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Buyer Enablement Best Practices & Success Stories · Sales Pipeline Radio

• 0:17
  Matt Heinz: All right.
• 0:17
  Welcome to another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio.
• 0:21
  So excited to have y'all here joining us for another great episode.
• 0:26
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• 0:29
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• 0:31
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• 0:34
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• 0:38
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• 0:42
  with great guests, great topics.
• 0:44
  Very excited to have Doug Sechrist — he's the new CMO at Consensus here today.
• 0:47
  We're gonna talk about buyer enablement, and what the shift has looked like
• 0:51
  from sales enablement to buyer enablement and why that's so important.
• 0:56
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• 0:59
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• 1:03
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• 1:06
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• 1:07
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• 1:09
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• 1:11
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• 1:14
  at salespipelineradio.com.
• 1:17
  Doug, thanks for joining us today.
• 1:19
  Doug Sechrist: Hey, thanks for having me, Matt.
• 1:21
  Matt Heinz: Excited to have you here.
• 1:22
  You are a fellow journalism major from back in the day, I noticed — been in
• 1:28
  the industry for a long time, Eloqua alumni amongst other companies.
• 1:34
  Let's start with the broad strokes, right?
• 1:36
  You and I have been around for a while — I'm not saying we're old, I'm
• 1:38
  just saying that we have experience.
• 1:42
  What are some of the shifts you've seen in go-to-market from the early days of
• 1:48
  marketing automation to where we are now?
• 1:50
  Doug Sechrist: Yeah, I mean, we can definitely say we're old, Matt.
• 1:53
  We've been around for a long time.
• 1:55
  Matt Heinz: I'm not saying it for you — I'll say it for myself, but I'm not gonna—
• 1:58
  Doug Sechrist: I think I'm older than you, but we can figure that out offline.
• 2:03
  It's funny — when I think about my career and where it started, you mentioned
• 2:07
  journalism, like, I was a writer, so I didn't really know what marketing was.
• 2:11
  And I found my way into marketing as a writer.
• 2:15
  And, you know, I'll never forget this — how I got into growth and demand gen: I
• 2:21
  was writing RFP responses and proposals, that's what I was good at, and that forced
• 2:25
  me to get really close to sales teams.
• 2:29
  And I'll never forget this — I think it was 2000, so that tells you how old I
• 2:32
  am — my CEO came to me and said, "Doug, the phone stopped ringing. You're the
• 2:37
  marketing guy, figure out how to make it ring." And so, having been super
• 2:44
  close to sales, I figured it out.
• 2:48
  I'm like, "Okay, what do you guys do, and how do we make this work?" So, I think
• 2:53
  when we look at how things have changed, back then — and why I tell that story
• 2:58
  is that question and that conversation prompted me to go to Dreamforce in 2001,
• 3:05
  where I met Mark Organ and Rich Eldh — Eloqua's founder and SiriusDecisions'
• 3:10
  founder — and I discovered this crazy thing called marketing automation,
• 3:15
  which, I guess that was 25 years ago.
• 3:18
  And that led me down the path I've been on since.
• 3:22
  And it was really to evolve the buyer journey.
• 3:25
  Back then, 90%, 95% of the buying journey was sales-driven.
• 3:32
  And today it's completely flipped — we've seen that journey
• 3:35
  over these couple decades.
• 3:37
  Matt Heinz: We certainly have.
• 3:38
  I mean, I think about when I first hung up a shingle for Heinz
• 3:41
  Marketing, there really wasn't sales enablement even, right?
• 3:44
  It was like, "Okay, well, someone in product marketing creates some collateral
• 3:47
  and gives it to the sales team, and they've got their own stuff." And the
• 3:51
  very first piece of research content we did for Heinz Marketing was with a
• 3:54
  sales enablement platform that was fairly new at the time, and in the survey we
• 3:59
  built, we realized we couldn't even use the term "sales enablement," 'cause no
• 4:01
  one knew what that meant — we had to describe, like, "Here's the functions
• 4:05
  that we now consider sales enablement." To your point, the most successful
• 4:08
  companies we see today are talking a lot more about buyer enablement than sales
• 4:13
  enablement, which you could argue is what we should've been doing all along.
• 4:16
  But there's definitely some new motions that go along with aligning that
• 4:20
  enablement more towards the buyer versus directly with the sales organization.
• 4:25
  Can you unpack what that means and how people should be
• 4:28
  thinking about that difference?
• 4:29
  Doug Sechrist: Yeah.
• 4:29
  I mean, if you just think — when 90% of the journey happens before
• 4:35
  a seller's in the room, right?
• 4:37
  And it's
• 4:40
  AI search, it's a conversation on your website with an agent, it's the first
• 4:47
  click you take to watch a video, or a product tour — it's all of these
• 4:52
  interactions where someone is shopping, but they don't wanna fill out a form,
• 4:57
  they don't want an SDR to call them, they don't want a salesperson to call them.
• 5:01
  They're doing their homework, they're doing their research, they're sharing
• 5:05
  content with their peers and their boss and all these people so that they can
• 5:10
  come to an informed decision, or at least do enough of the heavy lifting
• 5:17
  before they engage with salespeople.
• 5:21
  And I think when we really think about buyer enablement, that is the
• 5:26
  journey — people are doing the work, they're not ready to talk to sales.
• 5:31
  It actually makes that first engagement with a seller or an SDR
• 5:37
  that much more important, right?
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  You get one shot.
• 5:40
  And if someone's evaluating four or five vendors, and 90% of the journey
• 5:44
  happens without a seller in the room, that means you get 2% of their time
• 5:49
  — so if you screw it up, you're dead.
• 5:51
  Matt Heinz: Yeah.
• 5:52
  Doug Sechrist: And I think it's even interesting — I think the
• 5:55
  pendulum is starting to swing back
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  in favor, in my opinion, of sellers and marketers.
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  Because in today's day and age, all those interactions are giving us
• 6:09
  this amazing amount of intelligence — most companies aren't using it.
• 6:14
  And so I think the whole notion of buyer enablement is shifting more to — yes, this
• 6:22
  is a no-brainer, put your buyer in the driver's seat, give them control,
• 6:26
  because they're doing it anyway.
• 6:28
  But now we have this opportunity to harness all that amazing intelligence
• 6:32
  and data to guide the seller, to guide the marketer on what they need next.
• 6:38
  So that's kind of how I see buyer enablement evolving
• 6:42
  to the next generation.
• 6:45
  Matt Heinz: And when I see companies doing this, and sort of letting the
• 6:49
  buyer have more control of the process, giving them more that they can do
• 6:54
  on their own, it sort of sheds a new light on what we've done forever on
• 6:58
  the sales enablement side — which is sort of, I kind of think of it as the
• 7:01
  audacity and fantasy of control, right?
• 7:03
  That we're in control of the process, that we need you to fill out a form
• 7:07
  so we can follow up with you, that we need to shoehorn you into a demo
• 7:10
  whether you're ready for it or not.
• 7:11
  Someone told me a week and a half ago that their company requires a 90-minute demo
• 7:19
  with at least three members of the buying committee, or they won't have a meeting.
• 7:22
  I mean, theoretically I get why you'd say, "Oh, this is gonna help us
• 7:25
  qualify and help them understand the product," but who's gonna sit through
• 7:28
  that, and who's gonna do that work, unless you're way down the process?
• 7:32
  So, the research is clear on this, right — Kerry Cunningham's done a
• 7:35
  ton of work around the fact that your buyers don't wanna hear from you until
• 7:39
  they're ready to have that product conversation, so they're not going to
• 7:42
  fill out your form, they're not going to take that early-stage meeting.
• 7:45
  I've been fascinated with this topic this year — we've done
• 7:47
  some research on our own as well.
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  At one point we asked people, "Where do you wanna get information about
• 7:52
  our product or service?" And 19% said, "I'll take a meeting with a seller."
• 7:57
  Doug Sechrist: Mm-hmm.
• 7:58
  Matt Heinz: And yet 100% of a lot of companies' go-to-market
• 8:00
  motions are focused on that 19%.
• 8:03
  And so you're giving up the opportunity to engage with the rest.
• 8:07
  And so when you hear — and especially given that you're new at Consensus,
• 8:11
  I know Consensus has a platform that addresses a lot of this — when you
• 8:15
  hear people share those vestiges of control, when you have that as an
• 8:21
  objection to enabling self-service demos, to enabling more sort of
• 8:26
  do-it-yourself, choose-your-own-adventure buying, what's your response to that?
• 8:31
  Doug Sechrist: Yeah, and it's true — we've instrumented the seller with all this
• 8:37
  crazy technology to automate different parts of the funnel to keep control.
• 8:43
  And I think, unfortunately, control has left the room — the buyer's in control.
• 8:48
  And so I think the way we have to think about it is: sellers are always
• 8:54
  gonna want control, marketers are always gonna want control — this is
• 8:58
  how, historically, people have been compensated and how we've built process.
• 9:03
  But at the end of the day, you've gotta build trust.
• 9:05
  So you build trust by giving, by providing value — give the buyer what
• 9:10
  they want, they're gonna get it anyway.
• 9:13
  If you don't give it to them, they're gonna find it somewhere, somehow.
• 9:15
  Matt Heinz: Yeah.
• 9:17
  Doug Sechrist: So I think the notion of control — how you get control back is
• 9:21
  you build trust, and you give all the value, and in return you get signals.
• 9:27
  And again, if buyers are taking what you're putting out
• 9:30
  there, you can now see that.
• 9:32
  A year ago, five years ago, we couldn't see that, right?
• 9:35
  Matt Heinz: Right.
• 9:35
  Doug Sechrist: And so now we can use that information to have control, but not
• 9:41
  feel like we're hamstringing the buyer.
• 9:44
  It's like, "Yeah, we know — we know what you did, we know who you sent
• 9:47
  this demo to, we know what questions you asked in that AI conversation you
• 9:52
  had on our website." So now we're way more intelligent — let us control this
• 9:57
  by giving you the next thing you need.
• 9:58
  It's that next-best-action that I think we now have the opportunity to give buyers.
• 10:05
  Matt Heinz: Yep, absolutely.
• 10:06
  Talking today on Sales Pipeline Radio with Doug Sechrist, who's the new
• 10:09
  CMO at Consensus, and really kind of covering this concept of buyer
• 10:14
  enablement and buyer-centric enablement.
• 10:18
  This was a topic — part of the reason I wanted to have you on, it was a topic
• 10:20
  at our CMO Coffee Talk community a couple Fridays ago, and it was a great
• 10:24
  conversation on a number of fronts.
• 10:25
  One of the things that came up is that, as marketing leaders sort of
• 10:29
  advocate for this change, it's not just the technology and process
• 10:34
  change it represents, but the culture change inside organizations as well.
• 10:38
  As you have sales and marketing teams that, in complex selling situations,
• 10:41
  are required to work closely together, bringing the whole organization along
• 10:46
  becomes part of the process here.
• 10:48
  What I've found is that instead of positioning this as losing
• 10:52
  control, you showcase to sellers what they gain from this.
• 10:56
  You don't really wanna be in meetings with prospects that don't wanna buy, you
• 11:00
  don't really wanna do the same demo for the 400th time when you're like, "You
• 11:04
  should've just watched a video on this or walked through it yourself." So it's
• 11:08
  kinda similar to the AI migration, where people go from being afraid of it taking
• 11:11
  their job to being excited about where it's gonna help them focus their job.
• 11:16
  So what have you seen, both in the work you've done in your role as CMO,
• 11:19
  as well as things you've seen from Consensus customers, that are helping
• 11:23
  accelerate that culture change?
• 11:25
  Doug Sechrist: Yeah.
• 11:25
  It's amazing — it reminds me of kind of the old days of marketing automation,
• 11:30
  and, like, dynamic scoring and nurturing, when we could actually help sales
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  prioritize their time — like, "Hey, just focus on the A1s and A2s," and,
• 11:39
  you know, all these Ds, whatever, whichever nine-box you use to score.
• 11:46
  That was amazing back then.
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  But now, to your point, and where I started this, is the human moment
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  is so critically important, 'cause we only get 2% of the buyer's
• 11:57
  time for each vendor, right?
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  So you gotta crush it.
• 12:00
  And I think our job as marketers is: we're gathering all this intelligence
• 12:05
  in the async journey, and our job is to harvest that and help a
• 12:11
  seller personalize their experience.
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  The days of the Harbor Cruise demo, like you mentioned — the 90-minute demo,
• 12:19
  three people have to be there — anyone who's doing that, that's a dying
• 12:23
  company, that company's gonna disappear.
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  Nowadays, most of that Harbor Cruise demo, a buyer's already gonna have
• 12:32
  seen, and they're gonna ask questions.
• 12:34
  So now, the 30-minute demo that you do, you've got to inject live data, you've
• 12:40
  got to have it super personalized to exactly the use case and what they want.
• 12:46
  So now a seller — this is again how they get control back — they show up
• 12:52
  wildly smart, better than any of the competitors, and here's the demo to
• 12:57
  the committee and the right people.
• 12:59
  So I think, as a marketer, that's our job — let's figure out how do we build
• 13:04
  the right buying experience so that we collect this data that makes our
• 13:08
  sellers the best sellers in the world.
• 13:11
  Matt Heinz: I think about friction and efficiency here, right?
• 13:14
  If you're still doing traditional sales enablement, you are paying for
• 13:18
  people and resources to do things the buyer really wants to do on their own.
• 13:21
  The buyer will do the work and replace the people that you
• 13:24
  used to have to have to do that.
• 13:26
  Your people are gonna be more efficient, 'cause they're gonna be talking to more
• 13:28
  prospects that are better educated, better motivated, and honestly a little further
• 13:32
  down the commitment to change — and that also increases your deal velocity, right?
• 13:37
  So I'm sitting here talking about efficiency and cost reduction, I'm talking
• 13:41
  about better leverage of your sales team's time, so better use of active selling
• 13:46
  time, and greater velocity of deal flow when you've got a prospect interested.
• 13:50
  It just sounds like a slam dunk to me.
• 13:52
  And yet you still have these conversations that are really just
• 13:56
  about, sometimes, people's resistance to change and fear of the unknown, even
• 14:01
  if there's an understanding that the status quo is broken or not working.
• 14:06
  Doug Sechrist: Yeah.
• 14:07
  And I think it's two things.
• 14:08
  One — we've spent years, decades instrumenting this process, this marketing
• 14:16
  and sales process that's linear, it's around the MQL to the SQL, people get
• 14:20
  paid on it, it's how we measure success.
• 14:23
  It's really hard to change that and rip those systems out.
• 14:27
  I think that's one.
• 14:28
  The other one — there's this fear that AI and demo agents and
• 14:33
  conversational AI is gonna replace the SDR, it's gonna replace the SE or
• 14:38
  the AE, and the reality is it's not.
• 14:42
  It's only going to replace them if you don't move forward into the future, right?
• 14:47
  Because if we do our jobs right and we create a better sales process and a better
• 14:54
  buying experience, more deals are gonna come in, and we're just gonna insert
• 15:00
  people at the right time, as opposed to wasting all this capacity on 90-minute
• 15:05
  demos and long discovery calls and four to five handoffs before we actually put
• 15:10
  the right person in front of the buyer.
• 15:14
  Matt Heinz: Well, and we're kind of just getting the tip of the iceberg
• 15:16
  here, 'cause most of our conversation has been related to net-new sales.
• 15:21
  Buyers can be existing customers, too — so you think about applying
• 15:25
  this into your lifecycle marketing.
• 15:28
  Shout out to Omar Akhtar — literally just earlier today got a preview of some of
• 15:31
  his new 2026 go-to-market benchmark data, and one of the greatest growth areas he's
• 15:37
  seen, '25 to '26, in terms of marketing budgets, is around lifecycle marketing.
• 15:42
  So not surprising to me at all, given the conversations I'm having
• 15:45
  with companies that are embracing that full lifecycle opportunity.
• 15:50
  But your buying journeys don't disappear just because
• 15:53
  someone is already a customer.
• 15:55
  So the signals, the evidence, the self-service nature of what you're
• 15:59
  doing here — I could argue you could use these tools just on your buyer
• 16:04
  enablement side, or just on your—
• 16:05
  Doug Sechrist: For sure.
• 16:05
  Matt Heinz: —customer lifecycle marketing side, if you're a big enough organization,
• 16:08
  and you're gonna see the ROI you need.
• 16:10
  Doug Sechrist: Yeah, and we definitely see that with our customers.
• 16:12
  You know, I would say 40 to 50% of the use cases are post-sale.
• 16:18
  Matt Heinz: Mm-hmm.
• 16:19
  Doug Sechrist: It's adoption, it's engagement, it's getting your team
• 16:24
  to use what they've purchased, and demonstrating the value.
• 16:27
  And certainly for us, this is how we go to market — we get
• 16:32
  in with one group, and then
• 16:37
  we're driving the expansion motion using our products.
• 16:41
  Matt Heinz: So we've got just a couple more minutes left with Doug
• 16:42
  Sechrist here, CMO at Consensus — really grateful for your time today.
• 16:48
  I wanna take a slightly different direction on this — you're
• 16:49
  about two, three months into your new role at Consensus.
• 16:52
  I'm curious, what are some best practices that you have now, when you start a
• 16:57
  new gig — 30, 60, 90 days — to balance between understanding the market and
• 17:02
  the product, as well as assessing the team, assessing the go-to-market motions?
• 17:07
  'Cause every day, every week, someone's starting a new role — sometimes a
• 17:11
  veteran CMO, sometimes a first-time CMO.
• 17:14
  What are some lessons and best practices that you would recommend?
• 17:17
  Doug Sechrist: Yeah, I mean, fortunately for me, I started this conversation
• 17:21
  before I started — I had a few months to really dig into the market and
• 17:25
  do my own mystery shopping, and
• 17:29
  one of the first things I did is exactly that — secret-shop everyone.
• 17:35
  You know, how does it work?
• 17:36
  And it helped me understand the buyer, it helped me understand internally how
• 17:41
  we go to market — way more than talking to the sales team, or talking to anyone.
• 17:47
  So that was number one.
• 17:50
  I think the second thing — and I'm, I think this is seven
• 17:54
  weeks in — you gotta listen.
• 17:56
  You've gotta talk to everyone, and that includes analysts, that includes
• 18:00
  customers, certainly your internal teams.
• 18:03
  But coming in with a playbook that you've used at a different
• 18:09
  company just doesn't work anymore — every company is so different.
• 18:13
  So that's been my journey — listen, listen, and start thinking about
• 18:19
  the future and what we need to do.
• 18:22
  And there's obviously some low-hanging fruit — "These are things we're not
• 18:25
  doing today, let's do 'em better."
• 18:27
  Matt Heinz: Right.
• 18:27
  Doug Sechrist: But I think that's number one for me — you gotta listen.
• 18:31
  Matt Heinz: Well, I appreciate that.
• 18:32
  I appreciate this conversation.
• 18:33
  Thanks again so much for joining us today on Sales Pipeline Radio.
• 18:36
  And thanks, everyone, for listening live, for joining us on demand.
• 18:41
  Just appreciate everyone's time, and hopefully this has been a
• 18:43
  useful conversation for you to take back to your organization.
• 18:46
  We'll be back next week with more Sales Pipeline Radio.
• 18:49
  Until then, my name is Matt Heinz — thank you again for joining us.
• 18:51
  We'll see you next time.
• 18:52
  Take care.
• 18:53
  Doug Sechrist: Thanks,