Two years ago, I engaged a design agency in Sydney to speak to executives who have been engaged with meetmagic so we can plan to build a digital channel that works for them to self serve. The focus was mainly to understand the executives world and how they go about navigating the world of transformation, machine learning. cloud, and all that buzz wordy type of stuff because a lot of them do not care much for the conference scene and shallow networking.

It was all about learning for us but what we discovered was fascinating 

Our hypothesis, (and i use that word lightly because I never went to Uni) ..ok, my gut feeling was that If a business leader is going to speak with a vendor anyway, then why not use a digital platform? The business leader might say something like "Hey, look, there's something I want to know about cloud but I don't know who the vendors are. Could you identify them for me?

So rather than just random cold calls or emails and getting paired up with vendors for random chats, the executives go about their work in a more structured way 

Tech leaders need to be answering the question: What do we need to be investing in now? So we are ready 2 or 3 years from now. So when your CMO says "Right, I want to do this stuff" you are able to say, "Yep, cool"

The idea for a digital channel for leaders to self serve is happening faster than we think. Gartner and McKinsey give it 2 years before 80% of B2B buyers will be transacting in digital channels. The boomers and the X’ers are declining and the millennials prefer a sale with NO Salesperson..

The advantage of the self serve journey is that it drives a sale without the seller being needed, even at the moment of purchase—making every marketer a seller.

So what is driving this self serve adoption.?

We discovered 3 main things

1. Education - Imagine, you have just stepped into a CTO role from a Chief Digital Officer role and you need to get up to speed with what cloud looks like. Who are the quadrant leaders, who are the challengers the emerging startups.. so rather than a random connection, you use digital channels to get focused

2. BAU - Im going to talk to a stack of vendors anyway, why not do it in a low energy kind way. Rather than waste time and money going to a conference, you might meet 3 or 4 in a digital channel and help them understand where you are at in terms of qualifying, the decision process, your business needs etc, You can answer the questions quickly and get the answers you need

3) The Unknown -  I don't know who to talk to. I want to know if there is a product out there that can help me with some software to monitor staff web surfing for illicit purposes, as an example. Although that would be kind of creepy.. but you get the point.