How to Build a Revenue Machine by Aligning Sales and Marketing with Bruce Scheer

Bruce Scheer [00:00:00]:
God dang. Where the contracts get signed, that’s the final 30 and that’s fundamentally messed up. So I’m on a mission to try to help improve that. How can we help revenue teams take those deals home and make their clients.

Bruce Scheer [00:00:15]:
Successful, influential and thought provoking minds in marketing, sales and business? The Business of Marketing Podcast.

A. Lee Judge [00:00:25]:
Welcome again to the Business of Marketing. I’m a Lee Judge. You know, this podcast originally started as two marketers talking about recent marketing events and giving advice. But then after a few episodes, I decided to pivot and begin interviewing the brightest and the best, not only in marketing, but also in sales. And the very first guest has come back to visit us today. And it’s even more interesting because since then both we’ve both released books, launched consultancies, and really work hard at bringing sales and marketing organizations together. So if you’re looking for new ideas on bringing your sales and marketing teams together to improve your revenue, this is the episode jam packed with value that you’ll, you’ll want to hear for sure. Uh, today’s guest is a best selling author, a keynote speaker, and the host of a show that’s becoming a go to for revenue leaders.

A. Lee Judge [00:01:16]:
So joining me today again is Bruce Scheer. Hey Bruce. So I want to jump straight into this, Bruce. And you know, you and I talk a lot offline. We’re in different communities together. And before we go too far though, I noticed as I was pondering what we talk about today, I want to make sure that we don’t get into any business or marketing or sales jargon that, that our audience may miss. And so we’re going to be using the term go to market a lot and it isn’t going to be the focus of our conversation, but we may mention it. So I want to get your take on Bruce, what is your definition? How do you define go to market?

Bruce Scheer [00:01:54]:
Gosh, one of the ways I think about it, it’s a really big bet, Lee. You know, you’re an organization, you’re an enterpr, and you’ve got a new go to market. You know, what’s that mean? You’ve got a new product, new solution, new market that you want to go after, New partnership. You know, perhaps it’s a joint venture or strategic partnership or you just made a new acquisition, something new’s going on and that triggers us to think about, hey, what’s our, what’s our go to market for this? So that’s kind of short form, but go to market means, hey, you know, because we want to go have Impact and grow our revenue in this particular area. How do we align sales, marketing, product and service to go to market? And sometimes it’s not just our team, but gosh, what about the ecosystem, Lee? What about our partners, our value added resellers, our distributors, all the different routes to market, you know, what’s our channel strategy? So we need to think through all of that to have a successful go to market. One of my old bosses, Lee, used to always say, hey, you can’t afford to go to market twice. You need to get this stuff right. And that’s what I call go to market strategy.

Bruce Scheer [00:03:11]:
And Lee, this dates me, but I’ve been using that phrase for a long time, since the early 2000s, before people were even talking about it. I even had it on my business card at one point. Go to market strategies. Till I got a bunch of feedback. I go, and Bruce, better take it off because people don’t really know what it means. But now it’s being slapped around, you know, just common vernacular. But I’m glad that you asked for the definition. Does that match with yours, Lee, or.

A. Lee Judge [00:03:37]:
It does. When I, when I first heard it again, early 2000s, at first it seemed like this really complicated or difficult business jargon that was bounced around and used different ways. But as I began to understand it more, go to market was like you said, it’s how do we organize the whole organization behind taking this thing we’ve built and presenting it to the market and selling it. Now it gets complicated because every part of that team has a different role in bringing this thing to market. I mean, everything, everyone from HR to product to sales to marketing, they all have roles in helping a company bring something to the market. And that’s where the whole, you know, the big umbrella of go to market is. But you can simplify it down to how do we bring this thing to the market? As a company, right?

Bruce Scheer [00:04:28]:
Yeah, as a company. And also, I just might add, and this is going to get so much more important also as an ecosystem. You know, no company’s an island. You know, you need to leverage partnerships to go to market, you know, to do that effectively. And I do believe that is going to be a competitive edge for, for many organizations as we move forward. Board, how do, how do they get aligned internally? Which I think your book just does a beautiful job of talking about. But then also how do you align your whole partner strategy and the ecosystem around bringing this type of value to customers? Oh, and I’ve had the honor of doing that between like Hewlett Packard and Microsoft, Fujitsu and Microsoft, you know, for Azure they had a joint go to market because they wanted to tackle the Japanese market and all of Europe. And Fujitsu was standing up Azure based data centers.

Bruce Scheer [00:05:29]:
That’s a whole partner play. So I mean the complexity gets even greater when you’re doing these joint go to market initiatives.

A. Lee Judge [00:05:38]:
Yeah, I was thinking in terms of this conversation, what’s beautiful about us talking about this is that I think most of my work has been aligning sales, marketing and customer experience because that’s. I worked for my first business, my first working in sales and marketing was in a software company that built software for customer service departments. So I was really tied into the customer experience, customer facing software. So mine was sales, marketing and customer. Whereas you have a lot more experience in sales, marketing and product. That’s something that I don’t have as much vision in as you do. So as we talk about these aligning these different departments and teams, how important is it? Let’s talk about how important it is to align these internal teams because I know that even your book inspire your buyers. You outline a clear go to market narrative identifying like this big problem, helping them envision their desired outcome and presenting your big solution.

A. Lee Judge [00:06:39]:
And even that means you have to understand internally what your alignment is first before you approach this big solution. So tell me more about, about that.

Bruce Scheer [00:06:49]:
Well, I’d love to. Yeah. And you know, thanks for giving a shout out to this bestseller inspired buyers.

A. Lee Judge [00:06:56]:
I have mine here too. So you know, shameless plug for Bruce’s book. We got it right here.

Bruce Scheer [00:07:01]:
Love it, love it. Well, it’s a good book man. And it’s been doing really well, you know, in market and gosh, it’s, it’s only two years old and I’m, I’m starting to try to fan the flame and I want to go international with it. You know it’s already sold a few thousand copies, done pretty well. But the, to drive that alignment around a go to market initiative, I, you know, one of the biggest reasons I wrote this book and the way I like to foster alignment is what’s the story we’re telling? You know, we, we need a good, you know, aligning narrative around this whole go to market initiative and it’s really fun. When I work with organization sleeve very often I’ll come in and that, you know, there’s random acts of narrative, you know, people are and just ideas. There’s rarely a coherent narrative. There’s just a bunch of ideas and gosh.

Bruce Scheer [00:07:57]:
I did a project for an organization that Adobe acquired Out in Utah and I came upon this phrase, I spoke to 10 different executives and I got 10 different stories. And God dang, if we can’t align around a narrative, how can we help plug everything into that? Like what you were saying, customer service, hr, et cetera. How does everybody understand the role they play, their activities, in relation to what? If you don’t have a good narrative, then things get confusing really fast. And so I love solving that problem for organizations, helping them align to a go to market narrative. And hence, you know why I wrote the book. But when it’s done right. And Lee, just before we hit record, was telling you a story about tableau, how I helped build their narrative pre IPO and just before ipo, actually. And, and it was wild successful for them.

Bruce Scheer [00:09:01]:
But we started. It’s kind of funny, but they decided they wanted to penetrate enterprise accounts. And that’s where we had a lot of expertise and experience in doing that. So we built a narrative that was going to be used by the enterprise sales team to go to market and try to knock down some big elephant types of accounts with a great story, a great sales narrative. But what ended up happening was the commercial team loved it and they started using it even more than the enterprise sales team. So the commercial team was going after small, mid sized, large businesses as opposed to the enterprise team that was set up specifically to go after the enterprise. But they grabbed onto it and absolutely loved it. And then lo and behold, it actually became a whole company story, their narrative.

Bruce Scheer [00:09:56]:
And it became from chairman to frontline. Everybody had to be indoctrinated into this narrative, the tableau narrative. And it became part of the on onboarding rhythm after that. One of my favorite stories, Lee, was somebody in learning and development sold a customer tableau using this whiteboard visual narrative that we had built to complement that sales sales narrative. And she wasn’t even in a sales role, but, you know, everybody got into that narrative and then they could figure out how do they plug into that?

A. Lee Judge [00:10:32]:
Well, you know, I want to ask this, Bruce, and this may be a bit of a pivot because part of the work we do is helping to build these narratives and helping to get sales and marketing speaking the same language to go to market or to sell a product. And at the end of the day, we have to measure if that worked. We have to come up with some numbers to report on. Okay, we agreed on this narrative, we’ve gone to market, we began to sell this thing. But then we find, and this is part of the reason why I wrote my book Was we end up measuring things differently, like sales hazard measurements, marketing hazard measurements. Instead of having a holistic revenue measurement as a revenue team, we have these different measurements. Marketers and sales leaders. If you want to close more deals and drive real revenue growth, you need cash.

A. Lee Judge [00:11:25]:
And I don’t mean money. I’m talking about my new book, Cash the four Keys to Better Sales, Smarter Marketing and a Supercharged Revenue Machine. It gives you a proven framework to improve the four areas that impact revenue the most. Communication, alignment systems, and honesty. You need a stronger sales and marketing engine and this book will show you how to build it. Get your copy now@aleadjudge.com cash now back to the content. So what are the biggest gaps you see between sales and marketing teams and how these companies can bridge these gaps to drive the same narrative and measure the same revenue goals?

Bruce Scheer [00:12:09]:
Well, the narrative is a unifying narrative where everybody understands what, what is the, you know, the sales narrative, the strategic narrative, you know, very often I call it a value narrative because, you know, it’s, it’s a buyer first type of narrative that’s kind of foundational. It’s, it’s almost like a brand, you know, you know, it’s, it’s a building block for everything. And you need to have your narrative that, that is customer facing again, that everybody can plug into, you know, content marketing. They can build content in support of that narrative, you know, for, for double clicks and triple clicks into, you know, you know, different aspects of the narrative. But you know, that’s an aligning function. The sales conversations and how sellers are trained is against that. Narra Even brand could be shaped by narrative in terms of the brand story. How’s that in relation to the sales narrative? Trying to think what other attributes? Oh, I was doing a project for McKesson Lee and I was building a bigger narrative than what they were offering at that point in time.

Bruce Scheer [00:13:21]:
And I went to the president and said, hey, here’s our narrative, but why aren’t you doing this? You know, it could be in concert with the narrative and it was doing more at the time offering hospitals office365 as a capability and now they weren’t offering it. But I was able to connect those dots with their narrative to bring forward a whole new product capability that they could bring to their customers that was in alignment with that narrative. Does that make sense? So, I mean, these narratives can be a swing effect on strategy. But I think you had a mixed question there. Now, how do we measure against that?

A. Lee Judge [00:14:03]:
Yeah, because I know that when you go to, well, whether you, whether an executive comes to you or you’re going to the executive to explain to them, here’s our plan, here’s our joint narrative between sales and marketing and the rest of the team, at the end of the day, you have to measure it. We have, we got to present some numbers. And too oftentimes the numbers we present are different between these two, two or three different teams. And the goal is driving revenue. You know, how do we get past the, maybe the soft metrics of here’s our plan now, because we know through our experiences that these things are one, necessary and two, effective. Right? But no matter how effective we know it is, at the end of the day we got to bring some numbers.

Bruce Scheer [00:14:49]:
So even with that, or I was working with Gong and you know, at the time they had the number one conversation intelligence platform. They’ve elevated their platform. Now they’re into, you know, revenue intelligence versus just conversation intelligence. But even then we knew that if sellers use the narrative that we had built, they would see a 30% improvement on their deal close rate by using the messaging that we were providing. But a lot of organizations don’t have those measurement, you know, that apparatus in place to get that, those types of data points. I was just lucky to have a client like Gong that, that, you know, ate their own dog food if you would, you know, used, used what they offer their clients. So we could do some, you know, effectiveness around the messaging and the impact of that messaging. So it wasn’t just a, you know, the right thing to do or like I was saying, it’s foundational.

Bruce Scheer [00:15:50]:
But we could look at the, the influence on revenue which, you know, I don’t know if I’m sure you and I would agree, but that’s probably the, the ultimate yardstick, you know, how are we doing and growing revenue and you know, are there leading indicators that each of these functional areas have that, that, you know, that create that lagging indicator of revenue success, you know, and that’s where things get really confusing and marketers get lost in marketing attribution and you know, and you know, oh, you know, different tribal, you know, wars occur internally and whose metrics, you know, me are meaningful, etc. That gets really messy really fast.

A. Lee Judge [00:16:31]:
That’s something that you and I know from experience that will probably always continue to be difficult to integrate within companies because there’s things that, you know, these leading indicators that, you know, if you do this, you’ll get better results and then you have companies and this is really vital at a time like we are right now with AI going into everything we’re doing and with, you know, tracking being more difficult, attribution being almost impossible, with Google, you know, AI changing things in terms of search results, everything’s changing. Right now we have to pretty much turn over our playbook and start writing again. But the result of that is we’re going to have to help businesses understand that what you did before may not be the playbook moving forward and that you’re going to have to trust what we know works as opposed to last month’s report. Like, you know, those hard numbers that you’re depending on, by the time you figure out something to get a hard number, either the goalpost is moved or those hard numbers were given to you. Just performative to say, okay, we’ve been we, you want some numbers, boss? Here’s some numbers. You know, and that’s something that I spoke about, the honesty part of my book, which was I was in a situation myself where upper management wanted numbers and the data team was set on giving them numbers. But the problem was the upper management wanted the numbers and the data team knew they’d be happy if they got their numbers. But there was some honesty missing in there of are these the right numbers? Do these numbers actually help management make decisions? Or do they check the box for data to say we gave it to you? Check the box for management to say we got it.

A. Lee Judge [00:18:22]:
But for the business, it wasn’t a positive move because they were just being performative and giving numbers. And I think right now, and this is, you know, should be good for folks like you and I who can be consultants and say, look, here’s what you should do. You may not have these hard numbers to prove what you should do. Trust us, we can help guide you in the right direction rather than having to depend on lagging indicators of what happened yesterday because that boat sailed already.

Bruce Scheer [00:18:55]:
The other thing, Lee, I’d just like to add is you were saying, hey, trust us, this is the right thing to do. But one thing I would argue that I’ve been doing a lot of lately is deep research with the AI tools. So I use ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini Daily, especially ChatGPT. That’s kind of my go to for pretty much everything. But I can get substantiating evidence as it’s the right thing to do, you know, through, by, by different studies and prompting these AI tools to do the deep research to go out and find recent studies. You know, that that might be science backed that, that talk about the efficacy of having A better story or making a better first impression or, you know, having the right pacing in a conversation with executive or, you know, any types of attributes. But, you know, are there any studies behind that? And then we can go get that. And, and that’s an another way to kind of create some comfort around some of the investments we want to make for improvement within organizations.

A. Lee Judge [00:20:02]:
You know, what I, what I heard from you right then is the things you mentioned were more psychological than they were based in what your industry did last year. I find more value in that. In other words, if psychologically people are, people tend to do X, Y, Z. That makes more sense than waiting around to say, you know, if we do this type of ad for this kind of product, we’ll get this much raise in our sales. All those variables have changed, but the psychology of humans haven’t. So, you know, I’m glad you made that point because I can, you know, I can be very pessimistic about making future decisions on historical data. But if that historical data is based on humans, and as our friend Nancy Harhot mentions, like behavioral science, if it’s based on that, I could see making future predictions off of past or historical data. I just fear companies who waste time.

A. Lee Judge [00:21:03]:
Like, we need proof. We need to know if doing XYZ in this industry on this kind of product will. Because we both have seen cases where companies have done things that were out of the norm and got phenomenal results. And the rest of the industry goes, ah, I wish we have thought of that, or I wish we were brave enough to do that when reality was, you could have done it, but you were waiting for evidence. You can’t lead if you need evidence, right? The person who’s first did it without evidence, they did it with what you call it, gumption, faith, nerve, kahunas, whatever you want to call it, they did it. I guess our friend Mark Schaefer would say audacity. They had the audacity to do something without all that proof. And then they become the case study for those who have to wait for proof.

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Bruce Scheer [00:22:52]:
Yeah, and I, I challenged a group of marketing leaders in the Seattle area two weeks ago. There was a panel. One, one of my former clients, the former CMO of Tableau, was on the panel. And I was asking them all, you know, because they were talking about, you know, how do you manage marketing? We were talking about the measurement issue, Lee, that, that you started to talk about a little, little while ago. But I, I did challenge the panel around. Hey, you know, what are your guys plans to be audacious? And then boom. What? Oh, you didn’t hear me? How are you going to create awe and be and stand apart from the pack in your market? What’s your plan there? And these are senior marketing leaders. I pretty much heard a thousand watts of silence for a while.

Bruce Scheer [00:23:43]:
And then I heard Lee justification. Well, hey, you’ve got to have the right culture. You’ve gotta, you know, you know, you gotta be able to take risk and sometimes that’s really hard. Or you gotta be a smaller company because smaller companies know they have to take risks, but bigger ones they don’t want. You know, so I started getting a bunch of this pushback against that idea versus, and I love Mark Schaefer’s book Audacious. But you know, how, how can you have that mindset and make sure, you know, you’re, you’re going to win at the end of the day by standing apart from the pack.

A. Lee Judge [00:24:20]:
Yeah, I guess the reality is you, you mentioned some key levers here. The size of the company, you know, the smaller companies are going to be more agile, less risk averse. And then depending on who you’re talking to, I mean, you could be a senior executive or marketer who your job could be on the line. Like being audacious is not safe for your job. So you play it safe, you know, so it all makes sense.

Bruce Scheer [00:24:45]:
And everybody else, everybody, it’s unsafe to, I’d argue it’s unsafe to not be audacious because, you know, and we were laughing about that, you know, the average tenure of a CMO still, you know, a couple of years. So I’m glad they’re not doing something wild and crazy and that something’s going to move the dial. You know, their days are numbered.

A. Lee Judge [00:25:05]:
That, that, that point is is what I made in the honesty part of the book. And it, it’s kind of a dichotomy, though, because I would say being not being audacious or not having the nerve to be different is a company needs to be different. A company needs to be audacious and try new things. But if you’re the employee of that company, it isn’t safe for you to do that. And so the honesty part comes in, is like, okay, if you want to do something that’s out of the norm, can you convince that company, is it small enough? You can convince someone to say, look, from a company standpoint, we need to take this risk. But from an individual standpoint, they may say, look, I’m retiring in two, three years, or I just got this job or I just bought a house. Now it’s not the time for me to push the limits and be audacious. Right.

Bruce Scheer [00:25:56]:
Yeah.

A. Lee Judge [00:25:57]:
So then we got to figure out where’s that balance? How do we encourage people within companies to take more chances? There’s always a whole bunch of it depends in there.

Bruce Scheer [00:26:06]:
So one thing I think you’ll love a lot is this phrase. I got this from Elisa Fink, former against former CMO of Tableau in that same session. But the, the phrase is this pipeline equals permission. So, you know, do you have a track record with the leaders that you’re serving, perhaps you know, their last successful company and they brought you back in as this new cmo. And you know, you’ve already earned your, your, your chops and you’re right and you can be bold and audacious or perhaps you’re in that organization and you consistently deliver on, on pipeline goals and the CFO sees you as being reliable. What, what you get to do then? And here’s another point of wisdom. Sell the management team the C suite on, on the total result, not all the different activities. So, you know, if you’re going to promise this much revenue, promise that and then make sure you deliver on that.

Bruce Scheer [00:27:10]:
And you know, but get the budget against that. But what you do with your budget, you can, you know, do some, you know, you can have your audacious little slush fund and have some fun with that. You know, if you sold the, you know, you know, the total promise around revenue, I like that you get to, you know, you can set aside some funny money and some things and, and, and you know, that are going to move the dial or not, but you can, you can, you know, be bold with some of that budget that you’ve got.

A. Lee Judge [00:27:39]:
I like that. I think that’s a lesson for marketers or for. For executives. Present a solid plan, and within that plan, maybe you have some audacious or some. Some risky tactics within the plan, but that’s for you to manage in your world. You don’t have to go up to upper management to say, hey, we got to do this crazy thing. You just manage that within your. Your goal and you present a solid goal to them.

A. Lee Judge [00:28:03]:
That. That makes good sense. I like that.

Bruce Scheer [00:28:06]:
Cool. Cool.

A. Lee Judge [00:28:07]:
So I know you have some conversations around this and near this because as a sales leader and a podcast host, you’ve built a platform that shares frontline and sales insights while positioning Value Pros as a learning brand. So let’s talk about your show. What inspired you to start the Value Pros show? And, and what impact has it had on your approach to sales and marketing leadership?

Bruce Scheer [00:28:33]:
Boy, Lee, my show and just the whole ethos of Value Pros. We started Value Pros, me and two other partners. One was my old roommate from college and the other one was our first employee hire. And we’ve all had amazing careers since, but we decided to bring the band back together about a year and a half ago. So Value Pros, you know, we, you know, our stated reason for existence was to turn sales reps into value professionals. Buyers love. And I had seen some statistics that are just shocking, but, you know, 75% of buyers prefer to have a sales free experience. That’s not good.

Bruce Scheer [00:29:19]:
And that’s a Gartner statistic and other horrifying statistics. You know, here’s one for you. You probably heard this one, but 60% deals end in no deal in action. Just nothing happens, no decision. And, you know, on average, organizations, maybe 2 out of 10 deals close. And, you know, the low side of that is 1.5 out of 10 deals close that sellers actively engage on. And then the high side of that is a little over 2.2.2 out of 10 deals close. So that’s the range, which is just horrible, horrifying.

Bruce Scheer [00:29:57]:
You know, that, you know, think about it.

A. Lee Judge [00:29:59]:
Yeah.

Bruce Scheer [00:29:59]:
You know, marketers are doing all this work, trying to build some pipeline, and one out of ten deals closes. Yikes. You know, why is that? And so, you know, I contend we were kind of led into a little bit of a trap, product led growth, you know, and hey, it’s all about the product. Yeah. I even remember one CEO saying, God, if I had to do it again, I would have not invested in marketing. I would have put way more money into the product. You know, it, you know, it’s all about product, product led growth. And, and what I’m trying to bring to the world, Lee, is you know, a value led approach.

Bruce Scheer [00:30:36]:
Now product led growth, you know, there, you know, you got to have a great offering at the end of the day, you know, you’re, you’re gonna, you know, you, you want to be proud of it. You want to create the value associated with that offering against the problem you’re solving, solving for those buyers. But a value based approach is how, how can we work with the vire buyers to help buyers buy. And so this year you’ll hear a lot in the Value Pro show around the value or around the buying experience and how the buying experience is, is fundamentally broken based on some of those stats that I’ve just mentioned. Another stat, Lee, that I absolutely love and I got this from a company called, called sbi. A friend of mine works there, but they did a pretty huge buyer survey and they determined that 59% of the influence on a bold B2B buying decision is it comes from the buying experience itself. Only 41% of the influence on the buying decision comes from the offering itself. So experience way outweighs offering in terms of influence on a buying decision.

Bruce Scheer [00:31:53]:
But with 75% of B2B buyers preferring to have a sales free experience and leading pretty much everything to chance, you know, based on their online by online buying journey, you know, one that’s more influenced by marketing. The world’s still broken though. You know, last year I think it was 91% of sales teams didn’t achieve their sales target. You know, just the, you know, fractional. I think 30% of sellers hit quota, you know, so just bad numbers. So the situation’s still broken. You know, there’s the online buying journey. A friend of mine wrote a book called the First 70.

Bruce Scheer [00:32:34]:
The first 70% of the buying Journey and you got to nail that. But my argument is God dang, where the project or where the contracts get signed, that’s the final 30 and that’s fundamentally messed up. So I’m on a mission to try to help improve that. How can we help revenue teams really kind of take those deals home and make their clients successful? Not just closing contracts, but making sure those contracts get renewed? Yeah, that’s another big issue right now in the world that a lot of, oh gosh, just months after buyers buy, they have buyer’s remorse in the B2B world because, you know, promises weren’t, weren’t kept. You know, the, the value didn’t materialize and, and they’re thinking, oh my God, why did we do this?

A. Lee Judge [00:33:23]:
You know, throughout all of that, I kept hearing the word friction in my head because it’s like, you know, that first 70 whatever. The least path of friction is to get to my solution. That’s the path I’m going to take. And then once I become a customer. When someone becomes your customer, they want to be wanted to be easy to be your customer. If there’s too many steps to continue working with you, I’ll give you an example. My, my agency, we’re a content marketing agency. We always work to make sure that if someone wants to onboard with us or if they want to learn how to work with us, remove all the friction.

A. Lee Judge [00:34:01]:
You know, we can’t be just, you know, click and buy. We’re not a product. But we have to also think of how can we make it as close to that as possible. You know, easy onboarding, easy understanding of what they can do and what more can they do later and then we become a customer. Easy onboarding, easy to buy new things. You know, I even think about recently, this is more of a B2C situation, but I was buying flights last week and I had to buy several flights to different places. I’m going for speaking engagements and I realized I’m loyal to Delta. I didn’t even look to see other prices and I had to stop and think as a marketer, as a business person, why, why didn’t I shop around? Well, friction like Delta has my car, they have my sky miles.

A. Lee Judge [00:34:52]:
I know how to do business with them. I don’t have to figure out, you know, do I have to check a bag or pay for a bag or. I don’t have to figure out anything. I’ve done it over and over. They’ve made it easy for me to be a repeat customer. In fact, I almost get the exact same seat 15F on every flight because even the planes are familiar to me at this point. Right. I know 15, 16, 17F.

A. Lee Judge [00:35:18]:
That’s where I’ll be that if you take that to a B2B world, the same thing applies. How easy is it for the customer to feel familiar with the buying process and how easy is it for them to self serve without speaking to sales? All those things. You know, I always say B2B can learn a lot from B2C because we’ve all been customers on the B2C side. How can we take our customer experience as a B2C customer and apply that to our B2B processes?

Bruce Scheer [00:35:53]:
Yeah. Sadly though, Lee, we’re so Plagued by this story. And I got this story out of the community that we’re part of with Mark Schaefer Rise. But another speaker named Shep reminded me of this old story, Shep Hyken, and he’s one of the customer experience gurus in the world right now. Have you heard this story, Lee? It’s about a guy who dies and goes up to heaven, and he’s just outside the gates of heaven. He’s kind of looking in there. You know, there’s some harps, etc. Going on in there, but the person at the gate is going, hey, before you come in, do you want to check out hell first? You know, and.

Bruce Scheer [00:36:36]:
And the guy’s like, going, well, sounds like the smart thing to do. So then they get in the elevator and head all the way down to hell. And then the elevator starts open up, and he goes in. He’s like, just going, oh, my God, this is awesome. And it’s a rave, and, you know, lots of weird acts are going on. He’s like, oh, and this is fun party. He’s thinking Vegas, and, you know, that’s what he’s witnessing. And then he’s like, goes, hey, you know, let’s.

Bruce Scheer [00:36:59]:
Let’s boogie back upstairs. And he goes back upstairs and goes, hey, you know, you guys, sorry. It looks great in there and everything. See the harps, etc. But hell kind of looks like a lot of fun. I think I prefer hell. They’re like, on, okay, have it your way, if that’s what you’re looking at for. And so then he goes back down to hell, down the elevator again.

Bruce Scheer [00:37:19]:
The second the doors open, they grab chains and put it around his ankles and then drag him by chain and ball into hell. And it’s fire and burning. Everything goes, hey, what happened to the party, man? What’s going on? He’s like, going, hey, before you, you were a prospect, but now you’re a customer. And. And sadly, in the. In the world of B2B, we’re in. Lee, you know, that. That story still plays out, you know, and I’m gonna have to use that.

A. Lee Judge [00:37:51]:
Because I was thinking you were gonna say that. Oh, you were talking to the sales team before.

Bruce Scheer [00:37:57]:
Yeah.

A. Lee Judge [00:37:59]:
Now you’re with the product.

Bruce Scheer [00:37:59]:
I didn’t want to say that, but that. That could. That could be true too.

A. Lee Judge [00:38:03]:
That was marketing and sales.

Bruce Scheer [00:38:04]:
They’re not for value pros, though. Value pros don’t. Don’t create an unreal vision. Funny enough, Lee, as it relates to value pros and our buying experience index, that we built. The fourth phase of the buying journey is what we call accelerate impact. And within that, you know, of course you need to get your contract signed, but also you want other agreements. You know, the seller and the buyer would say, hey, let’s set a meeting three months out and let’s see how we did against you achieving the value I just promised you. Of course, you’ve got to do some things and we’ll do some things, you know, and I’ve got my whole success team ready to support you, et cetera.

Bruce Scheer [00:38:47]:
But let’s set a date where we can meet three months out and, and let’s look at some measurements at that date just to see directionally are you getting the value we promised? And what could those metrics be, Lee? And we’ll agree on 1, 2, 3 metrics that we know we can get the data for and months. We’ll either celebrate together or we will. We’ll cry and drink a couple of drinks together and figure out what to do about it. But there’s some built in accountability, not just on the sale side, but on the buyer side too.

A. Lee Judge [00:39:20]:
Yeah.

Bruce Scheer [00:39:21]:
To make sure we’re achieving the, the value that we promised. And for me, that’s what I want value pros doing to keep their promises, not. Not paint a picture of, of hell and then do the bait and switch, you know.

A. Lee Judge [00:39:34]:
Absolutely. Before we wrap up, Bruce, you mentioned something earlier, before we recorded, something that was an aside from, from your. From sales and marketing. I think it was a personal thing that you were involved in that I want to share with the audience. I always want to make sure that we give as much as possible, not just from a professional standpoint, but anything we have going on that’s outside our lives that people can benefit from. So what was that program you mentioned earlier?

Bruce Scheer [00:40:00]:
Here’s what I think we talked about, Lee. Just confirm if I’m right or wrong. But one thing I’m super passionate about is I do pro bono work and I like to do at least one pro bono project a year. And it’s taking the same skills, but applying it in a not for profit world. And so I just finished putting together a sales narrative for a not for profit. This not for profit. They’re called journeymen and they want to help young boys become what we call wholehearted men. And this is a result of all the messaging work we did.

Bruce Scheer [00:40:38]:
But you know, the, the big problem that we’re solving for, we call it the Lost boys crisis. So boys enter what we call a maze of madness and you know, they might get trapped by confusion, by isolation, by addiction, or, you know, dominating types of behaviors. There’s lots of little traps that they could fall into on their way to becoming men. But when things work out right, they become wholehearted men, meaning men with integrity, with curiosity, with empathy, with accountability, respect. We call that our eye care set of values. And if we’ve got that, we’ve got wholehearted men. And the impact on society is profound, on their own families, on their communities and society at large. Men growing up this way as wholehearted men can really move the dial.

Bruce Scheer [00:41:38]:
So that’s what we’re excited about. But Lee, I had the honor and opportunity to come in and serve this not for profit and helping them get their story straight. And so that’s what. And I’ve got a group of 10 donors that I’m training next week. And our strategy, our go to market strategy is especially in these tight times because the federal government’s pulling back on funding. Those shortfalls really need to be met by donors. So donors are just getting squeezed all over the place. But what we plan to do to help with our growth ambition is to leverage our donors for introductions to other donors and also will enable these donors to become sellers as well on behalf of this organization using this really slick sales narrative.

A. Lee Judge [00:42:33]:
Great, great. Well, Bruce, you know, I always part of my mission is to share other experts with my audience and that’s why I wanted to talk to you, to your expertise. I’m never greedy about audience or connect networks and so I want to make sure our audience knows about valuepros IO. I see you have it on the screen there. Bruce’s book is called Inspire. Your buyers got the book right here. Be sure to grab a copy of that. Is there anything else, Bruce, you want to share before we go?

Bruce Scheer [00:43:02]:
I don’t think so. Yeah, Lee, I think we covered quite a bit, so. And thanks for the plug for the book and please everyone connect with me on LinkedIn. I love dialoguing and solving problems and and would love to hear from you.

A. Lee Judge [00:43:16]:
All right, well, thanks again, Bruce, and also to the listeners. If you want to see Bruce and I video, the podcast and others are available on the podcast section of contentmonster.com we’ll catch you next time.

A. Lee Judge [00:43:34]:
Thank you for listening to the Business of Marketing podcast, a show brought to you by contentmonster.com the producer of B2B digital marketing content. Show Notes can be found on contentmonsta.com as well as aleejudge.com.