We're at a crossroads in B2B sales and marketing, staring down two possible paths. We can continue with business as usual, even as we see that traditional strategies, tactics, and technologies are producing diminishing results. Or we can break through to a new and powerful future, toward a customer-driven experience fueled by meaningful account insights, big data, and AI.

It's an exciting time to be part of this world. Buyers are more sophisticated, active, and engaged than ever. At the same time, tech advances allow us to know our consumers better than at any time in sales and marketing history.

But as exciting as it is, it can also be overwhelming for us sellers and marketers to wrap our heads around all these advancements. Those smarter, more involved customers expect more from us than we've delivered in the past, and they're in control of the customer journey more so than ever before. And the amazing new tech? Well, if we don't know what we're doing with it, it can turn into an anchor keeping us stuck in one place.

It's no wonder that some sales and marketing people decide to take the easier path. I've personally felt in over my head more times than I can count, trying to leverage new tech stacks and make inroads into an industry brimming with brilliant people. But in my years in the role of CMO—first at Appirio and now at 6sense, I've had some major a-ha moments that have led me to choose the harder but more rewarding path—the path toward breakthroughs.

The Virtuous Cycle

At Appirio, we faced a crossroads, not unlike the one I described earlier. We could keep on going the way we had always gone—but if we did, we wouldn't see the kind of growth we knew we were capable of. So instead, we “zoomed out” to see what was unique to us—the expertise we could offer that other companies could not.

What we realized was that we had a unique understanding of culture—of how to shape the experiences of the people we worked with, both internally and externally, and how to use that for the greater good of our business.

It was the lifeblood of our company, and we knew our clients would benefit from learning our methods and philosophy too. And so we created a framework called the Virtuous Cycle, which helped our clients break through in their businesses by improving their employee experience and simultaneously transforming their customer experience. I believed in it (still do) and saw the payoff of really living it.

The Age of the Customer

It might be helpful to have some background on the historical context in which we developed our customer-experience-meets-worker-experience philosophy.

Over the course of the past century, business has gone through a series of evolutions. Forrester Research neatly segments the past 100 years into a series of ages that define how businesses have functioned in each era.¹

The 20th century started with the Age of Manufacturing. This is when manufacturing-based businesses like Ford and Boeing found their foothold and eventually dominated the business world.

Fast forward to the mid-20th century, and it was no longer what you could make, but how far you could distribute that determined your success. In the Age of Distribution, a broader reach meant broader success.

Then with the advent of the Internet, we entered the Age of Information in the 1990s— that's when Amazon and Google took off, and when the stage was set for a tech-fueled future even the Jetsons couldn't have imagined. Businesses that controlled information flow came out on top.

Since 2011, we've been in the Age of the Customer. Now it's not what you make, how you distribute, or even whether you hold the reins on information flow that determine your success. It's how well you empower and engage your customers. Customers now have greater access to information than ever before, and they have radically different expectations for their customer experience. If you want to succeed in business today, you need to live up to these high expectations and deliver a truly stellar customer experience.

It's not just Forrester that champions customer experience as the backbone of success. Just take a look at all this research on how important it is today to prioritize customer experience in everything you do:

• According to a Salesforce survey, 80 percent of customers report that they value the experience a company provides just as much as the products or services.²
• That same survey found that people will change their buying behaviors because of customer experience—57 percent had switched to competitors who provide a better experience.
• According to Gartner, customer experience is responsible for more than two-thirds of customer loyalty—making it more impactful than brand and price combined.³
• Eighty-two percent of buyers expect the same treatment in business purchases as they experience in their personal lives.⁴
• B2B companies that have transformed their customer-experience processes have higher client-satisfaction scores, 10 to 20 percent reductions in cost to serve, 10 to 15 percent revenue growth, and better employee satisfaction.⁵
• Even a modest improvement in customer experience has the potential to increase the revenue of a typical $1 billion software company by $1 billion over three years.⁶

Clearly, customer experience needs to be front and center for any business operating today. Steve Jobs understood the importance of customer experience decades ago— even before we entered the Age of the Customer. Way back in 1997, he argued, “You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to try to sell it.” He described developing a strategy for Apple that always started with the question, “What incredible benefits can we give to the customer?”⁷

This customer-first doctrine has worked so well for Apple that more and more companies are adopting it as their guiding principle, too.

The importance of employee experience

At the same time, there's a philosophy put forth by Richard Branson that has always guided me and reflects the core of our Virtuous Cycle. It's the idea that if you treat your employees well, they'll take good care of your clients. And that's the key to success for your business.

In other words, according to Branson's philosophy, the client doesn't come first; the employee comes first.

That idea may seem like it's in direct contrast with the Age of the Customer argument that the most successful companies are those that put the customer first. But cultivating a level-10 employee culture is in fact the cornerstone of a stellar customer experience.

Think about it. How positive and passionate of a message will your employees convey to your customers and future customers if they're miserable, burned out, and not bought into the vision? You simply can't inspire your employees to be enthusiastic evangelists of your brand unless you treat them right.

Success has everything to do with how we empower, engage, and care for both our employees and our customers. An optimized customer and employee experience— powered by the cloud and AI-driven technologies we now have access to—can thoroughly transform a business's success.

Then … why do we treat prospects like dirt?

When I came on as CMO of 6sense, I brought this customer and worker experience lens with me. But to be honest, at first I was so overwhelmed and suffering from such massive imposter syndrome (was I even the right person for this job?) that I immediately defaulted to what was straightforward and comfortable—the road labeled, “How It's Always Been Done.”

But it didn't take long for me to look around and realize that the philosophy I'd embraced over my years at Appirio—that happy, engaged customers and employees are key to the success of a company—could be hyper-boosted at 6sense, where we had this incredible technology that allowed us to design a revolutionary approach to customer experience with deep, meaningful insights about when to engage the right accounts for the business with the right message at the right time.

So I stepped back and looked at how we could transform our approach altogether. And what I realized was that the way we were approaching our marketing activities, which was along the lines of how other companies did it, was treating future customers (aka prospects) like dirt.

We're getting in their way

The typical B2B buying process from the customer's perspective starts with the desire to do research and learn everything you can about the options out there. But guess what? Too often, our marketing process prevents that research in three major ways.

First, we gate our content behind forms. What's that like for you when you're the customer? You're searching for information on the best widgets, and you find what looks like an interesting ebook—but as soon as you click “learn more,” BAM—you're blocked by a form.

So suddenly you're faced with a decision: Do you hand over your email address just to learn the basics about picking the best widget, or do you move on? Keep in mind that customers know full well that filling out that form is only going to lead to problem number two …

We annoy the hell out of them

Here comes the spam! Prospective customers know that the second they divulge their email address, they're going to start getting carpet bombed with emails. And guess what unwelcome emails are—even ones the marketing team thinks are useful and well written … That's right, they're spam.

All of us wake up to overflowing inboxes because we live in a world where nearly 300 billion emails are sent each and every day!⁸ The last thing we want is another company harassing us daily (or multiple times a day) all because we downloaded an ebook. In fact, the problem has gotten so bad that many of us create dedicated email accounts just for the junk we know we'll be inundated with whenever we give out our email addresses. It's crazy-making, and from a business perspective, it's pretty close to useless—what's the point of creating all those nurture sequences when they're just going to end up in an inbox someone never even checks?

We disrupt their lives

The third way we make it difficult for our prospects to research is maybe the most egregious … the universally hated cold call.

Picture this: You've just gotten to the office after a frantic morning of getting the kids ready, prepping for a big presentation, and surviving the school drop-off line. You're trying to pull yourself together before you head into the meeting (first thing in the morning, naturally). You're going over your notes in your head and nailing your delivery, all while making sure you don't have any of your kids’ breakfast smeared across your shirt.

You finally gather your poise and walk into the conference room to give your talk, but as you walk in your phone starts ringing. You glance. Local number … shit. Is it the kids’ school? What did they do now? Or worse … has something bad happened?

So you hurry out of the conference room, all eyes on you, and pick up the call only to hear not your kids’ principal, but an unknown and gratingly chipper voice: “Good morning! This is Sally Sales. I see you downloaded our ebook on widgets. I'd love to tell you more about what our widget solution can do for you!”

Tell me: How likely are you to take a meeting after a cold call that came at the worst time and completely threw you off your stride? Not only did it come at the wrong time of the day, but it also came at the wrong time in your buying journey. You're nowhere near ready to set up meetings to discuss widgets—you only started researching them yesterday!

It's no wonder buyers have shifted the way they buy. They want to be treated like humans, to make purchase decisions on their own terms, and proceed on the buying journey at the pace that makes the most sense for themselves and their business. As sellers and marketers, our job is to meet buyers where they are on their journey, educate them, and help them make an informed buying decision.

How B2B buyers buy

1. They want to be anonymous. Buyers these days make it further than ever into the sales journey without ever revealing themselves. In fact, some research points to the fact that B2B buyers get through 70 percent of their buying process without ever speaking to a salesperson.⁹
2. They're fragmented. B2B buyers are no longer individual decision-makers. They're buying teams of 10 people or more. Each member of this dispersed team may own a small part of the transaction, with no one person owning the whole process. It's decision-making by consensus, and it completely changes how sales and marketing teams need to understand and speak to their buyers.
3. They are resistant. And no wonder, when they've been treated so poorly for so long. They know that if they give up their email address, they're going to be opening themselves up to a lifetime of harassment. All for what? An ebook? No thank you.

The dreaded Dark Funnel™

These three buying characteristics drive buyers into the dreaded, evil, swirling vortex we at 6sense call the Dark Funnel™. Sellers and marketers have made it so annoying to research solutions that buyers now do most of their learning away from our websites— through independent information and review sites, competitors’ sites, trade publications, networking sites, and other channels we don't control.

So we're left scratching our heads and diving deeper into our old ways to try to tap into the information that's being lost. We create more forms, send more emails, and make more calls. Which, of course, just pushes them further into the swirling arms of the Dark Funnel.

As you can see, this approach is absolute madness from a customer's perspective. But it's not much better for our employees who are spinning their wheels and burning the candle at both ends, trying to keep up with the increasing demands for content, new tech, and endless phone calls. They're pushing that damn boulder up the hill, day after day, just to see the faintest signs of life.

And all in pursuit of what? The most useless “success” measure out there: the marketing-qualified lead (MQL).

We'll talk more about the dreaded Dark Funnel throughout this book, and I'll even show you how to shine a light into it so you can gain some game-changing insights. But for now I want to explain why we shouldn't be driving people further into the darkness in order to chase the MQL.

Why MQLs aren't worth a dime

I came from a sales background. That's my heritage. And here's a secret: I really like going to Sales Club. I also really like nice shoes.

You know what doesn't get you to club and definitely does not get you a new pair of Manolos? MQLs.

So MQLs have never been a thing for me. And I realize that this will sound utterly radical to a lot of marketing folks who have spent their careers chasing the MQL, but here's my take: They're not worth a dime.

Let me tell you why.

The definition of an MQL differs from organization to organization, but the basic idea is that it's someone who has engaged with marketing's efforts in one way or another. We take that engagement as an indication that we've got a prospect who's at least somewhat likely to result in a sale. Then we run them through some kind of arbitrary lead-scoring system, where we assign points or letter grades based on actions they've taken—like downloading an ebook or giving up their info at a trade show. Once they've been attributed enough points, we consider them an MQL and toss them over to sales.

The problem is that we know people will engage in our marketing efforts for all sorts of reasons. Maybe they've filled out a form to get a free ebook that we've gated—not because they're particularly likely to buy, but because they're doing some preliminary research. Or hell, maybe they're just a competitor trying to pilfer our ideas. Or maybe they're someone who gave up a badge scan at a trade show just for a chance of winning that coveted iPad. We're applying points to these nebulous displays of interest and calling it science.

Plus, we're often capturing them either too early, when they're not realistically going to engage in the buying process—or too late, when they're already inbound leads and are meeting with all our competitors too.

The truth is that the designation of MQL tells us absolutely nothing about these people's motivations or intentions, or even where they are in the buying journey. Which leaves us with lots of guesswork and very little insight.

It's no wonder so many MQLs end up on the “stuck leads” dashboard. We expect too much of them when we know literally nothing about them except their email address and maybe their name and title.

The reality is that there's commercially available tech that can fill us in on all the blanks in our MQL process. AI-based technology can tell us when accounts are in-market—not inbound. That's when it's time to engage.

A shift toward a customer-led digital experience

If we want to truly engage our potential customers, we need to break free of the chains of the MQL and the forms, spam, and cold calls we rely on to generate them. Instead, we need to base our sales and marketing efforts on real data and real insights.

The first step in creating this approach—one that customers actually want to engage in—is to understand that today's buyers are not like the buyers of 20, 10, or even 5 years ago.

We need to understand how modern buyers buy

Remember, modern buyers are anonymous, fragmented, and resistant. These three characteristics require a vastly different approach than what we've used in the past.

We need to understand the stages of engagement—and know when to act

As I mentioned, one of the reasons that MQLs are useless is that we don't know what stage they're at when they “engage” with us. We're either capturing their information too early—they're downloading an ebook when they have no real intention of buying— or too late, when they're a hot inbound that's scheduling a demo with us and 10 other competitors.

We've all seen the five stages of the buying journey:

But the problem is that most marketers don't have the insight to really know what to do with these stages. Without the right technology, they have no way of knowing when a buying team is at each stage, and therefore they're not able to deliver messages that are going to connect at each given stage.

Here's how I think about the buying stages:

1. Target. Target accounts are essentially living under a rock. They're not actively researching products and solutions like mine, and they're showing no signs of intent.

   How to connect with accounts in the target stage: Don't. There's no reason to waste any resources on accounts that aren't even poking their heads out from under the rock.

2. Awareness. This is when accounts are just starting to show some signs of life. They're not researching specific brands yet, but they're searching generic keywords.

   How to connect with accounts in the awareness stage: Help them get to know you. Don't try to sell them anything. Just get into their psyche to connect their problems with the solutions you offer.

3. Consideration. This is where things get fun and interesting. Accounts that are considering are eager to learn.

   How to connect with consideration accounts: Make sure you're the one they're learning from. Why would you want them learning from anyone else at this point? Get your message in front of them and make it as easy as possible for them to get their burgeoning expertise from you—not your competitors.

4. Decision. When accounts move into the decision stage, we're at the prime time to actively engage. This is when accounts are comparing their different options and deciding which one to go with.

   How to connect with people in the decision stage: This is the magic window for business development reps (BDRs) to get involved, initiate call and email sequences, and try to schedule an introductory meeting. At the same time, marketing deploys campaigns and content to provide proof points, validation, and customer stories.

5. Purchase. In the purchase stage, prospects are ready to turn into real opportunities. They're getting into the nitty gritty of comparing solutions, scheduling meetings, and deciding which solution is the best fit for them.

   How to connect with people in the purchase stage: The goal here is to further deepen your level of engagement with the account and help them buy from you. While sales progresses from the first meeting to second and third, marketing provides air cover with campaigns and content that help the buyer build the business case internally that you're the best solution. This is also the time to start engaging other members of the buying team who haven't fully engaged so far.

As you can see, when you really know—from real-time data—where your customers are in the buying journey, you can find that sweet spot when they're most likely to be influenced by your messages. And that's when they're in-market, not inbound. As I said, inbound is too late. I'll dive deeper into the idea of in-market in future chapters, but for now it's just important to know that identifying in-market accounts is key to making meaningful change in your sales and marketing.

Act on real insights

Imagine that you're free from MQLs. You no longer need to waste your time relying on guesswork and delivering the wrong messages at the wrong time. So what's your new North Star?

Real insights about your accounts. Not only does this include information about their industry, number of employees, or annual revenue, but also their tech stack, who is on the buying committee, what they are researching, and (most importantly) where they are in their buying journey.

This is the kind of deep knowledge that you'll use to make your mark—with personalized content delivered over the right channel, to the right person on the buying team, and at the right time.

Suddenly, when you have these kinds of insights, your customer engagement looks entirely different. This is an example of what truly personalized prospective customer engagement looks like when you base your outreach on real insights—not guesswork.

A bold path forward

When you move past MQLs into an insights-driven, customer- and employee-focused approach to sales and marketing, magic starts to happen. That's what we've seen at 6sense, where we implemented this approach. We took a stance to reimagine our customer experience, stop making our employees spin their wheels, meet prospects where they are in their journey, and treat them the way they want to be treated.

For those who adopt this approach, it will lead to your next breakthrough. Without being beholden to MQLs, and with kickass technology on your side, you can fundamentally redefine the future-customer experience. Anyone who knows me knows that my approach to life is that anything worth doing is worth overdoing … so I didn't come at this timidly. With a new initiative we termed Project Bold Moves, we declared that we were done with the old ways of doing things. Specifically, we took a stand against forms, spam, and cold calls.

It sounds crazy to ban these three pillars of sales and marketing, I know. And truth be told, not everyone rallied behind me when I proposed this overhaul. In fact, one person quit my team over it. The head of sales gave me some serious stank-eye—especially when he heard the “no cold calls” part of the game plan. In his experience, the way you create pipeline is by pounding the phones. But once he understood that I was not saying no calls—just no more wasting time on cold calls—he warmed up. He put his trust in me, and the rest of the team jumped on board too.

Now, the implementation of Project Bold Moves has not been perfect. We've had some hiccups and missteps, and we still have a lot of work to do. But we've learned a ton and are seeing some crazy wins that encourage us that we've chosen the right path forward.

So let me tell you more about what the “no forms, no spam, no cold calls” manifesto means to our team.

What do we mean by “no forms”?

At 6sense, we want to make it as easy as possible for our future customers to get information from us and, eventually, to buy from us. So we do whatever we can to remove friction from the buying process. But what's more friction-filled than an annoying form that pops up demanding personal info right when you're ready to learn? Forms are a total buzzkill, and they're a great way to drive potential customers away from your business—and right toward a competitor who makes it easier to access information.

At 6sense, we committed to eliminating all forms for education and product-related content. That means everything we publish is available and ungated. The only times we use forms are when we actually, honestly need a person's information to do what they want to do:

• Register for an event or webinar
• Use one of our online assessment tools
• Request a demo or ask us to contact them

Other than those times, we are 100 percent form-free. The truth is, beyond being super annoying from a customer perspective, forms are also entirely unnecessary if you're armed with good buyer intent and anonymous visitor identification tech. We're able to forgo forms because we have such great data on our side. We don't need forms in order to know what accounts are on our website. We already know. And that allows us to reimagine and redesign an amazing digital experience for customers, all without sacrificing our business goals.

So what does the customer experience look like without forms? Well, we're now completely honed in on a personalized experience on our website. When future customers visit our site, we know their account, their industry, and their business size. We know their persona. And most importantly, we know their intent keywords (i.e., what they're searching for) and where they are in their buying journey. So we can serve them up content that is most relevant to what they're researching and most effective for their stage in the buying process.

Here's an example of what one of our display ad campaigns looks like—no forms and personalized for account, persona, keyword, and timing.

• As I said earlier, the target stage is showing no interest, so it gets zero of our dollars or effort. That's why it's not even pictured here.
• In the awareness stage, I just want them to be familiar with us and our thought leadership. So I connect them to a relevant episode of our video series, TalkingSense™.
• In consideration, I serve them up an ebook—no gate, no form—to make sure I'm the one they're learning from when they search for keywords that are important to them.
• In decision, I want to start to engage them and offer proof. So I offer to show them how we can uncover their Dark Funnel.
• In the purchase stage, it's all about getting that meeting. That's when we're encouraging them to schedule a demo.

This display approach goes hand-in-hand with our content strategy. We're creating content that people actually want and delivering it to them right when it's most useful to them. It's an intelligent, customer-driven user experience.

What do we mean by “no spam”?

When I said we were swearing off spam, the email-loving folks among us were mortified. But “no spam” does not mean we never send emails. It just means we don't load up people's inboxes with yet another email they're not going to read.

In practice, here's what that looks like. We avoid sending an email to a prospect unless we know the following:

• What they care about, based on keyword research
• Key personas in the account—in other words, who we should be trying to reach
• What stage they're at in the buying journey

Boiled down to its purest essence, our email strategy is this: If you know nothing, do nothing.

If you follow that rule—if you only send emails to people you know a lot about and who are in-market—it's nearly impossible to spam. When you deliver content you know people are interested in, right at the time when it's useful to them, that's not spam. It's just a good customer experience.

To put this into practice, we are 100 percent account-based across sales and marketing. What this means is every program follows five key steps:

We'll keep coming back to these five steps throughout the book and filling in more detail to help you understand how to implement them yourself. But for now it's just important to know that these are the backbone of meaningful and successful account engagement.

Next-level personalization

With Project Bold Moves, we've really doubled down and designed our strategy around personalizing for intent keyword and timing. The beauty of knowing intent keywords— what buying teams are searching for when they research products like ours—is that we're not guessing. We're not manually creating persona maps, which are outdated the minute the ink dries. We have a living, breathing, AI-driven dashboard telling us exactly what our accounts are searching for at any given time, and that's what we develop content and engagement around—and what we deliver to them. So it's more useful for our customers and less work for us. Win-win.

We use this approach across the board. For instance, our new chat bot pops up with communications tailored to persona, intent keyword, and timing. And if you happen to be a competitor visiting our site, it just might direct you to our careers page. So yeah, we're having fun—and connecting in a way we never have before.

As you can see, when we have real-time insights into our accounts, we're able to deliver useful content at just the right time. We're not just serving up some generic “thought leadership” pieces and crossing our fingers. We're providing exactly what our prospects need, when they need it. And that allows us to have true, trusted influence throughout the buying decision.

What do we mean by “no cold calls”?

Last but not least, the most controversial of my edicts: No cold calls. What does this look like in practice? Well, like I said, I wasn't advocating for an end to telephone usage. Calling can be really valuable—not only for pipeline building, but also for building confidence and knowledge as a seller.

So yes, salespeople are allowed to make phone calls under Project Bold Moves. I'm just not throwing them to the wolves. I'm not making them call people who are cold. I'm only giving them warm accounts to call, and I'm making sure they have all the rich information they need to be able to lead with value and have a meaningful conversation. Value is priority number one.

So under our new plan, we do not call a prospect unless we know all of the following:

• That the prospect is “in-market” for our solution
• What the prospect really cares about
• How to articulate the context of why the call is being made
• How to have a meaningful conversation and add value

One of the ways we ensure we're never calling cold is by creating something called a value card. This card is essentially a matrix, and it includes the top intent keywords and the top personas. It tells the BDR not only what the personas are searching for, but also why that keyword is important to them. So when the BDRs make a call, they can actually have a meaningful, helpful conversation. It's a high-value discussion, not an annoying, ill-timed cold call that pushes prospects away instead of drawing them closer.

Dynamic territories made possible by intent data

We also implemented another key change that has made this no-cold-call philosophy not only possible, but also overwhelmingly successful. That was to shift from static, updated-once-a-year territories to dynamic territories based on customer intent.

Before implementing this change, we'd been creating territories using traditional metrics geared toward known accounts. And that was working okay, but like every business, we found ourselves pursuing some accounts that looked like the perfect fit for us on paper, but that wouldn't give us the time of day. Meanwhile our AI was uncovering accounts that were in-market— ones we knew were a great fit for us and were ready to buy—but we were leaving them on the table. Why? Because they were not on our static list of territories. So our amazing head of revenue operations, Kory Geyer, redesigned the process and implemented technology to allow us to dynamically change territories based on in-market accounts. This solution ensures our AEs have the best possible chance of hitting their numbers because they're always working accounts with the highest likelihood of opening an opportunity with us.

So we're evaluating and prioritizing these dynamic territories on a daily basis, and then quarterly we add and remove accounts based on intent and activity. But that doesn't mean we lose patience for the accounts that are going to take more time. In fact, one-third of our enterprise sellers’ accounts are long-tail, strategic accounts that they'll continue to work on regardless of daily (or quarterly) shifts. As for the other two-thirds, we're making sure to provide attainable accounts—in other words, the ones that are a great fit for us and also have the highest intent scores.

For our sales team, this shift has been a boon. They're happy to have more information on timing and interest to better prioritize effort, for example, swapping out a big-name account that isn't giving them the time of day (and with our analytics, they know that the timing just isn't right) for two or three accounts that are actively engaged and interested in buying.

And these dynamic territories have been even more successful than we hoped they'd be. In aggregate, we had 103 percent quota attainment after implementing dynamic territories—which is unheard of in an industry whose average attainment is between 75 and 85 percent for a business of our size.

Let's talk results

Well as I said, we're having fun. But we're doing a lot more than that too. Project Bold Moves is totally working. We've tracked our conversions, and we've seen a big boost in conversions and new business win rates after taking this approach. Every quarter has been a beat and a raise, and we're doing it with industry-leading customer acquisition costs.

Everyone is happy—especially our BDRs. Now that BDRs have real insights into the composition of the buying team, each person's current level of engagement, what they care about, and when to time their outreach, they're blowing their goals out of the water.

Before we started Project Bold Moves, we used TOPO's BDR benchmarks based on our industry and size and determined the amount that each BDR should reasonably be able to bring in per month. We were hovering right around that amount, but I was baffled because I felt like we should be meeting it easily. (Truth be told, I felt like we should be crushing it.) But we weren't … until we ditched the forms, spam, and cold calls.

After six months, we were easily doubling the pipeline per BDR per month. Now, a year later, the system continues to deliver. And on the employee experience side, we've had zero percent regrettable turnover among BDRs. In fact, three BDRs have been promoted.

But the best part for me is when we get emails like the one on the following page.

This is what customer-led engagement looks like—customers who are so pleased with how we've treated them that they actually take the time to call us out as examples for how companies should market and sell!

As we hoped and expected, our numbers have gone up. But more importantly, we have happier, more engaged customers and happier, more successful employees. And that's what these breakthroughs have been about all along.