Dave Heywood, MD & Growth Partner at OX7 Partners (00:00)
We’ve got more information about buyers than we’ve ever had. And yet the thing that gets your competitor onto the short list might still be someone sending a message to an old colleague saying who would you recommend?

This is Scale, an OX7 Partners podcast, and I’m Dave Heywood

and today I’m gonna be taking a look at whether our pursuit of increasingly precise cost effective growth is causing us to overlook some of the people who actually influence whether we win or not.

over the last decade or so, we’ve become far more sophisticated in how we target businesses. We’ve got incredibly detailed ideal customer profiles, account based marketing programmes access to rich intent data, engagement scoring, attribution models, you name it. And

That’s a pretty good thing, right? If I can understand who’s likely to buy from me, what they actually care about, and when they might be in market, of course I want to understand and use all the information and tools available to me. Particularly when every pound and penny of investment I make is under greater scrutiny.

But I do think that there’s a point when that pursuit of efficiency can start to work against us a little bit.

Especially when that efficiency starts to get a little too precise and means we start reaching fewer people. We narrow that ideal customer profile, we tighten up the account list, we focus the budget, we identify the buyers signing the checks.

and all of a sudden we can end up at something that looks incredibly efficient on a spreadsheet, but doesn’t necessarily reflect how people actually make decisions and who they call upon to do that.

And a little while back I worked for an outsourcing business where we also became increasingly sophisticated in how we understood buyer behaviour and engagement.

We had better data, better targeting, essentially better visibility of what people were actually doing. But when we started to piece together what actually happened across wins and losses, a little bit of a messier picture emerged.

competitors would often end up in the consideration set because somebody knew them or recommended them.

So a colleague had worked with them before, someone trusted had recommended them, an individual who wasn’t particularly senior had experience with one of these competitors, and their opinion carried a lot of weight. And that influence wasn’t always coming from inside the organisation we were selling to.

And that outside influence is often the bit we risk missing here

‘Cause we still talk an awful lot about the buyer in a singular sense. As though there’s one person sitting there rationally progressing through our wonderfully mapped customer journey

Until we finally arrive at the end, sign on a dotted line, and we all walk away into the sunset. but as we know, the reality is often a lot, lot messier than that. and Gartner found the size of B2B buying groups are getting bigger and bigger.

And can now involve anywhere between five and sixteen people,

across at least four different functions.

But even that doesn’t quite capture the reality for me, because there’s the buying group, and then there’s the wider network around them.

Former colleagues, peers, advisers, existing suppliers, people within the professional network, clients of yours, people who considered you three years ago. And some of those will absolutely bat for you. Some will introduce you.

Some will recognise your name when it appears on the short list and some will kill your chances.

And some research from Trust Radius found around half of buyers sought out former colleagues or known peers when discussing potential options. and then when we look at larger enterprise buyers, that rose as high as 62%.

And so that changes things quite considerably for us. we can spend a lot of time becoming increasingly sophisticated at tracking the behaviour of those people inside an account, while someone completely outside the business can have a huge impact on what happens next.

And you might not even know that they ever existed.

and despite what a lot of technology vendors might have us believe

Buying remains a pretty opaque experience. We don’t see those private WhatsApp messages, the conversations over lunch.

we don’t know that a key voice of influence used our nearest competitor five years ago and absolutely loved them or that someone else might have had an absolutely terrible experience with us at their previous company.

and this is where I start to think that this pursuit of tighter and tighter and tighter targeting creates a bit of a problem for us.

Because if we become much tighter and more focused on only the people that we identify as potential buyers, we risk missing the wider halo effect around them.

No, I’m a hundred percent not making an argument for spray and pray here. We absolutely should map our market, understand our ideal buyer, we should know the accounts we want to win and the people involved in that buying process within the firm. Sure.

But I’d just go one step further. understand the buying network that influences those people. Who do they listen to? What communities are they members of? Who advises them? who’s likely to influence their decisions? Who has credibility in the market? where and who do they go to when they want to assess whether a supplier is actually any good?

at the end of the day, it’s impossible to identify exactly every individual who might influence the deals in the pipeline. But we can understand that ecosystem that they operate within and we can absolutely build presence there.

And there’s also a really interesting role here for your existing clients.

They’ve been through the journey. We’ve got them over the line, they’ve moved into account management or customer success or whatever you call it.

yet we often very quickly turn our attention back towards finding the next customer.

But more than ever, prospective buyers actually want to speak directly to your existing clients. and they’re just for ones that we can see.

For every formal reference call that you arrange, there’s loads of other conversations happening privately.

And they really get to the heart of questions like you know, what are they actually like to work with? did the implementation or onboarding go well? If you were starting again, would you pick these guys?

And then all of a sudden that experience we delivered to someone two, three years ago can have a real influence on current opportunities and pipeline.

which all of a sudden forges this really strong link between your customer experience and your customer acquisition.

It’s all part of the same growth system essentially.

So there’s a lot there. what do we actually do with this?

I think for me there’s a few fairly simple principles for us to hold on to.

One map what you can.

Two, target what you know. And three, amplify into the networks that influence them.

And that amplification doesn’t necessarily mean abandoning that precision and targeting. It just means that we recognise the limits. we still concentrate that budget where it makes sense and where we can get most bang for buck.

but we also acknowledge that we need to create enough presence around our market so when our name comes up in those private conversations there’s a much higher chance somebody knows who you are, understands what you do, and can hopefully advocate for you.

but that begs the other question how on earth do we measure and quantify any of this? Because a lot of this isn’t gonna appear in those attribution reports we’ve come to know and love.

And I do think attribution’s got a lot to answer for in giving us that false confidence that we can understand some elements which are inherently unknowable.

It it doesn’t mean that attribution is completely useless. it just means we probably shouldn’t ask it to answer questions it it’s not capable of answering.

And I’m still a huge believer that that sometimes the best way to understand why somebody has bought something is just to ask them.

Win loss conversations have been really, really useful for me over the years for exactly that reason. Ask people how the short list was actually formed, who else they spoke to, who do they ask for advice, which suppliers have they already heard of? what gave them that confidence to move forward?

What little niggles of doubt were there? Where did they come from? And was there anyone internally or externally who strongly advocated for or against those options for you? and if you do that consistently enough, you can start to piece together a really good picture of how your market actually works.

And so what’s a practical exercise you can do around this?

Have a look in your sales pipeline and pick out a good sizeable deal one that you’ve won and one that you’ve lost.

Just try to reconstruct how that decision was actually made. So not just who got it over the line and signed the contract, but who influenced it along the way? Who introduced other options? Who was consulted? What other competitors came into the mix? Where did all of this information come from that influenced that?

And then compare that buying network that you’ve just constructed a picture of and compare it with the audience that your marketing and sales activity is currently pointed at.

You’ll either find that the two don’t match nearly as neatly as you thought, and you’ll also find there’s plenty that we don’t know and don’t understand them.

Cost effective growth isn’t about reaching the fewest people possible to deliver a result.

It’s all about spending intelligently to influence the people who shape the market, whether they be inside or outside your target accounts. And that’ll include plenty of people who you’ll never see within your CRM. Hope you found that useful. I’m Dave Heywood this is Scale, an OX7 Partners podcast, and I’ll see you next time.