Name: How to survive as B2B CMO and drive enterprise pipeline in AI era
Uploaded: 2025-09-25T16:36:08.290Z
Duration: 2 h 7 min 40 s
Description: How to survive as B2B CMO and drive enterprise pipeline in AI era

Transcript for "How to survive as B2B CMO and drive enterprise pipeline in AI era": Hey, everyone, and welcome to our brand new webinar. It's been a while since our last webinar, probably three to four months. And before we dive, into the agenda, I would love to thank you all guys for signing up for this webinar. We have more than 1,000 marketers signed up today, which is fantastic and means a lot to us. And also proves that the topic of today's webinar, how to survive as b two b CMO and drive enterprise pipeline in AI era resonates with a lot of people. So before we dive deeper, let us know please where you guys all join us from. We are again broadcasting from sunny and warm, Valencia. Hello. Nicholas from Greece, Ahmed, Egypt. Casey from Boston. UK, Scott. UK. Good. Brazil. Hello. Paris, India, Toronto, Brazil, love it. Jose from Spain, good to see your neighbor. France, yeah. 1,000 web webinar sign ups. It's also a surprise for us, but, I mean, a pleasant surprise. And just to give you a little bit of context, guys, how did we come up with the topic? Last year, we were running out of the state of fullfunnel marketing research, talking to, like, around 150 B2B marketing leaders, serving them about their GTM priorities, challenges, etcetera. And we came up with the first version of that, report. And this year, we saw a strong demand for account based marketing, but it didn't come as like, hey, we want to implement ABM. It all came with a sort of go to market challenges and people were always asking us, okay, how can we prove the short term ROI? So that's why we want to implement ABM. How can we show the attribution and the values? So lots of these, kind of questions that led us to rethink, if we should start a new research. So in the last two months, we reached out and so fast spoke to 50 plus b two b CMOs about what's going on. And today, we want to share with you, a, our observations of what's really happening, then why it's happening, then basically how to test these challenges. And just to make it more engagement for everybody, we invited our ex customer Ken Roden, who is VP of marketing and who successfully handled this issue to share his story. So with that being said, let's dive in. Hello, everybody. Here from the same room. Let's start with an overview of, what is going on? What did we learn in the research? And I think this, quote really summarizes it very well. The biggest roadblock I face is widening gap between expectations and reality. Leadership wants faster results, bigger numbers, cheaper acquisition, all of that amongst what we all know, of course, what the reality is that the buying cycles are going were getting longer and longer, that our budgets are tighter, their budgets are tighter in the buying side. Marketing noise is increasing and deafening. So even if you do follow the playbook and do the right things, conversation and revenue takes much longer. But the credits doesn't always get attributed to marketing. We know that. And then, of course, in what is, let's say, the elephant in Rome, what is going on in the market, what we see, like, in so much content about the LinkedIn, there is so much hype about it, is, of course, the AI. And there is a huge expectation. Yeah. Right? So the leadership just hears AI and thinks kind of magical thinking that you'll be able to do so much more. Right? There is a pressure to bolt it on everything, but not real clarity on why, what success look like, without real strategy behind it, without clean data, and, of course, the fundamentals. All you're doing is just contributing to the noise, increasing the noise. So scaling things that didn't work in the first place. And this is, such a good quote to highlight what's happening in terms of the actual, let's say, spread of the challenges, what we learn is that the biggest challenge is, it always was and it still is creating pipeline revenue. But what is new is that people are actually struggling to prove the direct revenue and pipeline contribution and influence. I think this is, very well of again, another I remember another quote, where it's, the the the contributor she described, you know, there's all these things that are happening, and the buyers are, you know, seeing a post on LinkedIn and maybe listening to a podcast, maybe checking a reference and whatever. But all that disappears in the CRM, and all that we see is the last click, the last call, that was done. And so, we don't really see what the contribution of marketing is. The big problem another very big problem is lack of marketing and sales collaboration. And the third and and it's almost half of, the people that have shared that. And the last one is lack of long term programs to build a brand, create awareness, and trust that is needed, in today's market. I don't think this is surprising, but I think it does make to it does make sense to check what how you feel about this. So I think we can share the poll, Andrei. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So we decided also to ask you guys and update the stats, of that research. So a very straightforward question. When you think about hidden pipeline and having the targets, what's really getting in the way right now? Please vote. Multi selection is allowed and we would love to incorporate your insights and just to update our report. And let's see how accurate was what we have collected so far. So let's do it for a few seconds. I already see proven marketing revenue and pipeline impact, constant push for short term ROI, lead in one. Yep. So the the biggest one, budget and resources constraints. Another one, data cost and CRM, lack of cross functional collaboration. So pretty much aligned, and I think, we have how many almost 200 people already online with us. That just proves, right, what we have collected. So the you you just prove the three core steps that b two b CMOs shared with us. Thank you very much for voting. So if you look beyond our research, there are also eye opening and, let's say, sobering facts or stats, that we see what's that tell us what's happening in the market. Less than a third, less than 33% of CEOs trust their CMOs. And, majority of them, more than half, believe that marketing teams put their own interest over the company's interest. Ouch. The average tenure of a marketer marketing leader is between sixteen and eighteen months, and we have seen many cases where this is even shorter. CMOs don't really get enough time to implement long term programs, which are needed to create trust. Companies are now on average spend or median spending a double of the on on acquiring new customers. Right? And the cut payback period has been increasing by 12 and a half percent since 02/2022. So, of course, it's getting more and more expensive. And, of course, we know all know and referred to many times and experienced it ourselves, b to b buying process is changing, has definitely changed. 86% of enterprise buyers actually buy from the vendors they have shortlisted before they start their research program. So on the one hand, we don't get enough budget and time to build the long term programs that are required to build that trust. And on the other hand, that's exactly what is required to win those high value customers. So what is really happening, and and in in in a lot of companies is that if you're a marketing leader, if you're a CMO or head of marketing, if you don't have the CMO, that you find yourself between two fires. On the one hand, you have the different way that the buyers are buying. You know that you need to invest in those long term programs to build the trust. You know that you need to be, you know, creating brand awareness. You know that you need, to do that. At the same time, because of the attribution, it's hiding a lot of these, of the impact that your long term programs are creating. The executives are breathing down your neck and pushing on the short term ROI from quarter to quarter, and that you can prove with clear attribution, basically, almost questioning any activity, what is the ROI of this as if b two b was transactional. So the next question that we would like to answer is, okay. This is the situation. It's a little bit dire. So how did we get here? And, later on also, what is the way out? Yeah. As they say, knowing the history helps you to predict the future. Right? So September ago was exactly when I started my career, but not in b to b marketing and b to b sales. So I spent five years in sales. And guess what? Like, I started, at Kimberly Clark, big corporation. Right? World known as MCG brand. And we didn't have all this modern software. And the final fact, as I mentioned, I started in sales. Marketing actually had a bad kind of perception among my sales colleagues. I was just regular SDR. Right? But I always heard people complaining about brand managers, about paid marketing managers, etcetera. And the biggest problem is that at that point, marketing actually lost a seat, a strategic board. Right? Marketing was kind of perceived as arts and crafts department. So what happened next? Marketing wanted to regain that strategic seed. Right? And smart vendors, they actually saw it. You probably all have thought about the demand gen waterfall framework that we still use today, like despite that it was invented twenty years ago. And the framework was pretty simple just to tell and to tell the executives, hey, this this story, this narrative, hey, we are just driving the revenue. Lifecycle stages, linear journeys. Right? Leads, first of all, marketing leads, marketing qualified leads, sales qualified leads, pipeline close won, close lost. And basically, that's initiated the infamous MQL playbook. Generate and like put in 1¢ as John Roden calling it in the MQL gumball machine, which we'll be referring to later. And get the MUMAC MQLs out. That was perfectly working for four or five years, but then we all face the scalability problem. Right? So how can we can how can we do this at scale? Because there is a growth appetite to generate more leads, more pipeline. So the smart vendors smell the demand and create that marketing automation for us. Now you can do nurturing at scale because we know that these NPLs are not sales ready. We need to nurture them. And by nurturing, we mean just setting up the of automated emails, begging for a demo. Here we go. We have the solution led by the market and automation. We did it for four, five years, and then we kinda entered the growth hacking era. Well, I will skip, let's say, Dropbox Airbnb started that you guys all thought about and move to b two b. I remember I started to post on LinkedIn somewhere in, like, twenty seventeen, eight years ago. And my LinkedIn feed was full of, like, this gross hacking advice, which was all about I scraped the web. I found the emails of, like, let's say, strategic decision makers. I set up automated cadences. Here we go. This is the new playbook. Why we needed this? Because we didn't have enough MQLs to nurture to put into our marketing automation machine. Right? So we started to invent gross hacking and it was all about this. And what happened next? Now we are supposed to do all of this with AI. We have wonderful AI tools, just crashing with it and step by step, we are just going down this B2B market on suicide scale, just trying to optimize the broken playbook that we all know that it's not working. But the history repeats itself. This is my favorite anecdote, to be honest. Like, if you guys remember the California Golden Rush, I very briefly shared that story. Like, it was February ago. People were just gold seekers. They were moving to California because somebody said that there is tons of gold and you can find it. But what happened, actually, desperate people moved to California. They tried to seek the gold. But guess who actually made money? Guess who actually became millionaires at that time? People who are selling the tools, equipment, food, all of that stuff. Because the cost of the equipment became so expensive, and people, they were so desperate. They were put in because they were believing that there is a goal and all all they need is just a better equipment. And the same is happening at Marketo. Look, John Miller, when he joined, ex actually ex cofounder of Marketo. Right? When he joined our full final summit earlier this year, he said, like, I feel, responsible for that playbook. So we came with Marketa in twenty o six. I found that off, landing page, and we said, okay. Marketing, drive more revenue, optimize marketing spend, improve marketing accountability. All you need to is just to to buy Marketa. And what's happening today? Nothing changed. Right? Look at Gong's position. And I'm not questioning Gong. Gong is fantastic product, but look at the positioning. Drive real outcomes with revenue. I I right? So the same promise, we just we tried to promise, and I totally get this. We tried to make market unpredictable and just to show the market of impact. But guess what's happening meanwhile and who is making the money? Just look at the growth of market Martech software app since twenty o one. I think that graph tells pretty much who is making money right now. So what's the problem here? For the years, we ignore the elephant in the room. Right? The elephant in the room is that we're all trying to optimize the broken playbook instead of fixing go to market fundamentals, instead of running the change management and the organization and explaining that this is not how the marketing, but not how marketing works. This is not how the pipeline is generated. And this is how not leads are created. Leads are not created because we send like personalized emails or thought or we had like a fantastic tool to set up nurture and cadence at scale. No, leads are created because of brand, because of trust, because we earned their attention and they believe that we are the best choice. And you all know that this linear funnels, this linear buyer journey, they don't work anymore. People don't buy, right, because they saw just an ad, clicked or filled in the gated form, received five emails and booked the demo, received like, a bunch of personalized emails from SDRs. Right? And nobody says I I I personally don't know any buyer who said, hey. I want to be your NPL. Please pass my details to your SDR. I love just to receive this a bunch of your in marketing emails and SDR who is going to pitch me, right? You all know that the buyer journey is completely different and that people are learning about the solutions from LLMs, private chats, right? From internal conversations, conversations with peers and learning in different communities, which are also social channels like LinkedIn or Reddit. And I mean, very fast a lot to this. Probably you guys have seen. If you didn't, I highly recommend you to take a look at this research done by HockeyStack and, yeah, HockeyStack where they basically measure, how many touch points and impressions it takes to generate sales opportunity. And obviously, these are value added touch points. And in actual, you can see that it takes, like, more than 250 touch points just to be able to move the deal from fast impression to closed one. Right? That's the key. And where it's leading us? The key point is that even to be considered today by your buyers, you need to create trust. Right? Buyers, they precreate the least of their top choices. I'm not obviously, I'm not talking about transactional products. Just, better to me, we're not talking about $15, you know, outreach product or whatever. There is no risk to purchase. We are talking about enterprise deals. Right? Starting from 50 k, 100 k, etcetera. Right? And in this case, 86 of well, like, this is the research from Willian. Right? 86% of enterprise buyers shortlisted the product they have heard before sharing the research process. So where we are today? And let's look at it. This slide, very nice, prepared by Andrei. Andrei mentioned this already. The credit goes to John Miller, that he used this analogy, the gumball machine. So we were thought that you put, you know, whatever, a dime in and you get to you get the dime out, get the lead out from the marketing machine. This is how we were taught, to think about, marketing b two b, and we all know that that's not how it works. It's not a transactional thing where you, you know, do a number of actions, put a bit of budget, transomads, and immediately get directly the result. Takes many more touch points across the different channel, across the buying committees, which are growing and becoming more complex before before you have actually built that trust and created that, you know, preference for your brand, actually, and before the buyers are going to even put you in the consideration set. The problem that is happening is that the more we try to scale it with the tools such as AI, the more we are teaching our buyers to ignore, you know, the content that is en masse being produced by AI. The messages that they're now receiving more than ever is because the more that we do that, the more we are actually teaching them not to, not to trust those messages, not to ignore that type of content. And, I think it's also John who mentioned this call is the tragedy of the commons. So the basic concept of tragedy of the commons is when we're all fighting for a limited resource. Let's say we have you know, we are all farmers, and we want our sheep to graze the grass, and the grass is common. The problem is that we know even if we know that if, let's say, I'm going to let my sheep race for one day, and then I'm going to let my neighbor and their sheep race for another day, and if we all share this common, goods in a proper way, that all our sheep are going to have enough grass, enough food. However, if I'm smart, I know that if I come there first and I let my sheep graze a little bit more, I will get more out of it. And so, of course, I ruin it for everybody else, and this is what's happening. So the more people, create, you know, what there is a new playbook. There is a new, thing that is shared on LinkedIn and is catching fire, and everybody is going crazy about it and implementing that playbook in their own, you know, marketing and sales. And suddenly, of course, this playbook stops working because exactly, that's what happened. People start ignoring it. I think Andrei Andrew Chen has another great name, maybe, not such a nice name. The law of of click of shitty click throughs. It's just like whatever new tactic, whatever new thing appears in the market, it's going to work at the beginning, but then as more and more people jump on it, as there is more and more of that tactic misalignment within the marketing teams, between the marketing and the sale team, sales teams, despite the best intention. It's not about people not wanting to work together or, you know, not not, you know, having the good or the bad, guys in there. It is simply because of the misaligned incentives. Right? Some are incentivized, like, maybe the SDR may be incentivized on the activities, the number of calls that they can book, etcetera, while the, you know, marketing might be incentivized on MQLs or other metrics, AIs and closed deals, etcetera. So we have misalignment in, incentives, and then we have misaligned teams. And today, if you want to really be able to create a deal in the new buying, in the way that the buyers are buying today, you need to work together. That's the only way. And the problem or the net result is that well, when forgot to just mention one thing here. Our quarterly hamster wheel that was also it was a one marketer who who don't quote it. She came up with that, that basically what is happening is that a lot of marketers feel that, you're always on the hamster retrying to, make this quarter's quota this quarter's results, whether these are MQLs or other other metrics. And even if you put in your best effort in and you meet those, those targets, all you have done is, one, you have just raised the bar, and the leadership is going to raise it for next quarter. And, typically, if you're trying to kind of squeeze the last juice out of that lemon, you're kind of, like, also set the patch in the future quarter. Of course, what we we know that the pipeline of today is was created six, nine months ago. Right? So we need to be working today for the pipeline of the future. Unfortunately, a lot of people find themselves a lot of us, you know, marketers find ourselves in this situation, and they just feel there is no way out. We have inherited this broken playbook. We are doing our all doing our best within those constraints to get the the bet better best results we can, But what's really happening is, despite our best efforts, it's not working because the playbook is broken and not because of something that we are doing wrong, which is how some people may feel about it. So as I mentioned briefly, if you this situation, if you look at it, what's happening today with the AI or let's say the misuse of AI is that now we can do more. Yes. Now we can create more content. Now we can send more messages to even more people. We can use Clay, and we can, pull out more information about those target accounts and send quote unquote personalized messages in mass. But all we are doing, as we know, is just increasing the tragedy of your commons and teaching our buyers to ignore us even more. So in a way, the bad use of AI is accelerating the death of the broken playbook. So the next, part where we wanted to talk about is the solution. So how do we escape? I think it's enough to talk about the problems. And as we promised, we have, also invited, our friend and our ex customer Ken Roden, who is an experienced seasoned VP of Marketing. And so we are going to ask him to share his story in a second. And, the key point of this webinar is to share the solution. Right? It's not like we can, you know, like, hit the face of the wall, but that's not the point. We need to find the solution. So what we did, we actually, we analyzed lots of our successful use cases. And you guys probably know across live episodes with our customers talking about the real solutions. And you can see also one of the episodes we had was Ken as well. So we want to share with you the solution and also ask Ken to present his challenges with what he was dealing, right, and how he solved it. I will just very briefly summarize the key points and then, we'll just pass the mic again. What we feel, just to summarize everything, here's the core issue. Attribution calls, silo teams, broken playbooks, pressure on short term results. As a result, we have decline on pipeline and revenue. And you might feel that this is enough. You are fed with this. You need to make the revolution. But revolutions are never working, just to be honest, unless you want to be done at dark in your organization. Right? So the key point is to make an evolution of your marketing mix and how your team works. And basically, this is all about see the grains and prepare the change, run cross functional pilot programs that help you to connect the dots between your different programs, including sales, operationalize what you are doing with playbooks and AI, and create center of excellence for further scaling and experimentation. That equals the long term growth. That being said, before we'll dive into our frameworks, I would love to welcome Ken, and thanks a lot for joining us. Hey. Thank you so much for having me. It's great to see you too. Hey, Ken. Hey. Good. So I think what would be the best is just we share it, like, how did we end up where we are today as beta the marketer. So I think you have a fantastic story of change management to share. So just thanks a lot for being open about this. Just pass and mic to you. Sure. Happy to share and I'm happy to answer any questions that people might have. But, to set the stage a little bit, before I implemented this change with the team, the conditions were were already changing even before AI. Enterprise software buying changed dramatically, and what we were seeing was longer sales cycles and actually a decrease in size of deals. And the, you know, tried and true measure of MQL just stopped working. We had volume without value. I remember right before we kind of realized that we needed to make a change, we had our most successful MQL month in the history of the company, and it barely converted into opportunities that, showed business impact, for the value of the campaigns. Also, along with that, there was a lot of friction with the sales team and the BDRs. Our measurement, our North Star was around MQLs. They could care less about MQLs. There we were speaking different languages, and we were chasing different goals. It felt to, like, to them that we were just doing things for the sake of doing them, calling them, random acts of marketing. I mentioned the deal quality drift, but what that actually meant from a business perspective is that we were getting further and further away from our ICP because we had had a consistent growth and relationship with a certain enterprise, which was the Global one thousand, and our deals were just skewing smaller and smaller, which means that we were no longer targeting, and our sales team was just going after anyone they could get their, hands on and who could engage with. And then the other thing which I'm sure you all are feeling right now is the idea around the buyers' habits are changing. Buyers have been shopping before engaging with organizations now for a while. 70% of the buying process has happened. But the not only has that changed, but there's been a real emergence of trust, in the past few years. How can I trust a brand, especially in the software space when software has made all these commitments about high ROI, you know, 30% pipeline growth using our tool or 30% ROI in just six months? And that wasn't what's happening with the companies who ended up using those vendors. So we were struggling with a trust obstacle, and people didn't know who we were and what we were all about. So, to take you kind of how we thought about what the change was, I really thought about this organizational change like it was an internal buyer journey. If my end goal was to get the, implementation of a new approach, and this example is around ABM, how was I going to sell that to my company? Meaning, getting stakeholder buy in as well as actually making it come to life after we implement it. How we're gonna make sure it was a success? So things that really started things out were around curiosity. I wanted to understand who my ICP was. What were their drivers talking their language? One of the biggest learnings I had, which I misstepped, these guys can attest, was assessing the risk, and which is why I think the pilot is so important. Because coming in to your leadership team, talking to the sales team and saying that the thing is broken, we have to blow it all up, it's quite intimidating. So by saying, hey. We're noticing these changes in our buyer. We're noticing changes in our deal size. We have some theories or hypotheses about how we can make impact on this an effective way. That's much more, less scary to the person on the other side, Especially if you're in a publicly traded company or a private equity backed company, it's really good way to think about things in terms of a pilot. I'm just gonna take one or two resources, four resources to focus on this rather than, you know, blowing up the whole team and reimagining their roles until we have something to to stand back on. So, you know, I wanna pause there and just really hit on the fact that, like, picking your team to do the pilot is really important. You don't need your top performers, and it might be actually harder to pull them off, what they're doing. What you want are the people who believe that this, pain is real, that they're also experiencing this and are motivated. They might be motivated to be part of the team to dive into more work. They might be motivated because they're not hitting their quota if they're a salesperson or a BDR. But finding people who are also struggling are are gonna be the people who are gonna give the most. And that part is really important was really important for me. So what we did with this pilot is we picked a small team across the marketing sales. Subject matter expertise was also a big part, and we needed some ops help. But we did role clarity. We had a team of, people focused on the outbound motion from a SDR perspective, but also content marketers, and then a demand gen person who kind of was their orchestrator along with with myself. One thing that was really important, probably the most important thing was, sowing seeds to engage the stakeholders throughout the journey. So before I even presented that there was a problem to the leadership team, I actually had one on ones with the CRO, a few members of the sales team, asked them questions about what they were experiencing. Honestly, swallowed a little bit of pride and had to acknowledge that what marketing was doing wasn't as effective as we had hoped, which is a good way to build rapport and trust with someone. And I asked for their advice and their input. And some people actually said things that I was trying to get to. We aren't connecting with the types of buyers we're looking for we're looking for. We aren't moving together as a sales and marketing team. Wow. That's great because I'm also experiencing that. How can we work together to accomplish that goal? The other thing that I think was really helpful was, paying attention to ask questions and who was kind of more standoffish. This is a more of a change management aspect. If someone's asking questions, they're most likely curious and engaged. And so if the CRO is asking questions, if the VP of business development is asking questions, if someone in rev ops is asking questions, lean into them because they're going to be able to help champion what you're doing. Again, sticking with the pilot was really important. Really getting clear on the metrics and sharing things along the journey. So if even if we created a new content piece, from a podcast interview that we had done, I shared that with the LT to give them an idea of what we were doing. And I even was like, hey. We were able to engage this, this contact who had, gone quiet quiet on us for six months. Hey. We got 30 likes on this piece when we're typically getting, like, five or six on content pieces like that. Little milestones are okay when you're still building towards something. Expectation setting is really important. If you're in a PE setting or a publicly traded company, you have to focus on results coming. So we need to set expectations on what's possible. Again, we are gonna be able to deliver consistent growth, out the gate. We have to be able to set expectations, and that's why you wanna make sure that you're communicating to your stakeholders about what's happening. The other thing that was really positive about that approach was I was actually sharing that one on one with people and then sharing it at large. And at some point, I actually got the CRO being like, can we're actually noticing the deal quality conversations are getting better, which is a good sign because that means we're getting back to our ICP. So I wanna talk about some of the results, from the pilot because that was really important from us to go to a proof stage then to a scale stage. Just as a reminder, we didn't boil the ocean. We would very much sequence this. We started with ICP, messaging, channels like LinkedIn and podcast, and then into sales play. We were crystal clear at that small pilot group so that we could really align. We had stand ups three times a week for, to unblock things, and we shared as we went, from the screenshot of success of a comment from a prospect to something big like launching, you know, our first podcast series. And the results of the pilot were real for us. Marketing pipeline share grew from about 30% to approximately 60%, which is closer to what benchmark would be for our industry and target market. We did also shift from the MQL conversation to marketing source pipeline and account, pipeline engagement. So how many of our accounts target accounts do we have in pipeline, which was closer to what the sales team was talking about. And so I really had to work with these guys right here, but as well as our sales leadership on what metrics could we agree that were important. One thing I really love was, the LinkedIn outreach from a podcast interview, to offer someone, hey. Would you do this podcast? I wanna learn about you and your expertise and turning that into a a piece of content as well as a way to engage. And that really helps get, marketing source opportunities within two weeks far faster than our old models. That was a really good approach, that I hope you can take away with it. That was kind of the big things. I wanted to talk a little about change management, but, Andrei and Vlad, is there anything else that you thought might be helpful for me to talk about? No. I think it's great. So feel free just to move. I like yeah. With that at all. Sure. So, one of the things when I look back, I realized that was really hard was not actually the play. These guys actually know the play pretty well, but it's getting it implemented at the company you're at with the team you have, where everyone is starting out. And we're all starting from different places, and so having that empathy and really understanding, what's the mindset of that BDR manager who's, like, feeling discouraged because they're not hitting their target? Or what's the frustration level of the demand gen manager that you're talking to who is just working all the time on building out campaigns and not getting the results or the positive feedback that they're looking for. And where you can lean into that is something that I've now called the chain velocity model, which is really leveraged in around, human psychology as well as some insights from McKinsey and Korn Ferry. The logic all applies, and I found this can't come to life with us. But what's really important is, people have to feel the friction. They have to believe that there's a problem in order for the problem to be addressed. So in this example, my demand gen manager was so frustrated that we weren't able to convert. The BDR manager was extremely frustrated that they weren't hitting their quotas. It was impacting their pay. CRO was panicked because our sales target was slowly getting out of our grasp and wasn't sure what we were going to do for the rest of the year. So we're understanding that what the friction is and where we can lean into it. The other thing that's really important is people need to be able to see what the picture looks like at the end. So not only do they have to feel friction, but they also have to be able to say, like, okay. In the world where things are working like they should be or how we want them to be, what does that look like? What is sales and marketing doing? What is the content team doing? What is demand doing? What is leadership doing differently? And what does that look like operating? You've gotta really help them envision what's happening because things are maybe bleak and challenging right now, so it might be hard for them to see it. So you have to help them. And if you're here on this call, you have the vision for it. So, like, paint the picture. Now the last part, the third part of this is the most important. People have to believe that change is possible. Because if they can see the vision and they feel the pain, but they don't think that they can get to that scenario, they're gonna try for a little bit and give up. So it's really important that you have people believe that it's possible. It's hope. You can build conviction with credible pilots, fast proof, but also in team unity. I think the stand ups for part of it were to align on work, but, like, these guys are on the calls. Sometimes it was just a frustration session. We were just venting. What's not working? Why isn't this working? Okay. Let's work on it together to figure out how to get through this part. That's the stuff that's really going to make people feel like they wanna be part of the change. You can get the frameworks and the templates and the expertise to get set up, but your team's gotta be bought into it. And so that's the really important part. So that three step approach, if you take a step back, how are you gonna do those things? That's how to get started and bring this to life. I think the other thing that it's coming up for me in reflecting on all of this and also where we are with AI, right now is, you know, our buyers' habits are changing, and so it's important that we understand them and how they're looking for things. So are buyers looking for your products on, ChatGPT? Are they typing in what's the best x software? Well, is your content optimized for that? Are your buyers completely overwhelmed by LinkedIn? Maybe. So how do you create content that cuts through the noise and makes them feel like they're maybe part of it? I think the podcasting approach is a really smart one. Teams still struggle with things like fuzzy ICP. It can really dilute your process. I remember being like, well, what if we expanded to this or this? And the conversation was, well, we could, but then we would be targeting this many people instead of this many. Start small and then you can expand if you need to, but it also is hard to test a hypothesis if everyone's in your hypothesis. Right? So that's one that thing that's really important. Leadership often skips the picture aspect. It underestimates the fatigue and frustration. I had probably one of my most engaged people working on this initiative who's truly an amazing marketer, but also just an amazing human being, very resilient. And the third weekend, they were really frustrated. Why aren't we seeing the results? We've been working our butts off on this. This sales team isn't hearing us. And talking about, realistically, that things take time and that we can't solve it overnight is really important. And it's also just good for sanity's sake. Also, too many KPIs you're going to drown in, and don't get caught up in going back to your MQL thing. If you have to keep measuring MQLs for the other parts of your work, fine. But don't start trying to measure people as MQLs when they're not MQLs. Right? We're talking about pipeline. We're talking about accounts and accounts engaged because that's how your sellers are actually thinking about it. But that's also a more modern approach and realistic approach of actually who you're in with it, who you're not actually in with because everybody loves a good webinar, but not everyone's ready to buy. Those are my big thoughts. That's perfect. Thank you so much. So I think it's always fantastic to hear from peers. Right? We could come from, let's say, consultant perspective, but, it's been kinda a long time since we left our corporate seats. For me, it's almost nine years. But it's always good to hear, right, from, fullfunnel, b to b more on, like, what's going on and how to solve it. I think it was brilliant, and I already see the feedback from people in the chat. It was a fantastic story. What actually, we did, we tried to map out everything, what you have shared with us, into actionable framework and how to deliver it step by step, stages, time frames. Because I think for many people, it clicks, it resonates, but the biggest challenge is, okay, how can I implement it today? Where should I start? And that's the entire goal. I think the most important thing here, you shared tons of brilliant examples, and the most important message I hear, the change is possible. But we need to dare to challenge the status quo and lead that change. So thank you. Yeah. Maybe before you go, just for folks who are interested, where they can find you, where they can learn more about you, if they wanna connect. I know that you're also working on some new cool things, so maybe share that before we dive into the framework and the solution shares the solution with the audience. Great. Yeah. I'm happy to. So please connect with me on LinkedIn. I took one month off LinkedIn, and now I'm back on starting today. So, like, please connect with me on LinkedIn. I'd love to talk to more people who are experiencing this. And if you have questions, I'm happy to talk to you. Also, I'd love to invite you to listen to future craft forgetting, future craft go to market now. It's called which is a podcast where we talk to real marketing leaders and go to market leaders who are actually dealing with AI and the future of marketing and go to market. So that would be great. I'm also a doctoral student right now, so I'm doing research on AI and how it's changing work. So if you have questions about that or wanna talk about it, I can nerd out with you all day long. But Maybe maybe the log will set up a separate session about that. I I would really like to nerd out on that, Ken. Yeah. Uh-huh. Thank you so much. We'll be sharing also with people some of the key links, that, you know, to your to your podcast, to your LinkedIn profile. Thanks again so much. And, Andrei, you wanna dive into the solution part? Yeah. Thank you so much, Ken. So again, just a reminder. Right? The solution is an evolution, not the evolution of your marketing mix and how your team works. So what are the keys to success? A couple of them. First, you build on what exists. You don't need to kinda, hey, let's build this new program or that new program or print this software, etcetera. No. Try to connect the dots between existing activities and try to make them more actionable and create more impact on pipeline. Next, you need to build a proof of concept using existing budget resources and stack. That's essential. No budget ramp ups. Avoid any unnecessary debates to prove ROI of what you are going to do. Next, constantly priming and nurturing your leadership and sales about what's not working and what's working by sharing the best practices, showing how other folks are doing the, kind of good activities. Next, lead change with data facts and anecdotes, not by you don't get it. I remember a couple of years ago, there was like a popular threat on LinkedIn. Lead a company where CEO doesn't get marketing. Well, it's fine to come to LinkedIn and post this. I'm fed of CEOs who are not getting marketing, but the sad reality is that that's what's mean, like, 90% of b to b companies. Right? Hence, where we are going all the work. The problem is that it's not going it's it's not going to help. Posting this, you'll unlink it and you'll just get some likes from, from your peers, but nothing else. Right? You need to come with the data with the real examples and, real stories that what you are doing, right, actually works better than what you have done before. Next, one of the most important things, and I saw a question from Christina that marketing and sales have different incentives, right? The key point is that you need to solve this attribution challenge and avoid with these debates about whether marketing source and sales source with CFO quiz. This is something that they're going to present one of our favorite solutions. Another one, don't shut down any existing activities. That's, where you have proven motion. Don't come and say, like Ken Roden said, don't come and say, hey, it's not working. This is not working. This is not working. Don't make this revolution. So run a small pilot, small experiment in parallel to what you are doing. And two more important things. Your change management program should benefit sales. If you invented Samsung, let's say, you know that you need to improve brand. But if there won't be any impact on sales, pipeline sales KPIs, it's not going to fly. Just bear with us. We have seen this multiple times. Make sure that everything that you are going to do is connected to sales KPIs and incentives. And lastly, because all of you who attend, who attend on this webinar, I believe have long sales cycles, you need to have intermediate metrics to prove the success of what you are doing. Hence, that's why you need to have this leading indicators and milestones that you can report on and present that you are actually moving the needle. So these are the keys to success. And that being said, let's dive into the framework, which as we said, we are going to, present to you short actionable steps with the stages. The key point is sticking to the stages and not keeping them. So let's start with the first stage, seeding the grains of change. And I think Ken explained this beautifully. So let's get practical here. The first thing to understand is, understanding how the buyers are buying, how your buyers are buying. The more concrete you can make it, the better it the easier it will be for you to show to your stakeholders key stakeholders inside of your company how actually the buying process have changed. And I we love this story about, a snowflake video snowflake. He spoke at an event, and somebody in the audience says, hey. How can a rep get your attention with cold outreach? And, VP's answer was, you can't. He explained basically, the best way to get my attention is to have my team bring something to me. I don't trust cold outreach. I just trust people who I actually trust. Right? So I will trust a recommendation of a colleague or somebody, from the market, from the industry that I trust much, much more than I called outreach. It's just to show that, how people are buying is not by, you know, getting an email from a random rep and deciding to buy today. So try to collect this from talking to the salespeople, to the account executives, but whenever possible also to the actual customers, studying their calls and trying to map that out. That is the first thing. Next, start seeding the grains of change by sharing some solutions, best practices, case studies with your team and leadership. This photo was sent to me by, one of our, at the time, prospects and current client. I think that deal was in the making two years, I believe, from the first touches, maybe even longer. But this was somewhere in the middle of our buyer journey or their buyer journey, where they actually share this photo of their marketing team watching a video that we created as maybe you can see my big face there on the on the on their big screen, and they were watching that together. So this is how our champion was seeding the grain in turn grains of change internally by sharing some of the content, that we were producing. Then really important is to also show why the today's playbook is broken, that it is actually broken. And I don't think everybody will be aware of how much, it could be broken. I think it's also important to kind of take sober look like Ken explained. You know, I'm speaking to sales, and I had to be modest, and I had to be like, Ken. You're ready to hear the hard feedback from them. Also, the same holds for looking at the numbers. So try to really dig into the numbers and figure out, okay, what were the things like, you know, the MQLs or whatever the other place that we are running today, and how many of them have effectively converted into sale. And that was this is a real, these are the real numbers where we had something like 16 Ken, MQLs, and then one opportunities were 33. And, actually, a lot of these didn't come through MQLs, and more than half came through sales. So we saw that there was a huge gap, a huge problem with the current model. I think this is really important to collect. Then based on your stakeholder interviews, you know, whether you're interviewing the the the deal analysis, doing the AEs, collecting the data from your customers, try to visualize the buyer journey, the different steps that the your buyers have taken. And, usually, it will include different kinds of channel, different kinds of touch points. You know? It may include things that are not tracked actually. A lot of steps that are actually not tracked by your attribution software today, even you have an advanced one. You know, things like, you know, sharing I mean, sharing something on their local Slack or, you know, checking that reference, the client reference, you know, maybe listening to a podcast where your brand was mentioned, things that are really difficult to attribute. The more of these touch points and anecdotes you can collect, the better you will be able to, present to see the grains of change and present this. Because in the next step, what you will do with all this data and I love this, Andrei. Credit goes to you. This is beautiful. Run the CFO quiz. What is the CFO quiz? It's basically take this bar journey that you have collected. This is an actual example of a bar journey that we collected and and and illustrated from one of our, fields. Good to have this visual for that. Absolutely. No. Absolutely. The more steps you can collect, the better. And then start asking questions like this. You know? Out of all of these touch points, which one should get a credit? And is this now a marketing source or a sales source opportunity? And how do we get how do we calculate the cost of acquisition of, you know, whatever, this channel or this channel? And how do we calculate that in in total? And, what is the ROI of that reference call that they did that wasn't on track? And the reason you're asking this question is because these are the kind of questions that you might be getting from your leadership. Right? So why why should we invest in this when you know, what is the ROI of that, you know, piece of content of that whatever brand activity that you're doing? Well, turn turn it around, show the buyer journey, and ask them, okay. How should we attribute this? How what should be the ROI of that one activity there? Right? And, the point that you're driving at is how do we actually attribute similar deals, complex deals with multiple touch points, with multiple people from our team being involved in multiple activities? How should we attribute that in future? And an ideal outcome is what we call, like, the old bound attribution, or we should agree that these deals are actually a result of a team effort, both inbound and outbound, both, you know, people coming, discovering us, and our sales being proactive in reaching out to them because that is going to be the easiest way for you to drive impact instead of having to justify, marketing, which we know it's impossible and which we know that we are all struggling with in in our teams. I would just add maybe one small, nuance to this. The key point is, like, you can call it all about marketing influence, marketing contributed. Whatever you want doesn't really matter, but the entire point is that later, if you are building reports, right, you can easily see that marketing was involved in that deal. Right? That's the key. But also to avoid the debates. Okay. Who is getting credit? In most cases, right, marketing won't get any, unfortunately, bonuses for the for for these opportunities. But it's essential to agree that the credit will go to SDR, an account executive who owns the account. Right? So you align it with sales incentives. That's really essential. Now, what we are doing here is that, as you see, we're not coming with any solutions, but we are collecting anecdotes from your key stakeholders. How they are buying, why they are buying, certain ways, Changing, showing some best practices, showing the inefficiency of some of the broken playbooks, and changing the attribution. Because to be honest, if you are not selling, if you are not solving this attribution issue, then like almost all marketing programs are doomed aside from MQLs, unfortunately. Right? So that's essential to fix. When you do this, you can move to the second stage. Right? Human action model that's, Ken mentioned, which you can, like you can pass effectively through the stage in two to four weeks depending on your organization size. Right? Just briefly remind you about the framework. People must acknowledge the problem. They believe it's worth solving and see a clear solution. So again, as we spoke, like all of that makes sense, but where should we start? For this specific reason, we always suggest to do a fullfunnel GTM audit. You can do it on your own alone, or you can involve some of your like, some somebody from your marketing team. We are going to share this template. Some of you guys requested this before the webinar, so we'll share it. But we'll share after the webinar, so don't worry. Here, you just see a part of that scorecard. Right? Obviously, not the entire one. It's a big spreadsheet. And the entire point here is that you go one by one through all go to market fundamentals. We build it to our to best of our knowledge. Right? The key point is that you go through multiple areas, you write down the notes, you see what can be improved, and you prioritize. Right? The point is that after this audit, you'll have a good roadmap that not only you can present to multiple teams and the stakeholders, but you'll also see what is your lowest hanging fruit. Right? And what are some, kind of quick wins that you can do. So this is the best kind of resource to start. You'll have a good overview of what's going on. Next. As Ken said, the next point is find and change agents in different departments, product, demand, depending on how your organization is structured. Right? If you have a smaller team, that would be relatively easy. If you have a bigger corporation, then you need to look at multiple departments. But the entire point is that you need to kinda create a cross functional team, and the bare minimum here is marketing, content, and sales. These are three roles, and that's also an answer to, adult's question about the bare minimum. Right? These are like these are three people with whom you can implement any good pilot. But before you dive into solutions, the first thing that you need to do is to do a debriefing and talk with them about the go to market challenges and what can be improved. Right? Like Ken Roden said, it should be a painful problem, and people could should kinda tell you, okay. This is what has frustrated me today. So, the key thing here, you don't necessarily I mean, depend depends on the corporate policy. Right? The like, you all might be different working in different environments. You can name contributors, but in the basket, like, you even don't need to do that as you can just collect the quotes from sales, from marketing. Right? And, like, you can see this as the screenshot from a real debrief and that we have done with one of our clients. The key point is that you collect this anecdote that you can present. Next step is printing an idea of the pilot, but I I'm not mentioning any solutions here or any playbooks. The key point is that you print an idea of the pilot. Right? Okay, guys. What if we are going to change this? Right? For example, we have you said that we have a problem that our strategic accounts are not aware of us. Right? So this is our requirement. This is what we want to improve. And the reason is basically sales this is what sales rep told you. Okay. I'm sending cold emails. So I'm I'm sending messages on LinkedIn, and people are not ignoring. Good. Sorry. People are ignoring this. Right? I'm not getting any replies. That's the reason. The next step is okay. Like, if we are going to improve anything, how would we know that we are improving this? The measurement. This is essential. Right? Because if you don't agree on the metrics, you simply want no, I've been proven what like, am I changing the status quo with the playbook or no? So this is the key. Define what you want to change, define why, the reason, and then define the metrics. Right? And, again, we are not talking about the playbooks here. Just sharing with you the screenshot to show. This is essential because when you collect all of this, you can actually move to plan on the pilot program, which can take another two to four weeks. So let's look at the that stage. We hear you see the change management framework that we use, and I think, Ken highlighted that what we want to get at is that pilot, which usually takes about a quarter. Somebody asked already. You might do another iteration after, you know, another quarter, but usually, we can get pretty good results within one quarter. Shorter doesn't make sense. And for that, you need to create a pilot strategy. And so we are not talking about revamping your whole go to market strategy. We are talking about making the key decisions that you will need in order to define that pilot. What is the goal? Are we going to focus on net new or expansion? Who is going to be in the team? Somebody asked earlier on this webinar how many people should be in involved in the team. Essentially, you can start with a team as small as two people, one key person from marketing, one key person from sales. You usually want to have somebody to lead the ABM program. You want to have a sales development rep. You want to have a person from content part time involved. You also want contribution usually from a a subject matter expert and, maybe rev ops. Some of these things can be done by the same person. But let's say a minimal team, you don't want to involve too many people for sure. That will be a big mistake. You want to select the target. You want to scope this down, not to boil the ocean. Like Ken explained, we don't want a broad ICP. We want to focus on very specific use case, within a segment. So we define a segment around a common use case. We call it the bread and butter use case that your customers have and the reason why they buy the program because that also allows you then to align all the content and messages within the program to that use case. You then define account selection scoring and prioritization, how you're going to select those accounts. You define your content strategy for it, basically, content topics and messages that you're going to use, how you're going to warm up those accounts, reports and KPIs. This is basic basically how you define them. We'll break it down, and give some examples in a moment. And then you run the pilot. So today, we'll share a bit more exam a few more examples about how to do these steps and how to run the pilot. The key point here is you want to run the pilot, show on a small number of accounts on a scope down pro on a scope down market with a small team, not the volume, but increase in effectiveness. So we can go from targeting, you know, thousands to get a few call, we can now go to targeting a a dozen or two dozen, and engage many more target accounts and book more calls from a smaller number. So you're looking at better conversions. Right? Because if I have better conversions, then I can scale this, and everybody will understand that. So let's look at how does how that looks like. For you to be able to plan a pilot successfully, very important thing to include is to connect the dots with ABM. And what I mean what we mean by that is that usually, a lot of companies have something on the top of the funnel, some sort of awareness creation, you know, some content is being produced and distributed, some webinars and events are being run, etcetera, etcetera. And marketing is usually good at creating that initial engagement, but not converting it. And on the other hand, on the bottom of the funnel, we usually also have quite a good process with sales to take those, accounts that are now ready to buy through the whole sales process. But what most of the teams are missing is connecting these two parts. In the middle of the funnel, where actually fullfunnel sits. And without going into a lot of detail, essentially, it is all about extracting meaningful first party signals. What are the different signals that we can extract from the data about accounts and how they are engaging and what are the what are the insights that we can collect from that and how together with sales, agreeing on what is the appropriate action that we can take when we see a specific signal. So aligning the activity and the the next, let's say, call to action or the next action with the level of buying intent and with the data that we have, this is an important part. And if you don't have that in the program, it's not likely to be able to convert that engagement into actual, deals and opportunities. Oh, just the good incentive, if you don't mind here. The key point also here, just to summarize, Harrison, is that you need to look at all the activities that you are running. Then together with sales, define good engagement signals, like and then engagement threshold. Like, what behavior an account should demonstrate so we can call this engaged account? I saw this, question in the q and a. There is no rule of thumb, but you define this together with sales. Either there is, like, two buyers signed up for the webinar and connected with you on LinkedIn and then reply to kind of the sales connection. Right? Whatever. You define. There is no rule of thumb. It's your joint definition. And when an account hits this, you don't and as as we are saying, we are not making change on the top of the funnel. You collect this virus, and the good thing is that they are already aware of you. And then you move them to ABM, and you start thinking, okay. Now with all of this, how can we create how can we book the discovery calls? How can we start working on pipeline creation? So that's the key. So when we're planning that middle of the funnel accounts, based marketing that is usually missing in the program, you can use this framework that we always use, the six a framework, which needs to include how are we going to prioritize our accounts? How are we going to determine whether an account should be included in the program or not included in the program? What are the actual criteria beyond just pure, you know, firmographics, you know, the number of number of employees or, you know, techno graphics, like, what tools that they use. What are the specific criteria that can tell us that this account is a good fit, and should be included in the program? The second a is account segmentation. So how do we know how do we prioritize accounts? So instead of just segmenting them into tiers, tier one, tier two, tier three, which is an important criteria in revenue potential, What we also like to understand is, like, how can we align the segmentation with this stage of the buyer journey? So we usually define accounts that are, just aware of us, or or not even aware of us, accounts that are aware of us and starting the engagement versus accounts where we actually have enough insight to know that, we actually, there might be a there is a need for a product, and there might be a potential sales qualified opportunity. Knowing this, you will know how to actually prioritize those accounts. Which accounts should I put into one on one place? Which accounts I should put in purely awareness creation, which accounts I should kind of, like, start multi engaging with the multiple buyers. That's the part of the framework. The next one is account research. Now how do I what is the information that I actually have to know about an account to create a personalized one on one personalized offer for that account and run account research so that we know how to market to that account. What are the challenges that we need to address in our marketing so that we know how to market to them? One important part of account based marketing also is how are we going to create awareness about our product within those target accounts, within the buying committee of those accounts, knowing that that we have actually different members in there? How are we going to engage those members? What are the multithreading kind of, a place that we can use to engage both from marketing side and from sales? What should sales do? What should marketing do? And finally, how are we going to turn those that engagement into an actual sales qualified opportunity, or how are we going to first initially book the discovery calls and then create the pipeline? You need to have these six components in order to have a proper ABM program, and that's part of the creation of the plan, is answering these six questions. And important is to take I think, Andrei, you mentioned this. Let's look at what we are already doing, like, what are the existing activities such as, like, in this example, we have a webinar. And how can we connect those activities in, let's say, an account journey, if you like. Right? So, okay, so we are running webinars. Maybe this is a webinar we can use to create awareness in our target accounts. All we need to do is make sure that we are running a webinar about a relevant topic for those accounts. That's why The most important thing that often, unfortunately, isn't the case. So that's why we selected a specific use case. Now we have a webinar about its use case. It becomes more relevant. But then we need to think about, okay, how are we going to engage before the webinar? How are we going to engage after the webinar? Can we align the content that is being created and shared, with the topic of that webinar? Can we have our salespeople maybe share some of that content, on LinkedIn or whatever, communities where your buyers are active? What are what is the information that we can collect from those target accounts, maybe during the webinar, before the webinar, reaching out to them, asking them, about their, you know, challenges, priorities, and other questions that you know are important to you? And finally, okay, how can we then, turn that insight into more personalized, offer solution proposal, so that they understand how we how we might be able to help them? What are the bridge activities that we could, you know, offer them, to go from this engagement and knowledge to an actual call? So I think it's important to look at what you're already doing and connect the dots And try to leverage as much as possible these marketing touch points, you know, to take them and see how you can use them in sales sales outreach. It's important is we I think Ken Roden mentioned this as well. Like, we need to have aligned expectations or manage the expectations. We know that this is a pilot. We know that this is scoped down. We know that if we have somebody else, like, what do we do if we have eighteen months or whatever, twenty four months long sales cycles? We can't really expect to have ready deals and revenue within three month within the three month pilot. So what is an actual reasonable expectation, to to have? We Andrei explained, we need to understand, to agree upon, like, what is actually broken today, what we need to improve. So we need to make sure that we are actually improving that. And what are the leading indicators that can help us show that we are moving in the right direction? Right? You know, the engagement of the target accounts, you know, maybe the number of internal stakeholders within those accounts that are being engaged, the conversations that our sales is not maybe having better response rates, starting more conversations, and, obviously, also the number of calls that we are able to book. I think it's very important to align on realistic expectations that are actually also aligned with your resources. Because if you're going to run this pilot for three months and you're only going to have two or three people in there and these people have, you know, a lot of other things to do, okay, what is actually reasonable given what we all need to do? How many accounts can we engage and how what can, what can flow out of there, and and and just have that honest conversation. But, also, I think it's important to, take a moment to think about, okay, what can go wrong? What what are potential risks in other in other, words? And think about okay. If, you know, we have internally, for example, the agreement that we are going to work with a specific salesperson and that person doesn't engage, okay, then we are going to have problem. We are not going to be able to execute. What do we do in that, with that stage? So I think this is important to manage the expectations, turn that into leading indicators that you can expect after one month, after two months, after three months so that you can actually, communicate about those and show meaningful progress. I think over communicating on any wins that you get during the pilot is extremely important. I think it's very important for you to be able to show that. But knowing also, like, having the awareness of what success could look like even if it's not yet revenue, I think that's really the key because, otherwise, what you will get is, you know, three months later, a question. Okay. So what was the error of this? Maybe. Where where are the yeah. Probably. Probably. Executives don't tend to to be very patient, especially I mean and also kind of forgetful about what you spoke. So the more you can remind them of that, the more you can share this, the better the outcome will be there. Very important is not to just say, hey. You know, we are going to run this program, and sales is going to help us, and we are going to, you know, go after these accounts, but to have clear, specific responsibilities. This is what we expect from, you know, the person who is going to create content. We expect them to create x amount of pieces for LinkedIn or other social. We expect to an SME to run a webinar. We expect the salesperson to do specific engagements, steps, you know, to share, maybe, content on their profile, to, engage with these accounts, that we put in the pilot in this way, and connect with them on social, and, you know, start, start try to start conversations, etcetera, etcetera. So I think it's very important to make this very explicit and agree upon, with the people upfront. Prepare a simple timeline with the core activities, to share so that people can visualize and understand what will happen. And when. And when. Exactly. And create a simple dashboard. Here, it says in Excel in a spreadsheet. And the reason why we said it explicitly, if you're in a luxurious environment where you're the person who can change your CRM anyway, like, I guess, nobody is, you might implement that. But probably, it's not a good idea because it usually is going to take too much time and Debates. Debate. And, also, actually, it might not be a good idea even if you were able to do that because, you know, you're just kind of doing an MVP, a minovial product in a spreadsheet, seeing what of these, there's or what which of these metrics were actually useful, we were able to collect, we were using before putting them, in, you know, tool that everybody's using such as the CRM. So that's why we always suggest, let's start with simple dashboard, but, like, collecting evolution. No. Exactly. Exactly. It's an evolution. And, what is a quick win, to definitely have as a part of the product of of the program, excuse me, of the pilot is to actually take one or two engaged accounts that you know are, you know, in a conversation with sales, identifying those accounts, whether they're already in a pipeline or, you know, not yet. But you know that they are engaged, they're a good fit, they fit all of all of these criteria. And together with sales, just plan exactly what we are going to do, what kind of content we can use to engage those accounts based on the challenges and the insights that we have in in in them, what should sales do, what should marketing do, the better you can prepare a plan. The simple you don't need to do more. Just one or two accounts because they can be the quick win to show the progress. They are already engaged. You already have some information about them. You're going to work together with sales on them. You can show some real progress on them. So including that is going to be a big help. Now that you have planned and collected all this information about your current situation, about the challenges, about, you know, your, the the pilot, where you're going to focus it, how you're going to do it, who is going to be part of it, you can prepare what we call a memo. Program memo, can be kind of like a a bit extended business case if you like, where we explain in a executive style, executive summary style, explain, okay. What is the background situation? What is the current status? Where are we now? We have these challenges. How are we going to how are these challenges impacting our KPI, our pipeline and revenue, and our goals? And how are we going to solve these challenges? And what is the program going to be about? What are the expected results? Who is part of it? Timeline. So, basically, putting it all together in in in a document. Actually, most executives like like to be able to read, you know, a memo like that, where all the information, is is stored. And, of course, if you get an opportunity to create a presentation, actually defend it. And and, defend the program, is another thing that you should definitely do. I know it's been long so far, guys, but sorry for this. Unfortunately, it's not an easy topic to explain in a few slides and just say, hey. Do this, do that, and the magic happens. No. That's why we wanted to make it really detailed and just also invite Ken to show the best practices. But, we'll try to rush a little bit and just, move also to like what everybody is also interested in, the AI use cases. As you see, we didn't mention AI yet. Why? Because before introducing AI, you need to actually execute that pilot. You need to build the processes that later you are going to refine with AI. Our recommendation for any pilot for, that you are going to cost the sales and that will, basically, if you operate with one sales cycle, the bare minimum should be one quarter or three months. What are the key things? The first one is that you need to install regular weekly meeting with your core IBM team sales product content. Right? So the key point here is that you basically review the plan for the past week. You tag the engagement with the accounts and you plan the next week. Week to week would be different. You might go to the events. People might take vacations. Sales might be busy with working on specific accounts. The key point is just to make an actionable plan for the next week and have this weekly tracking of your progress. Right? If you try to run it in Silas, just expecting that everybody would run their own thing. Just bear to me, your pilot will fail in two weeks. So these are the most essential meetings. The key point is that you as a team make a consensus. You define the bottlenecks. And if if anything stays on your way, you you define how to fix it, and you make an actionable actionable plan to move forward. Next step, document what works with the examples. The only way to later to change the minds of the rest of the team is prove by the data, like we said. Right? Collect the anecdotes. Make screenshots of conversations. Right? Anything that might change their opinion. Right? Okay. So our sales reps were following up with webinar attendees earlier and didn't get any replies. Now we collected x number of replies. Here is the screenshot. Here is the message that we were sending. Check your progress. As we spoke, right, it's essential to break down your leading and lagging indicators and track them every single week because this is how you can see. Are you putting enough effort into that pilot or it's just like something that's, everybody wanted to prioritize but actually not paid attention to. Right? Every single week, your number should be either constant or should be increasing. That's the key. Right? So when you have a holistic dashboard, you can compare your results. Something that Vlad already mentioned. Constantly share your wins and your team's Slack or whatever you are using for team communication. Right? Book the first meeting from that engagement. Fantastic. Right? People are as you can see, this is like a screenshot from Slack. Unfortunately, I needed to blur some confidential information, but just to give you an idea. Right? That's already a huge win for people from doing, like, what they are doing. And when you finish the pilot, again, you can see maybe Ken's face. I just made a layout of the pilot program retrospective. Make it retrospective of everything that you have done. Right? So the key activities, the expectations before the pilot, the requirements, the measurement, and the results. Right? Plus the breakdown of the key activities. Your leadership because this is what you are going to present to the leadership to the broader group. Right? These are the challenges. This is what we have done in parallel to all other tasks, and these are the results. And from today, we want to scale. The key point with that retrospective is that you make an actionable process. You don't present random acts of market and overrun some ads, over send some emails, and then do that, and then do that. It's not going to sell to your executives. But structured process will. That's the key. So we'll have two more stages that we are going to cover. And the next one is that probably a lot of you are interested in is, the AI story. Right? Where AI comes through. I will pass the microphone to Vlad. But quick question. How did you like the webinar so far? Let us know in the chat, whatever. Put your favorite emoji. Just let us know. Thank you very much. Thanks, Dave. So in this stage, where we wanna go is, like, we have just run a successful pilot. Hopefully, we have just run a successful pilot, and we want to go from a one off success to a repeatable process. We want to be able to come to a place where we are, one, have kind of a, we know what the process is. And if we repeat this process, we are getting similar results. So some sort of predict predictability, not in the terms of predictable revenue as it was popularized in the past. And we also have clear documented playbooks and processes that we can now also implement on other segments on more accounts involving other team members, involving more people from sales, etcetera, etcetera. So before you are able to scale it like that, you need to have those processes operationalized. And that's also where AI comes into play, and it's really, it can and it can help a lot to, scale this up. But only if you actually know the process, you have the good input, only then it's it's going to work and can work brilliantly, of course. So as we are, you know, doing this, we are done the retrospective. We know on the one hand where we need to improve, what were what were the things that were working well, what were the things that we need to improve. You're starting to understand these processes, and you can start also defining where in these workflows we can actually implement AI. You know, we have run account research, and now we know what are the questions that we need to ask. We know where the sources of that information are. Now we can, of course, implement an AI agent or even just a simple, you know, assistant with a prompt. Deep research, for example, if you don't have specialized tools, to repeat that process to use it with AI. Of course, we like to, you know, always check the result and compare it. So sometimes you might need still the human in the loop to kind of complement these results. But, it actually only makes sense for you to run that account research after you know what is the information that you're looking for, how this information is going to be actioned, where we can find that information, and that the AI is able to replicate this for you. I think what is really important is you during the pilot before AI, you create your internal definition of good, your internal quality benchmarks. Right? How the good account research looks like or qualification of content or whatever. And just show to this AI, this is how I want you to create. This is kind of the exact delivery that I am expecting from you. And also given the instructions, highlight them the data that AI can't get. This is essential. So, then you want to make sure that you have detailed documented playbooks and training videos. And this is one of the reasons why we were also collecting the examples of what was working in in your pilot. One is obviously to share the wins, but the other one is also like, okay. What exactly did you do, and what was the outcome? And because instead of using the generic step by step process that maybe you've downloaded from, you know, our website, Substack or whatever, now you're having your concrete examples of what your your sales rep has done. You know? Oh, so we have found out that this account is in that situation. This is what they shared. This is what we found on their website. We use that information to create the LinkedIn post, the account love letter as we call it, which was, like, very specific about that account. Our SDR used that to start a conversation, with, you know, this type of buyer. This is a screenshot of that conversation, what happened, etcetera, etcetera. I mean, this is the most beautiful playbook that you could create is based on your concrete example. Why do we do that? Again, it's because with that, you can now both train your AI on a real process, but also, you know, help other teammates that you want to onboard on that process. If you want to scale that beyond that pilot team, now you know exactly what they need to do. Develop AI prompts agents playbooks based on these processes. Right? So we spoke a little bit about this, but I think what's very important is the more information you can give the more concrete information you can give about your target market, I think this is, like, one of the key mistakes that I see that people make is not feeding that information about the target market, who the target buyers are, what their top challenges are, based on the research that you have done, based on the insights that you have collected. So that's, like, the the the one thing. The second thing is now you have done this process. You know what the steps are. You can share those steps also in in the front. Right? So that's that's another, important piece. So not just, like, asking you, hey. You know? Do run account research. Just like out of the blue run account research and, create a personalized message for this account. No. You know what questions you need to ask. You know what is important. You know what are the typical challenges. Then you know where the sources to look at are. And now they have done all of that. You also, like Andrei says, you know how good looks like. And when you combine all of that now, you can have some meaningful results, from from those AI, AI, prompts assistance and and and if if you if you're inclined to do so, maybe even agents that do multiple steps. Next, you want to create, you know, with the documents that you have created, different steps where you documented the playbooks that your team has used during the pilot. You also want to save, you know, the templates and the scripts, with concrete examples of how your people were reaching out. Okay. What is the typical process? What is the template that you can use? And how does it actually look like in the practice? This is going to help, of course, operationalize that process. It's going to help other people replicate it. And in other words, what you're trying to do, you're trying to replicate success. Do more of what works, but do it properly. Then because you might have multiple, processes, multiple playbooks for different stages of your target accounts, for research, for outreach, for warm up, for one on one, personalized outreach. Create the master document where you kind of an index document where you can link all of that so that people can find this easily. And, start slowly adjusting your CRM. If you if you can do it in some organizations, that's actually basically impossible. But if you're doing that, do this gradually. I'm always like, you know, CRM can easily become mess. So, gradually starting to do to make changes. Obviously, it's best if your reports are being derived from, your software instead of you having to produce them in, spreadsheets. It's obviously better if all the information about those target accounts is stored in the CRM instead of being stored elsewhere so that it's all in one place. But it's also good practice to slowly start making changes, making sure that people are actually using that they are useful and usable, before, moving on to the next step. Remember, it's an evolution, not a revolution. And, create an emergency playbook, and you can kind of borrow here some some of the ideas, what to do if, like, things like, you know, if leadership starts questioning your program, if a sales rep starts to become disengaged, if you're not getting engagements, what are the kind of things that we should check? Typically, we need to make sure that how did we select the account? Going back to foundations, I think, what happens in a lot of cases, what we've seen is instead of going to panic mode and and just trying trying starting to try different kind of, you know, copy pieces of content, different messages, sending more, it's like going back to the fund usually, it's the problem is somewhere in the foundations. Did we select the right accounts? Why did we include the accounts that we were they just, like, pushed on us by sales and they were actually wish list and didn't have any, meaningful reason to include, didn't have any insight into are they actually have a need for our product? Why do we think that and what whether we should include them? How did we approach them? Did we actually implement I think, like, one of the biggest reasons why you don't have engagement, did we actually do all the steps on all the accounts that we were supposed to do? Usually, steps are being skipped. So, you know, if you're supposed to, you know, create a piece of content and share it and then engage with the target buyer and then invite them to content collaboration and follow-up with them and invite them to whatever, we we actually go through all of these steps through for all of the buyers that were in our list. And, what exactly did we send them? When we say personalized, we don't mean, hey. First name and then the very basic personalization. We have what good looks like. We have our benchmarks. So we want to make basically make sure that the playbooks were complete, that they were run completely on all all target accounts. So these are the kind of, like, the most common, mistakes, but have that ready as well. And only then you can go to the next stage, which is scaling. And the last one, which I'm I promise you to cover very quickly, and then we'll go to q and a. So scaling is from here to beyond. You have a successful pilot. You create a center of excellence. You have good documentation. You start deploying AI. How you are going from here? First, you start basically, Ryan, a series of experiments using your center of excellence. Right? You onboard your teams on the proven processes, so they start replicating the success and center of excellence train these regional teams, for example, other sales reps. Right? Or you can create micro teams that are focusing on different use cases or products, right? And then you leave 20% of time for center of excellence to run new experiments. This is where you can try new things, new processes to operationalize with AI, for example, try and use software, for example. So everything becomes a pilot. Right? You leave 20% for the experiments and 80% on scaling what already works. That's the key. Next one is you prepare gradual deployment of what works for different business units, regional teams, products, like I said. And you make you need to make a realistic plan. It's not that, what we have seen and when we we have global customers, enterprise companies, they say, hey. Can we scale from the pilot to all, like, 11 teams that we have? No, unfortunately. Because in your center of excellence, you have, like, four people, and you won't be able you simply won't have time to work with 11 teams. As simple as that. Right? So you need to, map out the schedule deployment of the program. Right? Not just accept. Oh, like, let's let's do it, like, globally. Why? Because different markets you will in different markets and different regions, you will have different level of maturity, different level of competition. For example, you are selling successfully in The US and you have a good brand presence, but in Europe, you want to sell to Nordics, for example. Nobody has thought about you and you have local competition. And then you are screwed if you just, you know, throw your playbook and tell your Nordics team to replicate it. It will fail in a few weeks, and you'll create distrust with that team. So the key point is that you have central frameworks and you start teaching the local teams and help them to adopt these frameworks according to their go to market challenges and needs. You act as a coach. And then you start for this experiment. You start automating low value engagement based activities and touch points. For example, outbound to tier three accounts, you are welcome to automate. Right? Automated connection requests to people who like the post. Desk account research to collect publicly available information. Qualify accounts, right, that are coming from different sources. All of that stuff, you can start automating and create new good processes. And lastly, I want to share one thing with you guys at the end of moving to q and a. For years, we've been creating this whole final academy, which is collection of our core courses, a full final account based market and demand generation, go to market fundamentals, LinkedIn playbook, etcetera. Next year, because unfortunately this year we had more demand that, our capacity allows us to cover. So we needed to reject quite a lot of, smaller projects, unfortunately, which also frustrated us. So the next year, we decided to invest a lot in the fullfunnel academy, which would be the best copilot for the B2B marketers. We want to make an educational space with trained AI models that will help to work as a consultant, if you will. Right? So that's another story. This is what we are going to do before, that's what we are going to do in 2026. But for now, what we want to suggest to everybody, we have five of our on demand courses. Right? That you can get a bundle before the end of the week. So you have the QR code if you want the the, the course of that you can see in on your screen. And, later, you can use it as a credit if you want to upgrade to fullfunnel academy. Or if you want, you can get access to academy as well and just have lifetime updates. It's just one time payment, and you'll get everything inside. Right? So all the courses, like community, etcetera, and plus the product that we are going to build next year. So I want to make, the key point of that academy is support and what we were sharing today with you in a structured way with detailed frameworks, templates, examples, so you can see how to implement ABM, improve brand awareness, and all of that stuff. Right? So that's the key. Thank you so much for coming today. I know you have a lot of questions, so we're going to cover these questions right now. Alright. Thank you so much. Are we going to go yeah. By the way, if you haven't, done this and you still have a question, please use the q and a section, that you will find on the right hand side, to ask your question. If If you drop them in a chat, we'll just promote it there, but we're going to use it there. So let's start them one by one. What difference is in success, if any, have you seen between companies with in house paid media functions versus those that outsource to agencies? It's a very interesting question. And I I I don't think that I have a concrete example, but I can share some of the observations and thoughts that I've seen. There are some advantages and some disadvantages of in house versus agency. So definitely working with a solid agency, that is specialized. For example, you know, Justin, what what what did what are they they called? Help help me if you remember. It doesn't matter. Justin Roe. You specialize for LinkedIn. They can bring a lot of value to you to help you, like, figure out how to make this work. They have a lot of knowledge on the specific channel. Right? However, at the same time, you can also there is also some issues. The main issue with, you know, working with an agency always is that you have a problem internal problem of marketing and sales alignment. And if you have yet another partner who is now part of that picture, this this it's it's impossible to basically achieve that alignment in the in the way that you can do that with an internal team. Just to be very clear on that, I think working with an agency with a proven process where you know what the content should be, what's working, what's not working makes a lot of sense, and bringing them in to really, like, get advantage of their knowledge and, obviously, like, scale this later makes perfect sense. But I the best pilots that we have seen were were pilots where sales and marketing met every week on the a ABN pipeline review meetings where, you know, the content was being shared with the sales. Well, first of all, the sales would say, hey. These are the accounts that I have this week that are engaging, that I would like to focus on more. Then they were discussing what are the challenges. Then they were creating content and planning the activities for those specific accounts, and being, like, very lean and adaptive in the way that they were working, which is much, much more difficult to do with an agency. So I think, like, during the pilot, I mean, you you won't get, it won't be as easy to work with an agency, but, like, as you want to, like, improve that, scale that, optimize, you know, what you see in working for sure. We have done, for example, for this webinar, and we we'll we'll share that in the future, also some paid promotion. And so we have seen that, you know, some of these plays worked really well. Some of these plays maybe didn't work as well. Now that we that we know that that we know what content and how, you know, working with an agency who is specialized, that would be very beneficial if you wanted to scale this. But, doing it beforehand or less so. But I haven't seen concrete examples. I don't know if you have, Andrei, where you could, like, really, like, share the difference between, the result of working with an agency and in in house team. No. This is a fantastic question from Karen. Outbound attribution is great, but CFO still want the forecast of where marketing will invest and what's working. How do they do they determine how much budget marketing gets? So I will give you two scenarios. Right? When it comes to the first stage, see the grain of change. Right? This is this should be a part of your CFO quiz. So when you finish that quiz, right, the logic question is how would you suggest me to to invest? I think the most important thing is not you taking the task, but the goal is to cocreate with CFOs. Here is the complexity. Here is the constraint. Help me to invest. Right? And then maybe it would be easier just to explain, hey. I have a few ideas that I want to try in future. But for now, like, okay. We should stick to the budget that we have, or if there is an opportunity to increase, let me know by how. Because in ideal scenario, and I know that's not acceptable for many companies, but I will share you the ideas ideal scenario. So one thing, first of all, you can come to that meeting with your current pipeline velocity. Why? Because pipeline velocity is a perfect trajectory of your revenue at the end of the year. Right? So if you'll imply if you'll put the right formula. So this is you can say, these are our current metrics, and this is where we are likely to end up at the end of the year with this current metrics. I'm going with the programs. I'm going to improve each of these metrics. Average contract value, sale cycle lengths, win rates, number of sales qualified opportunities. Right? So help me to define what would be the right budget for this. In ideal scenario, it's not possible with the pilot, but later, the best outcome would be just getting a percentage of revenue targets or current revenue depends on CFO preferences. So let's say we have finished the last year at this number, let's say $40,000,000 What is what is an acceptable, let's say, percentage of that revenue that we can invest in the marketing? So that would be the ideal scenario to to deal with the budget constraints and also present realistic forecast. Right? Here where we are today, these are our real metrics, and this is what's, like, we need to accept and we need to work from today. Co created with CFOs, not just try to debate. That's the key. This is an interesting question. ICP keep keeps changing over time. How frequent that one should change? Once a year, maybe. So, basically, several remarks about the ICP. First of all, the way that you create ICP for a game programs is based on an account cluster, which we usually define related to a specific use case. Oh, we are going after, CPG brands who have grown through acquisitions, and they have a specific challenge. Right? We are going after, let's say, in our case, maybe PLG brands that are now trying to implement that have grown through PLG, hit the ceiling, and now they want to implement enterprise sales and enterprise marketing and ABM. That's an example. Right? So this is a specific ICP. So when do you change the change or update the ICP? Well, basically, as you want to scale to other segments, other use cases, you will need a new updated ICP. So that's one part of the answer. And the second part of the answer, I think, is just in general, how frequently should you review it? Well, definitely after the pilot, review what's the metrics. You will have you will have had some assumptions at the beginning of the pilot of why you should include some accounts, why you should not include other accounts, etcetera. And you will now learn, what actually was the reality. Like, okay. You've included some accounts, but there was no real engagement. Or maybe we had a call with them, but we realized that it's not a really good fit. Okay. What can we learn? In part of your retrospect is to also review your account selection prioritization criteria. That will be your first review. And I think it does make sense to review this quarterly. Especially in today's market, it's changing so much. If you're doing this properly, every quarter, you should do a retrospect on the previous quarter program. And that part of that retrospect will be reviewing, you know, your qualification, prioritization criteria, thinking about including other use cases or not. All of that is part of ICP work. Okay. So let's cover this question from Nadiajda, if I pronounce correctly your name. With so many touch points which are required investment, there is a very little chance for SME with small marketing budget to stand out what to do. The simple answer, those things differently than your competition. The more complex answer. Again, like we said, you already you are likely to do some marketing activities. Right? I guess that you are doing and your sales team is doing something. So you already will make a huge contribution to pipeline creation when you'll sit together with sales until you define that account engagement. Right? Criteria. How to select the right account and just simply start mapping out the activities. Next, what would be the difference that, you can make? The content that you create. Again, not just, superficial content, that ChargeGPT can create, but literally start interviewing your SME or cocreate with your buyers. Right? Or start, partnering with, different companies and start sharing this. I believe most of the competition is not doing this. And a couple of the default go to market things, clear messaging, not just the WAC one. Right? We help to boost revenue with this and that, but just concrete messaging, frictionless experience for your buyers. That's already a huge win that can help you to stand out. Like, I highly recommend I share it in the public chat, but I will drop the link. Give me a second, guys. I will drop a link, here in the session chat as well. So check this as the our kind of starting page for people who are interested in ABM that basically is a mini weekly page. Scroll to the bottom where you can see ABM case studies. And we have a lot of case studies with the lean teams, three for people maximum. No budget investments. And I told our philosophy for the pilot, no budget ramp ups. Execute with what you have. And you can see real examples. With some companies, okay, that's exceptional, but even able to drive in three and half million in revenue in three four in three to six months in very complex environments. So you can see it's a small team. Often, to be honest, small team is not an excuse, but rather a benefit, which means that you can be very aligned, very lean, and agree faster on what you can do. Yeah. Absolutely. There are no corporate, silos. It can be easier. Julian asked, how do you measure account engagement? What KPIs do you use? This is a good one. So I think the what's important here is, like, what do we want to measure? First of all, we want to understand, are these accounts aware of us or are they not aware of us? So we have a number of accounts that we can go after. They fit our ICP. We call it the cluster ICP. We know that we should include them. But the first thing is, like, are they even aware of our brand? And what does that mean, aware of our brand? This is actually what you want to define specifically for yourself. I mean, somebody coming, you know, having an information that an account has visited and bounced off your blog post is probably not shouldn't be considered as account awareness. You know, somebody, like, with one like on a LinkedIn post, is that awareness or not? So, usually, we define awareness or engagement, in this case, as as it relates to awareness, is, multiple engagements, from the target account, with content or web pages that are relevant to that account cluster. Whether we did, let's say, a webinar about that use case, whether they were checking out our case study of our best customers from that use case, whether they were, you know, having visits to our high intent pages, checking out maybe, like, we know, for example, one of our clients defined that very high engagement is checking out integration information because that was a technical product. So nobody would check that unless they are really considering, that product. For them, that was very meaningful. So I think it's up to you to define what are the meaningful engagements, but, usually, we look at engagements with content web pages or, you know, content such as in social and and, you know, advanced webinars, etcetera, with with content that is related to that to the challenges and the priorities of those of the target accounts in that cluster to the use case that you're after. And, another thing that you can measure is account penetration or blueprint, whatever you call that, internally, is how many actually accounts are how many buyers within the target accounts are we able to engage? Another one that I I think is really good to measure and I would always include is number of conversations. So engagement can be kind of passive. Okay. I like the piece of content. I attend the webinar versus, I've actually, you know, engaged with content, and then the sales rep has reached out to me and asked me a question, and I responded to that question. These kind of conversations where we're actually talking not about the weather but about what's going on in my in my company are probably the most meaningful types of engagement that you can track. Awesome. Let's cover maybe two more questions because I feel the rest in the chat we have covered during the webinar. So this one and about, percentage of budgets, I think. So this one I think I've covered I've I've covered this. I just spoke about, different ICTs and Okay. Different clusters. So we'll go for that budget. Okay. Sorry. Maybe I just because that was a similar question. Good. So this one from Vlad. What percentage of budgets are go to awareness consideration on bottom of the funnel for SaaS product with enterprises, ICP target companies? I think that's a fantastic question. And, what I personally have seen on LinkedIn, there are lots of people who are talking about brand. You need to invest in the brand. I totally agree. We all need to invest in the brand. The problem is that I honestly have never seen somebody on LinkedIn and laying out the entire framework how to build a brand. It's good to say like Samsung that people will agree, but the problem here, Andrei, is that if you can't show to your leadership and to your CFO that your brand program, if you will, will have a tangible impact on pipeline and revenue, you'll never get any budget approved. Right? So this is this is kind of the key here. Right? That's why I was set on the slide. I think this is one of the most important points. I will just come back quickly to that slide. When, we have ABM integrated into your go to market, I think it explains a lot the the concept. So if you look at this, right, the key point is when you, like, when you have this pilot created, right, and you know what works efficiently, then you can see what platforms are generated more first party signals for you. So like in our case, historically, LinkedIn was the core channel. Right? So from that perspective, we can say, what do we want to do on LinkedIn? We can we want to hire an expert content writer who is not going just to ask Chargebee, hey, help me to create this PDF for CTOs, let's say. Right? But the person who is going to interview subject matter experts, buyers, engage with journalists, niche industry, leaders, etcetera. And to know that expert content would resonate a lot. So then from thought leadership perspective, right, and brand awareness perspective, we are going to spend money on boosting that content to set up our strategic accounts to our target addressable market, if you will. Right? So I'm just giving you the pattern, the same as any other activity. If you know that webinars are working well, you can apply the same principles. Right? The core point is that you need to make sure that you have these good activities established before even having this conversation. So an ideal scenario, there are a lot of folks who are referring to the study. I forgot the company. John Miller actually presented this. That the ideal proportion is 60% should be invested in the brand and 40% into demand capture. You can stick to this. It's absolutely fine. I think it's a good proportion. The entire point is that you need to be sure that this 60% are spent wisely. Right? That's the key. I find let let's oops. Let's answer this question. Is MQL really dead? There is a lot of bashing of that MQL going around on on LinkedIn. A lot of, people are saying drop it and and gate everything, etcetera. And I think, we like to present a little bit more balance to you, and I I like that you've shared this slide. So I would read that slide for the moment here, please. So I think, m MQLs are not dead. Nothing is dead. I mean, gating content has its place. I mean, sometimes it's just even impossible to have people sign up for your webinar. I mean, you have to gate quote unquote gate it. You have to basically ask their email so you can send them the information about how to join the webinar, for example. There is no problem with that. If somebody wants to sign up for your newsletter because they appreciate the content, there is no problem with that either. Right? There's definitely place for that. Of course, we know what is the problem with MQL. The problem with MQL is treating that as buying signal. We don't wanna treat MQLs as buying signal. We don't want to treat to use that as a KPI for marketing. This is what is not working. But MQL can have its place in marketing. How we can use it within our program? Well, we can treat it as one of the engagement signals. We can now okay. If somebody was interested enough for us to download the relevant piece of content and leave their email, we can first, of course, qualify whether that's the right person from the right target account. We can run some more enrichment around that person and that account and decide to include it in the ABM program? Yes or no? We could then always think about what is the next appropriate action depending on what was the engagement trigger of what was the actual thing that this buyer did. What is now actually logical? It's not logical if somebody has downloaded, let's say, our guides on, let's say, planning the ABM program or budgeting planning and budgeting. Let's say this was I don't think we have we gave this, but let's say this was the case. It doesn't make sense to reach out to that person and say, hey. Do you want to set up a chat about how we can help you with our consulting? No. But what could make sense is to just, you know, reach out to that and say, hey. So that you downloaded this, was it helpful? Are you, by any chance, actually planning, an ABM program and, you know, looking at how to budget? You have other, you know, interesting pieces of content that we can share with you. Right? So I think one is don't treat them as KPI. Don't treat them don't, pass them onto sales. Don't treat that as a buying signal. Align the next activity with the next action with the level of intent, what makes sense actually for that MQL or any other engagement signal. And, you know, consider that as one of the touch points that you can then use or engagement signals that you can use to decide with an additional research to include that, account in your ABM program. And to finish it with like, we were rushing to finish this presentation and jump into q and a to answer questions, guys, but we had a few polls that we skip also about AI, but doesn't feel any better. We want to end it up with, like, this simple question. Right? Which stage of this CMO survival framework would be the most valuable for you to dive deeper into? Right? So why we're asking this? Because like I said, in the, inside the academy, we are going to run a series of actionable workshops. So we have our fundamental courses that are not going to change. Maybe update just a few things. But then what we want to do is just to run workshops as use cases. So for example, like getting leadership by in or executing the pilot program or building the playbook, showing how the good looks like and what are the processes. So please vote. We would love to see what could be the most, valuable parts of that framework for you. And, that being said, thank you so much. It's amazing to see that, like, for two hours, we got so many people with us. I know, again, usually, we aim with Vlad to finish Harrison in one hour. But as I said, it's simply not possible to cover this topic in just a few slides. And also, we wanted to invite Ken as a person who really handled the same challenge that we were explaining, who defined the problem and who did it successfully. And that's always great to hear from peers. Right? Seeing that the change is possible. And like the good story about high agency, we were talking a lot recently. If it's not breaking the laws of physics, it's solvable. And with that being said, we wish you guys a successful q four, solve all the go to market issues that you are facing, and hit these revenue targets. With the best regards from Spain, Ponsaluda. Ciao.