already, uh, seen in the past, that's often a really good thing. It helps you understand that the people you surveyed, what questions you asked, they're, they're in line with reality that as we understand it.

Kerry Cunningham: And so the first number is that, and that is that buyers said that they have their first direct interaction with vendor representatives. at 70 percent of the way through the journey. And so that aligns really nicely with what we said back at Serious Decisions, two thirds of the buying journey is digital, what everybody's been saying, two thirds of the buying journey is digital or on their own, that kind of stuff.

Kerry Cunningham: So that was like a good confirmatory data point, but it's nothing new. Um, what we did find that's new is that if you look at the role of the person who's telling you that they're a champion in the buying process, if they're the financial decision maker, if they're, uh, just a individual contributors, uh, an influencer, maybe, um, they all said the same thing.

Kerry Cunningham: They all said within the margin of error of 70 percent is when they have their first interaction with sales, and that's really important to understand because of what that tells you is. When a member of a buying team interacts with sellers, they're doing it with their teammates. They're, they're doing it as a team, right?

Kerry Cunningham: If everybody says the same thing, that means they're doing it at the same time. Um, and that's really important to understand when you get to the rest of the numbers. So the next thing that we looked at was, all right, so 70 percent of the way through the journey, that's when you have your first interaction.

Kerry Cunningham: So did you initiate that interaction? Or was your first interaction, did that come as the result of you just got an email and you responded or you got a call that was just so great that you had to respond. And 83 percent of the time buyers said that that first interaction with sellers. Was something that they initiated.

Kerry Cunningham: Uh, so, so, you know, we love to say back at, uh, serious decisions enforcer, the buyer's in control. Well, hell yes. They are. 83% of the time, they're very in. They decide . 

John Common: Yeah. Yeah. Well, hold on, lemme just, let's just, let me unpack that for a second. So, 83% of the time on average, your buyer, well, whether you realized it was your buyer or not, that maybe that's part of your.

John Common: The, the, the, the lesson here, but whether you realized it, it was your buyer or not, they reached out to you. So what does that mean about audience targeting about understanding even who your buyer really is? 

Kerry Cunningham: Yeah, well, um, one, I think what it has to do a lot with what I would say is if you step back and look at how a B2B organization spent a ton of time and money over the last 15 years, that is producing and following up on inbound leads.

Kerry Cunningham: What it says largely is you can chase them all you want, but until they get to the point in their buying journey where they're ready to talk to you, you will just be chasing them and not getting any results. Now, I don't think that that means that it's always bad that you chase them, uh, as long as you do it properly, uh, and we'll talk about what that is, I hope.

Kerry Cunningham: But it does mean that, you know, all of the time that you spend following up on those leads and nobody responds, well, part of the time, they're just not in a buying process. And a lot of the time they may be, but you made them fill out a form to see content and they're not ready to talk to you and you can chase them all you want.

Kerry Cunningham: But when they're ready to talk to you, they will get in touch. 

John Common: You know, it's, it's, it's funny. Uh, what's new is old. What's old is new. Right. I mean. What you just said, I have heard come out of the mouths of sales veterans my whole career, also, you know, the danger isn't that, uh, you know, your, your buyer's going to reach out to you when they're ready.

John Common: That's a fact, but I think the danger in metabolizing that insight is in going too far and saying, yeah, and therefore don't even bother like, like you just said a second ago, it's not that you shouldn't. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I mean, but it seems like you're saying, yeah, engage them, but I have the correct expectations and understanding about how buying really works.

John Common: Is that, is that kinda? 

Kerry Cunningham: Yeah. And then we'll, we'll get to it when we talk about kind of guiding principles a little bit, but I think we largely have to do it differently than we've been doing it for a long time. So when we reach out to people who've filled in a form to see content. You know, the assumption, you know, everybody knows that this assumption is wrong, but the assumption is that they're interested, they're a buyer, and so I'm going to reach out to them.

Kerry Cunningham: You know, we're sort of ignoring the fact that we made them fill in the damn form to see this awesome content that we have, uh, and there was no way for them to get to it unless they did. And they were very reluctant to do it in the first place because they know what's going to happen next. Uh, and so calling them to get a meeting off the back of that, yeah, I mean, it, I think what this research shows, so, by the way, there's two pieces of data around this, and there's a lot of, a lot of pieces of data to throw, but even from a, so we asked, did you fill in a form?

Kerry Cunningham: on the website of the vendor that you bought something from, right? 31%. So 3 out of 10 members of buying teams filled in forms on vendor websites that they bought from. We asked the same people, did you reach out, uh, to, did you reach out directly to have an interaction with people from the vendor, the winning vendor?

Kerry Cunningham: 51%. So, you know, people are, people who are part of a team that's going to buy from you, they're much more likely to reach out to you directly to ask a question or do something than they are to fill in a form on your website. Could 

John Common: it be that a decade of gated content, uh, where everyone knows what the game is, have we trained our buyers to be resistant to that?

John Common: Is that what you're telling 

Kerry Cunningham: me? That is exactly what I'm telling you. Yeah, that's exactly right. So there's a couple of, couple of more numbers in that string, two more. Uh, so there's 70 percent of the journey there's. At, at, at 70%, I reach out to you 83 percent of the time as a buyer, I'm overwhelmingly likely to be the one who starts that conversation.

Kerry Cunningham: So the question is, what's so magical about that 70 percent point that I've got to get there before I reach out and want to have a conversation? So one of the questions that we asked was, when you had your first conversation with a vendor representative. Was that first conversation with the winning vendor or with some other vendor?

Kerry Cunningham: 84 percent of the time, buyers said their first conversation was with the vendor that ultimately won the business. That is staggering. It is staggering. And so, and I think, you know, there's two, you know, to be a good research scientist about this, you have to present the two possible, two possible reasons for that.

Kerry Cunningham: One is, That, and I'm going to obviously bias the answer here, but one is after eight months of research, typical buying process, 10 people and thousands of digital interactions, they reached out, they reached out, they initiated a conversation randomly with a vendor, didn't matter which one, and that conversation was so compelling that 84 percent of the time, they ended up buying from that vendor that they happened to reach out to first.

Kerry Cunningham: That's one possibility. A bit of a straw man there, but yeah, it's one possibility or face Yeah, or It took them eight months to figure out what they wanted to buy and who they wanted to buy it from to put together a short List put a vendor on top of it and like everybody else in the world when they're buying something They started with the one that they want because they're busy.

Kerry Cunningham: Yeah, and then everything after that point is Confirming that decision that they've largely already made and because they've done so much homework. I mean, again, in a typical B2B buying process, 11 month average, we're talking month eight of that process, they've done a lot of research. So they've got a very good idea, what you offer and that they wanted.

Kerry Cunningham: And it's yours to lose at that point, if you're the 84%. 

John Common: If two thirds of interactions are digital, if they reach out to, if seller engagement, brand and seller engagement happens 70 percent into the buying journey, if that engagement is buyer initiated 83 percent of the time, and when that happens, 84 percent of that, of that, of that time, they go with, and the winning vendor was the first one they reached out to.

John Common: It focuses you back up funnel to the 70 percent you weren't a part of. What were they doing and how do we appropriately either get invited or intersect with Mr. and Mrs. Byer? And that's 70%. That's the game, isn't it? 

Kerry Cunningham: It's looking like pretty much the entire game. Uh, it's all but 16 percent of the game, right?

Kerry Cunningham: And 84 percent gets decided before that. So, you know, one thing is, uh, we talked about content gates a minute ago. Um, I mean, the first single most important thing is if you've got anything that's going to help a buying group pick you, then you better make it as easy as possible for them to get their hands on it.

Kerry Cunningham: And that means It's not behind a gate no matter how good it is and how much money you spent on it and all of that. You got to get it out and available for those buyers because you know Seven out of the ten people on that buying team are not going to fill out a form It may get passed around or it may not but you can you can leave that to chance if you want to Uh, but I would suggest you make everything available and then you know We think of seo as a way to get found so people will find our stuff.

Kerry Cunningham: Okay, good Yes, but make sure that that you get your stuff found by the buyers who are asking questions about The kinds of problems that you solve, like think, think of that and everything else about your content from the perspective of the people who are going to make a decision about whether you buy your stuff before they talk 

John Common: to you.

John Common: Not to lead the horse to water here, but that sounds to me like maybe one of the first guiding. That was my next question is what are some guiding principles we might want to know? Is that the first guiding principle? Make it easy. 

Kerry Cunningham: Yeah. Okay. All right. Yeah. That's great. Back at Forrester, we said, we use the word frictionless, like it should be frictionless.

Kerry Cunningham: to for a buyer to answer the questions about how they solve their business problems with your solution. Um, and you know, nobody can afford to have perfect content for every member of every buying team that they sell to. But you gotta, you gotta make sure that those buying teams are fully enabled. They, they have everything that they need.

Kerry Cunningham: Uh, and we can talk about more of what that actually is. And then, yeah, so to me, that, that is thing number one. And, and that's particular, particular to the CMO, to the marketing side of the house. That's your job. You know, your job is to one, know which accounts are in that crucial phase where they're making decisions.

Kerry Cunningham: And then two, make sure that, that you enable them better than your competitors do, because that's when they're deciding. Any other 

John Common: guiding principles, either from this research or just from your whole career, where you say to yourself, man, if I was a chief revenue officer or head of sales or head of marketing, I would really generally have this loaded 

in 

Kerry Cunningham: my head.

Kerry Cunningham: You've got out of, out of all of the accounts that you might. Uh, target. Let's say you do a really good job of identifying your ideal customer profile and a thousand counts fit that. At any given point in time, maybe a hundred will be in a state where they're actually making buying decisions, but it's probably more like 50.

Kerry Cunningham: You know and for some it's less than that, right? It's 

John Common: this time by the five percent 95 

Kerry Cunningham: Somewhere in there, right? You know somewhere in we did we actually did some research on that last summer We found you know numbers depending on industry size of deal between five and ten percent of uh Of a market is in market.

Kerry Cunningham: And so, you know, it's something like that, depending upon what you sell. And so the number of accounts, even the really good fit accounts that you sell to, that actually are in a buying process, is really small. Right? So it seems to me like the whole key is to understand which 5 percent or 10 percent is that.

Kerry Cunningham: Uh, and you don't have to get perfect, like you just have to get better than a hundred, you know, like, uh, uh, not all of them. And so understanding, because, because I think the, the next big thing is we've got to spend our budget and our, of time and of, of money resources on the set of accounts where it's going to make a difference for revenue at some point in the near future.

Kerry Cunningham: And the way to do that is to know which accounts are actually out in market and looking around. Uh, and, and to never miss one of those, and then to really focus resource on enabling, not selling those buyers. You're enabling needs to sell, but you've got to think about it from the perspective of enabling those buyers, like what are their needs in terms of making a decision?

Kerry Cunningham: Um, who, the, the key people inside the organization are the champions for your solution. Who do they have to convince and what do they have to tell them to convince them? All of those things. 

John Common: All right, so, uh, Kerry Cunningham's guiding principles filtered through John Common's imperfect brain goes something like this.

John Common: Uh, number one, focus on making it easy for your target buyer to learn, get inspired, educate themselves with your content. And a good example of that is Before you gate something really ask yourself how bad you want to gate that. But, but it extends beyond even the gated PDF offer. It's more of a mindset.

John Common: Think about making your wares, your enablement, your content. Uh, easy and frictionless, number one. Number two, use the tools that you should have or have to identify the five or ten percent that are actually in a buying mode. And, and I would add a John sidecar to this, which is adjust your play accordingly.

John Common: There are things you do for active demand, active buying mode buyers that are related, but not the same things you would do for the 90 or 95 percent who are not yet in. There are differences in messaging, position, and content, etc. Yeah. And then, uh, you mentioned, um, Yeah. And then, and then I think the last thing you mentioned is use a buyer enablement mindset, not a product sales mindset when you go out there.

John Common: Okay. Really good. That's good stuff. I want us to get granular and go through five or six sort of key areas where B2B go to market teams really might want to get serious about up leveling how they market and sell. And so Uh, first area is target audience. How should B2B go to market teams define their target audience through the lens of what you've researched and learned in your career?

John Common: Talk to us about, uh, advice, tips around target audience 

Kerry Cunningham: definition. We have to make it, uh, pretty general, uh, because I know we're talking to a pretty broad audience. If you've got, uh, if you're a company that has, uh, a small number of strategic accounts, you know, big accounts that you're betting the farm on, um, you know, one, I guess the, the first principle is always you have to have complete agreement between one within the selling organization and including customer success.

Kerry Cunningham: And then of course, with marketing as well. So no matter what you decide and what that target is going to be, I think it's more important. To have complete and utter alignment around that than it is to have a perfect definition So that I would start with just perfect alignment. 

John Common: Don't let perfection be the enemy of alignment, right?

John Common: Exactly Yeah, that's a good that's a good. All right. I like that 

Kerry Cunningham: Um, and then your strategy for selecting those accounts is going to vary depending upon how many of them there are How big your tam is all of that? Um, I would say you know If your, if your TAM is going to be measured in the hundreds, you probably don't need sophisticated predictive analytics to figure out which ones those are, especially because in that case, absolute commitment from everybody is required.

Kerry Cunningham: That's more of an agreement thing than it is a pure data thing. I mean, you should bring as much data as you can to that party, but there where you're placing such a big bet on a small number of accounts. I would focus primarily for a little more, you know, 60 percent on the agreement and the commitment and 40 percent on the data and the perfection.

Kerry Cunningham: Uh, and that maybe seems strange because there's such a big bet on a small number of companies, but I've seen so many times and you can get the analytics right. But if everybody's not committed to doing it, then it doesn't matter. 

John Common: Right. Preach it. One more thing about target audience. Um, what are your thoughts?

John Common: Do you have any thoughts around target account? Definition, buying group, buying team within that target account, and then target personas or individuals or contacts. Talk to us about how, how go to market executives should be thinking about that level of the 

Kerry Cunningham: definition. Depending upon, again, the size of account you're trying to sell, but then also your product portfolio.

Kerry Cunningham: So if you've got four different product lines or solution lines, solution family, something like that. Um. One, hopefully you've chosen accounts to go after because they can be customers for multiples of those things. That's why you have multiple solutions. Um, so that part's really critical. But then, now you've got to understand that you've got not one buyer there.

Kerry Cunningham: That account is four potential opportunities, let's say. So, when you're thinking about sizing your audience, if you've got four lines of business, you've got four. selling opportunities for Uh prospects there and they may not be equal, right? So you may be a great fit uh for two of them and not so great a fit for one or something like that and that level of granularity when you start thinking about that and prioritizing where you're going to put dollars and resources on it is It's, you know, it's, it's incredibly important.

Kerry Cunningham: It's just as important as if you're segmenting a larger audience. Let's say you had one, uh, solution and you've got 4, 000 accounts. You need to segment that, uh, set of accounts into the top priorities and others and where you spend your money. It's the same thing if it's 1000 accounts with four solutions.

Kerry Cunningham: So it's, and you can't let the, the marketing team and the sales team just go, okay, now there's the thousand accounts have at it. Uh, you know, uh, we've done our work, that's it. No, it isn't. Uh, you know, those, those, so you've got to understand where does product A fit best, where does product B, you know, where should we lead with this and then where we always sold this.

Kerry Cunningham: So that level of work has to be done and a lot of times it doesn't get done. Then each one of those buyers for those solutions is going to have a different buying team to some extent, you know, depending upon how different those solutions are. They may share individuals like, you know, oftentimes it'll involve, it'll involve the same finance people or IT people across all of those solutions, but different business people, lines of business people.

Kerry Cunningham: So you've got to understand what those, what those things look like. Um, and if a, if you've got common, uh, if you've got common electrons across those little atoms that you're trying to sell to, then, uh, it's a really good idea to have consistent messaging, uh, that's going to be reaching those people so that, Those people who are seeing you across these different solutions, even if they're seeing different salespeople for them, are getting a consistent experience that's consistent with the broader brand and all of that.

Kerry Cunningham: And I think not a lot of thought goes into that very often. Yeah. Um, so. 

John Common: It's, it's, especially if you're, if you're up market or moving up market, to your point, a, a large enterprise account, depending on the complexity of your offerings. Is almost a market unto itself. It needs segmentation. You need to recognize before the forest or B to B waterfall.

John Common: There was the serious decisions demand unit waterfall. Um, we're part of that. And 

Kerry Cunningham: you know, that was called her. That's pretty sure. 

John Common: Yeah, it's amazing work, but it basically recognizes that that, you know, it doesn't do you much good to say, hey, we're targeting Cisco. Um, which Cisco, right? We're selling them something.

John Common: So anyway, that's, uh, yeah, we'll put it, we'll put a link to the demand unit and the, and the, uh, the, the, the B2B, uh, revenue waterfall as well in the show notes. Um, One other thing I just do want to mention, uh, yeah, one thing I do want to mention and, and talk about briefly while we're talking about target audience is something I've noticed is as the, as B2B go to market teams have, uh, rightly begin to focus on end to end revenue, not only new logo acquisition.

John Common: Uh, there's something that I think needs to be teased out more and more, which is a recognition that your target audit, and this is stuff. It's so obvious when you say it out loud, but the, the, the members of the buying team for acquisition are not the same as the members of the buying team for adoption and value realization.

John Common: Yeah. And they're often. They start to smear and evolve for re renewal, and then they can get very radically different when you get to cross sell, upsell land and expand buying team. And, and there's this simplicity, this simplistic thinking that B2B go to market teams use, in my opinion. And I get why?

John Common: Because it's hard to do hard things. But sometimes, uh, if you just keep your, uh, persona and buying team definition anchored in on acquisition and you continue to try to use it across the end to end growth process, you're going to be marketing to people who are literally not the right people. 

Kerry Cunningham: Yeah, it's a hundred percent right.

Kerry Cunningham: You know, back when we did the, the B2B revenue waterfall, we spent about a year with a customer success organization at Forrester and the sales organization talking through what should this look like. And, you know, one of the things that we absolutely landed on was, yeah, that the renewal buying group is different from that other buying group, just like you're saying.

Kerry Cunningham: Um, and by the way, just cause you have a relationship, you can have a great relationship at the customer success level with the users of your product. You will still not be talking to the people who make the decision about buying it most of the time and they don't want To talk to you the same exact thing that all the numbers.

Kerry Cunningham: I just said Uh, they cross the new acquisition renewal and even the cross sell purchases There's no difference in the way buyers think about 

John Common: that Wait a minute. This is really interesting. So you're saying that when you're already in it, you've landed, you've won the first piece of business with an account, and now you're trying to expand into cross sell, upsell, land and expand.

John Common: Those next new buyers behave like the acquisition new logo 

Kerry Cunningham: buyers? Yeah. Yeah. Cause you know, I think it really comes down to, they're human beings like the rest of us. They do not want to be sold. They want to understand what they need. That's hard enough by themselves. Like, you know, uh, it's a 10 person committee.

Kerry Cunningham: And then, you know, if you add, if you go from four vendors to five, it's a 12 person committee getting decisions and, and, and coming to agreement in a group like that is very hard. We all know that it's super complex and super frustrating. Uh, and so. They're not going to want to do that being hammered by outside forces.

Kerry Cunningham: They want to gather themselves, gather the information, talk to each other, talk to other resources, but not be sold. Uh, and that's what's I think clearest and that's true of all purchase 

John Common: types. This is a good segue to the next sort of pillar or major sort of component that I want to ask you about. So target audience, we just talked about.

John Common: What about buyer identification? How do we move from the theoretical buying team to actually identifying real buyers? And we used to imperfectly do it with forms. But see above, you told us ungate things, don't do forms, people don't want it, and I agree with you. So how do we evolve buyer identification in a, in a, uh, ungated world?

Kerry Cunningham: This is my favorite question right now because, uh, what we do right now does not match what we know about how buyers buy. And so, and the most important thing we can do is think about how buyers buy and what that looks like, and then match our processes to it. And so that, a couple of numbers to keep in mind.

Kerry Cunningham: We know that, uh, and I just talked about three out of ten people from a buying team fill out a form. They're very reluctant to do that. They also, you know, Gartner, uh, their research, 15 to 20 percent of the buying journey happens on vendor websites. The rest of it happens somewhere else, which means that almost all of it happens somewhere else.

Kerry Cunningham: Um, so the buying journey, it has involves, you know, 10 people on average, but a lot more in many cases. And it's almost all anonymous, you know, anonymous to you as a vendor. Uh, and so you have to, you know, I, I see all these conversations on LinkedIn all the time, uh, generally from sales guys saying I hate intent data.

Kerry Cunningham: I don't give a crap about your anonymous traffic on the website. Give me a name. I get it. You need a name to talk to, but if you want to see which buyers are in market and by buyer, I mean the account and that potential opportunity, you have to see the anonymous signals. Don't send your salespeople out after them.

Kerry Cunningham: That's a very bad use of their time. It's a terrible use of the signal. It's a desperation move if you have to do it. But your marketing team has to be looking at all of the intent signals for all of the accounts in your ICP. Cause that's the only way you're going to know where they are. And so when we talk about it, that 

John Common: intent is at the account level, not the persona level.

John Common: So talk, and I bet you're going to say it's imperfect, John. Sorry. Don't hit the messenger. But how do I as a CMO, as a CRO. Nav, how do I go from an actual account exhibiting intent to, okay, what, who, which humans do I engage in? How do 

Kerry Cunningham: I engage them? I would say first, we're not there yet. I think you have to first, like the marketing organization first has to identify which accounts are going to be worthy of the effort to identify those people, right?

Kerry Cunningham: So we are going to have to do something extraordinary with those accounts to get them to identify themselves. At least. Early on. Um, now, you can gate all your stuff, but what that's going to do is drive away the people that you want to convince. So, ungate your stuff, and now we don't know who's there.

Kerry Cunningham: Well, I've already given you two stats. One was, three out of ten people from a, uh, company that buys from you fill out a form, but five out of ten But, but five out of ten people from that same company will actually reach out to you during the buying process. Right. So your form is not how you're going to find out, not the first, not the best way you're going to find out about those individuals.

Kerry Cunningham: What you have to do is you have to be able to one, identify those accounts and use all the resources that you're disposable disposal to provide value to the people inside those accounts. Um, I'll give some examples from what Sixth Sense does. You can apply some of these, uh, to every business in one way or another.

Kerry Cunningham: So we have a lot of different methods for. Uh, for connecting people who are in market for the kind of thing that we sell. And we know that because we look at the intent data, we use our solution. And when we see that they're in market, our sales reps are reaching out and sure if they're a CMO, are they, are they part of our CMO community now that we sponsor the community?

Kerry Cunningham: I say ours, but we don't pitch there. It's not a six cents thing per se. We make sure that they have this very valuable resource that CMOs love and that they get invited and become part of that if they want to. Same thing with our BDR coffee talk that we sponsor if they're in market We make sure that their BDR leaders know about this Great resource and get invited to it tomorrow I'm doing a champagne tasting for a bunch of prospects who are in the middle of a buying process.

Kerry Cunningham: That's not Value, but it's relationship, right? Um, we have a lot of kinds of things that we do that Uh, don't involve sales pitches. There will be no sales pitch in the champagne thing. I'm going to talk about the research. So I'm delivering value about the research. They're getting a wine tasting event or whatever.

Kerry Cunningham: So we blow it out on accounts that we know are in market. And people will sign up for a nice dinner, or a wine tasting, or an educational event, or to go to, uh, to, to go to some other sort of community event, something like that. People will sign up and do that, and they'll do that right in the middle of a buying process, um, and identify themselves to you, but not so that you can pitch them.

Kerry Cunningham: If your goal is to, is to get a pitch in, they will know that, and that's, they're not going to do that until, you know, they decide they like you, then they'll eventually let you do that. Um, but if you want to have a relationship with them before that point Then you've got to offer something else and that offer something else Is what you use all of that data that anonymous data you use that to point your budget and your arrows at the set of accounts where now I'm going to do something extraordinary like maybe I'll reach out and see if their CMO wants to talk to our CEO.

Kerry Cunningham: Or a CRO or somebody like that, right? Yeah. 

John Common: I'm sure you've run across the concept of the high value offer. Yeah. It's it's that it's that high value experience it's, but, but the thread running through all of what you're saying to me is. Um, you have to add value. You have to put the customer's value and experience first.

John Common: And you put your product second or even third. And that's a, and that's such a hard thing for traditional B2B marketers and sellers to do. But what this data is clearly saying is you have to do it. You probably should have been doing it the whole time, but you have to do it now. 

Kerry Cunningham: We know in our, in our defense, because uh, I wasn't doing it, uh, 10 years ago, 15 years ago either.

Kerry Cunningham: We didn't have the data, we didn't have the way to really understand and have confidence that we know which set of accounts we can do that for, because you sure can't do that for everybody. You know, you just can't do that. If you've got a thousand accounts, you can't do it for all of them, but you can do it for the hundred that might actually be in market now.

Kerry Cunningham: Um, and the, the, the key is to get to the point where, you know, that growth 

John Common: driver is brought to you today by the talented and kind people at intelligent demand. Look, if you're a B2B CMO CRO, or some flavor of a go to market leader, and you're personally on the hook for driving efficient revenue growth, you need to go check them out at intelligent demand.

John Common: com schedule a free meeting with one of their growth experts, talk some shop and learn how they can help you hit your. Goals. SDR, BDR. Yeah. I know this is something that you have studied and you're way into. Talk to us about the correct modern role of the SDR, BDR. How do you think about 

Kerry Cunningham: it now? Yeah. So, and for people who don't know, I, I ran a third party B2B teleservices company for 12 years, VP of operations, uh, all tech companies in the Bay Area.

Kerry Cunningham: Uh, well, we had off, we ended up with offices in a bunch of different places, but yeah. When, when I say this is near and dear to my heart, I mean, I spent a lot of my career around this function, um, and so one, we already talked about chasing after leads, um, almost all of the leads that you get are not worth chasing, and in fact, the only thing you're going to do is alienate the people who are probably leads.

Kerry Cunningham: potential buyers at some point, um, leave them alone unless they've asked you to contact them. Now, if we tell you, like if you use six cents and we tell you that this account is in market and is going to buy something, you know, here's what your SDR should be doing. Reach out to those accounts. If you don't have names yet, buy names.

Kerry Cunningham: Reach out to people inside those accounts and offer value. So the things that, that I just talked about are all things that our SDRs, even our, you know, our, our AEs, when, when we've got an account that's in market and we don't have engagement with them. We're going to make sure that they know about every possible way that we have to offer value to them, everything.

Kerry Cunningham: Uh, and so, you know, do we ask for meetings? Of course, we ask for meetings. That buyer is also going to get the invitation to the community. They're going to get the invitation to whatever event. They're going to know about all of those high value offers. And I think one of the, the disconnects is we've got to understand that's going to be dislocated in time from when that opportunity gets created, um, you know, that it's probably going to get that activity, which today we look at and like, ah, crap, it didn't work.

Kerry Cunningham: We didn't get a meeting, didn't, you know, anyway. And then, you know, it shows up as an inbound three months later. Okay. You know, it shows up in an inbound three, my contact me three months later because you did all that work, uh, and you didn't get the meeting, but you know, I see in so many, uh, SDR, VDR operations, there's a, like a one month.

Kerry Cunningham: Uh, expiration on, on the credit that the BDR gets for having done that work. Forget about all 

John Common: of that. The mindset of, when you brought up the time bound aspect, that, that is another significant shift in understanding the role of SDR and BDR as, um, this is gonna, might be a weird way to put it. I increasingly view it as, it's not that SDR and BDR is dead.

John Common: It's that the, the way we use the function over the last decade is dead or should be dying. And so what we do need is There's great value, I think, in having a human being invite me to something valuable for me. Like that's, I can't imagine that's gonna go out of style, right? Yeah, but, but the, but, but it's a bit, and how you use it, and I think that's so, so important.

John Common: Um, okay. So, I, the other thing that you mentioned around is, is, is attribution and measurement. The impact when you begin to think about using your BDR SDR team as a member of your growth team, your integrated growth team, executing cross functionally aligned plays, then. To I I to your point, it means that the way you think about and measure and compensate SDRs has to 

Kerry Cunningham: evolve, doesn't it?

Kerry Cunningham: It does, yeah. And I think it can't be the purely short term. So, you know, there, there's tensions here, and I won't, I won't say that I know what the answers the best answers are here yet, but I think very clearly you have to be using them to enable buyers earlier in their journey. When they're very unlikely to talk to you and that that is not wasted time Now the problem is, you know, SDRs BDRs typically early in their career and one thing that's true of people earlier in their careers The timelines are shorter.

Kerry Cunningham: You can't pay me six months from now for something I'm doing today Because I'm not gonna be here for that. You know, that's I need to pay the rent today You know, that's what's gonna happen. So so I think One, you should never look at SDRs, BDRs as, as, uh, you know, little mini salespeople with commissions.

Kerry Cunningham: Um, they're, they need to be part of the team that's helping produce those opportunities. But those things, especially in the kind of enterprise environment, they take longer, uh, to happen. And your best bet is going to be to have them doing things that, uh, that do not produce. opportunities most of the time.

Kerry Cunningham: A lot of people who want to probably puke, uh, hear me say that, but, uh, you know, it is what it is. 

John Common: Let's talk about funnel management, MQLs versus opportunities. And buying teams, where do you stand about that? Cause you know, uh, my take on this is that we have reached the part that the point where most what I would call, you know, forward leaning go to market teams and marketers in particular know that they probably shouldn't be optimizing on MQL and yet.

John Common: And almost all of them are still working at companies that do. So what is your take on that whole topic? 

Kerry Cunningham: Yeah. Well, you know who gets in the way most? Uh, well, at least if you think about, uh, say midsize tech companies, and there's probably more than a few people from midsize tech companies listening to this, uh, the people get in the way there are the board members, um, and, and sometimes the very senior leadership, but those are our numbers and metrics that they know and we're familiar with.

Kerry Cunningham: Uh, and they, they keep wanting to, to hear about MQL conversion rates and production and all of that. Um, so MQLs have zero to do with production of revenue. They're just not related to production of revenue. Um, in your company it looks like they are because that your whole process is built around them.

Kerry Cunningham: Uh, but they're not. The research that we've just done, the, the BDR research, uh, two things, two, two different research projects. One, the buyer identification study. We asked, if you get multiple leads from an organization, do you notice? And then do you do something differently with that account because you did?

Kerry Cunningham: That number, I mean this is the best news I've heard in a very long time, was 72 percent said yes they recognize multiple members of a buying group showing up and they do something different with that account. So that's amazing. That's how you use the leads that you get. If you get one lead from an account in the last 30 days, I don't care who it is or how much content they consume, it doesn't matter.

Kerry Cunningham: If they came alone, it doesn't matter. Now, if they came with a friend, there's a lot less chance that that's random, right? And if they came with two friends, now you've got, you've probably got a buying team of 10 people on your website, right? Because our, our stats show that three out of 10 people fill out a form from a buying team that will buy from you.

Kerry Cunningham: So, if your buying team is around 10 people and 3 people have filled out a form, you can bet the other 7 people are on your website anonymously, right? You should go find out. Like that, that's a thing you should also be looking for. So for me, uh, don't, you know, don't throw away your leads and if you have people who fill out forms for your high value offers and, you know, that kind of stuff, okay, great.

Kerry Cunningham: But look for multiple people at once, because the MQL and how much content somebody consumed, that, that kind of MQL, zero. Zero relevance to bots. You 

John Common: found that a single person MQL does not correlate much at all to actual pipeline that gets closed, that turns into revenue. 

Kerry Cunningham: Is that what you said? Only where that's the only thing that gets turned into pipeline.

Kerry Cunningham: So if your whole process is built around MQLs, then of course, MQLs fuel your process. That's what you've decided in advance. That doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of your MQLs go nowhere. Uh, and you know, what we saw at Serious Decisions was something like a 1%, you know, lead to revenue rate.

Kerry Cunningham: Maybe it's 2 or 3 percent for MQLs, something like that. Uh, that sucks. I mean, that's the reason that we developed the Demand Unit Waterfall in the first place. How we discovered buying groups is like, we gotta be solving the wrong problem. Why are we, you know, this is, we can get somebody and I'm sure you go, you go through the same thing.

Kerry Cunningham: I, I can improve your conversion rates from 1 to 2%, alright? Uh, from, who cares, right? Uh, you know, just not a, that's not a fun game to be playing. Like a much more fun game to be playing is just look to see if you have multiple people. And if you do, pay attention to those. Don't miss any of those. Don't spend any time chasing individual leads where you could be looking at a buying group that's on your website.

Kerry Cunningham: And then so, one, that's what you do with the leads, but then, you know, for every three people from a buying team that come to your website and fill out a form, seven other people will be there anonymously, and so, seeing those seven people is going to be an even better way to prioritize the people who filled out forms.

Kerry Cunningham: Like if you've got one person who filled out a form, just think about the, the logic of it. One person filled out a form and nobody else from their account's been on your website. You've got another account where one person filled out a form and five other people have been on the website anonymously.

Kerry Cunningham: Where do you go spend your time? Like you don't have to be in B2B to get the answer to that one. Right. You know , right, of course. Right. So why wouldn't we be doing that all the time? Yeah, that's just necessitates. 

John Common: A strategy that gets executed through your technology and data layer and lead, not, it used to be called lead prioritization, now it's called buying team or account prioritization, opportunity prioritization, and handoffs, obviously, that's the trick.

John Common: In light of that, let's say I go, okay, Kerry, I'm sold. What are one or two pragmatic things that a CMO, CRO can agree and execute to begin moving out of the muscle memory of MQL and into the muscle memory of buying teams and 

Kerry Cunningham: opportunities. I think one really good forcing function is establish a law that you never ever follow up on a lead again unless you multi thread.

Kerry Cunningham: And why it's a forcing function is because you're going to look at a lot of your leads and go. I'm not, that's not, I'm not going to multi thread into that account. Okay, great. Then don't follow up on that lead. Like the only reason to follow up on a lead is because the account is one that could buy something from you.

Kerry Cunningham: So if you don't think it's worth multi threading in, don't follow up on it at all. And then spend that time multi threading on a lead where that account is worth the effort. Uh, so to me, that's a really great forcing function. Just never, ever. Follow up on a single lead again and give up don't ever do that And I think that's a really good start.

Kerry Cunningham: The second thing is make sure that Um, even if it's just simple lead to account matching, get every lead that comes from the same account matched to the account it comes from, preferably all the way to an opportunity if you have multiple solutions, right? That technology is mature, works great. Do that.

Kerry Cunningham: And then multi thread. Thank 

John Common: you. That's really great. And like that point you just made. Okay. Step one. Uh, refuse to work one off MQLs, evaluate them through the lens of, is there really a buying team lurking here? Have I already found it? If not, how do I find it? Are they the kind of account I want? That's number one.

John Common: Number two, duh, get down in your data layer and, and, and, and do lead or contact to account matching and even better contact to account to opportunity potential, you know. You say something like that to someone who's. been doing B2B growth for, you know, two, three, four years or ten or fifteen. They get it.

John Common: It's the knowing versus doing gap that I think I hope our entire industry is moving from saying, Oh yeah, I went to that webinar. I know it. That's not the question anymore. The question is, is your end to end go to market team doing it like clockwork? That's the new bar. And that's a, you get radically different answers when you ask, do you understand it?

John Common: Are 

Kerry Cunningham: you doing it? Well, that number I gave you. 72 percent of organizations notice and do something about multiple buying team members showing up at the same time. Um, you know, when we ran this study a couple of years ago for the first time, we had about half or more of the audience were people that, you know, did it on LinkedIn.

Kerry Cunningham: So people that were connected to me or connected to Sixth Sense and you know, that number was, it wasn't even 72, percent when we did it first time. But I thought, yeah, I don't think it's that good. I think that's mostly people who know the right answer. And, you know, are giving us the right answer, but not probably doing it.

Kerry Cunningham: Uh, so this year, most of the survey responses came at random from a survey panel provider. They are not people who are connected to me necessarily. Um, and the number was even better. So I'm really, I'm really happy about that. I think the knowing doing gap has been closed there dramatically. There's a lot more, there's a lot more to it, right?

Kerry Cunningham: There's, you know, there are other steps and there's what is the sales team doing? But, you know, we also, so in this, we just did a, we've got BDR Appreciation Week coming up. We just did a survey on that and I'm looking at the data right now. And about 55 60 percent of the BDRs who responded said that they multitask, multitask, multithread when they're following up on leads.

Kerry Cunningham: Um, so that's good. That's not quite connected necessarily to what their marketing folks are saying, but it's getting there. Uh, and then the average, if they do multithread, the average number of contacts they're attempting is six. Uh, so they're going at it if they're doing it, uh, 

John Common: which is great. I had John Miller on growth driver recently, and I, I kind of put him in a corner.

John Common: I said, what is the right balance? I asked him an impossible question. What's the right balance between investments in brand versus investments in demand? And there's a big topic here on LinkedIn right now, like literally right now about. You know, demand versus brand. What's the right allocation. Some people think you can't even create demand.

John Common: It's not, I'm going to skip all that for a second. My question for you is, I want to ask the same sort of impossible question. If you were the chief growth officer, CMO and or CRO, the amalgam of those three personas at a mid marketer enterprise company, and you're like, Okay, I'm adopting these more modern growth and go to market strategies that Carrie and John have been talking about and now I'm going into my next budget cycle and I really have to think differently about brand and reputation building and demand creation.

John Common: Sometimes called early journey, top of funnel stuff, versus active demand focused, you know, demand capture, demand conversion and sales. The impossible question is what percentage of your budget would you put in brand versus demand? 

Kerry Cunningham: Here's how I'll, I'll weasel around it a little bit, but this is how I would produce the answer.

Kerry Cunningham: At Serious Decisions we had, you probably know this little framework, but we had this thing called the demand type framework. And it's about. It's about how familiar your audience is with the kind of solution you offer. So if they're super, super familiar and you're competing with, uh, known entities and you're one of four players and they're going to buy from one of you and everybody's got one and it's a matter of whether you get the deal this time around, um, you've got to invest super heavily in brand.

Kerry Cunningham: You've got to be a company that people love and are thinking about all the time. And when the, their, their, their education process and the buying process is this, uh, the way that the, their length of time they spend, you know, evaluating vendors is going to be shorter. They know what they want. It's really about, do they love you or not?

Kerry Cunningham: Uh, in a lot of those cases, right? And do you fit with their environment? Um, so heavy investment in brand, um, if you're most tech companies and you're kind of, you know, you, you have competitors, but you do something a little different or whatever, um, you've got to have brand. You've got to have a pretty decent amount of brand all the time for people to know you and understand you, but then, you know, you've got to get out there and beat the bushes a lot and demand to do a lot of this stuff that we're talking about.

Kerry Cunningham: Um, then, you know, if you're a, if you're a company that sells something that, you know, is a, and this is the one that this LinkedIn conversation is going on about, but if you, if you have a solution where it's kind of in search of a problem, uh, and maybe the problem is a real one, but people don't know it yet and they don't know that they can solve it.

Kerry Cunningham: Uh, you know, there's no brand that you can do. Uh, you're going to have to go create, despite what people are saying. You have to 

John Common: educate me about the fact that this is a problem that can be solved. Right. Either at all or differently. Right. Yeah. What do you call this? New, new concept versus new approach.

John Common: New 

Kerry Cunningham: concept. Yeah. Versus, yeah. New concept, new paradigm, and then established market. So new concept is that one where you're solving that problem that, that maybe didn't, didn't really exist for folks before. So I think you've got to think about it that way. And then you can scale up and down how much you're spending on brand versus demand, uh, to ensure that, you know, you're, you're hitting it right.

Kerry Cunningham: And then the, the last thing I would say is if we're talking about modern marketing approaches, Yeah. First thing for me in a modern marketing approach is ICP. The second thing is where is all of your ICP right now in a buying process, knowing that most of them are not in any. So if not in any is 95 percent of your market, it's going to take some money to keep brand in front of them.

Kerry Cunningham: Right? Uh, and so you've got to spend accordingly. 

John Common: I think it's interesting. Most buyers and market recipients of the intent message receive it as Know who's in market so you can go do something about it. Yeah, but I think the whole industry has an entire the other side of that coin is But you really need to be doing a lot about the people who are not in market But are gonna be in market in the future and I don't think that yeah, 

Kerry Cunningham: and you have to know who they are Yeah, right the key to everything is I think knowing you've just got to know and then you can decide so, you know I was trying to do the math in my head from Again, the study that we just did, the buyer identification study, where we did ask, uh, we didn't, we didn't ask about, um, brand budget because we were asking about demand and ABM stuff.

Kerry Cunningham: But if I do the. So first of all, what was interesting is that across the board, people said that they're spending or their, their marketing, overall marketing budgets are 13 and a half percent of revenue. Um, which to me sounded crazy at first. And then I went to, uh, I said, I saw this Deloitte study, uh, of a bunch of, they, they did this research with a bunch of CFOs and theirs was 13 and a half percent also.

Kerry Cunningham: So I thought, okay, maybe it's not crazy. Um, it, it's less in, uh, tech. It's, it's 11 percent in tech, but still more than I would have thought. Uh, I was thinking more like 7, 8, 9%. Um, and then we asked about how much of that budget is devoted to if you do ABM, how much does ABM get, how much does, uh, outbound get, how much does inbound stuff.

Kerry Cunningham: We just left it at that high level. And I think when you add up, uh, those three things, if somebody does all three or if they just do two, when you add up the demandy parts of things, It's like 65, 

John Common: 70%. My stock answer is if you, uh, if you've achieved product market fit and you've got a decent size customer base, whatever that means for your category, a good starting point would be 30 percent brand, 70 percent demand.

John Common: And look what that really means for most companies is more, more brands. I mean, that's, that's kind of where we're at. We're going to do lightning round now. And uh, you know how lightning round works. I ask you a quick question. You give me a quick answer. It's here we go. Here we go. Cary, what is one big idea about ABX for 2024 that people really need to understand and focus 

Kerry Cunningham: on?

Kerry Cunningham: Big idea for ABX that people need to focus on is you need to have a full accounting of where every potential opportunity inside those accounts is at all times. Um, and I'll just sub point to never ever miss a deal in any of those accounts. That are in your ABX program that if you're in charge of that never miss a deal How do you 

John Common: define intent data to someone who's completely into it?

Kerry Cunningham: It shouldn't have been called intent They should have been called interest signals Because we don't know if it means intent. But what we do need is it's a signal of interest. It's all of that signal And never send your sales reps at it unless you're absolutely desperate. If you're desperate and a lot of us are at various times, then okay, but that's not the use.

Kerry Cunningham: The best use is for marketing to direct its budget towards the part of the market that's in market. And you see that with intent data. 

John Common: What is something about intent data that often is misunderstood? 

Kerry Cunningham: I think the big misunderstanding is that any of these signals by themselves are useful. They're not. Uh, where they're useful is when you combine them together.

Kerry Cunningham: Like when you have, when you triangulate, you have, I've got a, I've got a lead. I've got anonymous traffic and I see intent from that account. There's something happening here. I've got lots of evidence, right? That's ideal. That's what we want. If you have two pieces of that, it's not as ideal, right? It's just not as good.

Kerry Cunningham: And we can be honest about that. And it should be, that's, you know, that's what it is. 

John Common: Intent is not a silver bullet, auto opportunity, auto win button. Yeah. Um, what is one thing that CMOs and CROs should do to significantly improve cross functional 

Kerry Cunningham: alignment. You know, a couple hours in the sweat lodge, agreeing that they're, uh, they're actually trying to accomplish the same thing.

Kerry Cunningham: Uh, maybe one set of goals between them? How's that? One set of goals. Not marketing has a set of goals, not sales has a set of goals, but one set of goals. What are we trying to accomplish? What's our pipeline number and our revenue number, you know? Do we agree on what those multiples are going to be? And then 

John Common: let's go do that.

John Common: All right, last lightning round. What is one piece of advice you would give B2B CEOs to up level the, their understanding? around modern go to market and growth strategy. 

Kerry Cunningham: You know, I think just sit back and, and, uh, you know, get with your customers, get your, get some of your customers with your marketing and your sales leaders and walk through with your customers what their buying process was like.

Kerry Cunningham: Not why they chose you. You can talk about that. But, what was that buying process actually like, uh, so that you can understand what it's actually like when an organization is buying from you? Organizations love to tell stories about how they sold the buyer. What we know now is, well, the buyer sold themselves and then they came and told you about it and you went through the motions.

Kerry Cunningham: Uh, for the most part, so find out what it was like on their side selling and really understand that as a group together so that you have a mutual understanding, everybody, about what that buyer needs from you, how they found out about you, how they went through that process. Um, I think that would be like a really great exercise for companies to go through.

John Common: That is great. That was advice for CEOs. I would, I would extend that to as many people in the company as you could possibly do, right? I mean, that's, that is golden advice. Thank you for taking time out of your crazy busy schedule to share your talent and your expertise and your passion. I have had a blast with 

Kerry Cunningham: you.

Kerry Cunningham: so much. Thank you for having me. I really, really appreciate it. 

John Common: Great time. All right. We'll see you soon.