"Smart ideas only matter when we put them into action."
Ashutosh Prasad is the CEO of BuyerForesight, which provides market intelligence and demand generation services to B2B technology companies. With a strong background in technology and marketing, Ashutosh has been instrumental in driving BuyerForesight’s growth and innovation.
Before leading BuyerForesight, Ashutosh held various positions in the technology and marketing sectors, giving him a deep understanding of the challenges and opportunities in these industries.
His experience spans strategic planning, business development, and digital marketing, which he has effectively utilized to position BuyerForesight as a key player in its field. Under his leadership, BuyerForesight has expanded its reach, offering tailored solutions that enable tech companies to identify and engage with potential buyers more effectively.
Ashutosh is known for his forward-thinking approach, leveraging data analytics and AI to enhance market intelligence services. His leadership style is marked by a commitment to innovation, customer satisfaction, and employee empowerment, fostering a culture of excellence at BuyerForesight. Under Ashutosh’s guidance, the company has achieved impressive growth and become a thought leader in the B2B market intelligence space.
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Table of Contents
Ash, can you share your journey leading up to BuyerForesight? What inspired you to start this company?
Ashutosh Prasad: I have been working for the last 23 years, mostly in sales. Very early in my career, I realized that to maximize every opportunity, it’s necessary to understand and learn about your prospect. There was not as much marketing noise back then, but the information was also much less accessible.
This made it harder to build a detailed understanding of what a prospect might respond to, but the success ratio was astounding when you were able to do so.
I remained invested in the approach of “genuinely understanding your prospect,” which evolved into the two ventures I started. BuyerForesight was the second one, going strong for the last nine years. This approach focuses on understanding the pain points your buyers care about.
There is a huge gap in “genuineness, understanding, and compassion” for what is needed in sales and marketing. At BuyerForesight, we focus on genuinely being interested in our audience members, partners, and customers.
What is BuyerForesight’s vision and mission, and how will it evolve in the next five years?
Ashutosh Prasad: As we see tremendous growth in MarTech and SalesTech, there is a huge focus on achieving B2C-like scale in B2B marketing, with a heavy reliance on automation. However, this is distancing prospectors and marketers from their buyers. Instead of reading, listening, and learning about their target audience, they request large language models (LLMs) to do that on their behalf and create plans.
The downside of this approach is that we are not feeling the emotions or pain of our audience. Instead, we look at this as a task to check off our list, underestimating the power of genuine understanding.
This is disrupting the human connections between brands and individuals. Sellers are impatient with prospects because prospects are not saying what sellers want to hear. In many ways, this technology reduces our communication patience and resilience for solving problems.
This is what we are looking to change. BuyerForesight’s mission is to create “genuine interest” between groups with a problem and groups who can solve it. We’ve evolved from a lead gen company to producing “conversational events” to an “audience-based marketing” firm.
In the next five years, we will continue to push the envelope for marketers to start more effective and meaningful communication by growing communities, driving meaningful conversations, building partner-driven ecosystems, and turning marketers into performers who engage audiences based on what the audience wants.
We are building technology, processes, and extensive training for our people to remain relevant in the face of accelerating technological change.
What were some of the biggest challenges you faced in the early days of BuyerForesight, and how did you overcome them?
Ashutosh Prasad: This is an ongoing challenge – most clients are looking to engage prospects in a way they want, as opposed to how buyers are looking to buy. This creates a lot of friction between internal customer teams (marketing and sales).
After the first five years of trying to be a company focused on doing personalized outreach for our customers, we were challenged by the fact that prospects acknowledged the problem but were not ready for a “sales call.” (That was our deliverable from 2014 to 2019).
We struggled to meet numbers. While we managed to develop relationships with prospects, we were falling behind on targets with our customers and the way our contracts were written.
We thought of adding a layer where we turned the “acknowledgment” of the problem into a program. We started doing virtual and in-person roundtables with no pitch, just an exchange of problems and solutions. Once problems were discussed along with probable solutions, the natural next step was “Mr. vendor, what do you do?” which led to sales calls.
We expanded that approach to producing hosted buyer conferences where there was no pitch, no sales presentation, no PowerPoint, no speaker – just senior executives and solution providers conversing over 1.5 days. This was the foundation for our “Common Sense Conferences” brand.
Can you share a milestone or achievement you’re particularly proud of in your journey with BuyerForesight?
Ashutosh Prasad: That evolution took us from being an outbound lead gen company to a full-service company with a conference brand, “Common Sense Conferences.” We planned a slew of events right after our first successful, in-person Common Sense Conference for CX in Chicago in 2019.
Then the pandemic hit, and something we had just pivoted to was in danger. We reacted well and moved everything digital for the next 1.5-2 years before beginning in-person roundtables, conferences, and roadshows again.
We are proud that during the pandemic we did not have to let go of any team members. Instead, we doubled our team and we all rallied together.
How do you see the current trends in market intelligence and buyer engagement shaping the future of B2B marketing?
Ashutosh Prasad: I believe intelligence is only as good as its usage and application. Without the right application, intelligence has no value. We often let systems interact with each other and expect to find revenue. There is a lot of noise around how a few pipeline generation jobs will be eliminated.
However, we are not discussing the semantics. A BDR doing personalized outreach will always gather a lot of knowledge – and I’m not referring to superficial conversation starter knowledge.
That BDR will not be replaced, but someone who has been using LinkedIn automation to view profiles and send connection invites, followed by messages, will be eliminated. Superficial signals will add to the spam epidemic, whereas understanding what a signal means, its related impact, and connecting that with pain points will generate meaningful, effective personalization.
If companies invest in training their frontline teams on their customer industries, problems, and the language their buyers use, the future will look bright. However, you will be left behind if you are deeply dependent on a pile of tools without a proper strategy.
What unique challenges do businesses face today in understanding and engaging their buyers, and how does BuyerForesight address these challenges?
Ashutosh Prasad: “The only constant is change” is a phrase that has evolved to “rapid change is the only constant.” Every business should be mindful of the speed at which buyer priorities are shifting and evolving, as there is constant pressure on retention, reduction, and optimization.
Post-pandemic budgets are scrutinized, and retail and institutional investors both remain conservative, making this one of the most competitive economies ever. This means it’s key to seize every opportunity to intimately understand your buyers.
A B2B company’s prospect universe is not more than thousands of companies at most, so having a qualitative view of their prospect universe is vital. Understanding the entire ecosystem where the buyer operates is essential, including their current role, management, company priorities, tech stack, vendor lock-in status, future plans, internal vs external build vs buy approaches, and more.
As I discussed, sellers often lack the patience to navigate that complex cycle, where both buyers and sellers work together to overcome hurdles. Half the time, companies have only a superficial understanding of buyers and fail to refresh their buyer personas often enough.
Growing a business is more difficult than ever, and the only way companies can achieve growth is by adopting strategies that support the right field-based activities, partner-led activities, investments in the right enablement technologies and tools, and effectively using those tools to multiply output.
As a CEO, how do you foster a culture of innovation and collaboration within BuyerForesight?
Ashutosh Prasad: I play a dual role in the company: keeping the current business running while constantly looking to the future, ensuring the business remains relevant for tomorrow. Cultivating innovation is challenging when you are a revenue-funded company.
However, the management team is encouraged to identify problems and solve them. We have an open tech feedback group comprised of users and managers of our internal tech.
They provide daily feedback on challenges faced while using, managing, and reviewing metrics. This allows us to keep our tech requirements on point at all times.
Could you share a success story of how BuyerForesight has significantly impacted a client’s business?
Ashutosh Prasad: I can share a couple. We have worked with quite a few series A & B funded companies who were chasing their next milestone for fresh capital infusion or acquisition. We helped a few companies get acquired by the likes of Twitter, DXC, and SAP, to name a few.
We also worked with a $3 billion global corporation, refining their positioning for a newly launched martech product targeting B2C marketers. We conducted research to identify their total serviceable market by applying insights from use cases and situations B2C marketers often find themselves in, breaking from the traditional TAM validation approach relying on firmographic data.
This contextual analysis helped us understand the number of companies facing the problem our client was solving. We went a step further and conducted phone interviews with 100s of their prospective buyers to gather valuable prospect intelligence and conducted a lost deal analysis.
This allowed us to filter further and understand where the buyers were in the problem admission stage because it is easier to solve if someone acknowledges the problem.
This enabled us to tap into a total greenfield market, with new positioning communicated to prospects by building communities and hosting virtual and in-person curated roundtables and half-day conferences. All of this generated a $100 million+ pipeline within 16 months for our client.
What feedback do you often receive from clients, and how has this shaped your operations and improved your services?
Ashutosh Prasad: We are very open to listening to our clients. In fact, we are in the business of understanding companies and the people running those companies and functions. This has made us good listeners, as listening allows you to observe and understand opportunities.
Early feedback from clients shaped our customer operations process. It created a couple of new functions, enabling us to add value, multiply efforts, and evolve before clients expect or demand that we do so.
We have worked with a few very demanding clients, and their input has been phenomenal. I owe them a drink for their passive yet hugely impactful contributions!
Looking forward, what new initiatives or developments can we expect from BuyerForesight?
Ashutosh Prasad: We’re developing “Audience Based Marketing” services where we enable B2B companies to begin focusing on building their brand and audience from their prospect universe.
We’re working to grow pipelines and forge relationships with companies by establishing meaningful field marketing investments, which have the potential to generate exponential pipeline growth.
This also enables partner-led sales to take center stage, where companies focus on solving their buyers’ highest-impact problems in the way buyers want – by mobilizing partners to join them.
We are building impactful communities for marketers, especially field marketers and partnership leaders, to exchange ideas. In 2024, we will also host several large conferences, building on our successful Sustainable Impact Summit in Bali.
We are looking at hosting Emerging Tech and Sustainability conferences across APAC, EMEA, and the Americas – along with three unconferences for partner management teams.
Jerome Knyszewski, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Ashutosh Prasad for taking the time to do this interview and share his knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Ashutosh Prasad or his company, you can do it through his – Linkedin Page
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