Your Sellers Have a Playbook. Do They Have One for the Buyer?Your Sellers Have a Playbook. Do They Have One for the Buyer?

Your Sellers Have a Playbook. Do They Have One for the Buyer? Transcript:

Jeff White: Welcome to The Kula Ring, a podcast for manufacturing marketers brought to you by Kula Partners. My name is Jeff White. Joining me today is Carman Pirie. Carman, how you doing, sir?

Carman Pirie: I’m doing well. Another fun conversation here in the Kula Ring, so it’s always nice to get it off and underway. Yeah I’ve been looking forward to this one, but yeah, Jeff, it is always nice to have an author on the show that’s bringing a unique perspective to the world that we live in every day.

Jeff White: So joining us today is Eve Chen. Eve is the CEO and co-founder of Catalysi and also the author of an upcoming book, “Era Six.” Welcome to The Kula Ring, Eve.

Eve Chen: Thank you so much, Jeff and Carman. I’m very excited to be on the show.

Carman Pirie: Eve, it is wonderful to have you on the show. Thank you for joining us. Era Six, I wanna just jump right into it really. But before we do, tell our listeners just a little bit about the company and what you do at the firm, and then we’ll jump in and spend most of our time talking about the book, I think.

Eve Chen: Yeah, absolutely, Carman. Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah my name is Eve Chen, and for last roughly about 30 years my work has a focus on really one question. I’ve been really exploring how do companies turn market opportunity into predictable revenue. Throughout the last 30 years or so, I’ve explored that questions from few different seats.

For roughly about two decades, I’ve served as CMO for global technology companies and for the past 10 years, I’ve worked with B2B companies on go-to-market strategy, revenue growth through account-based marketing. And across these roles, I kept seeing the same challenge. Companies could identify promising accounts, and they can measure plenty of activity, but they often had little visibility into how people inside those accounts made a decision together.

So that observation led me to write Era Six. It’s a work really come from the last 10 years of research and also co-found Catalysi this year, where I’m the CEO. Era Six makes the case that we need to rethink revenue readiness around the buyer group itself, rather than treating them as individual lead as the unit of analysis.

Whereas at Catalysi, we are putting that thinking into practice by building buyer group intelligence that helps teams to see who is actually involved in the decision, who may be missing, where the authority sits, and whether the group is actually progressing toward a decision. So that’s the thread connecting my work today, is really from helping B2B companies understanding how buying happens so they can build a more predictable path into revenue.

And on a personal note, so just adding to that, I have lived in four countries, and I speak five languages, and now I call Denver, Colorado home with my teenage daughter.

Jeff White: Oh, that’s wonderful. One thing that I’ve noticed as we talk with a number of marketers on the podcast and in our practice is that the number continues to climb about, how many people are in a buying committee. Do you think that this is a trend that is going to always grow?

’Cause my concern is that as buying committees get too large, and even now I think what is it, 13 or something are some of the estimates now. There’s almost a point where there’s so many people involved that you’re just paralyzed by the options and nobody can make a decision.

What do you think is the optimal size of a buying committee?

Eve Chen: That’s a really good question. So I typically think that a party of six is the most manageable. And but you’re absolutely right that Forrester tells us that the average B2B buying group is now 13 internal stakeholders, and plus there is nine external influencers. When you look at the me too large enterprises and that they all have tons of technology in place already.

When they look at adopting a new technology into their ecosystem it becomes really important for them to make sure your technology that you’re trying to get into that environment aligns and also works really well with the current tech stack. That’s why a way, that additional nine external influencer come in.

So personally, I would love to have, the buyer group sizes shrink down to six people, but that’s just not the reality, unfortunately.

Carman Pirie: And Jeff to your point I believe there’s some research around this as well that’s shown that just as the buying group continues to get larger, the propensity to do nothing goes up. That kind of paralysis decision paralysis that happens is I think is real. And Eva I know you mentioned the tech stack side of things, but I suppose for, in the world of manufacturing maybe you think about somebody that’s trying to sell a new piece of equipment into a line or something like that for another manufacturer.

That same kind of tech stack integration challenge that you mentioned is, there’s other, business or industrial equipment integration challenges that I think run somewhat similar and probably do expand the external influence into that buying committee for manufacturers just the same way as it does it for more tech-forward organizations.

That’s interesting to think about.

Eve Chen: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, no manufacturing is n- no different to any other sectors that, it’s a complex selling environment and when you are producing a solution in a manufacturing space and typically you’re selling into environment that, it does have a multiple decision influencers who need to understand that, your solution is compliant, is secure it fits with, those compliance within the ecosystem.

So that, typically that is a later stage of the funnel but a lot of time that they, those folks behind the scene, and typically that the marketers and your seller side don’t even get to see these people. You’re having to actually communicating your ability to meet those requirements through your champion.

And those folks, and this is where the sales forces that come from because if a seller sides, from the beginning, you don’t know that who are the people capable of making as well as killing the decisions. A lot of time that you might be actually investing a lot of time and the marketing resources and your sales resources as well into those account, they’re simply just not ready for you.

If you don’t understand the dynamic and how the buying process work at your buyer side.

Carman Pirie: It raises an interesting thought in my mind, Eve. I don’t know if it’ll be interesting to you, but I am wondering what I wonder what’s more common a selling organization spreading themselves too thin across too many members of the buying committee and not being focused enough on who can make a decision, or a seller maybe being a little too narrowly focused and only wanting to speak to the economic buyer?

’Cause I, I guess I, I’ve seen both. What have you seen in, in your work? Is there one kind of challenge that seems more common?

Eve Chen: I think you are absolutely right. Companies don’t have unlimited resources, right? It’s really where do you put the resources that gets you the best traction and then take the deals that, really that help that the deal to move towards closure. I think that, focusing on champion is obviously the, the logical, natural focus for a lot of companies.

And simply because of that we just don’t have, the resources to, get in front of 13 plus nine external people. But, it really comes down to the importance about understanding who’s involved, how they make those decision individually as well as collectively. ’Cause that information is still extremely critical if you just deal with your champion that within this account, because that will help you to ask a very different type of questions to focus on, making sure that, those influencers as well as decision makers, you’re sure that your champion in making sure that their needs and their concerns are absolutely ticked.

And really from the beginning, not really, down to when the opportunity pipeline stage to really understand that, what potentially can actually kill your deal. What I’m trying to say is the buyer group and the buyer group dynamics and intelligence, what I call it, is absolutely critical at the early phase of the funnel.

Who you actually engage, which is the costly exercise, matters to me less, to be honest, but it’s more about really sure, the most viable and the most economical, effective channel to get those information, making sure that you get those information intelligence from, understand where they’re at, and so you can actually focus your res- resources accordingly.

Jeff White: You just blew away my next question i- in the middle of your response there. I was going to ask if you should be trying to call the shot for who within that buying committee as a salesperson should be your champion, the person most likely to respond or carry the torch for you internally.

But I also know that in a lot of situations, they’re responding to inbound interest, and that’s the trigger. That person becomes the champion, and then you have to deduce the rest of the targets within that account that form the rest of the buying committee. If you’re saying that it doesn’t necessarily matter who that person is, but I’m wondering if you did have to make a choice once you have figured out who the buying committee is, how would you make that decision of who to target as a salesperson to be your conduit into the organization?

Eve Chen: Right. I think typically that your business champion is still the person experience that most pain that your solution can solve. Experience that on the day-to-day basis and whether it is, additional costs and, or, the ability to meet their revenue targets and as well as the time productivity type of scenario, right?

And some others obvious, can be resolving environmental challenges and… But your champion typically will be the one that experience the most pain on a day-to-day basis, and therefore this person will have, better the interest to look at you, to spend time with you, provide the data and resource, with you to go into some sort of pilots or diagnostic to understand how your solution, by using your solution, will be able to resolve this person’s pain.

But, making that decision, procurement decision, however, is a totally different ballgame. This person might be your champion, but this person might not actually be the budget holder, right? And the budget holder, they might, get to the point that, through the champion understand, yes, there is enough economic return to adopt this piece of a solution, but this person might not be the right person to actually evaluate this piece of technology, whether it actually works in your environment, whether there could be actually incurring some technical challenges or even due diligence risk, in that environment.

So your champions, tend to be the day-to-day pain, really they experience the most pain that you’re trying to solve.

Carman Pirie: I appreciate that it’s probably hard to fully separate these two things because so much of the change that’s happening from how organizations buy is coming about because the number of people doing the buying is larger, the committee’s getting bigger. I guess if we had to try to tease those things apart a little bit your hypothesis of Era Six, is it mostly around the, the fact that it’s changing because the number of people is going up, or are there other components to the how they buy that you’re also seeing change that is in some way independent of the number of people?

It’s just that in this day and age, in 2026, people are buying differently.

Eve Chen: Got you. Yeah, so in my journey as a coach as well as, in my private consulting practice I have deal with clients from startup, scale-up, all the way to enterprise. When I ask them the questions like, “Do you have a seller’s playbook? Do you know how do you sell consistently, systematically into your lookalike accounts?”

I would say that 97% of my clientele, and I’ll, I will argue even the broader market would say that, “Yeah, we have a seller’s playbook.” And if I ask different questions, do you have a buyer’s playbook? Do you actually know how your buyers from the very basic, in terms of buyer group completeness, do you know who actually influence, make decisions of your type of solution?

And all the way through to do you know that, where they see what is the influence, how do they influence each other? And all, all the way down to the culture of that company. Do you know that the culture of the dynamic of a buying, decision in those environment? The chances are it’s the opposite.

97% of these sellers wouldn’t have this buyer playbook mapped out. We focus so much energies and resourcing the seller’s playbook side. And partly is because the rise of a revenue ops, right? It becomes such a disciplined practice that most of the sellers understand we need to document and then make it a systematic approach.

In year 2000 early on my career I did something that most my friends, think is a little crazy and I joined the Australian Reserve Army and second week into the trainings, and I still remember we had this navigation exercise we have to do. So the sergeant came over to each sections and handed over a map, and we all have our equipment and say, “Okay, you got a day, you have to get to this target point.”

And so all sections, come together. We have all sorts of tools and navigation tools, and we have lots of landmarks, and we… Off we go. And by about 6:00 PM, we got back and mission accomplished. And after the dinner, the sergeant came over to us and say, “Okay, now you gotta do it all over again, and this time you gotta do it in the dark.”

And there is no torch allowed because, you’re in the enemy’s terrain and if you use torch then you’ll be spotted, right? We still have the same map. So this is what I consider years later is a bit of a aha moment for me. That map is basically the seller’s playbook. And the nighttime when the terrain change, which is what I’m talking about, the buyer side, the buyer group dynamic, they keep on changing.

And the sellers, if you don’t actually anticipate some of these changes that can happen, then you wouldn’t know what is the next course of best action. And this is also why that, companies spend so much money on the marketing and the targeting all different stakeholders, but they don’t actually simulate some of the scenarios that could happen.

In the army, we basically… The, the military developed the game theories, right? We do that all the time. We actually, kinda simulate different scenario. When at a nighttime, that playbook and the, that, what I… Our assumption that during the day no longer actually worked at a nighttime.

So all we can do is simulate. If this happen in a nighttime scenario, terrain changes, condition changes, what do you do? This is a, my experience in the reserve army told me that, to, we really need to bring that kind of discipline into the enterprise selling. So we do spend so much time, money into the seller playbook.

We should really be focusing on putting equal amount of time to really come out with different scenario, so you know, actually, this happen, you can actually counteract with a different strategy. So that’s my kinda take to your question. Did I answer your question?

Carman Pirie: I think you’ve quite fully, in fact as you see, it brings plenty of others. I wonder… part of when we talk about, different scenarios and things of that sort and mapping the buyer side of this, I think the desire for people is to find some level of pattern matching, like some level of, give me some rule of thumb for the enemy that I’m encountering here, to stick with your military analogy.

Because otherwise, it just seems like a bit of a one-size-fits-one situation, and every buying committee is completely different. So I guess I would be interested to have you reflect on the balance of that. In your work and how you’re seeing this unfold in Era Six how much of it is around building if you will, target account intelligence systems that allow us to have one-size-fits-one and just look at every account uniquely?

Jeff White: And be comfortable with that?

Carman Pirie: Yeah. Versus how much of it is about seeing patterns amongst your prospects and, the maybe repeating scenarios and things of that nature? Because I think for a lot of people, the one-size-fits-one feels very daunting

Eve Chen: Yeah. One size fits all doesn’t really work, and I think, the Kula Ring folks, you guys are ABM marketers and we talk about accounts and to me now one-to-many, to be honest, is really demand gen. And once you get down to one-to-view and a one-on-one, that to me, that is a true, like where the account-based marketing really starting to happen.

However, having said that, there are patterns that are really, truly helpful. We’re talking about manufacturing industry here. In a manufacturing industry, there will be certain things that, is important across the board. Certain things, safety, you know is really important when you are actually producing a piece of manufacturing equipment.

I’m talking about physical safety, right? Because you’re dealing with a, a physical piece of equipment in an area that will have like occupation hazard implication. For those kind of thing, this kind of concern is very different to, say, if you’re dealing with finance industry.

They don’t have the same type of like sensitivity to those type of issue. Those pattern becomes, really become, they- therefore become quite useful. And also that, when I talking about understand the the complainers, if you at the beginning understand that who actually might be inside your buyer group.

The question you ask your champion, you will actually elevate and then bring those type of sensitive, concerns forward at a very forefront beginning. Your procurement might have a certain things. Your buyer’s procurement have a certain thing across the industry they care about. And for, this kind of thing can be very much like a industry level and/or segment level, right?

So those pat- pattern, you know help you to then create your sales talk track, questioning to bring that information up front. Let’s find out the procurement’s concern right at the beginning. Whether that, your solution actually cannot actually meet those requirement, therefore, there’s really, there’s no need to waste that time, right?

So you’re wasting the buyer’s time, the champion’s time, as well as your time on targeting those audience, unless that you actually can tick those boxes. So that’s what I’m talking about.

Jeff White: I really like that because you’re quite right. Manufacturing, especially on the equipment side or really with anything physical, it’s one of the few areas where there is always going to be some kind of safety element amongst the buying group. There’s always going to be something there, and that just doesn’t apply in other places.

Having an answer for that or having the proof going into it is just one of those things that’s gonna check that box and hopefully satisfy the safety officer who has to rubber stamp this purchase on top of procurement and engineering and whomever else. That’s interesting.

Eve Chen: A- absolutely, Jeff. And I keep emphasizing the word readiness. So are you actually ready for them?

So is your solution, like I said, ticking those boxes? ’Cause those are absolutely must-have from the buyer’s point of view. So you wanna get that out of the way as early as possible. And the second readiness, are the buyers ready for you? Do they actually have the composition from people point of view can make that decision for the type of solution at a budget level?

And so you know, it really that, by shifting the thinking to, look at your selling and buying process, to look at the readiness, it really help you to craft different sets of question to dig out whether the buyer’s ready for you and whether you are ready for them as well.

Carman Pirie: And closing the closing the loop on this around predictable revenue I guess a little bit. Can you do that for me? How have you found basically building selling systems that are more sensitive to the different buyers and how they buy that have mapped out these scenarios potentially a bit more in advance and is a little bit more ready for that reality?

How does that shine through in terms of revenue predictability? Yes, I am assuming revenue predictability goes up. So up and to the right is assumed, but can you give me a bit more around of that and what you’re what you’ve seen on that side of the equation?

Eve Chen: Yeah, absolutely. To scale with, to opera- operationalize, even though the ones you have your buyer playbook down pat, you understand that these are, potential industry pattern impacting the industry you’re trying to sell to, and then, also then, understand your buyer group members and understand each of the roles, their day-to-day pain points.

You must actually be able to speak to those pain points, tick those boxes, right? Helping… And the those exercise in the buyer playbook help the seller crafting different sets of question. That’s number one, right? So when you ask, manufacturing and, you possibly have to, few segment that you sell into, and it’s manageable enough, to build out the buyer’s playbook for each segment.

So that guides you, how to actually navigate through each account. Obviously, you go in with, those interrogating question, each accounts, based on the answer they come back. And lucky nowadays we have so many different technology the call recording, which AI enablements that can actually, help you to continue to actually improve that, the decision-making model that you’re trying to understand within the account, right?

But if you actually have a company actually selling into, say, dozens or, different type of verticals and industries that have a very different pattern of making decisions, this is a way that, you know, the reason that we actually build the Caralysi. So instead of you building out, all these different type of playbook, Caralysi actually build, gigantic playbook behind the scene, and we actually model, the different industry pattern, buying pattern based on the size of the company, the size of the procurement, the different type of solution that actually, comes with different due diligence, calling, right?

So us leveraging, technology like that, that can quickly tell you the 50 accounts you’re working on, which one actually has a more in ability to make decision for your type of solution. Because, with the, that now the availability of big data and the AI speeding up the analysis, contextualizing information into the buyer’s, you know, decision model, that kind of scenario, that we are able to see on the service level that, which account, which buyer group is actually more ready for you.

But it doesn’t stop there, obviously, because, that is based on assumption still, right? We’re using the industry pattern, different, kind of company level, size level, procurement level to make those assumption. But then the system itself will guide you the next set of question to interrogate into the account.

And that is how you actually generate that continuous improvement to actually refine your model down to the point that you’ll get to the point instead of 94% of those opportunities don’t close. Continuous, training your own model and through this, like a real time, real, kinda buying scenario conversations, you get to the point that you reverse that ch- challenge.

Instead of 94%, you want to get to the point that 6% don’t close and 94 percent to close. It does come, with the discipline to continue to train your model, your ecosystem knowledge base, right? To be able to then, generate that kinda output. And then, your sales will, be able to experience a better success as a result.

Carman Pirie: And I would have to think that it’s lovely to see it come through and increase close rates, of course. I would think that a leading indicator to that would just be a little bit of an increase in forecast accuracy. A, a bit of a more, a greater ability to predict what’s actually gonna c- get through.

And it’s probably I’m assuming a several-year journey to get from 94% of opportunities don’t close to only six don’t close. But that forecasting accuracy could be a bit more of a leading indicator along that path, I would have to think.

Eve Chen: Yeah, 100%. And at the moment I see a lot of forecasts, it’s still based more on gut feeling than the actual, data analytics and just through the course of tracking the account, engaging the accounts, right? So this is the basically, what I’m trying to challenge, really focus more on the buyer’s journeys, really live up to the ABM’s and marketers, our manifesto is following the buyer journey, documenting that, learning that, know who they are, their influence level, and asking the right questions to speed up that process.

So that is, really Era Six are trying to explore and challenge the status quos. And you’re 100% right, we’re not gonna get there overnight and but, even if we can improve like it’s 3%, that can, impact the bottom line in a sig- significant way.

Jeff White: Your comment about gut feel, certainly reminds me of a billboard that used to be here in Halifax from a sales consulting agency that said “Hope is not a strategy.”

Eve Chen: I hope it’s not. I can’t agree more. Yes. Absolutely.

Carman Pirie: It’s been wonderful to have you on the show. Thank you for introducing our listeners to Era Six, to the change that you’re seeing in in how B2B is buying. I just I hope our listeners have enjoyed this conversation. I hope they pick up your book and check it out.

I look forward to reading it as well. I know it’s just about to hit the shelves. Thanks for joining us today. It’s been really great to have you on the show.

Eve Chen: Thank you so much, Jeff and Carman. It’s been a pleasure.

Jeff White: For me as well. Thank you