Ep. 149 - The Buyer Has Changed—Why Haven’t You? How Splashmetrics Delivers the Experience Buyers Actually Want

Guest: Steve Brothers, CEO of Splashmetrics

With 77% of millennial buyers avoiding sales interactions until they’ve already made a purchase decision, buyers are consistently clear about what they need: fast, personalized, and self-directed answers. 

Yet vendors stubbornly stick to outdated practices, forcing buyers into their processes rather than meeting them where they are.

In this episode of SaaS Backwards, Steve Brothers, CEO of Splashmetrics, explores how modern B2B buyers are reshaping the sales process—and how many vendors are failing to adapt. 

He discusses how Splashmetrics bridges this gap by enabling companies to deliver tailored, interactive content journeys that put buyers in control while providing sales with critical insights to close deals more effectively.

Key Takeaways:

1. The buyer is in control: Buyers prefer to self-educate, completing 80% of their research before engaging with sales. Vendors must adapt or risk irrelevance.
2. Outdated models kill opportunities: Relying on traditional MQL-driven processes results in 95% of SDR outreach being ignored.
3. TheSplashmetrics solution: The platform allows buyers to “choose their own adventure,” and bridges the sales-marketing divide to create a truly buyer-centric experience.

This episode is a wake-up call for companies still stuck in yesterday’s playbook.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Steve Brothers Splashmetrics Audio Podcast
• 20:46 Marker

Transcript

Jason Myers: Welcome to SaaS Backwards, a podcast that helps revenue leaders at SaaS companies to enhance growth and achieve greater profitability. Today's guest is Steve Brothers. He's the founder and CEO of Splashmetrics, the world's first AI driven selling platform for today's self serve B2B buyers.

Steve, welcome to the podcast. 

Steve Brothers: Thanks for having me, Jason. 

Jason Myers: So before we dig in, can you talk a little bit more about the genesis behind Splashmetrics and maybe what you're up to now currently? 

Steve Brothers: Sure. So, I personally come out of the agency world. Had an agency here in, Austin called Watershed 5 for about 20 years.

Steve Brothers: and our focus, we work for a lot of enterprise clients like CA Technologies and Symantec. And what we were doing was building 

Steve Brothers: kind of 

Steve Brothers: sales enablement, interactive personalized content for these companies. And so doing that kind of put us between the marketing and sales departments and It really kind of let us see a lot of the same pain points over and over and over again, but also seeing kind of the, embrace of this kind of content by their customers, really showed me that there was something here.

Steve Brothers: And so what we did is decided to build a platform to provide the tools. to allow others to kind of build this kind of content, and think through these content driven by our journeys much more easily, and quickly and affordably. And so that's, that's where Splashmetrics came from. And then where we're going now, again, we're, we're really focusing with the, you know, kind of onslaught of AI.

Steve Brothers: I think what's very different about our platform, in that respect is you see a lot of kind of AI chat bots out there, you know, kind of promoting themselves to be that SDR role and that's fine. But what we're doing is going all the way back to using your go to market strategy. Directly to build this content for your buyers.

Steve Brothers: And the reason that's important is because it lets you test your go to market strategy directly against how that's working with your buyers in self serve buying. So we're creating kind of this new role, new way of measuring, that go to market against those results. And that's where we're taking Splashmetrics in the future.

Jason Myers: So you mentioned the self serve buyer, let's back up just a bit and talk about how you've seen that, rise, and how that's changed the traditional customer journey. 

Steve Brothers: Yeah, I mean, I I think it's fundamentally changed everything about go to market. And the reason for that is, if you look at statistics, today, about 77% of millennial buyers want zero interaction with a sales rep.

Steve Brothers: Until they've made the purchase decision, right? Another stat that's really important is that by the time these buyers engage with any business the very first touch, they've already done about 80% of their pre purchase research, right? So they're already in your sales pipeline, but they want to don't want to speak to sales.

Steve Brothers: How do you sell them? So this is self serve buying you need to provide them a way to get the information they need that a sales rep would otherwise give them, but you need to provide that through content, through the interactions that they can work with the content. The content personalizes to them answers their specific questions as they move through it.

Steve Brothers: So this really changes not only what content is and what it does, but I think it changes the marketing and sales operations fundamentally all the way through. I think the advantage is we've been through kind of the ABM era where we saw much better alignment between marketing and sales. and now we're what I would say in the GTM era of really taking that to the next step. But to your point, I think this self serve buying as we've just described it, really will accelerate that alignment and bringing all of your operations and making it truly buyer centric for these self serve buyers. 

Jason Myers: Yeah, we talk a lot about when somebody comes to your website, that is a potential prospect, you've got to answer the questions that they're asking themselves.

Jason Myers: And when I look at websites or SaaS websites to review for messaging and all that kind of stuff, I rarely see, marketers doing this well. So what do you think is the biggest disconnect? Why, why is that? 

Steve Brothers: Speaking like 30000ft level, I think the disconnect, as I've seen, you mentioned many times, is we're still operating on a 20 year old model, right?

Steve Brothers: So both marketing and sales. Are still going through what we've done forever. Buyers are not, they don't care about the operations, right? Buyers care about what you just said. Give me the answers I need specifically and quickly. so that I think is really, what's changing. But another thing, another way to think about it and the way we try to think about it is you just mentioned, you know, coming to a website.

Steve Brothers: That another problem our operations are causing is we put all of the work on the buyer and what we're doing with Splashmetrics is instead of sending these buyers to a website, bring them into that customized content journey that you've done the work to build specifically for them, their role in the company, their industry vertical.

Steve Brothers: So that they're having this bespoke kind of concierge sales service. that's what they're looking for. So I think it changes a lot of kind of fundamental ways that we need to think about both marketing, but also sales. 

Jason Myers: Yeah, I don't want to simplify it too much, but kind of what you're doing is like choose your own adventure

Jason Myers: if you're a buyer, right? That's right. 

Jason Myers: That's 

Jason Myers: right. How do you prepare content for those different cohorts or buyers to be able to serve up before you get into the technology? How do we prepare for something like that? 

Steve Brothers: Well, I think most businesses that are successful are already doing much of this work.

Steve Brothers: In other words, good business is already doing good GTM planning, right? Defining that ICP, who are our buyers? What are our personas under those? What are their general needs and what are our solutions for those needs, right? We're building all of that information. but typically the way that we're doing it is.

Steve Brothers: You know, whiteboarding it, spreadsheets, flow charts, and it's all of that is completely separate from the actual execution of that sales conversation with the buyer. So that I think is one of our biggest hurdles. in the way that we've always worked, it takes a lot of time, especially as an enterprise.

Steve Brothers: If you're trying to communicate a plan, Like that across multiple divisions, departments. I mean, that's months and months of work, right? So 

Steve Brothers: I just think 

Steve Brothers: there's a real disconnect between the way we think about the buyer against the way that we operate and execute that conversation with the buyer. And that's a huge critical gap.

Steve Brothers: And one last stat I'll point out that I think proves that is, you know, today's buyers ignore 95% Of an SDRs efforts, those emails, those calls. We all know nobody deals with those. So when you think about just that problem alone, that sales and marketing divide, we always talk about throwing MQLs over that fence is a huge waste of money.

Steve Brothers: it's easily fixable if we can really bridge that divide with these customer journeys we're talking about. So hopefully that answers your question. 

Jason Myers: It does. And I want to delve into that a little bit further because I recently wrote an article about moving away from the predictable revenue models and how to do that.

Jason Myers: I think a lot of companies are kind of stuck because they've made a lot of investments in that format, and they're trying to retrofit today, with a buyer that's just not having it. Yes, that's right. but they don't know what to do differently. 

Steve Brothers: And, and, you know, I, I would say.

Steve Brothers: All of the seeds are already there. Everyone talks about buyer centric marketing and sales. So we're already thinking that way, but you've put your finger on it. It's, we've got to change the operational mindset in order to meet this demand of what today's buyers want and make it truly buyer centric.

Jason Myers: That's a great topic to kind of go down that rabbit hole too, because a buyer centric, everybody likes to say that they're buyer centric, but then they do things like, put, get a demo right in the hero when it's in the upper left hand corner and then repeat it out through the page. they don't give me anything that I can look at without talking to a sales person.

Jason Myers: They may have like pricing up there, but you know, ultimately I got to talk to sales. so they may think that they're being buyer centric, but what they're actually doing is still trying to control the sales process as much as possible. 

Steve Brothers: That's right. And they're doing it for themselves, right? In other words, like you just said, we've invested in this machine that we need to run in our way, but you're making the buyer pay for that.

Steve Brothers: And that is the fundamental problem. 

Jason Myers: how do you solve that in an organization that is pretty well funded in the predictable revenue model? 

Steve Brothers: I think it's going to be kind of a 1 bite at a time to eat the elephant. you know, change is always difficult and and slow. I think, you know, smaller companies are much more agile and

Steve Brothers: you know, the mid market is, is able to make those kinds of moves obviously much more quickly than enterprise. But the bottom line is, look at what's working and what is not. And again, these statistics that I've thrown out, that 77% is not coming. It's here. And to, you know, to give you a sense of that growth,

Steve Brothers: a year and a half ago, it was 44%. So, you know, this is this is here. We have to deal with it. And when you look at the ROI of 95% of your efforts being ignored, I think any CEO is going to look at that and say, okay, we need to make changes. So, you know, I think the luxury of waiting is over in our opinion.

Steve Brothers: especially when you look at it against a bottom line. 

Jason Myers: what have been some of the results with the clients you've worked with when they've implemented this and tell me what it looks like after they change it as well, right? Like, give me a vision. 

Steve Brothers: Sure, so, with CA and Broadcom, Symantec, some of these other enterprises, so some of the immediate results that we saw, I mentioned this kind of planning

Steve Brothers: process. we went through that with them before we had built the platform, manually doing kind of the traditional meet with each product team, build a creative brief, you know, start building the content off of that. That process took 14 months. we built, the planning component of Splashmetrics and implemented that with them and brought that process down to 6 weeks.

Steve Brothers: So an 85 percent reduction in the amount of time to get to market. So that was that was a very big deal for them. also the engagement with this kind of content. if you think about, you know, what you're used to is going to a company's website, and you have to go into their resource library and find PDFs that may apply to you, right?

Steve Brothers: That's the work we're making buyers do. Well, when we presented these journeys, these content journeys, as I'm talking about, to CA's buyers, engagement with that content went up 800% because, again, they were able to interact with it, get the answers they needed to take back to their buying committees, and then, really, one of the most important things across all of our customers, Is that, this content is driving this buyer specific data directly into the sales team into the CRM. And so you're able to see exactly what my pain points are as I interact with this content and tell you this is what I struggle with. The content that is then automatically serving up answers to those questions and those those challenges and then sales is getting all of that information on the back end.

Steve Brothers: So that conversations happening now through content. Sales knows what's going on. So when I'm ready to reach out to them, they can close those deals. So all of that really starts to work much more effectively across any size business. and we've been able to show up to a 7x increase in ROI with self serve buying using Splashmetrics. And that sounds really big, but if you think about it, what the self serve motion itself is doing is reducing the amount of content you need to push out.

Steve Brothers: One asset of ours can serve up multiple, versions of that content for your different buyers, right? So much less content to create, manage, You're getting all of that data to your sales team, much more efficient. Our sales cycles are much smaller because the buyer is moving through our pipeline themselves.

Steve Brothers: So all of that really starts a flywheel effect of reducing, the cost and time that you're putting into those motions. but also giving you much better outcomes. 

Jason Myers: What's really exciting about that is that it's, a solution that we could only accomplish previous by doing different pieces of content to different cohorts.

Jason Myers: I remember like in the 90s, like, I used to like doing custom magazines because I could, I could do a different article for every different buyer persona and they would find the content that they want. And then the web kind of the same thing. So, but what you're talking about now is actually when one of those people come to the website.

Jason Myers: They're actually able to find all the content readily and quickly that they want based on the actions that they're choosing. 

Steve Brothers: That's correct. And so let's imagine an ebook, right? So instead of downloading that PDF ebook, moving that buyer into this ebook experience, it's the same kind of experience, but that ebook is mobile friendly.

Steve Brothers: It's personalized specifically for them for their role within their company, their industry vertical, so it's answering their questions. But more importantly, as you just mentioned, now that that buyers engage with the content, he or she can move through to an ROI calculator, a case study and it all of that will be personalized to them.

Steve Brothers: So it really does change that experience. It makes it much more valuable for any buyer moving into it. 

Jason Myers: And where are we now with, AI in that picture? So like how is that playing a role currently and where do you expect that to go? 

Steve Brothers: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, despite all the, the hype, we're still in early days and I think, what we're going to see is there's a rush to use AI, kind of,

Steve Brothers: at its base level. and so everybody's jumping on chat GPT and building content and doing that kind of work. And that's fine. Uh, we're using AI for kind of, customer support or sales support chat back and forth. That's fine. But what's going to happen is I think people are going to tire very quickly of pretty generic content.

Steve Brothers: So, our opinion is that we need to put the business in the driver's seat of generating good content quickly, affordably, easily. And the way to do that, in our opinion, is to start , with your strategy. Who are those buyers you want to talk to? what are the pain points you want to speak to? Get that information solid.

Steve Brothers: And if you do that, what happens then is your strategy that you're already doing. That becomes the prompt for the AI. That's what's missing, right? We're, we're asking AI very basic questions and building content on that and getting very basic output. And so when you start to move strategy into that conversation, AI is much more powerful.

Steve Brothers: And so that's really what we're trying to do is build a bespoke AI for your business. So, as you start creating this content, measuring the kind of sales results you're getting from the buyers through that content, then our AI can learn what's working and what's not and help every initiative that you're running become more and more effective.

Jason Myers: So we talked a little bit about. How marketing should be more buyer centric, but how should the sales role evolve to be more customer centric in that same process? Yeah, this is what's really kind of fascinating to me again, just because of my background of kind of, being in between those two organizations.

Steve Brothers: A lot of things that we hear today about, you know, the SDR is dead. AI is going to take it right? All of this kind of hype that we always hear. I don't believe that. The SDRs. today have the best insight into what buyers are asking about, right? If those SDRs could work more effectively with marketing to build the kind of content we're talking about right now, that would be some powerful content.

Steve Brothers: Because the SDRs know how to have that conversation. Marketing typically does not. So that goes back to that alignment we're talking about of really these two organizations working much more closely together on behalf of the buyer, making that content truly buyer centric. So both sides of this equation can change.

Steve Brothers: Should change and must change and I think this this kind of self serve motion is an opportunity to really allow that to happen. 

Jason Myers: Yeah, I think that's why a lot of SDRs or BDRs are actually being moved under marketing because they do play an important role in nurturing. They know how to talk to people, 

Steve Brothers: Yes, 

Jason Myers: and dig for the for the problems, but the, what was the gap is, the incentive to book meetings is really what drives most of the bad behavior.

Jason Myers: So if you remove that and make it about engagement and adding value, it changes the whole equation. 

Steve Brothers: That's right. And another I think critical point on this on the sales side, is we always talk about sales needing to instead of being a salesperson to be a trusted advisor, right? And so if you think about what we just talked about, if I'm going through this content journey.

Steve Brothers: And I'm interacting with, for example, an assessment or ROI calculator. And I'm getting the answers back based 

Steve Brothers: on my 

Steve Brothers: input that I need to answer my questions and take back to my buying committee. Well, the beauty of this is sales is getting that same information. So now when I'm ready to speak to that SDR or AE, you have that information, you know exactly how to give me the solution I need much more quickly and much more efficiently, right?

Steve Brothers: So now you can become a trusted advisor because you know what I need. Right. We don't need to have that conversation. I've already given you that info. So now you can kind of see how that sales cycle can be drastically decreased, but the outcome is much better for both parties. 

Jason Myers: Yeah, that's right. I see a lot of sales or talk in the sales world about.

Jason Myers: the closing, process being more prescriptive as opposed to the old model of, you know, having to inform and educate buyers, which is really what marketing should be doing today. 

Steve Brothers: There you go. That's exactly right. And that is the bridge. That's why we built Splashmetrics, is that last mile of educating the buyer.

Steve Brothers: They want to continue to do that themselves. And if you think about the role of marketing, that's another really cool fundamental change that's coming, is marketing has already done that. Again, these buyers have done 80% of that research as we talked about. Well, that's through marketing.

Steve Brothers: And through reaching out to colleagues on LinkedIn and finding out who's using what, all that's been done. So what we're doing here is extending marketing's role further into the pipeline to continue that great content that great dialogue, but then also overlapping that with the sales motion.

Steve Brothers: And what that does is we always talk about the difficulty of marketing attribution. This will change that because you'll be able to tie through these specific customer journeys as are going through it and the sales outcome from that journey. You can tie attribution of what marketing is done because we're no longer just throwing SQLs over the fence, right? So it really does solve a lot of those problems as well. 

Jason Myers: And I think you mentioned too, one of the biggest problems I see in websites, especially in the SaaS world is really making the buyer dig to find out what you do, or if you're going to be able to solve our problem. 

Steve Brothers: That's right. 

Jason Myers: That's right.

Steve Brothers: Yeah. And I, you know, I'm a, an advocate of having a very light website, and getting the buyer into the journey as quickly as you can, because that's where they're going to get the value. 

Jason Myers: I like to talk a lot about struggling moments, as opposed to pain, pain is important to get people's attention, but if you really want to, understand why they make purchase decisions, you need to look for that moment that they were struggling and they've decided that enough is enough.

Jason Myers: We've got to do something about this. So in your case, what would you say is the struggling moment for marketing or sales organizations where they should be looking at your solution? 

Steve Brothers: would say we're seeing a lot of that already, for example, on LinkedIn. Everyone's talking about the death of the MQL.

Steve Brothers: So I think across the board, everyone understands the predictive revenue model, is broken. It's, you know, it's, done. It's, time. So that, I think is really the struggling moment for businesses. But I also think that's a, just a symptom of the actual problem, which is we need to change how we think about our operations

Steve Brothers: in relation to the buyer. That is the fundamental disconnect. and the MQL is just a symptom of that, right? So again, I go back to what I said earlier. I think we really started to do that with ABM. That that was a forcing function on businesses, to say, look, you know, we've got to do more legwork to find the right people.

Steve Brothers: We need to go after to know who's in that buying committee to reach out to them personally. That's an operation where we're now for as a business taking those steps to save the buyers effort, right? So we're, we're moving that direction, but again, I think we're still aways away from it. And I think self serve is an opportunity to really take that next step.

Jason Myers: What do you think are the key organizational or cultural changes that companies need to make to be, or to accept, I guess, a customer first go to market strategy? 

Steve Brothers: The biggest one is close the marketing and sales divide, right? In other words, truly make those two teams as one as you possibly can. I mean, I, I fully understand there are vastly different functions going on, but again, the buyer doesn't care about that.

Steve Brothers: They care for a seamless journey from engagement to purchase. And if we can really align those two teams as well as customer success. All of that, as we're talking about with GTM, all of that needs to work together. Another thing that comes out of that, that's kind of fascinating to me is what the future role of an AE will look like.

Steve Brothers: because I think AEs need to be much more connected to the customers that they're bringing on over the lifetime of that relationship. So, you know, is it some kind of hybrid of a customer success and sales role? You know, all of those things I think are up for grabs, because when you start looking at what buyers need and how they're expecting a much higher touch experience, a much more trusted advisor experience, you know, how you're going to handle that operationally is a big question.

Steve Brothers: And I think that's going to be a very interesting future to kind of see play out.

Jason Myers: Well, I think that's a good place to land the episode. What else would you like to tell us about Splashmetrics and how can people get in touch with you if they're interested in finding out more? 

Steve Brothers: Sure. So, I'm on LinkedIn, Steve Brothers, feel free to reach out there. Our website is, 

Steve Brothers: splashmetrics.com. Take a look at what we've got. You'll see on that homepage, a link into our own content journey. So you can kind of see how all of this works. And yeah, I would just, I'm always here. Happy to answer any questions that, people may have. 

Jason Myers: Great. And our agency is called Austin Lawrence group. We sponsor the SaaS backwards podcast, and you can find us at austinlawrence.com. That's spelled just like the two cities, Austin, Texas, Lawrence, KanSaaS. If you'd like some help figuring out how to optimize your messaging for today's buyer, take us up on a free offer to do a marketing and messaging review. We'll look at your website messaging, content, and advertising and give you some ideas about how you can maximize those SQL conversions.

Jason Myers: Just reach out to me at jm@austinlawrence.com. And of course, if you haven't subscribed to the podcast, please do so wherever you get your podcasts and listen. Thanks a lot for joining us today, Steve. 

Steve Brothers: My pleasure, Jason. Thanks for having me.