Did your company have to pivot hard when COVID forced companies to pivot?  Layoffs, furloughs, remote workforces, and shifts in go-to-market strategies were deployed at breakneck speed as enterprises tried to navigate the quickest stall in global commerce ever seen.  The greatest companies in the world were forced to change course and accelerate digital transformation.

How did they do it, and what did these large enterprises learn that small businesses could learn?  Find out in this episode of The Summit where Josh Wagner, and Kyle Hamer discuss just how companies achieved agility and flexibility when things looked bleak.

Find out in this episode, Josh and Kyle discuss:

1. How outside sales is coping with COVID-19 changes
2. What companies are doing to train their sales teams
3. Where Account-Based Marketing is failing teams
4. Hidden gems of insight for aligning sales and marketing
5. Building a nimble go-to-market strategy for the future

TRANSCRIPT

 Kyle Hamer: (00:00)
Welcome to the summit, a podcast focused on bringing you the knowledge and insight for industry leaders. I’m your host Kyle hammer, and I’m on a mission to help you exceed your potential. As a sales guy, turned marketer, I’m passionate about building sustainable businesses. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned is that you won’t find an overnight growth scheme, short cuts is access or a way to hack yourself to the top. Nope. Success is the by-product of great relationships and we’re here to help you unlock that success. One conversation at a time.

Josh Wagner: (00:29)
So it’s a forced function now, right? Sales is like, okay, I can’t sell the way I sold. Maybe marketing can help me. And marketing has this, you know, marketing has been a support function in a lot of organizations for sales. So now it’s like, all right, let’s figure it out together. That’s a good thing. Right? We’ve got this reason to come together. Yes.

Kyle Hamer: (00:49)
So I’m, you’re chatting with Josh, Josh Wagner, my buddy. Um, it’s always good to see you, Josh. Yeah. He’s a lovely 70 and sunny there in Arizona today. Right.

Josh Wagner: (00:58)
70 would be great, but now it’s still over a hundred. Unfortunately

Kyle Hamer: (01:02)
You guys weren’t impacted by the fires at all. Are you,

Josh Wagner: (01:05)
You know, we had a few days last week where there was a noticeable haze in the sky and I do think it was fire-related the temperatures, there was a cold front that came through. I don’t know if you heard, but like last week, sick, Colorado got smelled and we had some residual effect of that where we dipped into the high nineties for a high, which was great given the hot summer we’ve had. But we did have some residual Hayes here locally, which was a little bit strange.

Kyle Hamer: (01:34)
I imagine. So, uh, for those of you who don’t know Josh, Josh is, um, man, he’s a MarTech warriors, sales guru, and champion of all things, technology related, at least in D what an intro. I mean, is there, is there a different way to say that? I, I, I’m not entirely sure

Josh Wagner: (01:52)
Whatever your perception is of me, Kyle, I’ll take it.

Kyle Hamer: (01:55)
Do you have a, look you a little bit to you on a pedestal and see if we can throw rocks at you and knock it off. Shouldn’t be too hard. I’m kidding. Um, today we’re gonna, we’re gonna chat a little bit about what COVID has done to the enterprise and forced digital digital transformations. What do you, what are you seeing out there? Like what’s, what’s going on in the world of lead MD and the conversations you’re having?

Josh Wagner: (02:15)
Yeah, it’s been super interesting. You know, I think the positive silver lining for a lot of organizations is that COVID became a forcing function. It’s like, Oh, there’s all these things that we should be doing. Fundamental things that, you know, we built buyer personas 10 years ago. And you know, there’s a, there’s a cereal box in our lobby that shows our buyer personas. We haven’t revisited those. We probably should, but let’s just business as usual. Status quo is easier. Well, when the status quo is flipped on its head and your business model, and a lot of cases gets turned upside down. It’s you start to think about revisiting some of those fundamentals. And that’s been probably the most interesting thing to me in certain. I can’t speak to every industry broadly across the board, but there are certainly somewhere and we’ll use medical device as an example, because this has been one that has come out of the woodworks to a certain extent, because think about their sales model, we plop an army of people in the field.

Josh Wagner: (03:17)
They go visit healthcare providers, they go visit physical therapy, places, whoever it is they’re selling to in the field, we build relationships with them. We bring them lunches and dinners and entertain them and talk to them about our stuff. Well, you don’t have access to anybody anymore. Extraneous people aren’t allowed into any sort of facility healthcare or otherwise. So your sales model, all of a sudden is flipped on its head. And it’s like, Oh, if I wanted to email, don’t forget every other marketing channel that’s out there. If I wanted to send one of my physicians in email, I literally couldn’t do it.

Speaker 3: (04:03)
Right,

Josh Wagner: (04:04)
Because so also think about the mentality of those field salespeople. And I don’t know how much exposure you’ve had to them or other folks in the audience have had to them. I was one for a short period of time. They’re very perspective. They think that that’s their book of business and they own that data. They’re very reluctant to put it into CRM or anything like that.

Kyle Hamer: (04:24)
Absolutely. I mean, that’s, the model is go hire a sales guy. That’s it. When you’re at that level, doing field sales or enterprise level type sales, if you’re selling outdoor face-to-face on premise, when you get hired away, they’re hiring you as much for your skill, as much as that is your, your relationships, right? Who do you know, who’s in your Rolodex? And it’s interesting that you bring this up talking about medical devices. I hadn’t even considered. I personally hadn’t considered that. Although in may, I was talking with a fractional fractional sales leader and we were talking about the forced migration and forced habit change for field reps who could no longer, you know, Hey, I’ve got this huge salary, I’ve got this huge expense account and this gigantic quota. And the only way I know how to sell is over a beer over an, a golf outing or at a dinner. And you’ve taken all of those things away from me now. What,

Josh Wagner: (05:25)
So a super interesting if you I’ll do a shameless plug for the love selling hate sales podcast, but I had a woman on you’ve been on, so it’s it’s okay. But I had a woman on named Amy Slater and she’s a VP of sales at Palo Alto networks, which has a massive field sales organization. They also have an inside sales organization. And she said that her inside team is literally teaching the field team how to function right now.

Speaker 3: (05:52)
Like

Kyle Hamer: (05:53)
It doesn’t surprise me one bit because it’s an entirely model

Josh Wagner: (05:59)
You have to learn. I mean, it’s, it’s a skill that has to be developed. And I don’t think many of the people that are, have been in the field

Speaker 4: (06:07)
While they have the,

Josh Wagner: (06:08)
Maybe the personality and some of the, some of the gifts they have definitely not developed the skill of how do I sell a multi-million dollar deal all over the phone or all over it. Yeah. It’s very interesting. Cause you know, you think you manage your week around your two big trips, right? So you plan everything for those meetings. Right. Okay. I’ve got one in Chicago on Tuesday and I’ve got one in, um, Iowa on a Thursday. Right. So my whole week is built around coordination of those two critical meetings. Well, now what, you know what I mean? Like what do you do? What does that coordination look like without those trips?

Josh Wagner: (06:48)
So that leads to some of the experiences. You’re having stuff that you’re seeing, where organizations are going, Hey, we need to change this. Do you think this is a permanent change? Or what kind of, I mean, before we even get to, is it permanent or not? What are the, what are the habits that are being forced to, to move or the processes or the, I mean, what does this do to your go tomorrow? Yeah. So let’s talk about some of the really good things, right? And we talked about fundamentals at the top, one of them, and I think we’ve had this conversation, even you and me before around sales and marketing alignment. So it’s a forced function now, right? Sales is like, okay, I can’t sell the way I sold. Maybe marketing can help me. And marketing has this, you know, marketing has been a support function in a lot of organizations for sales.

Josh Wagner: (07:32)
So now it’s like, all right, let’s figure it out together. That’s a good thing. Right? W we’ve got this reason to come together. And if we want to figure out ways to digitally engage folks or create a model where we’re more collaborative with marketing, we’re, we’re, we’re, we’re tracking and measuring engagement in different ways. Well, what does that look like? What are the motions that we want? What are we responsible for? So we see this almost organic sales and marketing alignment happen, which is great. And then to your point, what does the process look like to actually operationalize that? Okay. So now we have to design this thing that we never even really thought about before, but it’s cool. Cause we’re all getting on the same page. We’re creating a common language. We’re looking at how we’re measured. This is how I’m measured versus how you’re measured.

Josh Wagner: (08:15)
Does that make sense? Oh, maybe it does it. Let’s blow it up and find a thing that we’re, we’re both measured against. Right. So, you know, now we’ve got two steps down, okay. Now we’re going to actually start deploying and putting things in market. What are those things look like? Okay, well, should we maybe take a step back and figure out what do we really know about the people we’re selling to? So let’s look at our account segmentation. Let’s look at our buyer process and persona let’s look at those things. And what’s cool for marketing is they’re getting that Intel from the field from sales that they maybe never got before because they weren’t having those conversations. You know, sales is able to say, well, you know, my book looks like this. These are the people that I talk to. These are the influencers. These are the decision makers.

Josh Wagner: (08:59)
This is procurement. This is how a deal gets done. And eyes wide open. Now marketing is like, Oh man, this is great. So they can come together and figure out what does engagement look like? What does campaigning look like? Because you’re really getting back to the fundamentals of a go to market strategy, right? Count segmentations, personas, and all that kind of great stuff. So that has been a super positive by-product of people being forced to pivot, right? Pivot, how they access their buyers, pivot how they go to market pivot. However, however it is, they need to pivot and then more tangibly, one of the outputs we’re seeing, cause you know, it’s, it’s great to document and this and that, but a tangible outcome becomes this sales and marketing playbook. This go to market playbook where everybody has their roles and responsibilities outlined. You’ve got your, I do this, you do that.

Josh Wagner: (09:52)
This is when you do it. This is how you do it. And then, so you talked about tech stack at the beginning, right? So we live in a MarTech led world too, to a lot of cases. The missing ingredient oftentimes is operationalizing all that stuff in the, in the, in the technologies that you have, right? So we’re seeing companies finally take a step back and say, Oh man, I invested all this money in marketing automation and CRM and uh, intent data and whatever it may be, how do we stitch it all together and make this playbook work in there? That’s a great question. That’s how you’re supposed to implement those platforms. They are supposed to be an operational arm of your go to market strategy, but nobody really thinks of it that way [inaudible] come around, which is really, really cool. Technology is a terrible master, but a great servant. And when you, when you look at the way that a lot of great organizations leveraged tech up to this point, if they’ve not done the hard work that you’re talking about, it’s basically just a broadcast medium, you’ve taken billboards or newspaper ads, and you’ve digitized it. You’re putting it in somebody’s inbox with what you feel like is better, um, better delivery or vanity metrics. Right. But if it doesn’t really line up operationally with what you’re trying to do with sales in the field or, or otherwise

Speaker 3: (11:16)
Waste. Yeah.

Josh Wagner: (11:24)
Yeah. So it is, I would say that that end of NPR, end to end process of creating better alignment, getting back to marketing fundamentals and then operationalize it and technologies that has been either sitting there, maybe they don’t have, or just maybe not deployed in a meaningful way has been a super positive trend in terms of how the enterprises are pivoting, at least those that it’s cool to see that to, to take advantage of some things that have surprised you, that organizations either hadn’t done yet, or they responded in a way that you were like, wow, that’s very creative, very innovative. I wouldn’t have thought of that.

Speaker 3: (12:04)
Yeah.

Josh Wagner: (12:06)
One of the biggest things that I’ve been shocked by is how open organizations are right now to evaluating their account segmentations. Right? So what does our ideal customer look like? What are those segments of our customers look like? And how do we view them one versus the other, you know, who’s a good fit, who’s a better fit. Um, how do we distill that information down and give it to our sales organization or give it to our marketing organization or run a campaign? Um, in the past I’ve always heard we know who our best customers are. Right? We’ve got all that. You know, we, we know that it’s the finance industry and we need to hit the CFO and blot. Like it’s, it’s like, don’t, don’t talk to me about that. We know, we know, right. But then now I think companies are starting to realize that there’s this massive amount of data within the virtual walls of their organization.

Josh Wagner: (13:09)
They’ve acquired all this technology. None of it talks to one another. So what it’s doing is creating a disjointed customer experience. And the number one thing that companies are realizing is when people’s pocketbook attention, everything is at a premium. The customer experience has to be dialed like super dialed. So those fundamental things they’re realizing impact the customer experience. So just because you think the CFO at the top 200 financial firms is your target, what do you really know about them? What does the data tell you? What are they experiencing with you or without you, right. And starting to do deeper data analysis and letting data-driven insights combined with human intelligence, really draw some meaningful conclusions that then you can then apply to your customer experience. That’s been stuff that’s been super cool. And again, people realizing the customer experience matters and having a title of some marketing things that level of insight would have to tie back to more than just some marketing things. Right? For sure. All the more as you look at what the organizations are going through, are you finding that because they’ve, they’ve implemented a deployed products before, or they have certain elements in that this is a more rapid change in pivot for, for reassessing and going through this process or is it still just as laborious as it was the first time where you’re trying to peel back the layers of the onion to really figure out

Speaker 3: (14:46)
What’s the,

Josh Wagner: (14:52)
I think it’s rapid because decisions are being made more rapidly. The access to people who can make decisions is happening more rapidly. Like you and me both know like, uh, a marketing automation deployment does not have to be that hard. My company’s not slowing it down. Your company’s not slowing it down. You’re champions at that organization likely aren’t slowing it down. What’s slowing it down. Is the decisions that need to be made that inform how that then gets deployed. Right? So now you’ve got executives who need to make change and they know they need to make change and they’re buying into carving out the time to make decisions. So they’re supposed to do, is it a motivation piece this time around, or is it a distraction piece? You think there’s less distractions or more, more?

Josh Wagner: (15:45)
I think so. I even think about our business, right? And our CEO, when, when things started to hit with COVID, he took Swift action and addressed the company and said, we are going to focus on the things that matter in the business. Everything else that isn’t mission critical to the business right now, we’re going to put on the back burner. Well, if our little company is doing that, I imagine great leaders across the enterprise are doing similar things, right? So I don’t know. What’s more fundamental to your business and how you go to market. If we’re saying we’re making a pivot in our go to market, we’ve hired these people to help us make that pivot. We need your input and your decision-making prowess to help us do that. Yeah. We’re we’re going to do it. Right. So I think the, the minutiae of all the stuff we got bogged down in is getting put on the back burner and the core stuff is being brought forward. It’s um, it’s interesting how quickly those things like for the businesses forced in survival mode, which, you know, I don’t know when we talk about an enterprise level or even a large organization, how many people are truly in survival fight for your life mode? I mean, there may be cut backs and changes, but it’s not like many of them are looking at bankruptcy this year or is that going to be the motivating factor? It’s like, we’ve got to spend this money and correct this problem, or we’re going to be out of business next year.

Josh Wagner: (17:14)
I don’t think in the large enterprise, it’s, we’re going to be out of business next year. You know, they have a run rate and there, they build their business on a run rate. So that’s not it. But if you’re you, you always report to somebody above you. Right. I mean, that, that is what it is. So if you’re the CEO of a fortune 500, the board is your master wall street is your master and they have expectations and they are putting pressure on. And this is something I’ve learned over the last couple of years, that the pressure that comes down from the board and wall is like nothing that I don’t think I’ve ever really experienced. And it is crazy. Right? So, you know, you put, put in this oven right in this, and you’re a CEO and they want answers. And if you can’t come back with that plan to answer those questions, you know, the company might not go out of business, but you might not be the CEO any longer. So what the organizations that you’re seeing are these, these pivots, these changes, do you feel like they’re fundamental long-term strategies or they’re there for a period of time? Are they, you know, are they hard, REITs are hards, lefts, are they just there? Are they nuanced versions of what they were already doing?

Josh Wagner: (18:41)
Well, because they’re fundamental. I think they are. Long-term sustainable strategies what’s to be determined. Is, are they going to treat them as set it and forget it as they’ve done in the past and continue to optimize and iterate as time goes on. Right? So just because COVID lit a fire under their to say, we need to do something, once things start to level out and cashflow is good, acquisition is good and retention is good. We’ve got a dialed in customer experience for this period of time. Are they going to just revert back to the comfortable ways, which is very possible. We all do it. Like, you know, I’m guilty of getting comfortable as anybody, right? So I think that’s the biggest takeaway for me is this was a forcing function for people to get off their and do stuff, but will they continue to optimize and iterate on those strategies?

Josh Wagner: (19:39)
Because, you know, they may be good for right now, but if the market makes it ever shift where they’re going to be good again. And is it going to be a shift in a painful way that makes you iterate or is, are going to be shifted just like a bull market type of way. We’re like, great let’s rock and roll. Let’s, let’s start, you know, using the analogy, let’s start broadcasting 50,000 spray and pray for everybody in our database. So, you know, you’ve been doing this for awhile. You’ve seen, you’ve seen some market shifts, you’ve seen some changes, obviously nobody’s really seen anything quite like COVID and what, you know, what, what it forced, but are there things that you’re seeing large organizations do that smaller organizations could benefit from or vice versa? There’s things that you’ve worked with, smaller organizations on that you’re like, Hey, these are things that large organizations should really consider, especially as you’re going through a forced almost death March or Instapot pressure cooker changes. Yeah. Yeah. I think it’s just like, you know, smaller organizations always have that advantage of being nimble and being able to do whatever it is they need to do faster. And this is not a new concept by any stretch of the imagination, but with the way SAS technology has evolved, the internet has evolved. It’s just created that barrier to entry for the small player to get in and compete with whoever they need to compete with. Right. Um, and I think big enterprise level businesses have largely

Speaker 3: (21:21)
Figure it out

Josh Wagner: (21:21)
Ways to overcome those hurdles, right? To still sell against the small player and, or decide not to sell against the small player and say, this is our space. This is where we live. They can go live here and eat their lunch and make a fine living over there, right. Or say, you know what? We want that market. We’re just going to go buy them. So, you know, there’s advantages to both. Um, I think the enterprise is always going to be in that place where they’re going to let smaller companies figure stuff out. And if they like it enough and it’s worth enough to them, they’re going to write a check and go buy them. Right. I mean, that’s just what we’ve seen in the marketplace over the last 20 years, especially with SAS technology evolving the way it has. And SAS technology basically spinning up out of nowhere to scratch every issue that’s ever been imagined.

Josh Wagner: (22:12)
Um, some niches are worth scratching and some aren’t. And I think that some of the big companies that have the huge run rates and hold huge amounts of cash, uh, you know, the Microsoft and Amazons in the world, they are patients enough to be able to say, yeah, this little guys figured out a pretty good little market. I want that market. Here’s a check. I’m going to buy that market. You know what I mean? I just think that that’s kind of what the ecosystem is almost turned into. And I don’t know that that’s answering your question of what should the little guy learn from the big guy? What should the big guy gripper and from a little guy, but that’s kind of the evolution of how we’ve seen the market churn and cycle over the past 20 years.

Speaker 3: (22:53)
So

Josh Wagner: (22:56)
It’s almost like I was talking with Chris, uh, Chris Walker earlier. It seems to me like, this is, this is pretty fundamental. It’s almost business one, one, and you know, everybody’s got a hot take on, Oh, this is the, this is the hack. That’s gonna make it. Or this is the pivot. That’s going to change your life. But it really sounds like it’s enterprise or a little guy at this point, it’s a matter of getting back to the basics and just doing the blocking and tackling are the fundamentals of business. Your go to market strategy, aligning your sales and marketing team, looking for places to improve your operations, whether it’s on the financial side or on the, um, the go to market side,

Speaker 3: (23:39)
Rocket science.

Josh Wagner: (23:46)
No, it’s not. And I think that’s what makes it exciting for somebody like me, because as a smaller player in the consulting world, right? Those big concepts are reserved for Accenture and Deloitte and, and the big guys typically. Right? Well, they’re very good at those things, but guess what? Because they’re behemoths, they can’t pivot fast enough in some of these things. So it’s giving smaller consulting folks like ourselves who are used to working fast operationalizing things, not just coming with a strategy that looks like this 500 slide PowerPoint, deck a deck and saying, all right, here’s your new strategy. And everybody looking and saying, Oh man, this is beautiful. But now what? And, and those companies don’t answer the now what very well. So you, I think that’s where you’re seeing some of this comfort, you know, companies like yours or companies, my mind like mine, where we’re very nimble and we can say this is fundamental stuff, right?

Josh Wagner: (24:53)
If we can give you business fundamental sales and marketing fundamentals, but guess what? We could put it into action. And I had a Jeremy Donovan Donovan from sales loft on my podcast, and it was so cool. Cause he’s an admitted data nerd, right? Like he loves data. He loves analytics. Like he’ll mash everything up together. And he’s like, but everything I care about doesn’t mean anything, unless it helps somebody take action unless somebody does take action. And I think that’s the difference is people are realizing you can’t just spin wheels on stuff that isn’t actionable. And if we can put in, we can tangibly show that we can put something into motion quickly and it has tangible results. That’s going to yield something that people care about. Is this going to kill the, uh, predictive revenue model and the, the MQL Sal all the way to SQL process? Are we going to see the death of the normal or the historical sales funnel coming on the backside of this for enterprises?

Speaker 3: (25:59)[inaudible]

Josh Wagner: (26:02)
No, because you know, there’s going to be, so enterprises is an interesting thing because there are progressive enterprises that do things the way we think of things, right. You know, big companies that are in the software world, the technology world that probably don’t care about MQL that much. And they’re, you know, truly running a unified sales and marketing motion, but there are big legacy enterprise types of organizations that have been around longer than we’ve been around. Who’ve done things the way they’ve done things. And that next in maturity for them might be it’s time for us to implement the serious decisions waterfall. Right? So it’s hard for me to say, it’s going to go away because those are things that have been around a long time. They’ve got a lot of meat behind them. They got a lot of wind in their sails over the years.

Josh Wagner: (27:02)
And you know, you look at a a hundred year old financial services company or a 150 year old manufacturing company. And, you know, I think of things like Velcro and sure, tape an Eastman chemical, and you know, these big a hundred, 200 year old companies that they’re worth a lot of money. They’re doing things old school. That next level of maturity is likely not what you and me and they are thinking of in terms of, by the way. I think that’s a fantastic insight being in Houston. I mean, we have some of the oldest energy companies in the world, right? You’ve got your shells, your chevrons. And from an institutionalization standpoint, they are, um, I don’t know what the right word is or what the, the, the key word is, but they’re, they’re old and slow as hell when it comes to technology adoption. They, they are, they are aware of software. And many of the other industries were 25 years ago when it comes to adopting things like a CRM. And I had a conversation with somebody who what’s your CRM outlook, right? What do you mean? Oh, no, we’re using Lotus notes. You’re, you’re a, how many billion dollar company, or how many million dollar company and you’re using antiquated technology. How’s that even possible?

Josh Wagner: (28:28)
What does technology and operations look like from guys that are used to doing things like you were talking about Velcro tape, energy, how, how do they modernize their environment to either grow or position themselves to give a better experience? Postcode? Yeah. I mean, that’s a, that’s going to be a leadership type of decision, and this is going to sound horrible. I mean, as leadership retires and dies off in those organizations and there’s people that come in that are willing to do things a new way or see that the writing’s on the wall. And if we don’t do things a new way, we’re going to lose market share. We’re going to lose customers. Our legacy is not enough to support us 20 years down the line. You know, I remember speaking to a guy at GE one time and he said, we’ve got teams here that are thinking about the impact in 2050, right?

Josh Wagner: (29:34)
So some of these big companies, you know, they’re not all GE, but some of these big companies are looking pretty far into the future. So if you get a garden there that realizes that the way we do business now is really going to impact how we are perceived and viewed and whatever. In 2030, they might start making those changes because it’s not going to happen like that. Right. It’s, you’re not going to all of a sudden talk energy into adopting Salesforce and Marketo have their entire field sales organization populate that data, build automated workflows that, you know, are educating their entire customer base and their fundraising base for blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like it’s just not going to happen tomorrow. So it’s going to be a leadership thing. And that leadership is going to start to change over time. I think that it’s interesting that you, you, and you’ll see, you say, well, as, as leaders retires, they move on.

Josh Wagner: (30:34)
You know, there’s been a lot of leaders that have been retired in place for awhile independent and not picking on any specific industry. It just, you know, there’s certain guys that they get to a certain level in the business and they’re, they’re comfortable with where it’s at. Right. Change, change requires more work than just keeping it, keeping it the same. Sure. Um, but that being said, I think there’s something that’s really interesting that I don’t know if we fully ever appreciate on the sales and marketing side and it’s the digital digitization or the internet of things, right. As you’re seeing companies get into, um, tracking safety or deliveries of shipments inside of their trucks. Well, where’s my product data, as it moves from a to B a manufacturing company is going to care about that. What does that mean from a communication standpoint to your, to your, to your end customer? Or what does that mean for your sales rep to be able to, what are, what are the impacts of, I’ve always done it this way as the way you’ve always done, it becomes digital. What is that impact on your sales and marketing

Speaker 3: (31:36)
And

Josh Wagner: (31:36)
How you use that in order to gain new customers or to keep the ones that you have? Um, it’s a, it’s an interesting paradigm that I think we’re just really at the very front end of understanding, maybe it’s not Salesforce and Marketo, but it’s something,

Speaker 3: (31:57)
No,

Josh Wagner: (31:58)
It is. And, and what you’re talking about is primarily a data play, right. And what some of these legacy enterprises probably fail to realize is how much data they really have. Right. And then what do you do with it? And then how do you take action on it? And that action could be from a SAS sales standpoint, a marketing standpoint, a customer tracking, a shipment standpoint, all of these different things, all of these big companies invest a ton of money in making sure their customer can track their shipment, making sure that their customer can see their, or, you know, all that very consumer facing stuff. They invest big money and they all do, uh, because they know how critical it is, but the next evolution is going to be, what do we do with all that customer data that we’ve been acquiring over the years to inform how we go to market in the future? And how do we get that in the hands of our marketing and sales leaders, and then makes it draw some conclusions about the fundamentals we were talking about at the beginning of the call, use that data to inform all that stuff so that it’s going to start to shift how things look in the future. And that’s what it really is. It’s a big data play, and we are very much at the beginning. I think we’re getting better at it. Um,

Kyle Hamer: (33:23)
So there, um, there was a guy had on the podcast, Mark Skiles, he’s a, he’s a fractional chief data officer. And he had done some work with one of the largest seed producers in the, in the, on the globe. And I’ll just kind of like, I’ll leave it at that. But what he was talking about was there was research and development being done in silos over here with different genomes and breeding structures and geographies that if you looked at the finance of the operations, they weren’t getting visibility into what that was going to mean for demand in specific areas. So they weren’t able to effectively play it because it wasn’t that their information wasn’t being shared when it was completed. But it, if that, that side of the business that had the information six months earlier, it could have, you know, reduced a lot of waste as it remarried, you know, related to how they planned with the consultants or the different groups that they had.

Kyle Hamer: (34:17)
And they started talking about stitching this institutional data of information about products, future products, products, and development information about the customers, and really trying to start understanding what that meant for each of the silos in the organization. And a lot of the large enterprises that are, you know, you’re manufacturing your Walmarts, those groups, they have silos of data where, you know, you, you don’t get, I’ve got my sales and my marketing data. I’ve got my operations data. I’ve got my financials. They sit over here, nobody looks at those. And then I’ve got, whatever’s going on R and D as organizations start to understand that entire ecosystem, they start to digitize it. It’s going, I think it’s going to fundamentally change how organizations connect with their customers, whether, whether that’s the end consumer or that’s the customer, somebody who’s picking up a shipment, or, I mean, it’s going to fundamentally shift how organizations understand back to your point at the very beginning of the call. What’s my segment. Who am I really targeting? What do I do with that?

Josh Wagner: (35:29)
Right. Yeah. Yeah. And there’s very distinct things in there, right? Like data silos live all across, especially in the enterprise. So you do see people thinking more and more about how do I stitch it together and look at it more holistically, but you know, then you start to bring in the concepts of, okay, do we apply a level of machine learning or AI, or like in our business, we have a data scientist that we throw it, a lot of these types of projects to start to do things, but where the human has to come in is to be able to look at it and interpret it and say, so what, and that’s oftentimes the missing element. We just like, okay, well, machine learning is going to do this and AI and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But if someone can’t come in and tell you, so what, and look, I’ve been saying this for years, it’s kind of power.

Josh Wagner: (36:18)
Doesn’t rely, doesn’t reside in the answer. The power always resides in the question. You have to be able to ask the right question in order to get the answer that you can action. And to me, that’s what the, to me, that’s where the human element is to get an answer, that data, the data, is there, the answers in that data, right? It’s there, did you ask the right question, right, exactly. Right. What are we looking for? Yeah. What are we looking for? Yeah. And it’s super astute and, and that’s, I think where of the big consulting firms and hopefully, you know, the little consulting firms too are going to start showing their value because the human component can’t go away. We need, we need, we do need to ask the right questions and then we need to be able to interpret it, to get to answers. I don’t know if there’s a better way to end. Like that’s a, that’s a pretty profound statement. It really is. Um, because I don’t, I think what, what bridges to, where we started to where we ended is, is it really boils down to companies have to take action. And the action that they’re taking right now is pivoting based on the information that they have. And the action that they’ll take in the future will be based on some sort of information and data sets that they have in the future. But I think you said it best, right? It means nothing if you can’t do so now what

Josh Wagner: (37:47)
Thanks for being here. Thanks for, thanks for chatting again. And, and coming on the show, it’s always a pleasure. Yeah. You’re welcome. Hey, you could wax on wax poetic for half hour. People want to get ahold of lead in the, and fire up their go to market strategy, or, you know, work with a consultant that can help them actually get stuff done. Yes. How do they get ahold of you? They go to lead md.com. We’re there. All of our services are there. I’m Josh, josh@leadmd.com. It’s pretty easy. I’ve got some stuff out on LinkedIn. So if you go to Josh Wagner AC on LinkedIn, you can find me there’s links to my podcast in there. There’s links to lead MD in there. So, uh, um, easy to find you dropped it a little bit ago and you said, give it a shameless plug, but let’s give it an unshakeable puck talk, tell us about your pocket.

Josh Wagner: (38:36)
Yeah. The love selling hate sales podcast is all about the seemingly opposing forces in sales, right? There’s the building of relationships. And then there’s the data and the metrics, right? So it’s all about how do we make those to live in harmony because they are both absolutely necessary, even though, you know, some people love one. Some people love the other and probably the best are good at both, but that’s what it’s all about. That’s awesome. Well, thanks again for being on the show. Um, it’s, it’s always a pleasure to connect with you, Josh, and you’re always dropping dimes of brilliant. So till next time, next time. Thanks, Kyle.