Well, thank you everybody for having me here today. It′s a real thrill to be presenting to all of you. I work at a marketing agency, so I partner with folks like you. Oftentimes, you might be one of our clients, and we help with branding, marketing, sales enablement materials. I also am responsible for selling our services to you. So I′m heavily involved in sales enablement process and doing those pitches and trying to think about what would resonate with folks throughout a sales process. And so I′m really pleased to talk to you about how do you get to that last mile today. Now, traditionally, the buying journey is really about defining the problem, and this is what businesses are doing. They are trying to figure out what′s the problem I′m trying to solve, what solution can we attach to that problem, and which supplier can deliver the right solution. And as we also talked about earlier, a lot of this is done through research. So your customers are already online looking, researching, evaluating, figuring out, you know, self-diagnosing what the problem is in a lot of cases. And you′re smart. You know this is happening, so you respond by having target audiences with personas. You have product features and you have explicit benefits that really address the problems that customers are trying to solve, and you have already crafted your positioning and your value proposition. So this is the internal strategy work that I know all of you are doing. And you also then create your collateral. You have web content, brochures, white papers. There′s a whole lot of proof points that go into creating all of your marketing materials that get released out there for customers to consume. But the really challenging part, as Michael has highlighted, is that there′s a lot of conflict internally. We talked about the number of stakeholders that have to all agree upon what the problem is in the first place. And consensus can often fall apart. It takes one person who′s an advocate, but remember you have six or seven people that are part of this process, and they all may have different perspectives on what exactly the solution should do. And this may all fall apart before you′re even involved, before the sales team is able to even be part of the conversation. And if they even make it to that point, then it′s only about, okay, we already have the solution in mind, how much is it? Let′s think for a minute about what your sales team is up against. Now your sales team has to deal with your customers′ current beliefs. This is the status quo. This is something that is highlighted especially well in the CEB book about empowered customers. It′s all about the mindset they′re in today, the world they′re in today. And as a salesperson, you′re trying to get your clients to believe something else. If they could only imagine the world in a different way, then they would be able to buy your solution. You would be the obvious choice. So sales is really about changing behaviors. It′s quite different than marketing, right? Where marketing is all about trying to get a message out there. Sales is about getting someone off their butts to do something. But often times I find that when I look at our clients′ marketing materials, they fall into the desired belief side. Is this true with you? Do you find that you′re often trying to paint a picture of what the world should be like if you had the product? Raise your hand if this is something that you see in your work. And like Michael is saying, it′s important to attack current beliefs. It′s important to demonstrate how the current belief system is going to limit the vision that could be achieved at a company. You need to paint a new vision and show how the problems are limiting them. So today I′m going to take you through sort of techniques that can break down sort of the silos between marketing and sales that can allow you to achieve that last mile. I′m going to use case studies that we have put together based on the work we′ve done. Hopefully this will provide you with some of the tactics you need in your own work. So I′m going to start this first example with how do you develop insights? We′ve talked a lot about trying to challenge customers. I′m going to give you the secret sauce of how we do it. Now in this example, this was for Phillips Healthcare. We work with Phillips selling ultrasound equipment. We help them with their content marketing campaigns. And they′re selling to a global audience ultrasound equipment. And one thing that′s important to recognize is the number of stakeholders that′s involved in purchasing equipment is tremendous, especially at a global level. And this may be very true with your business as well. Raise your hand, how many people have different stakeholder arrangements based on the region of the country they′re trying to enter? How about size of market, mid versus enterprise? All right, more hands. It′s very easy to try to target one customer and try to pinpoint how your solution addresses their problem. But when you′re dealing with a series of them and you know that they′re all going online to research ahead of time, you need to create something that′s going to break through. So here′s how we do it at my company. We basically create segments or buying groups. So in this particular buying group, we′ve assembled them because Michaela, who is the head of hospital, in hospital radiology, and Felix, the administrator, and Jay Chafin, who is the private office practitioner, they all have something in common. It may not be the care setting, it may not be the services they provide, but they all have similar buying patterns. And because of their placements within their organizations, they think that the resonating topics would be patient throughput and patient ownership. So this really leads to a major theme. And I loved how Byron touched on the importance of themes. So the theme of compassionate performance. It′s not just about efficiency, it′s also about taking ownership of that patient experience for that moment when these particular clinicians are engaged with the patient. And the same thing can be done for a second buying group. This buying group may have a very different theme that resonates with them. So we have our themes. Great. Now what? Right? The next step is thinking, okay, how do these themes apply across the different parts of the customer journey? Now, a lot of these themes we′ve come up with are really good at helping define the problem space. They are those insights. If you can communicate with a clinician about being efficient and having passion at the same time, there′s a real good tension there. Themes such as the platform story, how it integrates across multiple platforms, or the price performance and the total cost of ownership, these are really better at closing deals because they are about the benefits of choosing them as a vendor. So some sample content marketing ideas. Of course, content marketing has to be sort of the first part in that mile. It′s the first 400, if you will. And some sample ideas. Throughput without patient offput. How to increase efficiency without making your patients feel rushed or sacrificing quality. And we′ve come up with additional ones. And it′s really important to link your content marketing ideas back to your differentiators because it′s these thought starters that are eventually going to lead your customers back to what makes your product unique. This is the creative process. Same thing happens for buying group B. Now when you execute your content marketing, especially when it′s intended to be sales enablement, while it could go online, sometimes leave behinds are a preferred technique after a sales pitch of some sort. So this particular one collapses several of those resonating points into a poster. And you′ll see that this poster is really geared towards community hospitals that are in more rural settings. And the topics are meant to up level the conversation. So radiologists have some way to speak with the C suite in their hospital setting. So balancing clinical and financial needs. Attracting and retaining top talent. Building hospital brand value. I mean it′s amazing to think a radiologist could contribute to the actual brand perception of a hospital just by using equipment that is contemporary and designed really well. And finally treating a variety of problems. This particular product was able to be used for shared services. So it wasn′t just for women′s health, it could be used for cardiology as well. Nowhere do we talk about the speeds and feeds of the product. Is anyone surprised by that? Okay. Few people. Now during sales it often happens that you′re supposed to, you know, sales people will meet with a bunch of different people who are part of that sales process and inevitably there′ll be one who sticks out as someone who can shepherd the sale through. We call this person an advocate or CEB would call them a mobilizer. And this particular individual likes your solution but, you know, we have this consensus problem as you recall. But, you know, this is one of the balances that I think we all have to walk as marketers is when do you appeal to a large audience and how much do you tailor your content because sometimes you can over tailor it. So appealing to an advocate, I′m going to show you an example that we had done for Microsoft. How do you connect to your customers without compromise on their terms? As the manager of a national retail chain, you understand all too well how many choices customers have. Do you deliver the relevant experiences that matter most? Are you ready for what′s next? Your brand is a promise. When the opportunity comes, how will you be remembered? As a dynamic retailer, you′re free to focus on what′s important to your customers even if that is simply returning what is lost. All right. One reason I like this example is because it leads in with a provocative question, right? The whole thing is about opening up the conversation and empathizing with this particular manager of retail chains. And just like the other pieces of content marketing, it does not talk about the speeds and feeds of what dynamics can do for you or the workflow or the teamwork enablement. It just talks about empathizing with somebody who is mired in daily tasks that can′t allow them to create great retail experiences. Before this particular series of videos, distinct ones were created for different audience members. And these were given to the sales team in order for them to pick which one they would like to lead off when they′re having conversations with particular individuals that they feel would best enable a sale. It′s a great way to appeal to somebody to have a personalized video. But don′t just do it for one if you′re going to try to take this technique. Make sure you address the various buyers that may be part of the sale. Now, there′s a danger in over-personalizing content because you highlight what divides the group. You are not building consensus if you appeal to the CMO in one way and the CIO in another way because as soon as they get to the table, then they talk about their differences. So it′s important to align stakeholders. And the last two examples I′m going to show are techniques for doing so. This first one is for a company we work with called Quorum. Quorum is a big data analytics company. They′re in the oil and gas industry. So they help oil and gas companies run their business basically through the accounting and the production side of oil and gas. Now, they already have a user committee or user board where they pull the users of their software for ideas and how they′d like to improve it. By show of hands, how many of you have user panels? Great. And they′re really effective because these are the champions of your systems. Now, for Quorum, we have a very smart CMO who we′re working with that realizes the value and also appealing to the choosers, not just the people who have to use the software every day but the ones who are going to fund it and buy it at the end of the day. So the technique that we used in this case was creating an executive advisory board. So an executive advisory board works somewhat different than a user board. Executive advisory boards, you invite a series of people. They are both your prospects and your current employee or your current customers. Typically, they are in the C suite and you invite them for an afternoon of sharing. Now, this takes a lot of courage but what Quorum is going to do is they′re going to test some assumptions that they have about their marketing with this group of executives. So I′ll share with you the activities that we ran them through. The first activity is a word prioritization activity. So we took the 24 members and divided them up into two groups and it′s really important to remember that we designed these two groups to be cross functional. It wasn′t just all the CTOs in one area and all the production officers in another area. It was a cross functional group of both customers and prospects and we gave them a set of keywords and asked them to rank them according to importance and facilitated that activity. So the second activity is the next was using the same keywords, how does Quorum compete as compared to some of their direct competitors? If they compete better, then put a plus. If they compete worse, put a minus and if they are about the same, you put an equal. So this gets to competitive advantage that Quorum has. Now, the final activity was Quorum introduced high level marketing messages. So agility, operational efficiency and the transitioning workforce. In the oil and gas industry, the transitioning workforce means there′s a lot of folks aging out and there′s a younger group coming in who is much more technologically savvy than the older group and that is a real pain point for the oil and gas industry because there′s not as many people replacing that workforce. So we introduced these topics and we did a group to take the keywords that they had already seen and align them underneath these major themes. Now if you think about it, it′s forcing a CTO, a CIO, a CMO to look at a word like agility, discuss what it means and then apply which proper word is going to fit under that. So they can align on the meaning of these words. This is a way for Quorum to really test out their marketing communications at an executive level. All right, the final example I′m going to show you is one that we use when we do our own sales work. So when we do our own pitches, this is sort of something we put together in order to align our stakeholders. You know, and it′s very interesting, in sales sometimes you go into a room and it′s the first time that these folks have ever sat across from each other to discuss the project that we are trying to pitch. There′s a lot of tension because they have unresolved issues. They may agree at a high level that they need a new website or new marketing collateral, but when it gets right down to it, this is the first time that we′ll have to dive in a little deeper. So I want to make sure that when you think about sales presentations and collaborating with your sales team, think about how can your presentations facilitate conversation that′s going to align stakeholders. When we′re planning these pitches, we think about the stakeholder concerns. We′ll literally write them out. It′s important to do X, Y, and Z. It′s critical to be secure. A lot of these can be taken directly from RFPs even, or from emails, or from the sales conversation itself. We then write guiding principles or themes, and that′s why I love this idea of a theme, something that can drive the teams in a way that they can overcome these challenges. They can see themselves in it, but they′re also intentionally vague because we want to make sure that stakeholders have a conversation about them. Then the final bit is putting together the slides. These are really simple slides. They are intended to be presented and to draw conversation. So I′ll walk you through how the presentation works. So this is for expeditors. I probably should have mentioned that earlier. Expeditors is a global logistics company. They are an assetless company. You don′t see their trucks driving around because they basically provide all the services to move freight and cargo by using vendors. So the presentation starts with a provocative question. What does a travel company and a global logistics company have in common? Well, more than you think. It′s all about the plan, planning for the future. If you think about us as a marketing agency, that′s one of the best things we can offer our clients is a clear plan. So we elicit our competitive edge right there. Then we introduce our topic slides of exemplifying culture, which resonates probably more with the CMO, but also maybe the CEO. We talk about intuitive and elegant customer experiences and content that determines the form of the site itself. Talking about content, there may be particular product owners that have a real interest in having their service offering highlighted. So it really allows them to have this conversation across the table from a CIO who has not heard that before. We close out the presentation with talking about our plan to achieve these goals. We walk them through the various steps, and we then remind people of the key differentiator that we bring, which is we plan for the future and we′re going to plan to be successful. Is anyone surprised that we didn′t show any design work? We didn′t show them the potential website solution. You know, the whole idea was just to make sure that we could facilitate conversations and find out which individuals were the ones that could help us propel the sale forward that were already aligned and which ones may have been more skeptical that we needed to then figure out ways to appeal to. I want to thank you guys for listening. Does anyone have any questions before I go through the last bit? Yes. Good question. For the expeditors, one in particular, it was a RFP process. So we were selected as one of the four vendors. So they were evaluating everybody at that point. I know in sales meetings, it often is you get one person and a variety. You know, you could have a mix of both the users and the choosers depending on the call. Any other questions? All right. I am definitely at time, so I′m just going to rush to the end. The things I want you to remember is when you create insights, make sure that you are reframing how someone thinks about the problem. Align your stakeholders. Find a common set of language. You know, this could be done through social media too. You could just follow the people that you are trying to appeal to and see what words overlap as you go. And then coach and educate your sales team to have conversations. It′s not just about preaching the speeds and feeds that your thing does. It′s about how do you have a conversation that aligns people. Thank you guys very much.