SalesTechStar Interview with Evan Liang, CEO and Co-Founder, LeanData: All About LeanData’s New Buying Groups

Evan Liang, CEO and Co-Founder, LeanData shares more on LeanData’s New Buying Groups in this SalesTech chat:

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Hi Evan, tell us about yourself and what inspired the LeanData Platform, how has it evolved over the years?

My career journey probably doesn’t follow a typical tech founder. I have an engineering background, but joined a VC firm called Battery Ventures straight out of college. There, I got to listen to people pitch business ideas all day. This helped me find my passion for entrepreneurship and led me on a path to being an owner.

However, before starting my own business, I knew I needed more practical experience so I worked at Microsoft, Ebay, and others.

During the early days of marketing automation, I worked as VP of Product and a general manager for Caring.com.

We bought Marketo, brought it in-house, but didn’t have any marketing automation specialists to run the platform. For months, we couldn’t get it up and running. So, that’s when I looked into the problem set and realized in order to have marketing automation integrating with Salesforce, there were issues with processes and data that had to be fixed.

It took us six to nine months to solve the pain points, but we saw a lot of payoffs from it. As marketing automation really took off, that’s when I realized other companies must be going through the same challenges.

I met with one of my VC mentors, pitched the idea, connected with a great cofounder, Kelvin Cheung, and became an entrepreneur.

The first LeanData product was primarily a deduping solution. However, as we worked with our customers to understand their pain points, we expanded into lead-to-account matching, routing, and meeting scheduling. Today, the LeanData platform is a revenue orchestration tool that sits within your marketing and sales tech stack, capturing signals, triggering plays, and increasing speed to response at scale.

Some of our customers call us the “quarterback” or “connective tissue” of their tech stack.

Take us through LeanData’s new Buying Groups initiative and how it enables modern B2B SaaS sellers and marketers?

LeanData’s recent innovations reflect what I see as the next evolution of ABM: a Buying Groups motion.

We’ve noticed that for many of our customers, their buyer is not one person, but a buying committee made up of multiple departments, roles, and personas. As a result, the traditional lead-centric model and account-based strategies aren’t as effective.

However, most B2B sellers’ revenue engines are set up to identify, nurture, and sell to leads. They’re not engineered to identify buying groups and focus on opportunities, not to mention nurture the buying group successfully from inquiry to close.

As a result, LeanData launched two new products in September that help companies operationalize marketing and sales plays around buying committees and opportunities rather than leads and accounts.

We’ve watched some of our customers run pilot programs of Buying Group motions and achieve pretty amazing results in pipeline progression, conversion rates, Closed Won rates, and revenue.

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In a competitive and budget conscious market like the one of today, what should sales and marketing teams be aligning more on to drive impact and create better sales and marketing experiences?

I think the most important thing sales and marketing teams can do to stay aligned is to be working as one team. At the end of the day, they’re only successful when they close deals together.

It’s too easy to focus on siloed metrics where one team looks better than the other, but in reality, you either both fail or you’re both successful.

Next, there must be alignment around ICP and who they’re targeting. I also believe both teams need to work together to ensure a healthy pipeline per rep and focus on quality leads that help sales reps hit their full quota.

And last, sales and marketing teams must be open to regularly identifying problems, experimenting with solutions, and making incremental improvements. If something isn’t working, both sides need to raise their hand and speak up rather than covering up problems. Trust is huge.

I like the example shown by the Japanese auto industry where instead of high volume, they focus on quality and efficiency. When a car comes down the assembly line, if someone sees a defect, they’re told to stop the entire line. They diagnose the problem right there. Any and every employee can stop the line.

That’s actually where the name LeanData comes from, the Japanese model of lean manufacturing.

Metaphorically stopping the line helps teams find more creative solutions. That’s the best way to implement continuous improvement.

Can you talk about some of the most innovative sales processes used by B2B SaaS brands of late and the key takeaways for our readers from those references?

As I touched on earlier, I believe the next evolution of ABM is an Opportunity-focused go-to-market motion based in Buying Groups.

In this motion, marketing teams focus on identifying members of the buying committee and engaging with all of them. Then, as marketing creates and qualifies a Buying Group, the group is placed into an Opportunity and sent to the sales team. The Opportunity object is like a container tied to a solution.

I’ve watched some of our customers like Palo Alto Networks, TechTarget and others increase Closed Won rates, improve conversion rates, and grow more revenue with this strategy.

It’s actually not the most innovative sales process, but technology did not support Buying Groups motion at scale until now.

What about today’s latest salestech innovations and especially AI powered salestech from around the world most interests you?

In regards to AI-powered tech, I think it’s important to separate the hype from the reality. AI is good for some things like summarizing and automating low level tasks.

However, I’m not one to believe that AI is replacing workers — like SDRs. AI can make SDRs faster, allowing them to work on more value-added tasks. For example, at LeanData our SDRs use AI for call recording summaries. But, we really want our SDRs to focus on human touches, things that AI can’t do.

Five salestech and martech platforms you’d like to shout out to before we wrap up?

I think Cognism is doing a great job in EMEA. While new signal vendors like UserGems and Boomerang are helpful for customer virality plays. And last, companies like Nooks and Orum are automating interesting things for sales teams.

Read More: The Role of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) in Sales Funnel Metrics