New buying signals research plus CMO reactions/debate

Great discussion last week about buying signals, buying committees and activating intent across go-to-market motions led by former SiriusDecisions and Forrester analyst Kerry Cunningham . And of course any discussion about buying signals and prospect engagement leads quickly to the gate or no-gate debate!

Chat highlights from both sessions are below. If you are in the CMO Coffee Talk Slack channel, you can get access to Kerry's research presentation deck here.

If you are a B2B CMO or head of marketing and want to join an exclusive community of your peers, a community that supports the full person and not just the role, let me know.

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That speed of buying committee growth may partially explain the sales cycle slowdown this year

The scrutiny and need to get buy in has increased so the size of committee has grown for sure.

No one wants to buy something and have the finger pointed at them when it's not working and the waste of budget/spend

Echoes the importance of the account not the 'lead.'

We forget how hard it is to buy stuff, especially in big orgs.?When I put in a sales enablement platform at Tennant, it took me nearly 18 months to buy it.?The reason I chose the vendor I did was largely because of how helpful they were in helping me navigate getting the internal alignment.

Totally agree.?I still haven't been able to get alignment about a sales enablement platform, mostly because the accountability for related activities/functions is so dispersed so it requires so many internal stakeholders to agree we need it and will get value from it... I find it easier to make buying decisions for tools that are marketing-specific since it's really just me I need to convince (kinda kidding, there are a few others involved)

If you move to more modern marketing where most content is ungated - I think "engagement” (how many visitors viewed a video/ungated resource etc) becomes the go-to metric and not form fills

This is why I use the FIRE (Fit, Intent, Recency, Engagement) methodology - and use ungated content!

Non-gated content and content recommendations based on who you are (and what we know about you whether anonymous or known) and where you come from, and what topics of interest you are engaging in is here. It’s not just what tags the marketer has used but the actual topics and key phrases in the content that are important.?Serving up the next best, most related content is possible with AI and ML!

Strong brands can ungate more because people remember you anyway

If you're unknown, and ungate, you're at the mercy of the human brain and/or your retargeting strategy

Ungating works really well if you actually have good content. You can still offer people the ability to get a PDF if they want it and I've found that conversion rates actually INCREASE on good, ungated content because people have a chance to vet what they're going to get and know that its worth giving away their email address in exchange for it.

On the other hand, if your content is mediocre, then meh - ungating it isn't going to make a difference

Not sure I agree.?If you know who is engaging based on known persona you can target accounts and personas for anonymous ungated interactions.

It feels like the match rates in the ROW are where NA was about 5 years ago!

Agree, that works, too. Either way, you have to get them to engage. How is calling a likely prospect on their cell better than getting them to convert on an offer via form?

Not necessarily DG.?It's all the way through the pipe as well when it comes to content consumption insights.

It's lack of or perceived lack of available technology. And barriers to entry into the technology that exists. A lot of systems are unaffordable for smaller companies... which is when they make a lot of their long term system decisions.

If I had a dime for every sales rep that said, "I see trending intent for this account, can you tell me EXACTLY who is on the site?"

Good reminder.?Eliminating friction accelerates consensus

Account-based engagement matters more than the individual for sure. But without the contacts in your system it's hard to flag that activity.

This is a huge cultural disconnect I've seen in multiple companies -- Sales is used to the old way -- educating them on the new way is evangelical.?And even if they get it intellectually, they struggle with it in practice.?We have to show them the way.

Using anonymous content consumption as an insight is a mind shift for sales.?Surfacing the size of the buying committee reinforces that they do/don't have enough members (known (persona/contacts etc. and unknown) to win the deal changes the conversation with Sales.

As we know, often the known 'lead' is not a decision maker but is fact-finding on behalf of higher ups. The sales pursues just that lead, gets no response and gives up....

We just changed that here.. we now pay BDRs on follow-up meetings with either a.) another team in the org or b.) higher-ups

We pay our BDR team (who report to me not sales) for every meeting, no matter what and we strategically approach accounts together with sales to assess who we need to get next

Also requires a WELL ENABLED BDR team who can have the conversations to navigate the account

That's how we move from stage 1 op to stage 2 - we need more than 3 people per account

It's important to train BDR/reps/etc on "how" to approach multiple people & groups within an account. There's nothing more annoying as a buyer than vendors “flanking" surrounding you by reaching out to multiple groups

RE: Marketing Attribution solutions procurement tips: https://www.clickz.com/a-practical-buyers-guide-for-marketing-attribution-solutions/267346/#.YyC7NjTWPXo.linkedin

We have started to examine closed deals every quarter for contacts engaged - Q1 was 6/ Q2 was 10

Often times, if sales has had some contact with a customer themselves (rolodex/event/referral etc..), they tend to discount the importance of marketing's influence on anonymous visitors.

So much signal in that traffic - forms are not the enemy, it's how you use them that matters.?And where you deploy them - if you use them to ask what people are looking for, it's gold!

Marketing influences every dollar of revenue!!

I literally just showed my content team the accounts that were visiting our blog. We saw that the Dept of Ed had had >100 visitors and we are actively pursuing them. The team has an unpublished case study from a relevant company and gave it to the AE so send to DoE. SIGNALS MATTER.

You can start to see where the $2 trillion in sales and marketing waste that BCG talks about comes from.

Form Fills is MQL thinking, working accounts based on intent signals is SQL thinking.

Is there a 'threshold' of how much traffic/engagement that a buyer has to have digitally to trigger intelligence on them? I'm in an industry where buyers are NOT in front of their computers each and every day... (mining)

Curious which content people have experimented with ungating.?We currently gate most because we rely on the MQL.?Soon to be changed with the help of 6sense but right now that is where we are at.

Past company we did that in a different way. By splitting comp between discovery meetings and 2nd stage meetings (use case/demo) and putting the dollar value higher for the 2nd part, SDRs organically started setting multiple stakeholder meetings because it increased chance of the next stage which made them more money.

Good article here on this topic from the Association of National Advertisers (ironically gated!):?https://www.ana.net/magazines/show/id/btob-2022-09-reducing-gated-content

In my last company, we ungated everything with two CTAs at the end of the asset. One Demo and one lower threshold conversation. MQLs are now conversations only. We grew MQLs by 30% and non-demo conversion to opportunity grew from 0.37% to 18%.

We un-gated everything except for events that require registration, trials, and contact me now forms and the volume of content engagement dramatically increased - both volume of accounts and breadth of contacts within accounts (easy content sharing). There were two items we wanted to do before un-gating: a) moving BDRs into the marketing function to monitor and action intent data to account progression (not lead response), and b) change our impact metrics from lead progression to account engagement, buying team sourcing, and appointment setting. We are still working on getting sales onboard with this motion, it is harder and why we put BDRs in to help bridge the gap.

White paper minus the words = content the C-suite might check out!

Stick with the visual, graphs and captions

Add a form to your content download- seriously.??When they download something ungated, ask them to rate it!?Don't ask for their email, just some demographics and feedback.?And then you learn and can see what is valued by whom.

We’ve ended up un-gating everything except things we know are so popular people will happily fill out a form for. For us that's when we publish rankings because it's catnip for our market, but other than that we un-gate

Chat is the "new form” so I *selectively* put Chat in the place of a form with a very light question

There’s a difference between a “gate” and a UX requirement. Helping people remember when and get to the live event feel UX vs. gate.

We keep the form for webinars pre-live and then cut it down to 15-20 highlights with a write up on a blog, pointing to the full webinar form

We tracked when more folks from one account or organization came to our website as it generally was a signal that they were ready to make a decision. We had a workflow in SFDC that pinged the Direct Sales owner

In edtech, teachers would be all over the site for samples and downloads, etc…. we did what was mentioned earlier, look at leads, see where they are coming from and then we could go after those districts for large orders

I've seen it multiple times in B2B analysis of the deal source and it was always a mix of sources (plus different attribution). Couldn't put a finger on one channel that is the 'main' one

Process is my biggest challenge. The shift to this way of thinking would be really tough for us.

To us – going after large enterprises, the signals of a group is too wide making it very hard to make it a usable data that sales can do something with

We’re struggling with the turnaround time between signal >>> research >>> outreach. Currently 2-3 weeks due to process.

Every component of sales + Mktg motion has been built around the 10-year old demand waterfall methodology. Hard to unwind all that and get folks to take the modern journey.

Demand waterfalls came from SiriusDecisions but times have changed!

Lots of change management required vs. tech / value problem

I think there is also a huge issue with platform integrations - you need multiple tools to fit and work together to bring this to life

Another interesting trend I'm seeing amongst start ups is they are becoming so resource sensitive around how BDRs spend their time, that those BDRs are over-pivoting on working Sales dictated outbounds. But if you ask the co, what's the gap, they say TOFU! Lol

Talk about growth "inefficiency”

Yes, that demand waterfall was hammered to B2B marketers for 10 years. They're just now moving to oppy motion while tactically we're all "stuck" with the 10-year old methodology and technology. That's why it's such a massive cultural shift b/c the expense has been incurred and it scares ppl to unplug.

So the critical tech is de-anonymization.... what are people using?

We’re balancing the ROI between simply running efficient cold outbound based on ICP-fit only vs. intent or signal overlay with the ICP-fit account list.

Sometimes. I think if the person who is winking doesn't fit the "senior leader” they tend to not work it as hard as the outbound. Though I agree they should use the winker to get to the senior person they want to target.

Form submissions are coming from SMBs. Enterprise buyers are the ones we need to look at for signals etc.

The issue with ABM is it takes long to show yield and these days we are given even less time than before! That said, I'm a big ABX fan/6Sense all the way, but just a tough dynamic to navigate

What works best is find out that there's always an exec sponsor and name them in every other meeting. Otherwise, there's awkward internal politics and other groups committing marketing's budget.