Brand Gravity: Stirred not Shaken

Three two one. There it is. And Carrie and Lisa, the floor is yours. Got it. Okay. I’m going to launch in. I’m gonna bring up our side. I’m gonna ask Lisa to finish introducing herself now that we know what we’re doing. Sure. And then she’ll pass it back to me for a second to talk about this really cool idea. That’s great. So if you could advance to the next slide, you might be wondering maybe what the inspiration was behind brand gravity or even why you should even listen to me. The background here is, I now I’ve been in marketing for a little over twenty five years. For sixteen years, I was a CMO adviser working for, you know, leading B2B marketing firms. I was helping those CMOs transform their marketing functions from the doers of things to going on the hook for a number. And inevitably, somehow, the marketing, the CMOs that care deeply about that also were on the hook for repositioning their brands, changing the perception of their organizations, and they figured out marketing’s really valuable for this. Marketing should be on the hook to be the growth driver. So I had kind of a front row seat to these organizations that were kind of repositioning their brands. And through that, somehow, I got this brainiac idea that I thought it’d be easier to be on the client side than in the agency side, decided to move over to the brand and lead the transformations from myself. And I’m now a four time CMO. The first three, I was hired specifically for those two efforts, transform marketing in such a way that it could become the growth driver and can demonstrate or prove that it had a meaningful impact on revenue growth. And the other piece was repositioning these organizations. And of those three transformations, two of which won awards, recognized by SiriusDecisions and Forrester for these end to end marketing transformations. That’s actually how I first met Carrie. That’s where our paths first crossed. The, the the impetus here is, 6sense invests in, buyer experience research. And Carrie and Carrie’s team leads the the development of this research, really trying to understand, well, how is the buying journey evolving? Right? And we’ve all known in marketing for a very long time that the math isn’t math thing anymore. Like, I mean, how many leads, how many MQLs can I generate to offset the challenge of for every hundred MQLs I might send over to sales, maybe one results in a sale, maybe two? That’s not scalable. And, I was at breakthrough, last year, I guess it was, last October, and Carrie’s on stage presenting the results of the research, and it clicked for me in a very clear way. Yes. Companies are, their buying journey is rapidly evolved. Most of that journey is conducted anonymously. And in my mind, I had visualized that when a company decides they have a problem to solve, they launch into orbit. And they effectively are navigating this digital universe looking for answers to their questions that help them make smarter decisions about how to solve that problem. And they’re searching all of these watering holes or these places. They get pulled into organizations that could potentially help them solve those problems. And in that moment, it appeared it really occurred to me. I was like, alright. Let me get this right. These companies launch these searches. The brands that seem to be not just findable, visible, but chosen. The brands that win were the ones that went out of their way to make investments to support that end to end journey before they ever were visible, before they ever became like, reached out to talk to sales. They cared about supporting those organizations’ research even though they weren’t yet ready to talk to sales, and they continued to show them the love along that journey. They had done a really good job at building sufficient enough gravity that attracted buyers and pulled the buyers in towards their brand and kept them there until they were ready to make a decision. So I shared this this this imagery with Karen. I this is how platforms like 6sense can help us understand when the company launches in orbit and can help us be smarter about how are we findable, where are we found, how are we chosen even before they’re ready to talk to sales, and then the math starts working. So that lent itself to the writing of this book called Brain Gravity. Carrie, I I’d love your thoughts. I know you you certainly helped develop the framework to measure a company’s brain gravity, but, you know, I’ll stop talking and maybe turn the mic over to you. Sure. That, you know, about, ten or twelve things that you said there resonate, really strong with me, obviously. And and as Lisa said, we first, encountered each other, way back when I was an analyst with, SiriusDecisions, and that’s that’s my background. It’s not on on the slide. But I I spent about eight years with SiriusDecisions and then Forrester after that acquisition. And since twenty seventeen, have been pretty strictly devoted to trying to get companies to give up this idea of the MQL and the MQL focus. As Lisa said, you’re lucky to get one out of a hundred of those things to turn into revenue. It’s what we got stuck with because the technology that’s really all the technology would support. But one of the primary developers and founders of that technology is completely off. Completely understands that that’s that that’s not the way to way to go and should be doing something else. So, that’s really what I’ve been devoted to over the last number of years. And I came to 6sense because I think, you 6sense has the best tool to do that. And we’re not gonna be talking about that so much anymore today. We’re gonna be talking about I’m gonna talk about the research that Lisa was talking about, that Lisa and I were talking about when she up with this idea of brand gravity. And and, you know, it’s one of those ideas where, I think we all have these moments where it’s like, oh, shit. I remember that exact moment, you know, when I heard that song or when I read that passage in that book or some or, you know, when I met that person or whatever. This is one of those moments I I remember very clearly because I just thought this was such a a great idea. Alright. So, talk about the research a little bit. We every year, we study buyers. We ask buyers to tell us about their buying experience. And, so we’ve we’re up to about ten thousand, people that we’ve surveyed now, about this. We’ve got a new report coming out in just a a couple of weeks at our breakthrough event. I’m gonna show you last year’s numbers because for the most part, I don’t wanna blow my, my big reveal in a couple of weeks. Break your own secret? Yeah. Yeah. But I’m gonna hint at it. So and a lot of this is really the same. So we know that buying happens in groups. The buyer in B2B is almost always a group of people. Even if what you sell only cost fifty thousand a year, it’s still gonna be bought by a, you know, five or more people who have to agree on what they’re gonna do, and that makes a huge difference in how that process works. The average buyer in B2B is evaluating five vendors. They have you know, with the the average itself is eight hundred and sixty, but when you look at the confidence interval plus or minus, it’s up to around a thousand or down below. And the typical buying journey takes nearly a year. And I’ll just give you a little preview. It’s actually compressed, this year, for a number of reasons. So the buying journey is getting a little bit shorter. Virtually everything else I tell you is is the same. Alright? So that’s what buying looks like. But here’s the thing that we we didn’t understand. Now, back at SiriusDecisions, we had a number. We said sixty seven percent of the buying journey happens digitally, and some other people would say, two thirds of the buying journey buyers do on their own before they talk to sellers. And that when we ask buyers, that’s what they said. But what they said specifically to us was we didn’t talk to sellers until we were sixty nine percent of the way through the buying journey. Now little preview of what’s gonna come. That number has moved back also and has been compressed, but now the rest of this stuff is virtually exactly the same. And that is that buyers also tell us that when they first engage a seller, they initiate that contact more than eighty percent of the time, which tells you buyers are in complete control. And if the buyer does not, in isn’t the one who engages first, in other words, if a buyer just takes a phone call from your BDR and and answers it or responds to an email, it actually happens later, not earlier. And that’s like a really simple easy thing to say, but the implication of that is everything that we’ve thought about demand gen over the last twenty or so years has been, we put up great content. We put forms on it. We get people to fill out the forms, and then we chase them down, and we cause them to engage with us and start a buying journey. And what buyers are very clearly saying is, nope. That’s actually not how it works. You can’t chase us down and cause us to do anything. And then when I thought of that, I thought, well, shit. Of course. You you can’t. You know? I would never do that. And I think those of you here probably would agree that that isn’t the way it works with you. When you’re in buying motion, you don’t just answer BDR emails. You might keep them and put them in in in your folder to hang on to for when you’re ready, but you don’t just respond. You engage when you’re ready. So what does it mean? Well, it means that buyers are completely in control, and we have to do whatever we need to do to keep them engaging with us. And that’s why this brand, Gravity concept, I love so much. One of the other things, and this is this is from the new data, is that, buyers say that they put four of the five vendors that they’re going to evaluate on the shortlist on day one. And that means that they already know who you are. They have to know who you are. You don’t get on the shortlist. And that makes this brand gravity concept so important. Like, they have to be revolving around your, brand while they’re not in market and certainly the minute they decide to go into market, otherwise, you stand a risk of not being on the shortlist. And why does a shortlist matter? You know, our data last year said eighty five percent. This year, it’s ninety five percent. The the winning vendor comes from the day one shortlist ninety five percent of the time now. The reason that number’s gone up is because when economic times are difficult, buyers become more conservative. We’ve got a lot more information about that coming up in the report as well. But the more conservative they are, the less likely they are to take a chance on a vendor they don’t know. And that means right now, nobody is buying from a vendor who didn’t already have their attention before they decided that they were actually gonna go into market. Alright. Last piece is the buyers that we care about, our ICP, let’s say we do a great job of identifying a thousand accounts that we care about. You identify a thousand accounts that you care about, six hundred of them will not be in market at any given point in time. And thirty four, these are the the buying journey stages that we track at, six cents. We actually predict where accounts are. That’s that’s what we do, is use data to identify where buyers are in their journeys. Thirty four percent are in early stages and just six percent down around the sharp end of the buying journey. So what this all means is that most of the accounts that you’re doing your marketing to, that you’re sending your demand gen, content to, they’re not in market, and they don’t care about it. They’re they’re not gonna pay attention to your product level stuff. What you can do is influence them with brand, and that’s not a thing that we’ve talked about in B2B very much. We know that the buying journey’s a long ways away. So if they’re not in market now, they’re not gonna buy anytime soon. But what we also know now is that when buyers go into market and they put four of the five vendors there, you can lose a deal on day one of the buying journey nearly nine months before you’re ever gonna talk to them. You’re not gonna win that revenue for a long time, but you can lose it, and you’ll never know that it was there to lose. And that’s why this concept that Lisa’s gonna talk about in thirty seconds is so important that we don’t think about our brands. We don’t think about being really literally attractive to the to the organizations that we would like to sell to to be a a brand that they want to hang out with, you know, in a way, whatever that means for your, buyers. But that’s really what we have to be doing. And, you know, the way that we can do that effectively is by, one, knowing who’s in market, knowing who’s not, and prioritizing the right kinds of treatments, based on that. So, Lisa, I’ll pass it over to you, and, just tell me when you want me to switch this slide. Well, look. Even to add on insult to injury, one thing that’s happening is AI and people’s adoption of AI isn’t making this easier. Right? The reality is is that, they’re able to, distill all the information that they’re finding out about you, again, while they’re researching you through the anonymous, through the anonymous process. So when you think about it, they might you know, what used to be maybe death by blueling some research and maybe asking some questions in community. Now they’re able to do this at scale using an AI answer engine. They’re getting feedback, you know, let’s say, whether they’re using perplexity and it’s referencing something like comments made about your brand in Reddit or in Quora, or maybe they do go to Google, but Google answers their higher level earlier stage question without needing to click through anything. This is just adding and making this even more important. Make sure that you are findable and chosen by the AI answer engines, which means your investments in content, your investments in community, your investments in establishing credibility with those that are industry trusted sources. All of those investments come more critically important because that’s actually how AI answer engines are basically serving you up. They are selecting you based on your their ability to understand your content, their ability to find credible references of your brand and how you solve, know, problems like that in communities like Reddit, which I’m not sure if you’re anything like me, but the last time I paid attention to Reddit and core well, it’s it’s been a long time. Right? So that’s the other piece. Now if when you think about, okay. If we all agree this data is true and we know it’s not getting easier, then what what’s a a good framework to apply, and build brain gravity? And that, I think, is where we’re going. Next, if you can go ahead and advance slides. Now go ahead and move to the next one. Yeah. This is a, you know, a basic seven step process for how to build your brain gravity. Again, these seven steps really are brought together to establish an authority loop in such a way that brings together and and creates this this self fulfilling loop between your content, your community, and your credibility sources. But very first step, you do need insights. You need visibility to when companies launch in orbit. And so gather those insights from a variety of channels, but a platform that’s monitoring your ICP accounts is a great place to start. The second, when you actually have that visibility, are you actually realigning your strategy in such a way that makes sure that you are findable in the context of those problems and those challenges? And not only are you findable, but the way you’re answering the questions along your buyer’s journey, to be relevant to the different stakeholders in that buying group and the questions that each one of them are asking, you’ve gotta rethink your strategy. Right? Your messaging, your positioning, where are you making sure, that your brand is present, how do you format your content. Believe it or not, those are all strategy decisions that you’ve got to make in order to build your brand gravity. And the critical piece here is, I would say, no more random acts of anything. Be very intentional about your content strategy. Be very intentional about your community and the channels and the, you know, the industry influencers that really matter that influence your target audience. Accumulate your digital mass. This is content at scale. Make sure that you’re, you know, able to produce the assets in such a way that are personalized and relevant for each one of those stakeholders in that buying group, and it can be on the line too. Yes. I was just gonna say, could you just pause on that for one second? Because Sure. I think everybody understands, you know, you’ve gotta have good content for that primary buyer persona that you care about. Yeah. But what we know about, there’s a lot of great research, by the way, that that I don’t do, that other people do. And what it tells us is that the people who are not your primary buyer personas, the financial buyer or maybe the IT person who gets involved, they can they can and often will kill your deal. And nothing on your website addresses their concerns. Nothing in your content, is focused on them. And, you know, in in this point in time where everybody can create virtually as much content as they want, and we’re afraid that it’s all gonna be garbage. The way for it not to be garbage is to aim it at the different buyer personas and the messages that you that they care about. And I think the first, you know, the first, companies that do that are gonna have a a pretty big advantage. A hundred percent. And this is where AI can help you to do that at scale provided you keep the human in the loop to ensure that the quality of what’s being put out there is is accurate. Then, of course, validating with social proof. And, you know, many organizations are very good about collecting testimonials and documenting case studies. But the reality is is how good are you at leveraging your ecosystem to amplify those stories? Really smart organizations, again, they’re creating this authority loop between content community and credibility where when they’re not in the room, those, customers, those that have used your model or your technology, the way that they’re talking about you and how they are sharing that with people like them experiencing challenges, like, they actually participating in that process? Are they, evangelical for your brand? Social proof is so critical. And this was even before we started seeing disruption with AI answer engines. If you look at, the way the AI answer engines are answering questions, who they’re referencing are people that are, speaking firsthand about, their experiences with your brand. This is why Reddit and Quora are being brought up. Another element of this is industry analysts, industry influencers that are viewed as credible sources. What are they saying about you when you’re not present? So the validating with social proof is critical. The next piece is why, it’s really important that marketing doesn’t go alone. Right? Integrating for maximum pull. Marketing can do all the right things. They can kill all random acts of marketing. They could realign their strategy to really build this brand gravity. But guess what? When sales or customer success engage, if they are not aligned, they will ruin it. They will break this whole model. And so invest in truly integrating and using go to marketplace that are truly integrated. Building awareness for your sales peers and your customer success peers around how you know, what are you doing to intentionally build the brain gravity? What’s the right messaging and positioning the offer strategy? Provide them with all of the assets you’re putting out in the world that supports and enables the buying journey and work very hard to integrate across that motion in such a way that every interaction with the brand really feels like it builds up where it last left off. This is what’s so critical. Tracking what matters, I think as marketers, we’re not new to measuring and thinking about brand, brand lift, brand preference, but wrap into all of the metrics that you’ve been used to. Include it, into it, you know, how findable you are. Perhaps even weaving in a metric around how chosen you are before that before engagement with sales. And so some will use questions and forms like, how did you first hear about us? You know, what chose you could do a win loss, analysis to understand how did you pick us? You know, what what drove that decision, but expanding your measurements to really not just include the traditional metrics you might have had, but add to it layers that have to do about being both findable and chosen before they engage with sales. And then finally, if you’re thinking about this in terms of growth loops, perpetual flywheels, you’ll look at continual continuously optimizing this, this collective effort to yield sustainable results. I think that’s the collective framework. The additional layer we wanted to share here is, okay. Well, what is actually working with AI answer engines? And I’m just calling attention to the right side. It it really comes down to your content structure and quality. Is it readable and understandable by both humans and machines? Technical AI accessibility. This is no different than saying no forms on your website. Stop with gating, but we also have to be intentional about how readable our websites are for AI answer engines. You might have heard of Cloudflare saying we’re going to prevent any AI models from training or viewing without proving that they’re human. That’s quite literally at a meta level saying everything is now gated. So be mindful about how accessible your web properties are, your content is online to AI answer engines, and and be strategic in the decisions that you make. And then, of course, platform specific citation signals, thinking about where your buyers, where all of your personas are, and who they’re turning to for questions, you know, answers and guidance and advice, and and just be a valuable addition to those watering holes. We’re not suggesting that you go into the communities and start promoting. We are suggesting that someone in your organization is going into the communities and offering smart and helpful advice and content without sales pitches. And then, of course, there’s b to b review sites and media that are going to be increasingly important. If you have a PR media function and their job is to attract new audiences to you, earn media coverage, hold them accountable for actually bringing those audiences to you with that earned media coverage. And personal little hack, you can query the different AI models, and Open I OpenAI in particular will tell you who it’s citing. So even if your brand’s not mentioned, you can see who it’s trusting when it’s answering that question and then use that to inform your strategy. For us, believe it or not, Ad Age, CMS Wired, these are the most trusted sources for two x. So now I’ve gotta focus a part of my strategy to make sure that our earned media coverage is focusing on those sources that ChatGPT is now citing in the context of two x. So you can go ahead and test your queries, which are natural questions for versions of your keywords, and then reverse engineer and have that inform your strategy. And, of course, multi platform distribution, large buying group, different personas of looking at different watering holes. There is no such thing as a magic bullet. But if you keep that in mind that there is no such thing as a magic bullet or one channel and you eliminate random acts of marketing, you can start to sit down and say, is my channel strategy? And then finally, one of the metrics that I’ve added into my board deck is a concept of our, how cited our our mention rate against our top queries related to our keyword strategy that we must own. I would bring forward a metric like that and then measure it, monitor it, and see how probable you would be inside it. That’s it. K? That’s great. I love it. We’ll we’ll take questions and things at the end, but I think it’s time for The second part of the drinking. Dirty martini. Yeah. Come on.