12 Growing B2B Sales with Trust and Empathy interview with Steve Woods, Founder & CTO at Nudge
Summary: We have more sales and marketing technology and channels to reach our customers, but they’re increasingly tuning us out.<br> In short: we’re getting more disconnected from customers.<br> Something is missing.<br> Even though our tools have become smarter with AI and machine learning, connecting and building B2B relationships has never been harder.<br> The question is:<br> How can we connect better and build relationships with B2B customers?<br> That’s why I interviewed Steve Woods (<a href="https://twitter.com/stevewoods">@stevewoods</a>), Founder & CTO at <a href="https://nudge.ai/">Nudge</a> to learn how we can be connecting and building B2B relationships with trust and empathy,<br> <br> What inspired you to start-up Nudge?<br> Sure thing. You and I have known each other, obviously, for a long time. A few decades. So, my history before Nudge was Eloqua, in the marketing space, obviously, it’s a space you’re very familiar with, you’re working a lot with marketers.<br> And really, we were able to see this wonderful transition as marketing went from kind of an arts and craft discipline to a very measured lead generation, demand generation-oriented discipline that started to connect with sales. Here are leads that are qualified; that are interested.<br> And, that was a wonderful transition to see. But, looking over the fence at the world of sales, we realized that the core of getting those deals done was the next step.<br> Building trust and relationships<br> The core was getting the trust and the relationships (and the breadth and depth of relationships at our organization) that would then allow that deal to be moved forward.<br> The trust and the empathy to be developed, and ultimately the deal to be closed based on those relationships.<br> As the Eloqua story was winding down, Paul and I decided to jump in and tackle relationship intelligence and use relationship intelligence to understand where empathy is being built, where trust is being built, and how you can make a sales team more effective, by focusing their efforts on the right initiatives.<br> Brian: That’s cool, just how you took your story from where you were to what you’re doing right now.<br> Growth lessons: relationships, trust, and empathy are the core<br> I think the thing that we were lucky with, more than anything, in Eloqua was being part of a major change in a space. Marketing going from unmeasured to measured, and all the effects that that had on the people and the processes and the technology and the understanding.<br> We were lucky to be a core part of that, and that helped us kind of flow along with that river.<br> I think what we were trying to do with Nudge was to be a little bit more proactive and say, “What’s going on at a macro level that is going to be a dominant theme of a space for the next decade?”<br> And looking at sales and looking at relationships, it became very clear that relationships, trust, empathy were the core thing, and it was unmeasurable. It was intuitive.<br> Dealing with deal slippage<br> Every sales leader, when you’re talking about deal slippage when you’re talking about deal progress, when you’re talking about your forecast, it’s all about the relationships and the trust, but it’s not measurable. It’s self-reported by sales reps that often have kind of “happy ears” on the process.<br> And so, we thought, “If we can do that, if we can figure out how to put a measurement on trust, empathy, and relationships, and then build the tooling on top of that to help people steer the ship in the right direction, then we’re going to be part of a very interesting transition.”<br> And that’s turned out to be true, as you see sort of the evolution of the sales space: an interesting place to find ourselves in the middle of.<br>
