Episode 5: Market Intelligence
Robert Rhame, Lionfish Tech Advisors
Episode 5: Understanding and Utilizing Market Intelligence with Robert Rhame
In this episode of the Launch Gravy Podcast, host Larry Weber converses with Robert Rhame, a seasoned market intelligence leader and CISSP. Robert outlines his role at Lionfish, a firm of ex-Gartner analysts offering personalized advisory sessions on market trends, messaging, mergers, IPOs, and more. They discuss the significance of understanding market intelligence, implementing win-loss analysis, identifying competitive landscapes, and researching personas and ideal customer profiles (ICPs). The episode provides a comprehensive overview of building effective market intelligence programs and enabling organizations to better navigate their markets.
Connect with Robert Online: Robert Rhame’s LinkedIn
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Transcript:
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Larry: Hey everyone. And welcome to the Launch Gravy Podcast. I'm Larry Weber.
And today's show, we're going to be speaking with Robert Rhame, accomplished market intelligence leader and certified information system security professional or CISSP. Robert has worked as a research director at Gartner, director of market intelligence at Rubrik and Veracode, and now at Lionfish Tech Advisors.
Hey, Robert, welcome to the Launch Gravy Podcast.
Robert: Thanks, Larry. It's good to be here.
Larry: Hey, so tell me, let's get to it. What do you do? What does your company do?
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Robert: Okay, so Lionfish is a bunch of ex Gartner, analysts that have more time to spend with individual clients than we did back at Gartner. So just think, think of it like, if anybody knows what a strategic advisory session is, you know how hard it is to get your covering analyst to cover you.
To actually spend time with you and advise you and mentor you along your path to, possibly even getting in the leader's quadrant or doing something like an IPO or whatever. It can be, you know, stuff like messaging, restructuring, looking at, at like, you know, what's hot in the industry, mergers and acquisitions advice.
So that's, that's what we do. We, effectively, work with our clients, vendors and, we get to the next level effectively, to augment their, their resources.
Larry: Got it. God, it's almost like being right around Gartner, but like holding people's hands throughout, like, you know, their research journey, their knowledge journey, and kind of helping them out along the way.
Robert: lot more hands on than a typical Gartner analyst has time for. We call it, we, we kind of democratize the whole company and call ourselves advisors.
Larry: Got it. Got it. No, that makes sense. And that's, that's super helpful. So, so let's, let's dig right in.
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Tell me a little bit of maybe your origin story and how you got started in market intelligence and possibly in the cybersecurity space as well.
Robert: Sure. So I've always been interested in security and, but I never really officially got into it until much, much later in my career. I was, you know, a child of the, the seventies. So. grew up in the 80s, and my computer teacher told me just because you can doesn't mean you should. So that, that was a good ethical nudge in the right direction.
I've always been interested in what companies do, what they produce, how they do it. and, you know, throughout my career, if I visit a company, I always want to really understand them. And I took that kind of the next level while I was at Gartner by researching the clients before we had conversations with them.
And it helped me really contextualize the advice that I gave to these, these organizations. Now, when, when I moved off into the private sector, so to speak, from Gartner. Market intelligence is something that a lot of startups or smaller organizations, even, you know, midsize organizations don't think that they can afford, but the problem is there, Larry, is that they still have to do these functions. And that's where, what's kind of interesting is, is that you have a situation where you'll have silos of, of within the organization of folks doing the same thing over and over, and it's not being reused and that's where a lot of waste occurs.
Larry: Got it. Yeah, no, no, that makes sense.
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And, and so like specifically within, how would you define maybe, you know, market intelligence?
Cause that's, that's kind of the theme for today's podcast here is really want to peel back the layers of the onion here. To help folks out and get an understanding of it. When market intelligence comes to my head, I'm like, “Oh, does that mean I just understand the market or is it all other aspects around it?”
Okay. Go ahead. Go ahead.
Robert: Okay, so the long and short of it is that that market intelligence is a force multiplier. It works with a lot of different groups, product, engineering, executives, marketing, of course, and it effectively makes the rest of the organizations better informed and it improves your effectiveness in meeting your customers in the market.
That's really what you're doing. So that that means that you've got a lot of different concepts or pillars within the role itself, you've got the win loss analysis. Within that, you've got, a quantitative process, which I did multiple times with Power BI. Just look, connecting to your salesforce, uh, instance and connecting to a couple of the data files, maybe Pendo or something like that.
Just with these customer experience platforms, you get an idea of how you're doing. And the dashboard very quickly, what are the sales people doing in a quantitative way, but that doesn't replace the voice of the customer. And that would be the next part of competitive intelligence. And arguably, win, loss, churn could stand on its own.
But these interviews that you do, allow mismatch between what you're hearing from your sales force and what your customers are actually experiencing. And that's a very, very, very valuable part of the, I guess, the competitive or the positioning or whatever you want to call it. The, the, the, the win, loss, churn analysis.
And then, of course, is the competitive aspect that, that, uh, gives you. Um, the actual intelligence on what your competitors are doing, what moves they're making that type of stuff. Um, but then other, other projects that you're going to get into would be like. The persona research that I've, I've done. Um, and, uh, then, uh, ideal customer profile or ICP.
Larry: Got it. Okay. So, I kind of just jumping around here a little bit, I just want to like define kind of what these are. So, we have win loss. We have, you know, understanding our competitor, competitive market. Really understand like, and then getting into like the strengths and weaknesses, all that kind of stuff.
Also, personas and then, and ICP. And then also how do we enable, how do we enable folks on this? Right. Once we get this information, this knowledge.
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So, so let's, if you don't mind, let's, let's pick through a couple of these and, and, and dive deep a little bit because win loss is something I've seen in different organizations.
I've been a part of some done correctly. Walk us through win loss a little bit. You mentioned about jumping into Power BI and the tools, but like, talk to me about what is win loss, right? Why it's important. And then kind of, you know, let's, let's dig into like how we used to get started with this. And what are the, what are the facilities?
Robert: So, the first thing you have to do is, is, is you have to understand, well, who are your primary competitors? And these are fields that will be populated within Salesforce, right? So, this it's your salespeople are going to close the deal. Uh, hopefully earlier on in the, in the, in the, the, the cycle, they would have populated the information about who the competitors are.
And then, of course, you either win or lose it. And then, you know, it could be also a renewal failure or renewal success and the competitors that are there. So, you can pull all these data fields into power bi and report on that. And you can also get some trending over time. That allows you to understand which competitors are surging.
I always added in also the sales notes and some other fields. So, if you clicked on a specific record, you could explore the individuals or, you know, sample a specific competitor and then look at what the reasons that were coming up, why you were losing. This is important because it informs your product team, but also your marketing folks and the sales team about what's working, what's not working, you know, who's, who's, who's where the gaps are, what things need to be filled.
If we've got messaging problems, it basically gets into all kinds of different, use cases and that's something that gives you the, I guess the intelligence, it should be shared in the organization rather than kept in an ivory tower. That's what actually helps the sales team understand why they're filling in these, these stupid fields.
Larry: Yeah, no, no, that makes sense. I mean, it's like you want to make sure you understand the score in your own business. And if you're just looking at revenue as a number, that's fine, but then you're not going to really understand what the nuances are and why you're winning and why you're losing deals. Right.
Robert: Which segment, which verticals and, and, you know, uh, it's, it's, it's, it shows you a good thing over time. You start to understand, okay, well, uh, Competitor XYZ has been surging by through an analysis of PR. This is a quite separate task. Actually, you look at, like, how they're doing, uh, over time in mentions, uh, web links, the SEO, the organic searches, that type of stuff.
And then you can generally see that pop up in parallel and it just gives you a chance to cross validate, within the actual quantitative reporting.
Larry: Yeah, and, and I think one of the challenges I remember from win loss implementation for number one is getting the sales team to actually put in. In, in, in Salesforce or whatever, whatever the tool does, like why we lost a deal.
And this is why, because a lot of times people culturally, they don't want to talk about the loss. That's like, “Whoa, I'm going to get yelled at.” I'm going to get drilled on this. So, let's ignore it. It's not a loss. It's actually, whoa, this is a deal to be determined a year later down the road.
And so, I think that's a piece of it is making sure. You, you, we build that culture within the sales organization to get that data. Otherwise, yeah, because when you don't have that trust, as you said, contact unresponsive, and then that's no insight for your company. That is just, that's, you know, you're thinking you might get a deal now when it actually, well, well, reality, you, you probably lost that deal. I went to a competitor.
Robert: Or it could also be that the lead wasn't a lead. It could have just been something that got thrown over the wall. And it's, it's a, it's a chance for you to start drilling into the organization saying, okay, well, let's look at the, the, the, the BDRs and. Or let's look at, um, the, you know, the, the outreach, the, the marketing, the, uh, our use of 6 cents.
How are we tracking the, the, the, um, the competitors as, as they're, uh, or our, our deals as they're moving through the pipeline.
Larry: Yeah, no, no, totally. And, and, and I do have a question for you because one of it is the first thing is getting it into the tool and making sure we have the insight. Was this a win?
Was this a loss, right? ...or did a customer churn out, so to speak. But the second piece of it is the insights around it, right? And, and I've had situations where we've used a third party and we've also had situations where I've used Salesforce to present information on the customer, whether it be a winor a loss.
And even though expensive using a third party, I thought I felt was much more insightful. Yeah. It's you tell me more about your opinions on that.
Robert: In my opinion, Larry, just the best thing that you can do is to somehow get the difference between what sales is saying and what the customer is actually saying. And it's really funny because these third parties they do a really interesting job of drawing the customer out.
It's fascinating. They know that the information is going to go straight back to the company, but they'll tell the truth where sometimes they won't do that with sales. They won't tell him why they lost. So really effectively, while you're in the deals in the stage of moving through a deal, you the salespeople need to bring up, “Hey, we're going to do an interview through a third party at some point, or we might do that. Would you be open to that?” So start recruitment much earlier in the sales cycle.
Larry: Yeah no. It makes total sense. And you think about it even as like a manager, right? When you ask for feedback from someone and I go to an employee, Hey, Johnny, Sally, give me some feedback. And wow, they're going to say something negative to your face and they might, but in general, people are going to feel that they're going to feel that, that pressure.
And then they're probably not going to be as truthful. And having a third party go to a customer. As you said they know how to ask those questions. They can dig in and then they get that, that data back to the organization in a much more palatable format too, rather than a sales rep trying to dig through that.
Robert: But you can also do as part of this analysis, say you've got contact unresponsive is like your number one cause of loss, it's just, it's wait, why is contact unresponsive? Is there something wrong with our leads? What did they select something else and then just ghost us? These people just. leave the company in that number, and if you want to, you can do surveys of these large numbers of any one segment and find out a little bit more about it. Because even if you get a response rate of, say, 10, 15%, you'll get a pretty good direction of why folks are not. And especially if you've introduced the concept of saying, “Hey, we're gonna, in, in the spirit of constantly improving ourselves are the customer's experience and everything else we would like to ask you about your experience afterwards, the organization that will do that is X.”
So that's just something that I mean, it's insight that you can't get any other way. And these are if you get them to buy in early in the sales cycle, then that's one of the best ways to do it.
Larry: Look I'm on board with the Win-Loss It's one of those things that was very eye opening to me when, the first time we had this implemented correctly and the insights and having it, I would say on, on, on a couple of different angles, one was, The overall architecture that the company and organization is fully tracking and the sales team is actually putting notes in, and then you're following up with a third party to wrap around it and get that insight. That's power. That's, when we talk about market intelligence, that's now we're starting to really get into it.
That is market intelligence
Robert: That's it. Market intelligence that the sales team and the company in general
Larry: Can start leveraging to make better, faster decisions in the field with the customers.
Robert: Absolutely. The other thing is that the best way to leverage this. This information is to democratize it to let it free. Get it out there. Don't lock it up because locking it up is it just basically you don't explain to your sales team why you need this data.Your risk of maybe losing control of it is we'll say X.
But if you don't release the data and you don't inform the sales team, the product team, the marketing team, all these different stakeholders, then your risk of not leveraging the information is 100%.
Larry: Yeah. You become the world's best kept secret. And so that's not necessarily what you want to do when it's, when it's market Intel and yeah so let's move like, all right, so I'm sold wind loss. Got it. All right. The second piece though, is, and this ties into win loss, because one thing you notice in win loss analysis is, competitors that are coming in.
Who'd you lose to?
Robert: That's right.
Larry: And you're like, wow. Okay. So where is that at? So can you talk a little bit more on, on other side of win loss, but now on competitors, how do you, from market Intel perspective, approach competitors, And talk a little more experience and maybe some thoughts on for the audience here.
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Robert: Yeah. So, first thing, one of the first things you need to do is understand what the competitive landscape is. And, there might be a ton of small fish in the pond, so to speak. So you have to understand, what's the scope, the service level agreement that you have with your sales team. What are the expectations? Do they? Do you want to have 30 competitors, that you track and do that very ineffectively? Or do you want to know? Okay we've done our wind loss analysis. We know that we're running into these competitors on a regular basis. We're losing to these on a regular basis.
So, let's tier them. You set up tier 1, tier 2. And then it's all about the resources and how much buy in you have, because the best programs really have a lot of interaction. So submitting Intel from the field, they can be interviews with the people that have recently joined the company from competitors.
You have to build up your, the amount of intelligence and then set an SLA for how often you're going to update the information. That's the only way that you're going to do it. Otherwise, the more competitors you track, it's like building a mile of highway or a kilometer of autobahn happened to me in Germany.
But you have to every mile or kilometer you build; you have to maintain that. And if you don't maintain it, then you wind up with potential problems with information not being accurate.
And if you're trying to enable your product marketing team who's not necessarily, they don't, you don't want them doing all this competitive research every launch. You don't want them having to, do the analysis for what's resonating. What the problems are. If you get something wrong, there's nothing better that I ran into when I was doing sales than somebody, some competitor making a false claim. Cause it was the easiest to deflect and it's, and you immediately, kill the credibility of your competitor. So that's a very dangerous thing. So accuracy is very key.
Larry: Yeah. I, one of the challenges I've always faced with the competitor aspect is who, number one, who owns them. two is how quickly how well can you stay on top of them? And three, inaccuracy is another big one. And I've I, a couple of things that I've, assisted a little bit other than having a dedicated person to market Intel that can be the ringleader for a month, some of this, rather than product marketing running willy nilly on some of these, or even sales or make it worse. Someone from product management going after this, because maniacally focused on just one or two competitors sometimes depending on their feature function of the product is tracking all of this.
And have you leveraged any tools to track any, cause you talked a little bit about how do you democratize, you know, competitors as well as is one of those areas.
Robert: So, you know, the question winds up being how, how do you scale yourself as market intelligence? And I mean, you're going to, you're going to need to use AI for some research. You're going to need to use some searches that you'll develop with your own, skillset over time, like, uh, these, these Google trends and stuff like that.
You'll probably need to use something that's called a competitive intelligence tool. You can look up the magic quadrant for that or on pure insights if you don't have access to it. And that'll give you a number of competitive products that do tracking and presentation to the sales force in the form of battle cards.
I used several of them at rubric and at, at Veracode. So it's just one of those things where you need to. I don't know. It's it's understand what tool is right for you And an evaluation would be good. I successfully used Klue and Crayon.
I guess if I'm naming names that the Win loss analysis that I was doing was actually with very successfully with, a company that Klue acquired called Double Check Research. And so it's separate from the competitive intelligence tool, but they did acquire that.
Larry: Got it. Yeah. I always felt that some of these tools, it's only as good as the data you put in because half of the time these tools, look they're doing web scraping. They're allowing you to move quicker and faster. Against the competitors you articulate by, scraping the web, getting the latest and the greatest feature ABC came out, but it's not unless you're putting the detail back in.
Robert: That's right. So, the thing is that you also with these tools, you'll be able to notice things like executive leadership changes. Hiring trends, maybe they're phantom roles that aren't really, there, but you can see the trends over time and understand which direction the rabbit is running, so to speak.
Large, turnover or instability at the executive level and indicates poor strategy, poor Pure execution and can be used very extensively for the sales team to, to attack. On the, on those basis is you could look at various different note things that, that the competitors have been doing and say, okay, we're going to do a takeout campaign on this particular competitor, because we think that they are, they have the stink of death on them.
There's a lot of just staying with your ear to the ground, so to speak, and continuing to search using these tools can scale the program rather dramatically. And it can also give you insights that, maybe you trickle it out daily to the to your slack channel.
Maybe you put some on SharePoint, maybe some of these get recorded and they go up on seismic or on, whatever tool you're using, just, you might even have a YouTube Channel.
Larry: Yeah. You get on the point of democratization again, and I think part of it is getting this in the hands of the right people as well. I loved being able to. get updates and Oh, company X did foo and you jump into it and you can start reading and getting it. And it's very proactive in the sense there getting into something where there's more curation.
And I would, I'm going to call it the term battle card, right? Where, someone from market Intel, working with product marketing has been spending a lot of time on it and, and, and Really, really digesting the market moves, the product moves internally, externally, and then creating that battle card for the sales organization, for the company in general that is, those are money when done correctly.
Robert: Yeah, if you can, the problem that I've run into in the past is that it's the, you ask ten different people and they say they want ten different things. So if you can actually get people to come to a consensus and say this is what I want, then you can deliver that.
But if you have people saying, I need more detail, I need less detail. I don't want 100 page report. I just need a 2 page or I needed at a glance. You call it a million different things. You have to get consensus on what the sales team, from enablement, everybody needs to work together and say, this is what we're going to do. And then you can say, okay for the people that just need the, at a glance, this is your card, so to speak, then for the folks that need an actual dossier, they want to really get in.
But you know what, one of the things that I under, I thought was really interesting is that the biggest users of these tools wound up actually being some of the top sellers. Because they were they just had the discipline. And that's just a matter of, looking at the actual discipline that the top sellers go through when they actually will go into a sales process.
Larry: That makes sense. And that, that jives because. people that are leveraging the tools and staying on top of it are those that are going to make the best decisions and have that insight going in, into battle, with a customer or, making sure. That, that, their product, if they have to do a bake offer or things like that, that they're able to stay on top of it as per what the competitors are already talking about or what FUD is already in market. And they're going to have that knowledge and that expertise going in to, to the discussion.
Robert: Yeah. And one other, one other thing, I'll just kind of bring it up really quickly. And that's the impact assessments.
You're sitting there on a Friday night and you're thinking that you're going to be lighting up the grill. And instead, competitor X announces something, and you'd better get a response out to the field pretty quickly. So that’s something that's very reactionary and it's not as common in market intelligence, but it does happen. And you need to be able to react to it and that's it's not just market intelligence doing it. It should be a bunch of different people getting together.
You might formulate the 1st draft and then you get input from other folks on their take. And that's how I've seen it done the most successfully.
Larry: Reactionary PR … Oh my gosh. So you get my PTSD kicked off now because for so many times, something in my early days in, in product marketing. Whoa.
When you move based on some competitor and you wake up in the middle of the night, and this doesn't have to be just a competitor too. This could be anything that's market moving, but then you wake up or you wake up in the middle of the night Oh, we got to get something out the door, right?
How do we get our army, our team, our sales force, educated as well as our customer base.
Robert: Because they're going to be asked, the customers are going to ask, and if you don't have a proactive response or something that gives the talking points, what does it mean, how bad is it? Because usually everybody thinks it's, chicken little, but most of the time your existing messaging is strong enough. You just need to remind people of it. And it's another option to repeat your messaging, repeat your talking points, repeat your differentiation. And that's how I look at it.
Larry: Got it. So, okay. So let's like, so we've, we've talked through win loss and we've talked a bit through competitors and I, and gosh, we can have more, more in general. It's, this is something where you and I could talk around some of these different areas and we could probably have five more sessions for each one.
So this is not to say this is a, deep dive on competitors. It's just kind of scratching the surface. A third piece I want to jump into here.
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Is the persona and understanding a little bit more of, if you could take us through, what a persona is, and then, you know, persona research from your perspective and, and kind of why personas are so darn important because, you know, and, and I'll just kick this one off.
Many times organizations, a lot of times startups even will be like, ah, this is the customer - we want to go after developers. Okay, great. Tell me more. Developer of and are there other people? are there influencers? Are there buyers? Who is the user? I and so this is where a lot of time and dedication into building the persona really pays off, but I'll shut up go ahead. Tell us
Robert: Yeah. Sure. Yeah, so personas, that's, it's, How do I put this? It's not an aspirational thing. It's almost a blocking and tackling. You have to understand, If you're going to use some market marketing tech to target people that are out there, you have to understand who they are. And that's, that's one of the things that you can do by hiring external agencies to do a survey to understand like who they are, what's their role, What do they, do the, just to just ask the questions about what's important to them. How, what do they like to consume? How do they like to consume it? And you have to remember that personas are a they are. Not a role if that makes any sense.
So you're not saying a role or a title. It's a responsibility within the organization. So you could say in this case, there's two different two different ones that might be an exception to that. And that's like the CIO. Who's always going to be the CIO. It might be an IT leader, But you'd say CIO and then there's the, like a CISO for example, As well but then you're going to have things like, Drop it down and generic, make it generic, like the head of engineering or something like that, and then you begin to talk about the various different people that are in Buying process the I guess the builds theconsensus that they identify the need. They investigate the products. They do an evaluation. They make a decision and they implement it. And it's a journey that these people are on. And that's something that gets very often turned around backwards.
You begin to think of this as how you move them through the funnel when you actually need to look at how a persona or a person or a committee of people, how they get everything with the direct and indirect interactions. These could be like, reading a blog post. They could be watching a video. They could be downloading a piece of collateral. They could be the sales meeting, which is very impactful. Usually, They could be. I want to go to a conference. I want to meet these people. I want to, I when I want to talk to somebody, I don't want to talk to the sales guy. I want to talk to the experts and, finding out all of these demographics, finding out like how these people like to consume is very important. And then you match that up with something like a 6Sense and you begin to apply job titles to it.
And that helps you identify. 6Sense can be a gold mine for this and understanding the buyer's journey. And, as soon as you start looking at some of the research that six cents has done, it will blow your mind the number of touch points that folks have since 2020 when it exploded from about 17 to over 26.
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And I think that it's even gone higher than that good bit higher than that in 2024 because nobody wants to make a decision that is going to be flawed. They don't want to pick something the product that's going to, they have stretched resources, not enough people. They need to consolidate products. It's a lot of different reasons why people are being careful with the acquisitions that they're making.
Larry: So I want to pause for a second before we go down the 6Sense, rabbit hole, which I love.
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But on the persona bit. Okay. So, we're doing research, understanding who the personas are start, putting, I would say different flavors on each one of the personas, buying patterns, habits, et cetera. Is there how do you determine how many you have?
Is there a rule and can you tell me more? Because I would think organizations that are maybe for the first time, really trying to understand their persona, how much is too much, right? And say, “Hey, this is good enough for us.”
Robert: I guess it's going to have to be the 80 20 rule. In that sense, you don't want to have too many because then you muddy the water. And you won't understand the ones that you have as well. So maybe 5, maybe a few more depending on how complex your product is, how many buying centers it touches, but generally you have to look at the buying centers that you're touching with the organization.
If it's 1 or 2, it's 1. Okay. Hallelujah. You've got like maybe a couple people.If it's gonna touch two, then maybe you've got engineering and I. T. It just really depends on what you're selling and what the complexity is of the deal structure.
The thing that you're informing. When you understand like the watering holes, how they like to consume, what they like to consume, how they like to be perceived.
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What you're trying to do is you're trying to inform product marketing, you're trying to inform the product team. So they understand okay, we need to make sure that we're managing the reporting for the organization, Or something like that, or just making sure that we're managing costs. Then understanding who's part of the evaluation really helps you to I guess storyline your sales evaluation process. If you want to do the quick demo, you want to know what's resonating on how to get that out there.
You're really you're deploying. You're literally once you get this research together, which can take - my last one was 6 months. It you deploy it into the organization to ensure correct usage of the Of the data itself. Okay.Of the information.
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Larry: And it's so heavily when I talk market intel, I, the first thing that comes to mind is sales. Cause I feel that if we don't have sales on board and if we don't build that culture where sales is close to this and they feel that, like this it's in their best interest to help this out, everything can break but one thing we didn't talk about in this, maybe with 6Sense kicked it off in my head a little bit, as we talked through the persona where I see this creating content for and really getting new leads in and or usage patterns in and really understanding too.
Is this an audience that you know are - these influencers that are gonna you know want to read something or understand it or are these we're in a PLG type environment or product led growth where someone's going to come in, swipe their credit card, go buy a product right away. You want to make sure you understand those nuances of the customer, what they're looking for too, as they're a part of that purchase journey.
Robert : Absolutely. And that's also something that when you're when you understand that just exactly what you said with the swiping the credit card or what’s important to them.
What do they want out of this relationship with you? And if you understand that then you're you're able to actually package things for it correctly.
You're able to train the, the sales team that the solution architects or systems engineers on how to talk to these people. Like, for example, you come in talking about how great your product is and how great it does X, Y, Z, I'm a CIO, my eyes are rolling back in my head, you know why? Because I have to align my IT enterprise infrastructure to X, Y, Z.
The CEO's priorities, not your product, how great it is. So you have to talk to them about how your product actually solves their problem. And once you begin speaking that language, and if you can get the sales team to begin speaking that language, then this is very, very, very influential.
And it, the, it, Product marketing. Same exact thing. You want to make sure that you're saying that the product marketing team, hey, this is how you talk to them. And then they begin to create messaging that actually resonates with the particular targets that you have. You can create parts of the website that are actually journey led, and that's, it's, there's a ton of different things that, how the personas actually assist an organization, done right.
Larry: I have a question for you because I'm thinking about this too, is, and maybe sometimes I take it for granted when I view personas and I think about it, you have a buyer persona, or those people are going to spend or correct the credit card or purchase, put the purchase order in. They want to purchase it for their organization for themselves. Number two is you're going to have potentially the users. This could be a situation where they're not the ones holding the buying power, but they're the ones using the product. And then thethird one, sometimes folks forget about is that influencer. They're a part of that deal. They could kill the deal or they could assist the deal. They might not be the user and they might not be the buyer. And that's how I think about it. Just those simple terms. Are there other types of roles that, that we're missing here, or are those three kind of the core ones?
Robert: Those three are the ones - you've, you've got a champion. If you can build it you've got the influencers, Champions are the ones that are gonna, that's more of a sales thing, but it's, they're the ones that are going to tell you what the competition is doing. And if they're not doing that then, You're probably not going to win this deal.
But if you've got the influencers, the users, and then the decision makers, the budget holders, that's the, Three basic things. And interestingly enough, if you really analyze who's involved in what stage, you can find out that more people are involved than you thought.
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According to research by 6Sense, the first vendor engaged. So this is one of the reasons why this is very important. The first vendor that's engaged is the winner. Like, I think 80 percent of the time. Which is very frustrating as a former sales person, a lot of sales and systems engineers because you, you think of all the dances you've been invited to for everybody to laugh at you.
Larry: Yeah. no, no, no. I, so yeah 6Sense. I, I. to ask digging some question on that, but I don't think I'm going
Robert: Yeah. We don't have time .
Larry: I want to ask as being able to really understand what people are searching for,
Robert: Sales as well. You can, you can actually look at what, what your customers have been doing. If you do, if you implement correctly and, and LinkedIn, You can see what they've been doing.
Larry: So a couple of things. So we went through this, I mean, we went through it backwards. I think maybe personas first is. Who your personas are to find who they are, even before anything. Cause that's even before you go you really understand that for folks that implemented already. Get them done now as soon as possible and make sure your company's aligned on them. I think the two of this win loss, okay. What's happening. What's the real Intel. Is there a feeling in place for this? Is there a culture within the organization, usually led by sales to get this data, to get this detail in there So, we can start making better decisions. And a third piece of it is overarching is that competitive aspect, right? Which ties in the win - What is the FUD? What is. What is the market discussion around it. What are the new features people are looking for? What are the new trends? What are those people that are coming in there or organizations that are trying to eat your lunch? So going to just stick with those three for right now. You getting back to the whole theme of democratizing this, how do you enable, right? It just seems the most important thing once this has been brought together is, articulating this to the organization and not just the sales organization, but everyone, can you tell me more about, I don't know what your thoughts are enabling folks and bringing this out into the mass of the organization.
Robert: The problem with competitive is as soon as you create it's out of date. So you, and literally, I mean, literally is anything you record, it's going to be out of date within, you - I, don't know, a couple of months at the longest. So live performances are live interactive type things. I mean, if, if you have enough people, you can do a deal desk or something where people can call in and say, I need the, you know, the latest and greatest on these, these competitors, but that's resource intensive. The, you can create groups like, like, I guess, SWAT teams, if you want to call them or, you know, trouble jumpers or, product owners.
The thing is that if it's not their primary job, then the attention might wane. But keeping a good cadence of presentations and competitive is very important because otherwise it winds up being only something that you see, a couple of times a year, and then it's, you just lose the focus. It's just not you need to be on the right presenting it at a regular tempo for sales to tell them what's going on, what you've seen lately, and that's really the best way - aligning with enablement is, one of the key points.
Larry: …Making sure that this knowledge is, transferred across the organization that this insight once created is really been able to be unlocked and again, this gets back into the whole orchestration across the organization, right?
Robert: Yeah, it's you - don't stay in your playpen, so to speak your, your, the market intelligence is something that is supposed to cross borders, cross divisions and empower a lot of different people.
That's the goal of it. And that's why I said that. The clever executive team will probably put a market intelligence function may not call it that, but, It may do that at a very early stage to enable, scalability of the organization
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Larry: On, on the idea on persona, sorry, taken back a little bit. Because one thing I've noticed a couple of times is organizations Can confuse persona with things like ICP.
Can you, can you perhaps share what the difference between the persona and the ICP is, and maybe, you know, any background on ICP and what companies should be looking for when, when developing it?
Robert: Sure. So, uh, the I'd say that in the order of events, persona is always gonna be first, right? So that's people. You have to understand people, but then the next step, um, there is the ICP or, or ideal customer profile. And that's a, that's, that's organizations.
And when, I say organizations, those are companies, not people, and you're selling to people, not companies. However, understanding for your targeted marketing, for your sales outreach and the, the various different, different types of ways that you're, you're, you're trying to increase the number of customers and amount of revenue – ICP informs that and it winds up being something that you can't just say, okay, our ICP is all. Fortune 500 customers because it's not effective.
It's you, you, you effectively are you know, loading up your, your marketing messaging into a shotgun and blasting it out and hoping that it lands somewhere. I mean, if you're producing something that does a really good job in financial services or manufacturing or retail, then, you know, you should know that, and you should double down on, on that usually. I mean, that's something that you should.
Say, okay, our primary customer, the one that has the lowest cost of sale and the highest return closes the fastest. Um, and that's, that's effectively you start off with a huge group of customers. Maybe, you know, um. It could just be everything that's in salesforce that you have right now. You know, if you, if you bought a list of something, or, you know, roster, or you're using, you know, some service that gives you the, um, the company data, could be a Dunn and Bradstreet. So, I mean, you're, you're looking at that.
Identifying the potential customers that are out there and then understanding their demographics. That's pretty easy. Every kind of gets okay. Demographics. We sort of understand that one. But then do you understand their firmographics and firmographics winds up being something that is, you know, where they're located. What do they do? How well are they doing? Um, you know, that's, that's the type of thing that you need to understand. But also, where are there, how are they structured? Where are the subsidiaries?
Then that helps you begin to, to build out a map of, of, of your regions and everything else. So you understand where these companies are. And then, of course, there's the technographics and everybody's going to be like, You know, I got demographics, but now you just threw two more at me.
All right. So technographics bear with me here. This is this is something that you need to be able to establish by understanding what products are actually already in this organization and knowing what the nearest neighbors are, what type of budget they've got.
Um, you can look at public, uh, public tenders, to understand, like, you know what, what the public sector is using. Um, that's all information that you can pull out. Uh, so, I mean, I, I, I can't really get into this deeply enough in, in the amount of time that we've got. And it's a project that generally turns into a product and done right. It informs.
Your ideal customer profiles is one thing. That's one thing. But that sprawls really heavily really fast because you're also looking at how you're doing territory assessment.You're looking at how you're doing quota targeting. So you're working with your packaging and pricing person. You're working with strategy. You're working with sales leadership and then you have to understand like how to get this done.
You can create a self-service portal so that they can actually look at it and say, Oh, hey, look, I didn't even know that Toyota had a subsidiary here, and we've got them as a customer. You know, maybe I should just give them give the account executive over in the other region a call and say, Can you give me an intro? Uh, so rather than just blindly charging into your, your, your territory, you're actually exploring it. Um, and you can explore it very granularly by, by, uh, and again, Power BI, uh, Tableau. Some sort of tool where you're, you're building a product on top of it for the sales force or sales team to explore their territories And helps the ramp up. It just keeps the benefits. Just keep coming and coming. And you can keep developing the product as well.
Larry: One of the things stepping back now and looking at our conversation and market Intel in general, I almost view that these are, there's a handful of, and I'm going to call them mechanisms that you need to have in place. Like I think when loss is a mechanism, you have to build a program out, build a culture around it.
You think about competitors, build a program around it, right? And there's, they're little machines that are running. And so at them, nurture them and get that content in there, feed your organization and defining ICP, defining your personas, getting that out there, updating them. And moving forward with that. It's
Robert : Once and done. No, They are not are not static ever. They have to be updated. If, and buying centers can change, everything can change. The influence can change. Security, for example, might say, Let them do it. It's their budget.
Larry: These, yeah, these it's, it's a very, very good set of, I like, I'm calling these like informational nuggets, right? Like you got to understand if an implementer already. You take it for granted sometimes, you really, as an organization need to build these into your DNA. And if you don't, if you're further along, I mean, I'm assuming larger organizations have this in play, but for folks that are smaller and growing, Get out in front of this stuff early, right? And get out in front of understanding who your personas are, understanding who your customers are, understanding why you're winning, why you're losing, because this is going to mean the world to you when, when you're fighting for your next deal
If you're maturing, you're like, Whoa, wait a second. You're not buying our product anymore. We've got this new, web based AI based organization that's eating their lunch. It's, it creates a challenge.
So it's also super important for those on the other …
Robert (2): But it can inform the necessity to either, create a sales play to to counteract the the risk. Maybe your customer success team needs to behave differently and reach out to some of these customers. There's all sorts of things that are, it's defend,
I call it the defend, the Castle move.
It's not losing your renewal. revenue to a move that's taken place from a competitor that, if you hadn't had somebody in this position. Then maybe it would have gotten lost in the field. People are talking about it. Oh, we lost another deal to, X, Y, Z competitor and they did it really cleverly.
And if you don't develop a and this is where the thermographics and technographics come in. If you don't understand who might be in your accounts as well as you are. So very often you'll see large organizations have multiple vendors. With competing products side by side and if you don't understand, like, where that consolidation play might happen.
Then, and that's one of the ICP things that comes out. It's not necessarily a it's a side benefit, so to speak, or side intelligence benefit that there's a lot of ways that you can protect the organization and enable the organization through these intelligence gathering activities.
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Larry Man, we've covered a lot today and I think we've only scratched the surface on some of these areas, but. look, Robert, we gotta cut it now cause we're at time, but look, if someone wants more information on this couple of things, how can people, how should they reach out to you if they had any questions here and if they want to start on this journey, what would you recommend for them?
Robert: Yeah. The first thing really, what you were talking about at Larry is that that if you don't think you have the resources that I'm happy to help out through an advisory session, depending on the scope of your requirements I'm available at Lionfish Tech Advisors.
And you, can reach out to me via LinkedIn. But really what I would say, get started with understanding like how your program, who's collecting data right now and. By the time you establish how much overlap there is, you're going to really understand why it's required to, to do some of these things.
Because any specific launch, you might have one person doing this every time and it's recreating the wheel over and over again. Like you said, if it's a product manager, they might be just a laser focused on two competitors, but how do you get that back out? How do you get that information back out and into a place where the sales force can actually, consume it or inform the product marketing team? There's, that's, it's really just get started understanding like where the information is being gathered already because 10 times out of 10, this stuff is being done. It's just not necessarily so formalized.
Larry Got it. And so any questions we're going to send them to you, Robert. And if anything else on this, feel free to reach out to Robert. He'll he'll take a look and he's a good one to connect with. So anyway, Robert, thanks again for coming on and sharing your knowledge with us. And we'll have to do this again soon sometime.
Robert: Sounds good, Larry.
Larry: Cool.
Robert: Take care.
Larry: Bye.
Robert: Cheers.