No Forms - No SPAM - No Cold Calls - with Latane Conant, Chief Market Officer 6sense

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics and form decisions. Now on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up Podcast. Today, we're joined by Latane Conant, the Chief Marketing Officer at Six Cents, and author of one of my favorite new books that I read recently, No Forms, No Spam, No Cold Calls. Today, we'll be covering three main areas with Latane. First, the buying journey sweet spot. Second, metrics that matter to increase pipeline performance and sells velocity in today's demand generation and demand capture model. And third, defining and mastering the dark funnel. Latane, thank you so much for being a guest, and please provide a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics and Measure Up podcast.

**Latane Conant** (1:18)
Sure. Thanks for having me, Ray. So first of all, my title is actually Chief Market Officer, and that's very deliberate, and that's part of my journey, was I really wanted to be able to be the voice at the table that represented the market. And I think a lot of times, CMOs show up and talk a lot about all the activities that they've done versus showing up really owning the domain of market. And so it took me a while to feel like I lived up to those shoes. But after our Series C round, I felt like in shaping that round and shaping the message around it and understanding the TAM that I was ready. So just a point of clarification, the rest of my journey here has been pretty interesting. I have a very non-traditional marketing background. I started in accounting and then I was in consulting, and then I was in sales, and I really thought I wanted to be a sales leader.
But you know, sometimes you get thrown a curve ball, and I always believe in saying yes. So I said yes, and found myself running marketing at Appirio and really loved it, and we had a great outcome, and then wanted to get into technology and found Sixth Sense. So that's kind of how I got here, an accidental marketer.

**Ray Rike** (2:47)
We're going to double click into the accounting side of marketing, the metrics in a few minutes. But you talked about your journey because I asked you to. Let's talk about another journey that gets thrown a lot around a lot in B2B technology, customer acquisition and expansion today. That's the buying journey. And it was one of the first graphics I saw in your new book, No Forms, No Spam, No Cold Calls. So let's start at the beginning. Can you tell me exactly how you define the buying journey and the primary phases across that buying journey? Sure.

**Latane Conant** (3:22)
So when we're talking about the buying journey in Sixth Sense land and in the land of the book, we're actually talking about pre-opportunity journey. So I think that's important to note. And why it's so fascinating is that's the area of the journey that most of the time you know the least about.
Because this is before they maybe even came to your website. And so much of the buying journey is anonymous. So there's three things that are true about the buying journey today. One, majority is anonymous. Two, if you are a B2B company and you have a normal B2B motion, then typically they are going to be a lot of people involved in that journey. So there's going to be a lot of anonymous activity across lots of different people. And there's a resistance. So it's really hard to get buyers to engage. There's so much noise out there. They've been burned. And so they're resistant to kind of our tricks, right? To get them to reveal themselves. And so that's why when we talk about the buying journey and this pre-pipeline and what, you know, in the third segment, we'll talk about the dark funnel. It's so important to understand that activity because too often, we're either missing opportunities or we're getting into opportunities late because we don't understand that journey. And so the way we characterize the journey is phase one is target. An account in target is a great account for you. You want to sell to them. You think they're amazing. They're in your ICP, but they are under a rock. They are doing no research at all. And so that's kind of the toughest buying stage. Then they move to awareness. And awareness is interesting. You know an account is an awareness because they're sort of trying to figure out if they have a problem. So they're researching things that would show they have a problem and or they could be buying other things that show they have a problem. They could be hiring that show they have a problem in that area. But they're sort of like they're waking up, right? An account moves to consideration. Same thing but they're probably starting to research more specific solutions that would relate to yours. So maybe they're researching competitive keywords. Maybe they're researching like solution types. And then they move to purchase. I mean, then they move to decision. And in the decision phase, they probably have come to your website, but they haven't filled out a form. So they might know about you. They might just be doing a ton of research and not have come to your website yet, which is a problem. We want to get them to your website. And then when they move to purchase this in our world, purchase means they're about to open an opportunity.