Buying group success: Filling in data and content gaps

Alex Jonathan Brown

00:00 - 00:38

It's 11 AM in the Bay Area, 2 PM on the East Coast, and wherever you ar, grab your favorite caffeinated beverage. It's time for a coffee break.

I'm Alex Jonathan Brown, senior content strategist here at Iron Horse. And today, we're diving back into one of the topics that we get asked about the most, buying groups.

And to help us make sense of it all, we've got a great lineup today. Batting first from Informa TechTarget, their CMO, John Steiner.

Hi  John. 

John Steinert

00:25 - 00:28

Hi there.

Alex Jonathan Brown

00:29 - 00:37

And batting up with 2 people. It doesn't really work, but let's just go for it.

From Iron Horsem it's our CEO, Uzair Dada. Hi, Uzair.

Uzair Dada

00:38 - 00:41

Hello. Hello. Excited to be here.

Alex Jonathan Brown

00:41 - 01:34

Thank you both so much for joining us. As you're watching, if you have questions for either of these guys throw it in the chat.

I'll be keeping an eye on it all day, and we'll do our best to get to them. And if you wanna let us know where you're watching from too, that's always fun for us.

So we've talked about it before, but buying groups are bigger than they've ever been. We're talking regularly up to 10 people connecting with a dozen pieces of content or more over a wide variety of channels.

And it's one thing to be like, oh, yeah, the buying group, and kind of just talk about it generally, but it's much more helpful to know who those people actually are. So I think that's a great place to kinda kick off our conversation.

What are some of the ways that we can identify and understand the members of the buying groups that we're encountering out in the market ?

Uzair Dada

01:34 - 01:36

John, take it away.

John Steinert

01:36 - 02:18

Well, I think I'd come to this from the sort of legacy historical, perspective first because I think that that's what most people are doing. And I'd say that, one of the ways is gonna be looking at your past deals, but there's shortcomings with that.

Another way is looking at research you've done into the market. There's gonna be shortcomings with that.

A third way is looking at your first party signals, and there are gonna be shortcomings with that. So those three kinds of, classic ways of doing it are all good, and you should continue doing them, but there are shortcomings with all 3.

Do you agree with me on that ?

Uzair Dada

02:18 - 03:04

Yeah. Totally.

I think the macro stuff, I think, is a starting point. But the good answer there with the three shortcomings you said is everything has a shortcoming, but you can get better, better, better, better.

There are a lot more tools available. There are a lot more resources available.

You know, when we are thinking of buying groups, the first challenge is not just looking at your own data that you have. For us, are the salespeople even talking to marketing people to even have a general conversation that this is who we're selling to? Oftentimes, marketing is going and getting stuff.

Sales is doing their own stuff. And when marketing sends stuff to sales, we get the 3 dreaded words.

And do you know what those three dreaded words are, John ?

John Steinert

03:04 - 03:06

I think it's, “These leads suck.”

Uzair Dada

03:06 - 03:46

These leads suck. These leads suck.

So I wanna make a t- shirt. These leads suck.

I think that's what I'm gonna put on x like the, you know, the old Salesforce logo. And I think that's the challenge.

And I think that fundamentally before you even go look at the data, talk, understand, have a hypothesis, and then have the data supported, and then have other stuff working with you guys, working with us, working with others to sort of refine it. But I feel we don't even do the fundamentals today properly.

We just are so anxious to get ahead. We start spinning, and then it's incomplete, incomplete, incomplete.

John Steinert

03:46 - 05:31

Yeah. I really like that because when we were starting to work on doing buying groups and drinking our own champagne and doing them inside our company, one of the big ahas we had was, you know, maybe this is an idea that didn't originate with marketing.

And maybe if we take the idea and we talk to sales about it, they might not be using the same term, but they might be implementing on the same concept. And we came up with 2 really good examples.

So the first one is that they are aware of groups of people who are necessary to influence in order to accelerate and close a deal. They use something called multithreading to find and influence those people, to bring them together into an active buying group.

So the account executives were doing it already. On the SDR side, when they're targeting a specific account, they do have a framework or a model of who they're gonna try to interact with.

And, conceptually, that's very much a historically-based buying group.

So this was really important because when we created the project called, you know, we're going to do buying groups beyond MQLs, we could bring these people together, and they could agree instantly that this was a natural thing to improve. Performance of opportunity discovery.

So the first thing is, yeah, if you can unify those constituencies inside your company, it's gonna make it easier to implement an evolution on how you think about leads and how you think about qualification.

Uzair Dada

05:31 - 06:42

I'd say one more thing that you referred to, which I was gonna go later, but I think it's a super important one. Listen to what the reps are doing. Listen. You have Gong calls. You have Zoom calls. The ability for you to derive insight from those conversations is easier than ever it was before.

So listen to those conversations, especially your best reps who are good at deriving who else needs to be involved in the deal. What is the process? How does it work? Roll that up.

Don't just rely on what someone is keying into the Salesforce because it's gonna be shitty. Let's all be real. Salesforce data is incomplete. No one likes to put the data in there. And if they are, it's in the notes field, and you were never looking at it. So very few organizations have their Salesforce systems dialed, but there's a lot of really awesome data in your unstructured knowledge bases.

You have the ability to start mining those knowledge bases to infer that because those personas and those insights to then drive broader alignment is a fantastic source, which very few people tap properly.

John Steinert

06:42 - 07:08

Yeah. I think that's a really good point.

So when I said there's first party data, you know, sort of a dyed in the wool demand gen person's gonna say, well, you mean leads, and you mean maybe website traffic. But really the richest source that's available now, and if you're lucky enough to have Gong or Chorus or one of those, the ability to analyze that unstructured stuff with AI is there today.

So you can do keywords. You can say, show me the reps who are asking, who else needs to hear about this ? Or the clients who are saying, you know, you better take this to so and so and start to understand those personas.

It's only by understanding the real personas who influence deals that you can move beyond sort of beyond the construct of receiving guidance from somebody important that these are the leads that you will recognize and nothing else. And part of getting your mind around buying groups that's so logical and and so much a part of the experience that we all have as buyers is that the names on the deal represent a small portion of the people who drove that deal.

So if you're trying to discover how deals are starting to surface or the need for a solution is starting to surface, you need to look for people whose names aren't on the deal.

And those are not people who your bosses typically ask you to go get leads from because bosses are working on historical, and they always want higher level, C-level decision makers, not the actual end users. When in fact, it's the end users who are innovating and studying in the industry, they're the ones who are throwing off signals that will tell you something's going on at that company. It looks like they're getting ready to try to do something.

Uzair Dada

08:42 - 10:43

Yeah. Unfortunately, we still live in the dark ages of where marketing and sales leadership still asks for who is that one person that is gonna sign off, and is marketing helping me set the meeting with that one person? And all their attribution is sort of, even though they say we don't believe in that, believe in that.

And so, you know, there's a dynamic that needs to change even though we've been talking about account based marketing and influence and intent for almost a decade now, seriously. It still is the actual day-to-day, and these are in large enterprise public companies and fast growing private companies.

It still goes down to, I'm gonna hold you accountable, John. How many meetings did you drive for my rep ? We're still stuck there.

So there's, you know, huge waste that's going on, and it's I think until we sort of can unlock that alignment to build that trust to say, yes, we're all growing in the same direction, and it is this that I need to look at. It's the people who are the behind the scenes crew. Right? The backstage crew that I need to see how I influence them is super important.

And I think along those lines, I think another important thing is if just because I have 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, who are the number of people I have on the buying team, doesn't mean as a marketer, I need to market to all of them, or at least not market to all of them at the same time. So there's also this when you think about buying group, there is an immediate sense of paralysis that happens. You're like, oh, shit. This is so hard. This is so big. This is so beyond me. Not only I'm gonna find them, but now I have to talk have content. Now I have to talk to them in 16 different ways. Right? You freak. You freeze.

So I think it just creates an aura of unattainability when it comes to buying groups.

John Steinert

10:43 - 11:24

Yeah. I think I mean, Stephanie's just asked a question in the chat that's really interesting.

And she's asked how much effort should you put towards reaching and catering to non decision makers in the buying group? And I wanna see if I crack this open a little bit and say, can we not think about this you know, if we can agree that the decision maker is the person who could stop the deal. That's one definition of decision maker.

So there are, to Uzair's point, there's very few of those. Those are powerful people with different kind of needs on the final decision.

But the people who are gonna drive the project forward are the influencers. And there's this asynchronous thing about if you wanna succeed with the influencers who will create more projects, you have to be educating them in a much different sort of timeline than you can expect to harvest them. So if the influencers in a company don't know your company, if they don't understand your solution, they cannot and will not recognize it.

So the question is, how are those people, I think, how are they educating themselves in their profession? How are they staying up? And where would you find those people? And then you have to think about what are you doing to educate the people who do originate projects.

Uzair Dada

12:13 - 13:11

Mhmm. So I think that the challenge always is you are the CMO. You got to go talk to Steve. You go talk to your new CEO. By the way, congrats on the Informa Tech target thing going through. I should have started with that. They come in and say, this is great, but, John, I think we need to influence the C-suite. We need to really go after the execs.

Even though the unsung heroes may be in tech buying, devs, DevOps, DevSecOps, whoever, we're just enamored with the CTO, CIO for everything, the leader for everything. So what's the dynamic that you are seeing in terms of getting people to buy into kind of the Stephanie's question a little bit, reaching beyond just the traditional, normal leaning of going to the exec or the highest person on the title chain.

John Steinert

13:11 - 13:28

So in our space, in the intent data space at the person level, the constant dynamic and some of where we see breakthroughs is that the way our intent data is built, it's coming from individual permission registrants on our websites.

And so we actually turn it around. We don't say, like, who are the people on the deal? Who are the top people at that company? We're looking for who are the people who are interested in solution information in these specific granular categories. And so this is something I learned maybe 20 years ago in my career about the difference between product out and what we call market back approaches to marketing. And this is really important.

And every time we go through these waves of so much of it is product out, and you see this in really great founder led companies because they've built, they understand the market.

They've built a brilliant product, and then they build a motion that is product out. That's a natural thing. What we have to do as marketers is say, well but the market is constantly evolving, and we need to listen to the market and what it is telling us. And so intent data at the person level is magnificent for understanding where the market is going and what specific people in the market are doing to kind of interpret what trajectory they should be on to solve their company's business problems.

So let me say that more simply. If you say that we would be lucky to launch research in our company to support our products twice a year. Usually, once a year is considered enough. The market can change so much in those 12 months that you may be trying to say something to the wrong people, to people who don't even exist, or to people whose ideas about how they're gonna solve their problems are gonna have changed. When you add person level intent data to that, filtered in 2 ways, filtered at the market level, filtered for the individual, you start to see the real people who are doing actual research to help them stay up in their specialty or solve business problems. And you can see what they actually care about.

You can see what keywords resonate with them, how they think about it, and you see their actual titles. And so when I say you wanna move to market back, it is to use data from the market to understand exactly what's going on.

And then you wanna have these conversations with your constituency groups about what they see and what you see versus what the old research says and ask the question, do we need to change Because and and back to the Gong statement that you made, it was there. Salespeople will tell you or you'll hear it in the Gong things when the collateral's not right. The positioning's not right. The people are wrong. Now depending on how your KPIs are set up, if your SDRs are incentivized to get meetings versus, say, quality meetings, you're gonna get meetings with one person. It's kind of the equivalent of thinking about MQLs. But if they're thinking buying groups and they're incentivized to add people, they will actually evolve to be more of biz dev kind of people, and they'll start thinking about how do I create better meetings for my sales people? How do I advance multithreading in the process and do some multithreading and disconnects directly into the personal level intent data? Right? That is who might be the right group minimum to get in that meeting.

Uzair Dada

17:09 - 18:54

Yeah. That's a good point.

I mean, I think on the sales side, and we'll move on after this, like, to the next topic. But I think the SDRs and the sales process has been so linear and so monolithic for so long that they are just in in most cases, in a lot of organizations, just following a checklist of BANT rather than sort of evolving to understanding the work situation, understanding the process, understanding the actors, and then setting up the next thing to be much more cohesive.

And then the same thing happens when the SDR goes to AE, and AE goes to an SC. So it's just a very linear process versus the modern organizations are like, okay, you've done all the research In day 1, even if I'm talking to an SDR, I'm ready for a demo because I know everything about you. I wanna know about pricing. I wanna see the demo. Let's go. And when I'm ready to let's go and you ask me 17 questions, you are just delaying the inevitable.

So we need to hone in better listening skills and at the end of this, and intent and digital listening skills and physical listening skills. I think that's, to me, is a forgotten art that needs to be evolved, because we have more data than god now. Like, if we have, you know, obtained different layers of data coming in from 1st party, 3rd party. We work with you guys. We work with all kinds of stuff. You know, we've got massive data lakes back to too much data is also crazy. So, like, you know, just kinda having a balance is an interesting thing. But I really like the approach that the SDR stuff you brought on. And I think the ability to listen and drive better downstream actions is an extremely important step that people underestimate and don't focus on.

Alex Jonathan Brown

18:54 - 19:46

So we've got, let's assume that this all works as we've talked about. Sales and marketing are talking really well.

Everybody's listening. We've got a really cohesive picture of our buying group, either theoretically for a future customer that we haven't met yet, or we've got somebody in the pipeline and we know kind of who those people actually are.

How do we start to build a content strategy around those kind of specific personas of, oh, we know we're gonna eventually wanna talk to xyz. Here's the kind of stuff that we think we wanna have ready for them.

How do we take the insights that we're learning about the buying group and hopefully turn them into things that, like you said, Uzair, lets them do their own research and show up to that first sales call pretty convinced already that they we’re the right solution for them.

 

Uzair Dada

19:46 - 25:08

Yeah. So we I mean, I think I mentioned it earlier in actually, Alex, you're you're largely involved in a lot of this from the Iron Horse perspective. But for us, we are obsessed with audiences. And so we spend a lot of time sort of defining audiences and creating sort of an audience targeting framework on a page that everyone can use.

So that everyone said, okay. Yep. You were all focused on this. And even though there are 27 voices in the organization, you've not prioritized for this. We're going after these 3 verticals, these 3 personas, this value prop. So at least there is some semblance of this, and there's it eliminates this. Second thing is some discussion on okay, now that I'm talking to John as the CMO of a tech company or a publisher, what is my conversation arc for these different personas for these different verticals? Truly a conversation arc.

If we met, how would I greet him? What would he wanna know? And then evolving that to as he's going from getting to know me to being educated to start considering and evaluating, what is that conversation arc and how does that flow ? If I haven't done the audience and if I haven't done the conversation arc, everything else falls apart because I'm just guessing completely. But if I have the conversation arc, now I can start thinking about my engagement path, which is how I engage, where I engage, and what I do.

That includes both my on- domain activities. So how do I organize my website ? How do I think about my content, my content strategy ? And then it kinda it also involves how do I work with other places ? So, like, we go to John and the TechTarget team and the Informa TechTarget team, a lot. That's second. Informa TechTarget team, though, combined. Sorry. 2 teams. 1 team. So, yes, we go to these teams, and we use their massive fire hose of intent data across everything to help inform what they are seeing that could help us inform the conversation arc and the content strategy.

Super simple stuff that they are always there to assess. Right? So and if you have their tooling, like, priority engine and then it's it's even better because you can kinda gain that insight yourself. But the notion of saying, here is what they are looking at. Here is what they're consuming. Here are the trends. Here's what your competitors are serving up at the high level.

Right? That is so invaluable, which kinda I think that I think earlier when John was sort of alluding to outside and an inside out approach. We have a hypothesis, we have the domain expertise.

And then we take that and say, as a result, how does it map to what you have? And most people internally will have a spreadsheet that says here's all my content. If they're slightly evolved, they would have tagged the content on different job buyer stages. They're slightly more evolved than that. They probably have assigned a persona to it. But now we're going from having a spreadsheet, 80% of the people, having journey tags, maybe 50% of the people, having persona tags, maybe 20% of the people. So there's a huge fall off, right, when it goes from that.

And if you add a vertical in the middle, that even slices the pie even more. So you don't have to have it all. That's kind of a separate conversation. But having the ability to do that and then you were saying, okay. Now that we have it, why is everything kinda clogged up in the awareness and engagement stage? Right? Or or conversely, if you're a tech company, why is everything product to you? And there's nothing for awareness and engagement. Because you just believe you are just so cool that if you put it out there, they will come.

Right? And that may be true for a highly educated audience that knows what they're doing and they want it, but they've not done anything to prime the phone. So I think to me, it's so important to sort of start there, build that content framework. We have a content toolkit structure that we sort of launched. I think we published for everybody that's been amazing about a month ago that Alex and the team sort of worked on. That's a really good resource.

But to me, by just spending a little bit of time organizing, spending a little bit of time using your existing partners and friends that you work with, ala Informa TechTarget guys and others that you work with, it's not hard. It's just a method and approach that allows you to be so much more efficient downstream.

And the last part I'd say is don't be afraid if you have good content. Creating derivative content is not that hard. Right? Human and AI assisted, both are things that are not that hard, but we just back to the analysis of when we see that work, we paralyze. And that does mean you need to have everything in place because you may not have the media dollars, or you may not have the resources or other things to do everything. But focus on the conversation arc and use the conversation arc to drive the engagement path. John, what are you all doing for I mean, you run a very large company yourself. What are you doing for you?

John Steinert

25:08 - 26:14

Yeah. So I would say I wanted to talk about the con the conversation arc first because I think it is such a good idea for understanding, like, the meets minimum members of the of the buying team or the core content that you really want to be able to produce in your content creation organization, be it product marketing or some version other version of marketing.

If you have big gaps in your content in terms of the core decision making group, you're gonna have a problem somewhere in the deal cycle. And so identifying these gaps as Uzair said is really important. What we do, of course, as a publisher is we think in terms of the audiences we wanna attract, and we start playing with different topics and different content, and we study who it is attracting. And if it's not doing a good enough job, we modify. So because we're a giant scale at doing this. The amount of content that's being produced on different topics is much, much higher.

I would say that for, you know, for the typical company, you're not going to have a content engine like a publisher. So what elements of being like a publisher do you need to think about ? And what parts of your organization are you likely to invest in consistently over time? So the building areas. And, otherwise, should you think about partnering? And so one of the things in corporate marketing at TechTarget that we've really made a lot of progress on in the past few years is thinking about what is core to our competency and what we need to partner with others on.

And so, you know, for example, therefore, sessions like this where it's a partner of ours who we're talking to about this. And so there are partners in the ecosystem who do this day in and day out. They talk about things like story arc.

How is the story arc different for an influencer like the paper we did together on developers ? How is the story arc different for the developers than it is for the finance community inside the same company ? Totally. That's what we mean about story arcs. It is the interaction and the topics that matter to personas who, I like to say, could stop the deal. And when you talk about, top of funnel and bottom of funnel, then think about, well, who's actually in the bottom of funnel? That's where blockers really get in. They're not gonna get in there early. So to the question earlier, it's like when you're educating the market, you're educating the influencers. The users, the innovators who are going to drive the creation of an idea that will become a deal. This is one concept of buying group. This is the biggest buying group.

Then there's a kind of the minimum buying group that will exist at the end of the deal. And then there's the concept of expanding the buying group beyond the MQL idea. These are all related. We're using the same word, but we're actually talking about different pieces of the same situation.

Alex Jonathan Brown

28:52 - 29:43

One of the things to kinda to tie this all together as we we move close to time, if you're if you're a content person like me and you're looking to kind of tie a lot of this together, conversation arcs and all this. Having the sales and marketing alignment is so important because your sales team knows the questions that they get often on those early calls. And that is, like, such a good place to devote some resources to creating content and answering those questions before those calls happen.

All it does is make everybody's job easier, and it's you know that it's content that's relevant to your audience and the members of that buying group because they're asking. They're just not asking marketing. They're asking sales. And without that connection, like, you gotta bridge that gap informationally.

Uzair Dada

29:43 - 30:05

And I would say it's not, it's not just doing that, but I think it's making it discoverable and easy to get to. I think that's the other thing we don't do.

We are because of how we stuff our garages, our domains, our websites, things become really hard for those personas who are trying to reach you to get that information. So I think, one, make it easy.

John Steinert

30:06 - 31:05

On that point, Uzair, so it is really important to try to understand where the members of the buying group typically go to find the information they want. Yep. And, you know, it should be no great news that the different personas in this core buying group actually are gonna populate different areas.

Like, I always come back to this wonderful example of people selling HR software and think that their only constituency, you know, on enterprise HR software is HR. Well, obviously, they have a big interest in the functionality. But they have nothing to do with the implementation challenges, with the security, etcetera, etcetera. I mean, imagine the security concerns on HR software. Right? They're incredible. The only people who are gonna be caring about that are the IT community. And to have a client say, well, we only want leads from HR is to totally misunderstand the buying group in that situation.

Alex Jonathan Brown

31:09 - 31:33

So, obviously, a lot of moving parts in this, but just wanna take a couple minutes real quick. We also havehas more tools than ever to do this efficiently and effectively.

And as we're wrapping up, I just wondered, could we do a couple minutes on how maybe this is the best time ever to, like, be trying to solve this problem ?

John Steinert

31:33 - 32:45

Yeah. Absolutely.

And I think I love the way that we started pursuing it because I think it's instructive of one way that you can get going. And I was talking about, well, first look for commonality of a kind of philosophy or concept, and that is the idea that buying groups are real and they exist. And then try to go beyond what you deliver today to deliver something better. And that's where we started.

If we said MQLs were as good as they are for as long as they have been, but could we deliver sales something better? And the something better comes in 2 forms. It's better information about the target account, and it's additional people.

So better numbers of people. And so we went really simple. Instead of building the buying or working the buying group idea from the outside in, now we're talking working it right from the bottom up that says, can we deliver something better to sales that they will be more interested in than they are in our standard MQL today? And so that's what we focused on.

Uzair Dada

32:45 - 35:24

I'd say 2 things. I'd say, talk to your prospects. Talk, not survey. Talk. Human. Right? Don't forget the power of talking to people. People are willing to talk to you. Go to the communities.Talk to them. Listen. Communities listen in those communities. The 3rd party intense stuff is awesome. The first party intense stuff is awesome. But nothing beats this. Right? Second thing is the AI tools are phenomenal at helping take the fear of ideation and framing. So iterate.

You can now talk to GPT and say, I'm trying to market to senior content strategist at a growth marketing agency that does x y z. What should I do ? And it's a constant back and forth. It's like talking to a peer. May not be perfect, but it takes away the anxiety of unknown. It makes you smarter. It's the super intern that gets you to 60%. And now you have that basis to translate that information. So when I come to you, Alex, and talk to you about, hey, this is what I want. You're like, oh, this is pretty cool. You've thought about this. Let me work on it.

And so I think it allows us, I feel it's sort of is kind of eliminated a lot of the anxious barrier of content creation. Because what has happened historically is when someone says create content, what do us marketers do? We just go create content. We don't look at what or who or what. That's why we have all this ungodly different lumpy content in our organizations that exist. But we have better ways to be market aware. We have better ways to iterate.

And frankly, the coolest part with digital, is I can build something, serve it up within the sort of the Informa TechTarget content network, and get immediacy of feedback, and see what's working or what's not, and just iterate. So the ability for me to try something and do something is so awesome that we need to take that feedback loop into the organization.

Instead of kinda try these 7 things and 9 things, and, oh, these 4 are working with this persona, and these 4 are working with this persona. What does that mean? What can I do? Let's try this instead.

So I think that new tooling and new partners like them have made the ability to iterate in a data driven manner and be able to constantly optimize a lot easier.

Alex Jonathan Brown

35:24 - 35:50

I think that's a great note to leave it on. We could obviously have this conversation for forever, but, unfortunately, that's not how scheduling works.

John, Uzair, thank you both so much for joining us. Like I said, this is a fantastic conversation.

I think I asked 2 questions the whole time, which I love. It makes my job very easy. Y'all did most of the heavy lifting. John, if people wanna learn more about you and the newly renamed Informa TechTarget, where can they go ?

John Steinert

35:50 - 35:53

Hit me up on LinkedIn. JS Steiner.

Alex Jonathan Brown

35:53 - 35:56

And what's the current website URL, actually ?

John Steinert

35:56 - 36:05

It's still www.techtarget.com. There's a redirect for www.informatechtarget.com.

Alex Jonathan Brown

36:05 - 36:28

You've got options. I always like to ask, especially when that happens.

Uzair, I usually do this for you because I know it. You can learn more about Uzair and I at and everything our team is doing over at ironhorse.io. Hit Uzair up on LinkedIn.

And, yeah, as you can probably see on the clock, coffee break’s over. Let's get back to work.

Thanks, everybody.

John Steinert

36:28 - 36:29

Thanks, everybody.