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Proof is what GTM leaders need to make fast and furious decisions that keep their businesses alive and thriving.
The Proof Point hosts conversations anchored in the reality of day-to-day life as a revenue leader. No algorithm-hacking, talk-track headlining buzz statements around here. We’re hosting conversations between GTM leaders so we can gather the facts and provide you with the tactics and tools you need to bulletproof your strategy.
Join host Mark Huber every other week as he invites the best GTM leaders into the conversation.
Allyson Havener [00:00:00]:
What's your goal? What's your end goal of what you're trying to do? And to your point, you're like this report supporting our company narrative. Like, why are we even doing this research in the first place? So how's like a. You know what you're trying to actually accomplish? I think the second thing is really okay, then how like, the designing of the survey is so important.
Mark Huber [00:00:21]:
You told both of my answers, but keep going.
Mark Huber [00:00:29]:
Here's what go to market teams are missing proof. That's what I think of every morning when I fire up LinkedIn and scroll through boring manifestos and endless lukewarm takes. Opinions are cheap and proof is gold. I'm Mark Huber, and this is the proof point, a show from user evidence that helps go to market teams find ideas, get frameworks, and swap tactics. Each episode includes an unfiltered discussion with the biggest names in B two B Saasden. To help find the proof points that I'm in search of, you'll learn from sales, marketing, and customer success leaders in the trenches, where I ask them seriously, what actually works for you. One of our guests actually told me this, felt like we were having drinks at a bar and talking about work without all the B's. And that pretty much sums it up on why I'm so excited for this new show.
Mark Huber [00:01:14]:
Join us every other week for new episodes. Hot takes always welcome.
Mark Huber [00:01:20]:
On today's episode of the Proofpoint, we're actually changing the format up because it's our podcast and we can do whatever we want. We just recently launched our evidence gap original research report, so we figured we could talk about our own report, what went into it, how we created it, and how we're using it in our marketing strategy. And then also have on Allison Havner. She's the SVP of marketing at Trustradius, and they came out with a very similar research report on the B two B buying disconnect. And we went back and forth for a while. We had a blast talking through some of our favorite stats, some of the things that surprised us the most, and how we're both using it as fuel on our marketing teams at user evidence and trust radius. Enjoy. All right, so, Allison, before we get started, I'm just going to get in front of this a little bit.
Mark Huber [00:02:06]:
Your voice is a little raspy, but I think that's because you had some fun this weekend. What were you doing this weekend?
Allyson Havener [00:02:11]:
I went to Austin city limits for the first time.
Mark Huber [00:02:15]:
It's always been on my bucket list, and I've never been. So give me the rundown. Who was amazing, who was not so amazing, and what was it like?
Allyson Havener [00:02:22]:
It was. Honestly, it was so fun. You know, you're like, in the music capital of the world and it's definitely not for the faint hearted, though. It's like, we went with my friends all three days and it's hot. It's like 90. It was like 97 one day. So I would say the insiders keep, like, hat sunscreen and always say hydrated, and they do a really good job of, like, hydration stations and things like that. But really, my, my top person, I think, was Chris Stapleton.
Allyson Havener [00:02:52]:
I'm actually not that big of a country fan. I know. Don't tell anybody in Austin. I know. Don't tell anybody in Austin that. I just, he's just so incredible. And he was just an amazing singer. And it was just, it was amazing.
Allyson Havener [00:03:05]:
And if you like, more of the DJ kind of vibe, we went to pretty lights and we went to du Lipa. I mean, honestly, you're walking 10 miles a day, and so that seems normal. It was. I honestly was looking at my step tracker each day because it's kind of like a walk to get into the actual festival. So then once you get in and we stayed at a house that was pretty close, so we just would, like, walking 10 miles a day. Like, it was. It was a lot.
Mark Huber [00:03:35]:
So you said a lot there. I think the craziest thing by far that you said is that you went all three days. So I'm going to out myself. I'm 34. I am not built for three days of a music festival anymore. And I've been to Coachella, I've been to La Palooza. I've been to some others, and that's impressive. And double that up with you being in Austin.
Mark Huber [00:03:56]:
Still, for a big event this week, like, you should win a, like a medal of honor or something. That's insane.
Allyson Havener [00:04:02]:
Honestly, I'm like, I'm, I'm 35, so I think I'm on my expiration date, too. With three day festivals. It might be my last one, but, yeah, I feel like it might be a little crash and burn after this week.
Mark Huber [00:04:17]:
All right, I'll have to do a wellness check whenever the is over. After all the events are done, before we get into it, today's going to be a little bit different of an episode. And I'm excited for this because, one, it's just you and I. Usually there's four total faces on the proof point, and two, we're going to be talking about some original research that you and your team did at Trust radius and then some original research that we recently published at user evidence. And it's kind of all looking at a very similar topic, but we also found a some different angles to that. So I gotta ask, how big of a beast was this thing to put together at Trustradius?
Allyson Havener [00:05:00]:
So this is our 8th year running this report, and I've been at Trustradius for three years. And so this actually was the most, I would say, organized. I've taken it over and I was kind of getting my head wrapped around original research that wasn't really in my wheelhouse as a marketer. And so, and we have a research team in house that is constantly surveying buyers, understanding what they want, like their expectations, how that's evolving over time, because that's how essentially we build trust radius when we know what type of content to put on there, or we know how buyers want to engage with vendors, and then we use that to help vendors, obviously better engage with their target audience. So this was already like a muscle that was built at trust radius. And then really we took that original research and we were like, how does this fuel essentially our marketing strategy for the year?
Mark Huber [00:06:01]:
Love that. So we'll get into the fueling of the marketing strategy and really the behind the scenes look at how you created this and how you're using it across all of your channels the second half. But before we get into the specifics of your research and then our research at user evidence, what does the b two B brand crisis mean? Just to kind of level set?
Allyson Havener [00:06:22]:
Yeah. So what we noticed is we started to see these trends over time. And two things that have been like, really standing out is, one, the generational divide that's happening. And like most buyers identify as millennials and Gen Z, and they are also probably the most skeptical. They've grown up, they're digitally native, they are social. They have grown up with all of that. And so that trend. And then you also have the B two C side of the house, which is they get all this product information up front, they read reviews, they talk to their peers, and that's all transcending into b two B.
Allyson Havener [00:07:08]:
And so when you look at those two things, the brand crisis is really people thinking about not thinking about brand and not thinking about how people want to align themselves to brands these days. And so you have this really skeptical audience that has again been so influenced by the B two C world. And at the same time, vendors are really lagging when it comes to the brand that they're building the trust that they're building, and you're seeing like that big disconnect now. And so we're calling it that brand crisis is because there's so much, and you see also in the report, there's so much investment in kind of bottom funnel tactics that people are just really ignoring the brand part and being in that mind share that they need to actually be top of mind for their buyers.
Mark Huber [00:07:57]:
So you mentioned B two C, I think a couple times there, and I think from my perspective, that's all true. But also us in B two B, we've been burned so many times by purchasing decisions that we've made when we've believed what the vendors have told us or maybe we didn't do enough due diligence or we trusted whatever generic case studies they gave us. So I think it's definitely a combination of the two and just all the scrutiny that people who are buying new technology in 2024 are under right now.
Allyson Havener [00:08:28]:
Absolutely. And I think that if you like, the tech scene is completely oversaturated. It's so difficult to understand what are the requirements when you're even assessing technology. It's like, what are my requirements? What are the use cases I want to power? And that's why a, people are so skeptical, but they're also so risk adverse, and they'll just stay with the status quo. You saw that a lot in the data from the report. They'll just stay with the status quo because they're not going to get fired for that. But if you go and you buy this, you know, $100,000 technology and it doesn't live up to what you actually needed it to do, we're not really in a state these days that you could be wasting that type of money. I mean, even smaller purchases.
Allyson Havener [00:09:11]:
Right. And so that risk aversion is really, really challenging for people because they have to overcome that. Like that trust gap, right. And then they have to prove out that ROI or that renewal, you're essentially selling chert as well.
Mark Huber [00:09:30]:
So we'll get into the specifics of how we each set up the research reports in a sec just to define our research at user evidence. So we called it the evidence gap report. And essentially what we did was we surveyed 619 total people across three b, two b buyers, sellers, and marketers. And we had about, I think it was like 20 ish questions per group. And then the unique hook to all of this was we tried to ask as many questions as possible that were consistent across all three groups so you could see how those three different groups thought about either how good or maybe how bad they were doing on certain topics. And when we first saw the data, which we'll get into here in a little bit, my brain kind of started to explode, mostly out of frustration and a little bit of anger, because it just shows that we are not on the same page right now between buyers, sellers and marketers, 100%.
Allyson Havener [00:10:33]:
When we looked at the data. So we surveyed, I think there was a little over 2000 buyers, and we kind of slice the, slice and dice the data. We can do it by. We looked at it, you know, by company size, purchase price and titles. And what you see is the inner, like, there's. There's not a lot of differences between enterprise and kind of the mid market ish. Like, there's just gaps. Like, it doesn't.
Allyson Havener [00:10:59]:
Like, it was interesting to see that. And then what we also looked at it. So you're looking at, like, okay, these are the buyers expectations. This is what their mindset is. This is how they want to interact with the vendor. And then you look at marketing, like, go to market strategies that people are implementing. What they think of is, like, effective, and there's just, like, complete disconnects, which is why we call it the b two b. Buying disconnect is because we're essentially analyzing.
Allyson Havener [00:11:26]:
Okay, hey, this is where you're missing the mark in terms of reaching your buyer. And it sounds like your report. You know, it's like, it's difficult to pull those data sets together, and then you have to go and tell people the bad news. You're like, you're still missing the mark, and what are the changes that you need to make? But it's definitely difficult to do that.
Mark Huber [00:11:50]:
So we'll run through a couple different stats from each of the two reports, but what would you say was your favorite stat that you found and then most eye opening stat, and maybe those are one in the same.
Allyson Havener [00:12:04]:
Yeah. So I think when I look at the stats, or what I thought was, like, most interesting was what buyers wish was different about the buying cycle. And when you looked at it, it was like, the number one thing is that they wanted to see pricing up front.
Mark Huber [00:12:20]:
Oh, I hope my. I hope my boss, my CEO is listening to this. Evan, please, Alison, keep talking.
Allyson Havener [00:12:27]:
It's just. It's just incredible. But, like, it makes. So it's such a, like, aha. Moment, but it's also just. It's so basic, but, like, we just don't. We don't do those things. Pricing is super complicated, especially when you get into the enterprise.
Allyson Havener [00:12:40]:
And we've worked with our customers to put pricing on their product page and we put ranges. We help strategize with them of how to approach giving some kind of information around pricing, because that's what buyers want. The second thing is, is they really, really dislike when salespeople reach out before they're ready to even engage with them again. You go back to the millennials and people that are digitally native, they do all this research and they, they're not even reaching out to you. They do all this research before ever even engaging with your sales team. The third thing was, is they wish that they could engage with more of their peers that have actually used the product, and then they wish that salespeople weren't so pushy. Again, like this. Like it all makes sense.
Mark Huber [00:13:27]:
That's a big wish, but keep going.
Allyson Havener [00:13:29]:
Yeah, yeah. And so I think when you see that, it's again, so obvious. And we are, we're all marketers, we all buy, we're sellers, we all buy technology. And so when you think about the way you want to approach things, and it's all the same, right. Those are the same ways that you have expectations with the vendors that you're talking to. So I think those were helpful, but they're also helpful to lead change within your organization, which I think is what I think both of these reports could help kind of go to market teams do.
Mark Huber [00:14:11]:
All right, before I rattle off my three favorite eye opening stats, can you expand a little bit on driving change within your, because I think that's a really interesting comment.
Allyson Havener [00:14:21]:
So it's actually what I'm going to be talking about tomorrow at Pavilions GTM Summit is around kind of like this, change management and alignment with your CRO and CMO to really meet buyer's expectations and change management is really, really difficult. But it starts with your CRO and your CRM like CMO being philosophically aligned about how you're going to engage your target audience, whether they're your current customers or your future customers. And to get philosophically aligned, you have to know what those expectations are and how they want to interact with you. And so we use this data in our own strategy sessions and we build our plan of how we're going to kind of approach the market at the CRO and CMO level. We build confidence. We circulate that with the organization, with the board, with the CEO. We get buy in and build confidence. And then from there we're like ruthless when it comes to okrs at trust radius.
Allyson Havener [00:15:24]:
And so like here's our strategy, here's our kind of company okrs, our business initiatives that we need to achieve and then we all have department okrs allowed her into that and that's how we really do change management is at the OKR level. But it all starts with being like philosophically aligned of how we're going to do it.
Mark Huber [00:15:45]:
Love that. Alrighty, so the first two that come to mind are easy for me. The one, it was one that we led with in the opening page of our report, it's that 90% of b two B sellers and marketers wish they could be providing more credible customer evidence. I think that was just so scary to me because its two functions, trying to persuade and influence buyers just straight up admitting and owning that they dont have the right proof points to be giving buyers and making them more confident. So that kind of made me feel like, I dont know, what are we doing here? Thought, why cant we provide better customer evidence for b two B buyers? That really stood out to me. And then I don't know if you've been feeling this lately. I've been seeing a lot of this. I feel like we're ten months into 2024 and influencer marketing has been all the rage this year.
Mark Huber [00:16:40]:
But I see influencers talking all about products on LinkedIn right now and you can kind of see through who is actually using the product and who is not. But one of the stats that we found was that if you looked at how marketers thought, or I guess, the influence that influencers had from marketers compared to what buyers actually think, 38% of marketers thought that influencers were a trustworthy source compared to, I think it was like 26% b two B buyers. And it just showed to me that the marketers think that b two B influencers are all of the rage right now and where they should be spending a lot of their money, whereas buyers don't really see b two B influencers in the same light.
Allyson Havener [00:17:27]:
And, you know, the influencer marketing and things like that, I get it. But like your customer voice is your last competitive frontier. Like nobody can copy your customer voice because that is proprietary to you. And I talk about that a lot because I think again, it's like, oh well, yeah dad, like your customers are influencers. In our report we looked at what was the number one thing when reading customer reviews that people want to see. The main thing that they want is somebody that's relatable to them. I want to see my peer that a company like mine, and then the review content like so what are they actually writing about? Kind of to your point where you have these influencers that aren't really using the product and they're not really saying anything that valuable. And so we really look at the, so buyers want really good in depth review content and they want it from somebody that's like them.
Allyson Havener [00:18:23]:
Which totally makes sense. When we talk to vendors that have all of this like review content, we're like, don't be, you know, don't be cherry picking your best customers because most people read three star reviews because those are the ones that are like in the middle. They're not like some, you know, five star promoter and they're not someone that's a detractor that's just like super pissed off about, you know, whatever. And so most people read three star reviews.
Mark Huber [00:18:52]:
That's actually what I read and I was laughing in total agreement by the way. I would say that the biggest stat, and we did not doctor this stat at all because it totally supports our value prop at user evidence. But 67% of buyers said that the most important thing that they need to make a buying decision is a compelling statistically backed business case with hard ROI and numbers. And that has been something that as a marketer for a while now, ive always struggled to capture and havent really had the means to figure out how to do that at scale. So it was pretty interesting that in todays economic climate that buyers, that is truly what they care about right now with all this scrutiny that theyre under and so many vendors just aren't doing that adequately at the moment.
Allyson Havener [00:19:40]:
You know, when you think about like your own customer kind of marketing programs, we have a, it's called customer spotlights. So we like rebranded that. Of course we're we mortgage marketers so we always like to like change up the names of stuff but we call it a spotlight to not make it so scary as like a case study.
Mark Huber [00:19:58]:
And we did the same thing.
Allyson Havener [00:20:00]:
Yes, perfect. Yes. Like it's not scary. It's not a case study but, and you, you know, we started to build kind of like almost like a blueprint of like what are the stats of like success. But what you realize is that people have a lot of different definitions of what success is and what success is to their organization. And so I think the flexibility of what those success metric is and telling the story is really, really helpful for people and we really make it about that person and what they were doing. So it's like really about like kind of like the process, what they did. Obviously you have to have those success metrics in there, but they're all so different because people are looking at different things and how that ladders into like their bottom line and everybody wants those hard dollars.
Allyson Havener [00:20:51]:
But sometimes it's like you can't get to that per se. But this is like, it's not just a, you know, zero. Like if we didn't get to pipeline and close one, we're not going to do it. It's like, well, it's a journey. Like there's a lot that goes into getting to that bottom line and getting to that actual revenue. And so we've kind of like, I guess, more open minded about how we tell that ROI story. And I think if you approach that with your customers, you know, you can start to really build some valuable content.
Mark Huber [00:21:22]:
I'll think of myself as a buyer and as a marketer. The biggest issue that I have with most of the ROI data that I see out there from menders, as we know how the game is played, we know how they pick those claims. You find the three craziest, outlier, successful customers that you have and then you say, hey, XYZ company can increase revenue, which is what most companies claim to do by 7000%. And you think about that claim, it's like, what was the starting point first off? And then two, I wouldn't go in front of my boss or CFO or really anyone on the leadership team and say, hey, if we buy this tool, we're going to increase ROI by some crazy just statistic that isn't even remotely close to being possible. I want those three star reviews. I want those average performing customers. I want to see what is the expected performance like the rest of your customer base is delivering on, not what your top three customers are doing, because it's just not believable at the end of the day.
Allyson Havener [00:22:28]:
Yeah, I totally agree with that. And I think going back to like, your original question around the brand crisis, but I think this kind of like this starts to weave into that. Because also if you think about the investment in brand and if you go to your CFO and you're okay, I'm going to buy something that is like a leader in this space. That ROI story is helpful, but you need it less because you have this leading brand, you've created this brand trust. That's really what people are going to. I think one of the other things that was interesting in the report is the shortlist. So we did a lot of like, we were like really interested around this like short, this idea of like the short list. So short lists on average now are only two to three products.
Allyson Havener [00:23:13]:
And 77% of buyers said that they just went with their original choice after the whole kind of research process. And so what you realize is what buyers are doing is like, I already know what I would need to buy. I just start to justify it now. Which is, again, which is why brand is so important, why building trust is so important. So customer evidence is a part of that brand, and your customer voice is a part of your, should be your brand voice as well. Right. And so a lot of the vendors or a lot of our customers, this is what we're really trying to push with them. Again, kind of going to that philosophy that we have.
Allyson Havener [00:23:53]:
But I think that if you start to kind of, if you look at the equation, it's like, okay, how do you build that brand trust? Because it's not just awareness, it's preference. And I think you do it through trust.
Mark Huber [00:24:04]:
Absolutely. And that was another thing that we found in our report as well that I found was pretty mind blowing, that, uh, the original question was, where do buyers typically begin their search for new software? And it was a multi select question type, so you could pick as many different sources of, like, where you typically start your search. By far, analyst reports were the number one source of where buyers typically begin their search. And I wonder is that because they're just trying to see, hey, who's up? And to the right? What is my short list of the two to three names that I should go have conversations with? And the stat that you just rattled off there, that blows my mind that oftentimes, whatever the original choice was that you think you were going to go with ends up being who you go with.
Allyson Havener [00:24:49]:
Yeah. And, you know, it's interesting because we looked at analyst reports too, and what we saw is kind of the same thing where it's like the analyst reports are where people are kind of getting an idea of what, like what the market, like who are the leaders in the market. And they do, like, the research, but what we noticed is then they're going, they're going a layer deeper and figuring out, again, kind of going back to the reviews is okay. But what's right for me, even though they're a market leader, maybe in this space, like there might be an, it's like an enterprise product versus an SM, some SMB or whatever your sophistication level is or whatever, you know. And so I think analyst reports are good for kind of like, okay, who's in the market? And who's like, who should I even start researching, and then they go that layer deeper. They're looking at reviews, they're looking at customer stories, they're looking at who your customers are, etcetera, to actually make, like, that ultimate decision. You know, as marketers, you're like, oh my gosh, you kind of have to do it. You have to do it.
Allyson Havener [00:25:48]:
All right.
Mark Huber [00:25:52]:
No, I'm with you. And I think there are definitely specific verticals where I think traditional analyst reports hold a whole lot more weight than other verticals. One that comes to mind is anything related to enterprise. It. I know that analyst reports are still very, very trusted source of information there. But for me, I've used that at times to narrow down the always overwhelming landscape of how many Martech tools are out there every single year. I honestly forget the exact number that it's up to right now. But let's say you have, I don't know, five to seven names that come to mind, and you look at one of those analyst reports and there's two or three that are in the, you know, the top right quadrant.
Mark Huber [00:26:35]:
That kind of saves you time that you really can't afford to waste in your evaluation process by whittling your list down.
Allyson Havener [00:26:41]:
Yeah, I think that time is a really interesting thing, too, when it comes to the buying cycle. We saw that, you know, on average in the enterprise, the sales cycles are twelve months at least. And you're like, okay, you have this year long sales cycle. At my last company, we only sold to the enterprise, and so we had to really back into, okay, how are we going to accelerate this? Our whole goal was deal acceleration. And so when I started our deal cycle with like 18 months, and by the end of it, we got it down to like seven, eight months. And so kind of to your point, it's like, what's going to do that?
Mark Huber [00:27:25]:
I'm looking at the chart in your report on the sales cycle, like, and I know we're moving up market at user evidence, but it does blow my mind that there are purchasing decisions where 18 to 24 people are involved. That was the highest value that you had in that chart. That's so many people that you have to win over and try to arm your champion to sell internally. Like, it's insane what it's turned into.
Allyson Havener [00:27:47]:
That's why it's so important in the market. And this kind of like marketing and sales alignment is just so important because there's, you need to multi thread so intensely, especially when you're selling to the enterprise. But also, if I always say this, there's a lot of debate, obviously, when it comes to attribution, but I think that if you're, if you have a really good brand, you're building that trust. When your sales team knocks on the door, people are going to answer, which is so important and really hard to do. But it's like you're kind of fighting over like, oh, our sales team is creating all this pipeline. It's like they wouldn't be be able to create pipeline if we didn't have all of this brand and trust and customer evidence, etcetera. So I think that's something to think about as well when you think about like, your sales and marketing philosophy.
Mark Huber [00:28:44]:
All right, so now that we've talked about a few of the stats, I'd love to hear how you and your team are using this in your own marketing at Trustradius, because our report created, by my estimates, about ten months worth of content and will fuel us for the foreseeable future. So how are you using this?
Allyson Havener [00:29:01]:
So this report is, it's like, and just like yours, like all this research, it's just a beast of, and so when you think about how you slice and dice this, we got a lot of input from our research team, obviously. So when we looked at the data and we build this whole report, we also start building out all the content streams. And like any good marketer, any piece of content should be at least ten to 20 pieces of content. So we actually partnered with Pavilion on the research as well. And also we worked with them to talk to, like different people. Like in the industry, we did a whole kind of LinkedIn, we like love LinkedIn lives. That's kind of like our, we didn't start a podcast. We didn't do that.
Allyson Havener [00:29:46]:
We like love LinkedIn lives because we're really, we like love social. And so we wanted to create a lot of that content and, but we wanted to get other people's opinion because you put this like, you know, if you're, you're interpreting the data. So we gave a lot of people some of the raw stats. We gave people the actual report, and we really wanted to understand what like, you know, other industry leaders, marketers in the, in the industry thought and kind of their take on it. And so we built like a whole content stream just kind of interviewing different people. The other thing that we did, and we just started this, is we really wanted to get more buyers kind of talking. So kind of to your point around, like it finance, HR. And so we go and we get kind of experts and leaders in different industries and want to understand.
Allyson Havener [00:30:33]:
Okay. Hey, like, what's going on in your industry? How are you approaching, you know, the challenges that you're facing, the use cases? What does your tech stack look like? Because everyone's trying to combat inefficiency and tech bloat and, you know, so we really use this report to kind of help guide those. We call them, like, buyer panels and those sessions. So, yeah, so it really helped us in terms of building out more content that was a derivative of the actual research.
Mark Huber [00:31:07]:
Love that. So you actually mentioned something that we did, and I promise I did not steal this from you, because I actually did not read your report until we were preparing for this podcast episode.
Allyson Havener [00:31:18]:
It sure comes out.
Mark Huber [00:31:19]:
I had this thought. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I had this thought at the end, because we were. We use Figma, so we're designing this in Figma, and this is enough time has passed, so I can talk about this now. With the last, like, week and a half was just utter, just insanity, trying to make sure that everything came out well. And we launched this with a bang. So, originally, we had Evan Huck, who I think was actually featured in your report. Right.
Mark Huber [00:31:44]:
You quoted him at some point. So Evan, and we love Evan Evans, was the only person who was quoted and commenting throughout the entire research report. And super smart guy, but the CEO of a company then, is the only person who's commenting on the stats and findings. It just felt way too biased for me. So I had this idea. I thought to myself, all right, we've had however many episodes at that point in time of the podcast. Let's go reach out to all of those people and then prompt them based on their background. So we had sellers, a few different types of marketers, and a few CEO's comment on specific stats that we polled.
Mark Huber [00:32:28]:
And I thought that they would find most interesting. And then we turned their quotes and responses to those findings into social proof or evidence about the evidence that we found in our research report. So that all came together, really in the last week and a half ish. And I probably got, I don't know, somewhere in the range of, like, five to ten LinkedIn DM's and comments total. How that lended so much more credibility to the report itself, because all the people commenting weren't actually user evidence employees and didn't really have a hidden agenda that they might be pushing if it was just the CEO.
Allyson Havener [00:33:05]:
Yeah, no, I totally agree with that. And that was, again, it's better when someone else says it. It's what they say about when you. When you're not in the room that, you know, they say that all the time, and I truly believe it. And I think it, you know, like I said, data, this type of data can be interpreted. And so it's good to give others in the industry and get their opinion and circulate that because you don't want to be in a. What is it called, the sound chamber.
Mark Huber [00:33:35]:
Is that the right echo chamber?
Allyson Havener [00:33:37]:
Echo chamber.
Mark Huber [00:33:37]:
Or sit on the LinkedIn echo chamber too often? Which echo chamber needs to stop doing.
Allyson Havener [00:33:43]:
Don't even give me credit on that. Yeah. One thing you'll notice about me, I don't ever get sayings, right, like, or like any kind of saying. I try to.
Mark Huber [00:33:51]:
My team is just like, usually that person.
Allyson Havener [00:33:54]:
Yeah, I am. Like, it's the worst, but for some reason I still try.
Mark Huber [00:34:01]:
The best is when you combine different sayings that have totally unrelated meanings behind the two of them and you start using interchangeably. Because I do that from time to time. So we just hired a senior content marketing manager who I'm super excited about, but one of the first things that she's doing is putting together pretty legit plan on how we're going to turn this long 30 page report into eight to ten months worth of content. But while she's working on that, one of the things that we did was we worked with a content agency, beam content. We've already created at least another, I think, somewhere in the range of like, four to six months worth of blog content that we're taking from this report itself. So I think that's one of the easiest things for us to do when it comes to repurposing. And then our social media manager, she's a freelancer and she's the best. Katie Cooper, she was basically, like, drooling at how much content this report created for her because this was our first real piece of content that I would say truly supported our overall narrative as a company and reinforced a lot of what we're pushing from a messaging perspective.
Mark Huber [00:35:11]:
So she could probably just take this and run with it for almost the next year. And then one of my favorite parts in all of this was the story within a story. So I printed out physical copies of this report for two reasons. One, to bring to an event that we were at. We were at exit five's drive event last month, and I wanted to bring physical copies to the people that I was interviewing. We did way too many video interviews in two days, and then I had a couple leftover copies, and I brought it with to our board meeting the following week. In Boulder. And once we got to the marketing update and I had handed out the printed old school copies, I had to go to FedEx like an old school project and get them bounded.
Mark Huber [00:35:56]:
And it was crazy expensive. One of our board members looked at this thing and he started thumbing through it and he looks up and he goes, this is like a lot of content, isn't it? I go, yeah, this is going to be the fuel for everything that we do. Won't be the only thing that we do. But, you know, starting with a super long form rich research asset like this, it just turns into so many more different pieces. Especially for a small marketing team like ours.
Allyson Havener [00:36:23]:
Yeah, I mean, you can slice and dice. I mean, we turned it into social posts. We like all the, all the stats, all the chart, like the charts alone are like amazing. And to distribute and create social copy, one thing that we did is we created a media kit. And so one thing is like, we, we never gate the report. We always, we turn it into a blog format. We have a PDF, everything just goes straight so we don't date it. And I know there's a lot of debate on that, on like gating, not gating, whatever, but we're like, just, we just want mass distribution.
Allyson Havener [00:36:57]:
And so the other thing though is like, again, if you, when we were talking about change management and helping vendors take this information and help lead change at their organization, so we created a media kit that has all the charts, like some of like the blurbs, social content, all of that, so people can go and you don't have to, it's the worst when you're like, oh, what was that stat that I wanted for this, like to prove a point and you have to screenshot it and it's like the ugliest thing. So we like created this whole media kit for it. We created like slides. So like, if you just wanted some slides for like your sko or something like that, we created slides and stuff. And so we put it all in this media kit. And actually at first, like, we were so surprised about how much traffic it got. We just started having all these stats of like, which images were downloaded. So we started it last year and it helped us actually craft the survey for this year because we're like, what was the things that people were most interested in? Because it's kind of hard to gauge that when you have this big, dense report.
Allyson Havener [00:38:04]:
But what we did is we looked at our media kit to see what content people were engaging with most. And then that helped kind of shape the direction that we took the next, uh, we took the report that following year.
Mark Huber [00:38:15]:
All right, I'm going to borrow that from you. We created a launch kit, really, for any of the, I hate the term influencers, but the, the influencers that we featured in the reports itself and then all of our own internal employees at user evidence and LinkedIn, especially organic LinkedIn, is probably more competitive than it's ever been for B. Two B SaaS companies. So we knew we needed to figure out a way to stand out on launch day. And I think one of the coolest things, looking back about the entire launch was I was very clear with employees that if you just copy and paste the same exact post, and everyone at user evidence, we're not super big. We have like 30 something employees post the same thing. LinkedIn is going to throttle the reach down of all those posts and nobody's going to see it. So what we did instead of, and this worked really well, was we had a few different prompts for employees to then get them thinking about how to write something that's in their own words, still hits on the same, you know, two, three messages that we want them to hit on, but then also puts their own spin on it, shows off their personality.
Mark Huber [00:39:25]:
And I'm going to make this stat up, but I would say, like, at least 80% to 90% of the posts, it felt like from our own employees, were completely written in their own words. And that's coming from a company who's early stage, doesn't have a whole lot of people who are out there active on LinkedIn, but seeing them do that and then seeing some of the influencers that we had featured also post on launch day and the week that followed, that gave us some ammo to use in LinkedIn thought leader ads that we're running right now. So the social push was pretty amazing. And I, we had, I think it was like 700 plus downloads within first. I think it was the first four days off of a week, one launch goal of 100 downloads. And in that board meeting two weeks after, I said, I've done this a couple of times before. If you asked me before the launch if we were going to get that many downloads in the first week, I would tell you, no way, like, you're out of your mind. And it really surprised me, it surprised our board, it surprised our co founders, and I don't know, it was a big moment for us from a marketing perspective and some extra validation for us that, hey, I think we might be onto something here with this evidence gap problem.
Allyson Havener [00:40:38]:
Yeah, you know, it's really interesting too, is we actually use a lot of the stats in our sales deck. So kind of to your point, like this is like our narrative. This is, this is like the proof points around our narrative. And so I think it's amazing to get, you know, that story around getting your team really rallying behind it because like we start to embed a lot of these stats into our sales deck and it really helps, I think, for people to get behind it and it helps people be on message. So I, that's amazing. And it's good to get like all that organic reach, but I really, I think that it's a lot of work and you, we've talked about this for a little bit. It's a ton of work. It's super intimidating.
Allyson Havener [00:41:23]:
But if you really put the time and effort and build the whole year content strategy around it and all the distribution channels of that, it's really worth it. And so congrats. That's awesome that you guys been your first report. That's great.
Mark Huber [00:41:40]:
Yeah, well, it's great, but it's also bad because now we set the bar way too high. So the next piece of content is like, all right, 701 in 24 hours. Where are we? And no, it's a good problem to have. So for people who are listening, I think original research is all the rage right now. And a lot of people just don't really know where or how to get started. Trustradius has been at this for, I think you said eight years now. What's the biggest learning that you can share from your experience for people who are trying to dip their toes in original research content?
Allyson Havener [00:42:11]:
So I think the main thing is, one is kind of to your point earlier where it's like, what's your goal? What's your end goal of what you're trying to do? And to your point, you're like this report supporting our company narrative. Like, why are we even doing this research in the first place? So how what you're trying to actually accomplish, I think the second thing is really okay, then how, like, the designing of the survey is so important.
Mark Huber [00:42:39]:
I told both of my answers, but keep going.
Allyson Havener [00:42:44]:
Yeah. So the designing of the survey is just like so important. And then the distribution, the audience, we're really lucky, like at trust radius because millions of buyers come to trust radius. We're constantly engaging with them and so that audience is pretty easy for us to go and survey. And also we have all the marketers and sellers that we work with. So we have two really big audiences. When I've done research in the past and like, we, we worked with an agent at my last company that I worked at, we had to work with an agency, and it was just difficult because it's just slower when it's not in house. But if you don't have, like, those core capabilities of mass distribution to the right audience, somebody that knows how to build survey data and do the like analysis of that, you're going to have a hard time doing it on your own.
Mark Huber [00:43:34]:
Could not agree more on the survey design note, I got to lean more on Evan and Ray, the two co founders of user evidence because of their survey design experience from a company called Tech validate and then from SurveyMonkey and then the other big thing that supports what you just said. So I had done this previously at my last company for, I think we did it for three years. I was there. We just looked at our customer data and we anonymized everything. But we would run the data, pull the reports, and then just try to figure out what to say. And I know it's a little bit different because we were at the mercy of whatever platform data we could collect, but there really was just a random assortment of stats and findings, and it didn't roll up to a big overall message. What we did differently here with our report was we just had an actual hypothesis that we were trying to prove out from the different surveys that we ran. And having that did us wonders because then it had so much more structure around the information in the report and what it was showing.
Mark Huber [00:44:44]:
Not just, you know, 35 random stats that you read it. You're like, yeah, I learned something, but I don't really know what it was rolling up to in its entirety.
Allyson Havener [00:44:53]:
Yeah, yeah, I think it's like that core theme, and like we always, like I said, we always tie, it's always called the b two b by disconnected because it's, at its core, is still analyzing those differences between buyers and marketer or, yeah, buyers and marketers. But you have to have a core theme of, like, what's the point? Like, what am I, if I, like, if I just walked away, what, what is that point that I'm trying to make? Because that's essentially the data is just supporting the ultimate, like, takeaways that you're trying to drive for your audience. And that's so important because you're right. Like, if you're just throwing a bunch of data at people, you know, I was like, what? Like, you have to have someone that can tell the story. You have to tell a story.
Mark Huber [00:45:35]:
All right, last question and then we'll wrap up. What was the funniest, craziest, most outrageous thing that happened for you all and your team during this year's report? Because I feel like there's always something and I'll share mine as well.
Allyson Havener [00:45:49]:
Oh, that's such a good question. My head of integrated marketing, Christy Gamboni, who I think, you know, she is amazing and she is, she runs at like 100 miles an hour. And I thought I worked fast. I felt like I was like, I'm on top of it. And she runs circles around me. But I think that the craziest thing that happened, well, one of the, actually, one of the things, when we sent out the survey, this is like a big mistake that we made. We did like a little incentive for people to actually take the survey, but we couldn't figure out how to, like, we messed it up when we sent it and we couldn't track, like, who, like, who actually completed it and what's, like, not fraud and stuff. So we had to, like, there was all this back end work that we had to do.
Allyson Havener [00:46:34]:
And we have like a huge, we have a moderate, a review moderation team. So I had to get our review moderation team to, like, help us get into this survey and figure out, like, who actually completed it properly, what was it? Fraud. Who got the incentive, and we totally, like, messed that all up. And then our review moderation team was like, next time we're going to beat me at etching this. And I was like, okay, sorry. And they're on my team. They reported to me and I was like, oh, my God, how did I, like, not think of this? So also, something to think about in your surveys is, like, how you're going to distribute it, how you make sure that you're not getting a bunch of fraud because there's, especially if you're doing an incentive, something very important to think about.
Mark Huber [00:47:17]:
So two things that I'll wrap up. So the first thing is we have a very small marketing team. At the time, we had myself and Alex Eaton, our director of product marketing and some agency and freelancer help. And on launch day, as you can imagine, it was a lot of craziness and pits in my stomach and just hoping that it all worked and went off well. So ten minutes before we're about to start promoting this on LinkedIn, really turning everything on, I think to myself, I don't know, why don't I just go through the HubSpot workflow one more time? Well, good thing I did, because when I went through the HubSpot workflow, I'd cloned it from a different content download that had absolutely nothing to do with this research report. So it was about to trigger a follow up email from me with something completely different related to what they were downloading. So that was a nice little, like, ten minute before we launched it. And then the other thing.
Mark Huber [00:48:13]:
So I haven't printed anything and bound it probably in 20 years, if not longer. Probably like high school. So when I went into the FedEx store in Chicago, around the corner from me, I printed, I think it was 15 total copies of the cheapest of everything. So just basic color printing, both sides, the basic binding, the basic laminate, and I had to have it rush printed to have it done in two days. Guess how much it was for 15.
Allyson Havener [00:48:44]:
Reports it had been like $1,000 or something like that, right?
Mark Huber [00:48:50]:
It was like $600.
Allyson Havener [00:48:51]:
Oh. So I asked, still.
Mark Huber [00:48:55]:
Still a little bit crazy, but I asked a couple people internally what they thought it would cost. And, like, I don't know, like $75. I'm like, no, it's way more expensive than that. So they brought me back to my high school projects and waiting until the last minute, like I still do at 34, to print things out. But that's another podcast episode. All right, we are at time. Thank you for joining me, especially after your weekend and the big week that you have down in Austin for the pavilion event. This was definitely a blast, and thank you for putting together this original research.
Mark Huber [00:49:27]:
This was pretty inspiring.
Allyson Havener [00:49:29]:
Yeah, thank you, Mark, for having me. This was super.