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How Marketing, Sales, And Product Leaders Can Activate A Perpetual Growth Strategy · Sales Pipeline Radio

• 0:16
  Matt Heinz: All right.
• 0:16
  Welcome again, live on the marketplace floor of Forrester, B2B Summit.
• 0:20
  My name is Matt Heinz.
• 0:21
  We're excited to have you back for another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio.
• 0:25
  We are excited to be here and interviewing a wide variety of people.
• 0:28
  We've had CMOs, we've had ROI award winners, and very excited to have with
• 0:32
  us now principal analysts at Forrester.
• 0:34
  John Arnold join us to talk about what he's gonna be presenting in the No
• 0:37
  pressure of a Closing keynote Yeah.
• 0:39
  Of this conference.
• 0:40
  So thanks for being here.
• 0:40
  John Arnold: Yeah.
• 0:41
  Thanks Matt.
• 0:41
  Nice to be here.
• 0:42
  Matt Heinz: Yeah.
• 0:42
  So, your topic is gonna be around integrating like just a small
• 0:46
  easy tactical topic, right?
• 0:47
  Just integrating sales, marketing product into sort of a single
• 0:52
  cohesive growth strategy.
• 0:54
  John Arnold: Yeah.
• 0:54
  Strategy is an interesting topic.
• 0:56
  I found in my research that B2B growth chains are starving for strategy actually.
• 1:01
  So everybody needs to improve their operational processes.
• 1:04
  We all know that.
• 1:04
  And, and a lot of B2B organizations are working on that.
• 1:07
  But what they don't know is that they need to improve their growth strategy.
• 1:10
  Matt Heinz: And even those that have done that to date
• 1:13
  often are doing that in silos.
• 1:15
  You got a marketing strategy, you a sales strategy, there's a product strategy.
• 1:18
  They might share them with each other.
• 1:20
  Yeah.
• 1:20
  But sharing is not integrating.
• 1:22
  John Arnold: Yeah.
• 1:22
  Or there's no strategy or there's no strategy's, that's another option, right?
• 1:25
  Or there's a strategy at the top and not one at the frontline level.
• 1:28
  So that's another thing that there's a big gap.
• 1:30
  So the company has a growth strategy, but it hasn't translated down.
• 1:33
  And there's this sort of mentality of, you know, the strategy falls on the
• 1:37
  frontline and then the frontline executes.
• 1:39
  And that's a very old school way to think about it.
• 1:41
  So the frontline actually has more access to data and tools and
• 1:44
  technologies and close proximity to the customer than ever before.
• 1:48
  And there's not this like separation of thinkers and doers anymore.
• 1:52
  So the thinkers and the doers are on the front line and they have sometimes
• 1:56
  a strategy that's counter to your strategy because the strategy's not
• 1:59
  working, and so they're going to, you know, have to hit their goals.
• 2:01
  Matt Heinz: I. Well, and for better or worse, if we pulled 10 people who
• 2:04
  are walking by us here on the show floor and ask them to define strategy,
• 2:07
  we'd probably get 10 different definitions of what strategy is.
• 2:10
  So when, when you're thinking about this and advising for your clients,
• 2:12
  like how, what do you tell people?
• 2:14
  Strategy is?
• 2:15
  John Arnold: So, strategy has, I can tell you about it in terms of its function.
• 2:18
  Yeah.
• 2:18
  So a strategy helps you to achieve goals, or it creates advantages when there are
• 2:22
  limited resources that exist to do so.
• 2:24
  Mm-hmm.
• 2:24
  So if you have plenty of resources, right, you don't really need a strategy, you can
• 2:27
  just spend the money and get the result.
• 2:29
  But when you're limited and you know.
• 2:31
  Hello marketers.
• 2:31
  Are you spread too thin right now?
• 2:33
  Of course you are.
• 2:35
  But you need a strategy to create growth opportunities
• 2:38
  when your resources are limited.
• 2:39
  So that's what a strategy does.
• 2:40
  Mm-hmm.
• 2:41
  What a strategy is.
• 2:41
  You know, there's not really one definition.
• 2:44
  Strategy can be strategy as position, strategy as a process,
• 2:47
  strategy as a decision or a direction, you know, so there's
• 2:50
  lots of different definitions of it.
• 2:51
  But it's basically, you know, one popular definition that, George
• 2:55
  Colony, our CEO likes to use is.
• 2:57
  Strategy is what you're going to do and what you're not going to do.
• 2:59
  So like how are you going to achieve your goal with the limited
• 3:02
  resources that you have and what are you not gonna do and why?
• 3:05
  Matt Heinz: That is one of the hardest things I think, for people to do.
• 3:08
  I mean, I agree with your CEO strategy is choosing, and so by choosing you,
• 3:13
  you inherently are saying, I'm going to do some things and not do others.
• 3:16
  And I think unless you have confidence in your strategy, that can feel limiting.
• 3:20
  John Arnold: Yeah.
• 3:21
  Matt Heinz: How do you so to, in a lot of cases, that's a culture change.
• 3:24
  That's just not a strategy on paper change.
• 3:26
  You have to change how people think and operate in the business.
• 3:29
  How do you do that?
• 3:30
  John Arnold: Yeah.
• 3:30
  And that's one of the topics for the keynote today mm-hmm.
• 3:33
  Is, you know, how are you going to roll out your strategy and what are the
• 3:36
  different components of a strategy?
• 3:38
  And the way we're talking about it is adaptive strategy.
• 3:41
  Mm-hmm.
• 3:41
  Because we're entering this new era of adaptive growth mm-hmm.
• 3:44
  Where buyers are changing, technologies are changing.
• 3:46
  B2B is changing and all those changes means that your
• 3:50
  strategy needs to be adaptive.
• 3:51
  It needs to be able to be flexible and change too.
• 3:54
  And you're totally right about the culture.
• 3:56
  In fact, what my research found was that your culture and your approach to
• 3:59
  strategy governance have to work together.
• 4:01
  So, you know, cultures can be top down or bottom up, and strategies
• 4:05
  have to be governed with behaviors like micromanagement where the
• 4:09
  managers are involved in all the details or self-governance where
• 4:11
  people have a lot of latitude.
• 4:13
  And those dynamics can really make or break your strategy, especially again,
• 4:17
  at that frontline level where your frontline marketing team, your frontline
• 4:20
  sales team, they're responsible for the number and they have to hit that number.
• 4:24
  And if they're not hitting their number and the strategy's not working,
• 4:26
  they're gonna kind of act independently and create their own strategy.
• 4:29
  Everyone has a strategy, whether they know it or not, or whether it's good or not.
• 4:33
  The idea is to get a hold of that and start to make it work together.
• 4:37
  Matt Heinz: Years ago I worked at a large software company based in Redmond.
• 4:40
  I won't name who they are.
• 4:41
  Yeah.
• 4:41
  And we would spend months building a strategy, presenting it, putting it in
• 4:45
  binders, and then we would present it and everyone would say, yep, that's it.
• 4:47
  And we'd put it in a drawer.
• 4:49
  Yeah.
• 4:49
  And we wouldn't revisit it.
• 4:51
  And that's wrong for two reasons.
• 4:52
  A, you know, we would, we didn't make adjustments, and b, if it's in
• 4:55
  a drawer, you're not really watching to make sure that your actions are
• 4:58
  following the strategy, let alone making adjustments along the way.
• 5:01
  Do you still see that in the market today?
• 5:02
  Yeah.
• 5:02
  John Arnold: I mean, Charles Kepner and Benjamin Trago were management
• 5:05
  consultants in the sixties.
• 5:06
  They advocated for flexible planning.
• 5:08
  Mm-hmm.
• 5:08
  Because they noted that executives would often present their strategic
• 5:11
  plans, you know, in three ring binders as evidence of said flexibility.
• 5:14
  And I find it ironic that even their own book, the Rational
• 5:16
  Manager, was later revised and retitled the new rational manager.
• 5:20
  So like even their flexible plans were like changing.
• 5:23
  And the idea is not to make your plans more flexible, but the idea is to
• 5:26
  make your people more flexible, right?
• 5:28
  So what you wanna do is give them what we would call adaptive direction.
• 5:33
  So not detailed step-by-step plans because when everything is changing
• 5:37
  and your plans are changing too, like that's just mayhem, right?
• 5:40
  Yeah.
• 5:40
  So what you want is some clear direction where things don't change
• 5:44
  as much and it's very uncomfortable for some marketing managers to give
• 5:48
  direction without a lot of detail, right?
• 5:51
  Matt Heinz: Talking on this special episode of Sales Pipeline Radio with
• 5:54
  John Arnold, principal Analyst Forrester.
• 5:56
  John, you spend a lot of time talking to B2B CMOs as well, and your topic
• 6:00
  this week is around how marketing, sales, and product leaders together
• 6:03
  are activating this strategy.
• 6:05
  What advice do you give a CMO.
• 6:07
  To either lead that discussion or to sort of collaborate with their
• 6:11
  peers in a level manner, sort of a peer-to-peer manner to make that happen.
• 6:15
  John Arnold: Yeah.
• 6:16
  A lot of what we talk about is something that we call
• 6:18
  internally at Forester Habitats.
• 6:21
  So if you're a CMO, you kind of have a habitat, right?
• 6:23
  Mm-hmm.
• 6:23
  Your, habitat is either very sales driven or product driven or engineering driven.
• 6:27
  Yeah.
• 6:27
  Or there's a lot of politics, or not very many politics or marketing
• 6:30
  is seen as a cost center or they're seen as a growth driver.
• 6:33
  Or maybe you were brought into the organization to change
• 6:35
  something or maybe you weren't.
• 6:36
  So you kind of have to assess things according to your habitat at first,
• 6:40
  because the last thing you wanna do as a marketer, as A CMO is come into
• 6:43
  an organization and just assume that you can change everything and Right.
• 6:46
  You know, come in guns blazing, so to speak, and you know,
• 6:49
  fire off a bunch of changes and that's a good way to get fired.
• 6:51
  So.
• 6:52
  You have to assess and then figure out the purpose of marketing.
• 6:56
  So everybody talks about the four Ps. You know, B2B marketers never
• 6:59
  owned any of the four Ps, right?
• 7:01
  Maybe promotion.
• 7:02
  Mm-hmm.
• 7:02
  And B2B is just very different.
• 7:04
  So I give marketers a new P. It's purpose.
• 7:07
  Mm. And marketing's purpose.
• 7:09
  Has a lot of different permutations and one of them is supporting sales, right?
• 7:14
  Or supporting the organization.
• 7:16
  And that's kind of a trigger word for B2B CMOs like it is, you just say
• 7:19
  you're supporting the organization.
• 7:20
  Well wait a second, actually, that can be one of the purposes
• 7:23
  of marketing, but it shouldn't be the purpose of marketing, right?
• 7:26
  There's three other ones, by the way, in that purpose
• 7:28
  Matt Heinz: model.
• 7:28
  So Well, and I think, a lot of times you just bring up the four Ps, you know a
• 7:32
  lot of marketers today feel like they own promotion and very little else.
• 7:35
  Right.
• 7:36
  That just, yeah.
• 7:36
  And
• 7:36
  John Arnold: the data backs that up too.
• 7:37
  Actually, we asked specifically if B2B CMOs if they or sales have more
• 7:43
  or less influence on those four Ps.
• 7:45
  Mm-hmm.
• 7:46
  And what we found is that most B2B CMOs believe that sales has
• 7:49
  more influence on price promotion.
• 7:51
  You know, or not promotion, promotion's the only one that, that marketers say
• 7:55
  they, have more influence than sales over promotions, but the rest of them sales
• 8:00
  has more influence than marketing does.
• 8:01
  Matt Heinz: So there's a difference between influence and ownership,
• 8:04
  like who should own those Ps?
• 8:06
  John Arnold: Yeah.
• 8:06
  Well, the product team product as a discipline is sort of a, you know,
• 8:09
  a relatively new concept, right?
• 8:11
  Yeah.
• 8:11
  So product management, product marketing taking some of those
• 8:15
  Ps, but I would argue that.
• 8:16
  B2B never had the four Ps, like B2B marketing was never about product
• 8:21
  or placement or price, really.
• 8:22
  Yeah.
• 8:23
  It was sort of sales support.
• 8:24
  Yeah.
• 8:24
  That's kind of where it came in.
• 8:25
  Matt Heinz: Yeah.
• 8:26
  We've been talking for over eight minutes and haven't mentioned AI
• 8:29
  at all, which may be a record.
• 8:31
  It might be a record.
• 8:32
  In modern conversations you mean AIDA.
• 8:35
  Ada like the awareness, interest, desire, action,
• 8:38
  John Arnold: or the old marketing funnel
• 8:38
  Matt Heinz: from 1898 maybe, or someone told me AI stands for average information.
• 8:42
  Right?
• 8:43
  Which is also like, you can go down a rabbit hole on that as well.
• 8:46
  I don't wanna talk about ai, but I wanna talk about data, right?
• 8:48
  Because I think that data and how you manage and leverage and activate data
• 8:52
  is becoming more and more important for how these teams work together.
• 8:54
  I think especially as you think about the integration across those, like
• 8:57
  go-to-market teams, including product.
• 8:58
  The data should not only help define and prioritize what your
• 9:01
  strategy's gonna be, but you should be acting on that data as well.
• 9:05
  What kind of advice are you giving go-to-market leaders on the data side?
• 9:10
  John Arnold: Yeah.
• 9:10
  So customer is the place to point that data because you know,
• 9:14
  marketers have a lot of internal data.
• 9:17
  A lot of that data is not trusted.
• 9:21
  It's, there's not a belief that data is accurate and it may be inaccurate.
• 9:27
  But it's really about the customer that's the best data.
• 9:30
  And last time I checked this fact, so I may have a more updated figure, but
• 9:33
  71% of C-level executives put aside their opinions when they're faced with
• 9:37
  customer data that contradicts them.
• 9:39
  Wow.
• 9:39
  So, you know, if you wanna make decisions in the organization, bring
• 9:43
  customer data to the equation, and if the customer says it, then it's true.
• 9:47
  Matt Heinz: When you talk to leaders about working together, and I'm thinking not
• 9:51
  just about leading marketing teams, but sort of that team of team concepts, right?
• 9:55
  Like, you know, thinking of your leadership team, like your head of
• 9:57
  marketing, head of sales, head of product as your team one, how, what advice do
• 10:02
  you give people on just the relationship building, the rapport building, the trust
• 10:06
  building that often becomes foundational to having those hard conversations
• 10:12
  about choosing the right strategy.
• 10:14
  John Arnold: Yeah, I think B2B organizations are a wide variety of
• 10:18
  different levels of sophistication and complication and complexity and
• 10:21
  matrices and all of those things, so it's hard to know exactly if
• 10:25
  there's one piece of advice for every organization because, you know, some
• 10:28
  CMOs sit over a whole bunch of different marketing motions and sales motions and.
• 10:33
  They've got an e-commerce motion, they've got a SMB motion, they've
• 10:36
  got an enterprise motion, they have this business, that business,
• 10:39
  this country, that country.
• 10:40
  Mm-hmm.
• 10:40
  Um, you know, some of these organizations that I work with are as big as a country.
• 10:43
  So, you know, it's like, what are you gonna do to bring it all together?
• 10:46
  Well, you gotta operate in different pockets of the organization.
• 10:49
  So some CMOs have really great relationships with some parts of their
• 10:51
  sales organization and not with others.
• 10:54
  And they're working on some of those where they don't have those relationships.
• 10:58
  Or they have to just prioritize, you know, and go after the places where they feel
• 11:01
  marketing can have the biggest impact.
• 11:03
  Otherwise they spread themselves way too thin and they can't get everything done.
• 11:07
  Back to strategy is what you're gonna do and what you're not gonna
• 11:09
  Matt Heinz: do.
• 11:11
  So you joined Forrester right before the pandemic?
• 11:14
  I think it was like early 2020.
• 11:16
  Yeah.
• 11:16
  Um, and so you've been here, you know, for instance, before and after.
• 11:20
  It seems like we're back to going in person, right?
• 11:22
  I mean, they got a lot of people here at the summit this week.
• 11:26
  I think a lot of people that maybe are working more remotely than
• 11:29
  ever, but how do you describe the benefit of being here?
• 11:32
  How do you describe the benefit of getting out of wherever you are day
• 11:36
  to day and actually prioritizing getting for a few days to B2B summit?
• 11:40
  John Arnold: Yeah, I think that's exactly it, right?
• 11:42
  You gotta get out of your business and think about it differently and talk
• 11:46
  to other people who are experiencing the same challenges that you are and.
• 11:50
  You know, have a lot of different perspectives because information
• 11:54
  and facts and those kind of things are easy to come by these days.
• 11:59
  Right?
• 12:00
  Yeah.
• 12:00
  You can ask your AI agent whichever one you want to answer a question.
• 12:04
  Yeah.
• 12:04
  So knowledge is easy, but it's really hard to get experience and wisdom, you know?
• 12:08
  So go around and talk to some people who have been where you've been or
• 12:12
  are struggling with the same things.
• 12:14
  And then you've got Forrester on your side and by your side we're
• 12:17
  creating research around this.
• 12:18
  So you can look at these frameworks and models and examples and case studies
• 12:22
  and you know, it all comes to life.
• 12:23
  And you say, you know, there's a company that's done this before.
• 12:26
  I don't have to reinvent the wheel.
• 12:27
  Or there's a company that's struggling with this.
• 12:30
  I am struggling with this too, but I don't feel like I'm behind.
• 12:33
  Matt Heinz: Yeah, I mean, let's face it like a lot of keynotes and
• 12:36
  presentations, like you can technically watch those on YouTube, but getting here
• 12:40
  with your peers and meeting other people that are facing this problem, and whether
• 12:44
  you see them in the sessions or whether you see them in the lunch line or walking
• 12:47
  around the marketplace, as we see a bunch of people streaming in from sessions
• 12:50
  right now, I mean, that is priceless.
• 12:51
  And you just can't replicate that.
• 12:53
  I just fundamentally don't think you can replicate that in a virtual
• 12:56
  format, like in a virtual format.
• 12:57
  We do an episode like this and we hang up and we move on to another thing.
• 13:00
  Hang up here.
• 13:01
  And you still have small talk, you still build relationships with each other.
• 13:04
  And I still think that's critical.
• 13:06
  John Arnold: And I think this is maybe my fifth summit.
• 13:08
  With Forrester, and one of my favorite things is to see people year after year.
• 13:12
  Yeah.
• 13:12
  And you know, the people that need it the least are usually the
• 13:14
  ones that are in the sessions.
• 13:15
  It's like, well, why are you here?
• 13:16
  You're a really smart marketer and you're really good.
• 13:18
  Why are you in this session?
• 13:19
  You know why?
• 13:20
  Because I'm sharpening the sword and I'm making it better, and I'm meeting
• 13:23
  my colleagues and it's my favorite thing is of course, when I hear people
• 13:27
  getting promoted or they have more responsibility and all of a sudden
• 13:31
  their budgets are bigger, they're thriving, their career is growing.
• 13:34
  And year after year they're getting better and that's why they keep
• 13:36
  Matt Heinz: coming back.
• 13:37
  I. Well, and the game's always changing.
• 13:39
  Right?
• 13:39
  Totally.
• 13:39
  If you, if you came to this thing 12 years ago and thought the
• 13:41
  waterfall was awesome, it was, it is.
• 13:44
  But like there's a lot of new stuff since then.
• 13:46
  This conference is not going anywhere.
• 13:48
  Let's assume we're here two years from now.
• 13:49
  What do you think we're focused on?
• 13:51
  What do you think some of the themes of the conversation of the
• 13:53
  research will look like in two years?
• 13:54
  Well, the big new
• 13:55
  John Arnold: announcement this year is buying networks.
• 13:57
  Mm-hmm.
• 13:57
  And buying networks is a new concept.
• 13:59
  You know, there's some companies that are dabbling with it.
• 14:01
  They're not really, um.
• 14:02
  They don't have full strategies around buying networks yet.
• 14:05
  Yeah.
• 14:05
  And it's gonna be a huge challenge for B2B to solve some of the
• 14:08
  problems that go along with that.
• 14:09
  Like marketing doesn't have a business case for spending money on an audience
• 14:12
  that doesn't become a contact for sales.
• 14:14
  So what are we gonna do with all these buying network members who
• 14:16
  we need to influence and how is marketing get justified that spend?
• 14:19
  So there's some problems to solve, but I think we'll still be talking about
• 14:22
  buying networks in a couple of years.
• 14:24
  But we'll have a lot more solutions around that.
• 14:26
  And the people who are here at this conference.
• 14:28
  Are gonna be the first movers on that, and they're gonna have an
• 14:30
  advantage and they're gonna have some more mature practices around that.
• 14:32
  Matt Heinz: Yeah, no doubt.
• 14:33
  I loved what you guys talked about this morning, not just on buying committees
• 14:36
  internally, but the ecosystem Yeah.
• 14:37
  People inside and outside of the organization that are increasingly gonna
• 14:41
  be critical to getting those deals.
• 14:43
  And the noise is only gonna increase.
• 14:44
  Right.
• 14:45
  The noise out there of people talking to your customers, the noise inside
• 14:49
  and outside the organization, creating some consensus and some consistency.
• 14:53
  Of that story across different people in that entire buyer ecosystem is
• 14:57
  gonna be more and more important,
• 14:59
  John Arnold: and marketing's gonna be even more important
• 15:00
  than ever in B2B organizations.
• 15:02
  Matt Heinz: Awesome.
• 15:03
  John Arnold, principal analyst at Forrester, thank
• 15:06
  you so much for being here.
• 15:06
  Thanks for sharing.
• 15:07
  Good luck this week.
• 15:08
  John Arnold: Thanks Matt.
• 15:08
  Good to see you in person.
• 15:09
  Matt Heinz: You too.