1710 – Wearing The Super Suit with Cascade Insight’s Sean Campbell

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0:58with us right now it's sean campbell sean you are the ceo and founder of cascade insights you're found on the web at cascade insights.com i'm excited to have you sean i'm a b2b nerd and so are you it looks that's true and a little bit of a space nerd i guess by the background for anybody who's seeing the video so i have like a ton of disc plates behind me for anybody just doing the audio and that's my son turned me on to those. Don't worry, I don't get a commission. They're these really cool like metal poster things. Yeah. And yeah, anyway, so always been an astronomy geek too. So, but Sister Mary Gale told me my math grades weren't good enough to be an astronomer.

1:38So instead I ended up being a business owner. There you go. So do you include Pluto back there? That's the question. You know, here's a really funny thing. So I do Pluto's lower down below the frame but i only bought the first eight planets and then my wife decided to put this on my wall okay so so this now sits under my monitor that like don't forget pluto because i i think pluto's a planet just to be clear but i was trying to go with the current you know state of things so i bought eight and then i bought pluto and a couple moons so that's below me like below the frame. There, just to our audio listener, just so I can describe what Sean just showed me, he has these beautiful photos of all of the planets there.

2:26And he just showed me a little sticky note and written on it was a circle that said the word Pluto in it. You know, I want to, this is fascinating. There is a website, since we're talking about it, you probably just need to Google this because the website is, it's at joshworth.com, but I'm sure you've seen something similar to this. It's if the moon were only one pixel, a tediously accurate scale model of the solar system. And, you know, to our friends that are listening right now, if you especially got young kids and you want to emphasize to them just how much space there is between these teeny teeny teeny teeny tiny little planets it's all space there's so much space in between these little pebbles that are floating around the sun it's it's a really and this is and this is pretty sweet i just pulled it up while we were talking because you can do that when you do this but yeah it's got great language in between the planets we'll be coming up on a new planet soon sit tight there is a lot of space in space and it's like, and it's just, yeah, I won't steal much of it.

3:36So people go look at it, but it's, um, it's really, really good. Cause I agree with you. I mean, what, I mean, a slight segue into business. Like I think the, the most important thing you can have is a sense of perspective, right. You know, and like, I, it's one of the reasons I've always been in astronomy because I mean, you can go look up at the sky and this isn't the astronomy podcast so i'll get off this in five seconds but like you you're staring into infinity if you really think about it for half a second i mean yes there's objects between you and infinity but for all intents and purposes and for the real geeks out there i know there's an edge to the universe and we can have that discussion or whatever but like i mean for all human measures you're basically staring into a version of infinity and it's literally above our heads all day long i don't know how else that can't give you perspective if you bother to look up So anyway, I digress.

4:30Okay. CascadeInsights.com. By the way, I loved our conversation. I would love to talk more about it another time. Share a bit about who Cascade Insights is, what the impact that you have and the work that you do. You've worked with the biggest, you worked with Adobe, Citrix, Cloudflare, Dell, Red Hat, Salesforce, SAP, Microsoft, a huge list, you know, big, big, big enterprise level tech, a lot of tech companies. But where does Cascade, what does Cascade Insights do? Well, I'll kind of give it to you in terms of like formal and informal mottos, but only because I think they're kind of cute and they seem to resonate with clients sometimes.

5:12It's like, we sometimes say we deliver bad news to good people, or if we're trying to be more positive, we make the truth visible. And basically, clients come to us because they don't understand something that's happening in their market and they want to get an outside perspective. I mean, ultimately, any company can get insular and not really understand what's happening outside them. But it's all the more so for larger companies where you can just go from meeting to meeting to meeting, just talking to people who work inside the building. And so the other kind of lens to look at it is that we sometimes say we eliminate pain and we help maximize opportunity and we get mostly hired for pain.

5:51Organizations are facing competitive threat. They launched a poor product. They have a bad sales process. They have a poor marketing effort. And they want to really understand concretely how to fix that. And so we'll go off and we'll interview customers, prospects, competitor customers. We'll go run quantitative survey instruments. But ultimately, what we're trying to do is give them some kind of recommendation that they can actually use to be better in three months, six months or a year. And that's honestly where it comes from. And the interesting thing for me in owning a research firm is that I wanted to be a college professor.

6:24That's what I wanted to be until I met a girl. And by the way, she was happy with me being a college professor. There's a whole story there that why I didn't become one, but, and I still love teaching and things like that. But in this weird way, I ended up owning a research firm, which is also part of what would have been a professor. I just own it in a professional context. And I really, I really enjoy getting to understand kind of meaty business problems. And so does the team here. And basically just trying to figure out what's going on and then how we can help these clients do better. And that's basically who we are.

6:56Yeah. So I'd love to get your perspective, Sean, any major trends that you've been seeing over the past 10 years and thinking about higher level B2B sales, account-based sales, consultative sales, enterprise or not, It could be maybe impacting consultants as well. Maybe it could be an independent consultant or a small consultancy. What are some observations that maybe you've seen in terms of trends over the past year or two? Well, I would be totally remiss if I didn't say what I think is the most important thing to pay attention to now, which is that you have to wear the super suit. There are so many people right now who are like, I hate AI.

7:38AI is bogus. AI hallucinates. AI is awesome. AI is everything. And like, and here's the deal. This is simply a matter of, we're inventing like the equivalent of the wheel, a hammer, wood and fire. Like, I mean, you're just, I don't usually use these terms this directly, but you're really just an idiot if you don't wear the super suit. because, and the super suit is just figuring out which of these AI tools make sense for your business, your lane, your industry, your marketing effort, your sales effort. And the fact that they're not necessarily perfect. We've been using computing solutions for years that I've said, all software is broken.

8:16We just don't know where, I mean, like, I mean, that's been true since we used the first computer, right? There's always been challenges in using technology. So that's not really an excuse. If I was to go to something a little more perennial, I would say one of the challenges I've seen is that there's an ever increasing desire for people to buy narrow solutions. And I think it's driven by honestly, consumer trends, right? I mean, you can go hang out on Netflix and just watch British historical period dramas for the rest of your life and never be exposed to any other media stream ever. Or you could watch Russian sci-fi, or you could watch whatever you want.

8:54We're very used now to being able to consume and interact with kind of exactly what we want. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. That's for a different podcast, whether it's a good or bad thing for society. I generally think it's mostly a good thing. But what it's done, I think, is it's created what I sometimes have referred to as a little bit of this like age of narrow, where clients want to find a very distinct solution to their problem. And they actually believe they will achieve that period of discovery and analysis because in their personal lives, they do it all the time. And so where I go with that is that I think a lot of companies will have a tendency to just go very broad the minute things get hard, like the environment we're facing right now.

9:37I mean, right now is not a time to just turn around and throw your opportunities in any direction and take any type of customer. My argument's always been when things are hard, you get narrower. You pick narrower slices, more targeted segments. And I just think that's a trend that I always want to bring up because the temptation for most business owners when things get stressful is to go broad. I was on a conversation with a client the other day. It was the same thing. All of a sudden, they're just, well, I could go after this customer and that customer and that segment and that market and that thing.

10:10And I'm like, stop, stop. And they're like, but what happens if, and I'm like, spreading yourself out isn't going to solve that problem. You know, you have to create a lot of value in a narrow space when times are hard. And, and I've, I've had times where I violated that early in my business career and I paid the price for it. Yeah. And so that, that what I'd say is a, is a perennial trend. I mean, I I'll stop there. I mean, there's other trends and things I could get into, but those are the ones that I always feel, I mean, I've got a lot of thoughts on the whole RTO thing and that's kind of a big trend too, but that's a different subject too.

10:43RTO? Return to office, basically. That's kind of the whole thing going. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, no, no. Go ahead. Take yourself a moment. I mean, I think the challenge with the RTO stuff, right. And I listened to another business podcast that I, I won't say, cause you know, who knows how you guys, maybe you're, you're, you've got more listeners than him or less, but I was listening to this other one and like, you know, he was just railing against like, you gotta be in the office to be creative. You gotta do this. You gotta do that. And I'm like, it drives me crazy, maybe as a market researcher, when people are like generalizing from their own specific, right?

11:18It's like, okay, well, I can't be creative in the office and my narrow team can't be creative unless we're in the office. So we must be in the office. And I had this argument with somebody the other day. I was like, I think we were creative before conference tables, whiteboards and chairs. I mean, I think we were creative long before that. I mean, Churchill and Roosevelt prosecuted a global conflict and they met only 11 times in six years. They wrote letters. They didn't even have Zoom. So like, I mean, you know, you can build and run a creative coalition virtually. And so I think, I think we're almost going back to strongly the other way.

11:55There's all, and the other thing about RTO that I felt is that we've kind of skipped over one really critical piece of the conversation when this like, well, we should go back to the office, some people feel. A lot of the discussion is around my employees weren't productive. You know what I never hear? The manager sucked at managing people virtually. Because I can tell you it's a different job. It's a different skill. It's not the same. You have to go through a very different way of interacting with your employees. You even have to skill them differently. And I could get into a little bit of that.

12:30But I mean, it's not the same. You don't have the same smoke signals in the office. You don't have this. So, so where are we talking about how to train managers to manage people virtually? Well, I've done it for 20 years. So to me, I know it's different. And I've also had an office if somebody's listening going, but he's never had an office. No, that's not true either. So I've seen both sides of it. And while I could wax poetically about all the benefits I think of work from home, I think there's a gap that we never address about managers capabilities. And And even on the employee side, and then I'll stop after this because you said I could have a little runway.

13:06But like, I'll tell you the biggest thing I've noticed with employees. Well, I'll say two things, I guess. Two things that I've noticed with employees when they go virtual that you need to make sure you emphasize as a boss. One, you have to make them better writers. Because I had a client say to me the other day, well, I should say at the start of COVID. He was like, and he was a nice guy, so nobody should take this the wrong way, I think. He said, I had no idea how dumb my fellow employees were until they had to write me everything they ever wanted. And so the point was they just didn't know how to communicate in that form.

13:38They had no ability to understand how to communicate in a written form when they were so used to strolling up to somebody in the office and having that conversation. But if you can build a team of better writers in almost any role, not just marketing, you're going to have better sales conversations. You're going to have better engagement with the market. all those things. And then, so that's, that's one piece of it. And the other piece that might, that I find rings a little weird to people, but I keep saying it partly because I think it does is I think you have to allow your employees to show their ignorance.

14:13And there's a big difference between the word ignorant and ignorance. You know, I'm not saying allow somebody to be ignorant, but I'm saying allow somebody to show they don't understand something in a safe manner, because in a virtual company, I think where a lot of that productivity gets lost and I'll kind of wrap on this on this is that if you were to say, well, gosh, why did that project not get finished? They were virtual, stuff didn't happen. I would say that the bulk of the time, if you really ask your employees, they'll say, well, I got off the phone with so-and-so and I wasn't sure what to do.

14:48And I didn't know if I could call and I didn't know if I could offer up, you know, that I wasn't sure about something and I wasn't clear. And in an office environment, And a lot of those things are much safer to do, but you can create a culture where it's okay to do that. It's okay to say, Hey, I just got off this call and I don't have an idea what to do. And I, I, I know it's a big deal because when we bring people on, we almost have to coach them on that, that it's really okay. Nobody's going to keep track of the number of times you didn't know something. And, and it's just, I think it's really hard.

15:20It's hard to build a culture that, that satisfies that. But anyway, that's, that's a few different things, a few different trends. Yeah. So, you know, when we're thinking about market, so Cascade's primary work is around market research services. And so, I mean, this is going to touch everything. What are you able to discover that internal teams, they're having some sort of a roadblock there? Or they're just some sort of, they're just not able to, what are they not able to see that you can discover for them? Well, I mean, in the general, I think biggest thing is that they just end up talking to themselves.

15:58Yeah. Sorry. My puppy has decided to go crazy. He's hanging out over on the other side of the frame is so I think they just don't really have ultimately a good perspective of what buyers and customers want because you end up with people are just communicating internally the whole time and not really having a good sense of what the market's doing. And I think it's just human nature. We're a little tribal. And so that ends up happening. I mean, the number of times it's really just, we had a conversation with an external prospect and they're like, I had no idea they thought that way. I had no idea that they hated our messaging.

16:39I had no idea that they thought that way about our product. It really just is kind of the difference between being insular and not. And that just crossing that divide makes all the difference in a lot of cases. I have talked with a number of VPs of sales who have expressed frustration that kind of lead gen or demand gen has been a little challenging over, well, I mean, gradually over the past few years, but I think it's really causing some stress with some teams And it just costs way more for that company to produce the same number of sales conversations. What do you see working well? Or more importantly, where would you kind of shift the focus and attention if demand gen or lead gen is going to be something that a sales team is pretty concerned about in the years ahead?

17:37I would go back to going narrow. I think that's really ultimately the thing. I mean, I think so many times the emphasis is on so much growth that it's all about expanding out massively. And I think that's really where the hang up is nine times out of 10. I mean, it sounds simplistic, but it's hard. It's hard for somebody to really be able to do that in a meaningful way and really stay narrow. And I think that's the biggest piece of advice I would get. I mean, like instead of targeting nine personas, target two personas for sales efforts. Instead of targeting nine verticals, target two. Instead of hitting 22 geographies, hit 10.

18:17I mean, and same thing with feature development. You know, I mean, I think really that's the fundamental thing that I see all the time. I mean, we see all kinds of other tactical errors that people make and things like that. But if you ask me the major one I see, it's an inability to stay focused on a target market for long enough to actually like generate the value out of it you should have. And what is the kind of the inherent value? And I know you talked about this a little bit previously, but I just want to, I mean, we could just kind of recap this in a very short answer, but what is the inherent value to being hyper-focused?

18:56Well, ultimately, that's a really good question because I had a client who was a CMO of a major mid-market fill out our form on our website, and she filled out what I thought was one of the best form fills I've ever seen in 20 years. It basically said, we currently serve 2 ,836 distinct use cases and everything is hard. And then she started to iterate a little bit what's hard. She started to say that one of the things that was hard was customer retention because we had all these different types of customers that were basically in play. And we had to figure out strategies and solutions to kind of like retain all those customers.

19:44On top of that, when it came to product development, they had a wide swath of different customers that they had to solve. So they were constantly building solutions for everybody's, you know, Tom, Dick and Harry to kind of make sure that they would all stick around. The sales team would regularly show up in meetings and basically say, my customer segment's the most important one. This vertical is the one that we can get the most revenue from. Marketing was a mess because they were trying to message to like a ton of different geographies and a ton of different geos and a ton of different industries and practice areas.

20:15And so ultimately, everything got smeared out into genericism. And they were asking themselves, how do I make this better? How do I find the next customer more easily? Well, keep serving more customers in the same market, and that makes referrals easier. How do I find really exceptional messaging? We don't make it so dumbed down that it applies to everybody that lives on every planetoid in the solar system, right? I mean, you find a way to be like very, very focused. And I thought she did a really good job of articulating at a CMO level what it means to be narrow. And we came in and we did a project that is basically an ideal customer profile type of project.

20:56So who ultimately should you be spending your time on? And at one point in this conversation, in the early days of it, they had 17 or 18 senior executives that got on. This was when they were trying to decide which vendor to pick, us or somebody else. And they got on. And one of the persons kind of said the way people do in these things, you know, like, so why should we pick you? You know, and after a bunch of conversation, and I said, I want you all to stop arguing. that's my job i want you to stop arguing in the end and i want you to settle in on something that you can actually get maximal value from and um and so that's that's what i would say is it it impacts everything it impacts recur you know recurring sales it impacts referrals and impact messaging it impacts like your customer success team because if you're not serving 25 different markets, it's probably easier to actually develop a solution that will be just loved instead of just broadly somewhat accepted by 20 different customer segments.

21:56So all of that comes down to the owner having the courage and the leadership team to say, I'm going to stay narrow. I'm going to continue to develop this niche. and once I've really maximized it, only then will I hop over to the next island in the archipelago. And ultimately, what does this come down to? It's courage. It's all it is because there's going to be a million people that will tell you somewhat self-interestedly, we should go do this other thing, right? And you as a CEO have to say no. I mean, even as a sole owner, right? I don't know how many times somebody in this company over 20 years, right?

22:36well, 16 years with this company and six, seven years with my first company before I sold it, said to me some version of, I think there would be more opportunity if we went over there. And I had to say, no, we're going to figure out here. And if somebody's thinking, well, what about lost opportunity and other planets and islands to go conquer? I'm like, yes, yes. But only when you truly have actually like conquered the one you're on. I agree with that. For most businesses, there's so much there, they just don't go after it. And here's the last thing that's really important about it. It's incredibly defensible competitively.

23:14Because to go back to the first thing, right, I said about the age of Nero, people ultimately want someone who understands them, right? That's what they want, whether it's the product that understands them or service that understands them, it's at the heart of what they're trying to buy. And so if you can be like, look, this is something I really understand and I don't understand this, that's key. And one last thing is, I could talk for a while about this last point, but I want to make sure I say it, is that you saying no to the market about what you don't do creates something that is really hard to create these days in content, trust.

23:52I mean, truth is, most people don't trust content. We just leave it at that. I mean, I'm not trying to make a political statement. I'm just like, if you took a poll, probably people trust content less than they did before. So, and it doesn't matter what side of the political spectrum they're on. But one of the things that cuts through that, like a knife, is I don't do this thing as a firm. I don't take this kind of client. I don't serve that kind of market. And the minute people hear that, I think what calms them is they're going from, I have to discover what you don't do well to you just told me.

24:27And that is a really killer thing. And then it lets you stand on a much firmer foundation about, yes, you can trust me that this is something I know. So it is a two-step. One part of it is this is what I've decided to focus on. And the second part is having the courage to tell the market what you're not doing today and who you're not serving. And I'd sum it up as this. I probably have won more deals over my life by the moment in the call where I said, yeah, but we don't do those three things. And they go, oh, well, talk to me more about the three things you do because I probably trust you more now.

24:58Yeah, right. And we could argue why that is psychologically, but I think it just is. Nope, that's one thing I learned. I said, listen, I am an ultimate nerd when it comes to this one very specific thing. I may be one of the best on the planet if you really narrow it down to like what exactly I do. And the other stuff, you don't wanna hire me for that because I'm not the guy, I'm not gonna be much help for you, but I know good people for that. You know, Sean, speaking of which, your website, cascadeinsights.com. Where do folks go from here? They can just go to cascadeinsights.com or you can just email me at sean at cascadeinsights.com.

25:37And we're obviously happy to talk to somebody that's a B2B technology company, which is the market we serve. And we don't serve other ones. So there you go. And at the same time, if you're just an entrepreneur and you're curious about journey and how to kind of evolve, I'm always happy to talk on that front too. Sean Campbell, founder, CEO of Cascade Insights, your website, CascadeInsights.com. It's been a great conversation. We are, boy, are we up against a hard stop right now. It's not like we're recording this, but Sean, it's been a great conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks, man.

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