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Founder @ DemandJen | Former Chief Evangelist @ Challenger
B2B buyers are making one thing clear: They want to research products and services on their own before engaging with a salesperson.
What’s shocking is how far into the sales funnel they get alone, as much as 83% of the way.
We call this the ‘dark funnel’ (also referred to as dark social), and on this Halloween episode of Closing Time, we’re going to break down how marketers can unearth and track what’s going on in the hidden shadows of B2B marketing.
Jen Allen-Knuth joins Val Riley to explain the impact the dark funnel is having on marketing metrics and give you tips on how to simplify your lead categorization in and around it.
The dark funnel isn’t scary when you know how to make it work for you, instead of against you. Find out how in this episode!
What’s scarier, having no leads or having leads with no idea where they came from? The Dark Funnel is like a hidden world where B2B buyers research, learn and consume content without us even realizing it. In fact, statistics reveal that up to 83% of a buyer’s journey happens before they reach out to a salesperson. It’s as if they’re wearing an invisibility cloak, and our marketing tools can’t track them effectively.
However, Jen points out a valuable lesson here – instead of fixating on tracking every move, we need to step back and see the bigger picture that dark social presents.
In the past, customers had to call sellers for information. But nowadays, everyone can access information easily. What’s fascinating is the rise of online communities in the last few years. During the pandemic, people were isolated, and they found solace in connecting with others in these communities – they discovered the power of unbiased advice and insights shared within these groups.
This shift has changed the way people learn about their problems and priorities. Instead of relying on sales reps’ biased opinions, buyers can now seek advice from a community on important decisions. The quality and objectivity of the advice and knowledge exchange happening in these communities is unparalleled.
Simply Google “Slack communities for CXOs” and you’ll find that many of our prospects (and/or their bosses) are either actively learning or passively absorbing information from their peers.
The problem is that we often treat dark social as a mysterious black box because we’re so obsessed with tracking it. While tracking is crucial, we should also see it as an opportunity to understand how buyers form their beliefs and assumptions about their problems and solutions. The easiest ways for brands to do that? Mirror your customer’s learning journey.
What podcasts do they listen to? Ask for your executive to be a guest. What industry events do they attend? Look into speaking opportunities at them. What communities are they a part of? Try and break into them with authentic and valuable content.
Embracing the power of dark social and participating in communities is the way forward for B2B companies – and it doesn’t have to be as much of a secret as we think it is.
Believe it or not, the dark, untracked conversations happening on social media can significantly influence buying decisions. Take, for instance, the recent spicy LinkedIn showdown between Apollo and ZoomInfo, both offering sales intelligence software.
A customer raised a concern about one of these vendors on LinkedIn, and it ignited a massive conversation between the two brand accounts, their partners, employees, and customers. Customers of both brands were voicing their opinions, sharing why they liked or disliked the software, how they use the software in their organizations, and their recommendations for others. It wasn’t about a formal sales conversation but an organic exchange of opinions.
Now, for sales and marketing leaders, this serves as a perfect example of the power of dark social. It made people rethink their stance on these platforms – they might decide to step back, fearing the risk, or they could align with one of the brands’ viewpoints and lean into it.
The fascinating part was that the most impactful voices were not from the organizations themselves but from impartial, unpaid individuals. This provided an authentic perspective we rarely get when buying such platforms.
This kind of unfiltered interaction is what attracts buyers to dark social. Sellers often hesitate to openly admit their weaknesses, which breeds skepticism. Many are focused on showcasing their strengths to secure deals. However, some sellers are transparent about their strengths and weaknesses, making them more trustworthy – a note from Todd Caponi’s Transparency Sale.
Buyers will discover your product’s weaknesses regardless of whether you tell them. The more honest, authentic, and transparent brands and sellers are – the better results they’ll see in the long run.
If your competitors aren’t pay attention, embracing the dark funnel could be your competitive edge. Rather than letting it intimidate you, consider it a prime opportunity to differentiate yourself.
That 83% statistic about buyers making decisions before engaging with sales is a game-changer. You can choose to make your slice of the pie bigger or aim to become a part of the 83%.
One of the most effective ways to do so is through a Chief Evangelist role. Chief Evangelists focus on promoting a company’s products, services, or mission with enthusiasm and zeal. They are active in the communities and places where your buyers are learning – but what makes this role unique is that they are educating buyers from a peer-to-peer perspective rather than from the voice of the brand. They teach buyers about the problem itself, separate from your solution. After all, nobody buys a solution to a problem they don’t believe they have.
Whether it’s a formal Chief Evangelist role or employees spreading awareness about the problem, someone in your organization needs to take charge of this. It’s the key to capturing some of that dark funnel traffic and having it convert directly to you.
In a more traditional marketing setup, this responsibility might fall between content marketing and product marketing. But it doesn’t have to be limited to marketing – it’s about having the charisma and effectiveness to rally people around the problem without pushing solutions onto them. It’s a role that can be played by individuals from various departments, not just marketing or sales.
In the end, it’s about finding the right person to lead the charge, whether it’s a charismatic CMO or someone else with the ability to engage audiences on the problem, not just the solution.
In a world where causation is becoming correlation, showing success in the dark funnel can be a bit challenging. So, how can you appease your attribution-obsessed C-suite execs and investors?
Jen shares six key metrics to help:
1. Reframe Your Leads from MQLs to Hand Raisers and Learners. Hand Raisers are prospects who are already quite far along in their buying journey. They actively seek a demo or want to discuss your product, indicating strong purchase intent. Track the number of hand-raisers month over month to gauge how effectively you’re converting prospects close to making a purchase.
Learners are those who engage with your content, such as downloading a whitepaper, attending an event, or even sharing your content. They might not be immediately ready to buy, but they’re gaining knowledge about your industry, product, or services. Track the growth in the number of learners month over month. This metric helps you understand how well you’re nurturing prospects who might convert later and shaping their demand for your solutions.
2. Embrace Free-Form Attribution: Instead of using predefined attribution sources, use a blank, free-form answer for the question, “How did you hear about us?” This allows prospects to express in their own words how they discovered your brand. It might not provide neat and tidy data, but it uncovers valuable insights. You’ll discover brand advocates and other organic sources that you might not have been aware of through traditional attribution methods.
3. Ask in Sales Calls: To enhance your attribution insights, have your sales team ask prospects during sales calls, “How did you get to us today?” This supplements the self-attributed data and might provide different perspectives. It’s an effective way to cross-verify and gather additional insights, especially when the self-attributed data might not reflect the full journey.
4. Evangelist Influence: If you have an evangelist or a similar role in your organization, consider implementing metrics around their influence. You can use checkboxes in your CRM to indicate whether a conversation started with a non-solution-centric approach. For instance, if a prospect reached out expressing interest in your point of view on a certain topic rather than directly asking for a demo, you can check the box. This metric allows you to track how often non-solution-centric conversations lead to conversions.
5. Podcasts, Shows, and Events: Keep track of how frequently you’re invited to participate in external events, such as podcasts, industry shows, or webinars to share your insights. An increase in these invitations reflects growing confidence in your expertise. The more your target audience seeks your opinion and knowledge, the more they value what you have to offer. It’s a qualitative metric that indicates a shift in perception within your industry.
6. Celebrate Growth in Learners: Don’t solely focus on handraisers and direct conversions. Instead, celebrate the growth in your learner audience. These are individuals who might not be ready to buy immediately, but they’re engaging with your content and gradually learning about your industry and solutions. Nurturing this audience is vital, as they are part of the holistic approach to the dark funnel. By tracking the increase in learners, you’re acknowledging the importance of building a relationship with potential future customers.
By implementing and tracking these metrics, you gain a more comprehensive view of how your dark social activities are performing. They help you understand the nuances of the buyer’s journey, measure the impact of non-direct conversions, and shape your strategies to make the most of dark social channels.
What’s scarier, having no leads or having leads with no idea where they came from. We’re exploring the dark funnel on this Halloween episode of Closing Time. Thanks for tuning into Closing Time the show for Go to Market Leaders. I’m Val Riley, head of content and digital marketing at Insightly CRM. Our show comes out on Tuesday and today is Tuesday, but it’s also Halloween. So we’re going to have a haunting episode to talk about the dark funnel. I’m joined by Jen Allen-Knuth. She’s the former evangelist for Lavender.ai and now runs her own consulting group. Welcome to the show, Jen. Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here. I feel like so much has happened in your life since the last time you were on our show. You got married. You went out on your own. So congratulations on both of those. I love seeing women step out and achieve new things. So that’s great stuff. Thank you so much. It’s been an eventful 2023, to say the least. Absolutely. So get ready for some Halloween puns, Jen, because we’re going to go for it hard, all right. Because we want to talk about how lead gen has become a chamber of secrets because the statistics keep showing us how B2B buyers are choosing to buy. And it is as much as 83% of the buyer’s journey is happening before they reach out to a salesperson. It’s like they’re under an invisibility cloak and our marketing automation platforms cannot track them. So it’s really hard to know exactly what’s happening. Yes, I think it’s really difficult to disagree with that. However, I think the head fake here is that we are so obsessed with tracking it that we’re kind of missing out on the bigger picture that dark social presents. So like, if you think about it, right,. I spent my entire career as a seller. Ten years ago, the customer had a problem. They had to pick up the phone and call sellers, right? Because that was their primary source of information. Everybody knows that like, you know, there’s more information and everybody can access information on their own. That’s been said and done. But I think what’s really fascinating is if you look at the last three years, the explosion of things like communities,. So we were all working out of our home. We were all lonely, we’re all going stir crazy. And now we have this ability to connect with people we would never connect with outside of a community. And I think what happened over time is people just saw the power, the objectivity of the advice and the insight that they were getting inside of communities. And slowly but surely, or maybe not even that slowly, it changed the way that people learned about themselves, the problems and what they prioritized. And so instead of picking up the phone, calling a sales rep who is under immense pressure to sell something, anything, and will say just about all those things, to get that buyer to consider. Now they can go on to a community and say, Hey, I’m weighing whether I do a reorg or whether I buy a piece of tech. Can you help me understand what your experience has been and the answers and the conversation that we see happening here is incredible. The problem is to go back to your original question, we still treat it like, oh, it’s this like mysterious abyss in a box because we’re so obsessed with tracking it. If we take a step back from that, not saying tracking is not important, but if we actually take a step back and say this is a whole new opportunity for us to learn and watch how our buyers are forming their beliefs and assumptions about the problems that they have and the options they have to sell them. To me, I’d take an untrackable, dark social all day long because we never used to have that kind of visibility into the buyer’s mind. Mm hmm. Yeah, that’s a that’s a really neat way to look at it. So we’ve thrown around dark funnel, dark social a little bit for those who might be listening and may need a little more explanation as to what that is. Can you talk through how the dark funnel or dark social might influence somebody? And for an example, let’s say they’re buying sales intelligence software. I’m going to assume you picked this one because it is like probably the spiciest category right now in terms of what’s happening on social. So, I mean, we’re recording this early October. A few weeks ago, probably most of us saw the spice fight on LinkedIn between Apollo and ZoomInfo. It was like, I I popped my popcorn. I’m just sitting there watching. It was great. Right? It’s like massively entertaining, but I think it’s a perfect example. Right. So someone who did not work for either of those two organizations raised an issue that they had with one of those vendors, and it sparked a conversation that blew up. Like I could not open LinkedIn that day and not see either Apollo or ZoomInfo somewhere. Now, I I’m not saying it is the right thing or wrong thing to do, but what I am saying is that is a perfect example of a conversation that is happening outside of any formal sales conversation. That for sure probably changed the way that some executives looked at Apollo versus. ZoomInfo and vice versa. And so I think to me that is a perfect example, if I was a sales leader or marketing leader, and I’m sitting on the fence saying, Hey, I’m thinking I might want to buy a sales intelligence platform. And I watched that debacle. A couple of things may happen. One, I may say, man, I’m going to back off of this because it seems like a really risky space to try and invest in anything. I don’t want to make the wrong decision.. Right. That’s one option. Or maybe it said cause them to believe, hey, I really agree with the way that Apollo or ZoomInfo is talking about this and their point of view on this. That makes me want to lean more forward into it. The reality is we don’t have control over what’s happening there. And I think when you look at those stream of comments, both organizations chimed in,. But I don’t think many of us were paying as much attention to what those organizations were saying. We were paying attention to what the unbiased, unpaid, unemployed by these two companies people were saying about it. And it gave us a really interesting picture of the reality that we don’t often see when we are buying those platforms. Yeah, I mean, it was super insightful and, you know, sometimes we rely on review platforms for that type of insight, that peer to peer. But there’s always that worry that, you know, reviews might be compensated or encouraged. But that was,. I mean, for lack of a better term, it was the most organic experience that you could have with those two brands. And it was it was just incredible to watch. It was. And I mean, if you think about it, right, going back to what I said initially and why, I think so many buyers have leaned into what we call dark social is because it is very rare. It’s not impossible, but it’s very rare that we sellers are willing to openly admit our weakness points. And I think that’s what drives a lot of skepticism from buyers. Like, I’m going to tell you the good news story all day long because I want you to pick me. That’s often the mindset that we have. There are sellers out there saying,. I’m going to be very upfront with where we fall down relative to our competitors, and I’m going to have the belief that you are going to pick the right one for your business based on our strengths and weaknesses. But there’s just far too many sellers who I think are under pressure to hit a quota, who are trying to do anything at all costs. And so when you look at that conversation versus you look at an unfiltered user, I’m going to go to the unfiltered user all day long. Mm hmm. Yeah. I’ve actually seen recently in some RFPs, there would be a question of tell us about a failed implementation. And I think that, you know, sellers can paint that as rosy of a picture as they possibly can. But they do have to say, hey, here’s a wart and here’s why we think we had that wart and that’s super insightful. Yeah, I mean, I think I haven’t seen that because I haven’t been in an RFP in a bit and I absolutely love it. I think that is a smart, smart question to be asking. All right. So let’s talk about how we can make the dark funnel a little less scary, because if your competitors aren’t really playing there or paying attention, you might have a good shot. Yeah, I think this is you know, we talk a lot about in sales and marketing, how do we avoid being commoditized. This to me is one of the biggest opportunities that we have to show up differently than our competitors. So you talked about that 83% statistic in the open. It is one of my favorite statistics. I’ve ever seen on selling, because there’s two responses you can have to that. It’s either how do we make our pie bigger? How do we get our customers to spend more time with us? Or you can have the response that I took, which is how do I earn the right to be part of the other 83%? How do I become part of the sources that they’re going to to learn about their problems well before they’re ever thinking about solutions? And so when I was at my not my last company, the company before that with Challenger, I actually created the chief evangelist role, which technically sat in sales or reported up to the global head of sales, but worked across sales and marketing. And the reason. I was so passionate about that is because I think in many organizations we’ve had this classic challenge of like sales versus marketing. And I’m not saying organizations haven’t figured out. There’s certainly some that have done a great job of it. But I think rather than continue to fight that battle, which is just exhausting and kind of soul sucking, to use the Halloween theme, it opens up this opportunity to say if we want to make sales the converters of demand, fine. If we want to make marketing the voice of what our solution is capable of, fine. But somewhere somebody needs to be teaching buyers about the problem in a new and different way because nobody buys a solution to a problem that they don’t believe they have. And so for me personally,. I’m not like the world’s foremost marketing expert by any means, but I am a huge advocate of saying whether you have a formal chief evangelist, whether you have a set of employees doing evangelizing of the problem. Somebody inside of the business needs to be wholly focused on teaching buyers about the problem. Agnostic of our solution. So I think when we do that, we do that effectively. What happens is some of that dark funnel traffic starts converting over to us directly, and I think that’s a great place to be in. It feels like in a more traditional marketing team that might fall somewhere between content marketing and product marketing, for instance, maybe you’re not big enough to have an evangelist role. Would you agree? Or is there another marketing function that might play in there as well? Yeah, I mean, I think it’s tricky, right? One of my and I don’t like making universal generalist statements, but one of the things when I sold into sales and marketing organizations that I heard just constantly was marketing is too far away from the customer to really understand like the emotional, real life stories that they go through. And so I think in many ways it’s easy to point the finger at marketing and be like,. You suck because of that. But in reality, I also think that we have to have some empathy for marketers who are being tasked with an ever growing set of channels to work on, more noise. Like we cannot just keep pointing the finger back at marketing and say, You need to be better at this on top of all these other things now. So where I stand on this subject is I don’t necessarily think it should be a marketer, it should be a salesperson, it should be a product person. I think it should be the person who has the most charisma and who has most effective at being able to rally people up about the problem without dumping solutions on their face. So I think that can take a lot of different forms. I’ve seen a lot of different people play that role. There’s not like one path. I think it has to come from marketing, sales, etc.. Yeah, that’s super interesting. You know, they already say that. CMO is the shortest tenure in the C-suite, so I don’t want to lock that onto the CMO, whose job too. But that might be if you have a charismatic CMO, that that might be where it belongs. But good point there. So, you know, one thing that marketers always face and sales folks to obviously is metrics. And so it can be tricky when we have to conjure up metrics when we’re thinking about the dark funnel. So if you’ve just got a founder and or a CEO, maybe it’s not quite as challenging, but if you’ve got a board and shareholders and the full C-suite, you know, you’ve got to have data. So what data points do you feel like marketing and sales can unearth to show that, Hey, we are having success in the dark funnel because it almost sounds like for years we’ve been saying with these data platforms we can show causation, but now it’s almost like we’re showing correlation, you know, I’m not trying to sound too medical, but I feel like there’s a shift. No, it’s not medical at all. And I think it’s a really positive shift. Right. We’ve been so focused on who gets credit. I think in many ways, because you talked about it before, like the tenure of CMOs is short, We’re seeing sales teams overturn very, very quickly. So I think the battle has been one of like, look at me,. I’m responsible for this good outcomes. I want to see that go away. And I do have six things that I personally tracked when I was in this role. But before I say it,. I do think it’s important to note why this is exactly why. I think we see so many organizations trying to make that shift to an owned media platforms. You’ve seen Crossbeam do it, HockeyStack do it, Lavender did it with Lavender Land because there’s so much wasted productivity inside of a business trying to figure out where did this come from? Right. Going back to the whole thing on attribution, being tied to success in a role and so I’m really excited about this future where people are realizing we can’t get away with the bad behavior of inviting someone into a discussion that is all about us. We have to create these platforms that mirror what people love about communities or love about events. And that, I think, is changing the game. I’m super excited to watch the space. That being said, if you’re not there yet, there are a few things that we tracked when I did this. So one was we actually changed the way that we thought about leads. So traditionally leads had all just been like MQLs like, here they are. I could be a white paper download,. I could be an event. I could be someone who wants to buy and get a demo. They were all MQLs. We bucketed it into hand raisers and learners. So a hand raiser is someone who’s like, I want a demo and I want to talk about the product. I’m already kind of later stage. That’s obviously something salespeople love, but there’s not a lot of them. Learners are people who maybe downloaded a white paper or came to an event or, you know, shared a podcast that we were featured in. Just because they consume something does not mean that they want to buy. But we as salespeople often treat them that way because we are in the motion of trying to convert as many people as possible. By separating hand raisers and learners, what we’re able to do is measure month over month how quickly were we increasing the total size of learners and the belief there was if we can get more people to learn with us early, we have an ability to shape their demand of what they ultimately want. It’s not a direct, you know, causation, but it’s a belief system, right? If someone’s learning with me versus learning with, I don’t know, some competing sales training company, I have a higher likelihood that when they have a need, they’re going to come to me. So what we would do is we would track not just the number of hand raisers, which is a good thing, but the number of learners. And were we increasing the size of that pie month over month? So that was number one. Number two, big fan of the whole Chris. Walker philosophy around like, “how did you hear about us,” being blank and free form. That was a freaking battle to get that done because again, it is our death grip on attribution that we cannot release. Like it doesn’t give you a pretty graph. It gives you a really messy one. But we learned so much. We identified people that were out there passionately talking about us, recommending us that we didn’t even know existed because they would appear multiple different times. We learned about different people or different organizations we could partner with because they were apparently teaching things in their classes that were pointing back to us. So in my opinion, yes, it’s messy, it doesn’t look pretty, but it gives us much more actionable data. So that’s number two. Number three is the problem with using that free form, “how did you hear about us,” is we all know that people tend to think about the last place they heard about us could be Google. So what we did is we balance that with asking sellers to then ask the question in their sales call. Out of curiosity, how did you get to us today? And that supplemented or sometimes corrected what we would see in the self attributed part of the form. So I think it’s a both not or. I love that approach. It can be hard to enforce with a sales team. You sort of end up being like, you know, the policeman asking, you know, please ask this question when you’re on the call. But so much insight can come from that. And you’re right, it is not necessarily the same as what they clicked in the, “How did you hear about us?” So if there was one thing I could communicate to my sales team was always, you know, I really need you to ask that question because it helps us put money in the right places for you to get more leads down the road. So, I mean, it’s like the onus is on you, but like, you definitely benefit from it. Yes. And you bring up such a good point, which is always like the adherence to it. So what we did at the company. I was working with is we made it so that every time we did deal reviews, the person leading the deal review asked that question, “How did the client hear about us?” And I think this gets back to just like good behavior on leadership’s part. If I ask the same question every single time I as the seller, I’m going to eventually learn, don’t show up not knowing the answer to the question. You look like an idiot, right? So it’s like some of it is not just putting it all in the sellers, but also on the leaders to make sure they are creating moments where the seller realizes, I have to know the answer to that question. It’s not perfect, but it’s better. So that’s another one. And then the other thing that we did was we actually had in our CRM a checkmark for evangelist influence. Now this is obviously if you have an evangelist, you can create, you know, different topics for this. But what that allowed me to do is if I, for example, got a DM on LinkedIn and someone was like, Hey, I’m really interested in learning about your point of view on discovery. I’ve never really considered this training methodology. I could have a conversation before I pass it off to sales and I could check that box and say it started with a non solution centric conversation. And then what we could do is start looking at what is the sales cycle speed for influenced versus non influenced deals by an evangelist. And that’s where it got interesting because one of the I’ll give you an example, one of the deals that we looked at was a seven figure deal, which classically on average would have taken our business close to a year to close. It closed in three months. And when we saw that repeatedly happening with these influenced deals, that gave us the ability to say, hey, when we start off not with a sales rep, but actually with a much more unbiased motion with the evangelist, we see a faster, larger deal cycle than we traditionally do. And I think that’s, it’s not a perfect science by any means, but I think it’s like that’s the leading indicator we want. And so if you start to see those patterns occurring, that I think gives the business at least in our case, give the business more confidence in leaning far more forward into those kind of learner motions as opposed to seller motions. And then the last one is again, an imperfect science. But one of the things we were looking for was the frequency of which we were invited to different podcasts, shows, events to share our point of view and the belief system there was the more that people that our buyers are going to to learn from are inviting us on to share our point of view. The more confident we felt in that motion of teaching customers where we go to learn. So I think it’s a pretty simple measure just track everything that you’re being invited to. If you see the number growing, great,. If you see the number shrinking, maybe we got to go back to the drawing board. Got it. So I want to go back and highlight. I love the way you call the the non hand raisers learners, because I think that puts us in a position to remember internally that we’re all here to like, help educate the prospect and move them down the funnel. I think that’s just that terminology really resonates with me and I’m wondering if that’s something that you came up with as a team or and did you get buy in on that term? Yeah, it actually was born out of a series of sales and marketing meetings where we were battling each other constantly. Like I sold to a lot of companies who felt that way. I was in a company that felt that way and we just had these really unproductive weekly meetings where we were trying to like, take claim of why something that worked really well worked. We were beating up marketing because you weren’t giving us enough lead marketing sitting there saying,. Look at the list of leads we’re getting. And so it was born out of that conversation where we said, Look, maybe the issue is the language, which is, you’re right, this is technically a lead because they gave us an email address, but it’s not someone who’s ready to buy. And it is really difficult to teach sellers in many ways, like how to treat leads differently without giving them an indicator that it is okay to not go full force, whole hog selling this person because they’re actually just in the phase of learning right now. And so that just became a really easy way to show sellers, Hey, we get that there is a difference, but also appease marketing because it wasn’t saying we’re going to cut anything that isn’t like a true ready to buy lead. So yeah, it was born out of like a bunch of frustrating meetings with marketing. I love that. I hope that gets adopted more across the board. I think it’s a great way to think about those folks who are just entering the top of your funnel. So in the end, so if we’re playing the dark funnel correctly, right? We’re doing all these things where we have, we’re using an evangelist or an evangelist like motion, if you’re too young or too small to have that, in the end, we’re looking for it to show up in, you know, sign ups, check outs, demo requests, whatever the equivalent is in your business. And you know those ones that are lurking in the deepest, darkest depths of our funnel, you know, just start to show up on the other end, just like seems like it’s just more of a holistic approach. It is, right. And I think one of the dangers is we can’t be so fuzzy duzzy that we’re like, just put faith in the system and everybody will convert. Like, we do have to be practical that this stuff costs money and you have to defend those investments. So I was able to show exactly which deals that the evangelist motion influenced. If you don’t have an evangelist to your point, you could do this with marketing as well. We were able to show that and actually create a number, a true number that was trued up by the self-reported attribution and the seller source info that everybody bought into. Like I had no fights with anybody in the business around whether or not the 7 million in pipeline that I influenced in 11 months was valid or not. Right? So I think that’s incredibly important. But at the end of the day,. I think going back to the learner versus hand raiser, we have to realize that there are inputs that go into getting someone to convert to a hand raiser So I think we have to celebrate a grow in learner audience as much as we celebrate a grow in the Hand raiser audience. And that seems like a great place to end, Jen. Really appreciate you joining us today. Thank you for tolerating the Halloween puns. It was a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me. Great. And thanks to everybody out there for tuning in. Remember, you want to like this video, hit the button for notifications and subscribe to the channel so you don’t miss an episode. And we’ll see you next week on Closing Time.
