Welcome And What’s Broken

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the GTM Reset Talk. This is the audio edition of the Sales Exchange live show for CEOs and revenue leaders who already suspect that the standard business-to-business growth model is no longer fit for that. If your market stack keeps growing, activity stays high, but revenue is still slow, costly, or unpredictable, this series is for you. Each episode explores what comes up to traditional go-to-market thinking and what it means to replace fragmented activity with a new business operating system. This episode was originally broadcast as a live stream. So if Nigel refers to diagrams, frameworks or on-screen illustrations, you can watch the full version using the link in the description. So let's get started.

Open PDFs And Real Demand

Why Gating Creates Buyer Friction

Quick Fixes To Remove Forms

The BDR Follow Up Trap

Measure Exposure Not Lead Theatre

How Martech And ABM Misled B2B

Trust Signals In An AI World

SPEAKER_01 0:47

I've said this before. How do you start these things? Also, what's the best way of starting off a show? And um I t I tend to think that you know you can have a big splash, but we're not into big splashes. We just do do it nice and calm. But anyway, thanks for joining me. Um this this is as you know, um, I just want to go on to onto here. This is the GTM reset show, live show. And really, I I hope you've had a good week so far. If not, well, hopefully, hopefully, hopefully, hopefully, um, this will brighten up your day just a bit. Because we're going to be talking about the reasons why gated content slows down selling to enterprise prospects as well as SMEs. Nobody's um kind of immune to this. And we've also got some quick fixes which um you should like. So um what we're gonna cover is at first a bit of news, then our main topic about, as I said, about why enterprise enterprise buyers avoid gated content and why B2Bs, us B2Bs need to stop doing that. Um, and leading on from that, I want to go, I want to kind of go over the issues regarding BDRs and the actual costs, because though those two things are actually connected, as well as the kind of the Martec illusion that we've all been immersed in, and and and really look at look at some of the solutions and activities that you can begin um scaling up your your business. Um we start with some news because this is really important, and it sets up the whole um the whole point of uh of today's show. Um six weeks ago, I kicked off an awareness campaign, or we kicked off an awareness campaign, um, and it was called the revenue reset. There's three um main PDFs. Um so this wasn't some kind of I don't know, polished um hang on a second. I've got two things, two things are going on. I've got um some buttons here, just just because this is all this is all part and parcel of what we're communicating. You know, it's not just I'm gonna come and um communicate what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna say that. The the point of this, of what I'm doing, is we have technology, of course. Um it's to demonstrate an element of authenticity in what I'm doing. Um and some things go right, some things go wrong, some things you just kind of need to, or that that thing that's in the wrong way, in the wrong place. I need to I need to move that down there. And what I'm what is he doing? I'm moving a foot pedal, and the foot pedal can stop and start my teleprompter. And if it's in the wrong place, when you're doing this kind of thing, you need everything at kind of at your fingertips. So I've so I've got on on in front of me, I've got laptop, I've got um some other buttons which can stop and start, and I can I can do this and change um change what we're looking at and looking at the the different kind of formats, and so it's like um uh rubber your tummy and and patting your head, that kind of thing. So, anyway, so that's so when you see me kind of look at look around, I'm just trying to get things organized. But in in your case, when you are doing it, excuse me, if you've got a couple of people having a chat, I would not expect those two either of those two people to be doing any of this. Somebody else would do it. So, but that's part and parcel of all what we're talking about. So we don't so back to the story. So we haven't got it's not some kind of um agency-driven campaign with a big media behind big kind of huge paid budget behind it. What we did um is is you know, we're not we're not going out and buying attention. That's that's the point. Um, you know, we're not we and we we purposely, you know, not throwing money at LinkedIn ads or Google ads and retargeting and all the all the rest of it because this is so important, because anybody could do that. So we created a series of PDFs, put them on the website, made them all open access, and started talking about the ideas and stuff that we're that we're doing. So it's like no no free gifts, no clickbait, no kind of fake scarcity, buy to get this now, add into your details to access the guy. There's no nothing, no tricks, nothing. Just straight documents saying what we think, what we've observed, and saying what's gone wrong in B2B and what needs to change. Now, here's the kicker. We've had over 600 downloads. Now, what I'm gonna do, I just need to just go on to Google Analytics because if you look at this, if you look at this this one here, that is a week it's the 14th to the 20th, 223 downloads. And right now, if I just refresh Google Analytics on there six hundred and forty downloads You have to think about that because people could look at that number and think well you can either pick it up or underplay it or misunderstand it. But if this was a a consumer campaign for some, I don't know, selling trainers or gadgets or whatever, 600 might not sound a lot. But we're not dealing with consumers who are gonna be clicking around on a Saturday afternoon. We're speak we're dealing with specifically B2Bs, and we we're we're dealing with you know commercial people at the end of the day. Um, you know, business owners, founders, directors, CEOs, and um senior people in business who don't spend their days downloading business PDFs for fun. So when you get over like 600 downloads in six weeks without paid media, that's not nothing. That means there are hundreds of businesses choosing to spend time with our type of thinking. Um and so you know, you you you you you you look at that and they this pattern really matters, it's bit it's a big deal, it's a really big deal because it's it shows things are not what they seem. It started off slowly, like a lot of things, you know. But this is B2B, and so you expect it to be slow. People don't wake up on a Monday morning and think, oh, do you know what? Let's go and change our go-to-market model. So it's a bit of a trickle, a few downloads, a few clicks, a few documents being consumed, and a couple of blips. And then, like I said, in you know, last week, it's like 223 in one week. You have to think about this. You have to think about what have been your our expectations. This is where it gets really interesting because um it tells you that the activities could tell me the activity is compounding. I mean, everything we do is compounding. The PDF, um, PDF's the the live show, this, the shorts, but then we do clips and social posts and podcasts. Don't forget we do a podcast, so you can if you you know if you can you can look at that as well. And a weekly email going out to a really tiny group of people, and all of it stacks up. One thing introduces the next. So, you know, someone sees a social post and then finds a PDF, and someone downloads the PDF and then sees the live show. You know, someone watches a short, visits the site, somebody listens to the podcast and comes back a few days later and reads the article. And and this is how it genuinely really works. So it's not one dramatic leap, but it's like um an accumulation of exposure. And you know, you you you look at this and you think, wow, okay. And that's where I think most BTPs got it wrong for years. Not just, I'm not saying you, it's it's us. We've all got it wrong. We've expected the kind of activity to produce this instant human conversation and an instant demo, instant meeting, instant deal. And everything's been judged through I don't know, the buyer should behave like a shopper standing at the tiller supermarket. But enterprise buying, we we all know, doesn't work like that, never did. So you you you you kind of look at the critical part, yeah, 600 640 downloads, they weren't gated, there's no forms, no forced registration, no um handing over of any personal details, or thank you, someone will be in touch. It's just a straight download. So you've got to think, well, okay, what I I I hear the 600. So what does that mean? So for us it means that 600 businesses know what we do. They know the website, they know what we think, they know how we analyze the problem, they know where to find us, they know how to contact us. And that's that's that's critical. Will they do it straight away? No, of course not. But that's not the weakness, that's that's an absolute strength. You you you you have to kind of let go of this the old assumption, the Martec assumption, is that someone shows you some kind of interest, and you've got to capture, you've got to capture them immediately, you've got to put them in a workflow, score them, nurture them, and hand to someone with a headset and CRM platform. And buyers, I mean, especially CEOs, we you we don't want that. Yeah, they want they want the information and education, they want to assess the thinking, they want to self-serve, remain anonymous until they're ready. If you think about how you you do things, we do things, you know. That's why that's why books still sell, you know, they've not been chucked in at us been the people have not stopped buying books. But you wouldn't expect a publisher to phone up a CEO because he bought a business book. Nobody's expecting, like, the author to ring up and say, Ah, I saw you bought chapter one. Can we book 15 minutes? Have a chat. I mean, it'd be ridiculous. But that's exactly the mindset of what we we as B2Bs have all adopted. So it treats every tiny expression of curiosity as a trigger for us to get involved, some kind of intervention. Same applies to podcasts. You look at the you look at the kind of a the podcast phenomenon. So why do people listen? Well, it's just entertainment, isn't it? Well, maybe. But in business, people are immersing themselves in a familiar voice, if you if you if you get my drift. Like that kind of line of thinking, the way of thinking, the way problems get analyzed. And they're kind of comfortable with that person's worldview. And that that really matters, I mean, in a big way. I mean, if you look at this, you look at um um TBPN, OpenAI just bought them. OpenAI just bought them. It's the technology business programming network. 250 million, 18 months ago. Because they understood the value of capturing that attention in a format that people were prepared to spend time with. I mean, some of their podcasts and shows, they're like three hours long. So they understand that long form that long form um content and thought has value. And it's even more true when you're B2B with a product that solves a serious business problem. You can't just knock out something really quickly. So, you know, that that's it's kind of the news. Is is is the the things that we have been doing as B2Bs, it's changed. Changing or changed, doesn't matter, yeah. It ain't what we've been doing because businesses and people and businesses are not doing enough business. So the critical, the bigger point about all of this is it's all about open access. And if you if you understand this whole thing about open access isn't giving away too much, it's about building familiarity, credibility at scale. That's exactly why today's subject matters, because once you see the, you know, you see start seeing these download numbers, you see how people are actually behaving when the content's left open, you start to realize why gated content slows down enterprise sales. So I mean uh the the the the the the point here is that um you you've got to see well what else is there what else is there about this and I think that um if you if you look at why it's gets slowed down well first of all is that it can if you gate it it causes friction at the wrong moment. You think about the psychology at that point buyer is curious, yeah. And that's a good thing, great. He's he's curious, they've seen something, opposed to clip, comment, something, something like that, recommendation, even I don't know, and they're interested enough to click because they want to learn something. They don't want to buy, they don't want to book a demo or anything like that, um, or sit through some some sales call just to learn something, and then they hit a demand uh a form that I don't know, demands that yeah, they want their name, address, email, telephone inside, telephone number, inside leg measurement, company size, sometimes project timeline, sometimes what's your budget? It's like, come on. I was staggering. Because what that says is before we let you see this content, and whether you're going to determine whether it's even worth your time, we want you to tell us who you are, where you work, what you do, how important you are, and how we can chase you down afterwards. And and marketers, they've normalized this to the point where they think it's sensible. It's not sensible, totally self-centered. It's based upon the assumption that the the vendors need to capture data, and it's more important, that's more important than the buyers need to explore something privately. I just I just, you know, you you kind of look at this this bit, you know, the whole thing that people want to self-educate. They want to self-serve, self-educate. Yeah. You know, want to remain anonymous, calculate the ROI. And then speak to a vendor. And that's not us inventing anything new. It's not some new law of business. It's how we, as CEOs, business owners, founders, whatever, have been behaving and evaluating something important for decades. That's how we that's how life is. So if you're thinking of um you know looking at changing some kind of core revenue system, you you don't want someone phoning you because you downloaded a two-page PDF. Yeah, you want to look around and check things out and understand, and you know, you want to read it and watch and compare, think, talk about it internally. And then when you're ready, you might reach out. Might. But at the end of the day, excuse me, gated content is predicated. On the opposite, it says that the moment someone's someone's curious, you can pounce on them. Bring them slowly by the neck, but everything slows down because most people, me, especially me, I switch off. Forget it. How dare you call me? How dare you chase me down? How dare you tell me that I've been on your website? This is another problem, big problem, negating content. And this is a bit bizarre, just laughable or bizarre when you want to think about it. The entire premise is that all your that your good form, your good content, the good stuff is all behind a form. The premium insight, you know, the premium guide, the full case study, hidden value, blah blah blah. So I say that's true. So your best content is hidden behind a form, a gated content. Then by definition, absolute definition, your best content is invisible to Google. So that means your strongest thinking, your best explanation, your most useful material, the very thing that could create visibility in the market can't be indexed. Yeah, it can't contribute to any kind of organic discovery in the same way, and it can't help people find you naturally. So the tactic defeats itself. So you hide your best material in order to capture a tiny percentage of people who are willing to surrender their details, and in doing so, you reduce your visibility of the one thing that could have helped you reach a wider a wider market and discover you in the first place. I mean it's just it's proper counterintuitive, but that's what we've all been convinced to do for years. And then there's the whole kind of lead narrative. Person fills in a in a form, and suddenly it's called a lead. It's not a lead, it's name and address, it's just a name. Okay, it might be a company name or um someone curious, but it's only somebody who wanted a document, probably got maybe has no intention whatsoever of speaking to anyone this week, next month, next week, next next week, next month, who knows. But when that information gets inside the business, that that that becomes a lead, gets counted, gets reported upwards. CMO says, Oh, we generated loads of leads from a website, everybody claps. I mean, what's that what what on earth does that mean? And what does it do to the business? I heard a story, CMO. Yeah. He said, Oh, we've got 400 leads, all come through our gated content demand gem pages. And it was it was called up at sales kickoff as evidence marketing was working. You know what's coming next. Not one deal. Because the so-called premium content behind a form was scarcely more was I mean, I say scarcely, it was it was a teaser. The buyer had actually been conned into filling out the form for something of like like zero value. So yeah, form got completed, trust was reduced instantly, not increased. You know, three paragraphs on the page, four paragraphs on the form, on on the on the download. Another story, which is even worse, another CMO, six thousand leads. An international SEO platform, six thousand leads. Sounds blinding. But the salespeople who are supposed to benefit, and I knew someone who actually worked there as one of the sales guys, supposed to be benefit this flood of information. Nobody got one deal from it. Nothing creating a pipeline, no revenue, nothing. So this is this is where you could you can very easily say, you know, leadership gets misled, this whole marketing, um, MQA, um, marketing qualified lead logic, all that all that kind of stuff. Um and if it's not market, you know, marketing qualified lead, lead gen logic, form fill logic, all of it creates the impression of progress and everyone's happy, everyone's like happy days. Oh, look at the numbers are going up, activity is visible, look at the dashboards, they're great. But the the buyer has not moved any closer to trusting you than before. No, no, no additional conviction in anything that they've seen or done. It's simply got shoved into a system, and us as CEOs and buyers can feel that, we sense it, we can see it straight away. You know, you look at it, you look at um what people are doing now, yeah. The layer and the the kind of like the current environment, and and and then we've now got AI dialers, AI written emails, AI scraping tools, reverse IP lookup in and intent platforms, and all these automatic sequences. And all these businesses are looking to hunt down browsers, and it all signals the same thing in the market or to the market. We're more interested in extracting your data than respecting your buying process as an individual. And who actually benefits from that extracted data is marketing and not sales, definitely not sales. So that's why the gated content slows down into price sales and SME sales, not because the forms are evil in themselves, but because they reveal what's wrong with the mindset. And they say, oh, the vendor's impatient, they say, but the buyer isn't, and that's where you've got these like two tempos, they just collide, it's like slows down or stops. Kicker, real kicker, real serious stuff. And I meant like before, uh right at the beginning, excuse me, I mentioned some um some quick fixes. But the first thing you've got to do is you've got to review your existing content, your blogs, your articles, and you gotta you've got to see which you know which of those actually attempt to educate your prospects without just alluding to the product being a benefit somehow. And they've got they've got to be yeah, they've got to include case studies, but but also how how these companies have actually generated an ROI. So you you your your content's got to be genuinely useful. I mean, us business people, as you know, are always on the lookout for new ideas. That's why we watch live streams, yeah. That's why we do this type of thing. Yeah. And we also listen to podcasts. And the reason we listen to podcasts is we you know it might be in the car for an hour. So so that's that's kind of like the that's like the first, the first thing. And the second thing is you you've got to get rid of your forms, your marketing automation forms. Yeah. If you can't get them off your website. And if you're using pay-per-click and and routing browsers to a landing page with a form on it, rework them. So the browser can access them anonymously. Don't get me wrong. Don't get me wrong. I mean, if you're generating loads of leads, you could be, oh, this guy's talking nonsense. Yeah, we're getting loads of leads from this, great. Prospects are really happy, want to give out their details, and they don't immediately unsubscribe, or they give you the main telephone number of the business so you can never get through to them, or they give you the info at email, and basically, but if your I mean if your BDRs make loads of appointments for loads of appointments for your salespeople, carry on. If not, the next bit is going to be quite interesting because you know you're looking at all these um all these uh products and the processes that we're expected to use as the precursor to the all-important phone call, you've got to look at the maths, got to look how much it how it actually works and how it affects us, how it all fits together. So if you look at the um, if you if you kind of look at the the how how the uh the sales are structured, because gated content has always been connected or joined at the hip with BDR follow-up. Yeah, so you you you've got your pay-per-click, you've got your download, you've got your forms, you've got information gets squirted into the um into your CRM, BDR follows up. And the the hidden assumption behind the gated content is that once you've captured the details, sales development, or to be ours, take over. Somebody phones, somebody emails, somebody gets sets some kind of sequence up or it gets um triggered some way, somehow, but basically somebody works the lead. So if you want to um if you want to test that assumption, see one of the things about doing this is that you can you press all you've got all these buttons, you go, oh that's what that's what's supposed to be on the screen. That's what I want you to look at. It's just the next title, you know. I can be pressing these and moving forward and go, oh I forgot to do that, never mind. But if you test that assumption with a bit of maths, okay, because your um your prospects, if your prospects um are are related to your um total addressable market, which of course there would be. If we said so work with me on this, if we said you you have a total addressable market of 10,000 businesses, so you talking an enterprise, right? So in the UK, there are um 20212,000 businesses with 10 to 50 employees, 38,000 with 50 to 250, and about 8,000 with 250 employees or more. So depending on what you're saying, what you sell, saying you could say that you're in practical terms your total addressable market could be 10,000 businesses quite quite reasonably. It's not not a problem with that. So if we now look at the at the technology curve, we also know that 10,000 of those those 10,000 businesses are not all going to be relevant and ready at the same time, and that's why the curve comes in, it's really important. So the innovators and early adopters, I just um we just use this. Um move this out of the way. I just want to show you where I'm where I'm where I'm going with this. Louis Pen. So here, this this section here, this critical section here, of your innovators and early adopters, your enthusiasts and visionaries who are up for reading and assimilating information. These are your excitable prospects, these are the people you want to sell to, that you are going to sell to first, always. So this data goes back and it's been honed over, I think, decades. Two and a half, thirteen and a half equals 16, 16 percent. Okay, so the innovators and early adopters are the people that are most likely interested sooner rather than later. So 16% of the market, 10, 1600 businesses. That is your realistic active opportunity pool that you're bringing something newer or different to the market. So let's look at the phone calling part of this whole equation. A BDR business development rep will make about 60 calls a day if you're lucky. So the current success rates are around about 300 to 1, give or take, of finding somebody who might be interested in your product. Some people say the that the ratio is even worse, but keep just be generous, we keep it at 300 to 1. That means 300 calls to find someone in an interested company who's willing to have some kind of conversation. And let me be really clear that's not an appointment. That's somebody that might be interested. That's not a demo booked, yeah, it's not qualified pipeline, nothing, it's just someone a human not hanging up. So if one BDR were trying to work through an active 1600 potential buyers, how long would that take 33 years? 33 years. That's you're gonna be thinking, wait a second, how's he work? How's he working that out? You have to work it out 300 to 1. Because the part of it, you know, people are gonna be in, not available, and so on. Come on to that. And the bottom line is it exposes something so completely absurd about the way us B2Bs have been told to think. We've been encouraged, do you know it? We've been encouraged to imagine that a large total addressable market coverage can somehow be achieved through a mixture and and activity of some BDRs and a bit of gated activity, bit of demand gen. But the numbers don't support it. Absolutely don't. So say you want you've got a salesperson and you want them to have four appointments a week. It's not it's not a big deal. Four appointments a week. Four proper conversations, yeah? If you've got two, that means you're gonna need um I'm not sure if I need to go on to the next slide, but yeah, but bear with me. So it's eight appointments a week. So depending on the conversion of assumptions, right? You're gonna need a team of sixteen BDRs to reach them. To give you to keep them busy. I mean it it it it should stop everybody in their trust, should stop everyone thinking, wait a second, sixteen BDIs, you've got to be kidding me. Salaries, national insurance, all the management tools, CRM um seats, dialers, data data recruitment, training, attrition, office overhead, all remote overhead. You you ain't getting much change out of a million. Just to keep two salespeople busy with meetings. So the bit that people haven't kind of joined up is that they're kind of blinded by this activity and the calls made and emails sent, and the leads, supposed lead sequences run and all the kind of but the the the core economic reality is dreadful, is jaw dropping. And and just jaw dropping inefficiency. All to achieve, this is this is interesting, this is kind of the interesting element, all to achieve something that broadcasters solved decades ago. Because they're looking at audience thinking, the word audience, not prospect audience. And we we both know sales has always been a numbers game, we know that. Broadcasting has always been a numbers game, advertising, always been a numbers game. The difference is that B2B never joined those numbers up properly. Broadcasters ended up, well not ended up, began measuring audience size and frequency, response and performance, all that kind of stuff. And B2Bs measured the like the cold calls, the marketing qualified lead to CRM stages. And the the wrong metrics became normal. So what percentage of your TAM actually know your exists? Yeah? Of that total adjustable market, do you think they know you? Do you think they actually know about you? Do any of them see you regularly? I mean, what percentage is actually or can actually learn from you? Because they're the numbers that matter. Only if a sliver of your market ever sees you. I mean all your downstream metrics, you just it just support invisibility, if you know what I mean. And you're it's an interesting way of putting it, you're you're har you're trying to harvest something from a field which has barely been planted, which explains this obsession with gating and follow-up and and so on. And that's why it's just so misguided. Because it assumes the issue is capturing people, but in reality the the issue is exposure, and once you realise that, I would I would say that a huge amount of B2B orthodoxy starts looking like fiction. Because manually telephoning your way across a total addressable market and hoping like demand gen lead gen, avi and pay-per-click is going to make a difference, that's it's not a strategy, it's just coping. And so I think that you know you you you you look at the um the the the the illusion and I mean it is it's definitely definitely definitely an illusion. Because you you know you look at the um you look at what's on on offer, you've got to think how did B2B get into this process when it thinks like forms, workflows, and lead scoring and all the different ABM layers and dashboards. It's kind of some kind of natural answer to new business development. And in my view, it's because B2B is bought into the B2C logic through the the whole Martech software and Martech advocates. Um marketing came in with a promise. Build your list, segment your contacts, and nurture them automatically, you know, score their behavior, push them along a journey down a funnel. And it all sounded really sophisticated, sounded kind of digital and modern because it was all software-driven. And people assumed it must be measurable and therefore it must be right, right? But the the examples that have been used to legitimise these were consumer-based or B2B to C. Yeah, like any of the tech big tech companies. You think that they're B2Bs, but there's the most the biggest markets are consumers. And also environments like insurance and travel, automotive, kind of broad volume transactional markets. Like even like I said, even with some tech markets, but they're kind of really they're selling it to like it it is the the consumer buying dynamics, but enterprise B2Bs, it's not like that. But still, you know, once the platforms are in, that whole culture started to wrap around the tech, and that the content became a means of getting hold of details and information and websites, and like they're there to collect information, and marketing teams became operators of software, and so when the um the that kind of promise started to fail, underperform, the industry did what industries often do, which is um they invented another layer, and that other layer was ABM. So when a CEO would say, you know, this automating automation thing doesn't seem to be delivering, the reply was not, oh maybe the the strategy's wrong or the core premise is wrong. The reply was like, Are you using ABM? And at the time, this back like 2016, the CEO say would say something like, What? What are you talking about? So the the COs and businesses were saying we not only did the content for the campaign, you you you also needed um to communicate to every single stakeholder in that account as well, not just content for that potential prospect. So it wasn't one or two people, in some cases it was like up to 19 people, 19 stakeholders. And so then you get you get things like this with the with your funnel. Um you know, we've all seen them top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, and so on. It's nonsense because it this is the propensity to that the marketing marketing love, oh we we we we love an infographic, don't we? So they knock out these infographics. You go look top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom of funnel, bottom of the of the funnel. Less than one percent of people that go through the funnels actually convert. But these originated in the consumer market. It was um Laffley was the president, I can't remember his Christian name, but his surname was his we'll call him Mr. Laffley, was the president of I think it was Unilever, I think, and he he he coined this this thing called the um zero moment of truth, first moment of truth, second moment of truth, ultimate moment of truth. And and this was a sequence that people would go through that would as in as consumers, you'd you'd recognize you had a problem, zero moment of proof of truth. First moment of truth was you recognized it and recognized that there was a potential solution. The second moment of truth, I think I've got this right, you recognize that there was a company that could provide a sol provide that solution to you, and you started engaging with them, and the ultimate moment of truth is when you recommended that company because you bought from them, top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel, customer. It ain't any different. And I think the you know when you when you look at it like that, it shows that businesses have actually been misled, I think. Not I think, I know, they've been misled into thinking that you we've all got to follow these examples, and so you know the the marketing industry's got everyone literally jumping through hoops. But they actually agree, all between themselves, unless you're kind of out and about, that no one actually really knows what's going on. Because all the decision makers stay quiet, stay silent, they self-serve, self-educate, remain anonymous, and you'll have it. You'll love this. It's called the dark funnel. I mean, you couldn't make it up. They keep doing the same thing over and over, hoping for a different result. Einstein didn't say that, by the way. But promising CEOs a different result all the time. Whilst between themselves, within the industry, they know they know there's a problem, but they don't know how to address it. Because I mean, even even looking at the information that I've got on this this particular um slide, I read it. Let me I and I'm reasonably the reason I'm reading it is because we've got a podcast. You know, we've got a podcast, and people listen to this on the podcast. I just want to read it out for the people for the benefit of the people that can hear this on the podcast. So it says B2B still rely on on demand, AB, and paper, click, and cold calls. Less than 1% convert. The average annual recovering revenue full-time equivalent is about 90, 80 to 90 grand in the UK. Not enough. And 91.6% of all businesses fail within 10 years. If you've got a bootstrap company, which is these figures, so you've got 20, 30, 50, 20% the first year, 30% the second, 50% the third go bust by year 10, 91.6. If you've got investment, 40% go bust, 80% or 85%, I think it might be 80%, fail to achieve their own targets, and 95% don't make the investors any any uh an ROI. So there's a problem here, but it's my my view, it's conveniently being avoided. Don't talk about it. And so you look at the next one, you look at this. Um I won't make it massive because there's just there's so much data on it, you couldn't read it. But half of all marketing, SaaS, start again, half of all SaaS is marketing. A little while ago when this the when the the um when this was done. I should have put the date on there. This is a year or so ago, so it was before all the D AI stuff came out. But there were 30 plus um SAS, 30,000 plus SaaS products on the market. 15 of them, 15,000 are marketing related. So like the the response to all this is pretty shocking. Because it was add more kit, add more software, multiply the complexity, more assets, more segmentation, more castration, tooling, and dashboards, and so on. And if it didn't produce the the results that they were promising, the blame delay landed somewhere else. Where was that? I wonder where that was. Yep, salespeople got a kicking. So it was product, product marketing, fit, messaging, SDR execution, anything, but the possibility that the actual architecture was wrong in the first place. And that is why I say B2B companies have been conveniently, deliberately shielded from the reality. And like I said, you look at the numbers, I mean, 15,000 um marketing platforms and B2Bs have been told year after year that if the numbers are poor, the answer is better utilization of the platforms. But what if the if the platforms were institutionalized or had had institutionalized the wrong behaviour? You have to think, but you really have to think about that because you you know we we we are we we are guilty of doing the same thing over and over again and hoping for a different result next month, next quarter. So if the if it's if this whole marketing um exercise has been uh has institutionalized the actual wrong behaviour and and what if I don't know turning marketing into a software management exercise has actually alienated the buyer. Yeah, what if this dependency because we know there's lot all these statistics, you can Google all of this. Um 20, 30, 50 SaaS platforms just made the all your different teams busier, didn't create more demand. Another another staggering statistic, you look at the kind of the wider business failure context for want of a better way, CB Insights, long, long, long highlighted the um marketing-related reasons. 52% of them marketing-related reasons for business failure. And as like I said, 20% of businesses fail in the first, 30% fail in the second, 50% in the third, and by year 10 you're up to 91.6. And that's all research done by Harvard and um and and the FT. And so whether you're a bootstrap company, whether you're an invested company, most people hope hope for the best. Hope and and hoping is that that's it. And and different companies again, GP Ball handed um kind of primary uh analysis on this. 80, 90 grand a year, and you're recurring revenue. So it's not hard to see why everything, any everybody feels under a load of strain. You have too much cost, too much software, too much theatre, and not enough efficient market exposure. And basically, now to make matters worse, I I think to make matters worse, um, you know, you've you've you've got this AI emails and uh calling, AI calling, enrichment software sequencing at scale, which means the market's now being told we can't even be bothered um to get real people involved. We'll we'll we'll just chuck AI at it and it's going backwards. And so, you know, we we are human. People by people, they always have. And voice, you know, voice matters. Oh think about voice. I mean, we know instinctively there politicians have voice trainers. They've been doing that for decades because the human being on a screen either builds, trusts, or repels it. In my in my own view, if it is live, like this is, it it can look and it does look and feel authentic, kind of warts and all. But if it's if it's overprocessed, um and can come across as being fake, people sense it, sense there's something being hidden, because you you know you wouldn't be you wouldn't be picking up a bottle and going, oh I don't I don't want to make too much noise there or or whatever. You you wouldn't do it because you want everything, everyone wants everything to be perfect for that video, that perfect delivery. And that's why we can all recognize when it's um when you've got uh uh an AI video, perfect skin, perfect background, perfect everything. And you look a bit closer and go, nope, no one looks like that. So what are they hiding? I'm just having a drink. People don't do that on video. So the thing is so so when companies ask why their content, their campaigns, um, and automation doesn't create traction, I think the answers the answer is not that they need another Martec layer. The answer's probably closer to doing what humans want. Doing what us humans like, like openness and consistency, and not just um a load of capture mechanisms. And that's why I say gated content is not just a tactic, it's a symptom of a deeper problem. And a whole generation I mean a massive whole generation of marketers has been been taught to um root everything through software. And it's got to be software every single touch point. And it's wrong. I mean I say it's f fundamentally wrong because there's there's a staggering amount of proof that demonstrates it, illustrates it day after day, week after week after month after year. And the outworking all of that is your bottom line. And that's why I I say retraining is absolutely critical. Absolutely critical. But how would you go about it? Because you've got to look at attempting to retrain an entire entire go-to-market teams. Where would you even start? The simple answer is um that the the people involved they have to start thinking differently, not superficially different. It's not a matter of like tweak this or tweak that nurture flow or or or the or that um that funnel element, but they've got to think kind of fundamentally different. And um, you know, they've got to start from the premise to understand what's gone wrong, and why it's gone wrong, and what the buyer behaviour actually looks like, and why self-educ, anonymity, and why all of that matters, and and what um and I suppose why totally trustable market visibility matters more than lead count, and why exposure has got to come before engagement. And the the thing is, is once that kind of logic lands with people, um, and they they can see that, they can start to see I can I can see where this is leading. I I'm starting to get it, and that's why we've created the sales exchange course. There's um I like this, I've always liked this. You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. I haven't got my hand on my face just because he has. I say it that way. But Buckmeister Fuller. Yeah. And the thing is, is that what are we what we're looking to do? We're not just looking to flog a bit of software. We're saying that there's a different way of doing things completely because the other one is should it should be obsolete. It's not, it's not, it's not just obsolete, it is not relevant for B2B. It's it's critical to get that. If you if you're selling insurance or cars or holidays or whatever, marketing automation platforms demand generally and pay-per-click, great. Happy day, very clever, very, very clever. B2B doesn't work. So that whole transition, that change can only happen if there's a um a complete understanding of what's gone on in the past, and to understand the um the creativity required to change something for the future. And so the first thing, I mean, the course, of course, is going to be my first recommendation. Not because I'm just trying to put a product pitch in this, because I can do that anyway, but because businesses don't need another random tactic. They've got to understand or they've got to have a catalyst to change the existing understanding across the board, otherwise, they'll buy infrastructure through some kind of ideology or lens that the old um uh that the old assumptions are there, which are there, which will just create the same problem again. But with these kind of tools, um what we've seen in the past, we we we know that's how we keep doing things. We keep do as you're told. I've bought this as a as a CEO, tell my team, do as you're told, go and use it. And they go, Well, it doesn't work or don't, whatever. But the but the the the critical thing about the course is that it's um it's actually delivered in it in it's all online, and so there's six sections, 20 modules, 189 short videos, 30 hours of content. So someone can do it in a month or in a week if they're pretty if they're focused, you know, it's up to them, entirely up to them. Um in addition to the the course itself, there's uh there are 80 worksheets and downloads and so on. So once the curve, if you get a couple of people to complete the course, which is what I reckon, I really I do think that's the right thing to do, that's when you've got to say the fun starts, because if you don't see this as fun, you don't do it. They can bounce ideas off them, and they've got worksheets and uh and and uh content and uh uh loads of stuff to help guide them. So they're not starting from scratch, they've got everything, everything they need. But the the critical, the most important thing about this is that they can see the waste, they can see where exposure's been too low, they understand why they would need hundreds of prepared graphics and assets and text gas and text assets. I mean I'm I am talking hundreds, hundreds and hundreds. There's a reason behind that, and also why something like this weekly live environment engagement changes the game, completely changes the game. Because it enables 10, 20, 50, a thousand people to get to know like and trust you. So it's really important for everyone to understand why um open access documents are important, the clips, the podcasts, the I don't know, you know, the shows and and and so on, all of that stuff. It's not a content marketing in the old sense, but part of like a it's an operating model or operating system, which is what we we've got. Yeah. Um and and I think I I said about a couple of people doing the doing the course. I would say that the CEO and maybe the VP of sales should do the course first. But if you've got a genuine, you see where I'm going with this, if you've got a genuinely open-minded CMO who thinks entrepreneurially rather than defensively, then great, include them too. Definitely. But to be honest, most marketers have been trained down a path where Martech isn't just a like set of tools, but a SAS. It's a belief system or a really a religion, even. Yeah. So expecting their immediate acceptance might be met with a bit of resistance.

unknown 59:53

I don't care.

Next Steps And Closing

SPEAKER_01 59:55

Say that quietly, because it's what's needed. But the course itself is is an important part of the process. Um, because it's it's the track the reason it's so is so important. Transformation, you've we've probably you may have heard these before. Transformation fails. Lots of transformation processes fail. But we're not looking at putting in tens, hundreds, thousands, whatever, different laptops or iPads, or whatever. Yeah, this is different. This is just a this is a re a restructuring of what's what so it's trans retransformation, transformation or restructuring. Doesn't matter what you call it. But if you if a business tries to put the the product that the foundational structure in without in kind of internal alignment, it's gonna mean that one person's got half the picture, the other person's defending the past 20 years. And marketing would be trying to justify what it's bought and what it's been using, and sales, you know, sales is still frustrated, and and then leadership goes back to the same old, same old, which is hoping that there's some kind of silver bullet, and that combination is unstable, we can't have that. So, what needs to happen first is you need you need to have this proper buy-in through genuine, genuine understanding, and you you know, you know as well as I do, selling is about getting people to believe your way of thinking, and that's the kind of the why regarding the course, you've got to do the course first. So you can see um you know, from this this particular slide, there's automated certification. So you do the course, finish them, answer the questions, automated certification, CPD certification at the end of it. So nobody has to do any babysitting or micromanaging or anything else. So that that really the course um the course is the first stage. Excuse me. So where does that leave us? Well that brings us to here. So this is um I've got to do this properly this time because before every time I've done this before, I've been um I've been too far over. So I've been like that. So you couldn't see the what was on the screen, it just looked a bit messy. Moving over, I've got to move my I've got to move my um my microphone. And the reason I've got to I use this microphone is because the audio is infinitely better, um, especially when this gets transposed and and and put onto podcasts. So there you go. There's there's the reasons behind it. So the whole thing about this is this is the the sales exchange operating system, and the OS basically uh automates and orchestrates every single element needed to achieve that um total addressable market scale exposure. It's the assets, publishing, live show environment, um, pathways to this kind of what we call structured activation and engagement, and the telemetry. Yeah, monitoring everything, it's complete set and forget discipline, and basically ultimately the ability to generate qualified meetings from sustained visibility rather than harassment. And so, and there's another factor that people shouldn't really ignore, and it's the the the this kind of combination of the course and the operating system transforms sales, the marketing, and the customer success, the entirety of that setup in a business in into something that is far, far leaner and far more profitable than anything you've ever experienced before. So once you start trying to force this market through this kind of software-mediated funnels and so on, you start to be able to reevaluate teams' sizes, their roles, their territories, the cost structures. So, in simple terms, you stop paying people and platforms to stimulate the demand and start building an environment where the market can see you and learn from you. And that's absolutely critical. The bottom line is gated gated content slows down enterprise sales as well as SME sales because it just kind of shows that that um that impatience and and and genuinely a uh a misunderstanding of a buyer's behavior. And so um as CEOs, we kind of we we do recognize it in ourselves. You know, that open access accelerates that trust because it respects how we behave if we're looking for looking for information. And when you combine all of that thinking into the right model, you don't just improve the marketing, you show how uh a business can create new business altogether, it changes the whole infrastructure, and it's all supposed to be and not supposed to be, it all happens at scale. So the conclusion to all your your work and the reorganization of your your GTM infrastructure, you go to market infrastructure, um, and and implementing a uh a new business is you get a sequence of dashboards. I can't I can't show it right now, but I will post this up on the when I when I do the video. I'll put the dashboard up on one side. And it shows you how much exposure you've achieved based upon impressions and reactions, engagement, and most importantly, the completed forms that book the meetings that generate the proposals. And that's that's if you're if you imagine you're reaching out and communicating to a very, very large market and a percentage of them are watching you and looking at you and then go they go and they could from anywhere in the world say do you know what I I think I'll um I'll find a bit find out a bit more about this and they go onto your site they complete the discovery and a meeting is booked how many how many meetings could you cope with? Because that's where we're at with this and with everything happened and and presented to salespeople with all of the work done everything prepared for them in preparation for that meeting what does it mean? Well it actually means nobody gets behind and you can cope with more business than you've ever had experience with and that's that's that's what's critical well apart from the um the end bit and my buttons don't my buttons have chosen to stop working I'm sure this there's a very simple explanation but that's it for me for this week and I hope you come and you join me next week and I hope that you've we've maybe sown some seeds because that's really the the main thing if you have any queries or questions you you know you can get in touch with me um online our various places online our website and so on but I think that's it I'm gonna I'm gonna press the button again I'm gonna see if it works.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:32

If it doesn't I'm gonna I just have to have to cut this off and go see you next week and I'll tell you next week what the problem was anyway bye for now that's it you have been listening to the GTM Reset Podcast the audio edition of the Sales Exchange live show if this episode reflects what you are seeing in your own business the next step is to explore the model properly use the links in the description to watch the full video version work through the foundational documents and request a private strategy call if you want to see how this would apply inside your organization. Thanks for listening