A live panel discussion! Explore the findings of LeanData’s 2024 State of Go-to-Market Efficiency Report. Learn how hundreds of B2B go-to-market leaders are shifting to opportunity-based selling, overcoming revenue process breakdowns, and using AI to streamline SDR functions. Take away tips to help your company meet growth goals and tackle the complexities of modern GTM motions. Don’t miss this opportunity to crack the code of go-to-market efficiency!
Webinar Transcript
Hello. Hello, hello, hello, everyone. Welcome. Welcome to our webinar panel today on Report Insights: Cracking the Code of GTM Efficiency in 2025. My name is Matt Lyman. I’m the VP of Demand Gen at LeanData. We put together a survey earlier this year that we sent out to about everybody in the world, and we got a bunch of responses around the full GTM cycle. We wanted to know more about how people were going through things? How did they found things working? Did it work? How was ’23 versus what they’re looking for at ’24?
We had some really, really amazing sponsors on that, and I’ve got a couple of them with me today. As we get into it, I’ll introduce them in a moment. But first, I want to do a couple of just quick housekeeping, if that’s okay. First things first, we will have a recording available tomorrow, so if you liked this, great, please send it to some friends. If you didn’t like it, I’m sorry. You can also send us some notes on that.
Chat, we do have a chat function. It’s going right now. Lots of people called, telling us where they’re calling from. That’s right, because this is a radio broadcast, telling us where they’re from. Please let us know. We see Chicago. Ooh, Costa, Rica, nice. We got some San Francisco, and a lot of Bay Area people. I personally am calling in from Burien, Washington, which is right next to Seattle.
We also have a questions board, so in that same panel over there on your right is a queue that you can see chat. But there’s also Q&A. Please feel free to drop any questions you have into the board, into that, and we will answer them as we can. This is live, so drop something in. We’ll try to get back to you.
Oh, Ryan. Hi. Seattle’s not so beautiful today but it has been, hasn’t met another Seattleite, if you guys didn’t catch that. Okay, so our agenda, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to talk through a few things as we have time. This is a conversation. This is not going to be a bunch of questions that I have built for them. We got the results back from the report and we found some really interesting pieces.
So, we’re going to work through some tech stack strategy or tech stack and today’s strategy, opportunity-based selling. I think that’s a really fun one. We can talk about that. AI and automation, marketing and sales alignment, and then lead management challenges. If we get to it, I think we will always have those conversations continue.
So, we’ll go through that. And then, we will leave time for Q&A. So, please bring that Q&A to the table. Okay, so one of the things that really stuck out to us is one of the results from the survey that we asked, and that survey results said that 71% of B2B companies agreed that revenue growth was a challenge in 2023, okay? So, that’s where we’re going to start as we talk through this.
So, I would love to welcome my friends onto the stage the panel today. There we go. I was just waiting for the image to disappear. So, we have a really awesome group of people. We have Trinity who’s joining us from UserGems. I’m going to let them introduce themselves. I just also like saying your guys’ names. We have Sarah who’s coming over from Qualified. And then, Brian. Hi, Brian.
Hello.
Matt Lyman:
Brian is from the team at LeanData, so we chat all the time. But I’d love for you all to go and tell us a little bit about you, introduce yourself and tell us about your company and what you do. And we’ll go ahead and we’ll start with you, Trinity.
All right. Well, thanks, Matt. Thanks for having me. My name is Trinity Nguyen. I am a VP of Marketing and Account Development at UserGems. What is UserGems? We are software for sales and marketing teams, where we help with capturing relevant buying signals. Then, provide automated workflows, playbooks, sequences to help your team act on these signals so that you can turn them into pipeline and revenue. And we are typically known for the customer job change signal. That’s us. Thanks for having me.
Matt Lyman:
Thanks for joining. Sarah.
Yeah. Thanks, Matt. Hi, everyone. My name is Sarah McConnell. I’m the VP of Demand Gen at Qualified. Qualified is an inbound pipeline generation platform, so we’re really focused on helping you convert your website traffic into qualified pipelines. So, we do that through a couple of different ways. We’ve got live chat, chatbots. We now have an AI-SDR, which is very exciting meeting schedulers intent data. So, it’s just a true all-in-one platform. But at the end of the day, we want to help you turn web visitors into pipeline.
Matt Lyman:
That’s awesome. Thank you. And then, Brian.
Brian Birkett:
Hi, everyone. I’m Brian Birkett. I’m the Chief Sales Officer at LeanData. And LeanData is the leader in modern revenue orchestration. We simplify and accelerate and coordinate all of the people, processes needed to transform your signals like UserGems and Qualified intent into buying decisions. So, I’m super excited to be here. Thanks for leading us on this journey, Matt.
Matt Lyman:
Yeah, yeah, you bet. Thank you. I do want to call out that… Yes, yes, yes. There are three marketers and one salesperson. Brian, we will not get into a fight. This will not be a West Side Story situation. But I do want to call out that everybody on this, we reached out to each of you because we do see you as being extremely thoughtful in this conversation and in this go-to-market.
Well, efficiency, I was going to say conversation again. But as we get into go-to-market, each of you have been very thoughtful in ways that you’ve discussed it, obviously on LinkedIn, but in conversations we’ve had. So, we’ll just go ahead and get started. So, the first thing we mentioned in the agenda is talking about tech stack and today’s strategy.
We can talk tech stack, but I do really want to lean into strategy to begin with. I think one of the things that we talked about the peak behind the curtain, yes, we all met and talked a little bit about this before we went into it. But one of the things that we were really talking about is when we look at the report, it’s all over the map on people’s thoughts about 2023 and how they’re going to get into 2024.
In the report, just so everyone knows, there is a word cloud in that report that is based off of an open field that you could fill out one word to describe how you’re feeling about your revenues team, or sorry, your revenue team’s outlook for 2024. And those responses were all over the board, challenged, determined. These are horrendously abysmal, right? But then, we also got hopeful and excited and energized.
So, I wanted to just open up to this team with, as we talk about the strategy, we talk about the importance of those signals as Brian mentioned, but then there’s also efficiency, operational scrutiny. So, I’d love to know from each of you as we talk about that, how do you feel necessarily about the transition from ’23 into ’24 and maybe a little bit about how you see either it does not have to be your company, I know we’re all from our own company, but what you are seeing into 2024.
And if it’s all right, we’ll just start with the same route that we went on the last one. So, we’ll start with Trinity, and then we’ll just kind of jump in. There’s no need to… Let’s just get into it. So, Trinity, why don’t you tell me a little bit about what you are seeing into 2024?
Trinity Nguyen:
So, I think from what we’re seeing right now is a lot of companies are making changes and ourselves included, there’s some kind of adapting some of the programs. So, a lot of the programs were used to be very predictable. Now, we have to make tweaks, diversifying within the programs to adapting to a new ways of people buying different priorities. And also, even the sales cycle also changes too. And then, the segments and different verticals.
So, there are a lot of micro changes or tweaking that we’re doing internally and we’re seeing that with our customers, our partners and our prospects as well. So, in terms of sentiment, I would say this year is definitely the general sense is that it’s more optimistic than 2023. Having said that, I think a lot of it is coupled with the expectation whether the fed is going to reduce the rate or not.
So, I feel like right now talking about the second half of this year, I feel like there’s a lot more optimism or hopeful that the rate will drop a little bit and it’s a bit easier.
Matt Lyman:
Yeah, right.
Trinity Nguyen:
That’s just reality. But yeah, a lot of like a tweak and changing in strategy, and then that will influence how company decides to build or retain the tech stack.
Matt Lyman:
Sure. I mean, that the macroeconomic stuff always does make a huge impact on that, right? Sarah, how about you?
Sarah McConnell:
Yeah, I think it’s a… I always like this question because especially the word club where it’s like, “Oh, it’s a struggle, but I’m determined to make it better.” I always think about this with pipeline generation. I think about this with go-to-market strategy as well is I have never talked to one person who’s like, “I’ve got it all figured out. Everything is moving, all cylinder is firing, I’ve got this 100% figured out.”
So, I feel like no matter what, when this question is asked, people are going to respond with like, there’s room for improvement because the bar never stays where it is. Again, I think about it from a pipe gen perspective. But if you hit a number, that number just goes up. It’s not like it just stays there. You’re always trying to grow.
So, I do think we’ll always be in a state of like, Trinity, I like what you said, tweaking. You’re never just going to let your strategy run as it is. As soon as you’ve got one thing figured out, you’re going to start to look for new ways to improve, whether it’s small like micro changes to even increase small percentages and sales funnel to increase win rates to larger new programs.
And I do feel like across the market, people I’ve been talking to are doing a little bit of both. Yes, the small tweaks trying to gain some efficiencies in the stuff they’ve already figured out. But I feel like end of 2023, early 2024 people were pretty stagnant in what their programs were and their willingness to spend more money. And I do think in the first H1 year of 2024, we’re definitely starting to feel a little bit more optimism and people are willing to try new things.
So, every time I talked to someone, and this includes what we’re doing at Qualified is last year we did our tried and true. We knew these programs and these initiatives and our go-to-market functions, were going to work with what we had. And then, now that those feel like they are running pretty well, we’re still doing those tweaks. But we’re starting to look at like, “Okay, now what can we start to open back up a little bit?”
Two years ago we were just like, “Do everything. Everyone has budget. Go, test and try.” And I feel like now we are back in this test and try. It’s just at a smaller scale and I think for the better, we have to be much more articulate and aligned with our team on what are we getting out of these programs. So, we are testing and trying, but we’re held to a higher standard, which I think is a good place to be. I think we’re all going back to that. We need to see ROI or we need to be able to convince our executives on the effectiveness of these new programs. And I feel like that’s something I’m hearing across the board.
Matt Lyman:
Yeah, okay. That’s really interesting. And Brian, do you have anything to add to that? I have a follow-up question that you just got, but I want to make sure we give Brian a chance.
Brian Birkett:
I would just say that strategy this year versus last year is like, hey, growth is still absolutely number one. And so, strategizing to drive growth, but efficiency and profitability are 1A and 1B. And so, I really like what you said about change and how it’s constant. I was just having the conversation with someone who was like, “Hey, the goalpost move.” I was like, “In this market, it’s constantly moving.” And we can’t control that, but we need to adjust.
And so, I think that the realities of the new market settling in and the changes that people are making are getting adapted. But I do think that there is also this idea that you still have to experiment and test because the world as we know it in B2B changed in the last three years. And so, while last year the tried-and-true strategy was there, now it’s like, “Oh, I need to be efficient, I need to get more with less, and I absolutely need to execute on the opportunities that I’m given,” because pipeline is harder, closing deals is harder. So, it’s just the reality of the market. And it may be like that going forward.
Matt Lyman:
Yup. And one day, what I’ll do is we’ll get this group back together and I have a real conversation about how conversion rates have all changed and what we’re expecting from, right? Because when you walk into 2023 you say we need X amount of pipeline to hit X amount of ARR, I guess Y amount of ARR. And then, 2024, what did that look like, right? Because it changed.
So, I want to ask a follow-up on something that you said, Sarah, that is for everybody, but really you mentioned how we had to change last year. And now, we’re kind of getting back into more of that testing. And I think what we’ve heard is there was so many companies that were in growth at all costs mode, and then last year it became efficient growth. Do we see a new term? I love the new terms we talked about, we made jokes about this yesterday, but sort of a new sort of in between because the pendulum is not going to swing all the way back to the growth at all costs. Do we see it fitting in the middle there in 2024?
Sarah McConnell:
Yeah, I don’t know from your point of terminology, it’s always so hard to keep up with all the different terms. But at its base, I do think you’re right, Matt, of like, 2022, 2021, we definitely saw a growth at all costs. It was easier to go ask for money. It was easier to go spend that money on activities that as marketers, I would like to think we’re always doing the right activities, but maybe that we didn’t have as hard of a metrics driven output for. But we’re like, “Hey, this is very brand awareness. We want to test this. We want to try it.” And I think it was easier to make those asks.
Then, last year with efficiency at all costs, those asks weren’t getting approved because it was like, “Hey, you need to have very specific metrics or numbers that you can come to your executive team with your board with,” and say like, “Hey, this money was well spent.” But I also think, your point of pendulum swing in the other direction is we probably all felt the impacts of that.
Suddenly, brand awareness is really hard to do because you’ve lost all of your paid channels, you have to rely on really difficult, noisy organic channels. And as marketers feeling the same thing, people aren’t spending money on brand awareness type activities. They’re going to all go and congregate to the same organic activities. So, it makes that space noisier and harder to stand out and harder to get noticed.
So, I think it was a weird reset that at least I felt this, it gave us time to say, “Hey, notice things like our branded terms not getting searched as often.” Have you noticed this potential… This part of our website traffic has gone down. Having to swing the pendulum all the way to efficiency at all costs gave us the leverage to say, “Hey, we understand why this is happening, but also it is impacting our ability to get a wider audience and drive pipeline.”
And now, we’re swinging back into that middle state of like, “Okay, we can open up the purse strings a little bit more to run some more brand awareness.” We just had to find the right metrics to get our team to buy into those things. But really, had to almost fail first to be like, “Yup, we’ve seen no branded traffic come in. We’re seeing it from the same people because we don’t have the ability to go find those net new audiences to drive brand awareness.” So, I do think this middle state is a good place to be in. I know I’m really comfortable here where I know I can go make those asks. It’s going to be harder.
Matt Lyman:
Sure.
Sarah McConnell:
I’m going to have to have a really buttoned up story and a really good strategy behind it. But I think for all of us marketers, that’s never a bad thing to have us in that state.
Matt Lyman:
Great. Anybody else have a… Anything they want to throw in on that?
Trinity Nguyen:
That was perfect.
Matt Lyman:
I thought it was great. I have nothing. You left me speechless, Sarah, which as my team would verify that is tough to do.
Sarah McConnell:
Well, I love that. What a great…
Matt Lyman:
Well, and actually, I do want to call out too that during that, even from what you said and I had put in the chat, are there challenges that people are seeing? And we’ve gotten a couple of them that we’ll jump into. Actually, why don’t we just keep it here and we will ask. We have a couple of really good ones.
And Brian, I’d love to see just your thought on this. I don’t think we have a… There’s no silver bullet on why, but Michael in the chat asked, “Why discovery meetings are down 30% in 2024? And what can we do about it?” So, obviously, today, we, these four cannot do anything about it, but what are you seeing? And what are some of the actions that your team is taking to help change that?
Brian Birkett:
So, I think when I think about why sort of top of the funnel, discovery meetings are down 30%, I think that buyers are just less willing to engage in something that they’re not interested in or they don’t think it adds value. I think we all know that the buying process, the customer journey is changing. They’re doing their research ahead of time. They’re bringing their past experience with them. And that’s why tools like UserGems and Qualified are so helpful. But I think the realities of the old world is we were probably having conversations and creating pipeline that was never going to close. And I call these the looky-loos.
So, I think it’s okay that there’s 30% less qualification calls, but I think your close rates have to go up proportionally. So, when I look at our business and how it’s changed, yeah, we’ve had quarters where we’ve created more pipeline in the past or we had way more volume last year than we had this year. But we’re getting way more efficient and we’re getting better at closing deals.
And so, while there are not as many top of funnel volume conversations, our team’s ability to get better at managing the sales process and closing is resulting in higher close rates. So, I don’t think that’s unique to us. I think that buyers are doing more to educate themselves and really only getting involved if it’s worth their time because teams are smaller, you just don’t have time to waste, to look at something that you’re not already kind of thinking about.
Matt Lyman:
Yeah, you had somebody in the chat comment that, “That’s so true. Everything changed.” Somebody’s calling that out. Trinity, it looked like you were going to add on?
Trinity Nguyen:
Yeah, I’ll add a little bit. So, I agree with everything that Brian said in terms of like, for the same market that you’ve been targeting, that’s probably could be down, especially four of us here, we’re in SaaS. SaaS, it’s very insatiable where we sell to each other, the market is tough. So, that’s why you see the volume in general and the demand in this space went down. So, that’s why the discovery, the top of the funnel is down.
So, a lot of companies, what are they doing is also trying to expand to adjacent industries is one thing, or internally expanding their product offering. And therefore, opening up the temps, so to speak. So, I’ve seen companies doing that and we internally doing that as well. So, I’m hoping to close or narrow down that 30% gap that Michael mentioned.
Matt Lyman:
Yeah.
Sarah McConnell:
Yeah, I was going to say the exact same thing as Trinity, which is sometimes the bad answer of why discovery is down is there’s nothing you can do about it. If you’re selling into a market and people don’t have budget, you can see all the website traffic in the world. It’s all ICP website traffic. But if they don’t have budget to buy, they’re just window shoppers and you’re not going to convince them otherwise because there’s no point. They don’t have budget.
And I think what we’ve been hearing across the market is exactly what Trinity said is either you have to look at your segmentation and say like, “Is there any subsegments within who we’re selling to that’s actually performing well and digging into that data?” And if you’re selling it to SaaS, maybe there are sub-industries within SaaS that are still buying and still purchasing or you have a good product offering for.
And if the answer is no, none of them are performing well, then it’s a little bit out of our hands as marketers and salespeople, and you do need a product offering, you have to expand your TAM and there has to be some sort of product or you’ve got to figure out from a product marketing perspective, how can you take the product you have and expand it into a new TAM and figure out your narrative and talk track and value prop there.
Because yeah, if it’s down 30% and that buying group just doesn’t have budget, the only thing you can do is start go fishing in a new pond. There’s not much you can do to convince some.
Brian Birkett:
Right.
Matt Lyman:
Yeah, yeah, and I think you’ve all touched on some really great pieces to that, right? Because you’ve talked about the ICP, you’ve talked about how people’s budgets are, which was all in effect of ’22, ’23, ’24. Somebody commented in the chat about how customers have changed during the pandemic. I don’t disagree because nobody takes phone calls, right? They are, again, I’m not going to say nobody that’s an inflammatory comment. But my phone has a block unknown numbers and a lot of people do.
What I would say there, and this is not in argument of any of it, but I think it’s true. We’ve all changed during the pandemic. But we’ve all been changing for the last 20 years too. Does anybody answer the door when a door-to-door person comes by and asks if you need your roof cleaned? I don’t. And I have a giant window on the front door…
Sarah McConnell:
My husband does. He’s so sweet. He always gets hurt.
Matt Lyman:
What’s that?
Sarah McConnell:
So, I said, my husband does, and he’s so sweet. I’m like, “Stop doing that.”
Matt Lyman:
Well, that’s…
Brian Birkett:
Is he in sales? Because salespeople are usually the easiest.
Sarah McConnell:
He’s not. And that’s the problem is like, we’re in sales, I feel like. So, I know, but he’s… It’s just, they’re too nice. But to your point, no one answers the phone or the door.
Matt Lyman:
No, nobody else. And I tell you what, somebody comes to my door, there’s a giant window on it. This is me. So, anyway, all right, I want to move on just a little bit, and we’re not going to get to all this stuff and I’m okay with that. Maybe we have a part two.
One of the things that was said, some people have said it in here, but then you guys have also said it around the tooling itself. Are they going to want to buy it? Do they want to buy it? Do you have that tool? One of the data points in the report was also that for 2024, 33% of people in the survey responded that new tech stack investments were in their top three for this year with 30% saying tech stack consolidation was in their top three.
I think if you look at that and you go back to the notes that you just mentioned around, “Hey, there’s a lot there, do they have the investment? Do they have the money?” Somebody in the comments said, “There are multiple tools that they’re learning at one time. They’re not adapting the technologies that can help them.” I don’t even know what my question is on this because I want it to be, how can we help that? But maybe, let’s say, what do companies need to do? What do we as the go-to-market leaders need to do to help companies with that investment and that consolidation through a curveball to….
Sarah McConnell:
Yeah, I can jump in here too. I think one, I love that data point because they’re completely contradictory where 30% are just throw money at it, and the other 30% are like stop throwing money at it.
Matt Lyman:
Yup, yup.
Sarah McConnell:
I do think there will always be a group of people where, yeah, you think you can solve with technology. And a lot of times that is true. A lot of the technology out there can solve some of your use cases. I think if you’re listening to this and you’re trying to decide which one of those two camps should we be in, should we be in the like, “Hey, let’s buy some new technology. Maybe that’s going to solve our issues. Or hey, maybe we need to consolidate and that will solve our issues.” It’s like, look at your use case first. Even budget aside, it doesn’t matter if you can get budget or not, if it’s just not the right ask.
So, in my mind, if you have such a deep pain point that you need new technology for it, you’re probably going to find a way to go maybe find that budget or make at least a really good ask for that new technology. If you don’t have that driving pain point or if a salesperson cannot convince you that you or a marketer can’t convince you have that very deep pain point, consolidation is a play right now. So many people are doing it. Products are also being built for that consolidation play. But I do think it really just comes down to your own strategy and what’s in your martech stack right now.
There’s glaring gaps and very deep pain points. You probably need to go buy something. If you are a lot of people and you went over spent on technology in 2021 and 2022 and suddenly, you’re having to cut, that is a place that a lot of people are in right now unfortunately. And you have to figure out what you can realistically consolidate.
But before you just go like hack away at your martech stack, really dig into what’s that going to do for your numbers? Because it’s really easy to look at something and say like, “Yeah, we don’t need this right now.” But there is this weird cascading effect that I think a lot of people… And as marketers, I know a lot of times, it’s not even of our own fault, we have to cut budget.
So, we’re like, “Okay, what are we going to do?” But make sure you can articulate again to your executive team, yeah, we can cut this, but here’s the cascading effect and how it’s going to impact all of these other things. And if we need to consolidate, great, I’ll do it. We’ll figure it out. But do the work first to understand what it’s going to do to your metrics, to your pipeline, to your website traffic, to your win rates, to everything that you can think of. And then, make sure you can articulate that if that is a piece of tech that you want to keep.
So, that was a long-winded way to say I think everyone is going to do a little bit of both. They’re going to cut some things and consolidate, but we’re starting to see people are rebuying new tech again. And not to jump ahead, I know it’ll be a topic. But with AI, I think that’s what a lot of people are like, “Do we need to buy it? Do we need something that new?” And that I think is a lot of that 30% new purchase.
Matt Lyman:
All right. So, I’m going to let everybody else answer, but you just… I was actually just messaging Kimmy who’s producing this currently and saying, “Hey, can we jump over to AI next? And then, we’ll talk the other one. We’ll go back to the opportunity base.” So, you guys want to… Everybody okay with that? Should we jump forward and talk about AI and automation? Because I think that’s a nice transition.
Brian Birkett:
Sure.
Trinity Nguyen:
Sure.
Matt Lyman:
Awesome. Oh, yeah, now we have the board. Now, it’s up there, it’s real. So, I think everything that you just mentioned is totally spot on. And as we talk about AI automation, we know that there’s so many different tools out there. It’s the wave of the future. It’s all of the things that people talk about constantly. It’s one of Salesforce’s giant messages from the last 18 months.
I want to talk about it a little bit because it is something that came up very heavily in the report. People talking about how they’re going to be using it across RevOps sales. They believe 60% of respondents use it to create targeted personalized content. That’s a lot of people.
So, I’d love to talk a little bit about how we see AI affecting and automation, but how we see AI moving forward? And is it going to take all of our jobs? That’s what I keep hearing, “It take my job.” So, let’s jump in there. I think, Brian, I want to start with you on this. How do you see it going?
Brian Birkett:
Yeah. So, I’ll start off with full AI replacement of humans. What I would tell you, and I’ll quote the great Ed Sheeran is that, “I think bad habits lead to you.” So, what I mean by this and what I’ve told my SDRs is, “I’m not going to replace you unless you’re bad,” because I think I still believe in the power of the human. We just need to make them efficient.
And so, going back to the previous question around strategy and investments in technology and AI fits into this, if I can make my humans more efficient, which is part of my overall strategy, if it helps me grow and it helps me be more efficient, then I’ll absolutely consider investing in it. I don’t think it’s going to replace everyone. I still need really good human interaction because people buy at the end of the day, and that has not been replaced yet.
But if there are tools that can help me make more phone calls, help me write better emails, help me respond to things faster, help give me more information so that I can take the best path, I’m going to invest in that. But I don’t think we’re ready for the Terminator to take over Demand Gen.
Matt Lyman:
We’re not at Skynet yet. Dang it.
Trinity Nguyen:
So, now, based on someone like my inbox these days, I don’t think Skynet is anytime coming for us.
Brian Birkett:
Yeah, right.
Trinity Nguyen:
But I also think in the survey when people said that, yes, they’re investing in AI, I feel like all of us with $20 a month open AI, we use it in our day-to-day. So, that’s why the percentage is large. I think what I’m curious in a marketer and B2B world is how many companies actually operationalize AI into their existing workflows, so that it’s a part of a day-to-day. Not like, “Oh, this could be a cool, creative thing I could do with open AI.” That’s the difference.
There are a lot of AI products out there right now, but how many of them actually can support enterprise go-to-market motion? So, I think that’s one thing that if I rerun the surveys, that’s something I want to ask because we keep hearing that everyone has AI budget, but not everyone or most of them don’t know how to really integrate it into their team in a consistent manner.
So, that’s why I feel like a lot of SaaS companies, they qualify, for example, like bringing AI and Piper is part of the full suite. It’s more believable to me or just call me… I don’t know. I’m old school. I feel it has to be integrated. Otherwise, it’s just a nice experimental budget or project I do on the side, and it doesn’t give you the meaningful impact and pipeline and revenue that you look for.
Sarah McConnell:
Yeah, I agree. I feel like what we’ve seen a lot from people is 2023, the year 2023. Yeah, I think a lot of board and executive teams were saying like, “What are you buying for AI?” They want us to have an AI strategy and I think that’s fair. They are bored and see a lot of like, “This is the future.” They’re hearing this. So, they’re then asking us, “What’s your strategy?” And 2023, so many products started to build AI into it, which was great.
So, a lot to your point, Trinity, is like having it be integrated, nothing was easier than just having it be a new beneficial functionality in a product that you already used. Yes, it was something new that you had to learn and there was new functionality or little things that the end users had to figure out, but it wasn’t a net new process or workflow or tool that you had to learn how to integrate.
Trinity Nguyen:
Yeah.
Sarah McConnell:
And then, now I actually think we’re in this world where people are going to start investing in net new AI technology, which is great and it’s really exciting. But I do think there is a lot of still unknowns about how do you integrate something that’s new in AI into it.
Because to your point, if every single person on the team is just using something completely disparate, they’re spending time on it, but it’s not worked into their processes. It’s not really benefiting the whole organization. It’s not making your go-to-market more efficient. It’s just a nice to have, not a need to have. So, all that’s to say, as people are starting to buy net new AI technology and not just learning the AI that’s built into the products that we’re already in their martech stack.
It’ll be interesting to see how teams figure out like, “How do we manage that? How are we making this an actual process that everyone’s adapting on our team?” And I do think a lot of it goes back to how the product is built, but I think it’ll be strategies within companies on how you’re going to use it too.
Trinity Nguyen:
Yeah. So, I’m managing the SDR team, I guess similar to Brian as well where I could see some of the early… We have early adapters that will use AI to research our company’s, buyers capturing any kind of like, companies hiring SDR, for example, prioritizing them, uploading CSV. They get all like, she bang on it. But then, what I need to get to my number is the entire team have to be able to do all that stuff.
Matt Lyman:
Yup.
Trinity Nguyen:
So, a lot of things we are doing right now is basically productize what these early adapters do and just insert it directly into a task or something, or email templates in outreach so that everyone can be elevated up. So, that’s why, I mean, how do you integrate that into the workflow? Because at the end of the day, you need the jobs to be done, not just cool, creative things that we are doing on a side.
Matt Lyman:
Yeah. And not to sound like an old manual and at a cloud, but there’s also pieces where it has become such a buzzword that are you using it? Is the productization of it by a company actually helping? Or is it just, “Hey, look, we’re using AI. Great. But how? And what’s it doing?” And I will toss back to Piper. I know, Trinity, you already mentioned it. But we started using it and the actual AI on the backend of identifying things and a bit pulling the messaging, it’s phenomenal. It does a really good job.
And I think the question becomes as a company comes out and says, “Oh, yeah, we use AI to do a thing.” Are they doing AI or are they just helping to automate something differently or orchestrate something differently? Because to me, there is definitely a difference between those, and AI can become a huge buzzword.
Trinity Nguyen:
Yeah.
Sarah McConnell:
Yeah. And I think Matt, to your point of like, yelling at the cloud and saying, “How much of it is a buzzword? And how much is actually useful?” Our CEO at Qualified, he’s very heavily invested in this AI era and AI workforce narrative. And it’s something he’s very passionate about, which is exciting. But even someone as passionate as him, I didn’t interview with him and was asking him about it and he even openly says, “This is a hype cycle.” And that’s normal.
We can all acknowledge that this is a hype cycle and that there’s going to be overinflated expectations, and overinflated ideals of what this can do. And then, when it starts to mellow out, we’re going to see what it can actually do.
Matt Lyman:
Right.
Sarah McConnell:
Now, that doesn’t take away from the fact that, yes, we still believe AI is going to be vastly impactful for your organization. And yes, we think AI workers and these AI agents are going to make our jobs easier and better.
Matt Lyman:
Yup.
Sarah McConnell:
So, I feel like we end up in this world of it has to be one or the other, but it’s okay to say, “Yeah, this is definitely overhyped right now.” And a lot of people are like, “Does it do what it says it’s going to do? I don’t understand it.” And I think that’s okay. And we’ll end up in a place realizing, yes, this is very useful, but there are a lot of overhyped expectations of what it can do as well.
Brian Birkett:
Yeah. I mean, I think the other thing just from a priorities perspective is like, “Hey, I want to add elements of AI into our process,” and things like that. But I want to start with the people. And I think that’s the approach that I’ve taken that it’s like, “Hey, if I spent as much time programming my real SDRs as I did some of the AI stuff, there’s an order of operations to it.” Like before I give… And you saw this with outreach and the email cannons in the old, “Hey, before I turn some of this stuff on, I need to make sure that what I have is properly enabled and taking the right actions and knows how to get the job done the old-fashioned way, if you will before, so that I can use that as the model to automate and be more efficient as it goes to scale.”
So, I think that it’s easy to put the cart before the horse in some cases. But making sure that the prioritization and the balance is there is something that I try to think through.
Trinity Nguyen:
Yeah. And I think just to clarify for folks on the line, I think the reason why we, talking about the other side of the conversation about AI, it’s just because I think in the tech bubble. I think we are all very pro AI. We believe in the capabilities of AIs.
Matt Lyman:
Yup, yup.
Trinity Nguyen:
But I feel like that’s already communicated over and over. So, I think what we staying here is like the counterpoints that so we have a balanced view. But yeah, the same way as well, I think the SDR role or the sales role or any role will evolve to do something a little bit slightly different. But some of the mundane work like data entry, researching accounts, these kinds of things can be taken over by AI to make the SDR and the sales reps a lot more efficient and effective. So, you can do a job of 10 with five.
Matt Lyman:
Yeah, I think that’s a great point. We have two questions in the chat that I think we can tie together, and then I want to move on to the next convo. But one question is how do you manage expectations of AI that has learned from a general data model versus what your business is? And then, we had another question where, it’s as a vendor, how do you solve the typical buyer prompt where they’re a team of six SaaS or a marketing team of six, 300 employees, 50 million ARR, they need tech to drive it, what do they choose? And then, AI rips through and does the fishing, how do vendors make the bait “better than the competitors?”
So, I think those tie together is how do you as a marketer, how do you… Or as a salesperson or however, how do you use that in the best way to make sure that when the AI is looking for you, when Google’s new AI structure is looking for the best chatbot or the best customer movement, champion movement platform or the best revenue orchestration that it identifies you, how do you help do that?
Sarah McConnell:
Yeah, I feel like the first one about general expectations or expectations for a general model versus your own business model. I really like this question because I think it’s very interesting that a lot of us are using a ChatGPT or open LLM type model, and they’re great. But to the point that Erica made, they are scraping the entire internet. They’re learning and point from the vast amount of data.
Now, when you get it in a product and you have what’s already in your tech stack and what we’ve seen some people call co-pilots or agents, but stuff that’s built into your products from an AI perspective that are there to assist you, and a lot of them are built on these LLMs, they’re generative AI. They’re going to help you write better, write faster, respond, whatever it is, they’re still built on those same models.
So, they still have learned from the same models that you’re talking about. However, what the engineers have then done is added on typically a layer of prioritization of your own data. So, you can use your own company data to help change prioritization. And obviously, I’m not an engineer, so I don’t know the ins and outs of this, so don’t ask me anything beyond this because I won’t be able to give you an answer.
But I do know from our own product perspective and other AI products that we’ve evaluated is they’re all learning from a few of the same open models on the market. It’s just that then you have the ability to give it your own products and your own information for it to also prioritize and weave into its responses and how it’s assisting you.
So, all that to say is open models that are free are great, but they aren’t going to give you very specific responses to your own organization. When you’re going to get those where you can train it with some of your own information, they’re going to cost you more money, but the answers are going to be vastly better. And so, that is the trade-off.
Matt Lyman:
Awesome.
Brian Birkett:
Yeah, I mean, this is probably more of a marketer answer, but I think you solve it with really tight messaging and excellent customer stories that are out there that can get picked up on. So, if you have published really good content that is very clear about the value you drive, the problems you solve and the impact you make, which is sales and marketing, one-on-one, and it’s out there and it gets picked up, hopefully, the user that’s putting that prompt in is writing a tight enough question to which the right solution comes forward. But I think that it just continues to go back to the importance of really strong, concise, coherent, accurate content with the… That shows your real value.
Trinity Nguyen:
Yeah, I want to double click on the accuracy piece. So, we were at the Salesloft conference, and everyone, they’re all like a true enterprise in the audience, everyone says that they have an AI budget. But the questions that, well, to get the right AI results or recommendation action, you need a really good data because it kind of go back to like, do you want an open LLM or your own first party LLM? We married the two.
If you do, even today in the simple open AI, just ask some questions a little bit more complex like medical, you might get a wrong answer just because the data is out there that it reads. So, as going to enterprise to our world, if you want to build something that is defensible, I think that you need both the public one, but then you need your own data.
For example, we write a lot of blog posts at what Brian said about our value prop use cases, et cetera, et cetera. But in order to generate the AI messaging for our SDRs, we have to marry it with a lot of internal information so that the AI would tell us, “Prioritize this company now or this buyer now,” because based on historical data, these are the people, the type of company that will more likely to convert. And by the way, here’s some public information about that company. And then, layer in with our own internal value prop, marry all that into an email.
So, you need a combination of both. But I wouldn’t just use any AI tool that just rely on public data because you can’t control, you don’t know anything whether the data is right or not.
Matt Lyman:
Right. Yeah. And so, I want to jump from that. I see another question and I want to just call out that I don’t … Hopefully, people don’t feel we’re railing against AI. We’re actually… I think we’re trying to just kind of discuss how we can use it as the leaders on that. But what has been raised in the same comment was we have a short time to attract prospects and it feels like we have no room for non-super targeted messaging.
So, I’m going to transition. Oh, okay, it doesn’t think we’re railing against it. Good. But I want to move on to the next one, which is probably going to be the last unfortunately, but that’s okay. And talk about opportunity centric. So, we have such a short time, I think Erica, you nailed it, a short time to attract prospects. We have no room for super, non-super targeted messaging.
So, in the survey we asked a multiple-choice question of what is your go-to-market motion? Is it account-based, lead-based, product-led, opportunity-based, opportunity-based with buying groups, same sort of thing. And number one, as I said, multiple choice, 62% was account-based. People are using account-based. They go out, they identify an account. They’re doing all of their motions that way.
Number two though was opportunity-based with buying groups. So, I want to talk about that a little bit because what that ends up saying to me is we have moved into the next evolution of account-based into the idea of now that we’ve got the account, we’re going to put an opportunity together with somebody, start adding in all of the multi-thread people to that opportunity. And then, as Erica mentioned in the chat, super target messaging to those people.
So, I want to open that a little bit to all of you based off of what we’ve been talking about on what are your overall thoughts. And before I do that, I want to just call it, there’s a quote in the report too, we pulled from Salesforce on implementing an opportunity centric motion can lead to an increase of up to 25% in deal closure rates. Because the idea is, if you’re talking to Brian about a new tool, but Matt is the ultimate signer, I could come in at the very end and torpedo that deal, so why not get everybody on board up front?
So, I kind of want to just leave that there, open it up, whoever wants to take that first, I think… What are your thoughts on open, sorry, on the account-based versus opportunity-based, buying groups, all of that stuff.
Brian Birkett:
I think it’s just the evolution like you talked about it. I think it’s the next step in the great B2B, GTM evolution that started with, “Hey, we market to people. Those are MQLs.” Now, we market to… People don’t buy things. Accounts, buy things, let’s AVM and market to accounts. And now, we’re on the buying groups, which is like, it’s more specific, right? Hey, it’s an opportunity. It’s related to a group of people, a buying group, it’s related to specific product.
It’s better alignment between sales and marketing that says, “Here are the specific things that we’re going after.” Very easy to hold each other accountable. Are we engaged with the right people? Are we doing the right things? It’s not new. It’s something we’ve inherently been doing forever. I think there is… Technology has allowed us to better operationalize this with better orchestration.
And I think that we are seeing companies, especially large enterprises, start to embrace this. And obviously, the analysts are talking about buying groups, and I think that it is an evolution beyond AVM. But I think intrinsically, most B2B sales and marketers will believe in it. It’s not controversial, but it’s more of an evolution and an even tighter focus as everybody works on being as efficient as possible and driving growth at the same time.
Trinity Nguyen:
I can jump in. So, the way that we at UserGems, we’re account-based, so I guess we in the 60 something percent. But at the same time, even at onboarding, everyone is trained on multithreading. So, the moment an opportunity created instantly from the page to the prospecting or a sales side, just covered entire buying groups, I guess with a combination of these like opportunity-based selling and account-based. But essentially, just the entire account, we want to surround the accounts that we’re trying to get in front of.
And to what Brian said, it really helped with the efficiency because then you kind of put all the resources after a fixed set of accounts that gives us a better lift in terms of conversion. What we’re trying to do is how to replicate that on the post-sales world because you get the buying group, everyone happy, and then you sign, and after a couple of QBR, then it’s very easy to kind of like… Because we are in tech, that the CS or AM lose touch with the buying group. So, now we’re trying to bring this mindset or this model to the post-sales.
Matt Lyman:
I would like to put a little Thumbtack there, talk to you about that later because I think you guys have done some things recently that I’ve been a big fan of, and I’ll tell you about that. But yeah, Sarah, it looked like you were going to say something.
Sarah McConnell:
Yeah, I just think for the opportunity-based selling the metric that you pulled out, Matt, it can help increase win rates 25%. I think my advice here for anyone on this call, like Trinity made the point of a lot of it is multithreading, figuring out who’s in your buying groups. For increasing win rates, one of the things that we’ve really focused on and that I would recommend, if you’re listening to this and you’re like, “Hey, what is this? How can we do this? Or what’s one thing we can pull out and focus on?” Is if you have a buying group, figure out who, Matt, you called it a torpedo, but figure out who your torpedo typically is.
So, you’re going to have your champion. And for us, that can vary by role, but sometimes it’s sales and it’s marketing, but you probably have a champion that’s pretty consistent. Alternatively, my guess is if you look at the data you interview your sales team, which you should be doing is talking to your sales reps, looking at gong call, whatever you can do, figure out who’s tanking those deals like, what is that persona or that person in that buying group that typically is your detractor.
And then, you should be focusing your product marketing team, your demand. It should be a full company-wide effort to make sure that persona, that’s a detractor suddenly is not anymore. And it starts with interviewing your sales team and understanding why are they pushing back. If it’s one thing like, “Oh, it’s just price,” there’s not much you can do. But if it’s, “Hey, we don’t want to adapt a new technology or we don’t like X, Y, Z, you can work across your whole marketing and sales team to make sure you can have the right messaging and get those people before they become a detractor on boarded.
So, I think it can feel overwhelming to look at a whole buying group that can be like six to 10 people. But if you want to start small, figure out who your tractors are and put a full company-wide sprint into making assets and messaging and enablement and all the things you need to do to make sure that that one particular detractor now becomes not.
Matt Lyman:
Yeah. And that can tie into your post sale too, right? Because if you know who your detractors are, you can then also… And there’s a detractor at the purchase, but then there’s also that person down the road. They might be different, right? And this is not, when I go through and I do tech, I have a decision point, a buying group I have to talk to.
However, our VP of RevOps is somebody that’s in the group primarily during post. She’ll be a part of it during the beginning, but when we go back and look at it, so you might have different people for those. And so, if you can identify those, that’s huge because you can keep that.
Brian Birkett:
Yeah, we actually did a look back across our opportunities. As much as I’d love to interview all the sales reps, I feel like that’s actually not the best in most accurate way. So, I think we’ve gone back and do look backs across our new business opportunities from the past few years to see, hey, within a timeframe and even post-sales as well, like who are we interacting with that led to the sale? What are those personas? What are those roles?
And then, trying to model that on our next group of opportunities that we are predetermining that we think should close in the future and seeing are we interacting with those folks? To your point, do we have the right things to engage them, the right content or the right plays to be able to replicate that. So, it’s all about being smarter about the look back to inform the right motions going forward.
Matt Lyman:
I’m just going to do a quick time check. We’ve got about 7 minutes left. I think we’ve actually been doing a good job of answering the questions as we go. So, I will leave a few minutes at the end for whatever, but we can keep talking through this. We did just have Cassie from our team just posted. Our team’s been doing a lot of discussion about this, and our CEO has been working with John Miller and some people from Forrester on discussing buying groups.
So, we’ve actually created a LinkedIn group for buying group leaders. So, if anybody’s interested, feel free to jump in, have that conversation. There’s some really good… It’s a conversation. Okay. So, buying groups specifically, we talked a little bit and opportunity centric, right? But it’s even buying teams, buying groups, that’s what people are saying in the chat as well. So, we’ve talked about the look back, but how? How do you do it?
Trinity Nguyen:
Analyzing who’s involved in which stage? Yeah.
Matt Lyman:
Sure, sure. I mean, I think what I’ve learned about the buying group motion is we can all sit here and talk about it, but the question then everyone steps in and says, “Right, but how do I do it?” Right? Because is it a big motion shift? Is it something that you need everybody on board? Is it looking back and saying, “Hey, we can run account lead and buying group motions at the same time based off of audience.” It’s just an open-ended talking point. How do you do that with or without tech?
Trinity Nguyen:
So, we, in our Salesforce dashboard, unless… I mean, you got to buy Salesforce or some serum. But essentially, we create, we know anecdotally who’s involved in the sales process. So, in the back, we have a formula to say, “If this person’s involved with this title, like say VP of RevOps,” and categorize persona as ops,” right?
So, that’s automatically happens every time a contact is in an opportunity so that we have dashboard and charts to track over time the mix of our buying group, whether it’s change over time or not, who’s involved, et cetera. And we typically have the three people that we call them, The Three Musketeers. And they’re consistent over the last, I don’t know, five years.
Matt Lyman:
Sure.
Trinity Nguyen:
That’s one thing. The second question you’re going to ask is, well, how do we capture all the contacts that involve in the buying group into Salesforce in the first place? So, for us, we have a tool to do that. Actually, our CEO just kind of hacked it up overnight one time. And now, we give it away to all customers.
So, if you use a Google Calendar or Outlook, anyone that meets with you automatically gets synced into the account and opportunity. And then, because we have the formula to map them into persona, and then we have a chart that automatically updates.
Matt Lyman:
Oh, wow. Yeah.
Trinity Nguyen:
So, we see that all the time like, who’s involved in our buying groups? Who’s typically involved in what stage? And then, with that as a foundation that we can run different campaigns or activities to kind of nurturing the buying group to help the sales team close. It sounds crazy, but it’s actually not. I’ll show you. It looks pretty simple.
Matt Lyman:
I would love to talk to you about that.
Brian Birkett:
We’re doing something very similar where it’s like you pull in all the contacts that are interacting post-sale. We have the ability to tag personas, adding personas, using that for the look back with engagement model to see who engaged in a certain timeframe, pre-opportunity during the opportunity sort of closing process.
And then, post-opportunity sort of munging that data to come in with, okay, here are the real influencers on the buying group based on persona and role that we capture. And then, using that data to go forward. And I think that this, look back, this analysis is something that we want to be able to help our customers with in the future as well.
Trinity Nguyen:
Yeah, I used to be a product marketing and I feel like every single company, if you ask who’s involved in buying group, like you said, Brian, don’t interview people because you’re going to get 10 different answers. Even at the leadership level that people might not agree on who’s the top one persona. So, just let data do the talking and just see how we can capture as much data as you can and just let it show.
Matt Lyman:
Okay. Sarah, do you have anything or just want to check in before?
Sarah McConnell:
No, no, nothing. I feel like you guys both hit the nail on the head there. And we’re in the same boat, where we know who our buying group is. Typically, there’s not a lot of variation. Once you’ve done that analysis, it doesn’t really change. And we do the same thing with dashboards. We know who typically, if you look at win rates and who’s involved in a buying cycle, we know if you’re missing someone that’s very vital to hitting that percentage.
And we can flag that in dashboards of like, “Hey, if you have a deal with X persona, you need to start multi-threading with this one because if they’re not involved in this deal, your percentage, the win rate on those drops by X percentage.” And typically, that’ll do the trick. If sales knows, all of a sudden, they have a much less likely chance of closing out that deal. That encourages them to obviously then go bring that person into the deal cycle.
Matt Lyman:
Yup. Okay, I want to thank you all. I know there’s a couple of last questions that came in at the end. We’ll try to answer those and maybe get to that point. We are throwing some info in here. I want to say very specifically thank you to Sarah and Trinity. We have put links to your pages here. I also want to call out the other sponsors because we had lots of partners on here.
So, obviously, it’s Qualified and UserGems. Cognizant was a partner. Modern Sales Pros and Welcome who we are doing our plat… This is the platform we’re using today. Thank you all for your help and for your data on this. As I mentioned, there is the buying groups thing in there. If you guys want to talk about it, we have recorded this. You all get our copy of it as well as a copy of the report after this. So, you can all take a look.
And then, I know that Kimmy, I think we were also going to put up on the slide here, a QR code for it. So, if anyone wants to pop in and grab that to begin with. But again, thank you everybody. I super appreciate it. That’s right there. There’s our report, so you can scan to download it. And we’ll put that back up in a second. Sorry, I know I just asked you to put that up there. I’m just throwing everything off.
But again, thank you everybody, I very much appreciate it. I love the conversation in the chat. So, thank you again everybody for the conversation, and we look forward to talking to you all again soon. Hope you all have a really great rest of your day and a great summer. It’s already summer.
