November 21, 2024 • 16 mins
This week's show is entitled, "Insights from the 2024 Buyer Experience Report" and my guest is Kerry Cunningham, Head of Research and Thought Leadership at 6sense.
Tune in to Learn:
- The surprising shifts in buyer engagement and the critical moments that influence buying decisions.
- How to rethink the sales pipeline in the age of AI and optimize interactions to match today's complex buying processes.
- Insights into aligning sales and marketing motions to ensure you’re not just building pipeline, but preparing for long-term growth.
- The role of intent signals and how they can be leveraged to create meaningful connections with potential customers.
Listen Now | Watch the video HERE | Read the Transcript on the Heinz Marketing blog.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:16):
Alright, welcome to anotherepisode of Sales Pipeline Radio.
My name is Matt Heinz,I'm your host today.
Thank you so much for joining us.
So excited to have you all here.
If you're listening or watching on demand,Thank you for subscribing and listening.
Every episode of Sales PipelineRadio, always available at
www.salespipelineradio.Com.
Very excited today to have formerForrester SiriusDecisions Analyst,
(00:39):
Kerry Cunningham, join us to talk aboutsome fairly new research that I feel
like I'm seeing all over the place,but every time I see it, Kerry, there's
another angle that is super interestingin terms of how we think about go
to market motions going into 2025.
So thank you for being here now.
Yeah, glad to be here.
I'm glad that's how you're feelingabout it because it does impact a lot
(01:02):
of how we go to market and be B2B.
And it changes what we've been used toand what we treat as the common way of
building pipeline in a lot of cases.
So I have a lot of questions and points Iwant to dig into, but wanted to start with
just you giving the thesis of the researchand why you did it and what you found.
Yeah.
(01:22):
So 30 seconds of it is that we'vesurveyed buyers in B2B, all kinds
of buyers, not just SaaS, butlots of SaaS, of course, as well.
And we did it globally.
We've done it two years in a row.
And what we found is essentiallythe same thing two years in a
row and everywhere in the world.
And what I'm going to sayapplies to 80 percent of buyers.
Buyers say that they don't engage withsellers until they're about 70 percent
(01:45):
of the way through their buying journey.
The trigger for engaging withsellers is that they have set
their requirements and decidedwhich vendor they want to buy from.
And that's the simple thing to say.
It really does and should changeeverything and then there are other pieces
of it, like one of the fundamental thingsthat we've assumed in marketing is that
(02:07):
you generate leads, you hand them off toBDRs, SDRs to follow up on them and that
process can cause buyers often we thinkcan cause them to go into market, which
is crazy in a way that we'll talk about.
But also that the simple thing thatjust because we're calling and emailing
folks, we can get them to engage with us.
And what buyers have said really clearlytwo years in a row is that no, you can't.
(02:30):
It's true, right?
And I think because we've always assumedthat we can just call and dial and
email our way out of this problem--.
And AI is making this almost worsebecause AI makes it easier, faster,
cheaper to get those emails out.
And Challenger almost tells uswe can do this, that we can tell
people the status quo change.
We can challenge the status quo.
We can get them to thinkdifferently about the problem and
(02:51):
move them into a sales process.
And I guess the research shows howarrogant are we to think that we are
going to change what happens insidethese large complex buying organizations?
Arrogant.
And I think also we've lacked justthe basic self consciousness of
understanding how do we operate?
Just think about how youoperate in your organization.
(03:13):
Could somebody call you today?
And cause you to go into marketto buy some big system that
you rely on this quarter?
Unless you were alreadywell along that path.
The answer is of course not.
It takes longer than that toget the budget for anything
above, relatively small amount.
So unless you've already got itbudgeted, unless you've already got
(03:35):
it planned, nobody's going to calland get you to do something that
you weren't already planning to do.
So from that perspective, Ithink we all already knew that.
But we don't operate that way.
We want to believe that we cancause and control things...
A moment's reflection wouldtell you, No, you can't.
You really can't.
That's not what we're doing.
(03:55):
And what we're doing is, I think6Sense is a great example of this.
You build a brand that peoplewant to be associated with.
You put yourself in all of the placeswhere your customers and prospects are,
and you deliver value to them even whenthey're not in market, so that when they
go into market, you're on the top of thelist or you're at least on the list, and
(04:16):
you get to play for that deal and thenbuild mechanisms that capture all of that
and don't miss it when it's happening.
And for some, it doesn't sound assexy, it doesn't feel like you're
as in control, but I think it'smuch more aligned to reality.
To me, You are still in control becauseyou still can get that message of value
and education in front of a prospect.
But what you're saying is it's notgoing to generate immediate pipeline.
(04:38):
And to me, this is a fundamental changeto how people think about the buying
journey and think about what is asales and what is a marketing motion?
Cause what you're saying is thateffort to reach prospects before
they're ready to buy, before they'reready to engage with you is not going
to generate pipeline, but is stillcritical to generating future pipeline.
(05:00):
The models we have need to get a littlemore complex, but need to be very
clear about what motion is doing what.
That's it.
That's exactly right.
And it's really importantfor everybody to hear that.
Cause I think when I talk about it, Iget so excited about the new findings and
what they mean that it can get lost inthe way that I talk about it, that it's
not that you should stop doing things.
(05:21):
And it's not that you shouldn'teven reach out to buyers.
You should, but you have to understand,what the research shows really clearly.
Whether buyers are receivingcalls or emails from sellers
and BDRs or not, does not changewhen or if they engage with you.
It just doesn't.
So all of that activity that you'reengaged in, that you think is causing
(05:43):
meetings, is catching meetingsthat you were already going to get.
Maybe a little bit later, maybea week later, maybe two weeks
later, something like that.
But if they engage with you, it'sbecause they were already going to
engage with you and you're catching that.
So you got to have themechanism out there to catch it.
You want that.
Make it easy.
(06:04):
Remove the friction.
All of that.
But again, if you work in a decent sizedcompany and you've got systems, things
that you've been involved in buying thatare 20, 30, 50, $100,000 a year kinds of
solutions, how long did that process take?
And did it start becausesomebody called or emailed you?
Or did it start because you had abusiness problem, you all worked
(06:26):
on that internally, you decided togo into market and then you engaged
with sellers when you were ready?
I think it looked a lot like thelast thing that I said, right?
And I think we just needto be thinking about that.
And when we do, then we'll dothings that engage buyers, enable
them, win them over to our side.
(06:49):
And when we do that, then wewill be in more control I guess.
We work with a lot of companies thathave very long sales cycles and then
we get into this time of the year.
If you're doing in some cases, 12 to 18months sales cycles, you are planning
on building demand next year that isgoing to generate maybe pipeline, but
definitely close business in 2026.
(07:09):
So you really are thinking about howdo I spend money and then monetize
that in a different fiscal period.
And it's the same thing we're talkingabout here, where I'm saying, I'm
going to invest in building a market...
so if I take this out of the SDRfunction out of these, spray and
pray, trying to get meetings functionand say, okay, I'm investing in
brand, I'm investing in content, I'minvesting in educating the market,
(07:33):
which is a bunch of different channelsin many cases, it's the same thing.
And so are there scenarios where I cannow treat people on the phone, not as
an appointment setting function, but asdelivering value deposits in creating,
just another channel and a human tohuman channel, and perhaps one of our
most effective channels at creatingvalue, attention, trust, credibility.
(07:57):
Yeah, I think that's where it's at.
So I think, you've got to thinkabout the segments of your audience.
If you sell to multiple segments, yousell to big companies and large and
medium and that kind of stuff, whatyou're going to be able to do and what
you should do is going to differ, likethe involvement of human beings in the
mid market on down for accounts thatare either not in market or early stage,
(08:19):
you probably shouldn't have any humanbeings involved early in those processes.
But when you're talking about bigaccounts, strategic accounts, your sellers
should be in there engaged all the time.
Your seller should be making friends,developing relationships, building
networks inside those accounts.
And earlier I said that thenumbers I was giving applied to
(08:40):
80 percent of buying processes.
So there's 20 percent of buyingprocesses where buyers say, I was
engaged with the seller before I madethe a choice before I picked a winner.
I think those are the places whereyou've got really good sellers who build
relationships with buyers over time.
Those relationships travel fromcompany to company as your buyers move
(09:01):
around, but your sellers have builtthose relationships and they don't
have to play by the rules that sayyou don't get to influence the buyers.
They get to be involved in thoseconversations and that puts you
in a very advantageous position.
So at the right levels, you can do that.
When you've got strategic accounts,when you've got really important
accounts, you've got the rightkind of resource applied there.
(09:22):
Absolutely you can do thatand you don't have to play by
the rules if you do it well.
Yeah, I appreciate that.
We're talking today on salespipeline radio with Kerry Cunningham,
former SiriusDecisions formeranalyst and the author of the
New 2024 Buyer Experience Report.
Highly recommend, search for2024 Buyer Experience Report,
you will find on Google.
It is ungated.
It is pages and pages of contentthat I guarantee is going to
(09:44):
influence how you think about goto market going into next year.
So I think we've already talkedabout ways to create solutions
around how to do this better.
I want to talk a little bit aboutintent signals as we go into next
year, and I think about intent signalsas three areas, like intent to buy,
intent to engage, and then you haveneed and evidence of need signals.
It might be further up the buyingcommittee or buying journey.
(10:05):
And definitely our people that areready, but help us not just reach people
earlier in the process, but reach themwith the right context, because just
going and offering a one to many valueprop is one thing, reaching them where
they are based on something that'salready happening is even more valuable
and can accelerate the relationship.
So talk a little bit about whatthat is and what the opportunity is.
(10:27):
Yeah, I think first of all, theway every B2B marketer needs
to think about things is 1).
You've got to know whataccounts you care about.
That has to be an explicitagreement with sales.
You don't have to know the nameof everyone, depending upon the
size, but there has to be anagreement of what they look like.
And then intent signals are about,first of all, never, ever missing a
buying journey that happens withinthat patch that you care about.
(10:50):
That should be everybody's goal.
Just never miss one.
And the way to do that is to seethose signals when they arise.
What is important about, a 6sense thataggregates signals from many sources
is that you increase the odds of seeingthose buying processes and you improve
the quality of the signal, right?
(11:10):
So if I get signals from four or fivedifferent sources and they all point
to this account, looks like it'sin market now, that's a much better
signal than any one of the four orfive that went into the signal, right?
So just a triangulation principle.
Intent signals, first and foremost,make sure that you don't miss any, but
then what's the content of the signal?
What is the content of the signal tellus about what that buying group, because
(11:33):
it's always going to be a group signal.
What are they interested in?
If I've got five different solutions,which of those five solutions.
If they've got specific questions thatthey're researching, what are they?
And now do I have content thataddresses those questions specifically?
I think one of the big things that weneed to get away from is not sending
them a link and then making themfill in a form to see that content.
(11:56):
If you've got questions that you knowyour buyers have, and you've got an answer
to those questions, get it to them withas little friction for them as possible.
And they will like youand appreciate you for it.
If you give it to them and thenmake them jump through some hoops
or pay you in one way or another,you're just causing friction.
That's annoying.
It's bad enough that people say I've gotthis great piece of educational content
(12:20):
and I want people to register for it.
I got into a spirited discussionwith a company a couple of days
ago that wanted to put all of theircase studies behind a firewall.
And I'm like, if people actually wantto read your case studies, that sounds
like someone that wants to learn a littlemore about validating that this works.
Why would you ever put a barrier infront of them to get that information?
(12:40):
You and I know why, it's becausethey want to know who it is.
They want to know who it is so theycan track it, but that's a seller
problem, not a buyer problem.
Yeah, it's a trick to get your email.
I mean we've been around a long time.
We know content marketing was started asa trick to get emails, but it's evolved
to something actually useful for buyers.
And I think we're not all the waythere in the evolution of it yet.
(13:01):
So we need to move away from the trickphase of it and into the All right.
We're here to enable buyers.
And if we do thateffectively, we'll get to win.
Yeah.
I imagine if we're sitting here in ayear and talking about the next version
of this we're going to be talking alot about how AI agents are helping
to enable this conversation, where wecan build some trust with prospects,
(13:24):
but not have to have, a 24 yearold on the phone to play that role.
We can prognosticate about anything, buthow do you see those things evolving?
The educational nature of the earlybuying journey, the leverage of the
intent signals and AI agents helpyou to do some of that work for us.
Yeah, I love it.
So I go back to 2018 whenI was at SiriusDecisions.
(13:45):
I did a case study with some folks fromthe Global Demand Center at Microsoft.
They built their own conversationalemail tool that they put on top of
some predictive modeling that theydid over leads and they applied that.
They took a whole layer of their Ithink they call them inside sales
folks, but they took a whole layer ofthem that were dedicated to going out
(14:06):
and trying to get meetings and theymoved them up to become people who do
meetings and then there's no human beingout trying to get meetings anymore.
It's just taking meetings.
I think that's the model.
So we gave them a big award atSiriusDecisions, we wrote a case study
about that years ago, because that tome seems like the model we should be on.
It's you deliver content at scale.
(14:28):
Make sure your buyers get everythingfrom you that could help them prefer you.
That you offer yourselves, makeyourself available for meetings, but
that can't be the primary focus of it.
And the best way to do that to me isat scale and use AI agents to do that.
You don't need your humans doing that.
You need your humans in those biggeraccounts, mapping those accounts,
(14:49):
developing relationships, butthat's a different capability to me.
That's right.
Where should we send people if theywant to learn more about this report?
Where do people get thisto get the full deal?
Two things.
One is 6sense.com/research.
It'll send you to the spotand you won't miss it.
So that's easy-- 6sense.com/research
and then if you just find me on LinkedInonce you do, it's pretty hard to avoid.
(15:13):
And so you'll get a lot ofexposure to the research.
Absolutely.
Thank you, Kerry, for doing this.
Definitely check out the report.
I appreciate that, companies like6sense have taken folks from the old
SiriusDecsions glory days and put intowork on important topics like this and
saying, go do your thing, go be research.
And so to help us figure out what, insome cases, Kerry, are inconvenient
truths based on what we've alwaysdone and what we want to do.
(15:36):
But I think if we listen and we followdirection, I think you get an opportunity
to create something that is a much morevaluable experience for our prospects.
So thank you for all that you do.
Thank you for saying that.
That is exactly right.
How I would put it, if I were tosay it better than I have been.
Thanks everyone for listening.
Appreciate everyone being here.
We will be dark next weekfor the Thanksgiving holiday.
But thank you everyonefor being part of this.
(15:57):
Thanks again, Kerry.
We'll see y'all in December for moreepisodes of Sales Pipeline Radio.
Until then, happy Thanksgiving.
We'll see y'all soon.
Thanks, Matt.
Alright, welcome to anotherepisode of Sales Pipeline Radio.
My name is Matt Heinz,I'm your host today.
Thank you so much for joining us.
So excited to have you all here.
If you're listening or watching on demand,Thank you for subscribing and listening.
Every episode of Sales PipelineRadio, always available at
www.salespipelineradio.Com.
Very excited today to have formerForrester SiriusDecisions Analyst,
(00:39):
Kerry Cunningham, join us to talk aboutsome fairly new research that I feel
like I'm seeing all over the place,but every time I see it, Kerry, there's
another angle that is super interestingin terms of how we think about go
to market motions going into 2025.
So thank you for being here now.
Yeah, glad to be here.
I'm glad that's how you're feelingabout it because it does impact a lot
(01:02):
of how we go to market and be B2B.
And it changes what we've been used toand what we treat as the common way of
building pipeline in a lot of cases.
So I have a lot of questions and points Iwant to dig into, but wanted to start with
just you giving the thesis of the researchand why you did it and what you found.
Yeah.
(01:22):
So 30 seconds of it is that we'vesurveyed buyers in B2B, all kinds
of buyers, not just SaaS, butlots of SaaS, of course, as well.
And we did it globally.
We've done it two years in a row.
And what we found is essentiallythe same thing two years in a
row and everywhere in the world.
And what I'm going to sayapplies to 80 percent of buyers.
Buyers say that they don't engage withsellers until they're about 70 percent
(01:45):
of the way through their buying journey.
The trigger for engaging withsellers is that they have set
their requirements and decidedwhich vendor they want to buy from.
And that's the simple thing to say.
It really does and should changeeverything and then there are other pieces
of it, like one of the fundamental thingsthat we've assumed in marketing is that
(02:07):
you generate leads, you hand them off toBDRs, SDRs to follow up on them and that
process can cause buyers often we thinkcan cause them to go into market, which
is crazy in a way that we'll talk about.
But also that the simple thing thatjust because we're calling and emailing
folks, we can get them to engage with us.
And what buyers have said really clearlytwo years in a row is that no, you can't.
(02:30):
It's true, right?
And I think because we've always assumedthat we can just call and dial and
email our way out of this problem--.
And AI is making this almost worsebecause AI makes it easier, faster,
cheaper to get those emails out.
And Challenger almost tells uswe can do this, that we can tell
people the status quo change.
We can challenge the status quo.
We can get them to thinkdifferently about the problem and
(02:51):
move them into a sales process.
And I guess the research shows howarrogant are we to think that we are
going to change what happens insidethese large complex buying organizations?
Arrogant.
And I think also we've lacked justthe basic self consciousness of
understanding how do we operate?
Just think about how youoperate in your organization.
(03:13):
Could somebody call you today?
And cause you to go into marketto buy some big system that
you rely on this quarter?
Unless you were alreadywell along that path.
The answer is of course not.
It takes longer than that toget the budget for anything
above, relatively small amount.
So unless you've already got itbudgeted, unless you've already got
(03:35):
it planned, nobody's going to calland get you to do something that
you weren't already planning to do.
So from that perspective, Ithink we all already knew that.
But we don't operate that way.
We want to believe that we cancause and control things...
A moment's reflection wouldtell you, No, you can't.
You really can't.
That's not what we're doing.
(03:55):
And what we're doing is, I think6Sense is a great example of this.
You build a brand that peoplewant to be associated with.
You put yourself in all of the placeswhere your customers and prospects are,
and you deliver value to them even whenthey're not in market, so that when they
go into market, you're on the top of thelist or you're at least on the list, and
(04:16):
you get to play for that deal and thenbuild mechanisms that capture all of that
and don't miss it when it's happening.
And for some, it doesn't sound assexy, it doesn't feel like you're
as in control, but I think it'smuch more aligned to reality.
To me, You are still in control becauseyou still can get that message of value
and education in front of a prospect.
But what you're saying is it's notgoing to generate immediate pipeline.
(04:38):
And to me, this is a fundamental changeto how people think about the buying
journey and think about what is asales and what is a marketing motion?
Cause what you're saying is thateffort to reach prospects before
they're ready to buy, before they'reready to engage with you is not going
to generate pipeline, but is stillcritical to generating future pipeline.
(05:00):
The models we have need to get a littlemore complex, but need to be very
clear about what motion is doing what.
That's it.
That's exactly right.
And it's really importantfor everybody to hear that.
Cause I think when I talk about it, Iget so excited about the new findings and
what they mean that it can get lost inthe way that I talk about it, that it's
not that you should stop doing things.
(05:21):
And it's not that you shouldn'teven reach out to buyers.
You should, but you have to understand,what the research shows really clearly.
Whether buyers are receivingcalls or emails from sellers
and BDRs or not, does not changewhen or if they engage with you.
It just doesn't.
So all of that activity that you'reengaged in, that you think is causing
(05:43):
meetings, is catching meetingsthat you were already going to get.
Maybe a little bit later, maybea week later, maybe two weeks
later, something like that.
But if they engage with you, it'sbecause they were already going to
engage with you and you're catching that.
So you got to have themechanism out there to catch it.
You want that.
Make it easy.
(06:04):
Remove the friction.
All of that.
But again, if you work in a decent sizedcompany and you've got systems, things
that you've been involved in buying thatare 20, 30, 50, $100,000 a year kinds of
solutions, how long did that process take?
And did it start becausesomebody called or emailed you?
Or did it start because you had abusiness problem, you all worked
(06:26):
on that internally, you decided togo into market and then you engaged
with sellers when you were ready?
I think it looked a lot like thelast thing that I said, right?
And I think we just needto be thinking about that.
And when we do, then we'll dothings that engage buyers, enable
them, win them over to our side.
(06:49):
And when we do that, then wewill be in more control I guess.
We work with a lot of companies thathave very long sales cycles and then
we get into this time of the year.
If you're doing in some cases, 12 to 18months sales cycles, you are planning
on building demand next year that isgoing to generate maybe pipeline, but
definitely close business in 2026.
(07:09):
So you really are thinking about howdo I spend money and then monetize
that in a different fiscal period.
And it's the same thing we're talkingabout here, where I'm saying, I'm
going to invest in building a market...
so if I take this out of the SDRfunction out of these, spray and
pray, trying to get meetings functionand say, okay, I'm investing in
brand, I'm investing in content, I'minvesting in educating the market,
(07:33):
which is a bunch of different channelsin many cases, it's the same thing.
And so are there scenarios where I cannow treat people on the phone, not as
an appointment setting function, but asdelivering value deposits in creating,
just another channel and a human tohuman channel, and perhaps one of our
most effective channels at creatingvalue, attention, trust, credibility.
(07:57):
Yeah, I think that's where it's at.
So I think, you've got to thinkabout the segments of your audience.
If you sell to multiple segments, yousell to big companies and large and
medium and that kind of stuff, whatyou're going to be able to do and what
you should do is going to differ, likethe involvement of human beings in the
mid market on down for accounts thatare either not in market or early stage,
(08:19):
you probably shouldn't have any humanbeings involved early in those processes.
But when you're talking about bigaccounts, strategic accounts, your sellers
should be in there engaged all the time.
Your seller should be making friends,developing relationships, building
networks inside those accounts.
And earlier I said that thenumbers I was giving applied to
(08:40):
80 percent of buying processes.
So there's 20 percent of buyingprocesses where buyers say, I was
engaged with the seller before I madethe a choice before I picked a winner.
I think those are the places whereyou've got really good sellers who build
relationships with buyers over time.
Those relationships travel fromcompany to company as your buyers move
(09:01):
around, but your sellers have builtthose relationships and they don't
have to play by the rules that sayyou don't get to influence the buyers.
They get to be involved in thoseconversations and that puts you
in a very advantageous position.
So at the right levels, you can do that.
When you've got strategic accounts,when you've got really important
accounts, you've got the rightkind of resource applied there.
(09:22):
Absolutely you can do thatand you don't have to play by
the rules if you do it well.
Yeah, I appreciate that.
We're talking today on salespipeline radio with Kerry Cunningham,
former SiriusDecisions formeranalyst and the author of the
New 2024 Buyer Experience Report.
Highly recommend, search for2024 Buyer Experience Report,
you will find on Google.
It is ungated.
It is pages and pages of contentthat I guarantee is going to
(09:44):
influence how you think about goto market going into next year.
So I think we've already talkedabout ways to create solutions
around how to do this better.
I want to talk a little bit aboutintent signals as we go into next
year, and I think about intent signalsas three areas, like intent to buy,
intent to engage, and then you haveneed and evidence of need signals.
It might be further up the buyingcommittee or buying journey.
(10:05):
And definitely our people that areready, but help us not just reach people
earlier in the process, but reach themwith the right context, because just
going and offering a one to many valueprop is one thing, reaching them where
they are based on something that'salready happening is even more valuable
and can accelerate the relationship.
So talk a little bit about whatthat is and what the opportunity is.
(10:27):
Yeah, I think first of all, theway every B2B marketer needs
to think about things is 1).
You've got to know whataccounts you care about.
That has to be an explicitagreement with sales.
You don't have to know the nameof everyone, depending upon the
size, but there has to be anagreement of what they look like.
And then intent signals are about,first of all, never, ever missing a
buying journey that happens withinthat patch that you care about.
(10:50):
That should be everybody's goal.
Just never miss one.
And the way to do that is to seethose signals when they arise.
What is important about, a 6sense thataggregates signals from many sources
is that you increase the odds of seeingthose buying processes and you improve
the quality of the signal, right?
(11:10):
So if I get signals from four or fivedifferent sources and they all point
to this account, looks like it'sin market now, that's a much better
signal than any one of the four orfive that went into the signal, right?
So just a triangulation principle.
Intent signals, first and foremost,make sure that you don't miss any, but
then what's the content of the signal?
What is the content of the signal tellus about what that buying group, because
(11:33):
it's always going to be a group signal.
What are they interested in?
If I've got five different solutions,which of those five solutions.
If they've got specific questions thatthey're researching, what are they?
And now do I have content thataddresses those questions specifically?
I think one of the big things that weneed to get away from is not sending
them a link and then making themfill in a form to see that content.
(11:56):
If you've got questions that you knowyour buyers have, and you've got an answer
to those questions, get it to them withas little friction for them as possible.
And they will like youand appreciate you for it.
If you give it to them and thenmake them jump through some hoops
or pay you in one way or another,you're just causing friction.
That's annoying.
It's bad enough that people say I've gotthis great piece of educational content
(12:20):
and I want people to register for it.
I got into a spirited discussionwith a company a couple of days
ago that wanted to put all of theircase studies behind a firewall.
And I'm like, if people actually wantto read your case studies, that sounds
like someone that wants to learn a littlemore about validating that this works.
Why would you ever put a barrier infront of them to get that information?
(12:40):
You and I know why, it's becausethey want to know who it is.
They want to know who it is so theycan track it, but that's a seller
problem, not a buyer problem.
Yeah, it's a trick to get your email.
I mean we've been around a long time.
We know content marketing was started asa trick to get emails, but it's evolved
to something actually useful for buyers.
And I think we're not all the waythere in the evolution of it yet.
(13:01):
So we need to move away from the trickphase of it and into the All right.
We're here to enable buyers.
And if we do thateffectively, we'll get to win.
Yeah.
I imagine if we're sitting here in ayear and talking about the next version
of this we're going to be talking alot about how AI agents are helping
to enable this conversation, where wecan build some trust with prospects,
(13:24):
but not have to have, a 24 yearold on the phone to play that role.
We can prognosticate about anything, buthow do you see those things evolving?
The educational nature of the earlybuying journey, the leverage of the
intent signals and AI agents helpyou to do some of that work for us.
Yeah, I love it.
So I go back to 2018 whenI was at SiriusDecisions.
(13:45):
I did a case study with some folks fromthe Global Demand Center at Microsoft.
They built their own conversationalemail tool that they put on top of
some predictive modeling that theydid over leads and they applied that.
They took a whole layer of their Ithink they call them inside sales
folks, but they took a whole layer ofthem that were dedicated to going out
(14:06):
and trying to get meetings and theymoved them up to become people who do
meetings and then there's no human beingout trying to get meetings anymore.
It's just taking meetings.
I think that's the model.
So we gave them a big award atSiriusDecisions, we wrote a case study
about that years ago, because that tome seems like the model we should be on.
It's you deliver content at scale.
(14:28):
Make sure your buyers get everythingfrom you that could help them prefer you.
That you offer yourselves, makeyourself available for meetings, but
that can't be the primary focus of it.
And the best way to do that to me isat scale and use AI agents to do that.
You don't need your humans doing that.
You need your humans in those biggeraccounts, mapping those accounts,
(14:49):
developing relationships, butthat's a different capability to me.
That's right.
Where should we send people if theywant to learn more about this report?
Where do people get thisto get the full deal?
Two things.
One is 6sense.com/research.
It'll send you to the spotand you won't miss it.
So that's easy-- 6sense.com/research
and then if you just find me on LinkedInonce you do, it's pretty hard to avoid.
(15:13):
And so you'll get a lot ofexposure to the research.
Absolutely.
Thank you, Kerry, for doing this.
Definitely check out the report.
I appreciate that, companies like6sense have taken folks from the old
SiriusDecsions glory days and put intowork on important topics like this and
saying, go do your thing, go be research.
And so to help us figure out what, insome cases, Kerry, are inconvenient
truths based on what we've alwaysdone and what we want to do.
(15:36):
But I think if we listen and we followdirection, I think you get an opportunity
to create something that is a much morevaluable experience for our prospects.
So thank you for all that you do.
Thank you for saying that.
That is exactly right.
How I would put it, if I were tosay it better than I have been.
Thanks everyone for listening.
Appreciate everyone being here.
We will be dark next weekfor the Thanksgiving holiday.
But thank you everyonefor being part of this.
(15:57):
Thanks again, Kerry.
We'll see y'all in December for moreepisodes of Sales Pipeline Radio.
Until then, happy Thanksgiving.
We'll see y'all soon.
Thanks, Matt.
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