Systematically Approaching Your Win-Loss Strategy
Spencer Dent and his team at Clozd are helping their clients to thoughtfully and deliberately nurture their pipelines for long-term marketing success.
[MUSIC]
>> Welcome to Pipeline Visionaries.
I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios.
Today's show is brought to you as always by our friends at Qualified.
Go to Qualified.com to learn more.
Today, I'm joined by special guest Spencer, how are you?
>> Good, how are you?
>> Excited to have you on the show.
Today, we're going to talk.
When lost programs,
we're going to talk generating pipeline.
We're going to talk about marketing it close and of course, your background.
So let's get into it.
First job in demand.
>> It's funny, my first job in demand when I was in college,
this might be a different job than some folks.
My first job that I had when I was in college was cold-calling on behalf of
mortgage companies and setting appointments for
mortgage loan officers and it was brutal.
Hooks to a dial or cold-calling, you had to have all your messaging down and
everything.
>> That is.
>> It was fun.
>> But I learned a lot about how do you message and how do you get people
hooked and
what do you have to say and how do you rebuttal and all that kind of stuff.
More of the sales demand side of it.
Fun times and retrospect.
>> So, flash forward to today,
you're obviously the co-founder of Close.
Tell us how marketing is involved in your role and what you oversee.
>> Yeah, so the interesting thing about what we do at Close,
we run win-loss programs for companies, right?
So win-loss is a fairly, it's one of those things that lots of companies have
done
historically but maybe done kind of in one-off, forgettable ways.
And now it's becoming more of like an operational component to drive a
competitive
advantage.
It's like if I as a company understand why we wouldn't lose deals,
it helps me drive better product development, drive better sales messaging,
drive better sales process, et cetera, et cetera.
So, the interesting thing about marketing this type of solution is we don't
really
compete with a bunch of really strong incumbent players and our buyers aren't
all super familiar with this.
It's very novel.
So you have to create demand a little bit differently.
And I think the way you do that is through thought leadership,
the way you do that is through really helping people's visions about things.
And that's much of what we have to do at Close is helping people see that if
you do
this and there is a way to do it systematically, your business will be able
to drive so much more go-to-market efficiency and you'll be much better off.
So much of what we're having to do is like on thought leadership front and less
on
like that.
Let me tell you very specifically the features of our product that we have that
somebody else doesn't.
So we're going to get super deep into when lost here in our next segment,
the trust tree where you go and feel honest and trust in share those deepest
darkest marketing secrets.
You told us a little bit about what the company does.
What types of customers are you working with?
What size companies?
Yeah, yeah.
Great question.
So from a company perspective, basically almost all of our clients are B2B
companies.
They have a great way to think about this is if you have a professional sales
team and
you track opportunities in a CRM, eventually you're going to ask the question,
why do we wouldn't lose?
What's my batting average?
So that's kind of like the group of companies that we could potentially sell to
But the interesting thing is not all businesses have advanced to the point
where
they are tracking things like that.
So it's like most of the companies that get to the point that they're like,
crap, we got to figure out how we can get more juice out of all these lemons
and
really run a good one loss program.
They tend to be tech companies because they're the most highly instrumented
businesses in the global economy.
And then like market leaders in their space.
So most of our clients are, I think, B2B, SAS, B2B, tech companies,
B2B professional services, manufacturing, shipping type companies.
The people that we're selling to within those companies tend to be what's
interesting about when losses, it tends to be a very cross functional output of
what we do.
Like I go talk to buyers about why they want to just did or didn't choose your
solution.
They're going to come back and give me feedback about your pricing.
They're going to give me feedback about your product.
They're going to give me feedback about your sales experience.
So within a tech company, very often like the persona is like an EP of product
marketing, kind of depends.
And then outside of tech, it's often times like sales operations or
enablement or the operations.
So our personas are actually kind of not well defined across industries
because this initiative gets owned by different groups.
Like in some companies, we sell directly to the C suite.
Yeah, that's fascinating.
And it makes sense.
It is, like you said, it's building a new program if someone has it from
scratch.
I remember back in the day, it was that the sales rep sends the email to the
joint email box and everybody who's on the close one email box is like, this is
why I won, this is why I lost, whatever.
And that was it.
And that data never went anywhere and never went to anyone.
And that's probably a good thing in because they don't know why they went and
lose, right?
The sales reps don't.
So, so crazy staff for you, right?
Cause we pull for our clients.
If I'm a CMO and I'm trying to figure out market position,
each I go listen to my sales reps or not.
For our clients, we pull their CRM data and then we actually go talk to their
buyers, survey their buyers, like either through like email means or directly
direct conversations.
We collect that feedback about why they did what they did.
85% of the time what the sales rep said, why they've lost the deal is not what
the buyer said.
Crazy.
Well, we look across our clients.
So think of that, like the sales reps, they don't know, like in their defense,
like the buyers will tell them everything.
So it's always a funny example.
I'm like, yeah, the reps would say this and I'm like, I know, like they do,
but they don't know.
And not to their own fault.
That's just the way these processes break down.
Yeah.
Or it's, or it's like right there in the CRM, right?
You hit that close loss button.
It gives you a dropdown.
You click the thing.
Uh, sometimes it's literally you only have one option of why I lost.
And you're like, oh, it's probably a multitude of factors.
I don't see it as one of these, you know, I mean, it's just never one reason.
Yeah.
I remember sitting there when I first learned sales a long time ago, I was
sitting there and I'm like reading these emails come in and I'm like, man,
the closed one emails are a lot longer than the closed, lost emails.
Nobody, nobody likes to write about the races that they lost.
Totally.
And into your exact point, right?
Like having personally done thousands of win loss interviews.
I've never done one A win loss interview where the person came back and said,
we chose to go with you for one reason, one reason alone, or we chose not to go
with with you for one reason, one reason alone.
And most of the time when you get the feedback from these buyers, what they'll
say is they'll actually say we liked A, B and C, but D and E were problems for
us.
And here's how that ended up waiting out.
And so you need it.
It is unique and dynamic and nuanced feedback that you get from buyers coming
off of deal cycles.
And so it's important not to that one drop down is the death of the company.
Like I literally had, I had one of our clients.
They were going to completely invest like $10 million in the product roadmap
to go fundamentally change their product because they had a monster think,
you know, a huge tech company coming into their space and they were freaking
out
about it.
The first competitor in the drop down was that company.
And the first competitor and the reason for a loss was price.
So they were saying we're losing to X because of price.
We're losing to X because of price.
And then come to find out the reps were just blindly putting those things in.
Yeah, of course.
And they're about to spend all this money to go try to address their pricing
and repackage their product and refense the product based off of just like a
total
garbage input.
Yeah, I mean, it's so funny.
We, we obsess about data.
There's so many companies focus on data, everything about getting data right.
And then at the end of the day, it's like someone like hitting, clicking a
mouse a few times when they're pissed off.
How do you go after these folks?
What's your marketing strategy and how are you all structured to go after them?
Yeah, very good question.
So the way we have to approach this market, because it is very like educate
first,
sell later, we have to do a lot of thought leadership exercise.
So we put a lot of content out around like, this is what best practices look
like.
This is what companies are doing in this space.
This is what these are the different ways that you can approach it and things
like that.
And then that's the first part of the strategy.
The second part of the strategy is let's make it easy for people to experiment
and see what good looks like.
So we do, you know, obviously demos, we have videos of what our solution is.
One of the things that our clients that sells prospects and people that are in
the market, it really like is the ability to try out our solution because it is
new
and novel.
And that helps us drive a lot of demand.
So like, we'll just invite people, hey, man, you want to see what a good when
loss program looks like, let us do some free interviews for you.
And they get the output and I'm like, holy crap, now I know what good looks
like.
Now I know what what what I should be shooting for.
And I understand the value.
That makes it easier for them to move forward.
And then the last thing for us on like kind of the third tier, first year,
educate,
second year, let them try it.
The third piece is continuously opening their minds to what once they get on in
our using our solution, we have to continuously educate.
Clients about what good looks like too, because the challenge one of the
problems
that you run into is people treat this sometimes like an academic process,
an academic deliverable, instead of an operational process.
And so getting people to realize like you're better off, instead of turning
all of this into a PowerPoint and having a presentation, you're better off
actually just sharing the feedback broadly throughout your organization and
the person that's at their desk right now working on messaging or building
product
roadmap or working a deal can see what the bear traps are in front of them.
And the reasons why you're waiting at losing and incorporated that into what
they do make them better.
So it's kind of those three things like educate, let them try help open their
mind to all the value they can continuously get.
That's really cool.
And I think that, you know, having the freedom to be able to like get started,
especially in this economy, super important.
But in terms of the educational piece, in terms of the category creation piece
of when when loss analysis being a program that you should be investing in
and the technology like close that you should be investing in.
How do you get people over that hump?
You know, they have no budget for this, right?
Because last year they didn't do it.
So always brand new budget got to come from somewhere.
Yeah.
How do you how do you sort of get over that?
Dude, great question.
Right.
Because because in this environment, you talk about demand and driving, having
to
drive pipeline, pipeline is hard to come by.
Right.
Like people aren't out looking in in shopping windows right now.
They're worried about budget cuts, not about having extra budget to go around.
The way that we do this is this is very much an ROI.
So what do you have to believe to spend the money to go get the budget
together to spend money on this?
And it's actually a pretty simple ROI.
So like our clients on average report that they get at least a $3 million
return
on their annual investment.
And a great way to think about that is let's say you spend $50,000 on a
win loss program or $100,000.
Do you believe that the learnings from that will allow you to win that many
more
dollars when we see it time and time again, like we actually just have a client
talking with my co-founder telling him about how they were doing a relatively
small program.
And what happened was in the first like five interviews, they learned some
things about their sales process that where the buyers didn't like and they
wouldn't incorporate that on other deals, particularly their biggest deals.
And it helped them win a $4 million bill.
Now all of a sudden you're like, dude, this is like, well, we could, we can't
afford not to have these learnings coming into our organization.
We can't afford to not have this knowledge being spread into the
or so.
The way we get people over the hump is to help them realize like, Hey, if you
actually heard from your buyers, cut the noise out of your org, cut your
internal
echo chamber, you know, out of the process, if you actually heard from your
buyers,
why they care about your solution, why they are choosing you, why they aren't
choosing you, you think that would help you to find your recipe to go win more.
And, you know, any logical person can connect those dots pretty easily?
Yeah, I think a lot of us are, are, are having to do that ROI math right now,
but
in this sort of sort of climate, like we built, we did the same thing at Casp
ian,
where we built an ROI calculator to show how a video podcast series can, you
know, can drive ROI and had to be more rigorous on that.
Whereas I think previously for us, I'm sure it's similar to you where you're
kind of probably preaching to the converted a little bit where you talk to
someone and be like, when loss is super important?
And they're like, yeah, it is like, of course, it impacts product marketing and
product roadmap.
And, and all these reasons, like, yeah, this is a no brainer, please like help
us.
Um, and obviously once budgets come, you know, get decreased a little bit.
It's like everyone, even if they're, even if they're the converted, they still
need to have the ROI thing to go to their boss.
Like that's, that's the difference, right?
It's just, even if they are like, I'm 100% in, they're like, I need more data.
Uh, so it's, it's kind of, I feel like almost everyone is having to, having to
do that more and more now.
To drive that home even further, like we see this in the data, like our
clients, right?
Like what's happening now in that wasn't happening a year and a half ago is in
the buying process, in my decision to choose, you know, to choose somebody else
I now have to actually go through an extra step that didn't used to exist
of getting the CFO's approval or a senior person on the finance team.
And so deals are historically crossing the finish, they're crossing the
historical
finish line only to find out that they have further to go.
And we've actually seen clients have situations where it's like, we were told
to deal is going to happen.
We sent it over for signatures.
They inserted this final decision because it was over some threshold that had
to be
approved by the CFO and it got stopped.
And like we're doing those interviews on behalf, on behalf of our clients.
And what, why did it get stopped?
Because the ROI wasn't clear, because we needed to prove why we had to have it.
And we weren't able to.
And so you're like, wow, that's, it's pretty interesting.
So definitely sign of the times.
Yeah, and I think people are cutting good programs too.
Like that's like part of it is like people cut software that they're like, yeah
generally everybody on the team likes it.
It's good.
It's a cool thing.
But we got to cut something and you're like, I mean, that's true.
You know, what do you, how do you argue with that?
Right?
Like, but why us versus somebody else?
Like, are we not showing the value?
Are we not doing, you know, those sort of things?
Um, and I think, you know, another thing that I've like, obviously,
you all do, which is part of this is like identifying windback opportunities.
And for life cycle marketing, like how, how freaking critical is that right?
This second, right?
All of us sitting here in the middle of the year, everybody's budgets are going
to
change, like if you just follow the math, it's like, you know, November, 2022,
real bad.
Everybody's going to go through a one year budget cycle.
Then the next year after that, things are going to change a little bit.
So it's like this, this Q four is going to be absolutely nuts because next
Q one is probably going to be when a lot of people rebuy stuff that they wanted
Um, so figuring out the messaging there, you got to do it.
You're totally not.
So, so the windback thing is totally real.
We started to see across all the pipelines that we cover, not at the same rate,
but
a bump in what we call, uh, lost to no decision deals.
Think the deals getting pushed.
Right.
I'm not spending the money's not coming out of my wall and I'm not spending the
money.
I'm keeping it.
Why?
Because we're in a recession, even though, you know, the macro folks have not
necessarily
fully declared that yet, we are definitely in a recession in B2B tech.
And B2B tech for sure.
And so we started seeing that as really as a year ago, like start to flash up,
right?
And it, and it got really big in Q two, really big in Q three.
What that actually translates to is exactly what you said fires that are saying
, I am
interested.
I want to do this, but I can't do it right now, which what you need to do is,
if you're
doing, when lost system, systematically, you're tagging those things as this is
an
opportunity that's still in play.
We can't let it, we can't let it just fall to the ground and rot.
We have to continue to nourish it, stay on the radar so that when it does come
back
around, we're ready to work it.
So that's one of the things that we've been able to do for our clients is make
sure we flag,
watch it like this is a real deal and make sure that it's flagged back into
their
organization into their CRM so that the reps don't lose sight of it.
You can make a really good argument that one of your uncutable budget, it's not
budget item, but, but areas where you need to invest right now is in nurture.
It's like, how are you nurturing?
Because like your sales reps, it is brutal to send an email every single month
for
six months, right?
Like, six straight, unopened, right?
Like, you know, whatever, people like, well, that's, that's like,
that's what they got to do or whatever.
It's like, that is marketing's job to provide the top cover so that they
respond
to those emails at some point in time.
But like, how do you keep those accounts engaged?
Um, but one of the things that we're focused on like right now is like working
on our customer stories.
So like getting those things out there so that when, you know, hopefully
warming
up that, that CFO that, Hey, here's three more customer stories that I can sink
my rolled data driven teeth into, uh, to show ROI and things like that.
Like that stuff is so important when you're trying to figure out, you know,
how to, how to give sales that top cover.
Yeah, totally.
Uncuttables right now, absolutely, thoughtfully, carefully, deliberately
nurturing
your pipeline, especially those deals in your pipeline that we're getting
kicked
down the can.
I also argue depending upon what your revenue model looks like, if you're
on like a traditional SaaS subscription type model, people that are turning
right now, doesn't, it doesn't mean that they won't be back in the market
in a year, right?
Like understand why they're turning.
Keep your brand top of mind for them when things come back and how do you
make sure that they don't forget or get the loyalty stolen away by somebody
else?
Oh, yeah.
We decided we cut, we cut this software solution, you know, in 2022, just to
save money and we went through 2023.
Now we're realizing we need it again.
And now instead of like, Oh, I've been talking to the rap and they've been
checking in with me and they actually, but actually they might be used some of
the functionality for free.
Yeah.
They actually like nurtured me through this.
And they actually were like a good partner or whatever it happens to be.
Now I'm coming back to you for sure versus I left them.
I never heard from them again, but these other people that we should add to
me and I figured I'd try them out.
I've used this example in the past of like, if you're like dead set, like
I'm buying a Tesla.
It's July 2022.
You're like, I'm buying a Tesla.
This is what I'm going to do.
I'm all psyched up to buy the Tesla.
And then you're like, ah, market change.
I don't really have the money right now.
I can't do it.
And then then the new, you know, Ford Mustang E comes out in in January.
And you're like, I mean, I was in the market for a Tesla, but this new Mustang
king came out like that is the opportunity that's going to happen in six
months in B2B tech where it's like you thought you had the deal one six months
ago, but and you probably did, but something else is coming out and new
features
coming out.
So like, how as marketers, do you keep turning up the heat?
A great way to think about this is you have to keep the heat on.
Like, is it if I, when you smoke a brisket or a pork shoulder, right?
Well, what, what you'll see happen with these, these types of meat is that
their internal temperatures will start to climb.
And then they'll hit this stage called stalling.
We're like, Oh crap, it stops going up.
And you as the person in charge of the smoker will be like, well, crap,
what's going on?
Did I mess up or whatever?
What's happening is it's stalling out and then eventually it'll turn in and
actually raise really quickly because in this process, this stalling process
makes it awesome and delicious and everything else.
But the point is you have to go through the stall to accelerate.
I think what a lot of, where a lot of people are going to blow it right now and
where frankly, a lot of companies are going to fail, go out of business or, or
they're going to come out of this recession week is they don't have the
resources or the discipline to keep the heat on and to continue to manage and
drive the demand in this, in this environment.
And when the economy comes back, their competitors are going to steal all their
still their share.
The biggest market share gains don't happen when everything's great.
They happen when stuff's not great and the strongest players are able to just
eat up market share from the competitors.
You got to stay patient and keep working hard and, and frankly, some companies
are going to run out of resources.
Yeah.
They have it.
They can't keep working hard and they can't keep dedicated and same amount of
effort towards it because they aren't capital efficient and they have it
been.
And all the more reason why you got to make sure that you're getting
everything out of your go to market in this, in this environment.
OK, let's get to the playbook where you open up the playbook and talk about the
tactics that help you win.
What are those three channels or tactics that are your uncutable budget items?
Spencer, where the heck are you spending your money?
Yeah, good question.
So, you know, for us, like I said, win loss is definitely a novel practice,
right?
So, but those people that do know what they want and are searching for it, we
have to make sure that we are visible to them.
So, you know, paid search is really, really important to us, making sure we
have the right net there to catch people that are high intent.
Second place, this concept of virtue, you totally nailed that.
Like we're, we're spending money there on like, how do we make sure we build
out
and keep people aware of what's going on?
And then the, the biggest place, honestly, that we're spending the most money
is
on the stock leadership and driving the market, right?
Like we're in a place where there's a lot of people that don't know
what full potential win loss looks like.
And we have to provide the content and the message to them.
So from very deliberate outbound campaigns, AVM style campaigns, we're
doing a lot of that right now to like make sure we go right at the exact
folks that we believe would benefit the most from this and make sure that we
are
on their radar.
And is this more content, you know, focus?
Is it more feature focused?
You talked a little bit about how you're not exactly very feature and benefit
oriented at this stage.
It's more content focused about what best practices look like and the impact of
it.
Because the future benefit people, people aren't ready for the future benefits.
They have to understand the concept first.
And then when you actually once they grasp the concept of, oh, if I were to
understand and get feedback about why we wouldn't lose, that would help me.
That would help my counter I'm a CMO.
That would help my counterpart CRO.
That would help my counterpart CPO.
That would help yada yada yada.
Then when you show them the future, well, guess what?
When we go do this for you, we have this platform.
We automatically pull your deals from your CRM.
We then automatically allow you to reach out through multiple needs and
channels
to go gather feedback from these different folks that you've tried to sell to
you.
We then analyze it and we allow you to push it back out to the folks in your
organization that benefit from this information.
And we do it seamlessly so that your team's not spent doing all the
administrative
work in that process.
Once they get the concept and you walk them through tactically, how we do it,
they eat it up and they're like, OK, yes, I know.
I'm ready.
Anything that you're not going to be investing in or you're potentially
more cuttable, uh, but Jadims.
You know, what's been interesting for us that I think is maybe unique for
closed.
Um, we bootstrapped for four years before we ever took on any cat type of
funding.
So we've already been a profitable business.
And when we raised money, that was the first time we were ever really willing
to
go into the red and potentially the burn.
And because of the financial strength that we're at as an efficient business,
we're allowed to continue.
We are able to keep investing and keep going down the path.
So we haven't at all been like cutting, right?
We've been very deliberate about where should we spend and maybe push the gas
harder?
Where should we maybe keep the investment steady?
Because frankly right now, like let's not go through seeds on the cement.
You know, like there's certain industries that are just not going to spend
money.
There's certain things that maybe we should wait a little bit longer.
For the economy to recover.
But like we're investing heavy on certain elements of our business.
We've increased our spend significantly on the product front, on the marketing
front, on the sales, SDR front.
So there's nowhere right now that I would say that we are cutting.
We are definitely performance managing our teams, right?
Like everybody needs to be in the boat.
Like we're a hundred and fifty person organization.
We need everybody in the boat rowing doing their part, contributing, being a
good team member.
Whether that's in marketing and sales and product, wherever, because
in this environment, you can't have people that are, you know, on, along for
the free
for a free ride.
Any any campaigns that that you've ran or or experiments that you've ran over
over the past year or so that have been particularly helpful from a marketing
perspective?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So so this is an interesting thing about about win loss in closed.
Historically, this has been like a professional service,
bill type of solution to companies have bought.
So I've been a lot of the CMOs listening that when they've done one loss in the
past,
they've actually hired like a team.
If they've used an external resource, it's almost like a team that goes out
and they deliver you back like PDFs, right?
And it feels like an academic exercise.
Well, as we've made this more of an operational exercise, we found that
having the CMOs on board, because oftentimes it sits within their realm is
really important, but also getting cell operations, rev-offs and CROs on board
is really important because we tie into all their systems.
So some of the campaigns that we have run and some of the messaging that we
feel
like is really resonated is when we actually have pivoted and been talking
through CROs as well, and not just CMOs about the importance.
And it's creating a much better alignment in our companies when we signed them
up.
We both the CRO and the CMO are approaching this hand in hand.
Everybody on this list of those knows that there could be tension between those
two
words, but when they're working together well and there's like a clear
alignment
and they're using a tool like close to be able to understand what's going on,
because it mutually benefits both of them.
Mm-hmm.
That's pretty awesome.
And a lot of the CMOs that we work like one thing, one of the CMOs that we
work with has told us is doing when loss doesn't just give me a seat at the
table
because I have this information that no one else has.
Yeah.
It gives me the seat at the table because it allows me to go influence the
sales
and revenue teams.
It allows me to go influence our pricing and allows because I have this source
of
knowledge and it creates for me as the CMO the ability to really help drive the
right agenda for the organization.
Yeah, we talk about this a lot in a different podcast, actually Rise of RevOps
about revenue operations where like at the end of the day, like revenue
operations
needs to be a source of truth.
Like it doesn't need to cater to marketing or to sales.
It just needs to be the truth.
And I feel like when loss is sort of the same sort of thing where I'm not
trying to
like point a finger at sales or marketing or, you know, like you promised the
road map
or you did this or you know, anything like that.
It's just like what's the truth of the market of why they're choosing the
solution
and just try to rely on the data as much as we can.
And a lot of this stuff is subjective.
At the end of the day, like we need to be more data driven.
I think you're exactly right that giving the CMO having that data and having
that
information is, I mean, it's as important as anything.
I think what you've seen in the last 10 years in terms of the evolution of Rev
Ops
going from being like, there's a marketing up team and a selling up team and
whatever and a customer success option to a lot of companies are moving to a
unified
there's one team that runs the whole customer journey.
It's responsible for reporting on the whole thing, making sure all the system
and everything are tied together.
You know, the more company we see that, right, across our clients.
And the cool part about when loss is it's the companies that do well with when
loss and actually get the most value out of it, it has very little to do with
who
owns it, whether it's sales or marketing, it has everything to do with
do they have a culture that can accept feedback?
Yeah.
Like I can't tell you how like awesome on the one hand it is and how like super
frustrating on the other hand it is when we have a client, like one of our
customers who the feedback comes back and it's like sometimes it's blistering.
Yeah.
It's like like your product sucks.
Like it looks like it was built and Bill Gates garage in 1985.
Like I've literally had somebody say that to me on an iPhone.
We lost everything.
Oh, tell me more about why you didn't like it.
You know, I know it doesn't feel good to when we go share that with our client.
But it's what the buyer said.
And if I have 50 quotes from buyers saying stuff along the same lines, like
your UI UX is just weird.
It's hard to follow.
It looks outdated.
Can you accept it and just that in a healthy way and say, this is something
we should go address or you get defensive and angry and blame the person who
signed up the win loss provider and stuff like that.
So it's a funny thing that we see where companies that have a healthy,
productive, mature cultures that want to get better that that work collabor
atively
together.
Don't blame the don't weaponize this type of buyer feedback.
They get so much value out of it.
And the ones that are immature and don't work well together, well, they're not
going to do well either way because they can't get along.
But they end up with real problems when they're not willing to listen to buyers
because of their egos.
How do you view your company website?
Much of the goal of our company website is this education piece.
Right.
Like who are we?
What do we do?
We obviously want to capture them in there.
We obviously want to allow people to engage with us and get the information
they want.
But we very much do it as a way to educate people.
So much of it is educational about the value of one loss with the ability for
people
to engage with us to learn more.
But it's, you know, one day it'd be sweet when we can drive this market more to
allow
people to just immediately engage directly with the product and move from there
So that's the direction we want to go.
We still like we feel like we're still in kind of the education space.
All right.
Let's get to our final segment.
Quick hits.
These are quick questions and quick answers just like how quickly
qualified helps companies generate pipeline.
You can tap into your grant and create a SSA, your website to identify your
most
valuable visitors and instantly start sales conversations.
Quick and easy.
Just like these questions, go to qualified.com to learn more.
Quick hits.
Spencer, are you ready?
Yep.
Let's do it.
Do you have a hidden talent or skill that's not on your resume?
People of clothes would tell you that I'm really good at analogies.
You probably see me here.
My mind thinks like crazy.
Like I'm always trying to tie this to something else that I've seen or
experienced.
I thought it was smoked meats.
Yep.
Yes.
Exactly.
Do you have a favorite podcast, a book, TV show, something that you recommend?
I really like the all in podcast.
I think that's really cool.
The Wall Street Journal podcast, like it's like 15 minute quick.
Snippets, biggest stuff happening today.
I listen to that a lot.
A favorite TV show.
I have.
I really like Ted Lasso.
I really like Ted Lasso.
I didn't think I would like it because I'm kind of more into the.
I want to go see something kind of crazy or dark about like, you know, really
messed up for stuff that happens in the world.
For whatever reason, I like that stuff.
But Ted Lasso has been pretty awesome.
What is your best advice for someone who is heading up a to man, Jen team?
Keep it simple.
Keep it simple, right?
It's about.
How are we going to go be really clear on the strategy of what you want to do
and how you're going to measure it, right?
Like, demand, Jen is one of those terms.
The, I don't know if you agree with the tsunami, but to me, it's one of those
terms that has 50 freak in different meetings, depending on.
Oh, 100%.
Be clear about what your objectives are and the and how you're going to measure
them and then go do that.
Because if you are clear about it,
you will have people in the organization that are thinking that you're doing it
You're supposed to be doing more or less and that creates confusion.
So because the that term is nebulous, you need to bring the specifics of what
your objectives are and how you're going to measure them and what you need from
other people.
And then you'll be successful because you can measure yourself against that.
100%.
Spencer, it's been awesome having you on the show.
Obviously, our listeners have learned a bunch about when loss and they can go
to close.com.
We'll link it up in the show notes to learn more.
It's super cool.
I'm very, very glad that we got a chance I've got on the show because it's so
timely and relevant for exactly where we're at in this crazy, crazy time.
Any final thoughts, anything to plug?
Yeah, thanks for having me.
And this has been great.
Realize it that what I've been talking about might be new or something you've
thought about before as a marketing leader.
If you're interested in learning more, obviously, you can go to close.com.
One of the best ways to learn about this is to just do it.
So if you go to free buyer interview.com, just free buyer interview.com.
That's a place where you can engage with us and have us actually go check and
go do some interviews on your behalf.
Right.
So if you have like a super painful deal from Q1 that you got that your company
lost and you're like, I wonder what happened.
And I wonder, I thought we were going to win it.
Like we'll go track that down for you and help you figure that out and do it on
your behalf so that you can.
Learn why so go for that.
Happy to do it.
Also, honestly, feel free to reach out to me.
I love talking to folks and here in the frontline battles, battles, a meter, a
resource to people.
So feel free to email me.
It's just Spencer at close.com.
Happy to always be a resource to folks that are dealing with the challenges in
this environment.
We have a lot of lessons and expertise we can share.
Spencer, awesome having you on the show and thanks again.
Thanks, man.
Appreciate it.
[Music]