Interview with David Lewis

Hi this is Bob Samuels I’m founder of Techconnector, TechConnectr is a
marketplace in a campaign management platform of best-of-breed account based
marketing lead gen solutions helping marketers
deliver highly targeted quality leads for their sales teams we’ve partnered
with the b2b marketing expo to bring you wisdom from leading account based
marketing thought leaders to that end I’m proud to introduce David Lewis
Founder and CEO of Demandgen a leading marketing automation consulting firm hi
David how are you today good thanks for having me Bob appreciate
the time together yeah it’s nice to reconnect it’s it’s always a pleasure to
speak with you looking so talking you at the b2b MX which is the topic I guess
the day for us absolutely so February 25th to 27th it’s going to be
outstanding and I understand you’re going to be presenting the keynote on
agents of change I am you know this is we have we’ve done the event either
attended or participated from a Content perspective for all of them and I think
that you know Andrew and Sal do a really great job I’m always asked by our
clients hey what events should I go to next year
when they start the planning process and this has been one that I consider now
table stakes because of you know the content that they have and the format of
it a lot of the events are super expensive for one thing and I think that
you know when when you’re paying as much money for some of the conference’s that
you go to you know you’re setting this mental bar that I’d really better walk
away with some great stuff and what I always hear that’s wonderful about this
conference is the cost is very reasonable to go the venues wonderful
and yet they it exceeds their expectations because the content is very
very solid it’s not salesy it’s not pitchy it’s it’s very educational and
very prescriptive especially the workshops on Monday it’s good
and I can I can double that I’ve been to dozens and dozens of events and this the
b2 BMX is one of my absolute favorites it was great
very happy with it so I’m excited and look forced and I understand your groups
also gonna be reading a account based marketing and lead management workshop
guys I started telling Andrew and those guys we’ve known each other for a decade
now um and I told them look anytime you want help with content whether it’s
training workshops or participation let me know and he said you know Dave you’ve
you know I’ve consulted with him about the strategy from the book that I’m
working on called agents of change and told him some of the content from it and
he said you know I think it is the perfect keynote if you would be
interested in doing that on Monday so I said absolutely and so Monday afternoon
and I’ll be doing the keynote which is entitled agents of change and I know
that every marketer and salesperson will get value and walk away with a lot of
thoughts about 2019 and how they’re approaching customer experience and then
we’ll Wahoo’s one of our senior consultants he is leading a workshop on
Monday which is on ABM and lead management and happy to talk to both of
those today so what kind of changes are you seeing well you know the agents of
change book that I’m working on and what I’ve encapsulated into the keynote it is
really geared towards people thinking about are they an agent of change and
what’s interesting that we see in so many of our engagements is that you have
almost two personas you have the people who come into a company and they’re new
excuse me just finishing up getting over a week and a half of cold they’re these
they’re new they’re the new sheriff in town and because they’re new in the
organization they’re expected to bring around change dramatic change and people
look to them for what they are now thinking of doing and how to take the
company in new and exciting directions whereas people that have been around for
a while when they reach out to us or are looking for consulting or input on their
marketing technology or sales technology or methodologies they feel like
something’s not going well but they’re also really hesitant because a lot of
times a team that’s in place are the teams that worked on those things so
there’s this caution there’s like what we we we know things aren’t ideal and we
need to improve things but how do we go about bring about change you know
telling people hey we got to move that cheese we got a we got to redo this so a
lot of the book really helps not only paint a picture of what it takes to be
an agent of change and bring about change in your organization whether
that’s your team or as a leader of an entire organization but also what’s
happening out there these days and the dramatic changes that have taken place
in the digital era so people will walk away from my session thinking about
customer experience and whether they are delighting their customers and what it
takes to do that but what the expectations of people are today as
buyers but also how to be that agent of change and and really where you need to
focus your efforts from the sales and marketing perspective again in in this
era wonderful wonderful and so what kind of
what kind of technology are you working with as far as enabling the change agent
well all of the b2b companies that we work with you know table stakes or
things like marketing automation you know they’re using one of the leading
marketing automation systems they have CRM and by the way we find that for
those that are using CRM if they picked one of the leading CRM is like a
salesforce.com they’re set up for success or even you know a system like
Microsoft Dynamics when they try to take a less expensive route or a less
conventional route they end up really struggling so marketing can struggle
because the marketing automation system is not as well integrated with the CRM
as some of those other platforms that I mentioned and vice versa the sales team
is not receiving the benefit of the sales enablement technologies and and
you know really true synchronization between a CRM and marketing automation
but those platforms are table stakes and I got to say like everybody coming to
the BTB MX has those systems already in place what they’ve probably also
invested in is a range instead of technologies you know their Mahr tech
stack and what we’re finding today bob is that you know there’s there’s been a
little bit too much of a spending spree over the past four or five years and the
processes for buying and selecting technology have not really been well
followed so there’s been random acts of investments and in tool sets and so
we’re spending a lot of time these days helping companies assess their stack
figure out which of those tools they should sunset and move away from and
which some of the tools that have been enhanced so dramatically that they’re
not fully leveraging and possibly even overlapping with other tools where they
can consolidate and so there’s just a lot of that going on which is which is
great and it’s it’s good for companies to recognize that there needs to be a
greater discipline for the selection and deployment and use of both mar tech and
and sales tech so well well you introduced you know dimension as helping
people with marketing automation with which may be a legacy positioning or
something that’s out there today we’re really helping people with with
full-stack marketing and making sure that that sales marketing and service
customer service because so much of customer service today is being done
online is all really well stitched together and all those components work
as one seamless infrastructure beautiful so I know you’ve had some
great experiences consulting with people and educating and learning from
different b2b brands and leaders who can you can you give some examples of some
of the the leaders who have driven change in their organization really well
oh I mean that we’d have to spend a very long time together to go through a whole
bunch but let me let me hit a couple you know one company that I’m really glad
that we’ve been working with over the past year is paychecks right now that’s
not a new brand name for you right you know they’ve they’ve been around for
a long time very successful sales driven culture and over the last year they’ve
invested in marketing technology tools they’ve also invested in the education
and training of their marketing team to really embrace and use these tools and a
company that really drove all of its success and all of its revenue from a
pretty large army of salespeople is now working much better between sales and
marketing not only from an infrastructure perspective but from a
process perspective and you know talk about being an agent of change Maureen
over there the CMO and her team which is Michelle and airy you know really had to
work very closely to build trust and rapport with the sales team and say hey
you know the way that we’re going to market let’s let’s take a look at what
we might want to do in this digital era of transformation let’s take a look at
our click to close process and think about who owns what and how we’re gonna
work together as one team and drive as much revenue and growth as possible and
let’s not also forget about our install base because so much of their revenue is
based on those clients renewing every year and you’ve got the bar is so high
these days I mean what matters most is customer experience and I’m gonna be
talking a lot about that in the keynote and these guys really get that and so
are they at the end of their journey know the journey never ends
but they are in massive transformation and already seeing the impact that’s
happening from their nurture programs and from you know the the systems that
they have now really optimized and put in place from the lead scoring
perspective and getting into ABM you know they’re they’re putting their
reports and dashboards together where they can now show better than ever
marketing’s contribution and impact to not only revenue but also the impact of
this transformation so they’re one great example Bob and like I said I’ve got a
lot for you also seeing what what is very nice is the better adoption of
tools all right as I said earlier these shopping sprees so we’ve got a lot of
our clients that take a much more disciplined approach in the rolling out
of things like lead scoring sales enablement and ABM and recognizing that
these are not set it and forget it projects these are ones that need
constant sales training and coaching and adoption because you can’t just you know
just like we never should have thrown leads over the fence to sales and wish
them good luck all right we can’t put tools and technology out there so that a
lot of clients that are doing a great job with the use and adoption of tools
on the sales perspective right because sales is you know from your background
sales is an entry point for new leads and new contacts right they’ve got tools
today or they can enrich and add to the database and we’ve got to make sure that
marketing sales works well together when when we’re adding records to the
database and adding personas and segments that we can we can target so
this past year we work with about a hundred different companies and most all
of our clients are large enterprises we’ve been leaving blessed to work with
really the who’s who and in technology very impressed with all the work that
LinkedIn has done over the years CenturyLink has also done a phenomenal
job CenturyLink is incredibly strong with data which is a topic we could
spend a lot of time on I mean they take data very seriously because they know
that data management and data operations when done well is gonna drive tremendous
insights and impact into better marketing and better selling so I give I
give Scott Burns and Kate the great credit for all the work that they do and
their passion for for data beautiful so so tell us a little bit about the ABM
and lead management workshop how’s that going how’s that going to roll out
what’s a quick look and someone expect you know anyone attending
workshop and I would encourage anyone to attend that workshop that they fall into
to two areas one if ABM is new to them and I don’t mean the acronym I mean the
discipline of you know establishing target accounts the discipline and and
you know what’s required for scoring leads and therefore then scoring
accounts and a measuring account engagement for anyone who is talking or
thinking about how are they gonna do content personalization at scale like if
you’ve established a set of target accounts how do you treat them unique
and distinct what level of engagement and type of engagement should you be
doing and what how do you approach content personalization so a very
prescriptive workshop on you know these are the recipes that we’ve put into
place with other clients of ours and you know Western Union is one of those that
we did you know two or three-day full-length workshop with them to get
them well set up for ABM success and so what what attendees to this event will
get to participate in our workshop is you know a condensed version of that but
leave with very practical insights around account targeting like I said
around content personalization how to assemble your you’re buying committee
and enrich your database with contacts score them in the accounts and then
really monitor engagement and then and lastly bob talk about how do you keep
score from an ABM perspective what are the categories of ABM metrics you know
so what do you measure and how do you know if it’s it’s working and then we
will touch on but it’s the last piece which is you know an ATM stack
discussion and because it’s a workshop because it’s several hours not only will
will be able to provide great training and information to the attendees there
will be a lot of interactivity so they can you know I I know you subscribe to
this theory which is you know some of the best things you get at these
conferences is birds of a feather right when you’re all there around smart
talented experienced people the workshops gonna service a lot of what to
do and what not to do from other attendees inside the group
wonderful I look forward to attending that that sounds great yeah will does a
great great job been on our team for a long time and you know it’s it’s almost
like when you hire somebody like if you hire someone and their resume has four
or five different companies in their past well great but guys like will and
other members of our team and they work with hundreds of companies so they bring
all those recipes for success and lessons of what not to do in DI reengage
which is which is awesome outstanding so I look forward to seeing you at the
event so is there anything I forgot to ask you anything worth doing right now
you know well we’ll talk about tech and we’ll talk about methodologies and that
type of stuff at the show what I really am most excited about in my keynote
which I start off is really talking about the day of a person and how much
their day has changed and it’s a great kickoff because it really gets you to
step back and go wow the world has changed I mean look at the number of
people that are taking uber look at you know my my mother-in-law just this past
holiday she goes this is the very first time in my life and she’s now in her 70s
that I didn’t set foot in a store to do any shopping for the kids or grandkids
and we talked a lot about that and so I’m gonna talk about how much the world
has changed and and what that means to marketing and to sales in a way that you
know this is the third time that I’ve given this presentation last several
months and I always have people come up to me saying so thought-provoking really
makes me go back and think about our customer experience and how we need to
really up our game and and I flesh out really what customers are expecting
today so I think it’ll be a nice change candidly Bob from a lot of the content
at the conference because so much will be on specific methodologies whether
it’s ABM or scoring or content marketing and this is a really up you know level
up discussion around customer experience and how to approach today’s modern buyer
beautiful I look forward to it so that will be Monday the 25th yeah I think
it’s a 4 o’clock on Monday is the the keynote and then the workshops are all
earlier in the day starting at the end night around 9:30
excellent and I’ll provide registration opportunities for 25% discount on our
website for people who are just now joining so I think you’ll be great
so I look forward to seeing you there at always a pleasure thank about thanks for
reaching out to me and and I look forward to seeing you and everybody like
I said I mean if you’re gonna pick a show one show or just a couple shows
keep this into your mix those guys did a phenomenal job the networking is
tremendous the venue’s are awesome and the content will not disappoint they do
a really good job of breaking out you know different tracks so that there’s
something for everybody every single hour and if there’s any stress that’s
created with the event it’s oh my god I’m gonna leave with a bunch of great
ideas so I always encourage you everyone to leave some time at the end or on the
flight back to say okay what are four or five things I’m going to do next from
everything that that I learned but people will dig it’s great great event
and I’m glad these guys continue to grow it’s gonna be I think well over a
thousand people this year I don’t know if Andrew shared any numbers for you but
they just kept on it like like crazy and yet it has as you know a very intimate
feel because of the layout and format the way they do all the social
networking events yeah the problem is there’s too many good speakers all at
the same time you have to pick and choose
yeah well that’s that’s that’s that’s good Pro Matt yeah exactly
alright so pleasure David I look forward to seeing you you too I’ll see you soon
take care thank you