Podcaster
Episoden
08.10.2025
43 Minuten
In a recent Gartner survey, 75% of B2B buyers said they’d prefer a rep-free buying experience. That’s a wake-up call for sales and marketing leaders everywhere.
So, is this the end of sales as we know it… or the start of something better?
On this episode of the B2B Roundtable Podcast, I sit down with my friend Brent Adamson, co-author of The Challenger Sale and author of the new book The Framemaking Sale. Brent explains why buyer confidence—not more information—is the real barrier to closing big deals today, and how leaders can help their teams become the sellers customers actually want to talk to.
Brent Adamson on Framemaking and the Future of Sales Key Takeaways
Buyers want confidence, not more information. The real risk isn’t being ignored—it’s being irrelevant. Framemaking is the answer. Instead of persuading, sellers must help buyers frame decisions and build confidence in themselves. Four forces undermine confidence today: decision complexity, information overload, objective misalignment, and outcome uncertainty. Sales and marketing must unite. The mission is to build buyer confidence in themselves—not just in the supplier. AI won’t replace sellers, but it raises the bar. The sellers who thrive will show up as trusted guides and sense-makers. Pull Quotes
“It’s not your customer’s confidence in you that matters. It’s their confidence in themselves.” — Brent Adamson
“If you could be the one seller your customer actually wants to talk to, that’s an incredible place to be.” — Brent Adamson Guest Bio
Brent Adamson is a researcher, speaker, and author best known for co-authoring The Challenger Sale. His new book, The Framemaking Sale, explores how sales professionals can rebuild buyer confidence and create customer interactions that truly add value.
Connect with Brent on LinkedIn
Get the Book: The Framemaking Sale Full Transcript
Brian Carroll: Welcome to the B2B Roundtable Podcast, where we bring together ideas, people, and strategies shaping the future of sales and marketing.
Today, I’m joined by my friend Brent Adamson, one of the most influential voices in sales. You may know Brent from his groundbreaking book The Challenger Sale, which reshaped how we think about commercial conversations.
I’m excited because we’re talking about his new book, The Framemaking Sale. And it couldn’t come at a more urgent time. In a recent survey, 75% of B2B buyers said they’d prefer to purchase without ever talking to a sales rep. Is this the end of sales as we know it—or could it be the start of something better?
Brian Carroll: We’re going to talk about why buyers have lost confidence in sales, what’s driving this shift, what it really means to be a framemaker, how leaders like CMOs and VPs of Sales can build teams customers actually want to talk to, and what the future of selling looks like in an AI-driven world. Brent, you open your book with that stat—75% of B2B buyers would prefer a rep-free buying experience. That’s wild.
Brent Adamson: First of all, it’s great to see you, Brian. Thanks for the invite. That statistic comes from Gartner research, one of the last pieces I worked on before leaving in 2022. We asked thousands of B2B buyers: “If you could buy a large complex solution without ever talking to a sales rep, would you prefer that?” Seventy-five percent said yes.
Now, that doesn’t mean they actually buy without sellers—it means they’d prefer not to. The data shows a big and growing gap between customer preference and customer reality. That gap represents risk for sellers.
Brian Carroll: So it’s not the end of sales—it’s the end of salespeople not adding value.
Brent Adamson: Exactly. The question at the heart of this book is simple: What would it take to be the one seller—or the one team—that customers actually do want to talk to? If you can be that person—showing up less like a seller and more like a human—you can differentiate not only from competitors but also from the overwhelming flood of information customers already face. Buyers Don’t Want More Info, They Want Confidence
Brian Carroll: What are the ways sellers unintentionally undermine buyer confidence?
Brent Adamson: One of the biggest findings is around decision confidence. When customers feel highly confident in their decisions, they are up to 10x more likely to make a high-quality, low-regret purchase.
But most sales and marketing teams focus on building confidence in the supplier— “trust us, our brand, our product.” What actually matters more is the buyer’s confidence in themselves.
The real opportunity is helping customers feel confident in the questions they’re asking, the research they’ve done, their alignment as a team, and their ability to execute. That’s what Framemaking is all about.
Brian Carroll: Can you define Framemaking? How is it different from Challenger Selling?
Brent Adamson: Framemaking is about creating the context—or “frame”—that helps customers make sense of complexity and move forward with confidence.
It’s built around two key moves: prompting and bounding.
Prompting = introducing ideas or perspectives they may not have considered. Bounding = narrowing focus so they can prioritize what matters most.
Together, those moves create a frame that gives customers both ease and agency—the decision feels simpler, and they feel like they made it.
Challenger is part of this lineage—it’s about teaching and reframing—but in today’s world of overwhelming content, simply adding more insights isn’t enough. Customers don’t need another “smart idea.” They need help making sense of all the smart ideas already on the table. Four Forces Undermining Buyer Confidence
Brent Adamson: In the book we unpack four big challenges that undermine buyer confidence: Decision Complexity – too many people, too many steps. Information Overload – endless content, conflicting advice, and AI adding even more noise. Objective Misalignment – different stakeholders with competing priorities. Outcome Uncertainty – even if they believe the solution works, buyers fear their team won’t implement it well.
The job of a framemaker is to help buyers navigate these challenges—simplifying, prioritizing, and guiding them without taking away their sense of ownership. From Challenger to Framemaker
Brian Carroll: If I’m a VP of Sales or Marketing, how do I coach my team differently? How do I stop undermining confidence?
Brent Adamson: Challenger was about showing up with powerful insights. That still matters, but in today’s content-saturated world, simply adding more insights can overwhelm customers further.
What buyers need now isn’t just more ideas—they need help making sense of all the ideas. That’s where Framemaking comes in. It’s not about proving how smart you are; it’s about helping customers feel smart and confident in themselves.
Brian Carroll: That word—sensemaking—is powerful. Buyers are overwhelmed. They don’t want another rep adding noise. They want someone to help them make sense of it all.
Brent Adamson: Exactly. And that’s the opportunity. Show up as the one person who helps buyers cut through complexity and feel good about moving forward. That’s how you become the rep they actually want to talk to. A Story of Framemaking in Action
Brent Adamson: One of my favorite examples is from a sales rep we call “Tara.” She sold human capital management solutions. In a discovery meeting with the head of HR, she suggested bringing procurement into the conversation early.
Most reps would avoid procurement until late in the process. But Tara said: “In working with other customers like you, we’ve found that when procurement gets involved earlier, things go much smoother. You might consider inviting them now.”
That simple nudge reframed the process, avoided future roadblocks, and built customer confidence. That’s Framemaking in action—it doesn’t have to be grand. Sometimes it’s just a well-placed phrase that frames the decision differently. Marketing’s Role in Framemaking
Brian Carroll: What role does marketing play in this shift?
Brent Adamson: A huge one. Marketing can gather stories, lessons, and pitfalls from customers and feed them back into sales plays and content. Instead of just creating thought leadership about the supplier, marketing can create confidence content—tools, checklists, benchmarks, diagnostics—that help buyers feel more confident in themselves.
Imagine win-loss analysis focused not on why customers chose you, but on what they wish they’d done differently in their buying journey. That insight is gold. It can shape sales plays, create powerful collateral, and make your content strategy far more valuable. AI and the Future of Selling
Brian Carroll: With AI moving so fast, what does the future of sales look like?
Brent Adamson: AI can surface options, compare vendors, and even create frameworks. But at the end of the day, customers are still human. After all the data, many will say, “I just wish I could talk to someone.”
The sellers who thrive will be the ones who become that “someone”—the trusted guide who helps customers feel clarity, confidence, and connection. That’s the future of sales. Closing Thoughts
Brian Carroll: Brent, you landed it. At the core, this is about empathy and human connection.
Brent Adamson: Yes. There’s never been a better alignment between doing what’s right for sales and doing what’s right for humanity. If you want to hit quota, win big deals, and earn that President’s Club trophy, the way to do it is by helping customers feel confident in themselves.
Brian Carroll: And that’s what The Framemaking Sale is all about. If you want to dive deeper, get a copy—it’s packed with strategies, stories, and tactics that will change the way you sell.
Brent, thanks as always for joining me.
Brent Adamson: I appreciate you, man.
If you found this episode helpful:
Subscribe to the B2B Roundtable Podcast wherever you listen.
So, is this the end of sales as we know it… or the start of something better?
On this episode of the B2B Roundtable Podcast, I sit down with my friend Brent Adamson, co-author of The Challenger Sale and author of the new book The Framemaking Sale. Brent explains why buyer confidence—not more information—is the real barrier to closing big deals today, and how leaders can help their teams become the sellers customers actually want to talk to.
Brent Adamson on Framemaking and the Future of Sales Key Takeaways
Buyers want confidence, not more information. The real risk isn’t being ignored—it’s being irrelevant. Framemaking is the answer. Instead of persuading, sellers must help buyers frame decisions and build confidence in themselves. Four forces undermine confidence today: decision complexity, information overload, objective misalignment, and outcome uncertainty. Sales and marketing must unite. The mission is to build buyer confidence in themselves—not just in the supplier. AI won’t replace sellers, but it raises the bar. The sellers who thrive will show up as trusted guides and sense-makers. Pull Quotes
“It’s not your customer’s confidence in you that matters. It’s their confidence in themselves.” — Brent Adamson
“If you could be the one seller your customer actually wants to talk to, that’s an incredible place to be.” — Brent Adamson Guest Bio
Brent Adamson is a researcher, speaker, and author best known for co-authoring The Challenger Sale. His new book, The Framemaking Sale, explores how sales professionals can rebuild buyer confidence and create customer interactions that truly add value.
Connect with Brent on LinkedIn
Get the Book: The Framemaking Sale Full Transcript
Brian Carroll: Welcome to the B2B Roundtable Podcast, where we bring together ideas, people, and strategies shaping the future of sales and marketing.
Today, I’m joined by my friend Brent Adamson, one of the most influential voices in sales. You may know Brent from his groundbreaking book The Challenger Sale, which reshaped how we think about commercial conversations.
I’m excited because we’re talking about his new book, The Framemaking Sale. And it couldn’t come at a more urgent time. In a recent survey, 75% of B2B buyers said they’d prefer to purchase without ever talking to a sales rep. Is this the end of sales as we know it—or could it be the start of something better?
Brian Carroll: We’re going to talk about why buyers have lost confidence in sales, what’s driving this shift, what it really means to be a framemaker, how leaders like CMOs and VPs of Sales can build teams customers actually want to talk to, and what the future of selling looks like in an AI-driven world. Brent, you open your book with that stat—75% of B2B buyers would prefer a rep-free buying experience. That’s wild.
Brent Adamson: First of all, it’s great to see you, Brian. Thanks for the invite. That statistic comes from Gartner research, one of the last pieces I worked on before leaving in 2022. We asked thousands of B2B buyers: “If you could buy a large complex solution without ever talking to a sales rep, would you prefer that?” Seventy-five percent said yes.
Now, that doesn’t mean they actually buy without sellers—it means they’d prefer not to. The data shows a big and growing gap between customer preference and customer reality. That gap represents risk for sellers.
Brian Carroll: So it’s not the end of sales—it’s the end of salespeople not adding value.
Brent Adamson: Exactly. The question at the heart of this book is simple: What would it take to be the one seller—or the one team—that customers actually do want to talk to? If you can be that person—showing up less like a seller and more like a human—you can differentiate not only from competitors but also from the overwhelming flood of information customers already face. Buyers Don’t Want More Info, They Want Confidence
Brian Carroll: What are the ways sellers unintentionally undermine buyer confidence?
Brent Adamson: One of the biggest findings is around decision confidence. When customers feel highly confident in their decisions, they are up to 10x more likely to make a high-quality, low-regret purchase.
But most sales and marketing teams focus on building confidence in the supplier— “trust us, our brand, our product.” What actually matters more is the buyer’s confidence in themselves.
The real opportunity is helping customers feel confident in the questions they’re asking, the research they’ve done, their alignment as a team, and their ability to execute. That’s what Framemaking is all about.
Brian Carroll: Can you define Framemaking? How is it different from Challenger Selling?
Brent Adamson: Framemaking is about creating the context—or “frame”—that helps customers make sense of complexity and move forward with confidence.
It’s built around two key moves: prompting and bounding.
Prompting = introducing ideas or perspectives they may not have considered. Bounding = narrowing focus so they can prioritize what matters most.
Together, those moves create a frame that gives customers both ease and agency—the decision feels simpler, and they feel like they made it.
Challenger is part of this lineage—it’s about teaching and reframing—but in today’s world of overwhelming content, simply adding more insights isn’t enough. Customers don’t need another “smart idea.” They need help making sense of all the smart ideas already on the table. Four Forces Undermining Buyer Confidence
Brent Adamson: In the book we unpack four big challenges that undermine buyer confidence: Decision Complexity – too many people, too many steps. Information Overload – endless content, conflicting advice, and AI adding even more noise. Objective Misalignment – different stakeholders with competing priorities. Outcome Uncertainty – even if they believe the solution works, buyers fear their team won’t implement it well.
The job of a framemaker is to help buyers navigate these challenges—simplifying, prioritizing, and guiding them without taking away their sense of ownership. From Challenger to Framemaker
Brian Carroll: If I’m a VP of Sales or Marketing, how do I coach my team differently? How do I stop undermining confidence?
Brent Adamson: Challenger was about showing up with powerful insights. That still matters, but in today’s content-saturated world, simply adding more insights can overwhelm customers further.
What buyers need now isn’t just more ideas—they need help making sense of all the ideas. That’s where Framemaking comes in. It’s not about proving how smart you are; it’s about helping customers feel smart and confident in themselves.
Brian Carroll: That word—sensemaking—is powerful. Buyers are overwhelmed. They don’t want another rep adding noise. They want someone to help them make sense of it all.
Brent Adamson: Exactly. And that’s the opportunity. Show up as the one person who helps buyers cut through complexity and feel good about moving forward. That’s how you become the rep they actually want to talk to. A Story of Framemaking in Action
Brent Adamson: One of my favorite examples is from a sales rep we call “Tara.” She sold human capital management solutions. In a discovery meeting with the head of HR, she suggested bringing procurement into the conversation early.
Most reps would avoid procurement until late in the process. But Tara said: “In working with other customers like you, we’ve found that when procurement gets involved earlier, things go much smoother. You might consider inviting them now.”
That simple nudge reframed the process, avoided future roadblocks, and built customer confidence. That’s Framemaking in action—it doesn’t have to be grand. Sometimes it’s just a well-placed phrase that frames the decision differently. Marketing’s Role in Framemaking
Brian Carroll: What role does marketing play in this shift?
Brent Adamson: A huge one. Marketing can gather stories, lessons, and pitfalls from customers and feed them back into sales plays and content. Instead of just creating thought leadership about the supplier, marketing can create confidence content—tools, checklists, benchmarks, diagnostics—that help buyers feel more confident in themselves.
Imagine win-loss analysis focused not on why customers chose you, but on what they wish they’d done differently in their buying journey. That insight is gold. It can shape sales plays, create powerful collateral, and make your content strategy far more valuable. AI and the Future of Selling
Brian Carroll: With AI moving so fast, what does the future of sales look like?
Brent Adamson: AI can surface options, compare vendors, and even create frameworks. But at the end of the day, customers are still human. After all the data, many will say, “I just wish I could talk to someone.”
The sellers who thrive will be the ones who become that “someone”—the trusted guide who helps customers feel clarity, confidence, and connection. That’s the future of sales. Closing Thoughts
Brian Carroll: Brent, you landed it. At the core, this is about empathy and human connection.
Brent Adamson: Yes. There’s never been a better alignment between doing what’s right for sales and doing what’s right for humanity. If you want to hit quota, win big deals, and earn that President’s Club trophy, the way to do it is by helping customers feel confident in themselves.
Brian Carroll: And that’s what The Framemaking Sale is all about. If you want to dive deeper, get a copy—it’s packed with strategies, stories, and tactics that will change the way you sell.
Brent, thanks as always for joining me.
Brent Adamson: I appreciate you, man.
If you found this episode helpful:
Subscribe to the B2B Roundtable Podcast wherever you listen.
Mehr
24.05.2021
27 Minuten
Customers care more about the values of the companies they buy from than ever before.
That includes B2B buyers, even when they pretend it doesn’t.
It’s not just about what you sell. Buyers want to know what kind of company you are. What you protect. What you tolerate. What you’re willing to be held accountable for.
That’s why I interviewed Dr. Philip Kotler, often called the “father of modern marketing,” and co-author of Brand Activism: From Purpose to Action, about what brand activism actually is and why so many companies get it wrong.
Author’s note: This transcript is edited for clarity and readability. Quick Answer: What Is Brand Activism?
Brand activism is when a company publicly commits to values and causes beyond selling products, and backs that commitment with real actions.
It’s not a “purpose statement.” It’s not a rebrand. It’s not a social post.
Brand activism only works when leadership owns it, operations support it, and customers can see receipts. Key Takeaways
Brand activism is a business decision, not a marketing tactic. Buyers are looking for signals of integrity, not slogans. Purpose without action becomes brand risk. B2B isn’t exempt. It’s just slower to admit this matters. “Greenwashing” (or any version of performative values) erodes trust faster than silence. Why This Matters in Modern GTM
In complex B2B, buyers don’t just evaluate your product.
They evaluate the risk of tying their career to your company.
So they look for signals:
Do you behave consistently, or do you “pivot” values when it’s convenient? Do you treat employees and customers like humans, or like inputs? Do you stand for anything that costs you something?
Brand activism sits inside the buyer’s trust filter. Not because buyers are idealists, but because they’re risk managers. The Interview Brian: To start, what is brand activism?
Dr. Kotler: Brand activism is a movement toward making a brand do more than tout the virtues of a product or service. It identifies values that the company has and cares about.
For example, The Body Shop under Anita Roddick was not only selling skincare products. It was fighting for animal rights, civil rights, fair trade, and environmental protection.
More and more consumers want to know what kind of company this is and what it cares about.
Our society is saddled with many problems. Does the company care about any of these problems, or does it just think it’s supposed to make money?
An increasing number of companies want an identity that goes beyond making products and services.
That is what we call brand activism: the brand connecting with causes. Why Kotler Wrote Brand Activism Brian: Why write this book now?
Dr. Kotler: If you look at barometers like the Edelman Trust Barometer, trust in society has been falling.
As a result, companies are not going to be trusted either.
Companies ought to fight against bad companies rather than stand near them or be part of them.
The reputation a company has can be whatever happens through its actions, or it can be designed better. Consciously better. The Evolution of Branding: From Products to Values
Kotler described brand development as a series of stages, moving from product-driven to values-driven.
Brands evolved like this:
Stage 1: Product identification (the brand name as a label) Stage 2: Positioning (lowest price, family entertainment, highest quality) Stage 3: Company qualities (integrity, innovation, multi-trait reputation) Stage 4: Corporate social responsibility (supporting a cause) Stage 5: Brand activism (a defined stand with real commitment)
Brand activism, in his view, is one of the latest stages of this evolution.
Translation: you can’t fake your way into stage five with stage two tools. How Customer Expectations Changed Brian: What’s driving brand activism?
Dr. Kotler: Customers have concerns about immigration, ethics, gun control, debt, and education failure.
These social issues become the ground out of which brand activism becomes essential.
An increasing number of people argue that companies do not have the right to be silent about these issues.
They want companies to show they care about more than making money. Is Brand Activism Different in B2B? Brian: Do you see a difference between B2B and B2C companies?
Dr. Kotler: No, I don’t see a difference. Both will want reputations that go beyond making products.
There are many B2B and B2C companies in the list of brand-active companies.
Salesforce is a good example. Marc Benioff has been a pioneer in this area, including actions around homelessness and affordable housing in San Francisco.
B2B companies have been slower as marketers. Most modern marketing came first from the consumer side.
But B2B companies are close to their customers. Through their salesforce, they know buyers and what they’re like.
There can be less “need” for B2B to signal values publicly because values show up in relationship and reputation anyway.
My take: that’s true, but the world changed. Buyers still talk. Employees still post. Partners still notice. Silence is also a signal now. Brand Activism Is Not a Marketing Department Project Brian: Brand activism isn’t just marketing, right?
Dr. Kotler: Absolutely. No CMO will move a brand into activism on their own.
Choosing issues like the environment or gun control is a corporate-level decision. This is about designing and protecting the firm’s reputation and meaning.
Purpose is now a major question:
What is your purpose as a company? What are you contributing? How are you making life better in society? If It’s Top-Down, What Can Marketers Do?
Dr. Kotler: Marketers can surface issues that matter to the business and bring them to senior leadership.
Example: water scarcity. If you’re Coca-Cola, water is not “an issue.” It’s your future.
The CMO’s role is to refresh the brand with meaning, and to research risk.
If there’s real risk, brand activism probably won’t be adopted.
But the marketer can initiate the conversation with leadership. Kotler’s Brand Activism Framework
Kotler broke brand activism into categories that companies might choose to engage with. Examples included:
Social activism (education, healthcare, civil rights, aging) Workplace activism (compensation, CEO pay, labor relations) Political activism (voter rights, lobbying, gerrymandering) Environmental activism (pollution, emissions, conservation) Economic activism (wage policy, tax policy, inequality) Legal activism (policies impacting corporations, employment laws)
He also emphasized the need for measurement: how the company is viewed before, what it’s expected to accomplish, and how outcomes show up in market response.
Not because you can reduce trust to a dashboard. But because performative activism is expensive, and buyers have gotten good at spotting it. Evolution of brands from marketing-driven to values-driven Authenticity: Where Brand Activism Usually Breaks Brian: How does empathy fit into brand activism?
Dr. Kotler: This can get lost in superficial talk by the company with no real commitment.
If you say you’re against pollution, what have you done?
If you only talk about it and don’t act, customers are not impressed.
“Greenwashing” is appearing to be green through talk and not doing much.
Customers will ask: is the company sincere? Is it genuine? Or is it just marketing?
That’s where empathy shows up. Not as a vibe, but as credibility. What This Means for GTM Leaders
Here’s the part most GTM teams miss.
Brand activism is not about being louder.
It’s about being coherent.
Buyers don’t need you to have perfect values. They need you to have consistent ones.
They need to know:
What you will not do to win a deal What you will protect even if it costs you Whether your internal incentives match your external claims
If your company wants to “stand for something,” it has to show up in how you sell, how you onboard, how you support, and how you treat people when nobody’s watching.
Otherwise, it’s not brand activism.
It’s brand exposure. Bottom Line
Customers aren’t begging companies to be political.
They’re begging companies to be real.
If your values only exist in a slide deck, buyers will treat your messaging like a campaign.
And campaigns don’t earn trust. They rent attention until the budget runs out. Additional Resources
The Case for Brand Activism – A Discussion with Philip Kotler and Christian Sarkar Purpose matters to marketing Get the book: Brand Activism: From Purpose to Action
That includes B2B buyers, even when they pretend it doesn’t.
It’s not just about what you sell. Buyers want to know what kind of company you are. What you protect. What you tolerate. What you’re willing to be held accountable for.
That’s why I interviewed Dr. Philip Kotler, often called the “father of modern marketing,” and co-author of Brand Activism: From Purpose to Action, about what brand activism actually is and why so many companies get it wrong.
Author’s note: This transcript is edited for clarity and readability. Quick Answer: What Is Brand Activism?
Brand activism is when a company publicly commits to values and causes beyond selling products, and backs that commitment with real actions.
It’s not a “purpose statement.” It’s not a rebrand. It’s not a social post.
Brand activism only works when leadership owns it, operations support it, and customers can see receipts. Key Takeaways
Brand activism is a business decision, not a marketing tactic. Buyers are looking for signals of integrity, not slogans. Purpose without action becomes brand risk. B2B isn’t exempt. It’s just slower to admit this matters. “Greenwashing” (or any version of performative values) erodes trust faster than silence. Why This Matters in Modern GTM
In complex B2B, buyers don’t just evaluate your product.
They evaluate the risk of tying their career to your company.
So they look for signals:
Do you behave consistently, or do you “pivot” values when it’s convenient? Do you treat employees and customers like humans, or like inputs? Do you stand for anything that costs you something?
Brand activism sits inside the buyer’s trust filter. Not because buyers are idealists, but because they’re risk managers. The Interview Brian: To start, what is brand activism?
Dr. Kotler: Brand activism is a movement toward making a brand do more than tout the virtues of a product or service. It identifies values that the company has and cares about.
For example, The Body Shop under Anita Roddick was not only selling skincare products. It was fighting for animal rights, civil rights, fair trade, and environmental protection.
More and more consumers want to know what kind of company this is and what it cares about.
Our society is saddled with many problems. Does the company care about any of these problems, or does it just think it’s supposed to make money?
An increasing number of companies want an identity that goes beyond making products and services.
That is what we call brand activism: the brand connecting with causes. Why Kotler Wrote Brand Activism Brian: Why write this book now?
Dr. Kotler: If you look at barometers like the Edelman Trust Barometer, trust in society has been falling.
As a result, companies are not going to be trusted either.
Companies ought to fight against bad companies rather than stand near them or be part of them.
The reputation a company has can be whatever happens through its actions, or it can be designed better. Consciously better. The Evolution of Branding: From Products to Values
Kotler described brand development as a series of stages, moving from product-driven to values-driven.
Brands evolved like this:
Stage 1: Product identification (the brand name as a label) Stage 2: Positioning (lowest price, family entertainment, highest quality) Stage 3: Company qualities (integrity, innovation, multi-trait reputation) Stage 4: Corporate social responsibility (supporting a cause) Stage 5: Brand activism (a defined stand with real commitment)
Brand activism, in his view, is one of the latest stages of this evolution.
Translation: you can’t fake your way into stage five with stage two tools. How Customer Expectations Changed Brian: What’s driving brand activism?
Dr. Kotler: Customers have concerns about immigration, ethics, gun control, debt, and education failure.
These social issues become the ground out of which brand activism becomes essential.
An increasing number of people argue that companies do not have the right to be silent about these issues.
They want companies to show they care about more than making money. Is Brand Activism Different in B2B? Brian: Do you see a difference between B2B and B2C companies?
Dr. Kotler: No, I don’t see a difference. Both will want reputations that go beyond making products.
There are many B2B and B2C companies in the list of brand-active companies.
Salesforce is a good example. Marc Benioff has been a pioneer in this area, including actions around homelessness and affordable housing in San Francisco.
B2B companies have been slower as marketers. Most modern marketing came first from the consumer side.
But B2B companies are close to their customers. Through their salesforce, they know buyers and what they’re like.
There can be less “need” for B2B to signal values publicly because values show up in relationship and reputation anyway.
My take: that’s true, but the world changed. Buyers still talk. Employees still post. Partners still notice. Silence is also a signal now. Brand Activism Is Not a Marketing Department Project Brian: Brand activism isn’t just marketing, right?
Dr. Kotler: Absolutely. No CMO will move a brand into activism on their own.
Choosing issues like the environment or gun control is a corporate-level decision. This is about designing and protecting the firm’s reputation and meaning.
Purpose is now a major question:
What is your purpose as a company? What are you contributing? How are you making life better in society? If It’s Top-Down, What Can Marketers Do?
Dr. Kotler: Marketers can surface issues that matter to the business and bring them to senior leadership.
Example: water scarcity. If you’re Coca-Cola, water is not “an issue.” It’s your future.
The CMO’s role is to refresh the brand with meaning, and to research risk.
If there’s real risk, brand activism probably won’t be adopted.
But the marketer can initiate the conversation with leadership. Kotler’s Brand Activism Framework
Kotler broke brand activism into categories that companies might choose to engage with. Examples included:
Social activism (education, healthcare, civil rights, aging) Workplace activism (compensation, CEO pay, labor relations) Political activism (voter rights, lobbying, gerrymandering) Environmental activism (pollution, emissions, conservation) Economic activism (wage policy, tax policy, inequality) Legal activism (policies impacting corporations, employment laws)
He also emphasized the need for measurement: how the company is viewed before, what it’s expected to accomplish, and how outcomes show up in market response.
Not because you can reduce trust to a dashboard. But because performative activism is expensive, and buyers have gotten good at spotting it. Evolution of brands from marketing-driven to values-driven Authenticity: Where Brand Activism Usually Breaks Brian: How does empathy fit into brand activism?
Dr. Kotler: This can get lost in superficial talk by the company with no real commitment.
If you say you’re against pollution, what have you done?
If you only talk about it and don’t act, customers are not impressed.
“Greenwashing” is appearing to be green through talk and not doing much.
Customers will ask: is the company sincere? Is it genuine? Or is it just marketing?
That’s where empathy shows up. Not as a vibe, but as credibility. What This Means for GTM Leaders
Here’s the part most GTM teams miss.
Brand activism is not about being louder.
It’s about being coherent.
Buyers don’t need you to have perfect values. They need you to have consistent ones.
They need to know:
What you will not do to win a deal What you will protect even if it costs you Whether your internal incentives match your external claims
If your company wants to “stand for something,” it has to show up in how you sell, how you onboard, how you support, and how you treat people when nobody’s watching.
Otherwise, it’s not brand activism.
It’s brand exposure. Bottom Line
Customers aren’t begging companies to be political.
They’re begging companies to be real.
If your values only exist in a slide deck, buyers will treat your messaging like a campaign.
And campaigns don’t earn trust. They rent attention until the budget runs out. Additional Resources
The Case for Brand Activism – A Discussion with Philip Kotler and Christian Sarkar Purpose matters to marketing Get the book: Brand Activism: From Purpose to Action
Mehr
07.11.2019
19 Minuten
Why does most marketing stink?
According to Michael Brenner, “Most of the marketing that we do that stinks and doesn’t work is that some executive with a big ego asked us to do it.”
On top of that, marketers are not in a happy place.
According to MarketingProfs 2019 Marketer Happiness Report, “Only 10% of marketers say they were very fulfilled in their work.” The report looked at the dimensions of feeling fulfilled, valued, and energized by the work, that our work is impactful, and engaged.
That’s why I interviewed Michael Brenner (@BrennerMichael), the CEO of Marketing Insider Group to talk about his new book Mean People Suck.
We need more empathy inside our companies to empathize more with our customers.
Michael Brenner states, “The most counter-intuitive secret to success in business and life is empathy.” I’m excited to share his thoughts on empathy with you.
In this interview, you’ll learn about asking what’s in it for the customer, rethinking your organizational chart, and making the changes you need to make to be more successful today. Why did you write Mean People Suck?
Michael: Again, I must give you credit. You were out in front of this empathy topic in marketing.
I think long before me. Kudos to you. It just took me a little longer, but mainly as a content marketer and as a former internal corporate marketer, I reached out to folks that I know that are still living and breathing corporate marketing struggles every day.
I found a couple of things, the number one being that marketers were miserable. It’s like that scene from, I think it’s Poltergeist where the obsessed woman has help written on her. Was it Poltergeist? Anyway, there was a woman possessed, and the words help showed up on her stomach because
I feel like a lot of internal corporate marketers feel that way. They’re miserable. Why are marketers so miserable?
Michael: When you get down to it, I’ve found that it’s mainly because they hate their boss.
They don’t love the corporate culture. They’re not happy with what they’re being asked to do. They feel they don’t have an impact.
When I looked at why content marketing programs aren’t successful, the answer superficially was content ROI. What’s the ROI of content? And if you don’t mind me, I’m not being promotional, but I wrote a book called The Content Formula, All About Content Marketing ROI.
And when I went back to folks I sent the book to, but I found that it wasn’t enough. The math isn’t enough to get people over the challenges that we’re facing and how to do marketing that doesn’t suck. Most marketing stinks for this reason
Michael: The answer is that I wrote the book is that most of the marketing that we do that stinks and doesn’t work, because some executive with a big ego asked us to do it.
Executives love seeing logos on stadiums, and they love seeing Super Bowl ads, and all the things that we make fun of marketing about primarily come from a request from sales or marketing or product people.
And the companies where content marketing is successful or marketers are happy are making an impact because there’s a culture of empathy. Their cultures don’t suck. The companies don’t suck. The leaders don’t suck. That’s why I wrote the book. Maybe a long-winded explanation, but that’s why. Why empathy is more important now
Brian: It’s hard for marketers to care about the customer when they don’t feel cared about too. They don’t feel safe. They’re anxious, or they’re frustrated, or they’re overwhelmed. You also talked about empathy. Why does empathy matter, especially to marketers and does it lead to better results?
Michael: Yeah, One of the stories that I tell in the book, the very first corporate book that I read, and I have to give credit to the former CEO at Nielsen, my first company who made most of us in the company read the book. And I was like, “Oh, here we go. And I read the book. I was like,” Wow, this is actually really pretty cool.”
It’s called the Service Profit Chain. I write a lot about it.
The book isn’t talked about much, but the premise is simple. Three or four Harvard business review professors got together, and they said, wait for a second, we’ve seen this correlation between engaged employees are happy employees, happy customers, and higher stock prices more satisfied stock investors.
They did some actual research and found that where there’s employee engagement, there is customer loyalty. Where there’s customer loyalty, there’s higher spend rates and retention and higher stock prices. The counter-intuitive secret to success
Michael: The key to those environments, those cultures, those companies where there were happy employees, was empathy. The company’s purpose was to make their employees happy because they knew happy employees created delighted customers. It’s totally intuitive, and yet it’s counterintuitive.
That’s one of the reasons we reconnected. my LinkedIn post’s empathy is the counterintuitive secret to success. The thing is, I think that life has beaten us down and gotten us to believe that we should take what we want, and we should put our elbows out and get to the front of the line. It’s the opposite. It’s counterintuitive that if we help people, we can get what we want.
It’s right for marketing, which really has a bad reputation. Most people think marketing is propaganda and promotion, but the companies that have effective marketing are those that are empathetic. It’s those that are empathetic to their customers and don’t just create advertising and propaganda.
Empathy really is the key to marketing and business and in life. I kind of wrote the book kind of really trying to straddle all three of those perspectives. I hope your listeners look, and hopefully, they can maybe get back to me and tell me how well I did to try to straddle those three.
Brian: Well, I just want to say I’m excited for you. I’m passionate about this book because big-picture empathy or caring for customers or wanting to help people it’s easy to talk about. Right? I think if you were asking your own executives, do you care about your customers? Do you have empathy for your employees? I don’t think anyone would argue with that, but it’s easier to talk about than it is to do. Getting customers to care (begins with caring)
Brian: One of the things you talked about was just the customer journey, and what the experience is for customers, why they don’t care about brands anymore and how the brand doesn’t matter. So why is that?
Michael: Well, the first thing is I think it’s essential for marketers and especially brand marketers, corporate marketers, but I also believe those who are in the trenches there need to understand how to explain this to executives. And that is that we just aren’t that important. We’re not as exciting or important as we think we are.
My former company, Nielsen, did a survey of brands and found that consumers wouldn’t care, 77% said they wouldn’t care if the brands they use disappeared completely. We’re seen as replaceable in many aspects. While we think we’re super important, and we believe we are fascinating. Our customers are just trying to get through every day and trying to meet the challenges they face.
They’re trying to stay awake. The bar is low. Yet so many brands don’t create any kind of messaging or sort of stories that resonate. And so that’s really the trick is if you genuinely care about your customers, you don’t talk about yourself as much.
When I meet somebody new, I don’t say, “Hi, my name is Michael Brenner, and I’m awesome.” That’s the last thing I would ever say.
If I want somebody to listen to me, I say, “Hi, how are you?” My first thing is outreach. It’s empathy. It’s not promotion and propaganda and ego. I think we just forget that sometimes when we’re sitting inside the corporate marketing department.
Brian: Well, you’re illustrating the point, and then I’ll come back, that empathy is more comfortable to talk about than it is to do. We’ve got to overcome our own bias, thinking that we have the answer. How to use empathy in your marketing approach
Brian: I believe marketers come from the perspective: If I were the customer, how would this appeal to me? Or, as you talked about the leader who wants to see the logo, well, that’s not a customer-focused decision in their calculus.
How might marketers use empathy in their approach to customers?
Michael: In my first book, The Content Formula, I talk about my year-long struggle to get my colleagues inside SAP to see and to have empathy for our customers. I started with data. The data often leads to the conclusion.
For example, at SAP, we were selling a cloud computing solution called SAP HANA, which now has a little brand awareness but then didn’t have any.
What I tried to show my colleagues in marketing was that people weren’t searching for our product name. They weren’t searching even for SAP cloud computing solutions. They were searching for things like what is cloud computing.
In every industry, no matter what thing you sell, if you sell, cybersecurity solutions, and you sell the world’s most excellent cybersecurity solution named alpha, I’m just making this up, people aren’t searching for alpha as much as they’re searching for cybersecurity solutions.
When I found the data didn’t work, I moved to fear, FOMO, in a way, but really fear. I went to the sales team and showed them that I use this term, the buying journey doesn’t start with a search for our product. And the sales team understood that better than my peers in marketing.
And I use search. I said, “Hey, look, when, when I, when I type cloud computing into Google, IBM, and Oracle and Salesforce show up, but SEP didn’t show up at all.” They got angry. That anger then translated to direct mandates over to my peers in marketing, who finally created the atmosphere and environment for me to create customer-focused content. It was kind of like a mafia move if you will. I kind of strong-armed them too to see that it was the right thing to do.
Brian: The point you made is you went to the people who we’re talking to the customer. They had that insight. And ironically, we’re in marketing, we’re supposed to influence messages of customers, but we are not in the building. Putting customers in the center of your org chart
Brian: You have a lot of great stories in your book. Do you have a favorite story? And if so, which one?
Michael: Yeah. One of the things I talk about how to create empathy inside the organization is to rethink the org chart. I talk about how org charts are boxes and lines, and they show who’s above and below us.
Basically, they highlight who directs orders down to the minions who do the stuff, do the work. I talk about the org charts miss the most important person, and that’s the customer. I’m not suggesting every company should recreate the org chart, but if we rethink the org chart, it will look more like a bullseye, right? Bullseye org charts focus everyone on the common goal of serving the most important person to the organization, the customer via https://meanpeoplesuck.com/
You have the customer at the center, and all the departments branching out from there would be thinking, how should I best serve this customer? There’s a couple of stories in the book of people, and they’re not all necessarily marketers, but indeed a few who’ve done that. Cleveland Clinic empathy story
One is Amanda Todorovich from Cleveland Clinic. She has a viral empathy video. If you Google Cleveland Clinic empathy video, you’ll see an internal… It was initially an internally created video to try to get the executives inside Cleveland Clinic to see that Cleveland Clinic is more than just a business. It’s more than a hospital operation.
It’s an organization that serves patients. The concerns that patients have are matters of life and death and giving birth and dying. Amanda’s teams’ video was incredibly impactful. I get chills just talking about it. I use it in every presentation, and it has 4 million views online.
They released it publicly at the behest of their executive team because they really understood the impact of, hey, you know, what makes us different isn’t because we have great surgeons, and we have utilized some particular technique or equipment, what makes us unique is that we really care for our patients.
It’s kind of empathy writ large in a way to a corporate mission in many cases all the way down to the content that Amanda and her team create every day, which serves patient needs. And so that’s one of my favorite stories from an empathy perspective.
There are probably 15 stories. I could keep going. I’ll stop myself because I love talking about the people, I call champions, the champion leaders, the people that celebrated others, and achieved success because of that. That’s the counterintuitive nature of empathy. It’s helping others, live your life in service of others, and you get what you want. And that’s really at the heart of the book.
Brian: Well, in my experience, I 100% agree. I’ve always had the best marketing selling feels like helping because it is. But I had a Jerry Maguire moment where I realized I wasn’t living that. My team was more focused on trying to convert people instead of connecting and help. We asked hey, what do customers care about? How can I help them get it? Ironically when we stopped trying to get leads, we got 303% more opportunities because we were really helping people.
Do you have tips for developing more empathy customers that you could share with our listeners? Ask this: what’s in it for the customer?
Michael: Yeah. There’s a couple of, I guess, tools I wanted to develop for your listeners. For the people who were like me who was sitting, getting asked to do stuff that we know won’t work. And the sort of the highest-level insight is asking what’s in it for the customer.
For example, your sales leader comes over and says, I’d like a brochure for this niche industry event we’re going to. It’s going to cost you $4,000, and it’s a couple of designers and a printer to get created. Just ask, “What’s in it for the customer?” Do people really read our brochures? Are they going to throw it right in the trash? You might think it’s essential to stuff that inside the conference bag, but I’ve never read a brochure myself from a conference.
If we ask what’s in it for the customer as opposed to thinking of our jobs as just doing what the sales team or the product team or our boss tells us to do, the answer, I think, is sometimes surprising.
We wouldn’t do half of what we do if we asked what’s in it for the customer. The pushback questions
I offer three deeper level questions that there’s a couple of examples of people who have done this. I call it the push back. It just goes a bit deeper.
Who is this for?
Why is it important?
How are we going to measure the impact?
And if you ask those three, those are three deeper level questions from them what’s in it for the customer sort of overview.
Again, you wouldn’t put your logo on a stadium, you wouldn’t create a brochure that costs a lot of money to print and kills trees. You wouldn’t do a lot of the things that we do that we roll our eyes about when we think about marketing and when we think about really all the propaganda that comes outside of companies.
Brian: It’s so funny as I listen to you. As I talk with marketers, often, VPs will lament, and we forget what it’s like to be a customer even though we’re all customers ourselves. That’s kind of the crazy thing.
Any other things you wish I would’ve asked about before we just close?
Michael: No, I think we’ve covered the primary tips. I appreciate you bringing me on and letting me share these tips with the readers. I’d love for your audience to read the book.
Again, everything I do, I’ve done in support of this desire to try to help people. I started blogging before I had a business just because I wanted to share what I know. The keynotes I give, the books that I write, and even the client work that I do get paid for are really to try to help people, and it’s worked for me.
I don’t think I’m smarter than other people. If it works for me, I think it’s the secret for many of us to live a life that’s maybe a little more meaningful, a little more impactful. I just talk to so many people. I talk about this crisis of engagement and empathy. The world feels like a meaner place these days. Three takeaways from the book
The three takeaways from the book are: be kind, be cool, and be you.
Be kind is just because it’s the right thing to do.
Be cool is don’t take things personally. A lot of the mean people we meet aren’t psychopaths and narcissists, they’re just having a bad day.
Be you is because the people that are, I think, living their fullest life, but they know what their purpose is, and they’re working in support of that, and it’s often in service of others. You may also like:
Download the Mean People Suck Companion Guide PDF courtesy of Michael Brenner
Bring more innovation to your demand generation now
4 Steps to Do Lead Nurturing That Helps More Customers Buy
8 Questions to Steer Your Marketing Priorities
According to Michael Brenner, “Most of the marketing that we do that stinks and doesn’t work is that some executive with a big ego asked us to do it.”
On top of that, marketers are not in a happy place.
According to MarketingProfs 2019 Marketer Happiness Report, “Only 10% of marketers say they were very fulfilled in their work.” The report looked at the dimensions of feeling fulfilled, valued, and energized by the work, that our work is impactful, and engaged.
That’s why I interviewed Michael Brenner (@BrennerMichael), the CEO of Marketing Insider Group to talk about his new book Mean People Suck.
We need more empathy inside our companies to empathize more with our customers.
Michael Brenner states, “The most counter-intuitive secret to success in business and life is empathy.” I’m excited to share his thoughts on empathy with you.
In this interview, you’ll learn about asking what’s in it for the customer, rethinking your organizational chart, and making the changes you need to make to be more successful today. Why did you write Mean People Suck?
Michael: Again, I must give you credit. You were out in front of this empathy topic in marketing.
I think long before me. Kudos to you. It just took me a little longer, but mainly as a content marketer and as a former internal corporate marketer, I reached out to folks that I know that are still living and breathing corporate marketing struggles every day.
I found a couple of things, the number one being that marketers were miserable. It’s like that scene from, I think it’s Poltergeist where the obsessed woman has help written on her. Was it Poltergeist? Anyway, there was a woman possessed, and the words help showed up on her stomach because
I feel like a lot of internal corporate marketers feel that way. They’re miserable. Why are marketers so miserable?
Michael: When you get down to it, I’ve found that it’s mainly because they hate their boss.
They don’t love the corporate culture. They’re not happy with what they’re being asked to do. They feel they don’t have an impact.
When I looked at why content marketing programs aren’t successful, the answer superficially was content ROI. What’s the ROI of content? And if you don’t mind me, I’m not being promotional, but I wrote a book called The Content Formula, All About Content Marketing ROI.
And when I went back to folks I sent the book to, but I found that it wasn’t enough. The math isn’t enough to get people over the challenges that we’re facing and how to do marketing that doesn’t suck. Most marketing stinks for this reason
Michael: The answer is that I wrote the book is that most of the marketing that we do that stinks and doesn’t work, because some executive with a big ego asked us to do it.
Executives love seeing logos on stadiums, and they love seeing Super Bowl ads, and all the things that we make fun of marketing about primarily come from a request from sales or marketing or product people.
And the companies where content marketing is successful or marketers are happy are making an impact because there’s a culture of empathy. Their cultures don’t suck. The companies don’t suck. The leaders don’t suck. That’s why I wrote the book. Maybe a long-winded explanation, but that’s why. Why empathy is more important now
Brian: It’s hard for marketers to care about the customer when they don’t feel cared about too. They don’t feel safe. They’re anxious, or they’re frustrated, or they’re overwhelmed. You also talked about empathy. Why does empathy matter, especially to marketers and does it lead to better results?
Michael: Yeah, One of the stories that I tell in the book, the very first corporate book that I read, and I have to give credit to the former CEO at Nielsen, my first company who made most of us in the company read the book. And I was like, “Oh, here we go. And I read the book. I was like,” Wow, this is actually really pretty cool.”
It’s called the Service Profit Chain. I write a lot about it.
The book isn’t talked about much, but the premise is simple. Three or four Harvard business review professors got together, and they said, wait for a second, we’ve seen this correlation between engaged employees are happy employees, happy customers, and higher stock prices more satisfied stock investors.
They did some actual research and found that where there’s employee engagement, there is customer loyalty. Where there’s customer loyalty, there’s higher spend rates and retention and higher stock prices. The counter-intuitive secret to success
Michael: The key to those environments, those cultures, those companies where there were happy employees, was empathy. The company’s purpose was to make their employees happy because they knew happy employees created delighted customers. It’s totally intuitive, and yet it’s counterintuitive.
That’s one of the reasons we reconnected. my LinkedIn post’s empathy is the counterintuitive secret to success. The thing is, I think that life has beaten us down and gotten us to believe that we should take what we want, and we should put our elbows out and get to the front of the line. It’s the opposite. It’s counterintuitive that if we help people, we can get what we want.
It’s right for marketing, which really has a bad reputation. Most people think marketing is propaganda and promotion, but the companies that have effective marketing are those that are empathetic. It’s those that are empathetic to their customers and don’t just create advertising and propaganda.
Empathy really is the key to marketing and business and in life. I kind of wrote the book kind of really trying to straddle all three of those perspectives. I hope your listeners look, and hopefully, they can maybe get back to me and tell me how well I did to try to straddle those three.
Brian: Well, I just want to say I’m excited for you. I’m passionate about this book because big-picture empathy or caring for customers or wanting to help people it’s easy to talk about. Right? I think if you were asking your own executives, do you care about your customers? Do you have empathy for your employees? I don’t think anyone would argue with that, but it’s easier to talk about than it is to do. Getting customers to care (begins with caring)
Brian: One of the things you talked about was just the customer journey, and what the experience is for customers, why they don’t care about brands anymore and how the brand doesn’t matter. So why is that?
Michael: Well, the first thing is I think it’s essential for marketers and especially brand marketers, corporate marketers, but I also believe those who are in the trenches there need to understand how to explain this to executives. And that is that we just aren’t that important. We’re not as exciting or important as we think we are.
My former company, Nielsen, did a survey of brands and found that consumers wouldn’t care, 77% said they wouldn’t care if the brands they use disappeared completely. We’re seen as replaceable in many aspects. While we think we’re super important, and we believe we are fascinating. Our customers are just trying to get through every day and trying to meet the challenges they face.
They’re trying to stay awake. The bar is low. Yet so many brands don’t create any kind of messaging or sort of stories that resonate. And so that’s really the trick is if you genuinely care about your customers, you don’t talk about yourself as much.
When I meet somebody new, I don’t say, “Hi, my name is Michael Brenner, and I’m awesome.” That’s the last thing I would ever say.
If I want somebody to listen to me, I say, “Hi, how are you?” My first thing is outreach. It’s empathy. It’s not promotion and propaganda and ego. I think we just forget that sometimes when we’re sitting inside the corporate marketing department.
Brian: Well, you’re illustrating the point, and then I’ll come back, that empathy is more comfortable to talk about than it is to do. We’ve got to overcome our own bias, thinking that we have the answer. How to use empathy in your marketing approach
Brian: I believe marketers come from the perspective: If I were the customer, how would this appeal to me? Or, as you talked about the leader who wants to see the logo, well, that’s not a customer-focused decision in their calculus.
How might marketers use empathy in their approach to customers?
Michael: In my first book, The Content Formula, I talk about my year-long struggle to get my colleagues inside SAP to see and to have empathy for our customers. I started with data. The data often leads to the conclusion.
For example, at SAP, we were selling a cloud computing solution called SAP HANA, which now has a little brand awareness but then didn’t have any.
What I tried to show my colleagues in marketing was that people weren’t searching for our product name. They weren’t searching even for SAP cloud computing solutions. They were searching for things like what is cloud computing.
In every industry, no matter what thing you sell, if you sell, cybersecurity solutions, and you sell the world’s most excellent cybersecurity solution named alpha, I’m just making this up, people aren’t searching for alpha as much as they’re searching for cybersecurity solutions.
When I found the data didn’t work, I moved to fear, FOMO, in a way, but really fear. I went to the sales team and showed them that I use this term, the buying journey doesn’t start with a search for our product. And the sales team understood that better than my peers in marketing.
And I use search. I said, “Hey, look, when, when I, when I type cloud computing into Google, IBM, and Oracle and Salesforce show up, but SEP didn’t show up at all.” They got angry. That anger then translated to direct mandates over to my peers in marketing, who finally created the atmosphere and environment for me to create customer-focused content. It was kind of like a mafia move if you will. I kind of strong-armed them too to see that it was the right thing to do.
Brian: The point you made is you went to the people who we’re talking to the customer. They had that insight. And ironically, we’re in marketing, we’re supposed to influence messages of customers, but we are not in the building. Putting customers in the center of your org chart
Brian: You have a lot of great stories in your book. Do you have a favorite story? And if so, which one?
Michael: Yeah. One of the things I talk about how to create empathy inside the organization is to rethink the org chart. I talk about how org charts are boxes and lines, and they show who’s above and below us.
Basically, they highlight who directs orders down to the minions who do the stuff, do the work. I talk about the org charts miss the most important person, and that’s the customer. I’m not suggesting every company should recreate the org chart, but if we rethink the org chart, it will look more like a bullseye, right? Bullseye org charts focus everyone on the common goal of serving the most important person to the organization, the customer via https://meanpeoplesuck.com/
You have the customer at the center, and all the departments branching out from there would be thinking, how should I best serve this customer? There’s a couple of stories in the book of people, and they’re not all necessarily marketers, but indeed a few who’ve done that. Cleveland Clinic empathy story
One is Amanda Todorovich from Cleveland Clinic. She has a viral empathy video. If you Google Cleveland Clinic empathy video, you’ll see an internal… It was initially an internally created video to try to get the executives inside Cleveland Clinic to see that Cleveland Clinic is more than just a business. It’s more than a hospital operation.
It’s an organization that serves patients. The concerns that patients have are matters of life and death and giving birth and dying. Amanda’s teams’ video was incredibly impactful. I get chills just talking about it. I use it in every presentation, and it has 4 million views online.
They released it publicly at the behest of their executive team because they really understood the impact of, hey, you know, what makes us different isn’t because we have great surgeons, and we have utilized some particular technique or equipment, what makes us unique is that we really care for our patients.
It’s kind of empathy writ large in a way to a corporate mission in many cases all the way down to the content that Amanda and her team create every day, which serves patient needs. And so that’s one of my favorite stories from an empathy perspective.
There are probably 15 stories. I could keep going. I’ll stop myself because I love talking about the people, I call champions, the champion leaders, the people that celebrated others, and achieved success because of that. That’s the counterintuitive nature of empathy. It’s helping others, live your life in service of others, and you get what you want. And that’s really at the heart of the book.
Brian: Well, in my experience, I 100% agree. I’ve always had the best marketing selling feels like helping because it is. But I had a Jerry Maguire moment where I realized I wasn’t living that. My team was more focused on trying to convert people instead of connecting and help. We asked hey, what do customers care about? How can I help them get it? Ironically when we stopped trying to get leads, we got 303% more opportunities because we were really helping people.
Do you have tips for developing more empathy customers that you could share with our listeners? Ask this: what’s in it for the customer?
Michael: Yeah. There’s a couple of, I guess, tools I wanted to develop for your listeners. For the people who were like me who was sitting, getting asked to do stuff that we know won’t work. And the sort of the highest-level insight is asking what’s in it for the customer.
For example, your sales leader comes over and says, I’d like a brochure for this niche industry event we’re going to. It’s going to cost you $4,000, and it’s a couple of designers and a printer to get created. Just ask, “What’s in it for the customer?” Do people really read our brochures? Are they going to throw it right in the trash? You might think it’s essential to stuff that inside the conference bag, but I’ve never read a brochure myself from a conference.
If we ask what’s in it for the customer as opposed to thinking of our jobs as just doing what the sales team or the product team or our boss tells us to do, the answer, I think, is sometimes surprising.
We wouldn’t do half of what we do if we asked what’s in it for the customer. The pushback questions
I offer three deeper level questions that there’s a couple of examples of people who have done this. I call it the push back. It just goes a bit deeper.
Who is this for?
Why is it important?
How are we going to measure the impact?
And if you ask those three, those are three deeper level questions from them what’s in it for the customer sort of overview.
Again, you wouldn’t put your logo on a stadium, you wouldn’t create a brochure that costs a lot of money to print and kills trees. You wouldn’t do a lot of the things that we do that we roll our eyes about when we think about marketing and when we think about really all the propaganda that comes outside of companies.
Brian: It’s so funny as I listen to you. As I talk with marketers, often, VPs will lament, and we forget what it’s like to be a customer even though we’re all customers ourselves. That’s kind of the crazy thing.
Any other things you wish I would’ve asked about before we just close?
Michael: No, I think we’ve covered the primary tips. I appreciate you bringing me on and letting me share these tips with the readers. I’d love for your audience to read the book.
Again, everything I do, I’ve done in support of this desire to try to help people. I started blogging before I had a business just because I wanted to share what I know. The keynotes I give, the books that I write, and even the client work that I do get paid for are really to try to help people, and it’s worked for me.
I don’t think I’m smarter than other people. If it works for me, I think it’s the secret for many of us to live a life that’s maybe a little more meaningful, a little more impactful. I just talk to so many people. I talk about this crisis of engagement and empathy. The world feels like a meaner place these days. Three takeaways from the book
The three takeaways from the book are: be kind, be cool, and be you.
Be kind is just because it’s the right thing to do.
Be cool is don’t take things personally. A lot of the mean people we meet aren’t psychopaths and narcissists, they’re just having a bad day.
Be you is because the people that are, I think, living their fullest life, but they know what their purpose is, and they’re working in support of that, and it’s often in service of others. You may also like:
Download the Mean People Suck Companion Guide PDF courtesy of Michael Brenner
Bring more innovation to your demand generation now
4 Steps to Do Lead Nurturing That Helps More Customers Buy
8 Questions to Steer Your Marketing Priorities
Mehr
20.06.2019
24 Minuten
Has our devotion to work and hustle turned into the UnAmerican Dream?
Some of the hardest working people I know are in sales and marketing.
We often read success stories about how hustle and grit drove fantastic success.
That said, the relentless pursuit of success can leave behind damaged relationships and personal life carnage in its wake.
Take me, for example.
Shortly after building up and selling a successful company, my 17-year marriage ended.
There’s a reason entrepreneurs have a higher divorce rate.
For me. My pursuit of business success left my health and my personal relationships in a severe need of help.
I needed to redefine the kind of life I wanted to live, make different choices, and set better boundaries.
It wasn’t easy.
Now, my health, relationships, and personal and professional happiness are so much better.
That’s why I was excited to interviewed Carlos Hidalgo (@cahidalgo), CEO of Digital Exhaust and author of the new book The UnAmerican Dream.
In this interview, you’ll hear Carlos’s story about finding personal and professional happiness and establishing work-life boundaries.
This is a must-read for sellers, marketers, and entrepreneurs.
Can you tell our listeners a little bit about your background?
Carlos: Yeah. Hey Brian. Always a pleasure to talk to you. I have been in B2B marketing and sales for over 20 years. I think right now it’s about 25 years, which is hard to believe.
I’ve been both client-side, and then in 2005, I co-founded an agency. That agency is still running. I left that agency at the end of 2016, beginning of 2017 to start another business. So, could say I’m a bit of an entrepreneur. I love creating things.
Now, I work with B2B companies in the whole area of customer experience under the new brand VisumCX, and then just wrote my second book.
The first book was on demand generation, so if you ever have insomnia, go for it. You can read that.
But this book was the UnAmerican Dream, which is more my story and a whole lot more personal than the first one. Why did you write The UnAmerican Dream? The UnAmerican Dream
Brian: Can you tell the story about why you wrote this book, The UnAmerican Dream, and why now?
Carlos: Yeah, great question. When I left Annuitas, which was the first company that I had co-founded and started, I put a post on LinkedIn about why I was going.
It was more to get back to what I should have been doing in the first place, which was cultivating those meaningful relationships, especially with my children and marriage.
I was struck by the number of calls and emails I got from fellow entrepreneurs and fellow business leaders who were saying,
“So, how did you do this? What steps did you take because I am at my wit’s end? I’m never seeing my family,” or “My marriage is falling apart,” or insert whatever they were going through.
I was shocked.
Wow, this is not just me going through this.
So, that’s why.
But the why now, is the idea of that book came to me over two years ago.
But I needed to work on me first.
I had to get some things straight in me, and one of those things that I start with the introduction, I believe, saying I first had the idea in 2016.
When I told somebody the title, they said, “It sounds like an angry book.”
I believe if I had written it then, it would have been an angry book because I had a lot of things that I had to work through and deconstruct some things that I had held to be true which weren’t right.
So, I needed to wait. Waiting, I believe, made it a much more authentic book, a much more vulnerable book, but not an angry book in any way. Walking away from the UnAmerican Dream
Brian: I’m going to ask the same question you got asked by many people on LinkedIn. How did you walk away from this UnAmerican dream, and what do you mean by that?
Carlos: Yeah. Wow. How I did it … From the outside, it probably seemed like, oh, he woke up one day and was like, “I’m done.”
It was a 10-month process for me. I really wrestled with the decision. And you know, Brian, you’ve started businesses. You’re an entrepreneur yourself.
When you start something from scratch, and you put everything you have into it, you really … The term I hear often is, “This is my baby.”
I wanted to make sure that, first and foremost, I had come to a place where I’m like, “I’ve got to do everything I can to get back those relationships that I had neglected for so long.”
So, I tried to do that within the context of the first business.
That took me 10 months.
I kept wrestling with what should I do and how should I do it? Getting the courage to make the decision
Carlos: It was a conversation which I’ve told many times, so I want to elaborate in case there’s an overlap with people who have heard this before.
But, a conversation with a colleague in the lobby of the Westin who encouraged me.
He said, “You know what you need to do. You just need the courage to do it.”
I called Suzanne, my wife, at that point, a few hours later and said, “I’m leaving.”
When it came down to it, I really just pulled the ripcord because I didn’t have a big buyout waiting. I didn’t have this significant hoard of cash in the savings account where I could run for months and months.
It was a risk.
It was scary.
It was like, “Okay, so what am I going to do now?”
But everything panned out, and everything worked out. I would do it again in a heartbeat. It was the best professional decision I ever made. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?
Brian: Well, Carlos, for our listeners, it will come through. You and I are good friends. I was just thinking about you as an entrepreneur and as I know you. I mean, entrepreneurship is in your blood. It’s part of your history, part of your family history.
As I was reading the book, you wrote about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What’s getting in the way of that?
Carlos: Wow, so much is getting in the way of that. I think, first and foremost, is we as Americans are on this treadmill and this pace, and we have made work our God.
We work more than any other group, any other nationality in the world.
So, just think about that. I just read a stat last week where 32% of Millennials will not take more than a four-night vacation because of work. 70% of the population says, “I don’t have work-life balance.”
I was at Nashville this last weekend, and the people we stayed with, he’s like, “I didn’t take all my vacation. I can’t.”
I think part of what’s getting in the way of our happiness is we’re slaves to our jobs, we’re slaves to our career, we’re slaves to our businesses, and that’s a choice that we have made.
I know people will debate me on that all day long, but it is a choice that we have made. Quitting weekend work
I literally, before this, saw a LinkedIn post that said, “If you’re reading this on the weekend, it’s clear that you’re a top performer.”
So, if you’re not connected to your profession on the weekend, the message is that you’re not a top performer.
That is a total fallacy because I don’t work weekends anymore. I used to all the time. I don’t any longer.
That means I’m not on LinkedIn, I’m not promoting anything, I’m not doing anything for my clients, and everybody knows that.
That’s a boundary I chose. I think that’s one thing. How social media impacts happiness
The other thing that I think that it’s really getting in the way of our happiness is social media, and these stinking things. We are so attached to, and I will use the word addiction, to our devices, and to social media.
To the point where we’ll put something on Facebook and then 20 minutes later we’re going and seeing how many likes.
We retweet.
“How many followers do I have?”
We have created what I call social loneliness where we are so socially connected, but we are so utterly lonely because people don’t really know us.
We haven’t built a relationship, and as human beings, we’re wired for connection.
I think when we put those things ahead of what we’re wired for, our happiness or our ability to choose joy, severely wanes.
Brian: There’s so much there, Carlos, as I’m listening to you. Something I remember from a conversation you and I had a while ago, and you had been going back to when I was trying to start my company again, as I was starting something new. You talked about setting boundaries instead of trying to get a work-life balance. Why is that? Why Focus on work-life boundaries, not balance
I don’t believe in work-life balance because I tried it for … At different parts of my career, I tried it.
At other parts, I was like, “I’m completely unbalanced, and I’m good with that.”
Now, when I think about it makes me want to shake my head.
The stats will show you 70% saying I can’t achieve work-life balance. So, when I see that, I know the reality is it doesn’t exist.
The picture I get is my daughter, who was a gymnast for 14 years. Upon that balance beam and nothing made me more nervous.
I had kids in theater and kids in sports, and they could perform, and I’d get a little nervous, but man, when she was there, you think about that. It’s hard to balance.
It’s hard to balance across a trajectory of time.
So, what I did is I rejected the idea of balance.
Maybe it’s semantics, but for me, the idea of boundaries is they are more permanent.
It takes work to move if I draw a boundary or install a limit. So, I’ve adopted boundaries, and when I say “I have,” we have because I’ve done it in the community, first and foremost, with my wife. Building boundaries in the community
Brian, you and I have talked about my boundaries, and I’ve invited you into that community of people who have permission to be like, “Hey, I’m kind of seeing this stuff,” or “What’s going on here and how are you doing with that?”
Because God forbid if I’m the only one who’s going to determine am I balanced. Defining what you value and want to protect
What we did was to define what we want to protect? What do we want to value?
For me, time with my family, time with my wife is priority number one.
My health, both physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual is essential.
So, I go to the gym regularly. I meditate.
I take time just to stop and think and shut off my phone and close my computer.
Some days, it’s just staring out the window. If you were to look at me, you’d be like, “Is this guy really working or what?” But I’m thinking.
So, it’s those types of things that I protect.
The counter to that is I’m so much wildly more productive in my work because there is a boundary around the time that I’m working. I’m not engaging in friendly conversation or texting or meeting a buddy for lunch. I am absolutely focused in on what I’m doing for a living.
So, my clients get the best of me as well as my relationships. How to set work-life boundaries
Brian: For those out there who are seeing this, it’s not easy to do. At least, for me, it isn’t. Do you have any tips, and advice on what you found we can do to get better at setting boundaries or non-negotiables in our life?
Carlos: Yeah, you’re right. It’s not easy to do.
I’m the first to say I don’t have this all figured out.
I’m on the journey with everybody else. I may be a few steps ahead, but I also know people who are so much far ahead than I am. It’s something I’ve been doing for two years. I shared with Suzanne the other day, I hate when people say, “Well, they’ve really done their work.” Like we’ve all arrived, we should all be experiencing.
Three weeks ago, I picked up my phone and wanted to check my email at 8:00 at night, and Suzanne’s like, “So, what are we doing because this is two nights in a row?”
And it was utterly appropriate, total gentle, not any kind of like … But that’s what I wanted. Start with your closest relationships
Carlos: Anyway, back to the question. I think, first and foremost, you have to do it in the community with your closest of relationships.
If that’s a spouse, that’s a boyfriend, girlfriend, close friend, close co-worker, even your boss, right?
Say, “I want to give the best of myself in all aspects of my life, professionally, personally, whatever else.”
Whether it’s work, if you’re going to the gym by yourself, I want to give the best while I’m there. Write down what you value
So do that in community and then sit down and really write down what do you value.
I was talking to somebody the other day who was talking to me how much they value their physical fitness.
Then literally, almost in the same breath, it was like, “Well, I don’t have time to go to the gym.”
Okay, so you don’t really value your physical fitness.
When I say to them even go for a run outside because if you’re shunning that, or if you’re shunning the annual checkup or whatever that is, you don’t value … You may say you do, but your actions say you don’t. Clarify what is getting in the way of what you value
Carlos: So, really define what you value, and then say, “What are the things that I’m letting get in the way of those things that I say I value?”
When you do that in a community, you’re going to get a much different perspective than if we just do it in isolation.
Because often the people we surround ourselves with, that we are close with, can kind of point out our blind spots which are of massive value to us and should be embraced.
I would say those are a couple of things that I would highly recommend. Identify blind spots by doing this
Brian: That’s really good. I can identify with the blind spots and the need to have a feedback loop. There are things every person has that we can’t see how we’re living our life or how we’re showing up.
We won’t know unless we ask people, “What do you see that I’m missing?” It sounds like to get to that place you got to have an intention or purpose, too.
How would someone start the conversation about this? Asking for additional help
Carlos: I think it’s starting with being really honest, first and foremost, about here’s where I’m at. I’m not here to judge people who are going to work 14 hours a day.
If that’s what you and your community have decided is good and works for everybody, who am I to say you’re wrong?
That’s not my place.
I think just asking the question, “How are we doing?”
Asking the question, “Hey, here’s what I want to be doing.”
I value family time, I value fitness, I value fun, which can be a value. It may be something you like.
Ask “What do you see that I’m doing that’s getting in the way of that?”
If you’re going to ask that question, be prepared for the answers.
Part of the work I had to do was to sit down and hear some pretty unpleasant things.
I didn’t want to hear about things I had done, the choices I had made, the decisions I had made.
That is not a fun thing to go through, but it makes us better. It makes us more aware. Communicating your boundaries
Carlos: I am so much more aware now, even more so than I was also just a year ago, or when I’m in my personal boundary after working hours of not checking my phone, not trying to stay engaged, not returning that text.
I’ve gone to this extent to make my partners, and my clients, and my professional connections aware of that, so oftentimes if I do get a text at 7:00 at night or 9:00 at night, what I’m starting to see is, “Hey, I know you’re not going to get this till the morning.”
I’m like, “Yeah, you’re right.”
Even if I see it, I’m not going to respond to it. Why work devotion and hustle porn are destructive
Brian: So, I was thinking about the LinkedIn post you brought up about, “Hey, if you’re looking at this on a Saturday … ” There’s this whole notion of work devotion or hustle porn. Why is that such a thing today? Why is it destructive?
Carlos: I think the reason it’s a thing today is you’ve got so many loud voices out there promoting it.
You’ve got Kevin O’Leary who’s talking … Literally says, “25 hours a day.” In the interview that I think I quote in the book is, “It’s 24/7. Get used to it. Get over it.”
You’ve got Jack Ma with his ridiculous 9, 9, 6. 9:00 to 9:00, six days a week. You’ve got Grant Cardone with his unhealthy approach to 95 hours a week, and the list goes on.
Daymond John’s, “Rise and grind.” We’re not real entrepreneurs unless we do this. I think those voices are so loud, and it’s this idea … I couple that with if I’m the scarce resource to my organization, which means I’m working long hours. I’m always available, we make that part of our identity, it is a perfect storm.
Carlos: The reason it is destructive is we only have a certain amount of time each and every day. 24 hours a day, 86,400 seconds.
If I’m devoting the majority of that time to my work, something has to suffer. Either I suffer which, if I do, I can’t give the best of myself to my relationships.
So, either way, my relationships take a hit.
When I go back to fundamentally as human beings we were wired for a connection, then we have to start to think about, so, what does that mean?
When we begin to move against what we’re wired for fundamentally, we begin to see anxiety, we begin to see anger, we start to see sleeplessness, we begin to see loneliness. More socially connected but more lonely
Carlos: I was doing research on that this morning. It is off the charts.
Over half of Americans are saying they have feelings of loneliness even though we’re so connected.
Just like all porn, hustle porn is destructive. It’s toxic, I agree with Alex Ohanion. I applaud him for taking a stand against it.
Honestly, I would be delighted to have the individuals that I just named shut up because they are doing a disservice to entrepreneurs and business leaders and families everywhere.
That’s why I had Suzanne write a chapter because there is a story on the other side of every hustle story.
I lived that hustle lifestyle for far too long. It’s not sustainable. It did damage to us as a family and to me personally. Sellers and Marketers are overwhelmed
Brian: I really appreciate you just sharing that there is another side to this. As you mentioned and as entrepreneurs, and you and I have worked in the sales and marketing world for a long time, is this happening in sales and marketing? If so, what can we do to change it?
Carlos: Oh, it is. I work with marketers on a day to day basis. I see more and more.
When you say, “So, how’s it going?”, they’re like, “Oh, my word. I’m slammed. I’m overwhelmed. I have so much to do. There are not enough hours in the day.”
I get emails from clients at 10:00 at night. I got a text from a client not long ago that said, “I feel completely overwhelmed, and I’m so down. I don’t know what to do.”
I go to conferences. At the last conference I was at, I asked a bunch of marketers, “How many of you feel there’s not enough time to accomplish what you want to do in a meaningful way?”
Virtually every hand out of 200+ went up.
I definitely see this on the marketing and sales front. Giving people permission to turn off
I think what we can do about it is, first of all, business leaders if you’re listening, start to create a culture that gives your people permission to turn off.
Carlos: When you are sending them emails at 10:00 at night even if you’ve said, “Hey, we have a culture where we have our working hours,” you’re putting them in a position of, “Can I tell the boss to wait?”
That is a disadvantage you’re giving to your people.
If you really want the best of them, you will allow them time to step away and turn off and not feel they have to shorten their vacations or be connected on vacation or connected at 9:00 at night.
That’s number one as a business leader. Designing your job to fit your lifestyle
Number two, there’s a corporate profile in the book of a lady named Claire Potter who is in a sales role.
Claire works for a multi-billion dollar organization.
What she did was,
“Hey, I just had my first child. I travel. My husband travels. That’s not sustainable. I’m going to create a new job role in my organization, and at the same time, I’m going to create a plan B. I’m going to start to talk to recruiters and understand what jobs are available that would now suit my lifestyle.”
Then she went to her organization and said, “If you want me to stay, this is my new job.”
Her new organization said, “That’s awesome. We value you. We want you in the organization.”
She took the initiative to say this is what I’m going to do. Defining the kind of life you want
Another profile in the book is Elle Woulfe, who is the CMO at PathFactory.
One of my favorite lines in the book, she closes with, “Life is short. I want to make sure I’m here for it.”
Elle had an opportunity to get a very high-profile job with a great company.
She decided to take a role with PathFactory, which is still significant, but it didn’t pay as much, for her family and for her own sake.
But it enabled her to live the life she wanted. Define what kind of life you want, and then design your career, job, and business around that and what it looks like.
We talk about that as well in the book.
You may also like:
Revenue Operations & GTM Leadership
Some of the hardest working people I know are in sales and marketing.
We often read success stories about how hustle and grit drove fantastic success.
That said, the relentless pursuit of success can leave behind damaged relationships and personal life carnage in its wake.
Take me, for example.
Shortly after building up and selling a successful company, my 17-year marriage ended.
There’s a reason entrepreneurs have a higher divorce rate.
For me. My pursuit of business success left my health and my personal relationships in a severe need of help.
I needed to redefine the kind of life I wanted to live, make different choices, and set better boundaries.
It wasn’t easy.
Now, my health, relationships, and personal and professional happiness are so much better.
That’s why I was excited to interviewed Carlos Hidalgo (@cahidalgo), CEO of Digital Exhaust and author of the new book The UnAmerican Dream.
In this interview, you’ll hear Carlos’s story about finding personal and professional happiness and establishing work-life boundaries.
This is a must-read for sellers, marketers, and entrepreneurs.
Can you tell our listeners a little bit about your background?
Carlos: Yeah. Hey Brian. Always a pleasure to talk to you. I have been in B2B marketing and sales for over 20 years. I think right now it’s about 25 years, which is hard to believe.
I’ve been both client-side, and then in 2005, I co-founded an agency. That agency is still running. I left that agency at the end of 2016, beginning of 2017 to start another business. So, could say I’m a bit of an entrepreneur. I love creating things.
Now, I work with B2B companies in the whole area of customer experience under the new brand VisumCX, and then just wrote my second book.
The first book was on demand generation, so if you ever have insomnia, go for it. You can read that.
But this book was the UnAmerican Dream, which is more my story and a whole lot more personal than the first one. Why did you write The UnAmerican Dream? The UnAmerican Dream
Brian: Can you tell the story about why you wrote this book, The UnAmerican Dream, and why now?
Carlos: Yeah, great question. When I left Annuitas, which was the first company that I had co-founded and started, I put a post on LinkedIn about why I was going.
It was more to get back to what I should have been doing in the first place, which was cultivating those meaningful relationships, especially with my children and marriage.
I was struck by the number of calls and emails I got from fellow entrepreneurs and fellow business leaders who were saying,
“So, how did you do this? What steps did you take because I am at my wit’s end? I’m never seeing my family,” or “My marriage is falling apart,” or insert whatever they were going through.
I was shocked.
Wow, this is not just me going through this.
So, that’s why.
But the why now, is the idea of that book came to me over two years ago.
But I needed to work on me first.
I had to get some things straight in me, and one of those things that I start with the introduction, I believe, saying I first had the idea in 2016.
When I told somebody the title, they said, “It sounds like an angry book.”
I believe if I had written it then, it would have been an angry book because I had a lot of things that I had to work through and deconstruct some things that I had held to be true which weren’t right.
So, I needed to wait. Waiting, I believe, made it a much more authentic book, a much more vulnerable book, but not an angry book in any way. Walking away from the UnAmerican Dream
Brian: I’m going to ask the same question you got asked by many people on LinkedIn. How did you walk away from this UnAmerican dream, and what do you mean by that?
Carlos: Yeah. Wow. How I did it … From the outside, it probably seemed like, oh, he woke up one day and was like, “I’m done.”
It was a 10-month process for me. I really wrestled with the decision. And you know, Brian, you’ve started businesses. You’re an entrepreneur yourself.
When you start something from scratch, and you put everything you have into it, you really … The term I hear often is, “This is my baby.”
I wanted to make sure that, first and foremost, I had come to a place where I’m like, “I’ve got to do everything I can to get back those relationships that I had neglected for so long.”
So, I tried to do that within the context of the first business.
That took me 10 months.
I kept wrestling with what should I do and how should I do it? Getting the courage to make the decision
Carlos: It was a conversation which I’ve told many times, so I want to elaborate in case there’s an overlap with people who have heard this before.
But, a conversation with a colleague in the lobby of the Westin who encouraged me.
He said, “You know what you need to do. You just need the courage to do it.”
I called Suzanne, my wife, at that point, a few hours later and said, “I’m leaving.”
When it came down to it, I really just pulled the ripcord because I didn’t have a big buyout waiting. I didn’t have this significant hoard of cash in the savings account where I could run for months and months.
It was a risk.
It was scary.
It was like, “Okay, so what am I going to do now?”
But everything panned out, and everything worked out. I would do it again in a heartbeat. It was the best professional decision I ever made. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?
Brian: Well, Carlos, for our listeners, it will come through. You and I are good friends. I was just thinking about you as an entrepreneur and as I know you. I mean, entrepreneurship is in your blood. It’s part of your history, part of your family history.
As I was reading the book, you wrote about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What’s getting in the way of that?
Carlos: Wow, so much is getting in the way of that. I think, first and foremost, is we as Americans are on this treadmill and this pace, and we have made work our God.
We work more than any other group, any other nationality in the world.
So, just think about that. I just read a stat last week where 32% of Millennials will not take more than a four-night vacation because of work. 70% of the population says, “I don’t have work-life balance.”
I was at Nashville this last weekend, and the people we stayed with, he’s like, “I didn’t take all my vacation. I can’t.”
I think part of what’s getting in the way of our happiness is we’re slaves to our jobs, we’re slaves to our career, we’re slaves to our businesses, and that’s a choice that we have made.
I know people will debate me on that all day long, but it is a choice that we have made. Quitting weekend work
I literally, before this, saw a LinkedIn post that said, “If you’re reading this on the weekend, it’s clear that you’re a top performer.”
So, if you’re not connected to your profession on the weekend, the message is that you’re not a top performer.
That is a total fallacy because I don’t work weekends anymore. I used to all the time. I don’t any longer.
That means I’m not on LinkedIn, I’m not promoting anything, I’m not doing anything for my clients, and everybody knows that.
That’s a boundary I chose. I think that’s one thing. How social media impacts happiness
The other thing that I think that it’s really getting in the way of our happiness is social media, and these stinking things. We are so attached to, and I will use the word addiction, to our devices, and to social media.
To the point where we’ll put something on Facebook and then 20 minutes later we’re going and seeing how many likes.
We retweet.
“How many followers do I have?”
We have created what I call social loneliness where we are so socially connected, but we are so utterly lonely because people don’t really know us.
We haven’t built a relationship, and as human beings, we’re wired for connection.
I think when we put those things ahead of what we’re wired for, our happiness or our ability to choose joy, severely wanes.
Brian: There’s so much there, Carlos, as I’m listening to you. Something I remember from a conversation you and I had a while ago, and you had been going back to when I was trying to start my company again, as I was starting something new. You talked about setting boundaries instead of trying to get a work-life balance. Why is that? Why Focus on work-life boundaries, not balance
I don’t believe in work-life balance because I tried it for … At different parts of my career, I tried it.
At other parts, I was like, “I’m completely unbalanced, and I’m good with that.”
Now, when I think about it makes me want to shake my head.
The stats will show you 70% saying I can’t achieve work-life balance. So, when I see that, I know the reality is it doesn’t exist.
The picture I get is my daughter, who was a gymnast for 14 years. Upon that balance beam and nothing made me more nervous.
I had kids in theater and kids in sports, and they could perform, and I’d get a little nervous, but man, when she was there, you think about that. It’s hard to balance.
It’s hard to balance across a trajectory of time.
So, what I did is I rejected the idea of balance.
Maybe it’s semantics, but for me, the idea of boundaries is they are more permanent.
It takes work to move if I draw a boundary or install a limit. So, I’ve adopted boundaries, and when I say “I have,” we have because I’ve done it in the community, first and foremost, with my wife. Building boundaries in the community
Brian, you and I have talked about my boundaries, and I’ve invited you into that community of people who have permission to be like, “Hey, I’m kind of seeing this stuff,” or “What’s going on here and how are you doing with that?”
Because God forbid if I’m the only one who’s going to determine am I balanced. Defining what you value and want to protect
What we did was to define what we want to protect? What do we want to value?
For me, time with my family, time with my wife is priority number one.
My health, both physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual is essential.
So, I go to the gym regularly. I meditate.
I take time just to stop and think and shut off my phone and close my computer.
Some days, it’s just staring out the window. If you were to look at me, you’d be like, “Is this guy really working or what?” But I’m thinking.
So, it’s those types of things that I protect.
The counter to that is I’m so much wildly more productive in my work because there is a boundary around the time that I’m working. I’m not engaging in friendly conversation or texting or meeting a buddy for lunch. I am absolutely focused in on what I’m doing for a living.
So, my clients get the best of me as well as my relationships. How to set work-life boundaries
Brian: For those out there who are seeing this, it’s not easy to do. At least, for me, it isn’t. Do you have any tips, and advice on what you found we can do to get better at setting boundaries or non-negotiables in our life?
Carlos: Yeah, you’re right. It’s not easy to do.
I’m the first to say I don’t have this all figured out.
I’m on the journey with everybody else. I may be a few steps ahead, but I also know people who are so much far ahead than I am. It’s something I’ve been doing for two years. I shared with Suzanne the other day, I hate when people say, “Well, they’ve really done their work.” Like we’ve all arrived, we should all be experiencing.
Three weeks ago, I picked up my phone and wanted to check my email at 8:00 at night, and Suzanne’s like, “So, what are we doing because this is two nights in a row?”
And it was utterly appropriate, total gentle, not any kind of like … But that’s what I wanted. Start with your closest relationships
Carlos: Anyway, back to the question. I think, first and foremost, you have to do it in the community with your closest of relationships.
If that’s a spouse, that’s a boyfriend, girlfriend, close friend, close co-worker, even your boss, right?
Say, “I want to give the best of myself in all aspects of my life, professionally, personally, whatever else.”
Whether it’s work, if you’re going to the gym by yourself, I want to give the best while I’m there. Write down what you value
So do that in community and then sit down and really write down what do you value.
I was talking to somebody the other day who was talking to me how much they value their physical fitness.
Then literally, almost in the same breath, it was like, “Well, I don’t have time to go to the gym.”
Okay, so you don’t really value your physical fitness.
When I say to them even go for a run outside because if you’re shunning that, or if you’re shunning the annual checkup or whatever that is, you don’t value … You may say you do, but your actions say you don’t. Clarify what is getting in the way of what you value
Carlos: So, really define what you value, and then say, “What are the things that I’m letting get in the way of those things that I say I value?”
When you do that in a community, you’re going to get a much different perspective than if we just do it in isolation.
Because often the people we surround ourselves with, that we are close with, can kind of point out our blind spots which are of massive value to us and should be embraced.
I would say those are a couple of things that I would highly recommend. Identify blind spots by doing this
Brian: That’s really good. I can identify with the blind spots and the need to have a feedback loop. There are things every person has that we can’t see how we’re living our life or how we’re showing up.
We won’t know unless we ask people, “What do you see that I’m missing?” It sounds like to get to that place you got to have an intention or purpose, too.
How would someone start the conversation about this? Asking for additional help
Carlos: I think it’s starting with being really honest, first and foremost, about here’s where I’m at. I’m not here to judge people who are going to work 14 hours a day.
If that’s what you and your community have decided is good and works for everybody, who am I to say you’re wrong?
That’s not my place.
I think just asking the question, “How are we doing?”
Asking the question, “Hey, here’s what I want to be doing.”
I value family time, I value fitness, I value fun, which can be a value. It may be something you like.
Ask “What do you see that I’m doing that’s getting in the way of that?”
If you’re going to ask that question, be prepared for the answers.
Part of the work I had to do was to sit down and hear some pretty unpleasant things.
I didn’t want to hear about things I had done, the choices I had made, the decisions I had made.
That is not a fun thing to go through, but it makes us better. It makes us more aware. Communicating your boundaries
Carlos: I am so much more aware now, even more so than I was also just a year ago, or when I’m in my personal boundary after working hours of not checking my phone, not trying to stay engaged, not returning that text.
I’ve gone to this extent to make my partners, and my clients, and my professional connections aware of that, so oftentimes if I do get a text at 7:00 at night or 9:00 at night, what I’m starting to see is, “Hey, I know you’re not going to get this till the morning.”
I’m like, “Yeah, you’re right.”
Even if I see it, I’m not going to respond to it. Why work devotion and hustle porn are destructive
Brian: So, I was thinking about the LinkedIn post you brought up about, “Hey, if you’re looking at this on a Saturday … ” There’s this whole notion of work devotion or hustle porn. Why is that such a thing today? Why is it destructive?
Carlos: I think the reason it’s a thing today is you’ve got so many loud voices out there promoting it.
You’ve got Kevin O’Leary who’s talking … Literally says, “25 hours a day.” In the interview that I think I quote in the book is, “It’s 24/7. Get used to it. Get over it.”
You’ve got Jack Ma with his ridiculous 9, 9, 6. 9:00 to 9:00, six days a week. You’ve got Grant Cardone with his unhealthy approach to 95 hours a week, and the list goes on.
Daymond John’s, “Rise and grind.” We’re not real entrepreneurs unless we do this. I think those voices are so loud, and it’s this idea … I couple that with if I’m the scarce resource to my organization, which means I’m working long hours. I’m always available, we make that part of our identity, it is a perfect storm.
Carlos: The reason it is destructive is we only have a certain amount of time each and every day. 24 hours a day, 86,400 seconds.
If I’m devoting the majority of that time to my work, something has to suffer. Either I suffer which, if I do, I can’t give the best of myself to my relationships.
So, either way, my relationships take a hit.
When I go back to fundamentally as human beings we were wired for a connection, then we have to start to think about, so, what does that mean?
When we begin to move against what we’re wired for fundamentally, we begin to see anxiety, we begin to see anger, we start to see sleeplessness, we begin to see loneliness. More socially connected but more lonely
Carlos: I was doing research on that this morning. It is off the charts.
Over half of Americans are saying they have feelings of loneliness even though we’re so connected.
Just like all porn, hustle porn is destructive. It’s toxic, I agree with Alex Ohanion. I applaud him for taking a stand against it.
Honestly, I would be delighted to have the individuals that I just named shut up because they are doing a disservice to entrepreneurs and business leaders and families everywhere.
That’s why I had Suzanne write a chapter because there is a story on the other side of every hustle story.
I lived that hustle lifestyle for far too long. It’s not sustainable. It did damage to us as a family and to me personally. Sellers and Marketers are overwhelmed
Brian: I really appreciate you just sharing that there is another side to this. As you mentioned and as entrepreneurs, and you and I have worked in the sales and marketing world for a long time, is this happening in sales and marketing? If so, what can we do to change it?
Carlos: Oh, it is. I work with marketers on a day to day basis. I see more and more.
When you say, “So, how’s it going?”, they’re like, “Oh, my word. I’m slammed. I’m overwhelmed. I have so much to do. There are not enough hours in the day.”
I get emails from clients at 10:00 at night. I got a text from a client not long ago that said, “I feel completely overwhelmed, and I’m so down. I don’t know what to do.”
I go to conferences. At the last conference I was at, I asked a bunch of marketers, “How many of you feel there’s not enough time to accomplish what you want to do in a meaningful way?”
Virtually every hand out of 200+ went up.
I definitely see this on the marketing and sales front. Giving people permission to turn off
I think what we can do about it is, first of all, business leaders if you’re listening, start to create a culture that gives your people permission to turn off.
Carlos: When you are sending them emails at 10:00 at night even if you’ve said, “Hey, we have a culture where we have our working hours,” you’re putting them in a position of, “Can I tell the boss to wait?”
That is a disadvantage you’re giving to your people.
If you really want the best of them, you will allow them time to step away and turn off and not feel they have to shorten their vacations or be connected on vacation or connected at 9:00 at night.
That’s number one as a business leader. Designing your job to fit your lifestyle
Number two, there’s a corporate profile in the book of a lady named Claire Potter who is in a sales role.
Claire works for a multi-billion dollar organization.
What she did was,
“Hey, I just had my first child. I travel. My husband travels. That’s not sustainable. I’m going to create a new job role in my organization, and at the same time, I’m going to create a plan B. I’m going to start to talk to recruiters and understand what jobs are available that would now suit my lifestyle.”
Then she went to her organization and said, “If you want me to stay, this is my new job.”
Her new organization said, “That’s awesome. We value you. We want you in the organization.”
She took the initiative to say this is what I’m going to do. Defining the kind of life you want
Another profile in the book is Elle Woulfe, who is the CMO at PathFactory.
One of my favorite lines in the book, she closes with, “Life is short. I want to make sure I’m here for it.”
Elle had an opportunity to get a very high-profile job with a great company.
She decided to take a role with PathFactory, which is still significant, but it didn’t pay as much, for her family and for her own sake.
But it enabled her to live the life she wanted. Define what kind of life you want, and then design your career, job, and business around that and what it looks like.
We talk about that as well in the book.
You may also like:
Revenue Operations & GTM Leadership
Mehr
05.06.2019
24 Minuten
Working together as one team in marketing and sales alignment is about the customer.
Why? Because today, buyers are in control.
For this reason, we can no longer have an artificial divide between marketing and sales.
I interviewed Heidi Melin (@heidimelin), CMO at Workfront, on how to get sales and marketing to operate as one revenue team.
Brian: Can you tell us a little bit about your background?
Heidi: Absolutely. I’m a career CMO.
I’ve been in marketing my entire career, having started on the advertising side but primarily focused on fast-growing software businesses.
So, I recently joined Workfront and am the CMO at Workfront. How can sales and marketing operate as one team?
Well, throughout my career, I’ve had the opportunity to work well with some sales teams, and I’ve also learned my fair share of working with sales teams and marketing teams that don’t align very well.
Also, all those lessons learned include ensuring that the goals are aligned and ensuring that the marketing team has the same goals as the sales team.
Indeed, the marketing team tends to have a broader view of the marketplace in the long term. But the immediate-term goals must be aligned.
So, being aligned on lead generation or demand goals with the sales teams is critical.
We talk about it inside Workfront as one view of the truth because so many times we’ve all probably sat in meetings with sales and marketing executives, and you spend most of the meeting arguing about whether or not the number is right instead of diagnosing what we need to work on to improve.
So, ensuring you’re working on a standard set of numbers is hard.
It sounds straightforward, but it’s hard.
One key to success, I think, is ensuring that measurement, all programmatic activities, and the process-oriented partnership between sales and marketing are aligned because it’s one business process. One business process focused on revenue.
I think that marketing and sales historically have been thought of as two separate business processes; we talk about it as a critical handoff.
But I think about it because it’s one business process, and inside a company, it’s really focused on the revenue of your business.
It starts when a marketing team targets a specific customer or prospect, and they raise their hand and ask for more information or engage all the way through to close business. So, it’s one business process, not two separate business processes.
And, oh, by the way, it’s aligned to something way more important than a sales team or a marketing team: it’s aligned to how a buyer buys your product.
And we forget that sometimes, we’re like, “Oh, well, the marketing process does this…”
I’m like, oh no, no, no.
We’re just trying to facilitate a buying process. Flip your focus on the customer
Heidi: Yeah, and so when you flip that, and you look at the focus on the customer, all of sudden marketing and sales from an outreach, from an engagement perspective, has one unified goal, which is to move a buyer through a buying process.
And when you have that change of mindset that becomes important.
I’ve worked in businesses where we focus cleanly on that critical handoff, and that handoff is the most vital piece. And frankly, it’s an essential piece, but it’s not the crucial piece.
Heidi: Yeah, it should support, and we have the tools to help that entire life cycle.
When I first joined Workfront one of the things that we did was as soon as we handed off an opportunity to the sales team, it was like, we’re out, we’re done, check, we’re finished.
Frankly, there are so many tools in a marketing toolkit that we can align with a selling motion and be more successful in helping to nurture prospects through a buying process.
To me, that has been an evolution that has been enabled by technology and is one that is critical in ensuring that sales and marketing are aligned.
Brian: As we talk about this whole idea of alignment, and you brought up measurements sounds easier said than done to get marketing and sales to agree on what common goals and measures are. How to get sales and marketing using the same numbers
Heidi: I think it must start a big picture and really understanding targets and targets by sales teams and working backward from there.
Because if we realize that as our goal, our goal from a marketing perspective is undoubtedly to raise awareness for the business and drive demand for the business.
Our goal is to drive revenue for the business. And so, we can all understand our revenue goals and then the steps that we all need to take to get there.
So, to meet our revenue goals, backing out of that, what kind of demand generation volumes do we need to have to achieve those revenue goals.
We then agree with the sales team not only on what we are going to use as our qualification criteria, how we are going to evaluate whether or not a lead is indeed a good lead or a bad lead.
Also, ensuring that, from a volume perspective, the marketing team is lined up to support the company’s revenue goals.
So, backing it out from revenue is critical.
And we’ve all been in situations where there’s a pendulum swing that goes from, “The leads are terrible, and we’re getting way too many of them” to “The leads are high quality, but we’re not getting enough of them.”
That’s a constant balancing act with engaging with the sales team. And there may be reasons to shift or change a qualification criterion based on the maturity of a field sales organization or a time during the market, like during market seasonality. There are lots of reasons to make those changes, and you can’t do that in a vacuum. What works to remove barriers of teamwork?
Heidi: You must go back to the customer, and you must understand the buying process of a customer.
And if you can look at the buying process of your customer and map that out to not only the activities and programs that you engage with to move that prospect or customer through a buying cycle but understand how it maps to a sales process, is essential.
So, if you can get to a place where you can map out the buying process from the time someone raises their hand or engages in some way through to closing business and revenue.
Also, understand how the customer or the buyer operates during that and how that maps to our internal process, you can actually really demonstrate where marketing adds value and where sales is adding value and where both of us add value.
Heidi: That’s where you can look at language and metrics and ensure that at each stage, you have the right metrics that you all agree on and the right language that you’re using to describe.
You must go back to, “how does your customer buy your product?”
If you don’t know that process and you don’t know how your marketing programs or your sales teams operate aligned to that, then you’re missing a big piece.
Brian: What have you found that works or what advice might you have for someone who would like actually to go back to that beginning?
Is it journey mapping? Is it interviewing customers?
What are the steps you would recommend? Understanding how your customer buys Source: Journey map based on what they are doing, thinking, feeling via markempa
Heidi: I think that there is nothing more valuable than interviewing customers that have just been through that process.
As marketers, we don’t always have as much engagement directly with customers as I think we should.
So, sitting down with customers that have just gone through a sales cycle, understanding the process that they went through, really listening to what their needs are and starting to look at that; you see commonalities for how customers buy whatever product it is.
Then taking that, making some assumptions, standardizing it, and then mapping it to internal processes.
I know we just did this recently at Workfront and we learned a lot.
One of the most valuable things that we learned is that there were stages that we weren’t touching.
We weren’t touching the buyer in the buying cycle, and we were getting them to engage, but then we weren’t continuing that conversation in a way that helped move them forward or we weren’t providing the kind of nurture programs that we could in the early stages of the sales cycle. Spend time listening to how customers buy
Just taking the time to step back, and to spend time with customers, listen to how they buy is the place to start.
It’s excellent practice for marketing teams to do that work and creates many synergies with the sales team because many times the criticism of a sales team is that they’re on the front lines. They’re the ones on the phone; they’re the ones in person talking to customers.
And a common criticism is that the marketing team is sitting in a back room somewhere developing programs and campaigns and not listening and touching customers.
So, having and leading that discussion with a sales organization is beneficial because it demonstrates the engagement that we all need to have with those customers as they go through a buying process.
Brian: I’m so glad you brought this up because I do find that, to your point, for the most part, marketers often do get isolated, especially in B2B, because salespeople are usually having more conversations or sales development reps are or whomever. And so, what you’re saying is, get this buyer insight and from that marketers will have a different perspective. Marketing must understand the customer perspective
Heidi: That’s correct. It brings a different level of perspective, and it also takes away from where marketing teams can sometimes get stuck which is in activity-driven programs where they’re doing just a lot of programs that are generating volume and activity but not necessarily moving the ball forward.
So, paying attention to how we can do things at different points in time to move the ball forward is awesome. It also gives them a broader perspective of not just stopping when that lead is handed over, like, we’re done.
Marketing’s done, marketing’s green, we’re good. Yes, taking responsibility for that portion of it, but our job doesn’t stop there.
And so really stepping back to from the customer perspective is a way to do that. Mapping the entire customer lifecycle
I think the first step is really to sit down and map it out together, and you must start somewhere.
So, I’m a true believer in, in beginning with a rough idea based on customer insight of what that buying process looks like through the life cycle and not stopping just at revenue but looking at how do we continue to engage those customers.
Because in the case of Workfront, like many businesses, we have a land and expand strategy where that relationship with customers continues well beyond that first sale.
Review and refine the customer lifecycle as a team
So, understanding that all the way through and having a sort of the first pass and then sitting down as a senior leadership team and really refining it together, both the sales and the marketing team members, is really valuable because then you start to share a language, as we talked about.
You start to understand where the disconnects are.
Sometimes when you do that, there are insights that you uncover that you thought, “Oh my gosh, they thought we were doing this, and we thought they were doing this and no one’s doing it. We have this big gap.” And it gives you much visibility.
To me, that is an extremely valuable exercise, and it doesn’t have to be perfect either.
People talk about journey mapping, and they spend months and months and sometimes years on mapping that journey.
To me, if you can get a basic journey down and map your business process to it, you’re going to be much farther ahead than most companies, and the quicker you can move on that, the better. Revenue team meetings include finance and operations
Heidi: Then, you refine it over time. One of the most valuable tools that I have used in my career is when you bring together the sales team, the marketing team, and the finance team together as a revenue team and you solve problems within that group, things get a lot easier.
To me, that’s one of the tools that I have that I think is beneficial because we must all be operating as a team. That’s the only way that you can get away from, “Marketing’s not doing what they’re supposed to do” or “those salespeople aren’t doing what they’re supposed to be doing.”
We have a weekly revenue team meeting at Workfront, and that includes our CFO, our head of sales, and me as well as folks on the operations team.
We go through a standard set of metrics. We have one view of the truth, and then we also go through and tackle challenges that we may have, for example, we see this in our pipeline: how do we tackle that issue? What’s the right way to do that? And that combination of people; we’re all addressing the problem.
It’s not a marketing problem; it’s not a sales problem; it’s not a finance problem: it’s a revenue team problem. So, shared ownership issues. Make sure marketing campaigns are known and agreed upon by sales
I think the strength of sales enablement programs is tremendous. So, as you look at developing marketing campaigns, ensuring the inclusiveness of those campaigns with the BDR, ADM, inside sales function, as well as with the sales and sales leadership teams and ensuring engagement and alignment.
Because to me, that is one of the most valuable pieces of communication: ensuring that the campaigns that we’re investing a company’s money in are well understood and agreed upon by the sales organization so they can support them as they continue through a buying process.
And ensuring that it isn’t just about developing a campaign to identify a lead and a qualified sales opportunity and stopping there. Instead, developing the campaign and enabling the field representatives, whether they be on the phone or in person, to carry those same messages forward and giving them the tools to do that.
That is one thing that I feel strongly about. One of the areas that can be frustrating is when a sales and marketing team isn’t working as well together. Focus campaign development on the entire buying process
If the sales team is like, “I don’t understand or know the campaigns that you’re running in my territory…”
There’s no excuse for that anymore.
We have a technology that enables that today, and we have common systems and platforms that we’re using, whether it be a marketing automation platform or a CRM platform. There’s no excuse.
So, to me, that’s a really important part that marketing has responsibility for is ensuring that campaign development is not only informed but also supported through the buying process.
Brian: That’s great. And what I was wondering is, we talked about sales enablement, what other advice might you have to marketers and listeners out there who want to improve operating as one team? Creating shared goals and standard key metrics
Heidi: I would say aligned and shared goals.
That is certainly something that a common set of key metrics that the entire team is looking at and that it’s not metrics by team or by channel. It’s metrics for the marketing organization that we all play a role in.
That, to me, is extremely important. Providing visibility into programs
Also, ensuring that there’s visibility to the work that’s going on in the business.
Not to be self-serving, but that’s one of the places that Workfront actually helps us a lot is that we can see what everyone else is working on.
And that is a really valuable tool to ensure alignment and also ensure better use of our investment dollars, so we’re not overlapping with each other, or working against each other. And so, the visibility into the programs that we’re investing in at a very detailed level is an essential part of working together as an organization with a common goal. How technology is impacting marketing today
Well, marketing has changed so much.
That’s such a loaded question because you look at over my tenure, not just at Workfront, but over my career, the technology that we have at our fingertips today as a marketer is overwhelming.
So, one of the skills that I think it is really important for marketing leaders across marketing organizations regardless of B2B, B2C, doesn’t matter, is to understand technology and the impact that technology has on your business process and understanding where technology can help you solve problems, and look at technology to support business process, not to drive it.
The reason why I say that is because I’ve worked in many organizations where there are so many tools out there that will solve problems.
It’s really easy to say, “We have this problem, let’s go get this tool.”
I call this “that-tool-itis,” and we’ve had our fair share of it.
I’ve seen that certainly Workfront as well as at other companies that I’ve worked for but understanding at a deeper level how the technology can support your business and your business goals is a critical skill. The impact of digital transformation
That speaks to digital transformation. You think about marketing as one of the organizations in an enterprise that has been digitally transformed.
We do marketing so differently, today than we did ten years ago, so digital transformation has really driven lots of change, not just in marketing, but in departments, in large enterprises. They’re always changing and having to adapt the way they work.
To me, that is sort of the most significant change that’s going on in the industry today is, as companies, no company on the planet would say, “We’re not going to transform digitally.”
Companies must keep up today.
However, it happens department by department, marketing being on the early end, but it’s changing the way knowledge-workers work in any organization, and to me, that’s the hardest thing to keep up with.
Brian: I think many listeners are nodding as you’re speaking to this right now that we deal with every day. So, with all this technology, how do you see empathy or customer empathy fitting in? Where does empathy fit into marketing?
Heidi: Well, I think that it is an area that has probably been overlooked.
As marketers, especially, have adopted technology, it’s become all about the data; it’s become about the analytics, it’s become about the numbers.
So, we’ve forgotten that there’s a customer on the receiving end and that it isn’t just about the numbers.
It’s about tying to the emotions and how a customer feels as they go through a buying process and being deliberate about ensuring that messaging is targeting people is hard.
It’s one of those things that I think many companies have forgotten in this age of digital transformation, this age of an overwhelming amount of data.
The marketing job has become a data-centric job, not a people-centric job and I think that it needs to balance out.
I think both are critically important because of the concept that it’s people, even in a B2B setting.
You’re not selling to companies, you’re selling to people.
Unlocking the insights and the emotional triggers that people have is how you’re going to move things forward and how you can use technology to support that versus just using technology as an enabler.
So, I think it’s gotten lost as marketing’s gone from almost 100% art to really science-based.
We’ve forgotten the people component, and that’s something that we must layer back in.
And the companies that are doing well are the ones that have done that successfully. You may also like:
4 ways to adopt human-centered marketing and get better results
The Biggest Contributor to B2B Revenue
31 ways to improve marketing-sales alignment quickly
3 Good Questions to Align B2B Marketing, Sales, and Strategy
How Sales Hustle and Automation Can Hurt Customer Experience
Why? Because today, buyers are in control.
For this reason, we can no longer have an artificial divide between marketing and sales.
I interviewed Heidi Melin (@heidimelin), CMO at Workfront, on how to get sales and marketing to operate as one revenue team.
Brian: Can you tell us a little bit about your background?
Heidi: Absolutely. I’m a career CMO.
I’ve been in marketing my entire career, having started on the advertising side but primarily focused on fast-growing software businesses.
So, I recently joined Workfront and am the CMO at Workfront. How can sales and marketing operate as one team?
Well, throughout my career, I’ve had the opportunity to work well with some sales teams, and I’ve also learned my fair share of working with sales teams and marketing teams that don’t align very well.
Also, all those lessons learned include ensuring that the goals are aligned and ensuring that the marketing team has the same goals as the sales team.
Indeed, the marketing team tends to have a broader view of the marketplace in the long term. But the immediate-term goals must be aligned.
So, being aligned on lead generation or demand goals with the sales teams is critical.
We talk about it inside Workfront as one view of the truth because so many times we’ve all probably sat in meetings with sales and marketing executives, and you spend most of the meeting arguing about whether or not the number is right instead of diagnosing what we need to work on to improve.
So, ensuring you’re working on a standard set of numbers is hard.
It sounds straightforward, but it’s hard.
One key to success, I think, is ensuring that measurement, all programmatic activities, and the process-oriented partnership between sales and marketing are aligned because it’s one business process. One business process focused on revenue.
I think that marketing and sales historically have been thought of as two separate business processes; we talk about it as a critical handoff.
But I think about it because it’s one business process, and inside a company, it’s really focused on the revenue of your business.
It starts when a marketing team targets a specific customer or prospect, and they raise their hand and ask for more information or engage all the way through to close business. So, it’s one business process, not two separate business processes.
And, oh, by the way, it’s aligned to something way more important than a sales team or a marketing team: it’s aligned to how a buyer buys your product.
And we forget that sometimes, we’re like, “Oh, well, the marketing process does this…”
I’m like, oh no, no, no.
We’re just trying to facilitate a buying process. Flip your focus on the customer
Heidi: Yeah, and so when you flip that, and you look at the focus on the customer, all of sudden marketing and sales from an outreach, from an engagement perspective, has one unified goal, which is to move a buyer through a buying process.
And when you have that change of mindset that becomes important.
I’ve worked in businesses where we focus cleanly on that critical handoff, and that handoff is the most vital piece. And frankly, it’s an essential piece, but it’s not the crucial piece.
Heidi: Yeah, it should support, and we have the tools to help that entire life cycle.
When I first joined Workfront one of the things that we did was as soon as we handed off an opportunity to the sales team, it was like, we’re out, we’re done, check, we’re finished.
Frankly, there are so many tools in a marketing toolkit that we can align with a selling motion and be more successful in helping to nurture prospects through a buying process.
To me, that has been an evolution that has been enabled by technology and is one that is critical in ensuring that sales and marketing are aligned.
Brian: As we talk about this whole idea of alignment, and you brought up measurements sounds easier said than done to get marketing and sales to agree on what common goals and measures are. How to get sales and marketing using the same numbers
Heidi: I think it must start a big picture and really understanding targets and targets by sales teams and working backward from there.
Because if we realize that as our goal, our goal from a marketing perspective is undoubtedly to raise awareness for the business and drive demand for the business.
Our goal is to drive revenue for the business. And so, we can all understand our revenue goals and then the steps that we all need to take to get there.
So, to meet our revenue goals, backing out of that, what kind of demand generation volumes do we need to have to achieve those revenue goals.
We then agree with the sales team not only on what we are going to use as our qualification criteria, how we are going to evaluate whether or not a lead is indeed a good lead or a bad lead.
Also, ensuring that, from a volume perspective, the marketing team is lined up to support the company’s revenue goals.
So, backing it out from revenue is critical.
And we’ve all been in situations where there’s a pendulum swing that goes from, “The leads are terrible, and we’re getting way too many of them” to “The leads are high quality, but we’re not getting enough of them.”
That’s a constant balancing act with engaging with the sales team. And there may be reasons to shift or change a qualification criterion based on the maturity of a field sales organization or a time during the market, like during market seasonality. There are lots of reasons to make those changes, and you can’t do that in a vacuum. What works to remove barriers of teamwork?
Heidi: You must go back to the customer, and you must understand the buying process of a customer.
And if you can look at the buying process of your customer and map that out to not only the activities and programs that you engage with to move that prospect or customer through a buying cycle but understand how it maps to a sales process, is essential.
So, if you can get to a place where you can map out the buying process from the time someone raises their hand or engages in some way through to closing business and revenue.
Also, understand how the customer or the buyer operates during that and how that maps to our internal process, you can actually really demonstrate where marketing adds value and where sales is adding value and where both of us add value.
Heidi: That’s where you can look at language and metrics and ensure that at each stage, you have the right metrics that you all agree on and the right language that you’re using to describe.
You must go back to, “how does your customer buy your product?”
If you don’t know that process and you don’t know how your marketing programs or your sales teams operate aligned to that, then you’re missing a big piece.
Brian: What have you found that works or what advice might you have for someone who would like actually to go back to that beginning?
Is it journey mapping? Is it interviewing customers?
What are the steps you would recommend? Understanding how your customer buys Source: Journey map based on what they are doing, thinking, feeling via markempa
Heidi: I think that there is nothing more valuable than interviewing customers that have just been through that process.
As marketers, we don’t always have as much engagement directly with customers as I think we should.
So, sitting down with customers that have just gone through a sales cycle, understanding the process that they went through, really listening to what their needs are and starting to look at that; you see commonalities for how customers buy whatever product it is.
Then taking that, making some assumptions, standardizing it, and then mapping it to internal processes.
I know we just did this recently at Workfront and we learned a lot.
One of the most valuable things that we learned is that there were stages that we weren’t touching.
We weren’t touching the buyer in the buying cycle, and we were getting them to engage, but then we weren’t continuing that conversation in a way that helped move them forward or we weren’t providing the kind of nurture programs that we could in the early stages of the sales cycle. Spend time listening to how customers buy
Just taking the time to step back, and to spend time with customers, listen to how they buy is the place to start.
It’s excellent practice for marketing teams to do that work and creates many synergies with the sales team because many times the criticism of a sales team is that they’re on the front lines. They’re the ones on the phone; they’re the ones in person talking to customers.
And a common criticism is that the marketing team is sitting in a back room somewhere developing programs and campaigns and not listening and touching customers.
So, having and leading that discussion with a sales organization is beneficial because it demonstrates the engagement that we all need to have with those customers as they go through a buying process.
Brian: I’m so glad you brought this up because I do find that, to your point, for the most part, marketers often do get isolated, especially in B2B, because salespeople are usually having more conversations or sales development reps are or whomever. And so, what you’re saying is, get this buyer insight and from that marketers will have a different perspective. Marketing must understand the customer perspective
Heidi: That’s correct. It brings a different level of perspective, and it also takes away from where marketing teams can sometimes get stuck which is in activity-driven programs where they’re doing just a lot of programs that are generating volume and activity but not necessarily moving the ball forward.
So, paying attention to how we can do things at different points in time to move the ball forward is awesome. It also gives them a broader perspective of not just stopping when that lead is handed over, like, we’re done.
Marketing’s done, marketing’s green, we’re good. Yes, taking responsibility for that portion of it, but our job doesn’t stop there.
And so really stepping back to from the customer perspective is a way to do that. Mapping the entire customer lifecycle
I think the first step is really to sit down and map it out together, and you must start somewhere.
So, I’m a true believer in, in beginning with a rough idea based on customer insight of what that buying process looks like through the life cycle and not stopping just at revenue but looking at how do we continue to engage those customers.
Because in the case of Workfront, like many businesses, we have a land and expand strategy where that relationship with customers continues well beyond that first sale.
Review and refine the customer lifecycle as a team
So, understanding that all the way through and having a sort of the first pass and then sitting down as a senior leadership team and really refining it together, both the sales and the marketing team members, is really valuable because then you start to share a language, as we talked about.
You start to understand where the disconnects are.
Sometimes when you do that, there are insights that you uncover that you thought, “Oh my gosh, they thought we were doing this, and we thought they were doing this and no one’s doing it. We have this big gap.” And it gives you much visibility.
To me, that is an extremely valuable exercise, and it doesn’t have to be perfect either.
People talk about journey mapping, and they spend months and months and sometimes years on mapping that journey.
To me, if you can get a basic journey down and map your business process to it, you’re going to be much farther ahead than most companies, and the quicker you can move on that, the better. Revenue team meetings include finance and operations
Heidi: Then, you refine it over time. One of the most valuable tools that I have used in my career is when you bring together the sales team, the marketing team, and the finance team together as a revenue team and you solve problems within that group, things get a lot easier.
To me, that’s one of the tools that I have that I think is beneficial because we must all be operating as a team. That’s the only way that you can get away from, “Marketing’s not doing what they’re supposed to do” or “those salespeople aren’t doing what they’re supposed to be doing.”
We have a weekly revenue team meeting at Workfront, and that includes our CFO, our head of sales, and me as well as folks on the operations team.
We go through a standard set of metrics. We have one view of the truth, and then we also go through and tackle challenges that we may have, for example, we see this in our pipeline: how do we tackle that issue? What’s the right way to do that? And that combination of people; we’re all addressing the problem.
It’s not a marketing problem; it’s not a sales problem; it’s not a finance problem: it’s a revenue team problem. So, shared ownership issues. Make sure marketing campaigns are known and agreed upon by sales
I think the strength of sales enablement programs is tremendous. So, as you look at developing marketing campaigns, ensuring the inclusiveness of those campaigns with the BDR, ADM, inside sales function, as well as with the sales and sales leadership teams and ensuring engagement and alignment.
Because to me, that is one of the most valuable pieces of communication: ensuring that the campaigns that we’re investing a company’s money in are well understood and agreed upon by the sales organization so they can support them as they continue through a buying process.
And ensuring that it isn’t just about developing a campaign to identify a lead and a qualified sales opportunity and stopping there. Instead, developing the campaign and enabling the field representatives, whether they be on the phone or in person, to carry those same messages forward and giving them the tools to do that.
That is one thing that I feel strongly about. One of the areas that can be frustrating is when a sales and marketing team isn’t working as well together. Focus campaign development on the entire buying process
If the sales team is like, “I don’t understand or know the campaigns that you’re running in my territory…”
There’s no excuse for that anymore.
We have a technology that enables that today, and we have common systems and platforms that we’re using, whether it be a marketing automation platform or a CRM platform. There’s no excuse.
So, to me, that’s a really important part that marketing has responsibility for is ensuring that campaign development is not only informed but also supported through the buying process.
Brian: That’s great. And what I was wondering is, we talked about sales enablement, what other advice might you have to marketers and listeners out there who want to improve operating as one team? Creating shared goals and standard key metrics
Heidi: I would say aligned and shared goals.
That is certainly something that a common set of key metrics that the entire team is looking at and that it’s not metrics by team or by channel. It’s metrics for the marketing organization that we all play a role in.
That, to me, is extremely important. Providing visibility into programs
Also, ensuring that there’s visibility to the work that’s going on in the business.
Not to be self-serving, but that’s one of the places that Workfront actually helps us a lot is that we can see what everyone else is working on.
And that is a really valuable tool to ensure alignment and also ensure better use of our investment dollars, so we’re not overlapping with each other, or working against each other. And so, the visibility into the programs that we’re investing in at a very detailed level is an essential part of working together as an organization with a common goal. How technology is impacting marketing today
Well, marketing has changed so much.
That’s such a loaded question because you look at over my tenure, not just at Workfront, but over my career, the technology that we have at our fingertips today as a marketer is overwhelming.
So, one of the skills that I think it is really important for marketing leaders across marketing organizations regardless of B2B, B2C, doesn’t matter, is to understand technology and the impact that technology has on your business process and understanding where technology can help you solve problems, and look at technology to support business process, not to drive it.
The reason why I say that is because I’ve worked in many organizations where there are so many tools out there that will solve problems.
It’s really easy to say, “We have this problem, let’s go get this tool.”
I call this “that-tool-itis,” and we’ve had our fair share of it.
I’ve seen that certainly Workfront as well as at other companies that I’ve worked for but understanding at a deeper level how the technology can support your business and your business goals is a critical skill. The impact of digital transformation
That speaks to digital transformation. You think about marketing as one of the organizations in an enterprise that has been digitally transformed.
We do marketing so differently, today than we did ten years ago, so digital transformation has really driven lots of change, not just in marketing, but in departments, in large enterprises. They’re always changing and having to adapt the way they work.
To me, that is sort of the most significant change that’s going on in the industry today is, as companies, no company on the planet would say, “We’re not going to transform digitally.”
Companies must keep up today.
However, it happens department by department, marketing being on the early end, but it’s changing the way knowledge-workers work in any organization, and to me, that’s the hardest thing to keep up with.
Brian: I think many listeners are nodding as you’re speaking to this right now that we deal with every day. So, with all this technology, how do you see empathy or customer empathy fitting in? Where does empathy fit into marketing?
Heidi: Well, I think that it is an area that has probably been overlooked.
As marketers, especially, have adopted technology, it’s become all about the data; it’s become about the analytics, it’s become about the numbers.
So, we’ve forgotten that there’s a customer on the receiving end and that it isn’t just about the numbers.
It’s about tying to the emotions and how a customer feels as they go through a buying process and being deliberate about ensuring that messaging is targeting people is hard.
It’s one of those things that I think many companies have forgotten in this age of digital transformation, this age of an overwhelming amount of data.
The marketing job has become a data-centric job, not a people-centric job and I think that it needs to balance out.
I think both are critically important because of the concept that it’s people, even in a B2B setting.
You’re not selling to companies, you’re selling to people.
Unlocking the insights and the emotional triggers that people have is how you’re going to move things forward and how you can use technology to support that versus just using technology as an enabler.
So, I think it’s gotten lost as marketing’s gone from almost 100% art to really science-based.
We’ve forgotten the people component, and that’s something that we must layer back in.
And the companies that are doing well are the ones that have done that successfully. You may also like:
4 ways to adopt human-centered marketing and get better results
The Biggest Contributor to B2B Revenue
31 ways to improve marketing-sales alignment quickly
3 Good Questions to Align B2B Marketing, Sales, and Strategy
How Sales Hustle and Automation Can Hurt Customer Experience
Mehr
Über diesen Podcast
Focuses on b2b marketing, lead generation, nurturing and complex
sales
Kommentare (0)
Melde Dich an, um einen Kommentar zu schreiben.