Preparing to Steer Through a Sea of Uncertainty - John Buten - Revenue Today - Episode # 052

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Sales, marketing, and RevOps. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale yourself and your company. Revenue Today is sponsored by Rev Genius, and we're on a mission to bring inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals in the world. Want to shout out our sponsor Demandbase. Demandbase is smarter GTM for B2B brands. They help marketing and sales teams spot the juiciest opportunities earlier and progress them faster by injecting account intelligence into every step of the buyer journey and orchestrating every action. For more information about Demandbase, visit demandbase.com.

Hi everyone, and thank you for joining us today in our webinar, Market Segmentation Strategies for Steering Through Uncertainty and Finding Growth in 2023. My name is Iris Zarecki, and I'm Director of Product Marketing here at Explorium. Explorium helps data professionals in the go-to-market team create the best segmentation, targeting, and scoring solutions. Our platform combines the world's best data sources in a single place so that create disruptive go-to-market programs, like discover every business that meets your ideal customer profile, like creating the best segmentation and scoring new leads and new accounts as they come in. I'm very happy to have with me today our guest speaker, John Buton, a principal analyst at Forrester. John, I will let you introduce yourself.

Excellent, thanks, Iris. Thrilled to be here. I am a principal analyst at Forrester Research in our portfolio marketing practice, and so we cover many technology domains as well in the Forrester Decisions new product line, many different role profiles, and provide support around a lot of different business practices. So I work with product marketers, industry marketers, and portfolio marketers at a range of companies. as well as people in demand marketing on how they can define better go-to-market strategies.

Great. So glad to have you here with us today, John. In the webinar today, we'll try to help you plan for— prepare and plan for 2023. What that means is, as we all know, the economic uncertainty is making it slightly different to plan this year. But as companies get ready for next year, they need to reprioritize their market segments and identify the ones that are— offer a bigger opportunity for a company. And external data can provide these real-time market insights that companies need in order to focus on the segments that will actually provide growth. So in the— as you can see on the agenda here, John will kick us off and talk a little bit about presentations and segmentation strategies for finding growth opportunities in 2023. And I will follow up and try to show how the right data can help take that segmentation to the next level and really find that growth that everybody is after. And of course, we'll finish by a Q&A session at the end of the presentation, but feel free to submit your questions right now, and we'll try to address all of them at the end of the session, and those that we can't, we'll get back to you after that. So with that, let's get started.

Terrific. Thanks, Iris. So it's the— it's almost November of 2022. And so we're all in the thick of 2023 planning. At Forrester, we do a series of planning guides every year to help people plan. And this is really hard to do this year, more so than ever. I mean, I don't think I've ever seen so much uncertainty in my career or my lifetime between inflation, between recessionary pressure, what's going on with the war, with politics. We wrote these reports in July, and thinking about January was really hard. And it's just amazing that here we are almost in November, and there's not a lot more certainty. So how are we supposed to do planning in this kind of uncertain environment? Well, we want to plan for that uncertainty, for one thing, and there's also certain things that we can be more certain of and plan around. Like, we know that some of the underlying trends that we're seeing in the marketplace are going to persist. Most importantly, the change to remote work has really changed the whole B2B buying process, and we're not expecting remote work to go away. in 2023. So we really need to start adjusting ourselves to that. When we polled chief marketing officers on what they're thinking about for their organization, this is top of mind for them. So the number one thing that they were focused on is addressing changing buying behaviors and understanding those buying preferences are one and two. So that's top of mind, all of this change, all of these ways that customers are buying has changed, and they need to respond to that. So between the changing buying behaviors with the move to remote work, as well as all of the changing economic forces, our number one guidance for the coming year is investing in market insights, both to course correct and make sure you're not making the wrong assumptions, really understand what's happening in the marketplace, So as we look out at these changing economic conditions, you know, there's conventional wisdom about what you should do as you pivot into recessionary times. Like, usually we would say the travel industry is one of the first industries to see a decline. So if you're targeting travel, you may want to reconsider. But in the current economic environment, there's just huge pent-up demand for travel, and there's a shortage of workers. So they're not even able to meet the demand that there is today. I mean, they're offering double, triple salaries for pilots. So we're not sure that the economy is going to start impacting travel that drastically. So this is why we need market insights. Same thing with messaging. We often try to pivot towards cost-centric messaging. But in this environment, with the talent gap, I think efficiency messaging employee experience, productivity, those are still going to find a lot of resonance. Which way to go? Market insights will help. So that's one of our number one planning tools that we suggest to companies this coming year is to invest in market insights. And there are a bunch of others that you can read about in some of our reports. But I think that investment in market insights, that was part of the reason that Iris invited me here today because it really fits in with Explorium's value proposition.

Yes, I completely agree. And I forgot to mention that we'll be providing one of those planning guides, the planning guide for sales ops that Forrester issued, to everybody that attends this webinar. So stay tuned for that later on. And also, I wanted to comment that while I completely agree with you that 2023 is different, and there's so many unknowns here. I think that change and unknown is becoming part of our reality, and we need to be ready for that, whatever happens. So in RevCon just a couple of weeks ago, um, Rosalind Santa Elena talked about the future of RevOps, and she said that RevOps has to build the infrastructure to manage that change. And every time there is a change, and it doesn't matter if it's the pandemic or the recession or something else, it means that you're changing so many things in the, in the go-to-market. You're changing the strategy, you're changing the ICP, you're changing maybe the market segments that you're targeting. And the RevOps organization needs to be able to support all of that and pivot quickly to the new direction every time a change comes in. So it's not just about planning for change in the planning season, which is now for 2023. It needs to be like that throughout the year.

That's a great point, that the change is the new constant and to build this into your process. Absolutely. And it's also a good setup for where we're going to focus, which is market segmentation. And that's usually the first part when there's economic changes. There's winners and losers, or there's people that are struggling and people that are thriving. Based on those shifting economic certainties. So we need to recalibrate who it is that we're thinking about targeting. One of my favorite, one of the big marketing sayings is, I know half of my marketing is wasted. I only wish I knew which half. I think it was John Wanamaker is at least attributed for that. And that's what segmentation is all about, is figuring out which half of your marketing you really want to focus on. Where is the target audience that you can have the most success with? What we see when we examine how companies succeed is that this activity of defining target market segments is one of the best predictors of success. When we poll companies and look at high-performing organizations, those are companies that meet or exceed their revenue targets, they are nearly 10 times more likely to invest in defining target market segments and do those kinds of activities than are low-performing organizations that miss their revenue targets. Things like identifying the market opportunities, doing market analysis, those are also great predictors of success. There are lots and lots of benefits of targeting and segmentation. And we talked about focusing on those accounts that are most likely to buy. That's the principal one of getting super efficient. Also optimizing your market for where you can have the most ROI, you know, to understand, is it that our marketing isn't working as well as it used to, or have we just tapped out the market? Do we know the market size and have a realistic expectation of how much we can get? And then, of course, personalizing the message for the needs of the different segments. A great statistic I saw from the DMA was just simply on email marketing. that if you change and segment the subject line and the content for email messages for 2 or 3 different segments, you see double the open rate. Same thing with banner advertisements. The more segments you do, the better the results. You'll see up to 5 or 7 times the ROI on online advertising based on custom content for different segmentation.

Whoa, another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenuetoday.live. For all my friends in the Rev Genius community, thank you. It's been awesome to spend this time with you. Please DM me any feedback and ideas in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn. If you're not in Rev Genius, join us at revgenius.com. It's free and it only takes like 2 seconds, and you'll be joining a group of 27,000 revenue professionals strong. We've got it all. Looking forward to seeing you there. Catch you on the flip side.