The New Order for Software Buying

Amanda Malko:
A bit for her.

John Jahnke:
Yeah, I know Jamie, the CRO a full story. We used to work together. I don’t know if you know Jamie. I know Atlanta is a small tech town.

Amanda Malko:
It is. Yeah.

John Jahnke:
All right. I see people filtering in. We’ll get started in a couple minutes. Thanks everybody for joining. Great to see you all virtually. Side by side gallery. My chair is squeaky. I need a webinar approved chair that doesn’t squeak.

Amanda Malko:
No, it’s funny you say that because I had the same issue and now I’m in this phone booth, so different issues. It’s like a sound vacuum, but yeah, the chairs, somebody’s figured that out.

John Jahnke:
I’m a fidgeter too, so I like to move around. But I have a standing desk for when I stand, then I move around way too much for the audiences, like the Blair Witch Project.

Amanda Malko:
Yeah, I used to have a treadmill. Well, I say it was a treadmill desk, it was a treadmill that I put a shelf on and then I put my laptop on it so I could walk during meetings. But people told me it made them really nauseous because you’re constantly in this rhythmic motion that I understand, it’s kind of distracting too.

John Jahnke:
I thought about the treadmill desk. I did not think about that. That’s a good thing.

Amanda Malko:
Yeah. I mean, I called it a treadmill desk, which sounds much fancier than what it was. It was just a shelf on top of that.

John Jahnke:
A shelf on a treadmill. Hey [inaudible 00:01:49]. Why don’t we get started? We’re at about two minutes after. Welcome everyone to our webinar and I’m super excited for this session. And my name is John Jahnke, I’m CEO of Tackle. I’ve spent my entire career in B2B software, enterprise sales, services, customer success. At Tackle, we work exclusively with software companies to help them pioneer new pathways to revenue through the Cloud Marketplaces. And our platform makes that a no code, business based decision instead of a product and engineering problem. I have a great fortune to spend my time with a lot of go-to-market leaders at software companies. So I spend most of my days thinking about how sellers can sell and finding new pathways to revenue.

John Jahnke:
I’m really excited for Amanda to join us from G2 and I’ll let Amanda introduce herself. But the intersection of what G2 does with buyers and with buyer data and buyer reviews and a lot of the work that we do with sellers is a really interesting topic. And we’ve gotten to work more closely with G2 over the last year, especially as they started to add G2 reviews to the Cloud Marketplaces and make reviews a more prominent part of the process, especially in this multichannel eCommerce evolution with Cloud Marketplaces. But Amanda, we’d would love for you to introduce yourself, say a little bit about G2 as well as the buyer report and all the research that you do around the way buyers buy.

Amanda Malko:
Happy to. So my name is Amanda Malko, I’m the CMO of G2. I think everyone probably knows G2 is on this webinar, but we’re a software marketplace and review site. I’ve spent my career in B2B software and services, the entirety of my career. And I would say that through thread has been helping companies adopt to how digital is transforming the way their customers buy, so I’m excited for this conversation. And the report and research that John’s referencing is a study that we did heading into this year. We did the analysis in the fall and it’s our buyer behavior report. We do it every year, analyzing feedback from over 800 software buyers across small business, mid-market and enterprise. And we can talk about some of the differences we saw between the segments and how is their buying behavior and investments in software changing. So it was a great study and we augmented it with data from our own marketplace as well. We’ve got over 60 million buyers every year coming to G2, so we get a tremendous amount of insight on what’s happening in the market.

John Jahnke:
Yeah, that’s pretty and 1.4 million reviews is that the last-

Amanda Malko:
We’re at 1.7 million reviews now, so we’re growing at a fast clip, actually. It’s definitely accelerating, which we think is indicative of how to be buying is changing.

John Jahnke:
A hundred percent. Yeah, I think social proof, if you think about your consumer life, the first thing you do is read a review about anywhere you’re going to buy from or any product you’re going to buy. And I think B2B is only accelerating to mimic that behavior.

Amanda Malko:
Yeah, I think sometimes we think we’re different people in our B2B lives, but if you buy anything in your B2C life, you’re probably as a consumer, you’re looking at reviews and we don’t change that behavior just because we’re buying software.

John Jahnke:
Yeah and maybe just starting at the highest level, when you think about changes that you’ve seen from buyers over the last few years, what would some of the major changes be from a buyer standpoint?

Amanda Malko:
Yeah. I mean, I think in the study we saw a couple of things. One of them is that the buying experience is becoming more frictionless, which is a great thing for buyers. It’s easier than ever to understand the types of software that’s out there to do your own research and homework. And in some cases it’s easier to buy. We actually saw that over half of purchases, people said they do them primarily on credit cards. And so even the payment process with things like product led growth and the eCommerce cessation of software is certainly reducing friction. But I think we also saw that marketing and selling software is harder. And so there is an erosion of things like trust. And part of that is because I think because there has been such an explosion in software, there’s more choice than ever and so it does become difficult for the buyer to understand what’s going to work best for me.

John Jahnke:
Yeah. I think that trust erosion is very true. And I know a couple of the stats I picked up through the buyer report, just talking about trust and how it only 34% of buyers actually trust the website, the content on the website from our seller, which it was shocking to me. You think about that as the front door to a software company in some ways and if your buyer doesn’t trust walking through the front door, how are they going to ever trust engaging with you?

Amanda Malko:
Well, that I love the front door analogy. I use that one a lot because it used to be that your website was your front door. And so what we’re seeing now is that you have many front doors. And so that makes your jobs as sellers harder because your buyer isn’t going to walk in through one place. They could walk in through a lot of different places. And it doesn’t mean that your website doesn’t matter, it just means that there’s a lot of different avenues that matter. Marketplaces matter, review sites matter and so it does make our jobs harder. It also means for the buyer though, there’s more opportunities to help them along their journey and if you do it well, hopefully more places to reach them.

John Jahnke:
Yeah, absolutely. Where from the data, were you still seeing friction in the process or the most friction in the process?

Amanda Malko:
Yeah, I love this question because I think even though we’re seeing that people are buying faster, there’s still an opportunity for us to improve. And there’re two areas that really stood out to me, were education. So specifically buyers citing that the biggest friction point for them was really understanding how to use a product. Both what’s going to be right for me and really educating themselves and then literally how to use it. So that trial experience and being hand held through some sort of experience of knowing what it’s going to be like to be hands on with that. And this is part of the user being a more important part of the buying process before they actually purchase. And so I think too often, when we’re selling software, we think of education on the product experience as a post sale part of the journey. But I think increasingly, buyers are really craving more tactical hands on education before they purchase to know that they can feel comfortable with utilizing it.

John Jahnke:
Yeah. That education piece, I think goes back to another point you talked about around content and just the kind of content and even the lack of trust in content. I think we see a lot of sellers trying to figure out the appropriate level of content at what phase of the process, what should they be presenting really early, for free what’s paid for as an experience, but the general theme of automation. And I think B2B is so much more complicated than B2C that you can’t automate everything in most B2B software. Some free trial journeys are really simpler, but others still require expertise, which is why B2B, I think hasn’t fully embraced what B2C has done.

Amanda Malko:
It’s true and I think there’s an opportunity for us to improve the buying experience by really being more intentional about what we want. I think at B2B we’re really good at handoffs. We’re really proud of when we have really good handoffs, whether it’s the inbound lead to the BDR or presale, post sale but for the buyer, so much of the delight in the experience and having a great one is when you don’t feel those handoffs. And so how can we make sure that back to the education piece, everything that we’re presenting to the buyer is very consistent. We start educating them from the first point of contact all the way through the journey and also, can we also learn more about them and continue to pass that along throughout the process as well. But that’s easier said than done, as you said, B2B buying is complicated.

John Jahnke:
Yeah, definitely. I think that understanding that handoff process and mapping it out, you see a lot of people just trying to seek to identify the friction as early as possible and just be thoughtful about analyzing the buying process itself. So I’m curious, coming back to that point on the shift in trust, there was a stat around 86% of buyers seek out peer reviews for the process. How should sellers be thinking about that and how can they think about leveraging that as part of the selling experience?

Amanda Malko:
Yeah. There’s so many ways to do this, but the stat itself, just to pause on it for a minute, I think we all instinctively know that reviews matter, but to have 86% of buyers and by the way, it’s 85% of enterprise buyers. So a hundred percent of the Fortune 500 companies utilize G2 for software research in the past year. So it is not something that is happening in just one pocket of software buying, it is very prevalent across all segments. And so you can use it, not just have a great review presence, it’s such a great, you mentioned this earlier, it’s a reference tool. And so if we know that it’s hard to build trust, reviews are currency for that. So as a seller, how do you make sure that you’re connecting the relevant reviews as testimonials for people who look like the buyer you’re selling to, is a great opportunity.

Amanda Malko:
And so I think just referencing them as proof points is really a powerful place in the buying experience to leverage them. I think the other thing is, in the data we saw that 67% of people, this was actually the scariest finding to me, at least as a former seller myself, 67% of buyers say they only contact sales when they’ve already made a decision. So the better you are leaning into customer voice, the better your reviews, the better your presence, just in terms of the volume or depth of information people can find about you, the more likely they are to hopefully get to your sales team and to be raising their hands and be very excited and qualified. So I think knowing how much of the experience is happening, pre actually talking to someone, it’s more important than ever to be thinking about reviews.

John Jahnke:
Yeah, definitely. I think there’s a very complimentary Gartner stat that says something similar, like 73% of buyers won’t engage with the seller until they’re very far down the decision process. That’s not surprising at all. I think one of the challenges we’ve seen and heard from sellers is just the fact that with reviews because the B2B buyer space is pretty complicated, how can sellers help improve the way that their buyers maybe different personas or different buyer segments connect with reviews, or how does G2 see that evolving maybe to even make it more targeted over time?

Amanda Malko:
Yeah. As it becomes more prevalent to your point, then there’s a need to really think about, how do we curate that experience so that it’s reviews for people like me, for example. So we do a couple of things on G2 that we find are really appealing to buyers. And by the way, as a seller, you can also take a similar review of your products and be able to provide more relevant, tailored testimonial content and almost third party validation, depending on who you’re selling to. So in G2 today, we offer capability to look at reviews by segment. So how the segment of SMB mid-market enterprise reviewer category or industry that the company is in, role types. So knowing if this is someone who was maybe part of the finance process versus an end user, depending on the type of software, that’s also really important, who’s reviewing this, is it the day-to-day user or a different persona and does that persona align with who I’m trying to sell to?

Amanda Malko:
And the other thing is LinkedIn connections. You can actually toggle G2 reviews by LinkedIn connections, which I personally love, because that is literally the ultimate lens of peer reviews within a pretty vast marketplace of reviews and we’re working on more. Actually, we’re rolling out later this year, a like me feature that will allow this to all be tailored even more. And you can think of it like in B2C, if you’re going and you’re shopping on a site and you want to see people who have the couch in their home, or you want to see what the shirt looks like on someone else who’s like you and people are posting pictures and leaving more tailored review content. We’re starting to see that in B2B and we think that those personalized experiences are really important. And we also offer content, so if you’re a seller and you want to curate that, there’s ways that you can actually curate, even our grid reports, based on how people, what your software looks like to an enterprise segment versus SMB, for example.

John Jahnke:
Yeah, I love that LinkedIn and like me concept. I honestly didn’t know about the LinkedIn thing until we were preparing for the session, so I’m excited to learn more about that.

Amanda Malko:
Yeah, it’s an amazing feature on the site. I use it all the time.

John Jahnke:
Yeah, that’s cool. So maybe just changing gears a little bit, I’d love to talk about retention. So there’s actually a pretty significant part of the buyer report that talks about retention and how buyers at points of renewal will initiate research again. I would love for you just to talk a little bit about the research around retention and even that point from a buyer standpoint and what sellers could learn from that.

Amanda Malko:
Yeah. So I think the thing that stood out to us was just, if trust is really difficult to build, then retaining your customers once you’ve built trust is really job number one, otherwise you do have a leaky bucket. And in this environment, retaining customers is the foundation for growing, is to make sure you’ve got happy and growing customers to start with. So I think the expectations are higher than ever is what stood out to us from the research. So we asked 12 different variables, everything that you can imagine from the onboarding experience and customer service to ROI and how important is ROI and what timeframe. And what we found is that everybody across all segments, a buyer said, “Almost everything on this list is important to very important to me.” So 10 of the 12 attributes were like, you got to have these.

Amanda Malko:
It’s almost an impossible bar. One of them, the majority of people said, I need to see ROI in under six months. Now that’s enterprise companies as well and we all know how long it can take at times to truly implement enterprise grade software, let alone see a tangible return. And in under six months, that’s a really high bar. The good news is from the research that one in three buyers would rather buy software from you than anyone else. So once they become your customer, they really want to do more. And we think that’s because once you earn that trust, customers appreciate that. And also find on their side, it is hard to find partners. And so once you find one, they’re more likely to want to grow with you. So we think in this climate more than ever really leaning into your customer success and growth is imperative.

John Jahnke:
Yeah. I love that one in three staff would prefer to buy from you, it’s just so much easier and I think plays into the SAS playbook. It’s about landing a customer, delivering value fast and then giving them the ability to grow with you. And as they’re gaining value from your product, having incremental capabilities that meet them where they are and just solve more and more problems.

Amanda Malko:
Yeah, it’s the silver lining of being a difficult place for acquisition, is that once you do acquire them, you’ve really been given a lot of latitude for expansion and that.

John Jahnke:
Yeah, definitely. And I will just restate, we threw it in the chat, please ask questions along the way. Questions about the content or questions about the report, we will definitely weave them in as we go. All right. You talked about how buying is a team sport and I think anyone who has sold enterprise software knows how many different stakeholders will weigh into the process. We, at least in the cloud domain, are definitely seeing shifts in buying centers. Where five years ago, it was very centralized and it’s becoming more and more decentralized every day. And I was listening to a podcast with Martin Casado yesterday and he talked about how the bigger the market gets, the lower the level of monetization is. So people will monetize features that are far lower in the stack the bigger the market gets, which only highlights the fact there’s going to be more and more software companies as software is one of the fastest growing markets in the world. But I think from that team sport standpoint, how are you seeing the shift in buying centers from a buyer research standpoint?

Amanda Malko:
It’s a great question and I’m going to first answer. Two people have asked it, so you can get this at research.g2.com. I just posted the direct link, so that’s where you can get the research. So appreciate the interest in that. And yeah, we’re seeing that probably similar to what you’re saying, just to echo John, I think the insight you’re providing which is spot on for what we’re seeing is, there are more people involved in the buying process than ever. So good news, bad news here is, software is becoming more ingrained and embedded across the fabric of an organization. It’s able to deliver more value to an organization than ever before. And so people care and about it more and spend more on it.

Amanda Malko:
Flip side of that is, there’s a lot more people involved in the decision. So you’ve got your IT team, I’m sure they’re very involved, finance is very involved and then oftentimes you find that there’s quite a committee between the decision makers, the users and even those influenced in the organization by whatever choice is made on the software. So as a seller, it’s knowing who do you need to influence and how becomes really important because it is going to be a collection of people and increasingly a larger group of people who are influencing and making those decisions.

John Jahnke:
Yeah, definitely. I know the research was done late last year and the macroeconomic climate has changed massively since the end of last year, where software valuations were probably at a all time high. Are you seeing anything or any new points of view from a buyer perspective based upon the latest macroeconomic climate?

Amanda Malko:
The short answer is, we’re seeing traffic, reviews and investments in software through our data continue to be on the rise. Now, I think it’s early, so I’m interested to see what happens over the coming months. We do have data from pre COVID and during COVID times and what came out of that was, software is incredibly resilient. And I think we’re still on the upswing, in terms of the maturity curve. And so what we saw is during COVID, there was a one quarter decline in software spent as everybody started to rain in spending and think about what do they do to cut costs.

Amanda Malko:
But the next quarter it started eking back up and by the end of the year, it was higher than it had been pre COVID. So a lot of that is digital transformation that happened during the pandemic, as we all started to work and buy in different ways, but it also speaks to the resilience of software and how software can really solve a lot of different pain points for companies, including when there’s macroeconomic challenges. And so, it’ll be interesting to see the current optimism we’re seeing, at least in trends on G2.com holds. But I would say, at least what we saw during COVID, it’s pretty resilient so that’s good news, I think for all of us.

John Jahnke:
Yeah, definitely. And hopefully in this downturn, usually people invest significantly, especially people with economic strength, invest significantly into automation and that just plays into investing as much or more into software. No doubt. During the pandemic, there will be certain segments of the industry that are more impacted than others, but yeah, I think it’ll be curious to see how it all plays out.

Amanda Malko:
Yeah, absolutely.

John Jahnke:
So there was a question in chat and I heard a recent statistic and I’ll just read it, that the Cloud Marketplaces has buyer center growth is 30% for software. Are you seeing this data in the study? I don’t know if you all covered it in your study, I could talk about it from a state of the Cloud Marketplace report standpoint.

Amanda Malko:
Yeah. Actually, I’m interested in what you would say here, John, and what you all are saying.

John Jahnke:
Yeah. Every year we do the state of the Cloud Marketplace research, we’ll actually kick off the research for calendar year 2022 in the very near future. And that looks at interviews, sellers as well as buyers, as well as platform providers on the evolution of marketplace. And I think some of the data we’ve seen and Bessemer actually did a section in the state of the cloud report, that is probably the most recent content but in general, the cloud budgets are growing 37% year over year. And that’s just the macro level hyper scale cloud budget growth. And the marketplace budget growth is growing faster than the cloud budgets, projected at somewhere north of a hundred percent year over year. And actually, there was a very recent article, it was in CRN and we can post the link to it, but it was from Thomas Kurian at Google and there’s a large section on marketplace.

John Jahnke:
And he talked about how they had seen the million dollar transactions through their Cloud Marketplace grow 500% year over year. None of the clouds publish the exact data around how fast marketplace is growing. But from the data we’re seeing, we actually made some predictions around how fast marketplace would grow over the next five years in the state of the Cloud Marketplace report at actually getting towards this 50 billion dollars of throughput. And if you look at the enterprise B2B software spend, according to Gartners about 500 billion dollars right now, that’s growing somewhere in the mid teens, so you see marketplace becoming 10% of that. And at a customer level, we have customers at all shape and size on this, where single digit percentages of their revenue are going through Cloud Marketplace up to companies who were born marketplace native and have a hundred percent of their revenue. So that, it also depends on where you’re at from a company maturity standpoint, but we see the dollars for marketplace growing, the dollars for cloud growing, the dollars for B2B software growing and a strong desire for buyers to buy digitally.

Amanda Malko:
I could speak to that last point, because we did cover that in the study. It was the first time we’d asked it, so we’re about to do the study or at least start fielding the study. And I’m interested to see, I mean, my hypothesis is we’re going to see some dramatic increases in this particular area, but in our study we found that one in five buyers prefers to buy software from a third party and of that, marketplaces were the primary place they’re buying. That’s probably no surprise. I think what’s more surprising is in SMV, over a quarter of buyers are saying, I actually like to buy from a third party marketplace, and it’s still eking up an enterprise. So I think we’re going to continue to see that be an increasingly prevalent way that people say, I prefer actually to buy. And I think it does go back to two areas that we’ve touched on a lot in this conversation of why.

Amanda Malko:
One is reducing friction. It’s like, this is the space where I know it is part of my experience as a software user to be in these ecosystems. And so it’s really convenient to have it all in one place and be able to get trusted information is the other piece. So knowing that it is part of a Cloud Marketplace to get reviews, whether it’s from G2 or within the marketplace, that trusted ecosystem and environment is helping them make those decisions. So I think it’s only going to increase because the reason people are preferring that, really points back to some of the friction points in the process today.

John Jahnke:
Yeah. In that state of the Cloud Marketplace report, we talk about how the cloud budgets specifically have moved over the last three years from being a departmental budget that was owned either by director of IT or director of product, to an enterprise budget that’s now owned by finance. And finance is looking at ways to optimize the cloud budget and especially with the massive expansion in the number of software companies and the number of software products, every company buys. People are looking at ways to streamline it from a contracting standpoint. So the combination of those forces we’re seeing just drive an acceleration to a desire to purchase through marketplace.

Amanda Malko:
It’s a good question, cued up nicely to talk about some of the data around marketplaces.

John Jahnke:
Yes. That third party one, really curious to see how that continues. We hear a lot from sellers on the evolution of the channel and I did a channel interview last week and the channel is really curious about how if a buyer can procure directly from a marketplace, what’s that mean for the channel? And I actually think we’ll see an evolution in the way the channel engages. I think there’s so much complexity if you multiply the number of software titles by five times over the next five years. There’s so much complexity, there’s no doubt as a role, but I think we see buyers really looking for expertise to help them guide them through that journey. It’s much less about the purchase and much more about success with the product.

Amanda Malko:
Yeah, that’s so true. And I think that’s where that experience of engaging with peers or in an environment where you can learn starting at the point of discovery then through the purchase process, then how do you think about community and discussion forums or just continuing that peer connection and content throughout the journey. I think the companies that are going to succeed are going to lean into that, not lean out of that and say, how do we actually facilitate and really enable more of those peer-to-peer conversations throughout the buying journey? And I think marketplaces can be a great advocate in that because that’s where that’s where people really are coming together, the buyers, the sellers and then in many cases, peers having discussions or leaving reviews. I think you’re just going to see more of that community led growth, which is a buzzword these days, but I do think marketplaces are able to facilitate a lot of that.

John Jahnke:
Yeah, definitely. I think the community led growth, we see that in so many dimensions. I actually think it’s hard because there’s so many communities now that communities continue to expand, even the way community engagement happens. I’m engaged in all these slack channels, but there’s now too many. So the quality of my engagement erodes and I look to engage with content in places where I spend time, which ends up being LinkedIn or on the web, or finding our way to hopefully interesting topics like this to learn more. So just from a seller stand, we’ve covered a lot of ground and definitely, please keep the questions coming. We’ve covered a lot of ground. What would a handful of recommendations or takeaways be that sellers could have in regards to the evolution of buyer behavior?

Amanda Malko:
Yeah. A couple of things in terms of takeaways. I think if you think about that first point we touched on in the very beginning of this conversation, of the buying experience becoming more fragmented, but also buyers self-educating and making decisions faster. Just thinking about how do you invest in meeting customers and prospects, you said it well, which is, there’s no longer one front door, there’s multiple front doors. How do you think about intersecting them wherever they are and finding places where you have hand raisers outside of maybe your website. So a great example of that would be things like using intent data, using signals from other marketplaces, trying to figure out how you can actually have a valuable role in those ecosystems can be a great way to lean into where your buyers are spending their time and hopefully aid them in their purchase process a little bit earlier.

Amanda Malko:
And so I think that customers are giving us all kinds of signals, but the website tends to be the last place they’re coming. And so how do you make sure that you’re leaning into that? I think the second piece is on trust and if trust is harder than ever to build, thinking about your existing customers as your best marketing partners. Now in enterprise, we’ve often had this idea of the customer reference is gold and they can be very high touch experiences to have a customer reference for an enterprise software product. But today we have all kinds of ways to have customers be advocates and really marketers for us in a way. And I think leaning into that, whether it’s peer reviews or using customer testimonial in your selling process is really key to making that successful and we know that will enable trust in the conversation and in you as the seller too.

John Jahnke:
Yeah, I love that, making your customers your best marketing partners and especially just creating ways for them to share their story. If you’re delivering value, I mean, we find customers are excited to talk about their experience if you’re delivering value. I think in our consumer lives, we’ve become much more accustomed to this style of engagement where 10 or 15 years ago, it may have been incredibly difficult to get a customer to speak on your behalf. Where now, everyone is like yeah, if I have a great experience, I want to tell others about it.

Amanda Malko:
And it’s easier to do it, right. There’s more forums and avenues to do it, it doesn’t have to be so time intensive for your customer. I think the final thing I would say is, as you think about that retention piece we talked about and retention being the foundation for growth, I think educating before marketing is really important. So a lot of times we think we have to sell differentiators and proof points and all of those things are table stakes for sure but I think increasingly, customers are craving really credible hands-on and how-to content both for your category and for your products. And so I think that’s the other thing, is how do we think about ourselves as educating our prospects and customers first and then marketing to them almost second. Because I think people just crave that valuable, tell me how to do this, because things are changing so quickly. And I think we sometimes forget you’re sitting in a place of real expertise, how do you bring that to the forefront?

John Jahnke:
Yeah, definitely.

Amanda Malko:
This webinar may be used an example for example, for Tackle as an example. Just leaning into education on how our Cloud Marketplace is changing. I think there’s so much there that I think if we start with education before selling, goes a long way.

John Jahnke:
Yeah. I’m a huge believer that content is the first step for everyone and if you’re delivering quality content, that helps people’s experience be easier and improve the quality of how they engage with you or even ask better questions. If you can answer all the questions, if they’re going to spend 70% of their time without you and they’re going to only engage with the buyer when they’ve already made a decision, you have to make sure you’re answering every question possible in an asynchronous content based way. And there is still, there’s still a scarcity of that. It’s amazing when you look at companies and how limited that information is, or even it’s just not easy to connect with. Maybe it’s there and it’s embedded in behind paywalls or beheaded behind customer experiences.

Amanda Malko:
Well, I think that’s a hundred percent right. First of all, I think software was too late to the education party. It got very complex very quickly and then they’re like, oh, we need academies and ways to train people. And then we said, well, this is just for our customers and you got to log in to get this content. And it’s like, actually a lot of companies have this rich educational content and material and they’re holding it for their customers. And in some cases, maybe you need to do that but in a lot of cases, it actually lowers the friction for a prospect who’s trying to understand, what is it going to be like and what kind of support am I going to get around this product experience? So free trials are obviously a great way to get hands-on, but even then people need to know how to use your product and that content is gold. So your point exists and we’re like, once you buy the product, we’ll give you all that stuff.

John Jahnke:
Yeah. And I think the appetite for the user to know more sooner where again, five or 10 years ago, they were willing to only know surface level things, but now people really want to understand how will this product solve my problem, which just increases the depth and complexity of the information they want to consume.

Amanda Malko:
Yeah, absolutely. I think someone’s asking a question here, which is a good one about competitors or tending educational content. I’m finding that competitors who want to find a way. I mean, there are certain instances, like if you’re in security software, there are certain places where this might be very difficult, but oftentimes your competitors are getting your product and getting into those things already. And so I have increasingly worried less about that, because I think the trade offs to not educating your prospects is too high, that’s my view on it.

John Jahnke:
Yeah, I absolutely agree.

Amanda Malko:
Use good judgment and there might be areas that are off limits, but competitors who are really wanting that find a way and hopefully you make them really jealous with all your great content and they’re like, “Oh, that’s a great product with great educational content and you’ve set a new bar.”

John Jahnke:
Right. Yeah. I totally agree. People will find a way when they want to and if you’re actively sharing, they’re going to be able to consume a lot. But ultimately, it sets the innovation bar on the company to say, we have to continue to innovate on our product and our content and our customer experience to be easy to do business with. And it should only challenge you to do better for your customers.

Amanda Malko:
Yeah, well said.

John Jahnke:
We’re in this mode of talking about areas of challenge that software companies may have. What are other mistakes that you see sellers making, as you think about this rich data set from a buyer standpoint?

Amanda Malko:
We kind of alluded to it earlier, but do I have time to tell a quick story?

John Jahnke:
Yes, absolutely.

Amanda Malko:
Okay. I’m not going to call anybody out. I’m going to use a B2C example, but it has happened to me multiple times, including this year as someone who buys, we buy a lot of software. The short answer is, the buying journey and the handoff experience is just awful, right. Sometimes we really screw it up and it’s not intentional. I think everybody wants that to be great. I’ll give you an example to buying a car that I experienced. When I was trying to buy a car late last year, I went to go buy a car because I had a baby during the pandemic and this is probably too much information, but car seats are huge. I was like, oh it’s only one kid, but the car seat alone is gigantic so I was like, okay, I got to go get a new car for the car seat. Anyway. Ridiculous.

Amanda Malko:
I go online and I’m going to set up a test drive as you do. So I set up a test drive and I go down to the dealership, which is a big deal when you have a small child and you’re like, I’m taking a day to go get this car. And they’re like, “We don’t have a record of you having an appointment here.” And I was like, “Well, what happened because I got a confirmation?” And they routed me to the wrong dealership. I was like somewhere else in the state far from where I was. And I laughed and I was like, this is like when you route the demo request to the wrong person on the sales side and it’s a really unsatisfying, handoff experience.

Amanda Malko:
And I said, “Okay, well, can I just take a test drive? I just want to try in this case, your product, the car.” And they said, “Well, we actually don’t have any of the cars you’re looking for here.” Because there was and is a chip shortage, so they had no cars. Do you want us to show pictures on the website? And then I laughed because I was like, well this is like enterprise software where we’re like, “We can’t actually show you the six figure product you’re about to buy, but do you want to see pictures, because I can show you screenshots?” And I’m like, okay, that’s really unsatisfying. So then I went and I was like, “I’m going to your competitor down the street, because row of dealerships, and I’m going to try their cars and see what they have.” And I walk in and the exact model that I wanted to buy was sitting in the lobby.

Amanda Malko:
And they said, “Do you want us to drive it out? You could take it for a test drive.” I was like, yes, this is very satisfying. I had no appointment, I just showed up, you made it super easy. And of course, they get in and it’s top of the line model, which is not what I was… I was like, just give me the basics. And they were selling me on the disco lights, I don’t know if they’re really called that, but you know the color. I don’t have a car with colored lights all around there so I was like, okay. And they’re like, “Your son is going to love it, kids.” I’m like, I don’t need this, but I’m trying it and I have my hands on the wheel and I’m experiencing it. And I thought, this is what it’s like to have a good experience, when there’s no barrier to me learning about this product. There’s no barrier to me trying it.

Amanda Malko:
I got back and they’re like, “Do you want it?” And I looked at my husband and I was like, “I want this car. I want the disco lights. I didn’t know I needed them, but now I want them.” So I think that experience to me, maybe I think about B2B software buying too much but I thought about that a lot because I was like, you want to be the dealership that had me wanting disco lights that I didn’t know I needed. Reducing handoffs, no friction, let me try it. We got to get better at it, so that’s the thing I still think we need to work on.

John Jahnke:
Yeah, that’s a great story. And it’s so true and I think once-

Amanda Malko:
And it’s true, it’s a true story. I wanted the other car, but I wanted a ridiculous car.

John Jahnke:
And when you spend all your time thinking about how people buy or how people sell, because I do the same thing where our customers, I go to their pricing page. We buy a lot of software. I go to people’s pricing page and I’m like, okay, what’s the experience look like? And I had an instance, a product we had used before that we wanted to use again and they forced you to only do a free trial. I’m like, I don’t want to do a free trial, I want to buy it. I know what I want. It was free trial, contact sales. I don’t want to talk to sales, I don’t want to do a free trial, I just want to buy this right now. There’s so much of B2B software when you try to go through the doors that are available, it just lacks action.

Amanda Malko:
It does. And I think we don’t give buyers enough credit. We’re like, “Oh, but it’s so complicated.” Is it though, or is it that we haven’t created the avenues for them? In some cases it might be so complicated, so that’s something to take a look at. And I think the second thing is, it’s hard and it requires a lot of cross functional alignment. And so I think just starting with, we want to be the curve that sells the disco lights, what would it look like, what would we have to improve to be that? And just recognizing that it’s hard and it requires cross-functional alignment, but I think it’s possible. I think you brought up in another conversation, maybe make them say, “Okay, you can do a trial, but pay for it.” Okay. Some people might be willing to do that, so what would it take to get their hands on the wheel sooner? That’s an interesting question.

John Jahnke:
I read, I forget what analyst it was, but I read some analyst research talking about how people were more willing to pay for trials than ever before, because cloud has changed the way you think about buying. When you turn an EC2 Instance on the meter is running, but you’re okay with that because you can shut it off when you want to. But how does that trickle into enterprise software? Product led growth, usage based pricing are all really complicated, everybody wants to do them. Some products are designed that way, but there’s a lot of work that has to happen to make that work well. Those are all the areas of friction we see from a seller standpoint where we think there’s so much innovation to come and just the machinery that drives the way that software is sold.

Amanda Malko:
Pricing models is a great example. You can introduce a lot of friction in just the way you price your product.

John Jahnke:
Right. And that’s one of those things you think about consumer, you can AB test your pricing, you can geo-fence your pricing, you can’t AB test your software pricing. Most people, if they think, I need to think about repricing, will go find a consultant to do a lot of research, pay them a lot of money in order to come up with recommendations. I think about pricing, you want it to have observability like you do in your software engineering system. You need all the exhaust from your selling system to inform your pricing. None of that exists yet.

John Jahnke:
So I think we’re coming up and I would say, we’re coming up at the end of our content. We had about 10 minutes reserved for questions and I probably have a few questions or areas that we could continue to chat about as we go, but if you do have questions, feel free, fire them into the chat. And one of the questions I had queued up was just, it was along the lines of making your customers your best marketing avenue. You talk about in the report, incentivizing advocacy and I’d love to hear your thoughts on how can people, in a really genuine way, incentivize advocacy.

Amanda Malko:
Yeah. I chose that word and it was intentionally, but I think in hindsight, it could mean pay your customers money to advocate for you, which isn’t necessarily the point. I think that customers increasingly want to talk about software that they really enjoy and had a good experience with. I know I do when I have a great experience because it is so important to our business. And so I think it goes back to how do you empower them and incentivize them? And it could be as simple as giving them a platform to share their authentic ideas about your space in a way that helps them build their own credibility or awareness for themselves and their reputation in the space.

Amanda Malko:
I was talking to another CMO and she sells enterprise software and she’s like, “Yeah, it used to be that we really struggled to get case studies, because we’d go and we’d say, will you do a case study with us? And now we just go and we say, we think what you’re doing is incredible. You’re one of the best in class examples of what we do. We’d like to just take 10 minutes to record it. Just you talking about your thoughts and feelings on this space and then we’re actually going to promote it and consider you one of our champions and give you and your company some visibility that will hopefully, maybe bring you new customers as well.” That’s a totally different ask, right?

Amanda Malko:
So how do you incentivize them to get some value out of this and increasingly, there’s tons of ways to do that. I mean, I think for reviews, a great example could be, I do know some customers who will give discounts or they’ll give them a free ticket to their conference to do a review. I just think a lot of times it’s how can you improve the relationship by providing something that your customer is going to value?

Amanda Malko:
It requires thinking through that a little more, but it’s not that hard. I think the other thing is creating programs or spaces where customers can come together and be champions and help each other can be really powerful, because a lot of times we’re just motivated by helping. And so I see a lot of software companies that are leaning into customers helping other customers and bringing them together, whether that’s in smaller forms or in some of these slack communities you might be in. And so this advocacy doesn’t have to happen to the entire world, it really just needs to happen within your community. And sometimes just creating a place where they can do that can be really powerful.

John Jahnke:
Yeah, that’s great. I’m curious what you’re seeing in that regard, just as the world goes back to in person. I feel like there’s going to be this tidal wave of in-person events that will happen over the next year.

Amanda Malko:
There is.

John Jahnke:
I feel it already just looking at my calendar over the next 12 months. We’ve all become so accustomed to this and now transitioning back to in real life, as a marketer and buyer expert, I would love your thoughts.

Amanda Malko:
I had a conversation about this yesterday with our head of events. She’s phenomenal. And we were sitting on a call with a consultant in this space, an events consultant who has been doing this forever and we said, “What are you seeing?” And she said, “I’ve never seen a busier season for events than this coming fall and onto early next year. You can go to an event every day, probably, if you want to.” And so she said what’s going to happen, what she’s seeing is small intimate events we really crave with our peers, big splashy events that inspire us. We haven’t seen those in a minute, that’s going to be great. Everything in the middle is just going to get pushed aside because we’re all going to be too busy. So think about how am I creating those small intimate events.

Amanda Malko:
And if you’re going to go big, go really big or couple up with other people, so you can make it a bigger affair. She said those few hundred people, the things in the middle, I don’t know. We’ll see if that proves to be true, but I know I’m really craving peer connection and I don’t know if I need to go to a thousand person conference. I would if it was really valuable, amazing content, but I definitely am excited to get back on talking to customers and peers.

John Jahnke:
Yeah, definitely. Awesome. Well, I think I don’t see any more questions, Amanda. I just want to say thank you for joining. This was super insightful. Love the buyer research, love thinking about how we can apply it to helping sellers sell and really look forward to seeing what the continued innovation come out of G2, as well as continued research around how buyers are buying.

Amanda Malko:
Likewise, love what you all are doing and thanks for having me.

John Jahnke:
All right. Thanks everyone, have a great day. Thanks for joining us. See you soon. Bye.

Amanda Malko:
Bye everybody.