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The Accountability Reset: Rethinking Marketing Metrics as AI Search Grows · Sales Pipeline Radio

• 0:16
  Matt Heinz: All right, we are back recording here live on the Forrester B2B
• 0:19
  Summit floor, right on the marketplace.
• 0:22
  It's booming — we got people everywhere here checking out the vendors,
• 0:25
  we got sound stages behind us, we got lounges, we got the big boot.
• 0:30
  Ross, right behind you is this enormous, like, 20-foot-tall boot.
• 0:35
  We've already established, we learned in an earlier session, that it actually is an
• 0:39
  ancient boot — it was here first, and they built the conference center around it.
• 0:43
  You know, when titans roamed the land, they needed solid footwear as well, and
• 0:48
  that's where boots were invented — by the titans that walked the earth, early days.
• 0:53
  Ross Graber: I had no idea.
• 0:54
  Matt Heinz: Most people don't know that.
• 0:55
  But if you look at the internet, if you go deep enough, you'll find
• 0:58
  evidence of it, I promise you.
• 0:59
  Ross Graber, we've got here today — he's the vice president and principal
• 1:02
  analyst at Forrester Research.
• 1:04
  And I was joking, like, you're an OG, man — you've been at Forrester
• 1:08
  and SiriusDecisions for 13, 14 years?
• 1:12
  Ross Graber: So it's just over 14 years — I was doing the math.
• 1:15
  This is my 15th North American summit.
• 1:18
  And I'm really proud of this — this is an awesome event, it's my
• 1:22
  favorite week of the year.
• 1:24
  Matt Heinz: Honestly, this has always been some combination of B2B reunion, B2B prom.
• 1:30
  You get some of the best and brightest minds in B2B getting together, everyone
• 1:34
  from analysts to practitioners, even, honestly, vendors — the people that
• 1:37
  are here showcasing what they're doing, it's a different round of
• 1:40
  stuff every year, and it represents sort of where the industry is going.
• 1:45
  I think this is my 12th or 13th version of this — it is always a highlight.
• 1:50
  And, as you think about that progression and where we've come as B2B marketers
• 1:54
  — and we're gonna get into your topic around the accountability reset here in
• 1:58
  a second — but I wanna take advantage of that legacy you have, that kind
• 2:02
  of consistency in this marketplace, in this industry, in this conference.
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  What have you seen that's changed the most, and what's
• 2:11
  remained the most constant?
• 2:13
  Ross Graber: Oh, my goodness.
• 2:14
  These are
• 2:20
  tough questions.
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  But I think
• 2:23
  what has been the most constant across all of these years is I love
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  being surrounded by people who really love doing business-to-business
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  marketing and are just trying to figure out, what does the future hold?
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  How do we do better at this?
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  What do we need to know to make sure that we're delivering for our businesses,
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  for our customers, even for ourselves?
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  So that sort of energy — I don't think that has changed from the first day
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  I got here, like, in 2011, to now.
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  Everybody's trying, everybody's trying to do a better job.
• 3:01
  I also think — but the question about what has changed, that's a walk down memory
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  lane, because you think about this, and we always thought that… I don't know
• 3:14
  that we ever thought we had it fully figured out, but we always thought we'd
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  figured out some pretty big pieces of it, and it's just amazing how much buying's
• 3:26
  changed, how much business expectations of marketing have changed over the years.
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  And how that starts to affect the ways that we do our job.
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  And it's so easy to just view it
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  as something that's like a constant progression, like one step in front of
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  the other, and you keep going up and up.
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  But there have been a lot of detours.
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  When you think about the amount of change there's been, especially in the last
• 3:59
  couple of years — and now I'm kind of hooking it back into what we're talking
• 4:03
  about today here at Summit — the theme this year is about singularity, because
• 4:08
  we're saying, "Well, wait a second, AI is changing the way buyers buy."
• 4:13
  Matt Heinz: Mm-hmm.
• 4:13
  Ross Graber: And so much of the discussion has been about, as marketers, how
• 4:18
  does AI change the way we do our jobs?
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  But it also changes the way that our buyers are doing our jobs, and it
• 4:24
  starts to change some of the paradigms for how we think about what our jobs
• 4:28
  are, and what good starts to look like.
• 4:31
  And it's a little bit frightening.
• 4:33
  Matt Heinz: Yeah.
• 4:33
  Ross Graber: I mean, it's certainly exciting, because it means that we need
• 4:37
  to do new research, and we need to find new techniques, and we need to find new
• 4:41
  ways to make sure that we're delivering our buyers what they need and delivering
• 4:45
  what we need, what our businesses need.
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  But it's a new world.
• 4:51
  Matt Heinz: I love the way you characterize the continuity
• 4:54
  of the audience, right?
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  The fact that, as a group, there are people who are curious, who are
• 5:00
  proactive about trying to learn, who really care about the job that they're
• 5:04
  doing, and care about their colleagues, and care about being successful.
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  Maybe not always 100% excited about changes to the status quo—
• 5:15
  Ross Graber: Sure.
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  Matt Heinz: But the change is a constant, too, right?
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  And so you sort of get used to that and say, the technology changes, what
• 5:20
  the buyers are looking for changes, the complexity of the buying group changes.
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  You have to constantly be in evolution mode to be successful
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  long term in an industry like this.
• 5:32
  Ross Graber: Absolutely.
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  I mean, if we're not
• 5:38
  changing, we're gonna get run over, because everything's changing around us.
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  And standing still, it's just gonna pass us by.
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  I know that can sound kind of hackneyed, but some of the things that
• 5:51
  I know — or used to know, and that I was really good at — sometimes I've
• 5:57
  gotta put aside, because it doesn't work quite the way it perhaps used to.
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  And I think a great example — we started off, before we got on the
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  air, we were talking about things like the waterfall and the evolution
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  of the waterfall, and how even we think about what interest looks like.
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  The differences between individuals and groups — those things change.
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  We weren't, I don't know that we were necessarily wrong, we were
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  doing the best we could at the time.
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  But we've just learned that things are evolving, and
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  we've gotten smarter about it.
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  Matt Heinz: Well, I think it's a really good point, because I think we kind of
• 6:38
  make fun of, like, "Oh, remember, we used to send emails and download white papers
• 6:41
  and send them to BDRs." Well, we did that because for a while that worked, right?
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  Ross Graber: Right.
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  Matt Heinz: And we could argue it's evolved since then, but I also think
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  about, I remember asking my dad after a while in my career, like, "How did
• 6:53
  you ever work without a computer?" He was in sales and marketing — how
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  the heck did he do any of that?
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  He said, "Well, I would come home at night and I would have a pack of paper
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  under my arm — that was my email, and I had to read it and write it back, and
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  occasionally there'd be marketing copy that an agency had written, and I would
• 7:09
  use a red pencil — not rev marks — to work on that as well." He's like, "We
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  didn't know better, we didn't know a computer existed." I think that's kind
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  of like — I'm already thinking about pre-Claude cowork versus a post-Claude
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  cowork in terms of being efficient — we didn't know better, we didn't have better.
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  We didn't have Wi-Fi on airplanes, and now we do, and that changes
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  the game a little bit, too.
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  So it's not that the past was bad, it's just that we have
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  an opportunity to constantly—
• 7:32
  Ross Graber: Absolutely.
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  But I think it's fun sometimes to go and look backwards and start saying,
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  "How did we get to where we are here?" And I'm gonna do a little bit of that tomorrow
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  in my keynote, saying, "Well, why are some of these things that we've just accepted—"
• 7:49
  Matt Heinz: Yeah.
• 7:49
  Ross Graber: "—why are they normal? Why do we accept doing it this way?" And a
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  lot of times it's because they did serve a purpose — they served a purpose at a
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  certain point in time, but sometimes that purpose evolves and it doesn't hold true
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  anymore, and we've gotta recognize that.
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  And that's kind of fun, because you've gotta be super introspective
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  and say, "Does it really need to be this way? Or could it be some
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  other way, and we've just accepted it 'cause it's what the limitations
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  at the time encouraged us to do?"
• 8:22
  Matt Heinz: We're talking on the show floor here at Forrester
• 8:25
  B2B Summit with Ross Graber.
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  He's vice president, principal analyst at Forrester.
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  And, you know, if we were doing this live, I'd feel like we were sort of
• 8:32
  giving away your summary tomorrow, but this will be published well after.
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  So let's talk about the accountability reset, and I'm really excited for this
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  session — I'm excited for the message you're gonna give, almost the challenge
• 8:43
  you're gonna give to marketers, not just in terms of accountability, but in
• 8:47
  terms of the culture change and change management required to get to where
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  we need to be, to be more successful, more productive, sort of repeatable,
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  sustainable producers of revenue impact.
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  Give us a little preview, I guess, of what—
• 9:04
  Ross Graber: You're talking about tomorrow.
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  So, here's the shape of the argument.
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  We know that our buyers are changing — so
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  I'm not breaking any news here that buyers are using AI search in really big numbers.
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  That is a fact of life, that is happening, we have no choice.
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  Most of the marketers I know and work with are aware of that shift, and they are
• 9:27
  doing things within their organization to make sure that they are feeding AI search,
• 9:32
  that they are showing up where their buyers are, and that's all important.
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  It's good, super-duper.
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  But the challenge that it presents — which is kind of a "seeing slightly around the
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  corner" challenge — is so many of the ways that we evaluate marketing right
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  now are based on being able to prove that engagement to our organizations.
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  We research what marketing organizations are evaluated by, and when you look
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  at the list, most of what they're evaluated by is built around being
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  able to show that we had a buyer who did a thing on our web properties.
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  Matt Heinz: Mm-hmm.
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  Ross Graber: We are funded by the fact that our buyers have done
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  that thing on our web properties.
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  What happens when they're doing a whole lot less of that on our web properties?
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  Does that mean marketing should be less funded, and marketing is going
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  to be less influential over buying?
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  I don't think—
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  —that's the answer to that.
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  Right.
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  Which means we have to stop, or we have to break out of this
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  idea that says everything is going to be engagement-based.
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  Now we have to start being smarter and more specific and more explicit about
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  what marketing is actually here to do.
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  What do good outcomes start to look like?
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  And we have to work all that much harder to make sure that we're calling these
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  things out, letting our organizations know what we're trying to create for our buyers
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  and our business, and how we're going to understand whether we're being successful
• 11:03
  in that, and whether it's helping us.
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  I'm sorry, I've given you probably the three-minute Cliff Notes of the 20-minute
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  talk, but there are all sorts of things we can go into on how to actually do that.
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  Matt Heinz: Well, how to actually do that — how to help your teams
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  navigate the culture change and change management related to doing that?
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  'Cause any time you ask someone to take accountability for something they may not
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  fully grasp, or fully understand, or fully know how to do, we get afraid, right?
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  And that fear sometimes comes across as defensiveness, sometimes it comes across
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  as almost belligerence — people saying, "I just don't know how to do that, I've
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  never known how to do that. You just changed my job, and now I'm worried about
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  paying my mortgage, 'cause what if I can't do this?" And so the accountability — we
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  really can't and shouldn't escape it.
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  And if we wanna think accountability is just traffic to the website or metrics
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  that you already have access to, that's not the game your team is playing.
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  So we have no choice but to make this shift.
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  How do companies do that?
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  Ross Graber: I wanna jump on something you just said before we talk about the how—
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  Matt Heinz: Sure.
• 12:09
  Ross Graber: —because something's been fascinating to me.
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  We started with some of the changes in the industry, and then we're talking
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  about some of the metrics we have, and some of the data we have, and
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  some of the information that we have.
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  And it occurred to me that if you turn back the clock to times where
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  organizations were just starting to get their arms around concepts of
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  inquiries, and MQLs, and sales-qualified leads, and all those things — those
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  were data elements that didn't exist.
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  They weren't real until we made them real.
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  And what that meant was we had to start saying, "We're gonna name this thing and
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  call it something, and come up with new techniques to start measuring that we
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  understand what demand is, and where it comes from, and what good looks like."
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  And it's easy to look back at what we've been doing the last few years and say,
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  "Okay, that always was there," but it was not — we had to bring that into being.
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  And I think we're at a point in time where we're going to have to do something
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  very similar, which is we're going to have to put new names on the sorts of
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  things that we're doing, and develop new techniques to monitor whether
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  those things are happening and whether they look good, and whether they're
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  substantial enough to give us direction about what we should be doing next.
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  So, I'm sorry, I went off on a tear in a different direction than you
• 13:32
  were intending, but the question you asked before I went on a jag was what?
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  Matt Heinz: Oh, it was just around, when we face changes in how we do things,
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  and there's ambiguity around how that's done, how do we help our teams manage
• 13:48
  that change comfortably and safely?
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  Ross Graber: So there were two things that really stand out to me.
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  I did a ton of interviews as part of the setup for this
• 14:02
  keynote I'm about to do tomorrow
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  — there was a fair amount of survey research, but the interviews really
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  stood out to me, because one of the things that kept coming across is
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  leaders had to create space for new sorts of objectives by relieving some
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  of the tension from the old objectives.
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  So there's an example I'll talk to — SAS Institute was really good about this.
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  They were seeing that their marketing-sourced pipeline numbers were
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  something they were hitting all the time.
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  But it really was not indicative of whether their business was having
• 14:44
  a good quarter or a bad quarter.
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  They were great at tracking it, but it was not something that was leading to success.
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  And the team over there started realizing that, and their CMO made a very bold
• 14:55
  call and said, "You know what? We're done with this — this is not how we're
• 14:59
  going to evaluate our team anymore." And it created new space to go and start
• 15:04
  to experiment with different types of objectives that they could put out there.
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  But what also stood out to me is they were doing it in ways that were a little
• 15:15
  bit more exploratory than punitive.
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  They were saying, "This is a direction we wanna run in — we're
• 15:19
  going to set objectives around running in this direction." But
• 15:23
  it never felt to me like they were
• 15:28
  putting it out there in such a way where — yes, they wanted to succeed—
• 15:33
  Matt Heinz: Yeah.
• 15:34
  Ross Graber: —but it was very much a new direction, as opposed to something
• 15:39
  that folks needed to be afraid of.
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  Or that's how it came across to me.
• 15:44
  Matt Heinz: Yeah, no, it makes sense.
• 15:46
  I'm looking forward to this tomorrow.
• 15:47
  Now, by the time everyone hears this, it'll be on demand, and for
• 15:50
  those of you Forrester subscribers, you'll have full access to this.
• 15:53
  You're sort of uniquely positioned to talk about this — you've been talking
• 15:55
  about this measurement trust crisis for years, that's existed for a long
• 15:59
  time, and we talk about attribution and we wring our hands about it.
• 16:03
  But I really like the frame around accountability, because I think, as
• 16:09
  marketers, we're constantly trying to prove our value to the organization,
• 16:14
  we're trying to prove that we're true revenue partners, and I think the only
• 16:17
  way to do that is to get closer to metrics and closer to responsibility around
• 16:22
  things that you can buy a beer with.
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  And, you know, it's hard to do, and it's hard to measure — but just because
• 16:30
  you can't measure it perfectly doesn't mean you can't seek to attain it.
• 16:33
  Ross Graber: Yeah, and one of the things that I'm a really big advocate for is
• 16:39
  being really specific about the business challenge that needs to be solved.
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  Because sometimes, as marketers, in our ambition, we look a little too
• 16:47
  far down the road, to, "This is my tactic, and how much revenue did it
• 16:52
  produce?" And most people listening to your podcast understand that B2B buying
• 16:59
  is complex, and it's never one thing.
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  And I think when we're chasing that one thing, sometimes we lose track
• 17:07
  of the intermediate indicators that say, "You know what, what we're really
• 17:11
  trying to solve for is the fact that most of our audience doesn't appreciate
• 17:16
  that this problem is more intense than they're giving it credit for.
• 17:21
  Or that our solution tackles it in this way." And if marketing can go and help
• 17:27
  change the perception of the problem, or change the intensity, or change the
• 17:31
  perception of the solution, or even help with different things that the business
• 17:37
  is recognizing as a competitive challenge — those are all things that start to be
• 17:44
  very tangible for business stakeholders who aren't sitting in marketing,
• 17:48
  because they recognize the problem, too.
• 17:50
  Now, that doesn't mean that we don't have to tie it downstream to the fact that,
• 17:53
  hey, when we do better at that perception challenge, or that sentiment challenge,
• 17:58
  we're seeing better revenue outcomes, or we're seeing pipelines moving faster.
• 18:02
  But we sometimes have to put it in terms that our stakeholders are more likely to
• 18:09
  embrace, because it matches their view of what's going on with their clients, with
• 18:13
  their prospects, with their products.
• 18:16
  Matt Heinz: Absolutely.
• 18:17
  Well, Ross, thank you very much for doing this.
• 18:21
  I'm excited for the rest of the conference to hear and see the accountability reset
• 18:25
  tomorrow, and just thank you for your servant leadership, honestly, in B2B.
• 18:30
  The longevity you've had at SiriusDecisions — it's not just
• 18:33
  coming up with great new approaches to accountability, but also all the
• 18:37
  legacy knowledge you bring to make that real, make it authentic, make it work.
• 18:41
  Just thank you for that.
• 18:42
  Ross Graber: Thank you for saying that — you've just made my day,
• 18:46
  and possibly my conference.
• 18:47
  So I appreciate that, and I appreciate you having me here
• 18:50
  and having this conversation.
• 18:51
  This has been a lot of fun.
• 18:52
  Matt Heinz: Awesome.
• 18:52
  Thank you so much, Ross.
• 18:54
  We'll be back for another episode here on the show floor here in a little bit.
• 18:56
  Stay tuned.