Intent Data, Back to Basics with ABM, and B2B Non SaaS (with Christopher Rack)

The execution of how the buying journey happens is, is obviously more digital in most industries.

Right.

There's so much information available digitally now that the salesperson is required for less of it. So 75 to 80% of that process is now quote unquote marketing driven. And then the final home run happens in the 25% with sales. But the buyer journey is not necessarily what the buyer does, but what they think. And almost every buyer thinks the same like five or six things as they enter the journey.

Ex, you were just telling me something interesting. You, you said you just got back from a, from what some people would call a, a kickoff, but you actually called it a csq. Can you explain that?

Yeah. So I mean I, I generally lean in the direction of doing things different than how most do them. And I think the term kickoff has kind of gotten cliche over the years. So I mean sales kickoff, revenue kickoff, company kickoff, GTM kickoff and people just keep throwing different acronyms in front of kickoff and it's like, and I, I kind of like what are you kicking off? Like what, what do we need to do? We need to kick off. So I call our event the CSQ live event which is challenging the status quo. So each year I bring not just the revenue team but also other teams into a central is location, know in person to really, you know, challenge our, our stand, our status quo. Annually ask ourselves the questions are we, are we doing the right thing? Do we have the right plans in place? And, and you know some of it's the first couple days is, is you know, leadership and then I bring the rest of the team in the second couple of days and, and it's just kind of a good event. You know we're, we're a relatively new company, we just got finished with a merger so there's a lot of folks who haven't met each other and I think it was a great opportunity to jump.

Well, let's talk about your company then. Give, give some, give some background on. We'll dive into your history in a little bit. But tell me about the business that you operate today.

Ferrous IQ is an interesting player in the B2B marketing demand generation space. So our product is our signal data or what most would call intent data. We aggregate down funnel signals or signals of actual intent to buy purchase into a single score and then we sales solutions or services leveraging that data to B2B marketers. So you know, lead generation solutions like content syndication and direct mail high quality calling solutions. You know with our Philadelphia based and Belfast based Calling centers all the way down to, you know, ABM targeted display and live events. So we've been around for quite a bit. You know, ferosiq is our new brand name, you know, coming off a recent merger. So yeah, we're, that's what we do and, and we're really pumped to kind of.

So what, what is quite a bit. And how did you, how did you get into this, how did you get into this world of. How'd you get into this world of B2B marketing? You're, you know, this is. People that listen to this are your people. We're all, we all work in, we all work in B2B marketing. We've all gotten here somehow you get into this world.

So I, I've, I guess you would say I'm a guest in the world, right, Because I've, I've spent the better part of 17 years selling and engaging with customers who are B2B marketers. So I can speak to B2B marketing tactics and problems and pains and solutions only because I've heard so many of them over the 17 years that I've been doing it. So I started, I kind of fell into the space I used to work at A. I worked at at the time was like recruitment advertising back in the day when Career Builder and Monster were kind of all the rage and they were battling for market share. I worked in that space and I got fired from, from that job because I told my boss at 26 something you probably shouldn't tell your boss. And then I, I got it. I responded to an ad for a company that was recruiting its first US sales rep and they were doing training in the UK because it was a UK based company coming into the US and that's. I joined just because I wanted to go to the UK because I'd never been really out of the States before and you know, the first day of training was like, hey, here's what a white paper is and we sell engagement with those. And 17 years later I'm still talking to the same types of people and the same types of companies with generally the same types of problems.

You've been in the industry for a bit. What some things drive you nuts about how people talk about tent and B2B marketing and driving revenue and ABM today. It's not change or what do you see people, what do you see people get wrong or you know, fall, fall victim to? When you see people writing about particular topics on LinkedIn or certain thought leaders sharing different strategies. I know some of that stuff gets you fired up. So I want to tap into that a little bit and, and into the tactics a little bit for folks.

Oh man. I mean, I, there's a lot that gets me fired up from the quote unquote influencer space, if you will.

Right.

I mean the constant, just massive emergence of buzzwords, right. I mean, what, what, you know, what was ABM is now go to market, right? So I think everybody in the planet is now plopping GTM in front of.

What was just the whole thing. The whole. Now it's just the whole thing. Soon it's just going to be business.

Yeah, no, we'll come back.

That's the next wave. The next wave is going to come full. It's going to come full circle and we'll just call it marketing again.

My biggest pet peeve is those who speak to strategies as the problem or the solution.

Right.

I found that any, any strategy executed flawlessly can do damage in B2B marketing or sales.

Right.

And any, any strategy executed poorly can be terrible.

Right.

Like, so there's the constant barrage of, of cold calling is dead. This is dead. You should be social selling only create a podcast and everybody will come, right? Like all of this, right? But if you create a shitty podcast, it's not going to work, right? If you make, if you execute a crappy cold call, it's not going to work. Whereas if you do those things masterfully, they will work, right? So execution is really. That's why a lot of the GTM stuff frustrates me because in tough times, which most B2B revenue teams are in right now, everybody is crawling for a new strategy. I need to. Oh, we need to go from, you know, product led to sales led or near bound or far bound or. There's so many different, you know, buzzy analogies to the strategies that drive it. When most people don't think, hey, let's. Are we really. They don't think internally, Are we really executing on our current strategy? Well, and let's check that box before we start talking.

Yeah, I've been thinking about this a lot lately because I'm now operating a business and so I think a little bit, I think I'm like part marketer, part more, more thing about business. And I feel like I've seen this now at three different companies that I've been a part of. I feel like my career in marketing is future proof or foolproof, whatever or timeless, whatever you want to say. Because I understand, I feel, I feel like I understand the timeless principles and I realize that what matters more than any of those things that you said, like abm, demand gen, this tactic, this tactic, podcast, whatever is it's the positioning, it's the understanding. Like it's the company story, it's the narrative, it's how you can uniquely what, what is your differentiat. And I don't think enough people get on that. That's the 80. That's the 80 20. Like I, I believe that any tactic can work. Cold calling can work, a podcast can work, YouTube can work, direct mail can work. It's usually not the channel. The reason that the channel is not working is most often because of like the, the story and the offer.

Yeah, most. I mean one of my early mentors told me many, many years ago that the truly people who are truly great at what they do generally have the ability to say very complicated things in very simple ways. And I think that's especially in revenue teams with sales and marketing. Like just being able to summarize an insanely complicated platform or service or software offering in a way that in 12 seconds immediately resonates with someone is that's the secret sauce. And I think to your point, that's why you've been successful. I've done that quite well.

The other day I wrote something that years ago I was working with a company and they for the life of them couldn't come up with the differentiator. And that was why they weren't winning deals. They didn't have a clear, it wasn't clear how they were different. There was a very crowded market and they wanted to try all these other different marketing tactics. And I'm like, guys, none of this mattered. Like let's just. You need to stop and focus on this. But like so often the CEO, the founder couple of the other, you know, maybe the product leader or the even the marketing person like want to, they want to be like three different things and they're kind of like half good at one and okay at the other and they want to try to sell all. Be all of it. Where like I had this conversation with Dan on our team the other day. We just talking about like positioning. I was like some days I wish that I didn't start the B2B marketing community. I wish I just niched all the way down and I was like the AI community for B2B marketers in North America. In North America, right. Just as an example, like when you can be that specific with your positioning, you're going to have a much, much more effective time selling it. But been at companies where it's like, hey, the sales team wants a slide to help us sell against the competition. What's our differentiator? And the marketing team fills the slide with like, you know, 500 words and it's like, no, this is impossible. I came up working at a company called Constant Contact and they, they sold email to email marketing to small businesses and they got their lunch eaten by mailchimp, pretty much the same product. You know why mailchimp won? Because they had a free version and they had a brand that was like they had a monkey and it little bit more playful and that's how they won. And I think so often we don't, we don't have that type of differentiator or focus and we do want to just go right deep into the channels and wonder why things aren't working.

And I think the other thing too is you have to, you have to go to the right people where they're at.

Right.

You mentioned like a podcast can, you know, I see, I see it all the time, like put a podcast up, you know, like, and throw, and throw it up on LinkedIn and you're good. Right. Like, I mean there's, there's whole, and I call this SaaS blindness.

Right.

There's people like the SaaS and the software, the technology community don't generally understand that there's about hundreds of trillions of dollars bought and sold at B2B that aren't SaaS.

Right.

So procurement, contracting, packaging, you know, high end manufacturing equipment.

Right.

Like a lot of those buyers aren't podcasters. They're not, they're not, you know, tuning into their local podcast or jumping on LinkedIn regularly to see the latest influencer chatter. Right. So while while some markets might be podcast and influencer and you know, product led, et cetera, some markets are events still.

Right.

Some people want to see the robot put the packages together right in front of them and then hang out with their buddies for a beer afterwards. So that's, that's a key thing I think is missed.

Well, your experience in the. I would love to talk about the B2B not SaaS because I do get messages from people and it's my bias because that's the end. That's where I came from. And I typically have a lot of guests and people on from that space. But I'd love to talk about marketing to B2B not SaaS. If you have some stuff we can, we can riff on in that bucket.

Like, yeah, it's, it's a really crazy, I mean usually it's it's interesting because they have the same problems and solutions but like they're usually about four to five years behind.

Right.

You know like I have a close friend of mine who sells in the packaging space and she's, she works for a $320 million packaging company. They have 200 plus sellers and she's a, she's a seven figure, she's a seven figure earner. She's a multi seven figure seller and she manages her day on an Excel spreadsheet.

Right.

Her contacts, her see her CRM is an Excel spreadsheet and then they all upload their Excel spreadsheets to a master Excel spreadsheet and that is how they forecast, that's how they pipeline, that's how they project and that's a 300 million dollar path.

Crazy.

So like, like people are like oh you need intent. Like I mean those guys just need us just need a something, you know. So like there's the, all of and so like there's so much and most of it's on the road, a lot of it's field, a lot of it's in person and again for them it's just about going to where their buyer is, right. And sometimes their buyer is in their own warehouse, right. That's their marketing team is putting on road shows where they take their packaging robots to the customer and put them in their own environment, let them see them and act so like it's a very different play. But I think, I think they're other industries are very much following technology and SaaS which they usually do. You're starting to see a lot more content being put out, a lot more video, a lot more digital type trends and less big event spend and marketing. So I mean it's exciting for me given that what Pharos does, it allows us to kind of jump in and in a lot of cases help non tech companies jump into or even very niche tech companies. Right. I just had a very large quote go out to a company that sells veterinary software, right. You wouldn't think that's a very hot market to sell into, but the vet software market is like $2.1 billion. It's really competitive and there's hundreds of thousands of vets globally that buy and interact with software. So little things like that I find fascinating.

I think you could reach the vet tech community with a podcast and I'm sure some of them are on LinkedIn. But I think to your point that's not going to be the majority. That world of B2B is it all mostly in person. Is it the way you influence them is there's a. Once a year there's a big event that some of those people go to. There's maybe one or two websites or magazines that people read. There's one or two meetups. Is that the world? How do you influence buying in those, in those communities?

I think it is, it still is right now a lot of the time. And some of those, it depends on the industry. But again, like packaging logistics, construction, manufacturing, like again, these are hundreds of billions of dollars of industries, right? So it's, but it is, it is migrating, right, from both an outbound and an inbound standpoint. Right? The, the outbound standpoint is getting a, it's getting a little less in person because T and E is expensive. And, and again, people just don't want to meet as much as they used to.

Right.

Everybody's busy, everybody's working from home with a higher propensity, you know, and you just don't want to have those drinks or dinner with the salesperson after work. But you know, and I think it's just a matter of those companies, to my point earlier, challenging their own status quos.

Right.

Do I need to send this salesperson to 17 states in the next three months to be able to sell their product or can I put out a great piece of content about, you know, transit manufacturing and have an inside sales team follow up with those same people and grab their interest?

Right.

Are there, are there intent signal providers in my industry in manufacturing tech and healthcare tech and you know, healthcare services? You know, there's. And I think there's a lot of emerging vendors in that space as well. It's one of my key, one of our key priorities at Pharos is those emerging markets, you know, like building what we call engaged audiences and very, very specific or niche mark, you know, niche markets on top of your standard B2B, SaaS, malware, IT, security, storage.

Right.

We're really kind of focusing on how can we give a solution to the dental software space, the veterinary software space, the manufacturing technology providers, supply chain and logistics technology companies. These are very niche audiences to reach. And we're finding ways to create engaged audiences that allow those vendors to leverage a more digital approach. And again, what's happening is they're finding savings. You know, they're finding cost savings because the in person, the big events, the T and E, I mean, it adds up and it becomes massively expensive. So if they can cut those costs by even 20%, you know, they're adding Hundreds of thousands to. You know, the profitability line item advice.

Is not a, not startup podcast, but in the B2B non SaaS industries there is a rising, there is a shift of trying to move some of this buying online at least.

Yeah, I would say engagement online.

Right.

Versus buying. Because buying makes me think E commerce.

Right.

And I don't think people are going to buy a 2.2 million dollar packaging.

How about, how about. Yeah, I'll meet you halfway. The buying process. Yeah, yeah. So engagement, Engagement with the. Okay, so what, what hap, what, what does that look like? What is engagement? What would an ideal, would an ideal funnel there be like. Okay, you see, we used to go to a trade show, I used to have to meet there. How do you start to build some, how do you start to shift some of that engagement for buying to be online instead of in person?

Yeah. And I think the buying journey, you know, you mentioned things that annoy me online, right? Buying journey is one of them.

Right.

The execution of how the buying journey happens is obviously more digital in most industries. Right. There's so much information available digitally now that the salesperson is required for less of it. So 75 to 80% of that process is now quote unquote marketing driven. And then the final home run happens in the 25% with sales. But the buyer journey is not necessarily what the buyer does, but what they think. And almost every buyer thinks the same, like five or six things as they enter the journey is I have a problem is the first thought. And the first thought is can I solve it?

Right?

So that's like, you know, do other people have the problem? Is it solvable? How is it solvable?

Right?

Once I understand how like okay, then after that, which vendors solve it and then which vent, you know, what do my peers think about those vendors? Can I afford any of these vendors? And then finally, which is the best or which should I choose?

Right?

So a lot of the, you know, a lot of the roadshow stuff in non SaaS industries is covering some of those fairly early stage problems they're trying to solve for do I have a problem and can it be solved where I think that part of the buyer journey can most certainly be digitized by Google. But just by putting out great content again in places that those people are talking about the common problems and how they can be solved and then also like, you know, pushing out, you know, creating additional content that solves against. You have to just keep trying to answer those questions. At some point of every buying journey, somebody says, what do My peers think at some point everybody says, can I afford it? Those are the thought process. And it's almost no matter what industry you work in, those are the five or six things that everybody thinks. So if you can attack those thoughts along the buyer journey, that's where you're going to find most of your return, whether you're SaaS or whether you're packaging or manufacturing. And I think that's where, that's where there's leaps to be had across.

Is that about the company? A unique point of view and creating content to answer those questions and to match each, each one of those steps?

I think it's a little bit of everything, right? I mean, I think the leadership of the company has to have kind of a unique presence as well. So you'll usually find that most of the leaders in any industry have a someone at their company who is either well respected or who's the most. Who's known as a very knowledgeable or influential person in that space. They've either done it for a really, really long time or they just, or they just built something unique or see things differently. And I think, you know, that that person doesn't have to be, doesn't have to be on social media or LinkedIn, but they could be, they could speak at a conference, they could, they may do a podcast, there may be a magazine to your point that they could do an interview in. So I think part of it is not just about the company anymore, but also the people at the company. And you could. A lot of digital tactics can be done non digitally. It's just a matter of doing the same conceptual things, building your own personal brand in the places that your buyer Personas go. Some of those just might not be digital.

Can you explain intent Data to me? Like, I have no knowledge of it.

You're diving into the Pandora's box of, you know, so. But intent data was designed to track signals on the web, to be able to try to predict when a company is looking to purchase, is in the buying cycle has a high propensity to buy a specific solution or technology. That's what it was designed as.

Right.

The problem with it is that aggregating and finding those signals is really, really difficult. And those vendors who've built their businesses on intent data have now realized that the signals that they've been aggregating aren't generally strong enough to, to show actual.

Like what, what, what's it. What are.

What's.

What are some examples of, of that that's not working anymore.

Most of the Most of the intent data in the space is, is based on bid stream data, which is, which is data aggregated by tracking bids on programmatic ad platforms.

Right.

When, when you make a bid on a programmatic ad platform. And I can speak to this because there's a lot of B2B marketers on this, so it's a little bit in the trenches. But when you make a bid on a B2B programmatic platform, the publisher on the platform gives you a little snippet of what's on that page.

Right.

And therefore you bid on it. And obviously if you win the bid, your ad gets served on that page and et cetera. But what happens is bid stream data collectors, where most of the intent in our space comes from, they build a programmatic platform and they bid half a cent on millions and millions of pages for the sole purpose of getting that snippet of information on it. So then they can look at consumption on, quote, unquote, those pages. And then they use natural language processing to say this company, ABC Company went on this page and this page was about HR software. So that's intent data to almost all of the, all of the.

As somebody who doesn't know a lot about this, there's think of a handful of marketing red flags instantly. Right. Which is like you just walk through kind of the, almost like Eugene Schwartz's stages of awareness. But you kind of talked about before, like, you know, do, do we have a. What is our problem? Does somebody know we exist? Like, you don't know why they got to that page. You don't know what else is on that page. They might not even be be in the market to buy, but they happen to see that. And so the intent, it's almost like assuming that because somebody opened your email, that means they want to hear from you.

Yeah. And it wasn't just that The Pixel fired 62 times when they were scrolling through through it.

Right.

So yeah, it's. And that's. That is intent. For there is a very small amount of, of providers who aggregate that bidstream data and sell it to dozens of different providers in the space who then market it as their intent.

Don't even know specifically who. You just know that, that somebody from that company looked at something like that.

Yeah.

And then the other, the other real mainstream intent, is it proprietary or co. Op.

Right.

There are some vendors in this space who have a large enough engagement with their network of sites.

Right.

They own the properties, they track engagement with the content on those properties and sell that intent data. So you have Like a, you know, a peer review site. Like, you know, like trust. Yeah, trust. Or, you know, or you have like a tech target who has a lot of proprietary websites.

Right.

You know, or Bombora is another very, you know, a pioneer in the space. They have a cooperative of, of partner sites that they, they have agreements with that they can track consumption on those sites. It's kind of a quid pro quo.

Right.

But there's value there. But again, there's only so much somebody visiting a website can tell you, right? Unless it's your website that's the most, that's the highest value intent that there is somebody going to your personal site. But that's, that's where most intent providers tend to miss. They track signals.

Right?

But are they really signals or is it just noise?

Want to play in this space? Because you all do it differently.

Yeah, I'm trying to like break it, if you will.

Right.

I don't, I don't use, I don't use any website signal data in my intent.

I'm also going to go with like if, if the, if there's more concerns about privacy and cookies and all that type of stuff, isn't that going to eventually become even harder?

It will. Bitstream data has been under the watchful eye of many for many years. And whether it's going to stick and whether it's. Will the DSPs who are running the bidding platform start preventing those folks from bidding millions and millions of $0.01 bids so they can track. Because really what they're doing is, excuse my French, their ass surrounding a bidding platform to collect data from somebody else's systems.

Right.

It's kind of a. And again, it's, it's, it's good to get a whole lot of data, right? It's great for a lot of information. That's why you'll see some vendors who are like 1.1 trillion, trillion signals a month.

Right.

It's just a whole lot of noise. But again, you know, if the trade desk or other prop. Popular DSPs started saying, hey, we're going to block these $0.01 bids, this high volume of $0.01 bids. These people have no intention of actually bidding on these sites and placing Programmatic. They're just collecting data, it could shut down half of the intent industry, quote, unquote. Because that's the key to the kingdom, right? Because if you can't place the bid that lets you collect the information that tracks the quote unquote intent, then you can't track the intent. So really it falls in the, I mean, could it be regulated and data privacy and et cetera. But I think it falls into the owners of the platforms that, that run the bidding, platforms that do the programmatic advertising.

What's interesting about this new like intent data 2.0 or, or the wave that you want to be a part of. If that's the old way, what's the new. If the, if you're, what you just described is the old way, what's the new way?

It's not the amount of signals ingested, it's the type of signal.

Right.

And we talked, we spoke earlier about those thoughts that people have along the process.

Right.

So those thoughts generally leave a trail at some form or fashion. When I think can I afford this?

Right.

Or how do I compare again, what vendors are in the mix or how do, how do, what do my peers think? Right. So there are places or types of content that buyers will engage with that showcase a higher propensity to engage or a higher propensity to buy.

Right.

So one of those is peer review sites, Right. So again, anybody who visits a peer review site to look at a piece of software generally is, has a, what we found from our data about a, you know, a 5x propensity to buy than just anyone else.

Right.

There's a really direct correlation there, engagement with certain types of content like case studies, comparison reports, pricing guides. Right. These types of content allude to someone who is in, in a purchase mind flow. Can I afford this? How does this compare against other vendors? Who's the top 10 those types of things? Then finally there are, you know, there are a lot of vendors who are just simply asking the audience, what are you looking to buy?

Right.

So I have a, again, a fairly large call center and a fairly large signals engine that does just that. You know, we do a lot of engagement with actual buyers and say, hey, what's on your agenda for the next 12 months? What are you buying? We track that data, categorize it and add it as another signal from there.

So actual buying, creating this data through humans that are making phone calls and.

Sending, and sending emails and sending direct mails.

Right.

And you know, all the content that we push out across our signals engine. We have a perpetual engine of basically email newsletters that goes out to targeted buyers and it's AI driven. So if I send you my newsletter and you click on an article about X, it learns what your preferences are and then it continues to send you relevant content each week until we start understanding a. When you're actively engaged, what you're actively engaged in so, and again, it's. You might read a white paper or a blog or an infographic, but my, my algorithms will, will not say that you have intent.

Right?

But once you reach the point where you're engaging with a case study that I sent you or a comparison report or, or a peer review site link or something more hooky, then we start bundling you into the intent standpoint. So we focus really. Again, it's the type of content you, you'll reach, not the volume. Most intent vendors are like ABC company has ingested 1700 web pages this month. Therefore they must be interested. And again, the volume is not as relevant as the type of content that.

People engage with your company. Or is this related to the merger? Like, how long have. I'm assuming you can't just like start a company overnight and collect all this data and have enough budget to have a call cent and, and build a massive email list? Where does, where does this come from?

Ferosiq is, is. Is the, I guess you would say the. I love. I might, you might probably edit this, but it's the love child of two companies. One of them is mrp, who is a legacy. Oh, great. So I just said love child. I'm sure my bosses will be pumped about that. No, so, yeah, we are a combination of two. Two companies that have been around for quite a bit. Mrp, which is a, I don't want to say we've been around for about 18 years. Been in the call center space for many years as far as, you know, driving HQL leads and email based leads and then a company called Contention, which is the perpetual newsletter engine side of the house that drives a lot of that data. So combining all of those signals together has been, you know, we obviously been working on the merger for quite some time and it's one of those perfect storms where what we did really, really well complemented with what they did really, really well into a nice situation where we can kind of hit the ground, hit the market running with something that's truly different. You know, B2B demand is one of the least innovative spaces that you could work in. Right? Again, I've sold the same people, the same general type of thing in some cases for 15 to 17 years. The good news is that it works tactically. What we sell works because people continue to buy it. But how it's done there hasn't been a lot of innovation in a very long time. And I've been really pushing that envelope. And how can we innovate our space?

Someone that's buying Intent data from a vendor or somewhere else? Like, can I be worried about, like, well, can't all my competitors do the same thing? And aren't we all just reaching out to the same people? Like, how, how do you work with intent data? So the outreach is meaningful. It's like, I, I saw somebody ask a question in Exit 5 the other day, and they're like, hey, we're gonna need best practices for following up with executives after a trade show. And I was like, well, I got a hundred questions like, did you actually talk to them? Did they go to your booth? Like, they. Do they know your company? There's, there's so many. There's so many. So it's one thing to, to, to get a signal about. It's one thing to get a, a signal that something happened. But then if all. Or like, you ever see somebody gets a new job on, on LinkedIn, X company hires a new CMO and then like, she just gets flooded for the next six weeks with job change notifications like, how, how do you really make this work? It's like, it's great to have the data, but it matters what, what you actually do with it, right?

Yeah. There's two questions in that, right? First, you know, does everybody get the same data?

Right?

And to my point earlier, when you're talking to an intent data provider, right, it is important to ask them where they get the data and don't let them dance with like, well, we know we've aggregated it over the years in time and place. And, you know, like, where do you get it? Do you buy it or do you create it yourself? And then if the answer is you buy it because most do, where do you buy it from?

Right?

And then because generally, again, most places are buying it all from the same two places, you know, so you're getting to your point. If you're going to X company, Y company, Z company and buying intent, all the people who are buying the same intent from what could be 15 different intent providers are getting the same data stream, driven by the same co op or the same bid stream. So when you're reaching out to ABC Company because they're interested in HR software, 15 of your closest friends probably are too, because they're showing the same signals from the same stuff. So ask that question, who are you buying? Where are you getting it? Is it yours? How are you building it?

Right.

Where? Or if you're buying it from who?

Right.

If they can't ask it, you should probably. That's another conversation for a different day, right? And then secondly, you know, find, try to find the providers that have signals that are proprietary to them or those that combine signals in a proprietary way. Because there are a lot of aggregators of signals as well too, and there's some value there. Second is, you know, how do you best follow up with it?

Right.

That's a, as a. Again, it's similar to your question about the event follow up. Right. I'd have to know a little bit about who's following up. Are you talking about a marketing? You know, generally I found that with most intent because it's not very good intent. You're better taking those companies and putting them in a nice nurture flow.

Right.

And tracking engagement with your personal communications until they score up to a point where they're ready for sales. If you actually find an intent provider that's driving actual signals, you know, you can work with very targeted programs at direct mail or, you know, outbound calling.

Right.

To turn those people into meetings and opportunities at a faster clip. Right. Like ideally you'd want to say, hey, I, I'm tracking that you're in market for HR software. And the person picks up the phone and says, oh yeah, I totally am. Awesome. Good timing.

Right?

Let's, let's talk. So it's just a matter of. Because most intent isn't good enough to do that. Most people struggle with the follow up because theoretically you should be able to reach out and say, hey, I saw that my signals are indicating that you're in market for X software. We sell that. Would you be interested in hearing? And the person will say, oh yeah, I totally am. Let's talk. That's the, the goal. That's the promised land. And the only vendor who can do that right now is Google and Bing and basically your search place. That's why they're $3 trillion companies and everybody else is. There's Google and their search and then there's everything else way down here. And I think what I'm trying to do is bridge that gap to the second best option. I think it's out there, but I think no one's challenged that for talk.

About the merger and the rebrand. Just as a marketer, I want to do that in a minute. First I want to talk about, I just want to spend a couple minutes on abm, because whenever we talk about abm, there's always a. Okay, so what does that really mean? And you said something to me that I really liked, which is going back to basics with abm. ABM needs a revamp going back to basics. No more expensive tools in tech. Back to creative targeted and lower budget. I actually first heard of the term abm. It wasn't even called abm. It was in this book called the Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes. And he talked about your dream 100 having a. Every business should have a dream list of 100 customers you want to sell to and you should be targeting those customers specifically. And then when I got into a company where we were doing abm, I'm like, this is kind of basically that, but there's a lot more nonsense. And then there's also a whole other angle of people that think abm. Oh, so abm, and this is because of vendors, I think in the space. But ABM is display ads. Okay, so we're doing ABM and so that means we're showing ads to target accounts. What does this mean to you? How do we, what would you like to see? How do we bring ABM back to basics? No more expensive tools and tech. Back to creative targeted and lower budget.

Yeah, I do, I mean, I do think that, that vendors created that. They did a hell of a job too, right? Like the vendors who are responsible for convincing the world that ABM was display advertising on a platform, you know, like amazing, amazing wizardry, right? Because they had, there was a whole market who thought I have to do abm. I'm going to call these two people, right? And I think that's, that's kind of unraveling a smidge now, you know. But ABM is, to your point, right? Like it's identifying those X companies that have the highest propensity to buy your solution, right? Either in general or at a specific time, right? You're really hyper focused target ICP from a company at a buyer perspective standpoint. And then creatively going to get them, right? Like creatively standing out from the noise and the barrage of prospecting that they likely get from people who look or sound just like you. So like an ab, like the best ABM is like, hey, two accounts a quarter. Sales, marketing, customer experience, the executive team. And everybody gets together and just figures out like how can we get a meeting with these two accounts because we know they're bigger than everyone else. Let's sit in a room and get creative. And I mean, I was reading an article about Spotify was trying to sell some people and they wrote songs, right? To some big brand advertisers, right? They actually wrote songs about the people and they hooked like seven of 10 meetings, right? Or you're sending someone a special thing, you Know, like that's abm. But what happened is people did that and they saw a lot of success. They got seven meetings and then the executives being the geniuses that they we are, said, oh, let's scale that turn. You know, put gas on the fire.

Right.

And abm, by the nature of what it is, isn't scalable. Like you can only, you can only be account based at a certain point to where it becomes not account based. Now you're just targeting every, I mean somebody. I've had customers send me a target account list with 610,000 companies on them. Like that can't be that targeted. We can't be. That can't be account based at that point.

Right.

And I think that's where it's broken. Account based marketing could be two people talking about how do we penetrate this account. One of them sales, one of them's marketing and I'll send them a direct mail, you call them.

Right.

We'll, we'll hit them at this trade show. All within this, this perfect to try to get them to hook. And I think that's where ABM is broken.

But you just said you think that would be the, that's the better way. It's the block and tackle. Like if it's Dave and Chris and here's our five accounts we're trying to sell this quarter, what are we going to do to go get in front of them? Right. That's not to say you can't do the other stuff. Like maybe air cover from display and digital certainly won't hurt.

Right.

But I love this approach. I also, this is my answer to some people. Sometimes people ask like, don't have any customers yet. What would you do? I'm like this, what you just said is this like you need to shrink this whole thing down and figure out like who are the 10 customers that you could sell to right now. Like spend more time on creating the list. Right? Like identifying those 10 companies that you actually could sell to right now is going to be more important. Where I think a lot of people get a list of, to your point, thousands of accounts, blast them all with the same messages that they don't even know works yet. And expect that person going to go from a cold email to a sales call. No way.

One of my favorite ABM programs, big or small company.

Right.

Is. And people kind of do this subconsciously when they start. But if you actually focus and target it, it's actually quite resourceful. But it's kind of a six degrees of Kevin Bacon approach, right? Where you, you look at all of the employees at your company, whether they're, whether they're the CEO or whether they're a BDR calling or whether they're everyone in the company, and you ask them to be like, hey, you know, like, who do you, like who do you know? You start, you know, and you be, you'd be surprised how many of your employees went to college with someone who buys what you sell or, or have an aunt or an uncle who knows somebody who buys what you said. Like, we did it earlier, you know, last year and it was, it was really, really successful because some of the people were like, oh, I, I know somebody who buys stuff. And we're like, right, I'll talk to him. Like, that warm introduction is just, it's a really cool, I've done that in the past.

I was at a company and they, we did like bought lunch for everybody, put on good music, said, hey, from 12 to 2 we're going to do like a pipeline thing. And they literally had the, had the list of accounts up on a huge monitor and everybody was like, do you know somebody? Or the sales team was like, hey, Dave, I see that you're connected to so and so at this company. Like, do you know them? And I was like, no, I don't know them, but we're first degree connections on LinkedIn. I'm happy to send a message to them and. Okay, great. Oh, actually, do you know this person? Yeah, that's actually my cousin. Like, I, I love, I love these things. The hard thing is, Chris, to your point, like, they don't, they don't play well. They're not, they don't make for pithy little sound bites or, or blurbs like, you know, for, for playbooks on, on LinkedIn or, or other otherwise. But this is what I've always thought in my head, like, yeah, this is, this is abm. And this also speaks to like, in order to do this effectively, you can't have sales and marketing working against each other. You have to have like, they're, they each have unique skill sets and they're going to combine their powers to get into this account. That's how you do it.

Yeah. Or again, add executive into the mix, add product into the mix, add, you know, all of the, all of the experts that you have that could cohesively, you know, attack. I mean, again, nowadays it's hard to find, it's hard to find a buying process that doesn't include a CFO right now.

Right.

So like when we have a big deal that's cooking on our side. Our CFO reaches out to their CFO and says, hey, CFO to cfo, if there's any questions you have about this deal or whatever, I'm happy to talk to you about it.

Right?

Like sometimes just that bridge, right? Two people who are from the same, who speak the same language and have that, like, hey, you know, CFO to CFO or sales guy to sales guy.

Right?

Like, let's have a chat. Like, that's, that's been really strong for us as well too. And yeah, I mean, Obviously most, most CFOs are curmudgeony, right? I happen to be lucky enough to have one that isn't, who can reach out to other CFOs, but, you know, I'm sure everybody can do that prospecting if you ask them to. I don't sell the CFOs, so I just offended that whole industry as well too. On the calls.

They don't listen to this podcast. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. And there's, you know, 50% of the marketers that do do have a curmudgeony CFO. So you just, you made them giggle. And then the others, you made them happy because they're like, oh, my CFO is not like that. I want a rebrand. Let's take off our ABM and intent data hats for a little bit and let's wrap up talking about a rebrand. I can only. Was this fun, Was it a headache? You got one company that's been around for 18 years, you got another company, you got two different names, you come up with a new name. How did, what's the process behind the scenes of. And how did you get here to get to Pharos IQ from, from these two companies and 18 years of history.

Yeah, it's, it's. I mean, it's really hard, right? Because especially when one company's been around for 18 years, right? It's, you know, there's a lot of, even a lot of market knowledge, but just a lot of like, emotion that comes with it. Right. But that being said, MRP presented a lot of tactical challenges, right? Like if you google MrP, you don't get us. You get manufacturing, resource planning and about 72.

No, I got, I got, I got some like, type of Amazon. Mr. Price. Mrp.com.

Yeah, so we're actually Mrp fd.com.

Right.

Because the domain wasn't available at the time in our previous owners were like a public company called FD Technologies. That's where that website came from. So there's a whole lot of that happening.

Right.

You know, Contention was a relatively new brand, but you know, it was, you know, it was kind of like a founder led company and they didn't do a ton of, you know, they were, they were never happy with the brand as a whole itself. It never, like it wasn't something they were like, we love this and we're stuck with it.

Right.

So the good news is that there were two brands that were kind of ready for a change. Change. And that makes it, I guess a little bit easier than if one of the two brands is like, I'm not changing. And there's a lot of emotion that comes with it. So not. Nobody was really sold that. That was the easy part, the hard part. Especially when you're, when you're naming a company it, I mean there's just so many, there's so many names already taken. There's so many name. So many. Like you might have a great name and you can't find a domain available. You might find a great name in the socials taken by somebody else. You might find a great domain and the name's taken. Like that's why I'm convinced that's why so many startups have just made up nonsense names like Jabuba or something.

Well, there's a company called Winter and it's W Y N T E R and friend of mine is a founder called, his name is Pep and he told me on the podcast a couple years ago, I was like, why did you call it Winter? He's like, well, I wanted a one, I wanted one word. And so he like hired some VAs to go and find like all of the relatively simple, memorable one word domain names that were available. And then like Winter has some meaning in some other language and so he's like, yeah, so we, we picked that one. That's how I came up with Exit five. I, I was trying to come up with a story. I was like, let me come up with a story and then try to find an available name. Okay. Oh, Exit five. I could tell that story. This is available. Let's pick that one. It is. You're right. It is so hard. The limiting factor is that is so often the domain and what's actually possible, possible.

And I didn't want anything. And we didn't want anything. That was like a lot of the companies in our spaces have the words like lead or domain or, or demand or intent in the name and I just didn't want to have an obvious name, right? I just didn't want to have like, I didn't want to be the next like lead ninja or lead whatever, right? There's a, like a hundred lead or demand or intent companies in my space. So we went through a lot of different renditions and. And we. I ended up, you know, to be candid, like both my CMO and myself, like, we just kind of went to those, like those free, like free name makers, right? And just typed in some. Just typed in some stuff and just kept like, oh, that's, that's. And then like I ended up bumping into Lighthouse with like a, like two eyes, like light li. And I was like, okay, like Lighthouse signals. I like it. Okay, now I'm getting somewhere. But I didn't want to have like this weird two eye name or house with a Z. Like it's 1996. And then, so then you, then you go like, okay, you know, synonyms for Lighthouse or. Or other languages for. And I ended up bumping into the, you know, like the Greek word for lighthouse is pharaohs, right? And from the, from the lighthouse at Alexandria, you know, which was the seventh wonder of the world. So I'm like, okay, like, I like it. Strength, you know, longitude, you know, longevity. I can connect lighthouse to signals. I'm there. I love all that. And then like, of course there's another company called Pharos. And I'm like, we're in different industries. I'd probably be okay, right? We have like, they're a print management company. We're never going to cross over. But I thought, okay, let's add IQ just to be safe from an intellectual, from a, you know, an IP perspective. And also connecting signals and intelligence into a single flow. So that's where we ended. But to be. I thought it was fun. I really love exercises like that. Like, here's a really challenging puzzle we just did.

We did a smaller one. We're doing an event in September and we needed to come up with a name for that. And I love those type of exercises. Bitten. And I think where a lot of people get stuck is like, you have to. You have to be comfortable. Like, you have to feel free to get all the shitty names out of the way. And I feel like if you don't say them out loud and write them down, you never break through. And so you have to be comfortable being. Look, we're just gonna go. And I want like. And so it was the three of us in Slack and we were like, just, just go. Start riffing. And we just Spent days and we each would share a name. Share a name, Share a name. Share name. That's not it. That's not it. That's not it. Okay, check this one out. What about this one? Yeah, I like that one. Okay, that's warmer. Warmer. That part. That part is fun. And I think it is cool to hear you say that because even for a. A legit, a legitimate company with millions in. In revenue, like this is how it gets done. It's not always you hired some fancy agency, they did all these, you know, focus groups and stuff. You just, you had a. You had a method and you wanted to just do it and you pick a name and you got to go. And now the brand is going to become what you make it, right? I think a lot of people obsess over the name before I do believe sometimes you got to ship it and go and then the brand is going to become what you make it after the fact.

To my pointer of execution over strategy, right. A crappy name with a really amazing story that people tell, well, that they're passionate about, that they believe in is going to outperform the sexy name that no one does that.

Right?

So like, I loved the process. My CMO has to do all of the other stuff, right? Like all of the, you know, just the pain that like the webs, you know, are we going to get. How are we going to migrate the websites? Are we going to, you know, how are we going to build all that? How are we going to, you know, migrate the emails over with tech, all of our collateral, all of our stuff, all like, all of that.

Right.

So obviously I'm not as close in the loop on that part of it, right? But you know, like, but it's really. I. I find it one. It's been one of my. One of my most fun projects that I've done in my.

Not bad for your sales guy. Did good.

I know, right? Like we get bad rap.

All right, so we got a wrap. It's great to have you on. Great to chat more with you. I'm excited to follow your journey and it's fun to have a B2B non my. I'm gonna get messages about this because people have wanted to take finally somebody to talk about B2B. Non. Sass. There's a whole world out there that we don't cover and I'm sorry for that and it's great to have you. So call to action for this podcast is as you're listening right now, go go to LinkedIn. Find. Find him his Christopher Rack, he looks much more. He's got the CEO look on LinkedIn. He brought his true self to the pod today. Rightfully so. Showing me the tats, showing me the flat brim hat, the. The Ricky Bobby 2024. I love. I love all that. I love. I'm glad to see that on LinkedIn. He's. He's polished.

That's my. My CFO.

I love that. That's true alignment right there. That's true alignment. So go.

I have a podcast as well, too, called Vita Boring. Feel free to check it out.

Right?

I know if anybody listening here is a podcast listener. Each week we. Each week we. I invite a B2B marketer on. We talk a little bit about marketing, but then I challenge them to tell me about a campaign or something that they've done over their career. That's not boring, right? I've found that most of my inspiration for ideas comes from listening to other people's ideas. So feel free to listen and. Or if you'd like to join the podcast, hit me up on LinkedIn as well. Talk about, like, a creative or cool campaign you've run, and maybe you could inspire another B2B marketer.

Love that. I love the name. I love the premise for that. So go connect with Chris on LinkedIn, send him a note, and maybe, maybe you'll get on that podcast to talk about something interesting you've done. Chris, rooting for you all. We'll continue to watch your journey. Appreciate you coming on and hanging out on the eggs of five podcasts, and I'll see you later.