Michael Webb: Hello everyone. This is Michael Webb with the Sales Process Excellence Podcast. I am excited to introduce you today to someone I have followed for a long time. Her name is Ardath Albee. And she is the author of two revolutionary books in marketing. The first one, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale. And the second one is a book called Digital Relevance: Developing Marketing Content and Strategies That Drive Results. So Ardath, welcome to the podcast. I really am glad you're here.

Ardath Albee: Thank you, Michael. It's a pleasure to join you.

Michael Webb: And I think it would really be helpful for my audience if you could spend a few minutes and just tell us where you've been in your career and how you got into doing what you're doing now.

Ardath Albee: Sure. So I come at this from, not a marketing background, so I ran companies in a past life, mainly hotels and country clubs, so on the B2C side. And then one day my sister called and asked me to move to Minneapolis and help her build a software company. And I kind of laughed and told her to go get funding, thinking that she would go away. And she got funding. And so I moved to Minneapolis and we built the company. So this is back in the year 2000. So think, the first-ever iteration of marketing automation software designed to also run your website that marketers could use without IT. And back then, of course, it was a big heavy lift, a custom install, because we didn't have SAS. And corporations at that time had basically taken their brochures and put them online and turned them into websites, remember? Back in 2000.

Michael Webb: Oh yeah, right.

Ardath Albee: So they've moved that content into the new technology and then they'd say, Well, nothing changed, nothing happened. And so I started going out and looking at their websites and thinking, no wonder, who wants to read this. And so my background is, I'm a writer, I always have been, have a degree in English as well as a degree in business. And so I started helping them rewrite their websites, and focus on their customers more so than their products, which was a fight kicking and screaming a lot of times. And they started seeing change and they started asking for more and more help. So in 2007 when I realized I could make a living doing something I love, I jumped and became a consultant, and that's how this all got started.

Michael Webb: Interesting. So there's a pretty famous study that's been going on by CSO Insights. You might be familiar with that. For the last seven years in a row, the percentage of B2B salespeople making their quotas has declined, seven years in a row, in a time of recovery in the economy.

Ardath Albee: Yeah. I think even more frightening than that is that what's the percentage right now? 50, right around 50% of sales reps are to make quota.

Michael Webb: Yeah. That same company said it proved that a CEO of a company might be better off taking the capital they invest in their sales and marketing organizations, especially with sales organization, and putting it on the craps table in Vegas because the odds are better.

Ardath Albee: That's just terrible.

Michael Webb: Why? But why is that happening in your view?

Ardath Albee: Well, I'll tell you what I see and I've been doing work on both the marketing and the sales side, but what one of the things that I thought was really interesting was something that I heard a lot about at the Gartner conferences this year.

And one of those things is that buyers used to say nothing's relevant to them. We're not producing content that speaks to them. It's all about our products or whatever. Now they're saying, Hey, 85 of them are saying, we go out and we find quality content, but you know what? It's still not relevant to us. And then they say, and it's confusing us because there are no apples to apples comparison between what all the different vendors say. And as buying groups get bigger, every one of them goes out and does their own research, and they all bring back this information that conflicts with each other. And so these buying groups are now struggling to deconflict all this information.

In fact, Gartner says it adds another 20% of time to their buying process if they even decide to buy at all. And as many deals are ending in no-decision as companies or vendors are losing to the competition, which is frightening because buyers can't figure out how to even move forward. And so-

Michael Webb: Wow-

Ardath Albee: It's difficult. It's changed a lot. Buyer expectations have increased exponentially, just because they're business to business doesn't mean they forget about their consumer experiences when they're going into the office, right? So they have expectations of instant information and being able to find things that are relevant to them. And we're not, as B2B companies, really following through with that. But the other thing that I find really interesting is a lot of what I hear is go forth and provide value, but nobody ever defines, what exactly does that mean. What's considered valuable, right? And so what I find is that companies really still don't know their buyers. They don't keep up with them.

In fact, a lot of times they do the research or some of it creates a persona and say, okay, great, check the box. And they put it in a folder. And they don't use those insights or that information to inform their strategies, their go-to-market strategy, their marketing strategy, their sales engagement strategy. They just say, okay, we did that work, file it away. And they don't understand how to use it. And so what we get is content that yes, arguably is high value, but it's not doing anything to help orchestrate the buying process. And your buyers don't care whether they're getting stuff from marketing or from sales, they just care that it's relevant to them, that it matches their context, that it provides some kind of valuable insight they can actually use.

Michael Webb: There's a wonderful quote from one of your blog posts. It was, "We need to start looking at the buying process as a continuous experience that sometimes plays to the strengths of marketing and other times to those of the sales team." So are you saying that the prospects are looking for conversation? Help us understand how that issue of figuring out, how to give into relative chats applying to this desire for conversation if it does?

Ardath Albee: Yeah, absolutely. I think it does. And one of the things that I find really interesting, it's one of my favorite parts of building personas, is understanding all of the questions that they have to get answered in order to continue to make forward progress towards solving a problem and buying your product. And so if you actually look at what a conversation is, just like you and I talking, you're asking questions, I'm answering. If this wasn't a podcast and we were just talking, I probably answer and then say, and what do you think or ask you a question to follow on. So if you think about it, Q&A is actually the basis of conversations, a lot of times.

And so the other thing about it is that marketers and sellers are disconnected. So marketers spend the majority of their time, and research shows this, creating content for awareness and engagement at the beginning of the buying process, or sellers focus most of their time at the end, right? The products, solution briefs, information negotiation, whatever closing the deal, those kinds of things. There's this huge gap in the middle. And what we need to figure out is how do we connect the dots all the way through. Because what's happening now is, for a long time there was that statistic out there that said buyers are pushing sellers to the very end of their buying process. Now what they're finding is buyers are so confused. They're saying we're willing to talk to sellers at the beginning of the process, but they have to bring us something relevant.

They have to be helpful. They have to bring that input, value thing. And so we've got to look at this as how do we get marketing and sales to work together throughout the entirety of the buying journey? How do we align all of that? Sales enablement is one way to try and bring marketing and sales together if it's done well. But we tend to look at this as in silos still. And our buyers don't. They don't say, well today I think I'm going to go find a piece of marketing content, tomorrow I think I'll go find a piece of sales content. They're just looking for how do I get through this? How does it all-

Michael Webb: So back in the day and you were probably there as I was, the big thing was to transition the company from selling products to no, no, no, we're supposed to sell solutions. And what you're talking about is way more sophisticated and nuanced than that. I mean we've already used a bunch of terms here that I get nervous when these buzzwords get floating around. Let's define them. Content strategy is one.

Ardath Albee: Right, well, content strategy is really creating this storyline or narrative for how you get a buyer from problem to solution. What do they need to know? What expertise can you bring to bear? What are the different decisions they have to make along the customer journey, the buying journey, so it's a combination of all of that stuff. How are you actually going to use content and information to reach your goal of growing the company, expanding your accounts, whatever those objectives are. That's really what a content strategy is. But how this story relates across different channels? Like whether marketing is telling it or sales is telling it. How is everybody on the same page being consistent in the story they're sharing?

Michael Webb: Well, but in addition to that, it's very common for one function in a company to realize we got a problem here we need to solve, but in order to solve it they have to go to another function in the company, to get their support and participation. And then when they get something that makes sense and they've tested it out and then they have to go to the CEO for approval and then it goes to the purchasing department. So that four different buyers are involved in making that decision. So I mean that makes your content strategy a lot more complex, doesn't it?

Ardath Albee: Well sure. And it's actually more than that. So the account is now up to 11 plus people involved, and it really does complicate things. And one of the things that can simplify it is looking at who was involved the majority of the time and who just comes in and out for specific purposes. For example, if a business lead is buying something, maybe IT has to come in and bless it. But they only involve for that evaluation period or whatever. They bless it, you move forward and then somebody else could step in and say, Hey, wait, if you install the system, it's going to affect all my processes and my team. So what do they need to know? And so I've created this system because otherwise, it gets really expensive and time-intensive. And it's hard enough to convince companies to do this groundwork and research.

But build primary personas for the ones that are involved all the way through, the champion, the deal that are the ones who are really selling it up to get the final sign off and involved every step of the way and then look at the people that come in and out and figure out what you need to know to create the content that they need. Just that. You don't have to create content across the entire buying process for somebody who's going to be involved for one month of a nine-month process, right? It only has a couple of questions that you have to answer to get them to consensus.

And so we have to look at things more strategically because creating a persona that you're going to engage across the entirety of the buying process and most of my clients are selling complex solutions that have a one-year, two-year, three-year buying process, that's a lot of content and companies don't have the resources to create all of that. So we have to be really smart about what do we absolutely need to have as a baseline in order to move this buyer from start to finish, given all the other people that are going to come in and out over time.

Michael Webb: So-

Ardath Albee: And-

Michael Webb: Okay. I'm straight, go ahead.

Ardath Albee: Yeah, no, I was just going to say, so it reduces the amount of effort you have to do to get those insights that you need so you can create this consistent connected story, that helps you engage and get consensus from those people that come in and out.

But you have to look at it a little differently. So for example, I got a call the other day from a VP of marketing, we said they'd identified 52 personas and I said go shoot your team now. Line them up by the wall and shoot them, because how are they ever going to create content for 52 personas across a nine-month buy cycle, which is what they were averaging. I said that's not even realistic. And after I took a look at them, we boiled it down to, there were really maybe 11 and only three of them were personas that were primary, right? That we're going to be involved across the entirety. And the other ones we could do many personas for, because we only needed to learn just enough to be able to get them on board and so, but I mean it's just people scare themselves.

Michael Webb: Okay, so a buyer persona, let's define that. What does that mean?

Ardath Albee: A buyer persona is a composite sketch of a segment of your buying audience, that is responsible for solving the problem that your solution solves. So think about it when I say composite sketch, think about the commonalities across a segment of your audience. So for example, let's say VP's of marketing, okay? So I don't care if one of your VPs wear stiletto heels and has a poodle and drives a Corvette. I don't care. I can't do anything with that. What I care about is that the majority of VPs of marketing, and I'm making this up, the majority of VPs of marketing have been in their role for at least three years, that they tend to have been in their careers for over 20, that they're trying to shorten time to get products into the market, that what are their specific goals, that they all align around, that they all would nod their heads and say, yes, this applies to us.

I don't care about the outlier things because the goal as a marketer is to reach the widest swath of a particular audience as possible, by being relevant and addressing context, right? Now when you move, of course, closer to getting sales involved, they will apply the one-to-one, but as marketers, we can't do that effectively, even with AI. And I don't care what everybody says, AI, a lot of times the data can tell you what somebody does, but not why they do it. So you need to understand that background information as well. And so-

Michael Webb: So how do you get into their mindset to understand that sort of thing?

Ardath Albee: Well you talk to them.

Michael Webb: Okay, well there you go. I found a salesperson, right? With the skills that I learned, painfully achieved of preparing for a meeting and asking, well-thought-out questions, active listening. And for a salesperson who is taught way back in the day, all the 16 different ways to close the sale and all these objections to overcome. You have to break yourself of that habit and not talk about your product. You have to really zero in and use what the prospect tells you to ask deeper questions, right? Well, this is a sales interview. How do you get to talk to these people in order to be sure that you've got a cross-section that's representative and then how do you know you're on the right track? I mean-

Ardath Albee: Right, well, I need to talk to, when I build a persona I want to talk to, I mean my goal is 20, usually I'm lucky if I can get 10 or 12. But what I want to do is get to the point where I start hearing the same things again and again and again. And then I know I've got enough to be able to help the company create content and storylines that are going to engage the majority of that audience. You have to learn to ask the right questions and believe me, I've had to learn to do it in 30 minutes or less because that's about all the time I can get a customer or a client's customer to give me. And it's one of the first things I do of course is talk to the sales team, find out who are they talking to.

One of the mistakes marketers make is they say, Oh, we've got to get to the C-Suite. And so they go out and they tried to build a persona on the C-Suite. They can't talk to him, so they go out and they just buy a pizza sitting around and decide, okay, this is what's important to them. And you can't build a persona that way. But secondarily, unless you're selling something that is really, really strategic, the CxO is not your buyer. They're going to delegate it to their team. That's why they hired them. They may take a look at it and give the ultimate blessing, but they're not the ones that are going to be buying it or recommending it to themselves with our view. And so we need to get really rational about who we're trying to engage rather than this aspirational we have to get to the C-Suite.

I had one client that was insistent upon C-Suite when I talked to their sales team. What I learned was there was no way they could have conversations with the C-Suite because they weren't prepared. I have a conversation at that kind of a strategic level, nor was their solution strategic enough. So you have to, first of all, make sure that if you're going to do this work, that you're doing work that translates to the sales team. Because otherwise, you're going to generate a bunch of leads and sales is going to say, Nope, not our buyer and go look for their own. So in order to get this alignment on buying, we've got to talk to sales and understand where they are at in this process, who they're talking to, what they're hearing, and then go out and validate that.

Michael Webb: So in the process excellence world, there's this idea of voice of the customer. And traditionally, it has been too narrowly construed into, what do we need to understand about the customer and the jobs they're trying to do in order to design a product. But in fact, you need to know much more than that about the customer. And very few companies actually have any thought put into what do they need to know about a customer. And so we will learn and work with them, helping them develop and measure and improve their sales process. That they really need to have an ongoing plan whenever they come in contact with a customer, trade shows, in conferences, in customer service calls, in account reviews with the customer. They need to be planful in uncovering information that they need to know. I'd love for you to say a few words about the kinds of things that companies should think about for a well-structured voice of customer program that can feed this valuable information for how to interact with them in a digital marketing or sales enablement or just regular marketing.

Ardath Albee: Yeah, well there's a couple of things. In my experience, voice of customer, the same is sure, not well done. And part of the reason for it is, they lead the witness. They're looking for accolades, instead of looking for information and understanding and empathy, right? And so there's a difference there. And when you're looking for accolades, you're asking questions that are kind of loaded already with bias, right? And so what we need to really understand is perspective. What words are our buyers using? How do they view the problem they're solving? Is it the same way you're talking about it or is the marketing spin your companies put on it, alien, we'll talk about it that way. We need to actually be able to address context. We need to understand, what does this problem mean to these people on a daily basis?

How does it impact their job or their team or their ability to achieve the outcomes they're tasked to? What's the risk to them professionally? If the problem remains unsolved and what the heck is in the way of them fixing it? Why haven't they solved it already? And how can we help with that and help them? A lot of times it's because they don't even understand the impact. They've created a workaround, it's just no, this is the way the day works. And so a lot of times we think people are further ahead in the buying process and they aren't, they may not even be in it. Their status quo may be. This is a pain in the butt, but it gets the job done. So heck with that.

Michael Webb: Bigger fish to fry, yeah?

Ardath Albee: And so we have to understand how to talk to people. And one of the things that we really need to understand, given that buyers do not buy in a linear process, is what does that process look like? What do they do? Where do they go? Who do they talk to?

Look at the new things down there that are here that weren't here a couple of years ago. B2B buyers are using review sites for heaven sakes. Now that wasn't around a couple of years ago. Their number one thing that I hear in a call is the first thing they do is reach out to their network. Lots of times on LinkedIn and say, Hey, is anybody else dealing with this? How would you solve it? What'd you do? And so there are a lot of things that go on behind the scene that we need to understand so that we even have a prayer in hell of addressing them. And those are the things that we overlook, we think, Oh we just put a white paper out there or whatever, really? Where you're going to put it? What is it going to address? And so we need to get really savvy about how we're engaging.

And the other thing I think that's interesting is this whole conundrum about personalization. And so, we don't need to know their shoe size in B2B. What we need to know is how does their perspective about the problem that our solution solves that they're struggling with. And how to apply it so that it's relatable to them in the context in which they're dealing with it. That's personalization and B2B. The sales rep will get to the one to one, but from an engagement perspective, we need to put stuff out that gets them nodding their head and saying, Yeah, that's what my day looks like. How do I deal with that? Oh good, click here. We need to connect the dots for them in a way that makes sense.

Michael Webb: Now, do you think that the sales force, that these individuals can be useful in gathering this kind of research? Or does it require a specially skilled person like yourself?

Ardath Albee: Well, I've trained a lot of marketers on how to do it, the salespeople aren't going to do it. And I'll tell you why. Because they're focused on selling. They're not focused on this other stuff. They're trying to get to understand the person in the account they're dealing with and they come to us with very specific singular focus. Like Harry at ABC company would say this, so your persona is wrong, right? Because that's not the conversation they had this morning. What they fail to understand is if they look across all of the conversations, and they took an average about what the conversation was, would this be relevant? And so it's different. Salespeople are very one-on-one focused and they're reacting to the specifics. The stiletto heels or the Corvette or 49ers fan type of thing. Marketers are looking across the bigger picture.

And so somewhere you've got to find a happy medium between the two. But salespeople also dislike anything and they should, that impacts their selling time. So they're not going to do your research for you. And I'm lucky if I can get their attention on calls when I'm working on client projects to tell me honestly what they think and who they're talking to, and tell me what else do they need? What do they feel they don't know. What would be really helpful for them? Because unless we shaped these projects to actually serve the sales team, then marketing is not going to get the ROI or the performance out of the programs that they create.

Michael Webb: Okay. So what would be the differences in your mind, in the focus of someone who's on the marketing team building this content strategy versus someone who's on the sales team who needs to execute? How they work together? What is their relationship? How do you make that positive? Love to have your thoughts.

Ardath Albee: Yeah well, for example, I just read some research from Corporate Visions that says that 75% of all sales calls are now done remotely, right? But most salespeople have been trained in face-to-face selling. It's very different to sales more remotely. So salespeople are now using more content, more digital assets, right? To send to their prospects and what have you haven't really talk about them? They are not going to go read your entire content portfolio. Trust me on this. So as marketers, can we create little microlearning modules that'll say this thought leadership piece's great for somebody struggling with X? Here are the three takeaways and here's what you need to know to use it. Boom, the salesperson has that in two minutes. Is there a way we can provide email templates that help them? Present an idea that could spark a valuable conversation with a buyer and get them on the phone.

Is it for remote selling? How are we talking to them? Salespeople are reaching out via email, via phone, sometimes via text. Those kinds of different things. How do you get their attention in a world where you're saturate? And I can tell you right now, I took a couple of days off for Thanksgiving, came back with 567 emails in my inbox. That was not a pleasant experience and most of them were irrelevant.

So I mean in order to get people's attention today, you have to be really relevant. And so not only do we need to provide the sales team with training on skills and products and that kind of stuff but also on buyers and on content and on how to engage them. And marketers who do all of this research and persona creation and understanding the audience and creating customer experiences and all of that kind of stuff, are often in the best place to help sales with this kind of stuff. And so, when you're trying to work with one foot in both sides, face-to-face or remote, how do you become effective at both of them when they're different animals if you will?

Michael Webb: Okay. So another question from my years in sales training for real senior-level sales organizations. One of the things that I struggled with was that the sales training industry, there's a lot of very talented people and a lot of very good processes. They call them processes and material methodologies out there. But almost uniformly, what they're trying to do is to get a sales team to all do the same (sound of dog barking). Oh, to the benefit of the audience, we have a student participating with Ardath, it's her new puppy who's a year old and has definitely has something to say about our topic. So please bear with us.

Ardath Albee: Sorry about that.

Michael Webb: But, so they would follow step one of the sales process, follow step two and then follow step three and, but sometimes those steps don't exactly fit and there's no real feedback. A real process has a cause and a result, right? An activity and a result and you adjust according to that in the interim as things are happening. It is not a rigid methodology that must be followed from A to Z. And it strikes me that there's probably people in this digital marketing world who likewise are coming up with a sequence and boy you put it in an autoresponder sequence. And it's going to go out, but they don't necessarily build in the feedback that tells you if it's actually working or not. Is that something you see and how do you counteract it?

Ardath Albee: Well, yeah, I see it all the time and one of the things that I'm not sure people understand is that if you understand your buyers and you're creating content to help them with this specific thing, the way they engage with it can give you a lot of feedback. And one of the problems that I see a lot of clients have is that they will create in quotes campaign, which I hate the word campaign because they start and stop instead of continuously tell a good story. But they will create a campaign and they'll put all the pieces together and they just shove it in the marketing automation platform, right? And hit go. So every week or so, every two days, whatever it is, an email shoots out regardless of what has happened with the last one. And so it's kind of set it and forget it thing, which automation has enabled for us, which really kind of stinks in my opinion. Because the only way we can actually improve engagement is to monitor what goes on and make adjustments, and tweak things and figure out what's working and what's not. And why?

Go find out why, and we don't do that. We tend to evaluate campaigns and say, well this one worked and this one didn't. But we still don't have any understanding about why. And part of that is because we haven't gotten to really understand our buyers. We don't know and we're not using our data in a way that helps us evaluate. Did the content do what it was supposed to? And one of the examples for that is, I see a lot of dead-end marketing or we're more concerned about sending the email out with LinkedIn and they clicked on the link. Great. They read that piece of content, but there's no what's next. There's nothing else for them to do, except maybe request a sales color or demo. Well, what if they're not there? What else should they learn next?

And we're not connecting the dots. And so if we think that they're going to go out and look for what's next on their own, we're crazy because they don't have time. They're not going to, they're going to just leave and say thank you very much. I call those drive-by views and go on with their day, rather than engaging. And so the point should be how much engagement can we build by telling the right story, right? Because if they're not learning from you and they're intent on solving the problem, they're going to learn it from somebody. And if it's you, then you become the anchor for the reference point for how they're going to solve a problem. If it's somebody else, you've just abdicated that.

Michael Webb: Still, so obviously this is a rich and deep subject. I could talk about it all day and you have really valuable insights and experience on it. If someone wants to get educated here, get their head into this, and learn to understand a structured, effective approach to think about this and then to begin implementing this. Which of your two books would you recommend?

Ardath Albee: Well, it's interesting that you asked that because I wrote eMarketing Strategies in 2008, it came out in 2009. It's now outselling Digital Relevance because people finally caught up to that. So it depends on where you are. I figured by the time they catch up to digital relevance, I'll be retired. So it just depends on where you are. I think both books are good. What's validating to me is that the book I wrote back in 2008 still relevant 10 years later, but Digital Relevance, of course, is more up to date. I received a comment via email from somebody who just bought and read eMarketing Strategies, and asked me why I didn't have more stuff in there on social media, social selling? And I responded, the book was written in 2008 we didn't have that.

Michael Webb: Very good. That's fascinating. It sounds not to be presumptuous, a little bit similar when I wrote Sales and Marketing the Six Sigma Way in 2006, and when people read my new book, which came out in 2014, Sales Process Excellence, you're like, Holy cow, what an advance, well you went way farther than you had before so. That's great. So both of these reading them one after the other would probably provide a very good structure for someone who wanted to do this. And I know that there's a lot of people out in the audience who would be interested in learning about that and experimenting with it. So if someone wants to get ahold of you, how would they do that?

Ardath Albee: Well, they can come to my website, which is marketinginteractions.com or they can find me on LinkedIn under Ardath Albee or on Twitter @ardath421.

Michael Webb: Superb. Ardath, this has been great. I have a bunch of more questions to ask you, but looking at the time, and we've already been on here for about 40 minutes, so thank you for this. Would you be able to come back to the show at some point, do you think?

Ardath Albee: Absolutely. I'd love to. Well, you and I can talk about this stuff for days, so.

Michael Webb: All right, good. Thank you very much. This was really, really helpful and useful and we look forward to the next time.

Ardath Albee: Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Bye bye.