95: Account Based Marketing and Sales Marketing Alignment with Latane Conant CMO at 6sense

good afternoon everybody this is john barrows make it happen monday hopefully you all had a fantastic weekend i'm very excited to announce my new guest here latni conant right did i pronounce that right you got it awesome from blast media latni why don't you tell everybody say hi to everybody give a little background where you're coming from and what you're up to these days sure so i am latni conant and i am actually the chief marketing officer for sixth sense so we are an account-based orchestration platform and i've been at sixth sense uh almost six months now no pun intended previously uh cmo and a sales leader at a company called aperio so i'm both i'm kind of like a fox in the hen house over here in marketing nice yeah i love you so my background is actually marketing that's my first degree and then i kind of came over onto the sales side so i have a healthy respect for both and and one of the things i i was i've been very eager to talk to you about um is is this whole account-based marketing thing because i i i personally am calling bullshit on it for for a few reasons uh but one of the things is i first of all i think account-based marketing is really just marketing's admission that we went too far right because this whole content marketing came out and it was like y'all look at this this is great we're you know we're getting everybody there's inbound and all this other shit and it just went a little too far i think and and all of a sudden turned into this massive scam where there's so much noise out in the marketplace and now i think everybody's saying okay we kind of went a little too far you know let's get back to kind of being personalized and those type of things but i have still yet to work with a company where who is quote-unquote implementing abm and and having it align it with sales at all as a matter of fact they say it does right and the concept is there but but talk to me to help me to pull me off the ledge that says abm isn't just another acronym that is giving marketers another excuse to to hammer our clients and and piss piss them off all right well i'm gonna get myself in trouble because i kind of call bullshit on abm too but i think i think it's for a different reason though okay so let's dive into that yeah so first off we all have to recognize the way our customers prefer to buy now um and there's three big ways that in b2b all of our customers prefer to buy um the first thing is they want to remain anonymous uh so they want to do as much research as possible and kind of to your point about being spammed they know our game man right they know if they put in their name and email oh god we're gonna send them on a one-way plane ticket to unsubscribe island by just sending them a ton and ton of emails okay so they all want to remain anonymous the second thing is they buy in teams okay okay so for the most part um the average decision making team and b2b is 9.6 people i have no idea what the 0.6 is but that's garter set it's like the average american household has 2.7 children it's like wow that's a weird child but yeah yeah exactly so that's a weird 0.6 of a person i don't know maybe it's an intern or something but um anyway so it's but the point is they buy in teams uh and this is a problem for traditional kind of digital marketing because we and all of our systems are set up for a lead right a lead is one person contact and so that reeks habit that second kind of buying pattern and the third buying pattern that we have to keep in mind is uh buyers are actually more resistant than before and they they are um even more resistant to talk to sales people and so they want to get farther down the process before they actually interact with a human which means marketing actually has to carry the ball a lot farther along and actually work in chunk conjunction with sales farther down the stage process which again we're just not set up to do and so to me what's happened is so that's kind of what's going on with our customers right so now let me tell you i'm going to tell you the dirty little secrets about how we are set up yeah okay so i told you there's all this activity that buyers are doing to research i call that your dark funnel that's what we at six cents call it because there is pipeline out there but it's not in our crm because that's all the stuff we know about those are the people that have come forward it's not in our marketing automation tool there's this whole like all these great opportunities are in this dark funnel but what we do in marketing is we produce all this content and then we put a form up because we're we are conditioned to try to capture a lead right so what happens i put in mickey mouse yep gmail at gmail.com yeah so 90 of the research even on our own website is anonymous and they're not filling out forms so what happens is we wait for the form we get in a bunch of mickey mouses maybe we get something halfway decent i already told you we send them on a one-way ticket to unsubscribe island we send them a ton of emails then we buy a bunch of technology uh determine if something is an mql whatever that means but yes which is a marketing qualified lead no i know but it means very different things to very like something oh yeah well we come up with a scoring schema then we make a bunch of charts and reports about how sales is not following up with these leads and we're really pissed yep so that's how the system is set up and so then it's no wonder everyone's pissed off at one another yeah right and so abm i guess tries to come to the rescue because what abm says is abm says first of all we're going to pick the right accounts we're not going to you know target your grandmother's shop in her etsy shop in her garage we're going to pick accounts that actually make sense for us and that can buy our products and solutions so we're going to be a lot more specific about who we pick we're then going to find out as much as we can about them so that we can then engage them the right way and that's what you talked about being personalized not sending a bunch of stuff that's not relevant we're going to collaborate with sales and let them know what we're doing and then we're going to track real stuff we're going to track number of opportunities opened we're going to track uh engagement levels we're going to track track the buying team so we're not just going to look at one lead we're going to look at the entire buying team so that's what abm is about the issue is because none of our systems and our data is set up to do that at scale marketing goes to sales and says we kind of know this is the right way to do it but we can only really do this for like 10 accounts it's just way hard and that's and that's the crux right because look i i think we're in this what about my accounts what about your accounts well i only get one account you're going to work on for me and also how do we balance that quality and quantity right like i think if it i think if we all kind of said hey like if we really hold in on our icp right i think and i think every company should do this where like and i don't mean just the basic demographics their icp right it's like size and industry and those type things i mean like the nuances what technologies what stage of the business are they at those type of things you know buyer intent data using some of that based on industry those type of things right you nailed it but the problem is is if we really did that to your point we'd be only going after about 15 accounts you know what i mean because like those would be the ones right so that's not true you don't think so i know it's not true okay so let me just preface it with one more thing here though it's like okay so maybe there is a a broader a little bit of a broader audience that fits that icp that might not be in the buying market right now but are on the fringes that we can convince with our with our approaches okay so there's a good subset there but we're in this world i think that that we're in this weird transition where i'm a gen xer okay when i when i grew up in sales it was a pure numbers game it was how many dials could you make to get how many meetings get how many proposals that type of thing so now we have gen xers like me as managers saying to you know gen y and millennials um we all recognize that quality is the answer we all recognize that more personalized and all that other stuff's the answer but the only thing i can measure because i'm a lazy manager is numbers so how many dials did you make those type of things so i think we're in this transition of quality to quantity because we're still being asked we're saying yeah abm we got to do all this stuff but i'm still you're still here in reps you make 100 dials follow up on every lead that i gave you that type of stuff so how do you balance quality and quantity with abm so i believe that the what makes you have to be able to execute that level of quality and personalization at scale right no and no human or process or strategy is able to do it you have to be able to leverage ai and big data to be able to process the volumes of information and be able to pick up on the anonymous behavior right um it's intent but it's also like i talked about so part of the dark funnel is is certainly intent but also part of your dark funnel is who's researching and how is not going to ever fill out that form and there's actually ways that you can de-anonymize those accounts um and so for for us and what we've been able to master is to say let's just take that process that i walked you through before let's take account selection i'm not going to go around to uh mark ebert who's the head of sales here and his team and say okay give me one account you want me to work on because that's all i can do um i'm gonna look at my icp and i'm gonna develop it just the way you said and i'm gonna do it on an ai and big data platform that creates a segment that's automatically going to be updating all the time and accounts are going to be moving in and out of that so rather than ask mark i'm going to come to mark and say you know what these are the accounts that a we have a great fit for we can go and sell to which is number one i don't want grandma's garage i love grandma yeah don't want her garage yarn making business or whatever it is right so one we can sell to them we can make good money off of them two they um the people that are engaging are the right buyers for us right these are the right personas that's a huge challenge with inbounds right the historical fill out a form and whatever even if they do do that nine times out of ten it's somebody way below the power line with no decision making authority and we follow up with them until our teeth are you know until until our eyes are blue and and which is like and then they have no even if we get a good conversation it doesn't go anywhere right right so we have to be able to put together this um picture based on a lot of data that's not known to us and that's where ai and big data come in to be able to help us understand those personas are the right personas out there doing the research to say okay this is a real deal then what when it gets really really interesting is being able to take all of that data and actually be able to chart timing and say you know what these guys are early stage that's okay that's clearly my job as the cmo to surround them with display ads to there are techniques that are ideal for an early stage buyer you know they're trying to identify their problem they're trying to size their problem they don't even know they have a problem so i have to draw that out that's my job but when i have that map of the timing i then can say when they're in market that's when you and the people you're about to train in where is it amsterdam or dublin that's what they want they want to know this is a good fit for me i can make money off this deal there is a buying team they're the right people to talk to and they're ready to they're going to open an opportunity and i want to be able to get in there first and that's the power of using ai and predictive and so when you apply that to abm all of a sudden again it's easy to align on the right accounts which is step one yeah the second um thing i said is know everything about them yeah well without that anonymous behavior i'm basically going to my sales team and saying what do you know about this account that's not adding a lot of value right or it means the only accounts i can focus on are the ones that we already know about and it's like already have an opportunity with those guys so again that's where being able to collect and connect all of these um data sources outside of my organization are critical to know everything about that account base engage the right way i talk a lot about personalizing for timing right so i think knowing an accounts industry and knowing the persona we all know to do that but you have to be able to answer the question and we know the questions based on where they are and so being able to serve that content and the right medium up based on timing and again that comes down to the right ai and big day big data platforms to be able to orchestrate that and then dance with sales on and out right have have the right platform of engagement that we can collaborate and see what have you done what have i done what is the intent data showing what does the persona map look like who's red who's green and align us on the on the same metrics i mean i've i've always done that my team does not get comped on an mql thank you they don't their bonuses are based on how much pipe we put up for a month and how much of it closes so with that what's the so i'm perfect world intent data timing the sales rep i what i'm worried about right now is that marketing is getting is getting better and they're getting significantly better with ai and a lot of these tools to understand and also you marry that to the fact that the buyer is going further and further and further i mean one of the stats that blew me away recently that i found was that the g2 crowd right they are the top 250 most trafficked website on the internet so if if you just put that in context you got facebook you got amazon you got and then a b2b review site is top 200 so that is telling me that there is a whole host of people out there that are way before they're engaging with a sales rep are doing way more intel and it's not just them being on our websites they're going asking their peers like hey i'm thinking about looking at a solution like this what are the rec you know who are at least the ones that people recommending right so with that with marketing getting smarter and smarter and smarter the client having less and less desire to talk to a sales rep or at least pushing it further and further where does that leave the sales rep in this equation i mean is it like i i always look at the last mile where the last mile before it before it hits the client we humanize it but help me understand like how do your reps use the data that you provide them to reach out to that client from a timing standpoint i mean and i'll just dumb it down here a little bit off for my benefit it's you know is it hey um i saw these things and you're doing these things and i know you're at this stage your business so we have a solution that can support that or is there a little bit more of an eloquent way that that your team uses the data to engage with somebody from a personalized standpoint it isn't effectively like yeah i see you've been looking at a bunch of crap and i can tell you're at this stage of your business so let's talk what's the what's that what's that last mile that the sales rep needs to bring to the table to humanize this and and add value sure so we've done it we did a study um and we looked at client we looked at when we make a prediction that an opportunity is going to open and when an opportunity actually opens we found that our clients can get into deals 58 days earlier okay then they otherwise could have yep which is huge which is huge so i don't think the you know we always learned to get there first and to influence the process and to be the educator i don't think that changes at all okay and i don't think that role of the sales rep changes at all i will say i think that you have to be even more consultative than before because the what keeps you up at night they they we've established what what has kept you up at night and so you have to be able to go very very deep and own more things like the deployment plan for example and you know how you really how you compare and contrast to your competitors so i do think you're going to see sales people become more and more specialized in by industry because they have to be a lot more consultative okay so so this is exactly what brings my concern to light which is i think that that especially inbound right if i'm a if i'm a um if i'm 68 percent of the way through the sales product i'll decide abm you educate me and now i want to talk the last person i want to talk to is some 22 year old wet behind the ear kid who's going to ask me bad questions and you know what i mean like that's the last person so my my hypothesis here is is that specifically the inbound is actually going to increase significantly as far as uh it's going to be more of a customer success or customer support person who is very educated on the product very you know what i mean and less of a commission but more of a base and and and it's really going to be their job to guide them through the rest of that 20 some odd 30 percent right um so i guess you know and this is just a bigger picture discussion i'm curious your thoughts like where does that leave the 22 year old kid like if if we are educating so much and by the time they're engaging with us they're you know they're there and you got this 22 year old kid who's just coming out of school just got stuffed a bunch of product knowledge down their throat and really has limited sales education like where does that leave that and where and where does that evolve us to yeah yeah i think that's why so many companies are starting to have a lot more sales tiers and when i say that it's you know you set up your bdrs which is outbound outreach um and those are you know kind of just out of college hungry and i i i do still think you know and and and what we coach on is you know that highly personalized outreach and email but again it's based on it's not oh you know we see you like the cubs we like the cubs too it's we understand this is your problem and because of all the data i talked about and then you can marry it back to them well i can't marketing do that so so i'm gonna keep pushing here because sure what i'm serious what i'm like literally freaked out about is that artificial i mean i'm seeing emails right now that artificial intelligence is writing that's better than any sales rep like i ever seen right i'm seeing more insight and analysis right where where i mean literally why wouldn't with all the information that information that you're putting and all the stuff that i do and all the stuff that you know about me why why aren't we to the point when it comes to outreach specifically like reaching out to me why aren't we at a point where marketing can do everything because i think the things that i described to you i mean we started this call by saying this is how most marketing departments do it and abm is focused on 10 to 20 accounts right so there is a transition that we're going through um i there is still like a human element to meeting especially if you think about field marketing and you know getting people to come to a dinner with their peers or being at an industry show and i the way i to mark those are one of the reasons that they wanted me to do it was i was so passionate about field marketing uh my mother-in-law says i just like to throw good parties uh but there is a connection that you make when um you do you know you you have that face-to-face connection and so i don't think that'll ever go away i think it is condensed i think people are going to have to be more experienced but i i think when you think about field marketing and the and prepping for events and like getting um people signed up for meetings and and dinners and things like that there still is a pretty significant role for um that bdr type team yeah i i mean i agree there's a role i just think it's a diminishing role i do think that you know the typical str role that is right now and i don't know if you're seeing it but like the typical str role i'm seeing evolved much more into a marketing and operations role than it is to a sales role right because if you think about if we tie if we if we tie all this data that's coming to us and then we come up with messaging based on triggers and personas and those type of things it's no longer me now as an str sitting down and figuring out okay what am i now going to say to this client it's now saying well they're at this stage of the process this is the persona so where's my persona messaging where's my trigger based messaging where's some content that i can layer into this and now let me put together that cadence and then send it out there right and then analyze the results to split test try different approaches so you know i'm just trying to figure out where that kind of intro sales rep role because you know predictive predictable revenue the segmentation of roles i think was fantastic for yeah for organizations from a scale standpoint but where i don't think predictable revenue has done any favors is in the customer experience because nobody wants to be handed off five times before they actually talk to somebody who knows what they're talking about so i i actually almost envision it going back to more of like a pod structure where there's one sales rep that is educated enough to bring them through the journey after they get to that 57 and take it from there as opposed to then how now qualifying then right right right because and we should be able to better qualify along the way using ai and big data i just don't think that is there right now and i don't think it's the worst thing in the world to have different paths for that entry-level role either right maybe they do you know become more on the marketing side and and take leadership roles there i mean marketing is becoming more and more ai analytics data ops tech so those are still really relevant skills yeah i mean i keep this concept that i keep having which is like you know the last mile the sales rep is the last mile right because so i'm sure you follow gary vaynerchuk right so or at least know of him um are you familiar with him oh you're not oh no follow like he's batshit crazy but but he's legit so gary vaynerchuk you know he talks about um he's like from a branding standpoint he's off the charts right social branding all that stuff and he's got a whole to play a company called vayner vayner media which helps some of the biggest brands in the world from their own personal branding and stuff like that and it was funny because he you know he talks about this you know everybody talks about content is king content is king he said fine if content is king then context is god right and that got me thinking that's the timing thing that's what i said sales and marketing right marketing content sales is context and if we are sales professionals so that's kind of the connection i made and so for us as sales professionals if we're not putting any context around this content we're no different than marketing and i don't know why we're getting paid to do what we do and one of the things that when i went to because he you know i about two years ago i looked for a marketing company to help me and my brand right i was like let me try gary right and i'm like let's see what and it was like starting at half a million dollars i'm like yep nope okay maybe that's why i haven't heard of him yeah but they can do this thing where it's it's called the 4d session where you go to his office in new york and for 10 grand you sit down for a day and you it's like 10 to 15 other entrepreneurs and business owners or whoever and and he goes through and every department head comes in and shares with you like the latest and greatest stuff that they're working on some of their biggest clients with right so branding social the tools all that stuff and then he comes in at the end and he does a q a for your business and one of the things he did like so my question was i saw this a this was two years ago i saw this ai like email that went out that i literally was the exact email that i trained and was as personalized as you could possibly get and and the person who sent it to me i was like are you serious right now because they were like hey john check this out right and i was like there's no human involvement and he said no and by the way it took 70 seconds so i was like holy shit and this is what i was like legit freaking out about artificial intelligence i'm like we're okay we're dead skynet's here we're all over right um but but he said i said so where does that leave us and what he said was interesting to me he's like don't don't try to fight ai you're not going to fight it it'll beat you eventually right right he said be be the guy that reviews the ai email before it before it goes out because there's always going to be something that the human eye picks up and until robots buy from robots right there's still going to be that empathy there's still going to be that thing and and you probably know more about this than i do there's like a pattern like the human eye picks up patterns right and so like no matter how personalized an email gets if it's if it's a template or if there's some the human eye is going to probably pick up on something that's going to say ah that's suspect and as soon as i think it's suspect i'm not going to trust it right right so so it's about trust and and i think that's where we're getting to is like how can the rep without just cranking out template emails without how can they use this abm information that you are providing us with to layer on that final mile some context that makes the human connection and i think those are going to be the sales reps that thrive and the other ones unfortunately i think are just not going to get replaced but shifted drastically over to marketing and operations yeah and that's why we when we align with sales our biggest alignment spot is in prioritization okay so because we do want people to spend more time and be more personalized and so the onus is on us to help them prioritize and make sure that the um we call it a six qa a qualified account really is qualified and they really are in market and it's a good use of their time and and and so we and we do like back tests and things like those that things like that to test our model and test the conversions against you know if you weren't using the model and it's a 40 improvement um to you know in opportunity creation nice and so that that like to me that's if i can give you the gift of time you you know you've been a sales leader you know that's that's the only asset i have is my time well it's not the one i have yep yep and so if i can help you prioritize and say you can take that extra time and you can bring empathy and you can personalize it because i don't want you working on a hundred emails today you know i'm going to give you the priority of the ones that are really good so so there does have to be alignment right because that's what frustrates me is is when i when again i hear from leaders yes we need to be more personalized but yet they're still telling their reps to make 50 dials a day they're still still telling them to do 100 activities on a daily basis and i just don't understand i don't know whether that's a eventually it's going that's going to break or if that's a segmentation standpoint look i get it like i don't think abm is appropriate well tell me if i'm wrong i don't think abm is appropriate for smb like people who are selling to the smb right if you're if your addressable market is you know i mean i guess at the best level with all the tools working the right way but for the most part if you're you know smb and your acb is you know less than 500 bucks abm sales part of that is a little questionable where it really flies in sales and marketing working together as mid-market enterprise where you get some you know the buyer intent may you see be a bigger a bit bigger that's kind of my perception of you know it's not for everybody is that accurate so uh it really comes down to are there multiple people in a defying decision so if it's just one person who decides that's b2c model like right if if it's a buying team or they need to ask people that's when you have to think about how you coordinate those all of those outreaches to all of those different personas um i will say at sixth sense one of the things that we are strong at is being able to de-anonymize smaller companies so even smb we can still de-anonymize that company okay whereas um it's pretty easy to dot de-anonymize really really big it's just an ip lookup um but as companies get smaller because of the way we use cookies and device ids we can actually de-anonymize for the smb too and give a lot of these powerful things to people that are selling to smb as well so do you recommend stuff to say to the sales rep you know what i mean based on where they are and the intent data and those type of things do you actually recommend hey by the way you should probably go after them with this type of message or do you kind of leave it up to the sales rep to say hey they're in the market it's a good time here's the indicators now it's you it's they're in market it's a good time here are the personas um here here are the things the personas are going to overlap in caring about because that's really important because and this kind of goes back to your thinking about the role of a salesperson i think salespeople are more and more therapists now um because a lot of your role is actually helping internally a company get consensus yeah oh yeah that's all about challenger sale versus challenger buyer i don't know if you've been for a challenger buyer i love challenger buyer right yeah i'm obsessed with the challenger buyer i think it's so true and and so part of what we come up with for reps is saying okay you've talked to the cmo and they're really interested they're gonna have to go to the cio so we need to prepare the cmo with what the cio is going to think and want to say so it's like a weird like new level of messaging that you have to be able to understand the organizational dynamics and the nuances between those functions um so that's a really important kind of coaching and content um strategy you got to be able to understand based on the timing what questions they're going to be able to ask or or you know the challenger buyer or challenger customer talks about buying jobs so we do a lot of our content creation based on buying jobs and because we know the timing we can predict what buying job they're going to be doing and what we need to create to help them do that buying job um and then last with intent data you can look at real-time behavior and how the behaviors are changing and like for example um you know before we walk into a meeting we can real-time see i always know competitors in a deal yeah because i have all i again have all the intent data i i know who else they're researching and that's really helpful you know that's going to help me if you know if you know an account starts ghosting me um i can see why well it looks like they started talking to this person okay so we need to understand that so you know just marrying the understanding of their digital signal up against kind of what the face-to-face conversations is super helpful and i think that goes back to that context right like just you know knowing that and then figuring out how to address it from a sales to your point being a therapist to a certain degree to ask the right questions to uncover whether they're being transparent with you or they're full of shit you know what i mean like people hate confrontation and they think they can lie to salespeople so they're gonna say oh no we're not talking to anyone else and you're like i know you not in and of itself tells me that the likelihood of of us being successful i mean if i know you're using if you're talking to three competitors of mine and i ask you hey who else are you talking to and you're like well no we're just you know we're just kind of in the preliminary phases like right now my chances of winning that deal fall through the floor because you're already lying to me up front you know what i mean so you know and how you handle that i think is the art of the sales rep figure out a way to navigate that and use that in a positive you know direction as opposed to a negative um and that's right you know i my philosophy always you know has has been you know i think ai and and a lot of this stuff is going to make good sales reps great great sales reps incredible and average sales reps are relevant and that's kind of what my thought process is for the sale because what i do is you know when i train i try to get sales reps to wake up to say just stop going through the motions because marketing is doing a better job than you are if you're just going to go through the motions if you're just going to crank out template emails and drone through you know powerpoint presentations and demos and stuff like that i don't need you as a sales rep i don't need to pay a 60 70 000 base salary plus you know 100 plus k you know for you to push a button you know what i mean like i i need a sales rep that's going to put some thought into this that's going to take the information that marketing provides to me and put some context around it and make it relevant to the person that i'm reaching out to and show that i give a yeah i think i think it's challenging us all to up our game it is it is and and i guess that's one of my final questions here for you is where do you see this going i mean i i i think that we have a long way to go to to get to where you what you painted as kind of the what it should be versus what it is abm right the promise of abm versus the reality of abm for the majority of organizations but say we say we recognize say that that happens in the next year or two or whatever it is where all the stars align i get the intent data i get the right information where does that evolve the model uh from a sales marketing alignment from a from a predictable revenue standpoint are you seeing anything that's saying you know i see if all the boxes are checked that it does what it should do this is what the quote-unquote future looks like from a sales and marketing standpoint i well i think it's sales marketing and customer success okay so i think of it in conjunction as a revenue team um and it's the reason it's all converging is we talked about sales reps needing to be a lot more educated on the product or solution right so almost customer success like but sales savvy right so and they are later in the process so those roles are have a you know are kind of combining we talked and then my role in marketing is also combining a little bit with customer success as well because the other thing you mentioned was they're going to g2 crowd they're asking their friends and so my time actually there there's what we talked about with abm and setting up the process and the technology and leveraging data and ai in a whole new way and investing in the right platforms that allow me to do that but i also have to be out connecting and building advocacy within that customer base and working with customer success a lot more closely to make sure that i have what we call an amplifier like it's one thing if you are happy but are you out there promoting us and so that's a change in in kind of how marketing is now evolving with customer success as well so i think those three together um have to work a lot more closely and and to your point i mean i think a lot of you know yes sales has to become more customer success because i'm bumping into a ton of customers who are now asking customer success to become more sales right cross sell upsell that type of stuff oh yeah and it's funny because it's it's like somebody gets into customer service a lot of times they get into customer service or success because they don't want to be in sales and you know and and how sales has been presented to them as ill it gives them the ickies right so now they're in customer success great i get to service the customer and then they're being asked okay now you got to go find you know 50 of your book is going to be upsells cross sells like oh crap i don't want to do this but the funny thing is is if you take the word sales out of the equation customer success and sales is almost the exact same thing and they're going to become more and more similar right and and also the seed and grow approach of i mean unless you're selling a major enterprise solution that is just locked in okay it's you know a couple hundred thousand people don't buy that way anymore right they buy they want to to your point of the consumerization right it's like i want to try it i want to see what this thing does i want to then i want to be educated and help me and then all of a sudden okay great right so that's where this all the stuff that you're doing isn't just a lot you know i think a lot of people look at account-based marketing as pre-sales stuff right like hey help me figure out but it's also just as if not more important with existing customers exactly exactly so those that's kind of where i see it going is those all of our roles kind of converging together and um just being a lot more cross-functional which is fun i mean that's the stuff we all love yeah exactly i mean it i think we're good we're moving away from the the loan sales rep out there with a territory and just go hunt and kill whatever you want you know what i mean like right the most successful uh organizations i see where you know we're working together hand in hand marketing sales customer success you know everybody trying to figure out how can we best get that educate that client in the right way without pissing them off um i think i do think we have a long way to go i really do think we're not there yet i mean i think i think we're closer than you think i think you are closer than than i think you know i think you and what you do and maybe with your customers but i think on mass i think we have a very i also have a very you know for me most of the clients that i work with are in the sas world and i constantly have to be pulling myself out of the san francisco sas world and realizing that that's such a bubble of weirdness that you know you go one step out in one down market and it's like sales back in the early 2000s again you know what i mean and those type of things so so i do i do think for the clients that are doing it right and with your solutions and and and some like it i think there is there is a kind of guiding light that says yeah like it's here if you do it right but i think doing it right is uh a very relative term if you put it if you put it that way yeah yeah i i think technology can be a catalyst for change and that's one more question on that because i think everybody does look for you said something that was interesting which is you know uh no process no you know that type of thing right but i do think people are almost trying too hard to look for a technical solution to what i think is an alignment issue so where do we start before i invest in a technology how do i have to make sure that internally we're aligned to make sure that that technology that we're going to get the most out of that tech and i'll use any forget about abm for a second salesforce you know what i mean like if you're not aligned of how the organization is going to use salesforce sales salesforce actually might become worse make things worse because all of a sudden it's a rat's nest and all you know who's doing what and whatever sales loft outreach any one of these marketing on earth or sales automation tools it's like again if you're not aligned with how it's you know fundamentally from a process standpoint a people standpoint layering that technology could make it fail are there some key things that you need to do as an organization to make sure that you're aligned the right way before implementing an abm strategy yeah i mean i kind of joke you know whenever my team wants to buy technology i'm like uh did you you try it on a spreadsheet first like excel is still pretty amazing for a lot of stuff you know so it's like you know but joking aside with that i also think about is this like there's platforms and apps and so i think about what what do i want my team working in that's a platform and if it is a platform that that is a more significant alignment people process technology play um and when you do a platform evaluation you you know i always look for how open is that platform can i build on that platform if people do want to go out and buy an app can i bring it in to my platform so no one has to know right because so much of adoption is like i don't want to be in a swivel chair working in this thing then that thing then that thing um the other thing on the martech side specifically is abm platforms are emerging that have so you don't have to have an intent you don't have to have an intent data provider you don't have to have a bunch of third-party data providers you don't have to have another provider to do website de-anonymization you don't have to do have someone to do display ads another person for reporting um and so on and so forth and so you know there's there's this convergence of call it six to eight technologies that before people had to buy separately that are now kind of becoming the the bill of materials for a great abm platform cool i love it so i you know i i probably could ask a million more questions because i i am very like you know skeptical but like fearful hopeful all at the same time yeah yeah and all that other stuff but um just because you know try to keep it at 30 45 minutes sure yeah definitely tell us a little bit about sixth sense and and you know if people are interested where can they find you um because i think what you're working on is pretty is like i said and you know if done right you know you guys are kicking some ass there so you want to kind of give the audience a little explanation what six cents all about where they can find more information yeah sure so we are an account-based orchestration platform um designed for that full revenue team like i talked about so we're designed for marketing bdrs sales customer success um to be able to essentially power them with ai big data machine learning and even orchestration so think next best action uh in one platform um that allows them to see that full customer journey so you can see all of their anonymous behavior that i talked about you can see those persona maps red yellow green and really it's about helping shepherd them through the new way they want to buy because we have to adjust and so because our platform was really built in this more modern era we understand that new buying journey and it really designed our our platform to be able to accommodate that and make companies that use us really successful so i talked about getting into deals early i talked about knowing what competitors are in the deal um i talked about being able to prioritize for timing um uncovering that dark funnel you know those are the things that people look to six cents to do love it yeah i mean i think the whole consumerization of of b2b b2c going to b2b i mean we're just we're just too used to it and and if we don't adopt or adapt if you will as b2b sellers the consumer will dictate our success well and it's still about getting there first it is it is and the people that adopt will get there first because the buyer will want to engage with them exactly awesome well let's say thank you so much for this conversation i really appreciate it uh it got me thinking about some stuff and and uh how my team actually needs to do a hell of a lot better job at figuring out where people are so because i we're evolving right now ourselves looking at you know how can we engage at the right time with the right you know it's small sidebar you know the the training that i took when i was at it was called basho and the email uh there was one very specific email approach that was it was created by this guy jeff hoffman it's called the why you why you now and it's yeah i know that yeah so the whole idea is you're on your website hey i saw you open up a new office whatever that is and the reason it prompted me to reach out is because we help companies that right super personalized whatever great four or five six years ago now it's watered down a little bit because of all this but whatever what was interesting was he posted something uh about the why you why you now that i had never thought of stupid me i've been training this for 10 years and he's like those are the two questions that you need to answer if you're gonna if you're gonna expect a decent response rate why you why am i reaching out to you compared to the 15 other people right and why you right now versus last week versus tomorrow versus next month and if you can genuinely answer those questions then you should expect a pretty high response rate if you can't good luck yeah and we can help you know empower people to be able to answer those at a click so you know and if people we have a new program called start uncovering now so i talked about kind of that dark funnel so if people want to come to us um we can start de-anonymizing your website it only takes 24 hours um so you can start to see you know that anonymous behavior um and we should get you a demo yeah absolutely put it on take a look at this on the list we're evaluating our whole tech stack here in the next couple of months so uh i'll make sure you guys are on that list i'd love it look at what this thing what this stuff can do awesome awesome we'll save uh have a safe flight thank you very much it'll be an interesting week like i said dublin landing and doing training and then uh dublin and then london london and then back and then san francisco all week next week so it's uh i was in dubai last week which was super interesting but uh but now it's you know now coming back a little bit in me and then back west coast so is the life but uh cool well everybody as usual i hopefully all got some good value out of this conversation i know i did and uh do me a favor go out there make somebody happy today ladies and gentlemen if you do nothing else today make somebody smile you know you did you had a really good day all right so have a great week and let's make it happen thank you all very much later it happened uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh