Nobody cares about your product

Micolas, thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to the conversation.

Yeah, I have I work now with marketing and sales teams. we do consulting to both, but I have a somewhat of a strange background to be consulting to marketing and sales teams. I was trained as a PhD social scientist at Stanford and the Rand Corporation. I did qualitative research and at Rand I found I was pretty good at raising money. I one year my last year there I was either principal investigator or co-principal investigator on about three and a half million dollars in grants and contracts. and in an academic environment there's not a lot of incentive to pay people for revenue. That's you create knowledge, you don't drive revenue. So they sat me down at the end of that year and said, right, Brent, great year. Rather than a 3.5% pay raise, we'll give you a 5.5% pay raise. And I said, I gotta find a better place for this skill set. So I did what academics call going to the dark side. I went to work for commercial firms selling into higher education because I had a PhD, I had credibility with leadership and decision makers. And I quickly had four growth successes as a marketing and sales leader. and it turned out that I was just really good at structuring conversations that focused on the buyer or the customer. And when I went to the commercial sector, what I found is, you know, most positioning, most marketing, most selling was kind of heroic. It told a story about the company and how great it was and its history and its product and You know, as you moved into this digital era where buyers were now more in charge and could get all the information, nobody cared. Nobody cares about you. They care about themselves. and so this teaching marketing and sales team that it's not about you, it's not about your product, it's not about your company, it's about the problem your buyer's trying to solve. So always anchor on that. was what led me to be successful as a revenue leader, marketing and sales. And with four successes, I just started consulting about a dozen years ago. And I started in higher education in K-12, drawing on the academic background, but we now, you know, work across a lot of industries and have shown this what we call a journey first method. It's about your product. It's about the buyer journey. actually will drive revenue for companies in all kinds of industries and all sizes. And I can tell you more about our own ideal customer, but that's sort of you know what I've been doing the last 25 years that got me to leading this company.

Yeah, I mean the simplest test, if you look, people your your product or service does matter. Ultimately that's what people are buying. But it has to solve a problem for them. And so your best test is we we might present our product to people that are going to use our product or our service. And if they they lean in, that's fine. But ultimately the question you have to always answer is what is the person who's writing the check? care about because usually they don't care about functionality they don't care about workflows they care about how does that help me save time make money optimize a process help my team collaborate better in ways that lead to a better customer experience how does it increase student retention employer retention right recruiting and yield So they're going to have some company goal or some organizational goal that the product facilitates, and it's your job to connect those two. What's the pro how does the product value connect to business or organizational value? And then if you're really smart, you'll think ahead to overcome the objections. If they were get actively thinking about considering your product. How does it compare to the other things they're doing right now? Other processes, other software, other workflows. Because a lot of sales are lost. The vast majority, 60%, are lost because of no decision. We get a product person interested, an end user. We don't get the person writing the check excited, and we haven't actually engaged the influencers that are going to be asked to do something different if. They buy my product or service. So we just stall with the product person. So very simply, if you want to sell more, you want to market more, you got to think about the value to those three constituencies of your product. Product problem, business problem, organizational kind of core the corporate buyers or influencers. Like, how does this compare to what I'm doing currently? Current state, future state. So s you just have to think about we have to plan for a multi-threaded buyer journey. We sell into buying committees. Unless you're if you're anything above a five K price point, twenty five K in some cases, there's gonna be multiple people on the other side evaluating it. It's your job not to be single threaded.

Yeah, the the one core concept is buyer goals first, product second. Right. Put put your buyer and what they're trying to accomplish first and your product after that. Yeah, people buy products and services, but only if it solves something for them. And all the work we do is around that. The revenue acceleration playbook, it was my first book, and it was written for three audiences, which was too many. Sales, it was written for sales teams, it was written for marketing teams. There is a lot of work on product marketing and positioning in there. And then it was written for the chief revenue officer or chief commercial officer across those two, that also often connects to account management. So the first book really can speak to that enterprise level go-to-market motion. Second book is only for marketing, third book is for sales and account management.

So s some something audience specific, but in all our work, the idea that if look, if you serve your buyer first, everybody does better. But it's not a human instinct that we're we're, you know, we're wired to be kind of selfish and think about ourselves. And it's you know, it's not my opinion. If you look at research, you get an endorphin hit when you talk about yourself. You don't get an endorphin hit when you ask questions and listen. Right, we pitch our product because it's very comfortable, it's very known. If I ask you questions, I have to be a little bit more fluid. So our product is our comfort zone. I get an endorphin hit when I talk about myself, and my brain is wired for confirmation bias, which basically means I go into the conversation thinking I know the answer. And so as soon as you say something that makes suggest that you're interested in one of my products, brrrr. I just start pitching my product because you've confirmed for me, right? That I was right going in. So our brains are not wired for good discovery. Our brains are not wired to be other oriented. So you have to shift your mindset. And honestly, you got to do it as a team. Because if you try and do it on your own, your peers and your leader are not going to reinforce the right behavior. So we do a lot of work on messaging and Sales work, but then it's the reinforcement, the enablement of actually the iteration and learning about your buyers that is the differentiator.

Yeah, I mean there are three ways that we use it and I'll talk about my personal usage on the the third. just getting better at intent and in market signal. So now if you build a target list of 200 companies and you know that an investment event, they just got investment or they acquired a company or a new executive that's come on board, or you can read their business plan and see a certain initiative. Like the ability to track those kind of intent markers and triggers is a lot higher. The ability to think about an account-based growth strategy, like I have a suite of products, but different parts of those products might be different to different buyers. So just that mapping of need to buy and committee, you can do agentic work to get better at personalization at scale. Do a lot faster than you can with an individual marketer or salesperson trying to do that research and do the matching. So that's one kind of intent identification and matching. The second is call scoring, right? We do we build rubrics when we coach teams. And so now you can score calls and you can build coaching workflows, right? Just cause you can hear snippets in videos and then content generation. I mean, you know, most ChatGP or Claude or whatever on its own writing content, it's a B minus. But as a coworker, that you're giving it high quality inputs and you're asking, you're giving it a direction on what the output is, you can get to a V1 draft that's an A minus pretty darn quickly. I mean, five times as fast as doing it on your own. So we do, we work with a lot of content. For ourselves and clients using AI. And I'll give you a very specific example. On my third book is Journey First Selling, which I'm working on now. I literally, this is the way I write chapters. I say it's a chapter on a discovery call. And a sales discovery call is a great opportunity to make a first impression. So I'll just go find research on how important a first impression is. Okay, that opens my chapter. And then I will in about 15, 20 minutes, I'll write, okay, here are the four main sections, and here are the three key bullets per section. and then I'll load in some related writing and with case studies, and I'll just say, Hey, write me a V one chapter where this case study is anonymized and written through the entire chapter, and like literally in three minutes, I have a V one. And then I just read through it and I say, Hey, adjust these four things. So my speed of it's my voice, because I trained Claude. to write in my voice. I've got other writings that I can feed into it. So I'm writing V one chapters in literally like five minutes rather than four hours. and it's awesome. my voice, my method, my content, and I just feed a bunch of it in there. I don't have to rewrite it or figure out where the case studies were. It just I just dump the stuff in there and it'll draw a straight line through it.

I use Claude, yeah.

yeah. Yeah, we we have very much a thought leadership led growth strategy. we've done different type of cold email outreach, cold LinkedIn outreach. I did an event campaign. you know, I went to like over a year and a half, probably six or seven major events, had eighty booth conversations, closed one deal, it wasn't very high quality. We have basically isolated on two themes, target account marketing that leverages AI and this idea of personalizing at an account level and a buyer persona level, and then skills coaching. Like how do you think about skills excellence for sales teams or client success teams? we have every every month, every other month, we do a round table on one of those. So we just invite executives to that. and then You know, for us, a lot of it is inviting people to participate in that thought leadership. We're networking to one step removed executives to see if they're interested in writing a guest blog on a topic, coming to our round table, sharing some thought leadership item that connects to something we've seen, name dropping somebody we've worked with in common. So that that has been our emotion. It's a little bit more labor intensive. Our best clients. are typically past clients that have transitioned to a new company. And you know, they they take us with them probably at a 60 or 70% rate to redo what we did with them at the last company. So that's the number one demand gen engine. The second is this hand-to-hand combat networking, but leading with not just, hey, do you want have a call with me? But hey, there's probably this thought leadership topic that we might learn from each other on.

Yeah, I mean the first thing I'm gonna ask if you're a VP of revenue, Mikolas, is you know, just to understand what kind of revenue outcomes that you're trying to drive. so is it really about, you know, the I mean the the four typically are you neither you need new more opportunities,

So you're on a demand gen motion, or you need to get better at working those initial opportunities because you have low velocity, got a lot of things that are dying after a first call, or you're progressing them but not forecasting very well or discounting to get things to a close, or you have a renewal and expansion, and those could be related but different. So what what is it you're working on that where are you trying to push? In terms of improve your revenue performance. That's that's the the main thing I'm gonna ask you. And then based on your answer to that, I'm going to usually we excel when it it's a problem across teams. Like for us, just doing a pure sales training engagement, there are tons of people that are good at that. But often the challenge is that what sales is selling and what marketing is positioning are not the same. And so we get hired sometimes just to build alignment between what it says in the website or our digital campaigns so that the salespeople now are as smart as the customers when they show up to a first call and actually can do discovery around what the people are consuming in terms of content. So building that alignment between teams. We also often get pulled in where there is just look looking for better sales. To account team collaboration, because your best growth motion, your sales team has already identified two or three or four use cases, might close on one, but to the extent that you're onboarded into the one you prioritize, and then, hey, but I know these other things are issues. What's the right time to come back to those? you're going to expand faster and you're also just going to renew. Faster. So we we are often looking for those. I'm trying to up level my positioning. I'm trying to get better cross-team collaboration. I I've acquired a bunch of companies and they're not all in the same messaging formula or sales process. we don't typically, we're not a marketing agency, we're not a sales training company. We really do journey first work. And so you need a C suite leader typically who or a VP leader who is looking to build a better customer experience for their customer versus investing in one department.

Yeah, find partners.

Yeah, they can connect with me on LinkedIn. I think I'm the only Brent Keltner on LinkedIn. Or they're welcome to send me an email at B-K-E-L-T-N-E-R at Winnalytics, W-I-N-A-L-Y, T-I-C-S dot com. They can either either is great.

Yeah, appreciate it. enjoyed the conversation, Micholas.