How to Embrace New Buyer Behavior and Move Past MQLs with Terry Flaherty and Kerry Cunningham

Kerry Cunningham: One person out looking around for anything doesn't mean anything. It just doesn’t. 

Terry Flaherty: just doesn't people are still important. So we want to understand like how many people are re engaging with, but instead of calling them MQLs, it's buying group members.

John Common: Welcome to growth driver brought to you by intelligent demand where the best minds and B2B are redefining growth. Hey everybody. John Common here. Okay. First things first B2B. Buyers and buying behavior has shifted, but most companies are still trying to figure out what to do about it. That's number one.

Number two, most companies happen to also still be addicted to MQLs and they need to do the courageous, scary thing of moving into buying teams, opportunities, and multi threading. It turns out that these two topics actually are highly interrelated. And so today we're going to bring these two topics together and give you everything you need to know and everything you need to do to make sure that your company engages buyers the way they really want to buy.

And also drives a way more effective revenue process. Okay. So today's episode is really special because we're bringing back two guests from season one of growth driver in episode 10. And I want you to look these up. You can think of this as a required reading or required watching for you and your team.

But episode 10. was how B2B buyer behavior has changed, and we did that with Kerry Cunningham, head of research and analysis at Sixth Sense, who happens to be with me today. And then we also did episode 14, which was MQLs are out, buying groups are in, with Terry Flaherty, principal analyst in demand services at Forrester.

Terry is also here. I'm bringing them both back. We're doing something really special. It's a double guest episode. Welcome back to growth driver, Carrie and Terry. 

Kerry Cunningham: Thank you. Great to be here. Even if I do have to share the stage with Terry, you 

John Common: guys, you guys know each other from way back. Um, I'm so glad to have you here.

Uh, I know you are two buddies. You guys go all the way back to serious decisions. Together, you helped build, uh, the waterfall models and helped architect what I think, and I say this with love, is now the old playbook. You guys helped create, helped us all create the old playbook, but what we're here today to talk about and get your, your expertise on is helping us build the new playbook.

But before we dive in, I, I want to ask you a question, um, what was your working relationship like over the years? Like, was it always like rainbows and ice cream? 

Kerry Cunningham: Well, first of all, I think it's worth noting that a lot of people never even bothered to try to tell us apart. Exactly. And it's 

Terry Flaherty: hard to do, right?

With Carrie 

Kerry Cunningham: and Terry. You did not help 

John Common: it with your first names, it's true. 

Kerry Cunningham: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so there is that. I think at some point we probably could complete each other's sentences about certain things. You know, we didn't always agree about everything, I would say, or at least sometimes it took a little while to get there.

Terry Flaherty: Um, I, I would say 95 percent of the time we, we got along great. I mean, we always got along great, but one, one of the best things in, in the relationship we had with Carrie is You know, we were, we were trying to vent and to be a little fair, right? We didn't, we didn't start the original Waterfall Carry and I, we kind of came in the, the original Waterfall with NQL and SQL and all that existed.

Um, we, we, you know, had to support it for a few years and then we kind of recognized. You know, that's not necessarily right 

Kerry Cunningham: anymore. 

Terry Flaherty: And so we had, um, ultimately the great experience, but at times the really challenging experience. Um, in the serious decisions going, going, Hey guys, you know, the, the family jewels, the, the waterfall, we kind of need to change it.

Right. And so there is a lot, a lot of pressure. I mean, obviously that was, that was a sacred object. It's serious. And for, you know, two younger, newer analysts come in and go, we need to change it. Um, added a lot of controversy and there was a huge amount of pressure and, and, and, um, Carrie and I talked five times a day, something like that, as, as we were going through this transformation, um, and most of the time we agreed, uh, and I think especially on the intent and the direction we always agreed, but we also had, Um, you know, we kind of pushed each other.

And so we used to have, you know, conversations with other people involved in it. And Kerry and I would get in, um, pretty heated discussions as we were making this transformation. Right. And, um, I think pretty much at least once a week, um, those conversations would include an enthusiastic, fuck you Flaherty or fucking Cunningham.

Um, not that we were wrong. Right. But it was much more as we were making this transformation. Did you consider this? And it was like, Oh man, we have to 

Kerry Cunningham: Terry literally at one point, he's like, so I was in the hot tub over the weekend with a glass of wine. And I don't know, maybe an edible or something like that, but I was in the hot tub with a glass of wine.

And I thought of this and that, you know, I'm like, okay, Uh, that's kind of a good idea. But the fact that you were in the hot tub with a glass of wine, it's kind of showing a little bit in how, you know, and so, you know, maybe it's a little bit of like this. And then, you know, I think, you know, his first response to that might be, well, fuck you Cunningham.

Then, you know, we would get into it a little bit. And certainly there were many that came the other direction for, 

Terry Flaherty: yeah, 

Kerry Cunningham: people, 

Terry Flaherty: right. Because other people would sit on it and we would get into it. Animated, he had discussions where it's like, they hate, hate each other, right? And that was like the furthest thing from the truth.

It was like, it was, it was just, yeah. And we had the ability to argue and debate and have different opinions, but we have a huge amount of respect for each other and still do, 

John Common: you know, it's been what, five or six, seven months since each of you were on growth driver in season one. And what I know is that each of you.

No surprise. Have continued to do your research and your work. And so what I'd love to do is tee you up first, Kerry. Talk to us about how your buyer research has continued. What, what has been validated or not validated since then? Number one, and then we'll hand the microphone to you, Terry, because I know you have since taken your insights around say goodbye to MQLs to the Forrester Summit.

You, you, a lot of information and adoption there, but, but Kerry, you go first. 

Kerry Cunningham: Perfect. Yeah. And I think these, uh, these two pieces of, of work, uh, still go perfectly together. Uh, and you know, it's not a coincidence. So the stuff that I've been working on is, you know, what occurred to me is that, um, that the thing that B2B marketing and sales folks don't really understand is what the B2B process buying process is like.

And you know, Terry, uh, just wrote something on Facebook, uh, a week or so ago that gets exactly at. The problem that I've been trying to solve with this research, which is the issue is not marketing and sales aligning to each other. The issue is marketing and sales aligning to the way that buyers buy first and foremost, and we're way, way off that.

And so, you know, it was one way to look at this. Lead problem, buying groups problem. It's just you got to understand what that looks like. So, um, so we went out last year around this time last year, a little earlier, we surveyed 900 or so people who've been involved in the legit B to B buying process. And we asked him about what that process was like.

Um, the responses that we got were in some cases exactly what you would expect, which is great. When you're doing a survey, you want to get some things that you Expect because that tells you that you've got the right audience. And then we found a lot of stuff that we suspected but didn't know was quite true.

And then some stuff that was surprising. So the stuff that we, we. Uh, got that we expected is that buyers say that they don't talk to sellers until they're two thirds of the way through the journey. Um, what was surprising that we did find is that there's nothing that changes that you ask anybody who's been involved in a buying process.

Now we know it's across the globe. Uh, it's anywhere in the organization. It's any kind of solution. They're going to tell you, yeah, we talked to sellers about two thirds of the way through our buying journey. Um, what, what we found out that was a little surprising was buyers said that More than 80 percent of the time, they they control when that first conversation happens.

So they initiate that first conversation. So they're not, they're not sitting back saying, you know, well, if somebody calls me, I suppose I'll respond. Or if I get an email, I suppose I'll respond. Um, Now they're getting calls and emails. It doesn't matter. They respond when they want. We, we also looked at the 20 percent of the people who said that their first interaction with a seller was because they responded to an email or a call.

And that also happened exactly two thirds of the way through the journey. So it doesn't matter. So this is like really, really important. For organizations understand it does not matter if you're emailing or calling them when they're not ready or not going to respond. Um, and I also, we'll talk about this later, I hope, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't write your call, but it does mean that you need to change how you do it and you need to change your expectation of what's going to happen as a result.

All right. 

John Common: Yeah. 

Kerry Cunningham: So there, what we know is that they're controlling this first interaction with Sellers completely. So I, I call this defensive buyer syndrome. They're just, they're not going to tell, they don't want to talk to a seller until they're ready. What does ready mean? The things that were super surprising buyer said that about 80 percent of the time, again, they have already mostly or completely established their requirements.

Prior to talking to sellers, part of the reason they can do that is that more than 70 percent of them are talking to analysts and consultants all throughout their process, and they're evaluating vendors that they already know almost all the time, like more than 80 percent of the time buyers know the winning vendor and at least one of the other vendors before they start the process.

So we're not starting from scratch. These buyers are not blank slates. They know the field. Uh, they're going in. They probably have a pretty good shortlist on day one. They don't stray very far from it. Uh, and they have. Uh, and then the last piece of data here that I think is really critical is buyers told us 84 percent of the time they have their very first conversation with any vendor is with the vendor who ultimately wins the business.

And while it's possible. That they have no idea who they want to talk to. And then suddenly they get a call from a BDR and they go, okay, well, we'll buy from you. What's a lot more likely is the reason it takes consistently two thirds of the buying journey is because two thirds of the buying journey is about coming to consensus as a buying team, about what you want and who you want to buy it from.

And then one third is about confirming that choice. And I think that's why, you know, the buying processes are so consistently two thirds before talking to sellers and one third after because it takes about a third of a typical buying journey to confirm a choice that you've already made. So you did a 

John Common: bunch of that initial research.

You have since doubled down and gone deeper, built a, if I understand an even deeper data set that is not just recent, but it's larger. What I'm hearing you say is it's, it's yielding more granular, more interesting, deeper insights, but it's not changing what you learned and shared last year. 

Kerry Cunningham: Yeah. No, nothing changed at all.

John Common: All right. Cool. Awesome. Thanks for that update. Terry, you have been, um Preaching and teaching the gospel of Time to Expand Beyond Simply MQLs. Then you took that circus, so to speak, to the Forrester Summit. What did you see? What did you learn? What'd you hear? 

Terry Flaherty: So, so Summit was really interesting, right? And, and first, before you do that, so Kerry mentioned the LinkedIn post I did.

John Common: Yeah. 

Terry Flaherty: So ago, uh, and he, he, he was kind of gracious. Right. Um, I guess as I'm getting older, I'm getting a little bit more cantankerous and controversial, but my actual premise on the LinkedIn post was marketing and sales alignment is a waste of time. Yeah, it was salty. Right. And the reason is that everybody's like, Oh, how can you say that?

And it's like, because you're trying to align to a broken process. 

John Common: Yeah. 

Terry Flaherty: Right. If I'm an MQL centric process, worried about an individual and I'm debating how many points are involved in getting that MQL and what the thought, that's why am I wasting my time doing that? Because all we're doing is allowing you something broken.

Right. And so way more important is I need to make sure my process aligns the way the buyer wants to buy. And when I do that, then it's a lot more natural on, okay, now how do we align our sales and marketing resources and how do I change their roles and responsibilities on doing that? And that was kind of burying the copy, but a lot of people freaked out when, holy cow, sales and marketing alignments, a waste of time.

How could you possibly say that? 

John Common: Our whole market needs to be re centered. It's not about the technology. It's not about, to your point, it's not about getting internal stakeholders aligned with one another while they drift further away from the buyer. And I think, I think maybe one of the first really Critical insights for this episode is is that which is if you want to move from the old playbook to the new playbook There are some guiding principles that are are worthy of being a north star And that work and I think you just said one which is align To the buyer, the modern truth of your buyer, and that's where you learn the stuff that Kerry just said and the stuff that you're talking about around surprise.

Well, I don't wanna take, I don't want to take your und, but it, it ain't just an MQL, it ain't just 

Terry Flaherty: an mql. Right. And, and, and so now let's talk about what we saw at Summit and, and, and, and so I'm gonna go back in history again. It was 2017 when Carrie and I stood on stage at, at Sirius Summit. And when, okay, we need to think about something and, you know, demand units back then, but we need to think about this concept of buying groups and opportunities and all that.

And for what, four or five years, we were doing 25 conversations a week and probably For my case, 23 of the people thought it was strange and bizarre. And your case, 25 thought you were bizarre and strange, but, but like nobody believed it, everybody's like really interesting idea, but nah, not, not, not going to happen.

It's a bunch of academic analysts making this stuff up. And we started to see glimmers of hope, um, you know, a couple of years later, but like the biggest takeaway for me this year at summit, number one, we had Five sessions, five clients who got up and told their story of the success they're seeing on this real life, right?

So, you know, it's not just a concept anymore. There's companies like Siemens and Palo Alto and Zendesk and Reltio and, um, um, Cheer ID, right? Who are like, Hey, this is working for us. Here's the results we're seeing. And, and, and that was like super powerful because it's not us talking anymore. Right. But the core base, this is we got to say goodbye to MQLs and get into buying groups.

Right. Right. Um, but that's also starting to evolve and, and, and there's been, you know, a couple of phases in the evolution of that to, to, to basically say, Hey, you know, I mean, Moving from MQLs to bind groups? Okay, cool. But what really needs to happen is a bigger transformation than just making that system change, right?

Because it's like Okay, cool. Now I've got buying groups and opportunities, but what we need to recognize like this, this is a change in obviously our focus, right? This is a change in the relationship between how marketing sales are working together. This is a change in culture. This is not one of the things that was always.

Kind of just the reality in the old waterfall. It was number one marketing only most anybody outside of marketing thought it was a marketing toy, right? And nobody cared. Marketing, go measure, do whatever you want. When we, when we start talking about. Buying groups, it's bigger than any single function, right?

It's bigger than marketing. It's bigger than sales. It requires a lot of collaboration and people need to work together. You need to define it's like in the past, the traditional process was marketing. Go get us lots of leads. BDRs, qualify these leads, sales, go get them, right? And, and, and, and it was silo based and it was broken.

And, and, and so part of the transformation is we need to work together. 

John Common: When organizations understand that they need to move away from single threaded MQLs and move toward buying teams and opportunities, what I hear you saying is clearly it's not just a Salesforce object. Rev tech thing. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's all, it's what an ID, we would call all layers of the revenue program.

It's culture. It's process. It's it's mindset. It's collaboration. 

Terry Flaherty: Is a perfect example. You know, we no longer have these silos. If we get somebody engaged. You know when the opportunity is in late stage, but we get somebody else engaged and we see that In the past second lead syndrome said thrown away their duplicate lead waste of time.

Why are you sending this now? It's like let's celebrate that we got buying group members seven out of eight buying group members and that's a wonderful great thing But that requires A change in how we collaborate. All of a sudden, marketing's involved all the way through the process. So BDR's involved all the way through the process.

It's a, it's a full fundamental change. 

John Common: If you were to summarize it in one or two words. Statistics tell the growth driver audience what is waiting for them in terms of improved revenue performance. If they go whole hog away from MQLs and toward buying teams, what could they expect? What's the range of improvement 

Terry Flaherty: when I'm moving from MQLs to buying groups?

What I'm really doing is adopting the concept of signals, right? And what I'm looking at is these signals and I'm understanding the context of those signals to be able to say, Hey, I just got three signals from three different people or four different people from the, from the account. Two of them by name, two of them anonymously, but they're all telling me they're interested in my talent management solution.

Right? And so that's a really critical element is to have that insight. And when I leverage those signals in the right way, It delivers results in sort of three different ways. So I'm doing a lot of study on the business impact and making the transition from MQLs to signals, packages, buying groups, right?

Number one, and the thing that everybody starts with is, you know, in the past, we would send sales one person, maybe attached to an opportunity, but it was one person, right? Now, if we say, okay, we're going to. You know, feed the BDR all this insight, BDR is going to qualify, and when they pass to sales, they're going to add three engaged buying group members to that opportunity as opposed to just that one person, right?

So that is dramatically improving the quality of the handoff from the BDR to sales. Right. So then the question becomes, okay, what, what sales is getting is, is a discovery mean, right? And so the real basic core question, what's the conversion rate of discovery mean to close one? Um, if it's one person, and then how does that change if it's multiple people?

And this is where all of a sudden you go, holy cow, because on the low end, what we're seeing is like a relative 25 percent improvement. So if I'm at my conversion rate from, from discovery meeting to close one was 10%, 12 and a half percent now. Right. And, and that doesn't sound like much until you actually apply numbers to it.

And it's like, holy cow. 

John Common: No, I know. 

Terry Flaherty: That's the low 

John Common: end though. That's the low end. 

Terry Flaherty: That's the low end, right? So, so the ROI, you know, we always give awards in our, I'm sorry, Program of the Year winner. They saw like a 60 percent relative improvement. And it's like, Ooh, that that's pretty cool. Right? We, we have other companies, big companies, multi billion dollar companies and they're seeing 275 percent improvement in conversion rate.

And I think the top I've heard, and this is from like the, the, the, super name brand, the top I've heard was 400 percent improvement in win rate. Now part of it, 400 percent is awesome. You know, it was amazing. They didn't have necessarily the best win rate to begin with, but still a 400 percent improvement in win rates.

Holy cow. Right. So basically we're improving quality. When we add people to the buying group, we're improving quality. Biggest concern all the time is, okay, so I get it. You raise the threshold, right? I'm going to have higher conversion rate. But holy cow, you're raising the threshold and you're going to kill my quantity.

Right, because you're gonna wait to get all this knowledge, all this insight, and it's gonna take forever. And you know, you're gonna probably cut my volume of what you're, feed me, what you're feeding me by 50 per 20%, 50% whatever, wrong. Right? And, and, and, and so the other side of the driver is introducing new opportunities to the world that we didn't know existed before.

Right. And, and that's because. In the past, I'd sit there and go, okay, I'm waiting for one person to hit the magic 100 point and become an MQL. And I'm ignoring the fact that, holy cow, I've got three people coming from the same company that I didn't see. Or I've got all this anonymous activity. I have all these other signals that I ignore.

And we're only looking at, you know, if I'm in an MQL based world, I'm probably looking at somewhere around 2%. Are they available insight that I should be leveraging about an opportunity? We wait for that one person to hit that magical a hundred point and we go forward. Right. And so leveraging those insights, that brings additional volume.

So, you know, we, I kind of feel like we found the secret sauce. So there's always been this debate of quality and quantity, 

Kerry Cunningham: right? When 

Terry Flaherty: they do signals, I get both, right. And then that third driver I mentioned is, you know, there's lots of people in market that we don't know about. 

John Common: That does round out the why.

The why is, is buyers have truly changed. And then the other part of the why is you will increase your win rates, you will surface new opportunities in the accounts you're targeting, and you will surface new opportunities in the accounts you might not be targeting. Exactly. You don't have to always choose from a quality versus quantity, you might be able to get both.

So that's fantastic. And not might, you will 

Kerry Cunningham: get both. B2B 

John Common: RevTech used to be pretty simple. A website, an email platform, some data. Those days are long gone. You know it, I know it. If you need an expert B2B RevOps partner, go to intelligentdemand. com and schedule a free consult with one of their RevOps strategists.

Let's get into the how and when we obviously the three of us talked about this episode before we recorded it. And, um, and the first thing that came off when it comes to the how that I thought we, we, we surfaced as such a great guiding principle. And this might be the second sort of important guiding principle is, um, use the customer buying journey as an organizing principle.

When you go to make a purchase, And think about what do we need to do differently? And then the three stages if you guys recall I wrote it down So i'll surface it the three stages You know, you can you can create a 20 step buying journey and and maybe you should in your unique company use case but at a high level there's Um when you're going to market for some sort of a target account or icp or buying team Step one of the customer journey is they are not in market You They're, they're experiencing some version of status quo.

So they're probably, they might not even be thinking about your category, let alone your brand or your product. So that's the first phase. Second phase, uh, I think we called it the. Selection phase, which happens to tend to be about 70 percent of the journey, and it tends to be very anonymous or dark. Um, and then the third step of the high level, uh, customer buying journey is what we call it.

Maybe the validation phase, that last 30%. So talk to me, or talk to each other about how do you think about the buying journey as a critical way for companies to focus their, how to make the changes they need to make. 

Kerry Cunningham: Terry started talking about signals a little bit. This is a slightly sore subject for me now because there are a lot of people out on the interwebs taking credit for inventing signal based marketing and all that stuff these days.

Yeah, so, uh, you know, almost immediately after we did the demand unit waterfall and you start thinking about, you know, Uh, the lead and, and the lead is not enough. It's buying groups. Now you immediately have to start thinking about signals. Like there's all kinds of signals. And the, and the really important thing about the fact that the buyer is a group of people is that they give off a lot of signals.

And when you have a lot of signals of anything, it's much more reliable than if you have one signal of anything. So when you have. In in the case, if we think, you know, and kind of the way things are today, you've got third party intent, who's out looking around. You have anonymous traffic on your website, who's on your website, but not logged in.

And then you have your leads. If we just take those three buckets, all three of them suck by themselves. If you take any one of those things and you try to give it to a sales rep and say, here, go do something with it, they're going to say it sucks. And most of the things that you read on LinkedIn about intent data are sellers saying, Hmm.

They gave me intent, it sucks. Uh, so totally agree. It does. So, but here's what they're used for buying journeys. The only way you're going to see the beginning and the, and the, and the, whether a real buying journey is in process is if there's more than one person from a buying organization out looking around for the kind of thing that you sell.

One person out looking around for anything doesn't mean anything. It just doesn't. Now it may. But the likelihood is very low, like the conversion rate of a lead is about 1 percent lead to revenue. The conversion rate of anonymous traffic to revenue, I don't know, but it's a lot lower than that. If it's, if you're just looking at one person, it's really when you take all of these signals together and you start to see.

You know what? There's a bunch of people at this account who are out looking around for the kind of thing that we sell. If you can see that starting now, you can say, okay, well, you know, we sure aren't going to give this to sales yet. Cause we don't know if it's real. It just started, right? Why don't we throw some ads in front of them and see if they respond?

Um, do we know any people from that account? Why don't we ping them with an email and see if they, You know, respond to that or if they're demonstrate some interest to that and start to grow, you know, that like we used to talk about nurturing leads. Now, what we're really thinking about is how we nurture the signal that we're seeing out there to see whether or not that that signal is real and whether that signal persists.

And since we know that a buying process, an average B2B is 11 months. And you look at our reports, you can see, you know, in your industry for your, Solutions eyes and all of that. How long yours is. We know that they're a really long process. And so if you see a bind group, that's out looking around, even if they come to your website and fill out all of your forms, if, if the activity just started this month, they're not going to talk to you for another seven months.

They're just not. They're going to be in market for a while, they're going to come to your website right away because they're looking around and they know you exist and you got a solution they want. 

John Common: And that's a good thing. That's 

Kerry Cunningham: a really good sign. Yeah, but but don't unleash the sales hounds quite yet.

Yeah. I mean, you can absolutely if you want to email them, you want to call them do it. But if you're going to do that, then do it in service to their buying process, not in service to can I get a meeting? Can I get a demo, but better off what you'd be doing is just make sure that if there's anything that you have that they should see because they're in market, make sure that they get it.

To help them 

John Common: buy, right? It's about enabling their buying their complex, difficult, unfun buying journey. 

Kerry Cunningham: Yeah. Okay. So. So that's, I think more than anything, having this buying journey perspective and understanding that a lot of it goes on before you're going to talk to anybody and there's nothing you can do about that.

Now you got to think, how do I enable them? And that means you have to see the beginning of the buying journey, see it across the arc of that long buying journey, be there to enable those buyers, give them what they want, make them feel love. You may get a chance to develop relationships with them as long as it's not about, can I get a demo?

Uh, like, you know, we do all kinds of things that develop relationships with buyers early in the journey. Um, you know, we sponsor a community for CMOs. So if we know that you're a company that's in market for what we sell and your CMO is not part of our community, they get an invitation, 

John Common: right? 

Kerry Cunningham: They don't get, we don't ask for a demo.

We say, would you like to join this community? Yeah. Add some value. Right. Um, you know, so those kinds of things, seeing the buying journey allows you to do that. Put some perspective on the individual signals that you're seeing, and then you can build from there. 

John Common: You know, Terry, what Kerry just said makes me think about your LinkedIn post about stop trying to align marketing and sales.

Start aligning, aligning to the buyer. I mean, that's this, this idea of understanding buyers buy in teams, but they also buy the way they want to buy. And you can't. Push a rope. You cannot force them to want to buy from you this quarter. If they're not ready to 

Kerry Cunningham: magic email or that magical SDR call, it's just not a 

John Common: magic SDR call, right?

That's not a thing. So what, has there anything around this idea of really what, what do companies need to do? What to go to market teams, what to go to market leaders, executives, CEOs, CROs need to, are there any bitter pills they need to swallow around buying journey realities from your perspective? 

Terry Flaherty: One of the major problems is we ignore the vast, vast majority of signals.

People, you know, come, people are coming to my website. That's, they're telling me they're in market, but a lot of times we don't start a real earnest process until, you know, they're in inquiry. They might fill out a form, identify themselves, which is only about 2 percent of the people with that, that come to your website.

Right. Um, and, and sometimes we don't really get serious until they're in MQL, right? And yet, you know, we have all this insight, all these signals, people are coming to my website, they're consuming ungated content, they're consuming gated content, and we ignore it, right? And what we ought to be doing is recognizing, you know, a, a, a signal of anonymous activity to my website is super, super valuable.

Right. Even if it's anonymous, because what that ought to trigger is, yeah, that's kind of an early stage. Not that they're ready to buy, but they're probably possibly telling me they're in market. Right. And, and, and I should be 

John Common: open. They're open to influence. They're maybe there's maybe they're saying, help, help me help us understand our pain and our opportunity in your category.

Help me buy maybe. 

Terry Flaherty: Right. And this is relatively new revelation for even us at Forrester, uh, Amy Hawthorne talking about summit, right? I mean, Amy Hawthorne, um, introduced this new concept of revenue process transformation, which is bigger. There's more change than just MQL to Vine group. And her whole theme was, you know, we kind of claim over customer obsessed and all that.

But in reality, our revenue process is completely 100 percent internally focused, right? And we're worried about all these metrics and all these behavior of how we want to drive people through the process, how we measure it and all this. And what we really need to do is come back and focus on. I want to align to the buyer and most importantly, you know, the, the buyers going through this research phase, they're not ready to talk, but they're absolutely willing and eager to learn the user experience to support the buying education process, I think is the huge, huge opportunity that's being completely neglected right now.

But when you solve it, you know, you're, you're, you're basically, if you're making it easy for buyers to educate and learn. Of course, you're going to be viewed as a partner ally thought leader. 

John Common: This sounds to me Um also like a return to fundamentals and also how human beings actually do things versus How corporations get get it twisted carrie?

I can tell you've got a thought. What are you what are you thinking? 

Kerry Cunningham: Yeah. Wow. So, so if you want a couple of things that are like tough pills, I think for CRO, CSO, et cetera, to swallow, uh, here's one, uh, stop chasing just, I mean, stop chasing the leads. Most of them don't mean anything. And the thing is you cannot tell which ones matter by looking at them.

One at a time. You can't, there's no, no amount of how many points for this or that. And you know, I, I was on a call with a very large company two days ago and they're debating over literally it's 2024 and they're debating whether this piece of this asset gets this points or that gets that points. None of that shit matters at all.

The only way to tell if a lead is a good lead is if they brought friends. And so. If they brought friends, then the lead has a higher chance of being a good lead and you should send them all to the same person at the same time for followup. That's it. If your leads did not bring friends, leave them the hell alone.

They don't want to talk to you. And even if they fill out your form, it's probably cause they had to, to get the content and the content was good, leave them alone. It's going to scare the shit out of you to do that because that's going to, you know, what Terry is talking about earlier, that's going to cut down on the volume of leads that you have.

So now the second bitter pill that you have to swallow is a lot of times an account is going to be in market for this for, and they're looking at you and you don't get an MQL from that. You don't get one, they like, they're smart enough to know what's going to happen if they go nuts on your website and fill out the form.

And so they're not going to do it. Or if they ever do, they're going to send the most junior person in the company. Somebody from, if they had mailrooms anymore, they would be the mailroom, right? The intern. To fill out the form. Yeah. Right. Uh, so, you know, so you, you have opportunities that are really good opportunities for you, and marketing wants to show you those.

And you look at marketing and you go, fuck you marketing. I don't want that. 'cause you didn't put the director of whatever's name on it. No. You're gonna have to go find out. That's what sellers do. You're gonna have to get the name and you're gonna have to do the work. 

John Common: What does. More enlightened signals base buying team centric sales enablement and SDR enablement look like how do we, how do we enable and direct and coach and guide our sales teams and SDR teams?

to not fumble the ball, to not misunderstand what's going on. 

Kerry Cunningham: Yeah. So first there's a cultural education thing, sort of, uh, if you have brand new SDRs and BDRs, great, you can start from scratch. But if you've got people who've been in the business for a little while, you're going to have to reeducate.

reeducate means, and this is probably more important for the managers who've been in business for a little while to, to get this reeducation. Again, the lead, the individual person and how much they did on your website or web, it doesn't mean a thing. It doesn't mean what you think it means. It just doesn't mean anything.

Um, but what matters is evidence that there are multiple people Paying attention and it does not matter whether those people filled out your form or not. You can see today, uh, in our tools and other tools, if there are multiple people on your website and you can tell what they're looking at, right? So what matters most is the signal that says how many people from this organization are on my website.

And if you know that you typically have a buying group of seven or eight people and there's three people with four people from an account on your website now. So pay attention to that, you know, and it doesn't matter if they're the right names. It doesn't matter if their names at all, they might all be anonymous, but you have to do something about that.

And if you don't have the right name, you're going to have to prospect just like the old days. You're gonna have to find the name. You're gonna have to go in there and get it. It's also a great place for marketing and sales to work together because if here's an account that is really in marketing, that is really in market.

Now it's marketing's job to do something that's going to get that account to engage. Right. So, you know, when, when we see accounts like that, where we've got all of this signal, and it's not yet the signal that sales really loves, we invite them to dinner or we invite them to a virtual wine tasting, or we do something.

We put something on the website. Then the next person who comes from that account, Is going to have an experience that's our best effort to get them to engage, 

John Common: offer them a high value offer. That is actually a high value offer. It's not a demo. It's not a, it's not a white paper. Yeah, that shit. It's, it's literally like, we're going to spend calories just on you.

We're going to do something custom for you. We are going to show up and provide. Value whether you spent before you spend a dollar. It's it's almost a plg kind of an idea Even though we're a services company where it's like you lead with value and then if they find value then they use that proof of value to make a to Um, 

Kerry Cunningham: I think that's, that's exactly right.

That's why you have to see the buying journey because you can't do that for every Tom, Dick Gary, and whatever who comes to your website, you have to have some degree of confidence that the offer you're putting in front of is, is the organization you're putting in front is worthy of that. It's worthy of your time, all of that.

And it's a good fit for them. And to know that you have to have a view of, The journey you have to know that they've been on one for a while. Um, You know, you can offer it to an account. That's Uh, that just showed up in the market, you know, the good news is it probably will save you a lot of time because they're not going to take it yet, you know, um, but later on if they've been in market for a while, if you still don't have the right kind of engagement, you don't feel your sales reps are not going to succeed.

penetrating this account because they don't prospect well. All right. Now marketing, you have to do something special to get the attention of somebody in that account. So that's the give and take that has to happen today. And every organization starts from, you start from wherever you start from. If your sales reps or SDRs can't prospect, they're not good at it.

You don't have that muscle. Then marketing is going to have to get better at getting engagement somehow to get that right person. 

John Common: Terry, what I want to go to, I want to throw the next one to you, which is if you were a CMO who had to go to a CFO, CEO, and even a board and, and explain to them why you're going to take and reallocate 30, 40, maybe even 50 percent of your marketing budget, you might even ask for more marketing budget to bring your company's investment.

into better balance between brand versus active demand, right? Um, how would you do that? What advice would you give that CMO who's got to go into the lion's den and say damn it I know you want me to put all of my resources at the tippy tippy bottom of the funnel to go do mqls But I because I care because i'm a growth professional.

I'm not going to do what you think I should do I'm going to invest some money in the middle and top of the funnel for lack of a better metaphor around demand creation around brand and reputation You For the X percent, 90 percent of the market. That's not in Mark, uh, of our, of our Tam. That's not in Mark.

What advice would you give that CMO? 

Terry Flaherty: So we can talk about this for hours. 

John Common: Hit me, baby. I'll go make a drink. 

Terry Flaherty: Yeah. I'll give you a perfect example. So another, I was on a terror last month on LinkedIn post, right? But, but another one I posted was. Um, Salesforce made an announcement in Q1 of 2025, going, Hey, it's hard out there.

Right? And as a result of it being hard out there, we now basically told our salespeople, and this is probably the dream for, you know, Everybody listening that instead of coming in the quarter with two X pipeline, they should come into the quarter with three X pipeline. And I think we'd all kill with three X pipeline, but they're a unicorn, right?

But, but, and then I start getting calls from clients going, Oh, we need to increase our pipeline because Salesforce is doing it. That means we should be doing it to our pipeline ratio. Yeah. And, and, and two bad things happen in that as a result of that conversation. Right. Bad thing. Number one is sales is like, okay, I can't be on the offender list of not having my pipeline.

So I'm going to get anybody I possibly can. I'm going to have happy years. I'm going to put them on pipeline, even though I probably shouldn't, I'll deal with that issue later. Maybe I'll get lucky, but I'm going to lower the quality of what I'm putting on pipeline. 

Kerry Cunningham: Right. 

Terry Flaherty: Next thing they do, they go to marketing and say, Hey, marketing, I need more leads.

You don't have any more budget, right? But I need more leads. So what's marketing have to do? They don't have any more budget. Right in the in the past it's like okay Well, all of a sudden content syndication is an mql. Isn't that great? We're gonna meet your need for more mqls The quality is going down on both of those and and you know, the cycle is okay So now we need to spend more money and you know, it's just that spiral that just continues And that absolutely has to stop.

And again, it's my belief, because we are so abysmally horrible at dealing with companies that are waving their hands saying I'm in market and our success on recognizing the early stages of their market and capitalizing on that. That's what we need to fix, right? And yeah, we need to invest in brand to bring companies in the market.

But, you know, we're 1 percent for people that fill out a form. We're way, way, way below, you know, somebody that's coming to our website for the first time showing first party intent and our ability to convert that into Pose 1 is abysmal. That's what we need to change, right? And the way we're going to change that is number one, fixing our efficiency, leveraging all the insight that we have.

I mean, you know, I don't have the exact number, but you know, I've been kind of quoting, we're leveraging one or 2 percent of the available insight and we're ignoring 98%. No wonder it's so expensive and no wonder it's so inefficient. 

John Common: What I heard you just say is, well, I'm not even sure that's the first place I would go, John.

I think what you said is even if you stay within, whether it's bottom of funnel demand or early emerging, you know, uh, engagement and call it mid funnel engagement. What I heard you say is most companies suck at At at reading signals and responding and in an appropriate way, you're saying, put your bets there.

Even before you go to the top of the funnel, 

Terry Flaherty: we have a new research where you coming out, the role of CMO and RPT, right? And we kind of use analogy. They need to be the person in the crow's nest looking in the future and going, Oh shit. Right. And the Oh shit is I can't continue this cycle of going and buying garbage leads.

Feeding garbage to the salespeople, the salespeople leveraging a small part of it and ignoring all this different insight that, you know, and, and trying to go on the garbage leads, trying to harass them the minute they fill out a form, trying to harass them to get that meeting that they're not going to be willing to take.

That's what fundamentally has to change. And so, you know, this, this, the role, the role of the CMO and RPT is gotta be a change agent to say, we need to break away from that process. Leverage all the insight we have, and yes, part of that, a key piece of that is that insight is going to help me form buying groups, but it's also going to help me identify organizations that are telling me they're in market, or I can see they're in market, and we need to, to, we need to help the research phase of that buyer, and that's where we're going to get the values.

Help the research pay that buyer in that stage and that's going to position us as the advisor thought leader and get us in there. 

John Common: All right, Terry, Kerry, what would you, what would you say? Yeah, come on, jump in, jump in. 

Kerry Cunningham: It's a big part of why we've done the research that we've done. Uh, it's you got to have evidence.

If you're a CMO, you can't walk in and go, I really think we just should be doing more brand. Trust me. Right. Yeah. Uh, but what we know, so, you know, like the, there's that Bain, HBR report that said that, uh, you know, buyers buy from their day one, uh, short list 95 percent of the time, whatever it is, we're actually gonna, uh, we're going to re, we're We run not that study, but we're going to do our own version of that with some questions around it.

Uh, just next month we'll be collecting on that. So we'll, we'll get another deeper look at that. But one, there's that, and you know, that's Bain and HBR. And I, you know, that I think there's probably, I think that's probably right that buyers have a short list because what we do know from our research is that buyers are familiar with the vendors that they're, that they're going to evaluate.

90 percent of the time, at least one of them that's on the list, they know already, they've, they've got experience with 80 percent of the time, they've got experience with the one that they buy from eventually already. And then, uh, because we know that they're making decisions and they're making choices prior to the time they talk to your sellers, uh, one, if, if you can't take that data and convince the people that matter in your organization, that you have to invest in creating preference Prior to that 70 percent mark.

I don't know how to help you. Right, exactly. You're 

John Common: immune to facts because you can call it brand. You can call it demand creation. We can quibble about that. You can, you can hate the word domain, the concept of demand creation. And, and I, I don't fucking care, but, but what maybe a better way to say it is you got to get on the short list, bro.

You got to get 

Kerry Cunningham: on the short list. 

John Common: Right. You got to get on the short list. So however the hell you think that whatever that word is, that's the word that needs to get funded and rethought. And what I'm hearing you say, Terry, is, um, not doing that is extremely costly and stupid. What I'm hearing you say, Kerry, is use data, not moral suasion.

And, and then at some point, if you've got a CRO or a CEO who just says, Shut up and give me more MQLs. I mean, honestly, go work somewhere else. That's what I would do. 

Terry Flaherty: Just to pull together maybe one more level. Brand is important, right? You have to get on the short list. Number one, I have to have brand.

What brand is going to stimulate is early signals. Right. That they're telling me they're interested in and I need to act on those to help support the education phase. And if I ignore those, then somebody else is going to educate. So I need both. Right. And I think it's that right combination. So invest in brand, but don't ignore, don't go from brand MQL, right?

Go from brand to early signal to education support, then to, you know, buying groups and prioritized. 

Kerry Cunningham: Right. You know, I think there's another, there's another piece of this also. So there's some research, uh, you know, LinkedIn's, uh, B2B Institute did a new, uh, report where they're, they're talking about, um, the, the idea that, uh, you know, you can't get fired for buying IBM, which was kind of the old thing and then it became Microsoft or whatever else.

But, uh, you know, we, we know that, buying is done by a big committee. And we all have been on those large committees or groups, and we know what they're like and be organizations are peop for the most part, they're do the risky thing. They the best thing that's saf if it doesn't work out, t It's not their fault for having done this risky, crazy thing.

That's kind of where the decisions get made and how you become that. I mean, that is, that's why people talk about reputation now instead of just brand, you know, if you're going to your CEO or your CFO and you're saying, I want to spend a hundred grand or something like that, it's gonna have to be with a company that has a reputation that your CFO whatever can understand and access easily.

Um, they're going to go talk to their other C level buddies and they're going to talk to the board. They're going to have conversations. Do you know these guys? Do you, have you heard of these guys? 

John Common: When they do that, if the answer is crickets, never heard of them, never heard of them, never heard of them, never see them, don't know who you're talking about.

That risk to your point, that buyer team risk starts notching up and they're like, I am not going to put my reputation on the line for some unknown company, no matter how great I think their software is or whatever. 

Kerry Cunningham: Right. That's right. Yeah. A hundred percent. 

John Common: I didn't mean to interrupt. 

Kerry Cunningham: Yeah. You've got to take all of those things that all of those things have to go into that conversation.

If you're the CMO is going to have that conversation with other folks, you got to know all of those things. Um, and they're all there to know now, like, well, you know, there's a lot of evidence out there that, that what we're saying is that we're not just making this stuff up. 

John Common: So a big piece of making this shift.

in the real messy world, it has to include reporting and analytics. So can either one of you or both of you talk, talk to me, talk to our audience about real world, cut the shit, what they need to do or not do in the area of measurement, reporting, analytics. 

Kerry Cunningham: One, like if you're, if you are still in the leads and MQLs world today, go start create a report that shows how many leads you're getting per account.

And if you have many solutions, you got to cut it by solution. How many leads you're getting per account slash solution today. Um, and then start delivering that report to the people who follow up on those leads. One, make sure all of those leads go to the same people. If they're from the same account.

They should always multi thread and then show that all the time. You should do that historically as well. So you should go back in time and look like the very first thing you should do is go back in time and look last year's leads. And if you had a thousand leads, how many accounts were there? It's not a thousand.

It's probably like six 50 of those six 50. How many were just one lead? Probably about half of those accounts were just one lead. And what was our win rate? Yeah. And what was your win rate when you followed up on those? Probably not great. But then the other, the other 300 or so, so this is 300 or so accounts out of 600, 700 accounts out of a thousand leads have an average of several leads per account.

And it's going to be super lumpy with some having many and some having a couple show people that. That's the reality of your leads today we think of like your leads and everything about your lead conversions is based on this concept that one lead equals one selling opportunity. And the minute you look at your leads in that way, you will understand that that is deeply, deeply wrong.

Right? So do that and then do the report on an ongoing basis without you and I need any other tools or anything. Just look to see whether you have multiple leads from the same organization makes sure that the people who need to see that see that and then do a report to see if they're following up on like that's you've got to do both of those things.

John Common: What about signals? Any any advice around how to leverage signals at the account level? Over time as a way to understand the effectiveness and mark of marketing and BDRs and sales. 

Kerry Cunningham: Yeah. And I'll say, you know, one of the things that we do with, uh, pretty much every account that goes into a sales cycle with us is we put a pixel on their website to show us, to show them which accounts are on their website anonymously.

Uh, cause that's, if they haven't been looking at that, it's, it's like, Oh, uh, and then you can look back in time and see, all right, so here's accounts that are on our website or on our website last month. The month before that, did we get opportunities from those, right? If we had a bunch of accounts and we didn't have any MQLs, did they, did we get an opportunity anyway?

No. Did we ever follow up with that account? No. Oh shit. You know, like here was an account that was looking at us. So that's, that's a really good way to understand. Uh, what that traffic that you're not paying attention to today looks like to justify the expense of saying, we got to pay for this and do this, and we got to see this stuff going forward.

John Common: That's good advice. All right, Terry, what do you got about, uh, give me, give me a couple of minutes on measurement reporting. Yeah. And 

Terry Flaherty: I think, so to expand on, on Carrie, right, um, so get an understanding of what additional signals people in say you have, what a lot of our clients do from a pilot perspective.

So that's sort of. Pilot level one is just let's look and see if other signals exist, right? But the next phase of the pilot is We're still going to keep them QLs, but we're going to call it MQL plus insight. And we're going to share in this pilot to the BDR. Here's the other, other insight we have. Here's additional people, additional signals.

And I, and I want you to leverage that as you qualify. That's nice. And, and. In many cases, um, even that research of what additional signals that exist or people exist, clients are starting out manually. Go, go look in your CRM and see what else you see, right? And qualify against that. And then the report, you know, so the KPI then is, you know, how many MPLs do I have where it's just traditional one person.

I've got that as my control group, non pilot. My, my pilot, I mean, you're going to find a lot of MQLs that have additional insight. And so how many of that, how many, you know, how many MQLs am I feeding to the SDR that have MQL plus additional insight? And here's what you're ultimately looking for is guarantee, 100 percent guarantee, MQL plus insight.

You're going to book more meetings more efficiently. Then just standalone MQL, right? The other thing you're going to do is that meeting at discovery meeting to close one, that conversion rate is going to go up. I might not in a pilot have the time to look all the way through, but there's leading indicators to say how many are moving across the opportunity stages.

But, but that's the key. So it's like, understand what you have. That's great to know, but, but then act on it. Right. Um, the other key thing on metrics from, from my perspective, conversion rate, we always want to understand conversion rate of the process, um, People are still important. So we want to understand, like, how many people are we engaging with?

But instead of calling them MQLs, it's bind group members. And so the building blocks on all the metrics used to be MQLs. Now the building block is opportunities. Right. Buying group members with any opportunity and it's fascinating and important as hell to be able to go. Oh, we've gone from two to three to four buying group members.

That's showing great progression and higher propensity by the more people carry kind of iterated this early, more people that are participating in the higher propensity to buy. So we want to understand opportunities. We want to understand buying group members that we've been able to gauge. Also probably want to understand how many buying group members or people are orphans.

Where we can allocate them to an opportunity. That's a process problem that we need to solve, right? And then the other thing we want to understand is interactions, right? So instead of just that MQL, it's, it's opportunities by group members, interactions, you know, and interactions per group. for buying remember and all that because again these interactions are important, but that's not the end goal.

Right? It's, it, it's the feeder of kind of understanding and how all the metrics fit together. And then, yeah, the other metric or the other concern we always get is, well, how do I figure out how effective my campaigns and my programs are? Right. And so I look at that and go, okay, cool. Let's number one, don't measure your campaigns and have metrics around the ROI of the campaign and the revenue from the campaign.

No way. Right. This email produced 185, 000 in revenue. No, it didn't. It was one of 75 different interactions, right? So if you are putting value on tactics, stop. 

John Common: We hear prospects and customers Without one ounce of irony, ask which white paper, which blog article, which media channel, which ad unit drove that opportunity.

And I'm like, uh, 

Terry Flaherty: which pass out of the 38 passes that were required to get a goal in Fokker. Exactly. That was the most important. Yes. 

Kerry Cunningham: Yeah, again, we, we got evidence there too. We got data. So, you know, the average buying group member is having 16 interactions with you and there's 10 or 11 of them. So that's 160, 170, 180 interactions with you.

Content, mostly interactions across their buying journey. So you tell me, so it's 

John Common: content mostly, which, which in this world probably means digital, Um, but it could be, uh, could be inbound or outbound phone calls or social touches or advertising touches or any of those things. I just want to validate that interaction.

You mean that in a holistic sense, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. We've been having a fantastic conversation for over an hour now. Lots of advice. Is there anything that you would modify or, or change or tweak if I, if I told you, What about someone who's listening who is running a product led growth motion, not SDR heavy, sales heavy?

Or, is there anything that would change if they have a particularly low ACV? 

Kerry Cunningham: Yeah. 

John Common: Or, would there be anything about this advice change? When it, when we go from new logo acquisition focus to customer renewal, customer expansion focus. So 

Kerry Cunningham: once you get into it, I think what you find is that, uh, PLG downloads, those kinds of things are another kind of signal and you should treat them as another kind of signal.

Any one of those downloads or whatever by itself, not really going to mean that much. Your conversion rate may be better than your MQL, but it's not going to be good. Um, what you really need to see is that, that signal in context of the other signals. So I treated me exact same way. 

John Common: Okay. I 

Terry Flaherty: agree with, with one other nuance, right?

Is often a PLG environment. The user and the signal that the user is using the product is interesting, but they're not the buyer for what I'm ultimately trying to sell after getting a bunch of users. I'm going to have an enterprise level orchestration or something. That's the bigger end goal that I'm selling, right?

And that individual goal. Product user. It's great that the signal says that there's activity. They're not the buyer. There's often a completely different buying group as part of that. Good point. That's a great point. Okay. What about, 

John Common: um, what about lower ACV? 

Kerry Cunningham: You know, our data, the, all the data I gave you, the big numbers about the buying journey, um, our survey started at 10, 000 in annual value.

When you go down to that level, that's pretty low ACV. All of those big numbers apply there. So that 70 percent through the journey, 80 percent all of those numbers apply equally. They're buying group sizes, get smaller, buying cycle lengths, get smaller. All of that stuff gets smaller. 

John Common: Okay. 

Kerry Cunningham: Um, but at, uh, you know, 10 to 20, 000 a year, it's still typically a buying group of two or three.

Uh, it's not one and all of those people will be on your website and the difference between one person being on your website and three from a three person team is meaningful. It's not 

John Common: as meaningful as 15 or 20. I figured that was the case. I didn't, but I didn't want to leave it unaddressed. Yeah. Good question.

Yeah. 

Terry Flaherty: And I think the key is whether it's one person, five people in the buying group or 10 people. They have to be educated, right? And so if I'm not driving that buying experience to educate whoever's part of the buying group, I've got a problem, right? Because if that one person, buying group of one, that's cool.

You can, you can leverage all everything we talked about. The buying group applies to stages with a single person, but if I'm not, if I'm not educating them, they're not ready to buy. And I try to call them. It's the same issue, right? It's the same thing. I'm going to want to talk to me because they're not ready.

So we have to educate. 

John Common: What about when you go to renew from acquisition to renewal expansion? Is there anything about the data or the recommendations that would shift? 

Kerry Cunningham: So I'll go, uh, from, from our data. First, uh, the vast, vast majority of net new acquis, or the vast majority of purchases are not. That new acquisition.

So most companies are selling to existing customers or somebody else's customers that kind of stuff Or selling upgrades or whatever So when we when when it is if somebody's buying from a company or from companies, they've never heard of for a capability They don't have in their organization We don't do this now and now we want this solution.

Um, those buying processes do tend to have earlier engagement than others. So it's about 70 percent for everything overall. It's about 63 percent through the journey for never heard of these, never done this before. So they do engage a little bit earlier, but. Interestingly, their, their, uh, requirements are equally set, all of that.

So they're engaging a little earlier cause they don't know the vendors and they don't know the brands and they want to develop relationships, but they're getting their input on how to, what they're going to buy somewhere else. Not from us, not from you. 

John Common: Yeah. Yeah. How about, how about you, Terry, any advice shifting or extra advice for when you go from new logo and do expansion or even renewal?

So, 

Terry Flaherty: so the back, and I'm gonna bring it back to new things from Summit, right? And, and, and, and so 100%, right, the, the, the, the conversion rates, the way I do resource allocation of, you know, does the BDR talk to somebody that's involved in retention, or does BDR talk on an upsell or whatever? That's gonna all vary.

But you know what the number one most important factor is on my success on selling additional things into an existing customer? How successful were they in opportunity? Number one, did they get the value that you deliver? And the reason I think that's really critical is the other thing we introduced at summit beyond the waterfall is this thing called the opportunity life cycle, right?

And the opportunity life cycle says, yeah, there's the presale phase, there's the purchase phase, and then there's the implementations and the success phase. Right. And we need to think about all three phases as part of the opportunity. Victory doesn't end when we win a deal. Victory ends when we have a customer that basically acknowledges, Yes, I got the value that you promised me when you sold me this.

And oh, by the way, I'll be an advocate. Right. So if you want to, if you really want to understand how to impact growth in an existing customer, Make sure that they're successful, right? And make sure that they're getting the value and you know, advocacy, external advocacy, internal advocacy, there's all kinds of nuances on it, but you want to make them so successful that you're at least able to leverage them internally to be able to point to other buying groups interested, you know, what's the experience in dealing with this vendor?

It's great. They got me successful. I'm going to use them for a different solution, but they're, they're trustworthy. They deliver what they say they're going to deliver. So, so that's, you know, for, for growth in an existing customer, it all comes down to what's, what's the buy experience. They get the value they delivered.

And the opportunity life cycle now is a way to start orchestrating that all around the opportunity. And, and yeah, the key is. In vast majority of time, an account is going to have multiple opportunities, but the success in those future opportunities are really dependent on what was opportunity one successful or not.

John Common: Yeah. There's a fundamental, uh, don't go sell me something, a second or a third thing. If your pitch is, well, you hated the first thing I bought you so much, I've got three other things. There's a human truth. Um, all right. Well, all right, so i'm gonna we're gonna pivot now last last little bit of uh, this Episode that I have enjoyed so much you guys is um, we're gonna kind of take it to the personal for a second What what's this gonna be fun?

Um, what's a book or an author or a band or musician or even an artist? something creative That really made a lasting impact on you And maybe it was years ago, or maybe it was last night could be a movie, but what's something creative where you're like, man, well, hold on. I know I'm throwing you a curve ball, but I just, I, we can't just be go to market nerds, man.

Like what, what, what, what's something that you're like, you know, that thing really resonates with me. It kind of changed me. 

Kerry Cunningham: I'll give you two things. Uh, one is, uh, song of myself by Walt Whitman. Uh, so That probably single most influent. Well, I'd like to say it's influential. It's aspirational in a lot of ways.

Uh, and then I would say, uh, the next other is a book called the selfish gene by Richard Dawkins, uh, which completely. Uh, change the way I look at the world. 

John Common: That's awesome. That's great. Uh, thank you. Terry, how about you, man? 

Terry Flaherty: So, so I'm not a huge book person other than History of DNA, obviously. I even talked about it earlier.

And, and, yeah. Even music. But, but if the question's like, what is it that's changed your life? 

John Common: Yeah. Yeah. 

Terry Flaherty: This is Winnie. Winnie. Right? And Winnie is a 15 month old schnoodle. Um, and before that we had Maisie, and Maisie, uh, was a schnoodle. And if you followed my LinkedIn, Maisie got bit by a rattlesnake a year ago.

And, um, so that's how we got Winnie, right? And before that it was Murph. But it's like, dogs are super important to me, right? And it kind of shakes my life. And so, so dogs also play an important role socially, social life. So we have probably the best dog park in Austin, in Austin, in the world. Right. And it's a combination of a dog park and a bar.

So, the reason she doesn't go out of the building to go, She's like, that's her signal. It's like, time to go to the dog park. Daddy needs a 

John Common: beer. Yeah, I love it. I love it. Your 

Terry Flaherty: buddy 

John Common: needs a 

Terry Flaherty: beer. So, this has been a thing that's changed my life just from The get away from work. You know, this is an important thing.

Get out, be social. This is a great social work and everything. So yeah, I'm less book, less music, but my puppies, my babies. Absolutely. Yeah. 

Kerry Cunningham: That's lovely. That's beautiful. I've had the pleasure of meeting them all. Uh, I've got two myself. They're a little less elaborate. We see all the time that you put on LinkedIn and stuff.

John Common: Oh, I am a dog loving fool. And so is Nina from the Growth Driver team. Uh, I, uh, I didn't come up with this phrase, but, uh, my dogs are some of the best people I know. They are, absolutely. 

Terry Flaherty: And the cool thing is they say the same thing about you. That's great. That's right. She doesn't know any better. 

John Common: Um, Exactly.

Hey, look, I thank you so much for you. You are. Um, you are literally is this true? Yeah, you are our first two time guests on growth driver and this was such a great episode Thank you so much for being so we got to do it together I know. 

Kerry Cunningham: Yeah. 

John Common: Oh, I knew it was going to be great. Uh, Terry, well, thanks. Thanks for being on growth driver.

And thanks for our audience. I know that you added so much knowledge and wisdom to them. Thank you for your insights. 

Kerry Cunningham: Maybe, uh, maybe put name tags on us, uh, when you publish the episodes. 

John Common: That's great. All right, you guys, we'll end it there. See you soon on growth driver. Everybody.

Well, that was, uh, every bit of a insight filled conversation with Terry and Carrie that I knew it would be. I have really been looking forward to that conversation for a while. And, uh, I love that here in season two, we already have our, uh, Repeat offender multiple times on growth driver gas. I love that.

It was the two of them first. Um, Such great guys and uh, and I love that we put those two Concepts together because they do fit together so well that around buying behavior changes and around the movement Uh from mql's to buying teams opportunities Um, hopefully you enjoyed what you heard and I just want to thank you for spending time with us on growth driver, you know You We know that your budget is really the second most precious thing you have, your most precious thing that you give us as your time.

And we don't take that lightly. So thank you for spending time with us. We're trying to build something pretty cool here on growth driver. And so if you like what we're up to, I would be so appreciative. If you would, um, subscribe. Uh, follow us if you see our content out there, give it a like, give it a comment, share it with your team.

I think a lot of this stuff could be helpful to you and your role and also helpful for your team. That's really why we do it. And also, uh, reach out to me on LinkedIn. If you've got ideas for shows, ideas for topics, we don't want to cover questions you want us to bring to our guests. Uh, we can even do special, uh, Special Shop Talk episodes that we're going to be planning here in Season 2 and also on Intelligent Demand.

So, all of that. We just love the interaction and appreciate your, uh, your sharing it. Um, you know, speaking of Intelligent Demand, uh, Growth Driver. is brought to you today by the talented and kind people at Intelligent Demand. If you work at a B2B company that is, uh, got a serious growth goal and you would appreciate having an expert B2B growth partner, reach out to them, go to intelligentdemand.

com, book a free consult. They'd love to help you take a fresh look at your go to market strategy. Help you, um, identify and execute the right integrated growth plays like demand, ABX, PLG, partner led, and then also provide the, the right tactical expertise that you need to really make those growth plays sing, um, reach out to intelligent demand.

They are good people and they would love to talk to you. Other than that, I just want to say thanks again, and we'll see you soon on growth driver. Bye everybody.