The Transaction

You know the icebreaker people do where they ask you your spirit animal?

That's got to be one of the worst ones of all time.

I wouldn't even know.

What do you think?

What is a spirit animal?

It's like the animal that, if you were an animal, that you would be, right?

It's the way you, like it handles your personality and all these things.

It's the, it's, I don't know, Matt seems to like it.

I'm actually just trying to watch his reaction.

Do you ask people who your spirit animal is when you meet them?

Every time I meet somebody for the first time, I always start off every conversation with, what is your spirit animal?

And why is it a 300 year old tortoise?

From ABM to PLG, from medic to med pick, the world of business is constantly evolving.

We'll cover the who, what, where, when, why, and most importantly, how you get The Transaction.

I'm Matt Amundson, and he's Craig Rosenberg.

Let's get started.

So I crossed paths with Alistair when we were at Gartner together, but before that, like he been literally one of the smartest guys I ever saw write and speak on the topic of sales tech, martech, AI now.

And so it was like, I've always, I've wanted to have him on the podcast.

We needed the right time.

We found the right time.

We scheduled this thing in days.

And so I'm just so happy to have you on Alistair.

And look, for anybody here that's not familiar with Alistair's work, you can Google him and you will find a ton of stuff either from your podcast or your writing, or if you're, I'm sure most of your work is still in the Gartner portal.

That was just amazing stuff.

And I remember just talking to you, just going, it made me feel like I had to up my game.

So I'm just really excited to have you on the show.

So everyone, the Transaction audience, I'd like to introduce you to our guest today, Alistair Wolcock.

Craig, Matt, it's awesome.

Thank you so much for having me.

Craig, at the risk of brown nosing to get the podcast going, I will say I felt the same when you came over from Topo and into Gardner where we first met and all of that, but also what you've done with Scale since has been impressive.

But it's a very cool space, super happy to be here.

Let's dive in.

Love it.

Yeah, I love it.

Two areas though that we'll do, our normal setup we'll do, and then I'd love, you've been doing a lot of work sort of looking at how changes in buying, but I wanna make sure we cover that as well.

But the first question we asked to start the conversation is if you had to talk about one thing, or it could be more than one, the most important thing we're trying to dig in on is where are the areas where the market thinks they're doing something right, they have a particular methodology, best practice, or what's happening in the market, and they're actually wrong.

And what is that, and then what should they do about it?

The microphone is to you, Alistair, and then let's see where this goes.

That's a big question.

I will, I'm gonna give you the answer, Craig and Matt, from the lens of sales tech vendors versus, I'm gonna say enterprise buyers, okay?

And specifically the enterprise space.

We love it.

The, there is a relentless, relentless push.

Like you only need to hop on every sales LinkedIn channel out there on any given day.

And it's just this nauseating push on advanced Mr.

Technology, now AI, now gen AI, and all of these things.

We saw coaching really take off out of the pandemic, of course, was kind of the thing that happened there and drove things.

And why I give that framing is the vendors are pushing the envelope as they should.

I think that's great.

But we all tend to forget that to the end buyer, particularly in the enterprise, most still today are still going, I just wish somebody actually regularly logged and used my CRM system.

Like you have these vendors talking to such advanced features and additional analytics, additional insights, the next best action, all of these things all the time.

And yet the average buyer is going, they're so overwhelmed.

They're like, I just need basic fundamentals from the core technology.

And I think that is actually where the sales tech vendors get mismatched to the buyer because they get an ops person hyped up on a functional piece.

Let's use coaching because it's probably the most prolifically used piece of sales technology, right?

Just basic coaching, recording what happened, what do I do next?

Like they all kind of do that now.

That's a pretty commodity piece of the market.

And where does the average enterprise struggle with that technology?

I don't have time to do anything with that.

It's great we now have a massive repository of this stuff, but I don't even have time to go do anything with it.

So vendors push on all of this to improve the rep, to have a better insight to the steps, but they've forgotten the fundamental.

And I think until you really in the enterprise hit on those basic fundamentals of automation, adoption, you're gonna miss the mark.

My final comment on that, Craig and Matt, is this.

I also think it's because of that, why these vendors gonna get massively disrupted over the next 24 to 36 months, because you now have Microsoft in the game with Copilot, and you have every one of them investing very heavily on the generative side, and they are giving good enough end user technology, but they're integrating it into the apps that everybody use every day.

They're integrating the outlook, they're integrating it into all of the core pieces, and at some point, why are you gonna continue to pay $150, $200 per seat when you can get good enough for $20?

Okay, did you, was that answer pandering to Matt and his sort of take on, but it is important.

I'm not sure you know, but like, so Matt generally, I'm gonna speak for you, Matt, and then you tell me if I'm wrong.

It's a different way of saying what Matt says to us all the time, which is like, the tech thing, we went too far when actually we just have to, he's thinking about it more of a seller perspective.

They just gotta, like, we gotta go back to fundamental.

You know, we're sort of thinking about all the advanced things when at the end of the day, one of the biggest issues we have on the sales side is fundamental and is actually more simple than that.

So that's why I was reacting, throwing my hands up in the air, thinking you were just pandering to Matt.

But I don't know, is that a good representation, Matt?

What you're saying?

Yes, yes, definitely.

Although I think what Alistair's talking about is something slightly different.

I definitely believe that, like, we have been continuously layering technology on bad process, right?

So when the foundation's shaky, you can put any great additional technology on top of it and it's not gonna be successful.

It won't be the thing that solves if you don't do a good job of targeting ICP, if you don't understand your persona, if you don't understand your customer's motivation, like, better technology's not necessarily gonna help you sell or even market more effectively.

But what I think Alistair's talking about is something that, like, I'm seeing really frequently in the market now, too, which is, you know, these successful sales in MarTech companies, a lot of what makes them them, the reason why their customers buy from them, that technology is being built by the larger tech companies and integrated directly into the products that they create.

So instead of logging into a separate tool in order to get that level of functionality, even if it's slightly worse, it's more powerful to the salesperson if it's where they live.

Now, I think certain companies have done this well and some of them have not done it super well.

I don't know how you feel about all the Einstein work that Salesforce has created, but I don't know how well that's helped salespeople.

And so having other tools like call coaching or AI alerts or email scripting seems to not be at risk of going away from Salesforce, but I'm personally very intrigued by what I think is gonna be a massive comeback from Microsoft in terms of what they're building into their office suite.

So that's my take, but I'd love to hear your feedback.

I'll jump in there, Matt.

Like I think, and Craig, yes, I'm very much on the, I say the bullish side of Microsoft's comeback on this, but let me just take a step back on that, Matt.

As you said, something is really important in terms of, you know, let's just pick on Salesforce Einstein.

Like just go to the product page and look through it.

It's a dizzying amount of optionality, okay?

Last time I tried to configure something on there, it was, you know, you could have 30 different optionalities times three.

Like it's just, it's through the roof.

Before I have even worked at Gartner many years ago, you know, I did a stint in management consulting.

And at that firm, at that time, we did a ton of work in building digital applications for end users.

So many of which most people probably used on this podcast to buy coffees or book flights and stuff like that.

One of the things that is always true when you're designing end user applications is, when I, whatever I'm trying to solve for, okay?

So the outcome I'm trying to create, if you can't achieve that in the product within at least six clicks.

So I'm talking like you open something, you click to do something, you got six moves.

Think of it, you got six chess moves to win the game, to produce the outcome, that's it.

So when you're talking about Matt there and a lot of the vendors tend to, I'm always like, just count your clicks.

Count what's going on.

You're talking about people that have to, just to sell something.

They're opening, what is the average now?

7.8 applications?

Like they're just to open stuff, they've already exceeded the six.

Let alone actually then doing something in the application.

And you will see people with browsers, with tabs all over the place and all of this.

So I think that's a really important piece to remember.

End user functionality, the user experience is so important.

And if you can't produce an outcome in six clicks, that's a major headwind and it's gonna be a big problem in terms of really driving prolific adoption.

Why Microsoft and the big OEMs have an advantage now?

Because Generative AI is giving them access to the data in a way they've never had it before.

And they have the native applications, there is used to, and they're simply able to get there a little bit quicker, a few less clicks.

And if people listening in here are not convinced about user experience, many years ago, unfortunately he passed away, but there was one of the smartest guys I've ever known in the world of driving valuations and M&A.

Names is Lars Van Dam, and he was a brilliant, brilliant person.

And he did this research arc one time and all this work to show, and you can benchmark this against the S&P 500, the Russell, every major index.

Companies that focus on that user experience side that are in the tech space, have a six to one out performance of those that don't in terms of market results.

And they have for 15 years.

So back to the fact that people are using 7.8 technologies and that's just to open the stuff, we clearly need to have consolidation.

Consolidation typically is going to favor the big guy.

But you guys are, so I just, well, first of all, I just got to push back because did you say Lars Van Dam?

Because I, that got me really excited.

Not what you're thinking of.

Oh, damn it.

So, but, so are you guys making the argument?

So I am, I too have seen, well, on the AI side, certainly what Microsoft has is in good shape.

But the guys that listen to our show and that buy this, they're not, I mean, I'm not sure they're aware of it or anything like, I mean, it seems like, you know, I do think there are, there's levels of functionality that the big folks will have that we think is really cool now that will be incorporated in their product and is now and will get better.

But like, it seems like there's a ton of innovation happening right now in sales tech from startups, and it's really exciting stuff, and it's stuff big folks wouldn't have thought about.

And so, I mean, well, first of all, just react to that and account for that really quick, and then we can talk about what you guys are saying in terms of consolidation and the big guys, because it seems like there's hundreds, if not thousands, of new vendors coming to the market here on the sales and martech side, leveraging AI for just completely different disruptive moves.

So, I'll just start with that scenario and get your comments on that, and we'll figure it out from there.

I react with some hesitancy on it, Craig, in that I look at a lot of what the innovation is happening right now, and it's largely really getting accelerated due to generative AI, right?

So, people are tapping into large language models, some are using vector databases, things like, and that is very cool stuff.

I'm a raving fan, anybody building off of that, please continue to.

But I don't, for a second, sit there and go and say, is that as innovative as what Anthropic or Gemini or what OpenAI has done?

No, you've taken the core piece, and you just figured out how to kind of do a process step on top of it that is helping.

And those things are helping.

Like, use the classic of everybody now does email summarization.

Take a meeting like this, you summarize it, they're hugely helpful.

Like, you compare that to 18 months ago, I wouldn't not want to have that technology anymore.

It's just a core table thing I want.

And we're seeing all of those kind of just functional pieces happening.

But does that make you a disruptive vendor?

So if you think of like Clayton Christensen, right, his classic disruptive innovation, is that disruptive innovation?

I would say no.

That is vendors fast innovating off of a disruptive technology.

And I think it's really important to categorize those vendors that way.

Those that are fast innovating versus those that are actually disrupting.

And I think very few are disrupting.

I think most are fast innovating.

Matt, you got any comments on that?

I would say I've seen people that take their own little spin off of the big pieces, and they feel a little bit like magic tricks, and they're very exciting for temporary periods of time, and then they fall out of vogue very quickly.

And I think it's because they are not truly innovative.

They're just kind of biting off a piece.

And I don't know that that makes a big successful company.

I think it's something that people will talk about and say, oh, isn't that cool that you can do this?

Great, yeah, but I can do it over here as well.

So I tend to agree with you.

The thing that I was more leaning into when I was thinking about some of this technology operating in the places where sales teams are is, you know, there was a time 10-ish years ago when, you know, people built their sales technology to exist in the places where salespeople existed.

And then it turned into this movement of, nah, you got to log in through our RSAS app.

And I don't think that that's done anybody any good.

I think some of that was driven by the fact that people were very careful around, like, their login numbers and their activity numbers and things like that, and so they wanted people to log in to their apps.

But I think the more that you can make, and the advice that I would give to anybody who's thinking about building sales or marketing tools that are leveraging AIs, like, build them so that they can be used in the places where people are actually working today.

So whether that's CRM, a cloud data warehouse, a marketing automation tool, et cetera, build them there.

I think that there is an awesome opportunity for these companies to bring real value to market really quickly by making headless applications that actually make the core business tools stronger and more useful.

And if you can step aside from the, well, it matters to me how many people and how many times people log into my product and actually just get to the point where, one, I can build something great.

I don't have to spend a whole bunch of time trying to design a really great user interface, but it can just be used directly in the place where my end customers will actually use it.

I think these things get to market faster.

I think they're infinitely more valuable.

And I think that they get used a lot more because they just exist in the places where people are actually working today.

I think a great example of that, Matt, and I don't typically like to mention vendor names, but it's a reasonably prolific one.

Grammarly is a good example of that.

It just lives in it.

But also, Matt and Craig, I want to...

When I think of you, you look at signals often.

What's something that is a warning sign of a change coming?

Gardner just actually released, Craig, our old firm.

Gardner is pretty good at the CIO research.

I think we would all agree when it comes to CIOs, they're pretty be dialed in on that better than most.

This year, what is one of the biggest trends and asks they're getting from CIOs is about repatriation and moving back to on-prem.

Now, I don't want anybody to interpret that as cloud is going away.

No, cloud is here, it's staying, is going to be a core function of any business.

But why are CIOs suddenly going, hey, I need data, like I need my data.

I can't have all of my vendors hoarding the data and not allowing me to have it anymore, aka the SaaS model for the other past 10 years.

Well, because they're trying to solve the same thing that we're talking about.

They're being disrupted every industry by AI, by generative AI.

You can't create your in-house competitive edge if all of your data is sitting with an end vendor.

And in the world of sales tech and marketing tech, how many vendor contracts don't actually allow the end customer access to that data?

Unless they know to go negotiate for that and create like a separate S3 bucket in Amazon or something like that, they're actually never getting it.

So they're one of the most important aspects of their go-to market.

They don't have access to that data.

Their CIOs are wakening up to this and going, hey, I got to start bringing some of this back in house because I'm going to be investing in my own large language models, my own vector databases, my own things I need to do.

And so that's a really good early indicator to say to Matt, to your point, if you aren't thinking as a sales tech vendor and a marketing tech vendor of how am I going to live in a hybrid SaaS world and be closer to that, I think you're going to miss the mark.

I don't think you're going to miss the mark in 2024.

I think you may be in for it in 2025 and 2026 though.

I agree with you.

I agree with you.

And I think what you're talking about speaks to something that I'm personally very passionate about, which is first-party data within SaaS apps needs to be freed to the customers so that they can leverage it.

And you see it all the time with any type of SaaS workflow tool that deals with data.

I want that data back.

I want that first-party data that's sitting in that app there.

And I don't want to have to download it into a CSV file.

I need those SaaS apps.

And SaaS apps, anybody who's thinking about launching a SaaS app needs to be thinking about launching a SaaS app as warehouse native.

You have to, because your customers are going to want to consume your data directly into their warehouse, whether that's or Data Lake or whatever their environment looks like.

And that is going to be the future of how this data is leveraged for go-to-market.

People now have the opportunity to sit on all this massive amount of data.

The infrastructure for collecting data is all there now.

And then they're going to want to actually activate that data and use it for their go-to-market.

And if it's sitting behind some wall that they can't breach, they're going to be unhappy, and they're going to go to another vendor that gives them access.

I am so excited about that, to clear approach, Matt, because when I think of, we've said for years, personalization, personalization, personalization, right?

That's been the mantra in sales and marketing tech, all of that stuff.

Most end customers know their end customer than any sales tech vendor, right?

And that's good.

They should.

They should know their ICP and all that.

But why wouldn't you then, as a vendor, want to go, hey, I have the process, I have the mechanism to enable you to actually deliver the personalization off of your data?

Not my data, not my product, but actually yours.

And I think those that figure that out and take a pretty verticalized approach to how they build their product, I think they're going to be wildly successful.

I think those that do what we've seen, this kind of horizontal play, and Craig, you and I have spoken about this, this wide horizontal play of, well, I'm kind of good enough for everything.

I don't see that.

I think the winners will be those that are highly verticalized.

They enable customers to enable their data.

And we're going to see those ones take off.

I love it.

Okay, one more tech thing, then let's transition off tech.

Because you said signal, and we threw out the phrase signal based selling the other day, and then we put on LinkedIn, it just took off.

And it feels like we're on the verge of that being the catchphrase of the century.

I haven't thrown it to Gottlieb to see what he says, but I'm just going to say the phrase, because I said word and I put it on LinkedIn.

It's not a word, it's a phrase.

And then I'm going to get your reaction.

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Signal-based selling.

Alastair, what do you have to say about that?

Is that the next coming of a wrapper around...

I mean, A, is this really happening?

B, I mean, regardless of whether you like the phrase or not, what does it mean?

Just give us your reaction.

I'm in a yes, but.

My theory is not a yes and.

All right.

Yes, but because the but is if vendors take signal-based selling and it is simply to provide more analytics and I'm more like that insight level, I don't think that will have as big of a driving impact.

But to Matt's point, if signal-based selling is to be hyper-focused on next best action and like specific functional end user impact and is driving literally telling me what to do is automating one of those steps so I can do more, then I think yes, absolutely.

I think signal-based would go.

So signals to me are about the action.

They are not about the insight.

So I'm a signal, yes, but action not insight.

Yeah, you know, we, I, so when I was doing my recap, just thinking about the things that would truly drive this, right?

Because frankly, we've had data for a long time.

I mean, there's been, there's a lot of data that could be used.

But like, you know, you know, one is more and more folks will drop that data into a cloud data warehouse or somewhere that you can actually look at the data and that could talk about that for hours.

That's real, right?

I mean, that the ability to take in the different points of data.

The second part, though, is workflow and like the ability to trigger action or recommend action.

Those are two important parts to this.

So one is because everyone sort of when we had the initial sort of phrase of just not actually signal based selling is a new way of saying it.

So forget the ability to collect data and insights.

Just having the data and being able to look at it was our first version and that includes allowing sales to look at it.

But actually what's in that, that's that is a real thing, right?

Because the other part of single base selling is there are some really interesting things we now capture.

Like I'll just give you a simple one job listings looking at that scoring perspective at scale is an interesting signal.

You know, I've seen more and more vendors on the sort of ICP side being able to capture data that's really used like ICPs two years ago were vertical.

It was like, yes, we sell to tech company.

It was that segmentation like the ICP is really like what tech do they use today is an example.

That's a great one.

But also like business, the way they set up their business, the things that are happening there, those things are now capturable.

Those make a big difference in both figuring out who to target and exposing those things to sales.

But the second part of signal based selling that's so powerful is the automation of workflow.

Example A is if the data and the signals tell us that this is someone sales should talk to, that's one thing, and we should expose that data and allow them to go do something, maybe even trigger an email or set them up with the information for them to be effective on a call.

The interesting one is automagic workflow coming out of signals as well.

That wasn't happening.

So Matt and I are sort of putting together our thoughts on the things that we've been hearing, and one of them is like a really simple one that everyone can understand.

So I just had someone talk to me the other day like, oh my God, the sales team is not following up on event leads.

What a surprise.

I've never had that issue before.

But it's like, well, what's the real answer there?

It's like, well, a bingo card is actually nothing.

And so are there other signals that would say sales should follow up with them?

What are the signals that say, let's just throw them through an automated work for an autonomous SDR, whatever those things might be?

That's a perfect example of, to me, just a simple example of workflow coming out of signals.

I mean, there's a lot of different ways you could think about it that are more complicated.

When we think about signal-based selling and the reality of it is, A, there is better data, more interesting data where it's now capturable.

And then B, in terms of next best action, the actual effectuation of that action is actually pretty exciting as well.

That makes signal-based selling a real thing to me.

So that's my reaction and I'm sticking to it.

Any thoughts?

I saw you write something down, Alastair.

That was a win for me right there.

Yeah, while I was writing down this, I said auto magic.

I thought that was a great way of putting it.

Whether it's deliberate or not, but in my auto magic workflow.

I love this simplicity of your event one, right?

Where, hey, I had an event, I need people to follow up.

Time is the killer there.

We all know that, right?

It's just the speed at the time and the context of, hey, Craig and Matt, I met you at the event, here it is, just following up.

Even if it's as simple as that, that's there.

Why you would ever task that anymore to an individual, I don't know.

That's just, why even ask the question?

If you're seeing them not doing it, just automate it, right?

And then have, and that's a sequencing thing.

Any vendor that's in the sequencing space, I think, will get there, or the event technologies will quickly get there on that.

I think it's really interesting, though, where you were going with this idea of crawling public data, right?

So like job boards, job listings, stuff like that.

I think of financial reports every quarter.

We know right now, in 2024, one of the most important things for most vendors is trying to do cross-selling in their businesses, right?

And the customers they have, they're going to go wider.

We always say, read financial reports.

That's hardly a new ha-ha in sales.

But it's kind of like, Ben, follow up, Craig.

How many actually do it?

They don't.

Now, you can go throw a file in ChatGPD4 today, and it will give you an amazing output of going, hey, here's the four things that actually happened out of that three-hour meeting that you need to know.

But again, people still don't do the step.

They actually don't do that.

So that's another example of just take that as a signal.

And if you had a company that was posting on these jobs they need, let's say a customer success team.

They're trying to hire a bunch of customer success people.

And you run their financial report through.

So I got signal one saying they're hiring customer success people.

Signal two is, oh, look, their churn is 10% higher than that of their peer group because you always want comparable data.

Well, now I give confidence to the seller and I automate that entire outreach to say, I noticed this was just happening from your leadership.

I noticed you're hiring these people.

My technology is purpose-built to improve those metrics in this way.

Let me show you how I do that versus how I would do it for your competitor, BCD.

And literally all of that, Craig, I think we can automate all of that.

So you'd say auto-magic, I go, that's auto-magic to me and it's all in there.

That's just scripting.

That's not even crazy AI.

That's just scripting and sequencing of things.

Totally.

By the way, I think, and then I said we're going to move off tech.

We got like 14 minutes left.

Guys like Matt, so Matt's like a CMO, but demand gen master.

He can build these demand gen centers of excellence as good as anybody I know.

That was your compliment for the day.

Yeah.

Well, you didn't say anything about my new haircut.

I was going to say your new haircut looks incredible.

Look, I mean, you look, what are you, 17?

What's going on here?

I'm working on that.

Yeah.

That's the innovation in Alistair to come up with.

I just thought he matched Bruce Willis behind him.

See, you notice that we didn't even talk about it.

He brought up Van Dam.

I thought that was a dig, but then I realized he's actually talking about a real person who had a glorious last name.

But I do think, guys, with the automation of SDRs, so the autonomous SDR work, frankly, it's going to be autonomous prospecting that a guy like Matt will have.

The center of excellence actually today is typically demand, so they're doing lead nurturing, webinar emails, et cetera.

These are organizations that are really good at the optimization of messaging and looking at data and actually being able to create what is today marketing flows.

But they're going to own the follow up, even to lesser extent, some of the high volume prospecting.

I think the account base falls directly into the top of the spear.

ICP stuff will enable sales reps or SDRs on, but you're going to see more and more where DemandGen, the CMO, is going to have this center of excellence.

They're going to be toggling the drone operators in Nevada who are working overseas from what looks like a video game room.

It's the same idea as we talked about.

You just gave the example I just gave.

These are things that will be run out of a true pipeline generation group and organization because the tech is enabling that in ways that, frankly, we could imagine.

We just never got there.

Now we're here.

We just have way more capacity for storage.

We can save way more information on each one of our customers than we could in the past.

It's like the level of understanding that B2C brands had on their customers in terms of their location, the birth dates, how frequently they purchase, what they purchase, what colors they like, et cetera.

All that stuff is felt very B2C, and it's coming to B2B now because of the capacity for storage.

Salesforce is never meant to be a database.

It's not built that way.

It's built to keep a couple attributes on businesses and to understand, like, hey, these are my customers.

These are not my customers.

These are the people in those organizations.

And then marketing animation tools came around and said, great, we can write some light level of engagement onto that, and you can use it for basic scoring.

And now you're like, no, no, no.

I can understand absolutely everything about a company, and I can store it in a place where instead of it just being, you know, lines or, excuse me, rows or columns of information on them, I can actually start to build models that put all that information together, and I'm creating real signal instead of just data points.

It doesn't matter that this company, to Craig's point earlier when we were talking about ICP, it doesn't matter that they're in finance.

What matters is that they're an enterprise company that sells to small businesses.

They sell a product that, you know, costs roughly this much money, and they do it via salesperson or they do it via PLG or they do it versus credit card transaction.

That's real ICP.

That's not just, hey, this is a finance company, right?

When you sort of, when I think about my history and companies that I've sold to over the past part of my career, like when I worked at Everstring, we sold to Capital One and we sold to FedEx.

Those are two companies that don't look anything alike.

But one thing that they had in common was that Capital One had small business credit card and they sold to small business.

And FedEx had small business shipping.

And actually, the fact that they both sold to small businesses made them more alike than the fact that one's a logistics company and one's a credit business or a bank, right?

Like, that's true ICP.

And being able to extract that information when you have so much information on a business to say this is what a true ICP is versus this is just what a vertical is, it's gonna help people be so much more targeted in their outreach as a salesperson, in their marketing as a marketer, in their ability to onboard new customers as an onboarding professional.

And you can do that now.

That's important.

Yes, you can do that right now.

Yeah, yeah.

All right, before we get less than 10 minutes.

So, Alistair, I'm gonna ask you the same question I asked in the front, but I'm gonna ask it in terms of sales or marketing.

But in the actual go-to-market, not the tech necessarily, what is happening, like what today in the market do people think is right or the way they should approach sales or marketing and they're actually wrong and they should be thinking about that differently?

How would you answer that from like less of a tech perspective and more of an actual revenue generation perspective?

Number one, I would encourage somebody to look at as much consolidation between marketing and sales as they can.

You just made the logical argument for SDR, VDR side, the operational friction that I think just needs to be solved.

We've been talking about it for years, but we actually have been really mobilizing around that.

I think that is for sales.

Look at the ops.

If you're running an org today, find those consolidation points and move on it because it's been automated.

You're going to see digital systems imminently, and you want the people that are the most data-centric in your company, which are typically actually marketing, to enable that.

That kind of rise of the new thinking of, as Brent Adamson used to say, the pod structure type approach, Craig, I actually think is now possible.

I think we're probably a little bit ahead of the curve four years ago saying that.

Now I go, it's just functionally there.

You've got to be tearing that stuff down and doing forcing function consolidation in those pieces.

And I just think there's a lot of people that they're either scared or there's a bit of tribalism in companies always that they have to fight through on that.

But you just got to make these moves, right?

It's a natural evolution of where it's going.

So I would, right?

I know it's not a sexy financier, but I'd be like, focus on that op structure, focus on those assets, reinvest in the dollars you're saving on the people, which there's going to be some consolidation on some of those roles.

And then think of how you're applying it to the models and call a signal.

So you guys are saying, right?

Like, I don't mind.

But I think that's the front and center right now in 2024.

Hit on that.

Once you have that, identifying the technology to help becomes a lot clearer.

Yeah.

Don't go by the technology thinking the technology is going to enable the ops change.

It's not.

We know that.

Like I say, it's just proliferation of tools.

So we know that's not going to happen.

Build the ops function.

Work on where people are going to sit.

And then go from there and build pods.

I think pods all day long.

And that's a right approach.

See, that was specific.

Matt, what do you think of pods, bro?

Big pods guy myself.

Love pods.

No, but I do agree.

There's actually one.

The way you said it is like the pod when Brent or whoever you start about pods, it always made sense.

It just never happened.

I think now we're in a different place.

I think we're in a different place also in terms of the synthesis between marketing and sales.

I've never been in favor of RevOps being defined as the consolidation of operational groups.

I've been thinking of RevOps as the ability to provide and to support the end-to-end operation.

But I was slightly wrong in that it has to be, there has to be a group that brings a lot of the, like I always said, look, you got to have marketing ops.

I still think you do.

The thing I remember when talking to Andy Moat about Box, he's like, look, we consolidate everything, and then I'm sitting there looking at landing pages.

That's not going to work for us.

It's not strategic.

You would still have some kind of operational ability in the functions, but the ability to, frankly, to be signal-based and to actually do something about it, that was a good example there, where I think, you know, we're in a place now where we can synthesize operationally in a way that we've, you know, frankly, I think we have a clearer path to that.

So that's good.

And then, yeah, like the pods, by the way, you know who had amazing pods back in the day was Rackspace.

I don't know if you ever heard about it.

I didn't.

Yeah, 20 years ago, and they were in pods.

I don't know if they're doing it now, but I was on, you know, one of the speaking tour that had the Rackspace guys come in multiple times, talking about pods.

It was a really great example of that.

So, all right.

Would you add anything else?

You said one, I think.

Why, I want to add on this and just to be, I don't even think it's particularly provocative, but what Matt said earlier, could you imagine, like we're debating pods and this alignment and all of that.

Did you imagine if we were running an e-comm company?

Would we ever debate that?

Of course not.

You would never debate that in an e-comm company, right?

Of course we need algorithms that traverse all the different signals to tell us what to do, to help every function do what they, like you just go, yeah, and we need an ops function.

I don't care what title you want to go on, that helps us traverse every step of that journey.

Like you go, yeah, I can't have an e-comm company without that, or frankly, a B2C company.

Why is that so provocative, and why is that so crazy to think that's now going to happen in B2B?

We just haven't had to.

That's the thing, the market has been so flush for so long, we haven't had to.

The market isn't flush anymore.

And so guess what?

You're going to have to just be a little bit smarter about this stuff.

And I think...

Yeah, I don't think it's crazy thinking.

I do think if you're a B2B company struggling, go hire people from B2C econ companies.

That would probably be a smart thing to do.

Thanks for joining us for another episode of The Transaction.

Craig and I really appreciate the fact that you've listened all the way to the end.

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