138 | Driving B2B impact through smarter signals and stronger teams

Jon Busby: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Tech Marketing podcast. I'm joined by another podcast veteran Threes Parks. Um, no stranger to us. Uh, you joined us actually at the AANAs back in goodness. What year are we in now? 2023, was it that were speaking to there? I think. Yeah. Yeah. And, um, what were you speaking about?

Um, so firstly, welcome back. It's pleasure to have you back on the podcast.

Therese Parkes: Yeah, always. Um,

Jon Busby: can you remember what you were talking about back then and tell us kind of what your role is now?

Therese Parkes: Yep. I was talking, um, about the changing, uh, B2B buyer journey. I'm almost certain, uh, 'cause I talked about it a lot.

Um, and so, you know, and what I'm doing now is actually working at, um, uh, uh, an enterprise software that's been, um, acquired by a much larger consulting company.

Jon Busby: Um, and, and how has, you know, we, I'm always excited to get you back on, like we, we've kept in contact since that, since that wonderful podcast back in, back in the summer of 2023.

So really excited to get you back, back on today. But going from shifting from somewhere like Google into, um, you know, one of the, one of the big consultancies like. What's something you've learned from that move? Like, what's changed? What, what's been has? Has your, is your passion still there for the buyer journey or have you seen it?

Seen it kind of evolve?

Therese Parkes: Yeah, I think what's interesting is, you know, at Google I, um, was certainly in an advisory role and I was, I was, um, my goal was to make each and every one of my customers as successful as possible. And we did that a lot of, through the lens of research and understanding how the market had changed and how the buyer had changed, but also how each of them.

Um, you know, what was prevailing going on with each of the, those clients, um, and, and advising them and sitting with them and having conversations. Well, now I am, my hands are a little bit more on the wheel, you know, I get to see how the intersection. Of, you know, um, how teens interact and how decisions play out and how internal friction can slow things down or how beliefs or that 30-year-old playbook that I talk about a lot can sometimes come into play.

And it's no fault of anyone's own, you know? It, it's just, um, it's really, these are the things that, that have always worked and these are the things that, that get perpetuated and, and. So it's, it's really interesting to see the intersection of going from an advisement role to sort of being more in the weeds and, and seeing how strategy and execution and culture all come together, um, and how that really all needs to go well, um, in order to make things happen.

Jon Busby: And Yeah, you, I, I mean, having this year, I've always said right, since, when was it beginning of 2023 this started. Mm-hmm. So just when we met before as, as well, um, uh, back in Florida that my job was really easy as CTO until AI came out. And now it's been so transformational. It's been, it's been very clear like which businesses can get strategy and execution and, and culture and that mix, right.

To move fast and which businesses can struggle. Um, and probably going from being outside, similar to, to myself as being outside in an agency to being inside, which is also the role we're playing, transforming ourselves. Like it could, it's super interesting how, um, frustrating that can sometimes be actually like, you know, you know where you want to get to as the answer, but you've gotta bring everyone along on that journey, haven't you?

Therese Parkes: Yeah, absolutely. I think, um, what's, we're at this really interesting intersection where we know. Right. We're all aware that, you know, AI was sort of the bingo card word, um, of the last couple of years and, you know, and then it's gen ai, orent ai, and now it's all different like in what sort of use case we're using ai.

Um, and so everyone wants to rush to, to, uh, create this and to use it. But, you know, do we have the right talent that's skilled up to do so are we, are we recognizing how we're, uh, we're leveraging that and is it in its best use case? And um, and in many cases we have sort of old measurement systems, old KPIs, old legacy, sort of ways of thinking about our business, and yet we're very quickly trying to inject mm-hmm the latest technology.

And so there's a delta between really getting the best out of it and making sure that it's informed in the best places, leveraged in the best places, um, and not just the shiny new toy, right?

Jon Busby: Mm-hmm. Like how do you, how do you even start about trying to get that balance? Like, just thinking about this from a, yeah, we're a marketing agency.

You are working at, you know, a, a, a big consultancy and previously worked at a big AI company or Yeah. Company that's pushing ai. Like, how do you even start to understand that balance?

Therese Parkes: Well, first I think you have to understand, you know, what are you really trying to solve for? Like what is the, what are you.

Step back, look from the macro, like what are you really trying to solve for? Because I think it's very, a lot of times we say, oh, we're not. Profitable or we're not efficient, or we're not, you know, we've, oh, AI can, um, help us cut costs or can move faster. Or, you know, a lot of times when we looked, um, marketing gen ai, it's like, oh, we, we did a study, um, back at, at Google.

It was like, oh, we saw that lots of people were starting to use gen AI in their marketing. Those that were the highest growth, the most profitable, weren't those that had gone full sail into actually giving over all of their marketing capabilities into Gen ai. It was those that were testing into it and understanding it.

Those that actually had given it all over were actually not in the, what we would call the highest growth or the, and we tried to unpack that and understand a little bit more, and that's probably because they were trying to understand its best use case. They hadn't just. You know, dumped it in and let it ride.

And I think that's the thing about AI or technology in general, it's do you have the right people? Are you solving the right problem statement? Are they skilled up in the right way to use it? Um, and then what does adoption look like? And is an endemic to the way that you're doing business? Is it actually solving, is it easy to use?

Right? Is it, have you, have you actually. Made lives easier, made workflows easier. Is it injected into the workflow or is it now this very non-natural process and we have to go left outside of the process and back in. Um, just to say that we're using it, and I think don't make it, you know, everyone wants to have the claim of using AI or or technology to solve in this.

Era, but people are still at the core of this. Mm-hmm. And it's mm-hmm People who leverage these tools. And so at the heart of that, you need to have the right talent. They need to be skilled up in the right way. You know, there's a, so much right now, I think AI was the word, and now it's all about building skills-based organizations or talent transformation.

Because as we look at how AI intersects, it really is changing the shape of every organization who we need to, hi, hire. The way that organizations need to be shaped, uh, the roles and, and, and responsibilities that everyone needs to have is, is actively changing shape. And it's, it's a flywheel. It's, it's like we all have to get to this foundational stage to catch up to where AI has intersected.

Mm-hmm. But then it's going to keep moving very, very quickly. And so we all have to become much more agile.

Jon Busby: Yeah, I think, I think the, the, the interesting thing I was speaking to one of our teams, uh, firstly let's recognize a couple of the points you went, you, you've referenced there. 'cause I think they are vital.

You know, even I've been on this journey for the, for the last decade. I'm gonna say I've been on this journey. I'm a technologist. I love

Therese Parkes: when you reference things and you're like, I've done this for a decade.

Jon Busby: I know, I know it sounds.

The, you've thrown me off there. No, the um, no, it's good. Uh, it, it comes down to like, as a technologist, I'd always go solution first. Like, I just get excited about the technology. Yeah. Yeah. And I think a lot of people do that with ai. They're like, okay, I'm gonna buy co-pilot. I'm gonna buy G and i, I'm gonna add all this to our organization.

And actually the ones where I've seen the best. Use case, actually, let me phrase it a different way. The most success have been the ones that have been very defined about the use case. That's right. Have said, you actually, here is a problem. Now let's bring AI to automate it. And on top of that, they focused on adoption.

1. Um, which comes into the talent and upskilling elements. You, you've, you've mentioned. So I think like those are like the two key elements and the technology is only really a third of it. Like whether you're using chat GBT or open AI or Gemini or, and like, is, is,

Therese Parkes: is it in the hands of those that need it?

Is it actually widely being then leveraged for the thing that you said it was needed for? Because it's easy to. Go out and buy or, or bring in a bunch of quote unquote technology solutions in the effort of, of these solves. But the reality, if it's only being leveraged in, in, in a third of its capability or in, in, by only a third of the people.

It is, it is debt, it is waste, and um, and the market is, is hard. So, you know, operational efficiency or operating margin is, is was the topic that I had with almost every single one of the CEOs, um, as I was when I was at Google. And so. This is a, a, a core consideration is that if you're going to bring in a technology to solve something, particularly for something like efficiency and profitability and making your, your business better, um, you surely have to make sure that it is actually being

Jon Busby: used.

It's, it's one of the key problems that I've seen just thinking about the future of all of our businesses. Right. Um, and I'm, I really wanna pick your brains on this, like, how do you. That adoption there, there's no, what I've found is there's no formula to get, if you're getting adoption working, I'm sure someone out there will say no.

Of course there's a formula and it says 10 step process and this is what you run. But what I've, what I've learned is certainly in kind of medium sized businesses, it's it, a lot of it is around energy and perseverance. Like yeah, it is you, you just gotta keep. Drilling, drilling with people about how they could use it until they adopt it.

Like nine months ago in this, I was talking to one of our teams earlier today, you know, they, they were, we were having to remind them of the tools we gave them access to and how to use them. And we, we had to run constant training sessions. Um, now. You, you, you could, you can't rip those tools away from them.

Like it is so ingrained in their processes that it, that we, we couldn't consider doing business any, any other way. Like what is your strategy apart, you know, I'm not gonna say pure energy and perseverance is the best strategy here. Like what, how would you break it down?

Therese Parkes: I think it's really funny that you're talking about an incredibly sort of manual process.

Yeah. For something that is a technology solve. Um, I find that. Wonderfully ironic. Anyway, um, what I think, you know, when it comes to things like this, it's, it's how are you baking it into workflows? How are you baking it into management conversations? How are you? Um, I. Exposing it in terms of, uh, it's adoption.

You know, do you have dashboards of usage and adoption and how deep? And obviously it depends on what the technology is. So I'm, you know, I'm trying to sort of think from a very, um, but. You know, chat GBT or Gemini or, or copilot or whatever it is, it's how many people are actively engaged? What is the feedback daily and are you gathering that feedback?

Are you actioning that feedback? Then what is the impact to and from? I think really interestingly, you know, a lot of times we get some form of technology. We implement it. And then we don't actually ask them how it's going. Right. We just expect them to use it. But if we don't ask them, has it, you know, it's about, so the sort of energy and perseverance, I agree.

It's about injecting it into, now the management, you know, one-on-one conversations. How is that going for you? Does that make sense? It's about having town halls and education, of course, but it's more about how have you now made. Whatever its solve is, or its impact, its intended impact now into workflow such that it's exposed, such that you're monitoring it, you have to, it, it has to be witnessed.

So yes, it's energy and perseverance in terms of education and like let's go and whatnot. But you have to be able to, um, sort of quantifiably. Um, understand how it's being used, and then qualitatively understand what's good, what's not, and then make changes and pivots. Um, because otherwise people aren't going to, you know, it's just gonna be the thing that hums in the background and it'll be like nice to have, not need to have.

Jon Busby: Yeah, it's, it's, and I think, by the way, this is a, this is a massive debate. I think a lot of the AI companies aren't giving a lot of, uh, giving any insight into some of those use cases quite yet. Um, like we've seen that as a challenge. Like it is, I, I'm surprised how little visibility they are providing into who's using it.

When are they, when are you using it, you know,

Therese Parkes: measurement in data. Yeah, are at the core of absolutely all things in business. I feel like, you know what I mean? Like it when it's marketing, I talk about data. When it's AI tool usage, I talk about data. I think you need to frame understanding through objective things.

And so these AI companies that you know. I have seen so many where it still feels a lot like vaporware, and it's like

Jon Busby: mm-hmm.

Therese Parkes: The output of whatever they've created might be through the lens of very sophisticated tools, but what they deliver to you is a very manual spreadsheet or a deck or, or whatnot.

That's not scalable yet. And so it is challenging to make sure that it is, um. Being used in its highest and best form if you're waiting. And if it's not real time, if you're not getting feedback, you know, it's like we put the technology into the shiny thing, but not into the thing that actually helps us with the adoption, with the, um, benefit.

Recognizing the benefit of it. Right?

Jon Busby: Hmm. Uh, look at it. Look at it the other way. What, you know, if you saw these businesses that had invested a lot and weren't in that top segment, you saw the ones that were investing in a more iterative fashion focused on use cases and adoption in, in, you know, in the high quadrant, let's say.

Yeah. What, what were the businesses that were falling behind? What were they not doing? Um, and I, I guess the answer might be easy. They were not adopting any of these new technologies, but like, was there any other insight into the ones that were falling behind?

Therese Parkes: Yeah, I think, um, I think it's just, it, it is hubris of, of like, I know better, right?

Like, I think that we all just need to stay curious and under, and like really understand is could there be a solve? I think that, um, the, the businesses that I have found where, um. They fall behind it is, is really just a set it and forget it mentality. And, and I think, you know, we've, we, we investigated this three years ago.

We know the answer we're good. Um, or we tried that technology and, uh, three years ago it didn't work for us. We're good. The speed that innovation happens today, the speed that the market changes today, that competition changes today, I think it's just about not having, um, enough agility and flexibility in your teams, uh, and in the way that you measure success.

Um. That you get stuck in sort of a river of thinking of, of like, we've got this and this is what got us here, and we're, we're gonna stick, stick on the path. Hmm.

Jon Busby: I I, and I've definitely seen that in more, certainly more technical roles. Um, there's that kind of reluctance to, to, you know, I know better. I've seen this before and this pace.

We did an evaluation again a year ago into certain, with certain roles, and we were like, it's just not good enough. Fine. Now we, we just rerun that evaluation and it's now, so the difference is so wildly different. Stuck. It's, it's scary. Um, yeah, like I've had coming back to building high impact teams, um, you know, I.

I've had team members come to me and say, I'm so excited to be using this. I'm also incredibly anxious. Um, yes. 'cause what this could mean for my job. So it's, it's, yes, it's kind of scary, but it's like, how do you, how do you try and manage, you talked about talent before, like how do you try and manage that?

Um. Dichotomy or

Therese Parkes: Yeah, yeah. Worried. I think everyone wants to believe that, you know, AI is coming for all of us, or, or ml or, or the machines, you know, the, the whole like, um, this idea that we're all obsolete, but it is, uh, technology, AI in the hands of well-trained. Individuals. And so there are functions that are repeatable.

You know, when we look at, um, and this is a throwback, but like there are are. Mechanisms and understanding and measurement and data sort of paths within marketing or that are wildly beyond what a human can and should do. Um, but that doesn't mean that the interpretation, that the, um, that the then net, like the net action as a result, like what to do next with that understanding crunching.

You know, billions of signals is the work of machines. What to do then is the work of humans. And I think it really is about, um, an assurance that these tools are, are built and best leverage in the hands of, um, of well-trained and, and well-defined roles for humans and. It's not a replacement, it's an enhancement.

And so how are we ourselves holding ourselves accountable to, um, be able to relinquish the things of ourselves that, that are, you know, that don't serve us to, to do the repeatable, uh, you know, heavy lifting of data crunching or, you know, writing an email, you know, better through chat, GBT, whatever it is, but.

What can we do instead? Are we keeping ourselves honest about, um, the direction of, and, and keeping our skills sort of refined and up to date with how to leverage these tools? It's. It's the machines plus humans. That is the, the sweet spot. So, yeah.

Jon Busby: Although I, I'm gonna challenge that slightly. So I saw, I saw a stat earlier today.

I'm sure you've seen this name before.

Therese Parkes: Oh no. Now you're gonna give me an existential crisis. Okay, go ahead.

Jon Busby: Yeah. You know, yeah. Ex like, so I think, and I think this was your ex-colleague at LinkedIn posted this, so Peter, this was, I think it was on Peter Weinberg's LinkedIn today. Oh, okay. Did you see this?

Where they No, I haven't yet. Where they talked about, um, and I can't, I'll have to try and dig out where the status is. Let me see if I can find it. But it's, um, along the lines of talking about doctors, right? Doctors without AI that say, had to have like 78%, uh, response rate. Sure. AI on its own had something like 92% success rate, like a ni in the nineties.

So an increase, and then it was along the lines of doctors with ai, which is augmenting it. You'd, you'd think like, okay, that's gonna be the best of both worlds was lower than AI on their own. So there's been a study on this to say, hang on, like that that does start, uh, don't get me wrong. Like, I read that and was like, is that true?

Um,

Therese Parkes: well, yeah. Again, I'd have to investigate what that quote unquote study is and, and the use case for that and what that means, and like the response rate. But I think, um, you know, chatbots or customer service, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think it was my, um, I, I think it was it Klaviyo or something? They, they replaced like, you know, an individual, like their chat bot, uh, their customer service chat bot was able to do like 250 hours times what an individual human could and with a sort of correct response.

Hit of 85, 90% versus like individual where you get it right, you get it wrong. Um, and, and it hovered maybe in that same, but the productivity leap was, you know, exponential.

Jon Busby: Mm-hmm.

Therese Parkes: But we still have to, like, we as humans, we'll get you, we as consumers have gotten used to a, um. A spectrum of sort of experiences that are different than before.

You know, think back just 10 years ago or more, you would walk into a bank and, and transact and get money. No one really walks into a financial institution unless it's absolutely dire, or you have to get a official check and you can even get those via mail. Ordering them from the internet these days.

Jon Busby: And by the way, we don't even use money anymore out here.

Well, that's

Therese Parkes: it. Well, and, and I will say the UK was always more advanced, like living there. Um, it's the one thing

Jon Busby: we're more advanced on. We, that's it. There's not much more. But it

Therese Parkes: was, it's wild. You are like giving a sort code and, uh, an account number in 2009 and why do we have Venmo like it Anyway, I, I, I digress.

But um. But the point is, is that we get used to a number of experiences. People still as humans don't love or are very critical of. Um, customer service is customer service experiences that are typically only run by bots. And so, um, a doctor experience, you know, I don't know that we're there yet. Mm-hmm. So while it might be.

Quote unquote, technically better, um, or more accurate. We still crave human personal experiences, and I'm not sure that we're at the place where we're ready to just. Sit back and let the machines take over. All human interaction.

Jon Busby: Yeah. And this, but this comes to like my other answer to, you know, I'm using the example of doctors there as kind of one extreme, like coming back to sales and marketing and coming back to maybe what's not changed.

Will this technology Yeah. Evolution. Um. You know, I think if we give, I've got a very strong opinion on this, um, and I'm gonna, I'll, I'll test it with you. Like, I don't think gen AI has as much of a place in marketing as people think it has. Um,

Therese Parkes: marketing is still about emotion and evoking emotion Exactly.

About trust and connection. And one thing machines don't do well is sentiment. If they don't do, um. That sort of emotive understanding. They can make pretty pictures. They can, you know, refine your text to make for flow for your email, maybe slightly better. But they cannot replicate trust, they cannot replicate emotion.

And, and that is where humans plus, you know, whatever, you might be able to crank out 15 versions of copy. Um. With pictures and, and you know, like ad variants or hundreds and thousands, you know, with gen ai. But you need to get to the first place where it's created from a place of understanding and understanding the personas and understanding your customer.

And, and, and from a place of trying to create connection and connection isn't created, um, by machines.

Jon Busby: Yeah, I, I, I couldn't agree more. And actually one, one of the biggest challenges I see is also this, uh, it's got so many different names today, so you might, you might have a better, more, better language than I will here, but like, essentially we're gonna, if the machine's not gonna get any new thoughts or new ideas from itself, so you're gonna end up with this prolonged sea of sameness.

That's right. Um, I think it's called like model degradation as the model that's right on, on themselves. Right, right. So I think there's still a part to play to be like, there's gotta be human in the loop somewhere. That prods it, that pokes it in the right direction, and that gives it some original creative and critical thought.

Otherwise, you're, you are just gonna, you're just gonna end up creating a, you know, a, a complete sea of sameness.

Therese Parkes: Well, we always say trash in, trash out, or something of that nature. Right. It is an insular, it's only as good as the date it's given. It's, yes, it can, um. It can extrapolate a bit or whatnot, but it's still with a data set, right?

It's not going into infinite. Um, it, it still is limited from, even if we, our human mind believes it's going into infinite places because the, the kinds of extrapolations it can make. But to your point about model degradation, it is. Limited by the sort of frame it was given. And so, and think about how fast culture changes or the lexicon or, you know, an event or whatnot.

If, if that sort of, uh, freshness and, um, awareness isn't in invoked all the time. Uh, and also just sentiment like. There's a tone of culture in, in waves, right? You could talk to your friends and you're kind of all feeling the same way at a given time. Um,

Jon Busby: if that's

Therese Parkes: not invoked. Then it becomes incredibly tone deaf.

Um,

Jon Busby: I mean, what you just mentioned there about, there's a whole other thing we can dive into about like building network effects and actually how Yeah. You know, actually I'm gonna go into this now 'cause I wanna, it's something, it's so, and it's not, you know, of our talking points' not discussed this, but it's something that someone planted a seed with me the other day and it's been going around my head since.

So I'm just gonna just let, let's dive into this. But before we do that, let's talk about the, let's come into one of our biggest topics that we love talking about, which is the B2B buyer journey. Yes. How that's changed. Yes. Like, let's level set with everyone. Like in, in your experience, what's changed?

What's still changing? What, you know, how has this, how do we need to be, think, what's the paradigm we need to be thinking about when we, when we think about B2B biotech?

Therese Parkes: Yeah. I think, look. Again, we're in this moment of awareness. The buyer has changed. The, the expectation has changed. The seller has not, in so many cases, and that's because it's self-referential, right?

Like the way that they measure success in these companies, the way they've done it for so many years, but so many, I, I've heard so many times like the. The buyer, the, the, the buyer journey takes longer. Like these leads are, it's time to close is so much longer. Well, why is that? Because those buyers are so, it is a buyer's game.

They're, they're self-empowered and self informed and doing all of their independent research, literally gone is the day where they want to live in this narrow funnel that we give them. They will act and operate however they damn well. Police and typically that is about, um, they will get all of the information they can that isn't gated.

1. They will go to video, um mm-hmm. And look at reviews. Video is huge these days about watching someone talk or do a demo that they can't, that they could be getting from the ae, but they don't want to talk to that ae. They wanna watch somebody else that's sort of independent or at least trusted in their perspective.

They want to, um, look at the white paper. They wanna look at someone on YouTube or Reddit who's doing them side by side. Yes, I've used this and I've used that, and here's my take.

Jon Busby: Yeah.

Therese Parkes: People love the sort of collective opinion, and so they're using this as, as endemic to their buyer journey. And we also know that advertising is actually much more influential than we think it is.

Right. Like 67% added. Someone to their consideration set because of an ad. But typically this is like a video ad or a, or a search a they people are okay with the internet of things, bringing someone into their sort of expansive, um, information gathering, and then they go to a reductive state and they try and narrow it down and when by the time they come to sales.

Oftentimes they're really just trying to figure out a couple of things. Hmm. Uh, price or that last little use case that they couldn't figure out because you gated something. But it's really, they're, they're the most informed buyer set that we've ever, ever, ever had. And so if we don't respect that, um, and let marketing take them much, much further, right?

How are we valuing the way that marketing should be on the hook for a lot? Because it can be.

Jon Busby: So, so you've mentioned this term collective, what was the collective opinion, right? Yeah. That's something that's been going through my head a lot recently. So, so completely agree. By the way, with everything you've said, is this tie

Therese Parkes: back to the network thinking that we were just

Jon Busby: Yeah, so, but, but I also think there's a, I'm gonna add like another trend in here.

Um, and I'll give, you know, one of the, one of my other previous podcast guests was the one that got me onto this train of thinking, which is this, this concept that we are in a. Uh, a lack of buyer confidence as well, right? So that, yeah, that group has got, but it's almost

Therese Parkes: like this because there is so much.

Data we get. It's like that analysis paralysis. It's like, am I making the right decision? Oh my God. Yeah.

Jon Busby: So, so that gr exactly, that group's got bigger, their data's got bigger. And so the core, the core decision maker has now they've lost confidence in themselves. They, they're no longer

Therese Parkes: because everyone has an opinion and it's not the same opinion.

Yes,

Jon Busby: exactly. Exactly. So, so I've got this, I've, I've, I'm coming up with this theory and I dunno whether it's something new or whether, you know, I, I dunno, it could be something completely obvious and you're gonna tell me that now, but we, in, in marketing, we always, and sales, we always target the kind of.

The core of that group, right? If you, I I'm thinking about it like a, a big cloud of different personas and people that perform. When you say

Therese Parkes: core, do you mean the CTO?

Jon Busby: Yeah, the CTO. The c the decision maker.

Therese Parkes: But I always, I, I strongly disagree with this opinion. I don't think we should be The Ct O mm-hmm.

Needs to look at the website or look at the brand. So this is where brand marketing comes in for the cto. So every person in the buyer journey. Needs a different form of marketing and a different, um, sort of feeling or outcome or, you know, they have a different buying criteria. A CTO needs esteem. They need that brand needs to feel valuable and interesting and needs to make sure that they, um, aren't ruining their career and they feel proud and they can puff their chest when they select said brand.

Yeah. Right. And so that they're not ruining their career and, and they. But all of the kicking the tires, the um, ui, the use, the price, like all of the. There is someone, director level maybe below that is sweating and staying up at night putting together a dossier to slide across the table to the CTO saying this is the one that will make you okay.

And that's the person you need to pay attention to, and we are not paying attention to that person.

Jon Busby: So I completely agree. Firstly, but also have being a CTO that tends to make decisions. I, I dunno, I feel the, I'm talking

Therese Parkes: against you. No, fine. Also agree. But your agreement is easier, I believe in the sense of is it known?

Is it recognized? Exactly. Is it valuable?

Jon Busby: So check, but Exactly. And then

Therese Parkes: you do trust that person. That's worked very, very hard. And so that's a, that's a conversation between you and the trust of that person, don't you think?

Jon Busby: Yeah. Completely agree. Right? But I think there's, I'm gonna extend that in a couple of different ways.

Firstly, uh, I think everything you've mentioned there is the reason why we're losing consensus in the buyer group, because there's that feeling of you, Hey, my job in the, like, like the, yeah, the, the. The science here, and I'm just getting behind on the science on this 'cause it's super fascinating. The more senior you get the, the less likely you are to take a risk.

'cause the more you've got at stake. Yes. Yeah. And therefore the less likely you are to actually promote or talk about a brand because you don't want to be seen to be promoting something a

Therese Parkes: thousand percent.

Jon Busby: Right. So, so you wanna

Therese Parkes: plug and play you Well and well, I can get into this in a total. Rat hole, but like you want to focus on outcome and you wanna protect yourself at all costs.

Mm-hmm. So you never want to, you are never going to hook your wagon, let's say, to any one thing, but you will discuss the outcome. You will discuss what it can do you, because if you come into a panic moment, you want the agility to. Unplug and replace. Mm. Something that can also do said thing, and you want, uh, and you don't want sort of a, a co-marketing internally with, with any singularity, with, you know, with a risk entity.

Like, like, Therese cares about this software and this is the thing, or this solution, or this strategy, unless it's already proven.

Jon Busby: Yes. So agree with that. So this is where the other, so two things I'm still gonna add onto what you said. Firstly, what you've described as that other buyer, I'm gonna call them, I think they're still the target buyer, but I'm, but I think there's a whole series of hidden buyers that we don't think about.

Right.

Therese Parkes: Because what I, that's a still a relatively senior person who is delegating parts of that.

Jon Busby: Yep.

Therese Parkes: And they, the, the delegated entities are very. Very important. That's why we say there's 17 to 20 people.

Jon Busby: Yeah. Yeah. But it's like, I keep saying security, compliance, legal, like all of these, you know, all these departments that Yeah.

Therese Parkes: If they don't get your green check

Jon Busby: Yep. Then they can come off to job and as

Therese Parkes: it move on. Yeah. So it has to go through legal, it has to go through pricing, it has to go through compliance. It has to go through a, for end users, it has to go through, you know, all these things. Yes.

Jon Busby: So firstly is that, but secondly, and this is, this is the bit that could be really obvious.

Now you've said it right, but if you think about that group, let's, let's look at that hierarchy that you just described. So you've got the CTO at the top and you've got this director level that's sweating the details around them will be a series of other roles, like it could be technical developers. Yep.

Support engineers. Now that's a role of, I think this is why a lead

Therese Parkes: never matters, by the way.

Jon Busby: Yeah, exactly. This is why a

Therese Parkes: lead is absolutely. A nothing.

Jon Busby: Exactly. And this is, but this is the point. Like I think, and this is where brand comes into it, our wonderful Yes, it does. You're right. I think that from a brand perspective, you need to target those edges and from a DM perspec perspective, target the center.

And that's the difference because I think if you go around the edges, I honestly

Therese Parkes: agree. Look, there's a role for all forms of marketing and unfortunately in B2B. It has largely, in most cases been overvalued in performance in M-Q-L-S-Q-L and like, you know, hero in volume. But we are, it's, it's, it's in brand and in consideration and in consideration marketing, which is sort of that middle distance of, are you, do you show up when I go to continue to research, right?

Mm-hmm. And so it's, it's not performance, but it isn't quite, it's sort of in that middle, right? Um. Consideration, marketing consideration as the, as the form of marketing is the most important. And it sits squarely between. But if you are only paying attention, and that's why I talk about signals and not leads, right?

You need to be paying attention to, you know, have they been coming to your website a whole lot more or, um. Have they looked at three layers deep into this sort of demo page? Or, or are they going to, you know, depending upon how much you can witness, um, in the free and safe internet, you know, are they, um, looking at content that's adjacent to you in your community page or in Reddit or wherever, you know, around the internet of things.

So like those are not necessarily direct. Right. Uh, we don't think of them as like immediately correlative like behaviors, but those are the correlative behavior behaviors. Now, those are the things, I can't get that word out today. Those are the things that matter, and this is where ML comes in big because we need to understand these patterns.

And we wouldn't necessarily make these associations. We need to crunch big amounts of, of, of data at times to understand the persona and the journey and, and, and where these, this is happening. But this is where the magic is happening. And if you don't influence those touch points, you've missed the trick.

Yeah. Because they, all of those key buying criteria influenced well before we actually get to speak to them.

Jon Busby: Actually, I, I want to extend your signals versus leads a little bit because. It's stuck, it's stuck in my head since our pre call. Uh, the reason, reason being, I think you, you've said signals versus leads.

We need to think about things as signals. I think bringing the brand to demand argument in, I think there's a signals question and then there is a point at which it, it does become a lead or it becomes, and how we define that lead is of course, I

Therese Parkes: mean, there's you, I think there's ac i, I, I, I am a little harsh, but I call lead acquiescence.

But at some point you've, you've committed and you do want to engage. Yeah.

Jon Busby: Yeah, but I, but I think there's this concept where we've gotta understand that. You know, before we were calling it engagement, I guess, which was because kind of still correct. Um, that's correct. You know, so, so, but I think there's this element of like, how do you start to define what brand means and the impact brand can have to then to then drive demand?

You know, back to my original point, I think brand is outside in and demand is inside out. Right of the buyer group. Um, yeah. Yeah. Depending on how you visualize it. And I think signals is your metric for how you measure the impact it's having and how far you're getting through that, that that buyer group.

Yeah, I mean it's all easy to talk about this. How you actually bring this to life is still a question that I think many organizations are, are battling with.

Therese Parkes: But I think look, brand acts as a demand amplifier, right? And so like we need to remember that you should be paying attention to short term.

Performance metrics, pipeline influence, and you know, your CAC and sales velocity and leads and all of those things. But you also need to look at, if you want to measure these things, you look at share, you know, your share of share, share of search, or your organic traffic or downloading white papers, or there are things to measure.

There is engagement, um, category preference, footprint, um, unaided brand recall. Like there are things you just have to be able to value them. Yeah. 'cause I think there's also market impact, right? Competitive benchmarking brand will help you with your ability to price, right? If your brand equity is high, um, you have pricing power.

So these are things to measure. Right, but we don't have an iterative culture of this. We think of brand as waste, and we've hyper value that lead and we are myopically focused on a cost per lead. And if you don't have an integrated sort of sense of a marketing program, you're just missing the trick because we hear time and time again.

You know, the sales team is. You know, we have these leads or we have this pipeline. How old is that pipeline? How many times have you turned that over? How, you know, how much of it is real versus not real? How, like what's your time to close? What's your deal size? Is it going down? Is it going up? Like we're not kicking the tires on that as much and, and it's sort of trending downward, but we accept that and yet we're not.

Really shifting the marketing strategy,

Jon Busby: but, but why? Okay. 'cause I know we're coming to a close now. Why are we accepting that we're trending downwards on that? Like what is, or everything you've just mentioned there, things, metrics that businesses should be tracking. Like why are they not,

Therese Parkes: because they don't have.

Room to value it in a way that is connected to revenue.

Jon Busby: Yeah. Yep. Yeah, fine. I would, I would, I would agree. Like I, but I think this is the big shift I've seen, so I, I had a chance to interview more, you know, more of your colleagues, I would guess, fellow speakers at the, A NAS this year rather back in 2024.

And that was the big shift I that, that we saw was this move towards using the same metrics as the rest of the business. That's right. Like we are now seeing CMOs. Two big trends that I love here. It's the

Therese Parkes: rise of the growth officer versus the CMO. Right?

Jon Busby: Exactly. Exactly. That's it. Like that's the trend that we're seeing is like people are now redefining themselves, not as CMOs, but as like growth and disruption

Therese Parkes: and, and growth is marketing plus revenue or marketing plus, you know, and, and that's the way it should be.

Mm-hmm. Because we spent all of our time online essentially.

Jon Busby: Agree. Agreed. So final question. I'm gonna try and do this question justice. So we talked a lot about B, B2B marketing and sales. Just then, how do you, how do you, as a business, how would you start to in integrate these signals into your. Into your workflow stack, tech stack people, whatever, that's people process reporting back to the board.

Like what is the first stage to break that down? What's the piece of advice you would give other B2B masters?

Therese Parkes: Well, first understand what you do measure and, and what do you measure and why do you consider that success? Right? What has historically and how is that trending? And so like take a state of play.

And then understand what your tactics are, understand what your competitors do, and then I would, I mean, I obviously care about, um, things like brand marketing and I care about, so investigate what that could mean. Like how can you, there are, there is so much, there are very smart marketers out there who make, you know, you can use things like MMS or you can use things like.

Um, schemas that, that bring in and make it sort of an end to end and tie it. Um, but we know things like, you know, as often quoted the, you know, for every dollar saved, it takes a dollar 85 to get it back. Like, that's about market footprint. That's about like, have you ever cut brand before? Can you look back and see what happened?

Right. Because I think that we often cut brand or we often cut, you know, leads or this form of marketing. Um. We look maybe very in a, in a short time horizon, particularly with brand, we look in a short time horizon. We're like, ah, no impact. But the funny part about brand is that it actually has a six year halo.

And so if we're not paying attention to actually what happened, and we just don't make associations, right? We say, oh, sales was less effective. We need to be willing to actually unpack and, and, and ask different questions. Mm-hmm. Did, maybe, did that actually ha like was our what, during the down periods or the high periods?

What was happening? And then what happened before and, you know, for the year or the two years, and can we create correlation? Um, and so how do you set it up? Look. Um, Neil Hoyne, who is, uh, wrote a book at Google about, I think it's co converted, um, and now I'm doing free press for him. But, um, you know, when he says measure brand, uh, and, and he talks so much about it because there is the prevailing question that everyone asks.

He's like, measuring it at all is better than not giving it a value at all is better than not. So my, uh, thought is. Imagine or look at how it could be valued. You know, is it brand equity or unaided recall or, or what? And can that be tied to something that we believe is closer to revenue and then measure it.

Yeah. And then if that doesn't work or it's not be iterative, of course, but having a value for it and valuing it internally is better than just. Letting it go to the wayside.

Jon Busby: I, I actually, I, strangely enough, I was having a conversation last week with a somebody in the channel space and they were having exactly the same dilemma about how do they ma measure the, essentially the brand, the micro brandand of their, uh, of their partner program with channel partners.

Therese Parkes: But it's like, is there more engagement? Yeah, that's great. Yeah. So value engagement, is there more? Yeah. Traffic to the website? No. I don't know what that necessarily means, but there's more. So if there's up into the right or down and you know or not. Measure that and then investigate what that could mean over time and then make that measure tighter.

Right? But start, I think is really when it comes to how do you start? It's start.

Jon Busby: Yeah. Yeah. Uh, it's been a real pleasure to have you back on the Tech Marketing podcast again today. Thank you for that. All that, that wonderful debate. As always, I'm looking forward to our next conversation. Um, so yeah, thank you very much.

Therese Parkes: Thanks so much, John.