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Hi this is Brent Adamson from Gartner, you know as we work with heads of sales and heads of marketing in the B2B space around the world trying to understand the top challenges they're facing and how to address them, one of the things that we've come to really understand and appreciate among all commercial leaders is just how hard it is to manage a commercial funnel in today's complex landscape. But let's face it it's all really hard as we build that MQL, the marketing qualified lead we pass it over we handed off the sales for the sales accepted lead, the SAL I often like to call that phenomenon right the MQL, the SAL to NMP, which is marketing qualified lead, the sales accepted lead to not my problem because let's face it if you're in marketing at that point you handed it off, it is no longer your problem and you pass it over to the sales organization and say 'Go get 'em sales!' and when in fact that sale falls apart, then it's great being in marketing because you look at it and say well it's not my problem, I wonder what happened gosh sales you're having a bad year. But in fact what we find is this is everyone's problem because it turns whether its sales or marketing, it doesn't matter finding, out ways to better more efficiently more effectively progress your customers through that funnel turns out to be really hard is a huge challenge for all of us and that we talked to sales leaders around the world, that is one of the single biggest questions we have is "what can we do in sales what can our individual sales representatives do to make that happen more effectively, more efficiently? When let's face it, we live in a world where we have less access to those customers than ever before and i've got a really tough question as a head of sales don't I? Which is how do I impact that progression when in fact i'm not there in person to have that kind of impact? So these are the kinds of questions that we have been studying in our sales practice trying to understand what is it that we could do with, for to our sellers, to position them to have that kind of impact on the progression of opportunities as they moved through our funnel and you know what we found in doing this research is actually something really interesting that in many ways the better way to think about this question isn't from the selling perspective or from the marketing perspective, the better way to think about this entire challenge is from the buying perspective because as hard as it has become to sell in today's world, it has arguably become even that much more difficult to buy. The single biggest challenge of selling in a market today is not selling or marketing, it is actually our customer struggle to buy. The place we've gotta start is not with our sellers is or with us, it is with our customers and their organization trying to understand what's hard about buying. This year we did something we'd never done before, we applied what's called a 'jobs to be done approach' to buying and when you do that what you find is that B2B buying coalesces around six different jobs. Six jobs that customers have to complete to their satisfaction in order for them to successfully make a purchase decision. Now why do these jobs matter? Well, these jobs matter because once you find, once you identify these jobs and qualitative research you could begin to test them quantitatively, when you do that you find two really interesting things that change everything for all of us because the first thing you find in these jobs with the jobs perspective is when you ask customers to what degree did you revisit any given job is part of a purchase process, you find over seventy five percent of customers revisited each if not all of those jobs at some point in a purchase process, leading to what we call 'looping.' What is looping? It is simply an acknowledgement to the reality that customers don't move in a purchase along a straight line, truth to be sure there's a beginning and an end but the way they get from that beginning to that end is almost anything but a straight line. As we've built this machine to drive progression, our customers aren't moving in a straight line that progression dictates. Now the other piece of data we found when we looked at jobs equally interesting is when we asked customers to consider the channel that they're most likely to use, the channel of information that they'll most likely used to complete that job what we found is they're just as likely to use digital channels as in person channels for any one of those jobs. What's interesting is they're likely to use both of them at a heavy level but if they're using bulk channels in person and digital channels to make all that work happen and we've set up an organization in a very different way, then we are no longer as a supplier organization aligned to how buying actually happens because you think about how we're aligned right now, we've got first the marketing than the sales, first the digital then the in person, what I've come to call the serial commercial engine, where marketing finds a demand, qualifies demand, nurtures demand and hands it off over the sales who then pursues it in person. So what we have to think about is what does the world look like when we start thinking about buying not so much as a progression, but we think about in terms of completion and you start asking really tough questions like, where's the hand off in that world? and the answer is there isn't one. The way that customers by today tells us there is no clear handoff from digital to in person, there is no clear hand-off from marketing to sales, it's all part of the same thing and when you think about it from that perspective it raises a question how can we help buyers by in this world? And the answer isn't so much we help buyers by through digital and then we help buyers by through in person, rather we help buyers by through information specifically the kind of information they need to complete their jobs more effectively more efficiently and more confidently and knowing that all of those jobs were happening at the same time through multiple channels simultaneously that tells us the first thing that we have to solve for is the supplier organization isn't sales rep excellence, it isn't digital excellence, it's information excellence, building an infrastructure of information specifically what we've come to call buyer enablement information Buyer enablement information is the specific kinds of information that your customers most need are least likely to find to help them complete each of those six jobs through which ever channel and whatever time they seek it and if we can do that commercially as a sales and marketing collaborative team a commercial organization, build that infrastructure of buyer enablement which we then deliver through both digital and in person channels simultaneously, we're now in a position to be far more aligned to how buying actually happens, and the payoff from getting that right is potentially huge. We find that the organizations that align around delivering the kinds of information that customers need to complete the jobs they're seeking to do at any given time are three times more likely to win what we've come to call a high value, low regret sale. These are the kinds of questions that we've been studying very deeply over the last year at the Gartner sales practice. And for that matter, the Gartner marketing practice well. And we're sharing with heads of sales heads of marketing all over the world. If you're interested in engaging us in that conversation, finding out what buyer enablement actually looks like, how to build it, how to deploy it, what it means for your sellers. This is the kind of stuff we'd love to talk to you about. If you're interested, reach out and give us a call.