Is B2B Sales & Marketing Broken? Reimagining B2B Success with Modern Strategies

Today we discuss how the traditional B2B sales and marketing approach is becoming obsolete as we chat with author Ray Hartjen. This episode guarantees a wealth of insights into the ever-evolving world of B2B sales and marketing, driven by the digital-first expectations of modern buyers. Ray shares his expertise on how companies can transform their strategies to cater to today's empowered B2B buyers who crave seamless, B2C-like experiences. Learn why outdated tactics like cold calls and gated content are losing their edge and how embracing transparent pricing can position your business ahead of the competition.

As we unpack the shift in B2B buyer behavior, Ray highlights the rise of AI-driven processes and the preferences of digital-native generations for real-time information. This conversation is a must-listen for those ready to reimagine their marketing plays and enhance buyer experiences.

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Transcript

Eric Eden 0:01

Today we have an exciting topic. We are talking about revenue orchestration, and what exactly does the new era of B2B sales and marketing look like? We have the perfect guest to help us talk through it. Author Ray Hartgen. Welcome to the show.

Ray Hartjen 0:20

Hello Eric, thank you so much for having me on Remarkable Marketing. I'm completely stoked about having this conversation with you, so thank you for the opportunity. Appreciate it.

Eric Eden 0:30

Why don't we start off by you sharing just a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Ray Hartjen 0:47

writer, a musician and a content marketer. For the last 10 years I have worked in SaaS software and I've run complete marketing departments for smaller companies and I kind of specialize in content, where I consider myself a full stack marketer. But my strengths lie in creating content.

Eric Eden 1:01

Content is quite often the key, and I know you've written four books. Your latest book on revenue orchestration, is on Amazon, correct?

Ray Hartjen 1:14

Yes, it's a short, 90-minute read, eric. It's my effort to kind of get out into the space for us B2B revenue team professionals, this new paradigm that we have to shift to a new model of going to market driven primarily by B2B buyers. I like to draw parallels, eric, with today's B2B buyers. They have been changing their approach to seeking products, solutions, experiences and the like for years, but they hadn't really made that big fast-forward jump, the incremental change, until the pandemic struck, and they're very much motivated by these world-class B2C experiences that they've enjoyed for 10 years or more.

Ray Hartjen 1:58

Right, you know, when a B2B buyer is buying for their personal self through a B2C channel, they are, first of all, they're digitally empowered. They're digital first. They have transparent pricing, they're able to compare alternatives on the fly and they can make their purchase decision without speaking to a single person. And they love that and they do that. They do that with a budget of $20, $50 or something like that. Then they go to the job using the same computer many times and they're thinking well, I need to buy a service, a solution I need to solve for a problem, I have a challenge, an obstacle, or seize an opportunity. They have a budget of $20,000, $50,000. And what do they experience? Do they experience that world-class?

Eric Eden 2:50

buying journey that they have in their b2c channels?

Ray Hartjen 2:51

no, they don't have to struggle to find customer success stories and they don't like gated assets and they don't like cold calls. So you know, we're looking at a from a b2b marketing perspective. We're looking at a playbook that we have. We have all these great plays that have proven successful in the past. We we just have to reimagine how we go to market with those plays so we can meet the customer where they are, when they're there, with the information and the data that they need.

Eric Eden 3:14

Some people have told me this year they think B2B marketing, as it's been for the last five years, is broken, which is a different way of saying what you're saying, because I think people who are not evolving their strategies are finding that these things don't work of, you know, cold calls and trying to get people to fill out forms, to wait for a couple of days to get a call from you then to schedule a meeting. People want a more digital first approach where they can just get the information they need and have a much better buying experience. Even five years ago, I think, some of the analyst firms, like Forrester, were saying that 80% of the buyer journey happens before they talk to a salesperson, and my guess is I'm interested in your opinion on this my guess is that it's gone even further. I think most people would prefer for it to be 95% or 99% before they talk to a salesperson. What is your view of it?

Ray Hartjen 4:16

Yeah, first of all, when you say the B2B go-to-market process is broken, well, it's not broken if it works right. So you know there are B2B companies out there enjoying success. I kind of define whether it works or not is based on what the competition is doing right. And I like to look at pricing and packaging exercises. If anyone out there has ever been involved in a pricing and packaging exercise, particularly with a technology company, it is a struggle. It is three to six months of cross-functional work with everybody in the organization, from engineering to product to the revenue team, customer service. It is hard to do.

Ray Hartjen 4:57

Research shows that today's B2B buyer want to have transparent pricing available on the web. They do not want to have. For years we've always thought of pricing as a very bottom of funnel type of concept. We'll get into that in the negotiations when we have an account executive and the prospective customer negotiating. We'll get to pricing. But now they're viewing that as an ante into the game. They want transparent pricing. Now, if nobody offers transparent pricing in vertical, that's not necessarily a problem, yet your buyer is not happy. We're not making it easy for the buyer to buy, but you're not behind any competitors. But as soon as that first competitor offers transparent pricing on the web, then you've got to. If you have not at least started your pricing and packaging exercise, you've got a problem. You've got a three to six month catch up, and nobody can afford three to six months being behind their competitor, right? So is the process broken? Yeah, it's broken if it doesn't work. It's maybe not broken if it doesn't work, but I'm kind of figuratively, you know, shaking you by the shoulders. You got to wake up, man.

Ray Hartjen 5:58

Today's B2B buyer is decidedly digital first right. Most of them are digital natives. They are tremendously skilled at search and comparisons and they don't want to deal with sales and marketing until they have to on their terms. And so be wary of that. Don't just shoehorn your customer into your past paradigm of click on your request demo or, you know, have a gated content, a gated form for your content. Give us your contact information knowing that you're going to have an SDR or BDR giving you a call. People don't want that. There's actually cloaking companies out there. Our test box is one of them, where a prospective customer can cloak their interest all the way through awareness, education, consideration and even negotiation for purchase. The solution provider excuse me doesn't even know the customer's name until the process is done. Just the fact that there's a business out there that exists shows you what customers want and what they don't want.

Eric Eden 7:03

That's super interesting, I think. The unit economics the way things were done five, 10 years ago, with having SDRs and direct sellers who could do complete handholding and would feed a customer all the information. The problem with that model is that it's just too expensive for a lot of companies these days and it's not the way. More crucially, like you said, that people want to buy and I think that, and a lot of companies in particular, let's pick on SaaS companies a little bit, A lot of SaaS companies instead of doing the extra work and I find it has been a lot of extra work to design processes that are digital first and prospects can just go through it and can buy. It's a lot more work instead of just saying, oh, we'll have the salesperson, just talk to him about that. People use that as a crutch instead of just designing it in an intuitive way that people could just on the website figure it out and not have to talk to somebody. So I think that's maybe the one thing that a lot of the B2C companies have gotten correct.

Ray Hartjen 8:16

You know what the tenement of all sales marketing is make it easy for your customer to buy right, and there's a lot of B2C companies out there that make it very easy for you to buy. In fact, sometimes you buy too quickly. It's like, oh, that was one click, okay, well, hopefully I'll like it when it comes into the mail. You've seen the B2B space. People try freemium types of products, free trials, things like that. That's it. That's giving it a bit of a, you know, a nod toward changing buying behaviors. So, so those are really good things to think about. And but you know, we, as revenue team professionals, we have to be kind of nimble in our approach and be willing to think innovatively.

Ray Hartjen 8:59

You know, it wasn't that long ago where, you know ago, where an account executive might have multiple SDRs working for him or her. Now it's probably more the case where there's one SDR, btr working for multiple AEs. But if you're trying to rearrange your headcount allotment with SDRs and BDRs, remember a chief revenue officer or a head of sales. They don't really want to get rid of SDRs because that's your pipeline for your AE, right? Why do you want to get rid of your best bench? But you need those SDRs and BDRs to do something. You can never have enough leads, have you, eric? Have you ever met a salesperson who had enough leads?

Eric Eden 9:34

Well enough qualified leads no A lot of times they have leads, but these ones aren't good.

Ray Hartjen 9:40

There's always just like one more I need.

Ray Hartjen 9:41

I need one more, at least one more, one more, but you know there's a you know, when you come over to the marketing side of the house, then it's the difference between lead generation and demand generation. You know, and demand generation that longer tail type of approach that eventually pays off in leads. But you have to keep. The SDRs have to eat right. They eat what they hunt and so you have to give them something to hunt. So it's a big conversation throughout the entire revenue team what's our go-to-market model, what's it look like and how does it appeal to our prospective customers and even our existing customers? And it takes sales, it takes marketing. I've always talked about them as being two wings on the same bird and they need to be coordinated. But you need to throw everybody in there. That's a customer-facing function, particularly customer success. Customer success is so important in customer retention. It's so expensive to get a customer. Let's keep them there, right. Let's upsell them if we can, let's cross-sell if they can, but at the very least we need to keep their business.

Ray Hartjen 10:38

So, eric, you and I will be standing there at the table. Here comes the runners, that's the buyer, and they're on their buying journey, the marathon, and as they come up to our table, we're going to supply them with whatever they might need at the time, you know in the form of data. What data do you need? Are you starting right out? Do you even know that there's an opportunity that exists? That's when it's search with key terms and show you how that we have a product or a service, a solution, an experience that can help you seize an opportunity or solve for a problem or what have you. So we give you that information and then, eric, you and I pop in our shuttle, we go to the next aid station.

Ray Hartjen 11:20

As they're continuing their journey, what else do they need to facilitate their buying journey? What's the information that we can get them? How do we continue to win at search, particularly during education and awareness phases, so they can understand, from our perspective, our point of view, how we add the most value our solution and, from our perspective, our point of view, how we add the most value our solution, our experience, our product or what have you offers the more value. So there's a lot of levers to push. The good news is is the skills already exist in the B2B revenue teams? Right, the skills are there, the experiences are already there. They just need to be reapplied because the buyer is in control now. We are not in control. So what's that paradigm shift look like and how do we change up the levers that we push and pull along to manage our business so that the buyers can lead their journey? We can help facilitate it, get it to a buying decision and hopefully it's in our favor.

Eric Eden 12:12

Are there a couple B2B brands that you think are good examples that are embracing the new digital first strategy that you're talking about?

Ray Hartjen 12:23

I think there's a lot of other companies that are still struggling coming to terms with this. We are so busy from a B2B perspective, on a revenue team perspective, that we kind of fall into these bad habits. How many times have we gone to an event and then, after you know, after the event, said you know, how can we make this just even better? You know, those are conversations that we need to have three months ahead of the event. You know, and tee up the event. Or when people show up at the event a trade show, for example they know I got to get to booth 1002. Check out the remarkable marketing guys because they've been talking about this 1002. Check out the remarkable marketing guys because they've been talking about this and this has piqued my interest. I mean, we as B2B professionals, we want to have that human-to-human conversation right. Trade shows and events those are great opportunities to do it, but we don't want it to be at step one of the buying journey. Let's get them almost into a closing position at that point in time.

Ray Hartjen 13:13

Same can be said for webinars. I can go on for eight episodes, eric, talking about how B&B marketers just get dependent on this old webinar model and, instead of really working. A value-added webinar to make it part of an inclusive, integrated, comprehensive campaign, to really optimize the effectiveness of it. We tend to take the easy way out. It's going to be four weeks from now. We're going to send out an email once a week for three weeks and at the end of it we're going to send out a recap email with a link and we'll put the link as a gated asset on our website. That's the cookbook, right? That doesn't work.

Eric Eden 13:50

I mean it works.

Ray Hartjen 13:51

It doesn't work optimally.

Eric Eden 13:54

Yeah, I mean it worked much better 10 years ago than it does today.

Eric Eden 13:58

You know it's interesting there's 700,000.

Eric Eden 14:04

Bdrs, or SDRs, in the US, approximately, and just over a million direct sellers working for SaaS or tech companies is some of the research that I've seen, and I actually saw a presentation from the co-founder of Sixth Sense, who now has a new company called OneMind, of Sixth Sense, who now has a new company called OneMind, and it's actually a very digital first strategy where AI agents will do the entire SDR BDR process and they will also do the direct sales process using AI agents that sound like humans and have reasoning, and it'll even do account management and it will jump on a Zoom with you and pull up slides and give you all the information you need, and I think a lot of people are okay with that sort of experience just to get the information, versus insisting and talking.

Eric Eden 15:03

They need to talk to a salesperson. I think a lot of people are okay with that. A lot of people are okay using automated phone systems for, you know, getting help when they're booking a flight. I think a lot of people, from a digital first perspective, are very interested in just getting the information in real time, and so I think that a lot of these things are very interesting, leaning into the new buyer behavior you're talking about, right.

Ray Hartjen 15:30

Yeah, and when you're a prospective customer, the difference is are you being served or are you being sold? Are you doing it on your timeline and you getting the information when you want it, or are you having your day interrupted by phone calls and emails? Are you getting spammed? Who's got the initiative? Who's driving control? Who's being served? Who you getting spammed? So it's who's got the initiative? Who's driving control? Who's being served? Who's being sold to? And I think you're absolutely right, and I think the marketplace is, as we become more comfortable in speaking with reasoning machines, there'll be a preference perhaps to lean in that direction, particularly for data not being sold, being served.

Eric Eden 16:10

I don't think that the AI agents at this moment, in November 2024, are there, but I think my prediction for 2025 is they will be there, and then the question is going to be how good are they? How long does the process take? Is there bumps in the road? I'm sure there'll be all of those things, but I think it's going to happen because the processes we're using for the last five or 10 years, like we've been discussing, have just proved to be pretty inefficient and, if we're being honest, a lot of the people the hundreds of people that I've worked with that were SDRs did not love that job. Like appointment setting is something that deserves to be automated. They just did it because they needed a paycheck, and so I think those people will go on and find other work, more strategic things, building better skills that help them grow in their career. So I don't really think it's about job replacement, but it is about providing a different buyer experience that's better for the buyer and more efficient for the company. That's the win-win right.

Ray Hartjen 17:18

Yeah, and it'll be important with those agents AI agents to measure conversion. You know how do we want to facilitate the buying journey and what are going to be the conversion metrics as we advance along. You know AI has been prompting customer success and service people for a couple of years now.

Eric Eden 17:33

Yeah, I think it'll get better. It's not perfect today. I think there's also the concern about inaccurate information, but one thing underscores why buyer behavior is changing. When you think about generational buyers and Gen Z, like my daughters, who are teenagers, they don't even remember a time before everything was on demand. They're like what do you mean? We have to wait to a certain date or time to watch this TV show this week? That's dumb. I've never even heard of that. Like they don't understand it. You know this thing about. Oh, just be patient, you know we'll get back to you in a few days.

Eric Eden 18:12

Like, people are like no, people are like on demand in real time. They want information and they want it in a compelling way. And I think it's sort of like other trends related to that. It's just sort of how people are moving away from doing Google searches like they've done over the last 25 years and now it's sort of like search anywhere. They'll search for news and information and stuff on Instagram and TikTok or chat, gpt and so, yeah, google has some competition now and that's for marketers a real head scratcher because we haven't seen that it's been so dominant for the last 20 years. So I think things are changing, like you said, and the buyer behaviors are changing for some good reasons there and I encourage everyone to take a look at your book. But is there any one or two insights that you would tease that make it worth that investment for people and time?

Ray Hartjen 19:08

Yeah, it's a good question, eric, and you know I want to build upon the fact that you're talking about your daughters and their B2C journeys with you know content and on demand. You know the workforce is getting younger. Those digital natives now make up a larger part of the workforce and they're going to get even a bigger part of the workforce. They're digital natives and so you know, understand that. You know your buyer, your B2B buyer, is not the same buyer that they were 20 years ago. In a lot of cases not even the same buyer they were, you know, five, seven years ago. Digital natives are popping in there. Digital natives have a different way of doing things and that kind of tilts our funnel on its head. You know 41% of Gen Z and 29% of millennials check review sites as the first step in their buying journeys.

Ray Hartjen 19:55

And a lot of us veteran B2B revenue team members, we've always thought of referral customers and customer success stories, review sites. We've always thought those as end of funnel assets that we hand out. And then you know, you think about it, these new B2B buyers. Research shows they want software pricing transparent 71% of them do. 70% of them want demos or free trials. And they want those customer referrals 35% of them and they don't want to be cold called. So think about that.

Ray Hartjen 20:24

And another thing I wanted to talk about, you know, is maybe as a precursor to maybe reading the book. It's not all doom and gloom out there, folks, you know, there's you, we've got the plays, you know. So, when you think of revenue orchestration, it's just the purposeful coordination of your people, your processes and your plays to facilitate the buying journey. You've got the people, you've got the, the plays. Many times it's just change our processes and it results from a one step back.

Revolutionizing B2B Sales Strategies

Ray Hartjen 20:52

Let's look at our strategies. You know how are we going to go to market as a comprehensive revenue team? You know we have these kind of these paradigms that we break down and sometimes into our silos with this heroic effort from the sales. You know I'm going to just knock on more doors but that sounds great. We have trophies up, you know, in organizations to reward. You know the salespeople who never say die and keep going out there. But what are the processes that are going to market and how does that affect the rest of the revenue team? So you know the book a short read. I call it a shook. A short, helpful book, 90 minutes. Talks about maybe reconfiguring the way that we go to market with our plays to again facilitate that buying journey as the buyer requires it.

Eric Eden 21:38

Awesome. Well, I'm going to link to your book and your website so people can get in touch if they want to learn more and really appreciate you being with us today sharing your insights. Thanks for being on the show. Yeah, eric, I appreciate the opportunity.

Ray Hartjen 21:51

Thanks, I love what you're doing with Remarkable Marketing and for the audience out there. My name is Ray Hartchen. If I can help you out in any way, please reach out to me. I'm on all the social platforms at Ray Hartchen, so I learn something every time I have a discussion with somebody.