Nick Zeckets is a successful tech start-up founder and sales and marketing leader. He has had a front row seat to see the dramatic shifts in how B2B companies introduce, market, and sell products and in turn, drive revenue growth. Join Nick and Greg as they discuss the disruption that is taking place in how B2B software companies manage revenue growth - moving from sales-led process to a product- and buyer-led approach.
According to Nick, functions in traditional B2B tech companies mostly stood alone in their goal of driving revenue - that is if they even saw revenue production as their goal. In Nick’s archipelago analogy, each function - product management, marketing, sales, and customer success, operated as its own island, sometimes with bridges connecting them, but not tightly bound. And the BIG person on campus with the most control was sales. But the expectation for more convenience and self-service, experiential buying is causing a real disruption in the role of each function and their connection to one another. Millennial buyers, the group making more and more of the decisions, are heavily influenced by their B2C experiences and are looking to match this experience in how they buy software and technology. Therefore, you need to start with much more compelling content to grab prospects attention and then give prospects the freedom to explore the product and hear from customers on their own. Building trust, virtually or digitally. And ultimately time the outreach from sales, at just the right moment, by watching the engagement of each prospect.
Connect:
Connect with Nick on LinkedIn and check out FunnelVision's website.
Connect with Greg on LinkedIn and check out Omedym’s website and their LinkedIn and Twitter
Greg Dickinson: Nick, welcome to the convenience economy podcast.
Nick Zeckets: Thank you.
Greg Dickinson: You're welcome. Great to have you today. Before we get started, tell us a little bit about yourself and what you're doing over there at Funnel Vision.
Nick Zeckets: Yeah, you know, I came out of college, two decades ago now, which means that I finally think that I know something, maybe doing the sales thing, the inside sales thing and the outside sales thing. For a great institution, corporate executive board, really learned a lot really quickly. And then managed to have a career that started to wind through a number of big data and consumer insights and tech startup and other businesses where the skill set kind of evolved from frontline sales guy to sales manager guy to sales and marketing to sales and marketing and strategy to sales and marketing and product and to CEO and, and I'm in my second role as a, as a leader in a business and a founder and at Funnel Vision, you know, kind of spun out a few months ago, recognizing that there are lots and lots and lots of companies big and small alike, who either need some disruptive third party view into their opportunities to build revenue, or younger organizations or younger offerings and even large organizations that probably have built something really compelling, but are struggling really to kind of marry that unique bridge between what's traditionally considered product market fit and the market part of it. That that really starts to bleed into marketing and in the revenue operation and helping organizations figure out how to really, you know, take the take the hurdles out of their way in order to to make some real progress on sales of new offers.
Greg Dickinson: Fantastic. Fantastic. Did you mention Did I hear you say the corporate executive board?
Nick Zeckets: Way back in the day? You bet.
Greg Dickinson: Wow, man, Were you there when they when they came up with that the challenger sale that's the group that think Bret Adamson was part of that team? And were you there then?
Nick Zeckets: I was indeed, yeah.
Greg Dickinson: All right. Well, I was, uh, you know, that was interesting, because I I didn't know that about you. And I'm glad you brought that up. Because, you know, we're big followers of the corporate center board. And a lot of what we, we talked about at Omedym is about is this notion that that same team is now doing reach new research around Biron Edelman, and it all fostered around this idea of the convenience economy, right. And that's what the now where we call this podcast, The Convenience Economy because today's buyer, right, they're all about convenience it or they call it the convenience buyer, the modern buyer, the Self Service buyer, right? We, as buyers are more in control, and I don't care if it's 40, 50, 60%, you know, 15 years ago, zero percent. So it's drastically different. Are you seeing any changes as you talk to different companies and are leading your own company in the b2b buyer?
Nick Zeckets: Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's, it's really remarkable. In some of this comes, you know, frankly, by by evolution and revenue models, right, this freemium concept has introduced the idea that people can really get their hands quite dirty, even with really heavy weight, very expensive enterprise offerings without really ever talking to somebody or certainly not even writing a check, or if they do, right, on a very small one. And then, and then the other piece is, frankly, you know, you've got a generation of corporate buyers and decision makers, you know, amongst millennials, who are just about to turn 40 they're adults, and they have a very consumer style expectation of what a buying opportunity and process ought to look like. Right. And so, you know, there's so much that's changed corporate websites used to be able to be exceedingly boring and have a picture of a tall building or a horse on a beach or something ridiculous and then that was enough and now the expectation is that hey, you know, we've we've really got to get a powerful proposition across immediately and and you look at leading marketers, from places like drift and and HubSpot and other tech organizations that are rapidly growing in the enterprise software space in particular, and, you know, these guys are obsessing over copy they're obsessing over imagery, they're obsessing over empathy. And and that's all the stuff that helps pull people in. Right marketing and product market fit have never been more important. So what we're seeing really is that by the time a salesperson gets a chance to engage, and particularly and this is important, if it's a successful engagement, they may be get to be involved in 30% of the decision process. And it's probably more like 10 to 15%. If it's unsuccessful, it's probably because the sales rep, or the SDR has reached out too soon, and actually irritated the prospect by not having given them the opportunity to learn enough for become familiar enough before getting a phone call. So you know, the beaches really have to be softened through through customer evaluation and, you know, lighter now, early, early stage value propositions before human even gets to get involved.
Greg Dickinson: Yeah, you got it. You said a whole bunch that we need to unpack. I think that I think you're right. I mean, you know, I know I can't put my finger on it. But I think the day when, you know, corporate america said you know, bring your own device to work day when we could bring our phones all of a sudden now that that, you know, instantaneous gratification of your phone, the Amazon effect, you can order food I can order online, I don't have to call someone to you know, call my Friday night pizza in, I can do it. I can do it online, I can order groceries that will be delivered to my house, I can take care of my homies this whole world, I read a study that said that, you know, now convenience is more important than price nine times out of 10 Holy mackerel, like, you know, 15, 20 years ago, price was everything right and so forth. And I think the other thing you said that was really interesting is that we see a lot of is the fact that the buyer is going to be the buyer, right? They got their own journey they're going to follow that they want to learn on their own rather millennial or not, people are kind of prone if you're buying a new car and appliance, a vacation a TV, right? You want to go do that work on your own. And when you are ready, and you've done your research, you raise your hand, that's when you want to engage with sales. Right? That's how you go to you said is that softening that that beachhead? Because if you interject too soon, you're not letting that buyer kind of, you know, learn on their own, and they're going to do it, whether you like it or not, yeah,
Nick Zeckets: yeah, yeah, that's, yeah, that's really spot on, I believe that deeply to be true, which is, you know, it's, it's fascinating. I think, a lot of revenue operations historically have been, have been archipelagos, right, you've had maybe a product team, that generally was stuck in a corner, built stuff off of a rough set of requirements, then you've had a marketing team, that was largely a, you know, not respected. And a lot of revenue operations you had, you know, then the sales reps, who were considered, particularly in the enterprise space, and large, large scale b2b sales, were considered, you know, the, the Jocks and the big guys on campus. And, and everybody kind of got out of their way, which is why, you know, you see some of the compensation levels that you do with that role. And then you had the customer service support experience organization, which was, in a lot of ways really an afterthought. And, and what I, what I find really fascinating is that those archipelagos are really starting to, to not just have really clear bridges built in between each one of those, those little jumper islands there, but they're really kind of coming together on the one landmass, because the customer experience has become so critical, it feeds into how good the product is. And then the product then in its capacity to serve the market starts to inform credibly, what the marketing organization needs to be saying, who's more measurable and more important than they've ever been before. So that they can hand off to a team of sales people who in the best organizations are experts in the work that their business actually provides, which is a very different profile, then then kind of the, the lone wolf that we used to see ages ago just on people down and go play golf right. experts in the in in the stack and you know, one of my favorite examples of how all this stuff has really evolved as you look at a business like twilio, twilio is, is very light with regards to direct enterprise sales organizations, but they have massive acbs with their customers because it starts with a handful of API calls. Somebody goes oh wow, I get what this does now. And and I want more and I want more and I want more. And so this change in revenue models is changing go to market has led a place like like Twilio to do $1.1 billion a year in top line, which is remarkable. Yeah, I mean, you know, even 10 years ago to get to that kind of a number, you needed a Salesforce of 500 plus people. Yeah, exactly.
Greg Dickinson: Yeah. I mean, and I think, you know, there's new word I heard three weeks ago, I was listening to a podcast, and I heard this word experiential. Right. And and today, right, the product is, you know, used to be the product was, you know, if you looked at someone's sales process, right, if a consultant came in and design a sales process, the demo, the proc experience would be way down the list, right? All these other things had to be done first. And you held that for the demo was I'm a pre sales engineer by trade, right? So I know this firsthand that the demo was held hostage and and now product led growth, experiential, right is now saying, hey, the product is where it's at. People are they want to taste it, they want to feel it, you think of, you know, it's been around for a long time, right? You don't buy, you know, perfume or cologne without, you know, sampling. At first, you don't go buy a car unless you test driven it, right. And yet, you know, software for a long time wasn't that way. And so I think what you're hitting on is this fact that, you know, in addition to the the buyer now saying, Hey, I'm a convenience buyer want things on demand digital and self service, the product is really kind of important. And it has to be early on in the in the in the festival, if you want to be successful. I mean, to your point, Nick, right, if if they've gone on and done all their work on their own. And they now raise their hand and say, Hey, Mr. software company, Mr. software company, I'm interested. What's What is it? They need to see the product? Right. So you know, have you have you have you had in your work? Have you seen that?
Nick Zeckets: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I've, you know, and I've been guilty of the sales driven growth, sin, and also been obsessed, and successful with the product lead growth, you know, promised. So, you know, sales lead growth, I'd founded a Mar tech company, eight or nine years ago in higher ed space. And, you know, ultimately, we, we did have a successful exit to that business. But in the beginning, you know, we were trying to sell our way into into good metrics and to being funded. And frankly, what happened was, we took a vision that was not terribly well informed by our market, we thought our vision was incredibly substantial. And in game changing, and the market couldn't possibly inform something that was game changing. There's this Miss, misaligned, quote, Henry Ford, saying that if you would ask customers what they wanted, where the automobile was made, right, they would have told you a faster horse. He didn't say that, but I love the quote. But but in believing that quote to be true, you know, honestly, it really, it really ignores the customer. And and I think you do that at your peril. And we found ourselves selling something in where we had done vision selling, and then people got the product, and really didn't know what to do with it, or how to leverage it, or how to get value out of it, we stumbled our way to something over time, you know, but as I, as I kind of stepped back, you know, as I'm watching Funnel Vision, and and also, frankly, a new martec solution, SAS solution, you know, on on, you know, the SAS side, it's really, hey, look, we've got an idea about a problem. Do you agree that the problem is real? Yes, the problem is real. How do you experience it? Now? Why is it hard? What would it mean to solve for it? Is it worth solving for it? You know, what would you want to see coming out of something like that? And we asked them, we asked them, we asked them, you asked, and then we started to get to something that looked real. And that we could kind of demo and talk about credibly and say this is something we can actually deliver on. And we started to go back and have these conversations. And it's turned out that we actually have some of these same people who informed our product from the earliest days, saying, I'd actually like to sign up for a paid beta, I want to get in on the ground floor and inform the rest of the build out. And we've been exceedingly tight on what we're we're willing to commit to and what we're willing to do and having customers say, That's exactly what I want, knowing that we can deliver on it. And, and we're finding that customers are coming out of the woodwork without our frankly, our website even being live yet. Right. Right.
Greg Dickinson: Yeah, I want that. We want that touch, right? The promise. I mean, think about it, right? I mean, software is something that you use every day, you're, you know, you're spoiled, right? We have this this, you know, mainframe, we carry in our pocket that has, you know, so many sophisticated applications that you know, people right, frankly say, Well, if I can get that on my phone, I can download it and use it within five minutes. Why is this software proc you're telling me about, you know, what do you mean six month implementation, right? So it's just a completely different philosophy. And, you know, plugging a little bit for Omedym here we kind of see this action that that product lead growth, the exponential, not everyone can do it right. I compare it to the, the evolution of SAS, right, you know, SAS came out Salesforce was doing well, not everyone could go from where they were a client server right to SAS overnight, right it took it took 10, 15 years for, you know, people to migrate over and and get the business model right. And and I think the same thing happening. Yeah, there are some true success stories and you know, the, the slacks of the world, the counties of the world, docu signs that, you know, 100% product led growth, very little sales, a lot of customer success. But, you know, we kind of use that video as a way for people to experience the product, right? Because sometimes a trial doesn't work, right, the conversion rate for a lot of companies going down that path isn't successful, because it's too complicated. It's too hard. And they're not really built for that. So I think I think there's a you know, nothing happens overnight. We all do, you know, when you guys you as a founder, as you as an entrepreneur and me as well, right? I want to start tomorrow be great tomorrow, the next day, right? It takes a little bit of time.
Nick Zeckets: That's right. That's right. Yeah, I totally agree. And I and I absolutely see where what you guys are doing there fits into the market. You know, I think I think back to when, you know, that the concept of a proof of concept started to evolve, right? And, and vendors were offering kind of a personal, you know, opportunity to companies to experience something, but knowing that it was complex, and not wanting to, frankly, lay an IT burden at the feet of a yet to be customer would pick that effort up and do their damnedest right to give that customer visibility into what the experience from deep would be. We did this at Nielsen, I was on a team there that was doing large scale retail data analytics, from places like Walmart and Kroger and things like this, where the volume of data was remarkably robust and voluminous, right. And, and we were, we were helping companies see what it would mean to be able to see that every day with with total visibility, right. And, and it was just too new of an idea. It was so big of a concept, and people have been talking about it. But they really had to see it, right, they just really had to see it. And the sales price point, frankly, was so high. And that revenue model, if I were to launch that exact same business today, and it wasn't mine, I just got brought in as part of the revenue organization there. But if I were to do that same type of a company today, I would hope that I could find all that company all that retail data through API's. But for the most part, it is an enterprise level implementation, it does require a boatload of effort. And so to bridge that gap, best case, you're going to be looking at videos, I want to see what it's like on the other side of this, then maybe I still get to a proof of concept. But knowing that the sales price point could be 200 $300,000 a year or upwards of seven figures. You know, that's that's worth the sales organizations time, the only way to really qualifies to know that somebody has seen as much as you can possibly show them before they've gone into a into a PLC. So yeah.
Greg Dickinson: And at their convenience, right, where our data is showing that people are doing that, you know, again, playing with the product, seeing the product using searchable video that Omedym produces right before before nine after six on weekends, almost 50% of the time. That means the buyer is busy from nine to five when your sales organization is busy, but they still you're not going to schedule they're not going to you know that reluctant to schedule a demo. They're not going to go to those Hey, we're having a demo every day at two o'clock because they're busy they want it at night or Saturday morning Believe it or not we we have people that one of our one of our our customers rolled it out 250 reps we have we have prospects that do it 11 o'clock Saturday night, right? That's when it's convenient for them and nothing else to do they want to go and do their research at that time. So the convenience economy has taken all kinds of forms. And really, there are so many avenues, right? The data shows that we all have 11 competitors today. 10 years ago, we had three. So if you're not making it convenient for your buyer to get, you know, their questions to their the answers to their questions and see your proc they'll go someplace else, which which really allows me to transition to the to one last topic I want to cover up before our time is up. You know, you and I could talk a lot a lot. You talked about that at Nielsen, I work for a company that didn't you know, that took that Nielsen data and did you know kind of found anomalies in terabytes of data? You know, and, and to your point, right, I'd go to sell to somebody and say, Greg, like show it to me like why can't it's too big. So anyway, but let's transition to this idea of trust. Right? So you've been in the world of marketing and sales for a while. And a lot of our training right was Hey, in order to have something to buy from you, they have to like you they have to trust you today. It's not the way it was before but you still need trust, we call it digital trust where you're able to establish that they have a question you give them an answer and not making it hard not making a lot of gates, that what do you think about that this idea of trust always existed in sales, but it doesn't go away. But it's now digital trust. you agree with that? And what's your thinking around that topic?
Nick Zeckets: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So across lots of industries, there's, there's a lot of great data showing that the customer acquisition costs when the lead sources or referral is significantly lower websites that have customer reviews, positive customer reviews on them, that the cost per lead there, and the conversion rates are higher. So you know, you can even step back a little bit and say that it isn't even about necessarily what you as a business are doing. Apart from frankly, delivering a phenomenal product experience that causes your customers to feel really comfortable and confident to talk about the ways in which you're really adding value to their business. This also applies to the way that you present your value proposition, right. You know, so there's, there's incredible data showing that websites that say, hey, our product makes you X percent better at function y, right? They do much, much better, because you've got proof, right? You're saying we have an impact, and we can measure that impact? The question is, do you care about doing that thing better. And if you hey, we've got proof to show it. And it gets back to my point before about those frontline sales reps even that when we do hand things over. It can't be an order taker, it can't be a process checker. Yeah, you know what everybody's got to be good at process. But guess what, every CRM today is incredibly good at causing people to follow good process, Salesforce has next best action tools, right pipe drive makes it abundantly simple to walk through process as a sales rep. So that's no longer actually the dictating factor of whether or not the end goal will be reached on a sales whether or not I've built that digital trust as you've defined it. Right. And then at the end of that line, Greg, having somebody who doesn't drop the trust ball, when it does become a human interaction, really putting someone who has expertise, and real empathy for their, their potential customer, you know, in in that conversation and saying, Hey, I can do this, I can't do that. We're really good at x. We're not so great at y, this is where we fit in. I'm really just trying to shepherd you through a process. And I think that we're the right fit. But we might both come to an agreement that that we're not right. And that's the kind of honesty people are looking for.
Greg Dickinson: Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, we we talked about digital trust here all the time. And in the book I wrote called the convenience economy, right b2b adapter, or fail, right? It's all about the point that, you know, that journey, whether it's 10, 30, 40, 50, 60% of the buyers journey by themselves, if you can have visibility in what they're doing, where they're doing it when they're doing it right, by providing them with a way to get the answers to their questions, as opposed to saying, Oh, no, no, you got to opt in Oh, no, no, you got to schedule Oh, no, right, you got to download this, in order to download this, you got to give me your email and phone number, right? Instead of saying, hey, they're gonna go find the information on their own anyway, provide a easy way for them to get it. And then if you're able to then right, understand what they're doing, when you do when they do engage with you, you're not rehashing all that you have established trust, they trust you because when they had a question on pricing, you provide it when it you know, on the web, or you know, somewhere on it within your when you're in the solution. So we find that to be very compelling to your point, hey, we're gonna run up on top of the time here, leave my audience so I like to always close with have you back in a few months, because we can talk again about about 20 of these different topics, but Nick, leave my audience with they listen to the podcast, they're done. They're heading back to work. What's one thing they could do different today that they didn't do yesterday that could have an impact on their performance or their you know, kind of kind of a work day or today?
Nick Zeckets: This is great. I would say have the product and and marketing and sales and customer experience teams, their leadership, but even their their lower. Earlier career folks get together in in cross functional pods, because the amount of information that is stored, and still siloed regardless of how much that archipelago is consolidating is profound and one great insight, I guarantee will come out of every one of those conversations and those little insights in those types of chats can be transformational.
Greg Dickinson: Nick, thanks so much for your time. I know you're busy guy, you got one thing on the wall, you got another one coming so audience Where can they reach you? If they want to talk to you, Nick about more of your topics work? Are they where do they reach you?
Nick Zeckets: Yeah, so we're at funnel vision.us or you can reach me at Nick at funnel vision.us.
Greg Dickinson: Nick, thanks for your time today. Appreciate it
Nick Zeckets: be good. Right. Thank you so much.
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