On the latest episode of the Interesting B2B Marketers podcast, Steve and Nate Bagley, Head of Content at Clozd, discuss how to implement a comprehensive win-loss analysis program within an organization.
They also cover topics such as creating customer communities, understanding relationships for successful marketing campaigns, using great questions in marketing, identifying unideal customer profiles and focusing on long-term relationships, and the challenges of attribution in marketing. Personal topics such as Nate's marital status and experience as a parent were also discussed, highlighting both the joys and challenges that come with raising children.
Tune in to this episode for an enlightening conversation about B2B marketing strategies!
Connect with Nate Bagley and Steve Goldhaber on LinkedIn.
On the latest episode of the Interesting B2B Marketers podcast, Steve and Nate Bagley, Head of Content at Clozd, discuss how to implement a comprehensive win-loss analysis program within an organization.
They also cover topics such as creating customer communities, understanding relationships for successful marketing campaigns, using great questions in marketing, identifying unideal customer profiles and focusing on long-term relationships, and the challenges of attribution in marketing. Personal topics such as Nate's marital status and experience as a parent were also discussed, highlighting both the joys and challenges that come with raising children.
Tune in to this episode for an enlightening conversation about B2B marketing strategies!
Connect with Nate Bagley and Steve Goldhaber on LinkedIn.
Disclaimer: The transcription of our podcast episodes has been generated by a third-party AI tool. While we strive for accuracy, we cannot guarantee that all typos, errors, or misinterpretations have been corrected. So, if you come across any blunders, don't blame us. Blame the robots. (Just kidding, don't blame them either. They're doing their best.)
Steve Goldhaber: Welcome back to Studio 26 and interesting B2B marketers. Happy to have Nate on the show today. Nate, welcome.
Nate Bagley: Thanks, Steve. It's good to be here. I'm glad you classify me as interesting.
Steve Goldhaber: That's right. What we don't know though, is each guest who comes on, there'll be an audience poll of, is this person interesting or not?
So it's an audience engagement. Feature that I'm trying out. I love it. Everyone is interesting and I've actually had many people who I've worked with over the years who are fascinating, yet they are so firm when they say, I'm not interesting, and I'm like, what are you talking about? You're, you're really interesting.
Anyway, give the audience a quick 60-second overview of who you are.
Nate Bagley: Yeah, so my name's Nate. I'm a marketer, like a true blue through and through marketer. I love marketing my career. I'll just like do a quick career recap of some of the interesting points in my career. I was a communications grad in college.
Started out my first job outta college, was working at an agency. Then I moved to a a software company. Then I moved to a restaurant company managing social media. This was like right at the boom when Facebook was getting launched to colleges early on and Twitter had just come out and. I loved the relationship aspect and the community that was starting to get formed in the early days of social media.
And so a lot of my early career focused around how to utilize that in a business setting for these different businesses. And then in my, like late twenties, I had this crazy idea where I was dating a lot and I, my relationships weren't, I guess in a, if we wanted to use a sales analogy, I was getting a lot of leads, but I wasn't closing any deals.
Steve Goldhaber: Couldn't close. All right. I like that analogy.
Nate Bagley: And I wanted to figure out like why, why were my relationships not progressing the way I wanted them to? And so I ended up quitting my job, raising a bunch of money to go on a cross-country road trip and interview couples and relationship experts to figure out what they were doing right that I was not doing.
And then that turned into me starting a subscription box business where I sent a date in a box to couples once a month, and then I sold that business and then moved back. To the B2B world and worked for a company called Workfront for a while where I stood up their community and their user group program.
And now I'm working at a company called Clozd and we perform win-loss analysis, which is exactly what I did on this road trip. I went out and studied like why some couples succeed and other couples fail. Now I'm doing the same thing. And essentially for businesses why they succeed and why they fail.
Steve Goldhaber: That's interesting. We could have collaborated on this years ago, and here's why. So, years ago, on the side, on weekends, I was a wedding photographer. I started. I started doing this by accident, so it was like a wedding for a friend. They asked for like, oh, who's your photographer? She's like, he's not a photographer.
He is just a friend, and that just snowballed. And what's interesting is this is, I'm bringing it back to win-loss in a second here, is over the years, you know, I've followed these couples and some have gotten divorced. Yep. And it's fascinating to try to pick up on the trends. I mean, I was just there for like a day or maybe an engagement session, but there's all these parallels between relationships and marketing.
Oh, for sure. Yeah.
Nate Bagley: And I'm sure there were weddings that you attended where you're like, you knew, you're like, ah. I give this a couple, like three years tops.
Steve Goldhaber: I always said that like a wedding is the perfect day to learn everything about a family because everything happens on that day. People come together or you know, they come together and then there's a fallout with, you know, distant cousins or aunts or arguments that happen.
It's fascinating. It's probably the most interesting job I've ever had. Yeah. All right. But that will be on a future podcast. We'll do our great, our wedding, wedding and relationship theme, one for Valentine's Day. But we're gonna jump off here into your first case study. And this one has to do with not necessarily jumping in right away and expecting that you're gonna have sales success, but taking a step back, building a course in this example, and using that course as a means to something greater.
So, Tell us about the first case study.
Nate Bagley: So, the first case study deals with a company I was working for that performs win loss analysis services and technology. So we would go into a company and we would analyze the deals. We would talk to their buyers after a deal gets closed, and we would figure out from the buyer's perspective why a deal is one.
And why deal is lost. Record those conversations, pick out the themes, report 'em back to the company so that they can make the necessary improvements to strengthen their weaknesses and double down on their strengths so they can win more deals. So really obvious, easy sell when somebody captures the vision.
But what we are running into the problem is that we'd reach out to companies who were not doing this in a comprehensive way or in an ongoing way, but they believed they were still doing it there. Oh, we're, you know, we. Get on a sales call with them and it would be like, oh yeah, we already do that. We track deals in our crm, you know, our, our sales reps log why we win and lose in the crm.
And so, so I've already got that data and they, they hadn't really caught the vision. And ver actually very frequently what we would find is a product marketers would glom onto this message and they'd be like, yes, this is part of my role. I wanna understand why we win and lose. But I need to prove to the leadership, to the executive team that this is a worthwhile investment, that we can actually see a positive ROI from this.
And so what we realized is that from an enablement perspective, they were having a really hard time making a case for a program like this to be established in their company. And so what I realized is that there, there was this hurdle before, before a prospect could become a customer, there was a hurdle they had to overcome and what they had to do.
Was essentially do what we would do for them so they could justify it and show data, show customer quotes, show stories, show evidence that this practice of conducting these interviews on an ongoing basis could yield like really awesome results. And so what we did is we devised a six-part course that walked them through.
They basically indoctrinated them into our way of thinking and our methodology, and we show, we gave them all the tools and resources and and teaching that they needed to stand up their own internal win loss program and, Basically pick a project, pick something they wanted to investigate in their business to understand better and go out and interview their customers and then report their findings to the leadership.
And what we have found was repeated over and over, we had customers come through our pipeline that said, Hey, the reason I'm here is because over the last six months I've been doing your. Six part course. Yeah. I just did a readout to my leadership team and it was so much better and more detailed and more impactful than just pulling a C R M report that they're like, how do we do this more?
How do we do this better? And the natural transition was, well, there's a provider that can help us do this. Yeah. So interesting. Yeah. So this, this course, essentially what, like how this came to be? We thought about like, what's the step. A company or the problem a company needs to solve before they can actually sign on the dotted line and become a customer.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. So tell me, was the course, was it branded using this company's name or was it just a neutral third party brand?
Nate Bagley: No, it was branded using our name. The way we launched it was we did a weekly live YouTube slash LinkedIn event, and we literally just live streamed the course and then I took the recordings and put them into an L M S.
Where they can be accessed in perpetuity. Yeah. But it was definitely like, it was free. It was accessible to everybody, but it was a way to establish ourselves as thought leaders and a way to kind of offer value before asking for something. Yeah. From our buyers.
Steve Goldhaber: I think that's great. I mean, it, it builds on the insight that's been going on for, I don't know, 15 years, which is no one wants to talk to salespeople.
So the fact that you just kind of say, here are cards. We're showing you everything. I think it's a superstar. Smart marketing strategy and one that like, that's the true job of marketing, right? The salesperson may be saying why are you doing that? You're slowing things down, but ultimately that's what the buyer needs, and if the buyer needs a couple months.
What I've also experienced when I've done similar things from my own business or clients is that when that type of marketing works, they are ready to buy. Like you are not selling. They're clearly buying because they've got religion and they're just like, we have to work together. So it's fun getting new clients that way because it's, it's a total rule reversal from someone who is the traditional style of sales, which is essentially you're interrupting them somehow getting their attention and then focusing them and saying, I want you to think this way and do this now.
But I'm assuming that was your experience, right? Like you've got people who are just raising their hands.
Nate Bagley: Yeah. People who are really excited. People who had wanted to do this for a really long time, people who knew this was part of their job role. People who saw the benefits that a program like this could have across the entire company, not just the sales team, and they were just aching to get it launched and just didn't have the direction, didn't have the resources.
One of the beautiful things about doing this, this course is we did get to like indoctrinate people into our methodology, but additionally it showed what a heavy lift it is to do something like this. And it kind of demonstrated the sunk costs involved in HA running a program like this internally. And the value of having an external third party who has technology to support and teams who specialize in certain things and how.
Basically having a third party do it would enable the internal employee to facilitate change instead of like transcribe interviews. I set appointments all day and do a lot of more menial tasks that get automated on our end.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. When you came up with the idea or or someone on your team who did, like what was the reaction by senior management, they embrace it or were they skeptical at first?
Nate Bagley: I definitely had to pitch it in a way that played to their interests, and one of the things was really at the top of mind for our leadership was wanting to. To focus more on thought leadership content. At the time, industry still is just emerging. I don't think there, a lot of B2B companies have really thought about having a third party perform win loss analysis services or even know that a technology exists to help facilitate that.
So we're still in the early adoption phase, and their focus was how do we educate our audience and show that we are the best, that we are the thought leaders in this industry. And so I positioned it as like, Hey, we're gonna do these educational videos. And then was able to kind of tack on the bonus of we can turn this into a course that we promote to our prospects down the road
Steve Goldhaber:
Yep. Awesome. All right, let's do this. Let's jump into case study number two. Great. This one's all about community management, but what I like about this case study that you're gonna share is it's not just doing community for the sake of community because everyone's doing it. We have to have a community.
It's actually connected to a business problem, so, Take it away. Case study number two.
Nate Bagley: Yeah. So at the time I was working at another tech company. They are a really complex, high level project management software. So big companies that were running massive month or year long projects that were really, had lots of deadlines and moving parts, would use this technology to help them, like meet deadlines and, and stay on task.
And as our business grew, we noticed that our customers, especially our power users, were desperate to connect with each other. They felt very siloed. You know, they would call the support line and just immediately say, look, patch me up to the top guy. Like I'm, this is not a level one support question. You know, they were getting a little, a little bothered and feeling a little lonely and wanted some connection.
And so I got hired to launch and roll out our community program, which grew very, very quickly. And the reason it grew quickly we can. Get into the nitty gritty details, but the basic reason was it gave our biggest fans an opportunity to connect with each other, to be positioned as thought leaders, to find answers to some complex technological questions that they had, like more, more technical questions that they had.
And also they got a more direct connection with like our team, our products team, and we're able to provide a lot more feedback into like the product roadmap and their needs. And they felt like they had a more direct voice into our company. So it was a really cool program. It grew incredibly quickly, and then quickly also pivoted into a user group program where we were doing live events based off of the power users in the community and where they were located.
Steve Goldhaber: So, yeah, it's fascinating. I've, I've seen this approach a lot and it is great. I've, I've used it for software. You know, one in particular was a project management software where it was so new and there was a lot of traction behind it. I got more out of it from the community than, you know, the five or 10 support, you know, tickets that I had this to start and even.
What's really fascinating about community in this application is there are things that you don't know about some software, and just by reading other people's messages and threads, you just get, you're like, whoa, I had no idea. Or, you know, the 50 features that the product team thought was most helpful.
And they're pushing that in all their marketing. There's three other features that like, are the hidden gems that everyone's like, no, this is where it's at. So it's, it's great to get the balance of like, You've got the version from the company, but then you also have the version from the users. I've found that incredibly helpful.
Nate Bagley: Yeah.I'm a, I'm a firm believer. I heard a quote once that something along the lines of the most important people in your life are not the people who've accomplished what you want to accomplish. They're the people who are just a few steps ahead of you. And I think one of the most valuable things a customer community provides is, you know, connecting with somebody who's maybe six months further into the implementation program.
Or process or maybe somebody who just built a project or accomplished a, a built out a campaign or accomplished a task that you're just starting and they can look back cuz it's fresh for them and give you a little bit of a step-by-step of, hey, this is, these are some things to avoid, or some things that really helped me out.
And that's what a community I think provides. A lot. Yeah. Is this this really interesting connection with people who are doing exactly what you're doing and are eager to help you out?
Steve Goldhaber: How did you launch it? Like what? What's the approach that you took?
Nate Bagley: Yeah. I think this is a big challenge for a lot of people when you launch a community.
The analogy I like to use is thinking about it like a house party. I think the biggest mistake. People use is they either give people too much space to play in or too little space to play in. If you're having a house party and you invite like five or six guests over and the entire house is open and you've got, you know, two people in a bedroom and two people in the basement watching movie and two people playing video games upstairs or whatever, like, it's not much of a party.
It's basically just like one-off conversations happening in in individual rooms, and there's not a lot of engagement, there's not a lot of energy, there's not a lot of connection. But if you flip that around and you have a house party and you invite over a hundred people and you only let them into your living room, That might be a case for disaster too.
Cause there's too much noise, it's too crowded, it's not fun. So neither of those cases is fun. So I think launching a community, one of the most important things you need to think about is how much space, or what rooms do we wanna have accessible to people early on So that there's this really interesting balance between a lot of conversation happening in that room that's like really meaningful and helpful, but not so much that people feel like they're drowning or they're being drowned out.
And so that first year of launching that community and getting our customers involved was this really delicate balance of trying to decide when we were gonna open up a new maybe room for people to play in around this specific theme or the specific product that we have, as opposed to just keeping everything in the general discussion board.
I think that's probably one of the biggest things to take into consideration when you launch.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. Talk about how, like give us an overview of this, of the customer support environment and how that changed after you launched the community.
Nate Bagley: Yeah. This was something that I didn't anticipate would have as big of impact as it did, but in any community, whether it's Reddit or Facebook group or something like that, there's always the power users.
There's the people who, this is their tribe. They love what they love, participating in the community. They love adding value. And I don't think I realized how much the power users in our community would impact our business. And what we noticed was that a lot of our customers, especially our newer customers, were turning to the community to, for some support and guidance and mentorship.
And they were getting responses to their questions more quickly than they would if they reached out to our customer support team. And our customer support team was starting to notice like, A drop in calls and emails and requests because our customers were actually helping our power users and our community were helping our customers more quickly and more effectively than our support team was.
And so that was a really cool use case, a, a cool perk of rolling out that community. We saw opportunities, we would see posts on a regular basis of people who are frustrated. You know, we were able to flag clients who were maybe at risk of churning because they were discouraged about, they were experiencing maybe a technical issue or the product work.
It wasn't working exactly the way they wanted it to. And when those issues came up in the community, I was able to notify their account manager and have them reach out and connect and. We were able to save some at-risk clients, which I think was another really cool side benefit. So yeah, it's a really powerful tool beyond just creating a space for people to connect.
Steve Goldhaber:
Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. All right, let's do this. Let's jump into q and a. Yeah. Tell us about your first, your first marketing gig.
Nate Bagley: What'd you do First marketing gig. I was that agency job. I got hired by a really good friend of mine and I ran. What, at the time we called it PPC campaigns, paid search campaigns for small businesses, and that's how I got my feet wet.
And then evolved into doing some SEO as well. And that was my first kind of foray into understanding marketing in general and, and yes, how businesses were making money on the internet.
Steve Goldhaber: It was funny. So I used to work at a big agency and the s e m practice started growing and I learned about s e M before S.
C o and it was always so funny cuz it was very different worlds. It was like, ah, the S scm people are like, we control everything. It's a bidding war. And then, you know, obviously SEO is all about user-driven technical optimization. Yeah. So it was funny to see those two worlds live and breathe and clients who are new to search.
It was kind of like, well, wow, like I have my quarterly goals, which can be hit with s e m. Like that's easy and. For years, everyone was like, oh, I'm just gonna do the s e m route, not Yep. Not do the optimization. And then now it's matured enough where it's like, no, you have an s e O game that should be strong and you supplement it with paid social.
So that was funny, see? Totally. All right. I'm gonna have you jump into the story. You alluded to this. When we did the intro, but take us to the day that you quit your job to set off on the journey of finding your own win loss analysis that you went to discover.
Nate Bagley: Yeah ,so I was, I always, I grew up in a family that was very family centric and always from an early age knew I wanted to grow up and get married one day and have my own family.
And I dated a lot in my twenties, so I had a lot of opportunities my. Pipeline was great, and the older I got, I kinda got to this point where I'm like, ah, I'm, I'm kind of getting ready to, to settle down. I'd like to commit to somebody and all of my relationships would kind of progress to a certain point and then fall apart.
So I was never able to, to close a deal and like find somebody I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. So I started to get frustrated and I thought, how do I solve this problem? Because the way I label it, I, I was becoming a good luck Chuck more than once it happened where I'd break up with a girl and then the next guy she dated, she'd marry, and I'm.
Started to think, well, obviously it's not them. They're marriage material. So what is it about me? So I'm like, what do I have to learn here? What do I have to fix? And I started thinking like maybe it would be a good idea for me to go connect with couples that have the type of relationship that I want and talk to them and figure out what is it that they're doing that's different than what I had been doing.
My whole I've been doing throughout my. Dating life. My twenties. So this came on the heels of a particularly rough breakup. I was really discouraged. It was right around the time that I think one of my younger brothers had just gotten engaged and I was like, ah, they're even beating me. Yeah, beating me on the timeline here.
And I was like, you know what? I gotta figure this out. I've had this idea for a while. So I quit my job. My friend Melissa had a similar idea. We connected with each other and we decided we're gonna raise a Kickstarter and we're gonna go on this cross country tour. And. Talked to as many couples as we can and try and figure this out.
And it was a life changing experience for me. And I came home with a big time education and knowledge about how relationships work. And more than anything, it fueled my marketing brain because, I mean, early on in my career, you know, I did the s e o and and paid s e m stuff. And a lot of that is like data driven.
It's really analytical. But this experience really tapped into an aspect of myself. It was more like the Seth Godin side, like marketing and businesses, relationships driven. It's about solving problems and helping people. And the parallels, like you said earlier on between what I learned about how like a long-term committed romantic relationship works and how a business relationship can work.
There were a lot of really interesting parallels there, and during these conversations, themes started to emerge. And one of the, the themes that really stuck with me is that at the foundation of every amazing relationship, every amazing couple that I interviewed, the foundation of their relationship was like these three pillars of I know You.
Like, they knew each other's hearts. They knew each other's desires, their dreams, their wishes, their fears, their anxieties. So they, they had this. What John and doctors John and Julie Gottman called the Love Maps, like they were really intimately familiar with what was going on in the other person's head and heart.
So I know you as one pillar. I like you. So you have affinity towards each other. You know, you light up when your partner walks into the room. You're excited to spend time together. You have inside jokes, you laugh, you connect, you have like, A lot of physical intimacy and there's just like a lot of enjoyment there.
And then the last one is, I trust you. I have your back. I can count on you. You know, you're not gonna take advantage of me, you're not gonna be my betraying my trust. You're gonna be the person who contributes positive things to my life. And I, I can rely on that happening. And I saw that happen in romantic relationships.
And then realize that in the business world, those three things are also ab. Those are the things that. Make people eager to do business with you. You know, they know you and they feel like you know them maybe better than they know themselves. They like you. You know, they enjoy talking with you or consuming your content or thinking about the world the way that you think about it.
And they trust you and you trust them. You know, there's that, those three mutual pillars. And so now as a head of content is my role, like my life revolves around trying to form relationships based on those three pillars. With our prospects. Yep.
Steve Goldhaber: It's really, I mean, this is probably the most interesting story of guests on the podcast who totally just took a break and then came back to marketing.
So my next question has to do with, you took this time off, you did this deep dive into understanding relationships and love. Mm-hmm. You then jumped back into your marketing role. Was it an easy transition back into marketing and to this day, do you still reference. All those learnings when you were, I guess, as they say in the field doing research?
Nate Bagley:
Yeah, super easy to jump back into the marketing role, especially in the role that I'm in right now, because that trip that I did, Turned me into a ma master of content. You know, I recorded all those interviews that I conducted and learned to host and produce a good podcast which is something that I do now learning to ask really good questions.
As you know, Steve is like, it's a skill. It requires a lot of effort, and, and the person who asks the best questions oftentimes gets the best answers, which makes a really good marketer. If knowing your buyers, knowing your customers is. Like a key part of being a good marketer? You're a good question asker.
You're gonna be a good mar marketer. Yeah. Becoming a good storyteller has been a part of that. And then just understanding that those fundamental principles of relationship building and offering value, like those basic principles that I learned on that journey, I think MA have made me a better marketer.
And it's how I think about marketing now. I actually prioritize the relationship stuff over the technical stuff at this point.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, that makes sense. I think the emphasis on asking great questions, it's such a deep insight and you know, I wrote a book years ago, but before I wrote the book, it was actually a blog post that inspired the book.
And the blog post was about the role of the chief marketing officer, and it was all about, you know, as a chief marketing officer, you cannot solve anything and you can't say here as here team, I've solved it. Now go implement it. And the, the blog post was all about you have to be able to frame a question.
That is a really interesting juicy question that gets people really thinking about it. And you know, you could spend hours just getting to a really productive question to then brief a team on and say, here's the question that we have to answer. What do you think? And even in just writing content, Whether it's a great headline or a great opening paragraph, the ability to ask a question that just stops the reader.
Because the beautiful thing about a question is like when someone says, what's your favorite color? You can't help. Your brain starts to, the wheels spin and you have to answer the question, right? But if someone just says, oh, my favorite color's blue, you don't, you may not think about your own favorite color.
So it's psychological warfare for content marketers. That's the headline for the podcast today is, Yeah. Is the ability to ask great questions.
Nate Bagley: And I think even more than great initial questions, it's great follow up questions. Yeah. You know, you might get an answer like, my favorite Color's blue, but the next couple questions you ask after that could really unearth some interesting insights.
You know why? Wh do you remember when? You decided that was your favorite color? Like Yeah, I, I know it's a simple example, but like, just you asking that question, I thought through my head like all what the answer would be that I would give. And I think you, the more wise you ask and the more open-ended questions you ask after you get an answer.
Yes. The more understanding you get for your buyers.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. The five why's is something I've written about in the, I love the five boys in my book and it's just, it's started in a MA manufacturing environment. But I love that approach of just continually asking why, why, why? Until finally you're beat down and then something just pops out of like, well, The reason why that's always been that way is cuz of this.
Yeah. And then you're like, wow. Now I've got to the insight. I try to do that with my kids all the time and they, they get annoyed with me because they're on, they're on to my games of asking why over and over again. They're like, oh no, we're doing that again with dad. That's okay.
Nate Bagley: That just means you're a good dad.
Steve Goldhaber: You're making them think, yeah, maybe I should ask them, do you know how good of a dad I am? That's my question to them. And then they'll say, why? Yeah, why do you, why do you think you're a good dad? I could see that one of my sons would definitely play this. Psychological game with me. The other one would just roll his eyes.
He's older. He'll be like, I'm not doing this. This is lame. All right. So what do you love most about marketing these days? What excites you?
Nate Bagley: B2B marketing has a notorious reputation of being devoid of humanity. You know, a lot of it feels really sanitized, sterile, loaded with buzzwords and techno babble.
And the joy that I get out of my job right now is bringing humanity back into. Our marketing messaging. I love both sides of what I do. One side, like hearing from our customers and our buyers, the impact that we're having on their business and on their, their jobs, and how much revenue we're helping them generate the insights that we're helping them glean.
Like that's a really cool experiences talking to them and, and digging up those stories. And on the other side, I really love. Fire research. I love trying to understand the pain points and the struggles of our ideal customer and really getting inside their head. I'm a firm believer that if you can state your, or describe your customer's problems better than they can, yes, then they will automatically assume that you have the best solution.
Yep. And so those moments where I can write some copy or record a video and have a customer like watch it or read it and be like, oh my gosh, you're in my head. How did you know that's exactly what I'm dealing with? Like it's, it's like you got inside my brain and took the words out. Those moments are magical for me and it shows me that I'm doing a really good job.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, I think too, like. We've had a lot of guests on the show talk about the icp. I think we need a W ccp, which is your worst customer profile cuz living, living, living in the world of like retention and churn. I've always loved the idea of like, well, yeah, I sold something today, but I don't know how good of a sale that is.
I. You know, like I need to wait six months or two years to see if that was a good relationship or not. Yeah. You know, and I, I think worst customer profiles are great so that you can have that conversation before you make a sale and just say, you know, I've done this with my own business. Say like, I don't think this is a good fit.
Here's why I don't think it's a good fit. And I've even had some clients that wanted to work with me where I passed on them. I just explained, yeah, this is my experience as it relates to what I do. I don't think it's gonna be a good long-term solution. I could never have done that in the first or second year of my business, but, As I'm moving into year six now, you just become more mature, you're more stable, and you can make some of those recommendations to say, I, I know how this is gonna play out, and I don't want to go on that journey.
Nate Bagley:
Yeah. So I've got a mini case study for you. All right, let's hear it with this exact situation. I'm so glad you brought it up. I was talking to a revenue leader at one of our clients businesses the other day. And he told me a story of this exact sa, same thing except his term was U C P Unideal customer Profile, but I like W CCP better.
I think he basically said it. What he did was went through win loss data that they'd been collecting and started to map out the customers that were churning and what they looked like in their win loss interviews and like what attributes they had. And he literally developed a W CCP for his sales team.
And it got to the point where if a prospect met certain criteria, checked a certain number of boxes, that they would literally just say, Hey, we love that you're interested. Here's some other solutions, but we don't think you're a good fit for us. And he actually saw revenue increase because his sales leader or his sales reps weren't wasting time.
Yes. Trying to overcome objections and close deals that one either weren't gonna clo, had a really low likelihood of closing, or two, they would close, but they would be problematic, frustrating clients that would end up churning in a year anyway. Yeah. And so there's definitely value in going through that.
Exercise of really understanding who is not a good fit for your product.
Steve Goldhaber: I think too, the other thing I, I'd love to see, I've only heard maybe an example or two of sales organizations doing this, but for those who have long-term, you know, renewal relationships with their customers, I'd love to see sales commissions paid based upon tenure with the company.
So if you bring a worse customer profile into the company, that commission is going to be drastically different than, wow, you've got our golden customer. They're gonna be here for five, 10 years and like, we're gonna reward you because of that. Right? Like I feel like, yeah, I feel like so much of the incentives in sales is really just, here's your monthly or quarterly goal.
You have to hit your bonus and you're gonna get paid your commission or not. So all you care about is bringing in that money for that month or quarter. Taking the long-term view on that would change.
Nate Bagley: Or like maybe your commissioning gets paid out in percentages year over year. Yes. So you get 50% of your commission in year one, and then 25 in year two, and then 10.
Steve Goldhaber: And then I see a whole sales software category. Being born right now is just, I love it. Steve is just figuring out how you want to truly incent your sales team. What drives you nuts about marketing? What are, if you looked at your calendar this week and said, I'm not taking these five meetings, like, what's going on there?
Nate Bagley: What don't you like about marketing? I hate the obsession over attribution. I definitely think attribution is important. Like I think it's important to have a methodology of understanding what's working and what's not working, but we, every marketer knows the attribution is imperfect. It's probably pet peeve of most people, and I think the focus, I don't know, the focus should be on your buyers and whether or not you're doing things that will meet their needs and solve their problems, and less on tracking every single dollar that comes through and attributing every single, or trying, trying to fight for attribution for every single lead that comes through.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. That makes sense. I, I've, I've heard that as a theme too. Attribution. It's like you need it, but it's also, it feels like we're just fighting for credit is what attribution is. Right? Like when it's really a shared experience, like Yeah, the product team gets some, the marketing team gets some, the sales team gets some.
Exactly. I remember I was doing, a years ago, I was doing a campaign where, We spent a ton of money on a homepage. I'm gonna date myself. This was back in the time when the internet was like, Hey, these 10 pages are like, this is where you want to be on the homepage if you wanna reach people. I remember those days, and we reached, I think a third or 40% of the US online population in one day because we just, we did a bunch of homepage takeovers.
Yeah. And of course we cooked all these customers. We knew that they went to the client's website, and I think it was a 30 or 40 day. 45 day attribution model. This was also right around holiday shopping time, which was big for this client. So since we had bought all that media and cooked all these people, we were now in a position to say, well, we know that, you know, half of all the sales from.com were related to our one day of advertising, so we can just take credit for all of those sales And it and it, yeah, of course that's not right.
But it was just, it was fascinating cuz technically you couldn't make that attribution claim and we chose not to do it. Like we shared the data and, but it was more around. We reached a ton of people on one specific day. Right. And yeah, attribution's tricky. I feel like especially the companies that are bigger in nature and you have multiple departments, kind of wanted to get that credit.
It's just tough. I, I think also, I'm a big believer in just asking the customer too, like, like you can collect all this data, but it's just great to ask the customer too. Like, Hey, looking back, You know, you've been evaluating our business for whatever, three months, six months. What are the different things that helped you get across the finish line and just say, here, here are eight different things and they can rank them.
You know, like the salesperson got me across the finish line. No, it was the content because I found you guys online through the content and sometimes we're just afraid to ask for that information cuz it's just like another step. But, right. I love stuff where it's just all about like, just talk to the customer and ask them.
Nate Bagley: Yeah. That attribution process so much focuses on like, how did we get a lead to enter our ecosystem and not what was most important to them? What was most impactful? It's like maybe they, maybe they came in through a cold email or maybe they came, maybe they found you through like a LinkedIn post or an ad that you ran.
But what really resonated with them was like an event they went to, or a webinar where they rediscovered you, that they watched or you know, some, some other thing that maybe got tracked further on down their, their life cycle. But that was the most compelling thing that made that switch flip of like, okay, now I feel a sense of urgency.
I need to solve this problem and these guys are the ones I want to go with. And that, that's something you can't really track in an attribution model is like, what's the most important thing? Not what's the first thing.
Steve Goldhaber: Yep. All right. I have a final question for you and I'm, yeah. I'm, if I know my listeners well, They've been thinking about this question the whole time.
We've talked about marketing, we've talked about relationships. Are you single Nate or did you find someone?
Nate Bagley: I found somebody. I am very happily married. We've married for seven years and we have two beautiful daughters. One just arrived January at the beginning of the year, so I have a little, a little baby in my house and a toddler and it's awesome.
Nice. My toddler just cut her bangs off with her scissors yesterday. The scissors, she. So I'm in the middle of that phase of life right now.
Steve Goldhaber: That's awesome. I look at memories in social media and it's so funny because my son did the same thing, my older one, and there's a great like three month span of him having just the shortest front hair ever.
Yep. And it's just, you know, it's one of those things as a parent when it happens, you're like, oh my God, what's going on? And then those are the things later on you realize like that's what you cherish about the memories of your kids is is all the bad, the bad stuff.
Nate Bagley: That's exactly the conversation I had with my wife yesterday.
She sent me a picture of the bennings. In her hand and, and said, I'm such a bad mom. And I'm like, every parent goes through this exact scenario. At some point you're normal. And then I googled toddler, like cut's own hair and did an image search and sent her like 25 pictures of toddlers with really bad haircuts.
And I think it, she felt a little bit better. So yeah, I think you're right. We enjoy those crazy times.
Steve Goldhaber: All right. Well Nate, I enjoyed. Getting to know you and about your experiences. Thank you for coming on the show and thank you to all the listeners. Make sure to like and subscribe as they say. And if you found us in one channel, you can subscribe in the other meeting.
We're at Spotify. We're on Apple. You can also go to the 26 characters.com website. We catalog all of our podcasts on there. So once again, Nate, thank you, and we'll catch you next time on interesting B2B marketers. Take care.