Buying Groups as an Extension of ABM with Alice Walker and Christine Maxey

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Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by marketingops.com, powered by all the MoPros out there. I am your host, Michael Hartman. Joined by no one today, at least not my co-hosts. So Mike and Amy, I'm sure, will join us again. But I do have guests. I have 2, so we'll make up for it. We have Alice Walker and Christine Maxey, both from Lean Data. Alice is currently Senior Product and Partnership Marketing Manager at Lean Data. Prior to joining Lean Data, she worked in consulting at Shift Paradigm/LeadMD, where she held several leadership roles focused on marketing and service delivery to clients. She also has a background in project and program management. Christine is currently Vice President of Revenue Operations at Lean Data, progressing through leadership roles in revenue operations over the past several years. She also spent a few years in solutions consulting at Lean Data. There's a connection between the two of you. Between her two stints at Lean Data, Christine was the Head of Customer Success at Tackle.io. Prior to those roles, she held various roles in sales operations and business operations. So, Alice and Christine, thank you for joining.

Thanks. We sound smart. Yeah.

Good backgrounds all around. Yeah.

Well, so it's funny, the lead MD says— so I finally met Andrea Lechner-Becker for the first time in person at Massapalooza last week in Anaheim. And it was funny because she sent me a message ahead of time. She's like, I'm taller in real life. So And she was. So, well, there you go.

There you go. Living up to the hype. That's important.

Yeah. That's important. So were you all there when you had the, uh, the, the business cards that said doctor?

I wasn't. That was after my time. Um, they, I think it was initially named to be like WebMD. So I spent more time than, uh, more time than I would have liked explaining, well, WebMD used to be a thing that people did on the internet and now it's LeadMD and We're not changing the name because we have great brand recognition. So anyhow, let's, let's talk about you.

Yeah.

And now I work for Lean Data, so I'm constantly juggling trying to say the right name every time.

Right.

Yeah.

That's so funny. Okay. So we're going to spend today talking about the concept of buying groups. So I'm not sure that our whole listener audience will be familiar with that, but it's a term that they may be familiar with if they're familiar with what was, I still think of as Serious Decisions, but now part of Forrester. So we wanted to talk to you because not only are you incorporating that concept into some of your products, they are, you're also leveraging it internally. So it might be good. Maybe we could start with a definition. So Alice, do you think you could start, maybe give us a definition or your definition and we'll kind of go from there on what is buying groups?

Yeah, happy to. So buying groups, I mean, the great thing about buying groups is it's as simple as it sounds.

Right?

A buying group is a group of buyers. It's that the naming is really quite on the nose. I think it's helpful to think about buying groups in the context of marketing trends decade over decade, because that's really what we're seeing with buying groups. That's why we're talking about it now. That's why it's gained in popularity. You know, roughly 20 or so years ago, when marketing automation was really just getting started, you have Marketos and Eloquas and the, you know, the Maps of the world or are being born, that really started with demand generation, right? And realizing like, oh my God, we can send an email to 1,000 to 100,000 people all at once, right? This is amazing. We've never been able to do this before. Demand gen was born. That got messy really quickly. So the MQL came out, the MQL being the marketing qualified lead, really focused on just the lead itself, which is really, really small. And a lot of problems kind of naturally came out of that, right? And so 10 years later, as people sort of fall out of love with that first blush of marketing automation and demand generation, that's really when you see account-based marketing start to rise in popularity and take over and say, okay, demand gen and the MQL did not solve all your problems. It did not make you $1 million, $1 billion. Sales and marketing are still fighting about the same things that they've done since the dawn of time. Too bad, so sad. Let's talk about account-based marketing. The MQL is so small. It's just a person. It's a tiny That's not good. We need to go big. So we're going to talk about the entire account, right? And we're going to market to the account and we're going to work with sales on that account. And you'll have the last, you know, 8 to 10 years really focused on the accounts. That's, you know, Sixth Sense is born at this time. Demandbase comes in, you know, Engagio at the time. You have all of these companies that start really trying to expand to fix the problem that that there was in the MQL.

Mm-hmm.

And then really what we've seen now, we're about in that same sort of trend timeline, 8 to 10 years later. ABM solved some of those problems, but not all of those problems. Sales and marketing are still fighting about the same thing they've always fought about. And what we've seen is that, okay, if the MQL is really too small and account-based, maybe that's a little too big just going for the actual account. Maybe we should start talking about the group of people in the account itself. So it's not doing away with people. It's not doing away with accounts. It's saying within an account, anybody knows that if you are trying to sell anything with any type of meaningful budget, you're selling to multiple people, right? It's very rare is a day where you get on a call and it's one person and they're the stakeholder, the decision maker, the budget holder, and the executive champion. It's just not gonna happen. So buying groups is all about understanding who those people are within the account and then finding out a way to scale And operationalize that so you're not relying on salespeople tracking all that information down, uploading that data into Salesforce, and then effectively maintaining that data because, you know, we all know that's not a realistic solution. So I really like the Goldilocks analogy. We're really going for a just-right approach with buying groups that really incorporates both the people of MQL, the accounts of ABM, and centralizes it a little bit more in Salesforce where people are really living and breathing anyway.

Yeah. I mean, I think when I first heard about it, it like, it was intuitively, it made sense, right? It just, the idea that like, yes, that when you're buying something substantial, you're typically not doing it on your own. Um, there are lower cost things where, yeah, I've been able to like put it on a credit card or even do it through a PO or something like that. But it's usually, you know, I have a certain amount of authority. Once I'm over that, which usually happens fairly quickly, then.

Mm-hmm.

You have to get in, get other people involved. See, my dog agrees. Um, and, but, but I mean, it seems to be too obvious, but I think with what, like, you talked about Salesforce, to me, like, there's already a place in Salesforce to capture this stuff, right? It's called opportunity roles, right?

It's really, it is. But how many people, how many sales organizations do you know have contact roles filled out for the entire buying group on the opportunity?

It's quickly approaching zero.

Right. It's like saying, what enterprise organization or any organization has clean data in their system? And it's so obvious, but in a way, buying groups is really just the technology and the process kind of catching up to how this has always been done. Like, salespeople hear about this and they're like, yeah, no duh. This is how I've been selling. This is how I make my commission. This is This is literally what we've been doing since the dawn of time. I'm so glad you finally figured this out. And one, it's like, yes, thank you.

We're glad to be here.

And also, the technology wasn't there to be able to build and scale around that. And that's really what we're doing at Lean Data is we are building the technology that takes the motion that your very best sales reps do, and we automate that so you can scale it across all of your reps who maybe don't have those Exquisite habits as one might like.

Well, and I am pretty pragmatic about it, having been in sales myself before. Like, when I think about— whenever I've talked to salespeople, they get the idea, right? Buying groups make sense. And I go like, yeah, if you put this stuff into Salesforce this way, it's extra work for you today, but down the road, right, it's going to help us better target and help you find your next account. So, I think your idea, like the Goldilocks analogy, is an interesting one. Like, you want to make it as easy as possible for them. So, like, what was the driver of building this into the Lean Data product set?

Yeah, yeah. I'll take first pass at that. And then, Christine, I think your perspective on this is really going to be important. But, I mean, I think all good products come from really acute pain.

Right?

And there has been a lot of pain in trying to understand who orgs are selling to. You know, I'm not going to bore you guys with the speech about these economic times, you know, and unprecedented moments like the ones we've been going through and are going to continue to go through. But what we, what everyone knows, what has become common knowledge here, it's a cliché at this point, is like, it is Harder to get deals done, especially in the B2B SaaS world. It is harder to get deals done. Everyone is asked to do more with less. You have a lot, a lot of people involved. And so we have a lot of organizations who are trying to figure out how they can scale and how they can make sure when they do get in those sales cycles, they are closing them really, really effectively. And so we saw that coming. from our own clients who had already been turning to us and saying like, hey, we think this is something we can solve with lead data. Can you help us get there? And we heard it from the market as people were saying, hey, wow, the way we've been doing things really doesn't make sense for the way business is and the way that, you know, the economy is really demanding. And those 2 things combined, you know, from a product marketer's perspective, it's like, yeah, jackpot. You guys, there is pain here that we can absolutely solve.

Sure.

Yeah.

Christine, any thoughts from you on this too?

Oh, so many. Um, I just, I want to touch on a few points. One is Alice made a really good point, and, and the why now is the technology. It always is. Not really that much has changed. I've been in the industry a long time. We've always been selling to people. People have always been buying. It's not— if you sell to the enterprise, it's not one person. One thing I'll add is we always say it's all these people working together to buy from you. Sometimes they're not working together. Sometimes they're working in silos at an organization, right?

Sometimes I've been in situations where I felt like I was working against people internally as a buyer.

It's true. It's true. So there are a lot of nuances to the people that you're selling to. There are multiple people, and it's the technology that really is the catalyst for these changes. And I think people aren't gonna just say, oh, I'm just gonna do buying groups. I'm just gonna do ABM. I'm just gonna do MQL. It's gonna be a combination of these things because I swear, and it's no, it doesn't matter how good you are at any one of those things. They're gonna say, I still need more. I need more MQLs. I need more accounts. But I'd love to be in a place where they say, I need more opportunities because you've given me so many good opportunities.

I need more.

That is the ideal state.

Absolutely.

So what makes inData in a position to bring this product to market? That's, I think, the last question you asked. And it's when I buy software, and I buy a lot of software, I look to see how the vendor came to market, because their underlying architecture is usually a really good indicator of where they're going to be good and how they can layer on additional products. in their roadmap, right? And so, because linked data is all about relating data in your system, wherever it comes from, whether it's external data, you know, company size, internal data, data you only know, tickets opened, health of customer, products purchased, we just relate all this data. We're positioned to take that data and do really interesting things with it. And Signals are great. All this information is great, but kind of separating out the noise from the actual interesting moments, the signals that matter, Mm-hmm. is one of the things that's gonna allow LeanData's product, or really any of the products that you look at for your buying group, that's one of the things that's gonna be really important to you. Not how many signals I have, it's how many important signals do I need? Which signals do I need with which people? to close a deal. And that's gonna be the differentiator. That and clusters, clusters of people. What people? When? What does good look like? That's the difference.

Yeah, it's interesting that you bring up like the timing for the technology. It reminds me of a couple of things in my career. But one of the things is, the other thing it's making me realize is we've had several guests on in the last 6 to 9 months, most, basically most of this year, where we've, we were talking to them about sort of emerging go-to-market approaches that are different. And I think it's, it's part of the same symptom, right? Like the ability to get into these accounts and sell to them has been a challenge. What's really interesting as I think about it is some of these just feel like they're actually not new concepts, right? The idea of a buying group, Like we said, intuitively obvious.

Right.

The idea of using partners, if you're using a partnership-based motion, right? They all make sense and they've all been used over the past. I think it's the ability to do those at scale that seems to be the thing that's really happening now. So it's really, I mean, I'm just putting this all together in my head as we talk, but one of the other things, and maybe Alice, you touched on this a little bit, is that you mentioned sort of the link to this in ABM, right? Which ABM has been a trend here, what, for, I think, I think you give us the history. Yeah. 8 to 10 years. So, um, like how does it rise and fall? Yes. Yes. Yes. So how does, because I think when we talked before, you said like, this is linked to ABM and you touched on it, but can you go a little deeper on that?

Yeah, absolutely. And this is something that I think is really, really important. You know, consultants and analysts, and I say this as a former consultant and with all the respect in the world, right? They love to say things like, oh, this is dead. You know, MQL is dead. The funnel is dead. You know, ABM is in a coma. There's all of these really provocative phrases that people like to say around these major trends and major motions that we have in organizations. And I get why. But usually the people who are talking about that, you know, you have— there's a little bit of an ivory tower vibe there, right? Like, it's great in theory and it's great if you're building a company from the start, day one, with absolutely no data or history or past motion, like no problem. But for the rest of us, you know, living in the world where we report up to the board on our MQLs and we have a full team that's running ABM programs that has some really impressive metrics that go to it, it just, it makes no sense to say, you know, all of this is done, we're now focused on this other thing. If anything, it kind of, you know, feeds into the stereotype, right, of chasing that shiny object syndrome, which, you know, marketers can perhaps be known for. So when you look at buying groups, I think what it really is when it's done right is it's an extension of your ABM program, right? I don't see— I see a lot of companies doing this successfully. I don't see any of them doing it as their sole motion. It is a hybrid approach where you still have your demand gen efforts going. In many, many cases, they're still collecting on and reporting on MQLs. They're developing out those parallel metrics so you can start to see how those things are going. You're still saying like the account still really makes a difference when we're talking about selling, right?

Absolutely.

The account and where it is and how it's positioned and how you can market effectively and what campaigns you can run against that account. Like Those are core marketing tenets that aren't going anywhere. Buying groups just says we are gonna go a level deeper in that account to connect and understand the people in a more systematic way and in a way that unveils context. And I know that can sound maybe a little bit, you know, ethereal, but what we're, what we're saying is we wanna pull together all of this data. And at this point, with all of these different techs Like, there's a lot of data out there.

Oh yeah.

We are going to aggregate all of that data. We are going to put it in the right place, in the right format, so people can start understanding more about who they're talking to, or crucially, who they're not talking to, right? Who's about to come in and sniper their deal, right, as they think it's about to get signed, um, and where they might exist elsewhere in the company, right? Where do you have somebody who's a decision maker in one open opportunity and they might exist as an influencer in another opportunity, right? you're gonna have a different conversation with that person if you understand what other conversations they're having that you might not be a part of. So all of it, I think, is connected. I don't think anything in particular is, is dead really. I think it's just a reimagining, which is something that we always have to do, right? We have to kind of—

Mm-hmm.

We have to reimagine. And I think we have to get really, really lean and really nimble. And I think that's where our approach with buying groups come in because you can, Plug into the existing tech stack and you can harness all of that data and you can leverage it in your existing account-based strategies to really amplify what you're already doing and what your salespeople are doing well.

Yeah, it feels like it's, it's not really a separate thing. It's something that augments what you're probably already doing is the way it sounds like. Christine, any additional Thoughts on all that? Uh-oh.

Yep, there it goes.

This is what happens when we're doing a real live recording.

Yeah, I do think it is not just turn it on and forget about the old things, because change is not like that. That's not how it works. Fine, you can have it all. You can have MQLs, You can— where you send over leads. You can have ABM where you send over accounts. And you can have buying groups where you send over opportunities. Everyone loves leads, right? They like demo requests.

Oh, of course.

You know, that's not gonna stop.

We all like hand raisers of whatever sort.

Yeah.

So, but MQLs overall, they don't convert very well.

Yeah.

Unless you're like, who'd I talk to the other day? Oh, Cognizant. Because all their MQLs, the only way you can MQL is if you raise your hand. So I was like, well, that's a different kind of MQL. Um, so will that go away? You know, no. But if, if I send you an MQL versus an opportunity with the contacts already on it and a call scheduled. It feels different. And people are gonna be asking for that more than they're gonna be asking for MQLs. The shift is gonna be like, where's my opportunity? Not where's my demo request?

Yeah.

And maybe the, if a demo request comes in, I already today, I already create the opportunity and send it to 'em. So, so for them, when they, when, when they say a hand raiser, that is an opportunity. So there were small things that we've done to be on this buying groups path. And we can talk a little bit about that, like what does that change look like and how am I selling it internally? But I don't think it will go away either. I think it's— we can have it all. Why can't we have it all? Yeah, it's easier to measure if it's in opportunities though. I will say, if everything goes to one object, my Salesforce brain is very happy, my reporting brain is very happy, my metrics are easier, my conversions are much easier to calculate, and It's much easier for people to work in one space, but I'll automate anything. I don't care.

And I think what you just touched on there is really, really important is talking about the opportunity, right? And one of the reasons why buying groups has been such a challenging thing, I think one of the reasons why the tech hasn't been there in the past is because, of course, you know, as head of RevOps, right, or perhaps as CMO, Love to have everything in the opportunity. Love to have everything set up in those contact roles.

Yes, I do.

Who does not love it is sales. Does not love people operating in the opportunity, and for good reason, right? That is their golden opportunity. That's their source of truth. That's what they're, you know—

That's how they get paid.

That's how they get paid, right? That is the most profitable thing. So I absolutely understand, like, the the bone-deep no that comes full-throated from the sales team when marketing's like, oh yeah, and we'll just update your opportunities and it'll be so great. And they're like, absolutely not, please stay away from everything that we're doing. And I think we have to take that really seriously because nobody, nothing is gonna get adapted, right? If you're fighting with people across the board. I think sales has some very good reason to be so hesitant, you know, to let other departments go in and tinker.

Mm-hmm.

in this object that is so crucial to their business, to the organization at large. And so what we've done is we've created the ability to build out these buying groups in a container, in a custom object container that's pre-opportunity. So you can build in Salesforce. So think of a buying group object in Salesforce that marketing can start, you know, your MQL is your buying group of one.

Mm-hmm.

Right? And then you work with sales and you say, okay, how many people would you want in this buying group before you would want to jump on a call with them? How many people would you need to have? And who are those people? You know, and sales says, you know, I want 6 people. I don't think you're ever going to do that. You know, get me 6 people and make sure the decision maker's on the call and then I'll pay attention. Right? And now what marketing has is they have an understanding of who those, those people need to be, what those roles are. They have the ability through all of these new, through all of these technologies and the stack that they were already doing to find all of those people through lean data, we have the ability to associate them into this unique container that we can track so that we see exactly how we've been touching them and what they've been doing and what they're engaging in, all of that fun contextual great data. And then when it gets to that point, we can turn to sales and say, great, here it is, it's ready to go. And then that is something that sales can then create the opportunity and associate, and that can be done manually, it can be done automatically. But it gives marketing the ability to play in that sandbox without saying, I'm going to stomp on your sandcastle to make it happen. We have 2 sandcastles, building a bridge between them, if you'll let me belabor that analogy.

Sorry, now I'm thinking about the beach. Yeah, it's interesting because I've had similar experience, but I think I just want to clarify something. So I think you said like, oh, we need to understand the 6 people. It feels like it's really, you want, like, if we say we need, we typically win when we have these 6 roles involved, right? And whoever those people are. But it also feels like maybe it could be a self-validating model, right?

Mm-hmm.

So we think based on historical data that we win when we have these 6 people, but what we find is, okay, so Now we get a new opportunity. We've got the 3 people and we actually win, right? Is that change the model? I see Christine's like nodding. I'm like, yeah. Okay.

Yeah.

All right. So, all right. Yeah.

And I think there's, there's reporting that comes with it. Right. And I mean, this is like anything else. There's, you're going to need to run models off of it. You're going to need to track performance. You're going to need to see how these things go. That's what our, our clients are doing. Typically what we see with buying groups is people will run a pilot. Or a smaller rollout with one product or one segment. And then they start seeing results and they start to see those numbers. And all of a sudden, people start paying a little bit better of attention, right? Because your conversion rates start going up. And in some cases, you know, the total opportunities are going up in pretty large numbers. And so once that starts happening in a small space, Then you start getting the buy-in, right? A lot of what this is, you know, from my perspective is building back up in some cases marketing's credibility with sales.

Yeah.

Having that executive champion, that executive stakeholder. Ideally, it's the CMO and the CSO are working really closely together and the CSO is kind of blessing all of this. And you have, you know, we have a product that will run all of the analysis on what those numbers should be and what those titles are. Many organizations might already have that. And then you report on that. And it's like any other program, right? You iterate once you have the data.

Yeah, no, it makes sense. Maybe shift gears a little bit. So you've been developing the product. And then Christine, I think I don't want to use the previous sort of analogy, but you drink your own champagne now, right? So yeah, you're using this internally. How Like, how do you approach this kind of stuff? Like, when you're— because this is not just a technology change, right? This is a— it's not even a process change. Like, it's kind of a mindset change, like Alice talked about, right? You have to build this trust along the way too. So, just how do you approach that when you're doing something like this internally?

This was— this is kind of funny. It's— we are not unique. I had to sell our own product internally. So, I— The thought was, you know, who is the best fit for buying groups? Is it enterprise? Is it commercial? Is it anyone selling to the enterprise? Is it anyone who has a product that sells into a buying group? What does that look like? So we talked a lot about that and, you know, finally convinced them, like, let, let me be our guinea pig. And And so I had to pitch this internally to our internal stakeholders and convince them that I wanted to do the historical analysis that we provide for our organization and— or for our customers on our organization. And so I found the internal stakeholders, sales, marketing, and our partners guy and our CEO. and found our partner, OpsFocus, and we ran the Blueprint. It's— the product's called Blueprint, but we ran the historical data, and we're just about to go through the analysis. And so, for us, the thought is we will run, like Alice said, this just for our enterprise segment of our business. I do think we're going to find that the commercial business is going to start wanting it too. When I start sending opportunities to the enterprise, they're going to want it too. So, we are just in the middle of our rollout. And it is interesting because what we're trying to do is not only drink our own champagne, but gain empathy for the change management parts of the process. And not just the change management from a people, but what does the system need to do? What changes am I going to need to make to the system. Now, thankfully, we've already done some of the things that I think set us up for success. And I presented on this and I'll share some of the things that I think anyone can do today to kind of set the groundwork for buying groups and really just for, I don't know, preparing for the— sometimes I call them the robots. I don't know what that robot will be.

Yeah.

Whether it's AI or your buying group, Or whatever next piece of technology there is. So you've got to know who you're talking to, right? And so one of the gaps that I do know is that regardless of what engagement tool you're using, there are people that your reps are talking to that are not in the system.

Oh, 100%.

The biggest— when I ran, I end up using Nectar. You can— there's lots of vendors out there. What I found actually were that our biggest offenders were our customer success side of the business. And which is interesting because one of our bigger churn risks are loss of a point of contact. And if I don't even know who that point of contact is, I don't know when they've left. And I do use software to know when people leave, but if I don't know the person, I won't know that they left.

So, right.

So you're, you're one of your risks, and I don't know how buying groups will play into renewals. That's, that's the next piece of where I want to go with buying groups is not just new business enterprise, maybe commercial, but definitely renewals. Because keeping up with relationships and existing accounts is actually harder than it is in the buying and the selling process because you're actively engaged where the renewals is a whole nother thing. So not only know who you're talking to, know who you don't know.

Yeah.

So scrape all that data and while you're at it, get all of your activities and meetings. But, but beware of duplicates because you're going to get it from something like Outreach or Salesloft. How do you get those other pieces without duplicates? And do you need all of the data or just the— is it an email and the subject? You probably don't need all the data and attachments. Be careful what you bring in, but bring it in because if you want to know who you're talking to, you gotta kind of know when you're talking to them, who you're talking to, what type of what it is. So that if it's meaningful, you've captured it so you can repeat that type of— you have that data to understand what meaningful is. You don't need— you probably don't need all of the text. Yeah, that's one thing.

So can I interrupt real quick? A couple of questions that popped into my head. Let me do the first one. So one, I don't think we talked about this. Who do you— what— who do you roll up to, Christine, in the organization?

I roll up to the CSO.

Okay. So you're on this. Okay. All right. Um, second question, when you're, so I don't know how you approach this. So like when I've done pilot stuff and I like the idea of like finding a small group, building some success and some momentum, right? Snowball effect, if you will. How, like, did you go after people who were like actively receptive to it? Or did you go over people who felt like they were almost antagonistic to the idea first and try to convince them? Because I've done both and made both work, but I've, I've, I've, the second one is harder, but I found it ultimately more successful. So.

This time I went after the people who were well for it, to be honest.

Okay.

Um, I, it's not that I had people who were against it, but I was just like, hey, we have this opportunity. I really want it to be ready by 2024. And I think we have an opportunity in the enterprise. And, you know, I don't have a lot of people saying no when it comes to our own product internally, but the thing was more about time constraints.

Mm-hmm.

They're like, it's Q4. Do you have the time? We have a lot going on. We have a lot of marketing initiatives. We have a lot of sales, you know, planning to do. And I kind of looked left, looked right, and was like, let's do it. Because I really—

Make it happen.

And yeah, the historical analysis is really no lift for me. It's very little lift. But I think the readout is going to put us in a really good position to give them enough information to make the right decision. So it's the— and some companies offer this and some don't. But I think I don't have enough information to make a good recommendation without the historical analysis. And I have enough data for the robot. So, eat the data, give me the readout, and we'll go from there. So, I needed data to be really compelling. And so, the thing that they worried about was my time. And for me, they didn't need to know, but it really didn't take any time for me to run it.

Interesting.

Okay. So you talked about this historical data, like, like what types of data? I imagine opportunities was a part of it, and if you had contact roles, that would be part of it too. But what, what other things did you include in that analysis?

Yep, opportunities, contacts, leads, tasks, events. If you have OCRs, OCRs. I think so.

Let me grab it. Campaign data.

Yes, campaign data.

You're right.

Got it. Was there anything like that you actually intentionally excluded that you, like other people are like, we really should include this? I'm curious, like throwing a curveball at you here, but.

I generally exclude Some marketing stuff. Email sends, like lists. I exclude any type of email ins that are— and I do this for all of my analysis— email ins that are automatic replies, out of office.

Sure.

Anything that I do a lot of— I keep data that's duplicate sometimes, but I mark it as a duplicate. So duplicate data. What else do I exclude? That might be— I don't exclude unqualified people because they may not have been unqualified at the time. So generally I exclude unqualified, but for this analysis I did not exclude unqualified. So that's, that's one of the reasons I don't always delete unqualified people from the system. If they have any relationship to anything that is relevant, I keep them. It's part of my data destruction policy, but So, so in this scenario, I would analyze unqualified where normally I wouldn't.

Interesting. So Alice, as you're taking this out to customers, are they doing like, are they using sort of a similar pattern of stuff they're looking at?

Yeah, so we have 2 different, 2 different offerings that we have around buying groups. And one is called Buying Groups Blueprint that does essentially what Christine just itemized. And so we would do that in the same way, right? We're, you know, we're already going through that process at our organization, the same as we would roll it out for anyone else. And that's providing them with not only what your buying groups should look like, what those meaningful events are, you know, the titles, roles, or personas that you would want to base your buying groups around, but also more of a holistic assessment of overall readiness. Yes, between the system, your tech stack, your business process, the change management, kind of a holistic approach to getting started with buying groups. So it's same, same, but in some cases we have, you know, a number of organizations that have, you know, really robust data science departments, frankly, and really robust ways of analyzing the data. That's not something that they need the support on. Some people do just— Because it's easy to build out as a proof of concept to kind of really jumpstart the motion. And so, you know, in some of those cases where they're using our product, it's gonna look exactly as Christine just identified. And for those who already have their information, you might see some variance, but across the board, it's pretty much always the same of, you know, really going back to just the obvious fundamentals. You have to know who you're talking to. You have to know what they care about. You have to know how they want to digest information. You have to know the role that they play in the sales cycle you're in.

That sounds a lot like personas. So yeah, it's a little bit of personas.

It's a little bit of attribution. It's a little bit of, you know, full cycle reporting. It's none of these past trends in marketing or past things that have just kind of the names have gone out of vogue, but none of them ever really Right.

No, I think so. And that's why I'd be like, this sounds very familiar if you've done any of that kind of work.

Yes.

So, so Christine, you've done this analysis or you're in the final stages, I guess, right? Has there been any, anything that has surprised you about it, right? Like, were you like, have you been able to say, oh, this opportunity, we really have, we have this one point of contact, but we really need these other points of contact. 2 or 3 or 4, whatever the number is. Like, what kinds of interesting things have you uncovered that you might not have otherwise expected?

Not yet, because we're just about to do our readout. But what I will say is we know that multithreading works. This is kind of a little off topic, but I do want to make sure I cover this because Multithreading is super interesting, right? And not because we don't do it, but because we don't pay anyone to do it. And I thought this was interesting in that I was talking to an organization the other day and they said they pay their SDRs on multithreading.

So just, just for my own edification, maybe our audience, when you say multithreading, what do you mean?

Making sure that they have multiple people at the account and paying them To reach out to more than one person on the account. And so what we did, um, 'cause I don't know exactly who yet, um, but I'm gonna approach it in 2 ways once I know the exact who. Um, I started automating bringing in the right people on the account. So I think I'll know soon exactly who those people are. I think I need 2 RevOps, 2 marketing ops, depending on the size of the company, could be 1 or 2. If they don't have it, I send it out to Six Senses or User Gems and I pull in those people and add it on. Now I don't pay the SDRs today by multi-threading, but I'm looking into it for next year because we know And again, maybe I'll automate it through buying groups, but we know you have to be talking to X number of people and soon I'll know the number and soon I'll know the personas, but why not pay someone to do that if I know that it's going to improve the win rate? And talking to, it was, again, it was Cognizant the other day, the co-founder there, he said they actually, that's how they comp their SDRs on multithreading.

Hmm.

And they found it to be very successful, not even on, you know, number of meetings booked, multithreading. So I don't know the output yet of, of the analysis of the— it's going to give us a few things. It's going to give us the personas, the clusters that we call it, Alice, the persona clusters that are important. Not only it's what it looks like in a won deal and a closed lost deal. That's the other thing that I would analyze that I don't always Analyzing some of my reporting. I'm going to also look at what lost and bad looks like, the clusters of titles that make up each of the personas, the number of people in those personas needed to close deals, and the number of personas, and then figure out what we either automate versus what we have a human do. We're still gonna have humans. Yeah, at least next year. At least next year, guys, we're still gonna have humans.

So, um, big promises from Christine Maxey.

So that's what I do with the output.

AI is dead.

Big word.

That's the title of this episode.

So that's what I'm gonna do with the output, even though I don't have it yet, is, is really, um, focusing on Identifying the gaps and risks and closing them with automation and people. And, and if, if that moves the needle, I'm going to keep repeating automating, paying people, closing the gaps, and then hopefully rolling it out to the other segments, not only for commercial but renewals, which is super interesting to me.

Yeah.

And I think the whole concept of the SDR is a really Like we could probably spend another hour talking about it here.

Yeah.

It's super juicy. And it's something that I think is going to continue to evolve. I don't know that anyone has a nice, neat pat answer, you know, for what do you do in this environment with the SDRs or, you know, the BDRs or whatever you want to call them, right? This moving fully to this model, it's part of why, you know, as Christina alluded, there's such a huge change management aspect associated with this. It's fundamentally a large-scale process change across the entire organization that has comp impacts, right? It has real, real finances that need to be accounted for. And the idea of, okay, if marketing is putting together a buying group pre-opportunity that's ready to go to sales and start selling it, how does that work for the BDR? What does that mean? What are they getting comp on? What are they doing?

Right.

I think you're going to see it done in a lot of interesting ways. TechTarget, for anyone wanting more information, John Steinhardt has got a really, really good approach. He recently wrote a blog about it that's up on the Lean Data website. Palo Alto Networks, you'll see marketing is just working really closely with the BDRs. And when marketing fills that out for pre-opportunity, they send it to the BDR, and then the BDR is comped on building that out even further and doing those initial calls. So there's a lot of different ways it can go. And I think it's good that there's no prescriptive one-size-fits-all flavor to it, right? Because these companies and systems are so complicated. Anyone who says they've got the solution is, you know, selling you snake oil.

Well, I mean, this is what I always talk about as the sort of fallacy of best practices, right? Because like, it's not— I mean, there's not a one-size-fits-all place. I mean, it's just, there's too many nuances. And I think what I do believe though is that like these kinds of technologies, AI, whatever, like it's not— I still think there's gonna be a place for that human element no matter what. So in all seriousness, because I think it— but it will— people will need to adapt and it will change the nature of the work that they do, right?

Yeah.

And they need to be able to adapt to that. And if you can't adapt to that, that's— and in some ways it could be way more interesting, right? If you're, if you're spending your time Like, oh, now I know I'm not just completely throwing darts at a big ocean of people at this account. And I can target because I get specific people, right? I can imagine that being way more interesting and less, you know, soul-crushing if you're just doing that kind of outbound stuff. It is hard to do that and get hung up on and cursed out or whatever, right? So Well, why don't we do this? So we've covered a lot of ground and we're kind of tight on time here, but maybe like, can you give us a quick rundown? Like what's next, Christine, in this rollout?

The readout, which I'm super excited about. It should be— we already, like I said, we ran the data, so we should have it in the next few weeks while they run the analysis. Again, if you have your own data science team, you can do it.

I don't. Mm-hmm.

Have the luxury of having that. So I worked with our partner. And I plan, given that I can have it rolled out, the analysis in the next, you know, 2 weeks, I plan to have a proposal to the executive staff for a 2025 rollout for the enterprise team. And if, even if that seems too big for them to roll out, or if they're a little uncertain, I have 2 reps that are really anxious to, to participate, and I'm going to propose that. I know that everyone's going to want to do it anyway. I think maybe my biggest hurdle might be marketing. I don't know. I'm curious to see how this plays out.

Marketing will play well.

Not that it'll be a hurdle. They're going to ask me the tough questions. The questions of how are we going to report? What does success look like? What are the metrics that you're going to be able to provide for me to feel comfortable understanding month over month, year over year, week over week? Do we have historicals to understand data like this and that? So those, those are the things. We have a very, a very analytics-minded CMO. Who I think is not going to say no. He's just going to ask me the tough questions. Sales is going to be like, oh, that looks good.

You know, I think, I think they're going to see like good numbers.

Make my job easier.

Right.

Right.

And so, and so I don't think marketing is going to say no. I think they're going to ask me the tough questions that are going to make me think.

Yeah, I can imagine that.

They're not automated at all.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I can imagine coming, coming from a marketing perspective, how this would be maybe seen as maybe a little bit of a threat, but also I think it's a potential opportunity too. So I think it really depends on the details. Gosh, I wish we could go on longer because I think we didn't even cover everything we had hoped to cover, but this has been really fascinating to me.

We'll just have to come back on again.

We'll do a part 2. There you go.

There you go.

There you go. Love it. Well, thank you. So if there's anything, if folks want to keep up with what's going on with either of you or learn more about Buying groups, what's going on with lead data, what's the best way to do that? One of you go first.

Yeah, you can connect with me on LinkedIn, Christy Maxey, and there is a LinkedIn Buying Groups Leadership Group. Do you have that?

Really?

There sure is. Yeah. So likewise, connect with me. I'm on LinkedIn. It's a great, great place to be. Connect. Alice A. Walker is my URL. Pretty easy to spell. And then come join me in our buying group leaders group that I am a member of.

It's the name of the group is literally buying group leaders.

A lot of good people from, from all across different company sizes and industries and verticals. Lots of great thought leadership in there. Lots of great conversation happening in there. So yeah, if you want to learn more, you want to follow along, that's a really great resource, as well as, of course, you know, following along with what we're doing at Lean Data. And if you're interested, everybody loves a hand raiser.

That's right.

Amazing.

Well, we'll have to get that LinkedIn group from you so we can share it in the show notes.

Absolutely.

Great stuff, Alice, Christine. Thank you so much. It's been a great conversation. I truly do wish we had more time. So thank you again. Thanks to our audience for continuing to support us. As always, if you have ideas for a topic or a guest or want to be a guest and want to join us, reach out to Naomi, Mike Rizzo, or me, LinkedIn or the marketingops.com Slack group. Until next time, everyone. Bye now.

Bye.

Bye.

Thank you.