Stuart Dale, Founder of OrbitalX, leads a conversation focused on how the buyer journey has changed, with most decisions happening before prospects ever engage with sales. It stresses the importance of brand consistency, long-term narratives, and aligning marketing with sales to cut through the noise. Practical takeaways include improving audience quality, rebalancing content toward thought leadership, and using signals—large and small—to guide outreach and accelerate growth.

back to the Growth Workshop Podcast with myself, Matt Best and Jonny Adams, and continued discussion with Stuart Dale. Stuart, I was with a client yesterday. We're talking about, you've got a target market. You've got a target persona. You know, who you want to speak to. How can you craft something that's going to apply to that person on multiple different levels to cut through the noise? So let's say, for example, you work with someone, someone said, this is fantastic. I'm gonna go and get all of this technology, and I'm going to be really, really deliberate about the way that I'm going to going to target this market. I've got this great new opportunity. I'm getting way more through. As that scales up, there is more and more of that noise. How do you cut through, through that? I think you shared a statistic with me, just just offline, which is, you know, the buying journey used to be 30 days, and now it's Yeah. Now it's 12 months, yeah. So how do we navigate that

in the context of making sure that we're pointing in the right direction with the right things?

Yeah, I think that that, that big shift is, previously 80% of the buyer journey was guided by the AE and the SDR. So you would have a call to learn, and then they would maybe challenge you using framework that you guys would help implement to like, guide you on that journey of what the required solution is for them. But what the research now says is that 80% of the journey is happening before they even tell you who they are, and that's because of things like chat, GPT and Claude, making it easier to aggregate information in some of these communities through things that we call dark social, which is basically, where are there commentaries or discussions taking place that you can't track and attribute. So think about like WhatsApp groups. Somebody's like, Oh, who's the best ex? And in London, like, there's people that are talking sharing information, they then go and look at your your your website, before they tell you who they are, and they're building up this

knowledge, and they're then coming onto the call much more informed. And that's why, like, kind of, what we spoke about earlier, is is so important, like the thought leadership and and getting your story out there, because what, what you can ultimately do is start driving that core narrative and start educating your audience that this is a problem that they should actually prioritize and solve today. And something that we spoke about was that the issue that we see time and time again is that businesses come up with a narrative, they come up with a marketing campaign or a marketing program, and they launch it, and specifically in B to B, they get sick of it themselves before their audience has even noticed that it's happened. And I think it's like it takes 12 times of seeing something before you even recognize that it's something that you should consider prioritizing. And in B to C, right? Like, who's one of your favorite brands, and B to C, who comes to mind, we think about, like,

Nike, right? What's, what's their coordinate, what's their what's their slogan,

Just do it.

Right? They've never changed it.

Put me under test, you have.

Well, they might have changed at some point, but that's a narrative they've owned. They've owned for years, and they will do ads that just show the tech would just do it, because that's brand, right? Show me equivalents in B to B that aren't just a handful of times. It's like, who is owning that? And what's been super interesting is you see companies like HubSpot going through Glasgow airport, flying back to London. What did I see? I saw HubSpot advertising, and it was, the message was something like, spend more time in the lounge. And I thought it's genius, right? It's like, Yeah, I do want to spend more time alone. I don't want to be in my CRM figuring out or spreadsheets, doing this, that and the next thing. And, like, broken this, broken that. And that was one of the first times in the UK that I've seen a B to B brand really just own a branding exercise, rather than thinking, Oh, well, you know, We're the fastest CRM in the world. It's like

nobody cares when they're about to go through the airport.

Yeah, and is that just because of a? Is that a maturity thing? Is that just because in B to B, it's been about going right back to the beginning of our conversation, it's been about features, and organizations think they need to sell the features because their buyer is buying features, versus in a B to C context, where you've maybe got to, yeah, approach it differently is, is that what it is?

They say B to C marketing is, well, they say five years ahead of B to B. I think it's probably closer to 10 years. So what you're seeing in B to C, the way that they're using user generated content on Instagram, on Tiktok, like their year their light years ahead of B, ahead of B to B. Why? I think there's two major reasons. One, we're a little bit more hesitant. We've got maybe a little bit more feeling that our brand is maybe more important than it is. And I think the second one is resource, you know, to hire a mid level marketer in New York, it cost you $100,000 York will cost you $100,000 in the UK, and the UK and London cost you 50, 60,000 then to go and hire the disciplines you need to execute at the speed that you need to be able to like do this. It could be another 910, 11 skill set. So your burns up at like five, 600,000 and the bit that's really. Messed up about B to B marketing is that the average tenure of CMOS is like 1819, months. And what that

does is it forces marketers to make short sighted decisions on how they build demand. Right? They spend more money on bottom funnel, PPC ads, which, by the way, for paid ads, is getting more expensive. So even if you previously got 100 demos for 100 grand a year, you're now probably getting 70, right? So everything's being compressed. And the bit that's like just ridiculous when you think about it, is that most enterprise selling probably takes six months from qualified deal to close, maybe even 12 months. But if you looked at the data, it's probably 12 to 24 months of previous touch points before somebody's got to the place, especially in enterprise sales, right before they even decide that they want to meet you. Yet we're putting CMOS in a place where they are expected within a 12 month period to transform your pipeline. And it is insane, because it just the maths doesn't add up. We've got all these super intelligent board you know, board members and CEOs, but they're

turning around to the CMO and going, Well, why don't we have more deals coming in? And it's like, because the buying, the discovery journeys longer than I've been here, and it's like, and that's the, I think, the major issue that is going on right now in B to B, it's like, we're not allowing these programs to build and to compound and to like, own, own the market, we're firing CMOS far too quickly, and we're just making short sighted decisions that ultimately is killing, killing, killing your brand, because whilst you're focused on feature and function, there will be somebody out there that is owning top of funnel, with Thought Leadership, with delivering amazing, useful content, being the educator, inspiring people and CMOS need to have more freedom to be the creative marketers that they ultimately are to solve this problem.

It just reminds me, and I was, as you described, that I just think that everyone in the world seems to be wanting an immediate hit of something, an immediate outcome. So, so if we think about what, what we want. We want something now. We want something tomorrow. If you're an investor, you don't want to wait 12 months. You can't wait 12 months. You know, I was thinking about football. Then I was thinking about the Premier League. How long are these contracts for these Premier, premiership managers? Now, they used to be five years. They went down to three. Now they're at like, 18 months. So what's the solution? Then, if you're only gonna give CMOs 19 months, but we know that the brand narrative needs to stick for up to 12 months. Like, is it the fact that you know, because capital is going to be the one that actually takes control over the most? Have you got any ideas, Stuart?

Yeah. Like, I think it's like, one of the things that we see great CMOS do is, like, before you deliver a plan, it's like, make sure the whole business and your C suite and the board understand the mechanics of it, right? So it's like, for example, they talk about working bottom up. So it's like, this is where we need to be. These are the inputs. These are the things that we've got high degree of confidence in, for example, our close rate, or our ability to move our first meeting to qualified pipeline. These are the unknowns, right? Currently, our spend is here, which is like 70% on feature and function, and over the last 12 months, the return of that spend has dropped by 20% so we need to change that. Does everybody agree? And everyone's like, yeah, we agree. We need to change that. Or you need to give me 20% more budget to maintain that same cost, and it's like everybody has to come on that journey, and everybody has to, like, buy into what the plan is. Now,

if a marketer can't execute against the plan, that's a whole different story. They probably deserve to be fired. But if it's the plan is being executed on, and everything's compounding, the signals are moving in the right direction. You're getting more followers on LinkedIn. You're driving more engagement on your website. Yeah, it might not materially drive revenue today, but it's the foundations of where your business is ultimately going. And I think, like one of the interim plays that, I think again, some of the more successful businesses that we work with are pushing, is what's the split of new business versus expansion revenue? And I think previously, it was maybe 80% new business. Percent new business than 20% expansion. For the first time ever, I've heard about a software company that their new business target is lower than expansion, even though the expansion team has significantly less headcount. And it's like, for marketers, it's like, 111, great example

is like, I think it's something like 95% of content is produced to help build net new pipeline. What happens if you produce 95% of your content to expand existing accounts? What would happen? How quickly would you grow? And I think that's like, some of the things that are, like, more tactical, but super high impact that gives you the revenue still coming in, and like, more short term period, whilst you're building brand over the top.

Yeah, and emphasizing your point at the start of that response, which is coming back to strategy. And one of the things that we at SBR, Matt and I do a lot of work with is actually binding together the functions that create that strategy in the first place. It's not just marketing, it's not just sales, it's not just rev ops, it's not just products. And. Is a combination of all and we're really fortunate. You know, we get, we get to meet. You know, we've worked with over 1000 organizations. We get to meet probably 30 to 40 a year. And when you ask, you know, how well connected are those functions? We don't talk to marketing until and we don't talk to sales. So the combination of that setting a clear strategy might actually mitigate that, that 19 month cycle, actually, the CRO that gets let go between 11 to 14 months might mitigate that, that challenge, because fundamentally, what a business wants is it wants to achieve its growth and its outcome. So

functional alignment. Any any thoughts on that from your side?

Yeah, yeah. It's a super point. I think, out of everything you could do tactically, if you're not aligned as a business and all clear on the goal, it implodes. And I know you had Alex ollie on on here, he talks about all bound. It's not about Inbound, it's not about just a line that it's all it's all working together, and we're all moving in the right direction. And I think, like the the bit that is interesting, even if you just think about marketing and sales or marketing. And BD is often marketing or on a narrative that sales completely disagree with. It's like, marketing think we're this, but sales are like bullshit, like we're not that. We're we're this, and this is why we're because this is what we're hearing every day. We're getting beat up on calls. This is who we actually are. And like, one of the one of the really simple hacks, that's something that we do religiously with our clients. No marketing program can be agreed without a salesperson involved. And

it's simple, but it's so high impact, because if the seller is there going, it's just not the reality, right? Marketing may be like, ah, it feels uncomfortable. It's like, well, what is the reality? And you typically find a middle ground. But the really big outcome is that the seller then goes and tells the team guys, super awesome piece of content coming, or this amazing webinar, this amazing podcast, is going to talk to this. And they're like, hallelujah. This is the problem that we face every day. And it's like that type of alignment, I think, is like, so, so critical to the overall success of what goes on.

And going back to that sort of putting some of these signals together. I mean, I've literally come up with this in the last 30 seconds as you were talking. You guys can judge, you know, you think about the funnel there, right? So you've built, you've built your narrative. It goes to the sales the sales team are having conversations. It's, it's caught by conversational analytics, and then the consumer uses it, and then what you do is you loop back to do some voice of the customer, and you can do that through, you know the AES, you know the account expansion team, right? You've captured all of that content. Surely, there's a way of connecting all those signals from market intent to conversations, just to draw that line, to solidify the silos 100% but why can't we solve that problem with silos to get the narrative?

100% you can. And I think the bit again, like this, some that Alex Ollie told me is that the opportunity is then when you close the deal right, and you've got super happy customer, because they've just signed the deal, and it's like, when they're most happy, it's like, hey, like, I know you requested the demo seven months ago. Can you tell me when you first heard about us, like, when, like, put your mind, and it's like, you know what? I listened to a podcast that your founder was on in 2020 right? And it's like, that's the example where, if we've got that consistent narrative, like these discussions and the content we're putting out is connected to the journey, and crucially, we can attribute back to it and actually say that whilst it was the PPC click on Google that was attributed to the demo that closed the deal. It was that podcast we can six months ago because we didn't see any ROI. That was actually the driver for them to sign the biggest deal we've

ever had, and we're buying this vacuum of more. Oh, well, what should we do next? It's like...

Wait. Be Patient. I've got to come back to because what that reminds me of, is your the necklace analogy earlier Stuart, which is like, you know, the same message is being delivered underneath all of these things, with little bits of nuance and little specific areas in different ways that all the beads around the necklace, but the necklace remains the same. So therefore the audience then says, Actually, my association is with the co founder podcast that links to the the Google ad. That's like, that gets me to click totally but if you change that all of the time, then that association is never happening in our audience's mind.

Simple, simple, like view, right? Is like, let's imagine your change as a software company. You're changing your narrative, like who you are every few months. And I think there's definitely a period in the equation where you should be, but like that tagline of who you are, what you stand for, if a typical buying journey is at least 12 months now, what happens when they first hear about you come onto the website and associate, yeah, this is the partner that's going to solve this problem. They then go away, and they're dealing with their OKRs for that quarter. And then it's the next set of OKRs. Of OKRs. They're like, yeah, we need to come back and speak to Company X, and they come on the website. It looks like they're doing something completely different, you know. And what you thought was important they might like, or what you thought was not important might be the thing that they thought was important. And the beauty of it is, is that some people might be like,

Well, I don't know what our core now. Narrative is that's okay. Like, that is absolutely okay. One, one choice you have is like, test, some, test, some simultaneously, test it with your ads. Like, what is it that people are engaging with? What is it that that people are downloading in your content? What is it that the sellers say people respond to? There's also amazing tools out there now, like, what one's called Winter, where you can actually deliver a request from your target audience in a research model where you basically come up your questions and you pay a credit for CMOS or CROs or head of sales to answer the questions, and it's like a really great service to help inform some of your assumptions on what your narrative actually are. And you're compounding it within 30 days rather than taking two years. But I would say like, the key point is own it and then commit to it. And your stories can still change, but the core narrative remains central and core to

what you're doing.

So Stuart one of the things I'm quite conscious of these days, and as a consumer, we love it, right? Because we go into Google and just type something in and go tell me who I should talk to about this, but just in the context of what we've talked about so far. And like cutting through the noise, how do you make sure your name's on the list?

Yeah, it's, it's, it's a big shift. So basically, what's happened is, where you previously had Google ads, that would be number one, number two, number three, and you could bid for that. Now the LLM is not using paid. It's aggregating information from the internet that it considers to be the most relevant and the most topical. So if your budget is heavily reliant on paid, it's like it's a big shift. The thing that's clear is that what the llms are prioritizing is third party validation. So think about PR. Think about trade news. Think about like, where your story exists, like, you know, you've got another partner that talks about your business, and what you what you do that is where the llms currently are prioritizing showing business X over business y. And if you don't have a PR strategy, one of the, one of the things to consider is, I wouldn't, I wouldn't recommend going and finding a PR agency and painting around a month for it, because I don't

think that's the solution. It would be search. The question that you think people are searching right? That's the starting point,

Genius, by the way. That's where I'd start. Thank you, Stuart.

Every best consulting company does this right. Look at how the LLM is, is, is prioritizing, and it's important that you don't just use open AI if that's who you currently use. Think about Gemini. Think about Claude. Like there's five or six that own probably 90% of the traffic. So that's where I would search. Look at who's then being ranked. Click into it because it's it now sources it and indexes it, click into and look at the publication, then look at what the content is. And then think yourself, okay, how could we, how could we be positioned there? This is going to be like an incredibly exciting next phase of for, you know, for for competing in this world, but certainly like understanding the the places that are being indexed, and asking yourself, How do you get in? There would be, would be the recommendation.

Contextually, so say, for example, you don't, don't hire the PR agency. So is it, what are those things that you can do? Because I love the fact that you say, third party validation, social proof, is really crucial. Is it? Is it having 60 case studies on your on your website, that's going to be helpful. Is it the fact that you can get into Forbes, and there's a little snippet saying orbital X or SBR consulting, just a couple?

I think it's it's actually less like when you look at the analysis of what llms are prioritizing webs, your own website is typically one that they really want to stay away from, because they know that you're indexing the news that you want to be indexed.

more things like industry news. So it's not even about Forbes. It's probably like, for example, if you sell into furniture, it's like furniture retailer week. Or, you know, it's things where there's a high level of highly qualified audience engaging with it going, yeah, that's, you know, love this. I think that's the starting point. And then the other one is, they're utilizing a lot from places like YouTube for, like, user generated content. So like most brands currently don't have a kind of influence, or specifically in B to B and B to C, 99% of them normally do. But user generated content, which is a person that the LLM, you know, distinguishes as not being bound to your business, talking about your business with views and posts and engagement, again, is some of the places that they're then indexing. But to be honest, and like to caveat, like these things are changing so rapidly, like the LLM can make a change. So what's relevant today could be completely

It's first person validation. Then, right?

irrelevant tomorrow. Yeah. So it's just like, you know, keep reading about it, keep learning about it.

Don't put everything on black, but just spread your bets a little bit at the moment and but just be aware of it. Be conscious, and just apply a few tweaks and tailoring tool to that point.

And I think that probably leads nicely then into into our last question for you really today, Stu which is, I. In the interest of not putting everything on black, like, what are the three things just we've had a fantastically rich conversation. You've given us some really great insight and advice for the audience. But whether you're a CMO, a sales director, a marketing manager, you know, wherever you are, board member listening to this podcast, what are the three things that in priority order that you'd recommend people start to think about based on our conversation today?

Yeah, look, I think the first one is just make sure you're really confident on the audience that you're trying to build your demand and revenue around. Like, that's the starting point, and it's just like, look inwards. Look at your CRM, look at the list that you're targeting, and say to myself, like, is this a really good list, or is it okay? If it's okay, just get it to really good. And there's loads of easy ways to do that, through Google, LinkedIn, whatever that may be. So it's like, just make sure your audience is right. The second one is, am I proud of the story that we're telling? If you were to look at the last six months of content that you've been pushing out, just ask yourself how much of it has been feature and function versus narrative versus thought leadership, and try and just get a healthier split. If, right now it's 90% feature and function and only 10% thought leadership, try and get to 20% thought leadership, like just some small steps to

build that up and challenge your own your own beliefs, like ask your customers, how would you describe us? What do you think we what would you say we stand for? If you were trying to come up with a Nike slogan for us, what would it be? So they talk about outward in, rather than inward, out, like go out to get the inward learnings, rather than just relying everything on you. The third one is execution, like with AI and llms and technology in general, your ability to execute far faster on programs, on outbound, on expansion strategies, is a lot easier. And if you look outwards and look at the technologies and think to yourself, like, what could we do better? What could we leverage the benefit of that execution and executing faster with a better story and a better audience is naturally, you're going to drive more signals, which should then drive more meetings and more revenue, and that can all be packaged up in a way that even if that takes a few months to kind of

work towards, I think the bit that's really important is there's so many things that you could just do tomorrow to just be a little bit better, like even on the signal piece. I know it sounds like a big complex, well, it's not you complex, but there's a lot of moving parts. It's like just start with something simple, like, look at your followers on LinkedIn and ask yourself, have I reached out to them all? Look at the last people that have viewed your profile. Have I reached out to them? Have I sent a voice note to try and book a meeting to learn more? And that's a signal, but it's just using that to be a little bit more intelligent in your outreach to ultimately hit your goals. And, you know, as we said at the start, like this is the start of this new wave. So even some small steps like that put you probably in the top percentile of businesses that are using it.

Yeah, I advocate that. I think one of the statements I've always lived by is, you know, Albert E Grays, which is the common denominator of success, is doing the things that other people don't like to do, yeah. And fundamentally, what you're describing there is, there's so many people that aren't doing this. If you could be that person that's in that 1% then you're actually like to differentiate yourself in the market, win more market share and actually be tactically more advanced.

And I think the key takeaway for me here is, yes, there's so much technology, there's so much sophistication you can bring in, but you can do some small stuff tomorrow. You said there, Stuart, just look on your LinkedIn. Look at your followers. I'm sitting here thinking, when did I last do that?

You haven't got any followers.

On that note. Brilliant, Stuart. Thank you so much for coming in today and joining us on the growth workshop podcast. It's been hugely insightful. Loads of fantastic examples and some really great advice for our audience. So we really appreciate you taking the time out, and we've already enjoyed the conversation today.

Thank you so much. It was great.