Speaker 1There is a moment in today's episode where my guest describes looking at his own dashboards lit up green. Every MQL target hit while his counterparts in sales were sitting in the red. It's the kind of disconnect someone with more than 20 years of enterprise B2B marketing has learned not to ignore. James Topfer spent seven years at Adobe, most recently as head of campaign strategy and demand marketing for APAC. With earlier roles at Google, Intuit, PayPal, and Optus, and credits Adobe's inside team, not himself, for building the model that closed the gap. We get into account-based model scored on buying group coverage rather than lead volume, the self-serve hub BDRs open each morning to see which accounts to call first, and why a hot inbound request still gets action within 24 hours, no matter what else is going on. Let's dive in. James, it's awesome to have you on the podcast. Thanks for inviting me, Shahin. It's great to be here. I'm really excited. We've been talking about this for a while. Yes. And we've known each other for a while. So I'm really glad we finally got to make this happen. Yeah, I'm glad I made the cut. No, I mean, way, way, what do you say? You would be way above the cut. Oh, thank you. So really, really excited to have you and have this chat. And we're talking about the infamous MQLs. Today. And I guess, I guess my first question is, if you could paint a little bit of a picture of what is the status right now, you know, you obviously have a lot of experience with a lot of different companies. And, you know, most recently at Adobe, what do you see as kind of the current status of MQLs inside of organizations?
Speaker 2Yeah, I think they still exist. It's still very much a metric that's still, you know, reported on by a lot of marketing organizations to their sales colleagues. And I've been actioned by BDRs and AEs as well. However, in more recent times, I think there's been a big move away from MQL. And I think the reason for that is there's, there's two parts is that we were measured very much on, you know, the volume of MQLs coming through. And then also the amount of coverage we had in our contact database of all the key people we wanted to acquire. And, and, and over time, what we've found is, you know, we've had a lot of people who have been is that a lot of our dashboards were lighting up green, we're hitting our MQL numbers, and when we look at our counterparts in sales, they very much were in the red. And how can you have that disconnect if one's performing and the other one's not? And I think it really came down to the fact that a lead is a person, and really what sales are doing is they're acquiring accounts. They want the buying group fully engaged. They need decision-makers and influencers coming to the party at the same time. And if that doesn't happen, there's a disconnect between what is actually converting and what's not. And so really what I've found is that lead is not really a good measure of demand. It's really accounts. And moving from an MQL to an MQA, Marketing Qualified Account, is really where real measurement's happening.
Speaker 1Yeah, interesting. And, I mean, we see this all the time, right? Marketing has hit their numbers, and sales is like, I don't care that's not moving the needle for me at all. Very curious to hear, how did you, when did you make the move to MQAs? And, you know, kind of tell me a little bit about how did that come to be?
Speaker 2Yeah, it took some time, actually, to move to that. And we needed a lot of help from our internal marketing insights teams to be able to report that way because what you're really talking about is aggregating a number of leads into an account-level view. And sometimes your systems aren't set up that way, your reporting's not set up that way. So a lot of this change was actually led by our global marketing insights team. This is at Adobe? At Adobe, yes, that's right. I think this is where the shift happened. I didn't, you know, previously, it was always MQL before that at previous employers and marketing models. And, you know, having some great MarTech to use, being Adobe, we had sort of the measurement happening, but nothing was really out of the box. And so the marketing insights team, pretty much balled together a view by account. And that required a change also in terms of our process and our handoffs as well. So we had MQL running side-by-side and MQA coming in because you couldn't just go from one to the other and switch one off and move to the next one. There was a lot of enablement required, so everyone understood how things were moving. And there was a lot of trial and error when you looked at MQA because a lot of these, I guess, buying groups that you're trying to target, some were known and some were unknown. Identified through, you know, contact acquisition. And so we're moving off this contact acquisition trail where we're trying to do form fills, getting people's data, and then that fills up the database. And then, you know, MQL was always driven by a point system of some sort where it's not just one piece of marketing that someone's engaging with. To become a lead, you have to do it. Well, it really depends how desperate sometimes marketing is, right?
Speaker 1That's right. One point, it's all it takes. One touch and you flow through. Yep, it's all it takes to turn into an MQA. But I interrupted you.
Speaker 2Yeah, and that's a bit of a black box as well. And sales don't really understand how that measurement works because it is based on a number of touches usually. And what we found is that, you know, when you look at conversion of MQL to, you know, a prospect or a pipeline lead, and then if you go even further and look at, you know, what was the conversion to, you know, a revenue, a closed deal, you're getting down to very small numbers. So, for example, you know, 5% to 10% of a lead, you know, you're getting down to very small numbers. Converting to a, you know, an SQL was kind of reasonable numbers. And then when you look at the actual translation to revenue, you could get down to 1%. So, if you reverse engineer that in a math equation, you know, you're going to need a lot of MQLs to hit the revenue number. And it's like sort of sand on a beach. You know, how much can you gather before you're exhausting your whole database of contacts? And so what we found is that it's a move to quality, not quantity. And that's the big shift. That we found more recently is that it's hard because, you know, everyone's used to having real large numbers of leads to coming through to a much, much smaller MQA number. But then when you look at the conversion metrics off MQA, it's much higher. And you think about the time wastage of BDRs, you know, working off every lead. And then it got to a point where some of these leads were not even in action because the volume was too high. So then it becomes a lottery of which leads can it convert and which ones not. Obviously, the RFI, or the request for information, they'd be your best leads coming through. And we would recommend that, you know, you want to turn those over within 24 hours because someone's actually saying, please reach out to me. But that's a diamond in the rough, right? So you're not getting lots and lots of those. Definitely RFIs, action them straight away. But when you're talking about leads flowing through to BDRs or AEs, then MQA was the metric we were measuring.
Speaker 1So tell me a little bit about MQA. What did you measure? An account, a cold account or whatever you want to call it to a marketing qualified account.
Speaker 2So MQA is interesting because it doesn't work off just one metric. It's a number of metrics and it's looking at all your marketing together. So it's not like last touch where that converts into a pipeline metric. So what we're generally covering is the number of ICPs. So across the buying group. So usually it's sort of seven to 10 is what we were working with. And then also then the lead, the level of engagement of each of those people in the buying group. And some of them weren't identified. We knew that in that account, there's a volume of people that are coming into our website. They're unidentified. They're not filling out forms. They're not coming to our webinars or events, but we know they're actually engaging. And so the key thing with an MQA model is you're not providing a volume of MQAs. You're just helping them prioritize which account should I go after first. And so the great thing is if you're working with your sales ops team, they're dividing up. All your target accounts by sales rep and then usually a sales rep is supported by some BDRs. And that becomes the target group you're trying to go after. And so when you're looking at MQA, you're trying to say, okay, if I've got a portfolio of 30 accounts I'm going after, tell me which are the ones I should be contacting right now. And so from one down to 30, you're prioritizing it and it becomes a moving feast. And so every month you're talking about marketing qualified accounts, but some are more qualified than others. And therefore the sales teams are then prioritizing and having faith in the measurement tools that we're using. As I said, it's either people that are attending events and you know them really well or down to those people that are just coming to your website and unidentified. And the dark funnel they call it is what we're trying to take into account. Because quite often a lot of literature is showing now the B2B buying cycle is 10 to 12 months. And by the time you're actually got a BDR setting up an appointment for a meeting, that customer's already down to their last two or three vendors they're considering. So they're a fair way down the path already. And that's because of all the research they're doing themselves.
Speaker 1I want to dive into this a little bit more. But before I kind of do that, I'd also love to hear what did that transition look like from MQL to MQA? Okay. What was that process? You talked about kind of getting the sales team used to it and all that stuff. Paint me a little bit of a picture of kind of that transition. inside the organization, I would imagine. fair bit of change management that's involved what did that look like
Speaker 2yeah so we're talking about a few quarters here of transition okay it doesn't happen overnight and the mql that was still flowing through to bdrs and i think what drove the change to mqa was the amount of wastage that was happening and the frustration happening on both sides of the fence both on sales and marketing because there's that classic challenge where you're saying what's happening to my leads and then on the other side is that you know we're not we're not talking to them because the quality is not there and you're wasting my time so we had the mqls running we had this new model around mqa a product internally was rolled out around an account engagement hub and that was a self-service model for the sales team so they could go in there see all their accounts and as i say see which ones are prioritized they click through into the account which is the priority they could see then within our crm database what's been engaged you know what content is being prioritized and what's not being prioritized and what's not being prioritized and what's not being you know consumed who is in the buying group that we can identify and reach out to and then and then they actually spend a lot of time then researching themselves on what's my opening line going to be what am i going to talk to them about it's going to be different depending on what your role is in that organization and a lot more thought going into the outbound motion whereas on the lead side what we were seeing is it might be one piece of content or one event that the customer's gone to that's all that the person's working off they're calling them they can't really solidify a real conversation with that person because that's all they've got to go on and then the worst thing that's happening is another lead comes in for that same account and the bdrs well that customer's not engaged at all i'm going to waste my time on the next lead and what you're finding they call it duplicate leads and they all end up being thrown in the trash and so what we were doing is we were pitching it internally to our sales representatives as here we're going to actually make sense of all the leads that are coming in and consolidate them in a way that you can then use it and build a you know an outbound account plan effectively for that account and then we started to get traction with you know it was it was hit and miss at first sometimes the quality wasn't there on those prioritized accounts that were mqas and we got the feedback we passed the feedback to our insights team and there was an optimization i think i sat on a podcast you had recently with nishi from google cloud and she talked about the optimization process and how it's going to work and i think that's what we're going to do and i think that's what we're going to do and i think that's what we're going to do and i think that's what we're going to do and i think that's what we're going to do it's always evolving it's about optimization always you never have the perfect model and you never probably get to the perfect model because it's always a continual optimization but at least you're moving forward and there's a trend heading in the right direction that's really what we got to we got a lot of trust built up over time the model got better and we could see then the results coming through and there was a lot of use cases where we shared you know deals closed and we said okay for that deal what happened in the last six months before that and you could actually see back into the accounting engagement hub you know all the buying group being represented and i i was really encouraged to see you know you see people from procurement from legal your typical icps that aren't your primary decision makers but they're very much part of the decision making process certainly towards the end of a deal closing and and and they were you know coming online coming to the website trying to understand what was being pitched to them and uh and that was really encouraging not on every deal but you could see it in some of the
Speaker 1deals fascinating fascinating you know this is a very interesting conversation because a lot of people talk you know bad mouth mqls right and they're like oh we should move away from them and we should stop measuring mqls they're an outdated model and so on and so forth and but but there's not a lot of people who come and say this is the model that we should we should implement instead so i i really love this conversation but tell me a little bit about you know you've touched on bdrs and or sdrs or whatever they're called in in any organization where do they come into to the mix uh and and maybe you know we're talking adobe adobe how did how did the kind of the reporting work were they reporting into sales were they reporting to
Speaker 2marketing yeah so we've had both models over the time i was there and more recently it was into sales so the bdrs were treated as a junior sales person that had a career path into sales and i think from that perspective it was great that they were sitting where they were and uh and very much outcome focused and and i think one of the biggest learnings from transitioning from mql to mqa too is they're very much driven by activity and uh and you can't just give them you know go from having a lot of information to you know deprive them of the amount of things they can follow up on but i think the learning i had also is that the the coaching was really important so the sales leader of the bdr team was very much coaching on conversation starters what's the you know objective you have on every call because you're trying to get a meeting set up with someone else and how are you going to talk in the customer's language and do some research before you call them and i think the more that happened the better quality of conversations were happening because the the numbers or the volume that the person was following up on had narrowed quite considerably but then they had a lot more insight to to work off and so hand in hand the marketing organization was working closely with the sales organization on you know what are those conversations what can we provide in terms of enablement of the campaign content that we were running so there's a lot more education on campaigns that were going into market to the bdr team so they understood you know what what sort of conversation could i have the off the back of these and we were also learning a lot more from the sales process what what are the hooks that are really working it helped us refine that refine the content we were running make it a lot more punchy much more talking about the customer's problem as opposed to our product or solution set and i think you know we were both getting better as a result of going to quality rather than quantity
Speaker 1that usually means the bdr or scr
Speaker 2targets need to change and incentivization definitely yeah i mean they were already outcome focused they had to build pipeline that was the number one thing that they were incentivized on even though it was to book an appointment most of the time and so that was the activity they were trying to do but that's but they would have less
Speaker 1yes to so and correct me if i'm wrong but did this happen where previously it was a lot of people that were doing it and they were doing it and they were doing it for a lot of numbers game where it's like how many meetings did you book and so on and so forth and now it's like well i don't have as many highly engaged accounts and therefore i'm not going to be able to book as many meetings therefore
Speaker 2was that an issue yes yes yes or no um the revenue net revenue number never changed and the pipeline number which was usually three times revenue never changed either okay but those were their targets that like they were specific outcomes there they'll measure it on numbers of meetings it still didn't change a lot to be honest because what you're getting is a high level of conversion off the leads or account leads that are coming through as opposed to there was a metric around um disposition of leads and that was really hard for them to get to and so in fact metric they achieved more of because what was happening is the number of mqas for them to follow up was lower number and therefore disposition was was increasing so they were reaching out to more of those contacts because they had more people to talk to in that amount and then the conversion of that number then to what was a pipeline opportunity was actually getting better and so conversion was getting better and that meant we were getting our pipeline number much much more easily so yeah so i i would say actually everything got better for the bdrs as opposed to the other way
Speaker 1around and walk me through a little bit of like how would it work for the bdr right so i'm a bdr i come and sit on in front of the account engagement hub and i open it up first thing in the morning and i see a list of accounts and i click on my top account what do i do then as an str or bdr yeah so as i
Speaker 2said a bit earlier they um they would click on the account and you could see all the contacts that were visible and even those that weren't yet identified and then you could click through into the serum and see what are those those contacts accessing or you're consuming and so you get a good picture of okay maybe this is the product of interest that i should be leaning into because we had you know a wide range of products to talk to and usually you know the bdrs don't get down to that level they're just trying to identify what the need is but these uh because they were getting close to the content across that organization you could see a an identification of what the product of interest was and therefore well this is my lead content i should be going back to that customer on and then having questions associated to that so there was a lot more preparation work going into follow-up and sometimes you know one of the biggest challenges the bdr has is making contact to the individual in the lead because maybe the information is not correct or up to date or it's not a real lead etc and you get that feedback quite often from the bdr team but because you're looking at the account view you're getting a much more holistic view on on the opportunity and then you've got a lot more chance of getting through to someone on the account and then it may not be the key decision maker or influencer but you're getting through into someone that's doing some research and then they all introduce you to the right people in the account and so we were seeing better success that way as well wow
Speaker 1fascinating fascinating okay and then the the bdrs are going through motion right like they're picking they're building a sequence calls emails anything else that they would be executing on
Speaker 2yeah um and i think the other thing that is that a key topic on some of your previous podcasts you've run is you know how you can use ai in that process too to speed things up because as you know now you can do a lot of the heavy lifting of research and and pull together a conversation and so a lot of training was happening around the enablement side uh for not just the bdrs but the sales teams how do you build an account plan how do you build out talking points, messaging, and I think that part has been a huge amount of growth in that area, which in the past, because of the volume issue, you could never get to it, never do a great job of it. And so what we're finding is that a lot more research and insight is being used in the
Speaker 1conversation setup. Did you take a different approach if sales comes to you? And I don't know how it works at Adobe, so you tell me, but sometimes sales is behind their target, and they're like, we don't have enough pipeline, we don't have enough people to talk to this quarter, today. Give me something. And first of all, did that happen? And if it did happen, would you basically stay the course and go through the same process, or would you just stay the course and go through the same process, or would you just stay the course and go through the same process, or would you just stay the course and go through the same process, or would you just stay the course and go through the same process, or would you just stay the course and go through the same process, or would you kind of pivot or change for a short-term outcome?
Speaker 2Yeah, that's quite a common, I mean, it's great to be in a position where you've got more pipeline than is required, and everything's going fantastic, and you can talk about the next two quarters ahead of you. But in quarter, if you're behind, like you're suggesting, then what I found is that sales don't really want to hear about a campaign next quarter or the quarter after, because that's how long it would probably take to get into market with something that's brand new. So what we've found is that because we've got an account for you, we're on the same language as sales. They're talking about how many accounts do they need to hit their number. We can work backwards from that. And then because you've got this MQA model, you can look at, okay, which are the accounts which are showing engagement this quarter? Let's just focus on those. Let's narrow the target audience down, because if we're going to make our number this quarter, it's got to be really tight. And obviously anything that's more than that will help us in the following quarters. But if we're behind this quarter, we work with sales. And then we can put a pivot, you know, we could do an online event to reach out to them this quarter, or we could do a physical event, a round table, you know, to the key people in those accounts that we've already got access to, because we can see it, and then be really, really focused in partnership with sales so that we're focused on the same result in the same timeframe. And that's the big shift that happened, because just to throw more leads in is not going to really help, because to turn those around into a real pipeline, you're talking about more than a 12-week process. Got it. Got it.
Speaker 1And is this, you know, when you were looking at this, the scoring model that you, was this like a similar to MQL? We're talking about like at 100, each account would get a score, or it's a traffic light model. What kind of the actual scoring look
Speaker 2like? Yeah, I mean, a bit like, you know, scoring out of a marketing automation solution. You don't really see the nuts and bolts of how things are scored. You have like some assumptions around what it's a high engagement versus low engagement.
Speaker 1Yeah, as in, I meant like the front-facing component of it. Was it like it said, this account has a score of 93? No, we weren't working off a
Speaker 2metric such as that. It was really a prioritization of account. Okay. By portfolio. So as I say, we broke up all our accounts by target groups, and AEs were accountable by target groups.
Speaker 1And when you say a target group, you're talking like, is it vertical specific?
Speaker 2Is it geography? Is it? It could be all of those. Yeah. Okay. But sales ops would, really do the science around how we're going to go to market. And then the breakup of that was determined by them. They had targets associated with all those accounts. So that was all pretty much set at the beginning of the year, based on where we saw our upsell, cross-sell or new acquisition. And the teams were structured around, there was a new acquisition team, there was a cross-sell upsell team. And that sort of also looked at renewal dates of customer accounts and things like that. So it's very organized from a sales ops perspective. So marketing is really targeting what has been set up for them.
Speaker 1Yeah. Right. Okay. And from the MQA model, did you take that approach both for net new acquisition and account expansion, existing customers, or was it mainly for one? Was it across both?
Speaker 2It wasn't evenly split out. I think new acquisition was a smaller percentage of the total target accounts we're going for. And then thereby, by nature, you know a lot more about the accounts than new acquisition. But it doesn't mean you can't apply the same model to new acquisition as much. It's just that you'll have less account depth, potentially. You might have two or three people in an account, you've got to work harder to bring the other people in. And then also, you're looking at unidentified traffic coming to your website, which is where people are doing a lot of research. And you're going to be working off, okay, those two or three contacts I have, how do I reach the rest of the buying group? I know they're there, and I know they're all, I mean, the model's telling me that that account is surging, so therefore I want to spend time on it. But you may not have the organization as well built out as you would if there's an existing customer. So you're trying to upsell or cross-sell, too?
Speaker 1Fascinating. Fascinating. You know, we're talking about Adobe rolling out this model. I would assume a lot of listeners who are listening are like, that's great. Adobe has all these resources and this maturity in their account-centric motion and sophisticated enterprise infrastructure. What is your advice for somebody who's kind of listening and is like, I don't have all that resources, right? I am from a tier two or tier three tech companies, right? I might be in region, and I'm the only marketer in the region, or I got a small team in the region. Or even I'm from a startup, right? Like, headquarters here, but you know, we're just a handful of marketers here. So if somebody's listening to this now, and they're like, I don't have all that resources, right? I'm from a first of all, what are some of the things that you don't think they can implement? So that they're like, okay, that's good to know. What comes to mind first there? And then I want to ask you?
Speaker 2Yeah, I mean, the first the first thing I would say is like, as I said, we relied heavily on a global marketing insights team to be the thought leaders, they brought the insights to us and the model and they spent all their time on building out as a product almost, and then they had the enablement piece to it. So they're not a huge team, but they're, you know, I guess a high end knowledgeable team that were very helpful in this process for us. Having said that our data is it was in multiple places, we had a lot more complexity, you're talking about cross region, and not everything was probably as clean as it could be, because we had some legacy legacy system to use. So if I was a smaller organisation, I would just keep it really simple. And I don't have a marketing insights team to help do it, I would roll up my sleeves and look in my own CRM of what are the leads I'm getting, let's group all the leads. By account, there might be some manual work here. I mean, with AI, you could probably pull it together a lot easier than than two years ago. And you can start to get a view even on a whiteboard of what your account universe looks like, and who are the ones that are showing a lot of engagement right now, and start to prioritise it almost manually. And then use, you know, your BDR or sales teams or whoever you're interfacing with to help you build out that landscape. And it might be in an Excel sheet to start with. But still, it's using the same thinking and methodology that I've been referring to, where you've got multiple touch points within an account. And and the worrying thing is, if you do have a multiple person by to sell your product, and it's a 10 month sales cycle, and you've only got one person that's really showing engagement, and not much is happening on your website, then you've got to question Am I spreading myself too thinly? I would expect if I'm a small organisation, I've got a smaller sales team to feed a smaller BDR team potentially as well. And therefore, I'm not having to do a lot of marketing. I'm just going to do the volume that I'm doing in my business. And, and as I say, keep it really simple and start working backwards from the number, like how many opportunities do we need to close in a quarter, do the math, and then that would help you work out Am I spreading my marketing too thin? Should I be more focused and, and I'm and engage everything around account views rather than leads like we have been in the past.
Speaker 1Interesting. You know, as you were talking, I was thinking about the stats that we were talking about from an SQL space, MQL, SQL, you know, close one revenue. Do you know the numbers for like the when you shifted to MQA? If that change, you know, we talked about, you know, lead to an SQLs five to 7%, you know, revenue could be 1%. I don't know if you have this off the top of your head. But do you know what that what those numbers kind of change to?
Speaker 2Well, I mean, definitely, when we were running the MQL model alongside the MQA model, it's not a Apple's versus Apple's and but what we did find is conversion of MQLs did go up because we just started looking at less leads. And yeah, right. And we it was really a prioritization of MQLs effectively what you're talking about, because you're grouping MQLs or leads by account. And then you're getting an account view of those leads. And so off the top of my head, I don't think we really looked at that conversion of MQL, it did increase from, you know, 5% to 20%. Because we were dropping the baseline, you know, the denominator, it was changing. So we weren't, yeah, we weren't looking at the same lead volumes anymore. Makes sense. Yeah. But so what I find is, is that the conversations you're having with sales changes, because you start getting down to an account conversation. And you talk about account coverage, and it allowed us to actually go broader than what we had in the past, where we were just looking at MQAs, we were looking also, okay, pipelines being created now, the deal closure rates are really important. So we started talking about account engagement scores, are we covering all those that are already in the pipeline, and we've got to help sales then reengage them so that they actually can bring them forward a quarter and that then translates to revenue so that was a conversation we were quite often you know we're talking about MQA but we're also talking about account engagement scores and that was just showing are we doing enough on each of those accounts to make sure we're engaging them ongoing after the the sales have engaged them and have pitched them and doing the business case and let's get those round tables going and get the executive team engaged because they're the ones who are going to sign off on the business case so I think the the short answer to your question really is the model just changed so significantly you can't really compare the two together yeah I understand that but pipeline as I said pipeline and revenue didn't really change it was still let's hit that number but I think we had tighter alignment around the pipeline and the the revenue number that we were both going after so we became more outcome focused as a marketing organization as a result I want to
Speaker 1ask you some rapid fire questions but before I get there is there anything that you think it's important that maybe we didn't touch on yeah I
Speaker 2was um I was thinking about it actually because we talk about the customer journey it goes for 10 months potentially on average and we need to be really engaged and and I think let's just not lose sight like the numbers are important and see the conversion numbers and all these things as marketers but I've been listening to some other podcasts and and I know you ask a question around that at some point but uh I was listening to my a past um leader that I worked for at Google Lucinda Barlow she's now the senior director of international marketing at Uber and uh and she's done some amazing or the Uber organization's done some amazing brand like I know it's b2c not b2b but the point I'm trying to make is we need to get back to what's great marketing and she talks about the jolt are we really pitching our message to the problem or we just talking about the rational ideas of what the customer needs to be so thought leadership is an umbrella we have when we you know roll out content and early on in the in the customer journey we're trying to you know stay true to what's the big topics that are happening in the market but I think the more we need to be doing is is what Lucinda does is you know if you look at some of the Uber campaigns they really hit hard on the customer insight and what's the pain the customer's feeling because to shift their behavior you need to almost have a jarring experience with the customer so they feel something and then of course your solution comes in there somewhere but it's not the main story and and I think when we're building customer journeys and to improve this MQA model and get people wanting to take interest especially with LLMs now and you're not maybe even going to the customer's website you need to be there when a customer's got a problem and and I think that's important so while getting your numbers right is important I think let's not lose sight of the great content you need to be rolling out at each stage of the customer touch point
Speaker 1yes and make sure we don't we're not going through the blandification process that we maybe are going a little bit even further and with with AI so that's such a great point James okay let's do some rapid fire questions go for it first one I got is what is one resource that has had a fundamental impact on the way that you work or live it could be a book a podcast a talk whatever oh look
Speaker 2I've been heavily influenced I went to the B2B marketing leaders forum and a guy called Kerry Cunningham was doing a you know a thought leadership piece there and he was his topic was this exact topic and I go back about three years ago when I heard it and I've been following him a lot and he's got a pretty common you know message he used to be at serious decisions so an analyst he comes from an analyst background and now he works I think for Sixth Sense so he's he's sort of in that intent space and so he's I think he's in that space because he believes in it and and he's a big advocate for this change and John Miller who was one of our founding members for Marketo which became an Adobe product he's been on the podcast has he okay he's gone down a similar path and they both nod to each other if they're on a podcast together but I think you know when you hear the insight and some of the research they come back with it convinces me that I'm on the right track even in those early days where we didn't have much evidence that this is the way to go on podcasts I think you know you can listen to a regular podcast but sometimes you've got to listen to some key people and hear what they're being you know what's the latest thinking and so sometimes you look for them and hear what their latest ideas are you obviously follow them on social media as well so that has had a big influence
Speaker 1love it if you could give one advice to be to be my what would it be
Speaker 2oh one piece of advice I think I keep learning keep testing this is a journey we're on to get better and there's no perfect science to whatever you're doing but but be bold and take risks I think through risk it's a similar line that everyone uses you know you learn something from it even if there's failure but be intentional and and and learn from other people before you do it if you're feeling nervous about something there's probably someone who's done it before you and now with you know what's going on and what's going on and what's going on and what's going on what's available through all these podcasts you can usually find someone who's talking about your topic and reach out to them directly it's amazing how many people will be open to you if you reach out to them but I think if you do go out to them be very specific what you're asking because I know when you get in people you know messages are in your inbox you uh you go oh my god what does this
Speaker 1person want to know share let's share some ideas and yes yeah be specific pick your brain don't do that um but yeah that that is such a great great advice okay who are and you've kind of talked talked about this is that if there is anybody else who are some of the thought leaders and you know I don't know if we want to call them influencers but can thought leaders that you follow yeah in our space oh look
Speaker 2um I think there's a couple in our space in the b2b marketing world we actually sponsor one mark jones who runs a cmo show he's got a regular forum which I think is really interesting for us because it's always bringing new people in and you know we're not as well known as some of the b2c marketers out there so it's good to hear from you people that are in the same trenches as you I exit five from david gerhardt's another one that I think is useful he brings some good good things especially around abm and the marketing sales relationship that we've all got to navigate something that I can think it's outside marketing I quite often listen to mark boris he talks about our local issues in australia and some of the people he has on there he's a great interviewer he's a bit like yeshu shahin he he really listens he listens and he breaks down what the person's talking about so that everyone understands and one thing I was just talking to you before the show was um he had a person on this on the show you mentioned it before yes shoddy shoddy yeah right yeah yeah so shoddy she's done a phd on on psychology and and being true to yourself and it's something relevant I think when we all listen to podcasts we're learning all the time but until you action something it just goes into your library and you never can bring it back up again easily and and she was saying you should write down things physically because it sends her sit in your brain but then she also said it's a simple model is that you know sometimes you say I should do this and I should do that and that's quite a negative thing saying you you know you're not sufficient but she said I'd change that language to be I could I could do this and if you list down six or seven things even off the back of this podcast that you could do in your organization but the reality is you can't do five or six things potentially off the bat so look at that five to six I coulds and change them into one or two I will and even that language of talking to yourself holds you accountable and I think you then you drive change and and don't pick off the hardest things first you know pick up the quick wins and and I think so I wouldn't have learned about that until I you know went on some of these other podcasts that tell your life
Speaker 1lessons yes usually if there's only one thing you can take away and and implement here what would that be is is a great advice what is something that
Speaker 2excites you about b2b today I think we're doing some great brand marketing out there and I think we're doing some great brand marketing out there we talked about it earlier to someone else on your podcast John Stoner from air wallacks and he's got a big job to do to tackle some of the incumbent brands and and to stand out you need to really do something interesting and I think some of the marketing that's come out of them has been fantastic and and we can learn from I mean when I was at Adobe we did some really fun campaigns as well where we made made fun of ourselves a little bit bit of humor and that that resonated but of course you know your solution is part of the story and I'd love to see more of more of that coming out as b2b marketers and because we can really test that we get direct response we're very targeted as we talked about earlier on the show and and you can learn a lot just from doing something like that and
Speaker 1taking some risks 100% 100% James it's been awesome to have you on the podcast thanks Ian I'm so glad that you flew down thanks we got to hang out so thank you so much for for the time and an older older golden nuggets yeah
Speaker 2thank you and it's a great podcast you run thanks
Speaker 1thanks for listening to today's episode if you like a PAX b2b growth podcast please share it with your b2b friends and subscribe today's show was produced by Alexander hip well and Jonah XE David Samito edited the episode and our theme music is by mysterious break masters cylinder we'll be back in two weeks with another episode unpacking trends busting myths and delivering insights you can put to work today to drive growth in a pack
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