Sales Pipeline Radio, Episode 366 Q & A with Mark Nardone

Summary

Matt interviews the best and brightest minds in sales and Marketing on Sales Pipeline Radio. Mark Nardone is no exception!

By Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing

If you’re not already subscribed to Sales Pipeline Radio or listening live Thursdays at 11:30 am PT on LinkedIn (also on demand) you can find the transcription and recording here on the blog every Monday morning.  The show is less than 30 minutes, fast-paced and full of actionable advice, best practices and more for B2B sales and marketing professionals.

We cover a wide range of topics, with a focus on sales development and inside sales priorities.

This week’s show is entitled, “How Data and Storytelling Impacts All of Sales, Brand and Marketing“ and my guest is Mark Nardone, CMO at PAN.

Tune in to Learn:

• • How storytelling differentiates brands, builds trust, and creates emotional connections with customers in B2B
  • Why companies are reinvesting in storytelling to foster deeper engagement and grow their pipeline
  • How and why data is essential for crafting personalized stories that resonate more effectively
  • How successful businesses balance long-term branding with short-term demand generation
  • The role AI plays in helping companies scale personalized stories for a broad audience

Listen Now | Watch the video HERE | Read the Transcript BELOW: 

Matt: All right. Welcome everybody to another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio. So happy to have you here. I’m your host, Matt Heinz, as we continue to roll along here every week, every Thursday, live at 11:30 Pacific, 2:30 Eastern, thank you so much for making this part of your day, part of your work day, part of your work week. We’re here, Mark, almost the end of the month, end of the week, end of the quarter. So for those of you grinding in and out trying to hit your number, best of luck over the next two and a half days. Plenty of time, plenty of time to bring in those numbers.

If you’re watching or listening on demand, thank you so much for downloading, for subscribing. Every episode of Sales Pipeline Radio, always available past, present, and future at www.salespipelineradio.com. Today, super excited to have Mark Nardone, he’s the Chief Marketing Officer for PAN Communications. And thanks for being here, man.

Mark: Yeah, no problem. I think the hair was probably maybe a little bit darker the last time I was on, but that’s all right.

Matt: Mine was probably still non existent. So it’s all good. We continue to age. One of my favorite sayings now is the older I get and the more mistakes I make and then be able to share something that is kind of an experience share or harder and less than that I wish younger Matt would have paid more attention to, or realized was a truth.

That’s a whole other episode, but so many different angles we could take together on this… But I think this concept of storytelling is super interesting to me. And if you think about the different ways we think about storytelling, the story we tell around our brand, the story we tell our prospects to have to hopefully earn some of their attention…

It is budget season as we record this so the story we tell when we’re asking for money, right? Instead of giving a laundry list of like where we’re going to go spend money, what’s the story you’re telling about what you are buying for the organization? And combine that with increased evidence and research, I’m now seeing that Dems indicates that B2B brands are going to reinvest or grow their investment in brand in 2025 and what is brand, if not a story? So we’d love to hear from your perspective– first of all, for the people that don’t know you and don’t know Pan, do a quick introduction there and then how are you thinking about storytelling and brand as we start thinking about next year already?

Mark: Yeah, yeah, sure. So just for the individuals that don’t know us, PAN Communications– actually PAN now, we rebranded a little while ago to just PAN. Kind of started off in the PR industry as an agency and then moved into the brand to demand kind of side of the business.

We focus a lot on telling really great stories working with B2B tech companies and healthcare firms as well on everything at top of funnel to middle of funnel. Starting to get pulled down to the bottom of funnel a little bit more, but. From PR to content marketing to social, a lot of digital activation.

So about 240 employees spread across a few different offices globally. So that’s who we are in a nutshell. Been around for 30 years.

Story. I will tell you it’s important and it’s interesting because what we’re seeing on our end being in the services side of the industry as well as representing a lot of tech, tech brands is second half of the year, we’ve seen an absolute kind of reverse a pattern and double down on inside of brand and brand awareness.

Some of that has to do with the fact that I think there was just a lot of kind of like hesitation and a little bit of concern in the first half of the year. So I think we’re kind of seeing maybe a little bit of the ricochet of second half finish strong, set brand up well for kind of beginning parts of 2025.

And then I think we’re just also seeing just marketers and brands moving to decision a lot quicker. I think when you and I last chatted, Matt, earlier this year, there was just a lot of issues within pipelines, whether it was the pauses, the delays, a lot of movements taking place. And so what comes out of that naturally is the ability for brands to kind of really, really hone into story and narrative, what that looks like, how do they begin it, what does it all kind of encompass?

One of the things that you started talking about was obviously what brand means for business, for product, but also from an experience standpoint. And I think that’s where we’re starting to see more of the brand storytelling start to come to the forefront, which is the experience that customers and the prospects and that industry has both with your brand and with your executive team. So I think it’s a critical component to what’s happening right now. So no surprise on, on brand investment.

Matt: Yeah. It’s interesting. Yesterday, I was in Palo Alto for our client’s– what they call a marketing therapy session.

We had about 70 B2B marketers in for lunch. And we talked about brand and demand together. We talked about this concept of investing in brand. And it was fascinating because a lot of the smaller companies in the room said, we can’t afford to invest in brand. And the bigger companies, including some of the Panelists said, we can’t afford not to, right?

So I think there’s this interesting dichotomy of how different companies, perhaps, based on different sizes or even maybe just maturity of the company, think about and accept the role of brand in driving, not awareness, but having a direct impact on pipeline and revenue as well.

Mark: No question about it. And I think one of the one of the misperceptions out there is based on size of brand determines obviously the levers of investment, budget aside, percentage of investment that you’re making within some of these activities.

We started our agency in the emergent growth, moved to mid to late stage types of brands. So what we start to see is a lot of the formula that emerging growth package, they put a lot of importance on brand, right? They put a ton on top of funnel awareness and what that all means around brand.

Mid stage gets a bit more comfortable with that, right? There’s a lot of things that go on with regards to storytelling and brand. At the mid stage to late stage, there’s a lot of vertical solutions– you might be moving from single product to multiple product. You’ve got business in the US, you’re starting to expand globally.

There’s a lot of things your executive team now moves from maybe one single subject matter expert to four, five, six different subject matter experts. Just think about all of those things that go on in that kind of equation and now wrap story into that. And you might have multiple stories going at once, but where the biggest concern on our end and from a brand standpoint is the inconsistency in telling story across individuals through product, through purpose, through employees;

that becomes a major driving factor in how do you streamline everything? How do you coordinate with teams so that you’re all aligned to the focus of the business? And sometimes that goes off rails quickly, Matt.

Matt: It does. And I think this is why I think it’s important for us to talk about brand in the context of storytelling here.

Because if you say you can’t afford to invest in brand, what I think some people say is I don’t have budget for that. And brand is not billboards on 101 in the valley, but brand is not putting your logo on the side of a race car. If you are good at nailing a story, a story that matters to your customer, a story that aligns with and or enhances their narrative, a story you can be consistent about sharing across your company and across your channels, a good story can take on a life of its own and can mitigate some of the costs of having to buy space. Like you can earn the space in your customer’s mind with a better story.. And I know I’m preaching to the choir here, I don’t know if you got an example or two to showcase this is at the heart of building a strong brand.

Mark: Oh, there’s no doubt. So a couple of things I’ll kind of address here. One is, brands sometimes make the mistake of going too quickly for the growth opportunity and missing the opportunity that’s right in front of them. And I get that growth is the number one driving factor behind, of course, business and brand, but there’s so much more potential at times sitting in front of them with the market that they’re focused in on and they start to dilute their value proposition in that market and start to go off into these other growth areas. And sometimes that might be too soon. And sometimes that just might not be the perfect timing, just in general. So, as we get into that, it’s become a driving factor around why so many clients right now and brands are talking about visiting messaging positioning.

I don’t know about you, Matt, but we’re working with a lot of brands where we’re either starting to do a refinement message positioning, or we’re starting to really start from scratch and rebuild the message positioning architecture, which then starts to really drive a lot of different brand narratives coming out of that.

And I think that for brands today, and this is a perfect time of year to talk about this, Matt– as you evaluate pipeline, as you evaluate what’s going on within sales, as you think about titles that are impacting decisions and or delaying decisions, as you just think about the committees that are going on and what that all looks like, take the time to start to audit and assess what’s happening with the new landscape. What are the competitors doing? What is everybody else looking like from an assessment and an audit? And take some of that research and start to build what could be just a great moment in time for message and positioning beginning in 2025. You know, brands sometimes today just make the mistake that our message is good. You know, it’s been in market for a year. We don’t need to tweak it. We don’t need to adjust it. That’s nonsense. It’s got to be in real time.

Matt: Well, you may be comfortable with your message, but remember that your message does not sit in isolation in the market.

Your message is sitting alongside and competing with countless other messages for the finite amount of time that your prospects and your customers and the decision makers of their organizations have, there is no good enough. And I think you got to continue to look for the ways to improve on that.

Talking today on Sales Pipeline Radio with Mark Nardone. He’s the CMO, Chief Marketing Officer for Pan. And we’re talking about the importance of storytelling as a component of building and managing a strong brand. One of the other topics we covered yesterday at the Palo Alto event was the balance between brand and demand.

And thinking about this sometimes in like just a two by two matrix, right? brand and demand on one axis short term and long term on the other and I tend to think like short term maybe three to six months long term six months to two years plus– a lot of companies very worried about the short term impact and said, okay, it’s the month, end of the quarter, I need to invest in demand.

And too often that short term need to drive demand precludes people from doing the building blocks of building brand as well. I believe there are things you can do short and long term to build that brand and to tell that story. You mentioned starting with just having a fundamentally better story and better message, but what are some of the things that you see companies doing well organically, even short term to start to build the foundation of a long term strong brand?

Mark: Yeah, that’s a great question. As we think through story and from the brand to demand connection that we’re talking about here, how to story-align everywhere throughout the journey of a customer coming into the pipeline.

What does that look like? How do you think of tone, pain point, necessity, and level of importance as they’re coming into the pipeline. I think some of the things we’re starting to see really, really resonate well is, I mean, this is going to be no surprise to everybody listening, but data– data and research.

I mean we’re starting to see some really, really great impact with regards to how story moves through data, how data reverses and tells a really good story. How do you analyze the audience of the prospector or the customer that you’re working with?

And walk in their shoes with regards to, I know Matt’s a major marketer out there. He does a lot of sales. What type of data can I feed you, Matt that kind of gets you to kind of, you know, act with some impact? So we’re looking at that through the lens of short term and long term. So when I think about data in particular, if we’re pulling out this one example, sometimes it’s just, Hey, give me some of the moments that matter in market right now.

Like what’s happening within the next month to two months? How can we jump on a lot of cool trending topics to align data so that we’re able to drive a lot of interesting brand awareness, but we’re also then able to bring that journey for them to come into an experience on our site or in this section of our data and insight section or hub section that says, ha, now I’m all of a sudden looking at annual research programs. Now I’m looking at quarterly research reports. They’re giving me full step In the moment, what’s happening this month with regards to the reaction and markets all the way– give me some more premium research that’s driving this. So data and research is really important and how that moves your story out to media is important.

How that goes across digital channels is really important. How is it sales uses that from an enablement standpoint, decks and everything like that. They just become one of our best options with regards to putting out some conversations and communication to market.

Matt: I’d go as far as to say that I think data may be replacing media as the coin of the realm for marketers in terms of creating differentiation and driving, not just a timeliness, but timeliness with context.

Can you talk a little bit about how intent signals and the data that you have available to you not only helps you shape the story, but also reach the right person at the right time with the story that’s relevant to them?

Mark: Yeah. So let’s just use Pan for a quick example, right? We’ve got a few different reports that we put out, ones around the Brand Experience Report. It’s all the experience that consumers and customers in general having with brand. That’s one angle that we go out with. The other area we look into coming out of that is AI. We might look at sector experience around security and, or healthcare, and how do we use data to go into specific sectors?

And then you look at as we see intent, and we see these triggers of engagement we’re having and some of just the 360 conversation we’ve got coming back around, many marketers that are coming even and looking at PAN are saying how do I know what I’m doing is right?

Am I measuring the right areas? Is my program performing where it should be? So now all of a sudden you see this other angle of content we come out with just reality check and reality check allows a marketer to look and say here’s the reality check of what’s happening today, both with the skillset that I have in my department, as well as the activation programs that I have behind brand. And it gives them this really cool connector around brand experience then over to the reality check. And then the output for that might be– five step guide to really looking at 2025 planning initiatives. How do you measure appropriately? So you go long term brand experience report. Short term, we’re looking at a quarter where we know we’re recapping a year. Measurement becomes really, really critical because they need to look back and look forward around how their programs are performing in market right now.

And we start to put content that’s relevant to the pain point that they might be experiencing as they flow through a quarter. That’s how we treat a lot of the data and a lot of a lot of the content that we’re looking at by quarter.

Matt: Well, it gets even more interesting as you think about the advancement of AI and what that’s going to enable to activate some of those stories in that content.

We’ve talked for years about building our white papers and our ultimate guides to this and that. And we spend a ton of time writing something and then producing it for everybody. Well, what if you could take your core story? What if you could take your core data and create a custom ultimate guide for each and every individual, let alone account, let alone industry, because you can customize the message to them and create something that is intensely, highly relevant on a one on one basis with near infinite scale?

Mark: I have a couple of different point of views on this. Right? I think right now from an AI perspective augmenting human to AI capabilities is really, really important.

I think it’s really, really important to remain transparent. 100%. I think we’re seeing a lot of ricochet around the ethics of AI. I was talking to somebody on the brand side last week and a team that they were using in a specific region was putting out so much AI that the fact checking now came back to them and they started to get hit on reputation.

So you have to be really careful in our world, especially from creators, right? How are we using AI in our everyday function? I always like to tell my team just in general, use it as a thought starter to think through the ideas, use it as a test bed on how that idea is performing, but please make sure that the authentic voice, that typically helps close these deals from a personalization standpoint remains relevant and timely. And don’t be so into the pace game, but rather the quality game. Matt, we could go down that hole where the benefit of AI is tremendous. Nobody’s doubting that, right?

Nobody is doubting what AI potentially can do, but it’s gotta be in a way that’s balanced, authentic, again, very, very transparent or else reputation is going to get hit. I think sometimes the decision makers and, or the audiences that you’re trying to influence might see right through it at times.

Matt: I would agree with you. I saw stats somewhere for a CEO from a tech company, looked and mapped the number of sales email she’s getting in a week and looked at it before ChatGPT and after ChatGPT and she’s getting four times as many sales emails now because it’s easier and faster to write them and your sales target, is just getting inundated with stuff.

Faster and cheaper may solve the seller problem but it makes the buyer problem worse.

How do you break through that? It’s a relationship, it’s a story, it’s being relevant.

Mark: A hundred percent. It is 100 percent definitely on the relationship mapping side of things. I think right now marketing needs to make sure that sales is doing all they can to keep the relationship map in place, bring that data back to marketing so that they’re understanding what’s going on with the relationship mapping that’s happening.

And, I talked to a lot of individuals that run the sales and marketing function. And I know BDRs and teams have quotas to make, but the ability to personalize your message, to take the time to personalize the message, to understand who you’re talking to and what they are feeling right now within the market, their pain, what solution you have, how you can do it…

I think AI becomes a nice component to that, but not the full component to that. It’s not the total solution. I’m not all about getting a hundred emails out in a week. I’m about getting the 20 emails that are really gonna land and that you’re gonna learn from because how are you learning from the hundred that you send that out if that becomes one of your quarters?

My kids are in sales, right? One’s at a really great, large publicly traded tech company and my daughter, just left a career in teaching and went over to an app testing partner company. So both of them, one manages teams, the other’s a BDR. I talked to them the other day. I’m like, so what’s going on in the sales? Like what’s happening there? They’re like, you know, sometimes we don’t have enough assets from marketing to do our job effectively. I’m like, well, do you have that stream of communication going with marketing where you can effectively help, feed what you need? Because you’re on the front lines and you’ve got to be able to be agile and react quickly. And both of them at the same time said, no. Well, there’s still a breakdown there, Matt, right? There’s still this breakdown where you still have to see.

And the other trend we’re starting to see too is marketing reporting to sales. Now, some of that is kind of 50-50, right? Some of it is CMO still kind of owning the role and think hopefully they got a really great relationship going with sales. They’re using a lot of the triggers and the data that they’re seeing on the frontline to help kind of course correct what’s going on in marketing. And then you’ve got a lot of areas where we’re starting to see marketing that’s reporting the sales.

I was just on a call earlier today where they’re like, yep, I got to get this approved. It’s a brand messaging exercise. I got to go to my head of sales.

Matt: Yep. I think there’s a lot to unpack there. I think as B2B sales processes, as the buying journey becomes more complex, as we’re required to collaborate across go to market teams, the level of communication and participation across lines, not just throwing information each other, not just doing jazz hands at sales kickoff, but how do you actually do this on a Tuesday morning, right? Nailing that orchestration becomes more and more important.

Mark: Need to wrap this up a little bit try to keep these usually within 20 minutes so Mark Thank you for being here. My last question to you as we head into Q4 here, what makes you optimistic for 2025? It’s absolutely very simple. What’s happened in our business in the last three months, and again, marketing is a leading indicator of what happens from an economy standpoint moving forward, we’ve seen a tremendous amount of progress, both in decision making, and the amount of investment that’s going into a lot of different activation strategies across digital, across earned media, across owned properties.

You know, if you would have talked to me back in June, I’d be like, man, Matt, I don’t know. This is going to be a tough year ahead of us. I don’t think so. I think post election, I think you’re going to see a lot happening. There’s a lot of good indicators, interest rates being dropping down. You see Tomo Bravo, you see KKR coming up, these massive funds directed right at the mid market.

I mean, who would have thought that, right? I think that’s going to fuel a tremendous amount of optimism next year. So I’m pretty bullish on next year. I think we’re getting some good signals right now that next year is going to be a really, really good year for marketing.

Matt: Yeah. We are as well starting to see and not just anecdotally, but also seeing some data and some research and some optimism from the investors as well as other parts of the market.

So yeah, fingers crossed, but definitely see things moving things move in that direction.

Mark Nardone. Thanks for joining us, man. I appreciate you being here.

Mark: Good seeing you, buddy.

Matt: Great thanks everyone for joining us today. We’ll see you next week on another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio. Until then, take care. Happy selling.