HubSplot
If big tech wonders why it has such a PR problem, look at HubSpot’s controversial move and claw back that broke trust and reminded us why engagement with so many B2B marketing enablers and SaaS providers leave us feeling like we need a shower.
Honestly, you cannot make this insanity up. Someone somewhere got the brilliant idea we’ll all get along better and sell better if only our data were put into The Borg. They then buried it into the fine print of T’s and C’s and made customers opt out. I’ve written about sales-as-a-disservice (SaaD) in the land of SaaS and why so much about B2B marketing is just plain broken. Their disastrous move embodied the lot of it.
We treat end-users as passive ‘audience’ members, and instead of putting them at the center of our universe to help them buy and solve their buying journey, we manipulate, track, cajole, dump emails, measure intent, refer to our knowledge about them as ‘first party data,’ and then turn them loose on agents and SDRs.
Just this week, an amazing piece of analysis by Rebecca Thorburn demonstrates in detail the major disconnects between how sellers sell and buyers buy, and how when a vendor finally sees them it’s really too late. Her “Before the Funnel” is a must-read piece.
While HubSplot ran rampant with our data, a real client calls us looking for a real solution to help them clean their CRM and improve the integrity of the data about their core ICP. We are hesitant to share either Zoom or Apollo as solutions, as both come from a more-is-more mindset at a time less is more. This shouldn’t be that hard, but it is.
This all happens when a Silicon Valley high-end restaurant unleashes on its largely professional clientele an AI agent to take and make reservations. It so badly bungles the process it leaves a terrible taste quite literally and puts a whole new spin on the phrase ‘agent agent.’ You know the one we use when we are in some convoluted customer service routing loop – a type of purgatory – that we can’t resolve until we hit 0 on our keypad and bellow the word repeatedly – pleading for a human.
But no – today that plea for agent sanity takes us to a machine.
And in a cute move to use their technology to prove their marketing prowess and ability to personalize I get a message using my blog posts as fodder. They demonstrate they know me/heard me/understand me. I start to think – this is interesting only to get hosed by the same company four times in two days thinking once again more must be more. This puts a whole new spin on TR Man and GartGuy & Gal. I wonder if the signor on said emails was even human. I doubt it. I hit delete.
We are pleading here in the land of Outsell to help buyers buy. Marketers don’t want more leads; they want more sales. And buyers want to know that what they are purchasing is the right fit for their organization. If we could help buyers buy and sellers sell without 45 software solutions in our tech stack, our world would be such a better place, because while AI aims to accelerate and automate that process, the risk of overcomplication and saturation misses the mark for both buyers and sellers.
That’s exactly why we’re launching a new study to dig in on buyers using AI tools in their B2B research, and to see what’s working – and what gaps need to be filled.
For this study we are teaming up with Rebecca Kitchens, who has spent over two decades helping enterprise leaders find, evaluate, and act on trusted information to make high-stakes purchase decisions. We share a philosophy that buyers and their needs belong at the heart of the B2B marketing equation and is poorly understood.
This new joint study will be out later this summer, featuring details on how buyers are using AI in their role and what they need and want in solving their everyday problems and what they are doing when they buy.
Stay tuned for results, which we’ll be alongside Outsell SVP Rob Keenan, and the vital research he is doing about the ways so-called audiences engage with different platforms, and how age demographics make a difference in their engagement. We are investing deeply in original research that ensures CEOs and their C-Suite in media, events, and marketing services understand market realities and pain points that affect marketing spend and effectiveness – real revenue streams – in this next era of transformation.
Just as we did with ground-breaking research when print to digital and mobile and SaaS changed their world. Change never stops. The stakes are high. Next week a look at how essential it is to be more tightly embedded in buyer and marketer workflows because media companies have an Outsell Pyramid to climb. This is not just a journey for ‘information services’ firms. Media and event operators also risk being invisible in the next wave of AI.