EP216: Conversations, The Kryptonite of MarTech?

Corey Frank and Chris Beall share eye-opening insights from their recent marketing conference experience that every CSO and sales manager needs to hear. Chris uncovers a startling truth: nearly all MarTech tools are based on the misguided belief that you can’t achieve success by simply calling prospects and having meaningful conversations. He challenges this notion head-on, emphasizing the immense power of genuine dialogue in building trust and gathering valuable information.

Our Market Dominance Guys also explore the critical difference between a mere phone call and a true phone conversation, revealing how these conversations can dramatically amplify your downstream marketing efforts. This episode is packed with actionable insights that will help you leverage the power of conversations to dominate your market and drive sales success. Listen to episode 216: Conversations, the Kryptonite of MarTech?

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Below:

Corey Frank (00:00):

Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys with Corey Frank and the Sage of Sales, the Hawking of Hawking and the profit of profit. Chris Beal. Welcome to Phoenix, Arizona and the campus Grand Canyon University for an onsite edition of the Market Dominance. Guys,

Chris Beall (00:17):

I’m telling you onsite, anybody, by the way, who has a chance to come to Grand Canyon University and visit this incredible campus and meet these incredible people and come in and actually hobnob with the Branch 49 team. I say, book your tickets now. Avoid that spring training thing because unless you really want to come and get some baseball too, because there’s a lot of great baseball this time of year around here. There

Corey Frank (00:42):

It sure is. And what brings Ms. Ucci and Mr. Beal to Phoenix and the greater Phoenix area, Scottsdale, Arizona if you had a very interesting couple of days at a marketing conference. That’s where I wanted to have a special edition of the market. Dom guys talk, not just about the conference and some of the learnings, but just kind of an above the line treatise, if you will, manifesto of what your rant for 2024 is about basic MarTech tools. So Chris, what did you learn at this conference where I’m taking deep

Chris Beall (01:19):

Breath? Well, I learned two things. So the conference is great. It was really well organized. It’s in Phoenician, so it was beautiful. It’s put on by Emerald, I think who puts it on, and they’ve got a bunch of conferences, so I highly recommend they do great conferences, go to their conferences, and I was invited to this one with Helen by our friend Scott Gordon and Lamb Alliance. They’re of salutary data, so they kindly invited us. They were going and they had kind of a discount coupon so to speak, and so well, but marketing conference, do I really want any marketing, right? I mean, I love marketing, but marketing tools and technologies and services have always struck me as there’s something about ’em that puts me off a little bit. But I decided, Hey, I want to go, Helen, you want to go? Yeah, let’s go.

(02:08):

So we drove up a couple hour drive, and here’s my impression twofold. One is actually about ConnectAndSell, which is surprising, and that is almost everybody, by which I mean about 35, 40% of the sales reps who were there pitching these marketing tools when they saw who I was and where I was from, as Helen said, you’re actually a little bit of a thing. I said, yeah, well, it’s kind of a thing that they would go to ConnectAndSell. I used that in and then they would cast it out in their mind when I was at this company 10 years ago, six years ago, nine years ago, whenever it was, and I love that all I had to do is push a button and talk to somebody and make this sort of a dance. Like, oh, I’d sit back in my chair and it was all smiles and all that kind of stuff.

(02:57):

And some really senior people were like, yeah, yeah, I really know. ConnectAndSell, blah, blah, blah. And one of them said, there’s something wrong with you guys. Your technology is so powerful, you should be dominating the entire world, and I’m going dominant, market dominant must not be doing something right. So that was part of it, but that’s a minor part. The major part was I went and talked to all the vendors. It was kind of a little bit of a quiet conference. It had some sessions. I didn’t do any of the sessions except I went and listened to ZoomInfo and technology advice together, and I like Henry a lot. So it was great to go and sit and have lunch and get to talk to him for a minute afterwards. That was kind of enlightening. They’re bringing in what they call second party data to go with first party data, which is the stuff you have third party data, which is the stuff ZoomInfo has.

(03:43):

But what about second party data, which is published data, but it’s not the data, it’s the fact that people who might be your potential buyers have come to consume it. So from publishers. So that was interesting, but the number one thing I walked away with was this, and I may be getting this wrong, but my impression is every single piece of marketing technology that’s out there is predicated on one concept, and that is that you cannot get a conversation by just calling somebody and talking to them that you must go through some, what I call textual time-based gymnastics in order to either cajole, influence, trick, herd, whatever, somebody to come to your website and talk to you. And so I thought, how interesting, and I’m starting to look at this. I’m thinking, how many hundreds of millions of dollars have gone into the development of all this technology. That’s based on what I believe is a fundamentally false premise.

(04:48):

As you know, Corey, we connect about 4.5 million conversations, live conversations with decision makers every year at ConnectAndSell. So I’m thinking this is just interesting to have a whole industry built around a notion that you can’t talk to anybody because if you could talk to people, then you would use every one of those tools differently. You would use the advertising differently, the sequencers differently, the stuff that tells you who you should talk to differently. You’d actually use it to talk to them. You would send emails after a conversation. So that’s kind of what struck me. Then the third thing that struck me was something mathematical. We always talk about the math of sales. We never talk about the math of marketing. And Helen told me something the other day, which she says, everybody says the same thing, and then they show you the same diagram and they believe this thing looks like it came off of stones that came down from the mountain.

(05:47):

It is etched in stone that only two to maybe 3% of your market is in the market now, and therefore you should do X, Y, or Z, which generally involves buying this vendor’s technology or their services or whatever in order to try to move that needle in your favor. And I just thought, what an odd mathematical claim that is. It’s just an odd mathematical claim. And here’s my thoughts about it. Say the number’s 2%. So somebody says, Hey, 2% of your market is in the market right now, so let’s just go forward. Say in the market means for one quarter they’re considering something for one quarter. So 2% in one quarter is 8%, four quarters, which is a year. And now that means that whoever says that believes truly that the replacement cycle for everybody’s category of solution in B2B is about 12 and a half years because 12 and a half times eight is Yeah, but

Corey Frank (07:02):

That’s true. Versus the great chat holmes who we know from market dominance is three.

Chris Beall (07:08):

It’s been three years. I mean, does anybody really buy a serious solution for their business? Unless it’s something really, I’ll call it strangely sticky, you can’t get away from, okay, Salesforce is a great example. Once you start with Salesforce, you’re probably doomed. Although I see people try to get off of it all the time, I mean, it’s like a rare rabbit in the Briar patch, you’re not going to get away from it. Why? Because all the fields change all the time and nobody knows what anything means, but it’s supposed to be your single source of truth. So it has the convenient feature that as a single source of truth, it never contains ascertainable truth and therefore you can’t get rid of it because there’s always a constituency for some flavor of the truth. We can’t take that away. It might not die. But in general, solutions in B2B last on average about three years, they don’t last for 12 years in the innovation economy. 12 years is 12 forever, right? So I don’t know, what are your thoughts about that?

Corey Frank (08:05):

That’s fascinating. So who attends these marketing conferences? Are they looking for the proverbial hope? Are they looking for the 40 yard path? Because when you extrapolate the math like that, and when you look at the wide variety of tool sets, that for the most part exists to get a couple of mere basis points. Not whole numbers of increases, it’s just people are running out of time, sales reps, sales VPs, CROs, board members, investors. It just seems that we’re on the T access here is running at a faster rate than the actual cash burn,

Chris Beall (08:46):

And that was a real theme when you talk to individual people who are attendees. So I’ll make a sharp distinction. So this conference was great, had a lot of good vendors there. The vendors of course send their salespeople, so that made it really easy for me to go talk to ’em. By the way, I realized that we are being kind of dumb at connect, and so we should just go to every conference of anybody doing anything. They send their salespeople and I go talk to ’em, and those salespeople will go, wait, you mean I could push a button and talk to somebody? Except what I’ve really learned is they say, I used your product before. I love that thing. It’s like, are you using it now? Well, no. That’s one thing is the conference itself is divided into the marketing people and up to chief revenue officers who show up to learn, which is great. They’re from the sessions and to check out the vendors and maybe to go to the happy hour. And there was a great dinner last night that was just a super dinner. The folks at postal put it on. By the way, the ceo co founder of postal actually said that postal is an okay name. I said, postal doesn’t going postal. And he said, no, no, nobody under the edge of 40 even knows what going postal.

(09:57):

That was great. And then we got invited to dinner. So there’s all this great stuff going on, and these are folks who are looking for something that they can kind of plug into their stack in order to really, in order to generate leads or pipeline. There was a lot of taco pipeline, pipeline, pipeline, pipeline, pipeline, pipeline, which is great. Really,

Corey Frank (10:15):

Really interesting.

Chris Beall (10:17):

A lot of taco pipelines, but nobody told me that they could measure a pipeline, not one. Nobody said, yes, we will help you produce a measurable pipeline. It was always, we will help you produce pipeline. It’s like, well, but if it’s not measurable, is it really a pipeline? It’s that tree in the forest, right? It’s like is non-measurable? Pipeline, pipeline? Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But I thought that was a curiosity also.

Corey Frank (10:45):

Well, if you’re measuring this pipeline or you’re not measuring this pipeline, you just want more of it, right? Everybody wants more. What did you see at the conferences? You’re roaming the halls here. Okay, great, thank you, Mr. Marketing automation tool or MarTech. He helped me get more pipeline. What can you do or what should I be doing to help close, nurture, qualify, move down the funnel here with this pipeline? Is that, oh, no, no, no, that’s your problem. Now, that’s a different conference altogether. We’re only about X, right? Versus Y.

Chris Beall (11:20):

Yeah, you still got the sense, I still got the sense that it’s us over here in marketing and them over there in sales, and if only them over in sales loved what us in marketing, were giving them appropriately, then we’d have alignment because we’re working very hard to give them good stuff that’s going to become pipeline, whatever that means, leads or whatever. And I think there’s a great deal of sincerity and there’s still a lot of frustration. There was also, by the way, a big murmur everywhere, including a question asked from the stage on one of the sessions that I did go to. Basically it says, Hey, raise your hand if for marketing. These are challenging times. And everybody’s hand went up. And the reason that was given was because CFOs and investors are now scrutinizing marketing spend and marketing spend is challenging to justify. So there is a general feel of compression. We’re being squeezed. And I don’t mean the vendors, I mean the attendees we’re being squeezed on budget. And the place where a lot of the squeeze comes across the boundary from sales to marketing is the SDR teams. So SDR teams shrunk

Corey Frank (12:38):

Really.

Chris Beall (12:39):

So down to a quarter or a half or whatever, all that’s mostly happened because of the need for efficiency. So efficiency with growth is now the thing because venture capital and private equity and all other investment dollars are now competing, quite frankly, the returns they would get from investing in these, whatever they’re investing in, they have to compete with the returns you can get from just higher interest rates. So now holding periods for these companies, if they’re private equity held as longer, much longer, and what do you do for the extra two and a half years? You have to hold that company. Well, obviously this quarter is not the only thing that counts. So sales can’t be there yet. So nurturing is a thing, but how do you get the budgetary support to nurture if nurturing delivers results in the future and the future is uncertain?

(13:33):

It’s a very interesting time where the marketing people are looking for, I would call it less expensive stuff that works because their budgets are squeezed and something that’s measurable. And I just thought it was interesting to say to people, Hey, it kind of strikes me if you could push a button and talk to somebody, which for those of you who know how this works, I mean, we enable 4.5 million conversations with decision makers a year. So there’s pretty hard evidence that at least once you can push a button and talk to somebody because 4.5 million greater than one

Corey Frank (14:08):

A lot.

Chris Beall (14:09):

If you could do that, what else do you need? And actually, I think Helen went off a little bit on one of the folks about sequencers, which I thought was interesting. Somebody said, well, plus sequencer. Sequencer. She said, why would you use a sequencer? And you could have heard it rippled across the trade show floor.

Corey Frank (14:29):

What?

Chris Beall (14:29):

Somebody threw a stink grenade into the middle. Yeah,

Corey Frank (14:33):

Right? Right.

Chris Beall (14:34):

Why would you need a sequencer when you can just talk to people?

Corey Frank (14:37):

Yeah. Is there a natural aversion to that or is it just Occam’s razor where it’s too simple? Or they’re going about a complex formula, methodology, and technology pathway. When you forget to dance with who you, which is what are my prospects? What are my people in my TAM saying, what are the people in my ICP? What do they want? What pain do I solve? And gosh, if I could just have a conversation, not send them a survey, not send them an email, but actually have a conversation that can open up these veins of trust that that’s the key versus carpet bombing them with content, with white papers, with Gartner magic quadrants, and there’s no dialogue there. That’s monologue,

Chris Beall (15:20):

Right? This is kind of the awkwardness that I noticed in the entire thing. I’d asked this question, what if you could just talk to people? It’s like, oh, well, you can’t just tell Chris spiel that you can’t talk to people. That one doesn’t work. You can’t go down that road. I’m sorry. No, you can’t talk to people. Then it’s like, well, but you’d still need, and then they’d tell me that you’d still need, and I tend to agree. I mean, my thing I was telling folks is, look, I think all the digital stuff is fantastic, but why not cheat by starting with the conversation? You can’t get enough conversations for it to be worth cheating. And I said, well, isn’t go to a SDR or BDR world if you had 40 conversations a day with targets, that’s the equivalent of 40 targeted Google ads that caused somebody to go to your website. So that’s pretty good right there. What would 40 targeted Google ads to a vice president or whatever you’re trying to reach that actually caused them to go to your website, what would that cost? And they generally go like 30, 40 bucks each. Well, that’s $1,600 a day without any meetings of value that you’re getting from the advertising of just having conversations. Surely you’re not paying your BDRs $1,600 a day. There’s margin in there.

(16:39):

And the idea that, oh, talking to people could be a form of marketing that is, I think where the edge is. It’s almost like, but talking to that’s

Corey Frank (16:48):

Interesting

Chris Beall (16:49):

Light or something. If marketing can’t include talking to people nowadays,

Corey Frank (16:55):

It’s like bottled water. Hey, we’re out of water, we’re out of bottled water. We’re going to die of thirst. Well, what about this little thing called the tap? I tell that my kids all the time. It’s like, Hey, dad, the ro, and we’re awa. It’s Arizona. You got springs all over the place. So sometimes I suppose we’re trying to overly complicate something where there’s conversations all around, but what do you say to that rebuttal of you can’t have enough conversations to make the math work? I think you and I would disagree on that, right? But is that where fundamentally the mindset is? Is that Chris? That’s cute. You can talk with a couple people, but I’m talking about sending out mass emails and segmentation, and I do more before 7:00 AM than you do all day with a conversation.

Chris Beall (17:37):

Well, I would say that that level of confidence is not what I was seeing at the conference. It was more like this, which is really, that seems unlikely. And I sometimes have my phone with our current statistics just for the day. I could go look at it right now and probably find how many conversations did we connect yesterday? So we have this thing that’s called daily dials, and  if I were to look at daily dials, here we go, daily dials, I can probably find some numbers. And this is one of the things that I tend to do is just look at the numbers every morning when I get up. Actually, I’m kind of lazy, so I lie in bed and I reach over for my phone, and here I am looking at the Daily Dials report, and it said that ConnectAndSell customers had 19,352 conversations yesterday.

(18:35):

Not over some vague period of time, but literally yesterday. And out of those, so say that they only set 1,679 meetings, and one of our customers sets lots of meetings. They set 983 with just one of their groups. Really, really kind of a good brand. So if I bring this up and I go, well see here, there’s this group of folks and it’s 242 companies, and they had 19,352 targeted conversations. It’s like, yeah, that’s them, but not everybody can afford that. And I’m thinking, well, wait. So I talked to somebody who does advertising, saying we wanted to send an ad or have an ad associated with all the online activity, the phone, particularly activity of everybody we talked to. So that’d be 19,432 people a day of everybody our customers talk to. Is that doable? Oh, yeah. And how would that work? Well, it cost you $20,000 a year minimum.

(19:32):

You have to sign up, you have to commit. It’s like, well, why? Well, I mean, for $20,000, you’d have a lot of conversations. Yeah. Well, it’s just like, it’s almost like I’m trying to come up with a good analogy. I love your bottled water analogy. It’s kind of like if you had the world of medicine divided into two kinds of doctors, those that had access to imaging like X-rays and MRIs and that kind of stuff, and those that just didn’t, they just didn’t. They’re not allowed to see what’s inside the body. They just kind of have to go with what might work. Here’s something that might work, take this pill and then, oh, maybe you should take this pill. It feels like that. I feel like the guy who’s going in and saying, oh, no, no, there’s this box. See, you can put this thing in front of a person and see all their bones, or you can actually see what’s going on in their soft tissue. You stick ’em in this big tube full of magnets and freak ’em out, make nasty noises, and then you can see what’s the soft stuff and talk about something that is so not experienced. But the weird thing about the show, for me, almost everybody at the show itself, salespeople working for these MarTech companies, was excited to talk about their personal great experience using connect and sell to talk to

Corey Frank (20:51):

People. Yeah, I bet that’s good. Last question here in this abbreviated episode, I’m curious, Chris, that when you look at folks are good friends on the MarTech side, and you look at two statistical models, same group, first group sent out emails, and you’re going to get responses, you’re going to get, do not calls, you’re going to get, take me off your list. But ultimately I’m trying to gauge, is there gold, a divining rod in this team? And I compare that with the same team, but I call and I talk with people, and let’s say that takes nth degree longer, shorter, it doesn’t matter. But if I just have two, can I deduce the same conclusions of a market if by email versus buy the phone and buy conversations? What do you see?

Chris Beall (21:45):

I think there’s two answers to this. One is, can you get enough information back from say your email campaign or your ad campaign or whatever to tell you what folks’ needs actually are? And this a lot of AB testing. So I’d say with email, even as attenuated it is, you’re going to get back in terms of the quantity, the response rates are way down. You’re still going to get back. Kind of a careful AB test will tell you which messages are resonating. So that’s fine. And there’s a lot of technology out there that’ll tell you who’s looking right now, who’s looking for solutions. So that’s another thing that will tell you that kind of information. And by the way, whoever’s looking, I think it’s great. It’s like, oh, bomb boas, six sense, blah, blah, blah. LinkedIn has got it, but it just takes you right into a red ocean. So if you’re seeking competitors because you like competing with deals rather than you like exclusivity, if you prefer competing for deals, then pay attention to intent. Because intent to buy right now means everybody knows the intent is there. If it’s worth knowing, all your competitors know it, therefore, you’re all now competing for the same customer

Corey Frank (22:56):

At the same time

Chris Beall (22:58):

And you’re doing it from whatever advantage or disadvantage you had coming in, but you can’t really move the needle. So I think, by the way, there’s incredible technology now available through ai. I talked to somebody about it last night, a company called Rev. I was talking to Fred Mongan and we’re going to have him next week on market dominance. Guys. Incredible technology because it basically says, ah, intent is nice, but fit at the company level for your solution. Even if you don’t know the timing, fit is greater than intent. We’re going to talk about that next week. I think it’s an awesome concept that does give you the 11 quarters that you’re otherwise missing, and it solves a false negative problem that plagues everybody in B2B. They’re calling on folks that are like the folks that they think they’ve worked with in the past, but they actually can’t see all the patterns out there.

(23:54):

They don’t see all the employment data, all the job histories of every single employee, of every company. These folks take every employee of every company in North America and make a fingerprint of the whole thing like Google does with websites. These guys do it with the employees of companies and everything they write about themselves, right? Yeah, that stuff is powerful. But the difference is if you talk to people, you don’t just get the information, you actually get the trust relationships, and so now you’re in a superior position because as you need more information, you have folks that you can rely on.

Corey Frank (24:29):

Yes. Bingo. Bingo. Yeah, I agree with that. And there’s an atomic weight of having a conversation, as we’ve talked about many, many times on the false negatives as well as just on the positives. And it just seems that the vehicles of beyond take me off your list or unsubscribe. I’m not getting the richness of the signals on the false negatives on the digital side, but it’s very interesting. Chris, we will learn more from Fred Mongan from Rev next week and the market dominance. Guys, any final thoughts as you depart probably your thousandth trade show in the career of trade shows here.

Chris Beall (25:06):

I love walking around those things. My thought is this, if you have marketing technology right now, look at it. Think about what it does, and ask yourself a simple question. What if this technology were used after a conversation rather than to get a conversation? That’s the question I would ask, because you’ve made an investment. The tech is amazing, by the way. I think the MarTech stuff is really stunningly clever because it’s trying to solve a really hard problem, which is how do you get people to love you when you can’t talk to ’em? But what if you could talk to ’em? Could you get ’em to love you even more? So I don’t think the MarTech industry is a waste in any sense. I just think it’s interesting when you add the catalyst of a conversation to the beginning rather than have the conversation be the goal.

Corey Frank (25:54):

Yeah, as the great Jerry Hill says, right? The conversations amplify your downstream efforts. And if you start with a phone call first, I think the rate’s about 14 x increase in the conversion rates from having a phone call first and then an email versus an email first and then a phone call. So lemme

Chris Beall (26:13):

Jump in and make a subtle distinction here. A phone call generally results in nothing. A phone conversation is a completely different beast.

Corey Frank (26:20):

Good point. Yes. See, even after 250 episodes, I still have the sensei, correct? Correct. My nuanced language matters here. Language matters here at the market matters,

Chris Beall (26:32):

Matters a lot.

Corey Frank (26:34):

Well, for the sensei of sales, this is Corey Frank and for Chris Beal. Until next time on the market, Dominus, guys.