In this episode, Steve Goldhaber is joined by Jon Russo and he discusses his extensive experiences in B2B marketing. He then shares a case study about a SaaS company that pivoted to new areas after optimizing technologies and presenting data. 

They also talk about helping an organization become more strategic with an account-based sales approach, avoiding landmines in the process. Finally, they explore the potential future of B2B sales and marketing, with a focus on personalization and AI. 

They also touch on the impact of online purchasing and the trend toward tailored buying experiences. Jon Russo shares his unique path to his first marketing job after leaving the Army, as well as discusses how marketing today differs from 20 years ago.

Key points from the episode

• Optimizing technologies and presenting data can be a helpful way to pivot business strategy
• Avoid landmines when transitioning to an account-based sales approach
• Personalization and AI are important elements of future B2B sales and marketing
• Online purchasing is increasing, with more tailored buying experiences
• Marketing today is different from 20 years ago, with more advanced technologies available for decisions and strategies.

Connect with Jon Russo and Steve Goldhaber on LinkedIn.

Steve Goldhaber:   Hey everybody, welcome back to Studio 26. Glad to have you back on the podcast today. I'm excited because today we are joined by Jon Russo. Jon, welcome to the show and give us a quick 60-second background about who you are.

‍Jon Russo:  Steve, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be here. Jon Russo, currently I’m an agency owner. But prior to that, I have invested over 20 years of experience in B2B marketing 10 of which have been a high-tech CMO in public and private companies. And I've got a passion for helping other marketers with their journey to make sure they avoid some of the reporting landmines in particular, that many of us step on. So that's a quick 60-second step of my background.

‍Steve Goldhaber:   Awesome, okay. And as our listeners know, there's not a lot of small talk at the beginning of the podcast, because we jump right into case studies, those are the most interesting thing. So the first one that you're going to walk us through has to do with understanding market performance. So I'm excited to hear about this one, take it away.

‍Jon Russo: Yeah, so this particular SaaS company is a growing company and they were really struggling with how to grow even faster, especially in a challenging economic climate very similar to the one that we have now. And what they really were struggling with was trying to figure out which segments of the market were performing and why they were performing. And through a series of interactions, we helped synthesize some of their data in their processes. They had purchased a number of technologies, marketing technologies, and platforms that were substandard, and were not producing what they needed to produce. And by optimizing those technologies, and really maximizing the investment out of that, we were able to give them insights from those platforms, and more specifically, Steve, we provided them insights around which segments of the market were performing the best. It's commonly called tearing in our world. And we could get real granular around the tears and the verticals that were performing, why they were performing. And so much so that the CEO of the company took a lot of interest in the insights that we were providing, and ended up pivoting the company strategy around to new areas that were not a focus of the organization until we presented that data in a clear and concise way. So that would be a quick rundown of that case study.

‍Steve Goldhaber:   Yeah. Interesting. So I want to dive into the optimization side of it. So like, once you've got someone new you're working with, you're trying to figure out how you can help them? Is it a methodology that you followed? Or is it you know, what we don't know until we get in there? Before we start poking around? And looking at what is there? What's not there? Tell me about like your day one I'm looking at how you optimize.

‍Jon Russo: Yeah, the a great question about the optimization. The answer is yes, we do a little bit of both. So typically, it's always a good starting point, in my experience, to really understand the lay of the land with clients, to see how they operate, how they work, how their systems work. And usually, we triangulate. So there's the point of view of people and what they think is happening, the point of view of systems, and then kind of our own methodology, and rarely do all three of those connect on day one. In fact, they're usually very dispersed. And surprisingly, what to me is surprising is what we hear from companies and their leaders. And their people often differ from what's actually in the systems when we so day one to answer your question. It's kind of that triangulation process we're trying to calibrate such that those three different data points or one concentric circle by the end of the kind of conversation or engagement.

‍Steve Goldhaber:  Yeah, and for this case, like when you got in there, and you had access to what they had done most last just for this case? Do they have everything that they need? Is it that it's there and they just don't know how to analyze it or it's just not robust? There's no central clearinghouse that gives an organization that full view of what's going on.

‍Jon Russo:  Yeah, and their particular case, and I would say they're probably a good majority of what we see in the market now as the technology and the data, pretty much is there. It may not be fully utilized to the ROI or its intended use case for a variety of different reasons. You've seen the great resignation, and people moving in and out of organizations. Business strategies change, people change, and new technologies get added. So you know, when you add all that up, it's typically more of a case of you got a lot, but you're not using it as effectively as you could, I'd say maybe one in 10, or one and 20 come to us and say, Hey, we need some help and figuring out what else we need. But usually, they're pretty good at the purchasing side, they really underestimate the process and the data side of making the optimal kind of situation to provide the right insights. It sounds really good in the sales process when they're talking to more tech vendors, I promise a lot. But then when they, you know, finally get to that destination, they make that purchase, they realize how perhaps they've underinvested in getting themselves ready for that technology.

‍Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. So you mentioned that once the optimization happened they pivoted and went into some new directions, it was that quick that they made that decision. And the reason I asked the question is, I've seen a lot of CMOs, and CEOs be very suspicious of data. And anytime there's a new take on, hey, this is giving us a different perspective, some embrace, and some just go, I don't know, it just doesn't feel right. So take us to that moment when they looked at the data. How did they react to it?

‍Jon Russo:  Yeah, this is a quick 20-ish-minute podcast, and you'd think that somebody would make a kind of on the fly decision, but it was probably the opposite of that. So leading up to that point, there was a fair amount of optimization work that we had to do with them to get the right insights to their sellers. And that optimization work would be in their CRM system, their marketing, automation, and their account-based platforms, these are all technologies that B2B marketers would typically use in kind a, what we call a selling motion. And over time, once we got that information, and worked well with them, we created the right reporting mechanisms. And it took some time for even our sponsor, who was the chief marketing person or the head of demand, in this case for the company. It took her some time to kind of have that confidence. And then once she started to really understand it, she was like, Whoa, this is super powerful information that we now have. And once we got to her, we socialized it with the head of sales and the head of sales agreed. Once we had their agreement, then the CEO started to get really interested in being really involved. So it was more of a process than a destination of the CEO changing the strategy on where, and the CEO was pretty thoughtful about it, too, you know, asked a lot of questions. But he too, once he saw the information, it was like, Okay, well, why aren't we focusing on this segment? And ultimately pivoted the strategy because of the insights that we provided there. 

‍Steve Goldhaber:   How long did it take them to get there from when you started working with them to when they actually went through their process? And they ultimately pivoted? 

‍Jon Russo:   Yeah, good question. And in their particular case, it was probably somewhere between the six and nine-month marker. And that's really a function of the corporate size of an organization, kind of their current state or future state that selling process of multiple people. So there are a lot of variables there. But in this particular case, is about the six to nine-month mark. 

‍Steve Goldhaber:  Okay. And I imagine in that six to the nine-month window there. There has to be.  I'm trying to be very dramatic, because to me I love that reveal of the data, right? And to me, there are always moments whether you're looking at a dashboard, or someone just cuts the raw data for you in Excel and shows you performance. There is that moment when it hits you in the face. And I would have to imagine as women asked you the question, do you get to those moments on a project like this? Or is it No, you find something little and then you find something else? And you have to really string together a series of different data events. How did that all unfold for you?

‍Jon Russo:  Yeah, that's a really thoughtful question. Usually, our process in talking with the clients goes back to your original question about the triangulation, because we're so thorough and talking with the people looking at the systems and having our own methodology. It's typically a recommendation that has gone undergone a lot of scrutinies before something gets presented. So I don't want to say we've arrived at a destination like Tada, here are the fireworks and here you go. We battled testing along the way the six to nine months. So I have made it sound like, hey, it's fireworks in six to nine months. And tada, look at this insight that we came up with. We're pretty thoughtful. So it's a tested process that by the time we got to that destination, we had kind of shake it out pretty well. So it's not necessarily, I don't think we met with skepticism, because we had done so much diligence, prior to that point, had we not done that diligence, then I think we've opened ourselves up for that scrutiny and, you know, kind of questioning of the data, but because we're so thorough, we didn't get a whole lot of pushback. Yeah.

‍Steve Goldhaber:  Okay. All right. So we're gonna jump into case study number two, this one has to do with how you helped enhance a sales process, always something that culturally is very difficult to do, right? Like, it's very easy just to have a go on a whiteboard, draw something up and say, Yeah, this is easy. Let's just do that. Right. But culturally, you're dealing with a lot of other things. So take us through this case.

‍Jon Russo:  Yeah. So this is a very different use case but kind of a somewhat related outcome, in that it was kind of a mesh between evolutionary and revolutionary change for the sales organization, where they had a book of business that they were going after that was very focused, so a fixed number of accounts that they really wanted to penetrate. Sometimes you hear a lot of people call it Account Based Marketing, I hate using that term. Now, I think it's going to be more of an account-based sales and marketing or an account-based experience. But long story short, this organization, which was a very transactional organization and want to get more strategic and focus on more of an account-based sales approach, and have marketing be on point and spearhead that initiative on behalf of sales. So I go back to the account-based experience. So our job was really to help them avoid the landmines. And we may get into this a little bit later. But we've had a lot of experience in this area of shortcutting some of the common pitfalls and problems that companies run across, such that they could get to the destination quicker with their sales process and ultimately grow. So that was kind of the problem statement.

‍Steve Goldhaber:  Okay. Tell me more about the landmines that you're seeing usually.

‍Jon Russo:   Yeah, so a good question about landmines. And we were talking earlier about how companies typically over-invest in technology, and they under-invest in the data and the processes, and the infrastructure that they have already. And so the biggest landmine is really being very thoughtful about the productivity implications of those processes and data on the people in the investments. So oftentimes, it's the company has it flipped around, where they're like, Okay, we're just gonna buy this technology, and people will deal with it. And they're not trained, they don't know what to do, they don't know how to do it, and none of their processes are in place. So the biggest landmine really is expectation setting around what processes need to be put in place and why. And that helps a business scale, more rapidly. And again, we'll get into my background in a moment, but I've scaled as an operator, businesses from two to 50, from 50 to 200, and from 500 to 600 million. So I've been in various scaling operations, and you've got to have those processes and data in place. Otherwise, it's just going to be a productivity drag on everyone.

‍Steve Goldhaber:   Yep. So tell me what did that new sales process or sales journey look like?

‍Jon Russo:   Yeah, so a good analogy would be one where the salesperson was kind of a beat street cop and was turned into a private detective. So instead of the transaction of a beat street cop making the Beat Street arrest, you're now synthesizing data and insights on an account as opposed to a person which is more transactional. You're looking at all the information across the account and making an assessment as to is this account and market are worth US pursuing. If they are worth the US pursuing? What are the insights that we can see across everybody in the account that we can then prospect into the account with some level of success or confidence that they have an interest in our solution? It's a hell of a lot of work to get from point A to point B with or without an external agency, it's a lot of work. But a lot of companies are moving in this direction now, because the number of buyers on the flip side, the buying committee side is increasing in size. So the sales process is almost headed in this direction, automatically. So companies either have to adapt to that, or they're gonna die if they don't make this transition.

‍Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. It's interesting that signals show intent by individuals or companies, I've always been fascinated with that. Specifically, as it relates to what I'll just refer to as false flags. So events can happen, that might seem really good. But they're false flags, right? Or you have data on a company that shows Hey, we're not seeing anything, meaning they're not in the market, they're not ready to buy. So let's not go after this person, but maybe they are. And whether that's, sometimes it's as simple as like the IP data, like, they go home at night on their personal computer, and they're searching for things, right? So like, how do you navigate a world where the data is telling you one story and you want to have conviction in that data? But you know that it's not perfect?

‍Jon Russo:   Yeah. I'm glad you asked that question. And that, too, is a common landmine of this process. If there were a silver bullet here of just getting revenue in the door, nobody would be listening to the podcast, and we wouldn't be doing the podcast. But what I've seen in this particular case, work, is that going again, back to the process side, if I'm hearing you, right, you're kind of saying, hey, what about these false indications? What do I do with this information? Like, how do I treat this information? Or how do I know what's good? Or what's not good? Let me make sure I got that question.

‍Steve Goldhaber:   Yeah, I mean, so the data might say things that you think yes, this is what we want to see in the data? Do you validate it? Do you not? And when the data isn't saying anything, what do you do about it? Or do you ignore it?

‍Jon Russo:   So you nailed that? You should be in my shoes here. Maybe we'll hire you afterward. But validation is the key part. So there's no technology? And technology is probably a strong way of saying it. But there are very few technologies that will present you a qualified opportunity, there has to be some level of manual inspection, kind of a red face test of, hey, does this really, you know, does this data really make sense? That's the first part of validation. And then the second part is really, it's prioritizing the efforts of the outbound outreach. So it's not a silver bullet, but it's more of a need for validation to determine whether or not this account is actually in the market are the signals really telling us the truth. So there's kind of a two-step process. One is introspective to the company, and the other one is a little bit more to prioritizing who you outreach to, and then kind of validating the information as part of that process. So you're not taking anything as carte blanc as, hey, this data has told us this, therefore, we should go do that. We're not at that point in our evolution. And I don't know if we'll ever be at that point with the way privacy and data laws are going right now. I can't imagine we ever will reach that. But we have a heck of a lot more insights than we did 5,10,15,20 years ago, than we do today. That's how I would probably approach that.

‍Steve Goldhaber:  Yeah, I think it's also a good lesson that such the role of the salesperson in this process is to, you know, the marketers armed them with the intelligence, but they need to then continue that up. So they can go into a conversation informed, but they still have to validate that and ask new questions. So it's definitely a one-two punch. So my final question on this case is, again, the timing. How long did this take? Before everything kind of migrated to that new philosophy?

‍Jon Russo:   Yeah, great question. And this too was a process. So this was more of a six to 12-month process, mainly because they didn't have an account-based platform in place. They didn't have any of the processes in place. We shepherd them through a lot of those processes. And then as they made their decision on a platform, we helped kind of jumpstart that process, particularly with what's called the STRS or the BD RS, which is kind of one step removed from the actual outreach of the sales rep. They're more of a qualification function. We spent a lot of time to training them and getting them up to speed, and really getting best-practice insights and reporting to and through them. So that was probably more of a six to 12-month process and again, a SaaS company that was growing relatively quickly. I'd say about a six to 12-month process.

‍Steve Goldhaber:   Okay, awesome. All right, we're gonna jump into the second part of the podcast where we get to know you a little bit better. So tell us about the moment you accepted your first job, where were you all in saying, I've been dreaming of this forever, or as many of our previous guests, it's kind of like this just happened. And I made a career out of it.

‍Jon Russo: Yeah, gosh, I've had a really unique path. So if you're asking about my first marketing job, I was actually an officer in the service, I was an Army officer and on active duty, and so I had kind of a twin challenge of leaving active duty service and finding a commercial job. It just so happened that I was stationed out and around Silicon Valley. And I found a terrific opportunity. That was really kind of the mesh of my unique background as a finance undergrad, which very few marketers in my experience have. So I'm a little bit more quantitative than most. But it was really a finance undergrad. And it leveraged the experience that I built in the service as a telecommunications officer, it was in a telecom company, doing pricing. And that worked for the head of sales, slash marketing. So it was a really perfect role for me coming right out of the service. And unlike a lot of other people in the service that I've noticed, because I started, I literally left the service on a Friday and I started my job on a Monday, there wasn't a lot of time to worry about the identity change, because that can be fairly significant. Like a professional athlete who changes from being a pro athlete to not being a pro athlete. Leaving the military is no different, I think as an analogy, but I didn't have a lot of time to really think about that, because I literally left the service. And I was working on the commercial front in Silicon Valley, and I got a front-row seat to a lot of exciting things. So it really worked out well for me.

‍Steve Goldhaber: Looking back in retrospect, what are some things that I would look back at in my career? And it's like, oh, my god, we're so sophisticated today. But going back 20. Some years, a lot of things were just easier, like slower to create stuff, but easier because of the lack of chaos and the lack of keeping up with tech. I mean, are there things that you really enjoyed in that first role that wouldn't happen today, just because it is such a different world that we live into?

‍Jon Russo:  I'd say the biggest difference would be, there are so many differences, but back then you really didn't have a lot of the tools at your fingertips to do more of the thought leadership and branding and kind of putting yourself out there as an individual as you do today. So I think it was in that regard, it was less complicated. But now you have more opportunity to reach a broader audience quicker at a younger point in your career, then perhaps, when I eventually reached that a little bit later on down the road, now you have the ability to reach anybody. So that the tool of just you know, webcasts and podcasts. Sounds may sound silly but really didn't exist back when I made that first transition. So you know, a Jon Russo would be unknown, except for the people in Silicon Valley and the people that he worked with. So you really had to work hard on your reputation. But he really didn't think about what was the rest of the world thinking you didn't have slack communities to compare and contrast your thought leadership views with so that too, has changed quite a bit. I think for the most part, things have changed for the better. But you've got a lot more tools and capabilities at your fingertips today that you never had back then.

‍Steve Goldhaber:   Yeah, I agree. I would never want to give away my tools like the power that I have as an individual today. It's obscene how much power you have with access to this stuff. There's one thing though, that I always miss, I started my first job after I graduated in 96. And I was doing commercial printing. So like we would, hey, we need an annual report or media buying we're gonna buy three months, six months of media. What I really miss about those days is the rallying point of a decision being made. And my example is you physically were unpressed printing something and everyone rallied because they said look, we're printing it. If you change your mind, in 12 hours, you've just wasted a million dollars of ink and paper. Or the media campaign, like if you go and change the buy, you're losing the negotiated rate. So it really was that moment when you made that big decision. And you could literally sleep the next day, because you're like, Oh, my God, you can't go back on it. And of course, today, it's all about iteration. You might launch a campaign, and then all of a sudden, it doesn't test well with, you know, an awareness of a service line or something. So all of a sudden, what do we do all right? We're fazed doing it. We need more content that helps people understand what we're doing here. So I do miss those days of like, you could go an entire year as a marketer, and make maybe three or four big decisions. And that was it.

‍Jon Russo: Yeah, that actually also reminds me of a printing story. Funny enough with the second company right after I left that first one, we were about to go public. And we were at the very last stage of going public, we were about to, “have the Reds printed”, which is the very last step. And it's like a big deal. Really big deal when you're going public because it's it kind of formalizes at that time. It formalizes your commitment to the public market that you know, you are going public, and then we had a company swoop in and buy us. So it all worked out fine. But the printing never happened. But I can relate to that very topic that you talked about, right around that same period, in fact, too, so I can totally relate to what you're saying.

‍Steve Goldhaber:   All right, I'm gonna accelerate the conversation for two years from 1996. So this hasn't happened yet. But we've been talking a lot about tools. And obviously, what you're doing involves a lot of tools to understand measurement. Have a look 5-10 years from now, what do you see as being possible today that we're just kind of like it may get there? But in five to 10 years, it will just be the way that we operate. And it won't even be new and exciting, because it's just part of what we do.

‍Jon Russo:  Yeah, I think what we experienced today, with Amazon, for example, in a business-to-consumer purchase, where your purchase is very easy, it's very tailored, you have near-perfect information of how others have purchased the product from your peer group or your peer set. It's a little bit more of a simplistic model because typically an Amazon purchases one to one, it's a transaction. And B2B has many more people that are involved. But I feel like we're heading down that same path of the more customized, the more targeted, the easier it is to purchase, and the higher probability of success. And that's where I could kind of see, you know, B2B, eventually being B2C-ish. When it comes time for the buying process. We're kind of already there in some regards, like, you'll hear the term product lead growth or plug, where consumers are purchasing a lot of their products online anyway. So there's a number of saas companies that do that today that you can just easily purchase. But I think you're going to start really feeling that here in the next few years. Because if it's not personalized, it's just not going to be an experience that a buyer is going to really want to engage with. You know, I'll leave you with an analogy on that. It's kind of the situation with my television set at home, I've got access to 700 channels, and I watched the same seven. I don't need to go to anything else, because the seven that I watch are very tailored to my interest. And I think it's the same thing, people will have a lot of choices. But ultimately, they're going to turn to the same seven or eight choices, because it fits their needs. That's what I think will happen with B2B.

‍Steve Goldhaber:   Yeah. Fascinating. I can relate to the channel thing. It reminds me of the Bruce Springsteen song it references 57 channels, but nothing's on the right that was obscene back in the day, like 57 channels, you don't need 50 He should update that. A friend of mine just went to Bruce Springsteen's concert, and he should update that to 700 channels and nothing on. Awesome. Well, John, I really enjoyed the conversation today. Thanks for sharing both case studies I can relate to your stories about what it was like, back in the late 90s Doing work is a whole lot different but also, today, it can't get more exciting today. I mean, AI is kind of just starting to like get some traction and not in a cheesy way where everyone's talking about AI this and that, like if you look at the fundamentals of what that can do, and the implications for ways that we gather and analyze information. I  go crazy over that stuff. Because it's like every couple of days I'm in that world, I feel like I discover a new application. And I always find myself looking back at myself as a marketer and just being like you silly marketer, you thought you knew what you were doing a year ago, 10 years ago, and it's just a whole other level. And that is what really gets me excited. 

‍Jon Russo:Yeah. And I think to your point where AI intersects with that personalization, that's exactly the intersection like AI to me is the delivery vehicle. To get to that personalized experience, you no longer have to be maybe an expert in the field, you can rely on AI to get you the personalized content, to give you the personalized experience for your buyer. So I see like AI as a means to an end. But it's going to accelerate by leaps and bounds for marketers that 10 years ago, 20 years ago, we'd throw people at it. Those days are done. It'll all be automation. And it'll be personalized. So that's the key thing is it's going to be hyper-relevant.

‍Steve Goldhaber:  Awesome. All right. Thank you, Joh, for some homework for the listeners. If you've made it this far in the podcast, that means that you've enjoyed it today. This means that you should now share it with someone so if you have anyone that you think is a B2B marketer you want to say, you know, I listened to this show the other day was pretty good. How about Have a listen, I would appreciate that. So again, thank you, Joh. And thank you, everyone, for joining us today on interesting B2B marketers. Take care. Thanks again.

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