SBP 139: Navigating the complexities of B2B Buying. With Mimi Turner and Jann Martin Schwartz.

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Welcome to the Sleeping Baba Podcast.

When I was going back to edit this conversation that we had live with Yana Mimi, it was just making me smile the entire time. I love this conversation. There's so much in here from the emotional jobs to be done to the importance of relationships and marketing strategies to help buying groups reduce their risk and why physical events are still so important. I hope you enjoy the show.

Welcome to the Sleeping Barber podcast, a place for business leaders to get the best and most credible information on marketing, strategy and innovation. Your hosts, Mark Binkley and Vassili Stouros, share their experiences as they gather insights from the world's leading experts. Now, on with the show.

And just before we get started with this episode, Vee I would love for this show to be super valuable to you. So if you could rate the podcast, leave a review, leave some feedback about who you'd like to hear about or the topics that are really important to you, that'd be great. Yannemiemi, welcome to the Sleeping Barbara podcast. You're leading the marketplace innovation team at LinkedIn, looking at the big models that are driving thought processes and decision-making and B2B. You've come out some new research, well, lots of research actually in the last little bit. We're going to merge a few of the things.

A big part of that new research that you just presented here was around the emotion and the relational aspects of B2B buying. And so we'll dig into that a little bit. I do want to ask you a little bit of first just as a setup, just in terms of the paradox of like B2B buying process, we think we need to target exact people in the buying process, but sometimes they don't have the complete decision-making authority that we think they do.

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Can you maybe just as a starting point talk about that and then we can get into some of other stuff?

start and then I'm sure Mimi will say something much smarter after that.

The key thing about B2B buying is that it's much more relational than it is rational. Of course there's rational aspects too, but the relational aspects of B2B buying are really the thing that often makes the decision between your product or service being buyable or it not being bought. And the key thing is that you have to have a kind of probabilistic approach in the way you think about targeting because you need to get the confidence of the whole

biogroup as our research shows and you need to make sure that you reach people who influence that biogroup. So you want to have broad reach but you want it to be on target and you want it to be relational reach, i.e. you're surrounding the people who are the ultimate decision makers who are being influenced by their colleagues, peers, people they know, industry experts. So you really have to think of it as

a relational game and creating a network effect where you build that proof point for your brand, your product, for your service in that way.

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Yeah, I mean I think that's exactly it and within the category that you operate is the real qualifier of B2B. So if I sell dental x-rays and I want to read the

a machine.

Maybe there's really.

Let's say you think it's within that category that you need to do and the expensive way round of doing that is through and that's like an optimistic trickle down. We think that the understanding that the category is a goal and who they're influenced by is in fact

that used to be famous. The long way round of doing a round is, you know, an F1 sponsorship.

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unmodeled.

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addressable.

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an event horizon beyond which you don't necessarily need to go but that is still a broad a narrow targeting strategy is what

sort of

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rather than, we're not saying is that you know there are eight decision makers and that's all that can be but to relational like you could do a heat map they're only connected to each other

50.

There isn't there's a cloud there are sort of connected cloud with a high interrelated They're not to you, but they're also That's actually the the network that we approach To make a decision. I think the point that yarn was making clear an important point which is there's a relational Prese above and beyond

when we want to it is the really

I should mention that.

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The functional. We're not saying that the functional will get you as far as being pricing transactional parity with the vendors. What gets you beyond that, what influences is what our research did is to decode the levers of trust. The levers of trust and connected. So relationships that can recommend you

.

a bunch of others.

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and the past are human.

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provide recommendations that you believe in, similar, and perhaps the world view is similar because you worked in similar companies and they cared about similar organizational things. is, I think what we

because the use case, the experience bench.

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The second part, and defined it, that's the moat. You don't get across, you don't get bought. And it's fine if all we ever want to do is to be in the consideration. We don't need to do anything like everything that we're doing about their stuff. But if we want to get bought, something has to happen and it's a commonality of things that we buy.

That made it.

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If we only have one third, different like.

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additional

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That's really interesting. think I'll actually segue to the second question we had prepared for you. When we're thinking about that buyers will naturally, maybe there's this illusion, the buyers will often choose the best product and you see a lot of the conversations or the reasons to buy that they're putting front and center, especially in the B2B, it's like really prominent. This is why you should be buying this product or service, right? Is that true?

Pass on to me. I think.

I've got a mini point of view and then I'll be on. We want to believe that that's true. mean, and I think one thing we know about human beings is that what we want to believe is often absolutely so powerful that we don't need... Of course, buyers want to believe that everything is...

go beyond that.

stratified in very measurable rational easements.

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But, buyers are also buying career reasons that are about defending their career. They don't really share in the upside if everything goes wrong. They absolutely can't risk.

FOOL

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And so what buyers really want to buy is even more, on parity let's say, I mean it came out slightly more, but let's say just on parity, you know, I want to feel confident that thing I do can do the job, yes, but slightly more than that, they want to buy a thing they can defend if it goes wrong. So those are pulling in totally different dimensions.

feel

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I think it also one way of explaining it is like people misunderstand

what a product is in b2b. think people in b2b have a very literal idea of like, our product is a piece of software that has like buttons and features, etc. But if you know anything about strategy, you know that there's a long list of famous thinkers who talk about people don't want to buy a drill, they want to buy a thing that makes holes in the wall so they can hang a bookshelf. So what they really want is a way to put their bookshelf on the wall. So no one cares

about the drill, they care about the holes it makes. Extrapulate that, right? Like we hire, as Clay Christensen says, we hire things to do a job for us. And so when you actually think of the product that way, what you need to do is you need to extend the definition of the product to mean people want to, in a B2B context where the downside risk is so big and you want to buy something that's defensible, the product is really, I want to buy a safe choice.

product or service that my peers and my boss and the rest of the buyer group thinks is acceptable to buy. And so it's just the wrong way of looking at it.

I've just had just listening to you talk. I've literally had a brainwave now to make realize that actually in our research the scoring of the emotions we actually just defined the emotional jobs to be done. just haven't just we haven't expressed it that way. Jobs to be done to get something bought and that's brilliant. If only I mean like

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which is be real.

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That's interesting.

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We're thinking out loud here and you guys are helping us. No, it is.

Yes, so the emotional jobs to be done are, I want to feel confident it does the job, I want to feel that I can defend it as soon as it goes wrong. It has to be easy. The job to be done is, it's got to be a relatively easy crisis. Another job to be is the by-group.

be done is it's got to be aligned. can't give me something that is not people wanted and half people like, we've never heard of this.

And the other is, you've got to show me the f***ing manager downside. That is how to define...

I think it's really... No, this is great. is why these conversations are really fun, right? Because if you think about it, like in B2C, no one thinks that like Coca-Cola is a thing that you use to hydrate your body with. It's a body hydration device. No one thinks of Coca-Cola as that, but that's actually what it is if you analyze it, right? If you ask a robot to analyze it, that's what they would come up with. Or you would say, you know...

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what is lipstick or what is cosmetics, right? But we all know in B2C, you might sell soap in the store, but what people are buying is hope, right? It's hope that they're going to be attractive, that someone's going to like them better if they look nice, right? And that those same dynamics are true in B2B. They're just in different dimensions because B2B companies are often run by engineers.

and very technical people who are very proud of the product they've built, they tend to narrowly define it. It actually makes perfect sense to be irrational and go beyond the functional because actually you need the whole package, you need the social and emotional needs to be met. That's why I think

B2B marketing misses the mark by so much and we're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars being left on the table. 40 % of all B2B deals get stuck because the buyer group cannot agree because you haven't given them the product they really need which is one that includes the social and economic needs and meets those needs, not just the functional needs.

make a decision.

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It's interesting that you had presented previously on some research.

This is so wild, this is like wild because in this minute we've literally had like it's another kind of cognitive breakthrough that it's the most jobs to be done. If only we'd said that yesterday.

slide up though but jobs to be done.

I've had four cups of coffee this morning. That's a rev on thinking. Emotional jobs are not defined in B2B, but we have done a piece of work that defines those emotional jobs.

We done.

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Awesome, pragmatical.

to be done, we are saying they're also highly addressed. They're highly addressed. The effectiveness of everything about them has been considered. The emotional jobs to be done. we just say it was just that it was forced. Also, I think that the hope not so political party is just out there.

in my

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It is exactly the same thing in B2B people want they want to be sure they want to feel safe. Yeah. They want to know that this thing will not blow up in their faces for sure. Yeah. And you the biggest the biggest guarantor of something not blowing up in your face is that the entire bio group has heard of the company that's right. And they all kind of their heads and go you know what I've heard of the I've heard of these guys.

Hey

and

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people I know have heard of it, some people have said it's good, some people I know have said it's good, even better if someone I work with now has used them before and they said it's good, that's what we want, right? But no one thinks of it that way. They go like, what are our functionality? How are we? What are the three buttons that we have that our competitors don't have? Forget about that. You're never going to get to that point unless the buyer group has heard of you and thinks you're okay to buy.

Can we riff on this?

I mean, it's very exciting. That's great.

I know, literally had like my coffee's on the table. So it is about emotional jobs to be done. a point of view that we've always had, I don't know that we've fully articulated it, is that one deeply unaddressed emotional job to be done in buyer group buying, in group-based buying in organizations is not to sacrifice political capital.

That feels like the job to be done. And in fact it was very interesting, were at the ANA, and Jan can talk a little bit more about this, the breakfast yesterday, and it's very, senior CMOs in the industry and we were just unveiling what we're now going to forever call the emotional jobs to be done.

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know, the CMOs are saying, yeah, you I really want to be able to stand in front of my board two years from now and say it wasn't the wrong decision to make. We couldn't have known differently at time. Absolutely. I suppose we hadn't really always thought of it at the CMO level because we're trying to think of it as at every level we want something to be true, but that job.

Absolutely.

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Reducing uncertainty.

Reducing uncertainty is a nice way of saying, it's political way of saying the number one job to be done for marketers is not to sacrifice. Marketers need to understand that their stakeholders, the buyers, cannot afford to sacrifice personal political capital. You know, that's just too high a Do you think that, mean, like, riffing?

more power.

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Yeah, no, I mean it's you want to you want to have certainty or try and buy certainty and a big brand That's why big incumbent brand are so important. Yeah, think it is different in B2B versus B2C I think it's not just the straight you need to build mental and physical availability all those things are true But it's a little bit more complicated and nuanced in B2B because you don't have that many light category buyers That's not really how it works. It really is about

Have we heard of this company? Do other people like me think this is a good idea and therefore that's a good proxy for me thinking that the rest of my buyer group and the other stakeholders are okay with this decision and so I don't have to give up political capital.

And often it's the only proxy.

It's not like we grow up with a, know, with a like a, you know, 30 years of knowing how CRM systems work. So like diapers. So like when you have our children, like, well, I know the diaper that. And also, I think, I mean, you come to Cannes and you see how quickly everything is changing. It's not only a proxy. is often the only proxy. And the only proxy is not now, I think, just even those kind of really bigger brands. It's recommendations from people that you trust. I think.

Hmm?

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Greater than or significantly greater in value than

Sure.

can be the most recommended you can be right like this is a lead the least yeah is a is the it should be called strategy yeah the one who make it call brand strategy

politically

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Yeah. now a short word from our sponsor. This episode was sponsored by Quoticle. Quoticle. Did I say that right? Quoticle? You did. Quoticle. Yeah. Quoticle. Mark, what is it? Wolfie, I'm glad you asked. Quoticle is my own company, actually. So, you know, I'm the Sleeping Barber podcast co-host with you, but I also have my own company. And so,

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There's so many things that I like, we're just rolling my mind as you were talking about this, but there's this one idea around, like so much creative has been produced that shows just the buttons you're talking about. And by the way, we're in aerospace, so we have to have a plane in the background or an engine of some way. And it's got to be specifically like we have to promote that, just that. Even though there might be a whole bunch of other buyers that are part of the buying process that aren't really caring about the buttons that we have on our product.

Yeah.

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That's right.

They just want to know whether they've heard of us or not.

Right, half of the buyer group really couldn't care less about the features and functionality. What they care about is, you a reputable company? Are your payment terms compliant with our financial policies? Is your IT security certification up to scratch so that we can actually integrate your system? It's a lot of stuff that's not about the functionality and features. I also want to just go off on a quick tangent because I think something occurred to me. I want to pose it more as a question.

and see if you agree. But I think there's actually a weird sort of distribution in B2B that's not a bell curve, it's actually the opposite. It's sort of like a bow tie where on the one end of the spectrum, you have huge brands that are very well known by everybody. And a lot of them are what I would call Nippo brands, right? So if you have a big consumer business like your Microsoft, your Google, your Amazons, everyone already knows you. And that is a massive, massive, massive advantage. And then on the

other end of the spectrum you have tons and tons of companies who are like we're a really amazing you know tiny niche but like super profitable interesting you know cutting-edge technology or cutting-edge service whatever but no one's heard of you

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And you almost have kind of the opposite problem because if you're the big company, your biggest problem is people don't know that we also do eggs in Y category. Everyone's heard of us, but no one, we don't come to mind when people think of specific category. And we need to work really, really hard to actually make sure that people understand that we apply to that category, which is a specific problem where you need to reach the right buyer group in the right category. need the right relational reach. And then

The other guys have the opposite problem where they're like, we cannot buy a football stadium or run a Super Bowl ad and become a household name. That's just not attainable. So again, we have to focus on the cat. We have to be famous in our category. We have to be famous with the right people. So in both.

Even though they're kind of opposing problems, the solution is actually similar, which is you need to really nail being well known in your category with the right cohort of people who each influence each other. Sure. And if you're a big brand, that sort of accidentally happens to you, but you could be more deliberate about it. And if you're a small brand, you have to work super hard to be able to make that happen. have to be ready.

It's definitely harder if you're small brand. I hear a lot of brands say, hey, we're really big over here, but we have to prove ourselves again. But I still feel like that's still easier with a big brand.

us.

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mean if you have a MasterCard for example, Those of us carry a MasterCard in our pocket. So we're intimately familiar with the brand and they've done a great job building that brand, right? But of course they want to be known for like very sophisticated B2B payment solutions, know things that don't come to mind, Much more of like blockchain startups or know crypto or whatever and they don't own that category. for them it's really important to be known in that category and that's something that they're trying to solve in their.

If you want to jumpstart being known in a category by doing the most high value activities is to identify, I think, the use cases of the companies that you want to do, which you have a, you know, your marketing, who those are, finding the most common use cases and then visualizing that in an authentic way. And I don't mean you have to look like, you know, I'm not going to buy a serum system because somebody looks like Mimi.

is.

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But if someone who

Looks like mark has similarities in the use case the company size the problem set the anxiety sure Mark is my guy like is literally my guy. Yeah, that's I think the We want to that's the unfair grantees. We want to drive. We want to help beat this understand how to buy runs in a world Currently trying to buy a right

you

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be marketed.

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weather.

players.

That's baseball analogy by the way. For those of us who don't play baseball.

Yes, this is the most important thing. Jan and I constantly argue over whether...

money pool.

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I understand the moneyball thing.

But it is, you we have to, there is a quicker way of winning than helping the size and asymmetric advantage are the way to go. Everything I've ever

And hope that's.

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I've learnt about marketing is if you spend more money you're going to be more successful and that's unfortunately...

If that's true, then we to believe that there are ways within that do something. At least that's my point.

don't

Yeah, yeah,

anything other.

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We've indirectly talked about this. We welcomed, I think it was about two years ago, Brett Adamson to the podcast and we're talking about how the buying groups are evolving. And there used to be a point in time was like five people. You had to make sure that you kept happy or at least there was alignment. But it sounds like that number keeps growing. think he cited 11 to 12, I think at the time, I think in the preamble you guys were showcased. There's this one reason suggests it's more.

research that says it's 23 or more. It's also there's a distinction between who are the immediate if you narrowly define a buyer group and say okay who is signing the check who has who has you know veto power over it but again that's way too narrow definition because it's networks it's network effects that influence your b2b purchase decisions right and so you really need to surround the right people with the right proof points and the best way to do that is

to personal, professional network effects, right? I know people personally, or I know people who I respect, and they seem to be saying, this is an okay thing to buy, you're safe if you buy it. It's incredibly important. The other thing I would say is, because there is a change happening in our industry in the way people buy things, number one, there's a generational change, right? There's a lot more Gen Z millennials now in the buyer group, up to 71 % according to some.

research, so they're weighing in in ways that are different, that they're much savvier about just knowing through their social setup, is this for real, do people like me like this, have others heard of it, et cetera, they're much more savvy. And then the other thing is, of course, the big word that everyone's using these days, AI, right? There's going to be a change where there's going to be AI agents helping you make decisions. That's already a reality. You can already say, chat GPT, give me a

comp list of software solutions for this according to the following criteria and they will go and do everything for you, right? But what that means is human validation that kind of relational proof you're gonna get before you buy is becoming more important and so people will outsource a lot of the functional rational. What buttons to this thing have? What case studies do they have? Are they compatible with XYZ? They're gonna outsource all that and they're gonna say let's have a meeting. Let's sit down with them.

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Let's ask around, let's make, some people on LinkedIn saying, have you worked with, hey Mark, have you worked with this company? For real, do you like them? Do they say what they say? Do they actually do what they say they do? That's going to become more important. And that's always been human nature. But interesting enough, AI has a way of kind of making us focus more on the human thing. Because a lot of the task-based stuff is going to be taken care by AI.

Sure, yeah.

Think!

the generational shift and also what is fundamental in B2B to see. I think there's a multiplier effect there with people becoming proxies. People are proxies for whether I trust rather than listening to them. You should trust it. With a generation of people who have always gone to people that they trust.

which might be different from B.

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a brand, and a brand, know, who will tell you that it's much less valuable than

rather than brands.

And brands that I go to, people that they trust in order to communicate with. I think we've seen that happening over 15 years. But I do think that these two tectonic elements actually amplify the same result in B2B, which is why I think it might be easier to be, you a time when had similar process, similar

Please

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If I find B2B influences, problem to me, customer size, want to make a similar buying decision, I am now in the...

21st century in the best place in the history of humanity to hear their point of view will be a driver of trust than anything I suppose that the brand itself is actually saying.

and they will a much stronger

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Yeah, it's almost like there's an internal benchmarking, so to speak, like of, you know,

Companies do this all time where they go, well, let's benchmark ourselves against the competitors. But internally, in a decision-making process, I think there's a benchmarking that happens. Maybe not so overtly, have I heard of this company? Yes. Have I heard of this company? Yes or no. And there's this thing where even just thinking about what you were saying earlier around to people like me buy things like this or to companies like us, ours buy things like. Think about coming to Cannes or any other conference I've been to. And there's this idea of like, okay, me,

back to where I'm gonna go with all these new ideas and we've all probably had experiences like this and all of a sudden I'm almost like a virus inside the organization if it's not well accepted already within the organization and so there's this natural antibody response from the organization culturally if it's not set up to accept new ideas they just reject the new ideas and so then no matter how smart the things are that people say here I go back and they're like yeah that's not the way we

But events, mean, you make me think of something when you said, you Cannes is an event. You know, people sort of poo poo events and especially Cannes gets a lot of ridicule for how crazy it is and like, oh, this seems very self-indulgent, et cetera. Of course. And when you look outside and you see all these ad tech companies with giant yachts and stuff, yes, I agree. That's probably not a good idea. But the social validation, the human validation power of a physical event where you go somewhere

and you see with your own eyes other people engaging with ideas or companies, et cetera, and you see there for real, I respect them, I see them talk about something. It's so hardwired into human nature. I'm a huge, huge believer in the power of physical events. Actually, LinkedIn is building some very sophisticated events ad where you can promote your event and you can take some of that human validation out back into the digital world.

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where you can have a physical event and then you can amplify it into the digital world. People seeing real humans interact at an event and endorsing something is very, very powerful. And there's also the costly signaling part of it where if you can afford to send people to a big conference or have a booth, do an event, that shows that you believe in the validity of your own stuff and you're putting your money behind something.

interesting.

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showcasing it.

I get a random ad in some random setting. The context matters. The credibility of a platform, whether it's a physical event or an online platform, it really matters. We register the context of that very, very strongly as humans.

Yeah, think lots of things, especially if they don't make sense empirically, but they sense behaviorally. Behavioral perspective, you're like, yeah, those guys, wow, wow, wow. Interpret that. That's the thing that doesn't even do the thinking.

Me, don't me.

Do you make? Say from a.

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not so well you know we have we just the 95 % of our brain just absorbing and makes a non thought through evaluation of something very very

quickly. And not that we're here to sell event ads, but the thing that the event ads, I think, does is it allows you to stitch together to get empirically better value. But also that creates an investment case to make for something that is actually the value is intangible. That's right. The value is really intangible. The value, the signaling value is really intangible.

Alien time.

Deep tangible.

and non-linear, that's the thing. People in B2B marketing are so freaking literal and linear.

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Speaking out

people who've got like opportunities to do it.

No, mean, we just need to like the way you win is you realize that's not how the world works. And so if you can be brave enough as a B2B marketer and be nonlinear and be much more probabilistic rather than deterministic. And if you have enough credibility where your CFO or CRO or CEO believes it when you tell them, look, I can't give you a spreadsheet tomorrow that shows how this worked, but this is a leading indicator for something that's going to pay

off later, every great investor, like Warren Buffett didn't become Warren Buffett by saying, this needs to pay off tomorrow, show me in the spreadsheet that this is guaranteed to work. Like value creation and capitalism is about coming up with new things that people couldn't predict from the beginning. And we need to get a lot more comfortable using that kind of value investment language. think that's very, very important because there's so much opportunity here when you realize that if you

embrace the relational nature, the intangible nature of B2B marketing, can create outsized enterprise value. This is not fluffy. People think it's fluffy touchy-feely. It's not. It cuts to the heart of like how does value actually get created.

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And how do you become a business that has a real strategy rather than trying to imitate what other businesses are doing and saying, show me that someone else has already done this and that it works and only then will I do it. By definition, can only add incremental value if you do that. You can't create outside value. And great companies like ServiceNow, for example, or Salesforce, they've won because they invested in the long-term power of brand building and they're now the category

leaders and once you're a category leader you make money while you sleep because yeah I kind of do the work for you that's really

I think that it's worth putting some of that to.

Because know, B2B marketers have difficult jobs and operating within tough constraints and there is an opportunity to demonstrate a kind of like absolute

difficult.

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Absolutely a strategic value, but not everybody can take those.

To be clear, you're absolutely right to qualify that. I'm being very ambitious about what could be.

absolutely right about what could be possible and what is true. So that's absolutely true. And I think that we see every deeply

owner, founder led, vision led, entrepreneurial business by someone who is not in the position where they

as typically led by people who are prepared to take a risk on something. For those who are not in a situation, they are able or empowered to take a risk on an issue. Surrounding positions, positions, data points, even a vision that then they can take away back to their own use. I think that does have value.

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based on intangible, their position with some additional points, influence or even

organizations and trying to

We were actually.

improving through data, what the jobs that drive purchase behavior, drive selling, whichever part of the world you want to contribute, we actually

to be

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got over the line too.

So there are some things there.

That's a wonderful qualification of my point.

There is a way of, you're absolutely right about, creative thinker who has made a difference has said, I believe in something that I cannot. Right? And that's the...

every individual.

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Right.

That's huge.

And you need, I mean if you look at the ones I mentioned like ServiceNow or Salesforce, they're led by very visionary CEOs who themselves believe in the power of marketing, the power of brand building. And not every company is running that way. There's a of companies that much more cautious about how they approach value creation or they're much more technical. But it is very important, as Mimi said, that we need to try and bring everybody along on this journey and we need to try and have

enough solutions for people who cannot, you can't switch out your CEO and say, let's get in someone who is more innovative. If you're a mid-level marketing executive, that's not up to you to make that decision. You have to work with what you have. So I have a tremendous amount of empathy for that. And I think there's ways you can approximate this and there's ways in which you can do this on a smaller scale. And then you have a proof point and you can say, look, we tried this and it worked, right? We invested in

funnel marketing, we invested in building the right on target category reach and it worked. So now we get more budget to do it again at the bigger scale and you build from there.

(: 35:49

There's a couple, I know we don't have that much time left, a couple minutes, but there's so many things running through my mind right now. But you mentioned the Warren Buffett thing and all of a sudden they had that quote about the voting machine versus the weighing machine with the stock market. And over time is a weighing machine, but in the short term, it's a voting machine, which then made me think about the

Relational metrics that you were talking about, the influences that relate to behavior, and so much of what we're doing, I think, from a B2B perspective, is using the voting machine to score things that are really being, should be measured in terms of it's a waiting machine. And so the relational metrics that happen over the life cycle of a buying product, or buying a B2B product, which can be two to three years, and we're just looking at the leads in as the voting, rather than looking at the weighing.

of do people like me buy things like that.

Yeah.

think the findings of the research that we...

(: 36:45

showed which we can kind of basically kind of run through.

I think they give any marketer anywhere, big media startup a perspective on

on what could be more successful for them.

And I think we apply that as a flyer to our work. we're constantly, well, other use cases audiences. I think that we are...

I drew. Being asked like different different.

(: 37:16

It's as applicable and I think potentially valuable in a way the smaller. This is the reason that when we talked about the customer promise, I'm really excited about it because it performed well for everybody and it performed best for the people with the least. The customer promise is

more visible that you are.

this research.

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amount of money right promise you know if everything else you don't have a lot of make us promise and it's three times more likely to increase your market share it's like one times more likely but the thing

If you did at the time, .582. So there was something about that. And I think that understanding the additional to be done product-based. Absolutely.

the emotional jobs to meet your vital are, you've to feel confident that it does the job.

But also, it's got to be decision that you can make. What's the quickest way to defend that decision? Companies like us recognize that. That's a pretty good rubric of your business. And if you want to be famous and you're not the...

defend how to defend it. Even that away from like I think you

(: 38:15

You can then take your knowledge of your category, your, you know...

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your parents aren't rich and good looking.

of.

being likable, being likable goes a long way.

I squeeze in one more? Just quickly? We're talking about, you talked about emotions again. In research, like what emotions are ranking the highest?

Well, I'm glad you're

(: 38:42

don't think you asked the question because I'd like to reframe the question which is what are the...

jobs to be done to make something viable.

That's a great frame.

And that would not have happened if had this conversation.

happened to be at

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We inspire people.

No, that's why we do all of our best thinking on the sleeping barber pot.

But no, is why it's actually good to have these conversations which are useful and sort of structured but also totally

amazing these kinds of conversations.

unscripted maybe too unscripted but anyway

(: 39:14

That's what editing is for.

Five things, like five things in

emerged as the emotional jobs to be done that buyers said, without this I cannot buy. One is the thing can do the job. Another is

is the process was relatively easy. Another is by

the group were generally aligned. Another issue

(: 39:31

is I knew there were going be down slides.

bumps in the road, I felt that we could manage them. I didn't think that something was going to come out of left and knock us all on the head and we'd be done. And then the fifth, I need to be able to defend the decision that was wrong. Five major things. And actually, I them in sequence, you know, not more than they were

feel

(: 39:43

is if it goes so that was the fun they came out of the call when we see they were more than 10 points apart there was a parity because obviously that validated that they were the ones that came the number two thing that buyers want to buy the job they want to be done is it can do the job the number one thing

Three.

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They can do the job.

can defend the bad decision. That's actually the number one job to be done.

maybe in a deeply intangible way that we find your boss's boss's boss

that would manifest a defying behavior.

And it's perfectly reasonable.

(: 40:35

to not be rational in B2B. It's perfectly reasonable because you're buying very complicated things and it's unsure whether they really are going to work out the way you do. If you buy a super complicated software system or you buy financial services from a company because you're trying to acquire a business or be acquired, those are complicated things. It's not like, does this drill, drill, hold? Yes, no. It's a lot more complicated. So actually focusing on

how do we protect ourselves in case things don't go to plan that is perfectly reasonable. We all should do that as B2B buyers to some extent because that's just smart business.

maybe.

I've actually figured out our next podcast franchise would be, so whenever I listen to Jan talking about things that we've, like you've talked about this for a year, for a whole year, and now we've got some results. We kind of go through it and riff through it. But I think that there's a, it's perfectly reasonable not to be podcast out there that has not been developed. I think that that is, it is perfectly reasonable.

We've been thinking.

(: 41:31

and we can get at it even more.

rational

(: 41:42

not to be

In fact, it's very... There's a franchise out there somewhere.

Maybe we can print some t-shirts that are as good as your t-shirt.

True.

(: 41:56

This has been amazing. How can people find out more about the stuff that you guys continue to do? We're going to find it.

on LinkedIn. Interesting stuff as we possibly can. We've got a post out which has got the slides and the data that we've got so far.

Yeah, you should definitely follow something.

to

(: 42:12

Yeah, so we have a big, big industry partnership that we announced here in Cannes together with the ANA, the IAA, which are the two big...

advertising industry trade organizations, CanLions and Work and lots of other great partners like Marcus Collins, our friends at Bain and Company. So we've built a really amazing movement that it's about the future of B2B through the lens of buyers. how do you become more viable? So the Biability Project is well on its way. We'll have more research coming out in the fall. We're building a big playbook for next year. So stay tuned. There's a lot coming.

It's exciting. we're going to have to have. Yeah, we have some of the smart people in the industry working with us, and that's really exciting.

You guys back is what I'm here

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and couple of best podcasters in the area

You're our favorite.

part of this building. I've had these ideas.

That's right.

It's like you get some research, you do a nice PowerPoint deck and it's like now we've added knowledge to the world.

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in research.

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