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“If you compromise buyer value for short term margin, your market share will eventually pay the price.”
– Monique Olan
What if the biggest growth lever in B2B is not more leads, more ads, or more automation but putting the buyer back at the center of everything?
In this episode of The Chat, we welcome back our very first guest, Monique Olan, Fractional CMO and go to market strategist, to unpack why modern B2B growth starts with buyer centric marketing. Monique shares her “hill to die on” belief that sustainable revenue only happens when companies align marketing, sales, and customer success around real buyer needs, not internal targets.
We dive into buyer led conversions and how letting the buyer drive the journey leads to stronger pipelines, lower customer acquisition cost, and measurable B2B growth. Monique also breaks down how B2B communities are quietly influencing buying decisions behind closed doors, and why growth hacking is losing ground to authenticity and value.
If you compromise buyer value for short term margin, your market share will eventually pay the price.
If you are a B2B sales or marketing leader serious about sustainable growth, this conversation will challenge your assumptions and sharpen your strategy.
Listen now and rethink how you convert.
01:50 – Buyer Value Over Profit
Monique explains why sustainable growth collapses the moment margin takes priority over buyer value.
06:00 – The Cost of Building What Buyers Do Not Want
A real story of product features chosen for profit potential instead of demand, and how buyer feedback corrected the course.
08:00 – “Growth Hacking Is Dead”
Why post-pandemic SaaS expansion forced a reset and buyers now demand authenticity and proof.
19:20 – Where B2B Decisions Really Happen
Insight into private Slack communities and peer networks influencing major buying decisions.
21:20 – 80% of the Buyer Journey Happens Before Sales
The strategic implication for marketing, website experience, and buyer-led conversions.
31:55 – A High-Risk GTM Pivot That Paid Off
A company shifts ICP and messaging toward health tech and lands one of its largest accounts.
46:40 – The Six Pivotal Points of Growth
Monique outlines the foundational levers that compound revenue over time.
01:15:24 – The Leadership Mentorship Gap
Why rising GTM leaders struggle after promotion and how lack of mentorship slows performance.
01:34:53 – The One Thing That Drives Everything
“Buyer value is everything.” The closing principle that anchors the entire episode.
Podcast Title – Buyer-Led Conversions: The Future of Sustainable B2B Growth
Host: Terry Wilson, Founder and CEO of Chatmetrics and Zotly
Guest: Monique Olan, Fractional CMO and GTM Advisor
Episode Summary
In this episode, Terry Wilson sits down with Monique Olan to unpack why sustainable B2B growth starts with the buyer, not the funnel.
They break down how buyer-centric marketing, aligned go-to-market systems, and real customer insight drive a stronger pipeline, lower acquisition costs, and long-term revenue expansion.
Monique shares real client transformations, practical frameworks, and one bold truth: if you compromise buyer value for short-term margin, growth eventually stalls.
[00:00] – Welcome Back: Why Buyer-Led Growth Matters
[01:50] – The Hill to Die On: Buyer Value First
Key Insight: Sustainable revenue is tied directly to buyer value.
[08:00] – Growth Hacking Is Dead
Strategic Shift: Move from seller-driven funnels to buyer-driven journeys.
[15:30] – Breaking Down GTM Silos
Framework Highlight: LoopLogic GTM as a buyer-led operating system.
[28:00] – The Six Pivotal Points of Growth
Why it matters: These levers compound revenue over time when aligned.
[41:00] – From Product-Led to Buyer-Led
[52:00] – The Leadership Gap in Modern GTM
[01:05:00] – Tactical Starting Point
Action Step: Ask why your best customers stay and build your strategy around that answer.
Stats & Insights
Useful For
Links & Resources – Connect with Monique Olan on LinkedIn
Learn more at – pivotalpitch.com, moniqueolan.com
00:00- Intro:
Welcome to the chat. Come behind the inbound scenes of some of the world’s fastest growing companies. For the past 10 years as chat metrics, we’ve had an exclusive inside view of how these industry leaders are revolutionizing inbound marketing and sales across diverse sectors. Each week we bring you conversations with top minds in marketing and sales who share insider secrets and strategies.
00:34- Intro:
For driving inbound success, join us on the chat, your front row seat to the future of inbound.
00:49- Terry:
Today on the chat. We’re bringing back a fan favorite. Monique Olan, our very first guest, and someone who shaped how this show thinks about go to market strategy.
00:57- Terry:
Monique’s back to talk about one of the most important shifts happening in B2B today, and that’s the move from growth at all costs to true buyer centricity. We’re gonna unpack where scaling companies get it wrong, how silos are still killing GDM execution and why most revenue leaders are flying blind when it comes to sustainable growth.
01:17- Terry:
And right in the middle of that conversation, we’re introducing something new. We’ve been working and thinking a lot about at Chat metrics, which is this whole concept of buyer led conversions. It’s our way of operationalizing everything Monique preaches, aligning marketing, sales, and customer success, and how buyers actually move, not how all charts say they should.
01:37- Terry:
Monique, welcome back to the chat.
01:39- Monique:
Thank you so much. I’m happy to be here.
01:41- Terry:
Let’s jump straight in. So let’s start with the Hill. You’ll die. Why is Buyer centricity more than just a philosophy, and what’s the real risk of staying stuck in it like a profit only mindset.
01:53- Monique:
Yeah, so you know, I work with companies of a lot of different sizes. The companies that I tend to work with are usually in like high growth into mid-market, but I also mentor a lot with early stage startups that. It could be anywhere from like Napkin idea or into like their first customers getting their pre-seed kind of funding. And hill that I’ll die on, which is what I talk about all the time, is that the buyers need or want needs to be at the center of what you’re doing as a business, at all times. So whether you are a product or a service, whether you’re B2B or B2C, this is a foundational concept. Products and services exist to serve a buyer need or want. Now we’re predominantly B2B. I know most of my clients are all in the B2B space or B2B two C, and so typically it is a need as opposed to want not. Most people are wanting a CRM system, they need it, but, the goal is to serve that need. And where I start to have seen some friction in my time, working for publicly traded companies, working for smaller companies is at some point there’s a time in growth where you’ve been serving that need and you start to possibly consider or actually compromise the delivery to that need of the customer in order to expand your profit margin.
03:17- Terry:
and that’s what that’s kind of all about is how do you avoid that transition? How do you stay buyer-centric not compromise those core focuses and values in order to see if you can move that needle in the profit margin?
03:31- Terry:
Very interesting concept. We, I will say recently, about three months ago, we had an ex-client come back to us who moved away in terms of trying to strike efficiencies moved over to an AI chatbot to save costs. Unfortunately, for them, the downside was that the reduction in lead generation and then all of the flow and effects from that, the reduction in return on ad spend, the increase in client acquisition costs were such that, you know, that equation really didn’t work.
04:01- Terry:
And, yeah, so very, very interesting. And you and I are totally aligned when it comes to buyer centricity, that’s for sure. It’d be, Excited to talk about the,Buyer lead conversion concept shortly as well.
04:11- Monique:
Yeah.
04:12- Terry:
In terms of experiences where you’ve seen this in play, do you have any examples as to where it’s either not, you’ve seen it start to negatively impact the business, or you’ve seen the opposite where they’ve been in that, you know, profit mindset where you’ve been able to shift into a buyer centric mindset and what were the impact?
04:35- Monique:
Yeah. a couple examples I’ll go through I wanna emphasize one quick thing is as I work with a lot of companies that are constantly looking for investor funding, I’m not saying you’re not in business to make profit. Right. We’re all in business to make a profit,
04:49- Terry:
and it’s not just a matter of like ethics and values either.
04:52- Monique:
It is a matter of, you know, your greatest sustainable growth and success is tied to your ability to be buyer centric. And so a couple examples I can think through, is actually when I was working with a large global publicly traded company, we launched a software solution and part of it was launched with a few. Here I’m gonna talk about how they positioned it and what they launched with. They highlighted a few key software features that they decided to double down on and expand based off of what they thought they could make the most amount of margin out of in that product being, the way that the model worked for their pricing model.
05:32- Monique:
Being able to get customers to buy up into, Lo and behold, we started to do some go to market effort around it. And part of what I like to do, and I’m running that is also get the customer or prospect feedback in real time, is we did an initial kind of, teaser launch and got some feedback on key features, functionalities, and things like that would be most bene to them. And during that initial rollout, we got statistically what they picked as like the path we wanna lead down for product features and functionality to get the greatest potential, profit growth out of, was not at all what was in demand. there were actually two other key features that were in demand for them that they would actually buy into faster for the product.
06:11- Monique:
So there was actually not only a misguided assumption into how they expanded the product and then how we were positioning in market based on this kind of what we think could gain us the most. but we were actually just missing entirely on where we would get the conversion, which is people wanted A and B, but we were focusing in on C. and so it was one of those that as we started to go through that beta and that, or not the beta, but the official like. Pre-launch, teaser. we got this data into the rest of the product team. We got it into the rest of leadership and we shifted some of the actual product focus. And so we had a really successful launch as we started to go into full scale launch within, past the existing customer base for getting the test and feedback and actually out into market. and a lot higher traction, better conversions across anyone that was net new and key account expansion. that was a good example of at least like righting our wrong, in the process. But I even see it where, I’ve been recently working with a couple, just as a volunteer mentor with a few startups that are trying to position in market and, They are in a mindset a little bit more, not in a misguided way of being the solution provider and not able to actually put themselves in the buyer’s shoes. And so
07:22- Terry:
up leaning into some key functionality and key, we’re solving this problem and as I’m working with them, I’m like, if you put yourself in the shoes of the actual customer you have, that’s not a problem for them.
07:35- Monique:
That’s a problem for the service provider. And so we’ve been doing some practices on how do you really truly get into the shoes of your customer, understand what they need and want, and make sure you’re actually building a product that serves that. and that has been, you know, hopefully very helpful for each of them.
07:51- Monique:
But, definitely great conversations that I’ve had with them to work through those challenges.
07:55- Terry:
Well, you know, history is littered with the corpses of organizations that have amazing products that solve problems that nobody wants to solve.
08:05- Monique:
Yeah. Yeah. And that is where I find it interesting. ’cause some people will be like, I see this market, I see this gap in the market, I’m gonna create a product for it. And they’re like, cool. There’s a reason why there was a gap in the market for that product. and yeah, that is a huge kind of misstep and it can result in a lot of lost, dollars spent on trying to scale that dollars time effort, everything.
08:27- Terry:
So how do you broach that subject when you’re working with an organization that’s got their mind set, they’ve already taken steps down a particular path, obviously level of investment made, how do you has say, hey fellas, maybe you haven’t exactly got this, this one right.
08:41- Monique:
Yeah. a lot of the work that I end up doing with clients is a lot in that research. And then also how do we map our revenue projections based on it. So what I really like to get into the weeds on is understanding, What is our current potential growth with the product as it is versus where the, if we were to write correct it, what does that growth look like?
09:02- Monique:
What is our short term and long term wins? So sometimes, a good example is I’ve worked with a client recently who, identified a single market as their core market to go after it had to deal with IT but their kind of focus on how they got to them was a little off. And so we did a little bit of writing on what is it they really care about and why your solution is solving that.
09:25- Monique:
And then how do we actually, another hill that I’ll die on, which is the riches are in the niches. How do you align to that niche and make sure you’re truly like speaking the words they care about. Make sure you are hitting on their core demands, but also mapping their longevity with you. and understanding customer lifetime value.
09:43- Monique:
is this a kind of one and done kind of customer? Are they gonna be out of my. Kind of cycle with me within a year. How do I maintain them? How do I grow within that key account? there’s a lot of ways in which we practice on making sure we’re aware of the buyer’s potential at all stages of their journey with you in order to ensure that there is a sustainable growth path, and then how do we actually operationalize on that?
10:07- Monique:
And I think that’s the key component.
10:09- Terry:
So I, for me, what I see with organizations is one of the challenges where they believe there’s a solution. How do you test that? how do you actually, you’ve explained almost in my mind, the next step, what’s the first step in, in actually recognizing whether or not that is the problem that the customers want?
10:27- Monique:
Yeah, speak to those customers and buyers. I can’t like overemphasize how critical it is to actually have the ear and the words and the conversations with those in market. when we’re working with really early stage startups, the number of times we just emphasize like getting one-on-ones with key people who would actually be your buyer.
10:47- Monique:
And getting that feedback, real feedback is gonna be important. there’s always supplemental research data that you can get into markets. and that is always important, especially as you’re talking with investors, for them to understand the baseline market, like what is your actual tam which are available market to go after versus, where you are in it, but like getting real feedback.
11:06- Monique:
And this is a huge component of also getting that product launched. The biggest wins you have is not just getting their feedback at the beginning, but real customer success stories. The people who excel have A deep presentable, in their brand, experience of their customers with their product or service.
11:22- Monique:
One thing that I constantly emphasize on is how history repeats itself in marketing, sales, our practices and go to market. authenticity is at the forefront of marketing today. this is not a new thing. it is just, we are kind of at the death of the growth hacking era and at a deep place now where data privacy is important, authenticity and, understanding of what the product really does for someone’s really important.
11:49- Monique:
And so when you can be a company that is oriented against what that buyer really cares about and can authentically present it in your awareness stages, in your sales conversations with them, able to show real customers with real value, and then. Also post-purchase. supporting them in a way that’s still very buyer-centric and making sure that it’s about their needs and you’re solving them. creates a significantly more sustainable, revenue pattern and a sustainable growth pattern for the company.
12:20- Terry:
Some of the most successful organizations that, we have the pleasure of dealing with as our clients are ones that review the chat transcripts and actually use those customer conversations to help drive product roadmap and new features. most recently, there’s been a particular customer that is a service, based business and they’ve got their offer and they’re very fixed to that offer.
12:44- Terry:
And we’ve found that through the chats we were having with the website visitors, that there were three particular questions that were getting asked that we were answering no to. And part of our continuous improvement process is to say, okay, it’s not just about how can we improve process.
12:58- Terry:
We’ll also go through and see where there might be any gaps in our client’s offer. And, Often they’re not in a position not interested or it is so far removed from their core business that it’s not something that they’re interested in. But I’d say about 30% of the time, it is something that they will actually start to build in and bring as an offer, particularly when they see that the audience that they’re attracting, there is demand for that, particular, solution.
13:22- Monique:
Yeah.
13:22- Terry:
So it’s the ones that Rev, we really do review the chat transcripts and use that voice of customer, to help drive their product roadmap and feature development are, you know, we see those, they’re the businesses that are head and shoulders in each of their sectors.
13:36- Monique:
Yeah, also seen where that, that voice of customer can’t get lost in a department or siloed somewhere. So this is like one of those, if I was to give some advice into any company to get that voice of the customer more activated upon, ’cause that’s the big question is how do you take that in input and actually do something about it is don’t let it get lost in the small processes.
14:00- Monique:
The number of times I’ve seen like sales conversations where they see all the objections they have and that never goes on to maybe marketing to figure out how can they preemptively get over those objections before a lead gets into the pipeline or post-purchase customer onboarding teams who work with the customers and get the feedback on, this is what they dive into first in our product.
14:23- Monique:
How do you get that into the sales team so that they can make sure they’re mentioning that at the sales point so that they can convert better? There’s. So much opportunity for that within the entire, like customer journey and how they engage with different teams. But one of the biggest falters we see as companies start to scale is that they start to create more silos within the teams.
14:43- Monique:
Whether that is because of leadership, whether that’s because of technology and tools, but a lot of times these very, subjective and very, qualitative data points can get lost or stuck in just this little field in your CRM system and not passed on to someone to turn into something that can actually matter for your bottom line.
15:02- Terry:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Look, you know that, we’ll talk a bit more about silos later, but the cost to organizations of a silo is immeasurable. the loss. I mean, you could probably go through and analyze. we’ve seen it a couple of times quite, vividly.
15:18- Terry:
We, we deal with marketing because they own the website, but we’re an extension to the sales team. So we deal very closely with the sales leadership. And, you know, I’ve seen meetings where there’s been a lot of friction. in between growth hacking where out of the phase of growth hacking or growth hacking is dead.
15:33- Terry:
how does that idea tie into the demand for more authentic and buyer aligned strategies?
15:39- Monique:
Yeah, I mean this could be a deep topic for like multiple hours I could dive into, but there’s multiple factors that go into like the transition of how, especially in B2B buyers have engaged with their types of products and solutions and services. and I think a big contributor actually the post pandemic era.
15:57- Monique:
So, just looking at SaaS companies an example, when we first actually had the pandemic and went into lockdown and everyone was working remote, there was this boom of SaaS companies and solutions to solve the gap. All of the new gaps. But what we’ve seen as we see in any, once kinda something gets more normalized, we see this happen again, history repeating itself where. At some point, okay, we’ve now adapted these 20 different solutions to help us stop gap, this bleed of how do we operate as a business. now fully remote. Now they’ve gotten to their one year renewals, their two year, their three year renewals, and they’re more educated on what it is they need and what functions in the business.
16:39- Monique:
They’ve adapted their internal operations and now they often look to consolidate their software or they start to look at, did I buy some software that we’re not using? and I’ve worked with multiple companies where we’ve been in that process of how do we actually one, lean into the right ones, eliminate wasted spend.
16:57- Monique:
And so this comes back to are you actually aligned to solving a problem for that buyer? Were you
17:04- Terry:
it well and were you messaging, positioning and supporting them in a way that made sure they were aware of that and taking advantage of that. And so it’s not this just like. You know, marketing, we want to make sure we’re always buyer-centric and putting them first kind of concept, it really is gonna be a make or break for your business as you get into a company.
17:25- Monique:
It’s one of those aspects where it can really make a big difference in, how you operate and how you’re actually able to expand the product.
17:32- Terry:
So we’ve been talking a lot about buyer led conversions lately as a shift from seller driven or marketing driven funnels to buyer driven journeys. How does that resonate with the shift that you are seeing in the market at the moment?
17:44- Monique:
Yeah. So that connects a little bit to the last point we were talking about where you have more educated buyers, and you also have to look at the technology that we’re using today to reach buyers. So we are no longer in an era where most of our effort was. TV ads and radio ads and billboards that
18:03- Terry:
of people.
18:04- Monique:
We went digital. And so the touch points for them went digital. Now at the beginning of this process, and I hate always moving into history, but again, history helps you understand the future. And, one of the key points here is, we went digital and one of the things I remember when I was still in a marketing agency was we sold so hard on the way we could track the buyer journey and influence it, but we’ve had the shift now where buyers own a lot of the way the channels operate for themselves. so that’s one component, right? So a lot of the channels were going to them is either passive, like getting to them on social channels, or it is their action that triggers it such as a, a search either in AI or in Google to find something. but there’s also, to the tie point back to authenticity is because. They have grown so accustomed to the amount of marketing and sales efforts we do in these channels. A lot of times decisions are not anymore being made purely on who’s gonna advertise in front of me knowing that I’m this type of person, but more a matter of their connections again. We go back to old school techniques, but today some of the biggest decisions that I see other CMOs making or I see other leaders making are behind closed doors in Slack communities for explicitly CMOs of SaaS companies.
19:20- Monique:
I’m in one where we have spaces where we say, okay guys, I am testing out product right now to help with my team and our operations, and here’s my feedback. Or we go in there and we ask, we, I’m looking for X, Y, Z. Does anyone have any recommendations or experience? And so you’re finding people going into these very private channels that you as an advertiser and a marketer or a salesperson may not necessarily have access to. and they’re looking for that feedback. So you get back to this whole, if you aren’t being at the best interest of the buyer, that’s gonna be talked about those spaces that you have no control over.
19:57- Terry:
It’s almost like there’s three types of information sources, that I’ve seen really come to the fore, and they are their own peer groups and communities like you were just talking about.
20:09- Terry:
Certainly for B2B, LinkedIn I think is a place where a lot of people go to, have a conversation, do some research, maybe not even the conversation, but do the research.
20:18- Terry:
And one of the other places that they go to, and interestingly we found this with not just inbound but outbound activities as well, is their website. So I remember the last time we were chatting, you asked the question, you know, can you afford to own 70% of your buyer’s journey? And the reality is, I don’t think any organization can, large enterprise can have a big influence on that and certainly can potentially penetrate some of those other communities.
20:44- Monique:
Yeah.
20:45- Terry:
place where you can, and again, I think the place that we focused on is, the website is one of the places that people go to, to do their research because that’s what you say about yourself, you know, that’s where you provide your evidence and you prove and the information. So they’re gonna go there and have a look as part of the research and.
20:58- Terry:
They’ll then, work amongst the peer groups and LinkedIn to verify or seek further information and get feedback. So
21:06- Monique:
Yeah.
21:06- Terry:
I saw a report, Gartner published I think about two months ago now, three months ago, the old challenger sales days where the percentage, supposedly a B2B buyer’s journey that was done before they raised their hand was 53%.
21:21- Terry:
Gartner have now said it’s up to 80% of the buyer’s journey for B2B businesses are completed before they’re even raising their hand with an organization.
21:29- Monique:
Yeah.
21:30- Terry:
and at that stage, there’s very little influence left, for a sales rep, so to speak. So, you know, the more you can influence in those earlier stages, and I think, buyer led conversions for us is around our experience on the websites over the last decade and the conversations we’ve had with buyers, and that’s.
21:46- Terry:
We are up to. I mean, the scale blows my mind. I don’t think, I’d actually looked at these stats last time we were talking, but we have had, getting close to 3 million conversations now. we’ve delivered well over 300,000 leads and over $5 billion in pipeline. And with that there is some insight that you gain.
22:07- Terry:
We were talking earlier about actually there’s a difference between, knowing statistics and, having some education versus actually living in the trenches and the experience that, the real world brings. And, where we’ve ended. And we are using this language of Buyer led journeys.
22:22- Terry:
We’ve been doing something for almost the entire decade, which has made us successful that we didn’t really have a name for or a framework for, or understand it. And there’s, 12 components to what we do. But in a nutshell, what it we let the buyer. Lead the journey. We let the buyer lead the conversation, at their pace anonymously.
22:42- Terry:
There’s a whole, like I said, a list of 12 pieces to the framework to get it right. But in a nutshell, it really is the buyer that’s leading the conversion, not the other way around. And the results have, ridiculously phenomenal. I struggle with a credibility perspective because when you’re talking to people and say, we actually quadrupled the conversion rate for our last customer, it’s nah, I don’t believe it.
23:02- Terry:
And in fact, I could bring up an email right now that I got, last week. It says, four times, that’s where you lost me. Impossible.
23:09- Monique:
Yeah.
23:10- Terry:
it’s, okay, you know what, it’s not you’re losing me. Like you are the one that’s missing out on the clients and it’ll be one of your competitors that gets ’em.
23:17- Terry:
So I think it’s a good timing for us. And I really do think there’s a lot of alignment when you talk about the customer centricity, particularly in this environment where cash isn’t as available as it was before. And expectations in terms of the KPIs is very different to what it was, return on ad spend, client acquisition cost is the primary focus, no longer can you have, a 36 month payback for client acquisition costs on a client acquisition cost.
23:42- Terry:
that’s, it’s, unless you’re running actually a profitable business, and you’re going through a cash burn where you’re not seeing a light at the end of the tunnel, then, yeah, it’s a very difficult position to, to be in terms of grabbing some cash.
23:56- Monique:
Yeah. And it’s interesting because, Being a marketer today is probably one of the most, delightful things as a consumer, myself or a buyer myself, but also one of the most hardest things to do as an actual person having to hit performance numbers and actually drive pipeline, which is. We are seeing this, like to your point, most people are de decided upon before they even get to having a conversation with a sales rep. there’s so many dynamics to what goes into what influences that buyer before they get to that stage. So
24:26- Terry:
about companies that have founders doing guest speaking on podcasts. You think about those that have ongoing content that they’re optimizing for AI and for search that they are doing, you know, social engagement, that they are doing paid advertising, that they are doing local events or virtual events, that they’re doing all the multiple things that can compose what we call kind of integrated marketing strategies.
24:49- Monique:
But we’re back to this stage where like the understanding of what’s truly driving that, point of what brought them here. It is a question that still companies keep asking, which I know it’s so hard ’cause. set ourselves up for this, right? As marketers, especially as marketers, we said, my gosh, we can track all the things.
25:07- Monique:
Let us show you how we can track the, where this lead came from. And now we’re having to double back and say, okay, but look, it takes like anywhere from seven to 20 some odd touch points to get them to actually convert and engage in some way. we can no longer attribute to just one anymore, and we’re in this lovely place where we set ourselves up for this, but. a marketer becomes a challenge because without a significant trust within your leadership team and having the right understanding of what marketing does and how marketing and sales are so intertwined and how much work goes into that awareness stage and consideration stage that you’re not actually able to see with the buyer, but you’re doing stuff in market that is clearly influencing it. and then making sure that everyone understands that’s going on, but maybe aren’t able to fully track it. it is now kind of a hard place, but as someone who’s buying, and I’m often buying software and services for me or for my clients, I am like happy with the transparency out there, with the authenticity that I can find, and it makes a huge influence into what I decide to buy into. and so it’s that like awkward as a marketer, I feel the pain, but I also appreciate the outcomes. but it definitely just leans harder into you. The softer elements that some people were able to overlook when we had like the SaaS boom of everyone just needed something to solve a gap. the things like being really good on understanding your buyer, who they are and what they need, positioning well against it, and what we talk about, which is the death of the sea of sameness, which is being able to stand out.
26:44- Monique:
You can’t just be sitting in the shadows of Salesforce doing something similar to them and just hoping to ride the, you know, their curtails. You need to really know your niche. You need to know how to speak to them, be where they are, and authentically present in a way that they can discover you and want to engage.
27:01- Terry:
Exactly, I found that. It seems to me, and I’m interested in your observation here, but it seems to me that there’s a very much a high tendency for businesses in the first instance to run outbound as opposed to invest in marketing. It’s almost and I guess look to a certain extent, it makes some sense in the very early stages to verify a market.
27:26- Terry:
The easiest way to verify whether or not you’ve got a product and there is a demand for it, is to go and have conversations.
27:33- Monique:
Yeah.
27:33- Terry:
and I guess I’ve gotta say, transparently, it’s probably one of my biggest regrets that we didn’t move to marketing, earlier on. It’s a, we’ve been a cold outbound business for a long time.
27:43- Terry:
and you know, I mean, that’s an insight that I’ve garnered over the last couple of years for sure. A regret of ours. But I think it’s almost like a, I see it regularly, businesses start with the outbound component as opposed to investing in marketing in the early days.
27:55- Monique:
Yeah, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing. it is a great way to get some initial traction, some initial insight, but it’s definitely not, one scalable and it’s also something that can quickly feel, very spammy over time if you try to scale it in the wrong way.
28:11- Terry:
but it is a way to think about how as a marketer, another thing that I say often that, I know people hate hearing from me, but it is also like a good indicator of a good marketer is that I constantly say it depends. so this as a tactic or a approach, it depends on how it fits into your mix. But yes, there is a fine balance of certain brand and fundamental like foundational elements that need to be done you do anything. and then there’s certain, What I consider like activation in market of those core foundations that you figure out what could be some of those, either quick win or low hanging fruit opportunities.
28:50- Monique:
And how do you also consider, activating in market that prepares for the long term? I am, depending on what stage the company’s in is, you know, you can’t just constantly be going after these quick win, you know, opportunities and just outbound. You need to be building some traction on long term.
29:05- Terry:
There is, if you wanna call it just SEO or SEO plus AI optimization now, for sites and copy, that is still very. Critical for your business, especially as you watch the trends of people change in the way in which they discover and how much more they’re leaning into copilot or Gemini or chat GPT or whatever tool they have at hand, that’s AI oriented. The amount of times that they’re just going to the preview that AI is generating at the top before looking at any search results now, it is a prominent aspect of whether your business has some potential long term. And if you’re not building that earlier, there’s no way you’re gonna generate in those results later. Yep.
29:43- Monique:
so there is a fine balance of what that is. It also depends on if you’re really early stage, I’ve had some people who are still like just getting their product to their first customer and they’re in these like, I associate with accelerator groups and incubators and, they’re like, I paid this guy to do SEO for me.
29:59- Monique:
And I’m like. Okay, we’re a little early. We don’t have a lot of dollars to play with. You are in a, I need to get to first customer, get some insight, get some feedback, adapt my product, and start to scale. That is not where your dollars need to go yet, but there’s definitely, points in which you need to start thinking about the short and long-term picture.
30:17- Monique:
And so it’s always
30:17- Terry:
Okay, good.
30:18- Monique:
a very complex mix of those type of tactics and channels that you take. And then based on understanding where your customer is, again, that buyer centricity that comes to the forefront, you can easily, try to do outbound and accidentally hit the wrong person. You could do, organic work and then realize you’re speaking the wrong touchpoints or problems in the work you’re doing, and you’re not getting in front of the right people.
30:43- Monique:
So knowing your buyer is so fundamental to how you operate and what kind of tactics and channels you go after, whether it is your kind of outbound or inbound type of techniques.
30:54- Terry:
I market validation. I think, that’s almost, you know, for early stage organizations, it’s a great way to do market validation. Whereas someone like Procter and Gamble, if they wanted to launch a new brand, well they’ll have focus groups. So it’ll be the marketing team running the entire, market validation of that new brand or product.
31:09- Terry:
Whereas for smaller organizations that are just starting to get into the market, then it’s a perfect way for them because you get the validation by getting the customer. That sort of helps tick so many boxes in terms of helping cashflow and everything else along the way. and esteem and confidence, which can’t be, which can’t be under underplayed.
31:26- Terry:
So let’s get back onto this topic of silos. why is true buyer centricity impossible without real alignment between marketing, sales, and customer success?
31:39- Monique:
Yeah. They are all touching and influencing the understanding of your buyer across the journey of your solution from. Beginning awareness through to actually being purchased and to longevity. And so when you accidentally create these silos, you break a lot of that connective tissue. I’m such an advocate of this, they need to live and breathe together, right? we’ve seen the history of incentivizing groups off of their performance numbers that are a little bit too vanity and not aligned to the bigger picture. There’s understanding marketing against how it drives revenue, but there also has to be some room in understanding. There’s other data points that are qualitative that we need to be tracking across that journey.
32:23- Monique:
We go back to that example I talked about earlier is the number of times I’ve seen us lose customers near the end because we just didn’t get the positioning right, the beginning. or, we had so many sales conversations that never happened simply because people didn’t see the core value that they’re actually using after they activated. we’ve seen faulty onboarding, like especially automated onboarding for. like SaaS companies that are completely like product-led and they build a product-led experience that is not actually focused on what they need to activate off most.
32:57- Monique:
I focus a lot on marketing, sales, and customer success ’cause they’re the key touch points that a customer experiences from pre-purchase to post-purchase.
33:06- Monique:
But I also wanna bring in like, your product development team needs to be in these conversations too. if they’re, looking at the, what’s next in the product beyond the fixes and the bugs that might be coming up from customer feedback. you need to have those conversations happening between those teams and they need to be all oriented around key foundational aspects of the buyer that should be, worked on from their perspective.
33:30- Terry:
So this is where your loop logic go to market framework comes in, isn’t it? how does that help teams operate in sync with how buyers actually move?
33:39- Monique:
Yeah, so this loop logic go to market, or GTM is this idea that you have your positioning, your pipeline, your people internally and externally, and then your performance all aligned around a buyer led operating system. So that is, operating system consists of your foundational knowledge, your foundational understandings, your actual, go-to-market components and how you pull certain levels to activate, which we’ll come back to in a second.
34:08- Monique:
But it also means your systems and tools that are driving that, as well as your metrics. And so you need to be thinking about how are all these teams operating off of the same core metrics? You’re all driving business revenue, but there are metrics from each of those different teams that help it. Inform how they’re activating towards that revenue. so those are the four key components for what I kinda consider take up across these different departments to fuel this buyer led operating system.
34:37- Terry:
Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think
34:40- Monique:
Yeah.
34:40- Terry:
the working to a framework to gather that alignment and, beyond two silos, that there’s obviously some conflict or just separation between, doesn’t even have to be conflict, but just a gap. sometimes can also hide, lack of alignment between other areas as well.
34:58- Terry:
Customer sales and marketing’s obviously the one that’s to get spoken about the mark most. But the reality is, customer success product are just as important because it’s one of those things I remember through my career, we, most of my years have been spent in a distribution type business, which gets product to market.
35:16- Terry:
And so that the pointy end, it’s really, it’s the sales team that are the ones that are closing the deals. They have, owning the majority of the customer relationships. And often the challenge was managing, the sales personalities into, hey, you’re not the most important part of this organization.
35:37- Terry:
There’s not one part of the organization that will operate without the other parts of the operation all working together. things like for instance, you know, even as far as hr, you don’t have all the HR systems working in the business, then you’re not gonna have operational staff to deliver the products out to where you need them to be once you’ve closed the deal, the customer, accounts department even in terms of making sure the money comes in to pay your wages each month.
36:01- Terry:
Yeah. all of the single components that I think there sometimes is a lack of understanding of the importance of all of those different components in an organization to actually deliver the outcomes. and this
36:14- Terry:
placing self-importance on any particular part of that can be so damaging. and again, I actually had a conversation yesterday with a, with a gentleman that coaches CEOs and business leaders in particularly around, Helping them increase the performance of their teams into high performing teams.
36:34- Terry:
And one of the things that we spoke about and I mentioned is that I think as the older I get, I realize that, this concern that often we all have, where we worry about what other people think about us. the reality is, they’re not thinking about us at all. it’s us that’s doing all the thinking.
36:48- Terry:
And that sort of flows through. I think I’ve noticed more and more that we all live in our own bubbles to a certain extent. We all have the self-interest to start with before we have the outer interest. And it varies obviously, in degrees, but the reality is if we don’t look after ourselves, we can’t look after anyone else.
37:04- Terry:
And I think there’s a good natural mechanism to keep us focused on ourselves as a starting point.
37:09- Monique:
Yeah.
37:10- Terry:
Some places that’s, a little bit over. Burdened in individuals. And we’ve seen it even with our own team, with recruiting. we’ve had, some agents in the very early days that came through that, they lacked empathy, they lacked curiosity.
37:23- Terry:
They were following the steps of a, you know, they were almost the perfect, place. If you just had an absolute sales script that you wanted them to stick to, day in, day out, they’d be happy in that environment, just ticking the boxes and moving forward. So we had to build things into our recruitment process to identify, okay, where that, self-centeredness is a primary focus for the individuals.
37:43- Terry:
They’re not a good fit for what we do. We need a high level of empathy. We need a high level of curiosity. There’s gotta be, you know, an other centered awareness as opposed to that self-centered. And I think that’s what drives a lot of this, silo. Between organizations? It’s not, it’s sometimes it’s because of the way the structure’s been set up.
38:00- Terry:
Sometimes it’s because of, some KPI or the structure can magnify it or, exaggerate it. The KPIs can exaggerate it, but I think the reality, it’s actually driven by the individuals more than the structure itself. Because I’ve seen some structures and KPIs that you would think would be completely destructive in terms of a cohesive environment, and yet they’re operating so well together because it’s almost like the individuals are cohesive in spite of the structure that’s been set up and the KPIs that have been set.
38:30- Terry:
I think it’s very, very individual and that was interesting thing about the conversation with Mark yesterday is that very, very, it’s driven by ourselves and what’s in our own head, I think as, as much, or even more than structure and so forth.
38:41- Monique:
yeah. I do think that’s where it comes back to making sure we understand that company and the people own that, right? So when I talk about loop logic, it is. leadership has to drive this understanding of interconnective tissue. Something, another, what a phrase that I will say I’ve coined. but another hill I’ll die on. that people power, profits, both those you serve and those that help you serve them. And I felt
39:04- Terry:
that where a lot of companies falter is in not remembering the second part of that, the people who help you serve them, the companies that I see with the greatest success are not only very much positioned against their buyer, the people that they’re serving, to power their profits, but they’re also really smart about listening to their internal people, being able to elevate their internal people that are, helping with driving that core delivery to the buyer. and putting them as part of their focus. I’ve seen so many good people in different departments. I a couple times, some really key members and a couple clients I’ve had like in the sales team that just took a lot of initiative on their own. some got recognized and one company I saw two that were just. So good. They partnered with marketing very clean. They made sure they talked to the customer success like lead director and got feedback. And then when they had sales calls, they did the right sales techniques of making sure they researched the person before they got in. They were the highest converting the leader of that company. Did not pay enough attention. And despite what us as other leaders would highlight is Hey, these individuals need that support, that elevation. We should do something with this. didn’t listen. They lost those salespeople. Those salespeople went to other companies that did listen. and I think that’s a really key point that people didn’t understand when we’re talking about these, like making sure you’re positioning your pipeline, your people and your performance are all interconnected, that people aspect can’t get forgotten.
40:34- Monique:
We’re orienting around the buyer, but the people who make that happen are so critical and the insights that they gather, especially today when people. in current tech, especially when we think about B2B SaaS and tech companies, they’re not sitting in a company for longer than one to maybe three years.
40:50- Monique:
We have a lot of job hopping, which is not a bad thing. It does a lot of benefit for companies with talent, but it also does a lot of benefit for fit for the individual as they grow in their career. But because of that, if you’re not making the most out of taking advantage and creating systems that take their knowledge and their insights and operationalize it in your business, when they move, they take it with them.
41:14- Monique:
And the number of times I’ve seen companies that don’t have that operating system oriented around the buyer, where they get that information woven in, they’re almost always starting from scratch as they lose key people and key members.
41:25- Terry:
You mentioned PLG earlier, and I think it’s a good time to bring it up now, you know the B2C, B2B. The reality in all of it. It’s B two H, it’s B to hu be business to human. It’s business to person. And whether your product is something that is simple to use and low cost, that can be potentially a product led play.
41:44- Terry:
There are still people on the other side, for now anyway. I haven’t seen AI agents out there doing all the buying at this stage, and I think it’ll be a little while before we do. But, there’s still people involved in that loop. The reality is that
41:57- Terry:
if, whether they’re employees, the example you just gave in terms of recognition, or their customers and the example in terms of, customer success, staying close, making sure there’s alignment in the messaging they’re getting from marketing and then through sales, then into customer success, making sure onboarding processes.
42:15- Terry:
There’s always the, if somebody needs to speak to a person, then there’s a person available. there’s this people aspect of the business. I remember. Many, quite a few decades ago, sitting in the Sydney Entertainment center as a, it was Bob Ansett who, set up budget, rent, car. he was talking about his business and what had made the success in his business and he said, first and foremost, we’re in the people business.
42:41- Terry:
And I, that’s something that has just stuck with me forever. it was very aligned to my values to start with. Then. Hey, look, you know, here we are now running a people business, a staffing at gly Chat, staffing, agency. you know, the reality is I think that too many times people try, our organizations will try and take people out of the loop in a way to increase efficiencies or to make things more automated when I think the real value is in those human to human conversations.
43:08- Terry:
And, that’s the way to forge a real connection, product-led. growth or product led sales is great. but where is the, long term relationships? how do you forge a long term relationship? A bond when there’s no real person-to-person connection in the organization.
43:25- Terry:
They’re using a product, they’re using software. They don’t know anyone in the organization.
43:29- Monique:
Yeah.
43:29- Terry:
a competitor comes along tomorrow with something similar, that’s cheaper. They’re gone. Someone comes along at the same price that does a better job to solve something slightly different to what you do.
43:38- Terry:
They’re gone. it’s a interesting perspective, but I think that, person to person, component, you can see I’m, I’ll die on this hill, quite frankly. I think that, that’s the hill that I’ll die on is that I think, people, and just as employees need to be recognized, customers need to be recognized as.
43:52- Monique:
Yeah. I think that’s such a good point too because, and again, we’re coming back to this comment of, it depends on what your product’s doing. It depends on how it operationalizes, it depends on what kind of value it’s serving. But if you are doing a smart job of putting the value of the buyer at the forefront of everything, and it drives everything, and your customers see that value, that paired with. Ease of getting in touch with someone, but also internal systems that can recognize power users, power brands, key accounts that allow you to expand on cost for net new customers is always gonna be higher than being able to maintain and grow existing customer bases. let’s talk about when it, because I worked with a lot of great, product-led companies, hybrid companies. this isn’t to say that product-led model doesn’t work. It works really well with a lot of people.
44:40- Terry:
got a really great methodology to the way that they operationalize with users very fast, get them into paid formats and get them scaled out.
44:48- Terry:
Yep.
44:48- Monique:
a very great methodology for recognizing brands and how do they get into key accounts and expand there. That is something that you have to work into your backend operations.
44:56- Terry:
Yes.
44:56- Monique:
to knowing your buyer, what they need, what they value, and how they work. Knowing your accounts that those buyers work for, and being able to have backend systems that can flag internally for your operations to see, hey, we just had this big conglomerate company sign up as a test user for a solution.
45:16- Monique:
and this is a director level person is gonna be a possible power user. How do we, make sure we recognize and take action in the right way to support the value they’re getting and create stickiness and then hopefully create some expansion. This whole buyer centricity comes in at every stage here.
45:33- Monique:
it’s so critical across all of that. And, Anyway, that was my slight little rant there. But I think it’s so important to make sure you don’t think that this buyer centricity is just a, like a, this idea that we have, that it’s the best way to operate. It truly is the greatest success rate to revenue.
45:49- Monique:
And I keep hounding on this concept of not just sustainable revenue, but like sustainably compounding revenue is something that I like to focus on with companies is how do we create backend systems and pull certain levers, what I like to call the pivotal points of growth. it’s something that I actually have as a framework. There are like six key levers or spaces in which you operationalize inside of this buyer led operating system in order to make sure that you are making the most out of the value you’re getting to them, and that you’re making sure your operations are fueling that or supporting that and are also being adapted and. Updated every single time you need to in order to keep that going, to keep that kind of perpetual men momentum that you’re getting and not find yourself backtracking at any point and losing that revenue, but rather constantly compounding that growth potential as you go forward.
46:40- Terry:
Absolutely, absolutely. You know, it’s really interesting. I hear a lot of leaders talk about, you know, we are a buyer centric organization. I can generally call bullshit within 90 seconds, one quick visit to their website. You can generally see whether they’re buyer really are buyer centric or not.
46:58- Terry:
you gave the example just there before of, the salespeople not being recognized in an organization, but you work across a lot of industries. Where do you see companies, typically fall short in connecting? where do companies typically fall short in connecting pipeline positioning and perform?
47:19- Terry:
there’s a couple places there. there’s one thing that, I build this with every client I work with, and this is not, I’m a big believer of there’s no such thing as gatekeeping. If you’re gatekeeping as a marketer or a leader in the world, then you’re doing no service to the greater good. I build something, it’s called a like buyer operational map, and I have three core components to it. The top is what the buyer goes through. So you have to fully uproot yourself from you being inside the company and put yourself in the shoes of that buyer. This is the hardest part for every company.
47:50- Monique:
This is often the biggest failing point is once you’re in a company, it’s so hard to have some objective view from outside, and this is why you end up hiring experts externally because they can bring that to you, but you have to get a full perspective and understanding of what do they go through. That thing that you can’t own necessarily, but at least mapping what you can do, hopefully internally, without that external expertise right now is understand at the point in which they might.
48:18- Monique:
Stumble upon you, what is their experience against you from their perspective? So do they land on your website? Do they experience certain information? Do they have a certain flow that they go through or their conversion points? what does that look like? And you understand that from their perspective.
48:36- Monique:
The second layer down is understanding that from your internal operations, what are the different systems and yes, no flows that happen. What’s the team involved? So you have say, a kind of social media manager who’s at a touch point that gets someone who came in through a chat on a social channel. And how do you get them into the site where they’re now at the site with the conversion point, and how are they going from that conversion point into your CRM? We’ve been able to tag that they’re this type of company, so they go straight to an account manager as opposed to A BDR, something like that. This understanding of your backend operational flow. Do you have that? Is that mapped out? If
49:17- Terry:
don’t, as a business, understand that, and I don’t just mean like the marketing branch and I don’t just mean the sales branch. You should have this from the point of any point of initial contact engagement, understanding that I now have a person. There’s a name or a contact point that I now can identify an anonymous user into a known person. And how have, what is our entire process flow? Every single touch point, every single yes no if then factor from marketing through sales, from sales conversion into customer onboarding, from customer onboarding to customer lifetime. And what does that look like if you don’t have that mapped out? you’re giving yourself a significant disadvantage to where you could scale and grow. It is the best place to understand where you have gaps. We have greatest opportunity. Where should you be tracking certain things? And then the third layer to that, I always like to map out, this is me going from originally being a very creative marketer and brander at first to growing up in the dawn of marketing operations is know what tech is serving where. So
50:22- Terry:
single one of those you have, what is the buyer experiencing? What is your backend operations that’s making that happen? What’s the technology that is activated at that moment? Is there a source of truth of ownership of data at a certain point? Is there a secondary like software that’s coming into activate, like chat tools and things like that?
50:42- Monique:
So this mapping is something that like is one of the first things I do with any company that I’m working with that doesn’t have it because it is the fastest way to identify, are your team siloed? Are they working together? Are you actually putting the buyer experience through down into your operations first?
51:00- Monique:
And that’s the fastest way for you to identify what does, do you need to fix? Versus what are opportunities to enhance? And you can create some really great ways to find like cost reductions. Are you wasting money somewhere in a tech tool that’s never even activated? Are you losing data points? Do you have regular feedback loops from certain systems that are operating at different points? that’s what would be my like, huge component that would help operationalize like this, what we’re talking about, buyer
51:29- Terry:
centric, you know, operating systems.
51:31- Terry:
are there friction points is the other big one. You know, we’ve done over 5,000. it was 5,006 was the number, but it’s quite a few more than that now. Inbound funnel reviews. we’ll go through and from, the customer’s first touch perspective right through until we get all the way through to getting a demo, but at the very least, understanding what that inbound funnel looks like and the amount of friction.
51:58- Terry:
And in my mind, and I should define that, friction is not just steps or number of fields in a form. It’s also the amount of time or the amount of changing channels that a customer needs to do from getting from that first question that they’ve got in their mind through to actually having a conversation with a salesperson.
52:18- Terry:
And you would be shocked, you would be absolutely shocked at organizations that you would look at, the brands are well known, and you would think these guys have got it and should have it nailed the hoops that they make customers jump through. I understand the logic behind it. and it’s perpetuated by the software providers in most cases, where they’ll say, gatekeep, you’ll get a, you’ll get the email address.
52:41- Terry:
It’s a lead. the reality is that just, it’s not true. it’s an absolute, I don’t wanna call it a lie. I don’t, I understand where it’s come from, but the world has changed so much. The buyer’s process has changed so much now. Their inherent trust levels have changed so much. Now, if you ask somebody for an email address, then you’re likely pushing that potentially highly qualified buyer away.
53:05- Terry:
And so your point about, gatekeeping, I think there’s an argument to gate keep on some items. For instance, if you’re an organization and you have accents to, you know, the Gartner Quadrant reports or something along those lines, it’s relevant for your industry. It’s not necessarily something you’ve produced.
53:21- Terry:
if people are interested in that, I guess that’s for me. Yeah, I would, you could potentially get an email address to send the Gartner report to, that’s showing that somebody’s interested to a certain extent, but with your own content, make it so valuable that, they want to come back.
53:34- Terry:
if it’s not so good that they want to come back and you have to put an email address to try and capture them, why are you putting that piece of content out? That’s question.
53:42- Monique:
thing that died off pretty fast in companies in the last like couple years is the, yeah, doing gated content and understanding if you’re not adding some very unique value, with that form field to get them as a lead, then they’re probably not filling it out. This is just tripled in concept when it comes to now that a lot of them will turn to AI for their answers.
54:06- Monique:
So if you are providing some like how to do X, y, Z, please enter your email so we can give you like what’s technically a blog article or something like that, that would answer those questions. They’re just gonna go to a free channel. So
54:20- Terry:
Yep.
54:21- Monique:
been another thing when it comes to like growth hacking and a few other things that have died off on the vine is definitely.
54:26- Monique:
assets and gating content has to have extreme value to make them see a reason to give you that email. And so there’s a lot of thoughtfulness that goes into what qualifies there. but there’s also, to your example, I just was chatting with the company that like they had a signup process for new customers.
54:48- Monique:
they were chatting with me and they were wondering why they were having such a low, lead conversion. And, so we started going through the process and we come to find out is w they had leads coming in, which great, straight into the product, immediately able to test it out. However, the process to get from, I start. I get to actually do something was like a 25 step process. So as opposed to getting in, I fill out my email and this, and I activate my account with a password. Then they had to go in and verify their email. So then they had to go to their email and they had to go verify it. And then after that they had to verify their phone number as a second form of authentication.
55:27- Monique:
and this is actually just to even get in to see how the backend of the system works. And so I pull up a competitor that has a significantly faster path to get there. Now mind you, they gate functionality after you get to experience a certain level of the product on the backend. But that’s when they’ve gotten to see, okay, I can see what I can get outta here.
55:47- Monique:
I can see the value. Now I have to actually either pay or talk to someone and then I can convert further into the product. But if you’re giving them a 25 step process before they can even finish signing up, that’s why we have no, no pipeline coming in, isn’t it?
00:56:02- Terry:
it looked absolutely true and I think that, gating wants, they’ve almost like that free trial where they’ve seen it, they’ve accessed it, you know, they understand or experienced the value. Then of course, mean, again, we are all in business to make money, and so, you know, that’s the commercial reality of their, flow.
56:19- Terry:
we have been so focused on making sure that onboarding is easy for our clients, that it’s literally we do all of the work. The clients need to do a little bit of checking that, we do all of the work. we’ve actually started, a new process now for our pilots where it’s almost like a light where literally you don’t have to lift a finger, you put a snippet of code on your website, and we’ll be live in 48 hours.
56:47- Terry:
With no touch whatsoever. we use your existing CTAs on the website. It’s a way for organizations, smaller organizations to get a sense in terms of a bit of a free trial. but it’s also a way for larger organizations to get a pilot and get a sense of the, some of the potential. that’s not how you unleash the full potential of what we do, but it certainly does give you some sense of what the potential in fact, what it does.
57:13- Terry:
Whilst it’s showing you the potential, it’s giving you much more insight into what you’re actually missing out on in terms of the conversions on your website. So
57:20- Monique:
well
57:20- Terry:
it’s been.
57:21- Monique:
You are good example of being buyer-centric, right? You understand where you could create ease for people to use you and then, immediate value. So that is just like such a key component here. If you can get your, make it easy for them to immediately get to value or see value and experience it, that’s such an easy way to get to stickiness and conversion.
57:43- Terry:
yeah, yeah. It is. It is. And so we haven’t really launched it properly. I’ve done little bit of a soft launch and, that was reasonably successful. And quite frankly, we’ve got a couple of projects that have distracted me and I’m sitting here kicking myself now thinking we need to actually launch that properly.
57:56- Terry:
So that’ll be this week’s job, this week’s job. Let’s have a chat, about the process of framework to execution. tactical. Let’s talk about tactics. What are the six pivotal points of growth and why are these the levers that you always come back to?
58:16- Monique:
Yeah. this is something again, easily found. I have a page just dedicated. You can just go to pivotal points of growth.com and find it. I break down six key areas. One is buyer knowledge and connectivity. Two is positioning and brand identityThree is a customer centric, pipeline design. So I even build in the words customer centric in there again. four is your dynamic, like market activation efforts and campaigns. five your cross functional data and operations. And then six is your customer retention and expansion. And I know that was a lot, but basically we’re looking at buyer, your brand, your pipeline, your activation and market, your data and ops, and then your customers, existing customers. I referenced this as a actual like circle because they’re all connected. They all influence each other. Honestly. If anything, it would be a web because there is interconnectivity between all of them. what I talk about here is that these are foundational areas of understanding for your business that you then operationalize off of.
59:20- Monique:
So buyer knowledge, the number of times I’ve worked with a company and I’ve come in and I’ve asked the CEO what it is that, you know, they’re who the buyer is, and then what it is they do. So we’re talking about buyer and brand. and then I go to maybe a sales rep and I ask them the same question and these are not the same answers that I’m hearing. that tells you that there’s a gap in their foundations as a business understanding
59:42- Terry:
Hmm.
59:43- Monique:
who their buyer is and what it is they do for them. So each of these, when I talk about them, I talk about them as foundational because every single department, especially those that are talking to your customers, but even your product teams and anyone else internally, they need to have these foundations understood universally.
01:00:00- Monique:
So this is where we come back to that everyone shouldn’t be siloed, they’re interconnected. is your buyer? Understanding who your ICP is, understanding who your personas are, understanding who your like greatest stickiness is versus maybe what’s your greatest, dollar value per customer understanding where you have your greatest growth potential. And then individual kind of department has their ways in which they operationalize off of that, right? your marketing team is gonna have a certain way they work with it. There’s gonna be a different way in which your customer team works with it and your product teams and your sales teams, you know, your buyer positioning, or sorry, your brand positioning and your brand, identity. This is something where I go back to that. we talk about the death of the sea of sameness. you need to have a unique value proposition and unique selling points.
01:00:46- Terry:
Hmm.
01:00:47- Monique:
A good example is you look at like CRMs. There are a lot of smaller brand CRMs out there, or marketing automation platforms or combinations.
01:00:55- Monique:
no one. Successful in that space that’s smaller is going out there just positioning against Salesforce, right? As a CRM company. If they just went out to try to gain sales, Salesforce’s marketing, like market share, good luck. You don’t have that money. However, if you are a CRM or CRM marketing automation combination platform, specialized in say real estate and realtor operations and you know that buyer, so we go back to number one, which is knowing your buyer. And then, you know, your unique value, your entire CRM system has templates and designs explicitly for real estate agents in real estate market. then you have a significant, unique selling point. And actually you’ll win that over Salesforce because there’s a bunch of things in Salesforce that they don’t need to be able to do, nor do they wanna pay the price point for. So you know your buyer better, you’re positioned against them better, you’re priced against them better. So your pricing team and your product teams are operationalizing off of that positioning, understanding, then you actually build your pipeline on understanding these key components. And so you can kind of see how each of these adds too, right?
01:02:03- Monique:
You don’t go to market without having a clear understanding of the pipeline operations that are gonna. Bring them in, nor your positioning, nor your buyer. And so it kind of keeps going through that cycle. But I emphasize it being a circle because when you talk about your customers and your customer, like efforts for retention and key account expansion, that goes right back into understanding your buyer.
01:02:24- Monique:
Because that’s where we go back to the conversation earlier. When you understand things, you know, post-purchase, and you’re like, okay, this is one of our key accounts. They’ve been with us for three years. What is it that brought them in? What has changed in our product and how they use it today in these last three years?
01:02:41- Monique:
And is there anything to operationalize against that? Back into how we understand our buyers, how can we get more of these power users in these key accounts? And then how do we position against it? And then how do we actually make sure our pipeline supports them? And then how do we activate and market?
01:02:56- Monique:
And then how do we track and have our operations against it? So
01:02:59- Terry:
Yeah.
01:03:00- Monique:
These are the key points that there’s foundational elements to it. And then there’s how you actually then. Activate and market per department against it.
01:03:06- Terry:
So if, you layered these six points on some on top of something like buyer led conversions, how does that shift the company’s GTM motion?
01:03:16- Monique:
it depends. so it’ll definitely depend on who their market is and what kind of product and solution they have. But again, you know, we came to those examples earlier of when you understand your backend operations is serving the buyer need and understanding their core need and that they own a lot of the key channels before they get to you. this is where these points come in, right? So. Knowing your buyer. Well, let’s go back to this real estate CRM niche, right? if you’re brand new and you’re, say, still in your kind of early customer acquisition, you might be finding yourself going to local events for real estate agents and real, you know, maybe, and again, I’m saying this as someone who.
01:03:55- Monique:
Probably shouldn’t be saying this without actually being in real estate, but maybe you’re going to the real estate, local. There’s organizations and associations that are local, and maybe you talk to brokerage firms and you talk to them about your CRM system. This is where we get back to and our whole conversation is so cyclical.
01:04:11- Monique:
This gets back to where we talked about having real conversations with your potential customers to better understand them and get in front of them. You get that feedback, you get in and you get an early case study. So say you got in with a mid-size brokerage in your local, you know, city and they start using your CRM and they can report back to you in three months on some data metrics on how well they used and how it’s been helping them better than this legacy one they used to be on.
01:04:37- Monique:
You immediately
01:04:37- Terry:
Yep.
01:04:38- Monique:
have a fast case study. You activate that case study in with your marketing team and your sales team so that you can garner more of those. And then you start to expand to more dynamic go-to-market efforts. So you’re not just showing up at associations, but you’re starting to do some digital efforts.
01:04:52- Monique:
Maybe you’re pumping out some new content and maybe you are at the point that you can start to afford some advertising channels where you now know they exist because you have customers who’ve told you, this is where we’re at. So. All of that’s a really good way to show how, you know, even if we are at that early stage, then you just think about, say you’re a bigger company, you’re mid-market, you’re, you know, a CRM for that kind of niche and, and you’re in the like 20 million a RR now there’s just a different way you operationalize that.
01:05:19- Monique:
You probably have more dynamic systems making a lot of that automated. So maybe you do have a hybrid model where smaller agents come in on a product led model, but you have a process for full brokerages to come through on a sales led or kind of hybrid format.
01:05:37- Terry:
Mm-hmm.
01:05:37- Monique:
Now operationalized the backend of your systems to recognize that when the data comes in and you have team members that, you know, in the sales department that gets flagged when you have a full brokerage coming in and, and then you bring in that human element where they start to interact more and that creates that stickiness.
01:05:53- Monique:
So. Being able to understand these six points. Being able to understand how you operate against the buyer, no matter whether you are at first customer or you’re at like mid stage.
01:06:04- Terry:
Scale. Mm,
01:06:05- Monique:
It is still an essential component.
01:06:07- Terry:
Absolutely. I get it. Look, thanks for explaining that because I, my next question was gonna be about what’s the difference between, you know, it smaller businesses compared to those, you know, larger enterprises at scales. They’ve explained it very well. I mean, I want to change or shift our conversation a little bit.
01:06:23- Terry:
We spoke earlier about, you know, leadership not recognizing good performance. but I think. Yeah. Personally, I think there’s a mentorship vacuum, you know, in the go to mark leadership right now. what do you think today’s emerging leaders are missing?
01:06:37- Monique:
Well, I think, you know, we, I mentioned this comment earlier, if we’re seeing a lot of role shift
01:06:43- Terry:
I,
01:06:44- Monique:
The biggest component you realize is that your mentors in the past, when I look back to my mother who spent 30 plus years in the same company, your mentors of the past were typically your boss some other leader in the same company.
01:06:58- Monique:
And at the time, that was acceptable because you’re trying to grow in that company. But now when you’re looking at trying to grow. A little bit more on a personal individual level. your mentor in the company may not always have just your individual best interests in mind. Your, their mentorship or their coaching for you and your career is gonna be aligned to your role and your performance in it.
01:07:21- Terry:
hmm.
01:07:22- Monique:
again, not necessarily a bad thing. ’cause you’ll always have great bosses who will help you do better at your job. But there’s challenges in things like. Recognizing when it’s time for you to move jobs and what does that look like? There are other elements like understanding, you know, when you’re new in your career, younger in your career, in early management, there’s a lot of things that you’re not able to see, especially if you’re at like a smaller startup.
01:07:47- Monique:
So the number of times I’ve seen, you know, SaaS companies that are only in the like. Five to maybe 20 million a r and their marketing teams aren’t that big. So they promote a content marketer into a marketing manager role, and they have an abundance of new issues, which is, I’m no longer a doer or practitioner of small things, but I am now a manager of bigger projects and possibly people.
01:08:12- Monique:
And I am not trained or equipped for that. But I’m also now having to move from being a content expert to being a more holistic marketer or a go-to market expert. And these are challenges that, like, if there’s no one there to really assist you with on that, who’s been there, done that, it can be a lot to take on.
01:08:30- Monique:
And some individuals are learning this from, you know, just as they go through the motions and it’s very reactionary. and it can actually, hurt them and their. feelings about their job. Like I can’t express how many times I’ve definitely felt that burden and you just don’t wanna go to work the next day. when you lack that kind of leadership or that kind of guidance.
01:08:51- Terry:
you know, I think that is, probably. It’s an area that I’ve had a lot of interest in for a long time now. particularly behavioral science, getting the most outta people support and mentoring. the reality is that moving from a practitioner we’re in, you know, we’re gonna get into, you know, defining time, defining what it means is, you know, managing your own time and tasks to moving into a management role, leadership role, where it’s really getting things done through others, a completely different skillset, a completely different skillset.
01:09:25- Terry:
And you, there’s this statistic that we’ll talk about, you know, most new businesses won’t even make it through. And I’m not talking about B2B Tech in particular, but, I’m actually talking more about bricks and mortar businesses or service businesses, whether it’s hvac, electrician, plumbers, all those types of businesses.
01:09:40- Terry:
Most new businesses that, set up, like I think that the numbers, 95% don’t make it through the first year. And I believe, and I’ve seen it, that it’s because moving from a practitioner, Hey, I am an electrician, I’ve got wages, I get the paycheck coming in each week or each fortnight, you know, I’ve gotta go to work, I’ve gotta do, you know, wire up a house, wire up this big part of this construction.
01:10:05- Terry:
compared to, and I’m not saying I’m not downplaying that at all. There’s a whole level of complexity around understanding a trade and having that skillset. But when you move into starting an organization and all of a sudden you have to start worrying about marketing, where are you gonna get new customers from?
01:10:22- Terry:
You have to start worrying about hr. I’ve got employees now. Somebody didn’t turn up, somebody hasn’t got a good attitude. How do I deal with this? You know, how do I get the best outta my people? All of a sudden, I’ve gotta worry about the bank ringing me because the overdrafts extended too far. I’ve gotta pay the bills now, I’ve gotta manage cash flow.
01:10:39- Terry:
I’ve gotta worry about the numbers and the profitability each month, though. I need to be an accountant. What is what, how do I know whether I’m actually making money or not? and all of a sudden I’ve gotta price these jobs. So I’ve gotta be a pricing expert as well, would actually understand all of the components to do a proper quote to make sure I’m making money and not going out backwards.
01:10:54- Terry:
And so, you know, when you talk about it like that, the complexity that’s involved in running a business, I have so much respect for business owners. I have so much empathy for business owners. They wear so many hats. their job is, probably one of the most difficult jobs, that I can think of, I mean, would be one of the hardest jobs that anyone could do ever.
01:11:14- Terry:
The second hardest job is a leadership role in the larger organization because they’re going through that same component. They don’t have as much complexity in their role. But then taking the biggest step, which is going from doing the work to getting others to do the work. And that is, you know, where there’s not good.
01:11:31- Terry:
Whether it’s internally in the business, training, mentorship, in terms of how to help people make that transition. or even chatting with a person the other day who was in Salesforce and was given a stipend to put towards their development as they’d moved from, you know, junior sales role into a senior sale.
01:11:48- Terry:
Even just changing into a senior sales role. and found that, you know, they were given a stipend rather than specific training. they didn’t know where to spend the money. You know, where are they going to make sure that they’re gonna get the bang for the buck in the right training that they need. So, you know, I think, you know, to your point about not being there, then, you know, that’s learning the hard way when there’s no mentorship.
01:12:07- Terry:
what’s the cost of learning the hard way, especially when GTM complexity keeps rising.
01:12:13- Monique:
Yeah, there’s tangible and intangible costs to that, right? So, I think one thing that we don’t talk about enough is making the transition from that, that maybe more niche space of operations to a bigger go to market leader role is not only are you now having to navigate from, this one practice and the metrics that matter there and how it works in your component of the business. But now you’re asking people who might have been like content marketers or marketing operations individuals or a, you know, a BDR or a salesperson. Now I have to understand bigger picture business and understand the minutia of how the interconnected efforts of marketing, sales, and customer success. And this is why I like emphasize the go-to-market leader needs to be able to put themselves in all their shoes.
01:12:58- Monique:
And there’s an entire, like, not to call it by such a negative term, but like corporate politics or even just like the, relationship management. how do you get to know your, if you’re a new marketing lead and you’re a manager, senior manager, trying to make your way to be a VP or a possible CMO, how do you a learn The business metrics that are different, like, don’t you dare go to a meeting with the CEO and start talking about your email, click-through rates. this could put you in a bad light. Like how do you transition to understanding marketing’s impact to revenue and reporting it accurately? Not only how do you then, you know, manage your team underneath it, but then are you having relationship building efforts with your sales leader so that you guys are coming to conversations at the big table with you guys in the same pocket?
01:13:47- Terry:
Hmm.
01:13:47- Monique:
the be best way to break down silos is gonna be having your leaders across departments. Support that and understand that and empower it within up to leadership, their own leadership, the owners of the company and down into their teams. there’s the individual learning lesson, but yeah, giving things like stipends, it’s great, but yeah, you don’t know what to do with it and it’s such a waste of possible time. mental energy when you have to make those mistakes yourself or go through that process yourself. And there’s just so many, like I found in my career. The thing that I enjoy a lot now is that mentorship aspect. I still
01:14:25- Terry:
Yeah.
01:14:25- Monique:
that I used to work with at other companies that I talk to periodically and jump on calls. I had a one that I would consider a friend now who reached out and said, Hey, I’m struggling with something at my company. I’d love to just soundboard with you. And it’s just an opportunity to have. Someone who’s in your court who has no stakes in the game, no bias towards the interest of the company, but just the interest to you to help you navigate a situation that maybe they’ve already been through before, whether they’ve experienced it or know people have experienced it, to help you be quicker to learn things, to grow faster, grow smarter. that’s how it is in everything. If you can learn from someone else’s mistakes or successes and be able to activate on it faster, it just makes it easier for you, but also makes it more rewarding for you. I hate to see young professionals, have disdain for their jobs simply because they lack guidance or support for them to navigate it in a confident manner.
01:15:24- Terry:
you and I are very aligned as far as that is concerned. The whole mentoring piece. likewise, I’m still, have, yeah, relationships that have turned into friendships now where they’ve been, not so in the path. There’s a flip side to that though, isn’t there? Not doing that, not having that available.
01:15:38- Terry:
one of the, if you think about the cost of learning the hard way, it’s easy to put your finger on and say, okay, well the cost of learning the hard way is you’re gonna make mistakes, which means you’re not gonna get the returns that you should be getting, and you’re gonna waste money.
01:15:51- Terry:
that’s one side of it. But there’s other aspects to it as well. I think in that individual’s development can be delayed or in fact damaged to such an extent that they’ll fail in the role and the cost of replacing someone in a role is, far more than training them properly and setting them up for success.
01:16:09- Monique:
Yeah.
01:16:09- Terry:
and I think the other component. To that, or the other cost component to that is that within their own team, when they don’t have faith in the leader and the leader’s struggling, or the leader’s doing the wrong thing and not having their behavior adjusted, then that can create exits from within the team of people not wanting to be in that environment.
01:16:29- Terry:
And so they’ll leave. So, you know, the real cost of learning the hard way, there’s a cost for the individual, but there’s a much, much larger cost for the organization compared to the investment required to actually set them up for success.
01:16:42- Monique:
Yep. Yeah, I definitely agree with that. when you’re in these smaller companies, and I say smaller, but I mean, you think about how lean some teams operate for high revenue companies in tech and in SaaS. it how small some of those teams can be can be shocking to those from the outside world, but not shocking to us who work with them regularly, but you can have a very small marketing team where, yeah, you elevated someone, but maybe you had a, you know, your VP change out, VP of marketing to, to move out to another role somewhere else or something like that.
01:17:13- Monique:
And you are elevating a director. do they have the resources and tools to do that? And maybe you do something like, as genuinely as possible, give them the stipend and try to get them, but if they don’t have direction on where to go and you don’t have someone internally who can help hide, you know, send them in the right direction of where to spend that money to actually wisely generate this new knowledge they need to have. It can be difficult. And you’re right. it creates. Possible like slowdowns in the business success. ’cause now you have to slow your in-market operations to compensate for a learning curve that you might have in a new elevated person. and it’s no fault to them and no fault to the business.
01:17:50- Monique:
It’s just a part of the process of having someone trying to grow in their position as you’re also trying to activate your business and market.
01:17:57- Terry:
but the reality is, even for smaller organizations, there are ways that you can set people up for success. A stipend is one thing, but I think, you know, that’s almost the easy way out or, the cheap way out. I think as leaders in organization, whether you’re at CEO or founder level, or whether perhaps you are A CMO that’s promoted a, junior marketer into a, a more seniorship role, responsibility sits very squarely on your shoulders to set that person up for success.
01:18:25- Terry:
Your responsibility is to take the first steps to understand, okay, and have something in place. look quite, transparently. This is almost a perfect segue into, you know, your mentorship cohort. you, who’s that for and what, problems are you trying to solve with that?
01:18:40- Monique:
Yeah, so, you know, we’ve been talking about this. This is something that I’ve been, I had in the back of my mind of something that I wanted to launch for years, and it’s finally kind of reached the point where I’m bringing it to fruition. My goal is to try to solve some of this gap. I’ve been through a lot in my career.
01:18:56- Monique:
Not to say I’ve been through everything, but I’ve been on the side of layoffs. I’ve survived them. I’ve been a part of them. I’ve been a part of making the decision in them. I’ve had to navigate, you know, being let go for other reasons. I’ve had to navigate. proactively choosing to lose, leave a company and go to another, and all in the path of my own career decisions.
01:19:17- Monique:
But, you know, I’ve also worked with and, helped guide a lot of individuals and companies that, whether I was in-house at that company or if I actually was consulting with them or working as their fractional CMO or advisor, and that gap of having someone who is authentically in their corner without the stakes in the game is something that I’ve wanted to solve for.
01:19:37- Monique:
So, I’m currently right now starting off with a kind of early founding group. It’s gonna be a little bit of a smaller group, but that definitely means I’ll have a little bit more one-on-one mentoring time with me, because I want them to help shape what this turns into bigger picture. But I’m, I’m looking probably more at right now, leaning into, marketing individuals who are probably in management into senior management who are trying to as. Best navigate their path to director and VP roles. Obviously the long-term goal might be to be a CMO, maybe it’s to start your own business. I’ve done that as well. but you know, this is who I’m looking for. I’m looking for those that are probably marketers in the B2B tech space tech to SaaS space that are, trying to navigate the senior managing role into becoming a director, becoming a vp. there might be some that are in early director roles that are now also trying to just get. Get comfortable there. That might apply here too. it’ll be a smaller group, but the goal is to kind of create a community space where we can kind of let them all share, what they’re going through and, what that experience is like for them to be able to ask questions.
01:20:43- Monique:
I will host some regular AMAs with them, and then I’d like to do some one-on-ones. Ideally, the long-term picture would be as this would expand into a broader group of professionals within the same kind of space. And I could start to bring in some of the people that I know and love that are experts in other areas.
01:21:01- Monique:
Like I have a great friend Wendy, who is an expert in executive HR and hiring, and she has a great perspective there. I have a few other friends and associates that are in operations, that are in sales, that are in customer success. those that deal with other types of challenges. You know, there’s,Things that we didn’t even talk about here, but like the dynamics, for example, that I can speak to personally of being a woman growing in a predominantly male space,
01:21:29- Terry:
Hmm.
01:21:29- Monique:
How do you grow in leadership and how do you navigate that? and I think that there’s a lot of great experts that I could bring in over time.
01:21:36- Monique:
But, so that’s what I’m starting off a smaller group. I’m looking to kind of launch in with them, in the beginning of December, hopefully giving some time over the holidays for some personal development and learning. And especially as we go into the new year, I’m sure a lot of people are gonna have some plans to orient.
01:21:52- Monique:
But, I think everyone should feel really good about their career and their, path in it and feel confident in it. And I wanna be a resource for that. so that’s what I’ll be, kicking off then.
01:22:01- Terry:
And so for clarity, this is much more about the individual and their career as opposed to, you know, how do I improve the conversion rate on my landing page?
01:22:12- Monique:
Yeah, somewhat, right? So part of this is giving them that mentoring for them as they grow in the, from early management into director into vp. Part of it is to help, and that’s why I’m orient around marketers, is I want them to help. out how to get out of these siloed spaces that I know very well and become a go-to-market leader.
01:22:33- Monique:
So we
01:22:33- Terry:
Mm-hmm.
01:22:34- Monique:
over things and talk about how do we think like a go-to-market leader, how do I bridge these gaps that could be existing in these silos? How do I operationalize on these six pivotal points of growth in my team? I would love to share frameworks and tools and resources that I have, that can help them be more successful faster at doing those things in their companies. so yes, it’s kind of a core, a mixed component, a little bit of the learning lessons to shift from, you know, niche marketer to a go-to-market leader, as well as how to grow as an individual in that effort as well.
01:23:04- Terry:
That’s wonderful.
01:23:06- Monique:
How about something along the lines of,you know, what’s the best way for marketers that have been promoted into management or leadership role? Where the organization is not necessarily providing development or mentoring-type opportunities. You know, what can they do?
01:23:21- Terry:
Something along those lines.
01:23:23- Monique:
Yeah, I think that could work. ’cause then I could emphasize into, find those who’ve been there, done that, and
01:23:28- Terry:
Yeah. Okay.
01:23:28- Monique:
into, this is why I’m starting this.
01:23:30- Terry:
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. so for marketers that have been promoted into management or leadership roles in an organization that hasn’t really set them up for success or doesn’t have the internal resources to be able to set them on the path of mentorship or development, what should they do?
01:23:46- Monique:
the best piece of advice I can give there is to find those who have possibly been there, done that. that is something that I’ve tried to do in my past. This is things I emphasize to anyone that I work with and collaborate with. Find someone who has experienced that, who has made that transition.
01:24:02- Monique:
The people that we say are like three steps ahead of you or more, that are willing to give that time. That’s part of the hard part though, right? Trying to find someone who’s a VP or CMO who has time to give you, to mentor you that’s not already actively mentoring their existing employees is a little difficult. So that’s why I am starting this, you know, community cohort effort that I’m doing is I find passion, enjoying being able to be that person who’s in their corner that has no stakes in the game, that is looking to support them and honestly disseminate some of the good and the bad.
01:24:39- Monique:
And, in the history of how I’ve gotten to where I am and those lessons learned. But I do this regularly with the companies that I work with. It. A great opportunity to do this with individuals, especially as today. We own a lot of our own career journey now, just like we talked about, the buyer leads a lot of their journey now when it comes to discovering products.
01:24:59- Monique:
We are leading a lot of our career journey as we see a lot more short term employment within companies and a disconnect there. So, that’s where I’d like to come in and help.
01:25:09- Terry:
and the real value of an individual when they’re looking at being recruited by an organization is that skillset, that level of development that they’ve had and how well that they can present and what value they can bring to an organization. That development really sits much more on their own shoulders now than, you know, the longer term employees that had organizations that had a program in place that might last for three or four years.
01:25:32- Monique:
That’s just really not happening so much these days because there is so much movement. employers don’t wanna invest. Because they feel they’re not getting a return. They’ll rather find people that already have that. So, very good. Excellent, excellent initiative. Yeah. Wonderful.
01:25:45- Terry:
So, in sort of wrapping things up for go to market leaders listening, who know they need to move towards a more buyer led thinking.
01:25:55- Terry:
Where should they start?
01:25:57- Monique:
Start at making sure they know their buyer. I think it comes back to starting with the insights, the data points, and even doing some of the qualitative work to find that information about your buyer. Are you adding value? What is it, the value they care about and are you serving to it? And how So I think that is a key component. To making sure they’re at the forefront. Do you truly understand ’em? Do you have that recognized in the team? Something that I love to do with people is try to create data points that understand the buyer. So can we create a dropdown list that breaks down key pain points of our ideal buyer, and are we actually tracking against that as we do operations within the team?
01:26:38- Monique:
So I think that’s the top one. Start at making sure you have the right understanding of who your ICP is, who’s your key personas in there? These aren’t just little documents that you keep in a Google Drive or in a Microsoft, you know, space. just for people to look at periodically. You actually do operationalize on your ICP documents and your persona documents.
01:27:00- Monique:
And then I think from there you can make those kind of next steps on how do I position to it
01:27:04- Terry:
so tactically, so something that the audience could actually walk away and start this afternoon tactically, what would be the first real step to take in terms of getting to understand the buyers better?
01:27:17- Monique:
If you have it and you’re big enough in the, as a company, I would look at your existing customer insights.
01:27:23- Terry:
Mm-hmm.
01:27:23- Monique:
think that is gonna be one of your, if you have your ICP and your ideal buyer is who you have as customers, I would go to your power users or your key customers, depending on whether you’re a product or software.
01:27:35- Monique:
And I’d look at your insights on them. I would ask questions, I would make sure and start with internal questions. Talk to your customer success managers and make sure that you’ve talked to them and not just randomly reached out as a marketer to a key account. but I think start with the data, you know?
01:27:51- Monique:
and that’s been proven. You have a customer that’s been sticky and they love your product. They’re a power user, they’re an advocate. Why? Can you answer that question why? And then from answering that question, why? What can I do to create more of them? And then you can bring that to the front of your funnel, the front of your pipeline.
01:28:09- Monique:
How do I take what I just learned from those ideals that love our product, work with it? Well, how can I get more of them at the front?
01:28:15- Terry:
And so conversely, even for all smaller organizations that might not necessarily have. that level of process in place, it’s still thinking about their current existing customers and what was potentially going back through the original sales calls and understanding what was their concerns and pain points then, and start to build that out.
01:28:35- Terry:
Then you would want to have the conversation with the customers so that you do actually understand what their perspective are.
01:28:40- Monique:
Yeah, definitely. That’s a good point. And I would emphasize don’t go to that conversation unprepared, so definitely do that research. Take a look at like, where did you have friction points before they converted? some of the best practices I’ve actually had is when we have the ability to, is I’ve talked to on behalf of a kind of almost anonymous third party.
01:29:01- Monique:
I’ve talked to both existing customers and, closed, lost. potential customers and I’ve had conversations with them, letting them know I’m looking for feedback on behalf of this client, and had a very genuine conversation with very prepared question points that I wanted to know based on what I saw in the falter of their sales process or their falter of their marketing into sales process.
01:29:22- Monique:
So I think that’s a really great point. And then even going smaller, if you’re even even smaller as a company and you don’t even have some of those data points, it goes back to know who your ideal person is, your ideal company and ideal buyer, and having a conversation with them and then understanding their objections.
01:29:40- Monique:
So if you don’t have that post-purchase data, you go into the sales process data. If you don’t have that, you go into your assumptions. But the goal is as you start to actually garner customers and data points, you should be able to inform those deeper.
01:29:52- Terry:
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So what’s one move you’ve seen that feels risky? Super risky, but has outsized upside when teams actually trust the buyer journey.
01:30:06- Monique:
I have seen some companies dramatically shift their full foundational like assets and messaging when we’ve gone through a practice of deep diving on their ideal customer. I’ll give a good example actually. I worked with a client where, they had a actual great, traction in the e-commerce market. and they are a service provider, that was doing a particular type of service, marketing service, in the e-commerce space. But they had started to garner some new traction in the health tech space. it was. Something that they saw potential in but did not have the resources to necessarily continue their, not really growing, just stagnant ownership of the e-commerce space, but wanted to start to see if they can grow more in that digital health space.
01:30:55- Monique:
And so I actually worked with them on doing some of that data insights. We did some research in market, we did some existing customer, actual interviews and I did some interviews with other CMOs who work in, health tech companies. So I used my own network for that. And we got to know what do they actually care about?
01:31:13- Monique:
And does this, seem like the greatest potential? And we got a lot of yeses. We saw a lot of growth potential in there. We saw a lot of key account potential too, where you get into the company and expand it out. so we did an entire effort together where I worked as their fractional CMO completely reshaped their ICP and their, their key personas against that, health tech focus. we redesigned the entire messaging and positioning and the whole website, against that. And then we actually started to do the activation in market. They were already good at doing some thought leadership efforts holistically in the service they provided, but now started to work with a key person in the team to make them into a micro influencer and a credibility source.
01:31:55- Monique:
Remember that authenticity in the core market. And then started shifting some of their thought leadership to not just be in that practice, but that practice for that space. And, we did see some great ex, results immediately. I think within the first quarter of the new launch of the website, they garnered one of their biggest accounts and when they talked to ’em on the sales call, they asked, how did you, like, why did you come to us?
01:32:18- Monique:
And they said, I went to your website and you spoke exactly to the things that we needed solved. And I can’t, like, that was such a, like, feel good moment for me as the marketer involved in it, because that means they understood the buyer, they spoke the words that they needed to see, they knew the value they added, and they were hitting the mark on their core shopping page, their core storefront of the website.
01:32:42- Monique:
And that garnered an organic lead in their ideal customer, and a huge elephant account. So, I think that’s a really good example for me that I think of that like. Some of these in the things you can’t necessarily measure right away, but you have to kind of trust the process of, we’re doubling down on, we know this is a good potential with the market.
01:33:00- Monique:
We’re gonna make sure we know them, we speak to them. And then it came to fruition as a huge revenue contributor. but that, those first, like what, six months leading up to that when we were in initial development and initial launching phases, is a lot of trust in that process to get there and it came to fruition.
01:33:17- Terry:
Well, and, the risk is that if it doesn’t work. Think, then it’s all been for n and the whole investment’s been wasted. But look, I think that’s where the preparation and you know, the one thing that we keep talking about here is know your customer, from both, of our perspectives.
01:33:29- Monique:
It’s about validating in that process, right? I would never have led them down that path to fully redo everything against that. If in that process we had checkpoints where we made sure this was a valid assumption, right? So there is a validation process to that shift. So even though we have a lot of trusts in the game to get there, there is steps that you take as a marketing leader and as the owner of the company did with me to make sure we are confident in the assumptions we’re making and we are using data to inform it from the market, even if we don’t have the data internally yet.
01:34:00- Monique:
So,
01:34:00- Terry:
So I almost feel like the next question I’m gonna ask you, which will be my last question, is if listeners remember one thing about buyer led conversions, buyer centricity, or the frameworks you’ve shared, what should it be?
01:34:11- Monique:
Okay. one thing out of all of that. God don’t disconnect. I think I go back to the people power profits notion again, like the people power profits, those that you serve and those that help you serve them. If that is like a keynote I can have people walk away with is don’t disconnect from the buyer value. so out of those two components, the people that you serve and the people that help you serve them, I would say the key thing to walk away with is buyer value is everything. If they don’t see value, if you’re not serving that value, your path to growth, success and revenue is gonna be faltered, right? that would be my biggest component.
01:34:53- Monique:
If you aren’t serving value, if you’re not still aligning to the value or if you disconnect, going back to the first thing we talked about, the very beginning. If you start to put the potential for a little bit of extra margin over the value that you’re serving to the customer, if it compromises the value, I don’t do a lot of guarantees, but I guarantee down the road you’ll see that negatively impact your market share and your revenue.
01:35:16- Terry:
So it’s almost the case of what you’re saying is make sure that the value for the buyer is at the central core of everything that you do.
01:35:30- Monique:
Yes.
01:35:30- Terry:
Buyer-centric.
01:35:31- Monique:
Right. That
01:35:33- Terry:
This has been a very circular conversation.
01:35:36- Monique:
it’s a core fundamental. We’re not talking about anything that’s new. The reason why a product exists, a service exists is to serve a buyer need or a buyer want. And that is the core. If that was honestly the, so you need to make sure you’re adding the value and doing that service. and that would be the key kind of point there.
01:35:53- Terry:
Absolutely, absolutely. Monique, it’s been a wonderful conversation.
01:35:57- Monique:
I think we had a good robust conversation
01:36:00- Terry:
good? I’ve enjoyed it immensely. we’ll have all the links, obviously, particularly to your mentorship cohort, but obviously how other people can get in touch with you at the bottom of the podcast here. I’ve enjoyed your second guest appearance on the chat and, thanks very much for joining us.
01:36:12- Monique:
Yeah. Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure.
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