The Different Buying Team Profiles - with Brent Adamson, author the Challenger Customer

**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 informed decisions. Now on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. Today, I'm so pleased that we are joined by Brent Adamson, the author of The Challenger Sale, The Challenger Customer, a former distinguished vice president at Gartner, a longtime advisory services leader at CEB, corporate executive board, and currently the head of research and community ecosystems. Today, we'll be covering three main topics with Brent. First, has the SaaS industry broken the sales process? Second, why understanding buying stakeholder personas is so critical to success in 2023? And third, does the oversaturation of the number of SaaS solutions impact the value of value-based selling? Brent, please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics Measure Up podcast.

**Brent Adamson** (1:27)
Hey, Ryan. Hey, everybody. How are y'all doing today? My journey to be, because it's all led up to this point, is my journey in life has been to lead to this podcast. So it's great to be with you.

**Ray Rike** (1:36)
It's not the peak of your career journey, but it is definitely where you're at today.

**Brent Adamson** (1:40)
It is the peak today. That's exactly right. So I spent the better part of, I guess, Ray, the last 20 years or so studying sales and marketing and buying some B2B commerce, and just trying to understand as deeply as I and the teams I've been with, as we possibly can, what does world-class selling and marketing look like in the face of B2B buying today and how that B2B buying is evolving. Just as a quick footnote, I mentioned 20 years. I'm actually much older than that because I actually have about a 35-year career in research and teaching and writing. Before I joined the world of CEB, a corporate executive board in sales research, I was a German professor where my specialty was applied linguistics, and I taught on the faculty of Michigan State, which I know is a total non-sequitur career-wise. But basically, I've spent my entire adult life researching things, teaching about them, writing about them.

**Ray Rike** (2:28)
Well, even though we could go down that professorial route and talk about really intellectualized things.

**Brent Adamson** (2:33)
Let's just leave that right there. Yeah, that's right. Let's just park that and move on.

**Ray Rike** (2:37)
Listen, the podcast, we like to have that hook right up front. So we're going to do that, Brent. So here's a hot take I heard you share on the Coffee podcast with Matt Hines the other day. And you highlighted that SaaS has broken sales. And I'm like, whoa, that's a hot take. Can you share some of the insights and data points that brought you to say that?

**Brent Adamson** (2:59)
Yeah, sure. It is a bit of a hot take.
Sometimes it's good to be a little over the top in your language. Sometimes it's actually not good to be over the top in your language. On that particular show, it's a little over the top. But there's a really interesting phenomenon, I think, in SaaS sales. In particular, I'm thinking of not the big players, but the small to medium who are largely VC or PE-backed, that goes along with so much of the last five to 10 years, where as you know, it's all been a quote unquote blitz scaling. How do we get very big, very, very fast? How do we get very big, very, very fast when we're backed by just huge amounts of absurd amounts of money? The way that you do that is, of course, you hire a whole bunch of people and you run a volume game. You run a volume game of BDRs or SDRs or whatever you might call them, essentially, sending out huge amounts of communication, whether it's in mail or email or cold calling. By the way, nothing against the people actually doing the work. They're just essentially doing what they're told. But the strategy is, it's a scorched earth strategy of, let's just reach out to as many, many people as possible and if we only convert a tiny fraction of them because we just annoyed the heck out of everybody else, that's okay because we're working off a small denominator. I can get big growth rates off of small returns because I'm working off a small denominator. So I can make that growth rate look like it's going up very, very fast until at some point that play doesn't work anymore because your scorched earth strategies left nothing but devastation behind you. Once you get to a certain level of size, then it no longer works because you're now working off a bigger denominator. By the way, this is all, in some ways it's autobiographical because this was our play at corporate executive order CB back in the early 2000s. We call them marketing associates. Today, one would call them BDRs. But it was the same thing. We would sit in little rooms in the office and dial for dollars, as we like to call it, and we'd tick off 10, but we'd get one. That's okay because again, the volume was such that you could grow very quickly until you reach somewhere around 300, 400, 500 million in revenue, and all of a sudden that play doesn't work anymore. But I think the thing that's interesting here Ray is, in the SaaS world, that's okay because that's all I'm trying to do is get to that 300, 400 because then there's an exit. Then at some point, then I can exit to a new set of investors or maybe go public or sell more likely than not, sell off to someone else and then it's someone else's problem. So it's very easy for me to sit around and be critical of that motions because I think it's so deeply broken and it's just so damaging to the profession of sales. But as I often joke, at the end of the day, I'm sitting here as a schlub talking on a podcast and the people run that player on yachts in the Mediterranean. So tell me who's the huckleberry? I don't know.