Sales Pipeline Radio, Episode 367 Q & A with Kerry Cunningham

Summary

In this insightful episode of Sales Pipeline Radio, Matt Heinz and Kerry Cunningham explore the latest research on buyer engagement and the transformative impact of AI, offering fresh perspectives on optimizing sales and marketing strategies going into 2025.

By Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing

If you’re not already subscribed to Sales Pipeline Radio or listening live Thursdays at 11:30 am PT on LinkedIn (also on demand) you can find the transcription and recording here on the blog every Monday morning.  The show is less than 30 minutes, fast-paced and full of actionable advice, best practices and more for B2B sales and marketing professionals.

We cover a wide range of topics, with a focus on sales development and inside sales priorities.

This week’s show is entitled, “Insights from the 2024 Buyer Experience Report“ and my guest is Kerry Cunningham, Head of Research and Thought Leadership at 6sense.

Tune in to Learn:

1. The surprising shifts in buyer engagement and the critical moments that influence buying decisions.
2. How to rethink the sales pipeline in the age of AI and optimize interactions to match today’s complex buying processes.
3. Insights into aligning sales and marketing motions to ensure you’re not just building pipeline, but preparing for long-term growth.
4. The role of intent signals and how they can be leveraged to create meaningful connections with potential customers.

Listen Now | Watch the video HERE | Read the Transcript BELOW:

Matt: Alright, welcome to another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio. My name is Matt Heinz, I’m your host today. Thank you so much for joining us. So excited to have you all here.

If you’re listening or watching on demand, Thank you for subscribing and listening. Every episode of Sales Pipeline Radio, always available at www.salespipelineradio.Com. Very excited today to have former Forrester SiriusDecisions Analyst, Kerry Cunningham, join us to talk about some fairly new research that I feel like I’m seeing all over the place, but every time I see it, Kerry, there’s another angle that is super interesting in terms of how we think about go to market motions going into 2025.

So thank you for being here now.

[00:00:55]
Kerry: Yeah, glad to be here. I’m glad that’s how you’re feeling about it because it does impact a lot of how we go to market and be B2B.

[00:01:04]
Matt: And it changes what we’ve been used to and what we treat as the common way of building pipeline in a lot of cases.

So I have a lot of questions and points I want to dig into, but wanted to start with just you giving the thesis of the research and why you did it and what you found.

[00:01:22]
Kerry: Yeah. So 30 seconds of it is that we’ve surveyed buyers in B2B, all kinds of buyers, not just SaaS, but lots of SaaS, of course, as well.

And we did it globally. We’ve done it two years in a row. And what we found is essentially the same thing two years in a row and everywhere in the world. And what I’m going to say applies to 80 percent of buyers. Buyers say that they don’t engage with sellers until they’re about 70 percent of the way through their buying journey.

The trigger for engaging with sellers is that they have set their requirements and decided which vendor they want to buy from. And that’s the simple thing to say. It really does and should change everything and then there are other pieces of it, like one of the fundamental things that we’ve assumed in marketing is that you generate leads, you hand them off to BDRs, SDRs to follow up on them and that process can cause buyers often we think can cause them to go into market, which is crazy in a way that we’ll talk about. But also that the simple thing that just because we’re calling and emailing folks, we can get them to engage with us. And what buyers have said really clearly two years in a row is that no, you can’t.

[00:02:30]
Matt: It’s true, right? And I think because we’ve always assumed that we can just call and dial and email our way out of this problem–.

And AI is making this almost worse because AI makes it easier, faster, cheaper to get those emails out. And Challenger almost tells us we can do this, that we can tell people the status quo change. We can challenge the status quo. We can get them to think differently about the problem and move them into a sales process.

And I guess the research shows how arrogant are we to think that we are going to change what happens inside these large complex buying organizations?

[00:03:01]
Kerry: Arrogant. And I think also we’ve lacked just the basic self consciousness of understanding how do we operate? Just think about how you operate in your organization.

Could somebody call you today? And cause you to go into market to buy some big system that you rely on this quarter? Unless you were already well along that path. The answer is of course not. It takes longer than that to get the budget for anything above, relatively small amount. So unless you’ve already got it budgeted, unless you’ve already got it planned, nobody’s going to call and get you to do something that you weren’t already planning to do.

So from that perspective, I think we all already knew that. But we don’t operate that way. We want to believe that we can cause and control things… A moment’s reflection would tell you, No, you can’t. You really can’t. That’s not what we’re doing. And what we’re doing is, I think 6Sense is a great example of this.

You build a brand that people want to be associated with. You put yourself in all of the places where your customers and prospects are, and you deliver value to them even when they’re not in market, so that when they go into market, you’re on the top of the list or you’re at least on the list, and you get to play for that deal and then build mechanisms that capture all of that and don’t miss it when it’s happening.

Andfor some, it doesn’t sound as sexy, it doesn’t feel like you’re as in control, but I think it’s much more aligned to reality.

[00:04:29]
Matt: To me, You are still in control because you still can get that message of value and education in front of a prospect.

But what you’re saying is it’s not going to generate immediate pipeline. And to me, this is a fundamental change to how people think about the buying journey and think about what is a sales and what is a marketing motion? Cause what you’re saying is that effort to reach prospects before they’re ready to buy, before they’re ready to engage with you is not going to generate pipeline, but is still critical to generating future pipeline.

The models we have need to get a little more complex, but need to be very clear about what motion is doing what.

[00:05:08]
Kerry: That’s it. That’s exactly right. And it’s really important for everybody to hear that. Cause I think when I talk about it, I get so excited about the new findings and what they mean that it can get lost in the way that I talk about it, that it’s not that you should stop doing things.

And it’s not that you shouldn’t even reach out to buyers. You should, but you have to understand, what the research shows really clearly. Whether buyers are receiving calls or emails from sellers and BDRs or not, does not change when or if they engage with you. It just doesn’t. So all of that activity that you’re engaged in, that you think is causing meetings, is catching meetings that you were already going to get.

Maybe a little bit later, maybe a week later, maybe two weeks later, something like that. But if they engage with you, it’s because they were already going to engage with you and you’re catching that. So you got to have [00:06:00] the mechanism out there to catch it. You want that. Make it easy. Remove the friction.

All of that. But again, if you work in a decent sized company and you’ve got systems, things that you’ve been involved in buying that are 20, 30, 50, $100,000 a year kinds of solutions, how long did that process take? And did it start because somebody called or emailed you?

Or did it start because you had a business problem, you all worked on that internally, you decided to go into market and then you engaged with sellers when you were ready? I think it looked a lot like the last thing that I said, right? And I think we just need to be thinking about that. And when we do, then we’ll do things that engage buyers, enable them, win them over to our side.

And when we do that, then we will be in more control I guess.

[00:06:53]
Matt: We work with a lot of companies that have very long sales cycles and then we get into this time of the year. If you’re doing in some cases, 12 to 18 months sales cycles, you are planning on building demand next year that is going to generate maybe pipeline, but definitely close business in 2026.

So you really are thinking about how do I spend money and then monetize that in a different fiscal period. And it’s the same thing we’re talking about here, where I’m saying, I’m going to invest in building a market… so if I take this out of the SDR function out of these, spray and pray, trying to get meetings function and say, okay, I’m investing in brand, I’m investing in content, I’m investing in educating the market, which is a bunch of different channels in many cases, it’s the same thing.

And so are there scenarios where I can now treat people on the phone, not as an appointment setting function, but as delivering value deposits in creating, just another channel and a human to human channel, and perhaps one of our most effective channels at creating value, attention, trust, credibility.

[00:07:57]
Kerry: Yeah, I think that’s where it’s at. So I think, you’ve got to think about the segments of your audience. If you sell to multiple segments, you sell to big companies and large and medium and that kind of stuff, what you’re going to be able to do and what you should do is going to differ, like the involvement of human beings in the mid market on down for accounts that are either not in market or early stage, you probably shouldn’t have any human beings involved early in those processes. But when you’re talking about big accounts, strategic accounts, your sellers should be in there engaged all the time. Your seller should be making friends, developing relationships, building networks inside those accounts.

And earlier I said that the numbers I was giving applied to 80 percent of buying processes. So there’s 20 percent of buying processes where buyers say, I was engaged with the seller before I made the a choice before I picked a winner. I think those are the places where you’ve got really good sellers who build relationships with buyers over time.

Those relationships travel from company to company as your buyers move around, but your sellers have built those relationships and they don’t have to play by the rules that say you don’t get to influence the buyers. They get to be involved in those conversations and that puts you in a very advantageous position.

[00:09:14]
Matt: So at the right levels, you can do that. When you’ve got strategic accounts, when you’ve got really important accounts, you’ve got the right kind of resource applied there. Absolutely you can do that and you don’t have to play by the rules if you do it well. Yeah, I appreciate that. We’re talking today on sales pipeline radio with Kerry Cunningham, former SiriusDecisions former analyst and the author of the New 2024 Buyer Experience Report. Highly recommend, search for 2024 Buyer Experience Report, you will find on Google.

It is ungated. It is pages and pages of content that I guarantee is going to influence how you think about go to market going into next year. So I think we’ve already talked about ways to create solutions around how to do this better. I want to talk a little bit about intent signals as we go into next year, and I think about intent signals as three areas, like intent to buy, intent to engage, and then you have need and evidence of need signals.

It might be further up the buying committee or buying journey. And definitely our people that are ready, but help us not just reach people earlier in the process, but reach them with the right context, because just going and offering a one to many value prop is one thing, reaching them where they are based on something that’s already happening is even more valuable and can accelerate the relationship.

So talk a little bit about what that is and what the opportunity is.

[00:10:27]
Kerry: Yeah, I think first of all, the way every B2B marketer needs to think about things is 1). You’ve got to know what accounts you care about. That has to be an explicit agreement with sales. You don’t have to know the name of everyone, depending upon the size, but there has to be an agreement of what they look like.

And then intent signals are about, first of all, never, ever missing a buying journey that happens within that patch that you care about. That should be everybody’s goal. Just never miss one. And the way to do that is to see those signals when they arise. What is important about, a 6sense that aggregates signals from many sources is that you increase the odds of seeing those buying processes and you improve the quality of the signal, right?

So if I get signals from four or five different sources and they all point to this account, looks like it’s in market now, that’s a much better signal than any one of the four or five that went into the signal, right? So just a triangulation principle. Intent signals, first and foremost, make sure that you don’t miss any, but then what’s the content of the signal?

What is the content of the signal tell us about what that buying group, because it’s always going to be a group signal. What are they interested in? If I’ve got five different solutions, which of those five solutions. If they’ve got specific questions that they’re researching, what are they? And now do I have content that addresses those questions specifically?

I think one of the big things that we need to get away from is not sending them a link and then making them fill in a form to see that content. If you’ve got questions that you know your buyers have, and you’ve got an answer to those questions, get it to them with as little friction for them as possible.

And they will like you and appreciate you for it. If you give it to them and then make them jump through some hoops or pay you in one way or another, you’re just causing friction. That’s annoying.

[00:12:16] Matt:
It’s bad enough that people say I’ve got this great piece of educational content and I want people to register for it.

I got into a spirited discussion with a company a couple of days ago that wanted to put all of their case studies behind a firewall. And I’m like, if people actually want to read your case studies, that sounds like someone that wants to learn a little more about validating that this works. Why would you ever put a barrier in front of them to get that information?

You and I know why, it’s because they want to know who it is. They want to know who it is so they can track it, but that’s a seller problem, not a buyer problem.

[00:12:47]
Kerry: Yeah, it’s a trick to get your email. I mean we’ve been around a long time. We know content marketing was started as a trick to get emails, but it’s evolved to something actually useful for buyers.

[00:12:58]
Matt: And I think we’re not all the way there in the evolution of it yet. So we need to move away from the trick phase of it and into the All right. We’re here to enable buyers. And if we do that effectively, we’ll get to win. Yeah. I imagine if we’re sitting here in a year and talking about the next version of this we’re going to be talking a lot about how AI agents are helping to enable this conversation, where we can build some trust with prospects, but not have to have, a 24 year old on the phone to play that role. We can prognosticate about anything, but how do you see those things evolving? The educational nature of the early buying journey, the leverage of the intent signals and AI agents help you to do some of that work for us.

[00:13:40]
Kerry: Yeah, I love it. So I go back to 2018 when I was at SiriusDecisions. I did a case study with some folks from the Global Demand Center at Microsoft. They built their own conversational email tool that they put on top of some predictive modeling that they did over leads and they applied that.

They took a whole layer of their I think they call them inside sales folks, but they took a whole layer of them that were dedicated to going out and trying to get meetings and they moved them up to become people who do meetings and then there’s no human being out trying to get meetings anymore.

It’s just taking meetings. I think that’s the model. So we gave them a big award at SiriusDecisions, we wrote a case study about that years ago, because that to me seems like the model we should be on. It’s you deliver content at scale. Make sure your buyers get everything from you that could help them prefer you.

That you offer yourselves, make yourself available for meetings, but that can’t be the primary focus of it. And the best way to do that to me is at scale and use AI agents to do that. You don’t need your humans doing that. You need your humans in those bigger accounts, mapping those accounts, developing relationships, but that’s a different capability to me.

[00:14:53]
Matt: That’s right. Where should we send people if they want to learn more about this report? Where do people get this to get the full deal?

[00:14:59] Kerry: Two things. One is 6sense.com/research. It’ll send you to the spot and you won’t miss it. So that’s easy– 6sense.com/research

and then if you just find me on LinkedIn once you do, it’s pretty hard to avoid. And so you’ll get a lot of exposure to the research.

[00:15:17]
Matt: Absolutely. Thank you, Kerry, for doing this. Definitely check out the report. I appreciate that, companies like 6sense have taken folks from the old SiriusDecsions glory days and put into work on important topics like this and saying,  go do your thing, go be research.

And so to help us figure out what, in some cases, Kerry, are inconvenient truths based on what we’ve always done and what we want to do. But I think if we listen and we follow direction, I think you get an opportunity to create something that is a much more valuable experience for our prospects. So thank you for all that you do.

[00:15:45]
Kerry: Thank you for saying that. That is exactly right. How I would put it, if I were to say it better than I have been.

[00:15:50]
Matt: Thanks everyone for listening. Appreciate everyone being here.

Matt interviews the best and brightest minds in sales and Marketing.  If you would like to be a guest on Sales Pipeline Radio send an email to Sheena@heinzmarketing.com.