 Live from the Mandalay Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's The Cube at IBM Insight 2014. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back. And when we are here live in Las Vegas for IBM Insight, this is The Cube Silicon Angles flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier. My co is Dave Vellante with bookiebond.org. Our next guest is Miles Austin. The web tools guy, sales and marketing technologist for Phil the Funnel Inc. Welcome to The Cube. I think I know what we're going to talk about in this segment. A lot of questions. Welcome to The Cube. Thank you, John. Appreciate it. We love talking data. We're data hungry, data full. We can never be full with data conversations. But one of the most impressive things happening now is this transformation and inflection point around getting data into the real time in the moment, immersive programming, content marketing. You name it, the entire content business is changing significantly. We broadcasted live at Oracle Open World just a few weeks ago. And you hear things like marketing cloud and Dreamforce was just out there with this new wave technology. We have the new CrowdChat platform for engaging conversations. So there's a huge emphasis on in the person, in the moment, programming, connections, relationships, cohort analysis, sentiment analysis. This is really gold for the funnel. Right? I mean, what's your take on that? I mean, also you must agree with everything I just said. Well, I do. I agree with it. I think the challenge is, at least from the audience that I work with, anything tied to that concept of big data, their eyes get glassy. It's a little intimidating. And I think what I'm finding is people really, there's an interest, but they're a little afraid of it. It's like, okay, what does this mean to me? I don't have the tools. I don't have the knowledge. And a lot of times I'm finding they're a little bit concerned about looking a little dull. They really don't know enough to know what they should do. It's scary. Carla Gentry is just on theCUBE talking about how scary and messy things look. Oh my God, it's complicated. I'm not a geek. Absolutely. What do I do? Is that what you're saying? The feeling of like, out of my pay range kind of thing? Or just a foreign entity? 100% agree. In fact, I just wrote yesterday a post about the fact that maybe your next important sales hire shouldn't even be a salesperson. It probably should be a data analyst of some type. So you can start to get into the information so you can start to understand the power that IBM and others are bringing to the table. So, Miles, I got to ask you the question because I talk about this stuff in my sleep practically. I think I actually wake up in the middle of the night and talk about marketing automation, sometimes sales data. But marketing automation is the buzzword. It's been around for a while. Lead Gen. I mean, IBM is very much a Lead Gen company. Give me the phone number. I got to get all the contact information. Fill the database up. That's a structured database. But the new way is not about that anymore. It's about real-time semantic analysis, the right moment at the right time with the right resource. Doing that targeting, that kind of precision is really the art and science of this new targeting. So what is this automation game? Because I just don't understand. I can't put my arms around it. What is marketing automation? If the game's changing, do even people know what to automate? I mean, marketing automated email addresses. That's old school. But in the new school, I don't even think it's been automated yet. I agree. I think the challenge is, is that you can automate anything pretty much. And automation by itself can be very detrimental. I'm convinced, at least in the B2B world that I live in, that the key that I want to achieve is a conversation. And I think if I can get the conversation, I win most of the time. And I think the problem is, we're trying to force information through content marketing and everything else. And the bottom line is, we end up with a forced, uncomfortable engagement rather than a real conversation between two equals. How do people fill the funnel? So filling the funnel is a concept. You put people in the funnel, and you kind of weed them down. They pop out their prospects. So it seems very linear. But now, with unstructured data, you don't have all the information. You might have a social handle, a LinkedIn address. You might have their email address. They watch the live feed. In our case, the feed's free. But they might owe off in with Twitter, data on CrowdChat. It's all over the place. How do people get the data together? Well, again, every industry and every company is different, based on size and the capabilities they have. I'm convinced that it's a matter of understanding where your customers are and where they're playing, where they're communicating, where they're hanging out, if you will. And from that, you should start to build a hierarchy of priority. To say, if my audience is on Twitter, primarily, then I better be there and engaged in all the tools that I can use to monitor and interact in a Twitter environment. If I've got a clientele that is in Facebook or is in some other mode, I better be there. And I think too many times a company will say, well, we don't do Facebook. And yet you go do the research and discover that maybe 50% of their audience is in a Facebook environment. And so you've got to go where the users are. So now the Internet of Things question pops up. Humans are things too, right? So now the humans are all over the place. They're all in these different channels, or omnichannels. It's kind of the buzzword in the media business. Which means it's like nightclubs to me. Like I'm in this club, I'm in this cafe. So you really can't do the old carpet bombing kind of banner ad unless you got to do them everywhere. So the issue is how do you do the targeting? And what are some of the techniques that you guys have seen that's been effective for targeting, pulling, and talking to customers? The key piece, I think, is to pay attention to what the streams are, whatever they might be. I think the communication, the customers that I'm finding out there are sharing what they need. And the key, I think, is how do I deliver what they're interested in, or what they're looking for in a format that's most easily digestible for them. So one of the things we like about Twitter is the in-the-moment real-time aspect of it. Are you seeing social sales becoming a hot topic for folks as an alternative channel, as a primary channel? What is the state of kind of filling the funnel? Because it really is. A lot of people, that's what people invest in. End of the day, they want to increase customer satisfaction, customer support, and drive sales and revenue. I mean, operational expenses. Okay, I get that. IBM's got a big footprint there. But in terms of driving revenue, it's keeping customers happy and keeping them customers and driving more sales. Social selling is a hot topic. And as a writer and a speaker, I can tell you if I want to get someone's attention, I'll mention that term, and I'm going to get someone's attention and probably someone to say, come and speak to us. My own personal belief is social selling is one portion of a well-thought-out, full-selling program. It's a part of engagement. It is not the answer. It's not the end-all. It's a part of the set of tools you should be using in order to be successful. I did an interview last week with the CEO and co-founder of something called Mintigo. They do social analytics. And they're all ex-big data guys doing. They were working in security intelligence in Israel. And I said, how do you start this company? Just like, how do you go from surveillance to B2B social sales? He goes, well, you know what? We were sitting in a cafe one time and said we're so good at finding the bad guys. Why don't we spend time finding the good guys? Good guys being prospects. So that's interesting. So you're seeing that mindset of the big data folks coming into this world of filling the funnel because you can slice and dice and do that kind of micro segmentation and targeting. But the question that always comes up is, and this is Dave's hot button, Dave Vellante. When are people ready to buy? That's signaling as well. People could say, hey, you know, my product is failing or I need new real estate or, I mean, so is that kind of what you see as a future scenario? It is. I think those are the easy signals. I think I always try to help my clients understand that it's not saying my internet's down, I need a new provider. That's simple, right? You can jump on that. I think it's the indication of watching the flow of that over a period of time. If there's dissatisfaction, if there's doubt, if there's levels of communication or expression or activity, and that's part of what I'm excited about at the conference is I'm learning that there's questions I don't even know to ask yet. And I think once we get access to these tools fully, as a sales guy, I can ask questions. That's how I've been trained, is to ask questions. But to think that there are questions I don't even know to ask yet, that's pretty exciting for me. You know, I got to ask you this question because I had a technical career and then later in my career I had a sales career actually in a sales force, and they always rolled out sales automation tools, the new sales tool. There's always that holy grail tool that's being rolled out. So how does big data and things like Watson change all that? Because I can imagine this new dashboard being almost like radar for the sales rep. So what's your take on that? Well, I think the key there, as you hit it, is that it's at the sales rep level. The lower you can bring the engagement, you think about sales force automation, you think about CRM, et cetera. Where is it designed and who does the implementation? Up here because they need reporting. They want to know the funnel, they want to know the pipeline. They want reports. No one ever asked the sales team, what do you guys need? What information is critical to help you sell more? That's the end result, but yet it's always started up here and they try to force information up. So they project some syntax down to the sales guy and it's like, ah, I didn't ask for that. So when is the largest day for, in a calendar week, when is the largest day for sales input into any CRM tool? Sunday night. It's proven. Monday morning salesmen. Monday morning salesmen, they know they better get it in there because they'll either be asked about it by their manager, or they'll be questioned. And I know some very large tech companies in these Monday morning, quote, commit meetings, it better be there, you better defend it, or you're in trouble. We know all about that. We have the same meetings. No, we've been there. And it's foolish. And you think, okay, so the promise to me of something like Watson Analytics, if it truly is down at that salesperson level, I know what I need as an individual salesperson. Let me go ask, let me inquire, let me query what's going on. And if I have access at that level, the results will bubble up. The results should be visible automatically to my management team. They don't need to ask me the question because my activity will dictate what the results are. When you hit on the problem earlier is marketing says, okay, here's a bunch of leads. And the sales guy goes, these aren't leads. These aren't qualified. They're not what I'm looking for in leads. I mean, that, every company that we talk to has that problem. And marketing spends tons of dough on finding these so-called leads that are Donald Duck and, you know, Mother Goose. Look, I mean, in this day and age, webinar marketing and e-books and all those kind of things are prevalent in my own practice. I can tell you that probably 60% of the e-mail addresses I get to get access to whatever it is aren't even real. They're not even real. I go back to trying to evaluate. They're not even potential leads. Exactly. They're nonsense. And so, yeah, what they want is that information. They don't want to share that information yet. And the critical piece, I believe, is how do I get them to engage in, and I'm at the point of saying, give it to them without all that opt-in process, right? But let me capture something so that the next time they come in, even if it's for free, I'll know they're there and I'll know they were there a week ago. That's one of those triggers and indicators to me that said, there's something more here. Otherwise, I don't want to be bothered by that traffic. So, you're right, because every company does this. They put up this huge hurdle, and you just want to read the bloody piece of content. You don't want to go through some rectal exam to try to get there, and you want a better experience. And you're happy if there's a cookie or something that collected a little bit of information, and you can always control that. But there's this rigid sense of, I got to collect all this data in order for you to get that piece of content. And it destroys the user experience. Plus, you are automatically in a bucket as a lead. I'm not a lead. I can't tell you how many times. I don't even know if I want the information for sure, but I need to fail out the form just to get access, and I might skim to a parent. Yeah, that wasn't what I was looking for. And the next day, you get an email or a call. Or both. You got some fans on CrowdChat. You've got Jim Canto just says, you've earned a miles off at Miles. You've earned a follower, sir. Forced engagement is truly an emerging problem. Engagement has to be a natural attraction for best results. Great point by Jim Canto, fellow community member of our group. Forced engagement, big problem. That's spam, basically, or too much shilling, or vendor puke as Dave always calls it. People on social are connected to their friends. There's a concept that we've been calling social proof where if IBM or a big company comes into a party or a poker game and just starts selling their stuff, be like, whoa, get out. You're going to get out. Or if they say, hey, I'm buying the beer. That's a different story. So it's an ingratiation kind of engagement. So there's an art to it, the engagement. Can you comment on what you found on that side of it in terms of looking for those kinds of engagement signals? I find a lot of times that, from a web experience specifically, it is frequency. If I see someone signed up for the third webinar, let's say in a row, I'll know that. If I find that they're coming back and they keep downloading, maybe I'll find their name in an RSS subscription or an email subscription, whatever it might be. Those are the easy ones. But if I have the newer technologies as they continue to come that start to give me an ability just to notice that there's a pattern of interest. To me, that's the early stage. And as a sales guy, I'd much rather be there at the very early stage of their interest rather than at the stage when they say, okay, I have to buy today. I think you're right. I think smart marketers are saying, look, we have to engage in the conversation and be a source of value in that conversation because by the time they're ready to buy, they've already done their research, they've already vetted people, they've already interacted with people. Okay, yeah, now I'm ready to buy and I'm going to narrow it down to these three or maybe this one. Well, and again, it goes back to your conversation about social proof. We learned even this morning it still goes back down to the individual people that I trust and respect within my circle of friends. And whether it's a professional circle or it's personal, whatever my decision process is, I'm going to ask or mention it to someone else. And if I trust them and they have a positive experience, I'm in. So again, I think all this work we do to position and posture many times is really just a waste of time. I think we need to earn the right through our performance and our content and what we have a value to offer. And if it's there and it's real, you're in. The odds of you winning that opportunity go way up. Can we talk more about social data and the value of social data? We had Nate Silver on, John, two years ago at Tableau. And I asked Nate about being able to predict from social data, generally specifically Twitter. And he said, data's not there yet. It'll get there eventually, but it's not there yet. And the tooling he commented, but your comment was, Nate's, you know, a polling guy and he's looking at structured sort of polls. Miles, in your experience, is the data there? Is it getting there? Boy, I wish, I don't have that background data, but I would tell you from a marketing and a sales guy, I get all the data I need from that stream. It's valuable to me, absolutely. If I'm not just looking at the surface level, as I said, I just look for how many followers and all those kind of superficial things that doesn't matter. But I look for frequency and there's times when, whether it's a comment or someone starts to add value to the conversation or challenge the conversation, I get excited because when someone says, Miles, I just agree with you. An engagement, social gesture, an engagement, maybe a harder engagement. We use the phishing analogy all the time. If the fish are jumping, that means you can actually see the fish. So you got to know what you're looking for too. A part of it is also knowing what you're looking for. For you, you have an algorithm that says, hey, if they've come to the webinar multiple times, I can take that as a positive gesture of interest. I don't know if it's an algorithm, but all I know is it works. There's an algorithm in your head. I mean, that's what people do. They have their own little nuances. But that's the beautiful thing about big data. You can't project formulas to everyone. It's all about knowing what to look for. And this comes back down to a trend that I see Dave coming, which is performance-based social media marketing, which is the performance is in the eye of the beholder. In other words, I might target X, you might target Y, but it doesn't matter. I got my objective. I got X and you got Y. So if we get our results, who cares? If I want tuna, give me the tuna. If I want a different kind of fish. So that's where I see it going. It's hard to figure that out, but I don't think the tooling's there, Dave. I think Nate Silver points it out that he's not a geek. He's a polar. But what he points out in that interview was that there is no real tooling for him. He's can only work with what he has, a hammer and a nail. He needs more tools. Yeah. Look, the tools market, I live in that space every day of my week, and I have a backlog of tools I haven't even gotten to yet. So that world and with all the new things that are coming out, I think tool development and applications are going to just explode at an even faster rate. But I always look back to maybe a networking event. And there's one individual that I'm interested in and so is a competitor. We both interact and do whatever we do on our day to day. And at the end of that event, you can go ask both marketers or salespeople. One has a fantastic opportunity. The other one says, nothing here for me tonight, right? It's a matter of understanding what you're trying to do to understand your goals and what your objectives are. And if you went there with an expectation I'm going to sell something, you're probably going to be disappointed. I wanted to ask Karla this question because she's also a practitioner on the data science side. And I want to ask you this question. And so I'll ask others is, we're finding an answer a lot, but I won't tell you what we're finding. I just want to see what you say. I'm a guy who needs tooling, okay? And I'm swimming in objectives. I got all this other tools and you're a sales guy coming in from a tool company. Hi, I have a platform. Use my tool. Oh, what do you react to that? I mean, are people, are you finding that people are like, give me another tool to evaluate like a hole in the head? I mean, it's really like over saturated with these quote magic tools. A fool with a tool. What is your take on that? And how should people, if you believe that to be the case, that people are frustrated by the promises and the snake oil and all these great magic formulas of greatness, how do you evaluate good tools from bad tools? Well, I think anyone in my, in a sales leadership role, that's usually who I'm interacting with, they think they need to make a decision on a tool. I tell them, forget about the tool. Let's identify what your goal is. What are you trying to fix or improve or add to? And then use people that you trust that have some experience with one or two or 300 different tools and will bring to you maybe one or two or maybe three alternatives and let's digest budget size, implementation, training requirements because you can't know them all. No one can. So the natural reaction then, what you're saying is people look to their friends and hey, what are you using? Right, there's a lot of that going on. Friends are even competitors. One of the things that we find a lot of fun with is when we help a company go out and discover what competition's using. The ones that they think are doing well and go find what those competitors are using. It's a great level to say, you know what, they're using the same tool we are, but they're killing it. And so maybe all of a sudden it's not the tool which is very common, it's the implementation, it's the training, it's the communication of what we're trying to do. It's their putting in the practice that makes it unique. Absolutely. But Maz, you're a big believer in social, obviously. What percent of companies you work with actually capture, let's say something like a Twitter handle in their CRM? It's growing dramatically. Two years ago it was like zero, right? You agree? Oh yeah, no, I'd say maybe 50%. Yeah, it's still a ways to go. Absolutely, and I think, you know, I mean, look at the event here. I mean, everyone has their Twitter address on the presentations. That's kind of the first path to get entry into what this guy or guy is thinking, and it's a quick way to say, is this someone I want to explore further? So if roughly half are capturing it, what percent are actually doing anything with it? Probably about another 50% of that number. So what would you, if I'm capturing it, what would you advise that I do with it? Well, today I think you just have to capture it, first of all. I think that the challenge is, a great question for me is, who has the data? When I go into an organization, the first thing I ask is, who owns your customer database? And a group of executives, and true story, they look around at each other and usually who owns it, in most of the companies in the mid-market? Which department owns customer data? I would think sales. Believe it or not, it's very seldom. Usually it's finance, because it's in their what? Accounting system, right? And some of them are porting over to CRM, but no one has access. I would tell you that more than half the time the sales data, the customer data, is not accessible by the VPSales. They don't have a password or a way to get into it. Which, think about it, from my perspective, I'm going man-alive, guys. Which is why some of this whole big data analytics thing is like, if you could really get it down in a natural language interface, maybe I don't have to worry about my leader dealing with it. I can get the guys and gals in the street that really know what they need right now, real-time data. That's pretty exciting. Right. And then they come to the Monday meeting and they say, here's my commit. Absolutely. And it's there and it's verifiable, which takes away a lot of that tension between sales and leadership. Right. Here's my commit and here's where it comes from and here's why I think that. And now, transparent, you test it. Absolutely. Because typically what happens, the question was, well, you've had that same customer at the same stage for the last four Mondays. Yeah. What's going on here, right? Maybe you've never done it. I have, right? It's a challenge. Miles, let's talk about the last, wrap this thing up. Two things. One, talk about your company a little bit. Fill the funnel. Great conversation. Thanks for the content there. Great insights. Here at Insight, pun intended. Talk about your company, Fill the Funnel. And then advice to folks out there, sales managers and also sales reps on how they can collaborate to really get an organic tooling out there. And what are the options? How do they get started? How do they go down the right path? Well, I appreciate the opportunity, John. I mean, really what Fill the Funnel does, I always explain to people, we really connect the dot between the shiny objects and there's way too many of them out there and the business name. And so it doesn't matter if I'm addressing a group of individual salespeople at a convention or I have a leadership team. Again, the question for me is, forget the tool for a minute. Let's identify the challenge, the problem, or the opportunity you want to explore. And we'll help connect the dots. Use our experience and our depth in this field of knowing a lot of tools at a pretty deep level so we can do some of that sifting for you. And advice to folks out there who are getting started, because a lot of guys use Salesforce, for instance. There's a lot of systems out there that are CRM's and or sales automation, all that good stuff. But now as the data signals start to expand beyond these legacy signals, there's new signals out there and all kinds of connectors. And so it's pretty chaotic for them. It's kind of messy, if you will, or scary as Carla, Carla Gentry used to say in the last segment, but messy is good in this new world, right? You got to get messy to be clean. So what do you suggest to those guys who are putting this together? I'd say the first thing is identify what kind of resources you have to bear. Salesforce is a great example. They have a very powerful tool in a platform and an whole ecosystem. I love it, but that's a disaster for a small company with 10 salespeople. It just doesn't work. So understand the size and scope of what you have to work with. And there's some phenomenal tools that are built from the ground up in the last year or two that are on the social platform first that then populate and build out the CRM tool. Just one example. Awesome. Miles Austin here talking to social sales. Really hot topic, actually. You know, it's one of those things where people want that holy grail. It's just so elusive right now. And again, it's top of the funnel right now. And I think you're going to see a lot of good science and art behind making those things come down. And it's always challenging. In an omnidirectional world we're living in, certainly in connected devices of Internet of Things or Internet of People, it's a huge challenge and a great opportunity. So thanks for spending some time here on theCUBE. Live here in Las Vegas, this is theCUBE. Sharing the data with you and creating some insights here. Extracting this little noise, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back after this short break from the social media lounge from Insight Go. We'll be right back.