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April 20, 2020 43 mins

In this episode, Josh and Kyle discuss:

  • What does the recent M&A activity mean for MOPs and SOPs teams?
  • Best of Breed vs All-in-One Software - What to choose?
  • Creating a business case for marketing software.
  • How to use technology for ABM pilots?
  • What can we expect in the coming years from marketing, sales, and technology?


About Josh Wagner
Josh started out like many sales professionals, cold calling! He knew early on there had to be a better way and adopted content marketing strategies to further his career. While honing his skills with basic email marketing tools and social strategies he found and fully embraced marketing automation as a way to fuel sales success. As a former client, LeadMD was there to help him build a better sales and marketing engine during his time as the Sales and Marketing Director for a Phoenix-based e-learning company. Now leading the Sales team for LeadMD, Josh brings enthusiasm and passion for helping his team and LeadMD customers accelerate revenue growth.

When not "bringing home the bacon" Josh loves to spend time with his wife and their 3 funny little humans. What time is leftover is spent throwing some weight around in his garage gym.


About Kyle Hamer
A sales and marketing veteran with a deep understanding of strategy, digital marketing execution, and using technology to enhance brand impact. A hands-on leader with a passion for solving business challenges with process, operations, and technology. When Kyle's not tinkering on businesses, you'll find him spending time with those he loves, learning about incredible people, and making connections.

About Hamer Marketing Group
Market growth for a new product or service is often limited by market distractions, unreliable data, or systems not built to scale.  Hamer Marketing Group helps companies build data-driven strategies focused on client acquisition and sales development supported by the technology and operations necessary to create profitable growth. on 



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Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Kyle Hamer (00:04):
Welcome to the summit, the podcast where we
bring your knowledge andinsights from industry leaders
and professionals.
No fluff, no double digitovernight growth schemes.
We're having real conversationswith real people and today our
special guest is Josh Wagnerfrom lead MD.
Josh, welcome to the show.
Hey, thanks Kyle.
Great to be here or glad to haveyou.
Josh, why don't you tell us alittle bit about yourself?

Josh Wagner (00:26):
Well, I am a long time sales and marketing
professional, probably as youngas I look.
I've got 20 years under my beltdoing both sales and digital
marketing and I grew up despitemy Pinchot for poking fun at
marketing technology.
I actually grew up in marketingtechnology, was a early adopter

(00:46):
of Marquetto in the late part ofthe two thousands and uh,
realized that there was actuallya better way than just cold
calling, smiling, dialing and,and making your way through the
phone book.
So super happy to talk aboutsome of those things with you.

Kyle Hamer (01:00):
That's awesome.
Today I think we're going tospend a little bit of time
talking about the state ofmarketing technology and how it
applies to sales.
And then overall what we seehappening with software, there's
a lot of merger and acquisitionstuff happening.
And then ultimately, you know,somebody like yourself is seeing
what this is doing to teams onthe front line.
So, you know, just kind ofstarting us off here.

(01:21):
What is it that you're seeinghappening related to the
technologies?

Josh Wagner (01:26):
Well, it's interesting that you started off
with that acquisition piece ofit.
And it's funny when you, whenyou think about how these
acquisitions all come about,right?
You, you rewind to kind of theGenesis of when all of these
things really picked up steamand we'll say that the early
marketing automation players gotall of this started, right?

(01:47):
Um, what we'll say Marquettowhich was where I started.
So Marquetto solve this problemof nurture, lead scoring,
providing insights to sales, allthese things, right?
And then as people got excitedand started implementing and
doing stuff, they found allthese gaps in the things that

(02:08):
Marketo doesn't do.
So someone from Marquetto spinsoff and creates a company and
this company is designed to fillthis specific gap that Marketo
doesn't feel.
And then that just extrapolatesand you get derivatives of all
of these different companiesthat are basically gap fillers,
right?

(02:28):
So that's why the MarTechlandscape is literally as big as
it is.
You see these 6,000 companies, Ibet you two thirds of them are
gap fillers.
It's a spin off of anothercompany that's going a gap for
that product.
The thing that they didn't do,and the problem with that, if
you rewind it back to like thecompany and the people buying
this stuff is these spinoffs getbought by a person who felt that

(02:51):
pain.
It gets siloed many times.
It's not a huge ticket purchase.
So it gets pulled into a smallteam.
It never gets involved.
Sales never gets involved, youknow, it just becomes the siloed
thing and then all of a suddenyou've got this tech stack
that's super bloated.
You've got cross-functionalitynow what you were trying to do

(03:14):
is fill gaps.
Now you've got all these thingsoverlapping because as it turns
out, when you put something inmarket, there's just a gap
filler on its own.
It's not going to generateenough sales to continue that
growth.
So you start tacking stuff on,Oh, we're a predictive company,
but we're also a customer dataplatform.
But we're also an attributionplatform.

(03:34):
But we're also this, we're alsothat.
So every point solution has tostart moving towards this
platform play to make themselvesinteresting.
And you just get a bunch ofjumbled up garbage, bloated tech
stack in which companies are notseeing the value in because
there's no connectivity.

(03:55):
And I think that's the biggestthing that you're going to see
as things trend forward is thatidea of connectivity,

Kyle Hamer (04:01):
which is lost right now when you talk about the idea
of connectivity, I think sothere's a couple of things that
you, you mentioned there Josh,that I think are really
interesting because you talkedabout point fillers or you know,
derivatives and fit in specificareas.
And um, in the software spacethat's usually taking the best
of breed approach.
Like, well, I can get a littlebit of this and we'll get

(04:23):
together.
But then there's also this newconcept of all in one platform
really I think driven a lot bySalesforce and their um, their
Salesforce development and theirapps.
And I mean the, the Genesis ofwhat Salesforce was when it
first came out, right?
Salesforce was well actinggoldmine really don't want to go

(04:45):
online.
So we're going to be the onlineversion of a CRM.
And then that expanded into,well there's all these custom
things people want to do, solet's let them build their own
integration points or customobjects or custom functionality
and flow inside of Salesforce,which led into this entire
development platform.
Is there anybody in themarketing space that's following

(05:07):
the same footsteps or kind ofheaded that direction or is
there, are we really all stillbeen holding back to the
almighty Salesforce and CRM?
Well,

Josh Wagner (05:15):
I mean that's an interesting question because you
could go a couple of differentroutes.
I think in the, in the bigplayer space, they have to go
the platform route because it'sthe only way to continue to
acquire, right.
Okay.
I'm Adobe and I acquire Marketo.
Am I acquiring that platform oram I acquiring a segment of the

(05:37):
customer of the market that I'mnot strong in?
It's as much that as it isanything else, right?
So the Salesforces, theMicrosofts, the Adobes SAP, the
big players are going to have tocontinue to acquire so that they
can have this platform play thatis this all in one so that they
could continue to attract otherpieces of the business.

(05:59):
Now in the marketing space, Ithink Adobe's probably your
closest, I remember a year agowhen the acquisition chatter was
really starting to fire up,right?
And as one of Marketo's toppartners really like, Aw man,
if, if more cattle gets acquiredby Salesforce or SAP, like we're

(06:19):
screwed.
I mean it's just, it's not goingto get innovated on anymore.
They're not marketing companies.
It's just going to suck.
Right.
I think for a big acquisitionlike that, for someone like us,
a small niche service companyplayer on a platform, that was
the best case scenario becauseAdobe, Adobe's a marketing
company, right?
I mean they were built onconsumer based marketing

(06:42):
products that were sold inboxes.
I remember when I started myfirst company, you know, I
bought the box for Photoshop, Ibought the box for dream Weaver,
I bought, you know what I mean?
And now does that concept is thepeople buying the stuff now they
don't even know what the hellyou're talking about.
What's a box?
So, Oh, that's a long winded wayof saying I think that the big
guys will continue to be big andwe'll have to innovate through

(07:07):
acquisition, right?
And acquire new customersthrough acquisition and new
markets through acquisition.
What does an opportunity goesback to something that you said
prior, which is stitchingtogether solutions.
There may actually beopportunities for people to make
some hay in the non enterprisemid-market with actually

(07:28):
stitching together solutionsthat might be more effective
than plugging in a platform likeMarketo or Salesforce or
something like that.
I'll give you an example.
So what we find oftentimes isthat data is the biggest silo
and lack of connectivity withinan organization, right?
So you've got disparate datasources all across.
You've got ERP, CRM, website,back end product.

(07:53):
If you're a product company,you've got a whatever, right?
You've got all these differentdata sources.
If you're in healthcare, you'vegot a EMS system, you know,
whatever.
Yeah, and stitching all thatdata together into something
that's meaningful and gives youa true view of what your
customer actually looks like isreally, really challenging.
So for a big company that'salready down that path of siloed

(08:16):
data, a lot of differentsystems, you know, the whole
scenario we talked about before,it's going to happen, it's going
to be some big overhauls, it'sgoing to be the next wave of
transformation.
You know, we've talked aboutdigital transformation.
I think data transformation isprobably gonna be the next wave
across marketing and sales.
But for the smaller companies,let's say now, okay, let's be

(08:37):
nimble, right?
We want to build a datainfrastructure that makes sense
now.
So let's look at potentially acustomer data platform that can
give us a full circle view ofwhat's going on.
We can do identity resolution,we can do customer stitching, we
do this and we do that.
And from this center of thisfoundation, everyone's like, Oh,
data is the foundation ofeverything, but nobody takes

(08:58):
action on that.
They just like to say it.
And then when you come in andsay, all right, well we need to
fix your day.
They're like, ah, yeah, I meanwe do, but can't we just, you
know, run some more campaigns orsomething?
Sure.
So I think what you could seehappening is create the center
around data, truly foundationalcenter around data and create
point solutions as endpoints tothe data, right?

(09:20):
You want to do email a scale.
I mean, to be perfectly honestwith you, if you've got a
database of 50 million people,Marquetto is not a great
solution for you.
They'll say otherwise, but it'snot the right solution.
There could be, there could besomething else.
It could be a way cheapersolution that's just really good
at sending high introductionalemail.
And for that use case, we'regoing to plug that into our data

(09:43):
infrastructure, right?
We want to do displayadvertising and end and push
people to digital.
Well, there could be that as apart of a big platform but there
could be a niche player that'svery good at that and they are
really good at taking audiencesand pushing at scale to that.
So let's plug that in, right?
And you can start to see thishub and spoke model almost like

(10:03):
Southwest airlines.
You know everyone else got thehub and spoke, but Southwest has
the point solution, right?
Where you could go with thismodel where we make data, the
foundation and we do plug in thebest of breed solution as
endpoints for all the differenttactical things we want to do in
marketing and sales and thatcould have some legs.
I don't see that happeningtomorrow, but enterprises are

(10:27):
going to go through some serioushiccups with the, with the data
orchestration piece of it,they're going to do it, they
have the money to do it.
I'm getting the executive teambuy off on the level of money
it's really going to take to doit.
It's going to take time, butyou're starting to see it happen
like you really are.
The conversations are happening,building out the use cases, the
business cases for it arestarting to happen.
It's really positive momentum.

(10:49):
But if you're not embedded inthat already and you've got an
opportunity to, you know, startfresh as a mid-market smaller
company and you're already in acycle with a big established
player, maybe it's anopportunity to think about it a
little bit differently.

Kyle Hamer (11:04):
It's interesting that you bring that up.
A couple of weeks ago we had um,Mark Skiles who is working, um,
he works in data is a basicallya fractional CEO, chief digital
officer and he was talking abouta project that he was working on
for a really large, um, genomein the agriculture, um, company,

(11:26):
a company really large in the agspace and dealing with the data
silos.
And he was talking about theprocess they had to go through
for, for hygiene and governanceand you know, inner polarity and
connectivity between what'sgoing on in the R and D versus
what's happening in operationsor finance and over into sales
and like all of these differentsilos.

(11:46):
Well, it's interesting to hearyou talk about is, is it's like,
well normally players likeMarquetto a Loquat, you're SAP,
those guys go to the enterprisefirst and that's where they get
a foothold.
Yeah.
But they're so far entrenched inthe organization that for them
to make this switch is, isreally challenging.
It's almost easier for a midsize or even a small, like you

(12:08):
must have better data in the midsize to a small business and
what's really going on inside ofthe business from a metrics and
stuff that matters than you doat an enterprise level.
So when you talk aboutleveraging point solutions, how
does a, how does a businessowner or a business leader,
somebody who's kind of in chargeof these things, how do they

(12:29):
begin to start looking at whatthey have and say, well, do I
need a CDP or w w when do Istart to need to make these
decisions or, or, or look to dodifferently?
What's typically the pain thatyou see that's forcing the
change in behavior?

Josh Wagner (12:44):
Well, the pain is squarely comes down to reporting
and reporting for the board.
I mean more and moreacquisitions are happening.
We just talked about that.
But PE is very active right now,uh, in the MarTech space.
And you're seeing even with, youknow, not even just MarTech

(13:07):
vendors, but companies that arekind of those customers as well,
where PE is taking an activerole, they're coming in and
their view of marketing is sonarrow.
It's, it's all right, you betterturn on the leads and I want
that lead report, this and that.
So what happens is the boardwants reporting and they want to

(13:27):
see impact and they want to seeleads and they want to see
what's driving the most leads.
Now, as a new CMO that gotbrought in, whether it's by the
board or somebody else, yourfirst job is to educate and help
the board understand that that'snot marketing, right?
Marketing is not just leads andwhat channels for writing the

(13:48):
most leads, because for the mostpart, those books don't know a
lot about marketing.
So the CMO has a greatopportunity to educate the
marketplace, right?
But part of that education comesmore accountability and you need
to be willing to take that onyour shoulders and provide the
board with reporting thatactually matters.
Okay, here's what I'm doing.

(14:10):
I did a data analysis that saysthese are the people I'm
targeting, here's why I'mtargeting them and these are the
things that we're going to do tostart to drive pipeline support,
the sales team and ultimatelyrevenue.
So if you're a mid sized companyand you find yourself in that
situation first back into whatare the reporting outcomes that

(14:30):
you need to report into who andwhy.
Right.
And then work backwards fromthere.
That's where I would start is,is who's asking for it.
Right.

Kyle Hamer (14:42):
Well I mean that's really interesting when you talk
about when we moved from MNA andwhat's happening into the space
to how that's actually impactinginside the boardroom.
What is, what has caused theshift from being a, well, you
know we just need more leads andfocusing on bottom of the funnel
activities to, you know, thewhole mechanism that is

(15:06):
marketing and trying to reporton it.
Like, is it, is it the evolutionof marketing mix modeling?
Is it, is it the evolution of,of software in general?
Is it boiling down to, Hey, wecan quantify things that we
couldn't before?
Like what's, what's reallypushing behind this shift?
[inaudible]

Josh Wagner (15:22):
so I actually think that this is something that
MarTech got right, right.
This drive towards, uh, was itJohn Miller, Phil Fernandez from
Marquetto who, who saidmarketing now has a seat at the
revenue table.
Like that line in itself, I feellike it's propelled marketing

(15:43):
into this place of you can'tjust be pretty pictures and
brand pretty pictures and brandneeds to be supported and
substantiated by something.
So I actually feel like that'ssomething that MarTech got
right.
Really driving that coal idea ofokay, all this stuff is out
there.
How do we funnel it into oneplace and look at, okay, we can

(16:08):
see some things are performingbetter than others and not even
some things are performing froman acquisition side better than
others, but something suck froman acquisition standpoint.
But really do a great job midbottom of funnel of converting
into revenue.
Well, that's interesting.
We've never really thought aboutthat before.
Is that marketing's job?

(16:29):
It is now, right?
We never thought about anythingmore than leads, acquisition
ads, anything like that.
2025 30 years ago.
Right?
Well now if you're going to runup, I think you commented on a
close the other day I put on ABMif you know, companies always
want to run a pilot forsomething, right?

(16:49):
Uh, running an ABM pilot, I urgeeveryone to stay as far away as
possible from running an ABMpilot on net new acquisition to
close revenue like[inaudible].
If you're running ABM, chancesare it's a long hefty sales
cycle with big numbers attachedto it, right?
Go fine.
A cohort of bottom of funnel midfunnel accounts that are stuck

(17:12):
and run your ABM pilot therebecause it's a faster path to
impact.
And just that thought processalone puts marketing in a way
different light with anexecutive audience then they've
probably ever thought aboutbefore, Oh, we're not talking
about leads.
What are we talking about here?
We're talking about generatingrevenue for you with a whole

(17:33):
bunch of people who know who youare, you're talking to, but
they're not getting over theline and this is how we can help
support you in that and yoursales organization.
That's a different conversation.
And like I said before, I thinkthe Genesis of all that was
MarTech exposing us to differentstuff.
So

Kyle Hamer (17:52):
what does that mean?
Your typical, you touched on itbriefly, brand and being able to
quantify it.
What does this mean for the new,the new age of moniker marketer?
They've got this, the series oftechnology that's in front of
them in the majority of peoplehave historically been
communicators, right?
Like I got a comms degree and Iwrite and I'm in marketing and

(18:14):
maybe I'm in an industrial spacein manufacturing or here in
Houston we've got a lot ofenergy where they'll have small
marketing teams.
One, two, three people.
Most of them are internal comms,a little bit of PR, but for the
most part they're just writers.
What is the change of takingthat seat from communications
and now moving into revenue?
What does that change for whatthe skills then the new set of

(18:37):
marketers need to be effective?

Josh Wagner (18:40):
So we talked about this a little bit when you were
on my podcast actually, which isthe ability to have a business
conversation, right?
And we talked about it in thecontext of salespeople, but it's
no different, right?
You look across the C suite andthe CMOs still has by far the
shortest tenure of any of itspeers in the C suite.

(19:01):
CEO, CFO are crushing.
I mean they're, they're thelongest by far.
Uh, COO and CIO are a closesecond.
And then like it's a cliff, theCOO and the cliff is, you're not
talking to me about businessstuff.
Everybody else is looking atspreadsheets and ledgers, profit

(19:22):
margins, revenue costallocation, like they're looking
at the business side of it.
And marketing's not coming withthat angle.
So if your track is to be a CMO,you better learn how to wrap
what you're doing into thebusiness context, right?
If you want to be a communicatoror a traditional marketer,

(19:46):
there's still a place for you inmarketing.
That stuff still has to happen.
Um, we need marketing needs,great writers.
They need great communicators.
They need all the things right.
You can't not do, you can't domarketing without them.
But like I said, if your path isto project the profession of
marketing, hire and get into theC suite, you have to learn to

(20:09):
speak language.
And there's a good example thatwe got exposed to our CMO
actually did a podcast with a,or an interview with Allocadia,
their head of marketing andthey're head of marketing offs
actually.
And they ran something that I'dnever heard of before, which was
marketing ops and revenue opsrolled up to the CFO.

(20:33):
And the CFO said, listen, I livein a world of data.
We have data everywhere,spreadsheets, numbers, this,
that ledgers.
When I peeled back the curtainon the amount of data marketing
deals, I was blown away.
So now when something needs toget funded to fix marketing ops,

(21:01):
it gets funded.
It has visibility at the C suiteis someone that says this data
stuff is important.
It's a problem.
There's a lot of it.
And if we don't get our armsaround it, it's costing us
money.
And they know the exactfinancial impact of it because
it's a business conversationnow.
It's not just a a marketingconversation.
And that was super insightful tome because I think that's where

(21:22):
the marketing team has to go.
They have to be able to go tothe CFO's office, knock on the
door and say, man, our ads orare not performing.
But I think it's a deeper issue.
And that deeper issue is a dataissue and well, what do you mean
by that?
Well, let me show you and reallybe able to dive into the cost of

(21:43):
bad data.
The cost of running bad-ass, thecost of just buying lists, the
costs, you know, whatever it maybe that we, the bad practices we
do in marketing, take that up alevel.
Right.
And I think that's where themarketer can start to propel
themselves higher into the Csuite and extend their tenure in
the CCU for those that aremaking it there.

(22:04):
I think that's[inaudible]

Kyle Hamer (22:05):
I think, I think that's valuable for people that
are listening to think aboutwhat kind of the next steps are.

Josh Wagner (22:10):
You know, when I, uh, when I was, uh, in marketing
leadership

Kyle Hamer (22:15):
and an organization, we were spending close to 35% of
our annual budget on,

Josh Wagner (22:20):
on, on software.

Kyle Hamer (22:22):
So whether it was, um, whether it was Marquetto or
it was the, you know, the, thetool that we were using to track
Yesware shores, the border,almost 35% of our annualized
budget was spent on[inaudible]

Josh Wagner (22:36):
Tula[inaudible]

Kyle Hamer (22:37):
and the COO and CEO would come all the time.
And I'm like, why do you need tospend this much money on
technology?

Josh Wagner (22:43):
Well,

Kyle Hamer (22:44):
we'd understand if the dollar we're spending is, is
helping us acquire somebodythat's net new or if it's being
used to retain the folks that wecurrently have.
And what's the influence ofthose dollars?

Josh Wagner (22:54):
Either way, some tools are really good for
tracking growth into net new andsome are actually good at
tracking upsell, cross sell.
Right.
And, and when we've looked at,we pulled that one spreadsheet,

Kyle Hamer (23:05):
which was our, uh, our program configuration and
campaign alignment matrix.
So where did the lead come fromand are we, or how are we doing
our attribution model for,

Josh Wagner (23:15):
for Marquetto [inaudible]

Kyle Hamer (23:17):
and the, if I remember right, it was 13 or 13
columns, right?

Josh Wagner (23:25):
Why 56 columns deep?

Kyle Hamer (23:29):
And we pull this out.
We showed it to them and theywere like, well, what explained
this to him?
And about 10 minutes into it,the CEO, his eyes rolled back
the back of his head.
He's like, okay,

Josh Wagner (23:38):
to your point, you guys have a lot that you're
tracking.
We don't fully appreciate thatwhen we get the report that says
you got a hundred

Kyle Hamer (23:46):
leads from this paid ad, right?
We only converted$3 of them.
All of those a hundred leadsthat we paid for, maybe 50 of
them were already customers.

Josh Wagner (23:55):
Right?
Those are there things that, um,

Kyle Hamer (24:00):
executives at the business level don't necessarily
appreciate as marketingdepartments are parsing data and
sharing information and tryingto bring to light what's really
happening

Josh Wagner (24:09):
with every dollar that goes in.
There's been a misnomer foryears.
Um, it's, it's become a lot offolklore, which is

Kyle Hamer (24:18):
50% of every dollar I spend on marketing is wasted.
You just don't know which 50, Ijust don't know what 50 I'm
going to buy MarTech.
Tell me what 50% are wasting andstop spending it.

Josh Wagner (24:29):
That's right.

Kyle Hamer (24:31):
Tell me, tell me how that's applying or playing out
today as, as you see it likeit's, do we still have, are we
still beholding to that or isMarTech changing the state?

Josh Wagner (24:40):
The landscape of our dollars, uh, MarTech as I
like to say is and should be anenabler, right?
So it's not a substitute forsounded better market strategy.
It's not a substitute for areally good process.

(25:00):
It's not a substitute for yourrelationship with your
counterparts in sales.
It's, it's not a substitute forany of those things.
It's an enabler of all of thosethings.
So if you were to look at any ofthose systems as a, as you're
going through an evaluation tosay, Hey, I really need to
understand what 50% is workingand what's not.

(25:23):
First take a step back and say,is that the problem I'm really
trying to solve?
Right?
Is that what the board is askingbefore?
Is that what's important and, oram I just trying to play?
Which you find in attribution alot, which I think attribution
has value, but where it doesn'thave value is when it's a credit
game and you hear people saythis, like, all right, I want

(25:44):
attribution.
Awesome.
I'm excited for you.
What do you want to do with it?
Well, I want to figure out whatI'm doing is bringing in the
leads, what, who's doing whatI'm doing, I gotta, I gotta show
them that, that we're actuallydoing something when in fact it
shouldn't be a credit game.
It should be closer to whatyou're saying, which is I need

(26:05):
to figure out which 50% isperforming and which 50% is not,
so that I can pull the levers inthe right direction and tilt
that scale in our favor.
Right.
So if you're thinking about howyou go to market and you're
thinking about tactically whatyou're doing and you've got this
holistic plan and you're tryingto put the business outcomes

(26:27):
first, then yes, MarTech canhelp you figure those things
out.
But oftentimes MarTech is lookedat as a scapegoat, as a magic
bullet, as all these otherthings that is really not
intended to be.
It's not the solution to theproblem.

(26:47):
It's a, it's you come up withthe solution and the MarTech
should enable you to get to thatend game.
I don't know if I directlyanswered your question, but,

Kyle Hamer (26:56):
so, so I have a couple more.
I'm just curious.
Um, what is it you see where themajority of MarTech liens when
you start, when you, when youstarted more tech was applied
for what customer growth upsell, cross sell or was it
applied mostly for net newcustomer acquisition?
What were, how was marketingbeing positioned 15 years ago,

(27:19):
MarTech being positioned 15years ago versus how we're
seeing it being leveraged intoour position today?

Josh Wagner (27:26):
Well, I think that positioning is part of the
problem in the first placebecause if you, I hate to keep
going back to like the earlydays of marketing automation,
but they really kind ofpropelled this whole thing in
the B2B space, right?
Like B to C is ahead of thegame, so I'm really not even
there and B to C is so muchabout acquisition.

(27:46):
There is buyer journey, there'sattribution, there's all that
kind of stuff.
But in the context of a B2BMarTech, you look at marketing
automation and you look at thedisconnect between what
executives think about marketingand what marketing automation
really is intended to do.
There's a major disconnect rightthere, right?
Like to this day I still havepeople talk to me about, okay, I

(28:09):
need to implement marketingautomation.
And everything they say fromthere is all about acquisition.
Oh, I have a whole lot of timeout.
Do you realize that marketingautomation is not going to help
you with acquisition whatsoever?
And I w w what are you talkingabout?
Like it's after acquisition,acquisition happens, what do we
do the rest of the way?

(28:29):
That's the most simplistic wayto put it, but it's how did we
acquire them?
What do we do with them once weacquire them?
What did we learn about themafter we acquired them?
And they start doing thingsright?
Like that's what marketingautomation is.
So that whole perception of youknow, what marketing's function
is and it goes back to what wewere talking about earlier, like

(28:51):
I think marketing's function toexecutives is just an
acquisition and we need to teachthem that it's, it goes beyond
acquisition and really theentire buyer journey.
And that's where again, the newCFO and if you read all these
interviews that come out withCMOs on LinkedIn and whatnot,
that's the thing that the goodones are trying to figure out.

(29:11):
They're trying to figure out howdo I own the entire buyer
journey?
How do I understand it?
How do I aggregate data aroundit so that I can make smart
decisions?
And then how do I bring that upto the rest of the Seasuite to
say this is what we need to bedoing and this is how we impact
the business.
Like, that's a very, verysimplistic way to put it.

Kyle Hamer (29:30):
Well, I liked the way you answered that because
one of the things that I seethat I feel like Mark MarTech
did a poor job early on and youcan credit this to um, you know,
several, several very creativestrategies around trying to
reinvent the marketing game,putting technology behind it,
right?

(29:50):
HubSpot's invention of theinbound game and then kind of
claiming that space mademarketing automation really feel
more like it was aboutacquisition.
Automation.
Automation doesn't really happenuntil you hit submit or automate
anything until after somebodyfills out a form or picks except
a phone.
All right.
So, um, it's, it's, it'sinteresting that you segmented

(30:12):
that.
One of the other things I thinkis a, is a common misnomer is
that marketing automation toolscan't be used actually groom and
grow population.
So a lot of groups will just useit in the buyer's journey of, of
known prospect to sale the firsttime, but then completely
abandoned any sort ofmethodology or a utilization of

(30:36):
the tools to cross sell, upsell,continue to stay in front of
their customers.
On a regular basis, which hasled to a unique point.
Solutions, right?
These little derivatives beingintroduced to the market as, Oh,
we're a marketing engagementplatform or we're at, we're a
customer engagement platform.

(30:56):
So two questions here.
One with, with the, the, thefurther fracturing of the
technology.
Will marketing technology everget branding right?
Where we talk about what it isyou're really doing from the
marketing technology side and tohow will the disruptors of
artificial intelligence andother things like data policy,

(31:19):
privacy policies like we'reseeing in CC CCPA and we saw
GDPR, how will those thingsinfluence the next five years?

Speaker 3 (31:29):
Oh,

Kyle Hamer (31:29):
MarTech, sales and marketing alignment.
And what we see in the, youknow, in the B2B, well

Josh Wagner (31:38):
we'll start with the, the concept of branding of
what the technology does and itreally, it makes me immediately
think of account based marketingand ABM and the two to three
year buzz that that moniker had,right?
And people were just like, Oh myGod, I have to do ABM and

(32:00):
[inaudible] okay, great.
I'm excited about that.
Let's do some ABM.
And so the immediate lean forpeoples and companies like us
is, all right, let's understandyour data.
Let's look at your customersegmentation profiles.
Dig deep into your buyerpersonas and buyer processes.

(32:20):
Let's understand how that mapsto very individualized
touchpoints across thoseselected accounts that we feel
are the best fit.
What behaviors are we lookingfor?
What behaviors are we drivingand how can we do that?
Not a scale, but how can we dothat very personalized for a
unique subset of, and everythingI just said just like in one ear

(32:44):
out the other like, no, no, no,I wanna I wanna I want to buy
this tool and do this so I cando ABM but isn't that, isn't
that marketing one Oh one whichis you have the people that you
will serve, but then you alsohave your target accounts.
Right?
It feels like to me like youshould've been doing ABM to a
degree all along.
Exactly.
ABM is just good marketing.

(33:05):
Right?
But the moniker made it seemlike it was something else.
So now fast forward to what'shot right now.
To your point.
Customer marketing is pretty hotright now.
The idea of focused on thecustomer and really they should
be the center of the universeand tailor everything from
acquisition through cross-sell,upsale around the customer.
I think it's getting closer,right?

(33:26):
Because all this stuff I saidabout ABM when I say that in
today's world of customermarketing, people were like,
yes, that's what I have to do,so we're getting closer.
I think that, you know,marketing automation was a bag
tag because I mean you're notautomating your marketing.
Okay.
It's a set it, forget it.
I plug it in.

(33:47):
I don't need to hire anybodyelse and you as a CEO here,
right?
Marketing automation, awesome.
I don't have to hire anybody.
I plug this thing in.
It's going to run out of songs.
The leads are coming like that.
That's what a CEO hears.
Right.
Then when we were talking aboutthis before, like the opposite
is true.
You invest in a system like thatmore is more like you are

(34:10):
absolutely, you need skill setsthat you never had before.
You need process you've probablynever defined before and you
think about your strategy in away you probably never thought
about it before.
That moniker did a bad job ofsetting expectations, account
based marketing.
It's marketing, it's what saleshas been doing since the
beginning of time.

(34:30):
These are the best companiesthat I want to go talk to and
I'm going to come up with a planto talk to them.
Like that's, that's what it is.
Right?
So I think the focus on customercentricity is a good one in
terms of like a macro trend andmarketing.
How the tech aligns to that.
I mean, is that what we're goingto see is, is everyone going to

(34:50):
be a customer marketingplatform?
Uh, you know, the upsellsolution and this and that.
I don't know.
Um, but I do think customercentricity is, is moving us down
the right path in a lot of waysthat you, you mentioned a
lineman, we did some researchlate last year around sales and
marketing alignment.
And what are the things thatmake it good?

(35:13):
What are the things that make itbad and then what does good
actually mean?
You know, I think everyonealways thinks good as a feeling
when good has to producesomething to the business,
right?
So we created a matrix of goodsales and marketing alignment
actually yields pipeline growth.
So on the new acquisition sideand year over year revenue

(35:35):
growth on the cross sell, upselland expand side.
So this is the definition of thematrix we created around sales
and marketing alignment.
And on the feelings side of it,marketing and sales generally
had good things to say about oneanother.
Like we respect the profession,they do this, they do that.
Like it was a high lean in thepositive side, right?

(35:58):
But it turns out that goodfeelings alone or the feeling of
alignment didn't produce thoseresults.
What produced those results was[inaudible] those two
organizations working togetheron a focus around the customer.
They built their KPIs around thecustomer, they built their
objectives around the customer,they built their, they budgeted
around how they're going toacquire and expand with

(36:19):
customers.
They can't play their campaignsaround the customer.
So everything was very customercentric and that actually
yielded, if you look at it in amagic quadrant to the upper
right, wherever it wants to be.
Whereas all the stuff that, oneof the things that you would
think of as as what, what, whatdoes bad look like that an

(36:40):
overly a heavier than the normalfocus on technology laggards
like way down at the bottom, youknow.
So those are some things that wetalk about.
You know, what does MarTechdoing?
What does it do well?
What does it do poorly that justfocus on the customer.
Customer centricity is good.
Focus on the tech without itbeing an enabler, rather it

(37:03):
being the solution rather thanan enabler of a solution is, is
bad, right?
You say this a lot, you've saidseveral times, which is there's
no silver bullet, uh, with thepressure that many marketing
teams, marketing leaders, salesteams are under.
There's a, I think there's atendency to want to deliver

(37:24):
delivery to the promised land,right?
To make you make your lifeeasier or at least be the
solution when the reality is youjust hit on the head.
It's not a byproduct.
It's a servant of the solution.
Be a part of it.
Well, it's funny, I, I, I did,uh, I was asked to speak at a
sales enablement, a little minishow, uh, one in New York and

(37:47):
one in San Francisco.
And I titled the, the talk magicbutton, easy buttons, magic
bullets and unicorns.
Uh, and it was all about salesand marketing alignment is real.
And it's funny cause I basicallythe crux of the talk, I nothing
to do with technology oranything like that.

(38:09):
The crux of the talk was createa common language with your
counterpart.
Commit to what each other'sgoing to do, do it, and then
check your ego at the door.
Like those are the three thingsthat I talked about and we're
not talking about rocket sciencehere, right?
This is basic human nature andhow relationships are built and
people came up and that like, Ohmy God, this is so simple, but

(38:31):
you're so right and blow up.
Okay.
Sounds good.
Just funny though, how we do getcaught up in the, the swirl in
the whirlwind of of whattechnology does a great job of
selling us, right?
They sell us that dream ofsomething better, something
easier, something that may notneed quite as much elbow grease.

(38:52):
They show us a report andthey're like, you too could have
this report.
They don't show you all the workand in structure, language and
alignment and all the thingsbehind it, the guts to that
report, the report, you're like,Oh, I want that.
That's, that's like looking atsomebody that's on stage at mr
Olympia and you're like, Hey, Iwant to, I want that body.
Yeah.
There's a lot of work that wentinto that.

(39:13):
Well, did you see my analogy onLinkedIn today, which was
MarTech is the diet pill of B2B.
Yeah.
I mean the same thing, right?
You watched the diet Cokecommercial and you're like, Aw
man.
All I gotta do is take thepills.
Wait, it's going to fall off.
I'm going to be shredded.
I'm going to look good in a snowsuit.
Like all that.
Well, the reality is, yes, thediet pill with a sensible diet

(39:36):
and exercise regimen can helpproduce these results.
Marketing technology with asensible go to market strategy
can help produce these results.
It's the same concept, right?
Like, yeah, absolutely.
It could work.
That's awesome.
All right, well I reallyappreciate you being on here
before you, before we go, onelast question being in being in

(39:57):
marketing, being in, in sales,and given that there's a huge
buzz right now about the, theaging, the K Whopper ad, curious
, I'm curious to know what'syour favorite advertisement and
why?
Oh man, this is very much on thespot.
Uh, so I'm going to go back aways and it's not a, it's not a

(40:27):
TV ad.
It was actually a print ad.
So when I was in college, I hadto, uh, I did, uh, I took a
class on rhetoric and I wantedto, I want to do identifying
something different that wasactually, you know, being very
rhetorical and rhetoric withoutsaying anything.
So there was this ad thatMercedes had an a magazine and

(40:50):
there was a little kid, youknow, kids and puppies are
automatic, you know, wins inadvertising are automatically
depending on your audience.
So the little kid sheets aredown over the kid in bed,
comfortable and safe.
But the outline of the sheet hadthe Mercedes Benz logo.
And I'm like, dude, you'repulling it PR.

(41:13):
I mean, how perfect is that,right?
Safety, security family like allwrapped are under[inaudible], no
car.
And they add nothing.
Just a Benz logo.
Kids safely asleep in his bedand you'll see the outline under
the sheets.
I thought that was brilliant.
So what I love about thatanswer, Josh is, is that it
doesn't, if you're intechnology,

Kyle Hamer (41:34):
doesn't matter if you're in sales.
Uh, what it shows is thatthere's still a place for
creativity and, and creatingsomething meaningful for a
company with, with imagery.
And while many people think ofadvertising, first is what
marketing is.
It's a byproduct of a lot ofhard work by a lot of people

(41:56):
behind closed doors to come upwith that.
It should be emotional.
It should be.
That's exactly right.
Yeah.
Well, thanks for being on today.
If somebody wants to, you know,connect with you or, or find out
more about what you do, give usthe ten second pitch on, on lead
MD or 32nd pitch on elite MD andthen how to get ahold of you.

Josh Wagner (42:16):
Yeah, I mean, we didn't D as a marketing
performance consultancy, our jobis to break down the silos that
I talked about between all thedifferent organizations and look
at marketing holistically,bringing all the components
together that really driveperformance marketing to help
organizations not become thestatistics.
The statistics that say readsthe, you know, 1% of marketing

(42:39):
produced leads turned torevenue.
The statistic that says mostmarketers can't prove any sort
of ROI on the technology spend.
They have the statistic thatsays 84% of CMOs can't produce a
tangible ROI doc in theirmarketing efforts to other
companies.
That's what we're set out to do.
I'm Josh Wagner, a Z on LinkedInor Josh at[inaudible] dot com.

Kyle Hamer (43:01):
Awesome.
Thanks for being on the showtoday, Josh.
We've, uh, we've enjoyed talkingabout MarTech, the future
technology and really practicalways to get bird what you got.
Alright, thanks Carl.
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