This post is an excerpt taken from the upcoming book The Hidden Buyer Journey, to read more click here.

Here is a question worth sitting with: if a researcher called your customers tomorrow and asked them about their buying experience, would they mention you by name?

Not your company. Not your product.

You, specifically. By name.

For most sales professionals, the honest answer is probably no. And that’s not an indictment of their effort or their intentions. It’s a reflection of how B2B selling has been structured for the past two decades — around process, pipeline stages, and quarterly targets rather than around the human being on the other side of the deal.

Ben is the exception that proves the rule.

We Weren’t Looking for Ben

We didn’t go looking for Ben. We were conducting customer research for a private equity firm that had acquired several companies and was evaluating how to consolidate their brands. The goal was straightforward: interview existing customers, understand the strengths and weaknesses of the brand, and surface the insights that would inform the go-forward strategy.

We interviewed dozens of customers across multiple acquired companies. We were asking about brand perception, buying experience, product satisfaction — the usual territory. And then something unusual started happening.

A name kept coming up.

Not a product name. Not a company name. A person’s name. Ben.

What made this remarkable wasn’t just that customers remembered him. It was that they remembered him across companies he had never officially sold to. Ben sold products across three of the acquired businesses. But his name surfaced in interviews with customers of all of them — including ones where he had no formal relationship, no account ownership, no territory.

In years of conducting this kind of research, we had never seen anything like it.

What Ben Actually Did

When we dug into why customers kept mentioning Ben, the picture that emerged wasn’t what you might expect. Nobody talked about his pitch. Nobody mentioned his product knowledge in the traditional sense. Nobody brought up his closing technique or his follow-up cadence.

What they talked about was what Ben did for them.

The product team at one company described how Ben had worked directly with their engineering team during product design — showing up not as a vendor trying to protect a sale, but as someone genuinely invested in making sure they had the right components for what they were building. That’s not in anyone’s job description. Ben just did it.

The procurement team at another company explained how Ben had somehow created a consolidated invoice that allowed them to manage purchasing across three separate business units — something the selling company didn’t actually offer as a service. To this day, we’re not entirely sure how he pulled it off. But he did.

And a third company’s buying team simply said: “Ben actually answers his phone.”

That last one landed hardest. In a world of automated sequences, CRM-generated follow-up tasks, and carefully managed response windows, the fact that a human being picked up the phone when you called was memorable enough to mention unprompted in a research interview.

What Ben Was Actually Selling

Here’s the thing about Ben that the traditional sales framework completely misses: he wasn’t selling products. He was selling something far more valuable and far more difficult to replicate.

He was selling himself as the most reliable, knowledgeable, responsive partner his customers had.

The consolidated invoice nobody asked for. The engineering conversations nobody else was having. The phone that actually got answered. None of that appeared in a product brochure. None of it showed up in a CRM field. None of it would have been captured by any intent signal or engagement metric in any marketing platform.

All of it was what kept his name coming up in interview after interview, across companies he’d never even officially sold to.

Ben had figured out — instinctively, without being taught it — that his job wasn’t to sell. His job was to make it easier for people to buy. And in doing so, he had built something that no competitor could undercut on price, no algorithm could replicate at scale, and no automation could replace: genuine trust.

What the Research Tells Us

Ben’s story isn’t just a feel-good anecdote about a talented rep. It’s evidence of something the research confirmed repeatedly across thousands of buyers in fifteen industries.

When customers are asked what actually drove their purchase decision, the top three answers — product quality, usability, and value — are things they can only experience after they’ve already bought. Which means during the sales process itself, they’re not evaluating the product. They’re evaluating something else entirely.

They’re evaluating Promise. Credibility. Trust. And whether the business argument being made feels honest rather than optimistic.

None of those are rational calculations. All of them are emotional judgments about the person in front of them. A buyer doesn’t calculate trust. They feel it. They don’t measure credibility against a rubric. They sense it in how a rep shows up, how much they know, how well they listen.

Ben understood this without being taught it. He wasn’t operating in a machine-to-human world, sending triggered sequences to a list. He wasn’t in a human-to-machine world, entering data and working algorithm-generated queues. He was doing something far simpler and far more powerful.

He was being human, to another human.

The Question Worth Asking

The B2B industry has spent the better part of two decades building systems designed to scale the sales process — to remove the inefficiency, the unpredictability, the human variability from the equation. And those systems have produced exactly what you’d expect: a selling environment where 61% of buyers say they’d prefer a rep-free experience entirely.

Ben is the argument against that trajectory. Not because he was operating without technology or process. But because he never let the technology or process become the point. The point was always the person on the other side of the conversation.

In our research, the most effective predictor of whether a deal closes isn’t the strength of the product, the competitiveness of the pricing, or the sophistication of the marketing automation. It’s whether the buyer trusts the person making the promise.

Ben built that trust across three companies, in an organization he only officially worked for one of, with customers who remembered his name years later in a research interview nobody told them was coming.

That’s not a sales technique. That’s a human one. And in a world that is rapidly automating everything else, it turns out to be the most competitive advantage of all.

The post The Salesperson Nobody Asked About — Who Everyone Remembered appeared first on Carbon Design.

I went to a developer conference and accidentally learned something profound about human nature. It started innocently enough – the All Things AI Conference in Durham, NC had a title too good to pass up.

What I didn’t expect was to be the only marketer among 2,500 developers, nodding along as whurly, CEO of Strangeworks (one name, all lowercase), dove deep into quantum computing and AI. I was in over my head. But sometimes that’s exactly where the best insights hide.

It was until Luis Lastras, Director of Language and Multimodal Technology at IBM began talking about “small models” that I finally found something I recognized. Luis said something that struck me that I didn’t realize – and I think I’m not alone – “hallucinations are intentional.” Say what?

According to Luis hallucinations are a way for developers to learn how models work. Because the models operate autonomously they don’t filter out what they output – at least not yet. Think of letting your grandfather who lost his filter loose at a dinner party.

It’s one of things that IBM is working on.  Small models validate outputs and commands at various stages in the process to reduce hallucinations.

Anyone who’s worked with AI has experienced hallucination from made up sources to statistics that are just plain wrong. But what Lastras shared was something I didn’t realize, it’s the little extra pieces of information intended to be helpful that AI tools add in that weren’t asked for in the prompt.

For example, he showed a demo of a prompt asking how many moons Mars has and the response came back with two and their names, with the added extra – the distance from Earth which was not requested.

The distance between the planets may have been right but it requires another step to validate which then triggered a fascinating article I had read over the weekend.

In a study by Elon University conducted with 500 AI users (US adults) last year, almost 70% believed that AI models are at least as smart as they are, with 26% believing that they are “a lot smarter.”

What is more concerning is that we believe that AI is thinking like humans. As the article in the Wall Street Journal article Why Even Smart People Believe AI is Really Thinking goes on to say “our cognitive biases developed to help us survive in complex social environments…evolved to view linguistics fluency as a proxy for intelligence, engagement and helpfulness as indicators of trustworthiness.”

The same tendency innate to humans that leads us to trust social creatures who must cooperate for survival are leading us to trust systems that appear to listen, understand and want to help us.

The more AI tools and bots act like humans, the more likely we are to trust them. Which brings us back to the hallucination. The more AI tools act like they’re being helpful, the more likely we are to miss that “little extra” piece of information that wasn’t requested.

The convergence of intentional hallucinations and our deeply wired human instinct to trust fluent, helpful communicators creates a perfect storm of misplaced confidence.

As AI tools grow more sophisticated and human-like, our evolutionary instincts will only make it harder to maintain the critical distance needed to catch the errors, embellishments, and unrequested additions that slip through.

The good news is that awareness is the first step. Whether it’s IBM’s small models validating outputs in real time or simply slowing down to verify what AI hands us, the antidote to a cognitive bias millions of years in the making is something refreshingly simple – a healthy dose of human skepticism.

The post The Fluke of Evolution Causing Us to Miss AI Hallucinations appeared first on Carbon Design.

Back when I was a client-side marketer, I noticed a pattern slowing our team down: the habit of holding onto work until it felt perfect.

To break that cycle, I led the team through what I called the “Embrace Your Suckiness” exercise – an honest conversation about what we were each great at, and where we genuinely fell short.

Out of that came the CRAP process: Create, Refine, Act, Perfect.

The rule was simple: if you got stuck at any stage, you passed it to someone else. It increased our speed to market and later that year we won an internal award for the best performing department.

We borrowed IBM’s 70% rule – get it to 70% and go. Let the market, the audience, the world complete the other 30%. Then we refined the campaign.

Fast forward many years, and I applied that same process to a book I just finished – three years in the making.

I sent the first draft to friends and family. What came back was hard to hear after all those late nights and weekends.

But that’s exactly the point.

The people who matter most told me: “It’s good… but it’s not good enough.” Good, because they appreciated the work and effort that went into it. Not good enough, because they respected me enough to push me further.

That feedback is a gift. And it only comes from people willing to tell you what you don’t want to hear.

If you’re early in your career, here’s the most important thing I can share:  Surround yourself with those people.

Not people who echo your worldview.
Not people who validate everything you do.
People who are honest – even when it’s uncomfortable.

We live in a time that makes it dangerously easy to only hear voices that agree with us.

Don’t fall for it.

Here’s the truth:  Everyone is great at something, and everyone sucks at something. That’s not a flaw – that’s just being human.

You may only have 70%. That’s okay. That’s why you need the right people around you to help you find the rest.

Embrace your suckiness. It just might be your greatest strength. 💪

To learn more about The Hidden Buyer Journey click the link https://carbondesign.com/the-hidden-buyer-journey/

The post The Tough Love We Need…and a New Book! appeared first on Carbon Design.

After 7 years of research – analyzing hundreds of buyer journeys, profiling the personalities of thousands of decision-makers, and tracking what actually drives B2B deals – I finally finished the first draft.

Unlike other books in the sales and marketing space, this is not survey driven. We didn’t ask buyers for their preferences, we observed their behaviors in the data.

The work took longer than I ever expected, but every extra year added a layer of insight I wouldn’t trade. The 📕 title: The Hidden Buyer Journey.

Here’s what I discovered that changed everything:

● 85% of buyers influencing your deals never make it into your CRM.
● Most personas are built for selling, not buying.
● Corporate culture predicts deal velocity better than any other factor.
● Although there are a dozen or more buyers involved in the journey, only 4-5 make the deal happen.
● Reps can sabotage deals by not adjusting their style to fit the buyer’s personality.

These aren’t just interesting data points – they represent a fundamental shift in how modern B2B sales needs to be approached.

The book explains why win rates aren’t improving, why sales cycles are stretching, and why “personalization” isn’t working. More importantly, it shows exactly what to fix…and how.

I’ll be sharing more over the next few weeks. If any of this resonates with challenges you’re facing right now, follow along.  You won’t want to miss what’s coming.

To learn more about the book and to reserve your copy visit https://carbondesign.com/the-hidden-buyer-journey/

The post This book outline has been on my wall for 3 years. It came down today. appeared first on Carbon Design.

Most of your best buying signals show up late in the sales cycle, but they’re invisible if the right contacts never make it into your CRM.

This problem has plagued sales and marketing organizations for as long as these functions have existed. Companies invest massive amounts in Martech stacks and sales databases, only to see them underperform – not because of the technology itself, but due to poor input.

Specifically, the issue is qualified, highly engaged contacts held tightly – like clutched pearls – by the sales force.

For years, the prevailing theory has been that sales doesn’t want marketing anywhere near its most valuable relationships. Sales executives often attribute the issue to competing priorities or a general lack of interest in “data entry.” Interpret that however you’d like.

The visibility gap

I’ve encountered this problem repeatedly when trying to map content consumption to the buying journey. Typically, we’re only able to connect 10%–15% of sales contacts to any measurable marketing engagement, such as content downloads, event attendance, or other interactions.

Recently, however, we had the opportunity to take a closer look under the hood.

A client shared their contacts, intent data, engagement data and – most importantly – sales email correspondence tied to active opportunities across more than a dozen accounts. The data covered hundreds of emails exchanged over a seven-month period. In some cases, we observed opportunities at inception; in others, we jumped in midstream and followed them through to close.

We mapped the emails chronologically and tracked every individual included in the conversations. It was only after reviewing the full arc of these communications that the real reason sales reps don’t enter new contacts into the database became clear.

Where are all these names coming from?

The first question we wanted to answer was simple: Where do these new contacts come from – and why?

What we found was remarkably consistent. As deals progress, new contacts tend to appear at three distinct points in the sales process:

1. Demo requests: These typically expand the buying group by an average of seven to 10 people.
2. Trial setup: This stage typically introduces an additional three to five contacts, often including stakeholders from other geographies within global organizations.
3. Final presentation: Procurement and finance frequently enter the picture at this stage, and if the presentation is on-site, even more participants tend to appear.

Why don’t reps enter the names?

Contrary to popular belief, this isn’t about laziness or disinterest. It’s about focus.

As opportunities near closure, activity between the prospect and the sales rep increases – sometimes dramatically. Last-minute trial configurations, contract negotiations and master services agreements consume nearly all of the rep’s time and attention.

The excitement of a potential win – like the smell of blood in the water for sharks – puts reps into a sales frenzy. Their behavior becomes almost entirely reactive.

New contacts who aren’t directly participating in the email threads are viewed as peripheral. In practice, they become invisible. This blind spot is especially pronounced at the very moment when insight matters most.

Why enter them at all? What’s the upside?

What most reps don’t realize – given their narrow focus on closing the deal – is that these late-stage participants are often scrambling to get up to speed.

They visit the corporate website.

• They search for case studies.
• They download white papers.
• They watch on-demand videos.

Their goal is simple: become informed enough to influence the final decision.

That behavior is precisely what makes them valuable.

If – and it’s a big if – reps take the time to enter these contacts into the database, their sudden spike in activity can surface powerful intent signals.

A real-world example

In one opportunity, a CEO entered the buying process shortly before an on-site presentation. The decision came down to the incumbent vendor and our client.

That CEO searched for a specific term more than 35 times over two weeks.

Because the contact was identified, that insight surfaced. The sales team redesigned the final presentation to focus heavily on that topic and directly connect it to the client’s value proposition.

They won the deal.

The fix is cultural, not technical

This isn’t a Salesforce problem.

It isn’t a HubSpot problem.

And it certainly isn’t a marketing problem.

It’s a process and mindset problem.

The most valuable buying signals often appear late in the sales cycle, introduced by stakeholders who weren’t part of the early conversations. When those contacts never make it into the system, organizations lose visibility at the exact moment insight can influence outcomes.

Sales teams don’t need more tools – they need a clearer understanding of the upside. Capturing late-stage contacts isn’t about helping marketing run better reports. It’s about giving sales an unfair advantage: real-time visibility into what decision-makers care about most.

When those contacts are entered, intent data lights up. Content consumption becomes visible. Messaging can be adjusted. Presentations get sharper. Win rates improve.

Until organizations address this blind spot, marketing will continue to look ineffective, intent data will appear incomplete, and sales teams will unknowingly leave leverage on the table.

The post The real reason your best leads never make it into the CRM appeared first on Carbon Design.

As previously published on 2/28/24 in MarTech

When he was a kid, Scott Gillum dreamt of running a business. He made his dream come true with a company focused on work/life balance.

MarTech columnist Scott Gillum runs his business Carbon Design from his home in Raleigh, N.C. He knew from a very young age that running a business was what he wanted to do. He just wasn’t sure what that meant. That led him on a circuitous path to learning a lot about business and marketing, and then having to unlearn some of it.

Q: How far back does the business thing go?

A: As a kid, I always dreamed of having my own company. I would wake up and remember having these very vivid dreams that I built a hotel or restaurant. I’d tell my mom about it, and she’s like, “You know, you should be an architect. You always think about building things.”

And so I always knew I was going to do something in business. So here’s my strategy in high school to figure out what I was going to do with my life: I was reading the Fortune 500 and I saw that most of the CEOs in the top 200 companies had their JDs.

And I thought, “Well, that’s it. If I want to get to the top with a company, I should go to law school because they all have their JDs.” So my college career was designed to get on the path to going to law school. I was a political science and economics major and I did two internships at law firms and realized, “Oh my god. I hate this.” So I got a bit smarter and realized what I really like is business, and it isn’t the law.

Got around to figuring out how I could go to grad school and get my MBA and get somebody to pay for it and that sent me on the path to where we are today.

Q: I can’t remember any of my dreams from high school, but I’m pretty sure they did not involve starting a business. What attracted you to it?

A: What I liked about it was the problem-solving, figuring things out was the appeal of it.

It wasn’t until I was 52 that I started a business of my own. With two kids in private schools or private universities. So the worst time to do it, but that’s when the opportunity was there, right? And the two years after starting the business were the hardest years of my life.

Part of the reason for that is that If you’ve been in a certain type of workplace for 30 years you’re accustomed to having a paycheck every week. You’re accustomed to understanding how you’re going to pay your taxes. How you’re going to get your insurance, right? All these things just happen. And you’ve been conditioned that way. It took two years of being an entrepreneur to figure out how to unwind that mental model of how I should think about making an income and a living. Figuring out there’s a different way that you can make a living.

That’s maybe the hardest part of being an entrepreneur. There are different ways that you can find insurance. You can figure out how to pay your taxes. But there’s a big hurdle for people trying to leave where they are working for someone else. In the current environment, where you’ve got a home, you got a mortgage payment, you got kids in college, to flip that upside down and become an entrepreneur, it’s very, very difficult.

Q: What do you like about marketing?

A: I like trying to figure out why things don’t work. And so when I founded Carbon Design, I founded it because of two things that don’t work right. The original idea for it was backward in terms of starting a business. I focused on the people and not the clients.

While I was working, I saw this next generation, the millennials, come in, and I came to the realization that their work styles are very different. And not in a bad way.

For example, I was doing a big rebranding project for a client. We just finished one phase and I was looking for the creative director and he was gone. We’re going to the next phase, and he was down backpacking through South America. And bells started going off in my head.

Q: Like that sounded pretty cool?

A: Yeah, I thought about the experiences I had when I was in management consulting. We would lose people when they became most productive. When they got five, six, seven years of experience under their belts, they would get married, and then have a family, and then we would lose really talented associates. They would try to come and work part-time, but they never felt like they could balance work life. They’re always feeling either like they were disappointing the client or disappointing themselves as a mother or father or whatever it is.

So the founding of Carbon Design was built around the idea that people really need a different way to work. They need to put their lives first and get that straightened out, then the work will come, and it’ll be really good. If you don’t have your life right, the work is going to suffer. And that’s the foundation of the company.

We’re on demand. We’re remote. We’re all freelance contractors. And you make your own time. You do work where you want. All we care about is your deliverables. Good quality work on time, it’s all we care about. So I started the company backwards with that. I figured if I get a good core base of people, then we’ll get clients and we’ll do really great work and we’ll retain them and get referred.

So the first question was really why aren’t people engaged in work anymore? If you looked at the Gallup poll before COVID, work engagement has never been above 32% in 20 years. I wanted to know if we can find a way to get people engaged again.

Q: That’s the first thing that didn’t work. What’s the second?

A: The second question relates to B2B marketing. There’s been all this investment in technology in data and insights, but performance hasn’t improved. Why? Why are we not improving performance? That got us on another journey, and we developed some proprietary, performance-based marketing tools. They allow us to understand people as individuals and to look at the softer side of sales and marketing. Because, if our job as marketers is to get somebody to take action, we have to understand their motivations and beliefs.

So we do a lot of psychographics. We use AI personality profiling tools. We know preferences in terms of content. We know preferences in terms of visualization. We’re starting to take in the people component, not just the title or a role. You add that in, you start to get better performance.

Q: What are you looking forward to in terms of marketing?

A: I’m glad you asked. We’re on our third version of an AI tool. And this one, I think, is really exciting and fun. We are using an AI tool called Cassidy. It’s a business development assistant and a project manager assistant.

The nice thing about this tool versus some other tools is that other tools are always prompt-driven. And the output was only as good as your prompting, and who has time to figure out what the right prompts are?

With Cassidy, you feed it knowledge. It sits on top of our Google Suite, on top of the knowledge and extracting the knowledge out of our drives. And it also reads our website, it picks up our tonality, our brand voice. So for me, what’s very exciting is that we are a business that operates with no overhead.

The way our organization is built, we’re very flat. We can scale up quickly and scale down, and we don’t have any overhead. What we try to do is we price efficiently, and we try to get most of the fees that we collect to our freelancers. So we have a model that means you make a lot of money working for us.

Now we have an assistant to aid people coming to work with us. We plug them into our G Suite, and they know where to find this proposal or this project, We’re super excited about it.

The post Scott Gillum: Spotlight on the expert. appeared first on Carbon Design.

By Scott Gillum
Estimated read time: 5 Minutes

Last week we finished a new website for a client. It’s the third time in the last 2 years we’ve been the “rescue” vendor on a website build that had gone wrong.

If you are thinking about updating your website, and/or are an agency building sites, here’s what we’ve learned through those experiences that you need to know.

1. Building a new or “refreshing” a website is not just a website build – it is also a rebranding, repositioning and a messaging project. Know that going in and plan for it. You may also want to scope in a competitive assessment.
2. Don’t build anything until everyone that counts has a say or has reviewed a page, content, images, etc. To hell with project timelines, don’t do a thing until the right people are on the same page.
3. Make it “paint by numbers.” Use pre-designed templates, provide direction on what you need from the client and be specific….”We need 250 words that describe your corporate culture.”
4. Scope in a copywriter. You’ll need one to either fill the gap on content or at a minimum, edit copy.
5. Give the client access to the staging server. Let them see the site as it is being built. Full transparency, do not wait to the end to share the site. At each client update meeting, walk them through the new updates and get their input. This is a collaborative effort.

And finally, if you offshore or nearshore the build, see the paint by numbers point. Give exact and specific directions to your developers. Stay on top of the development at each stage of the process. Plan reviews before showing anything to your client. Look at EVERY single detail.

The post How Website Disasters Uncovered 5 Critical Tips To Ensure a Successful Launch appeared first on Carbon Design.

By Scott Gillum
Estimated read time: 5 Minutes

The third installment of our four part series on how to navigate decision making blockers. 

Nothing sets off lead nurturing scoring system alarms more than the presence of a C-level Influencer hitting content. They’ve got the right title, hit your content, probably more than one and you’re thinking there has got to be intent. But unfortunately that’s not the case, here’s why.  

Influencers are information seekers to the extreme. In fact, you probably know one in your personal life. They’re the first to find out about a new restaurant or a new band. They’re your go to when you’re looking for a weekend getaway or vacation spot. And they love to do it. Influencers are motivated by being the first to know and sharing the information with others. 

And that’s why there is no real intent. The information that they are consuming or downloaded is going to someone else. Recently we found a C-level Influencer that forwarded an email invitation to a webinar over 30 times! Influencers often are a “false position” – giving off a signal of intent, but the real need or opportunity is with someone else. 

Influencers are great MQL’s, but terrible SQL’s 

The upside of Influencers is that they are a key channel for introducing new ideas into organizations. Even better, they’re great at selling people on ideas. They consume a tremendous amount of information from a vast amount of sources, online and offline. Marketers this is your number one personality type to target, but they have a unique preference when it comes to content. 

Sales, the good news is Influencers keep a loose schedule and enjoy meeting new people, but don’t chase them. Because of their position in the organization (often senior exec), and their personality type they are off to the next thing. 

Influencers don’t usually own projects or budgets, their staff does, and that’s who you need, especially a “Champion” personality. The good news is that they often come back into the deal at the end to deal with any resistance from others in the buying group. 

Here’s how to get the most out of leveraging Influencers in the account. 

1. Give them the right assets. Influencers prefer short highly visual content that travels easily. They LOVE short (30 sec or less) animated videos that they can forward. An interactive infographic that they can play around with it like a moth to the flame. Short, visual content pieces that convey information easily work with them. Additionally, opportunities for people to learn about something like events or webinar invitations also travel well as I mentioned. 
2. Find them in your data.  Since they have a habit of forwarding information, it’s easy to spot them in your data. Look for emails that have been opened multiple times over a 2-3 days period. Once you’ve identified them, see if that pattern repeats on other occasions.  
3. Tag and track them.  You can also use PURLS or forms to track where they’re sending information. This is a key insight, sharing (or forwarding) is a much better indicator of interest than a download or click thru. But that comes with a caveat, where the information lands has to resonate or address an issue that person has currently. Unfortunately, because of the Influencers behavior mentioned above they have a tendency to forward information that never gets actioned.  
4. Sell them on the idea, not the solution. In all of our research over the years we have only found an Influencer being a blocker on one occasion and it provided an interesting insight. Influencers want credit for the idea.  
5. Give away ideas.  One of our most important clients has an Influencer personality and a CMO title, but he’s never signed a contract. Give away free advice. It will usually come back to you in business from others within the organization.  
6. Use them to remove blockers. Influencers are present at the beginning of the buyers journey, and they will reappear at the end. In particular, to reinforce the value of the idea or solution. Influencers (hence the name) are very good at selling others on the idea, keep them posted on your progress and use them to get past Blockers in the buyer group.   

B2B marketing campaigns are often DOA before they even launch. Why? Because of the influence of sales, we often target titles, roles and budget owners. Sounds pretty common, right? And that would be fine if marketing’s job was to sell…but it’s not. 

Our goal as marketers is to grab someone’s attention and have them take action (click on this link, download a piece of content, and register for a webinar). Targeting roles or titles alone doesn’t give us the best opportunity to make that happen. Do you know what does?

Targeting Influencers, but know that they love your ideas or solution more than they love you, your company or brand. It’s nothing personal…it’s just the personality. Influencers play an important role for us as marketers. They react and take action. It’s not personal for us either, it’s just the type of personality that gets us the performance we need. 

To read the previous installment of the series, 6 Ways to Engage Champion “Blockers” click here. 

The post  6 Things You Need to Know About Influencer “Blockers” appeared first on Carbon Design.

It started with a simple question: why hasn’t B2B sales and marketing performance improved?

Despite advances in strategy and the industry’s massive investment in technology, the needle simply hasn’t moved over the last 10 years or longer.

Our curiosity led us to investigate this performance challenge. We noticed that our tools – mostly glorified task lists and activity trackers – were only picking up on rational factors. So we started to explore what wasn’t being tracked and discovered a “hidden buyer journey”.

As we explored buyer behaviors, motivations, and personality types, we found that purchase decisions made by buying groups were driven by individuals’ personal motivations, not titles or roles.

For two years now, we’ve been using research on buying groups and AI-enabled Personality-Based Marketing to help clients improve their sales and marketing efforts.

This eBook shares our insights and how you can apply Personality- Based Marketing to improve your B2B marketing performance – at last.

Download the E-Book now!

The post New E-Book on Personality Based Marketing appeared first on Carbon Design.

As previously published on 8/5/21 in The Drum

by Scott Gillum
Estimated read time: 4 Minutes

Years ago, doctors treated gastric ulcers as a chronic disease, most likely brought on by stress or spicy foods. As a young pharma rep carrying the world’s first billion-dollar drug in my bag, I’d actively promoted how this wonder product could relieve the symptoms for their ulcer patients.

That was until the day I met a doctor who questioned why we weren’t selling a drug to cure the problem. It was a very valid point, one that would not be fully understood until a couple of years after I left that job.

Given the success of that drug, other similar products would soon follow, all for the relief of ulcer symptoms. Pharma companies followed the money, rather than investing in developing a cure.

Recently, I recalled this memory while looking at Scott Brinker’s Martech Landscape, which now includes 8,000 companies. There are companies investing millions of dollars into B2B marketing technologies that have hardly moved the needle on marketing performance – tools created to treat the symptoms of poor performance rather than fix them.

This issue has persisted for years. Performance should be improving by now, unless we’re missing something.

Here’s an example: ask a salesperson to describe their ideal buyer in detail and this is what you will likely hear. They want more buyers who are ‘risk-takers’, ‘innovators’, ‘people who are looking to make a name for themselves’ or ‘big-picture thinkers’.

What you won’t hear is prospects who are ‘technical buyers’, ‘budget holders’ or the ‘CEO’. Do you see what we are missing? Sales reps are describing personality attributes that make prospects ideal buyers, not their role, title or budget authority. The martech stack doesn’t capture those descriptors.

Still not convinced? Ask a salesperson why they lost a deal when they should have won it. You’ll probably hear “they had an existing relationship” (trust) or “they have used the solution/service in the past” (security). These are emotional decision drivers also not capturing or seen in CRM tools.

Get at the cause to find the cure

There is a buyer’s journey that is hidden. Our sales and marketing tools are not built to capture, track or provide us with insights into what to do about these ‘soft’ factors that impact deals. And it may be more important than anything we are tracking or measuring today. It’s time, like the doctor I encountered all those years ago, to ask the question of why we aren’t fixing the problem.

In 2005, a couple of Australian researchers named Barry Marshall and Robin Warren were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their work on linking the bacteria Helicobacter Pylori to the formation of gastric ulcers. They won this coveted prize after spending decades trying to convince the world of their discovery, even coming to a point where Marshall ingested H. Pylori to prove the causation to ulcers (it worked, he developed an ulcer three days later).

Marshall’s research was hugely disruptive and would eventually lead to the demise of a multi-billion-dollar therapeutic class of drugs. Their joint research in the late 80s was discredited for years, until the first drug of its type (the one I promoted) came off patent. Suddenly, gastric ulcers could be cured by prescribing a common antibiotic (which, ironically, was also manufactured by the same company).

Millions of dollars have been invested into martech tools, yet our sales and marketing performance have not improved. This industry is thriving by treating poor performance as a chronic disease – developing tools to keep the focus on extending reach and increasing scale, not on improving conversion rate or return on effort and investment.

Just as Marshall and Warren used postmortem research and forensic medicine to link the cause and effect of H. Pylori on the body, we are doing the same with breaking down deals closed, both won and lost. We are starting to get at the ‘cause’ – and to find a cure.

What we’re finding doesn’t necessarily match with the conventional wisdom of the day. Intent data may not actually show any real intent. Lead nurturing programs may be set up to nurture prospects that will never become leads. Campaigns may be targeting ‘buyers’ who are actually the exact opposite, a personality type that is more likely to kill a deal than help to close it.

It’s called personality-based marketing, and it has the promise to cure our ills… but please don’t make me ingest a lead to prove it.

The post Feel lost? Understanding the hidden B2B buyer’s journey appeared first on Carbon Design.