Why legacy B2B marketing strategies are killing your growth

00:00 Craig: We're a little bit stuck. We're not really sure where to go. What do we do? Loads has changed, hasn't it? So it's no wonder that people are looking at their marketing strategy, their strategy in general, through a new view of what the world is.

00:25 Craig: We're going to start by talking about the worries, the challenges, the concerns that we're seeing from CEOs, from go-to-market leaders. We'll then get into some of the shifts and the new ways of working that we're seeing emerge. We're not going to make nonsense claims around things being dead. I don't think necessarily things are dead, but maybe some things are dying.

00:46 Craig: So if we start with the many that we talk to in this sort of mid-size scale-up phase—they're at the point where maybe they've reached the ceiling of growth. They've got to this point by relying on referrals, maybe relying on strategic partners, relying on a sales team, and maybe they've progressed into having an SDR function. We'll talk about that in a bit more detail.

01:14 Craig: And they've probably had some kind of marketing activity running, but it's been inconsistent.

01:21 James: Honestly, no. I don't think most CEOs know how a marketing function should run. And therefore, I think a lot of them look at it as, "I know I need a marketing function, I've got one, but is it really working? Are they doing the right things? Are they doing them in the right order? Is it achieving the results I should be expecting them to achieve? What results should I be expecting them to achieve?"

01:43 James: It's almost like a bit of a tick box in the CEO's mind that they need a sales team, they know what they need to produce, they need delivery teams, and they need a marketing team because it's the done thing. But I don't think they always have the know-how to understand what that marketing team should be delivering for them. I think that's part of the problem.

02:00 Craig: And I think that's always been a thing. I think there's always been a gap there. But I think what's apparent now, what's compounding now—and it probably has been the case for maybe the last 12 months, but it's getting—that feeling is stronger and stronger in my mind that CEOs are now not just questioning the marketing function, but they're really looking around on LinkedIn and hearing the voices, and maybe they're thinking, "Marketing is changing dramatically. Is our marketing function keeping up?" There's probably a lot of FOMO.

02:32 James: You just have to go on LinkedIn and, as I say, it's just rife with new ways of working—data-driven, technology-driven, AI-driven approaches that can make a lot of people feel that they're way behind.

02:46 Craig: And the CEO will be looking at that and they'll be looking at their marketing team doing a lot of the same shit that they've previously done. They're going to events, producing blogs, updating the website. You know, there's almost—and we'll come on to discuss this. I mean, it's not the fault of, I think, marketers, but I think there is—you know, ultimately, marketers get into that groove, don't they, of doing the same things at the same time every year. It's event season, for example, at the minute. You know, so they go into that business-as-usual, "get the events done" kind of thing. And ultimately, CEOs are going to be looking at that as, you know, "There's all of this change happening in the world. Yet my marketing team seem to be doing the same thing they've done every year." And we'll come on and talk about the reasons why that is, but I don't think it's the fault of the marketers, like I say. But you can see why they may be starting to question, A, whether the marketing team is delivering what they should in terms of value and impact on the business, but B, are they keeping up with all of this change that is happening?

03:49 James: When you look at the—

03:51 Craig: Yeah, because it's sensationalist headlines such as "XYZ is dead," "lead generation is dead," etc. And when you just peel back the surface a little bit, it starts to look like a very different way of working now for marketing.

04:07 James: We should be clear that it is.

04:09 Craig: Absolutely. And we're going to get into—I think if you've already got some doubts about marketing in general, you've never really been convinced that it works, and everything's suddenly going in a different direction or evolving at pace, largely because of AI, then those concerns are going to get amplified, especially if you're struggling to—

04:26 James: If you're struggling to—and the sources of opportunity that you've relied on for so long, they've got you to the point where you can't rely on it anymore.

04:36 Craig: It's almost three things happening, isn't there? There's the marketing team that are operating in the same way, not necessarily producing a specific result, a clear, defined, obvious demonstrable impact. At the same time, you've got all that change happening in the world, which is going to, again, amplify those question marks around whether what marketing teams are doing now and have done for the last 10 years is the right thing to be doing. And on top of that, sales has slowed down for many, and therefore marketing is now more needed than ever. So that lack of impact that many have been able to demonstrate is adding to that fire of suspicion around whether the marketing team is operating in the way that they should.

05:18 James: Another layer to that is buyer behavior. That's changing in parallel to everything else, which is making it harder to get through to buyers. Less responsive on the phone. If they are in buying mode, they really want to try and get as far as they can without being plagued by salespeople or engaging in a sales conversation. And that's happening even more in complex sales. I think the organizations that are serving the needs of buyers and helping them complete their buying jobs at the early stages are those that have got the right kind of content, whether that's helping you develop a business case or assessing your current state, some kind of gap analysis.

06:00 Craig: We'll come on to that, won't we? But content in the broadest of terms—a lot of people, when they think of content, think of words on a page. We don't necessarily mean that, do we? Ultimately, interactive content like calculators, etc.

06:13 James: Yeah. We'll talk about thought leadership.

06:15 Craig: I mean, it has been for some time, but I think people have really struggled to embrace that in a way that is really serving buyers' needs.

06:25 James: I mean, I think there's two types of CEO in this regard, really. There's those that have been through a journey and they've seen marketing work, and they're willing to sort of stick with and support that consistent strategic approach. And they have faith in marketing. They just need to find the right people to help execute on it. And I think there's others that have been through various different approaches, whether that's bringing people in-house, using agencies, using fractional resources. And they've had their fingers burned. And every time you have your fingers burned, you've got less faith that it's going to work. And you get fatigued with the whole thing, don't you? You start to think, "Well, this is a load of bollocks. I'm not even going to bother." Clearly we don't need it, we'll crack on with sales.

07:12 Craig: That is obviously the wrong impression to have. Ultimately, you can understand why some CEOs that have gone through all of those rounds of different iterations of marketing function and them not working will become fatigued with that process.

07:26 James: So, you know, if we turn our attention to marketers, in most cases they're just not given the support that they need. And that's because there's a misunderstanding and all the other reasons we talked about in terms of how CEOs regard marketing. Like you say, to really build an effective function in-house requires a lot of investment because you need a lot of specialist skills. That can be very expensive.

07:51 Craig: You've got to have all the tools. And we've been through a cycle over the last few years where marketers have spent a shitload of money on a variety of different tools, but not really got them to work or play together. For the same reason, they don't have the specialist skills in-house to make those tools work. So you make the investment in something like HubSpot, and we see all the time that they're getting sort of 10-20% out of that platform. And that platform itself is evolving so quickly, and there's so much to it that it's impossible to keep up with unless you've got, like many enterprise organizations, organizations that really invest in this stuff—you've got a team of marketing operations or go-to-market engineers or revenue operations specialists that really know how to get the most out of the platform. So marketing is under-invested in. We see marketing budgets being cut. Resources are really in the firing line as well, in question all the time, and it's hard maybe to find a business case to increase headcount.

08:56 James: It's not something that marketers themselves aren't aware of or are blissfully kind of ignorant of or ignoring. But most marketers in a role where they perhaps haven't got that level of backing, that level of support to bring in specialist agencies or to have a team of multiple specialists that can do the job internally, they're then forced to kind of operate in that business-as-usual manner. They don't often have time to look forward and assess new platforms and experiment with different approaches. And I think that's for multiple reasons. The first is time. And obviously when you're trying to operate a function, even in that old playbook in inverted commas, often they're overstretched. So they're just treating it day by day just to get the next day done and to get the work done, which is an understandable position to be in. I think we've probably both been in that position ourselves at some point in our careers.

09:55 Craig: You know, when you're stuck just—you know, stuck in that kind of—just got to get that event done, you're juggling so many balls.

10:02 James: Yeah, you can very much get stuck just hamster on a wheel, trying to grind through, never having the time to get your head above the parapet and look at what's coming. And if you go on something like LinkedIn, it's even more, you know, even scarier because you get this feeling that there's lots of other marketers that are way ahead of you. And those—equally, you know, as a—when I was the other side of the fence, I would—I might have pretended I knew everything, but no marketer does.

10:31 Craig: And so you see all these newfound methodologies for generating leads and implementing different AI tools and automation, etc. You might see a LinkedIn post, but you don't know if it really works. And I think the other challenge of an internal marketer is obviously reputation is everything, isn't it? Especially if you're leading that part of the organization, if you cock something up, questions start to get asked internally. And I think a lot of these new playbook stuff is experimental. It's going to require testing and iteration and failure to a degree. And I think a lot of internal marketers aren't prepared to take risks with stuff like that or have the backing to experiment and iterate and test different things until they're proven by the wider industry. And I think that's also preventing marketers from going beyond the business-as-usual old playbook stuff that they've been doing for many years.

11:28 James: And I think with, obviously, advances in AI, there's also that expectation from above that the marketing team should be embracing that wherever possible. You know, "Rather than hiring more people, can you do it with agents instead?" And without really understanding how all this works, you can kind of easily jump to that conclusion that AI is going to allow you to automate everything. But I think in certain businesses, it will transform marketing, I think, for SaaS where you've got sort of lower-value purchases that can be—you know, the whole kind of sales process is quite linear. You can automate it end-to-end, and that's possibly what will happen. But not in complex sales. I think it's just too messy, too complicated, and trust is such a big part of the sales process, given the size of some of these big deals. You're not going to—if you're a CTO, for example, you're not going to do your analysis using AI because you're going to make a decision purely based on what AI tells you. And equally, you're not going to be sold to through AI. You're going to be dealing with someone that you can trust if you're going to make these sort of big decisions and put your career on the line.

12:46 Craig: But it doesn't mean that certain parts of the old playbook, if you want to keep calling it that, can't be made easier or smoother or scaled through AI as a platform. Absolutely, yeah.

12:59 James: AI doesn't equal automation. I think a lot of people think that it is an advanced form of automation, which to some degree it is. But it can accelerate processes at the earliest stage of the journey. We'll maybe talk about some of them later, like social outreach, etc., which require a completely non-personalized approach. And therefore, it could prompt, for example, the right time to reach out to someone in a personalized manner or in a one-to-one direct manner based on signals or based upon all sorts of other things. So I don't think we should look at AI as a completely hands-off, do-it-for-you kind of technology. I think we've got to be a bit smarter about, particularly in a B2B complex sale type organization, how it's used. But it doesn't mean that it shouldn't be considered. And I think that's the problem that marketers face. They've got that expectation that they're using these tools and they're pushing the function forward, but they've got their reputation to protect, and no one has the knowledge to be completely 100% sure that those tools are going to work in that environment. And equally, they don't have the backing of maybe some external partners with that expertise or a bigger budget to go out and experiment beyond the boundaries of the traditional playbook.

14:16 Craig: I think it's a rock and a hard place. And just before we move on to some of these new ways of working, I think I just want to make a point around strategy, because I think if marketers are forced into that kind of operational mode, then it's hard to have that sort of impact at board level and to be involved in the strategy conversations. And we know a lot of businesses right now are trying to pivot, trying to adapt to AI, particularly consultancies—it's going to have a big impact on how they deliver. So there's a lot of repositioning happening. Really, marketing should be part of that conversation and they should be bringing customer insights to the table. But that's really difficult when you're stuck doing the day-to-day. You don't have the experience if you've always been in that operational mode, and you may not have that strategic thinking.

15:02 James: There's a bit of an irony there. I was having a conversation with a client recently, albeit about a different application of AI. And they said actually the mid-market is much more able to go and make the most of it. They can steal a march on the enterprise because they don't have all of these big teams and expansive processes and red tape. So it's a little bit catch-22. The enterprise has the funding and the backing and the ability to be progressive, but it's like moving an oil tanker. Whereas the mid-market has the ability to be agile, but they don't have the backing to take advantage of that position. Maybe, like you say, the resources and the skills to do it. I think larger enterprises are almost going to be reluctant to—certainly consultancies that are making huge amounts of money on the hour, charging out expensive consultants. A lot of that work could be done by AI ultimately. So that's pretty scary from a business model perspective.

16:06 Craig: So I think we've probably been pretty thorough in going through the challenges from a CEO and a marketing leader's perspective. But I think there's always been a gap there between the two. I think that's the danger—is that gap just gets wider.

16:21 James: So let's talk about some of the shifts that we're seeing in new ways of working. So I think let's try and break it down—strategic shifts and also the tactical ones. And I think probably the most focus out there, most noise, is around the tactical ones—tools and new ways of leveraging AI. But if we start with the more strategic shifts, I think developing strategy in itself, I think now can be massively advanced through AI. So if we talk about some of the work we do a lot of around developing value propositions, understanding buyer journeys—a lot of that maybe traditionally has been done through more conventional means, which is workshopping with teams, qualitative research with clients. Now you can go to significant lengths to really validate some of those findings through a small group of customers and through internal teams using AI, using agents to search the web and maybe just correlate some of the findings and aggregate those findings. There's synthetic research as well, which effectively creates clones of your ideal buyers, and then you can stress-test your propositions with those. I think for me that sort of stuff's really, really exciting. I think buyer journeys as well.

17:41 Craig: Having a really well-defined buyer journey is fundamental to a go-to-market strategy because you then know what your buyers are looking for at different stages and where the gaps in your process are ultimately.

17:54 James: Absolutely, the touchpoints they'll go to. So I think AI is going to really transform how strategy is developed, giving companies, leaders, more confidence in the decisions they make. So I think that that's a big shift.

18:10 Craig: Another big thing that has been driving me mad for years, particularly in our space, is this sort of notion of campaigns. So if we're in the game of complex sales, by its very nature, those sales cycles are very long—six to 12 months, if not longer. Also factoring in the 95-5 rule, most people aren't even in a buying process. So even if they start that whole journey, they become active and they start engaging with and looking at the market, trying to find a solution to a particular problem, that cycle itself may be six to 12 months to actually make a decision.

18:53 James: So it's ridiculous, isn't it, to think that a three-week campaign with an agency where you send out some direct mail that's got some cookies in the post is going to make jack shit difference? I've actually heard agencies use phrases like "burst campaigns" where you spend an eye-watering amount on a campaign that's going to run for three months. And what you lose out on there is you're only going to appeal to a fraction of the market that might actually be in buying mode at that point. And you're not in any way influencing those that might become buyers in two years' time.

19:28 Craig: And so we've always, always, always advocated for long-term programs, consistent marketing done well, continuous improvement, iteration. And I think we're seeing more and more people buy into that, particularly in complex sales. And I think all the new kind of ways of working that we'll get into, particularly from a tactical perspective, I think it's clear that iteration and experimentation is paramount, and you can't do that in a campaign.

19:56 James: No, but you can understand why it's an attractive proposition and why agencies particularly have probably been driving that agenda. Because ultimately what leaders want is short-term results, isn't it? It's pipeline, it's revenue, and you can see why they're attracted to, "We're going to run a three-month campaign, it's going to cost you 50 grand, and you're going to get a 3 million quid pipeline off the back of it," which rarely actually comes to fruition. I think the other dynamic that plays into why that's an attractive proposition for them has just slipped my mind.

20:32 Craig: Well, maybe it will come back to you. I think the other big strategic shift that we've seen—and it's been happening for a while, but it's really, really pretty obvious now that, and again, referring back to LinkedIn, but there's definitely a move to having to operate on earned channels. So your own channels like your website, newsletter, etc.—it's a little bit tactical, but it's much harder to get buyers to interact with those unless you've built up that kind of audience.

21:03 James: I've remembered. The other point is that the longer-term program requires some element of trust, doesn't it? And ultimately, when you start on the 12 to 18-month program to even kind of get some kind of footing in the industry, you've got to start that, be consistent, spend money on it, and do it month in, month out for at least 12 months before you really start to see the results of it. And for many, that requires a hell of a lot of faith, doesn't it?

21:33 Craig: At the end of the day, when you've got pressures from maybe investors or from the board or wherever else to turn stuff around quickly, it's so tempting to think or to tell yourself the right thing to believe is that the three-month campaign is the thing that's going to get you the results because—

21:53 James: Some don't have 12, 18 months to make that investment.

21:56 Craig: Well, I kind of look at it a little bit differently, and we'll get into this a little bit later, but I think there's a long-term play and there's a short-term play. And some people might say it's brand versus performance and all the rest of it. I think the two are intertwined. But there's activities that you can do on a consistent basis that will drive short-term demand by being more direct outbound. And then there's those that are more longer-term that are designed to build authority, build your brand. So that ultimately you become that go-to company that you can rely less on outbound.

22:27 James: The last point I was just making was the shift from company brands to personal brands. You know, it's clear on LinkedIn now there's a big play where the founders are taking the lead on the brand, and management teams are weighing in as well. And, you know, it's much more about that kind of visible expert approach. Just look at company pages. They still get followed, but I mean, there's really little point in trying to promote a company page. It's really about the founder story, the expertise within the people in the business. If we're talking about complex sales again and services-based businesses, then it's all about those experts and getting their opinions out into the market as much as possible under the guise of their own personal brand. And it comes down to trust at the end of the day, doesn't it? I think LinkedIn is driving a lot of that, but for good reason. Now ultimately, people want to see and hear from the people that they're going to be working with.

23:25 Craig: Let's move on to tactics then. So one of the big tactical shifts is obviously the shift from SEO to AEO or GEO, whatever you want to call it. And there's a lot of people out there that differ in opinion. Many people of an SEO persuasion, most likely, are saying that SEO doesn't need to change, that the same rules for SEO apply to AEO. Ultimately, a lot of the principles are the same. And there's an element of truth to that. How ChatGPT and the likes will index and crawl your information is very similar, but the things that they'll be looking for aren't exactly the same as what Google would be looking for.

24:05 James: So they want referenceability. They want to be able to link off to something which is trusted and which is fact-based. And therefore, we'll probably come into how that factors into content in a second. But really what we know at the minute is that whilst there are some similarities between the way you optimize for SEO and for LLMs like ChatGPT and the likes, they're not exactly the same, and strategies and tactics are going to need to change in order to optimize for those platforms.

24:36 Craig: But I think there's that first point that we've made there that ultimately we've seen a big shift, haven't we, towards more proprietary, data-driven, research-driven content being produced, I think for two reasons. A, it's more referenceable for the LLMs to index and hopefully help you rank higher. But B, because of the proliferation of AI-generated content, the noise has got worse and worse and worse. And to cut through that, you need something that you own. You need something that is yours and can't be copied by some junior marketer somewhere plugging some blog ideas into ChatGPT. I think that's twofold. But the second thing we talked about earlier, which is the element of trust—a lot of the principles in marketing in general, but in content production, are the same. Thought leadership isn't any different, but ultimately how you present that thought leadership to the world has shifted dramatically.

25:34 James: We've seen through our clients, but through our own content production as well, a big, big shift to having that more founder-led content production. And the mediums in which that's shared are things like this podcast, things like short-form video, things that are more directly representative of the people that are leading those businesses. And like we talked about earlier, it all comes down to trust. People buy from people. People want to see people. And distrust has risen a lot for obvious reasons in the world as well—AI being part of it, but also the amount of disinformation that's spread. And so seeing a real human, or whether you can trust it's a real human or not these days is debatable, but seeing them give that opinion, give that expertise via a mechanism or a medium in which you can visibly see them do it, is becoming much, much more popular. And it's been obviously led many years ago by the B2C world and by YouTubers and influencers, etc. But as always, we've seen that over time creep into the B2B world, and ultimately now we're at a position whereby those strategies that have worked in B2C for a long time, or the medium, sorry, of video particularly, are now really critical to a B2B function or content production function within B2B.

26:57 Craig: Sounds like you've been dying to get that one off your chest.

26:59 James: Yeah. Bit of a monologue there, James. Yeah, that's good.

27:05 Craig: So I'll just add to that, which obviously is very—it's a struggle.

27:12 James: Yeah, I think, again, bringing it back to complex sales, I think, and comparing that to maybe the more transactional, lower-end SaaS platform that achieves a really effective but simple aim—for the types of organizations that we work with, which are complex conversational-based sales processes rather than "we sell widget A, do you want it or not? Yes, no," there's more of a conversation that needs to happen to get across the benefits of working with that organization. It's multi-threading, it's speaking to different people in the organization, all that sort of stuff. I think that increasingly that message can't be presented through the SDR channel. I think at the same time, we've got things like call screening with iOS. People are trying to do that at scale through AI, which is increasing the already obvious aversion towards being cold-called anyway. So all of those factors together—the hatred of being cold-called, which has been persistent for God knows how many years—we've now got mechanisms in which iOS, for example, Apple are trying to prevent those cold calls from reaching you. And the complexity of the message which is trying to be presented through that channel is making, particularly outbound cold calling, less and less and less effective. They were already needle-in-a-haystack kind of approaches, and we call it a numbers game all the time because you've got to call a thousand people to speak to ten.

28:29 Craig: I think the SDR's role is very different. And this is where, again, in large organizations, they have these go-to-market engineers that work alongside SDRs. And it's very much about leveraging data, signals, intent to craft personalized messages, one-to-one messages, to enable SDRs to be more effective. But like you say, you can just see the connect-to-call rates are dropping because people are just not answering their phones anymore.

28:57 James: But I think ultimately the conversation on the phone is always going to be more effective than any other channel in converting. But how you get there is a challenge. You have to give them a reason to pick up.

29:06 Craig: Exactly. We've seen a lot more focus on LinkedIn outreach, but again, it's got to be very precise. It's got to be structured. You've got to have the right cadence. You can't be spamming.

29:18 James: And I think this is where there's sort of lots of overlap with what we'll come into in the next episode between short-term and long-term. If you've got authority on LinkedIn, but you're also going direct with DMs, then you're going to have more impact because you've got authority and you're going to be more trusted, and therefore people are probably more likely to engage.

29:38 Craig: I think with email, obviously, enter prospecting agents and that ability to take signals and intent to a level where you are personalizing. It's not just, "I saw that you've done a podcast, guys," you know, it's—I mean, obviously Clay has become increasingly adopted within a lot of organizations, certainly the bigger ones, because it's not cheap. But it's moving more into the mid-market as well, particularly for those more sophisticated companies. I listened to one of the co-founders of Clay talk about how they support Canva, which is really interesting—that they have agents that are scouring the web looking for companies, brands that have got really poor consistency in how they present themselves online in terms of their branding. And Canva's got a tool that can help address that. And through these very clever signals and through this very clever Clay platform, they're enabling that whole process where they can spot those companies that have these shortcomings and they go out with a solution.

30:43 James: I think it's important to make that point again—that even when we talk about the SDR function, what we're not saying is that you should not have one at all. Because ultimately what we're saying is that having someone that is dedicated to directly outreaching to your audience is a good idea. But doing so in the traditional means of banging the phones and calling a thousand people a day is what we're questioning here. Having an SDR which uses intelligent signals and is multi-channel like you said is an effective way to reach that audience and ultimately have a direct conversation.

31:19 Craig: As we've seen ourselves, you can't just hire an SDR and hope for the best. There's a huge amount of work that you've got to do in the background to get them set up correctly. Massive focus on data. You've got to think about if they are going to operate multi-channel, how all that fits together. You can't be hitting people simultaneously with three emails in the space of three days, for example. Everything's got to be coordinated. So, you know, it's not simple to get that to work effectively. But there are tools out there and obviously people that can help. But I think it comes on to the last point, I think, before we wrap up, which is—again, advances in AI are now enabling you to take all that unstructured data that sits within CRM and other tools that sit around CRM and really leverage that data to impact how you go to market and take those kind of outbound approaches. And I think that's something else that is going to be really critical for businesses to really invest and focus on. There's no way on earth you can really leverage AI from a go-to-market perspective unless you've got a really, really high-quality dataset and a team to maintain it, build on it, enrich it, leveraging all the tools that are out there from an intent and signals perspective. You have to have that operational kind of readiness before you even think about doing these things with AI. Otherwise, you're just going to make a complete mess of it.

32:54 James: I think the other big one that we should talk about, and this one's been happening for a while, is the change from more traditional methods of outbound. Primarily, teams of SDRs banging their phones, basically. There's still always a place for that in my view in certain types of organizations. Those which are selling more of a, let's be honest, an easier-to-sell proposition. A linear path, a straightforward message. A SaaS platform that achieves a really effective but simple aim. For the types of organizations that we work with, which are complex conversational-based sales processes rather than "we sell widget A, do you want it or not? Yes, no," there's more of a conversation that needs to happen to get across the benefits of working with that organization. It's multi-threading, it's speaking to different people in the organization, all that sort of stuff. I think that increasingly that message can't be presented through the SDR channel effectively.

33:33 Craig: I think at the same time we've got things like call screening with iOS. People are trying to do that at scale through AI, which is increasing the already obvious aversion towards being cold-called anyway. So all of those factors together—the hatred of being cold-called, which has been persistent for God knows how many years—we've now got mechanisms in which iOS, for example, Apple are trying to prevent those cold calls from reaching you. And the complexity of the message which is trying to be presented through that channel is making, particularly outbound cold calling, less and less and less effective. They were already needle-in-a-haystack kind of approaches, and we call it a numbers game all the time because you've got to call a thousand people to speak to ten.

34:29 James: I think the SDR's role is very different now. And this is where, again, in large organizations, they have these go-to-market engineers that work alongside SDRs. And it's very much about leveraging data, signals, intent to craft personalized messages, one-to-one messages, to enable SDRs to be more effective. But like you say, you can just see the connect-to-call rates are dropping because people are just not answering their phones anymore. But I think ultimately the conversation on the phone is always going to be more effective than any other channel in converting. But how you get there is a challenge. You have to give them a reason to pick up.

35:06 Craig: Exactly. We've seen a lot more focus on LinkedIn outreach, but again, it's got to be very precise. It's got to be structured. You've got to have the right cadence. You can't be spamming. And I think this is where there's sort of lots of overlap with what we'll come into in the next episode between short-term and long-term. If you've got authority on LinkedIn, but you're also going direct with DMs, then you're going to have more impact because you've got authority and you're going to be more trusted, and therefore people are probably more likely to engage.

35:38 James: I think with email, obviously, enter prospecting agents and that ability to take signals and intent to a level where you are personalizing. It's not just, "I saw that you've done a podcast, guys," you know. I mean, obviously Clay has become increasingly adopted within a lot of organizations, certainly the bigger ones, because it's not cheap. But it's moving more into the mid-market as well, particularly for those more sophisticated companies. I listened to one of the co-founders of Clay talk about how they support Canva, which is really interesting—that they have agents that are scouring the web looking for companies, brands that have got really poor consistency in how they present themselves online in terms of their branding. And Canva's got a tool that can help address that. And through these very clever signals and through this very clever Clay platform, they're enabling that whole process where they can spot those companies that have these shortcomings and they go out with a solution.

36:43 Craig: I think it's important to make that point again—that even when we talk about the SDR function, what we're not saying is that you should not have one at all. No. Because ultimately what we're saying is that having someone that is dedicated to directly outreaching to your audience is a good idea. But doing so in the traditional means of banging the phones and calling a thousand people a day is what we're questioning here. Having an SDR which uses intelligent signals and is multi-channel like you said is an effective way to reach that audience and ultimately have a direct conversation.

37:19 James: As we've seen ourselves, you can't just hire an SDR and hope for the best. There's a huge amount of work that you've got to do in the background to get them set up correctly. Massive focus on data. You've got to think about if they are going to operate multi-channel, how all that fits together. You can't be hitting people simultaneously with three emails in the space of three days, for example. Everything's got to be coordinated. So it's not simple to get that to work effectively. But there are tools out there and obviously people that can help. But I think it comes on to the last point, I think, before we wrap up, which is—again, advances in AI are now enabling you to take all that unstructured data that sits within CRM and other tools that sit around CRM and really leverage that data to impact how you go to market and take those kind of outbound approaches. And I think that's something else that is going to be really critical for businesses to really invest and focus on. There's no way on earth you can really leverage AI from a go-to-market perspective unless you've got a really, really high-quality dataset and a team to maintain it, build on it, enrich it, leveraging all the tools that are out there from an intent and signals perspective. You have to have that operational kind of readiness before you even think about doing these things with AI. Otherwise, you're just going to make a complete mess of it.