Between weekly coffee talks with other CMOs, spending tons of time talking with our customers, taking part in The Revenue Collective, and joining in on prospect meetings, I probably talk to thousands of marketing and sales professionals per year. I'm constantly awed by how smart and hardworking they are. They teach and inspire me every single day.

So when I saw the results of our predictable revenue growth survey, it was a bit of a shocker. I was surprised and, honestly, disappointed to see that as a profession, we were not as far along in transforming sales and marketing as I thought we would be.

Here are some of the more troubling trends the survey identified:¹

• Sales and marketing are misaligned on metrics. Most sales and marketing teams rely on different datasets, work in different platforms, and track different metrics to measure success, making it nearly impossible to coordinate engagement with the right accounts throughout the customer journey.
• They disagree about target accounts. Half of all sales and marketing leaders only somewhat agree (or don't agree at all) on their target account list. Even 42 percent of successful organizations lack consensus.
• Content delivery is guesswork. One in three organizations believe content is the most valuable way to generate demand, but only 48 percent can deliver personalized content experiences, and even fewer have a content hub on their website.
• Organizations still rely on lead scoring, even though it's a suspect way of prioritizing accounts. Nearly 60 percent of account-driven organizations are still most focused on generating leads (MQLs or SQLs). Half of the respondents believe their lead scoring processes don't even surface the best leads accurately or consistently. That means salespeople spend too much time working junk leads and marketing wastes budget and time on campaigns and events that don't deliver results.
• Tech stacks are bloated and hard to manage. From marketing automation platforms (MAPs) to point solutions, tech stacks are too bloated, too complex, or too expensive, according to half of all respondents.

Maybe it's because our study included only non-6sense users, but still, I thought our industry would have made more progress based on all the engagement I've had with so many brilliant, uplifting, and dedicated sales and marketing professionals.

So what's up? Why are we not breaking through and implementing modern sales and marketing strategies when there's a clear game plan for how to do it (remember those five steps?), the technology is available, and the results are real. Plus, it just makes sense—treat prospects like humans and provide a more engaging experience, and you'll have better results. It seems so simple.

But the truth is, we all have reasons (some might say excuses) for why we're not able to make big changes—even though we know they're important. Here are just a few of the reasons I've heard people give for why they keep sticking with the same systems that aren't working for them, instead of shifting to ones that do:

• My company is too big.
• My company is too small.
• It sounds like more work than my team can handle.
• We already have a lot of technology.
• We can't attribute it all, and even though my attribution isn't perfect, at least I understand it. (I'll get into my take on attribution in the Demand Generation section of this chapter.)
• I'm a “relationship seller,” and it works just fine.
• My executive team will never go for it.

Then there are all those people who say they want to make the change, but they're just not ready yet. They have a checklist of things they need to do, and once their ducks are in a row, they'll get started. But let's get real … It's like having kids. If you wait until you're ready, you'll never take the leap.

The brilliant Mariana Prado Cogan, former senior vice president of digital marketing strategy and operations at PTC, explains the urgency in terms all sales and marketing folks will understand: “You have no choice at this point—you have to do it. There was a time when if you didn't have a CRM, you could still get by. But at some point, you realized that if you're the only one without one, you're going to get left behind. That's how I see this. You have to decide which side of the movement you want to be on. Do you want to be one of the ones with a competitive advantage, or do you want to be left behind?”

Change isn't just coming, it's here

As Mariana said, change isn't a choice anymore. The old ways of selling and marketing are gone, and a new reality is forming, like it or not. I, personally, love it. As I've laid out in this book, the new ways of selling and marketing—with deep customer insights brought to you by AI and big data—are way better than the old ways, for both us and our customers.

So the change is happening. We can ignore it and be left behind. Or we can seize this opportunity to shape the future. As we undergo this transformation, I believe we'll see difference-makers emerge across organizations to lead the change.

What is a difference-maker, and how do you know if you are one? I reached out to our CEO Jason Zintak to get his take on this, because he has a knack for recognizing difference-makers from miles away. It's one of the things that makes him such a great leader—the ability to recognize and cultivate leadership traits in others.

Jason says that difference-makers are people who take real risks to advocate for the changes they see as necessary. “There are plenty of people who are armchair quarterbacks. They're happy to point fingers in the stadium, but they won't actually get on the field. Great companies are built by people who get on the field and take risks. They put up an argument for what has to change,” Jason explains. “Change is not easy on people. In order to effect change, you have to campaign for it. A difference-maker campaigns, with unabashed waves of courage.”

Jason points out these traits of difference-makers:

• They have grit and tenacity.
• They have a high work ethic.
• They're not afraid to provoke, in a professional manner, for the greater good or whatever change they're trying to effect.
• They're curious.
• They're not comfortable with the status quo, or with being conventional.
• They're not clock-punchers—they measure their contribution based on outcomes, not the time or effort it took to get there.

If you recognize yourself in this list, guess what: We need you right now. And I'm not just talking to the people in senior leadership positions. Yes, difference-making CMOs and sales leaders will be key in forging the path forward. But regardless of your role, if you're a difference-maker, it's your time to shine.

You'll remember that Chapter 1 is based on the presentation I gave at our big customer conference, “Breakthrough.” At that conference, we looked for the difference-makers— and lucky for us, our customer base is chock full of them. At the conference, I took their pictures and put them up on a wall as inspiration and as a reminder that people are going to be the difference in shaping our future. And at the end of my presentation I asked, “Who's in?”

So here's the moment of truth. I'm asking you, are you in? If so, I'm dedicating this chapter to you. Read on to learn about what the future could look like for your role—and how to use your difference-maker mentality to stage your own breakthrough!

Revenue Operations

Revenue operations (RevOps) is where sales, marketing, and customer success meet to drive, you guessed it, revenue. Whether it functions as its own official department within an organization or more loosely as a meeting-of-the-minds between sales, marketing, and customer success, the goal is the same: To create a unified approach to all things revenue.

RevOps ties directly to the Virtuous Cycle—the initiative I worked on at Appirio that I told you about in Chapter 1. This was one of my foundational breakthroughs: that it's only by focusing on both customer and employee experience that you can achieve great things. And to create amazing customer and worker experiences, you need the right technology, data, insights, and alignment—all things that fall under the purview of RevOps. That's why I believe RevOps needs to be the keeper of the Virtuous Cycle.

How RevOps drives—and benefits from—the Virtuous Cycle

Study after study has shown that profit and growth are predicated on having satisfied, loyal, and, ultimately, amplified customers. Improved customer experience boosts:

• Customer retention²
• Customer loyalty³
• Customer satisfaction⁴
• Cost to serve⁵
• Revenue growth^6,7

But reaping these revenue rewards requires sellers and marketers to have meaningful insights into what customers want. And in turn, those insights allow us to create the breakthrough digital moments that are personalized and consistent across the brand. Customer experience thrives, and the Virtuous Cycle continues.

“Customers want their partners, vendors, and companies to know them,” explains Glenn Weinstein, one of the co-founders of Appirio and current chief customer officer at Twilio. “It's one of the most basic human instincts, wanting to be heard. The only way to know your customers is to have clean, simple, accurate data about them. If you create a simple system that allows your frontline personnel, your sales reps, your support reps, your inside sales, to know the customers in 10 seconds, that reflects in how we talk to them.”

So with good systems and data, RevOps can help everyone across the revenue team provide stellar customer experiences—including designing those breakthrough digital experiences (after all, 70 percent of the buying cycle happens in the Dark Funnel™). But digital experience and great insights alone are not enough. To fully realize the Virtuous Cycle, you need productive, loyal, and energized employees. That means that RevOps needs to give marketing, sales, and customer success teams the tools, technology, and data to make them more successful.

RevOps supports, aligns, empowers

Positions that specifically mention the term “revenue” in the title are on the rise and with good reason.⁸ SiriusDecisions found that organizations with revenue operations grew revenue around three times faster than those that didn't.⁹ That's amazing and such a good illustration of how crucial RevOps is for predictable revenue growth!

In practice, revenue operations makes sure everyone is playing from the same sheet of music—or reports and dashboards, as it were. That goes a long way in preventing embarrassing moments like the one that still haunts my dreams, when in a previous job the head of sales and I showed up at a high-stakes meeting and started talking numbers … and they were different numbers. The data were all correct, but the way we reported on it was different, and it sounded like we were at worst making shit up, and at best totally misaligned.

At 6sense, we don't run into these issues because the head of sales and I decided to establish RevOps to standardize data from day one. We were lucky to be able to align on the data from the beginning so that we could create what Glenn calls the “democratization of data.”

When RevOps is operating well, data are consistent, shared, and understandable across the organization. And that does a lot more than prevent embarrassing moments—it also opens up the possibility for real growth. “Smart people, given access to good data, will figure stuff out,” Glenn explains. “They'll find their own insights and make you a better company.”

Most organizations don't do this. Instead, they funnel data through IT or BI teams. And in cases where people know the information they're looking for, that works. “But if you don't know what you want, if you just want to explore, that doesn't work,” Glenn cautions. Imagine going to Amazon to look for a good book and getting just a single suggestion. It'd never work because we want options. We want to see reviews, understand why these books are suggested, and have a chance to read the sample chapter.

RevOps difference-makers create an environment in which people can have self-serve access to data. It's this direct access, without a gatekeeper, that allows for real breakthroughs.

But that doesn't mean reporting and sharing insights from the data isn't still a fundamental role of RevOps. In fact, Glenn says that while plenty of companies go 90 percent of the way— creating a data warehouse—they miss that last 10 percent of making the data meaningful and delivering it in formats people can use. As Glenn explains it, “It's the difference between information and news. You can get mountains of information by reading Twitter and blogs. We rely on journalists, the news profession, to make sense out of that information and tell us what's important, to give it context.” Within an organization, those “journalists” are the difference-makers in RevOps.

Calling all RevOps difference-makers

Marketing and sales operations are huge jobs in their own right, each owning critical systems like CRM and MAP as well as a suite of additional technologies—plus a never-ending demand for reports, dashboards, and training. And the job of selecting and managing tech gets harder by the year; there are more than 7,000 sales and marketing solutions out there today!

With so many responsibilities already on sales ops’ and marketing ops’ plates, the idea of combining these roles might sound crazy. It may not even be feasible within your organization for any number of reasons, and that's okay. As I said at the beginning of this section, revenue ops is all about sales, marketing, and customer success aligning on all things revenue.

When RevOps teams operate with these big-vision ideals in mind, they have the opportunity to unearth end-to-end customer insights that light up that Dark Funnel™. Remember, only 13 percent of sales and marketing teams have confidence in their data. You can change that by bringing together known and anonymous data from first- and third-party sources, even if ownership of these capabilities is shared by separate sales and marketing ops teams. Layer on easy-to-use segmentation, and suddenly everyone is exploring data and making data-based decisions.

You have the tools, insights, and skills to enable teams throughout the organization to provide amazing customer experience and break through to their full potential. If you are passionate about data, people, technology, and experience, you've got what it takes to be a RevOps difference-maker—and we need you to help mobilize this customer and employee experience revolution!

Digital marketers transform the digital experience

If you're like most digital marketers, you love to generate impressions, clicks, and web traffic from your campaigns. We live for it. Throw some creative content and a healthy budget into the primordial soup that is the Internet, and life emerges. It's sort of like playing blackjack—you may bust a few hands, but eventually, you'll hit a winning streak.

I'll never forget the time I was advising a company, and they were so excited about all of the advertising experiments they had run, each with its own set of metrics: impressions, cost per 1,000 impressions (CPM), click-through rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC), views, shares, likes, share of voice (SOV), content engagement scores, and so on. They asked me which program I thought was best, which one they should put the real money behind.

The honest answer was that I had no clue, so I asked some basic questions: What were they trying to accomplish? What accounts did they want to reach? Did they get any of those who liked, shared, or even clicked to genuinely engage with their brand? And what about pipeline?

Unfortunately, understanding the true pipeline and revenue impact of campaigns is easier said than done for most digital marketers, but it's not their fault. Every platform has specific metrics designed to make us believe we're about to win—and win big. And there's no lack of case studies where you can read about how other teams are killing it on some platform and think, “We'd better do that, too.”

The phrase “data-driven marketers” has duped us into grasping at any fragment of data that can be measured, even though it may or may not have meaning. It's like being-hyper focused on the bark of a tree when trying to understand forestation. Tree bark can tell you something about what's growing in the woods, but it isn't even a whole tree, much less the entire forest.

Here are some notes from a recent meeting with a digital marketing executive on their strategy. Web form is working. Huge fan of PPC. Still getting calls today … Basically, this was him saying he's not at all focused on the pipeline. So, how did we get to the place where a head of digital marketing is thinking about everything but the pipeline, much less customer experience!?

At this point you are probably tired of me talking about the ICP and the IICP, but these are the breakthroughs for digital marketing.

1. When everything you do is derived from your ICP, it's like having guardrails in bowling; it's impossible to throw a gutter ball. From paid advertising and social, to content syndication, to outbound programs, you're always targeting the best accounts and never wasting resources on spray-and-pray assumptions.
2. By specifically tracking web activity from accounts in your ICP, you get a clearer picture of how you're influencing the accounts you're most interested in. Take our recent funding announcement, for example. We had a huge traffic spike, as we would expect, on the day of the announcement. We could literally sit on Google Analytics live and watch the numbers tick up. It was kind of mesmerizing. But then we had to ask ourselves: Who were all these site visitors? Were they just industry and investor types? Our competitors? By being able to specifically measure web visits from accounts in our ICP, we could see that indeed we were seeing increased engagement from ICP accounts, meaning the announcement worked from the standpoint of driving interest from accounts we care about. This brings new meaning to “performance-based” digital marketing.
3. Sales teams no longer really create demand. Demand is created by prospects in ICP accounts conducting research long before they engage with a salesperson. So digital markers must now uncover that demand and turn it into opportunities (remember the Dark Funnel™?). Uncovering this demand—and lighting up your Dark Funnel™—takes more than just driving loads of clicks. It requires a deep understanding of brand positioning, earned media, influencers, and an eye toward personas and the buying jobs they need to complete through the end-to-end digital journey. Advanced digital marketing provides engagement and progression of ICP accounts throughout the entire funnel.
4. Engagement is the name of the game. And engaging ICP accounts to move them through the buyer journey is not a straight line, so we'll need to help them along the way as accounts advance and retreat through their journey. Which leads me to the next big part of digital marketing … the website!

Ah yes, the website. The most controversial part of marketing. Find me a CMO who's happy with their website, and I will give you my entire shoe collection. The website is a constant work in progress: It's never done, and it's never exactly what you want. Let's look at examples on extreme ends of the spectrum so we can find a better path.

Company A: The “demand gen website.” Looking at their website you have no idea what they do. It's like a word randomizer. Clearly, their SEO consultant convinced them to string every search term together over and over again. Not to mention the carnival of bots, flashing lights, and “helpful” pop ups. Please, make it stop. No, I actually don't want to take a meeting or talk to your bot. I literally just got here. All demand, no brand.

Company B: “The brand/corporate website.” This one has a great company vision and mission—that's nice. I can also see they have offices all over the world. Swanky. And I can tell they have a strong executive team. I mean look at these awesome bios! Amazing, but … how does any of this help your customers/future customers navigate a complex B2B purchase decision?

Gartner research reveals that B2B buyers must complete six distinct activities—or “jobs”—to successfully complete a purchase today (see image on page 197).¹⁰ Most B2B buyers will revisit nearly every buying job at least once before they make a purchase. The result: a customer buying journey that resembles more of a maze than a linear path.

This is an incredibly important and eye-opening moment if you're thinking about how to use your most valuable digital asset to shepherd accounts through their buying journey.

We already talked about using account insights and intent data to develop a more personalized digital experience by aligning the right message and content with what prospects care about and where they are in their buying journey. But layering in the concept of helping B2B buyers complete the buying jobs just listed gives meaning and purpose to those experiences by defining exactly what we want the prospect to do to move forward.

This also helps us go beyond creating an endless stream of topical blog posts to developing useful tools like ROI calculators, benchmarks and assessments, comparison guides, business case and budgeting tools, and more. These are the types of persistent CTAs that can turn your website from brochureware to indispensable by providing real value for prospects who need to complete these essential buying jobs at the right time in their journey.

We've used this approach with good success and are now improving the digital experience with our conversational chatbot, which I told you about in Chapter 4. When we first launched Six (yes, we named our bot Six), we had okay engagement with site visitors. But we soon found Six was a little too aggressive—all he wanted to do was meet, meet, meet! Not very helpful at progressing visitors through the buying journey or pointing them to resources that could help them complete a buying job.

But now that we're able to use account insights to drive Six's conversations, we're seeing much better engagement and results. Because we know the topics (based on first- and third-party intent data) site visitors care about, and also where they are in the buying journey, Six can now tailor the conversation to recommend the right resources and tools on our site to help visitors complete those critical buying jobs. And the results speak for themselves. In just 30 days of infusing these insights into our chatbot, we saw a 118 percent increase in conversations.

I share this as a reminder that as a digital marketer, you create the digital experience. In many cases, digital marketing sits in demand gen. For us, it's under brand, because we believe creating a world-class digital experience is so important to the overall brand.

With every ad impression, every page view, and every chatbot conversation, our customers and future customers are making a judgment about us. And digital experience is like your favorite restaurant. They can deliver amazing food again and again, but one bad meal, or even one bad experience with a server and that's it, you're never going back. And why would you? There's a great place right down the street. In fact, there are lots of great places, just like there are lots of great places to do research online, so users aren't likely to stick around for lousy food and crappy service.

Your role as digital marketer is more important than ever. In fact, 70 percent of the sales cycle (and 100 percent of the judging about your brand and solution) is going on under your roof. As our vice president of brand, Michael George, likes to say “pressure is a privilege.”

Breakthrough moves for digital marketers

• Understand buyer intent. Now more than ever, you must shape your digital experience strategy based on what buyers care about, not what you want to promote.
• Measure engagement. It may seem like another vanity metric, but it's not. Engagement is everything, so it's critical for you to understand how many and which accounts are newly or increasingly engaging with your brand, along with which personas across the buying team are engaged and which are not.
• Focus on the experience. Your creativity might be amazing and your email might be perfectly crafted, but if you don't offer a friction-free, meaningful experience at every single touch point, visitors will just move to the next result in their search.
• Develop content and tools to help future customers complete essential buying jobs.
• Make friends. There's a good chance you're the smartest banana in the bunch, but you're going to have to help the broader marketing team and sales team get set up and on board. I once had a digital marketing leader tell me, “Just give me my money so I can generate a ton of leads and not talk to anyone.” Yes, you may have to explain how the Internet works for what feels like the 200th time, but such is life. Part of your job is rallying your team and communicating your vision.

Yes, this is all possible

I can see you over there freaking out over all these responsibilities being thrown at you. And if you're in the old-school marketing paradigm, I bet it feels like I'm telling you to climb Everest while also curing cancer and maybe juggling a couple of chainsaws.

But the fact is that once you make the mindset shift, you'll see that you can provide all of these amazing, customer-first digital experiences with far less effort than you're currently spending on less-effective marketing campaigns.

Here's a stellar example of this. Grace Kleaveland Kupzcak, our marketing coordinator, told me recently about a project one of her colleagues at another company was working on. They wanted to create personalized content hubs for 100 top accounts in multiple verticals, but they didn't have the same game-changing integrations and dynamic segments we have at 6sense.

“They had so many spreadsheets,” Grace recalls. “My friend had to get all the BDRs to do research on all of the accounts. Then from there, she compiled a bunch of different Google Docs and created 100 different landing pages, all of them static, with a logo she had to go find, and she had to manually create all of the copies. Then as accounts moved throughout the buying stages, she had to continually refresh.” Grace's friend rose to the challenge—but it took her two months of nonstop work to make it happen.

I asked Grace what it would look like if her colleague were to create a similar campaign with all the amazing tech Grace has at her fingertips. Her answer? “It would literally cut the amount of effort to 1/100th. So that alone … it's a game changer for a practitioner in terms of time, effort, and scalability.”

Ultimately, everything digital in the new world starts and ends with dynamic segments, which can be activated through any channel via native capabilities, integrations, or open API. And with dynamic, continually updated audiences ready-made for use, you're free to focus on developing and testing creative campaigns and experiences to drive engagement. Plus, you can personalize in a more granular way than ever before since you know where buyers are on their journey and what they care about, and it's easy to maintain that level of personalization across channels.

The reality is that the future is here, and it's yours for the taking.

Let's take a look at some other things that modern digital marketers can do, and how.

Demand generation leader: You're the chief operating officer of the marketing department

Demand generation leaders are some of the most skeptical when they hear about my plan for the future of account-based engagement. And I get it. I really am moving your cheese—off the plate, across the table, out the window, and onto the lawn. No MQLs? No forms? No spam? I get how it might feel like I'm taking a system that “works” and breaking it—but the truth is that the system is already broken. (Saying this makes me feel like Will Ferrel in Elf when he finds out the department store Santa is a fake. You sit on a throne of MQLs!)

But still, it's a heavy lift for demand gen. Revenue operations gets to light up the Dark Funnel™ and therefore be a hero to sales and BDR teams. Digital marketing gets to deliver amazingly personalized digital experiences and creatively target and reach the best accounts. So what does demand gen get? Well don't fear—I'm about to tell you all the ways this new approach is going to make your job a million times better than it is now.

But before we get to that, let me just say that demand gen is a tough gig. I know how hard you work, and I realize that you often hear more complaints than praise. More than anyone else in marketing, demand gen folks constantly have to address the never-ending chorus of “these leads suck” coming from sales.

Part of the problem is that the role itself often isn't well defined or supported, leaving you to answer a barrage of questions like, “Why did we go to that useless event?” And, “Why don't we have our content here, or there?” And, “Why are you emailing my prospects?” or its close cousin, “Why aren't you emailing my prospects?” The questions and comments go on and on.

The fact is, the demand generation role is incredibly diverse, and there is no standard job description that clearly defines the edges of it in any marketing organization. In fact, what the DG'er does varies considerably from company to company. The role can include digital, content, field marketing, marketing ops, and more. And if you lead demand gen, you know that even if it's not your “job,” you're going to be involved in all areas of marketing. DG'ers really are the decathletes of marketing.

In seeking our first demand gen leader at 6sense, I fondly called it our “search for a purple squirrel,” because the Swiss Army knife of a demand gen leader we needed likely didn't exist.

Fortunately for us, we found Susan Peterson Schatschneider, one of the smartest demand gen marketers I've ever met. Susan's breakthrough—and the one she instilled in us—was the realization that it's really not about demand generation once you light up your Dark Funnel™ and you can see all the demand in front of you; it's really about demand capture.

This creates a paradigm shift in arguing over what's a lead and what's not because it's not an arbitrary marketing score; it's a backtested algorithm that statistically shows which accounts are going to open an opportunity. The only question is whether that opportunity will be with us or our competition.

This is how it occurred to Susan that we needed to move from static to dynamic territories. She saw the game is not about generating more MQLs; it's about fast tracking in-market accounts and ensuring they're worked as effectively and efficiently as possible. Remember, in Chapter 1 I recounted how we realized we were throwing in-market, ready-to-engage accounts (6QAs) on the floor because they weren't part of assigned AE territories.

This “capture” ah-ha moment even became the basis for a new product feature: DG'ers can now see in real-time how many accounts 6QA'ed in the last X days but are not yet an open opportunity. Our team looks at the past 30, 60, and 90 days, and it's what now keeps us up at night. The last thing anyone wants to see is 2,000 accounts that have 6QA'ed, and no open opportunities to show for them.

But isn't that what forms and spam are all about—capturing demand so we can convert it to opportunities? Well, we took those away because they have the opposite effect, and the reality is that buyers are in charge of the journey. It's now about generating engagement with multiple personas to the point that they lean way in with you and convert—not just in terms of moving them to the next stage in the buying journey, but also in terms of buying into your brand.

So what does one need to do that? Well, to begin with, you need multiple tactics. Because some people will respond to direct mail while others will respond to a webinar invite, and still others just want to get straight to the point with a chatbot.

In other words, in addition to working with a variety of channels, we also have to multithread. This is a sales term that means ensuring you have multiple personas involved in a deal—or in this case engaged pre-opportunity. As marketers, we want to do the same thing with qualified accounts.

Multithreading with key personas

A brilliant analyst I've worked with a ton talks about research they've done on the importance of multiple engaged personas. He points out that a standard “lead” or single person showing activity converts less than 1 percent of the time. However, if a second person is engaged, the research found that the activity is statistically way less random. Furthermore, if a third person is engaged, it's even less random and likely to become an opportunity. As DG'ers, we need to be able to track and enhance that buying group engagement so we can pass really high-quality accounts to sales.

Sounds really sophisticated, but you don't have to be sophisticated to use sophisticated technology. You just have to be creative and know how to think through the ifs and thens that come with the key capabilities outlined in Chapter 3, like dynamic segmentation.

Dynamic segments are at the core of how DG'ers use buyer journey logic to hypertarget specific audiences across channels. For example, a segment might be created for strong ICP fit companies that have visited my product page, researched a competitor within the last seven days, and also attended our recent webinar.

With this segment in hand, we can then use it to orchestrate engagement through any channel at our disposal—such as chat, direct mail, content stream, and cadence— and they can all be connected and ready to rock. The segment determines the accounts we're targeting, and it's always updating as accounts meet or stop meeting the criteria.

Ultimately, the goal of orchestrating engagement is to meet the buyer where they are on their journey, follow them to the channels they prefer, and deliver highly personalized, consistent, and relevant experiences. In other words, it's all about customer experience. And it's achievable because today we have technology that allows for seamless integration across systems—without having to download and upload tons of spreadsheets and manually align data.

When you see the difference in practice, it's mind-blowing. Here are some examples of what this new, AI-driven orchestration can look like:

• If an account is a tier-one target and an executive-level persona registers for a webinar, prompt the AE to send a personalized email offering a demo.
• If an account is a strong ICP fit and moves to decision or purchase but then goes silent for 10 days, direct mail a gift to the key persona.
• If a director-level persona attends a demo, automatically invite a C-level persona in a specific job function to connect with one of our executives.
• If an account moves into the decision or purchase buying stage and is a strong fit for my ICP, automatically acquire missing contacts in the buying center and add key personas to a sales cadence for BDR outreach.

If you've ever used a journey builder, I'm sure these types of actions sound familiar. The difference here is that rather than a static, linear series of if/then statements, you have dynamic segments on your side. And if you recall from Chapter 3, AI reveals the buying stage, top keywords for your ICP, and the personas that are engaged. With those types of insights being updated dynamically, the dream of delivering the right message at the right time with the right tactic becomes a reality.

That's pretty cool—and user experience is only going to get better as AI continues to advance. In the very near future the old world of rules will go out the window entirely, and instead you'll simply set a goal, like increase engagement with accounts in this top-of-the-funnel segment, and AI will determine how to achieve that goal.

Does this sound too good to be true (or too scary to think about)? Let's double-click into this new demand gen world and take a look at how it works.

Dynamic segments and AI-driven predictions are still at the core of how DG'ers will target key audiences, but rather than building rules around segments, you'll start by setting a goal like the example above. Next, you'll tell the machine what tactics it can consider using to achieve that goal—and what parameters it must adhere to.

For example, for our goal of increasing engagement with a specific segment—say the financial services vertical—we might tell the machine that it can use display campaigns set up in the system, but that it must adhere to a weekly budget of $250 for this goal. We might also tell the system that it can personalize web and content experiences if those accounts visit our website, add leads and contacts to a campaign in CRM or MAP, add leads and contacts to a sales cadence, and purchase missing contacts and add them to specific systems. With the suite of tactics outlined for the machine, it can then choose how to orchestrate engagement in order to achieve the business goal.

In addition to tactics that we tell the machine it can use on its own, we might add other tactics like direct mail that require human approval. If the AI determines that a direct mail should be sent to five contacts tied to accounts in our segment, an admin user is notified and can choose to approve or decline the machine's request.

This is the future of demand gen. If it fires you up and sets your mind whirring with all the possibilities AI-driven orchestration opens up for you, you're probably “purple squirrel” material. And DG'ers like you who embrace these possibilities will be the ones who take control of their pipeline and lead their teams to predictable revenue while competitors are chasing MQLs the same way they always have.

What about attribution?

Leaning heavily on AI to generate demand with accounts you actually care about sounds great, but what about attribution?

Purple squirrels know that it's not the white paper download that generated the seven-figure deal that closed last quarter. It's also not the LinkedIn ads that generated the deal, nor was it the webinar series. It's a mix of all of these tactics because really great marketing is like an amazing craft cocktail: it has lots of tasty ingredients that need to be mixed in the right proportions and the right way, from muddled mint to high-end tequila to fresh lime. The more buyers and the longer the sales cycle, the more complex the cocktail.

Herein lies the issue with attribution: Most attribution solutions look at the top-of-the-funnel white paper download versus the ROI calculator and determine that the calculator is what converted. But perhaps it was the white paper that lured the account to the website in the first place. If you blindly follow the attribution, you'll end up serving straight tequila shots rather than well-balanced cocktails—and we're a little more sophisticated than that, aren't we?

But I get it. As DG'ers, we want to know which tactics to keep and which to kill, and attribution provides a potential white knight to help. I went down this road at Appirio, spending months coming up with an attribution model in pursuit of the dream of tying every last dollar to a marketing tactic. It's a lot like lead scoring—subjectively picking what gets points. This piece of content is worth X, that one is worth Y, and an event is worth Z.

The attribution model I developed was some extremely advanced stuff at the time, but when push came to shove, I found that using basic attribution with the campaign object in Salesforce was more informative than an attribution model and software. Basic attribution with Salesforce campaigns is actually a decent way to measure where people ultimately raise their hand or go from unknown to known, and it can help you create a throughline for an entire campaign.

At the end of the day, though, you still have to use your brain. Back to my cocktail versus straight tequila analogy: You can't compare the tequila to the mint or the fresh lime. Those elements aren't comparable. But if you consistently keep the buying stage at the forefront of your analysis, you can measure a tactic's effectiveness in moving someone to the next step. The Salesforce Campaign object does a good job of measuring the effectiveness of things like tradeshows and other key conversion points. We set up basic rules that require reps to add contacts to opportunities so we can compare and contrast tactics that make sense to measure this way. For example, you could ask, Is this a show we go to again or should we go to another show? You wouldn't ask Should we do another tradeshow or redesign the website, because those questions are not comparable.

Ultimately, attribution is not only about getting credit. Remember, we're always finding the red and looking for ways to improve. This approach is about putting future customers and their experience first. When sales and marketing collaborate, they're working together to find and fix problems so they can deliver great experiences to ideal accounts—and maybe mix some amazing cocktails along the way.

Breakthrough moves for demand generation

• Focus on in-market accounts. Determine which campaigns to run in order to capture the most 6QAs, and then etch that GTM plan into your brain. DG'ers should work across the marketing team to design ideal plans each quarter. Ensure your acts of demand gen are not random tradeshows or webinar series, but rather strategic programs designed to capture and progress 6QAs so you continually put the sales team in the best position to win.
• Co-own the revenue operating model. It's critical to monitor 6QA conversion and progression from stage 0, 1, and 2—and to adapt if you see shifts.
• Leverage tech and insights to fix cracks. Customer experience is our North Star, and we have the tools and data needed to patch leaks and improve opportunity conversion rates. Experiment with how you're orchestrating engagement to find improvements. For example, triggering an informative email to the right persona at the right time can enhance experience in a way purposeless blasts never do. And get ready for the future; AI-driven orchestration is a total game changer. Imagine being able to take 100 accounts that 6QA'ed and provide them highly customized orchestrations to progress them to pipeline—with a fraction of the effort it would take to do it otherwise.
• Eliminate time sucks. Implement disqualification and low-touch processes for accounts that aren't a good fit. It's okay to not spend a ton of time and resources on them. But have a plan so they are not hanging out to dry. Implementing an AI assistant tool like Conversica can be a great way to handle low-priority inbounds. On-demand or self-service demos and content and disqualification nurture programs are also effective.
• Mobilize the broader GTM team. Nothing is more important than really working in-market accounts. Our customer Impartner uses their “time well spent” dashboard to monitor key metrics for 6QAs, and our own BDR team here at 6sense relies on “Ernie's dashboard” to ensure in-market accounts are worked. Remember, the goal is to replace cold calls with warm calls that are perfectly timed based on buying center analytics and in-market predictions. This is what sets teams up for successful calls—and part of how we put customers first.

As the demand generation leader, the marketing team looks to you to define the path to pipeline success. Get ready for the future—and for greatness.

Field Marketers: The Future Chief Market Officers

I have so much love for field marketers. You are my people. In fact, a major breakthrough for me is that field marketers are the future CMOs of the world—you're the on-the-ground experts in your market, the quarterbacks of the go-to-market-plan, the alignment-builders between sales and marketing, and the masters of the mind-blowing moment. The difference-makers in field marketing have what it takes to grow their careers all the way to the top—and to make an incredible impact wherever they go.

Before I go too much further, I should clarify what I mean when I talk about field marketing, since there are so many different interpretations of the role. Field marketers are not event coordinators or party planners. Sure, they may be the masterminds behind killer events, but field marketing is so much more than “menus and venues.”

Instead, field marketing is a critical component of the customer experience revolution. Field marketers are the end-to-end creators of the programs that engage our target accounts in meaningful ways—all with their eyes steadfastly trained on the organization's business objectives.

My introduction to field marketing (and marketing in general) came when I was an ambitious account executive in desperate need of pipeline. Since I didn't have a team of field marketers behind me, I took matters into my own hands and started throwing field marketing events all over the country as a way to get in front of my key prospects. I learned a few important things through that experience. First and foremost was that— while it's really fun to plan and host parties—events are about so much more than just getting in the same room with prospects. Getting people together and creating unique experiences to connect, learn, and have fun is a strategic way to make a name for your organization, get your customers (and future customers) pumped, and build engagement and alignment among your own team.

I also learned that the event planning aspect of field marketing is a lot of freaking work. Maybe that's why it's listed as one of the top-10 most stressful jobs—right up there with firefighters and airline pilots!¹¹

But again, breakthrough field marketers know their job is about so much more than event planning. At 6sense, our field marketing team owns the majority of the Tier 1 or “lightning strike” campaigns I told you about in Chapter 4. They are the brains (and the blood, sweat, and tears) behind our critical pipeline-driving programs, taking care of everything from business objectives to budget to overall experience.

They're able to go from event-planning to major campaign design and execution because they have the technology I described in Chapter 3. The segmentation capabilities turn them into consultants instead of task-doers. Everyone in our organization knows that if they want guidance about how to engage with our market, the field marketing team can guide them.

When sales wants to run a dinner series, for instance, they can ask our field marketers which cities will have the best engagement and which accounts they should invite for the highest likelihood of success. The field marketing team can pinpoint the best cities to visit—and they can also equip the sellers with key insights (like personas and what keywords they care about), which allows meaningful engagement. It goes back to what Glenn said earlier—customers just want to be known, and the only way to know them is with good data.

Orchestration capabilities allow field marketers to take programs to the next level, with multi-tactic campaigns rather than just one-off events. Orchestration is also key if you want to be able to create these incredible future-customer experiences at scale.

Modern field marketing is (kinda) like throwing a surprise party

Clearly field marketing is evolving. Standing out in this crazy and loud landscape where everyone is competing for time is hard and scheduling the occasional steak dinner just isn't going to grab anyone's attention anymore. Modern field marketers need data, insights, and more to move the needle. Think of it in terms of throwing the perfect surprise party (because I know you field marketers love a party analogy!)

• Know your guest of honor (i.e., your segment). Would you ever try to throw a surprise party for someone you didn't know? Of course not. That would be creepy and weird. So the first step is to know the best accounts to target for your programs, and why. Why are these good accounts for you? Is there enough in the segment? What successes have you had with similar accounts in the past? Are these accounts in an industry where you can be successful? If this seems hard to know, flip back to Chapter 3 to bone up on all the tools that put this type of information right at your fingertips, so anyone on the field marketing team can slice it and dice it to extract whatever insights they need.
• Set your budget. Is this a big-payoff account segment (think 50th anniversary party) or a higher-velocity, lower-revenue segment (think 32nd birthday party)? Consider the payoff and make trade-offs where needed to get the most engagement for the buck. In our world, a 32nd birthday party might get display advertising and business development outreach, while the golden anniversary would get the full monte—display, content, direct mail, and an exclusive experience.
• Get your guests from point A to point B. If you're throwing a party, you're going to need a map to get people where you want them to be. Predictive analytics is the ticket to knowing where each guest is starting from (buying stage) and how far we need them to go to reach the venue (closed-won). Just like any good journey, previously traveled routes are usually the best option to get where you're going. If you make it overly complicated, charting new paths through the marsh, don't expect a full house.
• Assemble your helpers. Would you throw a surprise party without a few accomplices? Not unless you want to be pulling your hair out—and dropping a few balls here and there. For our purposes, sales or business development representatives (SDRs/BDRs) are the perfect partners in crime. They understand the logistics and the plan, and they know the end game. They have tools like a sales engagement platform to keep everyone on track.
• Give the people what they want! You wouldn't plan a surprise party for a vegetarian at a steakhouse. Likewise, good field marketers don't execute a campaign unless it delivers exactly what their prospects care about. This is where intent data comes in. Knowing the minute details about what their prospects are interested in allows them to deliver relevant, personalized experiences. In ABM, one way we do this is with a content hub where we can serve up personalized content. If you have great intent data and understand their persona and where they are in the journey, your hub can be incredibly tailored for the guest of honor.
• Check your guest list twice. What's a surprise party without all your guest of honor's favorite people? As a host, you need to know who their friends and family are—and make sure you're communicating with them about the soiree. The parallel in our world? We need to make sure we're engaging not just one person on an account, but the entire buying team. Look at persona maps to determine key people to invite, enrich your records, orchestrate your engagement, and get those VIPs to the big event!

Are you ready?

I hope that all you field marketers read about what's possible in this new world and feel inspired to reach new heights. You might wonder whether you're really the right person to lead this change. I think you are. In fact, I think field marketers are exactly the right people to do it. Here's why …

You're creative. Field marketers are some of the most creative people I know, and creativity is an underappreciated and absolutely critical skill in marketing. You're the ones who are always asking yourselves the important questions—the ones that will make you stand out and make your potential customers want to engage with you. What fun or interesting thing can we do to spark conversation? How can we make our direct mailer awesome enough that it gets opened instead of trashed? Does this microsite, content, or creative make me want to take a meeting? Those are all the insight-seeking, creative questions that make the difference between a ho-hum campaign and one that nets massive amounts of pipeline.

You know the event is only half the story. Your ability to see the whole picture amplifies the impact of the team's efforts. Great field marketers understand that planning a big event isn't just about the event itself. It's about creating a buzz before, during, and after. It's about creating valuable content that will live on long after the event is over. It's about creating a microsite that adds value and creating engaging ads for aircover. The best field marketers are always finding ways to differentiate via standout experiences that humanize the prospects. So who better to embrace and champion a bold new approach that's about all those things?

You dig data and technology. Modern field marketers love data and how it can inform and transform the way they do their jobs. They are also perfectly at home with cutting-edge technologies. They can dig into tools like 6sense, Marketo, SalesLoft, LeanData, Sendoso, ON24, and more to get to know their market and create experiences that will blow their prospects’ minds—and make them want to take that meeting.

You jive with sales. I said it before, but one of the key ways modern field marketers make a difference is by driving alignment between sales and marketing. A critical aspect of that is aligning on metrics so everyone is pursuing the same goals. At 6sense, our field marketing team sits on all the forecast calls. They know the state of pipeline and bookings. So every program they work on is tied directly to those sales goals—building pipeline, accelerating opportunities, and closing deals.

You've got your eye on the ROI. Sure, creativity, event planning, and blowing people's minds with amazing experiences is fun. But you know that the fun is not the point. Everything you do is rooted in your astute business decision-making skills. You ask yourself the right questions: What ROI have we gotten in the past? How can we eke out some more? How do I stretch the budget while still pulling off a memorable and engaging event? What non-attributable impact will this event have?

You can turn on a dime. Your extreme agility—coupled with your ability to put those Chapter 3 capabilities to good use—means that when things go sideways (and they will), you have the ability to pivot. Say, for instance, a global pandemic shuts down all in-person events. You have the temperament and the tools to brush yourself off and create new ways to engage with future customers that make sense to them right now.

You're the face of the brand. Whether it's in-person or in a digital environment, you're the one who is “in the field” with your customers, partners, and prospects. You're building relationships and representing your brand and culture, and you take that seriously. That's why I say that you're the budding chief market officers—you're building the skills, relationships, and knowledge you need to be the expert in the market!

Go forth and lead the change!

You may not have mastered all the points above. You may not feel ready. You may feel intimidated by the bold new path I've laid in front of you. But I have faith in you. Here's my advice: Just start doing it. Make the changes you can, and advocate for the changes you want to see. You truly are one of the most powerful positions in the marketing department—so go ahead and lead that change!

BDRs, SDRs, MDRs: You make the magic happen!

I have such mad respect for business development reps (BDRs), or as you're called in some orgs, sales development reps (SDRs) or marketing development reps (MDRs). Aside from all the built-in awesomeness about you—you're super motivated, creative, and enthusiastic—you also generate boatloads of revenue for your organizations.

That's not just my perception. Research backs me up. Advisory firm TOPO recently published research that shows BDRs/SDRs/MDRs serve a critical function for world-class B2B sales and marketing teams. Their 2019 Sales Development Benchmark report found that you are:¹²

• The most significant pipeline drivers in world-class companies, averaging $415K in pipeline per month, drumming up 57 percent of the pipeline overall.
• The most important channel for successful account-based programs, with 88 percent of account-based marketers citing outbound SDRs as an important channel in their marketing strategy. Because of this success, 41 percent of organizations have built a dedicated account-based SDR team.

But your job is challenging. In spite of how important you are to the success of your organization, less than half of you are consistently hitting quota.

So what's up? You're naturally driven, you work your tails off, you want to win, and for the most part, you love your job. So why isn't success coming more easily for more of you?

We did our own survey to get to the bottom of that question, and what we found might not come as a surprise to you. First, we found that prioritizing your time is a challenge. About one-third (31 percent) of you are spending your time on unproductive activity instead of activity that allows you to close more deals by engaging the right prospects at the right time. The top timesuckers filling up your timecard? Meetings, administrative work, and bad prospecting.

In addition to that, nearly half of you say the prospects you're working are not an ideal fit. No wonder 57 percent of you get a negative response when engaging with your prospects! If you're not targeting the right personas who are actually in-market (your IICP) at the right time in the buying journey, of course your efforts are not going to land. Plus, if you don't have insights into what your prospects care about, you're bound to miss with your attempts at connection.

Here's what BDRs told us they need to be more effective and successful:

• More relevant accounts and prospects to target
• Clearer buyer personas
• Visibility into where prospects are in the buying journey
• Tighter sales and marketing alignment
• More time to do outreach versus wasting time on research, meetings, and administration
• The ability to scale their efforts

Does this sound familiar to you? It certainly does to me, and I only spent one day as a BDR …

A mile in your shoes

I was so confounded by our BDRs’ struggles to succeed that I wanted to figure out what wasn't working. And when you don't know exactly what's going on, it's easy to assume the worst—that people are not putting in the work or that you hired the wrong people. But rather than jump to conclusions, I decided to spend the day with our BDR team to figure out what was going on. Let's just say, I learned a lot.

I quickly realized that what was going on had nothing to do with work effort or acumen. Our BDRs were talented and working their butts off. But that effort was being misdirected.

What first shocked me on my day as a BDR was seeing how much time and energy our BDRs spent researching accounts. They went through 10-Qs, websites, and articles—so much content!—to try to understand buyers’ needs and desires. We dedicated the whole morning to this research, without having any way of knowing if it was even valuable for the prospects we wanted to call.

Even after all this research, the team still struggled to figure out exactly what buyers wanted. Once we got prospects on the phone, it felt like we were missing the mark. We didn't have the right insights to understand what our prospects needed right then and there, so we didn't make great first impressions or hold meaningful conversations.

It was a long day, but it gave me context to understand what was going on. The team was putting the work in. But as leaders, we weren't optimizing how we applied that effort. They spent all their time researching and guessing at prospects’ needs, and they weren't able to use their creative brains and boundless energy to get meetings.

My a-ha moment

After that day, I felt like a curtain had been opened. Once I struggled through the challenges our BDRs faced every day, it made perfect sense that they weren't hitting their numbers. And that's when I had a huge a-ha moment—the one that led to this whole bold new vision (and this book) to begin with.

It started with the realization that as BDRs, your success or failure is not entirely on you. Sure, you're the only one who can control the amount of effort you put in, and you need to give it your all. But it's also on leadership to create an environment in which you can optimize your time. I knew we had to completely change the way we prospect to align with the reality of how today's B2B buyers buy. That meant we had to be willing to flip the script and rethink how we set BDRs up for success.

So we set to work. Our first step was to put an end to guesswork so they could use their time and talents more efficiently. We wanted to give BDRs full visibility into the Dark Funnel™ so their process would be 100 percent powered by real insights. As the CMO of 6sense, I was sitting on top of the best predictive intelligence engine in the world (in my unbiased opinion), but we hadn't hardwired the insights into our own process. Sure, we used insights in our outreach, but that's a far cry from hardwiring the insights into our process. I knew that we needed the latter if we wanted to set up our BDRs for success.

Our solution: We began time-stamping accounts the moment they moved from the awareness/consideration stages of the buying journey into purchase/decision. We know that this is the magic moment when accounts transition from just wanting to learn (anonymously) to wanting to engage with vendors. You might remember that at 6sense, we call this a 6QA (6sense-qualified account).

The reason it's so important to start the clock ticking at this exact moment is that we know that when accounts are ready to engage, our likelihood of success skyrockets if we're the first company to engage with them meaningfully.

Being able to provide this information to our BDRs makes it crystal-clear how to prioritize their account outreach. They're no longer spinning their wheels with the accounts that just aren't ready to hear from them. Instead, they're providing valuable communication at the precise moment that prospects want it. And if all goes well and we are, in fact, the first vendor they engage with, our BDRs have an opportunity to develop a personal connection with them—and perhaps even save us from going through the dreaded RFP process. It's the difference between in-market and inbound. If you wait until an account is inbound, guess what: Every other vendor in your space is engaging with them at the same time, and your likelihood of standing out just drastically decreased.

An end to cold calls

This was when I first made my declaration that our BDRs would not make another cold call. Cold calls aren't just a waste of time; they're also the perfect way to tank a BDR's confidence. I mean, who wouldn't start to take it personally when they get no after no after no?

As I've said, this declaration was met with a high (and understandable) degree of skepticism from the sales leaders who placed a lot of value on phone calls. But when I explained that I wanted to eliminate cold calls—not the calls themselves—they were all in.

What I wanted to make sure we were doing, as marketing and sales leaders, was setting our BDRs up for success. So I made it a rule that before BDRs could make a call, we needed to equip them with specific information about who a prospect is, their role, what aspect of the business they are most interested in, and where they are in the buying journey.

These insights would give a BDR far more confidence going into a call because they have the ability to immediately deliver value to the buyer. Meanwhile, marketing would be providing personalized, targeted aircover to ensure the prospects were warm and ready for the BDRs’ calls.

Same thing for emails. No more spam does not mean that email goes away. It means that we give our BDRs a clear list of accounts who want to hear from them. They focus on that list instead of filling inboxes with unwanted and annoying emails. And they can be sure they're providing value because we tell them exactly what each prospect cares about.

Five Rules for BDR Breakthroughs

Rule #2: Use a multichannel strategy with a mix of manual and automatic touches

It's important to create a cadence that incorporates a variety of types of touches, including LinkedIn connection requests and “likes,” manual and auto-generated emails, phone calls and voicemail, video, and direct mail. Take a look at this example of one of our cadences, in which we execute the first three steps over the course of the same day. We start with a LinkedIn connection request to put a face with a name, follow up with a personalized email, and finally call or leave a voice message if they don't answer.

If you don't take a multi-channel approach, you're overlooking the fact that prospects respond differently in different channels. Getting comfortable with multi-channel communication may take some learning and practice. But with good support from leadership, it's a skill you can build if you haven't already.

Difference-makers in action

So how did life feel once our BDRs weren't wasting their time on cold calls, unwanted emails, and accounts that weren't ready for them? Well, the energy was palpable. Walking into the office, you could feel the buzz. The BDR team wasn't wasting time figuring out what accounts to focus on, slogging through research, or tracking down contact information. Marketing had done all of that, so the BDRs could get to work making the magic happen with energy, engagement, and focus.

Juline Lamusga, who was one of our top-performing BDRs at the time of this change (and is now kicking ass as an AE), shared her perspective.

Knowing who to target and basic messaging is great, but the big difference in prospecting is learning WHY the account is in-market and figuring out how to talk to them based on what they care about. I loved being able to be hyper-personalized because I knew keywords, pages they'd visited, where the buying team was located, and more. It provided a lot of direction. It wasn't just raw data or scores, it was a clear picture and timeline of the account that I could use to engage in a meaningful way.

I'm pleasantly persistent and felt empowered to not give up. If one channel didn't work, I'd get creative in other ways. I'd almost do more touches. Hearing a no doesn't mean they are not interested … a no from one person at an in-market account is just that—a no from one person. If one person on the account wasn't interested, I wouldn't stop until I got a no from everyone on the persona map. Because I knew that if the account 6QA'ed, someone was interested.

Clearly, Juline is a difference-maker. And once she was given the tools and insights she needed to stop wasting her time on unproductive activities, she started to soar. In fact, so did our BDR team in general. Since implementing these changes, our BDR team is empowered to do their jobs efficiently and effectively. Today, 80 percent of our bookings come from 6QA'ed accounts. We went from inconsistently delivering our pipeline goals to overdelivering, increasing BDR quota by more than 50 percent. We exceeded my wildest expectations.

What's more, our CEO is now getting thank-you notes about how awesome and helpful our BDRs are. I'm telling you, that is not normal. Usually the only communication you get about the people doing outreach is complaints (and maybe the occasional cease and desist). So for our BDRs to be providing so much value that our customers are proactively thanking us is really just astounding.

It's been amazing to see the team progress and excel. And I'm confident that if you're a difference-maker like Juline, you can do the same.

Rise up and embrace the change!

If you're a sales, business, or marketing development rep and you're ready to ditch the old, ineffective ways of prospecting, it's time for you to embrace your inner difference-maker! Step one is to advocate for what you need to be successful.

While I learned a ton about what BDRs need by spending a day in their shoes, not all leaders are going to do that. That means that it's up to you to identify what will make you most successful and ask for it.

It's also important to remind yourself that you can do great things. Not just good things, but great. I have super high expectations of BDRs because I've seen what they can achieve when they're hardworking, well-resourced, and inspired. Keep your expectations of yourself high. Don't aim to be a super BDR. Aim to be the best seller.

And remember that you are so much more than a “cadence pusher.” You are the voice of the brand and the curators of the customer experience. In most cases you're the first impression a customer will ever have—so make sure you're putting forth your best, most brilliant, most customer-obsessed self.

Finally, BDRs, know that you are a BFD! The greatest gift I was given in life was high expectations—and I'm sharing those with you here. I fully believe that you are capable of working harder than everyone else, constantly learning and adapting, and seeking out every single advantage to better yourself.

Now go forth and advocate for this no-spam, no-cold-call vision—and see how it transforms your life!

Sales Leader

It's never been easy to be a sales leader, but it seems to be getting harder and more complex by the day. Whereas selling used to be all about relationship building (remember those steak dinners and ball games?), it's now so much more. The pace of selling has exploded, and the expectations on you as a sales leader are constantly increasing. Add to that the new tools, technologies, data, and intelligence now available, and it's clear that being a successful sales leader requires an entirely new set of skills and competencies.

At the same time, sales and marketing can't even agree on which fundamental metrics to use to measure success—so it's no wonder they're misaligned pretty much every step of the way. Here are just some of the disconnects we found in a recent survey we conducted:

• Accounts engaged: sales cares, marketing doesn't
• Deal velocity: sales cares, marketing doesn't
• Sales accepted leads: sales cares, marketing doesn't
• Accounts in market: sales cares, marketing cares less
• MQLs: marketing cares, sales doesn't

This is a huge problem for sales leaders. After all, your marketing team is supposed to be warming up accounts for you and arming your team with key insights into those accounts that they need to be successful. And yet 50 percent of sales and marketing leaders can't even agree on which accounts to target—which does not bode well for turning those accounts into opportunities and closed deals!

This disconnect—especially at a time when expectations of sales leaders are getting more and more aggressive—is untenable. But here's the good news: The new vision I'm laying out here will abolish the misalignment that's holding you back and set you up to achieve new levels of success for you and your team.

What keeps you up at night?

As a sales leader, your most important job is to put your team in a position to succeed. And if you're like the difference-making CROs, CSOs, and heads of sales I know, this dedication to your team's success drives you to constantly be “looking for the red.”

That never-ending anticipation of trouble spots and the constant search for ways to improve are marks of a truly dedicated sales leader—one who will stop at nothing to help his or her team win. If you're in that category, there are probably questions that keep you up at night. In this section, I'm going to walk through a few of the ones I've heard from some of my favorite sales leaders—and offer some insight into how this bold new vision of selling and marketing is going to help you put those questions to rest.

Where do we have leaks and breakdowns?

You know that opportunities are slipping and not getting worked—but why? Sorry to say it, but you have an eff-load of leaks and breakdowns—and a lot of them have to do with the misalignment between sales and marketing that I keep talking about. If you've ever heard the refrain, “These leads suck. Marketing isn't even qualifying them!” from your team, or “Why are tier-one accounts not even getting touched?” from the marketing team, you know you've got leaks and breakdowns aplenty. This lack of alignment doesn't just lead to finger-pointing—it also undermines financial performance, according to 60 percent of sales and marketing professionals.¹³

Step 1 in Operation Plug the Leaks: Get right with your CMO. Align on your metrics, starting by torching your MQLs. Just like that scene in Mr. Mom when he burns that old flannel shirt that no longer serves him, it's time to burn your breakdown-causing MQLs to ash. Working crappy leads is not setting your team up for success, so stop doing it. Instead, align with your CMO on the operating model (Chapter 4) and embrace an account-based funnel. Work together as a revenue team with your CMO— no defensiveness or territorialism allowed—to agree on metrics, share data, and align on priorities. This move alone will change the paradigm and allow you both to start working to plug those leaks.

Why does everything take so long?

If you're finding that everything takes forever—from deploying a field program to closing a deal—it could be that your data are inadequate. And in modern selling, data is king. You need to have trustworthy data in order to be able to do your job efficiently, and your team needs it to be able to do theirs. Without reliable, usable data, you're shooting blind and wasting time.

Here's another area where sales and marketing misalignment rears its head. If you're getting your data from an outdated CRM, and marketing is getting its data from a cruddy MAP, you come to the table with different beliefs about what's important and how to prioritize. That's a problem because you have critical decisions you need to make on a daily basis: What's my addressable market? What accounts should I call today? What's the best way to structure my sales territory? Should I run a competitive campaign this quarter? Do we go after a new vertical? How many new AEs can I confidently add? If you're not answering those questions with trustworthy data, you're just guessing. And while Ouija boards are fun for middle-school sleepovers, they're not how we should be making decisions in the high-stakes world we play in.

This is where rich, reliable data comes in. And I'm not just talking about that shaky first-party data you have but don't really know what to do with. I'm talking about integrating reliable third-party data so you can see not just known activity, like who's filling out forms, but anonymous activity as well. That includes who's visiting your website and not raising their hands, but it also includes information about what accounts are doing when they're not within your four walls—their research on blogs, competitors’ sites, industry reports, and so forth. This kind of rich data allows you to see where your untapped opportunities are.

The customer data platforms (CDPs) I told you about in Chapter 3 are also essential here. They make it possible to break down data silos, de-dupe records, and cleanse data so that when you're making decisions, they're based on a single source of rich, accurate account data that you can take action on.

When you have a clear source of reliable data, debates, and delays go out the window. In their place, you have deft, agile marketing and selling. Our director of commercial sales, Michael (Mac) Conn, has a shining example of what this looks like in practice.

We recently heard that one of our competitors was exiting our market segment, and that another one wasn't doing that well. So during my weekly call with our amazing Field Marketing Leader, Courtney Smith, I told her about it. I floated the idea of running a campaign or two in light of the news. She set up a meeting for us to talk more about it the next day.

At the start of that meeting, we pulled up our platform to look at the number of accounts we could target and see if it was even worthwhile. Within 15 seconds, we had determined that there were workable segments that either had those competitors’ technology installed or had been actively researching those competitors in the past 7 days. So right off the bat, we knew it was actually worth our time to pursue. We got to spend the rest of that 30-minute meeting talking about the fun stuff—what the campaign was going to look like. And the next day, the marketing team was already running ads and a LinkedIn campaign against the audience we had defined at the start of the meeting.

Within two weeks, we had five opportunities against accounts in those market segments. If that's not sales and marketing alignment, I don't know what is.

The ability to take the data equation off the table and figure out whether it's worth our time—without debate and delay—is what made this possible. Rallying around an objective data set is key, and usually that's the hardest thing to do.

That type of fast, agile, data-fueled decision-making is only possible because our sales and marketing teams are so aligned. And that alignment wouldn't be possible without the tech that makes clean and trusted data possible.

Are we missing opportunities or getting into deals too late?

Is there anything worse than working your ass off on an account only to wake up and find out your competitor just closed what should have been your deal—and your team didn't see it coming? Or when you hear that your competitor landed a huge deal that you didn't even know was in-market? Or when you bust your butt on an RFP only to learn that you were only column fodder?

I know sales leaders, and I know that there is nothing that gets under your skin like losing. But when you don't have the right tech and the right data, you're playing from behind.

One of our customers, Aprimo, ran into this problem after they were the leaders in three Forrester waves. (I know, sounds like a nice problem to have!) But suddenly they found they were being inundated with RFPs—not because these prospects were really considering them, but because the procurement teams at the companies threw them in there based on their wave success. And frustratingly (but predictably), they kept losing these RFPs.

When they took a step back, they realized that when they got into the game so late, they had no chance at winning. “We were finding that 57 percent of the buying process had already happened before we knew about it—there was all this in-market activity that we had no view to,” explains Ed Breault, Aprimo's CMO.

They knew they had to reach prospects much earlier in their journey if they wanted to influence their decision-making.

How did they do that? With the capabilities we talked about in Chapter 3, they were able to light up the Dark Funnel™. Based on the activity they saw there, they could easily spot which accounts were gearing up for an RFP.

Having this sneak preview meant that sales and marketing could both jump into action—doing their research, creating a microsite for the prospect, and putting themselves in a great position to win— sometimes preempting the RFP process altogether.

I love this story because it's a perfect example of how modern sales leaders can work together with marketing to anticipate possible accounts and proactively uncover demand—ensuring that you neither miss opportunities nor come at them too late.

Are reps spending their time on the right accounts, and am I setting them up to succeed?

As a sales leader, your only asset is your people, and their only asset is their time. So you need to optimize how they use that time and set them up to be as successful as possible.

I mentioned it in the BDR section, but it bears repeating: Our frontline hunters—the BDRs, the prospectors—are wasting a colossal amount of time on unproductive activities. I'm not talking about sneaking games of Candy Crush at their desks. I'm talking about chasing worthless leads, doing endless research, and reaching out to prospects at the wrong time, with the wrong message. And none of that is their fault; it's because we're not setting them up for success.

And BDRs aren't the only ones we're failing. Our AEs hate to lose. But when we give them territories filled with junk, or when they don't have the insights to know what their buyers are doing and thinking, they're bound to have lackluster results.

But fully equipping the entire selling team with these kinds of insights and making it repeatable and scalable can be a challenge. “It's easy to make one or two reps successful,” says Mark Ebert, our head of sales. “But I need to be able to make every rep—including our BDRs, our ISRs, commercial, large enterprise—across multiple territories successful, and I need it to be repeatable and scalable.”

Mark explains that given the pace at which they need to perform, modern sales teams expect their leaders to equip them with everything they need to function at a high level. That includes really good tech that can tell you about the buying team, the competitive landscape, the most important challenges your customers are facing, what they have in their tech stack, and how engagement is changing throughout the cycle.

With that tech in place, “It's about calling equipped with the information you need so you have the highest probability of winning,” Mark explains.

The right tech, like 6QA insights and dynamic territories, allows you to scale by giving you the tools you need to build proven, repeatable processes. Having those processes in place makes it easier for the sellers to sell and for you to add new people to your team seamlessly—and provides confidence that you can give them good territories.

As a difference-maker sales leader, you know that you can set your sellers up for success when you give them:

• An awesome territory
• Prioritization within their territories so they can make use of every incremental moment
• Prospecting insights to get connected with the best opportunities (i.e., the ones that are actually going to happen)
• Deal insights—including personas engaged and competitors involved—for every interaction throughout the deal

And knowing that all of this is running in the background for every AE is what's going to help you sleep at night.

Are we showing up the right way in front of prospects?

The customer experience is at the heart of this revolution we're creating. Are your sellers giving your prospects a stellar customer experience at every touch point? If not, they (and you) are leaving opportunities on the table.

When your AEs meet with a prospect, you want to be confident that every interaction the prospect has had with your brand so far has been a good one. It's the difference between walking into a meeting where the people across the table are already annoyed with you and walking in to find a buying team who's super impressed with what they've seen so far. If your prospects already feel a connection to your brand—and if they feel like your AEs know and understand them (you know, because you've treated them like humans), you have a much greater chance of success.

Every single interaction with a potential customer is a chance to either reinforce your relationship or minimize it (or have no effect at all). There are literally hundreds of these before a deal closes. It's true that 70 or 80 percent of those touches will be orchestrated by marketing (another win for alignment!), but there's still plenty that are in your control as a sales leader: You can control who you hire, and you can control how prepared they are to deliver a killer experience.

Let's start with who you hire. You're a difference-maker, and ideally, you'll hire a team of difference-makers. How do you know if you've found a seller who is going to crush it for you? “I look for aptitude and acumen, which is a great combination of natural ability and the capacity to exercise good judgment and think on your feet,” our CEO Jason explains. “If you have those two ingredients, most everything falls into place. The third thing I look for is a bit of an intangible, which is the will to win, willpower.” What is one sign that the person you're hiring has these traits? An insatiable curiosity. “If someone is relentlessly curious, they tend to focus on learning and optimizing on the job,” Jason says.

With your team of curious and talented sellers, now you need to set up the processes to make sure they thrive. These are the processes I spoke about previously—built on the best insights and repeatable and scalable across the team.

That's when you can focus on making sure your sellers are rocking the customer experience part of the equation. One tool for doing that is the value cards I've told you about. They make it possible for every seller—even the ones fresh out of college—to understand their prospects so they can be consultative and add value. I'm also a big believer in value selling and supporting processes with ROI, constantly improving our skills with tools like Gong, and mapping our cycle to buying jobs.

These are all keys to the no-spam and no-cold-calls parts of this manifesto—if you're providing value at every interaction, you aren't spamming, and you aren't cold calling. You're delivering the right experiences to the right accounts at the right time.

All of this needs to be built into your training process, and it needs to be reinforced daily as part of your team's culture.

The bright new world of sales leadership

For sales leaders who have made the shift to modern selling—bolstered by modern technology—there's simply no going back. They can't imagine trying to lead their teams without the types of insights and tools they have now.

In fact, one of our customers conducted a survey to see just how great of an impact the right tech capabilities have on their ability to sell. Every single respondent— 100 percent—said that losing 6sense Sales Intelligence would have a medium to high impact on their ability to hit sales goals.

The results were astounding but easy to believe if you've experienced the transformation that's possible with this technology. It's hands-down the greatest thing you can do to set your team up for success. I've never heard of another investment that gets the kind of buy-in we heard about in this research. There's no CRM implementation, sales training, certification, or coaching that can yield the type of growth that is possible with the right intelligence capabilities.

Being in sales is hard enough. Leveraging cutting-edge technology across the entire process gives every member of your team the greatest chance at striking gold—and that's the goal of every difference-maker sales leader I know!

Sales and Account Executives

There are a million books out there for sales methodologies, but most of them are written with the average salesperson in mind. You, my friend, are not the average salesperson. You're a top seller—one of the difference-makers. And if you're not there yet, it's certainly what you strive to be.

Over the past 20 years, I've worked with some amazing, awe-inspiring sellers. But the absolute best ones I've ever met are here at 6sense. Our incredible sales culture comes all the way from the top, and it permeates throughout the entire team. Our sales leaders have had noteworthy careers as high performers themselves, and they have a knack for hiring and growing great sales talent. So that certainly contributes to the success of our sales team.

But it's the sellers themselves who put in the hard work day after day to produce jaw-dropping results. They are the ones who hold themselves to sky-high expectations and accountability. For our top sellers, meeting quota is table stakes. If they're not hitting 150 percent or above, they're “finding the red” to do better.

When I think about what sets these sellers apart, what defines them as difference-makers, I realize they're fully committed to their why. They ask the big questions about what they want in life. They've determined what they want to do, and they're crystal clear on it. And they're committed to how their sales career is going to get them there. That's why they do the hard work, even when no one is looking. It's an intrinsic motivation to beat their goals that makes them unstoppable.

As I said, this is a culture that permeates our entire sales team. Every single AE working at 6sense is a difference-maker. And you know that the AE who is leading that incredible pack is truly next-level.

A total commitment to winning

When I heard Dasha Vasilyeva's presentation at our field kickoff, I had chills. Dasha— who goes by the well-deserved nickname DashaFierce—is currently our top seller, and she has some advice for modern sellers who want to rise to the top the way she has. She calls it winning by 1,000 cuts: “You have to keep fighting the daily battles,” she told our sales team. “At the beginning, you're going to lose more than you're going to win. The more you train yourself, the more you lose, the smarter you get. And eventually, you win.”

Like many top AEs, Dasha has the heart and perseverance of a professional athlete. She's totally committed to her craft—and that craft is winning. Like Michael Jordan, she's willing to fail as many times as she needs to in order to get the win. I loved this MIchael Jordan quote that Dasha shared in her presentation:

I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.

In basketball, the work to improve entails running drills, training, and taking shot after shot after shot. For AEs, that work is doing the extra research to really understand their prospects, getting in touch with the right people, taking the time to make their prospects feel known, and prepping for every meeting like it's a playoff game.

And there's good news in this new frontier of selling and marketing for Dasha and the top sellers like her: Today's technology makes these game-changing moves possible in ways they never could have dreamed of before.

Top sellers use every advantage

Expectations of sellers are higher than ever, and the way buyers buy has shifted dramatically. We know that they're completing much of the buying cycle anonymously, they buy in teams of a dozen or so people, and they don't engage until their minds are pretty much made up. It's no wonder selling is getting harder by the day.

But again, you're a difference-maker, and you're not going to stop because of new challenges. You are going to find every advantage available to you to help you win. And in the modern landscape, those advantages come in the form of the tech capabilities I described in Chapter 3. Here are just some of the ways modern tools have transformed the ways sellers sell with a competitive advantage.

The timing is right

Dasha remembers a time at a previous job when she warmed an account for months— visiting the office, walking the halls, building amazing relationships with the team—but never closed the deal. A few months after she had moved to a different territory, she learned that the company signed a deal with the rep who took over her territory. She'll never forget what the customer said when she asked why they hadn't bought from her: “Well, Dasha, we didn't have a need for what you were selling. Your timing was off.”

Timing is never a problem anymore, now that she has technology that prioritizes accounts based on their readiness to engage. She knows now that the accounts she's working are in-market to buy.

Meeting prep gets even more personalized

Real-time sales intelligence lets us see what accounts are researching, so when we show up to a meeting we can speak directly to the pain points we know they have—not just the ones they're telling us about. For instance, if we know that a team is researching Drift in addition to predictive analytics, we can add a slide to our deck that talks about our seamless integration with Drift, and how our solution can make it an even more powerful tool.

Forecasting is grounded in reality

Having visibility into the engagement of the entire buying committee gives us a really good measure of how likely a deal is to close. Dasha says she won't forecast something as a commit if she doesn't have the entire buying committee engaged. Using the persona map, she will find the gaps in engagement and make meaningful connections with all members of the buying team—thereby improving her chances of closing the deal.

The teams are aligned

As the AE, you're the quarterback of the deal. You need to be able to rally the whole team together. With trustworthy data that's shared among the entire revenue team, you're able to make sure you're all on the same page and presenting a united front. You can connect the entire buying team with their counterparts at your company and build relationships that will pay dividends.

You have allies in negotiations

Here come those dividends. Because you've been able to align your team to multithread your deals, you have multiple relationships you can lean on to finalize agreements. The different stakeholders you've nurtured across the organization become your champions.

It's about tech … and so much more

The future of selling is going to dramatically shift with the amazing new tech capabilities available to us, and if you use them to your advantage you are going to reach new heights in your career.

But what makes you a difference-maker is about so much more—it's your X factor that pushes you to the head of the pack.

You have off-the charts emotional intelligence, making it second-nature for you to build relationships with people. You set big goals, you embrace change, you have thick skin, you're sharp as a tack, and you are always learning. Add to all those amazing qualities the advantage that technology provides, and you're going to be unstoppable!

Why we need this change, now more than ever

I hope by now I've made my case that embracing this tech-fueled, data-driven approach to sales and marketing isn't just a good idea, it's the only way to stay relevant and thrive in your role.

It's no longer enough to look at our static ICP or persona maps. Customers, industries, and markets evolve constantly, and we must be agile enough to meet them where they are. Nothing put a finer point on this for me than seeing how our teams adjusted and adapted when Covid turned our world upside-down.

You probably remember the moment in mid-March 2020 when it became clear that life as we knew it was about to change dramatically. All of a sudden, schools were closing, professional sports leagues were canceling their seasons, and non-essential businesses were shuttering their offices.

It also became clear that travel was out of the question. Which meant that whatever revenue we were banking on from trade shows, conferences, and customer meetings had just evaporated. Companies across the world suddenly found themselves grappling with how to stay alive as the ground shifted beneath us.

Mac, our director of commercial sales, had it especially rough when Covid hit. He was a new manager with a brand-new team of six in a growth market we had just broken into. They were all just getting their legs under them when suddenly their legs were swept out.

That first Monday after the office shut down, Mac remembers a pervasive feeling of fear. “There was personal fear, there was health fear, there was professional fear. ‘How do I do my job? What do I do?’” For salespeople especially, the climate was confusing and scary. “Every LinkedIn post was blowing up some seller for doing their job in the face of Covid,” Mac says. “When you start seeing that, especially if you're doing outbound, you're afraid that anything you do is going to make you a pariah.”

There was no roadmap to follow—we were all redefining the rules in real-time. Mac made a prudent decision: hit the pause button for 48 hours and come back together after some thinking and with some perspective.

“I did a lot of deep thinking myself,” Mac says, “but I also put it on my team to come up with their own ideas.” What they concluded was that their work couldn't stop because the customers they serve don't have the luxury of stopping their work. Instead, they shifted their mindset and decided to double-down.

The second thing they realized, and it kinda brings a little tear to my eye, is that the technology at their fingertips made it possible for them to continue their outreach without being insensitive. They could see who was still in-market and actively researching. And not only would they not be insensitive, but they'd also be providing a crucial service at a critical time. After all, a lot of companies were scrambling to make up for lost event pipeline, so they were out there actively researching solutions—and Mac's team could give them that solution.

“It gave my team the confidence to know that if we focus on in-market accounts now, we not only didn't need to worry about being blasted on LinkedIn, but we were really going to be able to actually help them out.”

The approach everyone was preaching—stop sending blast emails, produce your content and let people consume it, sell with empathy—was the exact process we had already set up with our no-forms, no-spam, no-cold-calls strategy. The team took that 48-hour pause and came back with the realization that we'd been preparing for this for months.

Just like on a “normal day,” our tech allowed Mac's team to prioritize in real time the accounts that were ready to engage in that exact, bizarre moment. It also told the team what people were interested in so they could tailor their emails and phone calls to make them as relevant as possible—without a single “in these unprecedented times” blast email.

In the end, our insights and technology sustained us through what could have been a devastating time for our business (and that was for many). In fact, our numbers didn't just remain steady, they improved in the weeks after the shutdown took effect. Our pipeline exploded—quadrupling in that first week and at least doubling in the weeks after. In fact, Mac's team ended that quarter at 125 percent of plan.

“Without in-market understanding, there's no way in hell we'd have gotten even close to that,” Mac says. “Being laser-focused on going after those in-market accounts allowed us to be successful.”

Difference-makers, it's your time to break through!

Whether you're in one of the roles I explored in this chapter or if you're in another part of the revenue team, if you're a difference-maker, we need you. It's time to mobilize and be part of this movement!

I hope this book will serve as a guide to help you lay out your plan for breaking through to new heights in sales and marketing. If any of it feels overwhelming, just remember that you only need to start where you are and keep moving forward. Small changes become habits, and new habits become a way of life. As US Navy Admiral William McRaven said in his now famous commencement speech, “If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed.” In other words, monumental changes are made one small task at a time.

You'll make mistakes along the way (I know I sure have). And that's not just okay, it's good. Remember that Michael Jordan quote? Perfection is the enemy of progress, so anticipate mistakes and hiccups. You will accidently send an email meant for 90 people to 900 instead. You will sometimes send a follow-up email that someone considers to be spam. You will forget to take down that one form from five years ago and someone will call you on it. And, if you're anything like me, your skin will crawl and you'll beat yourself up … but you'll learn.

So expect mistakes. Just dust yourself off, learn from them, and move forward. Tune out the naysayers and the critics and carry on.

No forms, no spam, no cold calls is an aspiration, not something you need to succeed at 100 percent of the time. It's a reminder for us all to look in the mirror, check ourselves, and shock our systems into doing better. It's that big goal Edwin Locke told us about—set your sights big, and you can't help but strive for them.

And most of all—have fun. I hope you'll hear this as a rallying cry to bring passion, creativity, and outside-the-box thinking back into your professional life. The fun factor is so important, and this new approach helps you achieve it. I always tell my team that if they're not having fun at least 8 out of every 10 working days, we're doing something wrong.

Now's a good time to start laying the groundwork with your V2MOM. Get clear on your vision (deliver predictable revenue growth through a customer-centric prospect experience), values (no forms, no spam, no cold calls), and methods (strategy, process, technology, and people). It'll keep you focused not just on how you're doing this, but why.

It's time. Get up, make your bed, and get started on changing the world!