How Understanding Your B2B Buyers Can Drive Predictable Growth

Many B2B marketing and sales teams miss the mark with potential prospects because they focus more on products and features rather than the customer’s pain points, objectives, and key business challenges. To grow sustainably, both teams must be more aligned around how they help create true business transformation and positive outcomes for their customer’s business. So how can understanding your B2B buyers lead to greater success?

That’s why we’re talking to Braedi DeLong (COO, The Sales Collective), who shares proven strategies and expert insights on how understanding your B2B buyers can drive predictable growth. In this episode, Braedi explained why the outdated “spray and pray” approach is no longer effective, and emphasized the need for targeted, intentional marketing. She expanded on the importance of clearly defining a realistic Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and understanding stakeholder dynamics. Braedi shared real-world examples of effective marketing strategies such as targeting specific buyer personas, and how to leverage grassroots marketing. She highlighted the marketing team’s role in building trust and credibility, and stressed the importance of human connections and reliable information sources over digital marketing.

https://youtu.be/8a_0foTkWO0

Topics discussed in episode:

[2:14] Key challenges of the “spray and pray” strategy in B2B marketing

[8:32] Why B2B marketers should reframe how they think about marketing

[15:05] How B2B buyers have changed in recent years. and the implications to B2B businesses

[23:55] How to define and leverage ideal customer profiles (ICPs)

[29:50] An example of how marketing can help sales generate more qualified leads through understanding the stakeholder roadmap

[34:19] Practical steps B2B marketers can take to improve marketing effectiveness

Companies and links mentioned:

Transcript

Christian Klepp 00:00

Many marketing and sales teams out there miss the mark with potential prospects because they focus on products and features instead of the customer’s pain points and key challenges, both teams need to be more aligned in terms of how they can help transform the customer’s business by addressing their pain points. So how can understanding your B2B buyers drive true business growth. Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers on a Mission podcast, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today, I’ll be talking to Braedi DeLong, who will be answering this question. She’s the CEO of The Sales Collective who helps companies build successful sales teams. Tune in to find out more about what her mission is. Off we go. I’m gonna say Braedi DeLong, welcome to the show.

Braedi DeLong 00:47

Thank you for having me.

Christian Klepp 00:49

So great to have you on, Braedi. We had such an amazing pre interview conversation in spite of some hiccups, right? I’m just gonna leave it at that. But I’m really looking forward to this conversation, because folks are going to ask me this, or they usually do. They’re like, Wait, hang on a second. Christian, isn’t your show about B2B marketers, so why do you have a sales person on the show? Well, I think that for at least in my opinion, and from my experience, it makes perfect sense to get sales people involved in B2B marketing, but we’re gonna dive right in, and I’m really looking forward to discussing this with you.

Braedi DeLong 01:27

Same and we both hold such a belief about the core value of aligning sales and marketing because they are part of the revenue team.

Christian Klepp 01:35

Absolutely, absolutely okay, so Braedi, you’re on a mission, I’m gonna say, to help B2B companies to build scalable, winning sales teams. So for this conversation, I’d like to focus on the following topic, which I think is really important. It’s how understanding your B2B buyers can drive true business growth. So I’d like to kick off this conversation with two questions, and I’m happy to repeat them. So the first question is, why do you think it’s so important for B2B marketers to understand who the organization’s customers and buyers are? And number two, where do you see most marketing teams struggle regarding the above?

Braedi DeLong 02:14

Yeah, it’s a great question. So when it comes to understanding your buyers, there’s so many marketers and sales organizations alike that deploy what is known as the spray and pray strategy, where if we just get really high awareness, the customers will kind of come and trickle down out of that really high awareness. And there’s it’s a bit of a fallacy in both organizations that if you just gain a considerable awareness that the business will generate, that it creates an excessive cost of customer acquisition, the amount of work and effort it takes to get that awareness machine, and it doesn’t help you create a actual dialed in, scalable structure or system. So a lot of times, we’re really wasting resources and efforts across the full spectrum of the revenue machine, because we just haven’t dialed in. Who are our buyers, who are our ideal customers? What do they look like from a company perspective, who are the actual buying personas that can purchase our stuff. Where do they come from? From a campaign level? So as we think about like creating sustainable business growth, understanding who your buyers are is really at the core of creating a healthy business model. And I know I said a lot in that statement with very few words. But there’s one of the biggest fallacies in the revenue engine, is understanding how that creates sustainable business.

Christian Klepp 03:51

Absolutely, absolutely. And I couldn’t agree more. I mean this, this spray and pray. It’s interesting that you still see day in, day out, whether it’s on LinkedIn or in your inbox, people that still subscribe to this school of thought, and I can’t claim credit for this, because many people have mentioned it on LinkedIn. You don’t even see SDRs (Sales Development Representative) or BDRs (Business Development Representatives) like reaching out to you in a passive, aggressive way. They reach out to you in an active, aggressive way. And let me give you an example. If they send you an email saying, hey, Braedi, you know, your profile caught my attention. And love what you’re doing at the sales collective, although they have no idea what it is, you actually do, cue sales pitch, then you ignore that email. Then they send a follow up, bumping this, bumping this to the top of your inbox. And I think by the third or the fourth round, then they say something like, are you actually the person that I should be talking to, or could you direct me to the person who’s in charge? I’m like, wow. And you know, we can sit here and joke about it, but the reality of it is, it’s actually pretty shocking that there are sales people out there that think that that will help them get in the door. So what are your thoughts on that? Like, Why is this still happening in 2025?

Braedi DeLong 05:13

So I think it’s getting worse in 2025 to be fair, like as more and more people move to AI (Artificial Intelligence) and leveraging AI. AI is really limited to just cloning what it’s been trained on. So it’s actually these ineffective strategies are becoming bigger very the spray and pray is actually growing because of the accessibility of the tooling and it, you know, it’s, I had a, actually, it was my, yeah, last night I got a LinkedIn prospecting. And I gave the person a shot. They sent me a connection request with a very thoughtful note in the connection request. And I was like, Okay, I’m going to accept this one. So I accept it, and I thank him for his thoughtful note. I was like, I recognize you as a BDR, I know I’m getting to get some sort of pitch. I know I’m being prospected. But he did the thoughtful work, and I wanted to reward it. But then his next message to me was, what are the business priorities for you right now? And because he sent me the thoughtful note, I decided. I was like, Okay, I’m gonna give him a moment of my time, effort and energy. I’m not just gonna go ahead and, like, move on with my life.

Braedi DeLong 06:28

And I was like, I want you to think about what you just did, and I want you to think about it in this different social context. Imagine you met a married couple at a social event, and you just introduced yourself and learned their names. I’m like, Are you with me? And he’s like, yeah. It’s like, I want you to imagine your next question to them after you met Beth and Jeff, that you go, are there any problems in your marriage?

Christian Klepp 06:28

Sure.

Christian Klepp 06:57

Yeah.

Braedi DeLong 06:57

And I’m like, how skeeved out? Do you feel right now. And he was like, very uncomfortable with that question. And I was like, you just did that to me. You just did the business version of that to me. And I’m like, so let’s rewind the tape. How do you help organizations and what domain do you play in? And it was funny, and it’s relevant for here. He was like, I sell marketing services. Like, okay.

Christian Klepp 07:20

Yeah.

Braedi DeLong 07:20

You know, it’s like, it’s just so interesting. And I was like, so you don’t need to know about my business priorities. You need to understand my marketing priorities, right? They’re different. Like, you’re not here to help me with product development. You’re not here to help me with accounting. You’re not here to help me with like, an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system. You sell marketing services, so you don’t need to know my business priorities. You’re here to ask about my marketing priorities and whether or not I have enough resources to achieve them. And I’m like bringing the human back into that area engagement . It’s just fascinating to me, how few people know how to do it, know how to do it well. And it’s like everybody is operating off of the same bad playbook, including marketing.

Christian Klepp 08:16

100% 100% so on top of what you’ve just mentioned, and that is a great example, by the way, on top of what you’ve just mentioned, what are some other pitfalls that B2B marketers need to look out for, and what should they be doing instead?

Braedi DeLong 08:32

So one of my favorite phrases for marketers in particular is reframing how they think about marketing. So most marketers out there think all marketing is good marketing, all awareness is good awareness. This has been kind of a long term belief in marketing and in public relations, right? Like all play time, all exposure, it’s all good. I like to train marketers that if it’s not working for you, it’s working against you. This is a very hard concept for a lot of marketers to accept, and the way I like to think about kind of litmus testing my marketing is okay if I’m going to invest $20,000 into this particular campaign, would I get a stronger return on investment. If I took $20,000 put it in a trash can, lit it on fire, and posted it to YouTube. If the answer is yes, it’s not a good campaign. And that’s where I go into if it’s not working for you, it’s working against you. And you need to know what actually is working for you, and the only way to know that is to work with your sales team, because you need to understand what leads are generating your happy healthy customers. And I say that on purpose, happy healthy customers, not what leads go into refund risk, right? What leads create? Your happy healthy customers. What efforts generated those happy healthy customers? Can you put your finger on defining those happy healthy customers, the people that you serve extraordinarily well that keep coming back to you, that keep you as their vendor, happy healthy long term customers. That’s how you have a happy healthy business.

Christian Klepp 10:19

Absolutely, absolutely. And it was another friend of mine who was also a guest on this podcast who said that bad clients are a false economy.

Braedi DeLong 10:28

I like that and then write that down. Bad clients are false economy. It’s true.

Christian Klepp 10:33

True when you think about it, right?

Braedi DeLong 10:34

The success teams of the world think about that all the time marketers and sales people think about revenue, they very rarely think about profit. They very rarely think about refund risk, right? They think about the first top line, but they don’t have the full cycle and business acumen to understand the downstream effect of, ooh, what happens if you sell a customer on a feature you don’t actually have.

Christian Klepp 11:02

Right, right. And going back to this, bad clients are a false economy analogy. It’s, I mean, if you think about it, right, like, even if the money’s good, they are going to drain your team, right? They’re going to drain your team. The team’s going to be demotivated. And then fast forward to contract renewal. The chances of renewing might be fairly slim, but at that point, at that point, the company is going to be like, You know what?

Braedi DeLong 11:12

Yeah, the I actually was just consulting with a business last month and sitting down with the leadership team, and it was a really interesting conversation where they had kind of expressed, or alluded to a bit of customer churn. And I was just kind of like time out, like, let’s talk about the customer churn. How significant is the customer churn? And as they described the situation they were in, it was very apparent to me that they have a product problem. And their sales team, they hit the gas on scaling revenue before they hit the gas on the product. And the sales team sold the product based on the product roadmap, not the reality. Well, guess what? The customers were promised something that they never got delivered. None of them renewed. They were looking at a 60 to 70% customer churn, and 100% of their enterprise business was churning out. And, you know? And so it was fascinating, because we were sitting there, and I don’t remember my exact words, but I basically was like, there’s three strategies in business. And I actually got this from a movie years ago. And I was like, I’m going to remember that right, be the first, be the smartest, right? Or be the best, is kind of category two or cheat. And I was like, and I know, cognitively, nobody in this room mentally wanted or or perceived themselves as selecting the cheat box, but it’s what you did functionally, you know. And it was kind of this moment where everybody’s just kind of like hard, hard news to absorb, but that’s what we did when we hit the gas. Like the marketing team went they like, took the new go to market out into the world. A Sales Team sold on the new go to market, but product didn’t actually have that as a reality yet. This is the key of like it is. It is false economy. It’s absolutely false economy.

Christian Klepp 13:41

It’s interesting. And nobody, nobody was clued in on that, like nobody was aware that this, this, this solution didn’t exist yet when they took it out.

Braedi DeLong 13:51

You know, I think that there is sometimes some awareness. I think we often convince ourselves like, Well, maybe it’s good enough that they won’t leave, but they’ll maybe, if we build enough of a relationship, the customers will tolerate it longer. I think we it’s really easy to kind of tell ourselves lies. You know, it’s like we convince ourselves of certain things, and it’s just not necessarily true. And at the end of the day, your buyers have businesses to run. We don’t buy products, right? We buy solutions to problems. That’s what we buy. Everything we buy in life is a solution to a problem, or at least our perceived solution to a problem. If your solution doesn’t solve the problem, it was built like intended to solve and the reason it was purchased, your customers have no loyalty to you. They have a loyalty to solve that problem.

Christian Klepp 14:43

That’s a, that’s a, absolutely right, absolutely right. So for the next question, and I know this could be a little bit broad, or it depends on which industry or niche you’re talking about, but talk to us about how, from your experience, how have B2B buyers changed, and how should that change be reflected in the company’s overall approach to buyers?

Braedi DeLong 15:05

Buyers are gaining higher and higher distrust, and I don’t think people fully think through the trust lens in their efforts. So a great example is there have been a series of marketing efforts out there that remember that those three categories, right? Be the first, be the smartest, or cheat, right? The lie, cheat steal? Well, there have been so many businesses that have ticked the lie, cheat steal box where they’ve created false case studies. They’ve made up testimonials. They have false reviews that are highly curated, right? All of these consumer and sales behaviors there that it’s becoming harder and harder to break through the noise because they just don’t believe it’s true. And it’s hard for the marketers as well as the sales people, to convince people that the product is going to actually be represented correctly, whether that’s through your brand, that’s through your website, that’s through your social and if like, and they don’t necessarily believe the information, and so they do more due diligence. They do more deep dives into it. They do much longer sales cycles, much more internet sleuthing, right? They are chomping at the bit for third party evaluation and trustworthy third party evaluation, and that can be very hard if you’re in like the small and medium sized business space, because you might not have a Wikipedia page yet. You might not have a G2 crowd. You know, you’re still, you’re still in young, small business, and so it that is becoming more and more challenging in how we communicate with buyers and gain that trust and credibility in the community, as well as in our actual sales cycles.

Christian Klepp 16:57

Absolutely, absolutely. You made me think about this report that came out about maybe two years, two or three years ago, and it was put together by Gartner about the B2B buyers journey. It’s probably changed since then, because, you know, a lot of things just changed so quickly. But one thing that I took away from looking at that diagram, and it’s like, oh my gosh, that’s pretty much every B2B buying engagement that I’ve ever encountered. And we all know that, right? Like, we all know that the B2B buying journey is not linear. It’s at best, haphazard, right? Because if you look, if you, if you remember this diagram, it’s, it’s a lot of like defining what the demand is, so there’s the demand trigger, or what motivated the need for you to find said solution and etc. And then everybody goes and does their own research. Then they go and vet the vendors. And then the vendors, it’s not even the vendors, come in. They, as you said, they look at the vendors website, online. They go and ask their industry peers and forums and chat groups, and so there’s a lot of this. There’s a lot of these different channels that you can or cannot track, right? So there’s a lot of this activity going on. And it really hammers that point you just made home in this era, in this time of great distrust, how do you bridge that gap and re establish that trust, earn that trust, I think might be even the right phrase.

Braedi DeLong 18:28

Well, you know, we see, and this might, if this is like, kind of like an unpopular opinion, I actually see grassroots marketing gaining traction more and more right now over digital marketing like the and that also extends into like referral. People are kind of tired of trying to go to Google and getting reliable information, because they know that there’s just so many content, like entities out there and SEO experts, and it’s just everybody is paying to play, and so the information is not reliable, and so you people are not going to Google Search anymore for reliable information. They’re going to AI tools for reliable they’re deploying the deep dive, but they’re also just doing the very human thing that we all did before the wonderful years of the internet. They’re just going to trusted professionals and asking them what tools and systems they like they are, straight up going into just referral word of mouth. Word of mouth is gaining excessive trust because it’s the more trustworthy source than the digital sources and so grassroots, just being a present in community, like being live in events that human referral, human connection, that is growing in trust and reliability, and the digital footprint is reducing trust and reliability.

Christian Klepp 19:55

Yeah, I mean, I hate to say it, but you’re absolutely right. I mean, I’m seeing these. Patterns as well, right? There was a period, and most probably partly also because of the pandemic and covid that people went digital. They were trusting more and, or I wouldn’t say, trusting more. They were relying more on online sources, but partly also because they had no other option, right? But now fast forward three years later, to your point, right? Because what we what I did see happen, and I’m sure you’ve seen some of this as well, that covid put a pause on some of the bad habits that say that sales and marketing people had, and then when, and then when the pandemic was over, some of these people reverted to those same bad habits, right? It, there wasn’t a natural evolution, which, you know, we’re all hoping would be the next logical conclusion, right? That you evolved from what you did back then, and you, you learn, you relearn and unlearn. I think unlearn being the toughest one of the three, but you still see people like at trade shows, you know, we’ll give you this free swag. All you need to do is give us your details, right? And then, straight away, bam, cold call, email, letter.

Braedi DeLong 21:13

It goes into qualification. And this is like an area that I always look at with sales and marketing, is, do you have tight qualification, and that’s on both sides, like, how does marketing qualify the marketing leads? How are they nurturing them? The the in that, you know, it obviously connects to, like, understanding your buyers, but like, when I look at so many march marketing nurtures, they don’t understand segmentation. I’ll give you a good example. So a few years back, we decided to try doing like a viral high entertainment video, and the glamor metrics looked amazing, right? It’s like, it’s being engaged with, it’s being watched, it’s being shared. All of the glamor metrics that we look at as marketers to be like, is this content that’s resonating with people? But I’m looking at, does it work, right? Because remember, I follow the rule, if it’s not working for you, it’s working against you. And I’m looking at, is this generating business, and it’s not. So I start putting pressure on my marketing team, and I’m like, I need you to go deep dive. And they’re like, it’s doing great. And I’m like, it’s not, it’s not working. Well, it turns out, when they really looked at the details, it was being watched, engaged and shared with the segment of 18 year olds to around 22 year olds. And I was like, there you go. We have created high value entertainment, right? Entertainment for a age bracket that is well outside of our ICP (Ideal Customer Profile), because we sell to sales leaders and executives, it doesn’t mean it’s impossible for sales leaders to be in executives in the age bracket. It’s just highly, highly unlikely, and it doesn’t resonate with our audience. And it was really kind of funny, because, like, the marketing team, they were like, You’re impossible to please. And I was like, we’re not in the business of entertaining college students. That’s not what we’re here to do. Like and it’s this idea, and it’s this piece of understanding the puzzle is goes loops back to our first part of this conversation, which you need to understand your buyers intimately, like you really need to have a very dialed in buyer.

Christian Klepp 23:31

Absolutely, absolutely. And I love that you ended with that, because that was a great segue to the next question, right? So the next question is regarding understanding of the B2B buyers, how can marketing and sales work together to define who the organization’s ideal customer profile is, and what role can each of these functions play?

Braedi DeLong 23:55

Well, this goes down to a lot of like leadership, right? This is definitely like a leadership like when we work with customers, one of the first things we do is we build the sales playbook, which involves doing the ICP work and really helping them identify their buyer. And a lot of people make a mistakes with buyers. They don’t really go with an ideal customer profile. They start to kind of outline an aspirational customer profile, like, or they start to just go broad stroke, where they’re like, Okay, a common thing you’ll see is, like, all roads lead to the top, so I’m only going to go after CEOs because they’re the ultimate decision maker. Well, that’s not a good plan right there. Like, they don’t understand foundations of like, discretionary spend and like, your budget might actually just be at a department level, and you don’t need to go to the executive if you’re if your product is actually not that expensive and it’s within the discretionary spend of a director or manager, the CEO doesn’t really care about that. Like, so that’s not that’s a misaligned assignment, because you don’t know who your buyer is. So we teach people and we work with people on who actually is the typical buyer here in an organization where does that discretionary spend reside? Who are the key stakeholders that would be part of it? Stakeholder management is one of the top skills for sales and marketing to learn, because the number of buyers involved in a purchase has increased exponentially. Like years ago, it was, I want to say, in about 2019 the average was like 5.4 a few years later, it grew to like six or seven, and then it grew again into like, the realm of eight. And remember, because buyers don’t trust it, they’re doing more due diligence, which means you now have more stakeholders because they’re doing more due diligence. So like they now do have highly technical buyers who are going to go through a technical validation protocol. You’ve got your business buyers that are going to look at the value selling and the ROI (Return on Investment) and it’s like, okay, well, who actually are your world, like your stakeholders in this? Who are the people it affects in the organization? This is how you start to understand you, Who’s your ideal customer profile, and who are the adjacent buyers that are going to enter the sales cycle, you can market to all of them, like you can sell to all of them. In fact, you actually have to sell to all of them. Like, decision by committee is a really, real motion.

Christian Klepp 26:32

Absolutely, absolutely. And here’s a quick follow up question, just based on your experience. And I know it varies, right, but there are some common patterns. Who’s in this buying committee generally?

Braedi DeLong 26:45

Depends on the nature of your business. So think about different things that you can buy, like if you sell an ERP, which is major business disruption. It is an invasive technology. It changes how every reporting structure, every tool, right? It’s your payroll, it’s your sales force, like integration, it’s everything. If you sell ERP, you’re gonna have a massive stakeholder landscape, because you touch the organization on an organizational level. And so you really are in a high organizational buy in. You take marketing services. You’re not on an organizational buy in. So you sell marketing services. You are in the marketing lane with some sales. Buy in sales is still going to have buy in, but you’re really in the marketing so you’re really in a department level, with one adjacent department that’s going to have buy in. They’re not necessarily going to be your decision maker, but they’re going to have a role in that decision. I sell sales training.

Braedi DeLong 27:49

I understand my buyer is the sales department, and I’m going to have two other departments that are going to have buy in. I understand that marketing is going to want buy in because they want to make sure that their leads are being managed correctly the sales team so they want to make sure we’re training on things that support that. And because we’re a training in human development, HR is going to have a stake in that game. They have a dog in that fight. So I have three departments of stakeholders that I’m highly aware I need to manage. Does finance completely care, right? Your accounting department, your CFO, might care that you have a strong ROI, if they’re, you know, they might care a bit about it, but your accounting department has no, no stake, right? They’re not a stakeholder in this. They don’t really care about this, you know, does your manufacturing team care about No, it’s like they they’re not going to be on that stakeholder map. So it’s understanding, what does your product touch, what does it influence? What who might be impacted by that being implemented? And anybody that’s going to be impacted by that. They’re going to have some level of influence and vote it’s, it’s your selling environment. Your selling environment is going to dictate what that looks like.

Christian Klepp 29:11

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that’s a fair point. That’s a fair point. You brought some of these things up already, but like, based, let’s, let’s put it into context here. Like, based on your experience, how can, and also based on what you’ve just explained, right, like you’ve gone into very detailed steps on talking about the different stakeholders involved in the buying committee? So how can a better understanding of that help marketing to develop sales assets in a toolkit that helps salespeople overcome objections, address concerns, and gradually win prospects over. And the second one is to your earlier point, how can that help them to generate more qualified leads?

Braedi DeLong 29:50

So when marketing is equipped with really understanding that stakeholder roadmap, it informs how they go to market. So a great example is I worked with a company as a blanket company, and they have, like, the coolest blanket product. It’s called voided, for anybody that likes blankets. And when I first was working with their marketing team, they were only marketing to like the van life community. And so they had this idea that like, because this blanket was really versatile, and it could, like, it could stuff into a pillow so it didn’t require storage. It just became, like a sofa pillow that worked really well for the minimalist community of the van lifers. And so they were really leaning in that the van life community would want this blanket. And I was like, I don’t think so, because they don’t have a lot of extra space, they are minimalist. Like, how essential is this blanket? And, like, does it replace their actual bedding? No, it’s an adventure blanket, right? It’s for the outdoors. And I was like, I don’t think you’ve got the right customer profile that you’re marketing to, and I don’t think you’re marketing to them in the correct way. And so we started testing audiences, and I like, we started taking these blankets out into community. And I’m like, This blanket is an excellent beach blanket because it’s insulated, and if you put it on hot sand, it doesn’t have the heat transfer. So it’s a perfect beach blanket, and it’s ripstop, so the sand doesn’t stick to it. It’s also waterproof, so it stays dry. And we’re like, great beach campaign. Go right GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) targeting beach campaign. What else? I’m like, okay, it actually works pretty well for snow sports, anybody that’s back country snow sports, because again, it’s insulated, it’s a barrier, and it’s packable, and it’s light, right? And so we just keep testing audience after audience. How does this get used by the human and who’s going to use it in what capacity? So we can leverage that in marketing. What problem does this blanket necessarily solve? We figured out it was perfect for hammock camping. Was the perfect hammock camping blanket because it has snaps and it creates, like a bivvy. And I was like, All right, oh, photo shoot, right, showing its utilization in a camping environment. So it’s really like every single campaign was curated around different types of groups and how they would use this and how this would help them. That’s really the core of what marketing needs to be.

Braedi DeLong 32:32

So we didn’t show the beach campaign to the Mountain Group. They don’t have beaches, right? So when you think about B2B, right? That’s a B2C example, but B2B is not that different. We over complicate this stuff, like I understand on my stakeholder roadmap. HR cares about the educational validity of my training. So they’re a technical buyer. They care about the education they want, like when we do assessments, they want to know that the data is reliable, right? So they’re going to care about also validity studies, that everything that they’re going to care about is validity studies, and they’re going to care about culture. So I understand HR when it comes to sales training and sales development and all of our efforts. They want to make sure that the assessment is lock tight science. They’re going to want to make sure that the training is lock tight science, and they’re going to make sure that everything that we’re training is perfectly aligned with the culture, because those are the things that we affect in their responsibility bucket I can market to that.

Christian Klepp 33:40

Fantastic, fantastic. All right, Braedi, you’ve, um, you’ve given us so many tips and so many recommendations. And if I’m just going to put it this way, if somebody’s out there that’s listening to this conversation, who’s going through this challenge right now, because they’re maybe they need to review their understanding of the B2B buyer, and if they’re listening to this conversation, then there are three to five things you would advise them to do right now to deal with that right not not in six months, not next year, like right after listening to this interview, what would that be?

Braedi DeLong 34:19

Work on your ideal customer profile, and really start to look at, is this aspirational? Is this a guess? Is this real? And how should you be segmenting it? So, like a great example of working with a startup right now that their ICP was super aspirational, they were like anybody above 50 million we can serve. That’s way too broad. That is way too broad. That is not like, you’re a startup. You don’t have the product maturity. You are not ready, enterprise ready. Do not fool yourself into thinking you’re enterprise ready. I’m like, we’re going to shrink that. So if your ICP, like is billions of people or millions of companies, you’re too broad. It’s not your ideal customer profile, it’s your aspirational profile.

Braedi DeLong 35:07

So a great example of what’s on our ideal customer profile, our ideal customers care about sustainable revenue, right, and sustainable business. So remember, they’re not in the lie, cheat, steal category, and kind of a wild card. We know our ideal customers are people who care about a culture of excellence, and that is part of their culture. When they have a culture of excellence, they are a perfect client fit, because we only teach sales excellence, we don’t teach lies cheats, we don’t teach little tactics, right? So we understand that people that value a culture of excellence that’s on our ideal customer profile, if you don’t value a culture of excellence, nothing that we’re doing is going to be reinforced or enforced appropriately and effectively. We know this. So evaluate your ideal customer profile, and don’t confuse it aspirational.

Christian Klepp 36:06

Right, right, right. Well, that’s some fantastic advice. And for those of you out there that you, if you haven’t done this already, please, please work on your ideal customer profile. And if you’re not sure whether it’s the correct one or not, um, you can reach out to Braedi.

Braedi DeLong 36:22

That’s true. We do this. Our we have a VP of process, and he’s he works wonderfully with clients, where he creates the sales playbook and does the research and the investigation to hand you a customer profile, as well as a whole bunch of other documents to make sure that you you’re equipping both your sales and marketing teams effectively.

Christian Klepp 36:45

Fantastic, fantastic. All right, Braedi, get up on your soap box here a status quo in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with. And why?

Braedi DeLong 36:58

A status quo? Well, I think we kind of talked about it at first, right? They spray and pray. I loathe the spray and pray. I have seen businesses fail because their spray and pray model bled them dry financially and led them to bankruptcy. Because, guess what? You can’t have like, a $10,000 cost of customer acquisition to sell a $5,000 tool. So that is the status quo I really wish I could get rid of in the market. Is the spray and pay it is. It’s taking down good businesses every day, and it’s just not necessary.

Christian Klepp 37:40

100% agree with you there also, because I told a client two years ago to please not do that, right? Because they were going to hire a lead gen agency and they were going to prospect like this, many clients a week and I told them, like, please don’t do that. You guys are you know you’re selling complex web solutions. That’s not how you’re gonna get clients. And he said, he basically said, well, thanks. I’m just gonna go ahead and do it my way. And a year, fast forward, a year later, let’s just say that, like, to your point, the results were just like, below satisfactory in terms of closing, which, which completely, which didn’t surprise me at all, right, but it’s, it’s to your point. It’s crazy. How many people are still subscribing to this spray and pray approach and only believe in it.

Braedi DeLong 38:31

I probably get 100 prospecting emails per day. I think I get maybe one per month. That’s not spray and pray.

Christian Klepp 38:39

Yeah. I believe it. I believe it.

Braedi DeLong 38:42

It’s abysmal.

Christian Klepp 38:43

Yeah. Okay, Braedi, two more questions before I let you go. All right. So here comes the bonus question. So was having a look around on your LinkedIn profile, and you mentioned that you believe people should never stop evolving so, and obviously part of this evolution includes learning. So what’s one learning goal you’ve set for yourself this year?

Braedi DeLong 39:05

Ooh, I set a lot of learning goals for myself, just one. So one of my learning goals is always to get at least one piece of learning that is outside of my domain. I believe in diversity of thought.

Christian Klepp 39:27

Yes.

Braedi DeLong 39:28

And it’s sometimes we can get very into, like a silo. So like, if you only learn and engage with sales content, there’s a ton of learning and other areas that relate to the profession. So one of my learning goals is always to make sure that I’m learning something that is outside of the sales and marketing domain, and that I’m sharpening those tools. So like one of my favorite people and I actually have it’s my next book that I’m reading about, Todd Rose is one of my favorite thought leaders, and. And he’s, he runs the department for like, brain science, wow, yeah, at a Harvard University. Brilliant, brilliant. But his content inspires me more than any other content, any other thought leadership from like, sales and marketing. So one of my goals is always to make sure that I’m not getting tunnel vision.

Christian Klepp 40:20

Yeah, yeah, no, that’s, um, that’s a really great way to look at it, because I try to do the same, like I try to read things that are non marketing related, and try to think about how that can apply in my professional life, or, you know, in anything that I’m doing that’s work related. I even, I think maybe was it last last winter, um, when we had that really bad snowstorm up here in Toronto, I was while I was, you know, trying to dig ourselves out of all that snow, I was thinking about, like, how this could apply to B2B marketing, somehow, right?

Braedi DeLong 40:57

Yeah, I mean, it’s, it does. It’s a related field, right? When you’re in marketing and you’re in sales, you are in the business of humans.

Christian Klepp 41:04

Absolutely, absolutely.Braedi, this is such a fantastic conversation, and I really enjoyed it. Thanks so much for coming on and for sharing your experience with the listeners. Please. Quick intro to yourself, and folks out there can get in touch with you.

Braedi DeLong 41:19

Yeah. Well, thankfully, with a name like Braedi. I’m the only person on the planet to have this name with this spelling. So I’m very easy to find. But you can find me at The Sales Collective, so that’s https://thesalescollective.com/ you can also find me on LinkedIn, where I try to share at least once a week some knowledge and tidbits to help the revenue machine. So yeah, but I’m very easy to find.

Christian Klepp 41:43

Fantastic, fantastic. Braedi, once again, thanks for coming on, take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.

Braedi DeLong 41:50

Likewise, thanks for having me.

Christian Klepp 41:51

All right. Bye for now.

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