Conversion Rates, Attribution, and Making Decisions in Uncertain Times

[00:01] Michael McNary: Welcome to Mimeo's. Talk of the trade. I'm Mike McNary. In addition to leading the sales organization here at Mimeo, I'm also interested in unlocking the secrets of sales and marketing. In each episode, I talk with creative leaders to find out how they approach problems like motivating sales teams, structuring the revenue cycle and fitting product to market. At the end of the conversation, you and I have new takeaways to apply to our everyday life. Let's jump into today's episode.

[00:29] Michael McNary: Hey everyone, Mike McNary here with another episode of Mimeo's Talk of the Trade podcast. Today's episode is titled Conversion Rates, Attribution and Making Decisions in Uncertain Times. Our guest is Eric Quanstrom. Eric is the CMO of Cience Technologies and the host of a fantastic podcast, the Enterprise Sales Development Podcast. On his show, he covers strategies and thought leadership around outbound tactics, prospecting and account based marketing all in the world of sales development. So a lot of valuable content there. I encourage all of our listeners to check it out. Eric, great to have you on the show. Welcome!

[01:09] Eric Quanstrom: Mike. Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

[01:12] Michael McNary: Yeah, we appreciate the time and I've been really excited to have this conversation with you today. Why don't we start by talking about your mission at Cience and a little bit background about the company.

[01:23] Eric Quanstrom: Yeah, so Cience and that's Cience without the S. So an intentional misspelling. C-I-E-N-C-E. You can find us at cience.com. We focus on all things outbound, all things sales development. You can think of our business as having a blend of software that we've built to enhance the outbound motion, make it more effective, have a platform that kind of does it all, if you will, with regards to sales development and then services. So people and we pride ourselves on having grown the company quite a lot since its inception back in 2015. We were a four time Ink 5000 award winner, fastest growing privately held companies in America type set up and main reason getting back to the mission that that's important is because our mission in life and the reason we exist is to help our clients grow. So it's this kind of like very fortuitous goals in alignment. When our clients grow, we grow and that's the name of the game. We're always and forever looking for better ways to our tagline is sales conversations start here and so we really like to have that kind of put the wood behind that arrow when it comes to growing our clients’ businesses.

[02:48] Michael McNary: Very cool. That top of funnel remains the most important focus for a lot of sales organizations.

[02:54] Eric Quanstrom: The other kind of cool or interesting thing about our business is frankly we work with just about every industry under the sun. Every industry you can think of and plenty that you can't largely because the name of the game is building pipeline and net new growth and I think those are fundamental tenets of business.

[03:11] Michael McNary: Yeah, I think so too. We're going to talk about, as I mentioned at the top, Eric conversion rates attribution and kind of making decisions in what some would consider uncertain times right now. So I want to kind of start this conversation backwards a little bit. So let's start by talking about what makes these uncertain times. CB Insights recently released a statistic showing that venture funding has fallen sharply in the last few quarters. How does that impact you at Cience? And set the scene for our conversation today.

[03:44] Eric Quanstrom: Yeah, we're having the conversation for those that may be catching this downstream in May of 2023. And one of the things that we've observed over the last year, it's literally been a year now, is the precipitous fall from all time highs in especially the venture backed startup community, if you will, series seed through E-F-G and even private equity. So where that's manifested itself, especially for Cience in our clients, is essentially a cohort or a segment that the playbook used to be something like, hey, you raise venture funding. One of the questions that happens the moment after those funds hit your bank account is how are you deploying that capital to grow? Right? Show me the go to market, show me the proof points, hit the gap and nail those kind of mile markers with growth so that you can get to the next funding event that has decreased precipitously. And so I say that the venture funded startup has been missing in action largely since Q3 of 2022. Now, one of the things that we're seeing underneath the numbers is the nature of venture funding has changed a lot more. AI startups are getting the lion's share of available dollars out there. And so I think that that's kind of going to be the next trend that drives a lot of business and a lot of net new company creation going forward, which I think is probably a good thing. Creative destruction is a phrase that's probably well used and well known. But ultimately the venture funding landscape, it's just been remarkable how uneven it's been over the last year.

[05:41] Michael McNary: Yeah, and I think to kind of extrapolate that out a little bit, right. As there's been this decline in venture funding that you just described and we talked about with the CB results, there's also this apprehension in some areas around making expenditures in certain areas, investing in certain go to market strategies or potentially leaning towards the more cost intensive outbound tactics that maybe a company relied on previously.

[06:13] Eric Quanstrom: Right.

[06:13] Michael McNary: Trying to find ways to become more effective and efficient with whatever their existing budget or maybe curtailed budget looks like. So thinking about that in companies trying to do more right, or trying to be more effective in a dynamic landscape, tell me about conversion rates are a good key performance indicator for marketing teams. And with all the things that we talked about changing, how is your thinking about conversion rates changed recently?

[06:43] Eric Quanstrom: Well, I think one of the things that I would say at a high level, 20,000 foot, perhaps view, Stephen Covey once said in Seven Habits of Highly Effective People begin with the end of mind. And I think that's sage advice, mainly because a conversion rate is usually an end, an end of a process, an end of a journey, an end of whatever you want to measure. And so, ultimately, when you can begin with that end of mind, what is the conversion rate? You can work your way backwards to a how to increase it, b how to influence it, and C, I think you really want to understand what are the factors that go into any conversion rate for true, kind of. Like measure what matters and then ultimately move the needle on conversion rates that might be lower than you would have otherwise would have otherwise been the case.

[07:35] Michael McNary: Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. And there's also trying to make the sense out of the data.

[07:43] Eric Quanstrom: Right.

[07:44] Michael McNary: Sometimes it's purely objective, and there's this very direct one to one between the data that you see and the insight that you can kind of garner from it, and then other times, there's a lot that goes into that mix. Right. It's objective, subjective assumptions to really develop a notion of what the ROI might be. What can an organization do when they see, from their perspective, using all those data points, right. When they see conversion rates changing in various channels? What are levers that they can pull? Maybe say, deal cycles are getting longer and your win rate is going down? How should they look at it? Philosophically?

[08:28] Eric Quanstrom: I think that the numbers are a key to what is going on with reality, with the world at large, with what has changed in the system. If you can isolate those changes down, you would use the word assumptions, and I think that's a pretty healthy one to use. I'm also fond of using the word hypothesis. Sorry for being on brand here, but that's a very sciency way to look at the world, too.

[08:51] Michael McNary: Yeah.

[08:51] Eric Quanstrom: Like, you form a hypothesis, you test, you experiment or run experiments, and then you develop conclusions, all in the search of formulas. Formulas could be tracked back to things like conversion rates to understand again what's working. So what I would say is, if you see things deteriorating, changing, slowing down, otherwise not fitting the hypothesis that you would want to change, then it's up to you to figure out what inputs you can change, what experiments you can run to generate different results. And that's where the creativity of being a business person, understanding, go to market, understanding what factors might influence a conversion rate. You want to go to work on it's.

[09:37] Michael McNary: Really well said.

[09:38] Eric Quanstrom: Right.

[09:38] Michael McNary: And I like the notion that you shared earlier with operating with the end in mind.

[09:42] Eric Quanstrom: Right.

[09:43] Michael McNary: And when things don't track in the way that you had hoped that they would or your hypothesis stated that they might make sure that you're digging in and truly understanding what's happening.

[09:53] Eric Quanstrom: Right.

[09:53] Michael McNary: And is that something that's coming on the supply side of the marketing, right? Is it the tactics that are kind of going out or is it a market response to something else that's happening, like we're talking about with the venture funding and its effects? So I think there's a lot there, right, to kind of sift through. Let me ask you this, right? So you're thinking about the data, right, and digging into it and getting your insights. A lot of that comes from you can get whether you use an instance like Marketo or your CRM or you have all this data that comes back to you, but then there's that subjective that we mentioned, right. And then the assumptions and trying to kind of put it all together to get something to build off of how important is and I guess what is required of a good feedback loop between, say, the sales stakeholders and marketing in order to get the right insights?

[10:46] Eric Quanstrom: Well, ideally, you're trying to measure everything you can and you're taking that measurement. And I also think that there's elements where measurement is going to be darn near impossible. And you want to acknowledge that. And simply by acknowledging that, I think it gives a lot, both the sales and the marketing departments a lot of freedom with which to not put everything in all eggs into one basket, saying that everything is measurable because it's not.

[11:13] Eric Quanstrom: Right?

[11:14] Eric Quanstrom: So this is where you mentioned the word attribution earlier, and I think this is the hobgoblin that affects a lot of marketing teams that want clean, linear answers to things that are oftentimes the absolute opposite of linear, such as a buyable, right?

[11:31] Michael McNary: Yeah. Okay.

[11:32] Eric Quanstrom: Let me give you a perfect example that's really close to home and see if this try this one on for size. So anyone that listens to the sound of my voice and says, oh, you know what, maybe I should check out this company that Eric works for because they sound like they're worth their salt in being maybe on my shortlist, I was thinking about outbound. And you know what? I'm going to go look at science. Where is that going to be attributed? Anywhere. Like, literally.

[11:56] Michael McNary: Love it.

[11:56] Eric Quanstrom: Nowhere.

[11:58] Michael McNary: So true.

[11:59] Eric Quanstrom: Furthermore, Mimeo running Talk of the Trade podcast on the regular. When your clients listen to this and think, you know what? Mike's pretty sharp dude. I want to work with him, where is that getting trapped down as potentially the reason that someone makes a decision, you guys versus anyone else. Right. How does that affect the brand? In a sense, we can't get too tied up around trying to attribute everything so hardcore that we miss the forest for the trees, which is this is still a human medium, like going to market marketing. Sales are still the robots haven't gotten us yet, it's still one to one and it is still very human. Now, what I'm also not saying is I'm not saying throw away. In fact, you heard me saying measure everything you can, survey wherever you can, pay attention to the details. Ask customers, Where did you hear about us? How are you thinking about our brand? We love to ask this. In the first part of every sales cycle that we run, what led you to take a meeting with us? Those kinds of things are immensely instructive because then you bridge that gap between, oh, well, you know what it said here, organic search, Google, these keywords was the source of your visit, but it turns out you had heard about us, which is why you did that search in the first place.

[13:25] Michael McNary: Yes, exactly right.

[13:27] Eric Quanstrom: And all of a sudden, it's a much more robust and full picture. It's a wider aperture for understanding and then decision making around. Where did this deal start? Where was that awareness raised, by the way? That's important too, because every deal, every sales cycle is just that. It's a cycle starts somewhere, has stages, theoretically or hopefully culminates in a conversion of a closed one piece of business that then changes the trajectory for both companies. I like to think of sales as a change management exercise because I think it's healthy to do so. No change, no sale. And that's for both vendor and client, largely because the vendor that makes the sale then has to support it with their solution, their software, their services, whatever. And then the company that made the decision obviously is paying their money. But something changed. They're expecting a better tomorrow, some sort of result, some sort of KPI, some sort of need met, goal solved, problem eradicated, whatever on the other end. And that's change in and of itself. And I would argue that that purchase will largely be judged as successful or not if those goals are met.

[14:44] Michael McNary: Right, and I love looking at it that way and just thinking about conversations that I've heard or your other leaders having or had myself with sales team members. It is we talk about creating urgency sometimes, right? But those are all measurements around what the change that you're trying to drive. And if you're really lucky, somebody's raised their hand, right, and said, I'm looking for change and I'm going to, as you mentioned, engage in one way or another with maybe a form or the website or it looks like AdWords, it might look like it came from social. The attribution is very important, but the beauty of it is they've raised their hand and they said, I'm seeking change for you can find out what reason and why they came to the call, as I think you really put well earlier. But then it's a matter of, okay, great, let's see how quickly we can get this done, can we meet the goals that have been set forth by both sides? Right. I think where you finished with your summary there and I thought was a really good endpoint, and then there's the instances where you're calling or emailing or being marketed to out of the blue. You may not have even thought about this as being a problem or something requiring change.

[15:57] Eric Quanstrom: Right.

[15:58] Michael McNary: And that's where the job becomes, creating that change. Management on both ends that are required to get to the sale has a longer journey.

[16:06] Eric Quanstrom: Right.

[16:07] Michael McNary: And it requires more, I think, multichannel effort and team collaboration. But I think we talk about urgency a lot, but the change is really the heart of it. Does that make sense?

[16:19] Eric Quanstrom: Yeah, it really is. In sales cycles themselves. One of the things you brought up that I think is another interesting aspect or phase in the buyer's journey part, especially relevant to outbound but also germane on other channels and other go to market activities. I'm going to steal a phrase from one of the guests that we've had on our podcast, Josh Braun, where he likes to talk about illumination and the illumination of a problem, because I think that that language and that wording is very appropriate to understanding how to open up a conversation around. And it especially works wonders when, hey, I didn't even know I had a problem until you illuminated the idea that this might be costing me money, costing me business, stunting my growth, holding me back, otherwise insert problem space messaging here. But illumination is such a key to even generating that interest.

[17:20] Eric Quanstrom: Right.

[17:21] Eric Quanstrom: So you go from awareness to interest to ultimately, illumination is really in the desire phase of a model, if you will, and then into action. And that's that conversion rate and measurement piece of the puzzle.

[17:32] Michael McNary: Yeah, I really like that, the illumination component, because I think it captures a lot of different routes. You can get to the same place. Right. But there always has to be that moment if you're trying to get to the action phase where someone, like you said, has acknowledged that they have a problem or maybe for the first time is considering that even if they don't view it as a problem, there may be something better out there.

[17:53] Eric Quanstrom: That's right. Especially relevant for, let's be honest, most businesses exist in not competitive markets of one highly competitive, arguably blood red ocean markets, where it's worth thinking through the scenarios of like, oh, right, for someone to come running into my arms, they've got to leave the arms of the incumbent that they're with. Exactly.

[18:20] Michael McNary: Yeah. And if you're getting them very early, they may not have been in the arms of another, but they probably don't have a great idea of what they're looking for in the first place.

[18:29] Eric Quanstrom: Right.

[18:30] Michael McNary: So every aspect comes or every potential new relationship comes with that obstacle that you have to overcome. And it's a big lift.

[18:38] Eric Quanstrom: Right.

[18:39] Michael McNary: And that's why it's so important.

[18:41] Eric Quanstrom: Yeah.

[18:42] Michael McNary: From the first touch of that prospect all the way through the action component, there's a lot there, right. Thinking about the best ways to get that interest going or to get someone into that top of funnel by looking at the available channels, available angles that we can go at them. Do you see other organizations or maybe say, common mistakes made when you get into that area where it's the objective data, but then you're also combining the assumptions component. Is there a common error or a common road that folks go down where they kind of quickly say, oh, you know what? I made this classic misunderstanding of the data or my scenario.

[19:23] Eric Quanstrom: Yeah. The classic misfit here that I see all the time is where people play out of their weight class or they assume what got you here will get you there. So you talk to any marketer and you say, well, who's the best marketing organization on the planet? And more often than not, people will go, Apple. So do what Apple does.

[19:45] Michael McNary: Right.

[19:45] Eric Quanstrom: Except for the fact that nobody has the multibillion dollars, the brand heritage, the rolls off the tip of your tongue, the trust earned over decades, the iconic leadership, the ad campaigns that were revolutionary for their time. No one has that backstory of Apple. So, yeah, just copy what they do and call it a day.

[20:07] Michael McNary: Yeah. It didn't take them decades to do it.

[20:09] Eric Quanstrom: It doesn't work. And I find that especially pernicious for phase of business companies that aspire to be Apple and there's nothing wrong with that, you know what I mean? But thinking that you can just do what they do without the context, and again, that history is ludicrous on its face, and yet we do it all the time. We do it all the time. In fact, I would argue that this is where a lot of humans get really tripped up, is we always want to aim for or shoot for the stars. That's why I say punch out of our weight class. And I think that that leads to a lot of really bad thinking where I find it to be most acute, especially in the businesses of a lot of our clients that we come in clients come in thinking a lot of different thoughts. But one of the ones that tends to permeate is, I need to talk to the decision maker. That's my favorite hobby horse.

[21:03] Michael McNary: Right.

[21:03] Eric Quanstrom: To get on. Largely because… I'll split it five ways to Sunday. Here you go. So if you think about a decision maker, A, you're implying it's one person. And I think that I would argue that the evidence strongly suggests that we are in an age of consensus purchase or consensus buying. And the evidence is overwhelming depending on the analyst firm you listen to. Buying committees now are like in the double digits.

[21:27] Michael McNary: It's not one person, especially in enterprise level works. Right. The number always goes up. I'm with you every time I read an insight or something, it's 8.1. People are involved in purchasing decisions now or 9.7, right?

[21:41] Eric Quanstrom: Yeah. And I think if you think of a decision maker, you oftentimes form an archetype in your mind of, is that really how it goes down in that organization? If they were to want to make change with you, to really put it into different language and so oftentimes that'll manifest where people go, yeah, just get me on the phone with the CEO and then I'll close them because that's just how I roll. And oh, by the way, start with the Fortune 500. Let's stick with the Apple example because I want you to go after Tim Cook and get him into a meeting with me. That could happen. I've seen rare events happen, but the probabilities of that are exceptionally low and therefore expending resources to try to hit that note that exceptionally rare and arguably undefinable note are just not a good use of anyone's logical thinking. At the same time, you could be saying to yourself, what don't I know about my buying and what do I need to learn? Because that's a great use of outbound, for what it's worth. You go in with the hypothesis of who your buying group is, and I would strongly encourage any of the listeners that are thinking through this to say what is the in the software world, we have a term, it's called minimum viable product. I like the idea of thinking about like minimum viable lead. So what is the minimum viable lead that could get a story started within an organization that could lead to a buying outcome? So if you're thinking about it that way, all of a sudden it opens your total addressable market and opens it up like a lot less saturated audiences. Back to the example, Tm Cook's famous because a few years ago I don't know if he still does it, but a few years ago he actually communicated to the world that he read all of his own email, probably has five or six assistants sorting through it before he gets to him. But either way, that was a claim that rare few publicly traded Fortune 500 CEOs made. At any rate, the chances of getting through to that type of saturated audience, that person really low. Same exact kind of like lower title in a given or an associated department, much better bet, much higher probability. So encouraging businesses to think through that. If I'm going to do list led outbound, what is my minimum viable buyer?

[24:13] Michael McNary: Right?

[24:13] Eric Quanstrom: So my MVB, if you will. That's a healthy way to think about a hypothesis because then all of a sudden I can really tune the campaigns at getting to somebody that might pick up their phone more often, might actually answer email, might actually have a need. And then if you force yourself into the MVB kind of ethos, then the really exciting thing is now you can all of a sudden start to find who in your current customer base looks a lot like them.

[24:37] Michael McNary: Yeah.

[24:38] Eric Quanstrom: And on the sales side, I think I like that. The MVB, it makes me think of when, say, a sales development team is on the phones or trying to sequence out really good messaging to multiple departments at an organization.

[24:53] Michael McNary: Right.

[24:54] Eric Quanstrom: Segmenting out the folks that they're targeting into various, we'll call them, roles that they can play in the sale.

[25:00] Michael McNary: Right.

[25:00] Eric Quanstrom: And the MVB might be the coach.

[25:03] Michael McNary: Right.

[25:03] Eric Quanstrom: Or it might be, in some other instances, the influencer.

[25:06] Michael McNary: Right.

[25:06] Eric Quanstrom: You need to get to this level in the data, as you were talking about before. You measure everything, right. And you kind of keep on that data and you follow it to its logical end or where it just inevitably ends. You can determine that, hey, in this particular audience type, I need to get the year if I want the outcome that I'm searching for. And I'll tell you that the biggest forcing function of this and doing it kind of, I think, well, and I'm doing air quotes here for the audio.

[25:33] Michael McNary: You did them well.

[25:35] Eric Quanstrom: It is actually on the vendor side. It's actually on your own side. You're on your own team. And this is where endless border skirmishes start between sales and marketing, right. Because if you don't have full kind of buy in from sales, like, hey, this is where a buying journey might actually start and this lead will be worth your time. And you've got to work it in a sales cycle to completion. And by working it, I also mean adding more people as you go.

[26:07] Michael McNary: Right.

[26:07] Eric Quanstrom: Like starting kind of middle up in an organization. Because the thing you'd never want to have happen that can torpedo all of this is where sales gets the sentiment, oh, yeah, Betley wasn't worth my time.

[26:19] Michael McNary: That's a killer.

[26:20] Eric Quanstrom: It is. And as a CMO for I guess this is technically my fifth CMO role, I feel like I've seen it all. And it's a delicate balance because I definitely respect that sales team members have an idea of what makes for a qualified lead that they want to talk to. And I'm not saying fake the funk or skirt the rules on your qualification principles. What I am saying, though, is having an open mind around how a sale can actually progress.

[26:55] Michael McNary: While sales might have those insights that you pointed to, which I think is a value of sales in many instances, they know the customer really well, but do they always understand how they're changing right. And the things that they can learn.

[27:06] Eric Quanstrom: About them over time in the inbound circumstance? The phrase you used earlier and I liked it, was raised hands. When people are raising their hands to talk to you, it's important to ask the fundamental question, like, is there really anyone that raises their hands knowing full well that what they're going to do next is meet with sales that thinks to themselves, oh yeah, that's going to be the funnest thing that I do today. I'm pumped.

[27:31] Michael McNary: I can't wait to meet with them, said no one ever.

[27:33] Eric Quanstrom: Like, literally no one ever, ever.

[27:36] Michael McNary: I can assure you that is accurate.

[27:39] Eric Quanstrom: So in a sense, like we have this fine balancing act or high wire to walk around when people are raising their hands, they're generally doing it to solve their problems. Like, human beings by default are all self interested. They're not necessarily other interested until the circumstances are right. So with that self interest, when I fill out a form on a website to tell a business that I want to learn more and that I know I'm going to get a salesperson calling me up right afterwards, in a sense, the last thing that I want is to be qualified down or qualified out. You know what I mean? And I find, like, this is a real challenge for a lot of businesses.

[28:22] Michael McNary: Yeah, I think it's true. I think it's just going back to your point again, because I love it. Is continuing to learn and having your understanding of your customer evolve with them. Right?

[28:34] Eric Quanstrom: Yeah.

[28:34] Michael McNary: Because if you think you know everything because you've been doing something for a few years and you know your customer now I'm using air quotes, it's really detrimental because you can disqualify a lead well before you even engage with it. And that's not only devastating to an individual contributor's goals right. And their targets and success, but in aggregate that can cripple the new business efforts of an organization right. If it's happening at scale.

[29:05] Eric Quanstrom: Yeah. And again, back to the idea of a change management exercise being kind of the metaphor that we want to use or the structure that I think produces the healthiest thinking. Ask yourself this what is the change that the person in front of me or the person that's raising their hand or the person that I just got interested in? My brand or my solution? What is the change that they're seeking?

[29:31] Michael McNary: I love it. I have a couple of quick questions before we call it, because this has been fantastic, in my opinion, Eric, but is it possible? We've talked a lot about conversion rates attribution getting to the bottom of what works. What's going to work in the future? Collaborating between sales and marketing to get kind of the right efforts against your audience and prospects. Is it possible or have you seen it be possible to be too focused on conversion rates?

[30:00] Eric Quanstrom: Yes, without a doubt. I'll give you a really interesting anecdote from our current business. We developed a product or a project, if you will, that has increased our traffic to our own website, like five X by default. Our conversion rates against contacts per page. If you want to measure it that way. Contacts who have unique visitors who hit our domain, it's off by a couple of percentage points since that volume went five Xing. It would be very easy to get freaked out and say, oh, my gosh, my conversion rates are not what they used to be. And I think that it's right for myself as the head of marketing and all the members of our department to be looking very closely at that conversion rate. Fall, not take the easy answer of, well, just because it's far more volume, we can expect it to fall. Right now, we're forming a hypothesis around, well, what should the proper conversion rate be at these new lofty levels where people are finding us in much different ways than they've ever found us before, where our own buyer's journey is changing before our very eyes, at least for this cohort or this segment. And so I'm very cognizant of not being too over my skis or over indexed against, oh, my God, the conversion rate fell, the sky is falling.

[31:32] Michael McNary: Right. I get it, though, right? What do you really know about that is something changes in a dramatic way, everything is skewed, and you have to figure out what the new normal becomes. Right?

[31:45] Eric Quanstrom: Yeah.

[31:45] Michael McNary: I think that's a really good example. And in general, some takeaways that I've had first marketing changes right. And is always changing. And if you're not nimble staying on your toes, willing to evolve, it's probably not the area of interest for you.

[32:05] Eric Quanstrom: Right.

[32:05] Michael McNary: And if you do that well, you and your organization can benefit greatly.

[32:10] Eric Quanstrom: That's quadrupley true in the age of AI.

[32:13] Michael McNary: Yeah. Interesting. Right. Another takeaway that I really liked is operate with the end in mind, but measure everything that you can, right. Think about how this should be going, and then figure out whether that's the case, and if not, why and what's really happening, and try to get as much data as possible so that you can garner accurate insights that are actionable. Right?

[32:40] Eric Quanstrom: Yes.

[32:41] Michael McNary: And then finally I like this one a lot, too. Sales is a change management exercise, so in order to operate successfully within it, you've got to continue to learn about your audience.

[32:54] Eric Quanstrom: Yes.

[32:56] Michael McNary: I think all three of those are awesome. And thank you. If our audience wanted to get in touch with you, how could they do that?

[33:06] Eric Quanstrom: Yeah, me personally. Turns out there's not that many Quanstroms on the scene. You go to LinkedIn there I am. So easy. Good. And then our company, Cience again, it's Science without the S, cience.com and all of the relevant channels. You can find us on YouTube and TikTok and LinkedIn and everywhere else.

[33:31] Michael McNary: Rock and roll. I love it. Thank you again, Eric. And thanks to all of our listeners. And we'll be back with another episode sometime very soon.

[33:37] Michael McNary: Talk of the Trade is hosted by Mimeo the better way to print. Find out more at www.Mimeo.com.