The Journey into ABX as Your Primary GTM Motion with Kevin Sellers

Kevin Sellers: It was those two things that we realized we've got to get really good at going after who we care about and forget everybody else and stop promoting your product or service to a broad market. And then second is how do we do it more effectively, which is the use of personalization.

John Common: Welcome to Growth Driver brought to you by Intelligent Demand, where the best minds in B2B are redefining growth. Hey, everybody, John Common here. Look, if you're like most B2B companies that I know. ABM, ABX is probably already an important go to market strategy that you're using or contemplating using for hitting your growth goals.

Okay. But what if your ABX strategy becomes even more important? Like what if, what if it needs to become your ride or die, right? Today, we're going to put you in the seat of a global. Technology CMO who has to balance brand and demand and pipeline and sales and budgets and strategy shifts and team and culture and board expectations and cross functional alignment as he leads his company into ABX as its primary Go to market motion.

So you're going to hear the real deal from an expert who's done it and done it really successfully. Uh, and which gives me the opportunity to introduce you to my friend, Kevin Sellers. He is currently the CMO at Avalara. He is formerly the CMO at Ping Identity. Formerly the CMO at Avnet. And then he spent a big chunk of his career at a little company named Intel in a variety of different marketing roles.

So that's the professional piece about Kevin, but I have worked with Kevin for years. I know Kevin, he's an incredible storyteller. He's a deep. Thinker, I know that he likes to challenge himself and the people around him to innovate and to grow And he's also just seriously fun to be on the journey with kevin sellers.

Welcome to growth driver 

Kevin Sellers: john Thanks for having me. Tell me send me a bill for that introduction and i'll pay it Right up front 

John Common: what we're going to do in the first part of this conversation is I want to Center around your personal experience as a growth leader as a as a marketing leader in in how you You uh, no doubt saw And were very aware with and were probably abm curious abm.

Um, uh aware but how that began to move from Your field of view into something that you wanted to actually pilot and then build and build upon. And I think this is so important because so many companies are where you were, what, what four or five years ago on this topic, you know, um, ABM and ABX requires you to learn new things and frankly, also unlearn.

Old things to succeed. And that's true, not only within marketing, but it also has to be true across the entire go to market team. So I think your experiences are such a good fit. And I just want to start right at the top, how and why did you. Really seriously start to consider abm or abx To even be in the mix of the integrated growth plays go to market motions.

Why did it even rise up into focus for you? 

Kevin Sellers: Yeah, you know, it's and it's abm is um And we will probably all agree and probably most of your listeners agree. It's probably mislabeled Yeah, um, it's really a it's a it is a broader go to market motion, but we can talk about that later you know, um The, the, the idea, uh, uh, the world's changing as you know, as we all know, the world's changing dramatically.

And, and it used to be that we would cast a wide net into the ocean and pull up as many fish as we can. And then you sort through those fish to find the ones that are pretty good. And then, and, and, you know, you throw those over the, the wall to the sales team or, or you take the whole bag and throw it over the, over the wall of the sales team.

And, and, and we all know that's how the world operated for, for, for a long time. Right? And it, and it worked. And by the way, it still works. It's just not very effective, nor is it terribly efficient. So it's not that, it's not that all of a sudden that's a terrible thing to do, but there are better ways to do it.

And I think, look, really what ABM and why we got so engrossed by the idea and really realizing that this was a path we had to take is one at paying the focus was very large enterprise anyway, which large enterprise is kind of A more natural focus doesn't mean you can't do it in other ways and other segments, but certainly large enterprise is very, um, sort of a natural extension of, you know, a B.

1. But, you know, we were looking at this going, you know, you started to see over time. Some of these metrics were eroding, right? Your effectiveness was kind of eroding and your efficiency. CAC was kind of easing its way up instead of down, right? And you were, you were looking at, uh, you know, how much it was costing to create pipeline.

And that was actually kind of trending in the wrong direction. And so for us, it was like, how do we get better? And really what ABM is, and I'm going to oversimplify it, but that's the only way I can communicate it. But it's, it comes down to two really important things that. Are great for marketing is one is it's hyper targeting, right?

Knowing exactly who you're going after at the company level, but also even at the persona level and even beyond that at the actual person level. And there's ways to do that. But really getting smart about going, look, I don't care. It, it, it, it, it, our company at pain, you know, I don't care about Joe Smith walking down the street because that's not my, they're not going to buy my product, right?

I know who my, my buyers are. So I want to go after just them. So I'm going to get better and more efficient. So the first thing is, is it's targeting, right? It's hyper targeting. And I don't mean hyper as in narrow. I mean, hyper as in exquisite, being really good at this. And there's, we can get into this.

There's a lot of ways to do this, but, but knowing who you're going after by name, that's why it's called a count based, right? You do it by name. Second thing is, is it's about personalization. So once I know who I'm going after my ability now to, to. Engage that account at a more personal level is, is, is facilitated and I do that, but there's a third and fourth areas that we can get into.

But those are the two big ones, right? Targeting and then being able to more effectively outreach and personalized because I know who I'm going after what industry they're in, you know, so I can tailor and personalize that outreach and we can do it at scale. We do it. We kind of do it three ways. Like we have yeah.

A set of one to one accounts, we have a set of one to few accounts, a set of one to many, which we can dig into if you want to, but there are ways to scale this, because you can't do one to one to 10, 000 accounts, I get it, right, but you can do it in a way that allows you to be personalized. And you can tier those accounts in a way that allows you to scale even to a broader market So it was those two things that we realized we've got to get really good at going after who we care about And forget everybody else and stop promoting your product or service to a broad market And then second is how do we do it more effectively, which is the use of personalization.

Those are the two things that we realized that. And by the way, you're all, you're a consumer. I'm a consumer. I'm a CMO. I get targeted, right? I know you get targeted and when you're targeted really well and it's personalized outreach, it's pretty good. Well, it's pretty good. 

John Common: Especially when. Everyone else in your category is sending you poorly worded.

Just wanted to check in. That kind of stuff. 

Kevin Sellers: It's important that you call me back. Yeah, no, it's actually not. Not important. It's important for you. It's not important for me. Right. 

John Common: Yeah, totally. Um, okay. All right. So that's how ABM got in your field of view. And just to summarize what I, what I heard you say is, and just to kind of read through the, the, the, the, the strategy of it is you.

And I would assume your CEO CRO at the time, et cetera, took a really honest, brutally honest look at your growth goals and the truth of your ideal client profile, customer profile. And, um, and said to yourself, wait a minute, we could sell our services to many, many, many, many, many places, but we should sell our and market and sell our services to this.

And we're a specific ICP. And what if we. Had the courage to apply the targeting and personalization to do something special, uniquely value for that cohort of accounts. Um, so that, that's what I'm hearing is that you realize that your go to market strategy was guiding you to this go to market motion.

And I think that's a key thing that I would say for our audience is the choice of should I use ABM or not? It's not a style choice. It's a right. It's a strategic choice. It's a strategy. It's a strategy and your unique company situation will tell you whether you should pilot abm or not. 100%. 

Kevin Sellers: You know, if you're and it's not for everyone and I'm not here to be a pitch person for it.

It was definitely for us, but I know that in previous episodes and other guests you've talked to, and in everyone that's listening, you know, we're in a world now where Look, as marketers, we can go, I can generate leads in my sleep. Like I, I mean, if you give me a lead target, I mean, we can, I can take a nap and I can get you that number.

Right. And, and same thing with kind of MQLs and those, and I don't want to be the person that's jumping on the pile here, but, but those are what I call activity based marketing, right? Versus. Impact based marketing and activity based marketing is I did a number of things. I did this campaign. I did this number of events.

I got this many leads and of course leads, man, of course, I'm not, I'm not saying they don't, but if that's my goal, if that's what I'm compensated for, I'm going to get paid maximum bonus every year, even if my revenue numbers going down, right? So the disconnect that existed between The actual company strategy and it's go to market goals and objectives and some of what marketing was doing and getting judged and based on was was obvious, right?

And there's a way to solve that, right? Which was we kind of moved away from that. And ABM allowed us to say, look, we get some benefits out of this too. We get not only we're going to get more efficient. We're gonna be more effective because we're personalizing, but if I'm getting lead opportunities from that target base, I don't have to have the conversation with someone that it's low quality or it's outside of my cp or it's it's whatever the you know, the problems that exist.

So I'm screening for quality. The number of leads are going down. The quality is going up dramatically. You see better engagement from the, from the sales team. And by the way, we can talk about how that works and I'm sure we will. But, but the, but that, that, that was really the issue is alignment with the objectives of the company, its growth goals.

And how do you really effectively get there? It's not through maximizing. Lead count, right? It's through finding the right fit opportunities. And how do you do that effectively? And that's what really let us stay beyond. Yeah. 

John Common: Yeah. Okay. Okay. So phase one, ABM curious, are we a fit for ABM? Do we think this ABX, ABM stuff could work for us and our growth goals and our check?

Yes. What you do is you push. All of your chips in and go global with ABM is the next step. No, you don't. You pilot it. And that's what we did together at pain. And I remember, I remember the pilot we put together and I want to get in a time machine. Cause I think it was about four, four and a half years ago.

My God, we're getting old. Uh, and, and, and it was a, if you recall, we started with a list of 110 accounts about 20 of them were in the UK and about 90 of them were in the United States. And then we further split them into a small cohort, cohort of one to one ABM. They were going to get white glove treatment and then a second, this is all within the 110 accounts pilot and then a second cohort relatedly in the same industries that we're going to get more of a one to few account.

And we chose that we structured that pilot that way because we wanted to We knew that we were, we had a limited budget and we didn't want to throw in so many variables that we couldn't determine if it was going to work or not. So there's the, so what I want to do is go back in time into your CMO brain, as we were looking at, as you were looking at, Saying yes, let's pilot ABM.

Talk to me about how you made that decision. Number one, number two, how did you think about the, the, the internal prepper preparation work you needed to do with sales specifically? And maybe even your CEO CFO to prepare them for what you knew was going to be a different thing. And then thirdly, how did the pilot, what do you remember about the, the, the, the fears and the worries and the yay, ha ha, we did it.

Uh, so talk to me about that pilot. How'd you make that decision? 

Kevin Sellers: Yeah, I mean, you set it up earlier. I think very well, you're not going to just stay because I think sometimes to with marketers, we kind of think, Oh, this abm thing. It's this, this, this, this big, special, mysterious thing over here that I want to try.

I mean, abm is just marketing. It's just marketing. It's just done. So at a targeted level, it's done. So with more personalization, but we're still doing many of the same tactics within a bit within a framework. Now there's, there's, there's a I don't want to say it's just marketing. I'm talking about the marketing aspect of it because the other piece we haven't gotten to yet, which we'll get to at the third part of your question, which is how does this become an internal go to market motion, not a marketing tactic.

And that's, that's, that's what's going to separate your winners and losers in this, but we'll come back to that. But we looked at this and said, look, this is an important strategy. We worked actually very closely with the field team to determine what accounts made sense. They liked the idea because look, salespeople, Our coin operated.

We all know that. And, and in many ways, your investors, your CEO, your board are kind of coin operated as well, right? They wanna know that you're gonna deliver top line growth. And, but some of them have a little bit of a, of a, of a shot in the vein here, a little, a little iv if you will, a little drug attachment to the notion of, well, if I have a lot of mql, yes, okay.

At least I got flow coming in and I, I, I can feel good at night. So there was a little bit of concern when we said, look, but at a pilot level. That's why it's important to do these things, because we didn't just flip the switch, right? We piloted and said, look, we still got the machine going over here.

We're going to take a little bit of money. We're going to go do these things. And so selling that as a pilot was really not that hard. Point one. Point two, the salespeople loved the idea because we were focusing on accounts they really wanted to go after. And they recognized, and this is the cool thing about living in a digital era, is we now have the ability to go get.

And go after that one account. If we want to not have to send my message to 1000 people that I don't care about with only one of them that I really care about. I can just send my message to that one account and I can measure its effectiveness. I can see what happens with engagement. I can I can track it through the field in the SDR motion and so forth so that the tools matter a lot.

But the the Pilot. The first party question was it was fairly easily sold because it was a pilot. It was a limited investment. We set up a set of core metrics that we were going to track and follow through every stage of this. And then we reported on it and we got the CEO was involved. The CFO was involved.

The field team was constantly involved. We were working with them. And of course they had a role to play too. But in our weekly business meetings we would have, we had a special section on this to just talk about it. What we were doing in the ABM program and what results we were seeing great. And so, and everybody was engaged and was interested and they were seeing the data come in.

They were seeing these one to one accounts. We were seeing an outrageous return on setting meetings and getting opportunities with them. Now they were more expensive because we spent more money and energy on engaging them, but those types of things. Really engaged everyone from the CEO down. We were very transparent about it.

So the trial was was a Rousing success that wasn't perfect. We had some Bumps and bruises along the way but very very successful in demonstrating focus and personalization at the right account level can actually Deliver some serious results. 

John Common: It's so easy to go to the power point award winning case study slide and say to doll.

Look what happened as if it was easy or immediate or it didn't have any pain and suffering and fear. And that's kind of what I want to get in with you today is like, what was it really like during the pilot? Were you worried? Were you worried it was going to? 

Kevin Sellers: I was like all over the data every week, like what's going on, what are we seeing, you know, because we were spending some money, you know, we did carve out some money for it.

Uh, like I said, we didn't shut everything else off, but you know, it was, it was high visibility. It was probably the highest visibility spend we had. And the CFO was interested. He wanted to know what was going on. And, you know, some of the individual, because we did a pilot, we did some tactics at the individual account level.

That were, you know, relatively expensive. Now I say relatively relative to the other ways we went to market, but these were also accounts that we want to deal that are, you know, multiple seven figure deals. So we were willing to commit a little extra to the one to one motion, but those, those kept me up at night.

Are they working? I mean, you know, we did some interesting things, but we, we did some Spotify ads to individuals. Literally, right? You'd have a, uh, you'd have a CISO at Bank of America, uh, who was a targeted camera and literally an ad would run on Spotify with his name in it. And it was only served up to him.

And, uh, we had people calling, you know, that we'd get, we'd get inputs from, they'd be like, wow, you know, they, they, it kind of blew him away that I'm listening to, I'm doing a workout. All of a sudden I'm hearing, uh, uh, from, from Spotify on an ad, I'm hearing my name. Is being called. So we really got serious about that.

But the point is we got great engagement. Um, but I think the best part of yes, I was nervous. And yes, it was not easy. But the thing I look back on and say we did this right. I mean, not everything was right. But the thing we really did that helped us was that was that transparency. We got the CEO CFO involved.

The sales people would actually report during our weekly business update meetings. It wouldn't just be us. We'd actually have the head of sales in North America, the head of sales in for our growth team, the head of sales from Europe. They would come in and go, yeah, in our APM program this week, you know, X, Y, Z happened.

And, you know, and so that was really, really what helped so much is there became this joint ownership that allowed us to, to be successful in that pilot. That's then turned into something much bigger. 

John Common: And I think therein lies. The third pillar for successful ABX that you and I are inadvertently building as we do this episode today.

Sure. Pillar one, uh, exquisite targeting. I'm going to steal that exquisite targeting, um, to personalization. And I would say the correct amount of personalization based on the goal and the motion, right? So personalization, but the third one we just bumped into it, which I would nominate, uh, as, as a pillar, which is.

Cross functional, transparency, commitment to the goal, alignment, and orchestration. So cross functional, uh, orchestration is, I think, a critical. 

Kevin Sellers: By the way, and that's the beauty of it, right? Is that ABM Done Right is, by definition, a multi disciplined, go to market approach. Which is why I love it. I love it because it takes the, the, the, the tension out of the system because we all have a common objective.

We all have the right, the same goals and objectives. They're, they're similar. We're all compensated on the same kinds of things. And so it's no longer, you know, I mean, since the beginning of time, every salesperson that's ever lived has said, Either one of two things. You're not getting me enough leads.

Okay, then we amp up the number of leads and it turns into these leads are crap. So this takes all of that away. And this basically says we are aligned on who we're going after. We even align on many ways to how we're going to go after and then we track it like crazy and see what progress we're making and we get buy in early on because remember, we're kind of retiring an old model, which is a lot of lead flow.

You're going to, we're going to, we're going to have you so busy making phone calls that, you know, you're going to be busy 10 hours a day making phone calls. You're not going to get that many leads flows, but what we're going to amp up is that quality. We're going to see conversion rates go up. The real kicker is then is my conversion rate increase going to offset.

The volume decrease and we've seen that to be true, but that's something you have to track. And that's something that helps continue, continuously convert the rest of the engine to realize that when you, yeah, there's issues with the old model, but you know what? It's nice having a big bleed flow. It's nice having lots of those things coming in because that's just the drug that, that we've kind of grown up on.

Pulling that needle out is it's not easy, but you can do it. 

John Common: Okay. So step one, ABX curious, step two, pilot. So we had a really successful pilot. Everybody knew it. We actually ended up, it was, it was really, 

Kevin Sellers: by the way, and successful means it's important. You bring that up John, because we actually were able to demonstrate a financial return on the investment, right?

Not just these indicators went up or conversion rates, but that's all good. I mean, we want all that, but At the end of the day, here's what we spent in our go to market motion on this. What revenue did we generate? It wasn't just pipeline. That's 

John Common: right. It was spend that beget integrated cross functional plays that beget pipeline that your sales team won.

It turned into bookings. All right, so successful. So from there, what you didn't do is Blow it out as the ride or die global go to market motion. We didn't, you did not do that. You said, okay, successful pilot, but I'm not a dummy. What we're going to do now is move from pilot to scale, but it's still not our dominant primary way to go to market.

You still were running a one to many centric. Uh, uh, demand gen engine. So talk to me about the decision, the thinking and the decision making, the internal executive communications, the budgeting changes, the real deal decisions you had to make when you said, okay. This pilot really is. It has worked. I'm going to now scale the pilot.

Talk to us about that. 

Kevin Sellers: It just incorporates refinement, refinement and who you go after, refinement and how you go after and a refinement of the internal workings of the engine to align around those goals, objectives and targets. Right. And After the pilot, it wasn't, it wasn't hard people, you know, we had a proof point and people not only saw the result, which is like, if you're a CFO or CEO, that's what you care.

If you're bored, you care about that. Okay. So that certainly helps. But internally with sales and SDRs and product teams, and certainly the marketing teams, The level of communication and interworking the the the sort of teamwork that became Um obvious as a result was was something that we could easily build off of so we started looking at this in terms of How do we take this motion and turn it into?

At the, at the territory and at the actual rep level. And we started to build in some, some, uh, processes and structure around how do we get these pods working together? So we'd have at the territory levels, we'd have marketing. Sdr field sales and occasionally product, um, uh, participation. And we would, we would actually manage it at that level.

So that, that just people were excited about that, right? Cause they could, again, they could see the benefit of this, the fact that, because it's not a marketing is marketing doesn't bring the lead in and convert the lead SDRs. Don't bring the lead in and convert the lead sale. It's each of us has an important role.

And in the old world, it was a baton pass. And in this new world, it's much more of a soccer match, right? The ball gets, it moves around the pitch, marketing plays in multiple phases of that funnels, SDR is playing. And so when we're scripted more and coordinated better around who, what are we doing, what are the tactics and that, that constant engagement between those pods at the territory level, kept that communication flow working that enabled us to say, you know what, we're going to take this pilot now, and we're going to scale it to a much bigger part.

Of our go to market investment and everybody was on board. We really didn't have, um, major issues. We had some minor issues, of course, there's always been none of them were showstopping issues and, um, Yeah, that's kind of how we did it. It wasn't, it wasn't this hard. Probably getting the pilot moving was harder than getting the scale.

I 

John Common: remember a series of meetings that you sponsored with yourself, your kind of generals on your, your, your marketing management team, uh, which included head of product and also sales. And I remember you sponsoring. Meeting going into your next fiscal year where you and I think the CFO was involved as well, took the next year's growth goals and broke it into acquisition, renewal of base and expansion, and then further broke those three end to end growth goals into tier one whale accounts, tier two, Large accounts, tier three, kind of everyone else.

And I remember you doing the work with the team to really lay that out and then use that clarity of where is our growth going to actually come from in terms of account size, region, and even to some degree, product or use case. Nobody does this, Kevin. Nobody does this. And you did, and you lay it out and then you go, Okay, for us to hit this goal, we're going to have to take our finite resources and apply them in alignment with the and I'm just making this up.

The fact that 72 percent of our revenue next year has to be sourced from larger accounts. So are we going to use ABM? Are we going to use a one to many demand gen to do it? What is the right tool for that growth goal job? And I remember being in those meetings with you and watching you lay that out and then having the team be like, Well, duh, this is how we, we must scale ABX to achieve this company's growth goals.

I think the way you laid that out was really important. And, and then you attached the, where it starts to get tough is budget decisions. What are we going to not do or do less of so that we can do more or start doing this over here? And that's where I, I observed you being a pretty courageous executive sponsor.

But talk to me about the emotion of that. What was that? Was that difficult? Were there tough conversations? Because everyone says yes to everything until you take something away. 

Kevin Sellers: That's, that's, that's a great point. And by the way, you were extremely pivotal in a lot of that work as a partner. So yeah, thank you for, you know, you're saying nice things about me too, but you, you, you were very, very pivotal in doing a lot of key work around that.

And, and, and a shout out to you guys, which is why, you know, For anyone listening, having a good partner always matters because as you know, we, we get in these jobs and we become very, very vertical on our thinking, right? We get so caught up in the day to day of what we do, having a good partner that can step aside and go, wait a minute, you're missing.

Let me help you with a couple of thoughts. This was that, that template was great because what it did was, I mean, if you fundamentally break it down, let me answer your question directly. What was the emotion? The beautiful thing is, is when you arm yourselves with real data, you tend to shoot. Emotion in the head, right?

And that is where you cannot refute real data, right? Real so when you look at what we did is what you reference here is we looked at our trends We looked at our history. We said hey, here's what we typically get year to year Now, by the way, you're going to set goals and maybe you're going to increase them You're going to look to change them.

But the point is let's start with reality. Where does our revenue come from? From a cohort of customers, what types, whether it's what segments, what sizes, we looked at all the demographic, firmographic, exographic data around where we win, where we don't, but then you break it down into it's either a new customer, it's either an existing customer that's upselling, adding more seats, if you will, or it's an existing customer that is Adding new capabilities, new products into their suite, right?

That's fundamentally how you grow your business. It's either going to come from a new customer or an existing customer. And if it's an existing customer, there's a couple of ways, right? Now I'm not short shrifting partners. All that matters. Partners are, are sources of upselling, cross selling and new customer acquisition.

Uh, And but obviously winning share from another again, you're either it's either a new customer coming in or you're taking another product. And so the point is, it's really fundamentally those things. So we look at that data. What do we where do we win? Why do we win? And then what's the data tell us over the last several years?

Hey, 28 percent of the revenue comes from new customers and 62 percent comes from existing customers. And then look at the trends and why and so forth. And what's driving new customer acquisition? So breaking it down into those and then saying, okay. If we have a revenue goal, a growth goal of, say, 20 percent for the next year, where is that growth going to come from?

And now off the top of my head, I can use the data. But then I look at what's going on in the market, what's going on with our product suite, you know, what's the competitive landscape look like? This is where you bring in all your other stuff, but that allows you to say, Hey, here's where I think. The new A.

1. R. Is going to come from. And by the way, most C. R. L. S. Are not going through this level of detail, right? They're kind of just taking their targets and going all the crafties are big, and I'm going to divide them by territories. And, you know, but we actually get to that macro number first before we start doing any splitting up around regionally by territory or by what?

And that was super effective because it was built on real data, and we could then have a management discussion around. Okay, do we think That it makes sense that we're going to see a 40 percent increase in new customer acquisition when we've never seen that before, right? That is where before the data existed, somebody was in the room going, we got to get more new customer acquisitions.

So we're going to put this, you know, the board's coming down and going, they want, they want the number to be here. All right, let's ground it in some reality. Not that we're not going to take big goals because we need to, uh, but they've got to be, we've got to be achievable. In reality and this allowed us to sort of take away the craziness And man the ceo loved it and man did he glom onto this and man did the even the cro was?

Was like this makes so much more sense. So it just facilitated the types of strategic conversations around what does it mean if we're going to actually You know, we've got a new product coming out. We think it's gonna be a real winner. So that's our strategy this year. We're gonna go hard on this one. So does that mean we're gonna upsell this in the existing customers?

We think it's gonna attract new customers. And we had those discussions. But then once we got to a point we thought made sense, it also enabled us to come back and go, Look, If we're going to be successful in engaging these accounts this way, we're going to need X, Y, and Z resources. And then it, you know, then that gets you well into the budgeting conversations and you know, all that.

But, but that, that that's an incredibly effective template of how to think about growth. Just use your existing, by the way, we did the exact same thing with targeting, right? And this is an important point because we said, who do we go after? Before we start making up stuff and just pulling out a Dun Bradstreet report and going, yeah, that's it.

We looked at and said, let's look at the last five years. Where do we win? Why do we win with whom do we win? And then what's the profile? And we, we did all this analysis. Then we throw it into some AI tools that you have today that make it great. And it kind of spits out some core lift correlation factors.

It was like, 145 of them, but like, Eight or ten of them really matter had correlations Then you can take those correlations and apply it to the to the world at large and it kind of spit out You know this list for us that helped us realize hey these top it was about 12 000 accounts These are the ones that have the highest likelihood Of us winning, and that served as the foundation of our of our targeting and of our A B M efforts.

And I only bring that up because again, it's so much of this is based in actual real data. Understand that data. What is it telling you? Allow that to help you as you're making decisions going forward. We did it for targeting. We did it for our revenue targets. We did it for, you know, conversion rates. We did all the all the goals and objectives we did.

We had to get smart about what's real, what's working, what isn't working and why. Yeah. And therefore translate that into a budget going forward, both spend and top line growth. And it leads to a plan or you're going, you know, I, I 

John Common: think I can do this. Yeah. There's a couple of nuggets for the audience that I think are worth, um, calling out from, from the story.

One is look at how passionate the executive sponsor was and is even right now. About it. You've got to have. You're not going to transform your go to market. You're not going to improve your go to market. If you only expect your hardworking growth marketing manager to be responsible for that, it takes someone with a C in their title and probably multiple people with a C in their title to, to go through the kinds of.

Analyses conversations, strategic decisions that Kevin is talking about in the last five to 10 minutes. So one is executive sponsorship. You've got to have that. You've got to have that. Number one. Number two is that pilot really answered the question. What is this really? How does it work? And could it work here at Gartner or at Forrester or at a pavilion meetup, which are great, but could it really work here at our company?

And so if the answer comes back from your pilot, yes, then you start to do the kind of analysis that Kevin was talking about where you go. Okay, we got something here. It's not theoretical. How and where can we appropriately use it? And instead of just using a blind faith? Well, I guess I guess we're just going to do a B.

And now instead use the data and the analytics that Kevin talked about to say, where is the based on what we now know from the pilot? Where can we apply it? And at ping, what came back was, and I think this is not breaking any confidentiality to say this, but just generally speaking, uh, ping focuses on higher end enterprise accounts globally.

What came back from in the, in the ping analysis was, Oh, wow. That abm pilot is telling us we have many places to apply this new go to market motion if we want to And and and it was certainly deeper in the acquisition piece the acquiring of new logos. We expanded, you scaled that, but also in the existing customer expansion and growth motion.

Growth 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 responsible for driving efficient growth. You need to go check them out at intelligent demand. com. Tell us about a story when you're like, and that didn't go well.

And how did, what was it? How did you find out about it? How did you handle it as a CMO? 

Kevin Sellers: Um, you know, surprisingly there weren't any like big blow ups, right? There was a few issues. Like there was always a little tension in, you know, what, what I told, what I mentioned earlier around the targeting is I said, look, the sales teams, naturally they, they have their pet account.

They want to go after them. Right. And one of those accounts might be, you know, John commons, bait shop and wedding importance, but it's on their to do list. That they really want it. And we're like, Dude, like that, I'm out. That has, that's way, that's a hundred miles outside of our ICP. We don't want to, we don't want to touch that at all.

But, but, so there's, there was still some tension over that, right? There was tension over, hey, you, you've created this sort of AI generated list of targets. And, and I, I don't want to make it sound that bad. Technical because it was technical, but, but it was really built on good data. Like, like, you know, the, one of the best things I've ever heard in my life, good inspiration comes from good information and the better your information.

The better your inspiration is going to be. And in this case, when it came to we don't have Geico money, right? We don't have, um, you know, Apple money, right? We have to know who do we think is going to actually represent an opportunity or to go after that account. And I'm not going to go after those other.

140, 000 other enterprises out there in the world because they're less likely to convert. So if I go after this 10 to 12 and so that doing that was great and people seemed to like it, but then it ran into this. Yeah, but, but I got this list of, you know, and I bought my list over here and it has a bunch of names that yours doesn't have.

I found the most tension was on just continuously aligning to, as well as updating your targets. Target lists are always going to be, they breathe, and you have to let them breathe. Okay. Right. But you can't let them breathe to the point where you throw it out. Because again, this was really solidly constructed and then, but there's always nuances and things.

So here's how we handled. So there was a lot of places where I'm not, I'm not going to worry about that list. I'm going to do my own list. Right. And then it becomes. When that happens, you're starting to move off the rails of that integration. That is required for success, right? So again, how we tried to, uh, real deal with that is we thought a sales team said, Look, here's the deal.

We want this to be the fundamental again because it's based on real data. It's not. It's not us. It's not our opinions, right? This is based on. Where we win, why we win. Firmographic, ectographic, graphic, uh, uh, demographics, all that da all those data points, everything were considered in this and it guys spit out a list, right?

Which was, which was interesting, and I get it probably 80% of that list. They were probably like, well, duh, I would put, they'd been in my list. Yeah, because we, you target a large enterprise, you know, chase, JP Morgan, chase is gonna be on your list. Well, of course it's, but the data also affirmed it. But there was this, well, but I wanna do my own thing.

So we went to and said, look, here's the deal. Let's do this. And we'll have, we'll have the ability at the territory level for the territory leaders to flex a little bit and provide qualitative input, right? We'll provide the quantitative foundation. You guys provide the qualitative input. So, you know, in our territory, you know, Barclays Bank didn't make, I'm making that up because it did make, but let's just, you know, here I am in London.

Barclays Bank wasn't on the list, but man, there's a whole, there's a reason X, Y, and Z why we know we want to go after them. We gave the sales team a budget if you will of all right your Your sort of qualitative inputs need to go into this list and that's how we continue to work with them and we just We just live with as long as it wasn't throw your list out and here's my new list We weren't going that far But if they had I got I got another hundred accounts in europe that we want to add, you know This is the head of sales in europe.

We were like, all right, let's go through it together We went through it. All right, that makes sense. We don't have unlimited budget. So they understand that but Again, that was probably the biggest tension point was around that. Um, now I will say this. This is an important piece too. As you do this, it gets really uncomfortable because to be effective, a good ABX strategy is also very transparent.

And so when you're looking and you're having these pod meetings and you're looking at account level information and you're looking at here's what's happened, here's the outreach that's taken place with these accounts and here's your and you're getting information back that, hey, guess what? The sales team completely dropped the ball and never followed up on this account when they knew they were supposed to or or marketing.

Marketing didn't do what, you know, field marketing didn't do X, Y, or Z when they knew that that was. Kind of on the, on the program to, to go after these accounts and do these things for it, it gets very uncomfortable. And there's a lot of salespeople that don't want to, you know, and marketing people and even SDRs, because we point out the process sort of levels up or, or pulls out where the missteps are.

And this is stuff that I never looked at before. Like I never paid attention to this. This ball got dropped on this account. Now we know, Hey, this ball got dropped. So we have a conversation. What are we going to do about it guys? And that's 

John Common: about culture. I would submit that is about culture as much as it is about the detail of the thing.

And, and what I mean by that is if you work at a company, Where if you're just being honest your meetings and especially your cross department meetings are kabuki theater of either like There's several flavors of dysfunction that I see one is often one is um, you get in the meeting and everything's great And no one says anything really honest.

They're not willing to take the risk of saying that didn't go. Well, that's one is ducking ducking. Another dysfunction I see is, um, call it the cold war. Everybody is just sort of like not saying much and there's, you know, daggers out for later kind of vibe, which is horrible, but I see it all the time.

Another, another word is the blame game. You know, it openly like, well, the reason I didn't is because you didn't and you didn't because she didn't. And, and it takes. Leadership, I think, to set the tone and then not just once at, uh, at the RKO, SKO, but every week throughout the year, it takes leaders, the CRO, the CMO, the VP level people to demonstrate the courage and humility and, and willingness to go, Hey, I'm coming to this meeting.

This is what worked. I think this is what didn't work. My team, you know, we're learning from this. I'd love your input about that. And being vulnerable, being honest, being data led, it's a culture shift. And the truth is companies that are doing one to many demand gen need to do that too. But man, if you start doing ABX the way that you have done ABX, Kevin, I You're going to your point, you're going to be led into those moments more and more.

And I, and I want to point out to the audience that this is a culture change, uh, opportunity. 

Kevin Sellers: And it is uncomfortable because yeah, you, you, you are bringing your, your, your, your, your, your shining light. On things that might previously not have light shine on them and can be embarrassing for certain people.

And, and by the way, it's hard for me. If I see that we've dropped a ball, I don't like it. I don't want, I don't want to be, you know, like we screwed up man. Once you just invest in it and own it and just. Don't get defensive about it and just realize, and this is so great because I didn't know this before.

Like I was dropping a ball before. I didn't even know I was dropping the ball. Now I know, and I have access to the points of which I can be, you know, it's empowering because now I can see, even I can, I've seen the field markers. They're just, they're so, they feel somewhat more empowered because They've got specific goals and targets.

It's aligned with what the commissions are for the field teams. It's aligned with the specific accounts in their region they own and they, and they, and they get in there and they work with their teams to, to see, oh, we're not just trying to create leads right now. We're trying to take accounts and move them through that funnel.

And it's a different. Set of engaged. It's just different level of engagement and empowerment. So it's powerful, but it does lead to uncomfortable moments. You just have to be prepared for that. And eventually it gets better because then the machine starts to realize it starts to work better. Starts with transparency.

So important. Good data is so important for this to be successful, but it does allow for that cross functional stuff to happen. And maybe what we did it first. And maybe what I would recommend is just give people some grace. Like we look, we're gonna have some stuff. We're gonna people are gonna learn things that they didn't know before.

It's okay. The first few times we're going to see some stuff. We just want to know that people are seeing it and they're responding to it. And then it'll get better. And don't, you know, we don't want to, don't ever embarrass anybody, but man, is it great? Because you actually see what's happening at the account, where they're progressing, why they're progressing, what issues are rising because then the sales guy comes into those pod meetings like, well, you know what?

I finally had a face to face meeting and finally for the first time it worked out. But then they raised issue X, Y, B, you know, ABC. And so we go after and say, great, let's have a conversation. What could we do? Maybe marketing could create some content to support that. Or maybe, uh, you know, we do an executive outreach or all of a sudden you're having this strategic conversations about how to progress accounts through the funnel.

And it's not just a salesperson's job anymore. It's a hard job. 

John Common: One of my favorite moments of Our experience that we're referencing around this ABX program. One of my favorite moments was watching you communicate to the, to the company, the, the real buying journey for an actual closed one deal from soup to nuts.

You, uh, asked the team to go do the very hard work to collect data. Not in a silo, but in a holistic way at the account level. And you said, I'm going to take this account that everybody at the company knew it was a great win. It was a great win. And you said, let's go all the way back to the beginning when we first met them in the market and you showed the marketing touches, which were largely digital, hello, it's modern, modern buying.

SDR touches and other sort of call it human outreach touches and then sales touches and you put it all in one timeline all in one graphic and it screamed off the page. Several things. One B2B growth, not just ABM, but definitely ABM. B2B growth is a team sport. No one department wins the deal. That was the first thing.

Second thing I said, because a lot of the, it's not everybody who listens to growth driver, but a lot of them are marketing folks is it showed what we all know every day, all day, which is that it's not like marketing only works at the top and the top of the middle of the funnel. It was marketing touches where the vast 

Kevin Sellers: majority of variants 

John Common: all the way through the, that's the whole life cycle.

And, uh, that was, uh, I say proud, but I, I, I was proud for our field and this is a weird sort of way to put it, but I was proud for the field of modern B2B marketing and growth when I saw that slide. Cause I was like, that's real data. That's not some hokey theoretical thing. Any, any, any thought about that?

Kevin Sellers: No, it was super powerful. Eye opening. I mean, I remember the CEO was just like, Whoa, right. And we had never looked at it that way to realize just how many, and it was, what was the number? I think it was like 900 touches. Yes. Right. It was, and the, and the, and the, the deal cycle was about nine, no, it was six months.

It was actually for us, which is a shorter, we're about a nine ish month deal cycle. This was actually a shorter, uh, one, six months long. And it was a, um, about 900 touches, about 93 or 4 percent of those were marketing quote unquote, again, but that, but that's the point is to your point is that it was sprinkled, not just at the top, but all the way throughout.

Super eyeopening. It, it damaged. Now, what we didn't have at the time, and I know there's some tools that help on this, but it was still hard to assign. So let me just, let me just shoot something in the head when we, this is why attribution is such a dumb idea because attribution gets, when we said, well, marketing qualified leads were, you know, we hit our target.

It's, it's kind of a dumb idea because Um, it doesn't kind of matter at that point where it actually came in. It matters is everyone doing their job and moving that deal through the funnel. And so it's very hard to know which of those 900 really moved the ball down the field and which ones were more transitory or or less important.

But the point is they what we could see in the data was here's what they're doing and here's who's doing it, right? So we saw the different personas as the deal moved through all of a sudden you started to see. Business line unit line of business leaders getting involved CFO getting involved right later in the scene so you can kind of see and it helps you to kind of recognize that, hey, in this modern B2B world, I've got to be my content have to be on.

Point point one, which is I know that's a big terrible word, but let me just go with it. It needs to be on point. It needs to address all areas of that funnel, and it needs to address multiple persons because when that CFO gets involved, he's going to want to understand value. He's going to want to understand return on invested capital.

He's going to want to read, whereas the The CISO gets involved in, certainly in the business we're in, the CISO gets involved. He wants to know security. He wants to know uptime. He wants to know, you know, all those things. So there are different audiences. And so it really helped put a spotlight on the, the complexity of the journey, the number of touches, and just the types and breadth of content that was being consumed and engaged throughout that entire journey.

Eye opening would recommend everybody do it. It was a lot of work, a lot of manual work, different systems. I mean, we had to pull from Salesforce, from Gong, from, from Marketo, from, I mean, you name it. We had, I don't know how many systems we had to pull all these touch points for, but we did the hard work and it was like, boom, wow, look at this thing go.

John Common: Yeah. All right. This, I knew this episode was going to be great. Um, so a couple of more questions before I let you go back to your, to your, to your life. Um, you are many things, including you are a really great storyteller and a champion for what I call deep brand, not shallow identity only brand, but that the, the kind of brand that, that is rooted, In your company's north star, the kind of brand that, that really deeply understands who your target, your best customers are the kind of brand that, that uses emotion as well as rational and intellectual, uh, uh, uh, ways to tell a story.

Um, you know, uh, the, the kind of, brand that that recognizes that brand is not an episodic top of funnel thing. It's an always on end to end thing. So I'm, I know I'm pumping you up, but this, I know you, man, I know you, you are very good at this. And so my question is Take us into how a CMO who really understands brand thinks about and balances brand and what I'll call the demand creation versus demand capture and demand conversion.

How do you think about and make hard decisions around resources? And balancing brand and demand 

Kevin Sellers: man Do I have a lot to say? I know you do that might be I 

John Common: was gonna say that might be a part two, but did you give us a taste? Give us a taste. 

Kevin Sellers: Um, I Well, I chuckle a bit because you get on the linkedin and you just see these debates about brand versus demand And I I think we do ourselves a big disservice by creating putting them in such segments Look, marketing has one reason to exist, and only one.

And if somebody wants to debate me, I'll go round and round and round. But we exist for one reason, and that's to drive growth. We don't exist for any other reason. Now, people say, well, but you gotta do brand, and we gotta do PR. Great, those are all instruments to enable the one objective of why you exist, and that is to be successful.

Driver of growth. So everything you do in, in, in, in brand, if we want to categorize it that way is, is, should be aimed with the objective of growth. Okay. And then somebody said, well, I agree with you, but one's longer term and one shorter term. Okay. Sort of, but we got to also take, we got to take account of the fact that.

The world has changed a lot in the last five years, the last 10 years, the last 20 years, the last 50 years. Right? And it used to be a world where you could have a crappy, crappy product, but man, your storytelling was beautiful and people would buy it. And then we kind of morphed into, and I can give you a bunch of examples, right?

Um, but we, we, we kind of morphed into, Uh, what's the one I heard the other day? I was talking somebody was talking about this. Uh, uh, Jif peanut butter, uh, choosy moms choose Jif, right? This is a tagline from a hundred years ago. I mean, Jif, I mean, think about it. It's not any better than Peter Pan or you name all the different peanut butters out there, but clever marketing, great little storytelling, good advertising.

And all of a sudden, you know, Jif sales go off through it's just peanuts and sugar and a bunch of other crap, right? It's not good. But, um, the point is, We've kind of evolved, we went from, we swung the pendulum from all I need is a great story, to now we've swung the pendulum all the way over here to I just need that latest tactic that's gonna go get demand for tomorrow, right?

And the reality is, the, the world, the one thing that's never changed, Even though preferences have changed, the number of channels have changed, the products have changed, the preferences have changed, the world's moved digital, all these things have happened over the last 1, 5, 10, 30 years, what hasn't changed is the power of story.

John Common: Yes. 

Kevin Sellers: And, We talk a lot as practitioners about the different tactics, right? Well, you know, LinkedIn ads are no good, or Google ads are no good, or why are you doing display? I mean, we have these debates about the tactics we deploy, which is fine. Those are you can learn some things in there. But what we don't think enough about is At the end of the day, marketing job to drive growth in a world saturated, saturated, absolutely saturated with marketing messages.

How do you create distinction? How do you break through the noise so that people actually pay attention? Because like at the end of the day, marketing is one thing. It's applied psychology. You're trying to rent some space in the mind of your target audience. So if John Common is my target audience, my objective is I got to get a little space in that brain.

I got to get him to think about me a little bit because he might not even know who I am. Yeah. Right. So how do I get him to think about me a little bit? And that's where that's the power of story. And so I, in my mind, I don't necessarily segregated as a brand versus demand thing per se. And I don't mean to sound like I'm clever.

I'm not trying to come across that way. I just, in my mind, the one constant. Is the power of stores now that story can translate across lots of different tactics and it can translate to to to help you drive near term demand capture, but can also help you build preference over the long term and we've all heard that, you know, X percent of your market is not in the market now anyway.

So you I get all that. That's all good and fine. I agree that you want to be you. Pop of mind when someone decides that they're interested, certainly in a B2B sense. It's different than buying Coke or Pepsi, right, which you might do every day. B2B, you're doing something once every year, three, five years. So I get that, but the power of story matters so, so very much.

And I think we as an industry have lost our soul a bit on the importance of great story. As, remember Peter Drucker, who said, business has two functions. Marketing and innovation, marketing and innovation create results. All the rest are just costs. That's an important point, but he goes on. Marketing is the unique and distinguishing factor of the business.

Our job to drive growth is we have to create distinction uniqueness. We have to give people a reason to want to care. And in my industry, And then many, I'm sure many of your clients and many of the people that listen to this podcast, you're going to probably align with what I'm going to say here. I did an audit of all the people that are in my space, both direct competitors as well as adjacent competitors.

And you look at what they do in marketing, the message that they use. The frequency with which they do it. It's all it's all the same. It's all the same It's a sea of same and by the way, i'm not saying i'm so much but i've done this i've been guilty of this, too It's so easy to fall into the trap, but I did I said here's the bet I had like 10 competitors I did an analysis.

I had one took him to see we were talking at the at the Executive leadership meeting one time like look at these messages. Everybody's saying the same thing now. Look at how they do it They're all doing it the same way How do you break through in that? And that's where the power of story comes. And I think we have to be able to communicate what is that unique differentiating point about our business that's going to matter to our customers.

That's the power of story. Now, how you tell it, what kinds of emotions you go after? That's all, you know, that's all up for debate and every, every customer is, every company is different. Every industry is different. But the point is if you don't, if you lack a distinctive, differentiate, differentiating factor that you can exploit.

It's it's it you're gonna be In the sea of sameness, it's going to be very hard. 

John Common: Yeah, 

Kevin Sellers: that's by the way. That's why efficiency is going this direction 

John Common: Yeah, 

Kevin Sellers: because everybody's kind of doing the same thing and they're throwing much a bunch more money on it And there's only so much people can absorb.

John Common: Yeah, 

Kevin Sellers: that's great differentiate. How do you do that? 

John Common: Preach it Kevin Sellers preach it I agree and I One of the points you just made, I think it is, is really important is that brand, uh, I sometimes quote, or I sometimes refer to it as brand Island. Don't get sucked into brand Island, which is, well, there's a time to think about brand.

And then there's a time to do other things. Brand is always on. It is full funnel. It is always relevant. It is always there. And then so, so, so in other words, The way I think about it is your brand strategy and how you communicate and think about and, and, and activate your brand should be the base canvas.

The base canvas of everything else you do in marketing and sales. And I, that helps me just as a strategist, because we can get to your point. We can get faked out by so many tactical things and a new tool and a new thing. And I'm supposed to do this and not do that. And there's a time for that tactical game.

You got to play the tactical game, but all of those tactics and things and people in processes sit on top of a canvas that should be, who are we? Really? Who do we serve better than anyone else on earth? And why should they care? How? Why are we building? Why should they trust us? Why should they trust us?

And that base canvas is your brand. 

Kevin Sellers: I think that's right. I think that's right. And it's the foundation of your story. But let me give you an example why every company has to attach this differently. Like Sometimes you'll hear people say, yeah, but you know, if you want a story that's emotional, and by the way, I'm all, I love that.

I I've done much of that in my career too, but let me give you a great example of something that can be both brand and demand. This is where these lines blur. Okay. When I was working at Intel, we were one of our big, uh, clientele was Wall Street. And why? Well, Wall Street was interested in being able to transact as fast as possible because there's money involved in being able to transact.

Trades quicker. Okay. So Wall Street was always willing to buy the very latest and greatest in high performance, right? We could, it was the most price inelastic part of our market at the time. If we could bleed out an extra one or two percent of performance, we could charge thousands of more per processor.

And Wall Street was like, don't care, send them to me because it translated. So I could do for that audience. Like if I were if I were to do for a mainstream audience, I could say hey if you buy a computer with intel inside It's 10 faster than the computer with the other uh processor inside with amd inside I could do that Most people it's not going to resonate.

They don't care, right? They don't they don't they're not sitting there worried about a few percentage points of speed It's just not it's not a relevant thing to them, right? So I would do something different to engage that audience Because what do they care about? Right. But I would have a campaign for my wall street people that would be all about speeds and feeds because that's what they care about.

And if I can say to you, Hey, you buy the Intel chip, it's 10%, 10 percent faster than the other chip. That's going to allow you to do this many more transactions per second. Boom. Like I've hit a home run because I've hit the pain point very directly. So it wasn't a story. I could have wrapped a little bit of the story on it.

But the point is, Every situation, every product, every industry, every end market, every buyer, every pain point, they're all different. Right? So understanding that to be able to inform your unique differentiation and that unique differentiation is to your point, the canvas of your life. Story, which is the canvas of your brain.

John Common: Yeah. All right. All right. I'm going to, we're going to end this episode with just a couple of final questions. Um, first one is imagine you're standing in front of several hundred existing CMOs or heads of marketing who are staring out into 2025 and beyond. And I said, I need you to give them One piece of advice they probably need to hear and could do something good with.

What would you say to those existing heads of marketing? 

Kevin Sellers: Uh, that's a good one. I didn't have a chance to think about it. So off the top of my head, I would say,

well, I hate to, to, I hate to repeat a little bit of what I just said, but I, this is, this is my, my fundamental belief is that the pendulum has swung so far into the side of data and science that we have lost the art. And at the end of the day, the great marketers Are the ones that do great marketing and great marketing consists of great story don't Get so tied up in the science That we forget that I might have All of the right tools.

I might have all of the right metrics set up I might have all those things but if i'm not doing fundamentally Good marketing. It kind of doesn't matter. Give me a choice of being great at storytelling and great at marketing. And I got the worst data in the world versus the other way around. Oh, I'm choosing that first one every day of the week, because I'm going to be making a difference.

I'm going to be moving my, my audience to action. So. I would come back to how do we collectively think about the not just the how the channels, you know, the data sets, the, the analysis and analytics and the use of AI, all these hot topics. I'm not saying they're not important because they are, but we don't ever talk about the how, like, how do I actually.

Engage my audience. What's that message? And how do I tell it in a compelling way? Yeah, that is to me The secret of great marketing you fired 

John Common: me 

Kevin Sellers: up It's like it's like nope. Nope. We gotta talk about ai we got to talk about whether I should uh, You use this metric or that metric? Oh, you know, we don't talk about but look at the people that tell great stories and they are the ones winning.

John Common: Yeah You That's right. That's right. Okay. Last one is, um, now I'm going to pull you out of that room. I'm going to take you down the hallway and I'm going to put you in front of a thousand mid level emerging working their asses off marketers who want to be a CMO, a successful CMO or head of marketing one day.

What's one piece of advice you would give to them as they are moving out of the middle part of their career and beginning to step into executive roles. 

Kevin Sellers: Uh, interestingly, um, uh, what I've learned over the years is the one thing that matters, and this is a little generic, but just go with me for a second.

The one thing that matters more than anything is competence. If you're a demand gen person or a field marketer, you really need to demonstrate excellence in that, which you do at that time. And we all think about, okay, I'm going to do this job and I'll do that job. And I'm going to make my website. And that's, that's good.

That's not so good. I mean, I was there too. Don't get me wrong. I'm so good, but. Um, make it a natural thing that you are getting promoted because you've developed competence. And there are ways to do that. You might be in a job that you don't have a lot of background. Okay. I'm a, I'm a media buyer and I got moved over from some job doing something else.

Right. Take the time and the energy, carve out that time for you to, to learn from experts and get there. Really good at what you do now. Yeah. Like, and I, I, the reason I say this is I actually started my career in finance when I came outta grad school and I was in finance for the first few years. And I, I, it took me a few years to realize I don't like this.

Like I'm a square peg in a round hole. So, you know, I got over to marketing. I've been there ever since. My, one of my very first bosses gave me this piece of advice, and I'll never forget it. I can remember exactly where we were sitting and what, and who was at the table. And he, but he looked me dead in the eye.

And he said this from a finance perspective. He says, look, before you worry about anything else. You need to know your numbers. You need to know your budgets. You need to know your numbers. You need to know what's going on with that P and L that you're running. Know your numbers, right? And I say that to young marketers.

Now know the stuff you're doing. If you're working on ABM, then you've got to know the, to the customers you're going after. And you've got to know the tactics. You've got to know these things. In this moment and and and the next moment will come but don't cheat now 

John Common: Yeah, that's solid advice. That's solid advice kevin Uh, it is a it is so fun to know you and work for you and work with you Uh, thank you for sharing your expertise and your wisdom and your experience today on growth driver I hope you had a little fun.

I I have been wanting you to tell You This story and share, um, these nuggets for, for a long time. Thank you for being on growth driver. 

Kevin Sellers: It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me. 

John Common: All right, everybody. We'll see you soon. That was so fun talking to Kevin Sellers. Um, he and I have been having conversations almost exactly like that for years.

And for years, we've been saying we ought to record these. So to finally get that, uh, done here on growth driver makes me very, very happy. He is, uh, he's my kind of people, exactly, uh, the kind of B2B growth and marketing geek that I like to hang out with. I hope you liked it. Um, be sure to share this episode with your friends and your colleagues.

Uh, when you see us out there in the world, uh, you know, like us, Make a comment. I hated it. I loved it. I have a better idea. We love it all here on growth driver. If you haven't subscribed to growth driver, you pick the, pick the channel, um, whether it's audio or video, we're pretty much everywhere that I think you would normally look.

And, um, I just want to say thank you for your time. Thanks for listening to us here on growth driver. Last thing I want to tell you is the growth driver is brought to you by the talented and kind people. At intelligent demand. So if you work at a B2B company, that's got a serious growth goal and you got something to do about making that growth happen, reach out to the folks at intelligent demand.

com reach out and say, John told me I should talk to you. I want you to take a look at our. Upcoming strategies or plans. What do you think about it? Or I need a, an expert partner to help us with ABX or demand gen or brand or media or rev ops. Um, they would love to talk to you. And, uh, I guess the last thing to say is see you soon here on growth.

Bye everybody.