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Don't get caught smoking your competitors'

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marketing.

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Like,

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just because they said it doesn't mean it's anything.

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You've said that you see about 40 to 60%

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of B2B deals end in no decision.

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Most marketing leaders in this case,

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they blame sales execution.

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You in your case,

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you usually blame positioning.

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Sometimes customers will tell you it's too expensive,

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but what they really mean is it's too risky.

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What if I pick this thing and,

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you know,

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I get in trouble with my boss?

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because we don't

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things don't work out.

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And so this idea of indecision is the main thing that's causing these companies to basically go dark right at the very end.

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And in a lot of cases,

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the company even says,

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yes,

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we picked you,

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let's go,

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and then they ghost you.

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Their worst competition is that.

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They win the deal,

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but they never get the money.

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When you were speaking about the homepage redesign,

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because marketers are bored,

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usually I see two things happening with my clients as well.

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Is number one,

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they see their competitor change their homepage or change something on the website.

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And it's like,

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because they did it,

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it means they're right.

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But you know,

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you know,

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this feeling like if they did this,

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it means they're right.

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and

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Because we haven't changed,

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it means we are wrong.

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But it doesn't mean anything.

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Usually I'm like,

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yeah,

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but if everybody thinks this way,

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then you're always changing.

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Because anyway,

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market is changing,

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is moving every time.

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There's a lot of bad marketing out there,

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man.

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Because they're running a campaign talking about something or changing their stuff talking about something,

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it doesn't mean it's working.

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So where we really have to pay attention,

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is again,

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if you have a sales team where we really have to pay attention is what's happening in sales.

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So do all of a sudden we start to see them showing up in deals because that message is really hitting and customers are starting to consider them where they didn't before.

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That's scary.

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That's scary.

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But I had an old boss and he used to,

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his line when people talked about that is he's like,

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don't get caught smoking your competitor's marketing.

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Just because they said it.

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Doesn't mean it's anything,

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right?

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And they might change it again two weeks from now because it ain't working.

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Like,

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you know,

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I think it's okay to stay on top of what your competitors are doing and have a look at that stuff.

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But what you see externally on the marketing side is often not a reflection of the go-to-market strategy or the sales strategy.

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You don't know what their segmentation looks like.

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You don't know where they're getting traction and where they're not.

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You don't know where they're struggling and where they're not.

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Where you really see it is in sales.

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Like if they start showing up in deals,

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well,

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that's where we got to take it seriously.

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But often what you'll get in marketing is the marketers are very afraid of the companies that are spending a lot of money on marketing.

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And because they're everywhere and they're competing for marketing dollars or whatever and channels.

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And they're like,

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oh,

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man,

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I see these guys everywhere.

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But we've seen lots and lots of cases of companies that raise a spectacular amount of money.

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blow their brains out on marketing and then flame out.

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And two years later,

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we don't see them anywhere anymore.

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Oh yeah.

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And especially in the past five years,

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we've seen a lot of companies like these.

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Right.

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Yeah.

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So,

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so yeah,

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so I'm with you,

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like,

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just because they're doing it,

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it doesn't mean you should be doing it.

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Like,

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yeah.

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And you know,

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it's always this thing,

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like,

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if,

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if the competitor moving is,

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pulling the market with him or her,

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It means the first to speak is the one who wins,

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but it doesn't work this way.

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And the second thing I wanted to say is...

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If only we'd all just be moving really fast,

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everything would look different if that was true.

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Yeah,

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true.

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And second thing is,

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and I think your example with the vibe coding tools and,

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hey,

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these are our new competitors,

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et cetera.

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I also think sometimes a lot of people,

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they want to be part of the cool kids.

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And you see,

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like,

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for the past two years,

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the vibe coding tools like Replit and Lovable,

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et cetera,

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they attracted so much attention that

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I feel a lot of companies wanted to be part of this cool kids club.

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And so I'm not surprised you see a lot of companies wanting to.

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What I see is a lot of companies are scared stiff,

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right?

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They're like,

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you know,

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if you...

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If you could look into your crystal ball and say,

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man,

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like maybe someone could build a tool that looks like ours,

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only super highly customized to their situation and do it without any real.

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like without having a development team and without,

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you know,

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having a software company,

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like you say,

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like with seemingly very little effort.

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And,

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you know,

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potentially we get to a spot where that is true,

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but we're also notoriously bad at predicting the future.

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So just because it,

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you know,

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that is one potential future.

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There's another potential future.

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where,

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you know,

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that becomes a bit like,

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like when I started out and when I started in tech,

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everybody,

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everybody built their own stuff.

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Like if you wanted a CRM,

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you built your own CRM,

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or you got a company to build a CRM for you.

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And then you babysat that CRM after you didn't buy package software.

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There was no package software for anything back when I started.

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And then package software came and people were like,

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wow,

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I could just buy a CRM.

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I don't have to code my own.

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That's amazing.

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And you know,

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We were selling packaged software.

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We'd come in and say,

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look,

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do you want to be a software company or do you want to be a bank?

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Why don't you go be a bank and let us be a software company and let us handle the software?

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Now we're potentially entering this age where maybe if you're a bank,

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you are a software company.

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Maybe if you're a bank,

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you could.

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The question is timelines.

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Is that next year?

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The year after?

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Five years from now?

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Maybe we get to a point where

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You know,

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we hit some kind of a wall on that stuff and say,

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you know what,

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it's good for prototyping and we can get in certain kinds of applications.

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We can do it.

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But other kinds of applications,

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we can't because of whatever there's security or compliance things or things that are difficult or I don't know what.

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But we don't know what that looks like yet.

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We don't know what that looks like.

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So it's important to be on top of it and to be thinking about it.

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for your investors.

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That's a totally different conversation.

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So your investors,

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they've got a different view of the world than your customers.

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Your customers are thinking about right now,

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right?

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So your customers are like,

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I got to get this problem solved right now.

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And what's the best way to solve it?

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And I'm going to spend some money solving this problem right now.

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Your investors are like,

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is this company still going to be good in 10 years?

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So you may,

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in your investor positioning,

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have to position against those vibe coding tools because Thanks.

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Who knows what 10 years looks like?

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And if the investors are very sold on this idea that,

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you know,

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in the future,

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everybody's going to have their own custom software,

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well,

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then you're going to have to have a response for that.

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But do not confuse that with your customer positioning for right now.

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Right now,

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you've got to fight the fight that you're in right now to do deals right now to get customers money right now.

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And if they're not looking at vibe coding tools,

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you don't have to position against them.

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I agree.

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All right.

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You've said that you see about 40 to 60%

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of B2B deals end in no decision.

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It's not like the company lost to a competitor.

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They just abandoned.

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And you know,

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most marketing leaders in this case,

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they blame sales execution.

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But you in your case,

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you usually blame positioning.

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Sort of.

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I mean,

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it's not always that.

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Yeah.

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So walk us through that argument and that thinking.

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Yeah.

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So there's some interesting data around this.

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So if you read,

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Matt Dixon put out a book called The Jolt Effect.

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I forget when that came out,

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a couple of years back.

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And what they had done was a study.

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They did it during COVID and everybody moved to not having face-to-face sales meetings and everyone is doing meetings on Zoom.

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And they worked with a bunch of companies and they analyzed 2 million sales calls.

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And then they worked with the company and they analyzed first sales call and then what eventually happened with the deal.

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So did the deal close?

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Did it not close?

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What happened?

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And they came up with this number,

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which was 40 to 60%,

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depending on what industry you're in,

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whatever,

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46%

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of sales purchase processes,

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meaning they got into the purchase process.

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They looked at stuff 40 to 60%

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of the time,

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the deal ended in no decision.

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So because they're doing this big study,

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they could also look at,

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well,

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why was that?

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You know,

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so they interviewed customers and find out,

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you know,

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what was this no decision all about in the majority of the time.

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Now,

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sometimes the no decision was,

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um,

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the company looked at the other options and decided that the thing they were doing now was good enough.

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And,

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you know,

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the other options look,

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maybe it's too hard.

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I don't know what,

276
00:09:50.778 --> 00:09:51.039
but the,

277
00:09:51.239 --> 00:09:52.540
but you know,

278
00:09:52.560 --> 00:09:53.801
I'll just stick with the thing I've got,

279
00:09:53.821 --> 00:09:55.222
which might be legacy software.

280
00:09:55.242 --> 00:09:55.662
It might be

281
00:09:55.902 --> 00:09:57.927
doing it manually or it might be whatever.

282
00:09:59.010 --> 00:10:00.996
But the majority of the cases,

283
00:10:01.316 --> 00:10:02.078
that was not true.

284
00:10:02.159 --> 00:10:03.703
In the majority of the cases.

285
00:10:05.824 --> 00:10:08.246
They ended up in a point of indecision.

286
00:10:09.586 --> 00:10:14.129
So the solutions all kind of look the same or worse.

287
00:10:14.509 --> 00:10:16.190
The solutions look scary,

288
00:10:16.790 --> 00:10:18.871
like there is risk involved.

289
00:10:18.991 --> 00:10:19.111
So,

290
00:10:20.292 --> 00:10:20.572
you know,

291
00:10:21.073 --> 00:10:25.215
what if I pick this thing and it doesn't work the way the vendor says it's going to work?

292
00:10:25.255 --> 00:10:27.576
Or what if I pick this thing and,

293
00:10:27.876 --> 00:10:28.116
you know,

294
00:10:28.196 --> 00:10:30.298
I get in trouble with my boss because,

295
00:10:30.299 --> 00:10:30.498
you know,

296
00:10:30.658 --> 00:10:33.579
things don't work out or it goes over budget or something like that?

297
00:10:33.580 --> 00:10:34.640
Or what if I pick this thing?

298
00:10:34.920 --> 00:10:36.021
And the users all hate it.

299
00:10:36.181 --> 00:10:37.281
And then they don't adopt it.

300
00:10:37.421 --> 00:10:39.302
And then the project fails.

301
00:10:39.762 --> 00:10:48.806
And so this idea of indecision is the main thing that's causing these companies to basically go dark right at the very end.

302
00:10:49.046 --> 00:10:50.187
And in a lot of cases,

303
00:10:50.447 --> 00:10:51.228
the company even says,

304
00:10:51.308 --> 00:10:51.528
yes,

305
00:10:51.588 --> 00:10:52.248
we picked you.

306
00:10:52.908 --> 00:10:53.248
Let's go.

307
00:10:53.869 --> 00:10:54.669
And then they ghost you.

308
00:10:55.750 --> 00:10:58.671
So if you talk to companies that sell

309
00:10:59.151 --> 00:11:00.732
B2B enterprise software.

310
00:11:01.836 --> 00:11:02.337
Everybody,

311
00:11:02.417 --> 00:11:03.878
this is their worst competition.

312
00:11:03.938 --> 00:11:05.359
Their worst competition is that.

313
00:11:05.940 --> 00:11:06.600
They win the deal,

314
00:11:06.660 --> 00:11:07.601
but they never get the money.

315
00:11:09.342 --> 00:11:12.665
And so what we have to worry about is,

316
00:11:12.825 --> 00:11:13.045
well,

317
00:11:13.286 --> 00:11:14.987
what's causing that indecision?

318
00:11:15.708 --> 00:11:19.271
So if the indecision is the products all kind of look the same,

319
00:11:19.951 --> 00:11:20.071
well,

320
00:11:20.072 --> 00:11:21.352
that's a failure of positioning,

321
00:11:21.993 --> 00:11:22.153
right?

322
00:11:22.173 --> 00:11:25.716
I failed to position myself as being anything special from the other guys.

323
00:11:26.256 --> 00:11:30.640
Company couldn't make a decision and feel confident that they were picking the best thing for them.

324
00:11:31.720 --> 00:11:32.520
deal didn't happen.

325
00:11:32.641 --> 00:11:33.741
So that's a positioning thing.

326
00:11:33.761 --> 00:11:36.903
We need to get really sharp on our differentiated value.

327
00:11:37.303 --> 00:11:38.724
Why us versus the other guys?

328
00:11:39.144 --> 00:11:41.886
But then there's also other things that we need to think about.

329
00:11:41.966 --> 00:11:42.086
So,

330
00:11:43.727 --> 00:11:43.967
you know,

331
00:11:44.427 --> 00:11:45.427
has the company,

332
00:11:45.828 --> 00:11:50.650
does the company feel confident that they understand all the other guys too?

333
00:11:51.191 --> 00:11:51.931
Not just you,

334
00:11:52.371 --> 00:11:53.272
but all the other guys.

335
00:11:53.832 --> 00:11:57.114
So one of the things we can do is in our positioning,

336
00:11:57.454 --> 00:11:58.815
make it very clear,

337
00:11:59.355 --> 00:12:00.676
Here's what the other guys do.

338
00:12:01.584 --> 00:12:02.564
And here's what we do.

339
00:12:02.985 --> 00:12:04.145
And this is how it's different.

340
00:12:04.185 --> 00:12:07.486
You might actually pick the other guys if you have this situation.

341
00:12:07.827 --> 00:12:09.107
But if you're in this situation,

342
00:12:09.127 --> 00:12:10.508
you should pick us and here's why.

343
00:12:10.948 --> 00:12:16.590
So that education is helping make the customer feel confident that they've done their due diligence.

344
00:12:16.870 --> 00:12:19.191
They're not going to make a bad choice here.

345
00:12:20.652 --> 00:12:22.913
The other thing is this concept of risk.

346
00:12:23.113 --> 00:12:26.034
And particularly if we're talking about B2B enterprise software,

347
00:12:26.514 --> 00:12:28.655
it's usually risk around the deployment.

348
00:12:29.716 --> 00:12:30.236
is this

349
00:12:30.560 --> 00:12:31.821
project going to fail?

350
00:12:32.141 --> 00:12:33.082
Nobody wants that.

351
00:12:33.883 --> 00:12:38.767
And so that's where we need to emphasize all the things we can do to de-risk the solution.

352
00:12:38.887 --> 00:12:41.950
So do we have professional services to help them?

353
00:12:42.310 --> 00:12:44.311
What does our training look like?

354
00:12:44.572 --> 00:12:47.094
How hands-on are we after this deal?

355
00:12:47.594 --> 00:12:51.397
What can we do to make the customer feel good that,

356
00:12:52.258 --> 00:12:52.478
you know,

357
00:12:52.479 --> 00:12:55.341
they're going to take this big risk on buying our stuff?

358
00:12:55.801 --> 00:12:59.064
What are we going to do to ensure that nothing bad happens?

359
00:12:59.448 --> 00:13:02.909
Sometimes we do this with packaging and pricing.

360
00:13:03.009 --> 00:13:08.571
So you've seen companies do something in their terms and conditions that,

361
00:13:08.811 --> 00:13:09.031
you know,

362
00:13:09.032 --> 00:13:11.351
if the thing is not deployed in this much time,

363
00:13:11.352 --> 00:13:13.252
you're going to get your money back or you're going to get,

364
00:13:13.712 --> 00:13:13.972
you know,

365
00:13:14.292 --> 00:13:17.273
we're going to give you three months free or we're going to give the deployment months free.

366
00:13:17.413 --> 00:13:17.693
And so,

367
00:13:17.813 --> 00:13:18.053
you know,

368
00:13:18.054 --> 00:13:21.054
you don't start paying until this thing is successfully deployed.

369
00:13:21.554 --> 00:13:25.595
The other thing I've seen a lot of companies I've worked with is if the deal's too big,

370
00:13:25.635 --> 00:13:27.296
it often feels too scary.

371
00:13:27.828 --> 00:13:29.189
to bite it all off at once.

372
00:13:29.190 --> 00:13:32.030
So we'll break the deal into chunks or phases and say,

373
00:13:32.310 --> 00:13:32.510
okay,

374
00:13:32.530 --> 00:13:34.111
we're going to start with phase one.

375
00:13:34.391 --> 00:13:36.252
Phase one's kind of small and easy,

376
00:13:36.312 --> 00:13:37.552
and we're going to get to know each other.

377
00:13:37.832 --> 00:13:38.993
We're going to close that deal,

378
00:13:39.053 --> 00:13:40.033
deploy that deal.

379
00:13:40.153 --> 00:13:42.474
Now you feel confident that we do what we say we do.

380
00:13:42.894 --> 00:13:44.355
We can deliver on our promises.

381
00:13:44.356 --> 00:13:45.355
If that goes all good,

382
00:13:45.395 --> 00:13:46.636
then we're going to go to stage two.

383
00:13:46.716 --> 00:13:47.976
Then we're going to go to stage three.

384
00:13:48.497 --> 00:13:56.260
So there's a lot of things we can do to kind of make the customer feel more comfortable and get them out of this situation of indecision.

385
00:13:56.500 --> 00:14:02.224
But we got to kind of assess the indecision first and decide what our best course of action is and what do we need to change.

386
00:14:02.564 --> 00:14:16.675
Sometimes that's a positioning thing and sometimes that's a lot of objection handling and sometimes even like changing packaging and pricing or the way you do deployment so that the customer feels more confident that this deployment just isn't going to fail.

387
00:14:17.295 --> 00:14:17.415
Yeah,

388
00:14:17.416 --> 00:14:23.780
but it's not like what you're saying is that most of the companies usually they want to really.

389
00:14:24.160 --> 00:14:25.421
increase the value of the product.

390
00:14:25.561 --> 00:14:27.702
But in the cases you just mentioned,

391
00:14:27.722 --> 00:14:28.182
it's like,

392
00:14:28.782 --> 00:14:32.544
you can increase the value of the product or you can decrease the value of the risks.

393
00:14:34.404 --> 00:14:35.265
And in this case,

394
00:14:35.685 --> 00:14:38.646
you can win over by reducing the risk for the customer.

395
00:14:38.666 --> 00:14:38.866
Right.

396
00:14:39.487 --> 00:14:39.727
Right.

397
00:14:40.187 --> 00:14:41.247
So often,

398
00:14:41.347 --> 00:14:42.788
like I've seen very little,

399
00:14:43.148 --> 00:14:44.529
like people will come to me and they'll say,

400
00:14:44.569 --> 00:14:44.709
well,

401
00:14:44.749 --> 00:14:46.110
price is the objection.

402
00:14:46.190 --> 00:14:46.390
It's,

403
00:14:46.670 --> 00:14:46.930
you know,

404
00:14:47.010 --> 00:14:48.130
the thing costs too much.

405
00:14:48.150 --> 00:14:49.591
So if we reduce the price,

406
00:14:49.651 --> 00:14:50.211
would that work?

407
00:14:50.812 --> 00:14:51.752
Often that's not.

408
00:14:51.952 --> 00:14:52.873
really the objection.

409
00:14:53.413 --> 00:14:55.574
The objection is more around this risk.

410
00:14:55.994 --> 00:14:56.295
And so

411
00:14:56.855 --> 00:15:03.819
I don't think you should necessarily jump to the conclusion that price it's sometimes customers will tell you it's too expensive,

412
00:15:03.839 --> 00:15:05.820
but what they really mean is it's too risky.

413
00:15:07.082 --> 00:15:07.702
And so again,

414
00:15:07.902 --> 00:15:09.683
if we could break the deal into pieces,

415
00:15:09.703 --> 00:15:10.943
I'm not dropping the price.

416
00:15:11.644 --> 00:15:14.704
I'm just dropping how much you have to commit to right now.

417
00:15:15.665 --> 00:15:17.885
And then I'm going to have a phase two and then a phase three.

418
00:15:18.165 --> 00:15:19.606
Or we're going to start with something here.

419
00:15:19.607 --> 00:15:21.086
We're going to prove the value there.

420
00:15:21.486 --> 00:15:23.367
Or sometimes we'll do a stage deployment.

421
00:15:23.427 --> 00:15:28.968
Like I worked at a company where we're selling software to retail stores.

422
00:15:29.648 --> 00:15:30.769
And we had this very,

423
00:15:30.829 --> 00:15:34.870
very big deal that was like tens of thousands of retail stores.

424
00:15:35.234 --> 00:15:36.335
But instead of selling them,

425
00:15:36.655 --> 00:15:36.895
you know,

426
00:15:37.076 --> 00:15:39.417
all 30,000 stores all at once,

427
00:15:39.457 --> 00:15:39.858
we're going to say,

428
00:15:39.918 --> 00:15:40.038
look,

429
00:15:40.058 --> 00:15:41.039
we're going to do a pilot.

430
00:15:41.139 --> 00:15:42.320
We're going to do that with five.

431
00:15:42.580 --> 00:15:44.361
And then we're going to roll out to 100 stores.

432
00:15:44.622 --> 00:15:45.943
Then we're going to do this region.

433
00:15:46.303 --> 00:15:48.425
And then we're going to go region by region after that.

434
00:15:48.665 --> 00:15:57.532
And so the customer is much more comfortable with that because things didn't have the opportunity to go way off the rails in this ginormous deal.

435
00:15:58.393 --> 00:16:04.898
we were going to take these little baby steps so that the customer felt good and you know

436
00:16:05.018 --> 00:16:05.959
As we were going along,

437
00:16:06.039 --> 00:16:07.380
we were proving ourselves.

438
00:16:07.440 --> 00:16:11.062
We're developing the relationships and we're building that trust as we go along.

439
00:16:12.523 --> 00:16:12.703
Okay.

440
00:16:12.923 --> 00:16:13.884
Sometimes you can't do that,

441
00:16:13.944 --> 00:16:15.605
but where you can break things up,

442
00:16:15.665 --> 00:16:17.226
it's usually a good way to take risks.

443
00:16:17.246 --> 00:16:17.687
Sure.

444
00:16:17.987 --> 00:16:18.587
Do it.

445
00:16:20.088 --> 00:16:21.349
Just do it.

446
00:16:22.870 --> 00:16:25.012
Don't let your dreams be dreams.

447
00:16:25.972 --> 00:16:26.513
Yesterday,

448
00:16:26.773 --> 00:16:27.593
you said tomorrow.

449
00:16:27.854 --> 00:16:29.515
So just do it.

450
00:16:29.955 --> 00:16:32.016
Make your dreams come true.

451
00:16:32.677 --> 00:16:34.118
Just do it.