Using the Go to Network Motion with Mac Reddin

Speaker 1: 0:23

Hello and welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by MarketingOpscom, powered by the MoPros. I'm your host, michael Hartman, flying solo today. Mike and Naomi are both tied up. I think Mike is traveling to Adobe Summit, so he gives you a clue on when we recorded this in 2024. So let's get right into it. I am excited to talk to our guest today. Today I'm going to be talking to Mac Redden, who is the founder of ComSore slash Community Club, about go to network motion. So this is part of I guess we're calling it a sort of a mini series of sort of emerging go to market approaches and how they may affect marketing ops professionals. So, mac, thank you for joining me today.

Speaker 2: 1:05

Yeah, appreciate you having me.

Speaker 1: 1:07

All right, well, let's get to it. So I want to try to be as precise as I can about the language I'm using. We're saying go-to-network motion, but when you and I were first introduced, I was introduced to you as sort of an expert on community-led go-to-market motions. But when we talked you that, uh, the term you're using now is go to network, so maybe help educate those of us who are less familiar with what, like what do the two terms mean and how do you think of them as different? And, uh, you know why the change in terminology, if they're not so different?

Speaker 2: 1:43

yeah, I mean it's. I think, for starters, there's like a, I think, a big asterisk over this. I think b2b especially loves to just over-term everything and try to come. Everyone's trying to invent their own term and their own category and at the end of the day like Everyone needs an acronym, right?

Speaker 2: 1:57

Yeah, like the market decides what it is at the end of the day, right, and there's like no strategy is ever like truly unique. It's all overlapping and whatnot. But yeah, for context, we started about four years ago as a company building for this community-led growth motion and really the simple version of that is like it's putting community intentionally into your go-to-market process. Now we can sit here and talk about what community means or doesn't mean, and I think that's one of the never-ending debates. It's kind of one of the beauties and the dangers of the word community is it comes in many shapes and sizes and forms and things like that.

Speaker 2: 2:35

And ultimately we realized the transition for us happened. We realized we were trying to help companies measure their single community. This is something like oh, I'm doing community-led growth, therefore I have a community. But in reality companies are actually made up of lots of different intersecting networks, overlapping networks. Some might be called a community, some might not be. People debate is social media. A community Is my personal network. A community it's like yes and no and we can debate that till the end of time. So for us, gotonetwork is sort of an evolution of community led. It's almost an abstraction. A lot of the principles are the same and I'll get into the principles of GoToNetwork in a second, but it's without necessarily having the specificity of a tangible community.

Speaker 1: 3:20

Like I can go into this Slack space or this physical community or this you know forum or whatever, whereas network is a bit broader and open-ended, and intentionally I mean I think what I heard used to hear community-led, I would think, sort of an owned community, more than yeah, so the company that's trying to use that motion they're trying to build a community of you know, prospects and customers and others who care, but still managing it. I mean, I've been at a place where we talked about doing that and I think the risk there that I saw was there's going to try to be a lot of policing of the content that would be shared or used there and I think that was not a good thing. But that tends to be something that people get scared about.

Speaker 2: 4:15

Yeah, yeah. And community is hard and that's we could spend the whole rest of this podcast talking about the challenges of community and defining community. But the the evolved. When we say go to network, essentially it's essentially it's built on the premise that traditional go-to-market. I'm not going to say it's dead, but it definitely doesn't work the way it used to right.

Speaker 2: 4:35

The traditional predictable revenue model. The idea of, like I hire this many SDRs, I do ads, you know I do this many motions to get this many meetings to get this many deals this like direct hunting motion, which is what a lot of good market has been built on for the last 15 years. It doesn't work the way it used to right. It's like you need more cold calls, more emails, to get the same amount of meetings and that creates a vicious cycle and all this. So go to network is this idea. It's much more people first instead of account first, and it's based on this principle that companies have to build an inner network of people that they can get to the market through Partners, community members, champions, investors, advisors, influencer, personal brands, executives, etc. It's sort of like flipping the script where, if you imagine most companies traditionally, you have a company and inside the company you have people Almost like flipping that inside out, where it's like you're building this network around the company where, like you know, the the person at the company almost becomes more important than the brand.

Speaker 1: 5:33

Right, it's interesting. So I want to get back into sort of the, the some of the reasons behind things like go-to-network approaches and kind of the traditional if there is a traditional go-to-market strategy or approach and why it has sort of evolved. So I just want to make sure I understand. So go-to-network is sort of a larger model and community-led can be a component of that, especially if you're thinking about like owned community. But I mean, marketingappscom is a community of marketing apps folks and I know personally I've used that to not only learn specific things but also evaluate, say, technology vendors, Right. So is that am I understanding? It's part of? It's part of a network? Yeah, yeah, I think it's like.

Speaker 2: 6:21

The things I think of when I think of go to network is community partnerships, social selling, events, education, it's. It's really about shifting from a push model to a pull model right Ads, cold calls, emails you're pushing out to the market. You're basically going up to the door and be like, hey, Mike, you want to buy my shit, and then like, whereas this is more like we're creating things that pull you towards us.

Speaker 1: 6:43

Yeah, we're not doing the door-to-door encyclopedia selling or knife set selling or whatever Tupperware. So, okay, let's get into the traditional model. It's funny that you it's interesting that we've been doing this series with people and there's very much a theme that part of the shift in these different approaches is because people believe that the traditional model that is viewed as very linear, I think is really not the way that things happen. Correspondingly, we just had an episode recently with Rachel Squire.

Speaker 1: 7:16

She and I talked about the way does measuring the funnel in quotes I'm doing air quotes for our listeners here does that still make sense? And I think what we got to was there's this difference between how do you measure the flow of people in sort of a simplified model through your funnel, if you will, even though we all know that the reality of how people buy is very, very different than that. It's not that linear thing. Like people come in, they spend a lot of time, they do some research and maybe they come back, maybe they go away, right? So I is it that kind of thing that is driving the go I think, no matter how well it was working 10 years ago.

Speaker 2: 8:09

I think the B2B obsession with a perfect, linear funnel and perfect attribution was always a false quest for a thing that doesn't exist, even if you think you're measuring it perfectly, like dark social. It was never going to be this perfect, linear thing, but the system works, so people kind of ignored it and rolled with it for 10 or 15 years, right. Then there's there's things like cookies going away, third-party data going away. Ai is making this problem worse Cause, like I saw a stat recently and I don't quote me exactly on it Cause I don't remember the exact number, but it was looking at the amount of outbound touch points that buyers get over the last five years and it was like nine or 10 times higher. So you see 10 times as many emails, calls, ads, linkedin messages as you would have five years ago.

Speaker 2: 8:57

Ai is making that worse, so it's creating this vicious cycle. In a way, it's almost like an Ouroboros, right? It's like the snake consuming its own tail, where this quest for perfect attribution and automation and scalability created a very system that is actually devouring itself, because, as we automate it more, as we scale it more, as we make it more and more, more and more activities, buyers actually pull further and further and further back from the system, which requires us to do more automation and do more activities, which in turn makes buyers pull back, and it's like we've been in this sort of spiral for a while, and I think the last two or three years the cracks finally became apparent to a lot more people than it was.

Speaker 1: 9:36

Yeah, I think underlying all this raises belief that it's a volume-based game. Yeah, just like, the more stuff you shove out into the early stages of your funnel, the more that's going to come out. Your conversion rates are going to be consistent regardless of so.

Speaker 2: 9:53

I think all that is and that worked for 10 years in a zero interest rate environment where it was like you could do that show growth, didn't worry about profitability, and I just I can't remember the exact term I saw, but someone said growth at all costs is out, sustainable growth is in, and I think that's the difference is like this predictable volume game is very short-term minded, right, you're not worrying about the long-term implications, you're not worrying about churn, not worrying about will my company be here in 10 years? Because most companies for the last 20 years were built on the assumption they're either going to go public very quickly, die very quickly or get acquired very quickly. So who cared about the 10-year vision?

Speaker 1: 11:37

Yeah, no, I think all of that rings true and it's funny. Literally like an hour ago, I was talking to somebody about sort of a metrics framework that I'm working on and we talked about attribution and we both sort of agreed that attribution is still useful, but it you should not expect it to be I even hate to use the term right or accurate. Right, it should be used. It's useful as a directional tool. Right, are we? Are we? Are we moving the needle in the right direction? Are we hitting the right types of audiences? Are we underperforming here, overperforming there, right? Those kinds of things I think are still valuable, but it's probably been misused by a lot of people who are trying to be in quotes, right, air quotes again. Data-driven.

Speaker 2: 12:25

Yeah, I just said this to someone recently. I think this quest for perfect attribution, but also for, like everything has to be measurable. So people look it's like humans are so good at finding patterns where patterns don't exist because we love making things explainable. We love looking at me like, oh, look, I can prove that this system worked because this, and it's like I can't remember the example someone used, but there's like you can take pretty much any data set and you can make it tell the story you want to tell, depending on how you slice it, how you view it, how you want to tell, depending on how you slice it, how you view it, how you display it, data will tell the story you want it to tell at the end of the day and you'll mold it in your vision, consciously or not.

Speaker 1: 13:03

Well, I think of a couple of things when I think of data like that. Is that two things. One I've probably mentioned it many times here and certainly other places is Mark Twain's quote there are lies, damn lies, in statistics. Very much true, and if you don't know how statistics work, it's easy to fool people. The other this is totally out of left field, but there's a researcher on the study of happiness.

Speaker 1: 13:29

His name is Sean Acor and he has a TED Talk that kind of blew up. Maybe I can find it and post a link to it here in in the show notes or something later, but he he sort of was joking about in his research. Right, here's this pattern. He showed up a slight like pattern of data and and he goes I see these things out here. They're anomalies, I'm going to take them out right. So it's easy to sort of like have it, tell the story you want. And the sad thing is that's probably 10 years ago when they're like now. I think actually that kind of stuff we're finding is happening more often than not in research, but that's a whole nother topic.

Speaker 2: 14:02

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 14:02

That's a rabbit hole.

Speaker 2: 14:03

We definitely don't have time to go.

Speaker 1: 14:07

Okay, so you taught, we taught. We talked about community as sort of I guess, for lack of a better term a pillar of a go-to-network approach. You mentioned there's other aspects of go-to-network, so maybe talk us through what are some of the other things that you think of as go-to-network? Like, definitionally, what's included?

Speaker 2: 14:28

I mean partnerships, events, content, social selling, a lot of things that are putting. It's really like you're putting, you're putting trust basically first and it's authentic relationship and trust right. It's like the reason why a referral works so well is because there's trust. The reason why a partnership works so well is because there's trust. The reason why a community works so well is because the community becomes a vessel through which you build trust right. And it's like I think so many sales motions try to like it's like a vampire, you know, like the thing of like vampires can't come inside unless they're invited in.

Speaker 1: 15:02

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 15:03

It's like so many sales motions have assumed they're just going to open the door and they're going to be like hey, I'm here to sell to you and it's like I don't know who you are, I don't know anything about you. So a lot of GoToNetwork is really about you're trying to build human first trust before you get to the sale. You're trying to build systems that enable that sort of stuff to happen. You're putting people first, it's not account first. So, yeah, like the partnerships, social selling, all that sort of stuff plays into it. Community for sure, and it's actually I had someone recently when I was saying a similar thing.

Speaker 2: 15:35

They're like well, that all sounds like a marketing problem and not a sales problem, but you're kind of talking about it Like it's a sales problem and then the day it's like it's the same problem. Right, Marketing and sales are on the same team. It's a revenue problem. And all the best sales people that I know they have at least a little bit of their brain working like a marketer. Right, they are building their own brand on LinkedIn. They're thinking about content. They're thinking about educating their, their buyer. They're they have a marketing tilt to them compared to like a script following robot salesperson.

Speaker 1: 16:10

Well, and I I would argue that the when I think of salespeople that I've liked working with as a buyer, they're two very different ones. One is a person we bought multiple cars from at a dealership. I now trust him to tell me like, hey, this is not the right time, right, rachel's like you know things like. And I like now I'm like I go before I do anything. I go to him and I like, okay, well, this is like tell me what I should you think I should do or not do at this point, and it's usually been solid advice. So he's like to some degree, walked away from the short-term gain he might get for a longer-term relationship and we have now bought five cars, something like that.

Speaker 2: 16:46

Going to network is definitely a long-term mindset compared to traditional strategies.

Speaker 1: 16:49

Yeah, and then the other is a salesperson in Martech who I still think of to this day. I won't mention her name, but she was an early sales leader at Eloqua and I was trying to bring Eloqua on board and I not only did she invest a lot of time and just educating me, but I had I had at the time a supervisor who was had been burned by another vendor and was really challenging all kinds of stuff like little stuff, and she was with me the whole way trying to help answer all these questions. And I don't think I've ever seen anybody else invest that amount of time for what was, at the end of the day, a relatively small deal. And it still stands out to me as valuable and it's again that builds that trust that you're going to be there with them. So it's funny that I don't like. I do think it's not just a marketing problem. I've I'm surprised that people think that's a marketing problem.

Speaker 2: 17:47

Well, I think there is. There is still some of this like old school mindset of like it's marketing's problem to get a lead and throw it over to me as a salesperson, Right, which is you are.

Speaker 1: 17:55

you're 10 years out of date if you're still thinking that way like with a short period of my life when I was in sales. I mean, that was what I did. I did cold calling. I wasn't relying on yeah well, we didn't really have marketing, it was a as a consultancy and I mean I I worked my tail off to fight get my own leads right. I got hung on. I was doing the full life cycle right. I was doing cold calling all the way through trying to close deals.

Speaker 2: 18:21

Yeah, and there's a bunch of stats that have shown that reps who self-source perform better than those who just pick up what's put in front of them. I can't remember the exact number but it was like 40% or 50% higher performance than non-full cycle reps.

Speaker 1: 18:41

Okay. So I think in general, I like this idea of go to network. I'm a big believer in networks and the value of them. It's a buyer for sure, so I can see why they would be useful if you're a company trying to sell and leverage the networks of your employees and partners, etc. I'm going to throw one thing out, but I want you to poke holes at it and then also tell me what else I'm missing. But it feels like because there's got to be this, building trust takes time, right. There's got to be a culture that enables sales and marketing and the rest of the revenue function to be able to do that and probably correspondingly need, you know, customers to to actually get value fairly quickly once they do buy. So there's this, you know, onboarding component as well, but so like it feels like there needs to be a cultural component to this. For sure, absolutely so. But but what else is kind of needed to to make a go-to-network approach work?

Speaker 2: 19:34

I think, for start, it is definitely a mindset and a cultural problem to start Like no tool is going to solve this problem for you. I mean, realistically, very few tools solve problems without mindset. And people changes right and enablement changes and that's like the biggest scam in software ever is. People think software will just do it for them and it's like well, not really. Or like buying a hammer doesn't hammer the nail in. You still got to know how to swing the hammer.

Speaker 1: 19:57

Yeah, it may swing the hammer faster and just as inaccurately. Yeah, it might require less hits.

Speaker 2: 20:03

If it's a better hammer it might break less often, but, like, you still need to know how to hammer the nail Right. So I think that is the biggest thing. I think a lot of it is. I think a lot of the ways that sales and marketing teams are comped and structured is part of the problem too. Right, companies are built on this quarterly window.

Speaker 2: 20:22

And I'm not trying to say companies should throw out the window and I know that's a very unrealistic change to suggest but because, like, if you're selling like true enterprise software, there's a very good chance that your deal cycles are longer than a quarter, that your deal cycles are longer than a quarter. So how can you operate on a quarterly measurement basis when it takes longer than a quarter for a deal to actually happen, from marketing to lead to close, to onboarding, all that sort of stuff? So I think companies have to give at least some space to think and operate with that sort of long-term mindset. And what I've pitched companies is you know, once again, they're not going to change overnight, but they need to carve out 10 or 20% of their time to think with that long-term mindset or else they might not realize it this quarter, they might not realize it next quarter, they might not realize it this year, but eventually that short-term mindset will catch up.

Speaker 2: 21:11

And I mean there's like there's that stat I think it's Gartner or something only 5% of your buyers are in market at any given time.

Speaker 2: 21:19

So if only 5% of your buyers are in market at any given time, you can only probably sell to 5% right now. So your go-to-network strategy should be applying to the other 95% so that you're there when they buy. The other stat that I think is super relevant to that is that most buyers, at least in the enterprise software space, typically come with a short list in mind. By the time they're actually talking to your sales team, they've already narrowed down the three choices that are the finalists. So a good network strategy is really about getting yourself on that finalist list and at that point that's when a traditional sales process can be run. But so many sales teams are focused on opening that door when, like, buyers don't buy from salespeople, just opening the door right, they buy from referrals, they do their own research, all that sort of stuff. So the GoToNetwork is really the system to make sure you can be in the room to run a sales process when the sales process becomes necessary.

Speaker 1: 22:13

Right, right, it's kind of it's not getting rid. Of it's about building, building up trust, and it yeah, it's it. Trust is one of those things, like in any relationship, that takes time and it's hard, it requires work to do it and it's sadly it's relatively easy to undermine. Right, you can. You can lose trust points if you pretty quickly. So the more you have put in your trust bank with someone, the more likely you are going to be able to handle a setback.

Speaker 2: 22:47

Yeah, you actually have to give a shit to start, right, you can only fake trust so far, right, the salesperson who's like, oh okay, I'm going to be the trusted advisor, but like they're really just there to close the deal, Like you as a buyer, you're going to, you're going to see through that pretty, pretty quickly eventually, at least at least across the whole. So like it does require this, like individual mindset shift first Um and then the cultural shift.

Speaker 1: 23:12

That's a really good point. I think that's a really good point too. That that's a good point. I think that's a really good point too, bro. Culture is completely at odds with this approach.

Speaker 2: 23:39

Um the the commission breath approach, if you will.

Speaker 1: 23:42

Yeah, yeah, it's, it's interesting. Uh, okay, that all makes sense. So, okay, this is all great Theoretically sounds good. Any. Do you have any examples where something like this has had a you know been I'll use the word success, but it depends on how you define it, I suppose but where you've seen at least a positive impact on an organization in terms of their revenue growth?

Speaker 2: 24:06

I mean, I can see it on ourselves a hundred percent, just to use ourselves as an example. We so we pivoted from this community-led product to this more go-to-network product. So we kind of went quiet for nine months last year and then relaunched ourselves out of stealth again in January. But for the three to four months leading up to that launch we spent a ton of time basically investing in our network. You know, actually getting to know people, letting people get to know our people. Like we hadn't even launched our product. Nobody knew what our product was, it just had like a coming soon page on our website. But we were out there going to events, going to dinners, getting to know people, helping people out, all that sort of stuff also. At the same time we're learning right there's. You can't underscore that like absolutely I can't underscore that enough.

Speaker 2: 24:49

Like we're learning by talking to people, um, but we're talking about them in an authentic or with them in an authentic way. And we built this network of people that, before we even launched our product, before they even knew exactly what we were building, they liked us, they considered themselves fans of ours and I'm skimming over like a ton of details to give the high level version of this. But when we launched, we basically reached out to about 200 of these people and said, hey, like you've been a big part of the journey the last few months, do you want to be part of our launch on LinkedIn? And we had 140, I can't remember if it was 42, 48, but we had over 100 people who basically on our launch day, dedicated their daily LinkedIn post to talking about us launching. It was like 1.2 to 1.5 million impressions. We are still getting leads from that from end of January.

Speaker 2: 25:36

And it was because we went in this authentic approach, this long-term mindset, like you said, we were able to cash out of that trust piggy bank a little bit and people were willing to jump in and do things with us and do things, and it wasn't even just like they were willing to do things for us. They were like honored to have been asked to help us. Right, if I had just been like, hey, michael, you want to buy our shit? Hey, michael, you want to buy our shit? And then I was like also, do you want to help me promote my product? You'd be like, no, no, I don't right.

Speaker 2: 26:04

but like, think about the car salesman or the eloquent salesperson you mentioned, right, they, you're talking about them because of their approach to selling, their approach to building relationships. So so it's like I, just, whenever someone asks me, for example, I'll always end it with look at your own buying practices, look at the salespeople that you respect, look at the salespeople that you're buying from. I guarantee that they are selling in this sort of mindset, even if you're not realizing it.

Speaker 1: 26:30

Yeah, absolutely Well. And there's obviously the counter points, right, the ones that don't do that and how you feel about them, right?

Speaker 1: 26:37

they're the ones yeah, it's, you know how often you get bad sales outreach or pushy sales people, or like you get stuck on a sequence and you're like this company has contacted me 32 times in 60 days like holy shit, this is insane well, like when I or when I've told by the time I engage with a sales team and I'm asking for a demo or something, I'm like I'm really asking for asking for a demo, I don't want your bullshit, you know, slide deck about your company, cause I already done my research. Right, when I say I want a demo, give me a demo.

Speaker 2: 27:03

So if you've got 30 minutes with me and you start talking about this other stuff, I'm probably going to just stop it and say you know what I really want to see that I've seen nobody do yet and this feels like something that a marketing ops person could do or should do. I want to see like a choose your own adventure demo form. I've never seen a company do this. Where it's like like you should, I should be able to say, hey, I'm requesting a demo and I want just a demo. I've already done my research or I'm just kicking the tires. I need a salesperson going to kind of talk me through the whole thing, like more discovery call. Or like I'm ready to buy, just give me pricing info.

Speaker 2: 27:37

Like I have never seen a demo form that lets a buyer self-select into what stage of the buying process they're actually in, and then you get like cause, if you're at that later stage, you're like I'm ready to buy, just give me the demo, give me pricing. I don't want to get an SDR discovery call, Like I'm past that, as you mentioned. Right, but actually I'm going to make that our demo form. That's what our demo form is going to be. By the time this episode comes out, I'm changing it.

Speaker 1: 28:01

You've got a couple of weeks. That's about it.

Speaker 2: 28:03

All right, have a fun experiment.

Speaker 1: 28:05

No, I think that's really interesting. I mean, well, I mean, you can talk about it. I would love to see these vendors also offer short-term paid options for people who really want to evaluate it Right, as opposed to a free. A free pilot for two weeks is usually not enough, Right, whether you can't, you can't and you're usually not getting something that's real and I, like I'd be a big fan of, like I'd be willing to pay a little bit to to truly evaluate something, and then I've got skin in the game, and but that's a whole separate side of this.

Speaker 2: 28:36

But that would be my but basically, at the end of the day, what we're talking about here is like putting the buyer's experience first right. So many sales and marketing processes feel like they're designed for that perfectly predictable funnel and they're designed for a manager to sit and look at pretty measurable graphs. They are not designed for the human buyer who's actually interfacing with that.

Speaker 1: 28:57

Totally, totally agree, and I mean I think if, yeah, I suspect there's a lot of people in our listening audience who are looking for a job, one of the things they could in marketing ops and one of the things they could do to offer a company who's looking to hire somebody, is actually to go through that process as if they were a buyer for that company and talk about what that experience is like, cause I don't think a lot of people do pay attention to that. The the. The example I like to use is I think there's still this big push in a lot of places to do nurture streams, right Email streams, and I don't have anything per se against those. What I don't think is happening out there is people are signing up to get you know a piece of content and going I cannot wait until they send me that next email.

Speaker 2: 29:43

Nobody's, nobody's out there. You're like, if anything, you get the second email and you go, oh shit, unsubscribe Didn't mean to get that.

Speaker 1: 29:49

Yeah, I mean and and I unsubscribe to many things just because I am curious to see what people are doing and all that, but it's not. I think I'm definitely in the an outlier in that, because I think a lot of people are very quick to do that kind of thing though Unsubscribe.

Speaker 2: 30:05

I'm like, if I, if I don't unsubscribe quickly, my inbox becomes unmanageable very quickly.

Speaker 1: 30:10

Yeah, I mean I I've had to pay to expand the storage for my email just simply because I don't do that. Yeah, so that's but it's, it's helpful for me anyway. Okay. So you mentioned marketing ops. Um, I'm gonna bounce around here a little bit, maybe, but so, since our audience is primarily marketing ops, rev ops type people, maybe some marketers, you know, one of the things we want to get to is like okay, well, if so, I gave one example right, if you're looking to get hired with a company who is thinking about go to network, right, how can you, how can you advocate for that? How can you support it? What are the things that you think marketing ops teams can do to support this kind of approach to the, to the market?

Speaker 2: 30:53

I mean, I think a lot of it is. There's so many ways. I think so much marketing technology that you know marketing ops teams might be owning or implementing has taken the human out of the loop. I think so much marketing and sales tech has, subconsciously or not, trained us as sales and marketers to push button get value. Push button start a sequence. Push button get enriched data. Push button, push button, push button.

Speaker 2: 31:16

It's like it's taken the art out of it and it's taken this like, once again, the understanding that, like not everybody, like a one size fits all automation is very unlikely going to work. There's times and places for it, for sure. But I think that's one thing. I think so many I think putting themselves in the buyer's shoes and actually like, go, go, fill out your company's demo form, like, pretend you're a buyer, see what the experience is actually like, like, really reflect. When you're going through a buying process, you should be looking at what do I like, what do I not like, what's good, what's bad, and then taking that back to your own company and be like oh shit, like I hate this, why are we doing this? Like, if I hate it, why would our buyers like this, right?

Speaker 2: 31:53

Um, I think also, just like putting people first, most sales tools, especially, you know, for the contact we're talking b2b world here they are account first. Right, I only put you in my crm because you're at a company, I don't put you like. Like there's this idea like how can you structure your data and your tools to actually enable your company to care about relationships long term? And it's like right, because, like, think about tech, like user gems or even what we're building with Bronto, things like that, where it actually focuses on the person. Right, user gems is like oh, this person changed jobs. Like there's bits and pieces of tech out there that are starting to enable sales and marketing teams to think at like an actual people relationship level rather than an account relationship level. And that's where I would be looking if I were trying to set up new flows, new tools, new systems, new analytics that think about supporting this sort of mindset shift.

Speaker 1: 32:48

Do you think any of these also have and I'm putting you on the spot here any of these tools that can? So I love the idea. First off, let me back up. I love the idea of knowing where I'll call them good customers have moved to, where where there's they're moving to another company that is not currently a customer, or that kind of thing. I think it's a great like source of of potential revenue. What, what? And what I don't know is if there's any tools that can help identify for, like, I don't even know how to put this the quality of the relationship with the person where they were a customer. Right, how strong is it? How long has it been? Would they be an advocate?

Speaker 2: 33:29

I don't know if you are unintentionally doing the perfect tee up for me, because that's literally what we're doing.

Speaker 1: 33:34

I am not, I am not. That is not intentional at all. So there you go, take advantage of it.

Speaker 2: 33:41

So that is, we're trying to figure out like the actual like. Like, if you know, cross beam, right, like our partnership tools that look like oh, I'm partnered with your company, what accounts do we both know? What we're trying to build is essentially not what accounts does our company know, but what people does our company know. Not what accounts does our company know, but what people does our company know oh, our executive knows Mac really well, or this investor of ours knows this person really well, or this customer of ours knows that person really well. Like we're trying to build like a relationship intelligence tool. We joke that like we're putting the R back in CRM because CRMs are really not relationship managers. Like, ironically, like they're structured note-taking tools and management tools.

Speaker 1: 34:17

They're not like marketing.

Speaker 2: 34:18

Automation platforms are not really about automation either exactly because we're we're trying to build like, what would an actual relationship manager look like? That puts people first instead of accounts first. Um, I will say, hard as shit problem to solve. Yeah, um, it's. Uh. I think part of the reason why people have always fallen back to this predictable revenue model and account-based model is because it's a lot easier to measure, it's a lot easier to understand. I put this in, I put a dollar in and get $2 out. What we're talking about is a little bit like I put a dollar in, it gets buried for six months, I don't know where it goes and $3 pops up in a different place and I think it's from that dollar, but I don't really know. It's like it's a much, you know, it's a much more realistic path and it's it's sometimes hard to build.

Speaker 1: 35:03

Yeah, it's interesting. I literally just this morning was listening to a different podcast, as really like more of a CMO focused one, where they were talking about how do you communicate the, how do you communicate the long-term value of a marketing investment, particularly if you've got a long-term sell? That's a high dollar value, and the analogy that was suggested was something around investing right. So if you put a dollar into your 401k now, right, it's, you get the. You don't see the dividend this year, it's years from now. And likewise, if you pull investing from your 401k now, it doesn't affect you this year, it affects you down right, it's years from now. And likewise, if you pull investing from your 401k now, it doesn't affect you this year, it affects you down right. So there's this, and I think that rings well with the people who tend to be the ones who stop things right CFOs and CEOs who are familiar with the financials. So I don't know if I still am noodling on whether or not I've totally bought in on that, but it's as good as anything else I've heard.

Speaker 2: 35:57

I love the analogy of of hunting versus farming right. I think a lot of sales and marketing in the last few years has been more like hunting right.

Speaker 2: 36:03

You're like and yeah hunting for a bit of a gruesome analogy might get you your meal tonight, if you're successful. You might not be, because we all know like hunting is. Maybe it works, for me it doesn't, right. Um, whereas like what we're talking about here, the long-term mindset is like planting a garden right, you got to plant it out a bit, you got to make space for it. You got to plant it. You got to nurture it, you got to tend to it. It might not pay off today, but once it does, it's healthier, it's cheaper, it's tastes better like than going to the store and buying vegetables. So so it's like this mindset of gardening versus hunting.

Speaker 2: 36:39

Yeah, it's renewable, it's more sustainable, right? Once again, if you go and you shoot all the deer in the forest like oops, tough shit, you can't grow anymore.

Speaker 1: 36:47

Right, it's interesting. Okay, so it sounds like for marketing ops kind of going back to that question, I think it's a matter of, you know, looking for these new kinds of technologies that would enable really understanding those complicated interrelationships of the network you know, through your different stakeholder groups. It's funny because I feel like I mean probably 15, 20 years ago, I remember some tool I feel like it was on top of like Facebook, but something like that. That like did try to do a visualization of your, your network, right, yeah, to x number of degrees out, and it was interesting, and then I think facebook shut it down, like they wouldn't it was a party thing, but it was great, like it was actually really interesting, and I'm surprised that hasn't.

Speaker 1: 37:35

Maybe that's what you all are doing, but we can a little bit people have tried different iterations of it.

Speaker 2: 37:40

I think part of it is like you know this, like timing is part of it. I think also honestly, if I had been trying to pitch the market we're building now, four years ago, nobody would have given a shit, because it's like the old way of doing things was working right. The pain of needing a new way to do things or a better way of doing things wasn't there. Nowadays I can't tell you. Often I talk to a CRO or a CMO and they're like Mac everything we do isn't working. The system we had two years ago it doesn't work anymore. Right, we have no idea. We have literally no idea what to do.

Speaker 1: 38:10

Right, yeah, we're not meeting our. You know, we're, we're, we're predicting our revenue X quarters out and we're not hitting you know yeah.

Speaker 2: 38:19

And they're like their board is setting an arbitrary goal which filters down to the CEO, which filters out of the CRO, which filters. And they're like I've just pulled a number out of our ass. Basically.

Speaker 1: 38:27

Right, yeah, um, so something just popped in my head that I want to go back a little bit about talking about the trust component, and so this is. It just occurred to me that something I've talked about in my role as a head you know, heading marketing ops before with some marketing leadership teams is that part of what we should be doing? And this is I didn't even think to call it, you know a network kind of thing. But is you know what we should be doing with marketing is earning the right to ask for Be a vampire.

Speaker 1: 38:59

Yeah, yeah. And so I mean, is that, does that resonate with this kind of go-to-network model as well?

Speaker 2: 39:07

Yeah, my favorite model or visualization is like is the push versus pull? Right? Instead of trying to push out to the market, you're trying to pull the market to you, which is effectively earning the right. You're making them want to hear from you. Right? If you think about the best consumer brands, right, they're described as cult-like Apple, nike, right? People like wait in line for those products. Like, is a Nike shoe better than an Adidas shoe? I mean someone might hear this and like come, like you know, knock on my door and want to argue about it.

Speaker 1: 39:33

It people are religious about it, for sure, right right and b2b brands.

Speaker 2: 39:37

Just there's exceptions, but as a whole they don't actually build a thing that people want to come be a part of. They're always pushing out to the market. They're always saying like hey, hey, buy our shit hey, instead of like well and they're describing it in what I mean.

Speaker 1: 39:52

My big pet peeve about b2 most b2B companies is you go to their website and, unless you know what it is, they do, like if you came into a sort of you would have no fucking idea what what they sold.

Speaker 2: 40:04

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 40:05

Like cause they, they, it just doesn't, they don't use a language that connects in it. And I think this this is a little bit of a downside and I'm sorry to all my friends who are content and creative type people, but I think there's a point where you get too clever. Yeah, when you try to be a quote thought leader, it's to the point where, like now, when I hear like we want to be a thought leader in our space, like so I, I do we really.

Speaker 2: 40:31

Who was it that told me this? Simon bowen, I think it was a few weeks ago, told me this thing. He said everyone wants to be a thought leader, but what you should really aim to be is a sage, because the thought leader is about me. A thought leader is like I'm the hero of the story, right. A sage is the trusted. Once again, trust coming back.

Speaker 2: 40:49

And he used the analogy of yoda. Right, luke lands and meets yoda and he's like what, this little old green man is like the master who's gonna teach me stuff, stuff. And he like tries to beat him and Yoda like kicks his ass and he tries again. Yoda kicks his ass. He's like oh, I like Yoda's like this wise old man who's guiding him to become the hero, like like Luke becomes the thought leader essentially in that analogy.

Speaker 2: 41:09

But like a thought leader is very me centric. It's like look at me, look at my thoughts, versus the real goal as a company is like if I'm selling to marketing ops people or I'm selling to sales people or marketers or whoever, insert whoever you're selling to, your goal as a company should be the trusted voice that's going to guide those people to get promotions, get hired, make more money, save time, and somewhere along the line I think B2B forgot right, like the end of the day, the reason we sell things to other business people is to make money, save time, get a promotion, succeed at work. Whatever it is, you're a guide for those people, not a thought leader. And there's this weird, this trend right now with B2B influencers, where everyone's like, oh, I want my CEO to be famous on LinkedIn because that'll drive things, and it's like, yeah, it does work short term. But I think I just, I don't know, it's just the power of words, but I just, I love the framing of like be a sage and a trusted guide rather than a thought leader.

Speaker 1: 42:05

Yeah, well, and I think there's a place, there's a handful of brands out there and people will know who they are. Probably that a part of their brand image, I think, is they're they're serious, but they're also fun, right, they're not. They're not too, they're not. They're not so serious. They can't poke fun at themselves, they don't. They don't assume that they're the only player Like, and I think they try to add value in a in a way that is not not trying to talk down to people. And I think those kinds of brands are ones that I'm interested in and I think people follow them even if they're not a customer, and that's a huge value that is hard to quantify.

Speaker 2: 42:48

I got three leads referred to me this morning from someone who's been following my content and our company for the last nine months on LinkedIn. They will likely never be a customer of ours. They don't fit, they don't work in the industry. That makes sense for us, but because we built a brand that's like fun and approachable and something they want to be a part of. That's the thing is like B2C brands that succeed. They create something that people want to be a part of. Like the brand transcends product product Nike, apple those examples again. Whereas think about Red Bull. Actually, one of our internal things I said a few months ago to our team was I kind of want to be the Red Bull of B2B marketing. Whereas I think about Red Bull, they make half their revenue comes from what started out as marketing initiatives for them. Their marketing initiatives got so good and so interesting that they actually became moneymakers themselves.

Speaker 1: 43:42

It's so funny you bring up Red Bull, because I have three teenage boys and we were actually talking about Red Bull the other day and how all these crazy things that they sponsor that have absolutely nothing to do with energy drinks.

Speaker 2: 43:57

Yeah, like nothing, not even just sponsoring. There's a Red Bull soccer team. Red Bull are the Formula One champions, right, they're not even sponsoring anymore. They're actually like starting to partake in the sports and push them forward and make money. Like what started as marketing actually became profit for them, and I love that lens of like my marketing should be so good that it could on its own make money, even if I didn't have my product to market behind it.

Speaker 1: 44:24

Right. Yeah, I mean, I don't think everybody can do that, right, there's probably some of them.

Speaker 2: 44:28

No, that's very aspirational, but it's a mindset again.

Speaker 1: 44:32

Right, but I think the point is right. They well it required another thing that I think most marketing leaders don't get, which is they don't get the benefit of being able to allocate some of their budget towards things that are either really hard to measure especially you measure in the short term that don't contribute to especially net new acquisition in the short term, that don't contribute to especially net new acquisition but they certainly don't have stuff that most marketers don't get. The benefit of saying I'm just going to try crazy stuff that I think is going to have long-term benefit, but I'm not like. You got to trust me that it's going to help and if it doesn't, fine. But and I'm not talking, you know it's like in the 10% of your budget, right, hold it for-.

Speaker 2: 45:16

I think every team and every company 10% of their budget and time should be put towards experimenting and trying immeasurable things. Whether you're a product team, trying a new product idea, whether you're a marketing team, trying a crazy marketing stunt, whether you're a sales team, changing and trying a strategy that might not work at all Across the board, 10% of your budget and time, no matter who you are, no matter what team you are, no matter what industry you're in, should be spent on learning, iterating and trying new stuff.

Speaker 1: 45:42

Yeah, and I, and I mean I, I think I think it was Kyle Lacey who I first heard this say, cmo that we had on our as a guest at one point, but he talked he was the first one I heard Like he just that's what he does and he says like like I'm going to do stuff and we're not going to measure it, period. Right, he's earned the right to be able to do that. But I think more marketers could do that in this era. I think a lot of marketers want to.

Speaker 2: 46:06

It's their managers who need to give them the space to do it. To be fair, True.

Speaker 1: 46:12

At the same time, I think some of this be some of the think. Some of the responsibility for that being more of the norm should be borne by marketers. Oh yeah.

Speaker 2: 46:22

It's a shared responsibility, but it's easy for me to sit here and say that every company should spend 10% of their budget trying new things. When I'm the one who decides where our budget goes in our company, it's very easy for me to say that. So, I'm very well affected.

Speaker 1: 46:41

Marketing. People might listen to this and go. I wish I could do that, but no way in hell with my manager, right, yeah, no, I no, I think that is the reality, but I, I'm a big believer that mark a big part of marketing's challenges and there's definitely a lot of pressure on cmos, right, who are getting displaced, and in some large brands right now, that part of this is their like, their, like, their own doing right, they've, they've failed at what they should be good at, which is telling a story.

Speaker 2: 47:03

Yeah, and you know, telling a story is not. If you try and tell a story, that's perfectly measurable, you're probably telling a shit story.

Speaker 1: 47:09

Yeah, or, or, if you're not, yeah, anyway. So that by itself is a whole another topic. But, um, but let's, maybe let's wrap this up with you know, you're in this, you're in the space, you're doing it yourself, you've got a product. This can enable it what you know how and it sounds like good based on your description of how you you launched. But like, how are you, like, what's the reception in the marketplace out there beyond sort of your own products in terms of the idea of doing this go-to-network approach?

Speaker 2: 47:40

So bringing this back to community-led as well, one of the reasons that we started pivoting was that when we started shifting from selling community-led to community people and selling it more directly to CMOs and CROs, we always got hit with like interesting, but what do you mean by that? It was like the word community was once again just so confusing. So I was like, right out the gate, sales and marketing leaders seem to get the concept of go to network much faster. They understand it right out the gate. I don't have to educate them quite as hard because, like, what we're talking about is really a bunch of building blocks that people already know. It's just making it more of a forefront of your strategy rather than a secondary part of your strategy, so it's not really teaching you anything fully net new in a lot of ways, or there's always at least some element of it that's recognizable and they can latch onto, I would say, my reactions that I've gotten from the market. It's a third, a third. A third roughly About a third are like yeah, this makes a ton of sense, I'm in, let's do it. A third are like interesting, Like this could be interesting, I want to learn about it. And a third are like absolutely not. And that third are like they're very focused on using AI and automation to do more of what they already know.

Speaker 2: 48:50

I think it's a pretty common thing, right, when the economy isn't easy, you go back to 2008 or now, whatever. You kind of get two breeds of people. You get those who double down on what they know and what feels safe and you get those who go, all right, well, screw it, Might as well try new shit if it's not working anyway. So it's like you kind of get those two camps to this sort of thinking. But to go back to like the Ouroboros and the snake devouring itself, like I say this all the time, a lot of sales and marketing teams right now feel like Thelma and Louise right, they're in a car, they're heading towards a cliff, they know they're heading towards a cliff, but they're still debating how to make the car go faster. Instead of being like why don't we just like turn the car and try something different?

Speaker 1: 49:30

So it's interesting because my perspective is longer than yours and maybe a lot of our listeners in that than yours and maybe a lot of our listeners in that. To me, as I've had these conversations, some of it feels like stuff that was common 20, 25 years ago, with sort of new wrapper on it. I know it's not the case, because technology and all these other things are here at the same time. For sure, part of what part of what we talked about is like building trust is a like. It's a.

Speaker 1: 49:56

To me it's like, if you, if I, had a football team to build, american football, to be clear, yeah, right, I would probably start both on offense and defense with the line, right, yes, do I need skill players? But um, it's when my, when my kids go to the university of arkansas last year, they had arguably a great quarterback but he had no time to do anything. Right, the offensive line was a problem, right, and so, to me, like this, fundamentals of basics. So building trust, right. If you can't do that, it's going to be hard to do just about any approach, go to market, let alone. You know the what'd you call it? Like inviting the vampire in, right.

Speaker 2: 50:38

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 50:40

I mean it's like what's old is new again, right, I was like the sales leaders who started their sales career 20 years ago. They get it way faster. And it was almost like this reverse bell curve of like people who really only started their sales marketing career in the last three to five years and never really saw the 10 years of like relatively easiness they get it. The ones who are the ones heading towards a cliff and just want to make the car go faster. They're the ones who started their sales and marketing career 10, 12, 15 years ago.

Speaker 2: 51:06

And then the bell curve kind of comes back up again when you get back to like folks who started their sales career in the late 90s, early 2000s, where it's like like I spoke to a guy, spoke to a guy who's a, a sales leader at a, like a 300 person like prefab concrete company, like not the interview, and he's like, oh yeah, relationship based selling, like that's how we've always done it, and it kind of makes me think of like uh, you think about like, you know, like um countries like china or whatnot, where they skipped right to 5g, they skipped landlines and went straight to mobile phones. Right, because, like they never, they never had this like tech debt of like this is how we do things, so they were able just to jump straight into the new technology very quickly, versus like those in that middle of the bell curve. They've spent their entire career perfecting a marketing automation, sales automation, outreach, sequence-based world, so convincing them to change is significantly harder than almost the ones who are actually technologically further behind in tools and systems than that group.

Speaker 1: 52:05

Yeah, that does not surprise me that. That's the experience you're seeing being on that earlier end of being in my sales and marketing career. So well, hey Mac, this has been really really fun and interesting and I've learned a lot. So, first off, hey Mac, this has been really really fun and interesting and I've learned a lot. So is there, first off, is there anything that we like we wanted to cover that we haven't covered? You want to make sure our listeners hear from and then we'll go from there.

Speaker 2: 52:25

I mean we can record a whole other episode and I think I can touch on a bunch of good stuff.

Speaker 1: 52:29

Yeah, if I'm sure, I'm sure Well, so, so with that, uh, if folks do want to learn more about what you're doing and uh, you mentioned it, bronto is that. Did I get it right? Yeah, like what's going on with that, like how what's the best way for them to kind of learn more about this? And or, yeah, I mean it's uh, it's brontococo.

Speaker 2: 52:48

bronto like the dinosaur. Speaking of, earlier you said, brands that are fun and don't take themselves so seriously. Our logo is a dinosaur and we love that pretty heavily. Yeah, there's lots of. You can find me on LinkedIn. My name I think I'm the only Mac Redden on LinkedIn, so it's pretty easy to find me. I'm always happy to just like, shoot the shit like, truly, truly like not from a sales perspective. Anyone just wants to ask questions about, go to network or get feedback on an idea I'm. This is the stuff I think about all day day and I love thinking about it. I love talking about it, so I'm happy to be a resource for people.

Speaker 1: 53:18

Well, it's true to the true to the brand, right?

Speaker 2: 53:20

So it's the only way to do it Well.

Speaker 1: 53:27

Great, mac, this has been a lot of fun. Uh, thanks to all of our listeners for continuing to support us, providing us good feedback and support. Thanks for all our guests. Thanks, mac, for joining me today, and we will talk to everyone again soon. Bye everyone.