ABM and PLG Motions - Two Sides of the Same Coin with Julie Geller

Hi, I'm Michael Hartman.

I'm Naomi Liu.

And I'm Mike Rizzo. And this is OpsCast, a podcast for marketing ops pros and rev ops pros created by the MoPros, the number one community for marketing operations professionals.

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Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by marketingops.com, powered by the MoPros. I'm your host, Michael Hartman, joined today by no one. None of my co-hosts at least, but I am looking forward to our conversation today with our guest. We're going to be talking about the relationship between ABM and PLG motions, and joining me for that conversation is Julie Geller. Julie is currently Principal Research Director with Infotech Research Group. She is an accomplished advisor and strategist specializing in CX, customer experience, revenue, and growth, where she focuses on developing innovative and disruptive go-to-market strategies. Tailored to meet the business goals of SaaS and global service-based companies. Her frameworks and methodologies have consistently driven sales, revenue growth, and expansion within high-value accounts. Previously, she held executive positions at Cision and BBDO, refining her expertise in sales and marketing leadership. Additionally, she has contributed valuable insights to CX Dive, The ABM Report, and MarTech Cube. Thanks for joining me today, Julie.

Absolutely. Thanks for the invite.

All right. So should we? All right. I will, I will reveal the little, little hidden secret of doing podcasting. So this is our second attempt at this because we had technical difficulties. So I'm going to blame it. I'm going to blame it on the outages at Facebook and LinkedIn the last couple of days.

Yeah, I agree with that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Blame it on, we'll blame it on Zuckerberg and whoever's In charge of LinkedIn now. I don't even know anymore.

Yeah, 100%.

So, all right, well, let's, you know, one of the things we like to do, Julie, is we like to start with, uh, with some of our guests a little bit about career journey and kind of understanding the path that led to where you are today. So, you know, I, if you want to, if you could walk through that, and if you have any specific people or moments where you maybe had a choice to go down path A or path B, you know, that that maybe had a different, you know, major impact on the trajectory of your career. I would love to hear about those specifically, but I'll let you take it where you wanna take it.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think that one of the pivotal moments that I remember is working at an interactive shop called Sonic Boom. And that shop actually got sold to National PR, which is a part of Res Publica. So that's the umbrella. And it went through, you know, valuation and sale and all of that. And I think that it was just, it was, a great moment to understand more about all the steps to integrating those 2 businesses. So, that was quite fascinating for me. And at the time, I was really involved in that whole interactive space, you know, or at least that's what we were calling it. And then, of course, you know, we kind of— I sort of bridged that gap more into the strategic space as we joined National being a PR firm. So, that was a really big time. You know, I think After that, I did establish a consultant. It's a consultancy called Geller Strategic, which you know remains on my resume, and it's always one of those things that I get questions about. You know, so how come you were here and here and here and here? And it's like, well, you know, once you develop a consultancy, you just always have that running in the background, right? And it's afforded me some really great opportunities. I've worked with Baker McKenzie, which is a worldwide law firm for. over 3 years actually. So helping them to create editorial and demand generation for their teams all over the world. So that was pretty big. But I think all in all, I have to say that Cision was a really big role for me too, being the VP of marketing over there and just sort of spearheading that sales and marketing alignment and driving substantial growth that led us to absorbing Locus as well. So yeah, that's It's kind of a little bit bulky.

That's great. Yeah, I was late to the game on setting up a consultancy on the side for, for just what you described. So it's been, it's been an interesting challenge to get that going, but it's been helpful to have that for a variety of reasons. So I wish I had done it sooner.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's a great thing to have.

Yeah. So, okay, so let's get into this topic. So we hinted at this, right? We're going to talk a little bit about both ABM strategies as well as PLG, product-led growth, account-based marketing. For those who have their head in the sand and don't know what those are, we'll just explain that. So specifically though, I think you've had a lot of experience with ABM motions and go-to-market strategies, say over the last decade or so. So I'd be curious what your take is on how things have changed or evolved during that time. And if you think that the, you know, what are the key benefits and challenges for that kind of go-to-market approach?

Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, there's been a really big evolution just in platforms because I know that we were working with Marketo, we're working with Pardot, we're working with whatever it is. And of course, as those things get amped up, there's other martech platforms that get created in the background. So you have, you know, now of course those intent-based based platforms, which make it a little bit easier to set up your motion. So that has been a really big change, I guess, in the landscape in the past decade or more, probably a little more at this point. So some of the benefits actually are increased efficiency, of course, enhanced personalization. There's better alignment between sales and marketing. So I think all of those reasons are great reasons to do it, but it's really about targeting high-value accounts. that's what you want to do. It's often misunderstood about how you want to be involving ABM and what part of the sales journey that is. So yeah, and there are some challenges, of course, that you want to be looking at. I think that it can be resource intense, and that I think is just different than regular, I would call them inbound motions. Those are also intense, but this could really be building depending on what kind of an ABM program that you have. And then, You know, I would say also the scalability of it too. So I mean, it really does depend on the scope of what you're, what you're doing. But yeah.

So if I could, you brought up technology early on, you mentioned a couple of marketing automation platforms, you didn't really talk about other platforms specifically that either call themselves ABM platforms or whatever. I'm curious if, in my own experience, I guess is this way. That's why I want to ask the questions. When I've been approached by others in different positions when I've led marketing ops to— the ask would be to, let's do ABM. I think very often what they were thinking about is not a strategy or an overall coordinated approach like you talked about with coordinating sales and marketing, but a technology implementation. And I think that's one of the things that I've run into is people are thinking of it as just, We're gonna put in technology and then we're gonna start, you know, just ringing the cash register.

Right.

I mean, do you see that as a challenge? Like some places that where they think, don't really think through what it actually takes between coordinating and all that?

Yeah, absolutely. I think that's something that I've dealt with like on a day-to-day basis. So, you know, I think that you have these, these leaders that sort of, they want to take advantage of all the great platforms and technology and piecing things together, you know, so what can their martech stack look like? But they don't have a lot of the core maturity in their marketing practice yet. So, you know, they may not really understand how to manipulate like lead scoring. And so they don't know how to adapt that to account scoring.

Right.

You know, they just don't have those basics in place. And there's so many things that you need to have as well, I would say having a tidy database, and really this often happens where working with an ABM professional is important to make sure that you are cleaning up all that data, 'cause you're gonna want that for personalization and customization, and you can't have a proper program and engage success without bringing those factors in. So just going out and shopping for that really expensive platform is just not gonna do the job. The preparation is so important when you're implementing.

Yeah, I mean, my— and I've always taken those kinds of requests in my— in general. So I have not— I would say if someone asked me, have you done ABM? I'd say no, but not because there hasn't been a desire. It's because I could see that it was either a technology request, really, without really a strategy behind it, or the organization really wasn't ready for it, even though there might have been one person who, because for whatever reason, Thought it would be a good idea. And generally what I've done is my approach to that is first, before we go buy new tech, is there something we can do with what we have existing? And B, can we do something simple like let's just identify our top, pick the number, right? 50, 100 accounts that we want to target with this. And in just about every case, there was a struggle just getting those 2 things solved.

Yeah, right, exactly. And that's, that's exactly it, right? So the database is not in your CRM, your CRM is not in really good condition, it's very hard to ascertain who those top clients are. And then to boot, you're basically dovetailing into the point that I wanted to make about ICP is that they don't know who their ICP is. They haven't gone through that exercise. And to go through an exercise with detail as well, understanding what those attributes are, what are the winning attributes that you want to be looking at, right?

Yeah.

So, this will give you a more channeled approach.

Yeah, we could probably go on a whole rabbit hole just on what in the world does persona mean, but let's not go there because that really could— that could go anywhere and everywhere. All right, so let's talk about PLG. And I don't know if you've had much or, or even any experience with PLG motions. I haven't personally worked with these either. But I know a lot of our listeners do. So yeah, how do you see— similar question, right? How do you see it? What do you see as the benefits and/or challenges with PLG motions? And I think especially maybe compare and contrast that to what you think about for ABM. And maybe they're not totally different things. Maybe there's some sort of complementary components as well. But I honestly, I don't know.

Yeah, no, that's totally fair. I think it's just that you're looking at it from 2 different ends of a, I guess let's call it experience. It's a user experience that you want to be thinking about. So your PLG is more of a bottom-up approach, so it focuses on those end users and those experiences that they have as being that primary champion or growth driver within the organization. You know, I think it's about giving them a firsthand experience where they can really adopt the product and they understand how to use it. They're feeling like they have that support in order to learn and that they don't feel too restricted, that they can't understand what some features and functionalities are. So you want to be giving them that experience, giving them enough time to absorb that as well. So I think that PLG, that's, you know, that's how I view it. ABM is more of a top-down approach because it's about fostering relationships, it's about understanding deeper knowledge of that, you know, of that customer and of that client or account. So you want to target high-value accounts that are specific. Obviously, you'll understand what those winning attributes are, what you're looking for, and make sure that you're engaging those key decision makers and stakeholders within that buying committee. And there's a variety of ways to do that, but I think designing a journey that kind of leads one to the other, which is what I really believe in doing, and that's why I like to I generally call it a dual motion, right? Because you're designing for that one experience. And I see that a lot more often. It's something that is getting more and more, I guess, appealing to companies because they see that this is more of a natural progression of the way that people buy. So if your customers buy this way, perhaps this is something that you're going to want to think about doing. I know that it was just reported about, I think Amplitude did this for their platform. Many platforms, like if you look at, you know, Monday, if you look at, you know, there's just, there's so many of these platforms that have adopted this process. I think Airtable has done a very good job as well. So yeah, I think it's going to be very, I think it's going to be the way that we look at motions in the future is duct taping them together.

Yeah, I think a lot of the project management platforms that are out there have come about over the last several years. I have been really good about that, and it sort of builds a groundswell somewhat naturally, right? Word of mouth.

This—

so sorry, this, this is a little bit of a different thing, and I'm going to throw this at you unplanned, so bear with me.

Okay.

But it is— it, it popped into my head as we were talking about this that— so, so I think there are PLG motions that make sense where it's relatively low cost for the business to offer, you know, a free, free freemium kind of access for some period of time to an individual. There are, like, there are more probably, or maybe I, maybe I'm overestimating, but more, more, more places where doing that doesn't make financial sense, right? There's, there's a heavier cost or it's a more complicated tool or whatever. And so one of the things that I have struggled with as a buyer of technology in the market, especially in the martech space, has been, you know, it's, you can usually get a trial of some sort, right? And it's usually sort of, if there's a range of capabilities, you tend to get closer to the higher end for a short period of time. And it's a relatively short period of time, typically in the weeks, you know, typically less than a month. And what I've found is it's just not enough to be able to really fully evaluate Thanks. And I appreciate the free, and occasionally they'll extend it. But yeah, there's no, there was never really a huge financial incentive or penalty for me not taking the time with me or the team to do it. And one of the things I would, I think would be an interesting one that maybe is sort of in between full PLG and full ABM or traditional go-to-market is where you offer a trial that's a paid trial, but it goes longer, right? So there's, I mean, it could even be discounted, maybe, or maybe it's not. That really lets an organization have a stake in the game and kind of pushes them to evaluate. Like, do you think there's, do you think there's a place for something like that? Because I don't know of anybody that's doing anything like that. And I'm, when I say short, I'm saying, say, 6 months or less.

6 months or less. Yeah. I mean, often what happens is, so like in the case of Airtable, I believe they, I think they offer a reverse trial concept, which is, you know, puts a fully paid version, you know, at fingertips of the user, and it allows them that way to experience what they need. And then they'll wrap a timeframe around that. And then of course, they'll give you this option to, I guess, upgrade to a paid package of your choice, and they'll tier that out. So I think it's about understanding what tiers your what tiers your customers really want with what kind of features. And that is really, I think, about understanding things like usage patterns and feature adoption and what their engagement is with the platform in the first place. So I think from a SaaS perspective, it's really important not to have that go on forever. And I think that just—

Of course.

From a revenue model, you wanna make sure that this is something that's going to convert and that you're not keeping them the platform. I see this happen so often in PLG where it's just like, we're gonna just let them do whatever they do, but you are still storing data, right? So I mean, you do still have rising costs on your side, so you do want to throttle that to some extent. But I mean, also I think it's about personalizing the experience for that user. And this is where understanding what part of the— So what account does this person belong to. You know, who is this person? How much are they using it? And is there a possibility for them to experience more? And potentially you'll have an enterprise play at the end of it. So being very careful. Yeah.

Well, and what I found with some of these, whether it's a PLG motion is, and I have happened to work for, I guess we'd call them enterprise clients of those those platforms is there'll be pockets, right? There'll be a marketing set of users using it, and maybe there's an engineering one, or maybe like these different groups are using it and there's no coordinated effort. And one of the things I've gotten into a habit of doing when I'm in those scenarios is, especially if it's a new thing where I know that we need to— I'm evaluating whether or not we should continue spending on something from a tech standpoint, I will make sure I ask the question, Is there anyone else from our organization that you're working with? Because sometimes they're forthcoming with it just on their own. Sometimes they're not. And I don't, I don't want to ascribe intent or anything to that. But I do, I do know that, you know, there's some, some value. I can use it potentially as leverage for negotiating if I can coordinate all of the other folks internally who may also not know about it. And You know, from the, from the vendor standpoint, I think they could also get some value out of it and have leverage on, you know, it's like we can, we can expand your capabilities. And if you sign longer term, like there's a lot of things that go into it that I think would be interesting. But yeah, I didn't, I didn't know about the Airtable thing. Now I'm going to go have to check that out.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And yeah, I think that there's This is a case for when we were talking about martech a minute ago, right? Like, are you using any business intelligence tools? Do you understand who the buying committee is? Are you seeing all of this as something that is part of your process, right? So looking it up and seeing, you know, I guess how you can create relationships, especially for those users that are adopting, you know, can you offer a longer trial? Often they'll do that as well, right?

Sure.

So I mean, yeah, there's a lot of There's a lot of points that you can bargain against for sure.

Yeah.

So, yeah.

No. And I like, I'm not one who's looking to like take advantage of stuff, but I also, I mean, I try and tend to be very direct about things when it comes to like that. I don't feel like it's a waste of their time, waste of my time to be dancing around it. I'd rather be direct about it. So you mentioned, you just mentioned something about buying committees though, and I think This is one of the things to me that is a little bit different. Like with, as I understand ABM, right, that tops-down approach, one of the things you should naturally be doing is sort of mapping out the organization and who the key players are and ultimately decision makers and people who have financial power and things like that. Whereas with PLG, it feels like it would be much more difficult to do that. So just because it's— can be scattered, right? Like we just described. How do you see that playing out at organizations who are doing PLG motions?

Yeah, I think that you should have a target account list, you know, and you should understand what those look like for yourself, for your company. I think that also bringing in those other tools that let you know what organization they're a part of. So, I mean, maybe they're using their Gmail, but you actually know that they're a part of, you know, XYZ Corporation or whatever, and they have some kind of, you know, influence there? Are they showing different, I guess, intent markers that would lead you to believe that they might be the champion of a group like that? This happens a lot. It does happen in the business architect kind of arena as well. Those individuals often don't have the, you know, they don't have budget. They aren't allotted a budget line, but they might work with other groups that do, and they're influential in that space. So, you know, just understanding ahead of time. And I think that's what I mean by sort of earmarking it and saying, this is someone that I know is part of this corporation, which is a target for us. They're a really good match. We're going to keep our eye out on that person. We're also going to make sure that we get reports on usage patterns and feature adoption. And, you know, we're going to build in a feedback loop, you know, those kinds of things, and pay attention to things like strategic inquiries where they ask questions about things like, you know, security and scalability and all those things that they might need to go to their their team with and say, hey, you know, if we were to adopt something like this, and by the way, I've been using it and here's some of the work that I've been able to do here. This is what it looks like for our organization. Yeah.

So, so something you said about you still have, need a target account list. It feels like that, which makes total sense. But then I was like, well, it feels like there's a, I don't know that different is the right word. It feels like the idea of a target account list in a PLG motion is a little bit different in that you may put it this way. In a traditional model, target account list is essentially people you want to be as net new logos.

Yeah.

Accounts. Whereas in a PLG motion, there may be an existing customer in quotes, air quotes here for those who can't see it. because they're individuals, but there's not, as an organization, a full adoption. So, I mean, how do you— am I onto something here, or am I way off track? Is it— am I making it more complicated than it needs to be?

No, no, no. I think that— I think you're asking really good questions, actually. So here's the thing. The thing is, is that if someone is using this for— usually they're using it for their place of work, right? So, I mean, they're trying to make their life easier. Maybe they're paying for this out of pocket, which generally they could start off that way, right? I mean, especially if they just don't have the allotted budget line and they happen to be a champion, but they're not really running that business unit. So that makes sense in that case. However, what I do find is that when they do get into more of a role of, you know, they're using this, we know that they're using this often, we know that they, you know, they're using a lot of the features and they're finding this to be an important platform for them. I think it's only natural that they try to sell it into the organization and say, hey, look, you know what? I'm on it. I want you to be on it, Mike. I want us to communicate through this platform. You know what? Actually, let's make the business pay for this, right? Because then we can onboard John and Jane and everybody else. And so, you know, you're just stitching together the 2 motions as one because they are kind of that way naturally. And I think that's what we do from day to day in our jobs is that we might find that we have this new platform that will really help and we want to tell others about it. So it gets into that kind of advocacy kind of role, right? So now you're that champion to say, out through your organization. But in advance, and like, like you said, I mean, it's not just looking at it as it's one individual going through that process. I think it's trying to put down some markers of like, what does, what does it look like to have that ideal client? And yeah, champion, you know, what, what should we look out for? Yeah.

Okay. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. My head's sort of spinning here. Sorry.

Sorry, that's a lot.

I know. I mean, what I— and the reason I asked, you know, like both sort of in jest but also seriously, is like, am I trying— am I making this overly complicated? Because that's one of the things I fear about things like this is that they become almost too clever.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? And so I'm a big fan of keeping things simple. And, you know, an elegant sort of analogy would be football. I think football, American football, sorry, uh, to our international audience, is won in the middle, right?

Yeah.

And so, and it's, it's won with knowing how to tackle, knowing how to block, like just doing basics really, really well. And then if you add anything else that you can add on top of that, As long as you can execute the basics really well, then I think you're in a better position than somebody who has a scheme, although schemes will work for a period of time until things catch up. And that's what I'm like, it feels like it's, I would probably feel like I would tend to go towards being schemey as opposed to staying focused on basics if I was to do one of these things, because it seems like it would be very appealing to do that.

Yeah, I think that what we want to be thinking is more, less about the complexity and more about the CX experience. So when I write about this as a customer experience, this is not something that marketers should be, you know, doing in a silo or in a box. They really need to be looking at that person as they travel through on their journey. What do they need in order to not just convert them as an individual and make their job easier to sell this into a buying committee, but then also to expand the account, to land and expand the account. At some point you're gonna be into a renewal. Now, does it look like, you know, it's more of a, you know, onboarding other groups within the organization? How big could this grow? So I think it's just being prepared for that because otherwise you will lose out, you know, you will lose business. That's part of that is maybe even creating a side community, right? And so often you'll see that these—

Mm-hmm.

These platforms, they have the communities there, they have that continued engagement, they're letting you know about new features and things that you might find helpful. So I think having that great CX backbone is super important. You'll know what your own situation will call for just based off of interviewing your ICP and really getting a good idea of who these people are, Do your ICP. I know we already talked about not talking about it, but do your ICP, do your personas. Your ICP is going to help you with targeting. And this is where I see that a lot of the time you won't understand exactly who it is that you're targeting. And then going into personas is going to help you with content. So I don't think skipping that is going to work. But all of this PLG to ABM motion is really wrapped around what is the experience of that person. Get to know who that person is and why you're making this decisions that you are.

Yeah, it's so— this is bringing to mind to me, like, 2 things have come up recently in episodes that some are out, some are not out yet. But one is this differentiation in my mind that I think a lot of marketers and business people in general mix up this idea of our internal view of the The, the, the steps that customers go through the funnel, right? Which I think there's a part of me wants to say the funnel is dead, right? It's just, it doesn't make sense anymore. At the same time, it's a convenient and simple way of thinking about that. That is distinct to me and different than the way that people actually go through the process of finding, evaluating, and deciding on, on products now. Because I think, I think you brought— talk about communities. I think You know, there's also independent communities like marketingops.com as a community. And that is where I know I have started checking on things before I ever even talked to the vendor. And so, so I think, but I do think there's this distinction about like, we want to be able to measure the funnel and conversion rates, but there's this, we need to recognize that there's a different experience on the other side of it that the customer is going through or prospects going through.

Yeah.

The other thing is just how damn important it is for people to— for the people who are going through that buying journey, that experience to be easy and painless. And if there's a problem, you support them, right? That onboarding is super important and all those. And I think that does get lost sometimes in terms of how it can impact the brand, right? To put it simply, the brand can be really affected by that, as evidenced by So a recent post on LinkedIn that somebody had about, and it was initially masked, but everyone knows it was ZoomInfo and how they handled a customer who was considering canceling.

Right.

And it blew up. I mean, like literally hundreds of thousands of views on this LinkedIn post and a subsequent post. And so I think that, you know, it damages your reputation very quickly these days.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, definitely it can. And so planning it out is definitely key. I have actually. Developed something that I'm working on, which is a framework for this PLG to ABM motion. And it looks at an acronym that I've kind of, I don't know, adopted.

Let's go there. Let's do that.

Yeah, right? Why not? So yeah, so I'm using the acronym of ALIGN just to understand the steps and some of the tools that you're going to want to use in order to meld these 2 motions together. Because you're right, like it is, it's very, it's complex. There's a lot of consideration. You're definitely wrapping wrapping this around the user experience. So, you know, where do you even start? And I like to start at— so A is account-led prioritization. So the sort of concept of this and the framework is to, um, really understand those attributes that we were talking about. What does that target account list look like? Who is it that's the ideal candidate for, um, for this? And, and it could be starting by looking at the champion, right? So who is that champion and what kind of role or title do they have? What are their jobs to be done? Making sure that you kind of address that. And of course, yeah, you can get the account information from, you know, it could be anything from a demand base all the way down to— I just heard of another platform called Motik, I think, and it's like an open source, I guess, Mm-hmm. I think it's a marketing automation platform. So I'm not— I haven't worked with it yet, but I'm pretty interested to dig into that. But knowing who those accounts are, I think those, especially the high-value ones, are really important. So after you have that figured out, and that's maybe with your existing system, as you had said before, you know, maybe you want to dig into what you have.

Yes.

Right. And that's where the analysis is really going to come from as well, because you're going to have your salespeople there to ask questions. How did this get sold? And, you know, looking at just the success of good matches versus ones that are maybe not as good. After you identify that, I think you move on to L, which is that leadership identification. And this is really about understanding that buying committee that we keep bringing up. So who are they within that target account? You know, what are the decision makers? If you look at their goals, both, you know, professionally and also in a functional and personal areas. What would those look like? Who are they influenced by? Those kinds of things. And then, you know, you can find a lot of the relationships there as well. I mean, that can be recovered through discussing the accounts, but you can see that too on like LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Sure.

They'll give you a lot of the relationships there. So you can pick that apart, or you might just go straight into your CRM. So, and for those that are a little bit more fancy, they can and start up their, you know, maybe like BI or whatever they have. So yeah, business intelligence platforms. Um, yeah, so that kind of covers the first 2 steps. Should I, should I lead us into I?

Yeah, let's do it.

Okay, so I is for the ICP-centric, um, intelligence, and I'm finding that there are a lot of I guess, more dynamic tools in this area. I personally am old school in the way that I like to start with doing it manually and understanding it, and then putting that into some of those automation systems or, you know, wherever you want to load that into so you can understand who the tiers are that you're trying to target.

There are platforms that help with documenting ICPs. Is that what you're—

Yeah. Yeah. So most Most of the automation is going to allow for you to document and tier, and then you're going to want to also identify those individuals within the systems that you, that you have, like your, you know, CRM or your marketing automation. You should be, I think, quite acquainted with whether you're targeting a tier 1 client or tier 2 or tier 3, particularly if you're doing ABM, right? So, okay. Yeah. So putting those together.

Okay. So you're saying some of the tools that are out there that are I'll call them more traditional. What you're talking about is how— I hate to use the term, but how you segment your database based on those characteristics that match this ICP tier. Okay, got it.

Yeah, you got it. That's exactly it. So, you know, I think you can measure performance too, right? Because then you know that you are intending on hitting your tier 1 audience, but maybe the result is that you've actually hit more like an emerging kind of stream. So yeah, so just being cognizant of that. And then so after that, I have goal-oriented personalization. And this—

This is one I didn't understand when we talked before. So, I want to hear this one.

Yeah.

Okay.

So, this is all about messaging. And I think literally, I would love to say that companies are doing this well. But I don't have a lot of examples for you in the space. And I think what this has to do with is really understanding, like I was saying before, the jobs to be done. So, you're going to speak in a certain voice and use messaging and nomenclature that resonates with a particular title or persona. You want to make sure that, you know, you don't blanket it and send it out as like a brand kind of play. It's— you're speaking directly to these individuals and this is your opportunity to do that. So, you know, understanding that intimately is going to be key.

So this is a little more than just, you know, inserting their first name into the same copy that everyone else is getting. Okay.

Yeah, that's not going to do it anymore, especially as like AI becomes more and more sophisticated. It's just you're not going to get a big pardon for things like bringing up a tool. You know, you're selling a tool that they are a platform that they already have or package they already have, right? I mean, you should full well know how they're using it. what they've subscribed to, you want to have that kind of conversation or else you may not consider that you're very valuable at the end of the day and start looking for other options. So I think it's an opportunity for retention. And I personally think that's key is that personalization. Yeah.

So do you, you brought up AI, but so I think there are things that are trying to do that or have been trying to do that. But on particularly, I think on the sales motion part of this, you know, so things like things that do, because I get these all the time, right? That are, I think, in a pretty crappy automated way of trying to personalize messages through LinkedIn or emails that just don't miss. They don't hit the mark, especially you can very, it's very easy to tell that somebody had, there wasn't really anybody looking at something specific.

Yeah.

And so when the— when, when I see something where someone has actually done that, it stands out.

Yeah.

Do you— I mean, do you think AI is going to be able to come close to matching that human sort of ability to look for those underlying patterns? I guess is the— I can't think of a better way to describe it.

Yeah, no, for sure. I, I think it's going to get more and more sophisticated for sure. But like I was saying about the ICP exercise, I'm a big fan of of really sitting down and digging into it. I think that you still have to learn, or train rather, the AI and AI systems and be able to really query them in a proper way. So I personally would really sort of write it out first and talk a little bit about what those jobs are. See if you can replicate the same voice within AI before going ahead and just saying, I'm just gonna plug and play this stuff. Because I think, like, to your point, we know that, right? As human beings, we know what Feels like a real, you know, we're being addressed in an authentic way versus more of like an authentic automation way. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, totally, totally. But the idea here, the goal-oriented part of this, so the G is to try to match the messaging to the target person's goals or, you know, what they're wanting to accomplish by Is that—

that's right.

Okay, see, now I understand, right?

It's making more sense. I, I kind of thought it would if I went on. I was like, you know what, we're gonna do this. Yeah.

All right, so the, the, the N in align, I think this is, this is one we just touched on this, I think, if it's what I think it is. So you want to go with that next?

Yeah, we did actually. You had brought this up, and, uh, and I think that was— it's a very smart, um, you know, it's a very smart point to be talking about, is the, the nonlinear engagement. So I mean, when do we buy the way that we think we're gonna buy. The concept of a funnel, and I still find myself saying funnel, so I'm totally guilty of this, but I just would prefer to look at it as a journey.

Yeah.

You know, your journey might be that you go back and think about the way that you shop for even just an item for your house, or maybe it's like a new shirt even. You might look at something a few times before you go and buy it. So are you giving them all of the information that they need about it before You know, because you don't want your sales team to be engaging prematurely with this person and then kind of handholding them through the entire process. That's just not going to be useful, right?

So, yeah, well, and it's expensive.

Very. Yeah. And it often amounts to almost nothing. So what can you be giving them in their journey that they can use for themselves to self-educate and potentially even self-qualify? So that, that would help the business to know when, when you have to have those key conversations. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I think this is such a good point, especially for people who are in B2B and think that B2B buying is different than consumer buying. And I, and certainly there are distinctions. I think about like, there are oftentimes where we go like, I just need something. I'm going to go online. I'm going to order it and it'll be here in a couple of days.

Right.

And then there are times when I'll go through a more elaborate evaluation. And I think there's analogies to that on the B2B side. I mean, I think it's, there are times when I will do almost an impulse buy on, say, a really low cost technology where there's not a, I'm not committing to myself to a long-term connect. You know, if I can do monthly, do a trial. Pay for it, figure it out, see if it works, and then maybe commit to a longer one and negotiate something where I get a lower price. Yeah, I think, I think there's some analogies there, but the point is how I get to the point where I'm gonna make that decision today versus probably even just 5 years ago is different. And for sure it's different than it was 10, 15, 20 years ago.

Right. Yeah. I, so, I mean, And you may take the risk as a user to do something like that. But I guess the question is that as the companies to look at like sales velocity, how can you reduce sales velocity overall? And that really is to understand how the buyer wants to buy rather than how the company wants you to buy. So, giving them options, taking them through that process a little bit faster, making sure that they have all the information on hand that they can share with their team, things like that, that will be helpful for sure.

That's great. All right. Well, I, I know we could probably continue this on for a while, but I think we're both tight, tight on time here. So I want to be respectful for you. But that said, if folks want to learn more about the Align Framework or what you're doing at Infotech or in your own consulting, what's the best way for them to connect with you and hear or learn more about that?

It is always through LinkedIn. I mean, I think I'm always on it. When it went down yesterday, I was absolutely shocked.

Like, am I doing something wrong?

Right? So yeah, absolutely. But on LinkedIn, they can, um, you know, please engage with me, ask me questions. Um, you know, I, I'd love to engage in any kind of dialogue.

So terrific. Well, Julie, this has been great. I really Enjoy the conversation. And second time around, I learned a lot. So you may get more people coming back at you like I did, wanted to go deeper. So appreciate that. Thank you for the time.

Absolutely.

Well, and so, uh, to our, to our audience and our listeners out there, thank you for continuing to support us. We will be back with more guests in the near future, and hopefully we'll have Mike and/or Naomi joining as well soon. Until next time, bye everyone.