Good afternoon. I‍ll get back up on stage. But first, who here could just be honest with me and tell me that I have no idea who CEB is? Give me a hand. There‍s a hand right here. Okay. Here‍s a book. That‍s social marketing right there. But CEB has two main things that we do, we research how functions operate inside companies. So heads of marketing, heads of sales, heads of real estate and facilities management. Yeah. Anybody who owns a P&L, we look at how they can improve the effectiveness of how they actually manage their function, how their processes need to work. The second thing we do is we work on how they can better manage or steward their talent. So those are the two things that we do. Great. We said that. We can move on. I don't know if it's a surprise to you, but John at Pragmatic and Jeff at Sirius and I did not sit down this morning and plan out what we were going to say. But pay attention to what we're saying because we're saying some very similar things. One thing in particular, how to go about understanding what the customer is and what they want and how that means to how you product market is changing. It's shifted. We're all saying that we all sit at the tip of that spear and all inside of all your organizations day to day. We know it's happening. We see the difficulty of where people are making missteps, where they're stuck in the pathway of understanding and where some people are pivoting to a new way that is helping them unlock growth with their product. So that's a big theme that's coming out of these talks, even if we didn't plan it that way. Secondly, we also know that I did not sit down with them this morning because I don't have an image of a product on my screen. Segway, refrigerator. But I will tell you it's very great to see that because I talk a lot with heads of marketing that are just sitting there going, oh my gosh, I need to help my product marketing guys cross the chasm to help with better innovation. We need better products coming in because we just need to get that growth. And this is sort of at that level a real prayer. We do know, of course, right, that sometimes product innovation is so stupendous that the product sells itself. The media writes about it. The news starts traveling. It shows up through different influencer networks and stakeholders are hearing it in surprising ways at cocktail parties, at breakfast at Denny's. They probably don't go to Denny's. But anyways, they're hearing about that and they're feeling compelled just because of what is going on there about what's so amazing about that product that they need to go on the website and click buy. They need to call your salesperson and say, can you come and tell me more about this? I mean, that happens. But just with that preface, just here, is anybody's product just fucking killing it right now? Give me one. Just give me one. Were you? Awesome. Awesome. I'm going to not do like a concert thing and have Jeff push me over the top, but if you could touch the enemy and pass the book. What I think is, what I want to ask you, if you could just say for a moment, if you're killing it that well, what are you worried about? Could you just share a short phrase of what you're worried about when you're killing it? Because it's hard to ramp up humans as fast as it is our technology, right? Azure and other cloud services kind of help solve that, but there's human elements there. Okay. We might get more hands on this one. Whose product is dying and you're on charge of trying to figure out how to save it? Anybody here raising their hand? All right. Got a book for you too. There you are. All right. Who's from Oakland, California? All right. I have enough books. That's kind of sad. Anyways, just to go through all that, there are obviously aspects of product innovation that are great, but I think most of us sort of sit in the middle between the two book owners now. What I think we want to talk about today is looking at how do we deal with what was our main lot in life? Because it's actually, I don't know, nothing ever stays the same as we kind of heard in different ways. That moment in the meeting room when we were in front of the whiteboard and we sketched out the whole go-to-market model, we had it all perfect. Took pictures of it or we wrote it down or some of us were typing right away while others were scribbling, copying the notes to copy again into my computer. We go away and just everything starts shifting, right? We just can't stop that. That's not our fault. That's not anybody's fault. It makes our jobs kind of exhausting, challenging, sometimes dispiriting, but ultimately, right, when we can somehow juggle all these different variables and come out on the other side with, wow, we caused growth. We increased margin. We held pricing better this quarter. That makes us reveal really good, or at least it should or you shouldn't be here and in this job because that's what we're really trying to accomplish as product marketers. I'm not really going to be here today to talk about all those types of moving parts. What I really want to remind you of is the fact that all that shifting that's going on, all of that land undulating underneath us as we try to kind of keep up with what's going on with the market and our customers, it's happening to our customers too, right? They live in the same exact landscape of uncertainty, right? And we need to attack that uncertainty as product marketers. We need to use that to our advantage. We need to think about the ways, you know, we probably already imagined these stakeholders as VPs or CXOs, proverbial decision makers that are out there and we envision them as standing on some type of certain ground, right? And they have to, right? They have to walk around day to day, chin up saying, I know what makes me money, costs me money, towards my success, poses me risk and I make decisions according to the framework that backs that up. I have a conventional wisdom in my mind based on my learnings and my experience and this is how we do things. And that's kind of what's projected out there. That's what's projected downward or across, you know, their organization. That's sometimes what our marketing material kind of pops up against that other people are trying to say for on our behalf or that's sometimes what our salespeople go in and demurally sort of acquiesce to when we could challenge that. And I'm not going to spend time going into the whole like challenger model today. I want to get a little more brass tacks with you because Rowan said I wouldn't be able to stand on stage unless I did, but I'm happy to. And what I want to do is get at this aspect that we can attack this uncertainty that's behind the veil of their title and their experience or specific methodologies that we can use if we can go out and understand those customers in a certain way that's going to help our product get bought. Not just product content collateral read, not just downloaded, right, but that proverbial MQL, SQL handover which is shifting as we were just learning but that closes with revenue. Like we're sometimes measured by that, at least I hope we are. We need to be able to look at where is it that we can focus our customer learnings in a way that allows us to see this. So what I'll put up on this next page, there's a button here that goes like that. Yeah. So most of us I would think if we're talking with the commercial teams or if we are part of the commercial team depending on how we view ourselves, we're looking out there at a commercial landscape where if we're not killing it, which is awesome, congratulations. Applause. He's killing it. He's killing it. All right. Why didn't Rowan have you come up on stage? Anyway, and also in between and for those that are just trying to hold on, we still deal with this range of issues that are happening in the commercial landscape where basically companies can't get out of the way of themselves. We've been talking about the buyer journey, the buying process in different ways and it's really hard to buy. I mean you think it's hard to sell. Try working on buying in a matrixed flat organization and trying to get all those stakeholders together to make it a collective yes about what it is and whatever it is that you're pushing or selling. It's tough on them. So there's lots of things that cause deals to stall, cause people not to change, cause people to say like I can't fight to push like for the higher price thing with all this proposed value because I can't do that so let's just stay with the good enough. It's a little bit cheaper and I think we'll be fine. Like we all probably feel that fight. Does anybody not feel any of those corners? Okay. I would understand if you rose your hand but you know, sorry. So what I want to focus on today cause they're all issues, they're all elements about how we need to go out and understand from the buyer's perspective what's causing deals to pause. Are people not to go through with the buy? Are people buying sort of less than what they truly need because they don't know how to do it or how to articulate it? I want to deal with the commoditization issue. I'll deal with it by bringing up some numbers that I think you know should be written down or taken a picture of. Each one of these gets into different aspects of what's going on with buyers. Our customers but frankly buyers. And buyers aren't just the person in the purchasing office that's going to sign that PO, right? The buyers are the different stakeholders that have to come to the table and make an agreement that this is the product that I want. And so in our research a couple of different things have shown up. We're going to focus mostly for the next 20 minutes on the 57% number but I'll go through quickly of these. The 57% number was what Rowan was just alluding to and somebody else mentioned earlier that what we know from that buying process which Sirius was good enough to lay out on the bottom if you look at it from their perspective on the bottom from the buyer's way of moving through making a buy that we know that they wait a long time before they ever reach out to engage with us. Why? Because they buy the same way we buy a car. We go online and we research the crap out of it all. We don't want to talk to anybody that's there. We don't want to get signed tracked or hoodwinked. We don't trust what they're going to tell us and so we try to go as far as we can on our own. And we do that in a way that helps us to say all right here's the solution I need, here's the criteria I need, here's the minimum thresholds I need, here's the three candidates of companies that can solve that. They're all slightly different but they all meet the minimum threshold so I'm going to bring them to the table and I'm going to say you all are the same to me. Give me your best price. I don't care which one of you I take. You're all the same. Anybody heard that come back through the sales channel? All right. We'll get into that. On the second I'll just lightly touch on these. Over here, all those people that are these empowered learners, there's also these overwhelmed buyers. We put a lot of shit out there. I mean we produce so much stuff. Sales and Ablement Tools, ABM Collateral, all this stuff is just getting pushed and pushed and pushed. Some of them it's measured but I feel you on that. Like it is tough. I sit there, I was talking with somebody who's a $18 billion construction, you know, engineering company. They've got 180 countries. She's got 300 people and all they do is help with RFPs because she needs 10,000 deals a year. Closed. $18 billion. Like through the math, she thinks she gets like 17% conversion off leads which is actually really good but that's a hell of a lot of sales and Ablement, hell of a lot of collateral. It's all going out like kind of without large strategic purpose and we've heard enough about our good stuff about great strategic purpose but people get overwhelmed out there. There's just like I can't make hide nor hair of it. You know what we got going is just fine or the people that we know are just fine. There's no reason to change, right? It's just too overwhelming to make a buy. And then the same thing happens inside these diverse groups. Oh, I didn't even tell you what the number meant. 39% of people that actually buy your product regret buying it because they don't care, they weren't sure anyways, they knew they had to make a buy, it was mandated, they did it, you're celebrating and high-fiving and when the deal closed, they're saying, I fucking hope it works out. And then over here, the 6.8 is the number of people on average in B2B buying organizations that are buying in B2B space, average number of people at the table making the collective decision. That's the 2016 number. Lots of different organizations look at this number now. Last year, most organizations will tell you that it was about 20% lower, so a little bit under five. Now there's not point something number of people, right? So you either have six or seven people at the table on average. That's a lot of cats to hurt. That's a lot of yeses to try to get if that's the way you approach it. It's a really tough collective yes if that's the way you approach it. But what happens is that in that sort of group dynamic, this 51% number jumps up, which is for the number of people, anyone who has expressed affinity for you, expressed preference for your solution, told you on that sales call that you joined in if you're smart enough to listen to those sales calls and they said, I totally love what you guys are doing. Like, I really hope we go with you. 51% of them are not willing to take advocacy actions on your behalf. They're not willing to get out of their chair, walk down the hall, talk to Mary, Jane and John and say, we really should come together and look at how to do this. I think this could make a difference. They're not willing to advocate. That's a problem. But we're not going to go into it today. 57%. Let's go into the 57% number. So when you look at all these numbers, you know, it comes back to this customer understanding. And I think I hear a lot. We're customer focused. Our CEO has put a customer centricity play in place. We're going to put customer value at the forefront. And so when people hear that, what happens is we run to these sort of shaded things in the back. Now, full transparency, I come out of the customer satisfaction, customer experience, customer loyalty space from a decade or so ago. Who here knows what the Malcolm Baldrige Award is? You don't have to say it. Just raise your hand. Right there? Okay. There's a book. That is a book. I didn't see anybody under 25 raise their hand. Pass that back to the winner. She's 26. I know. That's the call out everybody wants. We're here to deal with reality. We're at a product marketing community. All right. But the point is, what I know is that all comes out of our total quality management initiative in the 80s. We needed to improve our defense. We needed infrastructure. We needed to improve our quality. We were being beat by Toyota themselves, my first car. And so we created all these ways to measure what was happening to the customer. Right? We needed to understand how our product was being used, the satisfaction with our product, the satisfaction with our touch points. We needed to all these different roadmaps. So we got a little bit further on into loyalty, likelihood to recommend. I fought against NPS forever and I lost. But it moves organizations. So give credit where credit's due. But there's all these great tools. They're great tools. I'm not here to tell you that those have to be stopped. But when somebody says, go understand our customer, everybody runs to the VOC champion over wherever they sit and they say, tell me what you got. And what they got isn't going to help you with those commercial issues I was just pointing out. They will help with product innovation. They will help with other things. They help with Six Sigma and air quality issues. No denying. Don't stop that. Don't tell them to stop it. Just don't go talk to them. We need to be able to shift what it is that we're trying to do, trying to learn from our customers. And that's what I want to dive into today. What does it really mean? The shorthand of those challenges that I was talking about before when we were looking at those numbers about the buying dynamics, the empowered learner, the large diverse group, those overwhelmed buyers. So we look at that. We've got research on what it is that contextualizes what that means. It doesn't mean what it means for you in the context of your organization and what your marketing and your product and how that fits. But it gives you the great landscape that tells you what should you do against that. How do you do content marketing that is helping align stakeholders together to get that collective yes? Or how do you help overwhelmed buyers just move inch by inch through their little buying process that they have to do and help that communicate that? There are these prescriptions on what to do. There's prescriptions on what to learn. And I'm happy to talk at Nausium about that. There are two YouTube videos at the back of this presentation where it says thank you and they would go through all of these, right, at a high level. So you're welcome to do that. But as I keep saying, we want to get a little bit deeper into this challenge the customer. And when I think about challenging the customer, challenging my own time, when I think about challenging the customer, I think that we have to understand again that what we're trying to do here is undermine or attack that uncertainty that absolutely exists. Those executives, those VPs, those senior stakeholders, they all know the ground is shifting underneath them, right? But what we need to understand is that they are also on the slide, on the side with their LinkedIn group or with their friends that they go to coffee over not at dinners. How is it shifting? How might I change? Because they need to come back and act with certainty. They're going to still come back and act with certainty, but they are absolutely looking for where are shifts happening? Where do they have flaws in the way that they're thinking about things? So not too much inside baseball here, but that top left thingamajig is something that roughly gets called the commercial insight egg. We don't have time today to go through all the layers, but what it is trying to get at is enumerated or explained in these boxes. And I'll just tell it a little bit further about why it's up there because what we need to be able to do in terms of attacking uncertainty is that we can't sort of lead with some of the traditional thought leadership that many of us maybe grew up in or that have been told to do where we need to paint some rosy picture about the future and how the future is and we're a part of it or we're making it. Because frankly, if you want to go back to your Psych 101, the promises of future don't cause changes in present behavior. Pain in your present behavior causes change in your present behavior. Think back to when it was that you finally started exercising, when you finally decided that you were going to be vegan or when you finally decided like something happened in your life where you're just like, enough! I can't let it go on like this anymore. It was a very like visceral, deep, emotionally disturbing learning, but you pivoted. You changed. When we talk about thought leadership, which is one of those things that we all put out there, I'm not saying it's bad, it can be brand enhancing, et cetera, but what it doesn't do is it doesn't sit there and attack what somebody is thinking today, what their conventional wisdom is today about how they think about their business runs and how they frame the decisions they make about their business and therefore what they use as inputs to get their business doing what it's supposed to do. We need to make sure that we attack or understand those, the conventional wisdom that people have and where there are flaws in it. We need to paint a picture, right, about how that flaw is costing them or keeping them from accomplishing a goal that maybe they just couldn't reach with the way that they do business. They just think, yeah, I leave that money on the table. I can't reach it the way we do this, the way that we go about doing this. That's just the way it is. They need that. That's the certainty talking, but don't forget about that uncertainty. If we sit there and say, hey, I know you're thinking this way. I know that you actually, with your organization, are probably letting like $160,000 go out the door every quarter because you just think you can't do anything about it. I know that your reason you think that is because this, this, and this. That's what's busting your conventional wisdom. However, what you don't know is that there are other people that are changing the way they're doing that and they can change it this way and they need to have these types of tools to do that and when they do that, they're able to execute that in this amount of time and this amount of money saved and don't you know we're the ones that only have that tool. Rit large, that is basically what is going on with what we call commercial insight. Something that is disruptive, maybe painful to the person hearing it, but creates that urgency to change. Now why do we know this? Because we asked and we went out and we looked at the different types of content that people are putting out there and what do buyers say about what that content does to them? What content out there causes them to change direction? This is not to say that being easy to find, creating nice anecdotes and putting them out there, being easy to understand, being smart. Not to say that that's totally unhelpful, just to say that it doesn't really show up on the radar screen. What matters and what content matters to people in this perspective of challenging their mindset is teaching them something new about their business and providing them compelling reasons about why it's necessary to take action. Because otherwise, they're just going to go and talk to their colleagues and maybe say, did you see that thing about the future that so and so put out? Yeah, awesome. That's the credit you'll get. There's no sale after that. Did you see we could save $360,000 a quarter if we changed, went through, it would take us six months, but if we did that we could have a 1.2 million, I know you're looking to do that next year with that initiative. I think we should do that. That's much closer to getting to change, to a sale, to adoption. So this is what we're hearing in terms of feedback from the buyers themselves, from the stakeholders themselves about they welcome this. So don't let the posture blind you to the fact that they recognize that there's uncertainty. They know things have shifted. From whatever it was that they started their strategic plan or they started to enroll, something has changed. The noise out there, most of the noise out there from marketing is not helping them see how to make a change. That's why we come together in conferences. That's why they get together in coffee clashes. They're just looking for somebody that can tell me a way forward that they've done something different. So let's use a real life learning here. We'll use the Xerox case. It is a case that we love and it's near and dear to our heart at C&B, CEB. But obviously Xerox makes printers. We all agree? All right. So Xerox was looking at the education segment and they were realizing, wow, they have different billing methods, they have different types of accountability, there's no type of volume of printing, people want to have color, we want to sell more color, it's a higher margin product for us. And so they came up with this new Doohickey printer called the Whatever. And the feature benefit spec against every other color printer kicked its ass, especially in the education space. They knew it. They had lined it all up, they had found out all the advantages to it, and then they went out to the market and they equipped with all sorts of, I guess, sales enablement tools that should have been guided by people that know better. And everybody said to them, I'm not thinking about printers. I got a printer over here in the corner. It's like $49 from Office Max. Like, it works. You're like, buddy, I got a technology roadmap. I got to think about student performance. I got to create the new classroom. I've got individual lesson plans that have to be accommodated on the fly so we can still meet Common Core curriculum. They're like, I don't got time to talk to you about printers. What were their sales quarter looking like then? I mean, when you're launching it, it can only look this way, right? It can't go down, but, you know. And so obviously, a little urgency, a little session back there, a little cross team discussion, like, holy, whatever. Like, what happened? Where do we make the miss? And they went actually back, and this is actually a great little tip. I don't say it works every time, but they went back to their R&D people and said, why did you make that printer? Because back there in file drawer F, page one was, we need more color in the classroom for student performance. And they're like, what? And it was just like a note. But they went and looked at this a little bit further, and it turned out that Xerox discovered that with this great new digital classroom that everything's in color. We've got all bright shiny screens. We've got smart tech white boards. We've got presentation monitors. And then somebody goes over to the $49 OfficeMax printer from wherever and prints out the tonight's curriculum materials and say, here's a supporting documentation. Go read this. And it's black and white. It's kind of faded. It's kind of like perky jerky. It's very unengaging. And they did all this work in looking at how students were disengaged with that material, how it hurt performance. And when they were sent home with glossy color prints, that their retention rates were higher, that their engagement was higher, their recall was higher. It stayed with them longer. And they went back and said, ah, we can go back to market now. Excuse me, Mr. Administrator, Miss Principal, I want to talk to you about student performance. I want to talk to you about increasing student performance. I want to talk to you about a way that you can affect this across your entire school system. Well, do you think they want to listen to them now? Of course they do, because they're talking about what they care about. And they're saying, we know you're all about the digital roadmap, but we think you're wrong about the fact that you're not including printing technology in there. But let's not talk about printing technology. Let's talk about student performance. Let's talk about color and how we're all washing it. And let's talk about how color needs to show up. And let's talk about how black and white drops these key metrics, results in these test score outcomes, and how color makes this better impact. Now they're like, well, we have totally got this wrong. We weren't even thinking about this. Landscape shifting is so fast. We're focusing on all these big picture, but that's a fundamental part every day of what we do. Let's talk about this. What should we do? Well, you need a printer that builds like this, puts color in like that, has this footprint in the classroom. Yeah, actually we're the best one and only one that has all these great features. But anyways, what do you want to do? We want to solve student performance issues. Let's buy. What happened to sales? Sales went up. Of course. So when you think about this, and we talk about challenging the customer, and there's the challenger model, but there's challenging the customer with a small C. There's, what are you trying to learn about the customer? And you think back to the VOC stuff. You think about the total quality management information that we go out and get. Even customer experience with the touch point maps, which I love. They're not necessarily telling you about, like, say, the mental model that a buyer has or a customer has, a stakeholder has about what is important to them. Because if you're not important to them, there's not really a sale that's going to happen. There's not a sale that's going to be advocated up from below. Like, you have to fit into what their mental model is, and specifically, much more powerfully, if you can show them where there's a flaw in that mental model and how you can lead it back to something that you do uniquely well. So I'll get into a couple of tips and tricks here in a moment, but this page kind of summarizes what we're looking at is that there is that buying pattern that's out there that research shows. And nobody would deny that this exists, that there are these empowered learners that call us to the mat and just commoditize us and ask us for price. And we need to challenge that, but we can't just go in and say, I've got a better product than they do, because that's not, they're not paying for the added value there. What they need to do is get a larger benefit on a higher order KPI for them, and that's where we need to provide them this disruptive content that makes them realize, I didn't realize I could achieve that KPI in that way, with that lever turning that dial. How do they manage for profitability, for commercial outcomes? So we need to be there. And when that kind of content is, of course, credible, and it's coming from you and it's about something not Xerox and printers, but Xerox and student performance, it's surprising. There's another element of stakeholders out there that also care about that and also advance that and also help amplify that message. So this is why I started off talking about, yes, product innovation is awesome, because product innovation just solves all sorts of great problems if it is like slapped down awesome. We can't all wait for that. So we deal with what we got, but what we can, and what we got is what we're selling, but how we sell it we can change. And how we sell it, right, how we position that, how we challenge that conventional wisdom out there is something that can be bigger than our product, bigger than what our company does day to day on manufacturing. It can be something that is newsworthy, that gets you that shared and owned leverage out of the media, I'm sure shared and earned leverage out of the own media that you're creating. So that's the real power here in pursuing this. It's undeniable that the buying pattern exists. We know that there is the desire to have the content put in front of them. We know it's not easy to develop this type of understanding, but we know it doesn't come from VOC, so you have to pivot a different way in order to figure out how to do that. So while I have two minutes and 22 seconds left, let me tell you how to do it. So just going to show you two slides, a little sort of DIY stuff for yourselves. One is a little bit of a come to whoever is important to you kind of conversation. You have, I think, a list of features and benefits, unique differentiators that are probably on a wall or somewhere. I want you to plot them and prove them. And when you look at this two by two, right, I think it's very helpful to think about where they are because if they're in the top right quadrant, which means all the customers value them, means that everybody knows about them, means your competitors are working against them, it means they don't, there's signal strength if you want to work like that, isn't that strong. You don't have that much time to work off of them. See if you can have some unique differentiators, truly unique. They might even be boring. It might be undervalued by customers, but that's okay because we can change through communication how they might perceive the value of that unique differentiator, right, if we understand their mental models. And then we're going to surprise everybody. We're going to have a longer lead time to going to be able to challenge and surprise, disrupt for a longer period of time coming out of that bottom right quadrant than if it's in the top right quadrant. Because I know everybody has two by twos and we all race to the top right. The top right is awesome territory to be in. Today it's the bottom right, okay, so think about that. If you can plot that, if you've been sort of mentally tracking along with me, think about the message we talked about with Xerox. Think about that like one unique differentiator. Maybe it's a couple, but think about if you could put it into this type of message. This is what we call the A to B message. Is that surprising to you? It's the A to B message. But the real important thing to know is that the arrow absolutely matters. The two. It's not A and B, it's A to B. Here I understand what you're doing and how you normally think about things. Let me tell you how messed up that is and you don't understand where to go. And you're going to say that really diplomatically, but the two part is the pain. If you're not showing them that pain, there's no urgency to act. If you're not showing them that flaw and spelling out for them and the cost for themselves, not on an account-based marketing base, we're marketers. We're trying to deal with scale here. So let's sort of summarize that. And then sort of say now you're open to doing something new. Now you can talk about the future because they know they don't want to stay with what the current is. So if you could do those two tricks, feel free to just email me. I don't care if you're a CED member or not. Let's talk about what that felt like, whether you felt your unique differentiators were defensible, whether you felt like you landed on some message that didn't just sound like I've got this awesome new product with this great feature and benefit. Because that's not the message that we need to challenge or disrupt, right? We need to pivot off that. So I welcome that. I hope you can go out and challenge more. I thank you for your time, Rowan, especially for inviting us to participate. Congratulations on the second event of your community. And thank you all for your time.