Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Brady Jensen, Founder of Aggregate Insights

Episode Date: December 12, 2023

Brady Jensen is a multifaceted professional who has traversed the realms of tech sales, product marketing, and entrepreneurship, but his true passion lies in bridging the often contentious gap between sales and marketing.Hailed as Inside Sales Rep of the Year at Jive Software, Brady’s natural sales success was evident from the start. However, his wandering eye for product marketing was ever-present. His journey through various roles led him to a profound revelation: Sales teams consistently distrusted Marketing’s directives due to a lack of alignment with external market realities.In response, Brady founded Aggregate Insights in 2018, a groundbreaking venture aimed at rectifying this pervasive issue. His mission was clear – to empower companies to validate their assumptions through direct, primary source research involving market experts and buyers. The ultimate goal was to harmonize the efforts of sales and marketing, fostering an environment of collaboration and driving business success.Learn more:https://aggregateinsights.com/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-brady-jensen-founder-of-aggregate-insights

Welcome to influential entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello and welcome to this episode of Influential Entrepreneurs. This is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach. Today we have with us Brady Jensen, who's the founder of Aggregate Insights. Brady, welcome to the program. Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me.

Hey, so I know that you work with sales and marketing teams to help them optimize and amplify the results. But before we dive into what you do, I'd love to hear your story and background and how you got into the industry. Yeah, so I started early in my career as a salesperson and eventually moved into technology sales. And from there, found my way into a product marketing role. I watched the product marketers do their thing and thought it looked really interesting. So while I was a successful salesperson, I made the jump over. And so I've had the luxury of seeing things from both sides of the coin, so to speak. Yeah, it's kind of like once you have made the mistakes and fix those problems and learned and kind of created your own way, then it's like, okay, how can I now teach other people?

to do the same, avoid those kind of landmines and things, right? I mean, it's, I hear this every once in a while where you hear this college student that goes, yeah, I graduate next semester and I want to get into becoming a business consultant. Well, you have no foundation and no background to consult any business. You know, you need to be working in business for a decade or so before you start giving your advice. So that's what you did is you figured out, I, you know, paved the way and, you know, took that machete and, and made the path through the jungle. Now let me show other people how to do the same thing.

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, there's a surprising few number of people who've been in a successful sales role that moved over in marketing. So from a point of view and perspective, it has proven to be very valuable. You know, I think that a lot of people assume incorrectly that sales and marketing is the same thing. So what is your perspective on what's, the difference between sales and marketing, and then moving past that, how do you get the sales department and the marketing department on the same page?

Yeah, I mean, ultimately, and I may get in trouble with some pundits out there for this, but from my perspective, the sales team goes to market, right? Like, in reality, they're out there looking to get the yes out of the customer. marketing department is the job is really to prime the pump, right? How do you, how do you get people aware of what the company does? How do you get people aware of the options that are available to them? And then during that sales cycle, how do you give the sales reps the best opportunity to win based off of the information that you can provide them? Yeah, that's exactly my definition. I would agree with you a thousand percent.

And also I think that the marketing department, it kind of even starts laying a deeper groundwork of content marketing, teaching, educating, and layering in one of my favorite books in marketing is influenced by Dr. Robert Chaldini. And then his latest book, which is almost like the precursor to that called pre-suation, which is how you need to pre-frame your content, your authority, your expertise so that it lays the groundwork for the sales team for when they come in. Now they're not viewed as a salesperson. They're viewed as that trusted advisor. Right. We talk a lot in terms of positioning and messaging and oftentimes it gets kind of

confused. Which one is which I think about positioning as being the opportunity you have to ground people's view about where in space and time you fit in the context of all the other things that they're aware of, that they could be considering for a certain job or task that they have to accomplish. So anchoring that prior to a sales rep arriving and then continuing to tell that same message throughout gives sales really an unfair advantage over vendors that go out there and don't provide that sort of cover fire for them. Yeah, you said same.

message throughout. And that's huge. I think a lot of people just think, let's try this and try this and shotgun approach and spray and pray. And you've got to have that integrated marketing communication platform that is delivering that powerful message to the best target audience so that it preframes all of these things, but then throughout all of your channels. And you can't have it one way, you know, really high brow on one channel and then really, you know, casual and cartoon like on another channel. you've got to have that same brand feel all the way throughout. And a lot of times people think, oh, well, our branding and our logo on a message. No, no, no.

It gets down to the messaging. And it's like how you are talking about what you do and how you do it and the solutions you provide. It's got to be down to that level of when people are hearing or reading that message, it's got to be congruent to your branding as well. Yeah, 100%. without that level of rigor, you're not going to get very far. It's interesting because people tend to assume that a message has been told too many times.

The fact, the matter is the amount of times you need to touch a buyer with a message for them to even have a chance of retaining what you're trying to tell them is a very big number. So the idea that you can wear out a message because you're using it too much, you know, taglines, I think in the consumer world prove that dead wrong, right? People want to attach what you are to how you present yourself in the world. Yes, 100%. So, you know, you say that your best customer probably doesn't look like your next customer. Explain that and your methodology behind that.

Yeah, so in the work that we do, it's really about getting out into the market and talking to people who are prospects, right? And one of the things that we've noticed is in those positioning messaging, messaging exercises, that sort of thing, or developing key differentiators, for instance, a lot of companies will go to their existing customer base and say, let's talk to our best customers. And they'll show us the path of how to go about selling to this next prospect we're trying to sell to. Well, we've found over and over again that especially in fast moving markets, your best customer isn't just an outlier by definition. They're also just wrong when it comes to the message that needs to be delivered to that person who, by definition, is further along the adoption curve. they're probably a little less worried about disruption and breaking things and a little bit more worried about safety and security.

So if you listen to the folks who are your best customers today, they're very well-meaning, but they're going to tell you what resonates with them. And the chances are you're going to be off by a number of degrees when you try to go and use it for people that you're trying to sell to today. You know, and it kind of makes me, based on what you said, it makes me think about, much of business and marketing has never said it and forget it. You can never go, oh, our target audience is, and the best message to use for them is, and then we're good to go for the next decade. It's this constant and never-ending testing and improvement and what works better here. What works this quarter might not work next quarter.

And I think that it's always about iteration and reiteration, right? Right. It's surprising the number of organizations that miss the fact that what your buyer cares about today is probably not what they're going to care about tomorrow, right? There's always this change in the wins, right? You've got something that's super important. Everyone in their industry is talking about how they have to be doing this thing. It makes it on to the strategy for the year. And next year there's a new strategy.

and new things that they care about and new things they're trying to change. One of the things that we do a lot of is buyer personas, and a lot of companies think, well, we've done those before, right? And that's great. Like, you've done them before, but chances are, if you didn't do them pretty recently, it doesn't look anything like your customer looks like anymore. If you want to just focus on how old they are

and whether or not they drive a Mercedes or whatever, sure, that's probably that's great. But if you're looking to say what makes these people tick, what makes them buy or not buy, what makes them hesitant, how do you actually go about selling to them? That's a moving target that you constantly have to be keeping that stuff evergreen or you're going to be off target.

Yep. So what is your recommendation for how companies can stay on top of all of that? Because there's probably many, many tools or methodologies. And it's probably similar to, hey, we just spent the last year coming up with our branch spanking new marketing plan. Here it is. And then no one ever looks at it again, ever. So how do you make sure that you're, number one, knowing how and where to access data to

stay on top of it? But then how do you make sure the organization is actually proactively moving that needle to make sure they're doing it? Well, there's sort of two questions in there. from the first question, it's really all about making the conscious decision that you're going to stay up on it, that you're not going to let yourself get behind because it doesn't feel pressing, right? It's the sort of thing that you've got all these other things that feel like more near-term pressing items. And, you know, you're one degree off every year for five years, all of a sudden you're out in the wilderness.

because you didn't pay attention to what was going on in the market. Now, we make a business out of this because a lot of companies do struggle with this. They struggle to talk directly with prospects unless it's a salesperson, which to me is the worst idea to take your sales reps and make them the guinea pig and tell them to go out and let us know how this pitch deck worked out for you. And then we'll make some adjustments over time. Very high cost way to run experiments to have costs. salespeople going out there trying it on prospects that are at risk of not buying because you

were wrong about how you wanted to go about marketing your product. So we're all about saying develop hypotheses, run tests, see how it works. We do very in-depth evergreen programs with companies so that they keep up on this sort of thing. There's some other vendors for kind of the quick checks of, you know, is our messaging on or off? One of those is winter W-Y-N-T-E-R. But there's some options to keep up on it on the day-to-day basis, but then just a concerted effort to make sure that you're constantly understanding your buyer is critical and worth investing in, whether it's, you know, with a partner or in-house. You know, I think a lot of times companies can access secondary research very simply and easily by buying it or accessing it online,

but you focus on primary source insights. Talk a little bit about why that is such a huge benefit. Well, you know, if you buy a report or if you subscribe to Gartner, Forest, or whatever it may be in your industry, everyone else is too, right? Yeah. All of your competitors, all of the people who are in the know are reading the same stuff. And that's not to say that it's not good, but it's not the primary source gives you an unfair advantage from my perspective. It's the same thing with sort of a chat GPT world.

Well, it can only make sense of what exists already today, right? but new, fresh, primary insights are something that you can't replicate in any other way other than going out and having those conversations, having aha moments that are just, you can't pull it off any other way. And those reports give you a good base to think about the problem. But if you want to gain leverage in your market, you want to win more than your fair share of deals, it's best you get out and talk to those buyers yourself and understand exactly what makes them tick.

100%. I love the paragraph on your website that says, what if your team could always know precisely what your buyers think, what makes or breaks a deal and why some customers needlessly churn? That really is a superpower. So I think that that's, you know, you're asking that question to open the question loop in the mind of an organization. but how in the world would you, you know, react if that was hand, that data was handed to you from your own internal primary data. What are you seeing some of your clients before and after when they're,

you know, they don't have any clue. They're kind of, you know, shooting in the dark. And then now when this data is handed to them, now all of a sudden they've got this laser focus, right? Yeah. And I mean, it's led to really incredible results. We've had customers who've leveraged this to increase their win rate 10 plus percent. Others who all of a sudden are winning twice as many contested deals with a competitor because they actually understand their market better. So it really is a superpower to be able to understand this stuff in great detail. When I think about early stage startups, the best ones and the ones that tend to survive

are ones that actually do this research to actually validate. that there's a market to go after at all. What we see is that tends to drop off as soon as they're people managers, and no one really takes up the charge, and they lose that advantage, that sort of startup advantage of having that information, even though we work with very large companies, and many of them are clueless as to this stuff,

despite plenty of resources, because they know what's better. They think that they understand their market well enough. They don't need to do this stuff. But you give up that advantage as soon as you sit on it and you rest on your laurels and nobody picks it up and nobody keeps updating that knowledge base over time. So once you do that full primary data, total market clarity report and then you meet with the client, you say, now let's unpack this.

What are you recommending or find? finding that the client is doing first off to maximize that low-hanging fruit. Because obviously, this is a really in-depth analysis, and it's not something you do one and done. It's something that probably is a rollout over a quarter or two. But what is the first series of steps that you're finding people making with this report? Yeah, the best way for us to actually put this stuff into practice is to have a really good executive sponsor who who will partner with us, right? We can come in as a third party and say,

this is what we found, and it opens a lot of eyes. But if we have someone on the executive team who can help hold court in a way, share what they've learned, ask other executives if they're seeing similar things, all of a sudden, like, lists start getting written of like, here's what we can do to fix this problem.

And it's a pretty incredible site, to see. I don't think it's something we could do without the incredible partnership of our of our clients. But when they do it right and they come to it with a curious mind and they allow others in the organization, not just to dwell on what the report says, like that's a pre-read. Everyone should understand that. But to help come up with clear answers and responsibilities across organizations. It's an incredible thing to see. And if you do it right, that stuff gets ticked off.

And all of a sudden, you're not focused on the really big rocks that are keeping you from being successful. You're constantly refining and getting more and more juice out of the lemon. And probably you see that they take that kind of dip the toe in the water approach and implement something. And they start seeing a little bit of benefit and momentum. and then that kind of encourages them to take the next step and keep going rather than, you know, show me a 4 billion percent increase day one. You know, obviously we need to take it in stages, but I think that they probably are seeing, okay, this is validated because I took this initiative and implemented it here. And then now they're probably getting a corraling more support within their organization going, hey, guys, look what we did with this. You guys need to and then we make sure that we're just amplifying and folding those results upon each other.

Right. And that's helped us be very successful because it's not just one type of research that can be done. We'll work to understand their market better. We'll help do win loss analysis to understand why are their buyers choosing to or not choosing to buy them. Differentiation, persona work. So all this stuff sort of stacks on top of itself and creates this whole view of their market. So, you know, we can do one of those, but it's not too long before a client comes and says, well, let's take this to the next level. Let's get another layer of detail that we haven't had. But yeah, it is pretty awesome to see when people start making their stack ranked lists of like, here's the stuff we're going to tick off right away. And then because we're around long term with our clients seeing this stuff as an evergreen program, we get to see as the things that were super important and really pressing, they fix it, and all of a sudden it just falls off as a conversation piece with the client. And you know you've done really good work when that happens.

And it gets replaced with more and more solvable problems because you've really tackled the big ones. Excellent. Love it. Well, Brady's been so great learning about what you do and how you do it. If someone is interested in learning more and then also reaching out, and connecting with you. What's the best way they can do that? They can go to Aggregate Insights.

That's A-G-G-R-E-G-A-T-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-Nights. com forward slash podcast. We'd love to connect with anybody who's interested in learning more. Excellent. Well, thank you so much for coming on today. It's been a real pleasure talking with you. You as well. Good to talk to you, Mike. You've been listening to Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders. To learn more about the resources mentioned on today's show or listen to past episodes, visit www.com.