Burning Questions, Counterintuitive Insights and Surprising Datapoints to Spark Your Imagination
So I was recently at the Forrester B2B summit in Austin and had a blast! It was an excellent opportunity to focus on new thinking in the B2B space, check out the latest and greatest vendors, and reconnect with old friends.
However, it was also an eye-opening experience as I experienced the sales prevention department of several companies in action.
Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or starve to death.
Every morning across the world, a founder wakes up. They’ll receive an email from an investor recommending reducing dependency on some platform. Every morning an investor wakes up. They know they’ll have to invest in some company with strong platform dependency.
As much as everyone would love not to depend on someone’s else platform, the reality is that there’s only one way to have zero external dependencies: becoming so big that you are a platform.
I found myself in a heated discussion earlier this week. The big contentious issue: which direction should the company go?
Now, it’s hard to make informed strategic decisions if you don’t really have a decision framework around it.
Plus: at a strategic level, it’s always about too many opportunities available and never enough resources to go around.
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In the last two years, I’ve been having many conversations where the build vs. buy debate is the crux. Like many conversations, perhaps the challenge lies in a lack of nuance or discrepancy in definitions.
However, there is a clear relationship between tenure and perspective on this issue. Fewer years of experience will favor building over buying and vice versa for more tenured professionals.
Since I’ve been around the block a few times, I have some inherent bias regarding this topic.
Most funnels and websites are filled with “service” pages that could have a high revenue impact but are completely neglected by marketers.
Thank you pages and unsubscribe pages are the most common ones.
Pricing & Packaging is such a critical part of every company’s GTM (or go-to-market), you could argue that any company at its very core has two existential imperatives.
First: it needs to be able to deliver value to a group of customers (which implies being able to define and reach them effectively). Second: it needs to be able to extract a portion of that value for itself.
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Big Data has been one of the major buzzwords of the last 5 years.
Everyone rushed to build all the required infrastructure to support them: CDP, ETL, reverse ETL, data warehouses, and plugging them across their stacks.
Great companies like Snowflake, Segment, and Fivetran flourished in this period helping customers gather, route, synchronize, and store the huge amounts of data that was being generated all across the funnel, from the first touchpoint with a user down to their whole customer journey.
That’s great. I love data-driven companies and I think, at least in the tech space, it’s time to call the Big Data war won. Most companies nowadays have a horde of data about their prospects and customers.
So…has the time come for celebrations?
Well, no.
One of the conversations I’ve had more frequently in my professional journey is “how do you define what’s a good lead/deal”?
It’s really interesting to observe that most companies struggle in this area, they don’t really have a mental framework for it, tend to use anecdotal information until very late in their lifecycle stage and as a consequence create friction/misalignment that could be very much avoided and that ends up slowing growth down instead, in some cases putting the company as a whole at existential risk even.
Dun & Bradstreet put out a piece titled “5 Shocking Stats About the State of B2B Marketing Data,” and I wasn’t shocked.
Maybe I’m cynical, or perhaps the years of experience at companies large and small caused me to react with a shoulder shrug and “meh.”
The starting salvo in the article was that only 50% of B2B professionals are confident in the quality of their sales and marketing data. Even though over 80% say, it’s crucial to their success.
Here’s why I don’t care–this will always be the case.
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Spoiler alert: this is really what most companies are at.
The “big data” narrative from a few years back introduced the idea that ‘the more data the better’, but today’s companies are most likely drowning in it.
Also: the problem is rather around how to store, organize, and complement the data they have.
TL;DR: It really depends. Also: wrong question.
Conversion rates are interesting, people look at a percentage and take it as an absolute truth, it’s a number after all right?
What most operators miss tho is that every number has a story behind it, a series of assumptions and ideas that were baked into the calculation to get there. Not knowing what that story is more often than not sets you up for failure.