OpenAI, LinkedIn's Privacy Concerns, & Customer Evidence in GTM
Join us for some of the latest news in GTM and hear from Evan Huck on the impact of customer evidence for your brand.
So you're just trying to pop out all these numbers,
which like half the time people didn't even understand.
This is like useless in my opinion.
Like who cares?
Like if you don't want this, don't be on social media.
Our quantity begets quality
and you can't have quality without quantity.
Real talk backed up with real action.
This is GTM News Desk.
I'm Nick Bennett and I'm Mark Killins.
Let's see what's trending.
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
The first headline story for today is around Johnny I.
You know, Johnny Ivnik?
I do, didn't he?
We used to work for Apple.
Oh yeah, he works for Apple for a long time.
Steve Jobs, you know, partner in crime
for a lot of different things.
He's a famous hardware designer, designer overall,
but you know, hardware is something he specializes in.
And if you look at this story,
we found it in TechCrunch has been reported
in numerous places though, 'cause it's a big deal.
Finally, someone has the smarts to say,
"Wait a minute, it'd be a lot better
if we created some type of hardware
to match to all of this AI hype."
Meaning if you try to just stick AI
into an existing kind of hardware experience,
I don't think it will go that well.
We'll see, Apple just announced they have a ton of AI
stuff coming out in the iPhone 16
and other versions that support it.
But finally, someone is partnering with Sam Altman
at OpenAI to say, "Look, let's design a actual piece
of hardware that is specifically created
for how people will and should interact
with different types of AI."
This is gonna be fascinating to watch,
'cause I hypothesized for a long time, software is great,
but it's only as good as you apply
in the context of something.
And for AI, like right now,
I think there's a lot of fucking talk about it, obviously.
Not a lot of follow through though.
It's pretty much like, "Do all these things,
do all these things, but how do you do those things?
How do you do them on an ongoing basis?
Show it to me in the context of like day and life."
But like, there's been a big missing void
and I'm optimistic that this news gets us closer
to a future where AI fulfills its promises.
- So I'm a huge fan of his and it's interesting.
- Why are you a huge fan of his?
I've never talked about him before.
- Yeah. (laughs)
Just because I knew he worked at Apple
and I've always found any story that ever came out
from him, I would always read it
and I was just found it fascinating.
The stories I read when he was at Apple
and worked with Steve Jobs
and how that all kind of came together.
And I'm using the iPhone 15
and I was a beta tester of their iOS 18.
So I've been using their newest operating system
for I feel like five months, six months or something.
And I know it just recently came out,
but I'm on now 18.1,
which is where they start to really infuse the AI piece of it.
And it's super interesting,
but you can now take a photo
and you don't have to go download any other software
or anything, but just within Apple's operating system,
you can remove stuff.
And I tried this with a picture
from our dinner the other night
where it was you, Mac and a few other people.
I was like, can I just remove someone from this picture?
So like, 'cause you think about it,
like we take pictures often,
like sometimes like you just need like a solo picture
and it's such a pain to like, how do you crop it?
Do I have to put it in the Photoshop?
And like the AI that they've built into the iPhone
or I guess the software of the iPhone,
like I was just able to like scribble out
and poof, you were like, you were gone.
And I was like, this looks like the photo was taken
with you not in it.
And I was like, that literally took two seconds.
And I was like, now that is fantastic.
And something that like, I can't tell you like,
there's been so many times that I've needed a,
like a use for that.
And like, I just haven't been able to do it.
And like, now I did it in like less than five seconds.
- There you go.
Yeah, it's a real big interesting to see how it shakes out
to trying to raise a billion dollars,
probably not even enough to build a new hardware device.
Probably could take more than that,
but it's gonna take a few years,
but I do think that's where it starts to become mainstream.
Once they have a piece or pieces of hardware
that bring to life the promise.
'Cause without the smartphone,
a lot of the talk about everything
that was talked about in the 90s,
and I was young, so I don't, you know,
remember all of it per se,
but there's a lot of promises being thrown around
around how computers are gonna transform your lives
until a device small enough to help you transform your life.
And even an actual watch,
it was a lot of just garbage talk.
- Yeah, 100%.
Cool, let's dive in to headline number two.
And Mark, I don't know if you've turned yours off,
but this pissed me off.
And it's interesting, I've been reading a lot about this,
but LinkedIn has decided to enroll everyone,
that is a user, and I mean,
they've over a billion users now,
or I don't know if it's a billion active users,
but they have a billion people on LinkedIn,
I guess, as a platform.
And so they have this new setting
that says, "Data for Genitive AI Improvement."
It says, "Can LinkedIn and its affiliates
use your personal data and content you create on LinkedIn
to train generative AI models that create content?"
Everyone is opted into that.
So basically, you're now creating content for LinkedIn,
which I guess Microsoft as well,
which I'm sure that's the reason why this whole thing
came about is because of Microsoft.
But like, you're consenting to use your data
for training their own AI models,
which like one, you know, they're secretly collecting user data,
that it's a hidden setting,
like to go and find this setting in your LinkedIn,
it's buried under a bunch of other things,
which is even scarier.
Users have to opt out,
or your data gets harvested by default,
which is like, why would you do that?
And for me, this raises major privacy,
major consent concerns.
I know lots of people that were so pissed off about this,
that were like, I'm done with LinkedIn,
and I don't know, I just, if they explicitly told me
this was going to happen and like told you about it,
maybe I'd be like, okay, cool, they told me about it,
I get it, but like to blatantly do it
and enroll me without my consent,
and that just, you know, rubs me the wrong way.
- I actually don't think this is a big deal at all.
And I'm actually surprised you're so upset by it.
- Really?
- Because have you seen the other story about meta?
For 18 years, what they were doing?
No, I haven't.
For 18 years, since 2007,
meta has used all of that data to train all their AI systems.
18 years, Nick, like this is like useless, in my opinion.
Like, who cares?
Like, if you don't want this, don't be on social media.
I'm not surprised by this.
I'm actually, I'm actually, this is probably
the best kind of thing.
It was leaked or someone told people about it,
before someone like meta could do it for 18 years.
I don't know, I just don't understand why people
are like pissed about this.
So you don't mind creating free content
for Microsoft and LinkedIn?
- We're doing it for Google.
We're doing it for everyone right now.
What's the difference?
We're doing it for TikTok.
I don't understand the difference, sir.
Again, but why couldn't they just like tell you?
- Dude, it's 'cause your parents will tell you things.
It's the same thing, it's the same reason.
Like, you don't tell your kids things.
Same reason, Nick.
I mean, this really is like, I saw the story.
I'm like, oh, this is gonna be great.
So I can debate you on this.
'Cause like, I am more, what I care more about
is the algorithm bullshit.
I could care less about this stuff.
The algorithm needs data to be an algorithm.
Like, whatever.
Like the AI stuff, yeah, it's probably pretty, you know,
black box, because AI is a whole different thing
than an algorithm, kind of it is, kind of it isn't.
'Cause like now they could use your IP
to regenerate something for someone else,
and blah, blah, blah, but like, dude, like,
that's already the box, the cats are the box.
It's a cluster right now with all that stuff, right?
So until government at some point could be five,
10, maybe never down the road,
regulate some of this stuff, I think we're at your own,
you know, you just at your own free will.
So yeah, to me, it's more like Google finally
after 25, 30 years of saying like, look,
and through some leaks, here's how the algorithm works.
I think if LinkedIn was really proactive,
they'd be helping people understand the algorithm
better and actually doing like updates like Google.
Like I think LinkedIn is on the scale
of like transparent from an algorithm standpoint.
Like not transparent at all, it's all over the place.
It's, that's what I hate about LinkedIn the most.
- I agree, I also don't like that.
'Cause at least, you know, I'm not saying
I do a lot on Twitter, but like,
at least they're pretty transparent
about their algorithm over there.
- You mean Elon's playgrounds?
- Yeah, I mean, but I mean, I don't create it.
I guess I don't create content there to like care about.
- I mean, maybe, maybe not.
I mean, I mean, talk about someone scraping your data,
like Elon.
So, I don't know man.
I just, he's definitely using it.
He's been forced right from the beginning.
We are gonna take all the tweets and all the stuff
to like train the data.
- Yeah, I mean, I guess that's what we're opting into
to do any social media these days without,
I mean, I never read those like,
when you sign up for something like,
this is what you signed up for.
I'm just like, yeah, scroll down, accept.
- I mean, I think that's like the vast majority of people, right?
- Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, we're gonna talk to Evan from User Evan
and it's here in a moment of the third segment.
And it's gonna be interesting to get his take
on being customer first and using the voice
of your customer of these things.
These platforms, we are the product, not the customer.
We are the product being the customer
of their free service.
And it's a very fast, slippery slope.
And yeah, I think if you don't want this stuff to happen,
you basically cannot be on any of these services, 100%.
Well, let's dive in with Evan, excited, and let's do it.
Let's go to segment number three.
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Segment number three, folks.
It's been a good show so far.
Our special guest today is Evan.
Evan from User Evidence, kind of rhymes.
- Yeah, well, you sometimes call it User Evan,
that's 'cause it's my complete, but.
Was that intentional?
- No, the domain was only $11
and seemed to capture the speedest that we're in,
so it popped out as a good choice.
- I like it, I like it.
Well, welcome to GTM NewsDask.
Tell us a bit about yourself.
- I'm a reformed salesperson.
Yeah, I graduated from Stanford
and at the time, finance was the cool thing,
but it wasn't, it became not that cool.
And I didn't learn any coding or anything.
So I've gotten the sales kind of randomly at a startup.
And then it's just been there ever since.
I've gotten the sales leadership.
And then four years started this company, User Evidence,
to have an out 32 people venture back $9 million
a series 18 months ago based in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
- Whoa, that's quite the place to,
it's a living if you like an adult playground.
- It is fun.
- Yeah, there's a lot of cool stuff to do.
If you ski your mountain bike or anything like that,
or sell a sauce, that's a good place to be.
I used to do both a lot, ski and mountain bike,
but now with three very small kids
that has taken a back seat for the time being.
- I hear you on that.
Yeah, I have a 10 month old and three in a half year old.
And so yeah, my back country skiing
is definitely taking a hit.
- Yeah, we're all in the same boat.
Nick has got twins, Nick's about to get his ACL fixed tomorrow.
He'll become even stronger after that.
User evidence, it's interesting.
'Cause it's the literal name of what you do in the company.
Like before we get into gathering user evidence
and what this all means and everything,
I love the background of you being a seller
'cause I can kind of see the connection
immediately out of the gate.
But when you thought about creating the company
and naming it and how it's evolved,
kinda give us a little bit of a backstory.
That'd be interesting.
- I had sole enterprise software for a long time
and I had felt the problem that we solve.
Like I would be in a deal with a healthcare company
trying to sell a six-figure deal and they would always ask,
hey, can you show me examples or case studies or whatever
of someone that looks like me,
my same industry, my same use case
and what kind of ROI that they got
and I'd be like, all right, well, crap,
it's a good marketing team.
What do we got?
It's like, we got this story from State Farm Insurance.
It looks awesome.
Like it does look awesome, but it's not relevant to my buyer.
But if you think about it's a hard problem to solve.
Like if you're selling to 17 different industries
across three different personas and five different regions,
it would be really tough to create stories
and evidence across that whole spectrum of segments.
But the insight that we have is that
software companies, they often have thousands of users now.
So if you could somehow just unlock stories at scale
from these thousands of plus users,
that would solve that content relevancy problem.
- Love that.
I'm gonna, Nick, you can ask the first official question,
but I'm gonna just plant something in your head, Evan.
I've talked a lot about the importance of customer examples.
When selling, when helping your customers become successful,
I'm just gonna plant that seed,
but Nick, take the first official question.
- Yeah, absolutely.
So, you know, and again, I've done customer marketing,
so I've also lived this, but you know,
how do you make gathering and using customer evidence
not suck?
Because let's be honest, like,
there's so much shitty stuff that's out there today.
And it's like, you don't want it to suck.
Like, how can you make it human?
How can you make it personal?
- Yeah, it sucks on two fronts.
One, the collection process for the customer marketers,
I remember it, when I was at Survey Monkey,
I closed this 1.5 million dollar deal with most Fargo.
And the marketing team was like,
"Hey, can you go get them to do a case today?"
I was like, "You're trying to get like a freaking fortune
500 bank to do anything, like let around,
like go on the record and publicly endorse you."
So it's just, it's a painful process to try
to like extract the storeation customer,
'cause they don't want to talk publicly,
they got legal PR or whatever.
But then on the buyer side, it sucks too,
because we're so skeptical.
Like we've all seen like, you go to every website,
it's like 4 and 38% ROI.
Like we're all gonna save you times of money.
And now there's like 50,000 tools
that are all saying the same thing.
And it starts to sound like noise.
So the kind of like varnished case study that's like,
you know, this company was a great partner,
delivered a bunch of ROI.
I think we're just starting to kind of like discount it,
just 'cause it seems so marketing-ified.
So there's an opportunity at some point, I think,
to go for humanized and like realism
and get more specific with the actual way
that the product would use
and what actual metrics it was driving.
That kind of goes against the canonical marketing advice
of like, "We can't market features,
"we have to market benefits."
People interpreted that so literally
that we're all just saving time and money.
Like, yes, all SAS does.
Like we can't just boil it down,
it's gonna be the sex here.
- Such a good point 'cause like, I feel like,
it's just like anything, like all those review sites
that are out there, like you think anyone,
like it would write a crappy read,
it's just like, you know, even like your user stories,
it's like, why would any company put out
a terrible user story that trying to inflate their numbers,
trying to make it look good?
But like you said, it's all just for me.
And this was something when I was at Alice,
we were in the gifting space,
like I was like, our case studies
in our user stories are so fluffy that like,
it's just, you're just trying to pop out all these numbers,
which like half the time people didn't even understand.
So like, I'm with you 100% on that.
- I think the special thing with review sites,
like it's a great place, we actually did our own
like research study on this.
We surveyed over 600 buyers and we asked them,
you know, where do you start your search
and then where you finish it?
And review sites and analyst reports
were great places to start, right?
Someone has done a lot of the mental work
and you know, calculations of basically getting
to a top 10 list.
But what it doesn't help you do is once you've made
that short list, something having a 4.62 versus 4.67,
like doesn't help us to choose the solution.
So there's a layer of depth and specificity
that again, review sites great to start,
but I don't believe they've solved the whole entire piece
and actually choosing the right render
in your unique environment and tech ecosystem and all that.
- Yeah, so there's a two-part question then.
So customer story, case study versus customer evidence.
Are they the same or are they different?
And then the second part, what is customer evidence?
- It's a great question and it's kind of a term
we're trying to define a little bit more.
And the answer I would give is that case studies
and testimonials are a subset of a broader superset,
which is customer evidence.
So they are one type of customer evidence.
What else is in there is I think one of the biggest things
today is like statistical proof.
One of the biggest challenges that we saw
in our research to buyers in this environment,
which makes sense and let's characterize the environment.
It is a conservative buying environment right now, right?
Budgets are tight, bigger buying groups.
You've always a little bit more hesitant to make a decision
and they want to know that things are going to work
and deliver value.
Helping buyers create like a concrete business case
around the value in the ROI was one of the biggest gaps
that was preventing buyers from actually making a purchase.
So another type of customer evidence is,
you know, broad based statistical research
and statistical proof that would substantiate claims
around time savings or cost savings or latency reductions
or increases in pipeline or whatever the metrics are
that you use to build a business case.
Competitive evidence was another one that stood out
where again, because there's so many damn vendors now
and they're all saying the same thing, it's just,
it's so noisy.
And so the reaction from buyers was to kind of flee
to what they perceived as safer options,
which were bigger vendors, you know,
vendors that showed up in Gartner research
and stuff like that.
And so emerging vendors are having a really tough time
getting people off of that default safe option
and customer evidence.
In other words, being able to answer why should I choose
you versus someone else is a huge opportunity
that emerging vendors are not, you know,
answering that question very well right now.
But it is another type of broad way
what I'd call customer evidence,
which is direct proof and feedback
from a broad base of users that would give you confidence
in making a decision.
- How do you gather this then?
Or maybe pick a specific type.
I love how you've worked on those types.
Like what's a good way to gather customer evidence
so that it is coming from the voice of the customer
and not the brand?
- I think it requires a variety of like channels
or mediums.
It depends on the size of your customer base.
And if you two are my only customers,
this is by far the most efficient way
to get an interesting depthful story
is just talking to you one on one.
However, if I am gone and I have 4,000 accounts
and at those accounts,
they're an average of 10 users.
So now I have 400,000 users I need to talk to.
I can't go do this with 400,000 users.
So you need some sort of one to many scaled way
of capturing the feedback.
But now we have, let's say,
so surveys are one way to do that.
But now we have another problem
where we have 5,000 responses and we need to somehow
make sense of it and start to divine
the kind of key salient themes and what they like
and what they don't like.
I would recommend a combination of both.
Like scaled one to many feedback collection,
but it is also important to augment that
with really in depth, organic human conversations.
This is an example.
We are obviously more on the scaled side.
Like our product helps capture feedback
from hundreds of customers
and then build content of proof off of that.
But we hired a win-losser to do manual human interviews
like this with our lost yields
and they've gotten an incredibly rich set of insights.
So you need a spectrum of different levels
to engage customers to get feedback, I would say.
- It's almost always both.
You gotta do both.
I mean, unless you're really small to your point,
then the scale thing doesn't make as much sense.
- Right, yeah, totally.
- All right, we'll dig deeper, but go ahead, Nick.
You can ask the next question.
I will go down a rabbit hole
and I just won't shut up about this
'cause this is such a passion of mine Evan.
Like going back to my early days of HubSpot,
the importance of, I mean, we said stall for the customer
and then at Drift, it was put the customer
at the center of everything you do.
Now it's become kind of like just this thing
that people say and it's become kind of just garbage,
but I'll go back in my soapbox in a minute, but go ahead.
- Let's talk about the biggest mistake from marketers
when it comes to gathering and also using customer evidence.
Like what are the things that you see
because we try to make these somewhat tactical
and we want people to be like, all right, listen,
like you're doing this, please stop
and this is a better way to do it.
- This is another thing that came out of our research report too
and this is not Marker's fault,
but it is that they're missing a little bit on it.
Executives and particularly like brand and corporate marketing
put so much pressure on marketers
and particularly customer marketers
to get the biggest, best shiny logos.
Like we want Wells Fargo, right?
We want State Farm and it makes sense, right?
The CEO loves it like you can use it
in earnings reports and stuff like that,
but they take forever to create
and there is diminishing marginal return
to that ninth awesome logo
and the cost of that is you are under investing then
on creating scale of content
across a diverse representation of your customer base.
And the person that feels that pain
and the example before is sales
and these more tactical go-to-market functions.
Like your investor deck will look sick,
your homepage will look awesome,
but even if it's a big company that has all the research
in the world like sales for a strict instance,
like you're gonna have some mid-market rep
that sells a particular product line,
a particular region that needs a specific story
against a certain competitor
and they're not gonna have it, right?
So I think there is a,
the air is an over investment in brand
or corporate marketing oriented polish stories
at the expense of scale, diversity and representation
across a larger portfolio of customers.
- Yeah, like that.
I was, before I did customer marketing,
I did account based marketing,
which this also comes very,
it's an important part of,
but I also did field marketing for about like 10 years.
And one of the companies I used to work for,
Clary, which was in the forch out space,
they had this impressive wall of logos
and it was interesting when I was developing
a lot of the programs,
they cared a ton about the logos and I was just like,
okay, you have logos on the wall in the office, cool,
I get it, come you know, people go there,
you have it on the website,
like you said, you have it in your,
your board decks, investor decks, stuff like that,
but like we didn't scale the content
the way that I thought we should have.
I completely agree with everything that you just said.
It's just like, and I've not only experienced that once,
I've experienced that multiple companies now.
- I think it's, yeah, it's like a Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Like if you're a really early stage company,
that you do need that logo wall to demonstrate
that you've sold an enterprise.
And once you hit long or Clary, it's like,
all right, we get it, we get it.
You work with big companies, right?
It's like, we knew that anyway, right?
It doesn't like differentiate yourself any further.
There's this interesting question that gets posed to me
sometimes is like, is quality better than quantity
when it comes to customer stories?
But if you think about what makes quality,
and again, we asked buyers this,
and like one of the biggest factors for,
is the story of quality, you know, useful story is relevance.
Like, does it look like me?
Can I see myself in their shoes?
Same industry, same use games, same tech stack?
And you cannot accomplish that sort of relevance
unless you have quantity, ironically, right?
'Cause if you sell to 17 different industries
in order to serve each industry, you need 17 stories.
So ironically, our quantity begins quality,
and you can't have quality without quantity.
- Like I said before, it's almost always both.
Which as I listened to you talk, Evan,
to me, one of the key things that makes customer evidence
extremely successful is specificity.
- Then you were saying relevance, but also like resonance,
which is like a derivative of, I guess, relevance.
But tell us more about specificity
when it comes to these different types
of customer evidence and how that's important.
- There's one thing that came out of our study as well,
is like the technological environment
is getting so much more complex, right?
Like we all wanna consolidate tech stacks,
and we all need our stuff, especially in Martek,
to talk to each other and work together.
So it's not enough to know, do you like the product?
Like let's just choose a specific example,
let's say it is, you know, clearing forecasting or something.
I need to know that it works in concert with Salesforce,
my CRM, and you know, GONG is my thing.
And also I have a PLG motion
with an enterprise motion on top of it.
And my ACV is 50 to 75 gig,
'cause that's a very different motion than 500 million.
So there's all these like factors and permutations
that help me as a buyer, like basically,
I'm trying to do a calculation in my head,
is like, is this thing gonna work?
That the more like a similar customer,
the less I have to put like a, you know,
kind of a discounted unknown on it, right?
And it's like, if this is exactly me,
then I know it's gonna work.
So I think that's, the specificity is a more tactical
examination of how the solution works
in a particular environment,
and what that customer actually did.
Like one trick I love, that's kind of a trend, right?
Not a trend, 'cause not many people are doing it,
'cause it's a good idea though.
Is framing customer stories in the context more
of like a playbook?
So we did this from one of our best customers, which is GONG.
It's not GONG case study, it's here's GONG's playbook
on exactly how they use user evidence to accomplish,
you know, whatever that it is, right?
So that framing in a more tactical guidance lens,
I think is a great way to up the credibility
and interestingness of a story relative
to, you know, polish marketing case study.
- Mutiny does us a bit.
- Yeah, totally.
- And so they're like, right?
Damn mutiny.
- They have great content, yeah, tactically helpful,
insights laid and that is, that's good stuff.
- Cool, all right.
Let's dive into the last question of this segment.
What's the most common misconception from executives
about either gathering or using customer evidence?
Because I've worked for a lot of execs,
you'll read the report directly to the CMO
or working directly with the CEO
and not all of them are funny enough believers of this,
which is even more mind-blowing.
But I'm curious, like, what's the most common misconception
that you've seen from executives?
- I think the most common misconception,
other than how much work it takes to do this well,
and customer marketers get their ass kicked,
'cause like, hey, like what the heck?
Like, you need to be creating way more.
Nick, you know that.
They also are just tricky,
'cause that function doesn't really have a seat
at the executive table.
Like, they're very elite product marketing
or corporate marketing, and so that's its own problem.
But I would say the biggest misconception from executives
is kind of narrowly framing it as case studies
or just testimonials, right?
As this checkbox thing that we need to have
some of our on our website,
there's a much more interesting and diverse range
of applications for customer evidence.
I'll give you an example, Gong does this incredibly well.
Yeah, that's a competitive space, especially now,
that all of them are building these suites, right?
And so what they've done really well in these evidence
is create really rich, interesting,
competitive, enabled mid-content,
so they did an entire survey around why people switched
from Chorus that looked at, you know,
what are the differentiators and features
that Dong has that Chorus does it?
You know, what was it like to migrate
to kind of nullify the concern people would have
that migrating is gonna take a lot of time?
You know, what's been the impact post switch
and that generated a ton of proof that was like,
we switched from Gong to Chorus and back again
and Gong's lights out, like Gong's analytics
or whatever it is.
So if you're a salesperson there and you get asked,
you know, why should I choose you versus Chorus?
Rather than being like, you know,
we're the market leader, we, you know,
Gartner Ritzis, you know, if we're here
in the Quadrant and Chorus is, you know,
slightly over there, they can now point to, you know,
178 people that have switched from Chorus
and be like, hey, don't take my word for it.
You know, here's actual evidence
from these users of why they switch.
So that's just one example.
Yeah, industry proof would be another one,
but ROI data would be another really good one.
But yeah, if you nearly just peg at the case studies
and testimony, you'll see missed this opportunity
to essentially have your customers go out
and be your best salespeople.
And obviously customers are gonna be way more credible
than, you know, anyone on your go-to-market team.
- Yeah, we're big believers in this idea of called
or named Integrated Revenue Campaigns.
So you bring a message and a set of offers
to the market between marketing, sales, and CS teams.
And you do this for specific audiences
at specific points of the customer journey.
Two things on this and love to get your take on it, Evan,
before we go deep in the exclusive content with you.
First off, it seems like every campaign you run
based off the statement you just said
should have some forward customer evidence,
even top of funnel, but like any type of campaign,
there has to be some type of customer evidence included
as part of the messaging and/or offers.
And then additionally, you should probably have
almost an always on campaign that is always running
that's more mid to bottom of the funnel
that brings to life the right type of customer evidence
for the type of buyer you sell to,
to always present to them something that's in their language
and coming from someone that they might know or respect.
Agree, disagree, how would you expand that?
- Yeah, I agree with that.
Particularly, so your first statement, you know,
customer evidence can be used for any sort of campaign
touch point to the whole thing.
Just as an example of that,
yeah, they may not sell like customer evidence,
it isn't a way, or early top of the funnel,
like nurturing type content, right?
So there's a good opportunity to use customers
in a couple of ways.
One is like best practices type content,
that's not necessarily like,
oh, our customers love us and they're seeing a ton of value,
but more tactical, like here, you know,
nine ways people are using gong for forecasting
or something like that.
So these kind of more educational advice,
you know, tactical guidance,
I think has a great way to use customers early in the funnel.
The other one that maybe is not exactly customers,
but the methodology is the same,
is more industry trends, market research.
So, you know, an asset that performed really well for us
as this report I've been talking about,
where we surveyed 600 buyers,
that 2024, you know, state of customer evidence
is a, you know, got way more at least
than any other type of asset that we've gotten.
So surveying the market,
and so that people can see from their peers,
like, where do they think the market's going?
I think is a really interesting asset type.
So yeah, you have people to traditionally think
a customer evidence is a kind of like bottom of the funnel.
You know, we're at the end of the sales cycle,
they needed a QCK study,
but if you can include it to the whole buyer's journey.
And yeah, if you have the sophistication, you know,
for using mutiny or something,
and you can serve it up in a targeted way where it's,
all right, we're going to show the healthcare testimonial
to the healthcare prospect, you know,
obviously bonus points for that too.
- All right, for everyone that's listening,
we're going to be going over to TAC Network,
where you can find the exclusive,
Evan's going to share kind of his proven framework.
We're going to be talking about some deep tactical
best practices when it comes to go to market.
So we will catch you on the other side shortly.
- Thanks for joining us on this episode of GTM News Desk,
presented by the TAC Network.
To hear our full conversation with our guests today,
head to the link in the show notes
to subscribe to the TAC Network.
Until next time, I'm Mark Killens.
- And I'm Nick Bennett.
Keep the people first, everybody.