Brand Building

Going Along The Customer’s Buying Journey With Matt Heinz

Many businesses are doomed to fail because they focus too much on developing a strong brand but blatantly ignore the customers’ buying journey. Without understanding their behaviors, needs, and interests, there will be a huge disconnect that could lead to huge losses. Mark Cox sits down with Matt Heinz, President and Founder of Heinz Marketing, to discuss the right way to build trust and credibility with your target market. Matt explains how to leverage today’s technological innovations, particularly AI, to swiftly adjust business strategies to the ever-evolving world. He also stresses the importance of proper collaboration and teamwork between sales and marketing teams to perfectly capture the attention and interest of the public towards their businesses.

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Going Along The Customer’s Buying Journey With Matt Heinz

Matt Heinz, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Introducing Matt Heinz

It's a pleasure to finally meet you. I think our past should have crossed sometime sooner than this. It's always helpful for our gang to maybe give us a little bit of that short story of your professional journey. It's interesting to hear how a Journalism major ended up doing marketing for Microsoft and the Seattle Mariners and then running Heinz Marketing. How did you get here?

It's been a giant mistake, Mark. Imagine when you started with a Political Science and Journalism degree, I started my career doing exactly that. I was a state government beat reporter for a suburban newspaper outside of Seattle. I made my way to a PR firm, went to Microsoft, marketing for a couple of startups in Seattle, and developed a fondness over time for the complexity of the B2B go-to-market.

I realized very quickly that you can't just send an email like a lot of consumers' transactional performance marketing tactics. Those don't apply to complex sales situations. I decided sixteen years ago to try it on my own. Over time, we've built a team. We have clients all around the world, helping companies with complex sales situations to create more predictable repeatable pipelines. It's been a lot of fun along the way.

You're right. It's spectacular fun doing this. When you go in and help companies, are you going in as a consultant? Are you going in as trainers? What would a typical engagement look like? How would a company identify if they need your help?

We're project-based consultants. I think there are a lot of companies that do ongoing retainer and agency work from the tactical campaign side. Most of our clients have great product market fit but don't have a repeatable scalable engine to drive growth. We have developed over the years a methodology around building a predictable pipeline. We bring that methodology to clients. We customize it to their unique go-to-market motions, their industry, and their culture.

We create and install the systems that are going to drive that predictable pipeline, and then we teach them how to run it. A big part of our focus is to drive client independence. Our clients want to do this on their own. They want predictable pipelines to be part of their DNA moving forward as a core competitive advantage in their business.

We get calls from companies that don't have that engine that have grown maybe organically because of that strong product market fit, but have reached a ceiling and are not growing because they don't have the systems to drive that. We have companies that have outgrown their current marketing functions and are not reflecting the complexity of how go-to-market works today.

We also have clients that as they grow, their outbound marketing efforts are strong, but their ability to orchestrate that work internally starts to fall apart. Gartner calls that collaboration drag. It is a real thing. As companies get to 2025-plus employees on the marketing side, agility speed to market starts to deteriorate unless you put a real focus on how that gets done. Over the last few years, we've developed a real focus and expertise around helping companies better orchestrate the very act of doing marketing and go-to-market work, to be more agile, to increase speed to market to get more of the right work done.

There are so many great things to unpack there. As you were speaking, it dawned on me that with the hundred or so episodes we've had, we've had sales thought leaders, coaching thought leaders, mindset thought leaders, and all those kinds of good things. Some folks talked about mental health. I don't think we've had somebody who grew up with this core marketing expertise. We haven't had enough marketing thought leaders. In a little while, you and I might end up chatting about this collaboration and integration between sales and marketing. Maybe that's why. Maybe I've been ignoring marketing.

Role Of Marketing In Mid-Sized Organization

You touched on organizations that have not stayed current with what's taking place in marketing. Frankly, when you start to think of big data, automation, AI, social selling, quantum computing, and all these things that have continued to evolve over the last hundred years, it's tough to stay current. If we took it from base principles today, this might be an overly simplified question, but what is the role of marketing in the typical mid-sized organization? A SaaS company has $25 million in ARR, and they have a marketing team of 15 people.

It's a good question. A lot of people would say it's to drive demand, which manifests the leads, but I think that's too narrow. Even in a small growing organization, marketing's function is to manage the product market fit, to manage how well, if you're developing product strategy, meets and matches what the market needs. A great marketing leader needs to know more about the customer than anybody in the organization and develop a go-to-market plan that reflects that.

A great marketing leader needs to know more about the customer than anybody else in the organization to develop a go-to-market plan.

Sales teams say they want leads and they do need leads, but what the sales team needs is a market that needs what they're selling. They need a market that's receptive to their message, that knows who your company is, but more importantly, understands why they need the conversation. They understand the problem, they understand what's wrong with their current situation, and they are seeking solutions to make that better to achieve a better outcome, and that is fluid. As your product evolves, as the market evolves, and as capabilities evolve, that's fluid. That's why I think a marketing leader's job to manage product market fit and drive market demand and all the manifestations of what that looks like is key to success in the short term and long term.

What an interesting approach by the way because a lot of times, you see these silos between we have product over here, we have marketing. Usually, there's pretty good integration between marketing and sales, but you'll hear a lot of sell what you have on the truck instead of having that closed loop. We're saying sales is in front of clients, marketing is in front of clients, who understand what the client needs, and what's the process for feeding it back into the product group so we help with that core value proposition to the market.

Turning Lead Into Sales

If some of the folks listening today, by the way, that's a real big one on this product market. If CEOs are tuning in to this and they start to think about their marketing efforts, what's a basic framework that they can think of outside of product market fit? What should I be doing to try and help create and turn a lead into an opportunity or turn an opportunity into a sale? How do we think about how marketing supports that effort?

I would start with a very simple two by two matrix. On one side, it says brand on demand. The other side says short-term and long-term. There are short-term and long-term things you can do to build a strong brand and build and drive repeatable predictable demand. I bring that up for a couple of reasons. One, I think a lot of companies that are thinking short-term prioritize demand over brand. I get it. You need leads and they're like, “Brands are expensive.” Not necessarily.

You and I are doing this podcast. I know we're recording one on the sales pipeline on your podcast. Except for a couple of streaming services and our time, this is free. It used to be you had to get a publisher to publish your book. Now, you can do it through Lulu. Building a brand is more about your ability to be creative and be proactive at doing it. I don't know any strong, predictable, sustainable demand programs that operate with efficiency that aren't supported by a strong brand behind them.

They have to go together, but your short-term and long-term strategies may differ. You have to invest now in the things you want to impact your business long term, but you also have to invest in prioritizing now the things that are going to drive the pipeline this quarter. Brand demand, short and long-term, and have an approach and a strategy for each of those. Revisit it on a regular basis. This is a quarterly conversation to decide what's working, what's not working, what's having an impact, and what are we ready for next.

Ideal Marketing Executives

When you start to think of that, it feels to me that the marketing professional today has to be part data scientist, part visionary, and part creative designer. What are some of the skills and attributes even of the members of your team, when you're looking at somebody and say, “They're the right fit for our team,” will part values for a second, so who they are. What do you look for when you're looking for marketing executives today? What skills and capabilities?

I don't want to say researcher because that feels too narrow, but I think fundamentally, all of this begins when a deep and ongoing understanding of who your customer is. Let me define that in a couple of different ways. One, part of product market fit is you need to understand the subset of the subset of the market that you're selling to. Saying you are selling them in market healthcare is way too broad.

Part of product market fit is understanding the subset of the market you are selling to.

By narrowing your focus, you are not excluding those other companies from buying from you, but you'll still take their money. What you're doing is emphasizing and prioritizing a subset of the market that based on a variety of attributes is most likely to buy, and is most likely to have the need for what you're selling because buildings don't write checks. We got to talk about the people in the building. You probably read the book Selling to VITO. It's back here somewhere.

Back in the day, I did. Yeah.

Very Important Top Officers are still important, but not sufficient. There's this concept of the buying committee. Very rarely if ever would they describe themselves as the buying committee, but there's a group of people in every company that have a vested interest in the outcome that worked together to build consensus. Sometimes formally, sometimes organically. Our job as sellers is to get that buying committee to commit to change and commit to that, to the point where they choose and implement a solution. That's it.

That's hard. Let's imagine there are five members of the buying committee. Four of them have said yes, but one is a soft no. The deal is dead. Our ability to orchestrate consensus and movement inside that buying committee is the core of the job for sales and marketing teams. Back to your question, the better I understand motivations, the better I understand needs, the better I understand not just intent but needs and evidence of needs, and how those correlate to a message I should get in front of someone to help them better understand, to unlock, to challenge and reframe a status quo, that's it. That manifests itself in messages, campaigns, sales playbooks, and trade shows, but it all comes from that buying journey understanding.

Mapping The Buyer Journey

I like that idea. I've heard you on other podcasts while I was prepping for today. You talked about mapping the buyer journey out and making sure that you're adding value, insight, and knowledge through collaterals or a point of view or third-party research to somebody at every stage along that buyer's journey, which I think is magnificent.

The stuff on the consensus, a friend of the show is Alice Heiman. Miller Heiman from back in the day when probably both of us had beautiful heads of hair. It still hasn't changed. There were groups of people buying back in 1987 or ‘89, whenever it was. They had personal needs and professional needs. You had to make sure how you navigated that. I still love that framework.

They've sold the company twice. It's now Korn Ferry. I think the brand is disappearing, unfortunately, but I love that framework for doing so. Understanding the buyer, how can that be a mistake? Having the business acumen, the industry acumen, and having that point of view in terms of a better future for them, how can you help them? How can that be a mistake?

Yes, and. A lot of companies talk about themselves and don't talk about their customers’ needs. A lot of founders out there say, “I don't need to research the customer. I founded this company based on my understanding so I know what they need to hear.” There are a lot of companies that are so enamored with their product and assume that the buyer is going to do the value translation on their own.

They were just going to throw a bunch of features and product conversations to people and trust that they're going to understand what that means. There is no build and they will come. Even if you have a great product market fit, you still have to think about that narrative. You still have to connect the dots or the customer to be not only more efficient but more predictable and scalable.

Even if you have a great product market fit, you still have to connect the dots with the customer to be more efficient, predictable, and scalable.

I've heard you on a podcast. You're a super positive guy. I'm a super positive person too, but I have to ask this question. That concept you shared about making it about them is nothing new. Dale Carnegie in 1939 said, “You can make more friends in two months by taking an interest in them than you can in two years by trying to get them interested in you.” Why are we still struggling with this in professional B2B sales and marketing in 2024? It doesn't make any sense to me why we still have to go through this.

I think it comes down to at the end of the day, we don't want to take the time. You look at examples of what happens out there today. Let's take the proverbial white paper. Let's say you create a white paper that is written with some insights for the customer that helps them address and understand a need and a problem. You get someone that downloads that white paper. What we typically do is have a 23-year-old, call them, and say, “Thanks for downloading the white paper, Can I schedule you into a demo?”

I'm not even being facetious. This happens all the time every day. We assume that because they have asked for the white paper, let alone read it, they're ready for a demo. What do we want from our sellers? We want meetings. What do we want to do in those meetings? We want to talk about our product. We want to show them all these great things we can do. Once they see it, give me fifteen minutes, sir, and I will show you how I'm going to do it.

Instead of saying, “Would you like to demo?” What If you said, “Thanks for downloading the white paper, of course, you have not read it yet. Why did you do that? What's going on in your business right now? Why was that topic of that white paper pressing to you right now?” Maybe they have an answer for that. Maybe they don't. If they do, great. You go down that line if that helps you.

Otherwise, say, “I don’t get a chance to talk to people in your seat all day long, and when I ask them about what is frustrating them in their business right now, I hear the same three things.” List those three things quickly and then say, “Which of those made you a little sweaty thinking about it,” because that is something you're dealing with right now, or maybe even better, “What's one of the things on that list that you weren't thinking about that all of your peers are losing sleep on? Would you like to know why?”

There's an insight there and you can teach a 23-year-old how to have this conversation. You don't have to be a sales rep. You don't have to be a deep product expert but to know how to ask questions and get the prospect thinking and aligning the time with something that they showed interest in, then the next step you are not doing a demo, but your chances of earning the demo after that conversation go up dramatically. Sometimes three steps are faster than one. Back to your original question, a lot of sellers in a lot of companies don't have the patience and discipline to do that.

It's such a great point. It's harder to teach somebody business acumen and industry acumen and effective discovery than it is to say, “Let our product do the talking for itself.” To me or you, frankly, that's a nightmare scenario. Can you imagine as a salesperson, I'm going to jump on a call because we scheduled a demo? Everybody out there faces this.

The person who scheduled the demo is not the person on the other end of the Zoom call. There are six people. They're all staring at you bold-faced. I have no idea who they are. I don't know why they're on the call. Three of them have no reason to be on the call and are not going to influence the decision in any way. Somewhere, they go, “Dance like a monkey.”

For those listening, the best thing you can do is say, “Great to meet everybody here. Today, we'll take it through a demonstration if that’s what you like at the end of this thing, but first, can I start, can you go around the room? Let me know who you are. What are you doing here?

“Why are you here? Don’t you have something better to do? Why did you choose to come here instead of the thousand other things you can do? What were you hoping to hear? What were you hoping to learn? What did you want to get out of this conversation that you thought, going in, might be the reason why you're here as opposed to something else? Let's have that conversation first.”

Even if you forget the demo, forget those presentations. If you can confirm and deepen the need and understanding of the need with that audience, they will blow through the end of the meeting and stick around. They will enthusiastically take the next meeting to see how you understand them so well, what could you possibly have built based on that understanding that’s now going to fulfill promises made, and promises kept.

Getting Attention And Interest

Great stuff. We switch gears. At this point in time of the sales getting an opportunity, we think on this podcast, we've had lots of great conversations. We probably have some frameworks and thoughts that are helpful. If we go a little bit upstream in this day and age, let's say we do understand our buyer and the problem, our solution solves for, or what's going on in their business and their industry. We have this point of view and some value. How do we get attention and interest in this day and age where 45% of what's in my inbox today is spam?

It is not easy. It isn't done quickly. You are not starting from zero. You're starting from a negative position because of what everyone else is doing to disrupt, ignore, and disrespect the time of your prospects. Our efforts to get someone's attention, our sales and marketing, outbounds, our blog posts, our podcasts, our sales emails. This is driving by your prospect's house at 35 miles an hour, trying to get something in the mailbox. You're going to miss a lot.

 When you do get something in there, I don't know about you, but literally like the other day, my wife and I were sitting out on the porch. We asked our youngest son, “Will you go down and get the mail?” He brought the mail to my wife. She sat there and without even opening anything, took 80% of it, and gave it right back to him. Without a word, he put it in the recycle bin. It was just sales. That was irrelevant, not something I don't spend time with. It didn't even make it in the house.

Know that if you have a great message that is relevant to that audience, you're probably going to end up in the recycle bin initially. Following my mailbox analogy a little further, eventually, maybe they look at something like that. That was interesting That didn't waste my time. They didn't spend a lot of time on it, but that didn't waste my time. The next time they see something from you, that sparks interest as well.

Even if you have a great message relevant to your audience, it will probably end up in the recycle bin initially.

Eventually, they start recognizing that car that drives by their house, throwing something in the mailbox, “I should check what that is.” I don't mean that in a stalker way but I'm trying to say that you are competing with a massive amount of information from everybody else, and over time, by being consistently valuable, you earn the right for someone to say, “I'm going to keep this piece of mail,” or “I don't have time right now to read it, but I know there's usually value here. I'm going to put it on my list and get to it eventually.”

That is a process. It is not a single email. I see people all the time. I bought a list, I sent them an email, I got no response, and apparently, the email is dead. No. Your prospects are just inundated. They don't know you and they don't trust you. That is a process. I run a business. I got to close deals. I wish I could call CMOs and close consulting projects more quickly. It doesn't work that way. Again, back to my matrix of the brand on demand, short term, long term, there are tactics, and there are priorities you can put in place. If you want your prospect to read all of your mail, you have to prove that your mail is worth reading.

We’ve learned a lot of this the hard way. The same thing for us. Matt, you've been in business longer. I think you started in 2006 or 2007, right?

2008. It’s coming to 16 years.

2008. Nice timing.

Thank you. It was November 2008. The market had just crashed. My wife is finally pregnant with her first child. I quit my job. You don't need benefits when your wife is pregnant. Now it sounds worse than it was. My wife is a teacher. Her benefits are way better than mine. I had a couple of clients lined up. It wasn't as bad as it sounds, but it was a time.

That's a great conversation for another podcast about entrepreneurship. We both lived through that. Going back to this getting this time and attention. We lived through a period of time when I outsourced our content on LinkedIn, Facebook, or social posts. In the early days of our business 10 or 12 years ago, we had marketing interns. Every once in a while, I'd read something and go, “I would never say that.” They were trying to interpret it. We gave them an impossible task.

The truth of it is now we write it. We have GPT and AI tool that helps us and starts to get to know us a little bit, It starts to get better and better and better, but I'm completely with you, anything that has our name or brand on it has to be adding value because the number of people who come to us and say, “I've been following you for two years on LinkedIn.” I go, “It worked. It was slow but it worked.” Make sure you're consistent with the brand.

Improving Practices And Collaboration

I've heard you talk about this and you read about this a little bit. Tell me a little bit about some of the best practices for the sales leaders out there, we have far more sales leaders listening today than we do have marketing leaders. What can they do to improve the collaboration or bring some best practices to the table by working with their marketing teammates?

That’s a great question. I think first is to know and appreciate that it is a team sport. You can't do this if you don't do it together. There is no successful marketing without sales. There are no successful sales without marketing. Full stop. Also recognize that the old way of thinking about the pipeline, where marketing owns the top and sales owns the bottom, is insufficient in most modern B2B selling environments.

Setting the funnel horizontally, We need to split it vertically, maybe with a diagonal band, where marketing has most of the jobs at the top, and sales may have most of the jobs at the bottom. I am thinking more about jobs to be done. One of the best examples of this is the BDR, the business development function where lead management takes the leads, turns them, and qualifies them. Is it in sales or marketing? I don't care. What is the job to be done?

In some cases, it's better if it's in sales because your BDR is the future AEs because they feel like they're part of the sales culture, but in some cases, that means they get that “Thanks for downloading white paper, would you like to see a demo?” Sometimes it's better if they're in marketing. Marketing is responsible not for leads, but the opportunity of creation. If you think about it in marketing, all of a sudden you’re saying, “I got a group of people that are on the phone.” The phone is another channel, just like LinkedIn, email, podcasts, or trade shows.

What's the conversation I want someone to have when I can get them on the phone that further qualifies and drives interest with the right person at the right company, and now it's worth spending time on? It's the same process and I don't care who does it. I think the lines have been appropriately blurred between sales and marketing and that sort of messy middle. If you can take ego aside, you can know that some of the mattresses we look at are leading indicators and or ingredients to the end results.

Also, I’ve been thinking a lot about when a deal gets closed and someone makes their quota and someone goes to the president's club. Increasingly, I have clients talking about who gets to go to the president's club. Is the AE that closed the deal? What about the BDRs that did the follow-up for months? What about the marketing team that builds the product market fit and makes them interested? What about the copy who wrote such compelling copy based on a deep understanding of that audience?

I think it's it's increasingly becoming insufficient to have AE that closed the deal to go to the president's club. That's a whole nother podcast as well. We have an entrepreneurship podcast and a president’s club podcast. The healthiest most successful programs to drive demand and sales are when sales and marketing work closely together. They check egos at the door. They have an integrated scorecard. They know that everybody wins or everybody loses. The metrics that matter are the numbers that you can buy a beer with, period.

Buying Journey: Sales and marketing teams must work closely together. They should check egos at the door and keep integrated scorecards to know when everybody wins or loses.

Money in the door, money in the door. When you start to think of it as this team sport, I think it's critically important today because you probably know matrix as well but the tenure of these sales leaders is so short. Frankly, the tenure of anybody in sales is insanely short, but a sales leader is like eighteen months these days. BDR, SDR same thing, about eighteen months, a little bit less.

This idea of saying if I'm a CRO as I've been in the past if I'm going to jump into somebody's organization today, I'm looking to build as many people closely in the team and link arms with the team because I believe in collaboration. I believe in the power of the team. By the way, it's also a survival mechanism. If we don't have a team around us, we're going to have a short stint of eighteen months is insane.

Exciting Things In The Future

Let's look at positive things. If we turn the table a little bit and say a lot of challenges out there getting attention and awareness, but I don't think we've ever been at this stage of the world where we're so well enabled, big data, quantum computing, AI, automation, technology, the ability to get more productive and effective.

I love those tools that help do a little research for me so that before I'm going to speak to Matt Heinz, I can get a DISC profile on Matt Heinz pretty quickly. What kind of person is he? How does that compare with me? Analyzing your digital footprint out there so that we can have a more engaging conversation. What are you excited about now when you start to think of the next couple of years in marketing?

What I'm excited about is flipping that, where instead of using all the tools to research you before I make the call, I used the data to figure out who to call first. Based on my understanding of the target audience, understanding of the ideal customer profile account, and understanding of the individual you need to be speaking to, that's a model that can be that inherently include an understanding and prioritization of data.

The level of data we now have access to through a variety of means is incredible. It's like the Library of Congress. Every book ever produced, but they're all on the floor. Where do you find the books you need? I think the better you understand your audience, the better you can prioritize the data you need and use that data to decide, “Who do I call next? What do I talk about?”

You hear the phrase intent signals a lot these days, a lot of the big data companies, a lot of the database vendors, a lot of them are producing what they're broadly calling intent signals. I'd break it down even further. I think intent signal means you have someone who is indicating interest in your product or showing evidence that they're seeking a solution, phenomenal. This is a later-stage buyer that hopefully you build some brands and some credibility with, so you're not a commodity at the last part. You don’t call them further doing the deal, but that's great.

Behind intent signals are need signals. It's prospects and customers that are researching or exhibiting needs that you know relate to your solution. You're still not going to offer in a fifteen-minute demo but you can respond to that need by giving them educational content, by teaching them what other people like them are doing with that need. The need before needs is evidence signals. Evidence of need that your prospect hasn't translated into a need.

They are on this journey maybe for the first time. You've seen the movie countless times, but you know that oftentimes evidence of need Is a way to accelerate that path from evidence to need to commitment to change. If you are the trusted advisor who helps them on that path, you're the incumbent in the deal now. That evidence signals and needs are early in the buying process. These are not sales-qualified leads yet. These are not people that should be in your immediate pipeline.

Your ability as a marketing organization, as a selling organization to identify and engage with prospects at that stage with the right channels, to make sure that it's not a bunch of people on the phone. The economics of that has to be right, but knowing you can break up the data into those three areas and respond accordingly is helping a lot of companies' brand and demand with that long-term play.

In simplest terms, I completely love this by the way. I think everybody out there is using Zoom for intent data or cheap and cheerful versions of Zoom for intent data. Lots of different technologies, but there's a certain sign of, for example, a software company. How long have they been in existence? Who's on their executive team? What's the solution? Who are they selling to? I could tell you with certainty, just getting those attributes, 80% of the time, they're growing less than 10%.

Staying Current

They came out of the gate and so they need what we would sell, which would be sales training and development for their team to elevate performance. I love this idea of getting smart in this space. In that area because this world is so broad. I know you get a chance with your podcasts and your blogs and your writing and your guests on everybody else's podcast. How do you stay current in this very confusing world these days? It feels like that sales leader or marketing person got this chameleon-type role where it's so hard to stay current with everything. What are the sources that you go to or how do you stay abreast of what's going on?

Episode Wrap-up

A couple of things. The easiest answer is you have to prioritize constant learning. You have to be a constant student of things you know you need to know and things you're just interested in, where your brain will make correlations. Some of my best insights into how we could be a better business, and how we can better serve clients have come from other Industries and random other situations where I'm like what happened there could happen with us too. What happened there could be part of our sales process.

You have to prioritize constant learning. You need to be a constant student of things.

I buy too many books. I don't see every one of these cover to cover, but I'm reading way more because I make it a priority. Honestly, as a marketing person for most of my career, the marketing stuff I get, I read a lot more sales books than marketing books because it's an area that I did not grow up with. When I started this business, I didn't carry a bag. I hadn't been a seller, but so I think to be hungry, to be interested, to make it a habit, and there are so many different formats.

If you don't like reading, watch videos. If you don't like videos, download a bunch of podcasts and listen to them in the car, listen to them when you go for a run. Put them in the background when you're doing something else easy. “Matt, I'm not actively listening to it.” At that point, you have information that you are consuming subconsciously even If you're working on some other tactical easy thing. I do think there's no simple answer other than you have to put in the time and make it a habit.

You almost sled there too by the way. Thank you for that. You sled to Lencioni's humble, hungry, smart thing in terms of what you're looking for, in terms of top people, and great thought leaders. In all 100 podcasts, we asked this question frequently. It does come back to being a lifelong learner instead of a know-it-all, be a learn-it-all. The most successful people in the world have driven that appetite to keep learning, be prepared, and be ready to go. The best athletes in the world are always looking to tweak 2% or 3% to get a tiny bit better because it has a massive impact.

Given your time, I'm going to maybe wrap up a couple of things here by saying thank you. Thank you for joining me today. I'm sure so many of the folks listening to this podcast are going to get enormous value from what we've heard today, but this will be the start of the process of them getting to know you. Where should they go to learn more? Where should they go to learn more about you?

HeinzMarketing.com is our company's website. You can learn about what we do. Click on the resource section and its sixteen years of blog posts, and best practice guides. We do a ton of research in go-to-market motions and a lot of that is up there as well. It's all free. Most of it doesn't have a form. It's take it and use it and benefit from it. You're going to be a guest shortly on our podcast as well, Sales Pipeline Radio. We named it that years ago on purpose. We are marketing consultants but the output of this is a sales pipeline. That's what that is about. Check that out.

I write a lot on LinkedIn these days. I used to write every day on our blog and now our company blog is written by our consultant and it's so much better. I can brag about it because I have nothing to do with it, but I spent a lot more time on our podcast and LinkedIn. You can check me out on LinkedIn as well, or if you don't find what you want, or want a shortcut to the library, it’s Matt@HeinzMarketing.com and I welcome anybody curious and has any questions.

We didn't get into curiosity today, but that's such a great topic. First of all, thanks, Matt. Thanks again for joining the team. I'll tell everybody that in preparation for today, I did go and check out the white papers, and the resource section. There are a ton of extremely well-written white papers. They're clear, they're good-looking, core messages you can pull from. I took a look at a CMOS guide to marketing orchestration, and from data to deals. Before we got in, I downloaded it and read two of them. I learned things. Teams, you will too. Please jump on to the website and download those things.

Thank you, Matt, so much for today. Team. I want to say thank you to you for listening. As everybody knows, we run this podcast because, at a high level, we want to improve the performance and professionalism of B2B sales. In doing so, we think we improved the lives of professional salespeople. Thanks for listening today. We're growth-oriented and we know we're not perfect at doing this. If you have some constructive criticism or some thoughts as to how we can make the show more valuable to you, I want to know about them.

I'm MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com. Some of the things we do on the podcast came as a result of the great feedback you gave us. Keep it coming. That's my personal email. I respond to your notes and we respond to everybody who gives us an idea. Thanks for listening, team. If you enjoyed today, please tell your friends and like and subscribe to The Selling Well podcast because that's how we get great guests like Matt Heinz. We'll see you next time on The Selling Well.

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