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Today’s show featured an interview with Government Business Results (GBR) leader Juliana Slye.
Find Juliana on LinkedIn.
JULIANA’S TIP: “For government marketers, you have to understand the persona that you’re marketing to at a deeper level. That’s step one. For the sales leaders and sales professionals out there, what I would tell you is understand that your role has changed. Your job is not to be the information or the education concierge. Your job is to be the trusted advisor who brings valuable insights above and beyond your company and your product, because they’re going to find that information on their own to the table. Focus on the relationship and bring those insights that are relevant to their problems and challenges in their agency.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: Gina, I’m excited to have you with me today. Gina Stracuzzi runs the Women in Sales programs at the Institute for Excellence in Sales. Gina, why did we bring on Juliana today?
Gina Stracuzzi: Thank you, Fred. Two weeks ago, Fred and I attended GAIN as a sponsor, and it was just a phenomenal day. We gathered so much information from that. Fred and I both come from a little bit of a marketing background as well as sales. We’ve always been very cognizant of the relationship and the working struggle sometimes between marketing and sales. Really what Juliana and her facilitators and speakers highlighted that day was just how integrated this conversation, these relationships have become now. There isn’t a lot of just, “Okay, we did our part. Now it’s your turn. Take it over.” It’s all changing.
As people who work with sales leaders and marketing leaders, we have really seen up close and personal how difficult those relationships have become. Not in a tense way, but people trying to figure out their parts. What Juliana and her guests really spoke about came home to Fred and I, so I’m super excited that we’re having this conversation, because this is the woman who knows, she’s got her finger on that pulse. I’m super excited about this conversation.
Fred Diamond: There’s so many other factors that we’ve talked about at the Institute for Excellence in Sales so many times. There’s data that the customer may be 60% through their sales process before they even engage the sales professionals. 15, 20 years ago, sales professionals used to be walking brochures, and customers would bring us in to go through our strategy. I worked at Apple Computer for a long time, and I remember doing three days of product presentations to our customers. Customers can go into ChatGPT now and type in, what is Apple’s product strategy? A lot of the roles are being defined, et cetera. Gina, I’m glad that you’re going to be here.
Juliana, it’s so exciting to see you here as well. Your presentation that we saw you give at GAIN was phenomenal. Your presentation at the Carahsoft Partner Summit was phenomenal as well. Gina and I really dug into what you were saying, and we’re so thrilled to have you here. Why don’t you give us a brief intro, and then why don’t you tell us why did GBR create the GovBuyer’s Journey framework?
Juliana Slye: Thank you so much for having me on board, Fred and Gina. I’m the CEO of Government Business Results. We’re a small woman-owned firm headquartered in Northern Virginia, but with team members spread across the US. We help tech companies effectively build their go-to markets, so marketing and sales aligned together, for the high-tech public-sector markets. I’m so glad that we had the opportunity to cross paths at the Carahsoft Marketing Summit in August, and then at GAIN in October. My opportunity to chair the GAIN conference this year was truly one of my highlights of the year. We worked with a team of over 50 different speaking professionals from across the public sector community to develop really powerful panels, as well as presentations that I think hit some very contemporary themes. I’m glad that you all found such great value in the conference. I’m looking forward to continuing on with the team there.
In terms of the GovBuyer’s Journey framework, thank you for allowing me to have an opportunity to talk about it. I’m a bit of a geek, so I’m going to geek out for a moment, if you don’t mind. There are many B2B buyer’s frameworks out there, but they don’t extend into the government space because of the unique structure inside of B2G, the regulations and the decision-making processes that are inherent inside of government today. We created the GovBuyer’s Journey as a way to really provide a clear roadmap for marketers and sellers inside of the public sector who need to be able to understand how government buyers today make purchasing decisions and the path that they have to travel so that they can really meet their buyer along that journey.
By aligning the buyer’s specific needs and concerns and motivations at each stage with recommendations for content and activity and engagement, we provide this blueprint that marketers and sellers can align to to really deliver a comprehensive experience for their public sector buyer. Of course, along the way, really do all of the great things that we know need to be done inside of sales, which is really making sure that we’re addressing buyer’s concerns and reducing the complexity of the sale, and at the same time, reducing the speed to close. Done right, it can be really incredibly effective. I’ve got a couple of stats here that I’m hoping I can go ahead and share with you.
Fred Diamond: I just got one quick question as you move into those slides. We’ve heard the term buyer’s journey, and you mentioned it’s in multiple contexts, if you will. Clarify exactly what a buyer’s journey is for us.
Juliana Slye: Most of us think about what the seller’s journey is. When we come to working with the buyer, we’ll think about it from our standpoint. We’ll think about what are the steps that we need to take to make sure that we’ve met all of the needs of the buyer and the process and the sale. Oftentimes, we’ll codify these into an acronym BANT. Have I discovered that they’ve got enough budget, authority, need, timing, things like that?
Well, the buyer’s journey is looking at things from the buyer’s point of view. A buyer’s journey basically maps out the stages that a potential buyer goes through from first recognizing they have a problem, all the way through to making that final purchase decision. It’s about understanding that map of awareness, consideration, and decision, but from the buyer’s perspective. It’s really interesting, and particularly in public sector, it’s a way to map the decision makers and the influencers and the detailed steps really on a single sheet of paper, if you will, so that you can start to build your sales and your marketing strategies from the buyer-centric point of view.
Fred Diamond: I want to have some specific questions about the federal government. We have a lot of people listening today or watching the LinkedIn live who are in B2B, and a lot are in B2G. Your company obviously focuses on B2G, business to government. At the Institute for Excellence in Sales, we focus on B2B, business to business, and business to government. Before you get into some of the framework elements, what are some of the specific challenges that have emerged over the past decade that make selling to the federal government more complex, and do these things apply to B2B?
Juliana Slye: It’s a great question. I like to say that B2G trails B2B by about five years. That said, there are some unique differences. First is the shift from a highly-regulated purchasing process to something that is a little bit more chaotic and complex. What do I mean by that? There is absolutely, without a doubt, a very regulated manner in which government agencies have to procure IT goods and services. However, in the government’s attempt to actually speed up the purchase process, they’ve actually introduced a little bit of chaos and a little bit of complexity. Things like OTAs, other transaction authorities, as well as other procurement mechanisms that were meant to enable shortcuts for public sector buyers to be able to gain their IT more quickly, have actually introduced a level of chaos.
The buyer isn’t necessarily aware of what they can do. They might be a little bit confused as to the steps. Then you wrap in the rest of the regulations around it and add in COVID and some of the huge agency-wide or segment wide contracts that have come on the scene lately that we tend to see in the publications as being hotly contested. All of this has shifted the landscape, shortened some of the buying cycles, while lengthening others. This shift to a more chaotic and complex buying process is one thing.
The second is an increased focus on compliance and security. For many of the government agencies out there, everything has to pass a compliance and a security test because of the ever-increasing tempo of threats, both insider threat and external threats to the agency, and the need to both protect our citizens as well as protect our secure assets like data.
Then the third is this rise of self-educated buyers. This is something that’s uniquely come out since COVID. Buyers today are more interested in educating themselves than talking to a sales rep. Fred, you talked a moment ago about you would go in and do product demos, or product roadmap updates back in the days of your time as a sales rep with Apple. In many cases today, we’re seeing government buyers and B2B buyers spending more time online than talking to sales. We have shifted from a sales-led buyer experience, really to a self-educated buyer experience. That is something that we’re seeing in both camps, B2B and B2G.
Fred Diamond: That whole dynamic has forced sales professionals to provide much more value than they’ve ever had to provide before. That’s something that we talk at the Institute for Excellence in Sales all the time, is the customer only needs you if you’re providing some type of value that they can’t get anywhere else.
Gina Stracuzzi: Let’s get to your slide, and then I want to talk about the seven stages of that. But I also want to go back to something you said a few seconds ago, which is five years behind B2B. In what aspects is it five years behind? Is it just now that the B2G has introduced a whole new layer of chaos, which I haven’t chuckled because I’ve been in government sales in one way or the other for a long time, and there’s never-ending layers of chaos, and they should not fix what’s already broken, because it only gets worse?
Juliana Slye: It does. Let’s talk about the five years. I see this on the marketing side as well as the selling side. Where we started to see B2B enterprise sales really pick up in motion, I want to say, is right around 2010 when you had a martech stack that could actually execute, and a more personalized approach to that B2B buyer. That was a wonderful thing. You would have Marketo and Salesforce, and they’re all working together, and your marketers are able to really tee up these beautiful, personalized emails. They’re able to understand and track what’s happening with the buyer. All of this is working brilliantly on the B2B side.
Meanwhile, on the B2G side, the DOD has stripped out HTML emails. Half of the federal civilian guys won’t take HTML-based emails, and HTML is where the cookies are hidden so that you can understand who opened what. You have this really rich martech stack happening within B2B, and you had sales reps who were able to really leverage all of the power and capability of Salesforce and gain insights into their customers. Meanwhile, on the B2G side, we were still blind and still are blind to a great degree.
When I talk about being behind the curve, it’s because of some of the regulations and the way that government agencies do business that prevent government agencies and their sellers from really engaging at a deeper level. Some of this shifts over time, and certainly now we’re able to have a little bit more visibility, a little bit more engagement, a little bit of a deeper engagement. But by the same token and government’s desire to really improve the rate at which they adopt technology, because it’s not only a workflow and automation and an efficiency issue, but it’s really a security issue. You really can’t protect those machines that are on Windows 95. There is a deep desire to modernize, to support national security interests and even state security interests at the state multi-level.
As they really leaned into wanting to adopt and modernize, they said, “You know what? The existing procurement regulations don’t allow us to do it. We’ll just craft some new ones.” Now based on whatever your purchase is, you can either go this way or you can go this way. At which point now the government buyer is confused and saying, “Okay, which way do I go again? How do I do this?” That’s what I’m talking about, if that makes sense.
Fred Diamond: Take us through the seven steps. After you give us that overview, I want to follow up on Gina’s question here, and you actually alluded to this before, that the people who are in government IT, they want to bring in great technology into their agencies. But I love the way you describe the chasm, if you will, between what they can accept from industry and how they have to be self-educated to follow it up. Take us through the framework and then let’s address the whole concept of how do we help them be self-educated. How do we still provide the value knowing that they want to be up to speed, et cetera?
Juliana Slye: I’m a big fan of WIIFM, what’s in it for me? We have a wonderful LinkedIn Live audience who are thinking, “Yeah, great, there’s this framework. What’s in it for me?” I like to lead with that. What’s in it for you? 66% increase in open rates, 170% higher click rate, 14% higher click through rates. These are marketing stats. On the sales side, 2x increase in 12 months, or a 4x increase in 18 months. What are all of these stats?
One of the things that we talk about, and I know as a seller, you feel this right here, is that there is a need to do more with a lot less. At this point, your pipeline is always hungry. When your pipeline is always hungry, you can do one of two things. You can turn the faucet on higher, increase the amount of leads coming through, or you can double your pipeline by doubling the conversion rate of the leads that you already have. A lot of what I’m going to be talking to you about today is how to have more efficient conversations with your prospects. For the marketers who are in the audience, this is about really improving the quality of your marketing pipeline as you’re transferring into sales.
When we take a look at the government buyer’s journey, the first thing that we do is we understand that the average government sales cycle is between 12 and 18 months, which is to say that some of them are 9 months, and some of them are 36 months, but we average it out to about 12 to 18 months. Within that timeframe, the government buyer is doing many different things. I like to coalesce them around the 3Ps.
The first is they’re talking to other people. They’re having peer discussions, team alignment, peer references, and executive alignment. The second is they’re focused on the problem at hand. They’re exploring the problem, they’re doing research around the problem, as well as their agency standards. They’re doing solution research and product research. Now, as far as the differences between B2B and B2G, B2B is doing exactly the same thing for the first two rows. Where we start to really differentiate B2G is that third row of procurement. The way that government agencies have to buy things, they’re really starting in that motion of RFI, RFPs, value exploration, RFQs, and then proper procurement.
These 3Ps, people, problem, procurement, are what your buyer’s working through, whether they’re B2B or B2G. The reality is, we see them at a variety of different steps along the way. We see them in government, we see them in industry days in both B2B and B2G. We see them in conferences, we see them in seminars and webinars and demos. Marketers who are on the line, where are my marketers at? We’re orchestrating all of this. We’re orchestrating these touch points and enabling them to happen.
However, if you think about it, it’s a lot of work that the government buyer has to do. We brought forward the government buyer’s journey as a way of understanding where the government buyer is in this problem set of people, problem, and procurement. One of the biggest differences between the B2G buyer’s journey and the B2B buyer’s journey is in that very first step. In most cases, in the B2B environment, the customers you are dealing with understand their problems from an intrinsic basis. We need to increase shareholder profitability. We need to increase profits. We need to tamp down on costs. These are not the same motivators that exist in government. Many government agencies today have an unbelievable amount of priorities that they’re working through.
Think about the Veterans Administration, or you can think about it from the IRS perspective, or even the state of Oregon perspective. All of them have just a laundry list of priorities that they’re working through, so much so that their priority list exceeds their resource and attention span list. What often has to happen is there needs to be a catalyst that knocks them out of status quo before they will turn their lens to a new problem. That is the first and perhaps the most significant difference between the two buyer’s journeys, where the B2B is intrinsic, the B2G is an external catalyst driven. Something comes to knock that agency out of their status quo. It’s a new policy, it’s a new memo. It could be a socioeconomic challenge, there could be a war that pops up. It is something that is a significant impact to the path and pattern that the agency was currently on.
Once that happens, there is typically a very discreet set of steps that the government agency takes in order to acquire the technology and the services that they need to address that catalyst. We’ve codified these steps into seven discrete stages, initiative, research, assess, decision, deploy, renew, cross-grade and upgrade. Deploy and renew have their own spinoff cycles as you see. But for the most part, the work that we do as marketers and sellers is really keyed into those first four stages, initiative, research, assess, and decision. It’s those four stages that typically take between 12 and 18 months. There’s a special conversation we can have around deploy, renew, cross-grade and upgrade. I’m champing at the bit to get into that conversation with folks, but for most folks, it’s really the first four stages that we’re talking about.
As we take a look at these first four stages, there’s a lot going on, and we look at it as jobs the buyer’s trying to do. If you think about the procurement paths, and by the way, these are the actual procurement processes for the civ side, the DOD side, and I picked a random state, the state of Oregon. It’s incredibly complex. Gartner calls it on the enterprise side, which is very similar to some of the complexity you see here, they call it a long, hard slog, is what they call it. We see this on the B2B side as well as the B2G side. But there are eight discreet steps or jobs that the government buyer is trying to get done during these four stages.
The first step is loosening the status quo. Does this catalyst really affect me? Do I really have to change? I don’t want to change because I understand that there’s a lot that I’m going to have to do here. Do I really have to change? How does it affect me? The second is committing to change, where they go, “Okay, I understand this affects me. Now I have to get my entire agency’s team aligned behind the fact that they now have to focus on this change and solve this problem.” Then underneath research, they’re exploring methodologies. They’re really looking at technologies and methodologies. “Okay, so we’ve agreed as a team that we have to solve this problem. What solutions set are we looking at?”
Then from there, they start to build their requirements list. Once they build their requirements list, the next step is to evaluate solutions to determine whether or not they meet the requirements list, and then they commit to a solution. Once they commit to a solution, they have to go back out into alignment building and get the agency aligned behind the decision, they have to justify the decision, and then they have to tee up procurement to actually execute the decision or the capabilities.
That is really the nexus of it. How does it affect a buyer and a seller? Well, realistically, there are different needs in each step. For example, the buyer might be thinking, “Something new just crossed my radar. What is it? How does it affect me?” As a team, we need to agree to make the changes. The buyer is then thinking, “What kind of technology will help us?” We need a requirements list so we can evaluate vendors, followed by which vendor solution meets our needs and our list of requirements. We need to align the team to pick a single solution and vendor. Then with a vendor identified, we now need to convince our stakeholders. Then we’ve got to set up procurement quickly.
There’s also a different set of questions that they process through as well. As I scroll through these questions, one of the things that should become apparent is that it requires a different set of information at each step. This is really the key to the buyer’s journey, because if you are timing your message and your information, whether you’re a marketer or a seller, to a certain step, and it misfires and doesn’t align and hit your buyer at the right time, they’re not likely to recognize it. It’s like walking into an Apple store for the first time and having somebody come up to you and say, “If you give me your credit card right now, I’ll give you a 25% discount.” You’re thinking, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. I’m just trying to figure out what iPhone I wanted.” That’s the misalignment we’re talking about and that we’re trying to correct.
It’s understanding where our buyer is in their methodology and their thought process and their buyer’s journey so that we can meet them where they are with the information they need to move forward to the next step. Because here’s the magic. If you can hit the buyer with the right information at the right time, every sales rep out there knows you shrink the sales cycle. You really tee it up more effectively.
The last slide that I have on this is, and this is the challenge on the government side, it’s a team sport. It’s not just one persona. We see this enterprise on the B2B side as well, but it really is multiple personas that you’re dealing with in the buy cycle who are all going through this journey together.
Fred Diamond: We’ve heard the stat before in the B2B side of the customer is 60% down the road before they even call in sales. That’s something that’s been kicked off by the challenger sale, and it continues to go about. What happens is, let’s say the customer is ready to engage you and you’re the sales rep, you don’t have to go back to step one. You did a great job explaining this, is where do you come in to be able to provide the value.
Talk about that for a second or two, is what are some of the work you’re doing to educate sales and marketing? Because typically we want to start from the beginning. We want to educate, we want to talk about our technology and the market, and we feel if we’re given this gift of being in tune with the customer, that we have to comprise 60% of stuff. But the reality is, like you just said, the customer’s already researched the 20%, 25%, 30%, 50%, 60%. Now we need to comment at the right place. You mentioned the word magic. What is some of your advice? What’s your education? What are your insights on that?
Gina Stracuzzi: I want to integrate my question into Fred’s because it’s very related. In this new journey, I can see just from your visuals there that the integration of sales and marketing, I can see them being at the table all the way together now versus a handoff. Is that what sales organizations should be thinking about, is like, “Let’s not do this handoff. Let’s work together since the buyer is doing half the work ahead of time.” Thinking about Fred’s question, integrate mine in there too, if you would.
Juliana Slye: Think about the buyer’s journey this way. The sales reps used to be more in control of the journey than they were today. There is an acceptance there. If you’re a seller, your buyer has already spent a significant amount of time by themselves self-educating before they’re willing to even talk with you. I think step one is understanding that.
I think meeting them where they are, more than ever, it’s the conversation, “Hi, what do you know about us already? What have you heard about us?” But more importantly, I would actually set that aside and say, “What problem are you trying to solve? What have you evaluated so far? Where are you in your process for solving the problem?” I think actually taking a moment and doing that pulse check of understanding where they have been already is more critical than ever. It’s not a question that we would typically ask in the past in a sales process, but I think it’s what we have to ask now because we have to catch up to where our buyer is. Because otherwise, if you don’t, you’re going to be firing all sorts of messages at them and missing them, because where you’re firing, they no longer are. Worse than that, you’re going to start to ditch some of your credibility because you’re not listening or not asking the questions about where they are in their journey and where their problem set is. That’s step one.
Gina, the integrated approach that you talked about, this is my big banner moment that I’m really driving out there. One of the things I loved about the GAIN conference is there was a panel on MQL to SQL conversion. One of the panelists, Darcy Hunt, stood up and said, “In our company, we no longer refer to ourselves as field marketers. We are revenue marketers.” I couldn’t agree more. The integration between sales and marketing is more critical than ever. Because if you think about those steps and that journey, and the rise of the self-educated government buyer, you’re realizing if you’re a sales rep, “Hang on a second. If these guys are spending more time online than talking to me, that’s my marketer. That is absolutely my marketer putting that information out there. How can I work more closely with my marketer?”
In the past, we used to have this really great, we talked about it all the time, sales and marketing collaboration, and collaboration meant, “Hi, I’ve done my piece. You now go do yours.” The reality is, the new sales-marketing motion, and I’m using that as a single word, sales-marketing motion or marketing-sales motion, is interleaved. It takes ABM and the concept of ABM to a whole new level. But there needs to be a common backbone and a common blueprint for sales and marketing to work from so that they can interleave their efforts knowing that as soon as that buyer gets off the line with a sales rep, if marketing was talking to them initially and all of their self-education and their research, they get on the phone, they talk to a seller to get a couple of pieces of information they need, they now go back and do more research online armed with that information. It is an inter-lead. That is what I’m really driving forward these days.
Gina Stracuzzi: Let’s talk a little bit about what needs to change. We hit that a little bit on what needs to change in the sales and marketing organization. It really seems like it’s a full-on mindset shift in that now we cannot assume that people are starting at 0.0, but I really liked what you said, the fact that they’re coming into the picture, self-educated, we’re going to hope that that means they’ve seen a lot of what we’ve done on the marketing side, that they’ve looked at our stuff, not just other people’s stuff. That we are part of that mix of information that they have gleaned. Now we’re going to use it, but how do we use it? How can they really take this and use it and be successful moving into 2025?
Juliana Slye: Great question, a lot there. I want to back up to something you said. You said, so they’ve gone online and hopefully they’ve looked at our information versus our competitor’s information. They will look at whatever information is there that they can find. Two really important distinctions, whatever is out there, if you don’t have enough information out there that needs every step of the journey, I bet your competitor does. Number two, is where they can find it. Where are they going for it? This is where marketing is really required at this point. Understanding where your buyer goes for information requires understanding your buyer better.
We used to look to the sales team as, “Okay, you guys are going to know your buyer better than anybody else. How can we support you? What do you need?” That marketer needs to have deep demographic data and a data-driven understanding of where that buyer is so that they understand where to meet that buyer with the information that’s necessary at that step. Guess what? Different steps, the buyers do different things and go to different places in those steps. You’ve got to make sure that you’re really driving through the whole buyer’s journey in that way. But it’s about personalized engagement that meets the buyer where they are.
On the sales side, we’ve talked a little bit about the sales rep getting in there and having some of those one-to-one conversations to better understand that. But on the marketing side, we have to use data-driven insights and personas to really nail that.
Fred Diamond: You also mentioned ABM, account-based marketing. I think one of the things I’m getting from this conversation very clearly, there’s a lot of debate because of AI and things like that. Are salespeople even going to be valid moving forward? Even marketing people for that matter. One of the great things is that sales professionals who understand the value they need to bring, specifically for the customer, it’s no longer broad, “Gee, you have these challenges, you’re in IT. Here’s what we do. Do you need it? How can we fit it in? How can we squeeze in what we do into what you’re up to?” But it’s like understanding specifically what’s going on at the customer, where they’re going, where their agency direction is going, where their mission.
We’re doing today’s interview in the middle of November 2024. We just had an election. We’re seeing things come out in the news about things that may happen across the government, understanding 3, 4, 5 steps down the road. The great sales professionals in B2G are the ones who can have real conversations with their government customers about where their agency is going, where the mission is going. It’s not just about here’s how my technology may be able to help.
Give us some of your insights, Juliana Slye, on some other things from the sales side that you believe sales professionals should be doing to be successful. Maybe you could talk about some things they could do with marketing, to tie in Gina’s great point, that there’s more interplay, integration, not just at the “old handoff”, but early in and throughout the process. Both organizations are valuable.
Juliana Slye: Fred, I completely agree with you. I think if anybody ever says sales is going away, that is absolutely not the case in any stretch of the imagination. Gartner and Forrester have done some great work on this on the B2B side, and let me step back a little bit. We talk about the rise of the self-educated buyer. If you step all the way back, for about 20 years, we had sales-led education throughout the buying cycle. What would happen is marketers would develop a lead and at some point turn it over to sales. Well, Forrester and Gartner have identified that for the last 20 years, up until about 2019, I’ll call it, there were about 17 touches in an enterprise sale, from let me identify the lead to let me close the lead.
Somewhere around touches four, five, and six, marketing would turn it over to sales, and sales would grab it at that point and run it the rest of the way. To your great point, and some of what we’ve been talking about earlier, the government buyer would turn to the sales rep and say, “Tell me about the product. Can you do a demo for me?” The sales rep was the concierge who then brought the educational pieces to the buyer.
Well, fast forward from 2020 to about 2024, what Gartner and Forrester have understood is the touches, those 17 touches, be they web touches or sales rep touches or conference touches, anytime where the vendor had an opportunity to have a touch point in any capacity with the buyer, has now flipped to 27 touches. We’ve doubled. Then in terms of that doubling to 27 touchpoints, they’ve identified that 15 of them are digital. 15 out of 27, marketing’s in charge of the pipeline, more so than sales. Think about that. Your buyer is spending more time online than talking to sales reps. You have this dramatic shift in the amount of touchpoint.
On the government side, that number almost doubles to 40 touchpoints, or more, depending upon which segment you’re in. Let’s talk about that for a moment. But in terms of your sales rep and their importance, the amount of touches that a sales rep has with a buyer hasn’t changed. What has changed is the amount of touches the marketer has, it’s nearly doubled.
Sales reps aren’t going anywhere. If you really need to validate that point, I want you to think about Carvana versus your local Ford dealership. Carvana is a service where you go online, you figure out what you want, you order it, the car shows up. You don’t deal with the sales rep. Yet they’ve been around for like five years and they haven’t taken off. Why is that? Well, as buyers, buyers want to buy from a person. The larger the purchase, the more of a human connection is necessary.
Our government agencies today are under a huge chaotic spin, and they need trusted advisors. On the B2B side, your enterprise buyer needs trusted advisors. They want and need to cultivate a relationship with somebody who can help them navigate through this. The sales rep’s role is never going away. I firmly believe that.
However, what does need to happen, and what the reps need to really focus on, is understanding the buyer’s behavior and the journey that they’re on so that they can more effectively connect. But then they need to turn inward to their company and work on training their teams on that as well. Marketers can get really data-driven, but having sales reps really work with them to really understand some of the more specific mechanics around the buyer’s behavior, is critical. Think about that integration. If I’m advising a sales rep, what I’m going to say to you is, you are no longer a party of one at the table. You have yourself, you have your SE, and you have your marketer. The three of you are working together on that journey and should have a shared vision of what that journey is and the role that each of you are playing.
Gina Stracuzzi: That leads nicely into a question I have, Juliana, is thinking about the content creation as a marketing tactic to influence that buyer’s journey. Now, it’s so critical. It used to be that people were so concerned with SEO, making sure they were optimizing, they would come up top of the list. Now there are so many competing things with that. As Fred alluded to, you even go into AI and say very specifically, “What can Apple give me? What can Salesforce give me?” As a competitor, you don’t have any skin in that game yet, because if AI’s not throwing something up, you might also want to look at X, Y, Z company, then how do you stand out in that area?
Juliana Slye: It’s going to sound contrary, but the answer isn’t, let’s do more content. The answer is, let’s make sure we have the right pieces of content to address the buyer’s need at that stage, and located in the areas where the buyer’s most likely to find it. My favorite thing in the world is a sales team that goes, “Oh, we just got listed in the Gartner Magic Quadrant report. Let’s go blast that to everybody.” That is exactly the wrong move.
Content plays a really critical role because our buyers want to go ahead and self-educate, but that content needs to be focused. If you think about the buyer’s journey, and you think about the first two stages right here, this is all about the problem set. Don’t talk about product. Don’t talk about who you are. Don’t talk about the greatest thing. It’s not until you get to the assess phase that they’re even going to be able to listen to you. By the way, that Gartner report is really going to come in handy when you’re trying to convince everybody else in the agency or the company that your decision was the right one. But up here, it is focusing specifically on the problem. What I like to say to folks is, content is king, but only if it’s the right content delivered in the right place to the right person. You got to know who you’re talking to and where they are in the stage.
Fred Diamond: One thing that I’ve taken away, Gina, from this conversation with Juliana, is, we talk about this all the time at the Institute for Excellence in Sales, if you’re a professional, you got to be a professional. That means, what is the sales professional now doing when. It used to be all the skills and methodology and process. We talk about presentation skills at the institute and using social media, et cetera. But what we’re learning here is a sales professional has to be a professional here, here, here, here, and here.
Part of it is working with marketing to ensure that the right content is created for the customer, because the sales professionals know the customer more than marketing does. Marketing knows the industry, hopefully, but the sales professionals should know, if I’m covering this agency, they need to know what the budget looks like, the mission, the politics, the challenges that have occurred. You mentioned a good answer in the very beginning, Juliana, one of the things with government is that things happen. Wars, hurricanes, weather related issues, disasters, crimes perhaps, and that leads an agency to need different types of skills and different types of technology.
I want to thank you very much. Gina and I got so much out of your GAIN presentation and out of your Carahsoft Partner Summit presentation. Thank you for sharing this great information today. We’re very excited to have gotten deeper into this and we look forward to continuing to work with you moving forward. I want you to wrap up with a relatively concise answer. What is your main message to marketing? You deal in the marketing world, and what is your main message to sales leaders and sales professionals? If you’re on an elevator and you saw a marketing director for a well-known tech company, and they said, “Juliana, what do I need to know?” Then same thing for sales professionals.
Juliana Slye: On the marketing side, what I would tell you is you have to get beyond segment and line of business versus IT. You have to understand the persona that you’re marketing to at a deeper level. That’s step one. For the sales leaders and sales professionals out there, what I would tell you is understand that your role has changed. Your job is not to be the information or the education concierge. Your job is to be the trusted advisor who brings valuable insights above and beyond your company and your product, because they’re going to find that information on their own to the table. Focus on the relationship and bring those insights that are relevant to their problems and challenges in their agency.
Fred Diamond: Gina, we’ve gotten so much great information here from Juliana, just curious on what your final thoughts are.
Gina Stracuzzi: My final thought is we need to do this again, and then we need to talk about not the marketing people and the sales people, but what can organizations, companies do to make sure the environment is correct, to allow the right pollinization and new world order, if you will, on this. Because that is something we hear too, is that nothing has changed policy/process-wise necessarily within the organizations, and individuals aren’t necessarily free to make those changes on their own. I can see a whole other conversation on this, where sales leaders, marketing leaders that run these organizations need to start working together and make it possible for their teams to do so.
Fred Diamond: One thing that we talked about, you and I, both, and Juliana, came from the sales and marketing world and it’s the partnership between sales and marketing. I referred to a Harvard Business Review article from 2004, How to End the War Between Sales and Marketing. Companies, you don’t have time for that, you’re doing your customers a disservice by not approaching the government buyer’s framework, the journey framework that we’re talking about here, on providing the value for the customer, where they need it, and when they need it, and all these places are coming together.
Once again, I want to thank Juliana Slye from GBR for being on today’s LinkedIn Live. For people who watched us, we appreciate it. If you’re listening to this as a Sales Game Changers Podcast, thank you as well. Thanks, Juliana. Thanks, Gina. My name is Fred Diamond.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo