In a recent Gartner survey, 75% of B2B buyers said they’d prefer a rep-free buying experience. That’s a wake-up call for sales and marketing leaders everywhere.
So, is this the end of sales as we know it… or the start of something better?
On this episode of the B2B Roundtable Podcast, I sit down with my friend Brent Adamson, co-author of The Challenger Sale and author of the new book The Framemaking Sale. Brent explains why buyer confidence—not more information—is the real barrier to closing big deals today, and how leaders can help their teams become the sellers customers actually want to talk to.
Brent Adamson on Framemaking and the Future of Sales
Key Takeaways

* Buyers want confidence, not more information. The real risk isn’t being ignored—it’s being irrelevant.
* Framemaking is the answer. Instead of persuading, sellers must help buyers frame decisions and build confidence in themselves.
* Four forces undermine confidence today: decision complexity, information overload, objective misalignment, and outcome uncertainty.
* Sales and marketing must unite. The mission is to build buyer confidence in themselves—not just in the supplier.
* AI won’t replace sellers, but it raises the bar. The sellers who thrive will show up as trusted guides and sense-makers.

💬 Pull Quotes
“It’s not your customer’s confidence in you that matters. It’s their confidence in themselves.” — Brent Adamson
“If you could be the one seller your customer actually wants to talk to, that’s an incredible place to be.” — Brent Adamson
Guest Bio

Brent Adamson is a researcher, speaker, and author best known for co-authoring The Challenger Sale. His new book, The Framemaking Sale, explores how sales professionals can rebuild buyer confidence and create customer interactions that truly add value.
👉 Connect with Brent on LinkedIn

👉 Get the Book: The Framemaking Sale
Full Transcript
Brian Carroll:
Welcome to the B2B Roundtable Podcast, where we bring together ideas, people, and strategies shaping the future of sales and marketing.
Today, I’m joined by my friend Brent Adamson, one of the most influential voices in sales. You may know Brent from his groundbreaking book The Challenger Sale, which reshaped how we think about commercial conversations.
I’m excited because we’re talking about his new book, The Framemaking Sale. And it couldn’t come at a more urgent time. In a recent survey, 75% of B2B buyers said they’d prefer to purchase without ever talking to a sales rep. Is this the end of sales as we know it—or could it be the start of something better?
Brian Carroll:
We’re going to talk about why buyers have lost confidence in sales, what’s driving this shift, what it really means to be a framemaker, how leaders like CMOs and VPs of Sales can build teams customers actually want to talk to, and what the future of selling looks like in an AI-driven world. Brent, you open your book with that stat—75% of B2B buyers would prefer a rep-free buying experience. That’s wild.
Brent Adamson:
First of all, it’s great to see you, Brian. Thanks for the invite. That statistic comes from Gartner research, one of the last pieces I worked on before leaving in 2022. We asked thousands of B2B buyers: “If you could buy a large complex solution without ever talking to a sales rep, would you prefer that?” Seventy-five percent said yes.
Now, that doesn’t mean they actually buy without sellers—it means they’d prefer not to. The data shows a big and growing gap between customer preference and customer reality. That gap represents risk for sellers.
Brian Carroll:
So it’s not the end of sales—it’s the end of salespeople not adding value.

Customers care more about the values of the companies they buy than ever before.
It’s more than your purpose. It’s more than what you sell.
They want to know what kind of company you are and what do you care about.
Does a company want to do more than drive profits?
That’s why I interviewed Dr. Philip Kotler, who is known as the “father of modern marketing.”  He is the S.C. Johnson & Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and co-author of Brand Activism: From Purpose to Action.
In this interview, you will hear Dr. Kotler describe brand activism, the importance of focusing on a purpose as a company, and the problems encountered when companies do not use brand activism correctly.
To start, what is brand activism?
Dr. Kotler: Brand activism is a movement toward making a brand do more than just tout the virtues of a product or a service, its usual function, and to go and even identify some value or values that the company has and cares about.
For example, The Body Shop, when it started under Anita Roddick, she made it her point that she’s not only selling skincare products as a retailer, but she really was also fighting for animal rights, civil rights, fair trade, environmental protection.
So, her brand was active. I don’t mean that all other brands are passive because they do a lot of work, but the implication is that companies carry reputations, and they want to carry a good reputation.
More and more consumers would like to know what kind of company this is, what does it care about.
Our society is saddled with many problems, and does the company care about any of these problems, or does it just think it’s supposed to make money?
An increasing number of companies would like an identity that goes beyond just making the product or service.
And that is what we are calling brand activism, the brand that connects with some cause or causes.
A Lack of Trust in Society 
Brian:  That’s a helpful distinction. You recently wrote a book on this topic. I’d love to know the story behind why you wrote the book Brand Activism and why now?
Dr. Kotler: I think that, if you look at some barometers, like the Edelman trust barometer, about the level of trust in society today, it’s undoubtedly been falling.
Brian: Yes.
Dr. Kotler: And as a result, many companies are not going to be trusted either, as part of maybe government not being believed, and other institutions.
And companies ought to be the first to fight against bad companies rather than stand near them or be part of them.
So, the idea is that, at this time, companies want to be profiled in a certain way.
In other words, the reputation a company has could be just whatever happens in its course of actions.
Or it could also be something that could be designed better.
Consciously better.
What are the different branding stages of development?
Dr. Kotler: And you see, the whole idea of a brand itself has gone through several stages, and that’s very important. I think brand activism is probably the highest stage, but let me tell you what the stages are in my mind.
Brian: That would be great.
Dr. Kotler: Yes. The first stage is when the company simply does its best to feature its product and services.
Now that’s normal. The brand name was an identifier.
Then brands moved into trying to define the company’s positioning, but not social positioning.

Why does most marketing stink?
According to Michael Brenner, “Most of the marketing that we do that stinks and doesn’t work is that some executive with a big ego asked us to do it.”
On top of that, marketers are not in a happy place.
According to MarketingProfs 2019 Marketer Happiness Report, “Only 10% of marketers say they were very fulfilled in their work.” The report looked at the dimensions of feeling fulfilled, valued, and energized by the work, that our work is impactful, and engaged.
That’s why I interviewed Michael Brenner (@BrennerMichael), the CEO of Marketing Insider Group to talk about his new book Mean People Suck.
We need more empathy inside our companies to empathize more with our customers.
Michael Brenner states, “The most counter-intuitive secret to success in business and life is empathy.” I’m excited to share his thoughts on empathy with you.
In this interview, you’ll learn about asking what’s in it for the customer, rethinking your organizational chart, and making the changes you need to make to be more successful today.

Why did you write Mean People Suck?
Michael: Again, I must give you credit. You were out in front of this empathy topic in marketing.
I think long before me. Kudos to you. It just took me a little longer, but mainly as a content marketer and as a former internal corporate marketer, I reached out to folks that I know that are still living and breathing corporate marketing struggles every day.
I found a couple of things, the number one being that marketers were miserable. It’s like that scene from, I think it’s Poltergeist where the obsessed woman has help written on her. Was it Poltergeist? Anyway, there was a woman possessed, and the words help showed up on her stomach because
I feel like a lot of internal corporate marketers feel that way. They’re miserable.
Why are marketers so miserable?
Michael: When you get down to it, I’ve found that it’s mainly because they hate their boss.
They don’t love the corporate culture. They’re not happy with what they’re being asked to do. They feel they don’t have an impact.
When I looked at why content marketing programs aren’t successful, the answer superficially was content ROI. What’s the ROI of content? And if you don’t mind me, I’m not being promotional, but I wrote a book called The Content Formula, All About Content Marketing ROI.
And when I went back to folks I sent the book to, but I found that it wasn’t enough. The math isn’t enough to get people over the challenges that we’re facing and how to do marketing that doesn’t suck.
Most marketing stinks for this reason
Michael: The answer is that I wrote the book is that most of the marketing that we do that stinks and doesn’t work, because some executive with a big ego asked us to do it.
Executives love seeing logos on stadiums, and they love seeing Super Bowl ads, and all the things that we make fun of marketing about primarily come from a request from sales or marketing or product people.
And the companies where content marketing is successful or marketers are happy are making an impact because there’s a culture of empathy. Their cultures don’t suck. The companies don’t suck. The leaders don’t suck. That’s why I wrote the book. Maybe a long-winded explanation, but that’s why.
Why empathy is more important now
Brian:  It’s hard for marketers to care about the customer when they don’t feel cared about too.

Has our devotion to work and hustle turned into the UnAmerican Dream?
Some of the hardest working people I know are in sales and marketing.
We often read success stories about how hustle and grit drove fantastic success.
That said, the relentless pursuit of success can leave behind damaged relationships and personal life carnage in its wake.
Take me, for example.
Shortly after building up and selling a successful company, my 17-year marriage ended.
There’s a reason entrepreneurs have a higher divorce rate.
For me. My pursuit of business success left my health and my personal relationships in a severe need of help.
I needed to redefine the kind of life I wanted to live, make different choices, and set better boundaries.
It wasn’t easy.
Now, my health, relationships, and personal and professional happiness are so much better.
That’s why I was excited to interviewed Carlos Hidalgo (@cahidalgo), CEO of VisumCX and author of the new book The UnAmerican Dream.
In this interview, you’ll hear Carlos’s story about finding personal and professional happiness and establishing work-life boundaries.
This is a must-read for sellers, marketers, and entrepreneurs.
Can you tell our listeners a little bit about your background?
Carlos:  Yeah. Hey Brian. Always a pleasure to talk to you. I have been in B2B marketing and sales for over 20 years. I think right now it’s about 25 years, which is hard to believe.
I’ve been both client-side, and then in 2005, I co-founded an agency. That agency is still running. I left that agency at the end of 2016, beginning of 2017 to start another business. So, could say I’m a bit of an entrepreneur. I love creating things.
Now, I work with B2B companies in the whole area of customer experience under the new brand VisumCX, and then just wrote my second book.
The first book was on demand generation, so if you ever have insomnia, go for it. You can read that.
But this book was the UnAmerican Dream, which is more my story and a whole lot more personal than the first one.
Why did you write The UnAmerican Dream?
 
Brian: Can you tell the story about why you wrote this book, The UnAmerican Dream, and why now?
Carlos:  Yeah, great question. When I left Annuitas, which was the first company that I had co-founded and started, I put a post on LinkedIn about why I was going.
It was more to get back to what I should have been doing in the first place, which was cultivating those meaningful relationships, especially with my children and marriage.
I was struck by the number of calls and emails I got from fellow entrepreneurs and fellow business leaders who were saying,
“So, how did you do this? What steps did you take because I am at my wit’s end? I’m never seeing my family,” or “My marriage is falling apart,” or insert whatever they were going through.
I was shocked.
Wow, this is not just me going through this.
So, that’s why.
But the why now, is the idea of that book came to me over two years ago.
But I needed to work on me first.
I had to get some things straight in me, and one of those things that I start with the introduction, I believe, saying I first had the idea in 2016.
When I told somebody the title, they said, “It sounds like an angry book.”
I believe if I had written it then, it would have been an angry book because I had a lot of things that I had to work through and deconstruct some things that I had held to be true which weren’t right.
So, I needed to wait. Waiting, I believe, made it a much more authentic book, a much more vulnerable book,

Working together as one team in marketing and sales alignment is about the customer.
Why? Because today, buyers are in control.
For this reason, we can no longer have an artificial divide between marketing and sales.
I interviewed Heidi Melin (@heidimelin), CMO at Workfront, on how to get sales and marketing to operate as one revenue team.
Brian: Can you tell us a little bit about your background?
Heidi: Absolutely. I’m a career CMO.
I’ve been in marketing my entire career, having started on the advertising side but primarily focused on fast-growing software businesses.
So, I recently joined Workfront and am the CMO at Workfront.

How can sales and marketing operate as one team?
Well, throughout my career, I’ve had the opportunity to work well with some sales teams, and I’ve also learned my fair share of working with sales teams and marketing teams that don’t align very well.
Also, all those lessons learned include ensuring that the goals are aligned and ensuring that the marketing team has the same goals as the sales team.
Indeed, the marketing team tends to have a broader view of the marketplace in the long term. But the immediate-term goals must be aligned.
So, being aligned on lead generation or demand goals with the sales teams is critical.
We talk about it inside Workfront as one view of the truth because so many times we’ve all probably sat in meetings with sales and marketing executives, and you spend most of the meeting arguing about whether or not the number is right instead of diagnosing what we need to work on to improve.
So, ensuring you’re working on a standard set of numbers is hard.
It sounds straightforward, but it’s hard.
One key to success, I think, is ensuring that measurement, all programmatic activities, and the process-oriented partnership between sales and marketing are aligned because it’s one business process.
One business process focused on revenue.
I think that marketing and sales historically have been thought of as two separate business processes; we talk about it as a critical handoff.
But I think about it because it’s one business process, and inside a company, it’s really focused on the revenue of your business.
It starts when a marketing team targets a specific customer or prospect, and they raise their hand and ask for more information or engage all the way through to close business. So, it’s one business process, not two separate business processes.
And, oh, by the way, it’s aligned to something way more important than a sales team or a marketing team: it’s aligned to how a buyer buys your product.
And we forget that sometimes, we’re like, “Oh, well, the marketing process does this…”
I’m like, oh no, no, no.
We’re just trying to facilitate a buying process.
Flip your focus on the customer
Heidi: Yeah, and so when you flip that, and you look at the focus on the customer, all of sudden marketing and sales from an outreach, from an engagement perspective, has one unified goal, which is to move a buyer through a buying process.
And when you have that change of mindset that becomes important.
I’ve worked in businesses where we focus cleanly on that critical handoff, and that handoff is the most vital piece. And frankly, it’s an essential piece, but it’s not the crucial piece.
Heidi: Yeah, it should support, and we have the tools to help that entire life cycle.
When I first joined Workfront one of the things that we did was as soon as we handed off an opportunity to the sales team, it was like, we’re out, we’re done,

Do you routinely look for ways to drive innovation with your demand generation approach? Or do you feel behind the curve?
According to Circle Research, marketers are split. Half say they’re “old school,” while the other half believe their approach is innovative.
Circle Research found that most marketers (93%) who describe themselves as innovative say that it has made their marketing more effective. However, 83% of lagging marketers plan to bring innovation into their approach this year.
I interviewed Jeanne Hopkins (@jeannehopkins), CMO at Lola.com, on how marketers can bring more innovation to demand generation.
Share a little bit about your background.
Jeanne:  Thanks, Brian. My undergraduate degree is in Accounting.
Believe it or not, the accounting office where I started told me in my annual review that I probably didn’t have a future in accounting because I was too loud. Everything was balanced andhing was good, but I was too noisy for a nice, cut-and-dry accounting office.
That’s when I moved into toys. I worked for Milton Bradley Company’s in-house advertising agency. Then, I moved to LEGO and then to other consulting companies.
I got into the software, an internally funded company called Datum E-business Solutions, which delivered a trusted time application.
A long time ago, way back in the year 2000, it used to be that you’d send an email. Maybe somebody would send it again, but it would be like three hours later or three hours before, and that’s because networks were not on the same timing device.
So, the whole concept of having timing and having to be secure became something that became critically important to all networks. From there, selling into IT, B2B technology companies, that sort of thing. So that’s my gig.
What does Lola do?
Jeanne: Lola.com is a corporate travel management solution that allows finance people, office managers, and business travelers themselves to be able to see their full travel details and integrate with an expense platform. I know, Brian, you’ve probably done some expenses before-
Brian: Yeah.
Jeanne: You take a picture of the expense, you watch it go into the cloud, you fill out the form, and it takes half an hour or hour and, I bet you avoid it, right? It’s like one of those things-
Brian: You wait until the last minute to do it, and if the reports are due on Monday, you’re doing it Sunday night.
Jeanne: Of course, taking away from family time.
Brian: Right.
Jeanne: We integrate with Expensify, Concur, a whole bunch of different finance applications, as well as travel. You can book all your travel with us.
We have a complete support network that helps you get checked in and makes sure that when disruptions come up (reroute people, get people back sooner or back later) and any other hiccups that business travelers endure. We’re trying to mitigate that for them.
Brian: I wanted to highlight you because you’ve done so much, you know, since you and I met, and we could date ourselves a bit here but-
Jeanne: That’s okay.
Brian: Way back, as we spoke, I think, at a MarketingSherpa Conference.
Jeanne: 2006, yeah.
Brian: Yeah! I was impressed by you and just how you were bringing innovation and creativity, and out-of-the-box thinking. Also, you’ve continued to do that throughout your career.
Driving more innovation with demand generation
How did you start thinking differently to drive innovation with demand generation?
Jeanne: Well, I can’t claim the credit myself, so I’d say that there would be a couple of different influences. I would say both of my parents are artists of a kind. My dad paints, he plays music, he writes. My mom sings, plays music, and paints.
So, when I was in high school,

Traditional sales and marketing methods have failed to keep pace with how modern B2B buyers purchase goods and services.
Meetings, phone calls, and email are still important B2B channels but how can you have immediate conversations?
Conversational Marketing is about having direct one-to-one conversations to connect with customers and offer help.
By using targeted messaging and intelligent chatbots to engage with leads in real-time (while they’re on your website), you can connect with people in real-time and convert leads faster.
That’s why I interviewed Dave Gerhardt (@davegerhardt), VP of Marketing at Drift.com and co-author of the new book Conversational Marketing. Dave is also known as DG.

Share a bit of your background and what does Drift do?
DG: So, my background. I don’t even know where to start. I love marketing. I do marketing at Drift. VP of Marketing; been here for three-ish years right since the beginning of the company.
The way that I talk about Drift is that Drift connects you now with the people who are ready to buy now.
Which is a significant change from how traditional marketing typically works, where most of the traditional marketing and sales systems were kinda built for later? Go to my website, fill out this form, and somebody on the team is going to follow up with you later.
But you know, there’s just been a huge shift in the way that we all behave and communicate online, and the now is more important than ever.
I think about walking outside this building: if I called Lyft on my phone, the driver would be there in about one to two minutes, and that’s what we expect from everything. Except in the B2B world, where the rules, for some reason don’t apply to how we actually all do things in real life.
Brian: Right.
DG: So, our mission at Drift is really to transform the way businesses buy from businesses, and the way that we do that is through conversational marketing.
Brian: Well, that’s awesome! And so, that sets us up actually.
Tell us about Conversational Marketing?
And what motivated you to write the book? Why now?
The reason we wrote the book is that we’ve just heard so much about the power of conversational marketing, we felt it firsthand.
We use conversational marketing and Drift to run our whole business, and we have become one of the fastest-growing companies of all time in this industry. And it’s not because we have some secret, but our secret has been we’ve used our own product and really made conversations the center of our business.
And so, as we created this category of conversational marketing and started to educate more people about it late last year, we were like, “You know what? It’s time to write the book.”
We’ve wanted to write a book. We had enough stuff to say, case studies, examples, methodologies, playbooks, blueprints, and all that stuff.
And so, you know we said, “Let’s make 2019 the year that we write the book, and really do the best job we can trying to help educate the future of marketing and sales on this next wave.

B2B lead generation has had to reinvent itself over the last decade.
Sales have always used an account-based approach. Now,, marketing is adopting account-based marketing. But it’s not an easy road.
Here’s why:
In B2B, you’re never selling to an individual. He or she is almost always part of a buying team. Moreover, the bigger the potential deal, the more people, departments, and functional areas get involved.
For this reason, many B2B marketers using a leads-based approach hit a wall with their account-based marketing efforts.
ABM isn’t just about marketing. ABM works best in companies where all revenue-generating areas are closely aligned as one team.
So, how can you improve your account-based marketing results?
To help, I interviewed Jon Miller (@jonmiller), CEO and Co-Founder of Engagio. Jon and his team just released the Second Edition of The Clear and Complete Guide to Account-Based Marketing. He brings a fantastic perspective on how to complement a leads-based approach and adopt account-based marketing.
What inspired you to start Engagio?
Jon: Great.  I’m excited to be here and to have a chance to hang out with you again. It’s been a while since we talked.
So, my background: I’ve been in marketing technology almost my entire career. My undergraduate degree is actually in physics, and when I was coming out of college, I ended up doing a lot of work with companies that were trying to take advantage of all the customer data they had [in order] to make decisions.
Because I came to marketing with that quantitative and analytical background, that led me into a series of marketing technology companies that were basically all about really trying to use all that data to drive better customer decisions and one to one interactions. You know, very much inspired by the Don Peppers and Martha Rogers book The One to One Future.
I worked at Exchange and then as an early employee at Epiphany, which was probably the leading marketing technology company of the mid-’90s.
After we sold Epiphany, I co-founded Marketo, along with Phil Fernandez. And I think that’s arguably, or maybe not even arguably, the leading marketing technology of the last ten years or so. Recently, it was sold to Adobe for just under 5 billion dollars.
I had a long career in marketing technology, but one of the trends I think is always true is marketing is changing all the time, and the underlying technologies are changing all the time.
I just felt about four years ago that Marketo wasn’t, frankly, moving fast enough to kind of keep up with all the new trends and changes in how marketing was done.
I was inspired to start a new company that would be seeking to build out the next generation of marketing products that could really take advantage of all these new trends.
One of those significant trends is what’s now known as account-based marketing. And so, that’s where I decided to start, to focus, to have Engagio be a platform for account-based marketing.
How do you define account-based marketing?
Brian: Well, there’s a lot of definitions out there about account-based marketing, and I’ve talked with CMOs and VPs, and they see account-based marketing as just good marketing.
But I’d love to ask you: you just had this new book come out,

We have more sales and marketing technology and channels to reach our customers, but they’re increasingly tuning us out.
In short: we’re getting more disconnected from customers.
Something is missing.
Even though our tools have become smarter with AI and machine learning, connecting and building B2B relationships has never been harder.
The question is:
How can we connect better and build relationships with B2B customers?
That’s why I interviewed Steve Woods (@stevewoods), Founder & CTO  at Nudge to learn how we can be connecting and building B2B relationships with trust and empathy,
What inspired you to start-up Nudge?
Sure thing. You and I have known each other, obviously, for a long time. A few decades. So, my history before Nudge was Eloqua, in the marketing space, obviously, it’s a space you’re very familiar with, you’re working a lot with marketers.
And really, we were able to see this wonderful transition as marketing went from kind of an arts and craft discipline to a very measured lead generation, demand generation-oriented discipline that started to connect with sales. Here are leads that are qualified; that are interested.
And, that was a wonderful transition to see. But, looking over the fence at the world of sales, we realized that the core of getting those deals done was the next step.
Building trust and relationships
The core was getting the trust and the relationships (and the breadth and depth of relationships at our organization) that would then allow that deal to be moved forward.
The trust and the empathy to be developed, and ultimately the deal to be closed based on those relationships.
As the Eloqua story was winding down, Paul and I decided to jump in and tackle relationship intelligence and use relationship intelligence to understand where empathy is being built, where trust is being built, and how you can make a sales team more effective, by focusing their efforts on the right initiatives.
Brian: That’s cool, just how you took your story from where you were to what you’re doing right now.
Growth lessons: relationships, trust, and empathy are the core
I think the thing that we were lucky with, more than anything, in Eloqua was being part of a major change in a space. Marketing going from unmeasured to measured, and all the effects that that had on the people and the processes and the technology and the understanding.
We were lucky to be a core part of that, and that helped us kind of flow along with that river.
I think what we were trying to do with Nudge was to be a little bit more proactive and say, “What’s going on at a macro level that is going to be a dominant theme of a space for the next decade?”
And looking at sales and looking at relationships, it became very clear that relationships, trust, empathy were the core thing, and it was unmeasurable.  It was intuitive.
Dealing with deal slippage
Every sales leader, when you’re talking about deal slippage when you’re talking about deal progress, when you’re talking about your forecast, it’s all about the relationships and the trust, but it’s not measurable. It’s self-reported by sales reps that often have kind of “happy ears” on the process.
And so, we thought, “If we can do that, if we can figure out how to put a measurement on trust, empathy, and relationships, and then build the tooling on top of that to help people steer the ship in the right direction, then we’re going to be part of a very interesting transition.”
And that’s turned out to be true, as you see sort of the evolution of the sales space: an interesting place to find ourselves in the middle of.
Brian: Yeah. Before us having our interview,

Growth for B2B is hard.
It used to be that you could accelerate growth with huge customer acquisition.
Ramping up your sales and marketing is not enough to sustain growth. Today, the best companies are growing through customer success.
That’s why I interviewed Kia Puhm (@kiapuhm), CEO at DesiredPath, to talk about customer success.
Kia’s got a fantastic perspective on “how do we accelerate and grow our existing customer relationships,” which is something that many companies don’t focus on nearly enough.
Can you tell us a little bit more about your background?
Kia: Thanks, Brian. Happy to be here. I come to software from an educational background in computer engineering and practical experience background of 22 years in the industry working at rapidly growing, very dynamic software companies.
I guess I’ve built every post-sales function, and always the common denominator has been how the organizations I led get customers to adopt software so that they are using it and get value out of it. Moreover, it translates into loyal customers that can translate into additional revenue at some point in time.
I had to do that with a finite, limited amount of budget and resources. So I always try to figure out how to drive that adoption equation while doing what I could or what I had available to me and use that most efficiently, if possible, to do it.
What’s the most significant trend affecting your work?
Kia: Great question. I’m going to have to say disruption. With all the changes happening out there to businesses, with technology and data and information we have, and artificial intelligence, and just the way the world is changing, it’s changing how we operate.
So, the biggest trend in the work that I do with my customers in helping them understand their customers and how to support that is how do you do that in a continually disruptive environment where things are always changing?
Vendor-centric vs. customer-centric
Kia: There have been many studies done and much research that shows that companies operating from a customer-centric viewpoint (that deliver amazing customer experience) far outperform their competitors that aren’t customer-centric.
So, I think that that is where companies are moving toward, and that is how we adapt to all these changes that are continually happening.
The reason I think that’s important is not only the obvious (customers stay loyal when they have good experiences and that the product is delivering on the promises that it says it’s going to deliver) but also as our customers keep evolving and changing, so too are the ways that we operationalize that and support those customers.
If you are customer-centric, it means you are observing that evolution that’s happening to your customer base. You’re able to be very agile and nimble in responding to that as a business.
If you keep using that information, that observation of a customer, either passively or through active engagement with them to find out that information, you could feed that into your organization and continually change and respond to that to continue to drive that value for customers and that loyalty that you need to keep growing your own business.
Using journey maps to improve customer success
Kia: I know you, and I have had conversations at other times and have completely aligned regarding the type of approach that we use.
I use customer journeys to facilitate customer-centric thinking to make sure that an organization understands empathizing and understanding what customers are trying to accomplish when purchasing your products.
When you understand it from the customer viewpoint, specifically, as it relates to software,

Are you applying empathy as part of your sales and marketing approach?
Why? Because according to Brent Adamson, “empathy” is the one word that matters most to sales [and marketing] success.
It’s tough to buy. B2B customers are overwhelmed with too much information and too many choices, trying to get their colleagues to agree, not to mention second-guessing.
This is part two of my interview with Brent Adamson (@brentadamson), Principal Executive Advisor at Gartner, and the co-author of The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer.
You’ll learn ways to apply empathy and how to solve buying problems.
Writers note: You can view part of our interview here: New research: Boost organic growth from current customers.
Does empathy capture everything your book, The Challenger Customer, is about?
Brent: The idea that empathy is the core principle of the entire book The Challenger Customer, I admit, is more of a personal opinion based on all of our research.
You’ll notice the word doesn’t appear anywhere in the proper book. It’s only in the acknowledgments where I made just a little blurb at the very back (a short note to my daughters). And I used the word empathy there.
But in many ways, for me personally, one word captures everything that the book is about.
I know this is a topic not only near and dear to your heart. But your expertise here is far deeper than mine.
But when I think of empathy, I think of two components to it, but it’s almost a right-brain, left-brain, or the rational versus the emotional.
I don’t know what the right way to think about it is.
But from my perspective, empathy is, at a fundamental level, your ability to place yourself in someone else’s shoes and see the world from their perspective.
And that might be logical (how they view the world from their perspective), or it might be emotionally (what the world feels like from their perspective).
I find both of those attributes of empathy to be potentially hugely powerful for anyone in sales or marketing.
How customers think
For example, whenever we’re talking about Customer Improvement or even the broader work in Challenger, is this idea of mental modeling.
The whole idea being, if you’re going to change the way a customer thinks about their business, what’s the first thing you must understand more than anything else?
How would you answer that, Brian?
Brian: If I were to do that, I’d need to understand their experience and how they see things.
Brent: You got it. This is where I have fun talking to you because you get this stuff. And I say this with great, hopefully, empathy and respect for anyone out there.
What I find when I ask most leaders, sales, and commercial marketing leaders that question is: “If you’re going to change the way a customer thinks about their business, what’s the first thing you have to understand?”
Virtually everyone will say, “Their business.” So, then they start reading 10K’s and the annual reports and the financials and all that kind of stuff.
We saw in our research closer to where you are, which is, if you’re going to change the way a customer thinks about their business, the first thing you must understand is how they think about their business.
That’s the thing you’ve got to change.
Map customer thinking  
We find it can be very productive to draw a “map” on a piece of paper. A map of their thinking.

CEOs and sales leaders have long wondered: how can we drive organic growth and increase sales from existing customers?
But it’s elusive. In fact, the traditional approach is no longer working.
According to CEB, now Gartner, “Only 28% of sales leaders report that account management channels regularly meet their cross-selling and account growth targets.”
That’s why I interviewed Brent Adamson (@brentadamson), Principal Executive Advisor at Gartner, and the co-author of The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer.
Writers note: You can view part two of our interview here: New research: Empathy and how to solve buying problems
 Can you tell our listeners a little bit about you and your background?
Brent Adamson:  I work with an organization formerly known as CEB and has now been acquired by Gartner.
I work with the Sales & Service and Marketing & Communications practices here at the company. And it’s sort of our mission in life, at least in the business to business space where I spend most of my time, trying to understand with data, with research, with analytics, what does world-class B2B selling and marketing look like?
We get after that, again, with all sorts of analysis and research. It’s funny, we’re actually industry agnostic. We work across industries, go to market models, geographies, and try to understand (across all of the different kinds of companies out there) what do we all have in common?
What’s the recipe for success that’s going to help us all move the dial, do a little bit better, in sales, in marketing and ideally in sales and marketing?
How can sellers drive account growth?  
Well, sure. This is brand new research for us. In some way or another, we always study growth, right? Because that’s what sales and marketing are all about.
There’s a certain almost urgency, or we like to call the “Why Now?”, of this growth question, especially in sales, which is especially relevant for us today.
And that is simply the journey that we’ve all been on over the last five years, five months, 10 years, 20 years of building out broader capabilities across our organization to offer our customers, if you will, solutions as opposed to individual products and/or services.
The idea that if you can offer your customer broader solutions, that’s going to allow you to stand out, to differentiate yourself, to command price premiums in the marketplace. All good things to do and good reasons to do it.
The thing that’s interesting though, Brian, as you add all those capabilities to your portfolio that you can now bring to your customer to add that additional value. The actual value they create for you as a supplier is of course directly contingent on your ability to actually sell them, to get your customer actually to buy those incremental capabilities.
Not surprisingly, companies all around the world, in their efforts to grow, are looking to existing customers to buy into more of the cart, as we all like to say, to penetrate that account more deeply and get them to buy into more of the value that we can offer.
It turns out this is a huge challenge for B2B organizations around the world, which is, simply put, to get existing customers to buy more of what we have to sell; to essentially drive growth with existing customers. That is the challenge or the terrain, as we like to say, that we dove into this year.
What can sales do better?
What can we, as sales organizations, do to do a better job of driving growth with those existing customers?

Sales enablement is intended to help raise performance, but many efforts have backfired due to departmental silos. And now there’s a growing gap between what salespeople need and what they’re getting to improve performance.
For example, Corporate Visions recently surveyed 500 B2B marketers and sales professionals that 20% of organization content creators “just do what they think is best” with no overarching structure at all. And just 27% of organizations are content that focuses squarely on customers and rather than their own story.
And all the tools and technologies meant to help boost sales productivity are now are slowing things down.
What’s the bottom line?
Salespeople are getting overwhelmed and slowed down with increased complexity, just like the customers they’re selling to.
That’s why I interviewed Dave Brock (@davidabrock), author of the Sales Manager Survival Guide, also CEO of Partners in EXCELLENCE. Dave’s brilliance is his focus on practical simplification. And I’m excited to bring his thinking on sales enablement and what can be done to raise sales team performance.
Can you tell us a little bit about your background?
Dave: Brian, thanks so much. I really appreciate the chance to continue the conversation we started in Washington, and I appreciate you inviting me to this.
By background, I actually started as a physicist in my career and ended up going to the dark side of selling and sold mainframe computers for IBM for some years. Went up the food chain to more senior management roles, then left to become EVP of sales for a technology company as part of a turnaround, later held VP of Sales or CEO roles in several technology companies.
And now run the consulting company – we help our clients solve some of the most challenging problems in sales and marketing and deal with the new buyers. We have a highly collaborative approach in helping really outstanding people solve really, really difficult problems.
What is the biggest trend you see affecting your work and sellers today?
Well, clearly, it’s the convergence of some things that we see in the marketplace. It’s the new buyer. Everybody’s changing the way they buy, and learning how we engage these new buyers through marketing, sales, and customer experience is critical.
At the same time, we see tremendous transformations in business and business models, whether it’s the digital transformation that virtually every company is undertaking or just older business models being displaced with new business models.
We have some of the classics of Airbnb, turning the hotel and lodging market upside down or Uber turning the taxi and limo business upside down. We see that the new business models occurring are driving real stress on customers.
And then the final thing is just overwhelming complexity, just between the rate of change, the amount of information we’re deluged with every day. Most of the people I’m meeting are really struggling with at least one of those three things. I see it impacting virtually everybody.
Brian: I can relate to those challenges. I think just in talking about complexity for sellers and marketers, I was having a conversation with someone earlier, and it’s just an overwhelming number of tools an average salesperson uses or a marketer uses. It also creates challenges around collaboration, that internal collaboration.
How do you get internal collaboration to improve sales performance?
Dave: The easy answer is to break down the silos and start talking to each other. It’s easier said than done. We see a lot of the issues we face regarding internal complexity, and internal collaboration is just people being wel...

Are you connecting with and empowering your customer advocates? If not, you should. Here’s why.
Customer advocacy marketing programs help you increase revenue by improving customer acquisition and retention (and they’re also your best source of leads).
How? Because you’re helping to motivate happy customers to speak about you positively to others. And delighted customers are your most powerful hidden sales force.
For example, in 2016, IDC research found that only 10% B2B companies surveyed had a customer advocacy program in place. This year, “The Role of Marketing in Customer Advocacy” report found that has increased to 67%, which is a 570% increase.
That’s why I interviewed Mark Organ (@markorgan). Mark is the Founder and CEO of Influitive, and he’s been a thought leader in the space of sales and marketing technology, a real innovator. I’m excited to bring his thinking to you on customer advocacy.
Tell us a little bit about your background and what inspired you to start Influitive?
Mark: Yeah, thanks. I’m really excited to be here, Brian. I think this is an amazing podcast, and I’m excited to share my story. I’ve lived several lives already. One of them, before I started Eloqua in 2000, was as a research scientist. I was actually a Ph.D. candidate in neuroscience at Northwestern University in Chicago.
I was really fascinated by how the brain works and what were the biological bases of behavior. It was fascinating for me. Although research, while fascinating, has some challenges concerning it, especially getting paid well. I also wanted to spend more time with my wife, so I left the research world to get into the business world and joined Bain & Company as a management consultant; from there, I started Eloqua.
The other big thread in my life other than being a scientist was being an entrepreneur. I started companies even as a teenager, as far back as age 13. I’ve always been really fascinated with working for myself and satisfying customers.
Really, I think now I’m bringing both of those together in my company where I still feel like I’m a scientist. I still feel like I’m trying to discover what makes human beings really work and tick, but also being an entrepreneur, building software for marketers, and leveraging the understanding of people and what drives them.
Regarding what motivated me to start Influitive – we’re an advocate marketing software company. So we believe that the future belongs to companies who, as opposed to marketing directly, do a better job of discovering and nurturing, and mobilizing their customers to do the marketing for them.
We think the future is for companies to get their customers to do the sales and marketing. We built some software for discovering, nurturing, and mobilizing advocates.
I got the idea while I was at Eloqua. It was 2005, and great VC convinced me to spend a couple of weeks out in the field to understand how and why people bought my software. What I learned was when we sold software efficiently, it was because there was tons of this advocacy involved. There were multiple referrals on the way in. Many case studies were relevant on the website, the best references, and those prospects went very quickly.
At the time, Eloqua was a bootstrap startup, so selling our software quickly was super important. I got really excited about this idea of advocacy, but it turns it was way harder than I thought to generate consistent advocacy. That’s because we didn’t actually understand what motivated the advocates.
I really wanted to understand better what motivated the advocates. Through some interviews and lots of other things like that, I began to figure out what drove advocacy. Unfortunately, I couldn’t work on that when I was at Eloqua,

Do you focus on capturing product stories or customer-hero stories? The answer can make a huge difference in your sales and marketing results.
Let me explain.
Despite all the time, money, resources spent on improving sales productivity, just 13% of salespeople produce 87% of revenue in a typical organization, according to the Sales Benchmark Index.
So, what do the 13% high achievers have that others don’t? They connect emotionally with their buyers.
That’s why I interviewed Mike Bosworth. If you don’t know Mike Bosworth already, he is a thought leader in the sales space. And he’s had a profound influence on how we sell and market, especially those in B2B.
In this interview, we talk about the power of customer-hero stories to connect emotionally with buyers to facilitate their buying journey.
Author’s Note: The transcript was edited for publication.
Can you tell us a little bit more about your background?
Mike: Well, it’s interesting because, I think today, it’s incredible how cloud technology is forcing companies to be more empathic in their sales and marketing. It’s forcing them to. Because with the cloud, the conversation has to shift from the old “our-solution” marketing: our solution will do this, and our solution will do that.
So, making that shift from that to how-the-customer-uses-our-stuff marketing: customer usage marketing or what we in Story Seekers call customer hero marketing. I want marketing to think about what we are really doing marketing for– I’m hoping we’re trying to create customers, and sales are also trying to create customers.
If we’re going to sell empathically, then, ideally, we won’t even be “selling.” We’ll be facilitating the buying journey of our customers and facilitating their customer experience because human beings love to buy, and they hate to feel sold.
What inspired you to talk about integrating with marketing and sales?
For my whole career as a sales productivity consultant and sales trainer, my stated mission was to help my client lift the bottom 80% of their sales force. The top 20%, the ones who bring in 80% of the revenue, they’ve been doing well for years and continue to. I figured I want to help my customers bump up at least the next 50% because you could get a 10% increase in productivity from that next 50%. Please do the math on that for most companies: it’s a lot of money.
Brian: It is. As you’ve been working with companies and clients, there’s something that’s existed longer than probably both of us have been doing our work.
Tell us the things most important for marketing and sales to agree on?
In most companies I deal with, they’re really two different silos, and they’re pointing fingers at each other.  Marketing thinks they’re sending these great leads to sales, and sales, they go into a black hole, and then there’s no follow-up. Sales think that the leads from marketing come from the janitorial staff of the company they’re selling to.
Quite a while ago, it occurred to me that if we can find the touchpoint in integrating sales and marketing, we could really help things out, and so Tim Riester and I, we dove into it, and we’ve made the touchpoint, the definition of a lead.
If both the chief sales officer and the chief marketing officer can specifically agree on the definition of a qualified lead, then the “integration” really starts getting a lot easier.
That word integration is messing people up in this day and age, and, if you think about it, it gets most people thinking about IT issues. APIs, and what plugs into this and what feeds into that, disable true integration. A couple of weeks ago, I just swapped out the word integration for agreement. Golly,

When did you last evaluate the quality of your B2B personas and contact data? If you’re like most marketers, you know the struggle of getting the right content to the right people.
Starting in 2014, Salesforce analyzed over 15 million data points from major B2B databases like Data.com and LinkedIn. The goal? To help marketers understand and improve the accuracy of their targeting.
I spoke with Mathew Sweezey, Principal of Marketing Insights at Salesforce, about his research and insights from the report, B2B Personas: Targeting Audiences. Here’s what he had to say.
Meet Mathew Sweezey
Brian: Mathew, can you tell us a little about your background?
Mathew Sweezey: Sure! I was one of the early employees at Pardot, which later became part of Salesforce. I’ve been in the thick of B2B marketing, writing the book Marketing Automation for Dummies and sharing insights as the Principal of Marketing Insight at Salesforce.
The Spark Behind the Research
Brian: What inspired you to dig into this data?
Mathew Sweezey: As marketers, we often focus on simple metrics like the number of email addresses we collect. But we rarely ask the bigger question: How effective are we? We needed a way to evaluate audience data and understand its true value.
Key Takeaways:

* The average cost of a B2B email address is around $150.
* Most B2B email databases hold about 50,000 contacts, meaning the average database is a $7.5 million asset.
* The only metric we often use to assess email lists is whether the emails bounce—not a great measure of data quality.


The B2B Persona project from Mathew Sweezey
Surprising Discoveries in Audience Data
Brian: What surprised you most during your analysis?
Mathew Sweezey: The biggest surprise was the high level of movement within organizations. People change roles frequently, which can make your database quickly outdated.
Key Insights:

* Role Changes: The contact may no longer fit your target persona even if an email is still valid.
* Database Churn: B2B contact lists churn at a rate of around 15% per year. Without updates, your database could be irrelevant in 4.2 years.
* Personas Are Fluid: People enter and leave target personas daily based on job changes and company shifts.

Tip: Track growth and churn rates in your personas to understand how quickly your audience changes.
Why B2B Marketing is Fundamentally Changing
Brian: Your report suggests B2B marketing is undergoing a major shift. Can you elaborate?
Mathew Sweezey: Traditionally, businesses controlled both the creation and distribution of media. Today, we live in an infinite media environment where anyone can create and share content.
The New Reality:

* No Captive Audience: Consumers now filter content through algorithms and ad blockers.
* Content Overload: There’s an overwhelming amount of content, and only the most relevant messages will make it through.

Insight: The biggest challenge today is cutting through the noise by making content genuinely valuable.
Should We Even Be Asking for Email?
Brian: Given what you’ve shared, should marketers change how they view email as a channel?
Mathew Sweezey: Yes! Email should be treated as just one part of a broader communication strategy. Consider social media handles, which may have a longer shelf life,

Does your purpose currently impact your marketing, revenue growth, and profit? If not, it should.
Here’s why:
According to research curated by Mack Fogelson, consider the following:

* 73% of people care about the company, not just the product, when making a purchase. (BBMG)
* 50% of purchases are made because of word-of-mouth (Brains on Fire)
* 85% of purpose-led companies showed positive growth (Harvard Business Review/EY)

In sum, purpose matters because it impacts your growth, revenue, and profit.
That’s why I interviewed Mack Fogelson (@mackfogelson), the CEO of Genuinely, a consulting and training company. I met Mack through a mutual friend, and we’ve developed a friendship too. I’ve learned a lot about marketing with purpose and why it’s important to revenue growth and profit, and I’m excited to share her thinking with you. You’ll also learn four steps to articulate your purpose.
Author’s Note: The transcript was edited for publication.
Mack, can you tell us a little bit more about your background?
Way long ago, I was a teacher and did that for a while. Then over the last fourteen years, I’ve been in the marketing space, so everything from building and coding websites to optimizing with search engine optimization and SEM to building community and brands and the full, integrated approach to marketing a company.
All of those layers have brought us to where we are now, primarily teaching companies how to use these concepts, frameworks, and the processes that we’ve tested and know really work to grow their companies. We do this to ultimately help businesses in the digital age compete, contend, and build really great, meaningful, and sustainable businesses.
What inspired you to focus on purpose and humanize marketing?
Around the time I started having my family, I just realized that if I was taking that time away from my kids, I really needed to make it count. I’ve built a business around something significant to me and for my employees. We started by helping companies be better. I started getting into the conversation about community many years back. When many marketers were talking about how to rank #1 in Google, I talked a lot about the benefit of the community and businesses building a community to help their companies. What I didn’t realize at the time, but unfolded many years later, was that purpose was really at the heart of all of that: helping companies understand how you bring people together through purpose and drive the organization’s growth.
You said that it’s not about what you spend on marketing; it’s the purpose that helps you get focused. Why is that?
Because there is so much that has changed, the world isn’t the same. Businesses aren’t the same, and the way the business community works. Customers are not the same. So, we cannot expect marketing to be the same. Mainly we’re looking at consumers now. We expect authentic and authentic and human experiences. And not only that, but employees are looking for more meaning in their work just like I was many years ago.
It really comes down to the fact that it’s not about what your company sells or solves anymore, and certainly, you need to be incredibly stellar at what you sell and what you make, but it’s about who your business is. And really, it’s about the three components of purpose, people, and promise, and having those pieces work together for any given company so that they can reap all the benefits that purpose brings,

Have you made empathetic marketing part of your strategy?
If not, you should. Let me explain.
I interviewed Michael Brenner (@BrennerMichael), the CEO of MarketingInsiderGroup.com. Michael has received recognition across the Internet for his knowledge and role in shaping content marketing as we know it today. He’s a sought-after keynote speaker and co-author of The Content Formula. I’m excited to bring his thoughts on empathy to you.
Author’s Note: The transcript was edited for publication.
Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and your background?
Michael: Yeah, sure. Thanks, Brian. It’s a pleasure to be with you today, and I look forward to talking about empathy, which I think is important in today’s landscape. As we get older,  I’ve needed to summarize my career much more quickly than I used to. But a 20 plus year career in sales and marketing and leadership roles in various kinds of companies, large and small. About ten years ago, I was hired by SAP as their first head of digital marketing.  I became their first VP of Global Content Marketing and mainly helped them modernize the digital marketing approaches that they were taking. Very much taking an empathetic approach like we’re going to discuss.
There’s such a need, I think, for brands to understand.  They want to do it, I think but struggle with getting it done and changing the culture inside their organizations. That’s where I’m focused now. I built Marketing Insider Group, primarily, as kind of a one-person agency for now, but with the point that I’ve been there, I’ve done that, I’ve been inside corporate marketing departments. I understand the politics and the cultural challenge that marketers face today. Now I’m dedicating my life to trying to help as many companies, like many brands, as many marketers as I can, to understand how to put themselves in a leadership position by helping their customers.
Brian: That’s fantastic. I came across your article on LinkedIn, and several people forwarded it to me and said, “Brian, you should check this out for your book.”
What inspired you to start writing and talking about empathy recently?
What I’ve found is as I talk to senior executives – I have a good story. We could maybe get to it a little bit later on – but a typical conversation for me might involve, “Hey. This digital world and content marketing, and creating content for customers – we think we get it. Now we need to figure out how to do it.”
Often, I find someone in a position of power (with their arms folded) asking challenging questions like, “Well, how’s this going to help us sell more stuff?” I co-authored a book called The Content Formula to specifically address this sort of results-based question, which was, how do you show ROI from this approach? In the book, I talk about showing a better return on investment with marketing that focuses on delivering content people want.
Even after all those sorts of financial objections are removed, I still found resistance inside many companies. I think we can talk about this in a little more depth, but there’s an instinct inside a business to promote itself. That’s counter-intuitive. That’s why I came to this kind of realization that the missing element, and you’ve been talking about this for a long time, is empathy. It’s missing inside corporate cultures and structures.
Empathy is the most counter-intuitive secret to success.  Why is that?
For instance, the posts that I put up on Facebook.  I don’t do a lot of business content on there.

Want to excel in social selling or help your sales team succeed? If you’re not focused on social selling yet, you should be. Here’s why:
B2B marketing has evolved to align better with how people buy today. But now it’s time for sales to catch up. As Jill Rowley, social selling pioneer and Chief Evangelist, explains, “We’re long overdue for a transformation, a modernization of the way we sell.”
Recently, I sat down with Jill, who brings years of expertise in marketing automation and B2B sales. She shared her insights on social selling and how to do it right.
Editor’s note: This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
Brian: Jill, can you tell us a bit about your background?
Jill: Sure, Brian. I describe myself as a sales professional trapped in a marketer’s body. I spent 13 years in software sales, and for 10 of those years, I was selling to marketers.
This unique experience lets me understand both sides of the equation—sales and marketing. For the past three years, I’ve been helping companies use social media strategically in sales, creating programmatic, organization-wide approaches to social selling.
The Shift to Social Selling
Brian: What inspired you to start social selling?
Jill: Honestly, it was my frustration with traditional sales methods. Cold calling and mass emails weren’t getting my prospects’ attention. Social media offered a way to be where my customers were, be visible, add value, and join the conversations they care about. It was also an invaluable research tool for understanding my buyers.
Outdated Sales Tactics: Why They’re Failing
Brian: Are salespeople still being pressured to make more calls and send more emails?
Jill: Yes, and that’s a huge part of the problem. The mandate for many sales teams is simply to “make more calls, send more emails.” But more isn’t better—more relevant is better.
Today, everyone has access to contact data, so prospects are flooded with generic, impersonal messages. Automation tools are only amplifying this with sequences that come across as tone-deaf and absurd by the seventh touchpoint. The result? Prospects are annoyed, not engaged.
Key Insight: “More isn’t better. More relevant is better.” – Jill Rowley
The Need for a Mindset Shift in Sales
Brian: Why does it seem like things are only getting worse?
Jill: It’s because technology is enabling bad practices. Sales leaders need to wake up to the fact that buyers have changed dramatically. People buy differently now—they do their own research, trust peers, and value insights over pitches. But too many sales teams are still using outdated methods that don’t align with this new buyer behavior.
Takeaway: Buyers have changed. Sales needs to evolve to match how people and companies want to buy today.
Common Social Selling Mistakes
Brian: What mistakes do you see in social selling?
Jill: A big one is taking old-school tactics and applying them in new-school channels. Too many salespeople are using the “me, me, me” approach on social media, where they talk about their product, their company, and what they want, rather than focusing on the prospect.
I recently received a generic LinkedIn invite from someone claiming to be a social selling expert. That’s a red flag! If you’re not even personalizing your outreach, you’re missing the point of social selling entirely.
Pro Tip: Always personalize your LinkedIn invites—it’s your first impression, so make it matter.
Empathy: The Heart of Social Selling
Brian: How does empathy play into social selling?
Jill: Empathy is critical. Social selling allows you to see through the eyes of your customer. LinkedIn, for example, lets you get insights into someone’s skills, career history, and what others say about them. Use this information to craft a thoughtful approach.

How can you drive fast growth with B2B marketing?
In this interview, you’ll hear from Jim Fowler, founder of Owler, on what he’s learned to grow fast. Owler – a free competitive intelligence platform – went from 0 to over 500,000 users. And they’re on pace to exceed a million users by the end of this year.
I first met Fowler when he was the co-founder of the cloud-based contact management platform Jigsaw, which he sold to Salesforce.com for $175 million (now Data.com).
Writers Note: The transcript has was edited for publication.
Brian: Jim, tell us about your organization. 
Jim: Sure, Brian. It’s a pleasure to be on the show. Owler is a competitive intelligence platform. All business professionals use it, but our biggest participants are sales and marketing folks that really need to keep their finger on the pulse of their competitive grasps. That means their competitors, their customers, their prospects, their partners, etc.
The general trend here is there’s just so much information out there. Our goal with Owler is to become a must-use tool that gives a lot of very crisp information that people can absorb. That’s the key thing that we’re a tool that helps people outsmart their competition of the competitive intelligence platform.
Brian:  Your brand name is derived from your last name, right?
Jim: One of my marketers came up to me as we were naming the company, and we were looking at a bunch of different names like Jigsaw.  I love that name. I mean, it’s a simple word putting the pieces of the puzzle together. Yeah, it worked great. That was a high bar to get over. She came to me and went, “Fowler, I’ve got the perfect name for our company: Owler.” I laughed and said, “Yeah, haha. Funny.” I thought she was joking. She’s like, “No, I’m serious. First of all, it’s five letters. Number two is that owl, wisdom, and people will be able to spell it. Most people aren’t going to associate it with your last name, which is true.” You’re more astute than most, Brian.
I was embarrassed by it at first, but now I love it. Of course, we have a cool little owl. By the way, the Owl’s name is Jim, so Jimf Owler. Any of your listeners are users of Owler, and I imagine there are thousands. They’ll be familiar with our owl that we call Jimpf.
After you sold Jigsaw to Salesforce.com, why didn’t you decide to ride off into the sunset? 
What inspired you to start Owler?
Well, that is a great question. I can tell you they’re a few times along this path that I’ve wondered that same thing. Startups are not easy. I equate a startup with a bag of problems. There’s just a bunch of issues to solve. You know, I was still a pretty young guy. Jigsaw was a great acquisition. It was a $175-million-dollar acquisition at that time. By far and away, the largest Salesforce has ever done. Now, that’s pocket change for those guys. They’re doing massive stuff.
I think that you realize that you don’t really do it for the money, especially once you’ve had an exit. You realize that the creation, the ability to go out and make something out of nothing and create a company that employs many people, but more importantly, build products that people love. I mean, that’s what gives me a charge. I’m really pleased.
At Owler, we’ve doubled our user base over the last ninety days to 500,000 active users. We’re going to blow past a million active users on those things by the end of the year. We’re starting to look at ten million, which is about one-tenth the size of LinkedIn. That becomes a globally important company. I think that’s what really drives founders because you want to … It’s like being a chef. You want to cook food that people love,